The Channel of The Alpha joins the G/Identity centre to the Throat centre through Gates 7 and 31, 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 7, The Army (Shi). Water stored beneath the earth. It is the disciplined mass, the campaign that prospers only under a seasoned leader with a just cause, and the ground that holds its people the way soil holds groundwater.
Hexagram 31, Influence (Xian). The lake resting on the mountain, the low receiving the high. It is mutual attraction and courtship, influence through openness rather than pursuit.
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.