The Secret of Being You

The Vehicle, The Passenger and The Driver

Imagine that we are riding around in this life in a vehicle: a beautiful, shiny, incredible, mechanical vehicle with a binary consciousness. This vehicle is both body and personality. The personality is what we tend to identify with, the aspect of our being that we call “me”. This construct of 'who I think I am' is the sum of all the personality aspects in the BodyGraph interpreted through the mind. The form is the sum of all the design aspects in the BodyGraph displayed through the body. The vehicle is essential to getting to the destinations, to making the journey.

The Magnetic Monopole is the driver, and the driver knows exactly where to go, how to get there, how long to stay, and where to go next. We don't need to get caught up in driving the vehicle at all, our vehicles all come equipped with their own driver.

Imagine that there is a passenger quietly sitting in the back seat looking out the windows - this is our consciousness. The role of the passenger is to sit in the back seat and observe the journey. To look out the windows and enjoy the view. This is our life, when we are living uniquely as ourselves. The journey becomes an incredible ride.

Now most of us, before we come to Human Design, believe that the personality is what is driving the car, and that the personality is an extension of the mind. Unfortunately, this error in judgment leads to disaster. The mind driving the life leads to improper decision making – usually at cost to the vehicle. Now think about this, if the mind does not properly understand the needs of the vehicle, and it makes decisions which run it into the ground, you can die. The mind literally does not care. It will run the body until it is diseased or broken down and then at the point of death, it turns to the personality and says “How could you have let this happen?”

Misunderstanding The Mind
Our conditioning as children has made us into mental decision making adults. “Use your intelligence”, “Think before you speak", "You have the answer in your head", or “Use your head”…All of these are different conditioning techniques to build a life in thrall to the mind.

Using the mind as the authority for decision making is denying the intelligence of the being, of the form itself; for every cell in the body has innate intelligence. In Human Design, you will discover your unique inner authority for making decisions, for aligning the consciousness with the path way for the life. When the inner authority is honored in the decision making process, the life meets less resistance, less failure, less anger, less frustration, less bitterness, less disappointment. Human Design teaches you a way of decision making that respects the intelligence of the body, that allows the personality to be at ease and detached, and then the beauty of life unfolds.

Not only does the mind make decisions that are unhealthy for the body, it makes decisions that are unhealthy for the personality as well. Sleeplessness, stress trauma, anxiety, depression, nervousness are all natural chemical reactions that the body experiences. The mind then creates a “story” about these chemical reactions, and the mind creates suffering. “I felt upset because…” “I’m anxious about this because…” All of these are stories that the mind creates about our chemistry. Common self-help teaching tells people – identify your feelings, understand why you feel the way you do – and so on. This perpetuates the suffering, and gives the mind more power.

In Human Design, people discover that their feelings are just chemistry, and like all chemical reactions, they come and they go. From hope to pain and back again, like waves in motion. When one learns to use the mind to observe the feelings – without judgment, without attaching a story, the mind does not turn chemistry into suffering.

The Little Dictator

Think for a moment about the mind and its nature. The mind is the most highly advanced, technically versatile computer that has ever been built. Most brain functions take place below the level of consciousness, at the unconscious level of the body. The heart is instructed to beat, the lungs are instructed to breathe, and the legs are instructed to move, the muscles to contract, and so on. The ears listen, the eyes see – all of the sensory organs constantly feedback information from the outside world back to the brain where it is processed by the mind for interpretation and filing.

The mind is the great great measurer – of determining this or that. It is an amazing processor, and it files information according to its own unique filing system called the memory. But it can only reference what has happened in the past, and then project onto the future what it thinks should happen. The mind cannot successfully be present – it looks and shows us the past from our memories, or it projects and anxiety onto the future.

When faced with a decision, the mind does a very interesting thing, it makes it up. It makes up a solution or a decision based on the filing system, and the past experiences of the being, and what it thinks it wants, or what it imagines might happen. It not only makes it up, but it then convinces the personality that this is what it should want – or else. The mind then makes up a scary movie to show the personality – what will happen if this occurs, or if that doesn’t occur. It literally tortures the personality with its projected images until the personality decides that it should go along with what the mind is telling it.

Imagine that the mind was a file clerk that suddenly became the dictator of a small country; and that this dictator wants to control everything that goes on in this country, even to the point that it will torture and even kill its people. It does this all in the name of 'the good of the people'. "It is for your own good”, the dictator says. The Little Dictator tells you how you should look at the world, at your self, at your relationships, at your career, at your finances, at your body, or your desires and needs – and over time you begin to believe it. The mind tells you - "After all, everyone else is listening to their own Little Dictator, why not you?"

The Mind Has No Power

Now if you look at the Body Graph, you will see the Head and the Ajna Centers at the top of the graph. The mind is the juxtaposition of these two centers. And from these two centers the circuitry passes to the throat. The throat then connects to all of the rest of the centers, either directly or indirectly through gate circuitry. The key thing to notice is that the mind is only connected to the throat. There is no real power here. The mind can get to the voice – and there are a lot of people out there speaking their minds. You might even call them “talking heads”. But the mind has no connection to the power centers of the body – the Heart, the Sacral, the Solar Plexus and the Root. What does this tell us about the nature of the mind? It tells us that although it can talk, it literally has no power to move us in our lives, to make things happen in the world. It is not the place designed for decision making, but rather a very sophisticated computing tool.

The mind as a computing tool is excellent for inspiration and thoughts, for questions and answers, for realizations and ideas, for inner truth and knowing. The mind is a wonderful tool for sharing with others. It makes a great outer authority, for making suggestions and developing projects and experiments for people to explore together. The mind is for reflecting, not for doing or acting. It isn’t a good decision maker for our own lives. In our own lives, it wants to turn into the Little Dictator and completely take over control. When we allow this, we are living only a fraction of the life that is available for us. Plus, things seldom if ever turn out the way the mind projects it will turn out. After all, how can it? The mind is literally making up a story, and then insisting that we believe it, without any real power to make it happen. 

Our Homogenized World

We live in a homogenized world. Homogenized, because we have 99.9% of the people on this planet using their mind to make decisions in the pursuit of the illusion of normalcy. We are products of our conditioning: by our parents, by our school system, by our family, by our society, by our religions; all of which all attempt to homogenize us towards an artificial standard called “normal”.

Think about this, no one is normal – not by size, color, intelligence, achievements, family and personal relationships. Yet, this seems to be the goal of society; to get us to fit in, to become like everyone else, to aspire to what is shown on TV commercials, to homogenize.

Conditioning is natural and automatic when we are living lives that are based on the strategies and authority of the mind. In Human Design, this is often called the life of the not-self. After all, the mind takes in information, stores it, and then attempts to create a future that is based on what it has assimilated. And what have we fed the mind? What our parents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, lovers, and TV have all told us is the Good Life. This not-self Good Life typically has little to do with our uniqueness, and our true purpose.

Transformation Takes Place in Seven Year Cycles

When we experiment with Human Design, we naturally go through a de-conditioning process. As we start to follow our strategy based on our design, we begin to overcome resistance in the world, life commences to work correctly. When we use our inner authority instead of the mind for making decisions, then we start to live the unique life that we were designed to live. When we begin to live our unique life, it becomes easier to see the conditioning that we have mistakenly adopted along the way.

As we pay attention to what life feels like when we are living our unique life, we also become aware of when we are not living our unique life. We can then become aware of when the not-self has taken over and starts to run things again. It is this awareness that allows the conditioning to begin to fade into the background.

• As an adult aligning your life to your unique self is a 7 year process from the time you begin to experiment with your strategy and authority.
• It is a process of becoming aware of the mind’s attempts to take control of your life, and the way it tries to lure you into its fantasy version of how your future should turn out to be.
• It is a process of understanding what is you and what is your conditioning; of discovering what the unique you feels like, rather than the not-self you.
• It is a process of tuning each and every cell in your body to resonate with your uniqueness.
• It takes 7 years for almost every cell in the body to replace itself, for you to begin to transform yourself, both in form and personality.    

When you begin to experiment with your inner authority for making your decisions, your mind may be very uncomfortable with the process of change. Letting go of controlling the life is something that the mind finds challenging. It will probably want to tell you any number of things about why it should remain in control.

You may want to let your mind know that this is an experiment that you are trying out, and that although you appreciate it’s concern, this is what you are going to do right now. As you get more comfortable with your strategy and inner authority, your mind will begin to learn its true purpose, as an important tool in your life. That is not saying that it will give up trying to run the show, but that you will become more adept at noticing when it tries to take over.

I've had a reading and I need help with my conditioning - what do I do next?

Once you have had a Basic Reading or an Advanced Analysis, the next step is to take a Living Your Design Course. We offer the LYD course online in group classes and one-on-one, so it can be tailored to fit any schedule, anywhere in the world you happen to be living. This provides you with the tools to really dig deeply into your open center conditioning and your design.

Once you have the experience of the Living Your Design Course, then we offer private workshop-style courses that are designed to help you go deeper into the exploration of your not-self. When you can identify those aspects of your mind that have been holding you back from authenticallyliving your design, you will discover that they begin to let go of the hold they have had over your life and you will experience a new level of freedom and awareness. Recommended: The Radical Deconditioning Course :: Embracing The Path of the Moon