Gate 37: The Gate of Friendship

Here the parent figure stands at the center, someone with natural standing around whom the rules of living together take shape. For this line, only the exalted expression is described. In its exalted expression, a sensitive friendship brings about the peace without which a family's relationships and values could not hold. This is how the family finds its footing.

This line asks where you look for responsibility in friendship and working together: in yourself or in others. In its exalted expression, each side takes responsibility for itself, and the friendship is built on that. In its weakened expression, your attention in friendships goes mainly to what the others really ought to be doing.

A group thrives when there is order. That is what this line is about. In its exalted expression, you sense what fits in a relationship and respond to broken rules with a sense of proportion. In its weakened expression, the feel for what fits is missing. Then you test boundaries yourself or come down hard on others when they try it.

Here, any member of a community can lead through their own example. In its exalted expression, you become a role model in your relationships by living by high principles in everyday life. In its weakened expression, a conservative attitude recognizes only traditional authority, such as the father, and fails to see other role models.

This line stands for an affection for family that needs no posturing and has nothing to prove. In its exalted expression, harmony arises on its own, and sharing comes easily, among friends too. In its weakened expression, love can slip into emotional dependency.

When you recognize the values of a family, you gain the strength to carry them. That is what this line is about. In its exalted expression, you understand the deeper meaning of family and value what it stands for, and new friendships can grow out of this. In its weakened expression, despite all your appreciation, the wish for variety draws you toward casual acquaintances, and what has grown within the family takes a back seat to the need to withdraw.

This cross is shaped by the agreement that sustains a community. Here, community means strength, because people's success rests on it. This includes working on details, skills and a tendency to go deep, all in service of building community.

With the Sun in Gate 37, family is at the center. Within the family's agreement, love and sexual bonding take shape, so that children and community can come into being.

Read spiritually, this cross belongs to the worldwide era since 1610, when communities and institutions arose, among them health care, schools, cities, companies and faith communities. They were meant to connect people to something larger.

As a Right Angle Cross, it stands for a purpose that concerns your own path. Other people enrich it, but they do not fundamentally redirect it. You grow into it by following your Strategy and Authority; it is not fate.

In this Juxtaposition Cross, every event turns into a trade. The people who carry it are fixed in this pattern.

It shows up even in small things: ask for something simple, like a cigarette, and the reply is a question about what it's for. This can drive others to despair.

Fighting it gets you nowhere, because this pattern can hardly be changed. It helps to see the humor in it: in these people you can see, in concentrated form, that society rests on unspoken agreements.

The gate of the Personality Sun gives the cross its name and colors the other three gates, whose themes show through it.

The Juxtaposition Cross is rare, and it is a fixed path of its own, like a train on its tracks. Someone who spends a long time with you can be pulled into this path along with you. You grow into it; it is neither fate nor a demand.

This Left Angle Cross stands for the urge to leave a community behind because you can no longer bear the people there, and to start over somewhere else.

As long as people are building something together, the bond holds. Once the work is finished and everyone has to live side by side as neighbors, splits appear, much like the schisms within religious movements. As a gate of love, Gate 37 has hatred as its flip side, and emotional dependence can make love turn into hatred. With a Line 5, projection can cause the agreement to break apart. Whoever leaves takes others along, founds a branch of their own, and often becomes an opponent of those who stay.

Read spiritually, the coming change in the emotional system is said to alter how agreements come about, because until now they have rested on a wave that held nothing true in the moment.

As a Left Angle Cross, it comes to fulfillment through being with others, whose influence can noticeably change your path. You grow into it; it is not a prediction.