The Channel of Inspiration joins the G/Identity centre to the Throat centre through Gates 1 and 8, and both of those numbers are borrowed. They are positions in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, the Chinese divinatory classic whose sixty-four hexagrams Human Design maps one to one onto the sixty-four gates of its bodygraph. Read as I Ching rather than as Human Design, the two numbers name two independent oracle texts.
Hexagram 1, The Creative (Qian). Heaven doubled, six unbroken lines of pure yang. It is the image of unresting creative force, the dragon that rises stage by stage, and its counsel is strength sustained rather than spent in one gesture.
Hexagram 8, Holding Together (Bi). Water flowing upon the earth. It is union and alliance, the streams gathering to the sea, and it warns that those who come too late to a forming union find it closed.
The I Ching itself never sets these two hexagrams in a pair. Each stands alone in the sequence, consulted about a changing situation and answered in counsel that passes. The pairing is a construction of Ra Uru Hu's system, published from 1987, which fixes each hexagram to a position in a birth chart and reads the joined pair as a lasting trait of the person. The correspondence of number is real, and both hexagrams can be followed into their own entries in this atlas; the pairing, and the character read out of it, belong to the modern system alone.