Knowing and Not-Knowing
The other day on FaceBook, Kim Gould said something that brought an ‘Ah-ha!’ moment to me. (Kim Gould is a Human Design analyst and mentor with great skill, intuition, and experience; she is also the creator of Emergent Human Design, which uses asteroids and feminine archetypes to refine what she sees in the Rave Chart. I am about to join her class in Archetypal HD.)
What Kim posted was this: “If I had to start somewhere, it would be with what goes unnoticed, with what I hadn’t realised was sacred.”
Coincidentally (of course) I am rereading one of the core texts of Human Design, a set of lecture transcripts called The Four Views by Ra Uru Hu (who brought in the Human Design System in 1987). He speaks about definition – the colored parts of your Rave Chart, the bits that you can see and know – and how the undefined or white parts are equally important. If your definitions show your unique circuitry, where the energy flows in your system, then the undefined parts are where (in Geotran we would say) you are NOT sure of who you are or what you can do, and so you look to those around you and ask, “Am I that? Or maybe that?”
In Human Design, these undefined gates, channels, and especially Centers are sometimes called the ‘not-self’, and they are just as important as what is defined by your planetary placements and what they light up in your Rave Chart… because they are ‘the other’. If your defined centers and channels delineate you as a developing person, then the white parts are what you get to learn, because those parts are not part of your natural programming. It’s like the difference between your conscious knowledge and your unconscious programming. A large part of your human growth and development lies in understanding what you don’t know; a large part of wisdom is knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Our human culture places so much emphasis on what we know and what we are – consciously – that we generally fail to see that what we don’t know is of equal importance (and even more relevance) to what we are here to learn. If you already know how to drive, for example, then you don’t need to learn how. Anyone with curiosity naturally wants to learn what they do not know; however, the white/undefined Centers show us the places where we don’t have answers to their characteristic questions, and we often don’t know if the answers we do perceive are our own or another’s.
At the same time, we are inherently attracted to those undefined Centers, gates and channels, because we don’t have innate understanding, energy, or flow in those areas. We will be attracted to people who have defined Centers that ‘fill up’ our undefined centers. We will be especially attracted – sometimes beyond reason – to those who complete significant channels. Humans are here in part to learn how to relate to others, to what is outside what we perceive to be ourselves: that would include animals, people, God/Spirit, and the planet as a whole. You cannot have a relationship with parts of yourself, but only with part and people you see as outside yourself. Paradoxically, these undefined gates, channels and especially Centers are simultaneously part of your design, and also outside your known circuitry. So, there is an innate attraction to create relationship between the opposite faces of the one coin that is ‘you’, and we experience that through our interactions (including conditioning forces) supplied by other people, genetics, and social, cultural, and/or religious groups. You could say that defined Centers and gates are transmitters, and undefined Centers are receivers of those transmitted energies.
What does this have to do with Kim Gould’s original remark? Think about it: “If I had to start somewhere, it would be with what goes unnoticed, with what I hadn’t realised was sacred.” What goes unnoticed is the undefined parts of your Rave Chart, while the sacred is what we have set apart as sanctified. In Geotran, we say that our main purpose is to ‘come out from amongst them’, to remove ourselves from assimilation, because we are called to be a peculiar people. Human Design is the science of differentiation, the ways in which every person is unique and called to experiment with their individual circuitry so that they release any and all conditioning by those around them. The very act of filtering the defined from the undefined is what makes the unknown ‘sacred’, as it acknowledges what we still get to learn and develop as we walk into wholeness of recognition and understanding.
For more about Human Design, go to the HD Section on this site.
Click here for more about Undefined and Open Centers.