A Tidbit on Human Design's History and the Styles of Mythology

No one's got the be-all end-all answer. Just enjoy what people have to offer, and drop the rest.

It’s all related to the identity. It carries with it this patina that we all know of the creative process, this mythology of the melancholic artist, this mythology of the artist self-obsessed. And of course this is the nature of any kind of creativity that’s rooted in the Self, that it is going to be self-absorbed. - Ra Uru Hu, “Channels By Type”

The above is not really a pull-quote but represents a moderate realization for myself and my study of Human Design: At some point in the mid-90s, Ra Uru Hu decided to move beyond the classical interpretation of the BodyGraph through the lens of the I Ching text and into its current, modernized keynote form, called the Rave I’Ching.

Thus formally began Ra’s storytelling phase, where Hexagrams, Channels, and Lines battle in the BodyGraph’s Circuitry for recognition and love against the villainous, conditioning forces of the Mind and the Not-Self.

But before I begin on the myth-making of Human Design’s founder, I want to touch on when and why he may have decided to go down this new path from a messenger of a New Age identity system to an imagineer of larger-than-life heroes and giants.

A bit of history on the greater changes to Human Design

According to the Definitive Book of Human Design, the Rave I’Ching keynotes, which provide the current interpretative system for the 64 Gates of the BodyGraph, were written in 1989, only a couple years after Ra’s first mystical download of the System.

These keynotes were adapted from the original I’Ching in such a way that supports larger themes and philosophies that later helped Ra develop the mythological stories behind the System’s many mechanical systems, including Gates, Channels, Circuitry, and Lines.¹

In 1998, Ra made a commentary series of all 384 lines of the Rave I’Ching (as 64 hexagrams multiplied by their 6 lines equals 384), and in the Spring of 1999 established the concept of Type and Strategy.

This appeared to be the point that Ra doubled-down on his own Rave interpretations of the I’Ching, ultimately leading to the creation of Type and Strategy, a sub-synthesis of the dynamics of the BodyGraph summarized in 4 easier-to-understand archetypes.²

Around then, the Channels were also re-introduced with specific names and a subtitle description (for example, Channel 20-34 was dubbed the “Channel of Charisma”, with the subtitle, “A design for where thoughts must become deeds”).

This decision surprised some followers, like Chaitanyo Taschler and Zeno Dickson, who later broke off from these so-called “Jovian interpretations” of Human Design to return to the basics of using the original I’Ching to read people’s BodyGraphs, calling themselves “Zen Human Design.”³

For Chaitanyo and Zeno, it seemed that Ra was adding more of his opinion and philosophy into the Human Design System rather than using the System’s self-evident truths, therefore obscuring the truth of the System with personal interpretations.

Why add these extra layers of interpretation on the Human Design System?

What does this all mean? Why create even more complexity to a system that already seemed complex in the first place?

You could go with Chaitanyo’s perspective that Ra became an ego-maniac and started tailoring the System around his own philosophies, attempting to lock up Human Design behind copyrighted “source knowledge” from the founder, using complexity to lure people in to the maze of information introduced after 1997.

Or you could go with Ra’s perspective that he had to seed out specific aspects of the Human Design system so as to keep it accessible to the world, leaning on its synthesis of Astrology, Chakras, Kabbalah, and the I’Ching, before further revealing more specific mechanics that could have alienated people too much in the beginning. In other words, he was slowly releasing information to ease people into the bigger truths.

But you can also take it from a more pragmatic view: The Human Design System is already open-source and logistically available to everyone with planetary transit calendars, which means that you can make the calculations yourself and take the System in any direction you want to. As with all things that are open-source, the money is not in the software but in the style of the software that you want it in.

What this meant for Ra is that after a decade of teaching the open-source version of Human Design, he decided that he built up enough “proprietary interpretative content” that he could continue to sell people on his interpretation of Human Design, even if it wasn’t for everyone.

Someone online had a joke that “There is only Inner Authority, not Ra-Authority,” meaning that the core intent of Human Design was always to find more about oneself so that they can follow their own path, not needing anyone else to guide the way.

Even Ra repeats over and over again that all information that he has outside of the BodyGraph itself is just mind candy for those curious, and that practicing the free, open-source teachings, such as the BodyGraph, Type and Strategy is the only real meat of the System.

But for someone like the creator of Human Design that knows every aspect like the back of his hand, Ra still had an opportunity to make money by genuinely continuing his take on the System.

You know, you can fully educate yourself on the workings of the stock market, whether through a library, the internet, or your own mix of research. But some people take a shortcut by simply following people who have their own style about interpreting the market.

The Human Design System has been laid bare, but there are still people who will pay to hear other peoples’ takes on the System, because we are in fact not paying anymore for more Factual Knowledge, but paying for Stylized Knowledge. We are paying for the Take.

Once you arrive at this perspective, rejecting the claims of both the Founder and the opposition, you can finally settle down on a choice: Do you like Ra’s style or not? If you do, buy into it because it’s valuable to you. If not, don’t buy into it, because it doesn’t have value.

I’ve read and listened to at least 100 hours of content on Jovian Archive out of curiosity about Ra’s take on this System, because I like his style. I also like Richard Rudd’s style with the Gene Keys, so I’ve enjoyed courses there as well. But if you’re coming to these wisdom/spiritual systems out of a desperation for capital-t Truth, you’re not gonna find it.

But if you’re coming out of curiosity about the imaginations of inspirational people, you’re going find a lot of value. This is because inspirational people help to create mythologies about life that are beyond what we have now, the “could be/would be/should be’s” of the world that inspire people to do new and better things for themselves.

Human Design the “Ra Way” is the process of living a personal mythos in normal life. Ra’s style is to anthropomorphize the hexagrams and lines in such a way that they become characters in a grand, operatic movie of grace and suffering, love and pain, anger and happiness, sadness and joy.

Unless you are going to take every word of his as fact, which I personally can’t as he never truly proved the foundations of the System, you can still subscribe to a storyteller who has woven a perspective of living that both elevates the mundane and accepts the mundane as mundane.

Like in one lecture, Ra mentions the very old concept of washing-dishes-as-elevated-experience:

Many years ago, in the countryside, I had a very strange experience. It was long before Human Design and I was very drugged—LSD, I think—and I was in the kitchen of a friend’s house. I can’t stand dirty kitchens; I can’t eat in a kitchen that has dirty dishes in it. In the peak of my trip I began to clean this kitchen. I had more dishes than space.

So, I suddenly got into this very slow-motion Zen game of placing all the clean dishes in patterns, and all of this stuff. I got down on my knees and was polishing the floor. That kitchen was incredible. I walked out of there and thought days later it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever done. It was the most—it was just cleaning—it was so beautiful.

From that point on in my life I never again ever resented or felt bad about going into my kitchen, cleaning my kitchen, and cleaning the dishes. There is some very basic magic and every time that I do it, when I’m finished, I feel so good. Now, it’s not about anything, I just cleaned some dishes. But it feels as good to me as somebody walking by me and smiling. It’s not a big deal; it’s this little thing. (Ra Uru Hu, The Abstract System)

Very reminiscent of the Thich Nhat Hanh parable:

Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end. We do the dishes not only in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them, and to be truly in touch with life.

By subscribing to the storyteller, you are taking peek at one man’s philosophy about the world as told through the New Age calculation system that he invented. For Ra, BodyGraph was a sounding board for small nuggets of wisdom, and the foundations of the BodyGraph has been the basis of a cosmological system that rivals the best that Scientology has to offer.

If you take everything Ra says as fact, you’re a great loyalist, but you’re a lacking critical thinker. If you take what Ra says as a unique and sometimes enlightening take on how humans socialize, connect, and conflict with each other, you’re going to find some great bits in his bibliography. There is wisdom in using geometry as a method of understanding people, because there is always wisdom in using mythologies and archetypes to understand the best and worst of people, and geometry is a form made for mythologization, just as we did with the stars.

To those discovering Human Design for themselves, enjoy the ride, take a stop next to the things that speak to you and provide you a bit of wisdom in life, and run over the stuff that’s a waste of time. You’ll have a better trip.

Best,

Dom

1. This re-imagining of the I’Ching is nothing new; more recently, Richard Rudd of the Gene Keys did the same thing for the 64 hexagrams, applying modern mystical wisdom to each one, and is even releasing a full 384-keynote book, The Sage, which will rival that of Ra’s own work.

2. Manifestor, Generator, Projector, Reflector.

3. Years later, Zen Human Design omitted any channel descriptions in their guide book “Human Design Revealed”.