Gate 55: The Gate of Spirit

How do you relate to powerful forces? Here, cooperation that brings growth stands against an agreement that merely keeps things as they are. In its exalted expression, your own work grows through principled cooperation with those in power. This can give you lasting support and, at the same time, be a way into the spirit. In its weakened expression, the focus is on staying on good terms with the powerful. Much stays stable without moving forward or serving the spirit.

Abundance is held back by slander or rumor. In its exalted expression, you can use skill with people and a sense for what really matters to show convincingly that you deserve trust. Emotional stability and mental strength rest on the trust of others. In its weakened expression, striking back directly at those who slander you while insisting on your own credibility brings neither reliable recognition nor mental gain, because suspicion only gives way to an example that lasts.

If you have kept to the prescribed form and still fail, you are innocent. That is what this line is about. In its exalted expression, you carry no personal blame for a failure as long as the form was kept and you acted with discipline within the guidelines. You can accept it without your spirit suffering. In its weakened expression, rebelling against conformity or going it alone can shift the burden onto others, while you stay in the background and shield your own spirit.

Energy and principles have to find their way to each other. A coherent framework stands against unbridled force that overwhelms awareness. In its exalted expression, principles and energy hold each other in balance within a firm framework. The teaching links this balance with growth, and with emotional awareness, spirit becomes possible as well. In its weakened expression, the energy knows no limits and overwhelms awareness, which puts spirit at risk.

In a position of power, you meet with advice. You either keep developing on your own terms or fade behind the influence of others. In its exalted expression, you take advice and put it to work in your own new way. That keeps the leadership visibly in your hands, and your emotional strength grows. In its weakened expression, being too open to advice can mean that at some point you yourself are outshone, and your mind becomes permeable to conditioning.

Material abundance and selfishness: the question is whether what has been accumulated finds its way to others by indirect routes or stays unshared. In its exalted expression, the urge to acquire does put others off, yet it passes something on by indirect routes and can even lead from the material to the spirit. In its weakened expression, what has been accumulated is shared with no one. Material things can become an obsession, and the spirit stays narrow.

Read spiritually, this cross carries a potential for mutation that lies asleep for a long time and is meant to turn the Solar Plexus into a center of spiritual awareness. The image used for it is the phoenix rising from the ashes. Through this mutation, the cross is meant to transform itself.

When your Personality Sun is in Gate 55, the moodiest of all gates takes center stage: sometimes the glass is half full, sometimes half empty, and the world can look radiant or pitch black in the morning. Gate 55 is seen as a gate that eats or doesn't eat depending on mood, and food stays a recurring theme for this cross.

On the Design side, people with this cross look very actively for love, romance and closeness. In the teaching, the cross is tied to heartache, to a love you search for that is hard to find. In the spirit of individuality, it is said: better to love what you cannot have than to have what you do not love.

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

This Juxtaposition Cross is stuck in its moods. The restlessness of the Right Angle falls away; the Design side supplies the energy for detailed work and skills.

Because identification is the theme here, what matters is letting a mood pass as a fluctuation rather than merging with it so completely that you can no longer get free of it. The search for individual love gives way to a deep drive for knowledge, for depth, and for getting to the bottom of the truth.

The image is of a person whose heavy burden is plain to see; friends want to lift it from them, but they can't. Someone who learns to understand individuality and melancholy can grow into an extraordinary creative force with great talent.

The Juxtaposition Cross is rare, and it is a fixed path of its own, like a train on its tracks. People who spend 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.

With this Left Angle Cross, the well-being of the spirit depends on love, sexuality, and good food. When these are missing, it can shake the spirit deeply.

The Personality Earth in Gate 59 ties the cross to the sexual strategy. Its transpersonal pull brings seduction into play, and the spirit hopes for something good from it. The Individual theme of mood and spirit tends to sink when what you long for does not arrive, and the teaching then links this to the themes of sexuality and food. Here, unattainable love is not quietly endured the way it is in purely Individual melancholy. Instead, the urge to draw even the unattainable toward you tends to grow.

In Line 6, the path into mutation is coupled with a built-in flaw: the Design Sun in Gate 9 points to the overlooked detail, the straw that breaks the camel's back.

As a Left Angle Cross, it is fulfilled in your time with others, whose influence can noticeably change your path. You grow into it; this is no prediction.