Gate 11 · Ideas

What it is like

Ideas come to you easily and you like to share them. Sometimes you treat them as a to-do list, when often they're more a story to tell.

When someone close has it

Ideas tend to pour out of someone with this gate, one after another. Listen with curiosity, without expecting each one to happen straight away.

A question for today

Which idea am I carrying around, and who do I want to tell it to today?

The six lines of gate 11

1. Line 1 · Tangled Roots

   This line checks whether an idea has roots before anyone hears it. When you pull on one thought, others come up with it, connected underground, and you like to know where they came from. You most willingly tell what you have thought through and can back up. Sometimes the search for firm support lasts so long that an idea which could already be spoken stays inside you and starts to weigh.

2. Line 2 · Wide Embrace

   Ideas come to you easily, and you can tell them so that they reach people quite unlike you. You do not divide listeners into your own and strangers, you remember those far away, and others come on their own to ask what you think. You do best when nobody demands a plan, only a story. When someone wants to turn it into a rule for everyone, it is easy to lose the lightness that is its whole value.

3. Line 3 · Slope and Plain

   Here ideas learn that every plain has a slope somewhere. You tell an idea, hear where it does not hold, and come back with a better version, and then again. It is an exchange in which nothing is final, and that is exactly how you arrive at what makes sense. Sometimes, after a few rejections, it is easy to decide that no idea is worth telling, although it is only one more slope before another plain.

4. Line 4 · Talk at the Table

   This line carries ideas to the people you know, and there they come alive. You tell them at the table, during a break, in a talk with a friend, and you see your thought change something in someone's day. You do not need a stage, a circle of people you trust is enough. Sometimes you enjoy sharing ideas with those close to you so much that you start instructing them, and then the conversation stops being a meeting.

5. Line 5 · Good Match

   Here ideas reach people like a well-matched alliance, and others see you as someone who will offer the right idea for their matter. You can join someone's need with a thought that fits it and do it so that it looks obvious. Your ideas carry over well and work in different places. When expectations grow, it is easy to promise more apt solutions than actually come, and then the disappointment falls on you.

6. Line 6 · Wall in the Moat

   This line looks from a distance at how ideas rise and crumble, like a wall that in time falls back into the moat it was built from. Over the years you fight less for your ideas and show more of how to live with them and how to let them go. Others learn from you a calm towards change. Sometimes, when something crumbles, you are tempted to defend it by force, although it is better then to tell what remains of it.

The centre of this gate

• Ajna

Channels through gate 11

• 11–56 · Curiosity