← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 161/164
Digestion (the determination arrow)
Digestion is the upper-left of the four Variables. The tradition's technical name for it is determination. It is read from the colour and tone of the built-in Sun — the Sun at the design moment, on the built-in side — and it describes how a person tends to take things in: the rhythm, the setting, the kind of attention that suits them.
It needs saying plainly, because this is the arrow closest to everyday life: this is not dietary, nutritional or medical guidance. It says nothing about which foods to eat or avoid, how much, or when. It is about conditions — calm or noise, simple or varied, warm or cool, light or shade — and it is offered as something to notice, not something to follow.
The six colours
The colour names the arrow. Each has a left and a right form, set by the tone (tones 1–3 left, 4–6 right):
| Colour | Name (left / right) | What it attends to |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Appetite (consecutive / alternating) | one simple thing at a time, or variety |
| 2 | Taste (open / closed) | how much variety the palate actually wants |
| 3 | Thirst (hot / cold) | whether warm or cool suits better |
| 4 | Touch (calm / nervous) | how much the setting matters |
| 5 | Sound (high / low) | the sound around a meal — noise, music, quiet |
| 6 | Light (direct / indirect) | the light a meal happens in |
The names are the tradition's technical vocabulary — ordinary English words for a classification — and we keep them so a chart of ours can be checked against another. The descriptions are ours.
Each comes with a simple experiment rather than a rule. For Touch, for example: notice whether eating somewhere calm changes how a meal sits. For Sound: try one meal in quiet and one with noise around it, and see which suits. The point of every experiment is the person's own observation, over time.
The sense beneath it
The tone of the built-in Sun does a second job. Besides pointing the arrow left or right, it names a sense — the channel through which information tends to arrive first. The tradition's technical name for this is cognition:
- Smell — takes the atmosphere of a place in before anything else
- Taste — judges by what something is actually like once sampled
- Outer vision — reads what is in front of them; the look carries the information
- Inner vision — sees it internally first; imagination goes ahead of the eye
- Feeling — picks up the feel of a room or a person before the detail
- Touch — knows by handling; contact settles what description can't
Why it is so often withheld
This arrow rests on the Sun, whose colour changes about every 3 hours 48 minutes and whose tone about every 38 minutes. With no birth time, it is withheld entirely. With a time known only to the hour, the colour is provisional and the tone — the direction and the sense — withheld. Only a time known closely makes the whole arrow stand. A withheld card is shown dashed: not absent from the person, just unreadable.
In a reading, the nourishment sub-section that draws on this arrow appears only when the birth time earns it, and it is quietly left out if anything a person has told us suggests it would not land well.
In your chart
The upper-left card of the four-arrows panel. It gives the colour's name, its left or right form, the direction as an arrow, and the sense from the tone ("via Smell", "via Touch" …); a dashed card is withheld.