← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 59/164
Channel 35-36 — the appetite for experience
Channel 35-36 — "the appetite for experience" — joins the Feeling centre (the tradition's "Solar Plexus") to the Throat centre. It is the channel of someone who wants to have lived things — new places, new feelings, the thing not yet done — and who becomes wise by having gone through them.
What it joins
- Gate 36, on the Feeling centre: weathering emotional storms. The I Ching's hexagram 36 is traditionally called Darkening of the Light.
- Gate 35, on the Throat: hunger for new experience. Hexagram 35 is traditionally called Progress.
Gate 36 meets the unknown with its feelings wide open, crises included; gate 35 keeps reaching for the next thing. Together they read as a restless, emotional appetite for change.
Its current
It runs on the collective current, in the sensing stream: meaning gathered from experience, looking back. What is lived through here is meant to be told, so that others benefit from it without having to repeat it.
What defining it does
Both the Feeling centre and the Throat become defined. The Feeling centre is a motor, and this channel connects it directly to the Throat, so it always changes the type: a Manifestor if the Vitality centre is open, a Manifesting Generator if it is defined. Because the Feeling centre is defined, the inner compass is always the emotional wave — clarity that comes with time, never in the moment.
How it is read
The tradition reads this as a channel that is never quite satisfied by what it already has. We read the gift as courage for the new and, later, depth: someone who has felt a great deal and can speak about it truthfully. The shadow is jumping in on the high of the wave and being disappointed on the low — moving on before an experience has given up its meaning, or blaming the experience for a feeling that was always going to pass. Because the compass here is the wave, the invitation is to wait for some calm before saying yes to the next adventure, and then to go into it fully.
In your chart
A complete 35-36 is drawn from gate 36 on the Feeling centre to gate 35 on the Throat, each half coloured by the moment that lit its gate. Either gate alone carries a *.