As we come to know ourselves as nine-centered beings, it is going to be a natural part of our mutative process to recognize where and how we are still conditioned and surrounded by the seven-centered paradigms, which is essentially all about the mind and our mental development of the last 90,000 years. It doesn’t take much to look around and see how the mind distorts, confuses, and projects its madness into our world.
Recalling my own personal journey, I remember it was around sixteen years old, I began to really question the meaning of life and began my quest to go beyond the superficial nature of the world I knew. While I encountered many things, some helpful, some not, in the new age self-help world (as many of us know), I was always looking for what seemed beyond the conceptual realm and something concrete I could trust. Learning about the path of “ascension” captured me and seemed like the ultimate way. I followed the threads of truth I could find, particularly with the record in many traditions of beings doing this advanced yoga of being able to turn the body into light. Right before our eyes in the West was the example of Jesus doing this. Looking towards the East, we have a rich history of the Siddhas (yogis with spiritual powers) of South India and the other master yogis and saints from the Himalayas performing indescribable, super-human, miracles, even until very recent times. Several other cultures and spiritual traditions have the same thread, rooted in ancient wisdom which could unlock the fullest potential…of the seven-centered being. And they all seemed to have a similar message, that we all inherently have the same power and potential.
That became my path for many years. I became deeply absorbed in my “ascension path” and taking it to the extremes that I saw as the only ways to transcend. I did all the things a good seven centered yogi should do. I renounced my family. I renounced “the world”. I became a celibate monk. I stopped relying on any substances outside myself. I broke all the bonds. And in that fire, many things did burn to ashes. Many worldly desires faded which gave me a helpful view on my own conditioning, but I also sensed that I was losing the gift of my uniqueness. At some point, I heard that something had shifted somewhere, somehow on a spiritual level and that we didn’t need to go through the whole renunciate path or even go through the physical ascension process to receive the highest initiations necessary for our soul growth. While it makes sense that we don’t have to renounce the world to become masterful or embodied, the deeper explanation was never fully made available or transparent as to why the physical ascension was no longer necessary. And then along came all the red flags which also made me question the solidity of this path. The founders of many of the theosophical and ascension material had been caught as charlatans, having made up or plagiarized their experiences with the “masters of wisdom”, the ascended beings who had been communicating with them. Many times my faith just stood on my personal experiences and studies of the Siddhas and saints of India, modern and ancient since all the modern day examples I could find had some kind of distortion.
Well, along comes Human Design to give the missing piece and logical explanation of why we do not have to get out of our bodies and renounce the world to achieve “the ultimate”. The name of the game is no longer mental dominion over the outer world – neither as controlling beings, nor as master yogis or disciples of mystery schools. As nine-centered beings, we have our own Authority to help us align to the core of our most authentic self. With the Science of Differentiation (HD), we have a map to understand our uniqueness in the context of the totality and embrace it, rather than homogenize it. Even in our spiritual practices, if we are applying seven-centered practices, it will most likely end in some resistance. This is what we see: people swinging to one end of the pendulum, only to bounce back in the opposite direction; doing all the mental practices to fill ourselves up with “love and light” only to meet our frustration, bitterness, anger and disappointment as the mentally initiated energy crashes. In our history as humans, we can also see our tendency to be a little superstitious, to rely on something outside to determine our fate, for better or worse: A guru will save me and deliver me; that such and such a belief, practice, dogma, prayer, deity, etc will save me and everyone else has to think and behave the same way if they also want to be saved. We even fall trap to projecting this on to Human Design, which is why Ra always made it a point to explain that it is not a belief system. Until you really live your design, it is easy to project our old human paradigms onto everything. The knowledge of Human Design alone cannot get you out of your mind. You can have access to all the knowledge, but it is just a worthless pile of gold if you do not learn to embody and live your true nature. We didn’t know and we did our best and that is ultimately what I wanted to recognize here. As much as the nine-centered being can operate on a spectrum, as seven-centered beings, we did too and there was some pretty magical stuff that we accomplished as humans during this time. We can have an appreciation for the spectrum of life, in all its fractal phases and forms. So that is why we can now bid the old way a fond farewell. As we enter a new evolution ahead into the development of Spirit Awareness, we will see a whole new spectrum emerging. We now have the tools to help us navigate through with awareness, balance, and a path to self-love.