Meaning
Heaven rises and water sinks, so the two trigrams of hexagram 6 move away from each other, and the tradition reads the figure as contention. Its Judgment is famously cautious. Even with right on one's side there will be "opposition and obstruction", in Legge's English; stopping halfway brings good fortune, and pressing the case to the end brings bad. The Image draws a lesson from the start of things: the superior man takes counsel at the first step of any affair. The text speaks of a lawsuit, and we leave its law to the text.
Human Design sets the gate from 22°37′30″ to 28°15′ Virgo, in the Solar Plexus centre, the motor the system ties to emotion. Its channel, which the school names Mating, runs to gate 59 in the Sacral; the pair is one of the two channels of what the school calls the Defense circuit, in its Tribal group.
The engine calls the gate Friction. We read it, in our own words, as the moment two people meet each other's edges, where it is settled whether they draw closer or keep apart. The hexagram adds its own advice: friction is not a fight to be won, and the wise course stops before the end. Read with the channel's other end, gate 59, whose hexagram is the scattering of what has hardened, the gate can be read as a boundary that has to be felt before it can be crossed.
The gate opposite is 36, the brightness wounded, the hexagram of keeping one's light covered in hard times. Friction and concealment face each other on the wheel, a contrast in the figures that the I Ching itself never draws, since the wheel is Ra Uru Hu's.
On the wheel
Gate 6 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 22°37′30″ to 28°15′ Virgo, the 42nd gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 15 September to 21 September, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 22°37′30″ to 23°33′45″ Virgo
- Line 2: 23°33′45″ to 24°30′ Virgo
- Line 3: 24°30′ to 25°26′15″ Virgo
- Line 4: 25°26′15″ to 26°22′30″ Virgo
- Line 5: 26°22′30″ to 27°18′45″ Virgo
- Line 6: 27°18′45″ to 28°15′ Virgo
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel Mating is defined only when gate 59 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 Eden (6/36 | 12/11), the Juxtaposition Cross of Conflict (6/36 | 15/10) or the Left Angle Cross of the Plane (6/36 | 15/10). 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)
- 6 訟 Sòng ䷅: Water below, Heaven above; Legge (1882) spells it Sung sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 22°37′30″ to 28°15′ Virgo, 172.625° to 178.25° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- Solar Plexus: the system ties it to emotion. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 6-59 Mating, to gate 59 in the Sacral: Defense circuit, Tribal group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 36, Crisis, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of Eden (6/36 | 12/11); Juxtaposition Cross of Conflict (6/36 | 15/10); Left Angle Cross of the Plane (6/36 | 15/10) sourced
- Gate name
- Friction: 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 6, 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
- The rub between two people that decides whether they come closer: read as the boundary that has to be met, and respected, before any intimacy. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Sung intimates how, though there is sincerity in one's contention, he will yet meet with opposition and obstruction …”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Friction and sets it in the Solar Plexus centre, at one end of the channel Mating. 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
- The rub between two people that decides whether they come closer: read as the boundary that has to be met, and respected, before any intimacy.
Claims about it
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Gate 6's place on the zodiac, 22°37′30″ to 28°15′ Virgo, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 6.
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 Solar Plexus centre, where gate 6 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 6 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.
