Gate 50: The Gate of Values

Humble origins can support your path more than they hold it back. In its exalted expression, the ambition to make a difference rests on your own basic strengths while also refining your values. This shapes the course your life takes later on. In its weakened expression, you experience your origins and values as inadequate or shameful, and the effort to refine yourself can become compulsive.

This line is about holding on to your own values in the face of headwinds and conditioning, either with growing resolve or by consciously stepping back. In its exalted expression, headwinds tend to strengthen you more than they weaken you. You stay true to your values, and overcoming adversity can even be fun. In its weakened expression, adversity is a nuisance. When your values start to waver under pressure or conditioning, you lack the strength to hold them, and you withdraw with determination.

Holding on to your own values takes other people. This line ranges from naturally aligning yourself with protective powers to resenting having to court favor. In its exalted expression, where your own strength falls short, you seek the protection of nurturing allies as a matter of course. In its weakened expression, it feels uncomfortable not to be able to uphold your principles on your own. Resentment arises when you have to win favor and your own mental gifts go unnoticed.

This line lacks values that would enrich life. In its exalted expression, the questionable gift of drawing material benefit even from weak values stays within self-interest and does not slide into criminality; this preserves your own strength. In its weakened expression, a lot of drive without inherited values can tempt you to bypass values altogether.

What has brought success through consistency is not changed without good reason. That is the motto of this line. In its exalted expression, you guard proven continuity with discipline. Nothing is changed without good reason, and principles are not given up lightly. In its weakened expression, the very method that has proven successful provokes resistance, and given enough cause, the rebellion turns against the principles themselves.

This line stands up for values from a position of leadership, sometimes firm and harmonious, sometimes moody. In its exalted expression, you can stand up for your own values in a leading role with conviction, even with firmness, without harmony suffering. In its weakened expression, you do hold on to your values, but in the leadership role, moods can easily set the tone.

In each Quarter, this cross offers its own version of the rules and values a community uses to shape how its members live together. In Human Design, these are seen as genetically rooted rather than as a philosophical concept. The rules mostly concern food and sexuality: who is allowed what, when and with whom.

The Sun in Gate 50, the Cauldron, gives the cross its name. This gate embodies the lawgiver of the community and its values. People with this variant shape their lives around rules and also set them for others; they keep their distance from anyone who does not follow them. When the rules are clear and people keep them, that leaves them content.

In this view, the path of humanity ultimately rests with the closed community that carries old patterns forward, and it is from this community that the rule-makers come. With the Right Angle, this rule-setting works inward: these lawgivers enjoy setting rules and seeing them followed, and they often miss how those rules land with others.

A Right Angle Cross points to a personal theme. Your path belongs to you, and the people you meet color it without steering it somewhere else. Rather than a claim or a fate, it is something you live when you follow your Strategy and Authority.

Here the Sun is in Line 4 of Gate 50. This stands for corruption, meant in the sense of a softening of community values. This cross is regarded as the most lenient point in the setting of rules.

With the Sun in Gate 50, the question arises whether a punishment really has to be that harsh. The cross adds another value by thinking of the person it falls on and of the consequences for them.

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

Juxtaposition Crosses are rare. Your path here is fixed and your own, a bridge between a personal and a transpersonal theme, much like a train on its rails. In this view, someone who stays with you over a longer stretch can ride along for part of the way. This is not a prediction; the meaning reveals itself over the course of your life.

Even the first variant of this Left Angle Cross stands for a striving toward a better world where different values hold. Anyone who mostly loses themselves in that world may end up wrestling with their own values.

Culturally, this Cross is considered especially challenging: it is willing to go beyond what has been handed down and to look for a greater, higher value. Read spiritually, with the Sun in Gate 50 the judge of the community turns away from its own tradition and opens up to other value systems. This is where religions come into being.

To someone for whom their inherited religion means everything, this can seem threatening. Others see these people as forerunners of the insight that different gods share the same task.

According to the teaching, this openness to other values often puts them in difficult situations. With a fifth line they are seen as Heretics who quickly run into trouble, whereas the Right Angle tends to keep its process together.

A Left Angle Cross is a transpersonal theme that only comes to fulfillment together with others. This path needs people who suit it and help carry it. This isn't a matter of fate. The meaning of the Cross reveals itself over the course of your life.