Human Design Mandala Godheads Exploration: Harmonia's Time of the Year
The following article is something experimental. I'm exploring another approach for looking at the Wheel and the Transits. Feedback from certified analysts and analysts in training is very welcome - especially if this is not what / how you see!
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Introduction
On the 5th of August the Sun made the transition from the Quarter of Civilization into the Quarter of Duality. It crossed the threshold from the 33rd Gate of Privacy - Retreat into the 7th Gate of The Army - The Role of the Self in Interaction. Since then, the overarching Transit theme has been Bonding.
These past 5 weeks we have been conditioned to think more deeply about our relationships.
So far we have moved through bonding themes regarding Role clarity and commitment. Followed now by the assessment of which bonds are worthwhile; which bonds to continue maintaining or go deeper with, and which ones not to. You might have changed jobs or responsibilities, you might be weighing who your friends, partners or allies are at this time. Or you might have refused, taken a step back or quit altogether. You might have given yourself a break from bonding.
Our minds will continue to be primed for evaluating the correctness of our bonding until early November.
Orientation to Now
The Sun has just exited the 64th Gate of Confusion - Before Completion (the mental pressure to make sense of the past) and has entered into the 47th Gate of Oppression - Realization (the ability to conceptualise abstractly about past experiences and piece residual impressions together into a meaningful picture). Which we will discuss below.
I'd like to briefly explore the basics of the Human Design Transits. And then take a step back to look at things from a bigger picture perspective.
Rather than the usual analysis of Transits (following specific Gate activations), I'll synthesize and summarize according to what Ra poetically called the 'Faces of the Godhead', as shown below:
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There is a hidden structure in the wheel that groups hexagrams together in bundles of four. Each group of four has its own holistic value, which divides the wheel into 16 faces.
Ra gave each face a name corresponding to influential divine figures that for him captured the essence of what each bundle is about. They represent forces in the human psyche that are ancient and could be said to have always framed human thought and activity in archetypal ways.
This structure provides a simpler progression to track the annual cycle (16 faces vs 64 gates) once you know what each face is about.
I won't cover all 16 Faces here - though you might like to check out Ra's Quarter by Quarter course on Jovian for that.
We'll just explore the Faces we've recently moved through in the Quarter of Duality. Instead of discussing all eight Gates (7, 4, 29, 59, 40, 64, 47 and 6) we'll talk about 2 forces: Thoth and Harmonia.
So rather than giving us a detailed look into the specifics, we take a step back to see an overarching frame in which the specifics take place. I often find it practical to zoom out in this way.
Before diving in, there's a brief explanation of what Transits are. Then we'll explore Thoth & Harmonia and conclude.
What are Transits?
1. Mental Conditioning / Personality Education
The first thing to understand about Transits is that they are a stream of mental conditioning received from planetary influences. This is an information feed that pushes and pulls on the mind and generates mental content. Transits lead us to think about specific life themes in particular ways, they produce scripts in the mind that can escalate into behaviour and action through reactivity.
We are spinning and cycling through space. Wherever we are, we have a direct relationship to the cosmic bodies that surround us. The Transits in Human Design are an orientation to the planetary agents in our solar system that activate the gates in the BodyGraph. This is a function of their movement through the Rave Mandala Wheel.
Original Imprint
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When you look at your own chart, you can see that the activations you carry are associated with given celestial entities moving through particular gates at certain moments in time.
The Transits track the ongoing movement of the planets relative to our unique designs. As they continue to activate gates, they become a transitory influence on us. They may 'turn on' certain centers that we have undefined in our original designs, or bridge our splits, for example.
When this happens, our minds will be 'turned on' to think about those transiting themes temporarily. In this way, the planetary aspects continue to influence how we perceive and think about life as time goes on. As such Transits may drive shadows and lead to distraction by influencing us in the undefined centers. For example, not knowing when to quit in the Sacral Center; thinking we should do more. Or overpromising and overcommitting in the Heart Center; thinking we have something to prove. This can have health consequences.
When we are running on these scripts, we are caught in what the Human Design System qualifies as a reactive 'mental decision-making' process. We are being triggered by transitory influences and jump in a stress response to try and do something about them. When this happens, the Transits are overriding our body's wisdom and its individual authority.
Heart Center and Sacral Center defined through Transit influence.
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When we can refrain from blindly reacting to the content generated by the Transits, we can observe the information feed from a different point of view. We are not entangled with it. We can begin to discern between misinformation and information that may be relevant for us, because we can discern what our body intelligence is indicating. The intellectual content we take in either way will affect the way our Personality shapes up.
Certain themes may be relevant for us at this time while others are not. Some of the content is simply a perspective on the world or on the way things work, but not something for you to actually get preoccupied with. Some education comes in the form of being challenged in your ability to stay true to your Inner Authority and learn how to own it.
How can we tell what's what? Human Design recommends following your Strategy and Authority to find a stable anchoring in the body and a sensory connection to the environment.
2. Incarnating Imprints
It takes time for things to change."
- Richard Beaumont (Foundation Analysis, 2018)
The second thing to understand about Transits is that they are incarnating imprints. They are new generations of beings coming into the world. Just like you received a planetary imprint at birth and 88° of the Sun before.
New Baby Born (07 Sep 2022)
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Right now, the mental information feed we are collectively experiencing reflects the Personality frequency of new born children and the Design frequency of children born 88° of the Sun from now.
Changes that we are thinking about, that we might feel compelled to act upon, are changes that these new generations will naturally manifest over the course of their lives.
There's a beautiful sentiment that comes out of seeing this. New generations are the change that we are mentally conditioned to think about. Put in a different way we could say that we are the change our ancestors dreamed of. Not by giving ourselves over to propaganda, but innately by being who and what we are.
This is a very empowering insight, because it connects us to the larger process of our species. It integrates us in the continuity of ancestry and descendants. It gives us a sense of lineage as homo Sapiens on planet Earth. At the same time it removes the pressure and stress of needing to change something, of needing to be different than what we already are.
Yes, no doubt the world has significant issues and there are many social movements fighting for meaningful change. The Transits reveal that we already are part of a movement of change, and that the work we do relates to the undoing of incorrect conditioning - not by changing who we fundamentally are in order to try and affect the world. We innately will resonate and conflict with established structures given the difference in our imprinting, our own mutative impulses and our own ambitions for growing.
We already are a force of change, it may just not be the change our minds think we should be due to Transit influence and the moralities of our conditioning.
Our institutions are subject to the pressure of humanity's collective reactivity to Transits from the ground up and from the top down. In this way we come to manifest these themes incorrectly at large, founded on general absence of awareness.
Back to School
1. Thoth (7,4,29,59)
So let's talk about these two regions of the Rave Mandala Wheel that we move through every summer.
The Quarter of Duality opens with Thoth, and you can see above the associated gates. If we string together the keynotes for these gates we get a holistic value that could read:
"Find your Role by understanding and committing to a pattern and reproduce."
This is essentially a job description. This is the prompt to find your place somewhere in the reproductive process of the species and perform your task. Go back to class, be a good student. Make a child, be a good parent. Commit to the job and immerse yourself in the process to learn. Whatever your particular Roles might be.
We know life can get chaotic and messy. A teacher of mine often says "If you still believe in them, you gotta make mistakes." We make mistakes to learn from the outcome. Teenage one night stands that lead to a child. Accepting a new full-time job after a recent burnout that still demands recovery. Giving premature advice to institutions as an influential public figure. And so on. It is tricky when we're inexperienced and don't yet know the actual demands of the job to gauge if we're up to the task.
There might also be the confusion of 'what are we to each other?' when there is still exploration happening in ambiguous relational space.
Once Role clarity is established, we have a framework for understanding our relationship and our responsibilities within that. It opens up the door to productivity.
A major thing I've seen managers grapple with is being responsible for managing a team of people who actually don't want to be part of the process anymore. When we say 'yes' to something and agree to participate, we go through a whole experiential cycle. Preferably with ease and readiness to grow as opposed to resistance to the decision we made.
2. Harmonia (40,64,47,6)
The gates of Harmonia when keynoted together might say something like: "Making sure the relationship and the effort are worth it," or "Delivering in a way that makes sense and takes care of conflict."
This is where the Sun is currently shining its light. Are we in reciprocity with each other? Am I in a contract / relationship that serves or burdens me? Is there a power imbalance in the relationship? Does it make sense for us to continue? Children may be asking themselves right now if they're gonna be part of the same friend group as last year, or if they're gonna focus on other people.
Harmonia wields a selectivity to intimacy to determine which pattern gets to continue to reproduce into the future and which one does not. There is a sensitivity to emotional correctness that demands respect.
We also see the tendency here to bring up the past when there's conflict. It can become emotionally entangled in measuring and quantifying who did what in order to determine if there is any form of indebtedness.
This is a zone that is emotionally charged and brings a pressure to think about the past and the future relative to our bonds. Wondering whether our investment is going to eventually have been worth it or not. Binding us to our history.
By honouring your Strategy and Authority as you move through this, you can imagine two sides sitting at a table. On one side sits the mind with its proposals for what to do, on the other side sits the Inner Authority or the body's intelligence. Recognizing and including both sides in their contrast can allow you to see which way you want to align - and whether there is even any decision to be made at all.
Conclusion
We move through these faces cyclically every year. They flavour our seasons, the themes we think about as we move through the year - they shape our holidays. If we live our lives by making mental decisions, we can see how these repeating themes recur annually to also shape our lives.
Alokanand Díaz has a course titled 'The Program is Not Your Life'. Just because there is stress or pressure surrounding any of these themes, does not mean there is a decision to be made. The way the mind may be interpreting life now may not be true once the Transit has passed. Even certain physical phenomena that seem to point in a certain direction may pass. The Inner Authority is a specific compass in the uncertainty of all of this.
Given the way things are changing globally, I suspect there is a lot of confusion about roles, relationships, contracts, tit for tat, indebtedness, etc. out there. These are areas that we have traditionally navigated through cultural norms and religious moral frameworks. Human Design is neither of these things. It's about finding the answer in you, which may have nothing to do with what anyone thinks.
Finding out where the road goes step by step. Movement by movement. Wave by wave. Interaction by interaction.
I wish you well,
Hagen
Mastering your System
Projectors are here to master systems so that they can be successful guides for others. Understanding a system to the core cultivates in the Projector the ability to recognize what is going on in the world around them, even inside of the other, perceiving directly how the process of enlivenment might be helped along through awareness.
Dear Projector, if you're reading this, the very first system you need to master is your own physiology. Not by domination, but by recognizing how your Design speaks its nature through your body, through your sensory contact with the environment, as it is received in awareness. We don't do any of our sense perceptions after all, we simply receive them as they are filtered by the Design.
In relation to your environment, you exist in a projection field. Projection is nothing bad (don't be fooled by much of the conventional interpretations in psychotherapy). The projection field is part of how you experience life, as well as your integration into the world - it is a mirror for you. What and whom you are drawn to connect with, how you perceive what is out there, is a reflection of your own state and condition.
Learning the language of your own biology is key to understanding the way in which the Design operates in its wholeness. Recognizing directly that we're all breathing together in a single continuous body - and that it has a nature. This is something that is constantly being communicated to you through the projection field.
You can learn the biological language of this system of life by studying how your form functions in relation to your environment - noticing its cycling through dualities of up and down, hot and cold, stimulation and neutral, acceleration and deceleration, energy availability and rest, intensification and deintensification, movement and stillness, doing and non-doing...
noticing the rhythms, the way things wiggle and oscillate as they pattern themselves, the way in which things respond to each other organically...
noticing the way in which the attention is naturally beckoned towards beauty and the simple, gentle pleasure of sensory stimulation...
noticing the way in which other bodies move and hold themselves up, without getting distracted by the personality layering on top...
noticing that all of this is already available without us needing to create any of it... There is seeing already happening.
All of this is what will reveal to you the nature of the Design, the intelligence that informs everyone's decision-making Authority, whichever one it may be.
Every system (including yourself) contains oscillation, and in that oscillation the Design brings messages of support from the unconscious to the conscious. You might recognize these as felt qualities that show up: your hand suddenly reaching up to carefully support your head, fingers stroking your lips or the side of your cheeks, a gentle rocking back and forth as you sit, feet that suddenly wiggle... and then, as we notice that contact, perhaps a quality of ease showing up elsewhere in the body. Soothing. Stabilizing. More present.
In the general Maya of Mind we pay little attention to these signals. We've been conditioned not to value them and even try to hide them or change them out of a sense of vulnerability or shame for looking weird. We were never taught to simply allow them to be and to drink them in. The Personality and the Design may have been placed into a forced marriage, as Ra liked to describe it, but they can have a communication of care and love. Between conscious and unconscious. Self to Self.
In the Not-Self we can get caught up in the negativity of the mind, absorbed and seeking a way out, running in circles, not noticing how good it feels to simply feel the temperature of our hand on our face for an extended moment of time. A simple gesture, but exactly the right quality of support in the right place at the right time, with the right intensity, not too much, not too little, providing us with an enjoyable portal back to our senses in the present.
In these times of crumbling support infrastructure around us, we may discover innate support emerging from our own depths. Not because we went digging and excavating into our darkness with the mind in the hope of finding the light, but because we made the effort to reclaim our attention back from the addiction to the Not-Self. Because we trained the mind to see differently. Because we opened up the door to awareness and invited the intelligence of the Design into the live conversation we are having with the world in every moment.
The more your mind can reside in the natural movement of your Design and track it, receptive to what it brings to you without overamplifying it, the more you'll understand the operating system we're all embedded in. The more your own nature is integrated within you, the more you'll recognize it effortlessly outside of you. And wisdom begins to flourish in your undefined centers. This is a biological cellular knowing, not a superficial mental memorization of 'how things are supposed to be' or copy-pasted wisdom from elsewhere to try and make an impact. The ocean of neutrino information simply flows through you, and you know what you need to know.
The more you can surrender your eyes to go where they want to go, seeing what they want to see while ignoring the delusional interpretation process of the Not-Self agenda, the more your Strategy and Authority can begin to truly unfold moment to moment.
This is vital for how we navigate the spaces between invitations. As Projectors, we too must be correct moment by moment, even though we might wait for the right invitation for years. In between invitations, what we take care of is our eyes (including our third eye), gifting ourselves the ability to perceive clearly. This is what the other Types need from us. To help them recognize where the unconscious Design already wants to go, and how we might get organized around that.
And all of this begins by recognizing when enough is enough. Recognizing when your system is making the shift from acceleration to deceleration, activity to rest. If you're reading this, I invite you to take a few moments to simply let go into wonder, without trying to create anything new. Perhaps gently asking yourself these questions, slowly, one by one, to nourish your seeing and guide your own awareness:
1) If I let my eyes go where they want to go, wandering around in the external environment, where do I notice the greatest sense of ease?
2) Without mental interpretation, what are these eyes already seeing that I may not have noticed before?
3) What are the physical properties of that? Can I see its color, texture, shape? How does that register to my awareness, without me trying to do or create any of it?
4) If I stay with this just a little while longer, lingering at this contact surface of awareness with the external world, as my eyes easily go where they want to go, might I notice something different than before? Is there something new?
5) After having wondered freely for a little while, how do I feel overall compared to before?
If you took the time to participate in this little exercise, I'd love to hear about your experience.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
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The 'Science' of Differentiation - Being a Human Design 'Scientist' (Part 2)
This article is a continuation of an exploration into what it means to practice Human Design as a science. Part 1 can be found here:
https://www.humandesignlifecoaching.com/blog/2022/3/9/the-science-of-differentiation-being-a-human-design-scientist-part-1
Thanks for returning to this read, as we dive into the question of what it means to be scientific in our experiment of Human Design, and in practicing it professionally as ‘The Science of Differentiation’. In Part 1, I introduced the scientific method and connected it to our individual experiment with the Type, Strategy and Authority formula. I also mentioned the concept of ‘pseudoscience’ which is the main critique the Human Design system inevitably receives with regards to required markers for it to be accepted as a science. In Part 2, we’ll be exploring each of these criteria, namely ‘verifiability’, ‘falsifiability’ and ‘bias’, to see where our limitations might be at.
I could not locate the audios, but in one lecture Ra explained that he felt confident to move forward on his path because the system could withstand scrutiny and therefore he as a messenger could too. In another lecture, he also explained that Human Design could never be free from the pseudoscience label, because there are so many components (especially at the foundations) that could never be proved.
We would never be able to find the evidence necessary to substantiate them. This is the paradox we find ourselves at as practitioners. We have a formula we can empirically test (this is explained below), but we can never prove its origins, the underlying basis that explains why it works the way it does. And for strict scientific critics this is enough to categorically dump the whole thing.
In the previous article, I put forward an essential question to reflect on, for anyone who remembers nothing else from this article series: ‘Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?’
For scientists, it is necessary to investigate what the evidence is that verifies their claims. Not only that, but to consider if others can run experiments independently to test and verify these claims too. This is what would create an intersubjective consistency that allows us to agree on what the 'objective world' supposedly 'is'. It is what allows us to create a framework for how things function and how we can best cooperate within that mutual understanding.
Now if you've been in Human Design for a while, you may already sense that there is a catch in this. Human Design more than anything else is about your uniqueness - a realm that only you have access to experiment with in any meaningful sense. Nobody else can run independent experiments with your inner world. Only you can.
And there is another dimension to this: the knowing of the mysteries of existence, as far the mechanics of Human Design go, is contained within the Individual Knowing circuit, which is not directly about proving oneself. The only Individual circuitry that runs through the Willpower of the Heart Center is the Centering Circuit through the Channel of Initiation (51/25). It's part of the Mystical Way: the leaping beyond the mythology of the Tribe. Separating oneself from the existing belief systems and support structures that bind the community together in its ritual practices, in order to make direct contact with the Higher Self alone. Being the first to go beyond the horizon of what the Tribe can embrace and include, hurtling oneself into the unknown. Then potentially returning to the Tribe with innovation that is sourced from one's own mutative individuality, after having successfully contacted the Spirit that lives in Matter, having survived and integrated the shock.
This Channel is the only Individual Ego that has the will to prove oneself. Which is not something that can be demanded from the Individual Knowing circuit. If you're a mutative creative artist, you know what happens whenever your creativity becomes subject to the pressure to prove your worth: the magic vanishes - and it's not you anymore.
This is what I continue to observe in myself too writing these articles, and this series in particular. I rewrote and edited this article after posting it because it felt out of tune when I read over it again. I saw my own openness getting a bit too jacked up on 'Being an HD Scientist' to the point of distortion, though I didn't catch this when I published the article at first. I was coming at it from an angle that nobody had really asked for, and as I went through it, I didn't feel well held as a reader myself. The narrative didn't flow and it seemed I had blurted to soon.
Science is about proving the validity of patterns that explain reality. And to leverage those patterns in order to move safely into the future together. The Cross of Explanation is rooted in the (43/23) Channel of Structuring. This is the Life Force of rational explanation. It's my Cross too, and I suppose this article series is an attempt to get to know myself better more than anything else. To see more clearly this interplay between my Individual Knowing and Logical Collective Channels, the inner tension that is there between them, and to try to unpack it in a universalizing way. Key to this Channel is voicing yourself at the right time and not before...
And so let's move into the next concepts with that tension in mind: the scientists that confuses and conflates proving the pattern with proving themselves. This is another stepping stone in the discourse about individual vs collective truth.
"Science of Differentiation: Human Design is the study of our uniqueness, our differentiation; a science which is verified through our own personal experimentation with its tools for living; it is not a belief system."
(The Definitive Book of Human Design (2018): 435)
In light of this definition, we'll now cover verifiability, falsifiability and bias step by step.
Verifiability: for evidence to be verifiable, it is commonly understood as something that must eventually be measurable ‘empirically’. ‘Empirical’ evidence means that we can perceive it directly with our senses, confirming accurate predictions of noticeable change.
The importance of this is that the evidence has a causal ground in the material world into which we are physically embedded, by which we are affected and which we seek to affect - where ‘reality’ is most persuasive. Our explanations should not rest on something ephemeral or purely spiritual in such a way that our only option is to believe it or not. Otherwise this could be a basis for superstition, lies and deception or plain falsehoods leading to all sorts of exaggerations rooted in ignorance like witch hunts, etc. One example of this would be the claim that Winter is cold and deadly compared to Spring because a particular Goddess descends into the underworld during that time of the year. Though poetic and perhaps of metaphorical / mystical / spiritual value, or ritual value within a communal mythos, it isn’t empirically testable. Another example would be sensational rumours or hearsay that becomes a wildfire. We can see plenty of that in the misinformation age that we're in right now. We no longer know what external sources to trust.
“Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
Ra Uru Hu emphasized that Human Design was an empirical science that needed to be verified through one’s own direct sense perception of life as they experiment with the formulas, observing and predicting change. And true enough, through the Type signposts and the shifting patterns in our relationships we can do that. We can test the proposed formula to see if it works. Though what we may not be able to verify empirically are the underlying ‘mechanics’ that are suggested to be the cause for why it works the way that it does. They were a mystical revelation, after all.
We’d need to be able to physically locate and correlate a neutrino produced by the sun moving through a Gate activating specific biochemistry in a body that leads to change in thinking and behaviour… Has anyone got the budget or means for that (ethically)?
Having said this, there is a power in Human Design that enables it to overcome this particular limitation in an intriguing way to still make it compelling. This is the power of the mechanical logic that underpins the accuracy of its keynotes. What's so compelling about it as a practitioner is that once you get skilled at the art of its poetry, you can invoke the logic to analyse or reflect upon any phenomenon in a way that describes it holistically and within a context that has direct implications for you as a unique individual. It can be used to understand the world around in a way that was simply never so accessible before.
What's compelling for both practitioner and client is that the accuracy of it is a felt at a physical level. The body recognizes what is being said in a noticeable way. Sudden shivers, sudden profound relaxation, crying, and other sorts of physical responses that can come in sync with a mental breakthrough as the keynotes are spoken. Which is strange because the language is generally speaking complex and far out. Yet it is intimate and capable of touching one's subjective perceptions about the world in a way that not only explains things that have always been noticed but remained mysterious before, but also that it touches the physical experiences of the body as it moves through the world. It describes mechanically the experience of being either physically at odds with or seamlessly in the flow within one's context. Moreover, it describes in detail how this functions precisely for the individual. It explains why copy-pasting strategies from other people into one's own life has very very little qualitative effect. And it provides something tailor-made to suit you instead.
All of these things can be verified as an individual measurement of 'what works' and 'what doesn't work'. That's basically the code hidden in every line description (not just the third line). And this to me seems more enlivening than trying to first verify if the whole neutrino business is actually true to begin with. If I can read a line from the Rave I'Ching and hear it come out of my friend's mouth, without them even knowing anything about Human Design; and I can ask them questions about that based on the chart in a way that helps us connect and understand each other... especially if it's about a trait that really annoyed me and felt like I wanted to change about them - then, hey isn't that neat? Making that available to people, starting with myself, is probably a much quicker and practical step towards widespread peace than the endeavour of building a new enhanced particle accelerator.
Falsifiability: Ra was a 26th Gate who loved to make bold claims rooted in what he individually ‘knew’ to be true in his bones. And this could alarm people into identifying his claims as persuasive and dangerous exaggerations. The falsifiability of claims means that they should be logically testable with available means. If we cannot verify aspects of the system directly, nor run an experiment that could contradict our predictions or hypothesis, then we have no scientifically meaningful way of knowing whether the claim is actually true or not. It’s fully untestable.
The main example used to illustrate this notion is Karl Popper’s statement “All swans are white.” This is a hypothesis that could be either logically ‘verified’ by observing all swans – which we do not have the means to do. But on the other hand, the claim could be ‘falsified’ by observing a single black swan.
A strong distinction is then made between what is considered to be ‘science’ and what is not on this basis. If claims made within Human Design cannot be technically falsified, if we cannot logically test their validity by finding contradictory evidence using available means, then it is not a scientific claim.
So if we think about that for a moment, we can see that many aspects of the Human Design system cannot be falsified. Ra knew this and therefore, as far as my interpretation of it goes, his focus was to prove at least the scientific validity of Type - out of which the Strategy follows, serving as the basis for the proposed decision-making formula. The next step then would be collecting empirical evidence for the Inner Authorities rooted in people’s personal experiments. These are things that could in a way be measured through sufficient statistical analysis, correlating and predicting patterns.
So ultimately, the scope is brought back to the individual, which is both the practical bottom line of the Human Design system as such, and also where the empirical evidence for any of it is going to come from. How we collect and evaluate that data could accumulate into a resource base for making scientific claims (or not).
For yourself, you can verify or falsify your proposed decision-making formula and evaluate its legitimacy by following it (or not) and checking the outcome against what it predicts. The limitation to this, however, is the all-pervasive ‘confirmation bias’ that each individual is hyper-prone to - and that scientific critics can hear almost instantly in the subtle shifts of intonation in your voice from many miles away with their acute sensitivity.
Bias: there are many kinds of biases, but one of the more prominent ones that we are concerned with when it comes to scientific experimentation is the so-called ‘confirmation bias’. This essentially means that we are prone to interpret our findings in a particular way that is most convenient to us and would serve to confirm pre-existing beliefs or what we’re already hoping to get out of it. There is an outcome we already have in mind, consciously or subconsciously, and we will warp information to conform to that outcome in order to bring it closer to fulfilment.
This can lead to distortions of evidence, paying disproportionate attention to that which seems to confirm and verify, while ignoring or even eliminating contrary evidence or attempts at refutation and falsification. This can lead to major mistakes in many professions, such as medicine or urban planning for example.
If you're reading this and you've already taken the Living Your Design course, then you're probably familiar with the concept of the Not-Self and how it works. You can probably see how it lines up with long-held confirmation biases. These are the strategies and ways of thinking that keep us stuck in life following the same mistakes over and over again. It serves the purpose to keep our system stable, which is adaptive in terms of not falling apart under constant survival stress, but it also prevents us from actually growing and developing as ourselves.
When this influences our interactions with others and impacts them, there's backlash eventually. And the tricky thing is that we're blind until suddenly we are not. We've all got our shadows and distractions out and about that help us cope with the uncomfortable intensity in the openness - and we don't get to sidestep their consequences.
One way of dealing with the problem of cognitive biases in science is that our experiments should be open to logical challenge - in particular by field ‘experts’. Investigation should be made in order to test how solid our explanations really are and whether the evidence is sufficient. We may say that we were frustrated because we didn’t trust and follow our perceived gut response, but does that explanation hold up when it is probed more deeply? And can it be probed at all?
Are there any other expert authorities on you and your decision-making process? If there are, how empowering is that really and what is their agenda? And perhaps the more relevant question: would you like to be probed?
Again we're getting in contact with this strange relationship between the collective logical process and the integrity of individuality. In order for something to be collectively accepted as a scientific truth, you need a panel of experts who all agree on a pattern due to its predictability, which they need to investigate and measure in significant detail within the context of existing knowledge. (Imagine a group of scientists deciding amongst themselves that you're wrong about your life...)
The individual in me is already sighing: 'Ain't nobody got time for that!' The Collective in me is saying: 'Yes, wouldn't it be interesting if we could reliably measure the gut responses of a whole batch of Generator's according to Channel variations?'
Nevertheless, biases and shadows are part of the game. I’m quoting one of my teachers in neurobiology here: ‘We’re biased to believe that we’re less biased than others!’ (Steve Hoskinson) And we have to come to practical terms with that. It is legitimate for a group of scientists to point out I'm wrong when my subjectivity has a significant sphere of influence.
If you take on the Human Design decision-making formula during a desperate and stressful time in your life (in the same way that many people turn to medicine or any other kind of ‘solution’ to their life problems that is being sold on the market), wouldn’t there be a psychological incentive to maintain a sense of security and mental stability by perceiving that ‘it works’ when all else has failed? Wouldn’t there be a bias to believe that you’re doing the right thing?
This is the kind of thing critics are afraid of and for good reason. In the end, we're all concerned with the consequences of decision-making and having the ability to see what we're getting into. For example, if you’re following Human Design’s Primary Health System, you are moving into pioneering territory - not a well-tested and scientifically proven miracle cure-all. Your experiment may end up on the list of 'things that didn't work'.
This modality is so counter to conventional dietary regimen advice and healthcare practices, that it can be a really radical step to take. If you’ve been experimenting with it for a long time and you aren’t really finding your health and wellbeing improving – but you persist anyway, then there may be a confirmation bias driving the process rather than careful attunement to your own body.
Quoting the Definitive Book: "Primary Health System (PHS): Discipline within The Human Design System that studies the Form's cognition; a dietary regimen which best supports each person's complex and unique brain development."
If anyone knows to what extent we have got brains scans or EEG readings that track someone's PHS trajectory, I'd love to hear about it.
Personally, I find PHS a component of the Human Design System where we need to get as scientifically sound professionally as we possibly can, collecting and evaluating data properly. And to my knowledge, this isn’t really happening currently. (If I’m wrong about this, someone please correct me.)
So having presented these three concepts, I’m bringing it back to the essential question of this inquiry:
‘Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?’
Knowing then that you and everyone else have certain biases at work might foster greater attention to what you and others express, or at least where it's coming from.
At whatever level you’re practicing the Human Design System, the points outlined above emphasize at least one major thing: it’s probably in your own best interest to be as scientific about your experiment as you can be.
And I'm breaking away here from what I had written in the previous version of this article because I was getting preachy. What I really meant to say with being 'as scientific as possible' is to pay very careful attention to your process, to consider the evidence you're really seeing versus what you think you're seeing, and how you actually come to know this mysterious thing called truth. To watch your mind distort things and bring that into the light. And perhaps, to document your observations following the scientific method if you feel inclined to make your experiment scientifically useful for others.
(Or, your know, 'Ain't nobody got time for that!' and enjoy your life.)
This is a simple orientation of mind to the unfolding of your life as it is, tracking what happens all the way through the cycle while the known and the unknown dance with you and things are revealed. I'm not suggesting you get your lab coat, read René Descartes and start dissecting your partner in order to measure their gut response from the inside in order to prove it.
Just as much, it's about evaluating honestly how you really move through life and being clear for yourself about where your authority is. To be scientific in this sense is to assume a direct relationship to truth, not externalising it to a third party who gets to plaster their 'expertise' across your life. However, this also means recognizing that you don't know what you don't know, and that well-founded expertise can be valuable information. It's a measured pattern that you can put into context, and that you can take or leave and see what happens. It's also about understanding that if you want to make claims that are scientifically applicable to the Collective, it's going to have to undergo scrutiny before it can have legitimacy.
So much of the work of understanding this term 'the Science of Differentiation' is disentangling the misguided personal proving from the logical collective process of establishing the patterns. What is a scientific pursuit in Human Design is to correlate scientific findings with what is described in the mechanics, given available means. Given the way in which the HD community is not very well organised around this, I don't see it as scientific by conventional standards. Right now, we've got individuals worldwide connecting the dots amongst each other in small groups and through online platforms as they share the patterns they notice in their lives. It's a myth-making in progress, which includes some really incredible stories that may point any one of us in a direction we could follow and check out for ourselves. And we'll live and die by that.
If at this point you're doubting about moving forward with it at all, I’d say that’s a good checkpoint to be at. It’s an opportunity to evaluate exactly what it is that has driven you and motivated you in this direction. This is an opportunity to get clearer with yourself that when you do make the decision to proceed, you are responsible for yourself, and that it’s time to really start paying attention to your decision-making process and its consequences. You won’t be the only one in the Human Design boat, but you’ll be the only one on your unique path.
For whatever it’s worth to you, my perspective is that each individual as a whole aligns with an underlying advantage that is deeper than their mental motivation. Even if it may be unsustainable and detrimental in the long-term or near future, whatever you’re getting involved with, however you’re getting involved in it - it serves you at some level of your being given your circumstances and conditioning; things you came by innocently and are not your fault.
Everyone's innately doing the best they can given what they've got.
In the previous version of this article, I continued to elaborate on the importance of 'bias' as a concept to understand, and I went down a thread of trying to get at the distinction between the individual decision-making process vs the collective logical decisions-making process. I then introduced Rupert Sheldrake as a perspective to explore so as to see if we may have a ground for relating to the Human Design system not purely as a pseudoscience, however appropriate that label might still be. There's another side to the story of bias in terms of how it accumulates into dogmatic power structures, which includes scientific institutions that get to dictate what is acceptable and what is not. But we'll get to that.
I think this is long enough now and will close Part 2 here. We can cover the other material in Part 3.
There's an open invitation for you to share your perspectives with me here and have a discussion.
Would you like to leave a comment below?
Thanks for reading,
Hagen
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The 'Science' of Differentiation - Being a Human Design 'Scientist' (Part 1)
In this article, we'll be exploring what it means to be scientific in our practical application of the Human Design system.
The topic of Human Design as a science is something that I’ve been walking with for quite some time and found meaningful to think about, given our context here on this network as a school, and then my own context as a Human Design professional. It’s too vast for me to contain in a single article, and I’ll take it as far as I can in this first part.
To start off, I’ve been hearing that Human Design is quickly becoming more popular and fashionable, with a risk of decreased quality of service due to many unlicensed and untrained ‘professionals’. Along with that, some critiques of the Human Design system recently crossed my feed in which the authors took issue with people who falsely claim to be scientific in order to sell things to a desperate audience.
It's common to find attacks masquerading as 'critiques', 'myth-busting', 'debunking' and so on while the authors seem more interested in ridiculing their target and describing them as con-artists scamming their audiences for their money. And while these dangers do exist and we should be alerted to them, sometimes it just seems like the venting of frustration to me. But this is a side track.
Anyway, I quickly checked out some Google Trends statistics (2004 – Jan 2022):
The results above are for the United States. In this graph we can see the red results indicating a notable increase for the term ‘Human Design’, compared to ‘The Human Design System’ (blue) and ‘Ra Uru Hu’ (yellow).
This second graph shows results for Brazil. Here we have a comparison between ‘Desenho Humano’ (red), ‘Human Design’ (blue) and ‘Ra Uru Hu’ yellow.
This third graph shows results for the United Kingdom. ‘Human Design’ (blue) and ‘Gene Keys’ (red).
Here we have Germany. ‘Human Design’ (blue) and ‘Ra Uru Hu’ (red).
India. ‘Human Design’ (blue) and ‘Ra Uru Hu’ (red).
South Africa. ‘Human Design’ (blue) and ‘Ra Uru Hu’ (red).
Globally then, we find the following results (2004 – Jan 2022):
‘Human Design’ (red). ‘The Human Design System’ (blue). ‘Ra Uru Hu’ (yellow).
And so we can see a global upward trend (almost 3 times as popular on Google than 10 years ago) that is likely to be driven by the US and Western Europe mainly, and some swelling in Brazil and the UK since the initial hype almost two decades ago, compared to other regions of the world. We can notice the difference between these terms, suggesting perhaps that even though people may be interested in ‘Human Design’ because they heard or saw it somewhere, they may not necessarily be interested in the source material from Ra.
With this in mind, the Human Design system also being called ‘The Science of Differentiation’ is important to consider. Though this term isn’t as search engine friendly, Ra Uru Hu on several occasions emphasized that the scientific validation of Human Design was very important to him, in part to distinguish HD from other belief based systems that incorporate new age spirituality. Having said that, just because we call Human Design ‘the Science of Differentiation’ does not necessarily make it a science, and I hope to shed some more light on that in this article series (hopefully we get there).
Firstly, because it is something that I wanted to check my own understanding about for myself, secondly as a call to professional Human Design practitioners – in particular to those who may be doing the system and the vocation a disservice, and thirdly to encourage reflection and evaluation of what we are doing here in this particular community together (and maybe what we are not).
This is an article that I found very hard to write because as I did so, many layers of my own conditioning emerged to the surface that I had not yet faced. It was a confronting process in which I could see my Not-Self tendencies emerge while putting words onto the page, distorting the narrative and its message with an underlying purpose in mind. I had to rewrite and spend more time than I originally thought I would. It was necessary to dwell in the uncertainty and unknowing for longer while watching the mind propose all sorts ridiculous angles by which I could try to prove myself as a scientist, or as a professional, through this piece of writing. There was a strong Not-Self structure my system was invested in preserving as if my life depended on it. I wanted to write about this subject sincerely, and yet it continued to feel contrived for a while.
The guiding question for this article is: ‘If you are a practitioner of Human Design experimenting at any level, are you being truly scientific?’
Originally I was driving a second question related to HD professionals who use ‘The Science of Differentiation’ as a convincing marketing trick in order to sell themselves, without necessarily understanding the limitations of that claim. (And then I took a whole wrong turn by reducing the rest of the article digging deeper into that.) Instead, I’m now reorienting us back to the beauty of science and the interesting crossroads we might find ourselves standing at as practitioners.
Personal Sharing:
In my Design, aside from my Individual Channels of Awareness (61/24) and Structuring (43/23) I have Definition in the Collective Understanding circuit, which includes the Channel of Logic (63/4) and the Channel of Judgment (58/18). Much of that is unconscious and formatted by the Experiential Abstract Cycle and Mutative Individual Pulse. And so at first glance you might expect or say that I’m scientifically inclined. Though a sincere interest in science was not really catalysed in me until the year I was introduced to Human Design while in my final year of university. I’d actually given up on mathematics quite early on in secondary school due to conflicts with teachers and had grown a general dislike for abstracting life into formulas that my senses couldn’t connect to. Then much of the modern sciences became increasingly unavailable to me from that point onward.
By invitation, I was encouraged to continue studying economics and began to develop a taste for logical patterns and thinking about systems. But I was missing a lot of essential foundations to understand complex mathematics and found myself slower than others, which I also allowed to discourage me in the conditioned striving for high grades. Meanwhile, what my attention was really preoccupied with most of the time were challenges in personal relationships (the 2/5 Profile in close relationships). I was more interested in understanding social dynamics between human beings, and this was not something I could grasp through abstract mathematics, nor could I solve my relational issues with the kind of scientific thinking that reduced real living complexity to abstract patterns and cold calculation. There’s a significant difference between describing a relationship as an equation and actually living one.
Eventually I went on to study Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College in Devon, UK. As a school this place has a different scientific lineage than most esteemed universities. In fact, the whole ethos of the school follows holistic principles that structure the college into a living community where the student body grows its own food, takes care of the communal spaces and learns to live together in a way that encompasses as many dimensions of life as possible. We were encouraged to really experiment and bring all of that into the classroom to reflect upon relative to the subjects we were studying.
If you’re somebody without any Tribal Definition in your Design like me, this may not necessarily sound appealing to you. And while I’m glad I had the experience, close community life like that may not be my thing (though I’m not so sure I’ll be able to escape it either). Nevertheless, what was very meaningful and valuable to me was the embrace of the totality of life as part of our classroom conversations. The body of the individual had a voice in the classroom setting and could shape how we would go about our day.
The intellect was not the only way of knowing that we appreciated. There was a deep scientific and philosophical inquiry into our relationship to nature, to the senses, to each other and to the complexities that emerge in the experience of living. Our focus, for most people, was much less on ‘getting the degree’ and much more on observing the mystery of what is actually meaningful in our lives and what connects us to each other. And especially, how we come to understand these things through scientific inquiry.
Scientists whose thinking I was exposed to, and some of whom I was taught by directly at this college include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bortoft, Brian Goodwin, Stephan Harding, Rupert and Merlin Sheldrake to name just a few that you might also be familiar with in one way or another. And though I’m not designed to be much mentally influenced by the thinking of others, by contrasting my own thinking with their essential concepts I found myself very enriched. I was given language for certain phenomena I did not have before, and I could question and evolve my own ways of thinking and knowing. All of this allowed me to expand what I could see and think about in my own way.
More importantly though, these scientists role modelled a different kind of relationship between the scientific observer and the observed than what you might traditionally find in academic institutions. Which is something I’d like to explore with you in this article series, as we think about practicing Human Design scientifically. But before we get there, let’s start with the basics. What is science anyway?
I think Wikipedia should at least be a good starting point for anyone beginning their inquiry into what science is conventionally understood to be. If we can’t trust at least that information to be accurate and reliable these days, then what can we trust right? 😉 …
The simple definition we find here is: “Science (from Latin ‘scientia’ ‘knowledge’) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.”
And then you can also find a concise description of some of the scientific human endeavour throughout history, piecing together an image of how scientific inquiry evolved to where we are currently. At the core of this pursuit we find several vital aspects of science: the ‘Scientific Method’, ‘verifiability’, ‘falsifiability’ and ‘bias’.
By understanding these concepts, we can get an understanding of how to approach Human Design scientifically ourselves, but also an understanding of where we are inevitably limited. By being able to hold both of these understandings side by side, we can practice from a place of humility and walk as closely to the truth as we can.
So before we briefly go into each of these concepts, I’d like to insert what I think is the quintessence of all of this. It is a question that reflects the scientific spirit, that I find helpful and necessary to bring myself back to continuously. And I invite you to remember this question if nothing else from this article:
“Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?”
There are many possible answers: 'yes', 'no', 'maybe', 'sometimes', 'I don't know', 'feels true enough but I'm not sure', ‘other people seem to think so’, ‘my gut makes an interesting sound’, etc. And all of those are fine - as long as we're aware of that and don't pretend it to be otherwise. There's nothing shameful about not knowing - that's where science begins.
Then there is the process of moving from ‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing something scientifically’, which is not the same as moving from ‘not knowing’ to ‘thinking that we think we know’. How you ask yourself this quintessential question and move towards an answer from there, reflects the kind of scientist you are (or aren’t). And there are many different possible kinds scientists who are prone to disagreeing with each other.
Ra Uru Hu in one of his lectures talked about Truth and Outer Authority, and that our process of getting there, sharing our awareness with each other, was not about agreeing with each other and seeing things the same way in the end. Rather, to be able to share peacefully how we see differently. I’ll elaborate on this more later on.
To answer this big question then, science proposes the ‘Scientific Method’ as a pathway to knowing:
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1. You start with a curious observation.
2. You let your observation inspire or inform you with a question about its nature, 'what' it might be or 'how' it works.
3. You develop a hypothesis, a theoretical answer for what could be the case, projecting some anticipated results or predictions.
4. You find a way to test your hypothesis through experimentation, finding out how you would measure your results.
5. You analyse your findings about the observation to see if they meet your anticipations and substantiate your hypothesis or not, and what else they might indicate.
6. You draw your conclusions based on evidence and refine your process.
This then is the guiding logical framework for training the mind to conceptualize and see scientifically. When we as Human Design practitioners claim to be practicing the ‘Science of Differentiation’, we have to understand how it follows this method. If we don’t, we’re better off just dropping the pretence.
What connects the multiple threads I’ve opened up so far is the word ‘evidence’ in step number 6. All roads lead back to evidence. “Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?” – what’s my evidence? What do I consider to be the evidence for my conclusions and is it scientifically legitimate?
In Human Design the practice is a proposed formula for you to experiment with and start validating the mechanics for yourself. This is your Type, Strategy and Authority applied as a way to make decisions and observe the outcome. ‘Decide for yourself to engage in this experiment and watch carefully what happens’.
So let’s follow the scientific method in a hypothetical example for a Sacral Generator Type:
Observation: A feeling of dissatisfaction with one’s life, repeated struggle with decision-making dilemmas and feeling stuck.
Question: Can following my Type, Strategy and Authority make a measurable difference?
Hypothesis: If I follow my Type, Strategy and Authority formula, I don’t expect much will change or improve. If I simply wait for things to come to me without making anything happen, I expect nothing will happen. I’ll measure by observing changes in how I physically feel as a consequence of my decisions.
Experiment: At work, instead of going out of my office to initiate stuff to do with my colleagues which I usually do (I always think the quicker we get started the better - just do it.), I sat and waited for somebody to approach me with work. I felt nervous about what others were going to think of me but stuck with it. Eventually somebody actually showed up and asked me if I was okay and if I wanted to continue to work on yesterday’s reports. I felt something like a knot in my gut, and had the immediate urge to say no. But it was an important report and if I wasn’t going to do it, I don’t think it would get done properly and my supervisor would get upset with me. So I said ‘sure’ and started working on the report. I felt very bored doing it and really did not enjoy the feeling that ‘I had to do it’. I worked on it for two hours and noticed myself grinding my teeth until my jaw tightened up. My mind started thinking that I was stuck in a slave’s job and that I resented my boss. I was counting down the minutes on the clock so that I could quit it and go for lunch break. I felt very frustrated and could barely enjoy my meal because I was so uncomfortable in my gut.
Analysis: I can see that I ‘waited to respond’ according to the TSA formula, and that my expectations were incorrect because somebody did show up with work for me to do. When I felt in my body that I didn’t want to do it (the knots in the gut or stomach and the urge to say no) I continued anyway because I thought I had to and was afraid of consequences. When I went ahead with the reports, I felt very frustrated afterwards and this was physically noticeable.
Conclusion: This particular case example does show a pattern between my decision-making, the feeling of frustration in my gut and overall dissatisfaction with my life and what I do for a living. It seems consistent with what is being suggested by the TSA formula. I have to experiment further to see if following my ‘gut response’ more liberally makes a positive difference and if making my decisions differently can connect me to something more ‘satisfying’ and how that would be.
The evidence is mainly to be found in the signposts (Frustration and Satisfaction | Resistance and Ease) at first. If the formula says that you’re a Generator, can you observe that when you make your decisions one way it leads you to a physical feeling of frustration in the gut and dysfunction in communication with others? And when you make decisions the other way, can you observe a physical feeling of deep satisfaction in the gut and greater ease of communication with others?
This process may suffice for you, but scientifically what remains is weighing this ‘evidence’ in terms of ‘verifiability’, ‘falsifiability’ and ‘bias’, as mentioned earlier. And this is where we may run into the kinds of challenges that critics may then leverage as a way to dismiss the value of the system as a whole.
On behalf of ‘real’ science, one of the main tools that aggressive critics use is the label 'pseudoscience', driving an assumption that when something is called a pseudoscience it doesn't merit attention and is invalid for exploration by definition.
Wikipedia defines a pseudoscience as follows:
"Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience#Scientific_method
And so what do you reckon? Is Human Design a Science of Differentiation, or a Pseudoscience of Differentiation? Does this matter to you and why (not)?
And why is it worthy of exploration to you?
(Would you like to leave your perspective as a comment?)
I’ll close this first part on a cliff-hanger. The content so far may be good enough to start chewing on already as an introduction before we go deeper. In the next parts I hope to dive into what ‘verifiability’, ‘falsifiability’ and ‘bias’ are and how these things play into the scientific approach to practicing Human Design (or lack thereof).
I also intend to bring in some interesting perspectives from Rupert Sheldrake’s book ‘The Science Delusion’, also called ‘Science Set Free’, which turns things on its head by investigating whether the prevailing scientific worldview holds up to its own standards – or not. And this may open up an avenue for us to look at some of the alternative scientific role models I mentioned earlier, and how they might inspire the Human Design experiment.
Then finally we can get into the topic of individual truth vs collective or institutionalised scientific truth, which is what we’re gradually building up towards.
(To be continued when the energy shows up.
If not, then at least you know where I was headed and have a trail you could follow.)
Hagen
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Human Design & Mythology: The Tengu
Ever since I took Ra's Quarter by Quarter on the 16 Faces of the Godhead, I've been intrigued about the way in which we can find the themes of the mechanics woven throughout our human mythologies.
You can find the course on Jovian Archive here:
https://www.jovianarchive.com/Audios/40/The_Sixteen_Faces_of_the_Godhead
In the 16 Faces of the Godhead, Ra covers each quarter of a Quarter in the Human Design Rave Mandala Wheel. Each one of those quarters of a Quarter is comprised of 4 Gates, which together form a Face of the Godhead. He gave each Face a name based on a particular divinity he felt most closely resembled the essence of the programming that came out of those four Gates as a quantum - a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Each one of those Faces represents a Personality crystal bundle, out of which each of our Personality crystals as individuals incarnated. The 16 crystal bundles together exist as a sheath around the Earth and filter the neutrino stream, as the planets move through the Rave Mandala Wheel. The themes of these 16 Faces create a global conditioning programming of our Personalities, following their archetypes.
In this course, Ra opened up the door to contemplate how and why human beings have been inspired throughout history to create particular gods and mythologies that are relatively consistent or similar across cultures, how certain archetypes emerge to the surface of human consciousness in relation to the higher forces that human beings have always perceived to govern the unfolding drama on the planet.
In this article, I'd like to take a look at the Tengu, a mythological figure from Japanese folklore and animistic religion and its potential connection to Gate 26, and the Channel of Surrender (44/26) A Design of a Transmitter, as well as its relation to particular Faces of the Godhead.
"Tengu 天狗 are mountain and forest goblins with both Shinto and Buddhist attributes. Their supernatural powers include shape-shifting into human or animal forms, the ability to speak to humans without moving their mouth, the magic of moving instantly from place to place without using their wings, and the sorcery to appear uninvited in the dreams of the living.
The patron of martial arts, the bird-like Tengu is a skilled warrior and mischief maker, especially prone to playing tricks on arrogant and vainglorious Buddhist priests, and to punishing those who willfully misuse knowledge and authority to gain fame or position. In bygone days, they also inflicted their punishments on vain and arrogant samurai warriors. They dislike braggarts, and those who corrupt the Dharma (Buddhist Law)." (https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tengu.shtml)
On the website above they are referred to as the 'Slayer of Vanity'. They are a breed of tricksters that come in two basic variations: the 'Yamabushi' or 'Mountain Monk' Tengu with humanoid face and long nose, and the 'Karasu' or 'Crow' Tengu with bird's beak and head. The Japanese government still made appeasement notifications and requests to local Tengu living in certain areas until the second half of the 19th century.
Adding a fun-fact here: the (44/26) Channel of Surrender is also our cross-specie bridge to the Design of birds, as well as part of the Stream of Instinct, corresponding to our sense of Smell (re: long nose and bird features).
So the first connection points we can already see here is the notion of pride, arrogance, boastful vainglory and trickster qualities that are also associated with the 26th Gate: The Taming Power of the Great - The Gate of the Egoist. This Gate sits within the Tribal Ego Circuit and as such it relates to hierarchy. It is the Gate of the braggart, the Gate of 'being the best', of exaggerating, and more importantly - manipulating memory.
"The maximization of the power of memory applied to the nurturing of continuity"
(Definitive Book, p. 245)
We can take a look at the Line Companion to understand the nature of this 26th Gate a bit better:
"The tribe expects to be exaggerated to. It is very important for the tribe. It likes that. This is the best refrigerator, the best car, the best country. Exaggeration is part of the way of getting the tribe to feel good. The 26: the strength or lack of strength to apply memory.
The whole thing to understand about the ego is that it is built on manipulation, and please do not think of this as a bad word. It is simply the ability to manipulate things. There are very few gates that are called 'taming gates': The Taming Power of the Small (the 9th Gate), to be able to take the broad spectrum of energy and to focus, tame it, to tame the root and its pressure by focusing it; and, here the capacity of the ego to manipulate instinctive memory." - Ra Uru Hu
(Line Companion, p. 165)
In the Line Companion Ra continues to explore the various Lines of this Gate. He explains that this manipulating ego conveys that they are the best by making sure that they are remembered in a certain way - using all tricks at their disposal, such as lies and exaggerations. Paraphrasing Ra: it's the sales person who is on the golf course smooching the client, rather than actively doing the sales in the way the 1/8 Channel of Inspiration would do. Telling the boss over the phone that the deal has been made when it may not even be true yet.
These things are a function of the Willpower of the Heart as a Motor energy that is expected to get things done, but is weaker compared to the Sacral. These tricks are a way of handling that pressure and expectation of the Tribe that is dependent on it, with a Motor than cannot actually work consistently and needs to be able to recuperate frequently in the midst of all of that.
"Sometimes, too, the Tengu would abduct human beings, only to release them later, but the "lucky" survivor would return home in a state of dementia (called 'Tengu Kakushi', meaning 'hidden by a Tengu').
(https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tengu.shtml)
As trickster goblins the reputation of the Tengu transformed gradually from evil to protectors, however dangerous still. As time went on, they were being culturally remembered differently. Once feared for a certain attribute, they were eventually beseeched for protection against the exact same thing:
"The character of tengu gradually changed over the centuries. For instance, tengu were long thought to abduct children, but by the Edo period they often were enlisted to aid in the search for missing children."
In the 16 Faces of the Godhead, the 26th Gate is located in the Face of Prometheus: the Greek trickster Titan who stole the original fire from the Gods and gave its power to humankind as a benefactor. Prometheus is comprised of Gates 9, 5, 26 and 11.
9. Taming Power of the Small - Energy for Detail
5. Waiting - Fixed Patterns
26. The Taming Power of the Great - The Egoist
11. Peace - Ideas
Within the context of Prometheus, the 26th Gate acquires additional archetypic characteristics that we may also see reflected in the Tengu - especially in constellation with the 44th Gate of Alertness in the Face of Minerva, as part of the (44/26) Channel of Surrender.
Here's a blog post by Laveena from 2017 that goes into the 16 Faces of the Godhead and what kind of conditioning forces they represent Quarter by Quarter:
Prometheus is located in the Quarter of Mutation, where purpose is fulfilled through transformation, which carries an underlying thematic of embracing death with the potential for rebirth. The movement through the Quarter of Mutation is a programming for accepting that the glory is behind us, that we are now preparing to leave life behind and move on. And yet as we scan over the Gates that are in this Yang/Yang Quarter we can see that all of them are fundamental to the creative spectacle of life. All the varieties of juice that are at the source of what makes life interesting, as it is expressed through the other Gates, Channels and Circuits.
It's funny that whenever I consider this I always think about the stereotypical 'accomplished' male who has just realized they are past their prime. They've 'peaked' and there won't be a next level for them to take it to. Their performance is on the way down, and they are on the way out. And the Quarter of Mutation represents everything they may be clinging to in this crisis, everything they may seek to reinvigorate, keep alive, immortalize or be remembered for. And I imagine how this stereotype acts out in their fear of dying, the denial and overcompensation that emerges - the pretence that they're still as vital and potent as ever. This is not an uncommon sight in homogenized society. It is this suggested or displayed vitality and potency around which their lives have been built. What has made them desirable and needed. It's their life's currency, and in this Quarter of Mutation - it's fading.
When we think about the 26th Gate, its ego and the way in which it manipulates how we remember things in order to establish control, we can connect some dots to the overcompensating masculine principle which clings to its own glory.
"The long nose relates to the Tengu’s hatred of arrogance and prejudice. Priests with no true knowledge, prideful individuals, those attached to fame, and those who willfully mislead or misuse the Buddhist cannons are turned into the long-nosed Yamabushi Tengu (or sent to Tengudo, the realm of the Tengu) after their deaths."
(https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tengu.shtml)
Whenever I look at any Face of the Godhead in the Wheel, I study them within the context of the Wheel and Bodygraph as a whole. (My PTL1 classmates know this from the Mad Labs I was hosting in which I introduced some of it.) It's way beyond the scope of this article to go that deep, but for anyone interested I would just like to mention that as a rich journey you could undertake.
When it comes to Prometheus as a particular programming agency, the main archetypic expression of that I see expressed in society today is the technocracy. This Face embeds the 26th Gate into focused and concentrated Logical Patterning in pursuit of an Abstract Collective Idea. On the other side of the Wheel, as programming partner to Prometheus, we find Lakshmi who carries our notions of Progress and glamour. And so what comes out of this is the vain and arrogant idea of technological progress that is supposedly the pinnacle of evolution, that is our conquering crusade across the face of the Earth and into the far reaches of space - which has also led to the termination and extinction of so many as a sacrifice. We think metropolitan cities are a magnificent erection - look at the luxurious size of that thing! Until suddenly the supply chain collapses.
Prometheus as an archetype is a force you'll encounter in the psyche of everyone who is actively participating in that flow. The promising scientist, scholar, CEO or philanthropist who wants to be remembered for their greatness. The debunker who persuades you to forget about the quacks you've been following and would love to teach you real science instead. Benefactors who bestow their gift, their particular kind of fire, onto humanity in their benevolence. Rallying the soldiers and the masses behind them in their cause - blind to what's on the other side.
"Corrupt Buddhist monks and corrupt Buddhist monestaries were in fact a major concern throughout Japan’s middle ages. Tengu are thus seen as protectors of the Dharma (Buddhist law), and punish those who mislead the people. Over time, the folklore of tengu and yamabushi become intertwined, and even the crow tengu (karasu tengu) begin wearing the robes and caps of priests."
(https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tengu.shtml)
Back in the middle ages the clergy were supposed to be the vanguard of the future, stewarding the afterlife as the mediators between the divine and the people. Today that's supposed to be the scientific institutions that guide governmental policy. The Tengu wear the clothes associated with these particular roles that carry the promise of protection, which can suddenly turn into misleading at any given moment. The security and resources that are there to be found in positions of authority and power within the Tribal hierarchy may corrupt. In particular when we move from the lower trigram into the fourth line. Those with influence may start to use it for their own advantage rather than their duty.
I mentioned earlier the termination and extinction that exists on the other side of the 26th Gate. This is something we find in the 44th Gate of Alertness - Coming to Meet, it carries the fear of the Past and the fear of extinction. The 26th Gate is biologically correlated to the T-Cells that are part of our immune system, who protect our wellbeing by eradicating threat. What comes out of that at the level of human to human interaction is soldiers of many kinds - as well as censorship and elimination of certain lineages of information. The 44th Gate carries ancestral and cellular memory that goes way back into our evolutionary past.
In my slice of life over these last few years, I've seen the dynamic between the 26th Gate's censorship and the 44th Gate's ancestral memory play out between the many indigenous communities who are fighting to keep their lineage of vital knowledge alive, protecting the ecosystems they are embedded in, while industrial technocratic forces are coming in violently to exterminate them and take hold of the natural resources. Co-opting the narrative along the way. Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing are labelled as 'primitive' or 'savage', while modern intellectual ways of knowing under the banner of science are 'superior', 'civilized' or 'sane'. A story is spun to give military troops an excuse to invade and kill people who do not comply and who stand for a different way of living in the natural world. And this is then called 'development' and sold to the citizens who consume vast quantities of beef and soy grown on these lands, after the forests and communities have been destroyed.
Minerva is the last Face of the Quarter of Duality, where purpose is fulfilled through Bonding. She is associated with strategic arts and crafts, such as trade and war. She carries Gates 32, 50, 28 and 44. As a conditioning force in the Program, she represents what Ra called the School, the Rules, the Way and the Promise. Here's what you need to learn in order to survive, here's where you can learn it, follow these rules and apply yourself - and everything's going to be fine. Go to school, get the degree, get the job, get the money, get the house, get the family, get the pension - happy retirement. Oh and don't step out of line or it's all gone.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengu#Martial_art)
"During the 14th century, the tengu began to trouble the world outside of the Buddhist clergy, and like their ominous ancestors the tiāngǒu, the tengu became creatures associated with war. Legends eventually ascribed to them great knowledge in the art of skilled combat.
...
Two stories from the 19th century continue this theme: In the Sōzan Chomon Kishū, a boy is carried off by a tengu and spends three years with the creature. He comes home with a magic gun that never misses a shot. A story from Inaba Province, related by Inoue Enryō, tells of a girl with poor manual dexterity who is suddenly possessed by a tengu. The spirit wishes to rekindle the declining art of swordsmanship in the world. Soon a young samurai appears to whom the tengu has appeared in a dream, and the possessed girl instructs him as an expert swordsman. "
The (44/26) Channel of Surrender, A Design of a Transmitter, is the life force capable of handling Tribal ego and selling or transmitting to the Tribe what it needs for its continuity, safety and wellbeing. Whether this is a product, a service or a strategic art. This Channel has the ability to match-make potential. For example, connecting a talented young samurai to the art of swordsmanship and the right teacher that will bring out his gifts so that he becomes of value as a protector of the Tribe. This Channel has the potential to sniff out what you need before you're even aware of it, then massage you and set you up for the purchase. Telling you whatever it is you want to hear in order to allow it in.
I attract this Channel into my life very frequently, though most of the Transmitters I've come to know more closely are involved in some kind of creative enterprise. Some kind of arts and crafts related field in which they produce products and services that carry an essence of Tribal Support, care and learning. Products and services that reflect a particular set of values by which we are educated (and potentially indoctrinated) into a manifesto, mythos or ideology. The premise is that, by all appearances, they've got something we really need in order to live well, to thrive and continue thriving into the future.
What I also see in my particular environment is the Alertness in the 44th Gate about our enemies, the threats of the past that may still be lurking, or the conditions that gave rise to the creation of enemies and war in the first place. We have ongoing and continuous reminders of WWII in Europe all over the place so that we do not forget. At the same time, we grow our crops with toxic pesticides that were rebranded death chemicals from the concentration camps, thanks to the dextrous manipulation of the 26th Gate.
In the Channel of Surrender, where these Gates come together as a greater whole, we are held in the surrender to life as it sets us up to exchange value and resources. To participate in the flow of converting the living natural world into resources for sustaining our lifestyles. And we are trained and educated in schools to do so, we are taught the way and the rules by which we keep the whole thing going. Markets are grown and cultivated through education.
What is truly vital here is the recognition of life and hierarchy. Many indigenous people who live embedded in the natural world say something along the lines of "We live amidst relatives, not resources." And this is a perspective civil society has lost. It's an ancestral memory that has been censored and eliminated from our ideological pursuit of progress.
In the Not-Self, it's a small step to take in the 26th Gate from 'being the best' to 'being superior'. There is natural tribal and evolutionary hierarchy, and then there is the vanity of thinking we're 'better than'. The blindness of reducing what we see to a diminishing label that removes from view the fact that we're looking at a conscious living entity. As we do with trees, animals and the inanimate. As we do to each other in our racism and fanaticism. Something alive becomes potential resource to subjugate to our personal agenda. No permission needed.
I'll end this article with a short Tengu Zen story:
“One day a hunter was in the mountains when he happened to see a snake killing a bird. Suddenly a boar appeared and began to devour the snake. The hunter thought he should kill the boar, but changed his mind because he did not want to be a link in such a chain, and cause his own death by the next predator to come along. On his way home he heard a voice call to him from the top of a tree. It was the voice of a tengu. It told him how lucky he was, for had he killed the boar, the tengu would have killed him. The man subsequently moved into a cave and never killed another animal.”
Something to contemplate as a metaphor.
I hope you enjoyed this experimental article.
Take care,
Hagen
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Cheers to a 2022 Without Expectations - Human Design Rave New Year
In this article we'll be taking a brief look at the Human Experiential Way, the evolutionary process of our species and how our human experience on the planet is changing, including a big picture perspective from Ra and some personal experiences from me.
As every Rave New Year begins with the Sun in the 41st Gate, it kickstarts what is called 'the Human Experiential Way', an emotional stream of feeling running from the Root Center to the Throat Center via the Solar Plexus. It brings forth our burning desire to manifest new experiences and feel.
RA URU HU (Line Companion, 271-272):
"Transit: Uranus in 41.6
The Human Design System is a Uranian system, and wherever Uranus goes in the wheel is significant for humanity. Every 84 years, Uranus comes to the 41st gate. This time that Uranus is there, it is going to initiate an 84 year cycle that will culminate with the beginning of this transition. It will take well over a thousand years for humanity to get to this sixth line. It will not happen tomorrow or in the next century. Evolution on the human scale is a very slow process. This emotional spirit consciousness has already been with us for thousands of years and yet, we did not have any tools to really be able to look at it until very recently.
In the children that are born with Uranus in 41, particularly those who are born with Uranus in the 41.6, they will begin the pull-back in this experiential way. They will be the first generation of abstract children (it is depending on the design) who do not seem to function that way. These children, in our time, over the next 20 years [Uranus left the 41.6 in January 1998], will be clinically looked at as repressed. "No, my Johnny does not want to try to ride a bicycle. I do not understand it. I can't get him on the bicycle. I think that he is afraid of bicycles." It is simply because this is beginning to work and Uranus is initiating this new experience, especially in the sixth line. Uranus will bring that out in the children, so that there is already this genetic field that is beginning to operate and the children who are born with the 41.6 will be alive deep into the next century. They carry this energy with them and keep the aura of this energy alive in the world. They are setting the foundation for this transition.
You can see some of that now in what people call the AIDS epidemic. One of the things about the stream 41 to 35 is that it is the most sexual of all the streams. It is literally rooted in sexuality for the experience and that experience can be anything. In that sense, you can already see that this repression of those things is something that will come very strongly.
You will have a reaction to this in the environment until all of the experiences, the feelings and desires that we acquaint with being human will slowly be repressed, be restricted, so that we can become more and more organized without constantly being dragged out of the organization by the need of the abstract person to have a different kind of feeling. "You are designed to be an architect". "I know but I have this feeling that I want to be an astronaut." The planet has to eliminate this other side that automatically pulls you to say, "Yes, but wouldn't it be great if...?"
For us, nothing that I am describing is particularly pleasant. For us, we are part of the aura of the fifth line where we give authority to experience. Without experience, you do not know. That is why we have virtual reality. Nobody gets the experience. We already have vast movements at work to take us out of needing to physically have the experience ourselves, and yet, we have come into the world in a time where it still has its authority. We will have its authority for hundreds of years. There will be a great reaction to that. In your work over the next years, it is important to recognize that, as these children are coming on a stream, particularly children that come with the 41.6, they cannot be pushed into the experiential way by their parents. They will become very ill because they are the first generation that is there not to get pulled into that. They have to be aloof from it.
The experiential drive is coming to an end. The whole experiential nature of being human is coming to an end. In other words, we are at the flourishing of that. We are getting so many experiences. We are collecting so much data. We will now go down the other side. Ever since Neptune left 61, we are going down the other side, the other slope. Everything is being reduced. We start to pull things back. We are not driven into new experiences anymore. We are locked into old experiences, trying to stay alive and survive and flourish. We will not look for something new, but we will go back to the basics.
The deepest event in the next century will be that the fertility capacity in humans will be devastated. We have to go back to basic things and be very well organized in order to keep the species alive. We will not be able to tolerate all kinds of drives for different experiences when the species itself is threatened. These are all mechanisms that will come into work in the next century.
From: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space
It is like the project to Mars. They spend 256 million dollars to get there. They are spending about 1/2 million dollars a day tracking it. When somebody comes along in the next century and says, "Okay, now that we have gone to Mars, why don't we go to Pluto?" There will be people who say, "Wait a minute. Why? We could take all of this money and give it to starving children and poor people." We have to stay with the basics of what we need to have to be organized properly. It is not to say that we won't do things, but the pragmatism of what it is to keep humanity alive will restrict the way we use resources. That is what the 41 is all about. It is wonderful to look at the pictures they took of Mars, but we come to the point where people reject that. Resources have to go back into our hands to increase our fertility."
In a recent HumanDesign.Live post, I shared with you the animated video called 'Game B'.
If you haven't seen it yet, I invite you to check it out here and share your perspectives with me: https://www.humandesign.live/posts/20075916/comments/53671731
In this video, the creators are exploring a narrative of who we are as a collective in this moment in time, and what would be needed for us to navigate safely into the future. They offer their big picture overview and how an individual who has 'woken up' can find purpose and meaning in keeping the species alive during a time of ecological collapse.
There's plenty to be discussed about that, as I'm sure many of you are feeling the changes and are seeing a whole spectrum of conditioned propaganda about this fly by your information feed on a daily basis.
What is an ongoing puzzle for me is the disentangling from moralising crusades, naïve idealism, and all sorts of homogenized spiritual ideas that still have a rooting in the mind, but have no grounding in my actual Design. I notice in me the urge to pull away from many 'movements' and networks I would have identified and associated myself with before in the fear for my survival. At the same time I still care about how we navigate into the future together and understand we need to get organized, I get splenic hits all the time when I see people engaging in regenerative initiatives and experimenting their way into bioregional organization and maintenance of ecosystem capacities.
The dilemma for my mind is how to be connected to what I see unfolding correctly. The Not-Self wants to get deeply involved in order to 'lead the change' (my Colour Motivation Transference from Innocence to Blind Desire). I would love for my work to connect to the soils in a regenerative circle - and I'm not there now. My Not-Self mind judges this and does its best to compel me to do something about it, using all the pain points it can possibly find in my psyche, constructing a false image of myself as some kind of parasite. There's a blind desire in me to be part of something 'good', but it's a misguided mental distraction.
Letting go of morality is a heavy one. Lately, this is something I've been noticing in my students with an Undefined Solar Plexus as they mirror my own process. Being 'good' is part of having a social persona that won't be emotionally challenged or confronted. We get around by playing nice as people-pleasers. And it isn't just about getting everybody's seal of approval because you comply with their conditioned moral standards. It's also about not getting bullied by the Not-Self voice in the head for being a schmuck whenever you're facing a mirror.
Underlying this behaviour can be various kinds of amplified emotional fears of conflict (like the fear of nature in the 49th Gate, for example). The source of all of them is being revealed for who and what you truly are. And the Not-Self does not want to be exposed, especially in its misidentification of being secretly a 'bad' and inauthentic person underneath all of the facades (which is just as false as being a 'good' person). It is ready to blame others but does not want to be blamed for the crash of the wave itself. The outcome is a mountainous weight of expectations about being or not being 'something' that can allow conditioned desires to be fulfilled. And this finally translates into carrying the burden of experiential guilt on one's shoulders and inside our shared emotional field.
As long as there are expectations relative to the Human Experiential Way and in our relationships, as long as we are attached to getting something out of it, as long as we are trying to strategically manipulate our way from the desire through the crisis and into the manifestation of our fantasy of progress, as long as we're trying to lock in the next experiential orgasm or the feeling of finally being free - in other words, as long as we're trying to control what happens next based on whatever we think 'should' happen, then experiential guilt will be our fate.
I was contemplating these things yesterday, inspired in part by my interactions with my LYD students, and then finally had an epiphany about my own process in relation to this Not-Self strategy of running away from emotional confrontation. There were things that really needed to be seen and expressed, but that I had been too afraid of before. And I could see this was creating a duality in the psyche. On the one hand it left me trapped as a 2/5 to endlessly keep up with everyone's expectations, internalizing them as my own. And on the other it bound other people to my unreasonable expectations.
There was an additional curiosity here that I had been wearing old winter clothing from the brand Spyder. I was not actively pursuing that as something to identify with. I was not looking for a spirit animal or an expensive brand to show off with. But eventually it did capture my attention and I walked with it in awareness. Then when I finally sat outside to reflect on the transition into the Rave New Year, and whether or not I had any unfinished business left, I noticed a spider weaving its web not too far away from me.
And I recognized the web of expectations I was caught in, and how deep that rabbit hole went. It was beautiful to be taught by nature directly through its archetypal symbolism and fractals. Layer after layer the whole complex disclosed itself to me. I could see the Not-Self spider trapping people in my network in the hope of getting something out of them. Keeping track of everything through disturbances in the field. And on the other hand, I could see myself as being the one who was trapped by all of that. I could see how all my other Undefined Centers played into it and how it was detracting from my health and truth in relationships, setting me up for abuse.
(I could have read this on a divination card somewhere, but it probably wouldn't have done the trick. I had to come to that conclusion through my own reflection.)
Eventually this underlying drive of putting myself under the pressure of expectation dissolved for a while and I felt the peace of simply allowing things to be no more and no less than what they are in the here and now. Then also felt an aching body that had been carrying the pain of that for a long time, grateful to finally just be held in its own nature. There was an enjoyment of being able to feel the pain as opposed to resist and futz with it.
And in this I found the empowerment to speak up according to what felt instinctively correct and necessary for me to address.
The Rave I'Ching suggests that freedom on the material plane is an illusion (No Choice, we're not in control, etc.). From my perspective then, this freedom that I yearned for was to be free from expectation and blame. And to just let the experience of life be what it is. It already is in perfect accordance with my Design - it can't be anything else. I don't need anything extra.
So to close this chapter, I encourage moving through this Solar week of fantasizing without expectations, without the mental shenanigans to try and 'make it so' - however beautiful or morally just it may all appear to be.
If you're here to take care of the soils and steward the future, life will bring it your way and your body will resonate with it.
Thanks for reading and I wish you well in this new year,
Hagen
Human Design and Money: Material Dignity—Serving the Fractal, Not the Market
Material Dignity: Serving the Fractal, Not the Market
In this article, I hope to help you on your way with finding the livelihood that's correct for you - whether you're considering starting your own enterprise, or looking for something new to do.
Per invitation by Ninna Amora, I'm writing a short article on the nature of the fractal with regards to one's service, vocation, profession - and target audience or market.
This is something that has come up from various directions; from clients, students and friends who are exploring how to apply the Human Design system as a means of establishing their interface with the material world, the mundane bureaucracies and many economic barriers that are part of living in a homogenised environment.
A prominent set of questions that I see many people asking themselves includes:
"How do I reach my audience correctly, when I do not want to do it from a place of strategic manipulation and typical sales tricks?"
"How do I connect to the material flow authentically, when I can barely articulate who I am or what I'm about?"
To make a living by earning a financial income, there needs to be an entry point into the marketplace at some level. This is where society tends to demand clear identification; a reliable product or service that promises certain results in exchange for a set value. If you've got an undefined or completely open Heart Center, especially in combination with an undefined or open G - the Not-Self mind is probably already getting desperate.
At some point in our growth and maturation process, we're put in the position where there are many questions with no ready answers, and no acquired experience either. Something seems to be expected from us in order for us to make progress, but we have no clue how to meet that.
Whether we are young and just starting out, or we already have a career trajectory behind us, as we follow our strategy and authority (perhaps even going through the four radical transformations) then we're likely to reach a point at which we barely recognize the person in the mirror. We've changed so much, we have traded knowing for not knowing, certainty for uncertainty, mind for inner authority - we've become much like an alien to most people out there.
Being truly different in this world is something we bear, not as a burden, but as an ongoing empowering challenge nonetheless. The most difficult part is communication, crossing the divide between the differences that separate us in order to bring our message across - without abandoning our truth. It isn't easy to understand and be understood while operating from an irrational body-based authority..
One of my Living Your Design students recently told me it feels as though he's undergoing a metamorphosis, like growing a new skin that is still delicate and very sensitive, and yet he has to meet social complexity and harshness with this unexpected sensitivity on a day to day basis. Suddenly dropping the Not-Self armouring can leave us feeling vulnerable and naked in the face of people who do not seem ready or willing to understand where we're coming from. If we add an undefined Solar Plexus to this story, the nervous system can be particularly apprehensive, touchy and nervous about being revealed for who we really are.
The pain can be significant to such a degree that there is very little bandwidth left for actually coming to understand the other, falling back on our own assumptions and projections rather than dialogue and listening - because it requires less energy.
Putting things into perspective: we are shapeshifting back into who we were born to be, reclaiming the gifts that are hidden in parts of us that were deeply wounded - once rejected by the world we now want to intimately connect to. By really grounding ourselves into the material plane. This is not simply a psychological adventure - this is as physical as it gets. It's a process that requires a lot of energy, and so we can expect to become more intolerant at first - it's a biological thing, nothing personal. Yet we have to be aware, or risk falling into contempt.
If you're recognizing yourself in this process, then it is your rite of passage of coming into spiritual adulthood. We are soon entering the next Global Cycle of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix, a time in which one of the keys to survival will be finding the spirit through materialism. For those of us who genuinely want to live in awareness and purpose, there is no sidestepping this anymore. Mother and Father's protection is diminishing and will start to be pulled away come 2027. It's time to emerge into the world on your own legs, in your own authority and in material dignity according to your unique spirit.
So far, I've mentioned three undefined Centers: the Heart, the G and the Solar Plexus. If, like me, you have all three of them undefined then you'll probably recognize they operate as a complex. In a recent post Laveena refers to them as 'The Big Three', and provides a simple step by step process to unravel them:
https://www.humandesign.live/posts/19899158
These three strong pain points can weaken one's self-esteem, sense of worth or value, and ability to confront emotional conflict and crises. Each of the shadows that we find in these Centers can prevent you from actually coming home to this planet, wandering endlessly through the mists of insecurity.
The Undefined Heart: 'I have to... in order to be valuable...'
The Undefined G: 'Fix an identity that secures direction and love...'
The Undefined Solar Plexus: 'Live a secret life (while avoiding the truth)...'
This complex brings the three strategies of these undefined Centers together into crafting what is basically a social caricature that reflects the homogenised environment. You shape yourself according to your conditioning in a way that secures you a place of belonging, compensation, and minimised hassle. 'Give them what they seem to want, so I can have and be something as opposed to nothing.'
Then when you get home you can look into the mirror (or every window reflection along the way) to check out the attributes you've adorned and misidentified yourself with to keep up your self-confidence. (Again there's no shaming in any of this, it's just the way in which these undefined Centers express themselves mechanically when conditioned.)
One of the manifestations of this is getting trapped and fooled by appearances. Homogenised society pollutes the collective projection field with all sorts of deceiving and distracting images that glorify the Not-Self. People hiding behind convincing facades of status, class, power, wealth - disguised in all sorts of material glamour in order to attract, seduce, distract and possess. This pollution does not only fill up our streets with advertisement, but it also fills up our minds with a plethora of conditioned ideas about what it means to be worthy of attention, support and financial compensation.
And the Not-Self makes its bargain plain: here are our ideal models, strive to look and behave like that and along the way we'll find something you can get paid for. If you don't, we'll ridicule or marginalise you. All homogenised conversation essentially ends every other sentence with 'good model' or 'bad model'. Thumbs up, thumbs down. I think we're all very aware of the mental judgment that goes on in everyone's heads.
To our own Not-Self mind, this is what the worry is about and it can trigger an identity crisis. We were raised to understand and express ourselves based on comparison with others, and this gives everyone else a reference point for mapping us onto their value hierarchy. The Not-Self defines relationships between self and other by contrasting the conditioned models that are being communicated:
You dress, walk and talk a certain way, which emulates a model that fits somewhere in the bigger picture of society where you think you should be in order to get what you think you want. Somebody else dresses, walks and talks a different way, you compare your models (totally subconsciously for most people), and you think they are 'that' and you are 'this' and therefore you 'should' or 'should not' interact a certain way - or can't even hope to interact. This is how we are divided and divide ourselves into social classes. It's how we give ourselves away to corporate behavioural psychoanalysts and algorithms because we're enthralled into a predictable pattern.
This is the conditioning we face when we are revamping our livelihoods from a place of unconditioned authenticity - and this is not a stellar issue for everyone. Some of us have a very clear and self-empowered sense of identity and role defined. Some of us have a very strong ego defined that can handle all of the above without losing themselves. Most of us do not.
What stood out to Ninna in our recent conversation, was a perspective on inequality that is not often discussed in Human Design circles. The conditioning that I just described above is not simply of the mind, unfortunately. We have concretised it into urban planning and law. This is where the Not-Self finds its juice, all the evidence it needs to back up its perceptions of not being good enough on the one hand, or feeling self-entitled on the other. It's the kind of context that leaves people struggling with the price tags of professional Human Design readings, and why you see certain geographic, economic and racial backgrounds dominate HD social media groups.
There is a limitation at work that we have to come to terms with, however distasteful it might be. The human population at large is segregated, and many people do not have access. And even when people do have access, a story in the mind often tells them they can't afford it or that they're being economically exploited just like everywhere else. As you probably heard Ra say - it's a dense Maya. So how do we cut through that?
In my work as BG5 Consultant, when I'm collaborating with people to find the work that is correct for them, a lot of energy is initially spent on discerning 'Who am I?' and 'What am I here for?'. The usual habit for people is to try and find some direct answers to those questions based on what I can analyse in the chart - followed by 'Now who can I sell this to and how do I go about it?'. Unless you're a 44/26 or a 1/8 with a bunch of third lines, from my perspective this is not the right approach - because we're playing right into divisive assumptions and conditioning.
I asked myself those questions for years, having acquired expensive business and economics degrees, having done a lot of introspective self-analysis and spiritual journeying - I had learned a lot, but gotten no closer to 'financial freedom' or articulating 'my service' in alignment with what I perceived my values to be.
The more I thought about these things, the more isolated I became, the more disconnected I felt from ordinary people. Not only that, but I also found myself more and more incapable of actually meeting genetic, cultural and economic difference. Regardless of the amounts of languages that I could speak. At some point, unless people were into Human Design, we basically couldn't sustain a meaningful conversation for more than a minute.
My Not-Self mind was roaring with assumptions that people wouldn't give me a chance based on what I looked like or how I spoke, while secretly rejecting everyone else by the same token. Feeling sorry for myself as 'a privileged white European dude on the Cross of Explanation' - haven't we had enough of those?
See, when people ask themselves "Now who can I sell this to?", chances are the mind is going to do some classic market segment analysis that reduces people to homogenised patterns. And though there is a place for that too, it isn't going to enliven your service and livelihood or help you understand what you're here for.
Taking a market approach like this follows an assumption that that's what your life is about - and it isn't. Your life, if you're here, is about expressing your Outer Authority as value for the other. That is something else entirely, and this is the only path to material dignity in alignment with who you truly are. If your way of making an income doesn't support that, you'll watch your spirit fade.
And this finally brings us to your fractal.
You are not here to serve a market, that's what it looks like on the surface and as we integrate into this mundane world, but that is not what your activity is. Don't let conditioning reduce you to that.
Just like everyone else, you're an aspect of existence itself. You're a differentiation of the Totality as it evolves and experiences consciousness within itself. As a nine centered form we get to share this process with each other in awareness. And because we are a fundamental part of the whole, we are intimately interconnected with everything else - according to very specific geometry. This geometry defines our innate place, and this place defines our value for others. All of this is coordinated by the monopole in the G Center and unfolds naturally.
There is nothing extra you have to do in order to be deserving, worthy, or competent enough to meet the forces that are here to nourish you. Just be yourself, doing what you love to do.
When you look at a fractal, what you're seeing is basically a self-similar form. A pattern that repeats within itself geometrically and connects all of its iterations in an underlying wholeness. There is a self-similarity like this that you share with everyone you ever encounter in life, at some level. This self-similarity is love.
When we analyse a chart, we can find fractals in many different ways. But for you to find out who you're here to serve with your Outer Authority, you have to find the fractal that corresponds to your correct trajectory through life. This is represented by the Nodes of the Moon.
Laveena teaches that the Design Nodes are 'Where You Be' and the Personality Nodes are 'What You See'. By bringing these two together with your incarnation cross, and by looking at this within the context of your chart as a whole, we can keynote and describe your place in the ecosystem - and how exactly you're here to bring value to the other in this life. These are the answers that catalyse significant breakthroughs for clients.
Ra Uru Hu was embedded into an environment where he was surrounded by other experimental 'freaks' who were ready to experiment with something new that he could initiate into the world. A shocking system rooted in his unique seeing about the nature of creative individual self-expression and mutative direction. A wisdom about the nature of limitation grounded in facts, voiced through his recognition of spirit - that innocence alone does not guarantee success. An impact that would allow future generations to survive the coming times. This was his fractal service.
It starts by understanding the difference between a 'market' and a 'fractal' (in Human Design terms):
A market is something you engage with in order to make money, to purchase something, or to leverage in order to build infrastructure.
A fractal, however, is your self-fulfilment through the other. It is who you are and where the illusion of separateness between self and other is eventually dissolved. The market is an abstract impersonal entity, the fractal is something you can actually care about.
When you can recognize your fractals by being correct in your own frequency, following your Type, Strategy and Authority into correct interactions, then you'll start to see what life is asking from you. You'll start to see the recurring themes in your life that you're here to learn about, you'll start to see Outer Authority being pulled from you to make a difference in someone else's life, and you'll start to notice what physically enlivens your spirit and body.
Putting this recognition into an articulate form that people can understand and compensate you for is a joyful and easy process. Whichever marketing strategies you then end up using, it follows correctness and awareness. And at the same time, your service is not strictly bound to the marketplace, it can occur anywhere anytime.
And so you'll notice something else too: the illusion of social class shatters. Who you speak or don't speak to is determined by correctness, not superficial appearance or preconditions. Whether the other is a beggar whose words you can't quite understand, an executive CEO whose experiential background intimidates you, or someone with a gender or skin colour you haven't seen before. When it's correct, there is value exchanged without effort. This doesn't mean you won't have to put energy into establishing a connection, a relationship, a mutual understanding - it may take work, but it'll be correct for you.
So as a BG5 professional, analysing a chart is one thing, helping someone identify how their fractal shows up in real life is another. And for yourself, receiving the analysis is one thing, but opening your eyes and ears to the world around you, putting your attention back out there to really see who is in your life - what enlivens them? This is something else entirely. (Shout out to Undefined G Projectors in particular.)
In the process whether we're moving through this ourselves or we're helping someone else find their way, we all find our edges. We encounter the limits to our empathy, our compassion, our understanding, and it's the relationship that provides us with the opportunity to grow by learning. We are mirrors for each other. Whenever you're listening to recorded lectures by Ra, pay attention to when he describes his own learning by relating to his students, given where he was coming from. It's quite humbling.
This is the trajectory of alchemy through relating, transmuting the shadows of our undefined centers into wisdom by living correctly. It's the only way you get to Outer Authority.
Your service is what characterizes the interaction and bonding along your fractal path through the material world (following your Profile). There is the enjoyment of correctness through cycles of pleasure and pain, cost and loss, profit and gain, and within that; the experience of flourishing as yourself - as you make a purposeful contribution to life and consciousness. Not because you have to. Not because it's the moral thing to do. Not because if you don't you're never gonna get what you want.
It just happens because you are who you are. And there is peace, satisfaction, success and surprise in knowing what that's like, and watching the material world roll out the red carpet in front of you.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
Relating without Blame: Split Definitions and the Penta
The Human Design System Penta by JovianArchive
In this article we'll be taking a look at relating with awareness.
Functional relationships are at the core of what makes civilization work and what allows us to thrive in the many social processes that we get involved in throughout life. And given the nature of the world we are raised in, such relationships need to be fought for. They cannot be taken for granted, they are precious and rare. The legacy of the Not-Self that pervades cultural models, stereotypes and moral ideals include co-dependency, indebtedness, blame and fault-finding - and this is not what relating is about.
This article features valuable quotes not only from course material on split definitions from Ra, but also information from my BG5 Career and Business Consulting on the nature of the Penta.
The Penta is the group entity that determines group and family dynamics and therefore much of the household scenarios that form our early life conditioning.
In my experience as a Broad Split design, what I have seen along the way is the complex interrelation between the split definition that is prone to blaming and the emergent stress or toxicity from group fields (Pentas that essentially do not have the energy they need to be successful). These things come together to create dynamics of scarcity, blame and hurt that are unnecessarily personalized and internalized. It becomes a part of our Not-Self story and we carry it with us into any new context we enter into. When a new context is similar enough in configuration to our family of origin, this can be especially triggering and bring out a version of the Not-Self we thought we had left behind.
If you're unfamiliar with the Penta, further below I will describe concisely what it is and the implications it has for human society, community and households - after introducing the split definitions.
Relating Without Blame - Split Definitions and the Penta
The Broad Split
"It says, “Look, I've got this broad split. I need, I need to have this. It’s what I'm about. This is what I'm here to experience; this is what I’m here to learn. If you cannot give this to me, then this is not a relationship that is correct. If you cannot give me, as in this case, the intimacy, if you can’t give me these things, if you don’t give me the marriage and the bonds of the 19/49 or the romance (of the 39/55), if you can’t give me these things, it’s not going to work. And I don't need them all. But, if we are going to work together, this is what I need from you.”
This is not about saying to somebody that they are not correct. What happens to the not-self with these broad splits is that they’re always just simply blaming. And again, blaming in the context of bitterness, frustration, or anger instead of understanding that because of their very design, anyone who will bridge that split of theirs with that broad split is ready to hear what they need from them, because they’re already bringing it.
“This is what I need from you.” It goes deeper than that because I want you to really understand that this is not about dependencies. It isn’t. These broad splits, in all of their relationships, have big problems because they're always saying there's something wrong with them instead of saying there is something I need from you. There’s something you can give me. And in that, we can form a more perfect bond, because that’s really what it's about.
Until the broad split gets to that place where they can be comfortable in their skin, then looking out there and seeing that they’re not good enough and that they're not good enough is simply the conditioning mechanism, and in fact, they are good enough, can be, but you’ve got to let them know what you need.
Two sides of the split definition process:
The single bridge learns what it needs for its relating life and then educates its partner.
The broad split lets its partner know what it needs and then the relationship can flower.
This is the fundamental responsibility that is there in the split definition.
..
Everything about the split definition is that they're here to teach relating. But they do it in different ways. The [simple] bridge split says that you’ve got to be able to do this. The broad split says you’ve got to be able to give this.
We have an enormous problem in the nature of communion. Human beings operating out of mental authorities are full of fears. Relationships, whether they are going to succeed or fail, can be very threatening. There are all kinds of pressure that is attached to these things.
...
All the many, many years that I did readings—I've done readings for thousands of people who are divorced, separated, angry, frustrated, bitter, or disappointed, all of those things. Nobody teaches a child how to be correct. Nobody teaches adults how to be parents. Nobody teaches human beings how to be correct together in respect. Nobody teaches these things. They don't. And the teachers that we need are lost in the maia.
Imagine, the next time you see somebody, one of these people who tell you all about relating and how people should get along, you make sure that you get to check their data, because you'll see that they're usually single definitions and they don't know what the hell they're talking about. They don't. It’s only the split definition that’s really going to be able to make a difference in that. We need to be properly educated. We need to not be afraid to recognize who knows something.
...
If they’re not aware, then we're going to have nothing but problem relationships. Yet at the same time, you can see that it takes a great deal of awareness to be able to come to grips with your design as a split. It takes awareness. It takes real awareness to get past the traps of the bridges as conditioning traps to begin to see that this is what you're here to master and teach in the way of relating.
None of the rest of us, none of us single definitions, triple splits, quads—we are incapable of evolving in terms of relationships; incapable. It's not our responsibility. It’s not built into us. It puts enormous pressure on that 46% of humanity who are split definitions, because the responsibility then becomes theirs to make the relationships work. And of course, it goes back to what I began with. It is a very difficult thing. Only the split definition can see a relationship as bringing wholeness. Nobody else can.
...
If I'm ever going to give another training for relationship teachers, I will only invite splits. I won’t invite anybody else, because the reality is that they're the ones who have the gift and those gifts can be so special. A lot of it has to do with what it means to accept and be open to outer authority. This is something, when it comes to relationships, is often very difficult. Yet at the same time, to recognize that it is inherent in any split definition to be a true outer authority for what it means to be together and to be able to maintain the quality of our bonds. This is what they’re about."
- Ra Uru Hu (Excerpts from 'Split Definitions & Relationships' IHDS, 2009)
I'll start off by highlighting this bold statement by Ra: "None of the rest of us, none of us single definitions, triple splits, quads—we are incapable of evolving in terms of relationships; incapable." I'm not sure to what extent this is actually true. What does your experience tell you?
Personally, the split definition does stand out to a significant degree when it comes to healthy relating for me. The other kinds of definition don't appear to be very interested until they are educated in one way or another to see the value or until they make it a part of their spiritual or vocational path.
Yet, I have also seen single definitions who have worked very hard to relate with awareness and wisdom about the nature of giving and receiving from the other with clear communication. And as a young split definition there were many things I learned from single definitions for me to be able to relate correctly.
The limitation however, was that in most cases there wasn't the understanding of the mechanics at the time. And therefore much of the examples I saw looked like honourable attempts to forge a lasting bond, with the people involved learning a lot about not disrespecting oneself or the other, but they didn't actually work out as a functional relationship in the end.
Usually the single definition distorted their own nature to the point they got fed up with their partner. I've also seen a weird dynamic of "I'm not blaming you ( -but I'm blaming you)," emerge more than once. Which is almost as funny as it is sad.
When this was not the case and both people felt very content with themselves and the other, it was because they felt like they could be themselves and do their own thing without needing to compromise that. And yet, all of this is still categorically different from the mechanical nature of being a split definition and the outer authority this can lead to.
Image by Sumeet Mishra
One of the reasons why relationships are difficult is that they can get very confusing rather quickly, and most of us want to do it right without knowing exactly what that means. The Not-Self doesn't only want to do it right, it wants to be in the right. It wants to win in the relationship, if you know what I mean. Whether it is by being really 'good', really 'bad' or really 'normal' - either way it wants to be victorious and is willing to pay a very high price for that.
Few people alive today grew up with parents who could role model for them what relating with awareness is like. One of the reasons for that (beyond not knowing their Designs) is that the moment you're together with both of your parents at the same time, or they're together with you, none of you can fully express yourselves. You're in a Penta. Parents may have a very different relationship that is available to them when they are alone with each other than when they are suddenly joined by their children. They may have a private relationship the children may never actually know about.
As soon as three people or more come together, the Penta takes over the social dynamics with only one goal in mind: to be a successful family (group) according to whatever societal / material model they espouse. It's about accomplishing the lifestyle and being able to demonstrate that success to other families, inevitably in a competitive way.
The communion that is possible between two becomes something else once we reach three. It was quite a shock for me to come to see this when I first studied the Penta, and recognized I actually didn't know who my parents were.
So what is a Penta?
Here's a quote from some of my BG5 Consulting work to explain the concept to clients:
The graph that you see above is called a PentaGraph, with its various structural components. It is the Design of the Penta as a Form, in the same way that we have a Human Design, or the various Designs of Mammals, Plants, Cells, etc., which are all different.
You can learn more about this in Ra's lecture series titled 'The Architecture of Life' in which he shares with us the Design of Forms.
At the BG5 Business Institute we use this graph to work with families, teams, communities, organizations in order to learn how to create a social and productive group organism that is functional and effective.
For this article, what is important to take note of are the empty spaces in the PentaGraph. As you can see, some boxes are colored in and some are left grey. These grey boxes are empty. Those that are colored in are the energies that the team members bring into the group field. These empty places are called 'Gaps'.
When a Penta has Gaps and is supposed to be a unit of its own, it generates a particular sense of scarcity in the field. The atmosphere and energy of the group becomes oriented around that scarcity and starts to focus on it. This in turn has an effect on the minds of the participating group members; their attention is hijacked to focus on 'what's missing' or 'what's lacking' and 'who is supposed to bring this in?'. And so this is what the mind will start to think about, and subsequently what everyone will start talking about.
When they can't find that energy, you can imagine the Penta becoming 'ill'. It starts to generate a kind of toxicity in the field that incentivizes the members to seek out the missing energy resources or competences. When acted out, this translates into toxic behaviour and communication. Most of the social dysfunction we see in society is a consequence of getting pulled into incomplete Pentas and being blind to their existence and conditioning influence on human beings. Like liver cells being blind to the fact that they are part of and determined by the liver as a transcendent whole.
Take the PentaGraph in the previous image as an example, you can see that they are missing four vital energies (which we call Skills in BG5). The skills at the bottom you might recognize as being associated with the 5th, 14th and 29th Gates in the Sacral Center. They are the generative power of a Penta, without them the group cannot hold together continuously nor attract the resources necessary to empower their creative direction. There's no sustainable lift-off of whatever vision they might have.
In a Penta these energies do not operate like Gates, their frequencies are modulated and they become something else within the construct of the Penta. Something that we can recognize as the productive energy flow of businesses (and material projects of all sorts) in which human beings come together to generate an income, resources or rewards.
This is the flow that families create. Generate the income that puts the food on the table, pays for the mortgages, pays for schools, pays for the car, the fancy clothes, etc. Assume responsibility for your role in securing everything a family 'should' have in order to be materially successful in the world, to be competitive enough so that its members can 'thrive' as part of society.
Communion goes out of the window here when the Penta can condition everyone to look at everyone else through that material lens. 'Are they upholding the model?', 'Are they fulfilling the role properly?'. And this is what opens the door to dynamics of blaming in the household when the Penta doesn't have the energy it requires. The mind thinks 'We can't seem to succeed in realizing the dream - whose fault is it?'
What I call a 'Blaming Atmosphere' is especially the case when there is a Gap in the Skill of Commitment. When this energy is lacking, the group is running on empty promises while nobody can actually follow through on their commitments. Among many other things, people start to make excuses and accuse each other for not putting in the necessary effort to make things work.
So now imagine what happens when we bring several split definitions into this kind of environment... They have a predisposition in the Not-Self to blame themselves and the other for lacking what is needed, and then this whole idea of 'blame' and 'fault' becomes amplified by the Penta and its scarcity conditioning. And eventually this becomes a cultural norm that is part of our lifestyle. It is a milieu we are raised in, it's something that we can take for granted as 'just the way human beings work'. It becomes an internalized part of our psyche.
And yet it isn't true - there is no awareness in blaming.
On the other hand, by respecting each others' Designs and understanding our context, we can speak transparently about what we perceive, about what we notice, about what is needed in order to make things work, and how scarcity could be overcome.
Free from expectations, free from blaming and fault-seeking. We can be unattached in a healthy way about actually 'achieving the model' or not.
We can be anchored in the present and with awareness have a healthy dialogue about our experiencing, about our learning, and navigate together moment by moment without disconnecting, disassociating or falling out into blind aggression, contempt or violence due to the mind's fears.
It all starts by understanding who you are, who the other is, who you are together and what context you're participating in.
It starts with awareness and the willingness to relate.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
Analyst Student Keynoting for 1/3 Triple Split Emotional Manifestor Cross of Sphinx
1/3 Triple Split Emotional Manifestor Cross of Sphinx
Advanced Keynoting for 1/3 Triple Split Emotional Manifestor
The following article is another example from my PTL1 keynoting practice under Laveena's guidance. It may be of interest to you if you'd like to do this kind of HD Analyst work yourself, whether you're self-studying or you're considering signing up for professional training (it may be fun to try and locate which activations in the chart the keynotes are coming from). It could also be enriching for you if there are any particular similarities between you or people you know and this particular design.
I can honestly say that Laveena's learning environment has been priceless for my personal growth and deepened understanding of the system, of people, groups and correct interaction. I was self-studying in very advantageous settings for a long time before, but the classroom interactions and one on one relationships that have developed out of these courses here simply took things to a humbling new level.
If you enjoy the quality of what you read here and you'd like to receive an analysis like this about your Career Design - or gift it to someone you care about - I'm offering a festivities discount on my BG5 Career Overviews here:
https://www.humandesignlifecoaching.com/bg5/career-overview
Dear Katya,
What is Truth? Is there such a thing as an absolute truth for you?
Even if it takes a lifetime to discover, would Your Truth be worth dying for?
Katya, you were born to impact the world with your creative individuality, with the sharing of your mental activity that is mixed with confusion, and by supporting your tribe with your instinctive honesty and aloofness, with your conscious refusal to engage in hypocritical interactions, and your unconscious indifference towards others that ensures your own well-being. Though this may sound surprising, you were born with the willpower to transmit what is best for your tribe’s continuity. And you have the unconscious ego to manipulate memory in order to sell others what would be beneficial for their wellbeing, even though in your self-absorbed nature your ego may fail to respect the experiential lessons of history.
Waiting for emotional clarity, when you are in the right mood for social interaction, you can cautiously confess to others and inform them about the passion and values that move you, and touch them deeply with the quality of your voice. When you speak your individual truth, you make a profoundly mutative impact, empowering others to experience the full range of emotional depth through your creative self-expression.
As an individual you are here to be consciously inspiring for others, grounding your receptive intuition and aesthetics in the patience to ride your emotional wave to clarity - following the special timing of your creativity. Katya, taking the necessary time with your creative process is what provides you with the secure foundation that bolsters your confidence as an authority on what your creative light shines out into the world. You will likely experience deep melancholy, a mood of sadness about all that is no longer, and all that is not yet, a mood that beckons the artist in you to reconnect with the creative muse and channel this emotionality through poetry, music, art and beauty.
Being true to the quality of your own mood like this gives you an ability to provide direction for others in a way that leads them to their own truth through inspiration. This strength is unconsciously anchored in your ability to lead in an anarchistic fashion.
Katya, when you are in the mood, you have an openness to listen to others in order to learn about what is meaningful to us collectively as human beings. You listen with a maturing optimism and the hope that openness will lead to better relationships, while unconsciously you filter what others share with you through a healthy dose of pessimism. This can engender the need for others to present concrete evidence, and it can also evoke a sense of humour about your experimental process of experiencing life as a series of events where things go wrong, where bonds are made and broken - in your determination to discover what actually works.
You are driven to be mentally active in order to find clarity, allowing your abstract mind to move through confusion in its own timing, protected by conscious participation in the mental process so that you can clearly identify opportunities for transformation. Overconfidence is part of your body’s nature while it processes mental pressure, and this means you may experience yourself unexpectedly alone in sudden moments of transition while you are moving through the crisis of your inexperience in life. In this way you can come to see the futility in your environment, where people are genuinely in a restrictive and difficult position without realization, without the ability to make sense of it all. This is a perspective that you are here to have in a physical environment of conflict, friction and retreat.
You can see that there is nothing the mind can do and you can only be who you are. That people can only role model their own uniqueness for others, so they too can come to find their own.
Embodying the wisdom to move beyond your mind, what might you discover?
When you let go of any preconditions in interaction, and difficulties do not need to be fixed, what truth might you find? And who might you impact with it?
Katya, your process of acquiring wisdom is characterized by the inconsistent energy to bring closure to a cycle at the right time, after having moved through its beginning, middle and end as an influential mediator, not succumbing to just any pressure for growth.
Your process is also characterized by an inconsistent energy for paying close attention to details, and to the step by step progression of patterns as they move logically into the future, which requires the fuel to be still in order to concentrate.
However, it also requires that you watch your mind and no longer let it push you around through pressure or craving. The mind may think that you should rush to get things over with more quickly, that you should find the right dream to focus on in order to get out of a perceived contraction, or that you should start a new experience NOW. With this depth of emotions that you carry, Katya, there is no truth in the now. It takes time, patience and self-love to access your emotional intelligence in order to make a correct decision.
The mind may worry about generating wealth and who can invest in your creative potential and direction. It may worry about intimacy and needing to be more available in order to find the right partner. It may be concerned about your personal power or sense of disempowerment to energize your correct behaviour. It can lead you to overdo things in order to access more power, or to attract more wealth or intimacy while completely disregarding your emotional nature and clarity.
It may run a story that if you don’t act spontaneously now you won’t have the freedom or space that you need to be yourself, or that you might miss out on something you desire. It may use an amplified fear of authorities and fear of dying before your purpose has been realized, it may worry that there might not be a tomorrow for you. Therefore, it may be wiser not to believe everything you think. The mind cannot mentally rationalize what your truth is, it cannot answer the ‘mystery of your life’ and what you should do with it. When it can pressure you to make rash mental decisions, you may find yourself destroying something out of anger that you come to regret - or other people unleashing their anger on you.
It could be very tempting to make hasty decisions on your emotional highs or lows, Katya, when there is nothing but the excitement of hope or nothing but the pain of despair. Such decisions would be dangerous and are unlikely to bring you to a more peaceful place. For there to be awareness, it is necessary for these waves to pass while your body processes and digests this life. This means you would have to wait patiently for neutral clarity to settle in before you can know if the right time has come to make a move.
It may be beneficial for you to move through public spaces where you can be exposed to other auras as they simply move through yours. You do not need to interact socially, but the simple auric contact and exchange of information may help you connect the different parts of you into greater synchrony, which eventually fosters clarity to come. To maximize the ease and grace with which you make your impact, you may find that informing those who will be impacted by your decision in advance tends to bring about greater cooperation - or at the very least less resistance.
When you know the peace of your Manifestor nature by aligning with what is the correct timing for you, the resistance of anger will subside and your mind can be unburdened from decision-making. It can finally unlock the wisdom potential that is there in you.
Katya, you have the potential to be wise about whom you can actually start something new with, and with whom it is time to break the bond. You can be wise about whom it is correct for you to sit still with in order to concentrate on details. You can be wise about who has the correct resources to empower your creative direction.
When it comes to pressure you can have the wisdom to know that not all dreams must be manifested. That pressure does not need to compel a decision. You can know that you have your own timing, you can be patient with yourself and relax regardless of what other people’s expectations might be.
In the transmission of your awareness, Katya, you are a force of creative destruction. So it may take death and resurrection to find the truth of who you are. It may take a revolution! Know that peace and a transformed world is what awaits you on the other side of returning to the uniqueness of your true nature.
Inner Authority: Material Willpower
Ego Authority: The Will To Do Something
"Ego authority is very limited in the way it can occur because of the hierarchy of the authorities. In order for the ego to be the authority the chart CANNOT have a defined solar plexus, or a defined sacral, or a defined spleen. This means that there are only 2 channels that can activate the ego as authority: The 45-21 channel and the 51-25 channel.
Ego authority is the authority of the will, of willpower. The ego center is essentially a 'me' energy. This is not to be confused with the 'self' of the G center. This is rooted in possession. Possession of things and of place. Who‘s first? Me. Who‘s in charge? Me. Who owns this house? Me.
Two Channels
There are two channels that create ego authority are the 45-21 and 51-25. This first channel is a manifested channel, and therefore anyone with 45-21 ego authority will be a manifestor. Of course, this is provided the sacral, spleen and solar plexus are not defined. The second channel is a projected channel and as long as the G center is not connected to the throat (which would make them an ego manifestor) people with the 51-25 only are ego authority projectors.
45-21 Material People
The dynamics of the 45-21 energy are straightforward. It is the focus of 'me‘ on material plane and the control that comes with that. This channel is called the Money Channel but it‘s not simply about money. It‘s about all of the elements of holding the community together in a particular order. This involves education and where one sits in any given status based organization.
In terms of authority, it means that such a person has to have the willpower to support their decision, to bring their will energy into play. There can‘t be any waffling about it. This person has to be able to forcefully say, with heartfelt conviction, 'This is for me. I will do it.' This is, after all, a manifesting channel. They have to have the complete conviction that they can control the endeavor, whatever it is.
The ego authority, if the person decides to get a Ph.D. for example, they must have the full force of their will over an extended period of time. To do that, they must begin with a strong sense of will towards the goal. There must be a clear goal and utter conviction that they can reach the goal."
- Excerpt from IHDS - Cartography 4 - Authority (p.16)
In recent articles and discussions on the HumanDesign.Live network, the topic of Free Will vs No Choice has come up frequently. I'm also encountering it these days in interaction between people who have the Ego of the Heart center as their Inner Authority and those who have an Undefined Heart center altogether. Telling people with this Inner Authority that Free Will is an illusion and that therefore they should give up on imposing their willpower and manifesting their control is unlikely to lead to any success. They have no choice but to establish material control by making a commitment to a goal. It seems to me that for them, this illusion of Free Will isn't going anywhere.
The revelation of the Heart center was one of the most liberating insights Human Design brought to me when I first began studying the system. I was in an environment where a lot of new age spirituality was going on all over the place. I had sat in sanghas and participated in various group healing modalities where people came together to address 'the problem' of the ego, its perceived selfishness and tendency towards 'separation'. And the leaders of these circles had constructed a whole detailed logical process of step by step trying to eliminate it.
Defined Ego Center the Human Design System
To learn there was such a thing as a Defined and an Undefined Heart center, and that there was a significant distinction to be made between correct and healthy Ego and an amplified Not-Self distortion was absolutely mind-blowing to me. I have a fully open Heart center and I had been so seduced by these practices of demonizing the ego and habitually trying to shatter the ego of others at the slightest manifestation. Looking back now, it was terribly misguided and plain unaware. And I have a suspicion that a Free Will vs No Choice conversation could head in that direction too if we aren't careful.
The struggle of inconsistent Willpower that most of humanity experiences sets us up for envy and jealousy in the Not-Self. Those of us with the Heart center undefined see the Materialists who can consistently manifest their will on the material plane, who can assert their 'me' above anything else in their life, and then there's the instant temptation to condemn those beings because when 'we' try to do that things go sideways.
The paradox to see is that the Ego serves its Tribe, that the 'me' of the Materialist is a function of its place in the hierarchy, inevitably supporting the community in its material wellbeing in one way or another. Their Willpower comes back around full circle. While in the Not-Self that 'me' becomes a self-serving menace in its blind disregard for others.
When introducing newcomers to Human Design, this is often a very humbling conversation to have with people who have Defined Egos, listening to the abuse they have faced from people overreacting to them for no good reason (and it is particularly painful when these people are Projectors). People who try to break the ego of the other in the attempt to prove themselves superior (spiritually or otherwise). And if they can't then they suddenly fall into a black hole of their own insecurities, ironically looking toward the Defined Ego for some external validation of their worth.
This dynamic is a radical misunderstanding of how things work, and it is a blindness to who people really are. The correct Ego is an incredibly beautiful thing. I thank my lucky stars for the Defined Egos that have supported me and stood up for me throughout my life. I now enjoy watching the egoic masks emerge in order to face social challenges. It is deeply impressive to me to witness someone consistently putting their heart forward to maintain their own integrity, or on behalf of whatever or whomever they represent.
At first it can be a bitter pill for the Not-Self to swallow; to sit in the presence of a Defined Ego and come to terms with the fact that this other being has what you will never have and being put in one's place in this way. Yet, once accepted this becomes very sweet. You were never meant to compete with them.
Once you can be who you are and the other can be who they are, your awareness can be free to witness the beauty of their process of proving what they're here to prove, seeing how the Ego is applied to that end. It's no longer about 'oh I wish I could do / have that'.
Once you've accepted your place, the hierarchy stops being a problem and the superiority/inferiority complex can start to dissolve. Nourishing resources can begin to flow downstream to you, and from you to others, in the way that is just right.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
The Mysterious Difference which Makes a Difference
This article is a response to a question from the humandesign.live community:
“As a 6/2 MG with emotional authority, waiting is extremely difficult… Almost painfully difficult. If one is in a difficult place in life and has the urge to make a change, but there is no change to make, what should they do?”
– Joshua French
Human Design Sacral Center - Life Resource of the Generator
In one of my recent articles '幽玄, Melancholy, Waiting, Art and Noticing', I connected certain Japanese aesthetic principles to our experiences of Waiting and Melancholy, using artistic work by Andrew Wyeth to convey the simple profundity of waiting for correct enlivenment to emerge on its own.
Of course, being a Non-Sacral Projector, I write from a point of view that asks us to value non-productivity and patience. Not only as a safeguard against rash mental decision-making, but also in the awareness of being careful with the energy we have.
Life is not a simple formula of energy availability and its general application. The energy any one of us carries is specific. It isn’t to be used for just anything because someone out there thinks we should. It’s there to be used for what we love. Our context is what enlivens our spirit and enriches the world in turn. And in order for our forms to function they need a healthy balance of activity and rest, no matter what Type we’re talking about.
This balance is naturally something you can only find yourself. Nobody else can know when enough is enough for you.
Others can only observe your signposts and what you’re broadcasting. At best they can tell when you’re approaching or have passed your healthy limits and ask you some good questions to help you orient yourself according to your Type, Strategy and Authority.
Neither can your mind tell when enough is enough - until it has surrendered to the body. Only then might it be sensible enough to recognize when it is time to stop after registering the body’s intelligent cues. Learning the language of your own biology is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself, which takes a significant amount of time and feedback – especially if most of your defined Channels are unconscious.
Having said all of this, consider then the perspective of a 34/20 Triple Split Manifesting Generator with all Centers below the Ajna defined according to a DLL PLR Variable - including a fixed ‘sports’ Channel between the Root and the Spleen.
Don’t worry if the sentence above still reads like an alien language or total gibberish to you. What I’m saying is that we’re looking at a person whose body needs to be actively moving and physically exercising to be healthy. Someone who is designed to be busy with a tremendous amount of energy building up that is ready to engage. Someone with an energy resource that must be depleted in a fulfilling manner every day.
It isn’t necessarily the best advice to tell this kind of Design to ‘stop doing’, dressed up with beautiful Zen poetry or Taoist philosophy. It may be a tempting avenue in order to prevent Not-Self chaos. After all, for the Emotional Wave there is no Truth in the Now. But recommending they get into a habit of ‘non-doing’ may equally lead to aggravation.
The Way of The Generator
“Sacral Beings Have to Work. The Sacral is about work. It’s why I call Generators slaves; they’re workers. Sacral beings have to have work. They have to be able to use their energy. They have to use their energy effectively. They have to live through their work.
Everything about Sacral beings is about work. Think about the horror of life when you do not work the work that’s for you. Think about the horror of life of being busy working at something that you don’t like and don’t enjoy, and it’s not for you; it’s a horror.
Because everything about a Sacral being is about the beauty that’s possible for them in doing what feels correct for them to do. That they use their energy properly, that they use their energy efficiently. It’s about work. Are You Ready?
I have a joke, a trick, that I did for years when I was doing readings. A person would sit down beside me and sort of try to get comfortable. And before I would turn on the recording machinery, I would say, “Are you ready?” Most of the people that come to me are designed to respond in one way or another. When I met the Voice, the first thing the Voice said to me: “Are you ready to work?”
- So, are you ready?”
– Ra Uru Hu (The Way of the Generator)
It’s important that the Generator works, and that the Sacral energy is used in a regenerative manner. This doesn’t mean it can’t be correct for you to have a meditation and stillness practice – it depends on your Design, follow S&A, you know the drill - but one thing is for sure: the Sacral energy must be used to the point of satisfaction.
So let’s make an essential distinction here between waiting and doing nothing. The concept of 無為 ‘Wú Wéi’, popularly referred to as ‘non-doing’, is a Taoist term. To provide some continuity with my last article, I can invoke Alan Watts here for translation: ‘Wú Wéi’ basically means ‘not to force anything’. It is to act in accordance with the flow of nature. Not resisting it, nor trying to push it in a certain direction we think it ‘should’ go.
The dilemma is the mind’s fearful tendency of forcing life down a conditioned pathway.
“ … in the end, you have to see that the greatest enemy you have is your mind, because your mind hates your Sacral. It hates it. “How dare you, you grunting, groaning thing have control over my life. Here I am with my vocabulary, my education, and my wonderful knowledge, and here is this, “uh-uh” telling me what to do.” The mind wins most of the time because that’s the way you’ve been conditioned. You’ve been conditioned to believe that what you think is what is correct for you, and that what you think is how you’re supposed to live your life. And it’s all a lie—your mind isn’t going to accept that lie until your Sacral is living your life for you, and not your mind.
And your mind will be in there screaming; it doesn’t stop. It’s not like your mind is going to surrender to your Sacral and say, “Oh, isn’t it nice to be awake!” It doesn’t do that. It says, “You’re being an idiot, look at the rest of the planet. They’re all running around like crazy; you should be doing that, too.” Because that’s the mind. Your greatest battle is with the mind.”
– Ra Uru Hu (The Way of the Generator)
And so when we bring our mental decision-making to a halt in order to ‘Wait to Respond’, ‘Wait for Recognition and an Invitation’, etc., it can be disorienting at first. We can look to the 5th Gate for understanding the nature of this Waiting game a bit better:
Gate 5: Waiting – Fixed Patterns: Fundamental attunement to natural rhythms. Waiting as an active state of awareness.
Ra would say it is like a pregnancy.
This is not about doing nothing. It is about not betraying natural rhythms through forced mental initiative. The mind’s burden of decision-making is then transmuted into simple active awareness - our witnessing presence to that which is unfolding.
In my previous article I used the term ‘dwelling in nature’, and this is what I was referring to. If we could imagine for a moment a forest hermit dwelling in the natural landscape, immersed in the natural rhythms of the elements, flora and wildlife. No longer attached to ‘the world’, and yet in their attunement still waiting for ‘it’ - waiting for the call.
Dwelling in the form principle, there's this obvious mystery at work:
What’s the next response gonna be?
Which environmental input will evoke my body to respond?
It’s such a mysterious thing that everything we’re conscious of at any given moment is happening on its own. We don’t ‘do’ any of our sense perceptions. The filtering of that information is all done for us, and we can just enjoy the outcome. This kind of active awareness is not the same as 7 centred hypervigilance. There is the allowance for the unknown to remain unknown for as long as it likes, and at the same time there is curiosity about what is being revealed.
What am I noticing in this moment?
What are my senses bringing to awareness?
Where might my eyes want to go of their own accord, moment by moment, if I don’t force them down the same old tracks?
Love is our context for life and work.
And yes, to anyone else reading, I know Ra’s descriptions can sometimes be heavy to digest, especially in times of pain.
In your case, Joshua, as a 6/2 with the alienating change of scenery Saturn has recently brought to your life, while it's vital not to skip over any shadows, joining Ra in experiencing the mind as an enemy may not be the most supportive perspective either.
The mind may not be a friend at this point – and friends in general may seem hard to come by in a polarized and distracted environment. But there’s no energy to waste on battling the mind in isolation. Storms of the mind pass on their own eventually.
“..If one is in a difficult place in life and has the urge to make a change, but there is no change to make, what should they do?”
In our brief conversation you recognized the pain was coming from your gut relative to your current working environment. In BG5 career coaching we emphasize environment as being a vital point of intervention. It is your environment that determines the nature of the information you receive. In the ‘wrong’ environment, there may be nothing satisfying for you to respond to.
Scientist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined an amazing definition for information: ‘a difference which makes a difference’.
So much is changed by noticing differently. We fall into places and people according to where our eyes go and what they pay attention to. We can align to different information simply by turning our head (or not even that). We could be miserable in the shadows and just and inch to the left find ourselves basking in the sun.
The mind is great at imagining mountainous obstacles where the tiniest detail could make all the necessary difference. In times of pain and total overhaul of what we value, renewed appreciation for the small can shift our realities around.
Unconditioned Beauty
Bateson called beauty ‘the pattern that connects’, and I think that’s quite on point. Not only is Gate 5 the Gate of Waiting, it is also the Gate of Fixed Patterns, with which we connect into the wondrous world of plant life. It reflects the fractal patterning of nature that connects the microcosmically small to the macrocosmically vast. The Channel of Rhythm 5/15 is shared by all biological life and defines the aura of the biosphere as a whole.
One tiny moment of glimpsing unconditioned beauty is an information imprint that can scale up fractally across your life. It’s like that brief instant where you decide not to react and catch your breath instead of engaging in someone else’s drama. It can change the course of the rest of your day - and beyond.
In such moments, you may remember the difference between right and wrong, correctness and incorrectness, at a level the mind may not immediately grasp - but the body does. This isn't any conditioned idea of what is beautiful, but a deep impression of beauty in which the external world reflects your unique nature back to you.
Unconditioned beauty and love go hand in hand, and they are the hallmarks of our unique trajectory. This is the magic of the G Center and its Magnetic Monopole, the Center of the Higher Self, Transcendent Love, Direction and Creative Self-Expression. It is all already there.
Now, to answer your question, Joshua, I cannot tell you what should be done - that would be disempowering to you. I’d say this is a crucial time for you to discover for yourself who you really are and where your source of power and authority really originates from.
However, where is the unconditioned beauty showing up? As you wait for the next response, as your body processes the hope and pain of your emotional wave, how do your senses bring beauty to your active awareness?
And perhaps - has the time come to change your job?
Strength to you in your transition to the roof, brother.
Hagen
A Fresh Start - Coming Back to Your Senses
Thoughts from a 2/5 Splenic Projector in the Human Design Experiment
The great thing about being Splenic is that any moment you can just start over.
I’ve been ‘in the experiment’ with Strategy and Authority for a number of years, and this morning I let go of my imagined linear track towards the 7 year deconditioning marker. I just started over with a beginner’s mind. No answers, only questions and curiosity.
What does it really mean to follow my Splenic awareness moment by moment as a Projector?
I was recently interviewed by Jelena Legcevic to provide some insight into questions like this for newcomers to Human Design. And I had a thing or two to say about it. But having had some time to ponder all of that, I’m considering that the question is more powerful than the answer.
I recall some things I wrote in my original introduction to this network, which more or less includes one of the most alive questions I have today:
How can I live more closely to the contact surface of awareness with its body and the environment - here and now?
Metaphorically speaking, in front of me I can see a fork in the road. Paying more attention to the simple signals of the senses and how the external world is contacting me, or getting predominantly absorbed in the wonder of my defined Head and Ajna, and whatever the mind thinks it knows or hypothesizes.
I can’t get rid of that mind, but perhaps my attention can be much more anchored in the sensory world than it currently is.
Much of my habitual attunement to the body signals have reinforced a way of sensing inside the body. But I think the real place for me to be is at that contact surface with the environment - the exterior world. Primarily noticing the external, then recognizing how the inner speaks about that sensory world and its qualities, rather than first digging into the inner sensations in order to get a perspective on the outer.
But I reckon that I still often get caught in a mental trap where the mind insists on being the interpreter of sensory data, moving from physicality to symbolic meaning and back, rather than simply from physical signal to responsive impulse.
Having a mind that is incredibly loud acoustically and visually, it presents a major psychic hurdle. Reinforced habits that keep my attention stuck on the mental plane, such as episodes of triggering memory flashes, leaving me dangling desperately in the unresolvable questions of my undefined Centers.
It’s a curious thing that there is this assumption floating around that we can somehow ‘remember’ our true self, our authentic individuality. Perhaps you experience something similar in your process that prevents you from staying present to the body’s life. This sudden overwhelm that opens Pandora's Box and out comes a flood of memories and past conditioning, pressuring you to find some kind of anchor in the truth of who you are amidst the confusion. Then the mind interacts with the memory and creates an endless loop of overthinking, pretending it is trying to see something new that finally resolves the 'issue'. And in the meantime you go back to some routine coping habit rooted in a Not-Self strategy.
If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone!
To at least open up a pathway out of this, in order to have a fresh start and not get spellbound by these psychic episodes of mental resistance to transformation, we can take a look at some particular mechanics for insight:
The Memory Circuit
If you look at the image above you can see something straight away: memory is not about the Empowered Knowing of Individuality.
For those of you who want to study this in greater depth, you can find resources on this as part of Ra's Rave Anatomy Courses.
Without going into too much depth on the memory circuit in this short article, I just want to point out one obvious thing: there are no Individual Channels that are part of the memory circuit.
So this leads us to a crucial insight: whenever you have memory flashes in which you’re seeking to find your individual truth in order to overcome life's oppression – you won’t. It isn’t mechanically possible. Yet in the hypnosis of that experience, the bait is that if you just dig deep enough, you can figure it out. At least, this is what keeps me endlessly tunnelling down the rabbit hole – dissociating away from my sensory contact with the external world. And it's this external environment that I invite you to bring yourself back to.
A fresh start in your experiment is all about gently coming back to your senses in the present. The simplicity of how the outer landscape is contacting your various sense organs here and now. After all, the intelligence of your Authority is rooted in your sense perception.
Sense perception is part of the substructure beneath the level of the Line, called Tone. You can learn more about this by finding relevant material online, and you can also be guided into how it works for you by Laveena in one of her Radical Transformation Clinics.
The mind may find this boring, addicted to the intensity of turning life into a problem to solve and coming up with many stimulating strategic ideas and revelations, but this boredom can be a refuge for your self-recovery that eventually opens up into the simple pleasure of being.
Reattuning to the external world, its simple physical features and many qualities - in whatever way they are available to you without forcing anything. Without seeking the next sensory orgasm for the mind to get high on, but simply dwelling in the contact with the environment, allowing your attention to freely wander and trace the textures of the landscape with ease and curiosity.
Letting your eyes go where they want to go for a while, and just noticing what it’s like to be where you are.
How are your senses letting you know that you’re in this place, here and now?
What does that knowing smell like? Does it have a flavor? A color or texture? A warmth? What else?
And while you’re here, you might as well notice how your body is enjoying that for a while.
Soft snowy vibes amidst misty mountains,
Hagen
幽玄, Melancholy, Waiting, Art and Noticing
photo by Mitchell Hartley
For me, following Strategy & Authority is not the Main Stream, it is not the highway everyone uses to get most efficiently from point A to point B. It's that little path off to the side that disappears around the bend, leading who knows where - perhaps to 'the' place, perhaps not at all.
It's an experience that holds a lot of melancholy for me as an individual, and it's in this sad emotional mood that I find a transcendent kind of beauty that I wouldn't trade for the world.
I have always been drawn to oriental philosophies and arts because these traditions have a certain way of dwelling in nature. A way of stopping all the doing doing doing and instead, residing with awareness in the present as the trees wiggle, as the clouds drift along, as the waves ripple across the surface of the waters, and as the sun and stars wheel on by.
Out of this awareness and mode of perception, many beautiful concepts have emerged that touch on qualities of experience the productive busy world has no attention for - especially in the 'West'. Japanese aesthetics have always captivated me since I was a child.
There are many particular Japanese aesthetic qualities that I'd like to write about within the context of the mechanics, but we'll focus on just one of them today which is called:
Yūgen - 幽玄
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics)
Yūgen (幽玄) is an important concept in traditional Japanese aesthetics. The exact translation of the word depends on the context. In the Chinese philosophical texts the term was taken from, yūgen meant “dim”, “deep” or “mysterious”. In the criticism of Japanese waka poetry, it was used to describe the subtle profundity of things that are only vaguely suggested by the poems.
Yūgen is said to mean “a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe… and the sad beauty of human suffering”.
Yūgen suggests that beyond what can be said but is not an allusion to another world. It is about this world, this experience.
(Ortolani, 325). Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995
My favorite description of this concept so far belongs to Alan Watts in his lecture on Japanese aesthetics called 'Unbleached Silk'.
Here you have a short audio clip in which he describes Yūgen specifically:
Alan Watts - Unbleached Silk_cut_part 3_cut.mp3
"Little sounds emphasizing silence, little motions emphasizing stillness"
"Suggestiveness"
There are many things Alan speaks to in this lecture that would merit pointing out and discussing - perhaps we'll get there sometime.
At the end of his explanation of yūgen he begins to describe how it flows over into another concept called 'sabi', which as a quality reflects the essential solitude of being in our own nature.
In the next few paragraphs, I will connect the concept of yūgen with the melancholy and solitude of Individuality as we know it in Human Design terms, using the medium of art.
Yūgen in Art
I love having conversations with artists and those deeply immersed in the arts who have an acute eye and feeling for the creative self-expression of individuality.
Had I been a Generator, or carried any of the Channels of Creativity connected to a Motor Center, I'd probably spend my days drawing, painting and sculpting away. My talent for art is sporadic and in hibernation most of the time. So I'm very glad to have connections with very vivid artists who bring their world into my life.
In a recent exchange with one of my friends, the artist Andrew Wyeth was mentioned, along with some of his incredible pieces:
Artist: Andrew Wyeth
As I observed these paintings, the quality of yūgen seemed at once all-pervasive to me. I wrote to my friend:
"The atmosphere and awareness suggested by each of these paintings is defined by what isn't there. We don't know if it isn't there yet, or if it isn't there anymore. Whatever the 'it' might be.
This is the quality of yūgen that accentuates at once every small thing and subtle nuance that is there. The blades of grass, the texture of the fields, the gradients of colours, light and shading. The placement and posture of bodies and objects interacting with the wind. It evokes the melancholic emotional mood of anticipation and loss, as we wait for 'it'.
And in this waiting there is only the noticing of the beauty of all that is there. All that isn't 'it'. All that isn't 'it' yet. All that will never be 'it'.
If we can accept the waiting and be with that, we won't miss a thing."
Yūgen, Melancholy, Waiting, Noticing
It is difficult to wait at first, when we are in our early experiment with our Strategy and Authority. In the end, every Type must wait - even the Manifestor. Each of us waits for the right time to be moved by life in one way or another. Though most of us have been raised with the conditioning that we should make it happen, that we should do it in order to be it, or achieve it, or experience it, or have it,...
It is a challenge for the mind to let go, and we can find ourselves addicted to action, and to the generating of the sacral. When we look at the busy-ness of modern society, and have conversations with people who are in that productive flow day-in day-out, then the compulsion to do, and the negative association with non-doing, are very much on the surface.
I did some research at university regarding people's perspectives on 'not doing' or 'non-doing'. And often people who struggled with not keeping themselves preoccupied reported similar fears:
Gate 55 The Fear of Emptiness
Gate 22 The Fear of Silence
Gate 28 The Fear of Death
Gate 57 The Fear of Tomorrow
Gate 24 The Fear of Ignorance
Gate 43 The Fear of Rejection
You can read more about each of these fears in the Definitive Book of Human Design, or by participating in one of the courses such as Living Your Design, Rave ABCs or Rave Cartography.
Each of these fears is part of our circuit of Individual Knowing, the central pathways that run throughout the Bodygraph. Because they are Individual, they are formatted by the frequency of the Pulse in the 3/60 Channel of Mutation, which is a timed release mechanism for the profound mutation that Individuality can bring.
The Pulse fluctuates and initiates suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere. But until it does, it isn't there. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. Until there is the sudden spark of mutation that can create a new order out of chaos.
This is the process that also underlies the chemistry of melancholy: an emotional mood of sadness that is present in these empty spaces between pulses. And when you look at many artists, you'll see that their creativity and art contains this sadness. It is what can be most attractive about them to their audience. This touch of melancholy gives their work poetic depth and augments the beauty that they have managed to channel into form.
The artistic skill that could appear to elevate them far beyond the crowds of people who would never dare dream of being so creatively inspired or capable, is somehow balanced by the mood of melancholy that pervades their art. It reminds everyone that the artist is human too, that they too have suffered existence in form, in one way or another. And it can be a point of connection, when they can recognize their own individual sadness mirrored in the sadness of the artist. The spectator can feel known, can recognize in themselves what they are otherwise too busy (or afraid) to see: the solitude of their individuality - and its uniqueness. This is what gives art its empowering potential.
You can notice the power of melancholy in Andrew Wyeth's work. Even though it isn't the only quality noticeable in the figures, landscapes and objects, you can see how each of them are held in this emotional sadness. This waiting in between the pulses of change. Also notice the quality of loneliness or aloneness (depending on how you want to look at it). This sense of 'there's just me now...' is part of the melancholy of individuality.
The Gates I listed above are awareness gates that belong to the Solar Plexus Center, the Splenic Center, and the Ajna Center. These are the fears that we confront in the solitude of our individuality and they each reflect the absence of something.
Gate 55 The Fear of Emptiness, reflects the absence of passion.
Gate 22 The Fear of Silence, reflects the absence of attention.
Gate 28 The Fear of Death, reflects the absence of purpose.
Gate 57 The Fear of the Future, reflects the absence of truth.
Gate 24 The Fear of Ignorance, reflects the absence of certain knowing.
Gate 43 The Fear of Rejection, reflects the absence of acceptance.
And it's in this absence that we struggle to dwell in the waiting, because the Pulse does not let us know when change will come. We don't even know if it will come at all. We're just suspended in the here-and-now.
To me, it is this absence that marks the quality of yūgen, the emptiness, the silence, the not-knowing, the purposelessness. In the Westernized busy world, we have no cultural frame or appreciation for this, and so it freaks most people out. When I interviewed people about this, it seemed that these fears tend to be too much to handle. I wondered if that's because you can only venture through them alone, and most people do not dare, so they cling to a mental preoccupation instead of their own unstimulating company.
And yet here you have artists like Andrew Wyeth who remind people there is something mysterious and profound about the absence of something. He reminds his audience to reside in the waiting, to move through the sadness of being in between that which has been and that which is not yet.
Through his art, it is the quality of yūgen that reveals something extraordinary: that if you can just be with the waiting, all of a sudden - everything that is there, all the subtle nuances and details that would go unnoticed in busy doing, finally there is the space for all of that to permeate awareness and stimulate consciousness in a supreme yet peaceful way. This is the power of suggestiveness that absence holds.
Suddenly, in the sadness of being, beauty is everywhere in the most dull and boring of places. One can see the whole universe contained within the absence of anticipation, disclosed by the wiggling of a decaying leaf - like 'little sounds emphasizing silence'. And this deep silence being more profound and meaningful than anything that could ever be said.
Suddenly there is something to pay attention to, something to be passionate about, there is purpose, there is life, truth, knowing and creativity. And it's all right here and now. It emerges as naturally as anything else, without us needing to 'do' anything to bring it about. Then we are called by our creative muse to channel the sadness of our own unique individuality into art.
It just required waiting, waiting, waiting and then noticing.
The acceptance of the absence.
The path that disappears in the fog, not needing to know where it may lead.
Yūgen.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
The Projector's Subtle Habit of Initiating
A HumanDesign.Live Advice Post by Hagen Artley, 2/5 Splenic Projector, Mental Split, Cross of Explanation
The following article can be enjoyed in 2 ways: full-length and summary.
If it's too much of a read for you, only reading the bold black and blue text will still make sense and summarise the whole thing.
Dear Projector,
Your curiosity is something that probably many Projectors encounter about their own behaviour in relation to others along the way. And how incredible to get to this place of questioning something that seems to be a very ordinary thing to say:
“I would like to spend time with you sometimes. :)”
Is this actually an initiation? If so, how many other ordinary interactions or messages we text to others frequently could be initiations?
It’s quite a radical thing to ask ourselves. How could we tell? And does it mean that statements like this are incorrect every time?
Laveena often says in her classes that Strategy and Authority, particularly for Projectors, are for the big things in life that really change things up for us: the people we spend time with, the relationships we have, the places we stay in, where we live, the work we do, etc. However, for day-to-day navigation and regular interaction with friends and relatives, many Projectors experience the need for a more refined tool to help them navigate the subtleties – as not every single thing comes with an explicit, loud and clear invitation. And it's not like we can use S&A for the big things and then return to mental decision-making in between...
After his first few years of teaching the Human Design system, Ra approached Projectors with an apology.
He said he’d done them an injustice because so much of his attention had been focused on trying to get Generators to respond. He came to realize that Strategy and Authority was too limited for Projectors. Ra added Color Transference as another essential tool for our Type to recognize what contexts and interactions are correct for us, and which ones are not. He introduced it as a ‘power that we (Projectors) never had before’.
Color Transference is something that operates at a level below the Line, so it requires a more subtle level of perception and awareness to see it. Projectors more readily operate at that level, though it may take some years of deconditioning for the brain fog to clear enough so that we can see the phenomenon at work. It's part of the Four Radical Transformations of Human Design.
The two main Color Transference tools we were given are Color Motivation (Personality Sun/Earth) and Perspective (Personality Nodes).
You may already know your Color Motivation, Perspective and Transference, but before I talk about how it applies to this process of learning how not to initiate, I just want to clarify things a bit more for those who are new to the mechanism.
A great piece on this by Ra to start off with is this one:
Here Ra talks about these tools that we as Projectors can use in relation to others in order to develop our seeing as passenger consciousness. He explains in detail the dilemma we have with Strategy and Authority alone, and how we can turn it into a problem when it doesn’t have to be one.
One of the things he says here is this:
“You get an invitation from somebody, you enter into that correctly, but the reality is if you're watching your process during the course of the time you're with them, you'll notice that there'll be a shift to your distraction. You're suddenly being pulled away from what's correct for you and it is in those moments where you need to recognize you’re being conditioned and watch that conditioning.
Because this is what it's all about. And being able to SEE the conditioning, gives you a way out.
Very hard for projectors to go like this. It's very hard to say “I need your generating and manifesting but not now.” There's this fear that you don't get it back, there's this fear that you lose it. There is this deep deep drive inside to hold onto… that connection no matter how you end up rationalizing that in your design.
So it becomes very important for you to begin to see the way in which you are being influenced on an ongoing basis by those beings around you. And remember why we see this. Not to end the relationship. This is not about that. It's not about saying “this person is terrible for me and I never want to see them again”, it isn't about that at all. It's about your potential, to actually SEE them conditioning you.
Most people think that you need to have a solution “Let's stop the conditioning" and so on… We don't want to stop conditioning. The only time that you can stop conditioning, is when you die. Conditioning ends at death. Until then it's a part of our lives. It doesn't have to be something that's negative. It doesn't. It could be the most fascinating thing in your life.”
– Ra Uru Hu
In this article, we’ll just focus on Color Motivation. Laveena has already written some rich articles on the subject which you can find here:
In a nutshell, below the level of the Line we have further layers of differentiation: the Color, the Tone and the Base – this is called the ‘substructure’ out of which everything we see on the surface of the Bodygraph emerges. Layer after layer, our frequency works its way up from the depths of the Base to the surface of the Line as it differentiates into a precise and nuanced expression of consciousness in form. This substructure is the way in which the crystals of consciousness operate as they filter the neutrino information feed.
Now, Color Motivation is the state of mind that you are pulled into by your environment and the people you interact with.
It creates the cognitive filter for how you take information in and how you learn. This state of mind is informed by your sense perception, which takes place at the level of the Tone - but we don’t need to go into that much detail here. Similar to our 6 Lines, there are 6 different Color Motivations named Fear, Hope, Desire, Need, Guilt and Innocence. To know which one applies to you your time of birth must be quite accurate and you’ll need to access software that can produce charts with this information (all popular HD software I know of can show it).
When you are able to watch your mind, when you can observe what’s going on in there without identifying with its ‘I’ as being who you are, then you can witness these layers of the mechanics live at work.
You can notice the scripts of the Lines as the voice in the head chatters away, you can notice the adaptive Not-Self strategies from the undefined centers show up as mental agendas and proposals for action (“if I do this, then I’ll get that”). And you can notice the Color Motivation – it is the overall state of mind you are in, the underlying quality that animates your thinking.
Each of us has a correct Color Motivation that is pure, that allows our Personality to assimilate information and express Outer Authority. However, it is also a binary.
Color is something that is moving and dynamic, it swings constantly from its correct frequency to its distracted counterpoint like a pendulum. When the Color frequency shifts, it undergoes a process called Transference.
Transference means the frequency shifts over to its harmonic opposite. Fear shifts to Need, Hope shifts to Guilt, Desire shifts to Innocence and the other way around in each case. When this occurs, we experience a distorted quality of that Color Motivation. It becomes disconnected from correct cognition.
This means we do not see clearly and the mind tends to freak out about this because it temporarily has no access to awareness, and it doesn’t know when awareness is going to be restored – it is blinded.
When you look at your own Transference Color Motivation you can add the word ‘blind’ in front of it to make its quality very clear: blind fear, blind hope, blind desire, blind need, blind guilt, blind innocence. Each one of them is an unintelligent expression of mind, and one of them will be particular to you.
This is not something that is bad or wrong. You don’t have to try to fix it. But it is also not a basis to make decisions from – it is something to observe. We need this contrast in order to distinguish what our pure Color Motivation is. It helps us recognize correctness from incorrectness. It is not something we can do anything about, we can only learn to abide more and more deeply by S&A as opposed to overreact from the Not-Self.
To learn more about the specifics of each of these Color Motivations, you can join Laveena's Radical Transformation Clinic for Non-Sacrals here:
So having explained the basics a bit, we can return to your inquiry, Roxana.
Is the text message “I would like to spend some time with you sometimes. :)” really an initiation?
What makes you think so? Did you feel bitter some time afterwards?
Giving this some thought myself, looking at examples in my own life, it seems to me that the Color Motivation can be a determining factor. It’s what turns a message like that into an initiation as opposed to a simple expression of appreciation and transparency. To me, the key seems to be the energy the message was written with, not the actual words themselves.
I think you could write the exact same sentence to two different people and one would be an initiation and the other would not be. What would make the difference?
One would carry the energetic charge of some kind of attachment to an outcome, some kind of anticipated fulfilment of the agenda your mind was crafting the message with, rooted in your undefined centers. The other would carry the charge of non-attachment, a simple voicing of appreciation for your friend, without the pressure for them to even reply or respond to it. Color Motivation Transference is a tool that you can use to recognize one from the other in the act of writing.
What state of mind are you in? What energy motivates your communication?
Roxana, in your case, were you in an emotionally clear place within yourself? Were you motivated by intelligent Need or blind fear?
From my personal experience, Color Motivation Transference can show up with varying degrees of intensity, from very subtle craving to full-blown desperation. In any case, when it shows up and we act on it, we’re tapping directly into the Not-Self strategies of our undefined centers.
So, through the undefined G’s endless search for love, identity and direction, was your mind worried about losing this person in your life?
Was your mind craving for the Life Energy of the Sacral to be turned on again?
Did the other person give your undefined Heart external validation of self-worth to boost your mental self-esteem?
Or were you feeling mentally anxious or bored looking for someone inspiring to focus on?
Maybe it’s someone special who just seems to draw out this incredible information from you that not everyone does.
For Split Definitions like you and me, our minds might be motivated to try and find a bridge that connects the islands of our Definition together. It’s likely that the person you were texting is someone who bridges your wide split, making you feel more whole when you are together with them.
In a state of blind fear I assume there can be a confusion about other people. The mind can start to obsess about survival risks, attaching to others in order to find security. You might experience mental worry about losing the bond you have, not wanting to make any mistakes. Or you might not know whether you can trust other people and get lost in alienation, too afraid of everything.
Correctly motivated, on the other hand, it could be good to let your partners know how important they are to you.
To share a bit from my experience: in some relationships, people have very explicitly invited me to feel free to engage with them as I please. In other relationships, I can feel the expectation from the other for me to initiate them, but without any recognition or invitation towards me to actually do so. I can notice disappointment in them that I’m always waiting for them to make the first move, and my mind thinks ‘I should’ initiate something with them in order to maintain the bond, but there’s no genuine energy in me moving in that direction. So, I think the relational context sets the stage for how much freedom a Projector can have in how they interact.
To me, particularly as a Wide Split Definition, what does matter is to express the real difference someone’s presence makes in my life. To have a secure bond it is important that we are aware of what it’s built upon – without that being a burden or an expectation.
Having said this, I also find that this open freedom to engage does not always provide my Projected Channels the energy to actually show up. Perhaps these beings love to have me around and interact with me, but don’t actually recognize me for any of my specialties. Perhaps I don’t need to be saving the day with everyone all the time 24/7 either. These are things I also wonder and am learning about. We’re all walking paradoxes trying to find our balance between this and that.
My sense is that it's the invitation that energizes the Projected Channel to function correctly. When there is a correct invitation, there is something specific - there is a context with your name on it ready to receive your input.
There is an aliveness waiting for your guidance. It isn’t random, it’s a body specifically calling for yours, it’s the wider ecosystem asking you to fulfil the role you were designed for so that life and consciousness can continue to evolve.
As I’m writing, the Definitive Book is lying open on page 354. It shows Gate 11: Peace – Ideas. Many people have ‘ideas’ in their minds about what they would like to do and who they would like to do it with...
But the secret of this Gate is that these ideas are not for manifesting into action, they are simply there to share and stimulate us - and this will have an effect, but not necessarily the actual realization of that particular idea into physical form or experience.
I’ve noticed many people in my social circles feeling so powerless because their ideas are never fulfilled. They think they have this great idea and they just need to find the right person who will value it and provide the energy to make it happen – and it never does. They may take a few steps in that direction until the creativity falls flat and they feel slightly frustrated, bitter, disappointed or even angry that it just didn’t work out again.
My reasoning here is that those ideas are top-down impositions from the mind that are not rooted in any local physical context or situation at hand – they won’t evoke a generative response to make them happen. They are inspired by the past and give rise to beliefs and stories.
The 3rd Line of this Gate, the material Line, is called ‘The realist: The acknowledgment that peace is transitory’. Its exaltation says: ‘The realization that ideas come and go’. Its detriment says: ‘A pleasure in ideas that have no real application’.
Our 3rd Line process here is not about materializing the idea through trial and error, it’s about finding peace in the realization that these stimulating ideas are beautiful as such and don’t need to be carried out – even when we feel bored or conflicted about life.
So why am I talking about Gate 11? Because it highlights to me an important concept: relevance and irrelevance. Only when something is relevant to the movement of Life Force will it be enlivened by the call.
We have many ideas about where we think we’re going, what we might do together, and so on. Our imagination may be filled with beauty, but ultimately it is the unfolding process of the form that actually materializes. We don’t make it happen, we are it happening as we witness it.
Yet I think that many of our common interactions with people - the subtle text messages, the emoticons and gifs we use, the ways in which we stimulate each other with memes and ideas - can be these small nudges of trying to push life into the direction of an idea we hope to see fulfilled. An idea that in the end is irrelevant to the life process – especially when it arises out of a mind in Transference.
Whatever it all might be, in the end, may not matter very much. If you know the Design of the person you were texting you could make a few connections and perhaps learn an interesting thing or two about yourself. But the importance here would be to find clarity about your own inner state of mind, as the conditioning reverberates through your openness. The same would apply to any other kind of ordinary interaction that we could easily take for granted.
Roxana, to be able to recognize subtle forms of initiation and misinforming hidden behind ordinary gestures and communication, all you really need is to watch your mind and recognize its condition. Then notice if it’s pushing you to act spontaneously while disregarding your emotional wave and how you genuinely feel, ignoring what you have actually been recognized and invited for in that relationship.
According to what I’ve learned in Laveena’s classes, this may take more deconditioning time for you as a Quad Right Variable. This is because your Right brain needs to be fed correct nutrition for a longer period of time in order to function optimally again.
(The same would be true for any other Variable with a Right brain. So for anyone else reading, grab a chart that shows you the arrows of your Variable next to the head. If your upper left red arrow points to the Right, then you've got a Right brain too.)
Remember that Transference is not something bad or wrong, it’s a natural process of learning through observation. It is not something that you are doing, it is not something that you need to get right. It’s something that happens as a consequence of how your environment, and the beings in it, impact you.
As you said in your message, you’re experiencing more and more how these things work for you and that’s all this is really about, no?
To be able to live life this way with enough self-love to embrace the whole experience, watching ourselves grow in awareness on this journey through space – isn’t that the greatest gift?
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen