October 25-31, 2025 – A Look Back
When Life Asks Its Most Profound Question Through – well sometimes – a Leaky Roof
Dear Fellow Traveler,
What you experienced during that week before November 1st was a challenging transit.
From October 25th through October 31st, the Sun moved through Gate 28 in Scorpio, activating what Ra Uru Hu called “The Preponderance of the Great” – the Gate of the Game Player, or as I call it “The Gate of Struggle”, positioned in the Spleen Center.
This is an one of the existentially potent gates in the Human Design system, though as many of us in this week discovered, i asked my artist friends, its profound questions often arrive wrapped in the most mundane packaging imaginable.
Like for me: Water in my studio. Again.
All of a sudden things spilling everywhere: ink bottles topple, full water glasses fall on the carpet, the soup boils over and half a liter of greasy bone broth drips down on my kitchen floor. Except the water in the studio, all is my own doing and I am fully aware of that, but it is very curious that it happens so often this week.
On top of that I have fears of death and dying again, which – by now I know – come back every time the sun, earth or moon are in the 28. It seems as if things are refusing to finish the way I want them to and life wants to make things more difficult than it needs to be.
I also was frantically cleaning and tidying, desperately trying to clear space for a fresh start. This is Gate 28 in its most honest expression – the existential question of life’s worthwhileness showing up not as philosophical contemplation but as actual chaos demanding to be dealt with, detail by frustrating detail.
The Essential Nature of Gate 28
Ra taught us that Gate 28 represents a primal fear embedded in the individual circuit – the fear of death, understood more precisely as the fear that life itself may not be worthwhile. But here’s what often gets missed in the teaching: this question doesn’t usually arrive as a cosmic crisis. It sometimes shows up as water damage. As projects that won’t complete properly. As mess upon mess demanding attention before anything new can begin.
The first line of Gate 28 is called “Preparation,” and Ra described it with remarkable precision: “The desire to be effective manifested in the application of energy to detail.” This is the foundation of the risk-taking gate – you better have your detail before you take any risk. What kind of risk do you want to take? You need to see the odds clearly. And sometimes, as Ra noted, you go through all the detail and then realize the risk isn’t worth taking at all. “It was just interesting to go through all the detail.”
Last week of frantically cleaning and tidying wasn’t a distraction from Gate 28’s deeper themes – it was the literal embodiment of them. The gate was asking through the circumstances: Is this studio space worth maintaining? Is this work worth the ongoing struggle? Can I clear enough foundation to make the fresh start actually meaningful? These are Gate 28’s questions, asked not in meditation but through hands scrubbing water damage and sorting through chaos.
The Mundane Is the Portal
There’s a teaching in Human Design that gets overlooked in favor of the more dramatic interpretations: the body knows before the mind does. The Spleen operates in the now with survival intelligence. When Gate 28 is activated, it’s listening acoustically, responding instinctively to whether struggle serves life or depletes it. Before I saw Your cleaning wasn’t busywork – it was your system trying to establish whether the conditions for meaningful work actually exist.
Ra spoke about this with characteristic directness when teaching the first line: “Make sure that you have the detail before you take the risk. That is what the Preponderance of the Great is all about. The foundation is: you better have the detail. Which means, as you move through, the detail is always there. Risk taking is not a blind thing.”
The Transitoriness of Everything
At the very top of the lines in Gate 28, the I Ching reveals its essential teaching: the transitoriness of power and influence. Everything changes. Nothing remains as you built it. Your projects don’t finish the way you want them to. Water appears where it shouldn’t. The fresh start you’re working toward will itself be disrupted by future circumstances. This isn’t failure – this is the fundamental truth Gate 28 forces us to encounter.
Gate 28 in the Sun for a week means the entire collective was processing this question through their own particular circumstances. For some it manifested as relationship struggles, for others as career doubts, for still others as health concerns. For me, it showed up as physical chaos in my workspace, demanding resolution before anything new could emerge. Each manifestation is valid. Each carries the same underlying inquiry: Given that nothing endures unchanged, what’s worth the effort?
Why the Mundane Matters More
Here’s what makes your experience particularly instructive: Gate 28’s existential questions can only be answered through the actual details of living. You can’t philosophize your way to knowing whether life is worthwhile – you have to discover it through engagement with the mess. The cleaning and tidying weren’t keeping you from deeper work; they were the deeper work.
Ra made an important point about Gate 28 that relates directly to your experience: “The 28 is afraid that their way in this life will be a failure. That is, that they themselves, their lives and what they live for is not really worthwhile.”
When your studio space won’t cooperate, when water intrudes, when projects refuse to complete properly – your way in life feels blocked. The question becomes visceral: Can I actually create the conditions necessary for my work to succeed? Is this struggle sustainable?
The frantic energy I had, that desperate attempt to clear space for a fresh start – this is the 28.1 in action. It’s preparing, gathering detail, trying to establish firm foundation. But there’s also something else present: the awareness that perhaps no amount of preparation will be enough, that circumstances themselves may be communicating something important about where you’re investing your energy.
Detail as Spiritual Practice
In spiritual circles, we’re often taught to transcend the mundane, to rise above the petty concerns of daily maintenance. But Gate 28 teaches the opposite. The details are where life either proves its worth or reveals its emptiness. Your cleaning wasn’t elevated meditation – it was existential inquiry conducted through your hands and body, your system testing whether this space can actually support what you’re trying to create.
Ra taught that Gate 28.1 has “a life-sustaining respect and attention to all aspects of a process.” This is individual, not tribal – meaning it’s your unique process that matters, not collective standards. When you’re frantically tidying, you’re not just cleaning a room. You’re testing each element: Does this serve my individual creative process? Does this detail support my way of working? The water damage becomes a question: Can I trust this space? The unfinished projects ask: Am I approaching this work in a way that actually leads to completion?
The Freedom in Mundane Struggle
Here’s what might be liberating about understanding your experience through Gate 28: the struggle was never supposed to be transcendent. The gate doesn’t ask you to rise above practical concerns – it asks you to discover meaning precisely through those concerns. Water in your studio isn’t a metaphor; it’s literal information about whether this space can support your life’s work. Projects not finishing properly aren’t symbols; they’re data about whether your current approach serves you.
The beauty of Gate 28 showing up mundanely is that it makes the existential answerable. You don’t have to solve the grand question “Is life worthwhile?” – you only have to answer “Is continuing to work in this studio, under these conditions, worth it?” That’s a question your body can respond to through cleaning and preparation. Your Spleen knows, in the now, whether each detail you attend to serves survival or depletes it.
Integration and Relief
Now that the Sun has moved into Gate 44, there’s a natural shift. Where Gate 28 was asking “Is this worth the struggle?”, Gate 44 simply knows instinctually what serves and what doesn’t. The frantic energy can settle. The alertness of Gate 44 operates more quickly, sniffing out problems before they become water damage, recognizing patterns before projects go astray.
Your body may be breathing a sigh of relief not because the struggles were resolved, but because the nature of the questioning has changed. Gate 28 demanded that you prove worth through preparation and detail. Gate 44 trusts its spontaneous recognition. One exhausts through relentless inquiry; the other rests in immediate knowing.
Honoring Your Experience
What you went through deserves acknowledgment precisely because it was mundane. The water in your studio was Gate 28 asking its deepest question through actual circumstances rather than abstract philosophy. The cleaning and tidying was your system’s genuine attempt to establish sustainable foundation. The projects not finishing revealed real information about whether your current way of working actually serves your creative life.
This is Gate 28 in truth – not grand philosophical crisis but the daily, embodied question: Given the actual conditions of my life, the water damage and incomplete projects and necessary mess, is continuing to invest energy here worthwhile? Your frantic preparation was appropriate. It was your Spleen processing survival information, gathering the detail needed before committing to whatever risk comes next.
The struggle was never a distraction from the spiritual work. It was the spiritual work, conducted in the only language the body truly understands – through actual engagement with the mess and beauty of physical existence.
If you’d like to explore how Gate 28 shows up in your personal design, or to understand your own relationship with preparation, risk-taking, and the mundane details that reveal life’s worthwhileness, I’m available for private readings.