Meaning
Five broken lines push up from the bottom against a single whole line at the top, like a house whose walls have been stripped to the roof. The hexagram is decline, stripping away, and its Judgment is plain: "it will not be advantageous to make a movement in any direction whatever", in Legge's English. The Image draws a lesson for those above: they strengthen those below, as a mountain rests on a broad earth, to make their own position secure. The top line is the fruit left uneaten, from which growth begins again.
Human Design places gate 23 from 18°52′30″ to 24°30′ Taurus, in the Throat centre, which the system ties to expression and action. Its channel, which the school names Structuring, runs to gate 43 in the Ajna, the centre it ties to the conceptual mind; the pair is in the Knowing circuit of the Individual group.
The engine names the gate Assimilation. Read with its hexagram, we take it in our own words as the stripping of an idea to its bones so that it can be said and taken in. What the hexagram strips is everything except the one line that matters. At the channel's other end gate 43 carries breakthrough, the hexagram of a decision forced through. Together they can be read as an insight that arrives all at once and then has to be cut down to words others can hold.
Opposite gate 23 on the wheel is gate 43, its channel partner: like 20 and 34, the two gates of this channel face each other across the circle, and each hexagram is the other with every line flipped. The I Ching's own pair for hexagram 23 is 24, the return, and the wheel puts the two side by side.
On the wheel
Gate 23 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 18°52′30″ to 24°30′ Taurus, the 20th gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 9 May to 15 May, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 18°52′30″ to 19°48′45″ Taurus
- Line 2: 19°48′45″ to 20°45′ Taurus
- Line 3: 20°45′ to 21°41′15″ Taurus
- Line 4: 21°41′15″ to 22°37′30″ Taurus
- Line 5: 22°37′30″ to 23°33′45″ Taurus
- Line 6: 23°33′45″ to 24°30′ Taurus
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel Structuring is defined only when gate 43 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 Explanation (23/43 | 49/4), the Juxtaposition Cross of Assimilation (23/43 | 30/29) or the Left Angle Cross of Dedication (23/43 | 30/29). 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)
- 23 剝 Bō ䷖: Earth below, Mountain above; Legge (1882) spells it Po sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 18°52′30″ to 24°30′ Taurus, 48.875° to 54.5° 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
- 23-43 Structuring, to gate 43 in the Ajna: Knowing circuit, Individual group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 43, Insight, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of Explanation (23/43 | 49/4); Juxtaposition Cross of Assimilation (23/43 | 30/29); Left Angle Cross of Dedication (23/43 | 30/29) sourced
- Gate name
- Assimilation: 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 23, 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
- Taking away what is not needed until the point is clear: read as an insight made simple enough to be understood by others. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Po indicates that (in the state which it symbolises) it will not be advantageous to make a movement in any direction whatever.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Assimilation and sets it in the Throat centre, at one end of the channel Structuring. 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
- Taking away what is not needed until the point is clear: read as an insight made simple enough to be understood by others.
Claims about it
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Gate 23's place on the zodiac, 18°52′30″ to 24°30′ Taurus, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 23.
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 23 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 23 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.
