Gate 22: The Gate of Openness

This line asks how a subordinate place is handled: accepting it or claiming more. In its exalted expression, emotional awareness helps you accept a lower-ranking role and even find joy in it. In its weakened expression, emotional energy runs ahead of awareness and reaches for a rank that was not meant for you.

Here lies the assumption that style can be laid over your own nature. In its exalted expression, an emotional style draws people in and can mislead them, just as it can mislead you, about your true nature. In its weakened expression, form becomes a rule that takes precedence over content, and style draws its strength from what your awareness lacks.

This line stands for perfect grace. In its exalted expression, emotional energy and awareness line up so closely that the form truly carries the content, and openness can come across as especially fitting. In its weakened expression, the grace is simply there on its own, an inborn openness that isn't shaped. This grace is not a technique.

With this line, you adjust your own behavior so that encounters turn out richer. In its exalted expression, openness grows out of an almost mediumistic simplicity that gets by without formalities or elaborate rituals. In its weakened expression, the wish for form and etiquette constricts openness, and the very encounters that could grow into something significant are given little room.

With this line, formalities get dropped when it becomes necessary. In its exalted expression, higher principles give you the courage to break social conventions and go your own way in how you deal with others. In its weakened expression, your direct manner can easily come across as awkward or rude.

Here, through experience, form and content come into line with each other. In its exalted expression, this is about accumulated social experience that can mature into a natural leadership others can sense. In its weakened expression, this matured openness shows up as more willful and unconventional. In both cases, the way you carry yourself has grown out of lived experience.

This cross stands for born rulers who are offered leadership rather than having to seize it. As a Right Angle, according to the teaching, they create karma: whoever sets up bad rules carries the consequences later.

For you, with the Sun in Gate 22, the cross rules as a listener. This is considered its greatest gift, and it makes the cross more open to the task of educating those it rules over. Part of the theme is that, through the Design Earth in Gate 45, territory and a kind of rulership are offered to you again and again, tied to the duty to educate. The heaviest responsibility of rulership is education; without it, rebellion and overthrow become a risk over time. Gate 22 brings an openness to art and music and a readiness for mutation. The Personality Earth in Gate 47 adds the pressure of the past and the struggle to make sense of it. Because they are occupied with ruling, these people are considered grounded.

Even in a child on this cross, the teaching sees the theme of rulership in family life, though nobody calls it that.

The angle is personal: encounters enrich your own path but don't fundamentally pull you away from it. You grow into this theme when you follow your Strategy and Authority. It is not a prediction.

The Juxtaposition Cross of Grace is rare and a fixed path of its own. The theme of rulership does not apply here. Instead, this cross is about deep attention and about falling in love, and not just with a partner, but with anything you have an ear for.

For you, with the Sun in Gate 22, listening can draw you in completely, for example spending hours listening to a voice you love. This is what makes this cross a strong mutative force. It is considered deeply social and open to strangers: others share a lot and are listened to with rapt attention. The image of interviewing quite ordinary people fits this well.

This angle sits between the personal and the transpersonal and builds a bridge between the two. It is like a train on fixed rails, and those who travel with you for a longer stretch can ride along on your track. You grow into this theme when you follow your Strategy and Authority. It is not a prediction of events.

Here attention becomes a gift: this cross can inform others in depth. The people who carry it are the great gossips of the world, and that is meant without any judgment.

For you, with your Sun in Gate 22, the emphasis is on informing others, whether they are ready or not. The teaching stresses that there is no truth in the moment: if you follow Strategy and Authority rather than your first urge to share, you experience this cross in a very different way. In the Not-Self, by contrast, things burst out at the wrong moment, and whatever you hear gets passed on right away, which can cause a lot of problems. Beneath the attention lies the pressure of the past, your Personality Earth in Gate 47: it wants to understand things, and it puts into words what it has understood.

This angle is transpersonal: your theme matures through contact with others, and they can change your path in noticeable ways. You can grow into it as you follow your Strategy and Authority. It is not a fate.