Gate 47: The Gate of Realization

In hard times, it helps to take stock. Do the reasons for the hardship also lie with you, or only in your surroundings? In its exalted expression, you recognize that your own negative thoughts are among the causes too, and you work to dissolve them. In its weakened expression, a delusion places the pressure entirely outside yourself, until the world seems like an enemy.

This line shows two ways through personal hardship: tackling it with resolve or staying undecided. In its exalted expression, you recognize activity as good for the mind, and ambition leads you out of the hardship. In its weakened expression, you hesitate over whether to look for a way out with your head or to carry the burden. What's missing is a sense of which activity does you good, and when.

Here the pressure comes from within. This line asks whether you can find your own worth again behind it. In its exalted expression, acting in a way that feels right brings, over time, the insight that the pressure had no real cause and that at the core everything is fine. In its weakened expression, the self-made pressure grows so strong that you get stuck in self-doubt and can barely see your own worth anymore.

Here you are restricted from the outside. In its exalted expression, a strong sense of your own identity carries you even under heavy outside pressure, so your reserves are preserved and partly serve others. In its weakened expression, outside conditioning overwhelms your identity. Hardly anything is left to take care of yourself, let alone others.

This line shows a special, almost saintly stance when things get tough. Among the lines of this gate, it is considered the exception. In its exalted expression, you stand by those who are under pressure while keeping a sincere, peaceful relationship with the people applying that pressure. In this view, grace is seen as the result of accepting this burden.

Here every effort seems to be in vain, and the situation is a hard one. No exalted expression is described for this line, only its difficult side. In its weakened expression, sheer willpower carries you through the situation without the constriction ever being overcome. Life then feels like a test that brings no insight.

In all its variants, this cross stands for rulership that is natural and rightful. Part of the theme is a leading role that is handed to you before you would have to take it. Rulership also includes the task of educating: strengthening the awareness of the people entrusted to you, for the good of the community. In the Right Angle, rulership is a personal destiny, and read spiritually, whoever sets up bad rules has to deal with the consequences later.

With the Sun in Gate 47, the cross draws its inspiration from what has been. It takes in what has been handed down, interprets it, and bases its own claim to leadership on it. The past serves here both as a model to imitate and as a warning; at its core, this is about learning from earlier mistakes.

In everyday life, this theme usually does not show up as grand rulership. The examples given include outstanding researchers, especially in the fields of power and history.

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

Here, the course is set by putting ideas into words rather than by natural rulership and Ego power. This Juxtaposition Cross is political because it rests on ideas.

Unproven ideas can weigh people down. These people use their understanding of what has been to put into words what might be possible in the future. In everyday life, they sometimes run right over other people's lives with their concepts, and because they are fixed, hardly anyone talks them out of it.

The gate of the Personality Sun gives the cross its name and colors the other three gates, whose themes come 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 get pulled onto this path along with you. You grow into it; it is neither fate nor a demand.

In the Left Angle, rulership becomes transpersonal. Rather than revolving around its own leadership, this cross educates others, much like what people today call open government.

The fifth line is called the Saint and stands for a willingness to stand by the oppressed even while you yourself are under pressure; what drives it is the memory that your own people should not have to live that way. On top of this come strong social skills that let the cross draw attention and that can change others. The same line can also mean betrayal: the informing is done for your own benefit or to protect the whole, for example by revealing secrets.

The informing often happens through art, meaning poetry, music, songs or novels, the way singers and traveling troupes once did it. The underlying mood is melancholy.

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