Gate 34: The Gate of Power

This line shows power used without aim, without checking what it serves. Its hallmark is that it is used indiscriminately. In its exalted expression, this variant plays out more mildly. Here, displaying power is mainly a reaction to frustration. In its weakened expression, a show of power can provoke counterblows that end up hitting you.

As soon as a win comes within reach, a lot of things pick up speed. This line asks how you handle that surge. In its exalted expression, your strength grows the closer the goal gets, and you keep sight of the big picture along the way. In its weakened expression, impatience puts the brakes on progress, because the nearness of success sweeps you up emotionally.

Here, strength is put on show to claim a certain place, whether or not the situation calls for it. In its exalted expression, this kind of bearing only rings true when it stays simple and real power stands behind it. In its weakened expression, the strength is staged with calculation to win a role, and untruths may be circulating along the way.

This line stands for the victory after which you are allowed to use your power more freely. In its exalted expression, an inner sense of security makes sure that the power you have won is used quietly and sparingly. In its weakened expression, self-confidence is lacking, and the ego can become intoxicated with power that at first carries no consequences.

This line wants more than to dampen resistance; it wants to thoroughly clear it out of the way. In its exalted expression, the power is measured: it steps in only where it is needed, clears things up decisively, and then returns to everyday life. In its weakened expression, the readiness to fight stays switched on permanently, because nothing truly feels settled. The constant tension becomes a burden.

This line stands for a sense of when the right amount has been reached. In its exalted expression, you notice overload early, pull back, and put in only as much energy as you can sustain over time. In its weakened expression, enthusiasm overrides your better judgment. Without limits, entanglements develop that drain a great deal of energy.

This cross carries the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes. Read spiritually, Gate 55 holds the possibility of a transformation through which the emotional system is meant to arrive at spiritual awareness. What all the variants share is a restless pursuit of love, romance and intimacy, along with the suffering that comes from how hard these are to find. For this cross, sexuality serves as a strategy.

With the Sun in Gate 34, this variant is shaped by power and busyness, because no other gate in its center carries as much energy. The motto goes roughly like this: Please don't disturb me, I'm busy. Along with that comes the strength to push others aside to keep it that way.

Busyness was originally a lure, because it promises achievement and with it provision. This variant uses it as a strategy of attraction: it shows what it can do instead of openly courting. Partners then often experience it as constantly occupied, even though that was exactly what appealed to them at first; anyone who wants to get close to the power has to approach it.

A Right Angle Cross points to a personal theme: your path belongs to you, and encounters color it without redirecting it. Neither an entitlement nor a fate, it is something you live when you follow your Strategy and Authority.

In the Juxtaposition Cross, business takes the place of sexuality. Power comes to the market as a service offered for payment, often as entertainment, provided the trade with the community stays fair.

When the Sun is in Gate 34, the tremendous power of this cross comes through. It opens up the theme of Duality, because here power and community meet as two separate worlds.

As with the Left Angle Cross of the same Sun, there is a chance to have an impact on the community through vigorous action. The community, in turn, wants to hold on to people like you and not let them move on.

Juxtaposition Crosses are rare. Here your path is fixed and your own, a bridge between a personal and a transpersonal theme, much like a train running on its tracks. In this view, people who stay with you for a longer time can ride along for part of the way. This is not a prediction. The meaning reveals itself as your life unfolds.

This Left Angle Cross carries a real dilemma: on one side stand your own power and self-expression, on the other the community. People with this cross are driven to bridge the gap between the two, and to do it with the help of the community.

If the Sun is in Gate 34, this can show up in everyday life as a contradiction between what you say and what you experience: first you declare that you want to be alone and hate parties, then you have a wonderful time there, and afterward you claim the opposite again.

Part of the punchline is that you can end up making friends along the way without knowing why, while you yourself are simply busy being busy.

A Left Angle Cross is a transpersonal theme that is fulfilled only together with others. This path needs people who fit it and help carry it. None of this is fate; the meaning of the cross reveals itself over the course of a life.