The third line is the staircase in the house, the transition between the personal ground floor and the transpersonal floor above. It is where the inward process of lines one and two meets the outside world for the first time, and the meeting is rarely gentle. Life bumps into the third line, and the third line bumps back, and out of the collision comes knowledge nobody could have got any other way.
The Role
Third lines close the lower trigram, and they are its most adaptable member. They do not take anything at face value. They kick the tyres, look for the loophole, and notice the flaw in the plan before it has been announced, and they are usually the first to spot a genuinely new possibility because they were the ones who tripped over it. The name Martyr refers to the willingness to stand up, say this is not true, and take the heat for saying it.
In Your Profile
If your Profile begins with 3, the 3/5 or 3/6, you know you learn the hard way and you have probably stopped apologising for it. If it ends in 3, the 1/3 or 6/3, the experimenting runs unconsciously through the body, and you may experience it as a life that keeps bumping into things without your having chosen the bumps. The 6/3 is a special case: its third line runs the whole first stage of a sixth-line life.
Living It Well
Bonds made and broken is not a curse. It is a mechanism, and it can be as ordinary as leaving for work each morning and coming home each night. The not-self third line reads every ending as failure and every discovery as proof of inadequacy. The correct third line knows that whatever comes its way arrives with a message, and that its job is to find out what is true by finding out what is not. Adaptable, tenacious and grounded in the material world, third lines are the people who quietly rewrite what everyone thought was possible.