Open Centers
When I set out to write newsletters again for Zen Human Design at the beginning of this year, I had no idea what would come of it. I just started, without a goal, without an agenda, without expectations, without anything other in mind than to share what I know and see whether I’d get any response and then see what my response to that response might be.
Turns out that the response from my readers is very strong and that seems to keep me going. From your comments and questions, themes are starting to emerge and my process is to just collect my thoughts and answers in roughly themed files, work occasionally on them when the inspiration strikes and at some point it looks like the words, sentences and paragraphs come together in a sensible way and then are ready to be published. There’s no particular order to what I publish. Right now I have about a dozen of these files, but I neither can nor want to make any promises whether you’ll get to read any of them. Except for this one, apparently.
I do have a motivation for this endeavor, but, as hard as this may be to understand for the 21st century mind set, and particularly the Western mindset, it’s not success. I care little about money, I don’t care about power, I don’t care about market share, I don’t even care about convincing you of anything I say, although I do hope that the one or the other may be inspired to step back from the Jovian trap. My motivation is very personal, intimately tied to my life-long quest for truth, but, at least at this point, I don’t feel a need to share these details with you. For now, this venue is a little too public and exposed for them.
To be clear about the money thing, I do appreciate some extra funds coming in from people who are inspired by my writing to buy a book or a class or a reading, no doubt about it. I do enjoy a nice, clean hotel room with a shower, hot water and good Wi-Fi, but I’m just as happy to use a bucket to clean my body to stay within my small budget, although bad or absent Wi-Fi does sometimes pose a problem. Of course, this may change as this body gets older, with its expiration in sight, but for now I’m alright. We’ll see what happens. It’s one of the joys of my un-settled life that there are so many surprises, forcing me to stay alert and present.
Anyway, I’m weaving these personal things into my writing about Human Design not because I think that my person is all that important or all that interesting, but to help you understand that it is my life experience that finally got me to grasp how Human Design works and what it actually is. As long as I relied on someone else’s understanding I didn’t really have a clue. Plus, after 65 years in this form, I pretty much know who I am, much better than I know anyone else. So, to use myself and my design to explain Zen Human Design to you and to encourage you to tap into your own wisdom makes sense. Since I have no hidden agenda or strategy to protect, I can allow myself to be pretty open with my readers.
Which brings me to the theme of this newsletter, the “open centers.” If you would look at my chart again, you can see that 7 of my 9 centers are undefined. Ra seemed to be horrified by this and in a confidential moment actually told me once that he was surprised that I hadn’t already killed myself. This puzzled me for quite a while, because in the thirty-nine years leading up to meeting him and Human Design there was never anything coming even close to a suicidal thought. I knew I was vulnerable and could be easily hurt, but I always saw this as a positive, as a strength, as one of the qualities that made me perceptive, sensitive, empathic, understanding, and flexible.
Observing Ra’s emphasis on definition up-close over the early years has been very educational for me. And mind you, these observations were in daily life, you know, the Ra who had a bald head when he took off his hat, who wolfed down his food and stunk up the bathroom, who had bad breath, sexual urges, smoked a joint first thing out of bed, got angry and melancholy, had longings and regrets. That’s very different from the poise and pose he cultivated and presented in his public persona, in his classes and videos, which are basically all the Raves ever got and get to see of him.
It’s true that definitions, and the color in the body graph generally, are what you can rely on because they’re there your entire life and don’t change, and that accordingly the white areas in your body graph are unreliable because they are conditioned and therefore constantly change. You get no argument from me about the mechanics, but you do get an argument from me about the prevalent interpretation of these mechanics.
Let me state the obvious clearly, especially because it doesn’t appear all that obvious to most Human Designers I meet and especially not to the Raves: You have all 9 centers, all 64 gates and all 36 channels in your design, whether there’s color or not. No exception. And all of it works and is at work, all the time, throughout your life, whether there’s color or not. Period.
Your natal planetary activations, the color in your body graph, whether they result in definition or not, are occupying at most 26 gates, more often less with the slow outer planets frequently remaining in the same gates between the design and personality dates. That’s about a third or less of your entire design, in my case for example it’s just 19 gates. You didn’t think these 19 gates are all there is to me, did you? If this were so, if the other two thirds of my design were non-existent or negligible or to be excluded, I might indeed have killed myself already.
The declaration of the “not-self,” that two thirds of your design are not who you are, is in my view the greatest error Ra made in his interpretation of the gift he received, the greatest and most devastating fallacy of Jovianism. How poor has this made Human Design, how much misdirection has this caused, how much tension, how much unnecessary effort, how much unnecessary suffering! How unhappy the Raves! I mean, how could you possibly hope to be happy if you exclude from your understanding and from your life two thirds of who you are and potentially waste your energy actively fighting it?
When I look at the color in the body graph, yes, I see reliability, it’s always there, from the moment of birth, throughout life, until death. It’s so always there that it’s easy to be totally used to it and not even pay much attention. A good example of this is a defined Spleen center, you know, the body’s awareness, the body’s health system, the body’s “washing machine,” as Ra loved to call it. When it’s defined, it seems, it’s taking care of everything all by itself, keeps you healthy, encourages and nurtures those antibodies and killer cells to fight every infection, keeps you up and running just like that.
In my experience that’s quite true. I am rarely sick and when an illness does happen, it’s quickly resolved and I’m back to being my accustomed healthy self. The problem is, it’s only quite true, not entirely. At age 60, when Obamacare came into effect and I could finally afford basic health care in the United States, I went through a series of medical tests appropriate for the age and to my utter surprise and devastation was diagnosed with a cancer that had started to grow a long while ago. Thanks to Obama it was discovered early enough, though only by a hair, could be removed and I’m still alive and happy today. But my point is that I was so used to rely on my good health that I simply neglected to pay attention when the first signs started to show and became worse over the years. In hindsight it was obvious, I could have easily seen it years ago, but I just glossed over it and moved on. Such is the power of habit and what could be more habitual than what is always with you since birth?
Ra himself provides another example of that blind overreliance on a defined Spleen. When we were traveling together in 1994 for our first US tour and there was a lot of time to converse and confide behind the wheel on those endless southwestern roads, he prophesized that his death would come by assassination by a gunman during a Human Design analyst conference in Phoenix, Arizona, sometime in the late 2010s. He actually mentioned an exact date, but I forgot. October something. He even went so far as to point out to me a pregnant woman in the audience of his introduction lecture in Phoenix, saying that her son would be his assassin. Really! True story. Oh, he would have so loved to become a martyr to further the myths of his extraordinariness he was so carefully sowing all along. Instead he simply and prematurely dropped dead of a heart attack one morning, presumably while smoking his wake-up joint. This goes to illustrate not only Ra’s prowess as a prophet, but also that it’s difficult but imperative to pay attention to something you’re habituated to since birth.
Not only is the color in your body graph a habit and therefore prone to disregard and neglect, it’s also a narrow path, excluding the potential and possibilities present in the other lines of the activated gates. That’s particularly true if you believe in Jovianism’s bible, Ra’s Rave I Ching with its fixed lines, which I consider to be another major atrocity causing the distortion of the Human Design System, although this will have to remain the theme of another potential newsletter down the road. In summary, your definitions and activations, while essential and reliable, are your limitations, your prison, the chains on your ankles. If you fall for the notion that this is all you are, that this is what you’re meant to be, you have voluntarily surrendered your unlimited potential, your freedom and happiness.
I do understand the impulse to hunker down with the known, with the familiar, with the reliable, and I agree that it’s very worthwhile to get to know it well with the help of Human Design so that it’s possible to clearly sort out the differences between what’s reliable and what’s not. After all, it’s likely that you’ve got some wires crossed along your way and mistake at least some of your conditioning for your essential character. But conditioning is not a bad thing to be shunned and avoided at all cost, it just has to be recognized for what it is.
When we’re children and over the years discover and fill our form, we routinely get hurt by the conditioning entering through those white areas of our designs and the natural reaction is to protect ourselves. By the time we’re adults the walls are built, the protections in place and most of us spend considerable time and effort defending the fortresses for the rest of our lives. We in fact often mistake the walls for who we are.
Take for example someone with an undefined mental system displaying totally fixed opinions about everything, or someone with an undefined Ji working diligently to create a professional identity they can claim for the rest of their lives. I’m a doctor, I’m an engineer, I’m an artist, I’m a Human Design analyst, etc.
Ra again provides a good example with his undefined Solar Plexus center. How often have I heard him claim that emotions are not him, that any emotions are conditioned on him, incongruously and ironically actually getting angry when confronted with emotions and blaming his anger on other people who condition him emotionally. What a poor life in a self-imposed and fictional prison.
That’s why Zeno once in a while in her classes objects to her students using the term “open centers,” because more often than not they’re not open, but the opposite, walled in, closed up and defended against openness. These defenses can take on many forms, from outright walls like Ra’s emotions to sophisticated selectiveness like one of my friends who defends her undefined Ji and Ajna by emphasizing that she’s a scientist at every opportunity she gets. The correct adjective for those white areas is not “open,” but “undefined.” Openness is a goal, something to work on over time to achieve, once we’re mature and aware enough to realize we’ve been building and defending these walls since childhood.
Imagine a truly open mind, someone who takes advantage of all the possible ways a mind can function, neither limited to the narrow track of a definition nor the self-imposed boundaries of a defensive artifact. That’s where real genius has an opportunity to flower, not in a narrowly defined 43-23. Or imagine a truly open emotional system, someone who isn’t bogged down by defined and repetitive emotional habits, but free to explore and feel the whole emotional range available to human beings. Yeah, being that open sometimes hurts, true, but really, that’s a small price to pay for the immense freedom openness bestows. We’re not children anymore, after all, have no real need of protection anymore, but can stand tall and breathe free and exercise awareness to let in as much as possible of the abundance life has to offer.
Open centers are where life comes in, the juice, the thrill, the risks and rewards, where we make mistakes and learn, where ultimately we can become wise. They are the connections to everything outside of us, other people, other life forms, the entire universe. They are our avenues to the totality of which we’re a part.
Let me say it again: There’s no such thing as the “not-self.” It’s all you, from pain to bliss and everything in between. Life is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Why miss it by voluntarily excluding two thirds of what it could be?
Love
Chaitanyo
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