A Framework For Consciousness
Have you ever asked someone for a copy of your “personal operating system?”
I’m going to bet you haven’t. (Otherwise, I’d send it right over.)
And that’s because the concept of even having a personal operating system didn’t exist prior to the revelation of the Human Design System in 1987, and so, humanity has had a very short amount of time to frame up this paradigm-shifting idea.
Instead, what you can easily ask for–in a myriad of spiritual destinations are things like:
An astrology reading
A past life regression reading
Or a reading with a psychic medium
And in many of these kinds of readings, practitioners will ask for the date and time you were born, so they can create your birth chart to work off of. Does this sound familiar?
Your personal operating system from Human Design also begins with your birth chart, and so:
Most people logically assume that Human Design is an offshoot of astrology
Most people assume that since Human Design is mystical, it must be also be imprecise and impractical
And most people assume that it’s “woo” by association, as it is typically offered in the same settings as other spiritual readings
And because we live in an internet and social media echo chamber of misleading information, most people simply don’t know that Human Design is fundamentally different from all other kinds of spiritual readings…
But here’s the problem and the missed opportunity: When Human Design gets lumped together with–sometimes accurate, but often vague–spiritual arts, it loses all its teeth, and the ability to make a strong first impression with skeptical minds.
First of all, chew on this: Human Design is not a “reading.” It requires no medium or interpretation. On the contrary, it’s concrete information that anyone can absorb from the primary source. But like any discipline, understanding and application can take time. Still, while getting a good explanation and expert application in a professional session is very helpful, no interpretation is actually required.
Human Design is not fortune-telling either. Nor is it a rigid set of labels that it’s often made out to be, and it’s a shame that it’s so often mischaracterized this way, because while it is incredibly precise knowledge, it’s also quite flexible. But in order to orient the seeker straight away, the next obvious question to answer is, “What is Human Design?”
And the simplest, most direct answer that I’ve ever found is that “Human Design is your personal operating system,” a “how-to” for running your human body vehicle most enjoyably and most efficiently in order to create the most fulfilling life possible. While that may be a fine introduction, it’s still not enough, because the seeker needs a real entry point–and a framework to size up what Human Design is, and just as important, what it isn’t.
Here’s the thing most people don’t know:
Human Design offers a model for consciousness to frame up exactly how it fits into your life. This model can finally help you make sense of:
Who you are and who you’re not
Why you are the way you are to this point
And how you can be your best self and make your best decisions by following the guidance within your unique energy fingerprint
Yet Human Design can’t describe all of you. It wasn’t meant to decode the high level, spiritual aspects of yourself, but rather, its purpose is to help you better understand and expand upon those things about yourself that can be defined. And that’s where Human Design will surprise you, because it can define more about yourself than you ever thought possible.
Here’s how it works: The diagram above breaks down two familiar ways of thinking about identity:
On the X axis: You have Nature vs. Nurture, the popular way of thinking about what’s innate and engrained in your DNA vs. what you’ve picked up from your environment and experiences along the way.
One the Y axis: You have three levels of consciousness, consisting of the unconscious at the base, the conscious ego and thinking mind in the middle, and the superconscious, spiritual aspect of awareness at the top.
Here’s what it means as a blueprint for identity:
Human Design is NOT your Nurture. It’s NOT your conditioning. It can’t account for where you grew up or what influenced your habits and beliefs. It even goes so far as to say none of those things are the real you at all.
Human Design is your Nature. It is your hard-wired setting, free from conditions, which make up both conscious and unconscious characteristics within you, and that you get to bring to life in a multitude of ways by following your intuition.
The Super-Conscious Level: Again, Human Design cannot describe all of your identity. It can’t tell you what kind of food you love, what kind of music you’re drawn to, or who you’re attracted to–because those motivations, god-given talents, and unexplainable interests come from the dimension of spirit. And from this super-conscious level of awareness, looking down at the ego and the body vehicle, Human Design presents itself as a complete operating system for successful living–by you, the operant power. (See Neville Goddard’s popular teachings as a parallel.)
The Conscious Level: From this level, Human Design outlines roughly half of your characteristics that you can observe and command in real time. Essentially, these are conscious qualities you can think about before, during, and after you do them, and therefore, they can easily become part of your identity. For instance: 70% of people in Human Design are driven by a gut or sacral response, and this strategy is something these people can continually practice with their conscious mind. Thus, from this conscious level of awareness, Human Design presents itself as an instruction manual–a gentle reminder that says, “do more of this, and less of that,” course-correct, and watch what happens. (→These conscious characteristics make up the right column in your chart, called your Personality.)
The Unconscious Level: From this level, this half of your characteristics can easily be felt and observed in real time, but knowing exactly how they work is a bit of mystery, and that’s because they reside in your subconscious. For instance: Let’s say you have the unconscious Gate 56–a proclivity for telling stimulating stories. This simply means that in order to tell the best stories, you shouldn’t think about it. Instead, try flexing that story-telling muscle intuitively, guided by the right timing, and let it happen without trying to script what happens. And so, from this unconscious level of awareness, following your Human Design simply means getting out of the way, trusting the moment, and being yourself. (→These unconscious characteristics make up the left column in your chart, called your Design.)
Here’s how this framework helps:
The purpose of Human Design is to orient you to your natural, intuitive characteristics in novel ways, all so that acting–with timely instinct–can become more fluid and empowering. While Human Design was never intended to explain all of you, it represents your dharma–the fixed aspects of yourself within the flexible whole. These unchanging parts of your identity give you reliable modalities for authentic self-expression, and a gentle reminder to stop looking outside of yourself for the real answers.
Grab your real Human Design right here today.
