Meaning
Thunder comes up out of the earth, the first stirring after stillness, and the hexagram is readiness, enthusiasm, the delight that sets people moving. Its Judgment says that in such a time "feudal princes may be set up, and the hosts put in motion, with advantage", in Legge's English: energy that others follow. The Image is musical. The ancient kings composed music to honour virtue and offered it to the highest and to their ancestors.
Human Design places gate 16 from 5°45′ to 11°22′30″ Gemini, in the Throat centre, which it ties to expression and action. Its channel, which the school names The Wavelength, runs to gate 48 in the Spleen, the centre of instinct and intuition in its terms; the pair is in the Understanding circuit of the Collective group.
The engine calls the gate Skills. With its hexagram, we read it in our own words as enthusiasm put to work: the readiness to rehearse something until it can be performed for others. The music of the Image fits. A tune moves a crowd because someone practised it, and the line texts warn against delight that is only noise, the first line boasting of its pleasure. At the channel's other end gate 48 carries the well, the hexagram of depth that has to be drawn up. Read together, the two can be taken as a skill that is only as good as what it draws on.
Opposite gate 16 on the wheel is gate 9, the small restraint, clouds that do not yet rain: enthusiasm faced by patience. The pairing is Ra Uru Hu's wheel, not the book's, whose own pair for this hexagram is 15, modesty.
On the wheel
Gate 16 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 5°45′ to 11°22′30″ Gemini, the 23rd gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 27 May to 1 June, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 5°45′ to 6°41′15″ Gemini
- Line 2: 6°41′15″ to 7°37′30″ Gemini
- Line 3: 7°37′30″ to 8°33′45″ Gemini
- Line 4: 8°33′45″ to 9°30′ Gemini
- Line 5: 9°30′ to 10°26′15″ Gemini
- Line 6: 10°26′15″ to 11°22′30″ Gemini
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel The Wavelength is defined only when gate 48 is active too, by either set.
When the Personality Sun is in this gate, the school's table names the cross by the angle of the profile: the Right Angle Cross of Planning (16/9 | 37/40), the Juxtaposition Cross of Experimentation (16/9 | 63/64) or the Left Angle Cross of Identification (16/9 | 63/64). The four numbers are the Personality Sun and Earth, then the Design Sun and Earth. We give the names only.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Hexagram (the I Ching)
- 16 豫 Yù ䷏: Earth below, Thunder above; Legge (1882) spells it Yü sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 5°45′ to 11°22′30″ Gemini, 65.75° to 71.375° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- Throat: the system ties it to expression and action. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 16-48 The Wavelength, to gate 48 in the Spleen: Understanding circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 9, Focus, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of Planning (16/9 | 37/40); Juxtaposition Cross of Experimentation (16/9 | 63/64); Left Angle Cross of Identification (16/9 | 63/64) sourced
- Gate name
- Skills: the name the engine prints, the same as the Definitive Book's title as the pyhd tables record it. A name, not the hexagram's sourced
- Gene Keys (Richard Rudd, 2009)
- Key 16, from the same hexagram at the same place on the wheel; our Gene Keys Profile page for it gives our own words sourced
- Our reading
- Enthusiasm that makes people move together: read as the readiness to practise a thing until it is done well and shown. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Yü indicates that, (in the state which it implies), feudal princes may be set up, and the hosts put in motion, with advantage.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Skills and sets it in the Throat centre, at one end of the channel The Wavelength. Its descriptions of the gate and its six lines are in Ra Uru Hu's books, in copyright; we do not quote or paraphrase them.
- The independent schools
- Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler, Chetan Parkyn, Karen Curry Parker and later teachers compute the same gate at the same place, and read it in their own words.
- EsoTerrier
- Enthusiasm that makes people move together: read as the readiness to practise a thing until it is done well and shown.
Claims about it
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Gate 16's place on the zodiac, 5°45′ to 11°22′30″ Gemini, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 16.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's arrangement: Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the 64, rotated so that hexagram 41 starts at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source ties a hexagram to degrees of the zodiac.
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The Throat centre, where gate 16 sits, is an organ or gland, and the gate tells something about the body.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: The centre's name is a name. The schools' pairing of the centres with organs and glands, taken from the chakra books of the 1920s, has no physiological correspondence that anyone has shown, and we never read a gate or a centre as the body or its health.
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Gate 16 is one of the 64 codons of the genetic code, so it marks something in a person's genes.
falseWhat the record shows: Both sets have 64 members because both are built from a small alphabet in groups: two kinds of line in six places, four bases in three. Nothing beyond the count matches.
