Origin 1987
Gate 6 sits in the Solar Plexus and is read as the friction that both guards and opens intimacy, the gate through which emotional and sexual contact is either admitted or refused. It carries the number of the sixth hexagram, Conflict, which in the classical text advises meeting an opponent halfway and warns against carrying a dispute to its end. Human Design keeps conflict but reads it as a membrane rather than a quarrel, joining Gate 6 to Gate 59 in the channel of Mating. The emotional wave attached to this centre, which practitioners treat as a defining feature of the system, is Ra Uru Hu's own contribution and has no counterpart in the I Ching.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1987 2Tradition: Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987) Origin PeriodEmotional Friction is gate 6 of the sixty-four gates of the Human Design system, corresponding to Hexagram 6, Conflict of the I Ching; the system itself was synthesized in 1987 out of the I Ching, the chakra teaching, Kabbalah and astrology. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe I Ching of China, the chakra teaching of India, Kabbalah and astrology are drawn on here inside a scheme assembled in 1987 and offered as an instrument of psychological counselling. The four traditions it draws on are old; the arrangement that joins them is not, and none of them produced it. 2 Identity
PositionSourced to the subject's own account Correspondences
CenterSourced to the subject's own account Channel PartnerSourced to the subject's own accountGate 59 (Channel of Mating) 1 I Ching CorrespondenceSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
The Gate and Its I Ching Hexagram
Gate 6 of the Human Design system carries the name "Emotional Friction," and this entry describes it as the system itself presents it. Human Design is a modern esoteric system, originated in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu (born Alan Robert Krakower, 1948-2011), who presented its content as received teaching rather than as an inherited tradition. It is roughly four decades old and is best read as a contemporary synthesis, not as ancient wisdom or established fact. Ra Uru Hu combined four older systems that had never before been joined: the I Ching supplies the sixty-four gates, the Hindu chakra model the nine centres, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life the connecting channels, and Western astrology the method of calculation.
The gates take their numbers from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, so Gate 6 corresponds to hexagram 6, Conflict. The link is one of numbering and binary structure only: the hexagram belongs to a genuinely ancient Chinese text, while the gate's psychological keynote, here summarised as "Emotional Friction", was formulated in the late twentieth century and is not drawn from the classical commentaries. The two meanings are best kept side by side rather than merged.
The Gate in the Bodygraph
Within the bodygraph, the composite body-map at the centre of Human Design, Gate 6 is placed in the Solar Plexus centre, one of the nine centres the system maps onto (and expands from) the seven-centre chakra model. Gates do not act alone in the model: each pairs with another gate to complete a channel joining two centres. It belongs to the Channel of Mating (6-59), which it forms with Gate 59 ("Intimacy And Bonding"). These placements and pairings are features of Ra Uru Hu's 1987 design and describe the system's internal mechanics; they are presented here as the system's own claims, not as verified facts about human beings.
The Solar Plexus centre carries a specific function in the system's own account: emotional awareness, read not as a fixed state but as a wave moving between poles over time. Gate 6 is one of 7 gates the bodygraph assigns to this centre, and its reading is built from that placement rather than from anything in the classical hexagram commentary.
The same number appears elsewhere in this atlas as Gene Key 6, Richard Rudd's later, contemplative rereading of the identical hexagram. Where Ra Uru Hu gives the gate the fixed keynote "Emotional Friction", Rudd spreads the same number across a spectrum: the Shadow of Conflict, the Gift of Diplomacy and the Siddhi of Peace. The two accounts share a hexagram and a number and diverge in almost everything else, since one issues a fixed mechanical reading and the other asks for years of contemplation.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Corresponds To
Human Design Gate 6, Emotional Friction, corresponds to Hexagram 6, Conflict, per its own iching-correspondence fact.
Human Design Gate 6, Emotional Friction, and Gene Key 6, From Conflict to Peace, are the same wheel position, both keyed to Hexagram 6, Conflict.
Design Earth in These Crosses
Design Sun in These Crosses
Located in Center
Personality Earth in These Crosses
Personality Sun in These Crosses
Sources
1. The Human Design System
Ra Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower), Human Design America, 1992Gate 6, Emotional FrictionView the Source 2. Über den Tellerrand, ein Blick ins Human Design System (HDS)
Petra Stute, Virineya Würgler and Johnny Würgler, Springer, Journal für Gynäkologische Endokrinologie/Schweiz 24 (2021), pp. 50-51, 2021p. 50: the four systems synthesised, and the use made of the synthesisView the Source The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Richard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), Princeton University Press, 1980The corresponding King Wen hexagram 6View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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