The agency through which you find equilibrium in the midst of change. The sustainer stands above all these separate approaches, surveying and appreciating them all. The sustainer takes the exuberant raw energy of the creator and gives it structure, shaping it into something of more lasting value. Like the creator, the sustainer also rests at the top of a small triangle, presiding over air and water, representing the impartial balancing of the objective, intellectual, proactive approach with the subjective, emotional, and reactive. The agency through which old things are consumed and dissolved.
Limitations are frustrating and painful.
But it is these things that provide the structure, the frame, within which the story unfolds. If every possibility in the mind of the creator were made permanent by the sustainer, life would become overloaded and unlivable. The destroyer stands over the elements of water and earth, establishing the fixed forms of the practical world and the feelings through which we become related to those forms. The spiritual forces give us a deeper understanding of the material elements. Earth springs from the destroyer, fire from the creator.