Gate 43: The Gate of Insight

An insight needs time and depth before it takes shape. This line asks whether you give it both. In its exalted expression, there is enough depth to fully form your own insight. You know that something new only holds once resistance has been cleared away. In its weakened expression, the insight lacks a firm footing despite all the joy it brings. If you savor success impatiently, you are left with a stale aftertaste.

Here you stay loyal to your own ways of thinking and your own routines, even when the goal is almost in reach. In its exalted expression, a way of thinking that is entirely your own, patiently cultivated, can lead to insight and breakthrough. In its weakened expression, the urge to share what you know throws proven routines overboard the moment an opportunity appears. Just short of the goal, you grow careless.

A breakthrough is under threat. This line asks what you do and how you handle the judgment of others. In its exalted expression, a strong will to renew leads you to secure the threatened breakthrough with every means and alliance available. Your inner certainty holds firm against the judgment of others. In its weakened expression, fear of how others will judge you makes you back away from your own insight and leave undone what needs to be done.

This kind of thinking runs on a single track: persistent, but not fond of advice. In its exalted expression, you rely almost doggedly on your own insights, despite repeated obstacles. With focused mental power, this can succeed, if only rarely. In its weakened expression, thin knowledge is enough to make you feel you are right. Advice gets turned away, and you speak up without going into any depth.

Relationships slow the breakthrough. This line looks for the middle path between skillful adaptation and excessive consideration. In its exalted expression, you recognize when an insight is landing with others, and in circumstances that slow you down you move forward in small, concrete steps without putting success at risk. In its weakened expression, your self-expression depends too heavily on how receptive others are. Striving for harmony then tends to strengthen the very forces that hold the breakthrough back.

This is where the breakthrough itself happens, and it raises the question of what comes along into the new order. In its exalted expression, the breakthrough rearranges everything, inside you and around you, and this one-of-a-kind knowing serves you as much as it serves the community. In its weakened expression, the ego carries its weak spots along into the new order, and the value placed on this knowing pushes other areas of life aside.

Explaining links all the variants of this cross, though it looks different depending on the Personality Sun: with Gate 49 it gives the reasons why an upheaval is needed, with Gate 4 it offers answers, and with Gate 23 it is explaining itself. When the Sun is in Gate 43, the weight falls instead on your own insight and on inner hearing. Explaining is often the very thing these people find hard.

The image for this is an important meeting that you rehearse in your head long beforehand, running through every possibility, only to get hardly a word out once the conversation actually happens. Getting from insight to language is a lot like translating. When it fails, these people come across as odd; when it works, they come across as strikingly clever. Many give up on explaining and hold on to a reliable inner knowing that can contain a great deal of value.

As a child, you may have needed encouragement to say your thoughts out loud, a bit like practicing a foreign language; adults, on the other hand, can easily find an often-repeated “I know” hard to take.

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

In the Juxtaposition Cross, everything revolves around insight, and bringing it out to others is extremely hard. Its image is a person in front of the TV who suddenly calls out “Aha” but can't say why, and whose explanations seem muddled to others.

This ties in with a basic polarity of individuality: wherever a voice expresses itself, there is also a point where it fails, and problems with expression are part of what is Individual.

People with this cross would need support to express themselves in words, yet throughout life they are mostly told to keep quiet.

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

What all variants of this Left Angle Cross share is a dedication to commitments that spring from a desire and aim at seeing an expectation fulfilled. This pairing carries a pain of its own.

When the Sun is in Gate 43, the dedication is to insight itself rather than to explaining it; the variant with Gate 23 takes on the explaining. The Juxtaposition Cross keeps its insight to itself. This cross, by contrast, shares its insight with others and doesn't ask whether it can explain it as well. It scatters statements of knowing without giving reasons for them and leaves the effort of understanding to others. Years later, someone may come back and confirm that it was right.

This is a subversive, mutative act: these people place their insight in others and move on, whereas in the past real knowledge was mostly withheld as a means of power. Like many Individual people, they struggle to have their otherness accepted, because in a world shaped by the Collective and the Tribe, mutation is seen as a threat.

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