The Channel of Struggle joins the Spleen centre to the Root centre through Gates 28 and 38, 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 28, Great Preponderance (Da Guo). The lake rising over the tree. Its image is the ridgepole sagging under exceptional load, the extraordinary time in which something must give, and extraordinary action is justified.
Hexagram 38, Opposition (Kui). Fire moving up while the lake seeps down, two natures diverging. It is estrangement in which only small matters succeed, yet the classic insists that after opposition comes meeting.
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.