The official name for Human Design Gate 61 is The Gate of Inner Truth. But I call it The Divine Door because its primary action is to discover your inner truth by reveling in the mystery of life.
About Human Design Gate 61 – Gene Key 61
Archetype Name: The Divine Door
In Action: revel in the mystery or life
Keywords: mystery, seeking, inner Truth, and mysticism
Download All 64 Human Design Gates Cheatsheet (for free!)
Official Gate Name: Inner Truth – Mystery
Human Design Definition: The awareness of universal underlying principles.
Core Theme: knowing something new, understanding the mysteries of life, and knowing the unknowable.
Bodygraph Center: Head center and connects to the Ajna center via human design gate 24.
Tropical Sign: Capricorn
(Want all of the correspondences and keynotes for the gates of your incarnation cross? The Human Design Map is for you.)
The Energy Spectrum of Human Design Gate 61
All energy in the Human Design chart exists on a spectrum of potential.
On the “positive” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 61 is the energy for inner truth. Gate 61 deeply understands that knowledge and wisdom are two different things. Knowledge happens in the mind. Wisdom happens when knowledge is integrated into the body. It also knows that Truth is subjective and can live with an open heart and mind.
On the “negative” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 61 is the energy for feeling pressured to answer the biggest question of all: Why am I here? It easily gets lost or overwhelmed with the question of why.
If you don’t like the results that the “negative” side of the spectrum is creating in your life, you can raise the frequency of Gate 61 with a number of boundaries, practices, and tools.
(I cover the practices for the gates of your incarnation cross in the Human Design Map.)
The most important thing to raise the frequency of gate 61 is to develop practices that open space to surrender to the mystery of life.
My personal contemplation of Human Design Gate 61 (Gene Key 61)
Gate 61 has a lot of significance in my life because it is in my Unconscious Earth.
In the Human Design chart, I interpret the Unconscious Earth placement as your unique path to that thing that some call God.
When you embody the highest frequency of your Unconscious Earth, you will feel connected to yourself, the people in your life, the collective, and the cosmos. And it provides the spiritual foundation necessary to unlock the highest frequency in the other gates of your incarnation cross.
So, my path to “God” is reveling in the mystery of life. In doing so, I unlock the full potential of my higher purpose.
(I’ll go into detail about yours in your Human Design Map.)
And, OMG (no pun intended), what a ride it has been.
I actually have the full channel (61-24) defined in my chart. As far back as I can remember, I have felt deeply connected with the mystery of life and the Divinity of everything.
But, I was raised in a religious context that believed there was one, and only one, path to “God.”
I’d sit in church completely confused.
I could feel the Golden Threads of Truth running through the sermons. I’d often get chills or cry.
But the hellfire, damnation, and insistence of unworthiness never resonated with me. Never mind the gossip, bold-faced hypocrisy, and isms as deep as the ocean (racism, sexism, classism, etc.).
My relationship with the “God” of my childhood unraveled very early.
I remember being 18 years old, pissed off at my parents, and yelling that I didn’t believe in God.
In hindsight (and true to gate 24), I can clearly see that it had nothing to do with believing in “God.”
I just didn’t believe in the God they believed in. And I wasn’t aware that what I believed (about anything, including God) was a choice.
All of that changed when, through the mystery of Grace, I stumbled onto the work of Richard Rohr.
The first book I read of his was called Falling Upward. And, as they say in the East, a meeting with the Divine and the river changes course.
My interpretation of what he says is this:
When terrible things happen, we try to reconcile those things with the God that we believe in. And if we can’t do that reconciliation, we have two choices.
We can make God “small” by collapsing our definition of it. Or, we can make God “bigger” by expanding our definition of it.
“In order to see God, you have to have special eyes. Otherwise, you cannot bare the shock.” ~ Neem Karoli Baba
The idea that I could make God bigger shocked me; it was my first spiritual awakening.
I saw that when I told my parents that God isn’t real, it was because I had collapsed my definition of God. I hadn’t known I could make my definition of God big enough to hold the trauma I was carrying.
But, in Richard Rohr’s book, I saw I had a choice.
True to the 61-24, from that moment on, I began to revisit my definition of God repeatedly. It became my spiritual practice to make God big enough to hold all my experiences, even the horrible ones.
Since then, I have studied spiritual traditions and beliefs from all over the world. I’ve looked for the Golden Thread that runs through them all, and I opened myself up to more powerful ways of thinking about God.
I’ve resonated most with Hermeticism (aka magick) and traditions from the East. What has been most interesting, though, is that I also really enjoy learning about the different ways people interpret the Bible and seeing those old sermons in a whole new way.
And, I’ve stopped believing that there is only one path to that thing that some call God.
I’ve realized that Truth is subjective.
We tend to think of Truth as being objective. But, most of the things we believe are “the truth” are really just thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.
The real good news is that thoughts and beliefs are always optional.
We don’t “have to” believe anything.
We are all just making it up as we go along.
No one knows for sure.
A younger version of me would have been terrified at that idea; it gives me so much freedom now.
“What I know
Is that I don’t know.
So I dance, and I sing, and I live full.
I give it all to the call of the unknown.”
Trevor Hall, The Fruitful Darkness, What I Know
I can now play, experiment, and see what resonates. If something doesn’t resonate, I can let it go. And if it does, I can hold it lightly enough to let it go if it starts to feel like I’m collapsing.
This surrender to “not knowing” is the spiritual underpinning that informs my approach to Human Design. And it is why I guide people inside the Human Design Map + Portal the way I do.
I’m not attached to the idea that there is only one way to use Human Design, that what Ra said was the ultimate Truth, or that you can get it wrong. That feels ways too small for me.
Instead, I choose to believe that my soul is always on the “right” path – even if it looks nothing like my chart. I choose to believe that God is everything – there is nothing that is not Divine. I trust what resonates in my body and lands with holiness. The mystery always plays out perfectly.
And so it is.
Now it’s your turn to contemplate Gate 61
When you stand in the truth that the gifts of Gate 61 are available to you, whether it’s defined in your chart or not…
What is your relationship with trusting your inner Truth?
What is your relationship to being open-minded and open-hearted with others trusting their inner Truth? What if their truth doesn’t match yours?
What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom to you?
Have you surrendered to the great mystery of life? Why or why not?
If not, do you like your reasons for that?
I encourage you to take some time with these questions. Take them out into your world and let their answers reveal themselves to you. Intend for deeper levels of clarity about gate 61.
And, if you have gate 61 in your Human Design Incarnation Cross, check out the Human Design Map where I go super deep into each cross gate.