Gate 60: The Gate of Acceptance

How do you deal with limits that are set from outside? Either you keep your inner balance, or it gets unsettled. In its exalted expression, your inner balance holds steady even when outer limits are drawn. In its weakened expression, restlessness and irritability can come up when your need for variety gets cut short from outside.

You adapt to limitations. That can mean seizing opportunities at the right time, but adapting can also harden into a rigid habit. In its exalted expression, an understanding of the nature of limitation helps you bear restrictions for a while without missing the moment when a chance appears. In its weakened expression, going along becomes routine and keeps alive a boundary that stopped existing long ago. This can block change.

Self-interest shapes how you deal with limits: either wisely safeguarding your own identity or disregarding limits. In its exalted expression, identity and security stay intact despite restrictions, because a well-understood self-interest handles them as a matter of course. In its weakened expression, self-interest mainly serves self-affirmation. Limits are then easily overstepped.

What do you do with a limitation? You can make clever use of the room it leaves you, or you can search for its meaning and pull back. In its exalted expression, intellect and careful thought get the very most out of a narrow frame. In its weakened expression, you dig into why a limitation exists instead of accepting it and using what it offers; this tends to lead to withdrawal and low spirits rather than to transformation.

Leadership shows in how you deal with limits: every limit you overcome creates new ones. Working against this is the urge to expand, which creates confusion. In its exalted expression, the insight that every limit torn down gives rise to new ones shapes a way of acting with the strength to lead, one that sustains a lifelong engagement with limitation. In its weakened expression, the urge to expand creates confusion precisely where limits would be needed. The unrest then comes from the leadership itself, because this energy has little use for restriction.

Rigor in dealing with limitation can be consciously softened or can harden into dogma. In its exalted expression, you instinctively recognize when strict follow-through is needed. Inventive approaches soften the harshness, backed by a rare capacity for restraint. In its weakened expression, rigor that is well thought out and true to principle hardens into dogma and turns cold and harsh, and the restraint can weigh heavily on your mood.

This cross carries the theme of law. Rules are necessary, yet laws are not rigid: over the span of one human life they seem fixed, while across longer stretches of time they change.

The Sun in Gate 60 brings the old to the fore. Limitation states plainly: this is how it is. The new only follows with Gate 3. This variant gives rise to the traditionalist, who guards old fundamental laws and handed-down customs. These include timeless ground rules for living together, like those found in many holy scriptures, but also long-outdated regulations that are still on the books; one example is the requirement to tie up horses in town. Gate 60 keeps such laws alive. In the teaching, it is also linked to old, well-established genetic material and to recessive traits that may only resurface after generations.

Because the modern world changes quickly, people like this often carry traditions into religious circles, where those traditions can become rigid and dogmatic and where worldly laws get mixed up with spiritual ones. Even so, these people are indispensable. Read spiritually, Gate 60 and Gate 3 belong to a mystical cycle: 60 stands for the old, 3 for the new. A body, too, keeps parts whose purpose no one can see; in the same way, the whole has to preserve old traditions and leave room for them, even when they are no longer needed.

A Right Angle Cross shows a personal theme: your path belongs to you, and the people you meet color it without redirecting it. Rather than a claim or a destiny, it is something you live when you follow your Strategy and Authority.

In the Juxtaposition Cross, Gate 60 is entirely focused on limitation and looks for its meaning there. It clings to tradition and draws on a willingness to take risks for it.

There is an affinity here with religious practice as a form of organization and control, and not with spirituality. For a long time, laws were proclaimed in the name of gods so that they would carry weight.

When institutions modernize, people with this cross would rather stick to an older, more traditional form. They reject new laws and progressive faiths, feeling that things were better in the past.

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 tracks. To stay with this image, those who accompany you over a longer time can ride along for a stretch. This is not a prediction; the meaning reveals itself over the course of your life.

This Left Angle Cross distracts: it wants to pull others away from progress and toward what has been handed down, and it can hardly let go of limitation. It looks for the original law and wants to return to first principles as soon as it sees tradition being watered down by innovation.

This also offers protection: these people keep others from rushing headlong into something new. Those who want progress, on the other hand, find them tiring, and they can make it harder for the community to develop further.

Because they guard old knowledge, even when people smile dismissively at it, they lay the groundwork on which something new, and a synthesis, can grow. Some, however, stay trapped in their tradition.

A Left Angle Cross is a transpersonal theme that is only fulfilled in connection with others. This path needs people who fit it and help carry it. This is not fate; the meaning of the cross reveals itself over the course of your life.