Love of the Body

Gate 46 of the Human Design system carries the name "Love Of The Body," 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 46 corresponds to hexagram 46, Pushing Upward. 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 "Love Of The Body", 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.

Within the bodygraph, the composite body-map at the centre of Human Design, Gate 46 is placed in the G/Identity 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 Discovery (29-46), which it forms with Gate 29 ("Committed Perseverance"). 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 G/Identity centre carries a specific function in the system's own account: a sense of self, direction and love, read as the seat of identity in the model. Gate 46 is one of 8 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 46, Richard Rudd's later, contemplative rereading of the identical hexagram. Where Ra Uru Hu gives the gate the fixed keynote "Love Of The Body", Rudd spreads the same number across a spectrum: the Shadow of Seriousness, the Gift of Delight and the Siddhi of Ecstasy. 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.