What this arrow describes
Motivation is the color beneath the Personality Sun and Earth, on the conscious, "black" side of the chart. The Personality Sun/Earth shows how a person conceptualizes: how the mind turns what it takes in into thoughts and concepts. Where Perspective describes what someone is meant to see, Motivation describes how that seeing becomes thought.
Theatre makes a good analogy. Two people can share the same gates and lines, just as two actors can share the same script. Yet they sound different, because each brings a different motive to the words. Motivation is what gives a line a quality nobody else can give it.
Left and right arrow
The direction of the arrow depends on the tone under the color: tones 1–3 make a left arrow, tones 4–6 a right one.
- A left mind is strategic and focused. It remembers what it concentrated on and can retrieve it easily, while everything else drifts past.
- A right mind is receptive. It takes in everything but can't always pull it out on its own; what it knows tends to surface when someone asks the right question. That's why company matters so much for a right mind: the level of the people around it shapes the level of its thinking.
Ra considered the right mind the one under the heaviest conditioning pressure, since school and culture demand left habits from it: memorizing, controlling, strategizing.
Each motivation color has a pair of keywords on either side, such as communalist and separatist for Fear. This is trajectory: on the Personality side the color is not fixed rigidly, so a person usually starts on the opposite side and matures toward their own over the years. The shift often becomes noticeable in the second half of life, after the Saturn return.
The six colors
- Fear — driven by the unknown: to understand, dig deeper, find solid ground.
- Hope — knowing when not to act; seeing what others filter out.
- Desire — a powerful drive to move, organize and lead.
- Need — thinking only about what actually needs thinking about.
- Guilt — the drive to fix what has been seen.
- Innocence — no motive at all; thought without a "because".
Living with it
Personality colors tend to slip into transference with their harmonic partner: 1 ↔ 4, 2 ↔ 5, 3 ↔ 6. In transference, motivation loses the backing of its tone and becomes hollow: fear turns into need without understanding, hope into fixing without knowing what to fix, and so on. Transference can't be removed, and it doesn't need to be; it's a natural counterweight. The value lies in noticing it.
- Strategy and authority come first; without them Motivation remains theory.
- You need an accurate birth time: the Sun changes color roughly every four hours, and tone even faster.
- Watch which people and situations pull you into your partner motivation. For Projectors and other non-energy types this can be a useful signpost.
- Don't try to manage your motivation with the mind; that's exactly how it gets thrown off. This is a field for observation, not self-correction.