Gate 4: Our ability to turn doubts into certainty
A tiny nagging problem, doubt or suspicion pops in your head: what do you do? You chew it mentally. You try to make sense of it, solve it, figure it out. You want to be sure before you move forward. This is Gate 4 in action, the Gate of Formulization.
Gate 4 is found in the Ajna Center, on the logical side of the bodygraph’s Collective Circuitry. The Ajna is our seat of mental awareness, where we process thoughts and also where we drive ourselves crazy. The mind, it turns out, is not suited to solve our own problems. Nonetheless, it is a valuable tool to share with others. This is the mind’s contribution to the collective, because sharing is the ultimate function of this circuitry.
The Gate of Formulization points up to Gate 63 (the Gate of Doubt) in the Head Center. Together they form the Channel of Logic. If you have this definition, you are logical and highly tuned to pattern recognition.
When something makes sense or doesn’t fit the pattern, you experience doubt as a mental pressure. To relieve this pressure, your mind goes to work to test out, substantiate and conceptualize the available evidence, looking for answers, proof, or truth.
However, just because one mind formulates a “truth” does not make it true or even helpful for others. For example, the hypotheses that Gate 4 comes up with can be immature (hence the I Ching name of this hexagram Youthful Folly). It can be tempting to grab hold of the first theory that makes sense to us in order to relieve the uncomfortable pressure, even though this theory might be completely ludicrous to other people.
Some of the challenges with this gate’s frequency include obsessive fault-finding and mental anxiety, which might play out as needing to be 100% certain about things – and yet never quite getting there. Chaos can feel very uncomfortable. And if you have the hanging Gate 4, without the harmonic Gate 63 to form the full channel, you might find yourself with the uneasy sense of needing to figure something out, but not being sure what.
For all the necessary fact-finding and problem-solving of Gate 4, real truth is not a mental concept. Still, humanity’s future depends on the power of logic to pave a safe, secure path.
