Genoa: “Welcome everybody, and I am so excited (obviously) to be back here one more time and to see you all. I wanted to share with you how moved I felt when listening to your writings last week.

We will start our class out today with that same format of asking you to share the work that you’ve done. It was very special. I just wanted to say also that as you’re writing, and particularly with regard to the wild mind writing, where you’re just bypassing the intellect, the inner critic as it’s often called, and just getting down to the work of writing – down what is coming to you internally in this way where you’re letting “your design mind speak” – that part of you, that deeper mind within you to speak and just record what it is that’s happening for you when you’re doing that, you are revealing how each of the Centers that you’re writing about is configured in your design.

And as you learn more and more, you’ll see that more and more it’ll all begin to just make sense to you as we add more detail. Then you go, “oh, that’s really interesting because I was writing about that detail and how it worked for me.”

We are going to have a fireside chat at Noon Mountain Standard Time this coming Sunday, and we get to talk about a lot of things during these informal sessions. The whole point of these sessions is they’re informal and we get to ask whatever we want to ask. I get to answer whatever I can answer and maybe I get to ask some questions of all you.

So we’ll see what happens. That’s the point. It’s very open, very spontaneous and informal. So we’ll be making a special link, which you will receive an email about. Please make sure that you put the email address that you receive notifications from our learning platform into your computer in a way that’s an approved recipient.

So that makes sure that you get everything and you don’t have to look through your Promotions folder or wherever you have to look when things, you don’t seem to get things. So please do that and let me now turn it over to Richard, who will then lead our discussions and put charts up while we’re listening to people.

It’s a pretty amazing thing to be hearing your writing and just how articulate everybody is and jumping right in there as much as you possibly can and letting yourself wonder to really have this wondering experience.

Oftentimes, of course, that wondering takes us into realizing how confounded our minds are by life. It’s what is this all about? And of course, the place where we’re going with all of this is that we’re going to be looking at which part of us does know what’s going on. This is when we come to our section, which will be coming up very soon, about what your authorities are and how those authorities work.

So hold on, it’s coming soon. Don’t worry, we will be delving into that soon enough. In the meantime, when you’re telling your stories, when you’re sitting there and you’re letting yourself write down what comes to you, people and situations will come up. And the more you drop down into those situations and give us detail about it, the more it draws us into the story with you so that we can hear what your experience is.

So that’s a guideline. It’s as you’re writing, all of a sudden, you know these things are going by and then all of a sudden this person or this situation comes up and you have no idea why that’s happening. Jump right in there, give details about it and the more you do that, the more surprising it becomes.”

Genoa :”So let me go ahead and share my screen and jump right into the next aspects of our study together and our journey through the Centers. Let me just say that what our goal is here is to go through all nine of these Centers, and as we go through this journey step by step and come to the end of it, we will see how all of these Centers fit together into one thing, our experiences, and the degree to which we’re able to connect with our experiences.

Those things, those situations, those people that come up for us. Even just in response to whatever takeoff point you have from one of the points you may be reading after the brief overview of one of the Centers and something catches your eye, let yourself jump in. When we get to the end, we’ll see how they all fit together, and you’ll also gradually be able to see how your experiences all fit together too.

That’s our goal. The first thing I’d like to do today is just talk a little bit about Ra Uru Hu’s experience on receiving the Human Design. I think it’s just important for us to take a look at and to empathize with what he went through. This is the body graph as it originally appeared without numbers or colors.

And if you’ve ever tried drawing out the body graph by hand, you know how difficult it is, and you can imagine how a bit haphazard and sloppy it was. It wasn’t quite as neat and tidy as what we have here on the screen. But what happened is the Voice began to guide Ra. It was like he was a little speck of dust and the voice had control of what he was looking at and where he was going. And what happened is that the Voice took him inside of the body graph.

Let’s let ourselves imagine what that was like. He would be taken to a place, he could associate it with the body-graph, but that place was filled with all kinds of experiences, all kinds of feelings, certain qualities of energy, and the Voice took him to this place that’s got this little circle on it.

But it didn’t have any name, it didn’t have any hexagrams or coding associated with it. It just took him into this place, which is a very expanded place where he got to see the fact that we, as human beings have, or the spirit aspect of us as human beings, had incarnated in various places throughout the universe, step by step, going from planet to planet and ending up here all the while as narrating this, and it called this particular place in the body graph, the gate of evolution.

The voice had his own name for these gates, but because Ra was a long-term expert in the I Ching, he’d been studying it for many years. He goes, “oh, this sounds a little bit like Hexagram 42. What I’m hearing about what I’m feeling in this energy,” and this is one of the most miraculous things that the Voice selected somebody who would be able to decode these experiences that it was giving him.

Taking him into this body graph, showing him around it like this giant mansion with these hallways, we might say these channels. So then he goes “what about the other end over there? I can see there’s something at the other end of this is a little bit like hexagram 53.” And that’s how he gradually decoded this years of work, decoding and naming and understanding how the body graph was put together. Years it took him to do this.

The only way he could teach about Centers originally was to teach us about the gates on the Center and then teach us about all the channels that were connected to the Center.

And he would teach about the Center by teaching us about all the details and all the channels and what they meant and what they would do. It took a long time to ever come to this point where we realized “Oh, the Center is like a hub that synthesizes all of those channels, all of those inputs that can happen.”

So in this illustration, off  to the right hand side here, you can see that the Root Center is connected up to the Sacral Center. It’s connected to the Spleen, it’s connected to the Solar Plexus, and each and every one of these channels means a certain thing, but they’re all summarized and synthesized within this Center. So when we talk about the Root Center, we are talking about all of those things. We’re touching upon all of those things and where I understand, “oh, we can talk about this in a somewhat general way, but really have a feeling for it.” And this is the important thing that we develop an inner sense, a felt sense, for what that Center means.

And so this is the topic in a way of our wild-mind-writing, that feeling, that felt sense, situations in your life that gives you that felt sense. Now, if we go over this, these Centers and what we’ve been doing last week as a little bit of a history, we see at the top of the body-graph, the Head Center. And then we’re going downward in the body-graph.

We skip over the Throat and we go to the G Center. And we talked about the Magnetic Monopole. There it is sitting there on gate 2. You can see the blue arrow pointing directly at Gate two. And you can see the hexagram, all broken lines, which means yin or receptive, magnetic, attractive pulling forces toward itself.

And Ra named this, the Monopole, the Magnetic Monopole there in the G Center. And as it pulls our biography to us and the people who are involved in our biographies, our mother, our father, our siblings, our friends, the situations we found ourselves in as this very helpless child, this infant that could barely control its own body.

There you are, which is in such a vulnerable position, and this force turns on and it draws into you the experiences that will be coming to you. During your life, one at a time, and it draws them in through your open Centers. Now, the Ajna Center took the ideals of the Head Center and said, “oh, okay. I can get you connected up. That’s what you want to live out. And I have a plan for you. I’m going to connect you in with the evolutionary web of nature, with the world, with history.” In fact, most likely with your history, what you’ve been through, who you are, and most especially what your attitudes are. Because how you live and what you go through is the result of how you behave and how you behave is the result of your attitudes.

And as experiences get drawn in through these open Centers, they put us in a position of being confronted by them. And again, we’re in a very vulnerable position. We don’t know why this is happening. And in fact, even though we may know our parents, or we may know mom particularly well, or we may know our father, we don’t really know who they are. We just feel this sense of connection with them for good or bad or indifferent.

There they are, and we need to deal with them. And the question is, how do we deal with them? That’s the most important thing. We deal with them through our design configuration. Now, there are all kinds of design configurations. I’m putting my chart up here as an example, and we can see the way the definition in this works.

I can, because I’m a manifestor, go ahead and initiate transmitting intuition —the splenic intuition to transmit that intuition out into the world. And I’m naming channels here and go up to the Throat through this Channel of the Wavelength, a Design of Talent. So I can go ahead and transmit on the Wavelength — intuition, in order to lead. That’s the channel that goes from the G-Center to the Throat. Through Insight… that’s the channel that comes from the Ajna Center to the Throat.

The Spleen is the Authority of my Design. So, as I confront what pours in through an open Center, I need to deal with that open Center and make decisions about what it’s doing, what it’s bringing to me,  through my Authority.

So, having an open Root like this, or any Root for that matter, we experience a lot of confrontation with adrenaline. Things rush into us. Experiences start happening. We’re very young. We don’t really understand any of it really. It’s quite provocative. But as life goes on, and now of course that I know that the Spleen is my Authority and I’m designed to transmit on the wavelength in order to lead through insight, and a bunch of pressure comes in through this open Center down here at this Root Center, I can ask myself, does this have anything to do with my transmitting on the wavelength, these intuitions, and to the leading?

No, I can have all kinds of experiences, no judgment involved. All of them are valuable, but at a certain point, I need to use this Authority to make decisions. And so our basic principle here, and as we come up on our Authorities and naming which Centers are our Authorities and how they work, or if we have an outer Authority, how all of that works. We know that the Authority makes decisions about the experiences we have because the Magnetic Monopole is pulling these experiences to us. And those experiences are actually something that our Ajna Center has defined for us. Otherwise, we’re the ones who set it in motion. And what happened to it once we set it in motion is very mysterious because the Ajna Center is doing that during gestation, and it’s using a part of us that is deeply unconscious.

It’s a part of our intelligence that is deeply unconscious. It’s related to the intelligence that beats our hearts that makes sure we know when to breathe or how our blood circulation circulates and how our heart is beating. But part of this same intelligence is used to connect us in with nature. Those connections, those filaments, the way it’s all connected together in the evolutionary course and in particular connected to who we are and the attitudes that we have and how we are likely to behave.

Well, Human Design gives us a great deal of clarity about that. As we move toward and we move through these Centers and we move toward understanding how they work and what they’re about, what they’re like, and particularly when they are our Authority. Then we have this situation.” I don’t know why this is really happening to me, but I set it in motion and I’m going to make decisions about it through my Authority or through the overall configuration of my design, is another way of saying that.”

This is the journey that we’re on here, is to see how does that work? How do we make that decision? Because making that decision and knowing how to handle what it is that we’ve set in motion, and it doesn’t matter which way you look, it’s all of it you set into motion… all these experiences, and particularly perhaps these experiences, which we were so tempted to think, “oh, somebody’s doing this to me, some mysterious force, somebody’s to blame. It couldn’t possibly be me.”

It’s quite confrontational to talk about our life experience in this way, let’s be honest. We set it in motion. There’s nobody to blame actually. It’s just an experience that you needed to have, and there’s part of you that knew you needed to have it. There’s no blame involved, but it’s a big step to go ahead and say, “I’m the one who set this in motion.”

Every little experience pushes up against my attitude and how I deal with these experiences, whether I go ahead and try to deal with them and I have the best intentions, but I find that in dealing with them, I’m actually increasing conflict, or I can see that, there’s a little something in me that says, “oh, being in a position of resolving this conflict feels pretty close to being within my grasp. It’s closer than I think. In fact, it’s closer than smelling my own nose.” That’s the whole problem. We’re so close to it, we can hardly see it.

And this is the dilemma of life. These things happen. We know they’re significant. We know we want to resolve conflict. We’re just not quite sure how to do it. And then these attitudes that we have can get in the way. But then at the same time, this is all very familiar to us. These are our moments. And again, nobody’s to blame for this. It’s kind of a setup, actually. And the quicker we get to that the better it is for us, of course. “Oh, Who set this up? Oh, I did. This is perfect for me. Not quite sure how, but it’s perfect for me.”

With that attitude, of course, we’re going a long way towards taking a step forward toward our Authority and how we’re taking that step forward is through what we call our Strategy.

There’s really no way of getting around the trial and error nature of this process. There’s a process of refining your strategy, which means you’re trying to do the right thing, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. “Oh, I think I’m getting an invitation here. And then you could you go ahead and say something, but it really doesn’t work. And you go “oh my gosh.” It’s just trial and error learning. It’s called refining your strategy or refining how it is that you deal with the world.

One way of looking at it is, oh, I make a mistake. The punishment is built in. It’s all a learning process. Nobody’s to blame for this. We do make mistakes and we do get blowback from our mistakes, but that’s how we learn. I set this up. I have this experience. I have my response to it. “Oops, that didn’t work.” This is how we learn. We go through things, so nobody’s to blame by the fact that this is all happening to us.

The pressure of the Magnetic Monopole, switching on and drawing life into this matrix, this place of stability and adventure called the G Center that is designed to weave all of this into a Higher Self-identity. Nobody’s to blame for this, but there is that thing that is so close to you, as I said, closer than smelling your own nose, feeling your own hand, being in your own body, and trusting your body to know how to navigate through that situation. Not perfectly. It’s never perfect. But you’re learning along the way and you’re refining the navigation process.

This is what Human Design is about, it’s that navigation process. How do you move through a situation as best as you can? What do you learn along the way? And occasionally you leap into a new attitude, “oh I really could. I could do it this way.” That’s one of the most extraordinary things, that new attitude you’re going like, “why didn’t I see this before? It’s so simple.” You’re just getting out of your own way.

We are all on a very crucial and important level. We are all living our designs deep down inside. We would not be alive if we weren’t. It’s not something that we study and we learn and intellectually grasp, “oh, okay, now I think I figured this out. If I do this or I do that, or I behave this way, or I behave that way, then I’ll be living my design.” 

No, actually living your design is something that you’re doing on a deep, super-sensible level; it’s how you get from one day to the next. If you had to figure out how to get out of your chair and walk to the refrigerator for a nice, cool drink, or to have a snack, you’d have to be doing the mathematics of how you did that with your mind for the next thousand years. You’d never get out of your chair! But somehow you know how to get out of your chair and walk into the next room and say something that to somebody that you need to communicate something with. These are super-sensible, tremendous forces through which we are actually living as ourselves.

But at the same time, we can’t really deny that in other ways. We’re working at cross-purposes to our truly natural way of being. We’re working both for ourselves and against ourselves. We get all these ideas of how we should be.

It’s as if somebody’s saying, you should drink so many ounces of water for every pound of body weight. You run to the scale to find out how many ounces of water you should be drinking. You set them all out on the counter and you start drinking all this water because somebody said that’s the amount of water you should drink. Forgetting, of course you drink when you’re thirsty. So, pay attention to when you’re thirsty because your body’s trying to tell you something. You need water, whether that comes out to the number that somebody said you were supposed to be drinking or not, or wherever that idea came from, which may be helpful, but it also can lead to a whole lot of self-manipulation as to how you’re supposed to be because somebody else said that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to other people, but it can be very tricky. The mind is very, very easily influenced. Other people connect in. It’s pretty hard to just ignore everybody and what they say. But boy, do people have a lot of pretty weird ideas actually? But the thing that’s weirdest about that is that you actually know inside of yourself how to live. In fact, you’re actually doing it already. As I said, you wouldn’t be alive if you weren’t.

The trick is “how do I see when I’m living as myself? I’m inhabiting my body and it’s telling me all kinds of pretty crucial and important information, and how do I use that information to navigate through my life?”

One of the big culprits in all of this is that as soon as the Magnetic Monopole switches on and starts pulling your biography into you, not just through your open Centers, but through all those white channels in your design as well. There’s a bunch of them, a lot of them actually, and open gates. And of course, the more you learn about Human Design, the more you can recognize each one of these things. “Oh, that Center, oh that’s my open whatever. And you can learn, oh, that’s my undefined this channel or undefined gate, that channel.” But for right now, the point is that stuff starts rushing in and we react to it starting from day one. We react to it, and it’s the Root Center that does a lot of that reacting.

Events can be pretty alarming, especially if you’re this tiny child in this little body and if you’ve observed a newborn recently, how spastic their motions are, how much they’re trying to grasp, what it’s like to be inside this body, and you’re so tiny and everyone else is so huge and their voices are loud, and whatever they’re going through, you greet your parents in the condition they’re in. No blame. No blame. They’re people just like you, but they have their own problems. They have their own difficulties. They’re going through things. You’re taking all of that in.

Remember, the Magnetic Monopole does not reject certain experiences. It welcomes them all through unconditional love. That is the nature of that magnetism of gate 2, with that hexagram that stands for the magnetic power of the earth itself. 

You came here to your home planet to live and to love, but that means you take it all in and yeah, you need to know how to deal with this. That’s what Human Design is for. But when we’re looking at this Root Center here, this is the Center of adrenaline. It can, but not always. It can see a great number of those situations, those people, the way they’re behaving, the somewhat crazy quality of life and the stresses and pains and the conflicts that can be going on in our home and these other creatures that are older than you are, who are your siblings and what they’re going through, God knows. And this Root Center gets adrenalized through this, oh, you better deal with this. Not sure what you’re gonna do about it, but it’s not thinking. Thee Root Center doesn’t think, it has no Strategy of its own, it has no Authority of its own.

It’s just this adrenaline force, and it has the kind of fuel quality where this energy goes out through it and it pervades your whole Design. And you can see in this illustration here where we have these Centers, the Root Center here, and the Solar Plexus and the Spleen and the Sacral Center. They’re in direct line of fire from the adrenaline of this Root Center. They are there to filter that energy, to get on top of it, so to speak, to bring their authority to it. And quite honestly, block its path to the throat.

Because if the Root Center energy were to ever come directly to the throat, and sometimes it does… we can see pure violence and insanity. So we’re built to filter it. We’re built to intercept it. To intercept it with these Awareness Centers, the Spleen and the Solar Plexus: the skepticism of the Spleen and the desire for a good future in the Solar Plexus. They do their best, but they’re relatively vulnerable. They’re Awareness Centers after all, and they see things from their point of view: The Spleen, in terms of past learning, wisdom, thousands of years, millions of years actually of instinctual learning, much of which is encoded into our genetic code already. It has its reactions to the alarmist behavior. energetics of the Root Center. It has its wisdom on hand.

And then the Solar Plexus, the Root Center going over in that direction, stimulating the upward movement in the wave and the excitement of meeting new people. Both of them are a little vulnerable being on the front end, the front lines the firing line of the Root energy and the Root is all about going faster. Go ahead/ Stop. We have all experienced stage fright at one time or another. I experienced some not too long ago actually, when Cheendana spoke up and said, “oh, maybe Genoa wants to read,” for which I was completely unprepared. I had a moment of stage fright. “Oh yeah, maybe I could go ahead and do that. Oh no, I really shouldn’t.” It’s a push me, pull me adrenaline rush that goes faster, slower. Go ahead, stop. We all know about this.

The one Center that has full capability to really meet that rush of energy from the Root Center is the Sacral Center. Remember, we all have one. We’re not all Generators. We certainly all know Generators. There’s a lot of Generator energy in the world. And in fact, this is Generator planet. The Sacral Center is the Center of the life force. Its responses show what the life force feels about what’s happening. “Aha, Yes. I can go toward this.” Ugh, ugh, No. I’m going to stay with my own priorities.” It makes all of its decisions based on the energetics of life itself, the consistency, the rhythmic nature that life needs, the gentleness, the tenderness, the green thumb, so to speak, that knows how to work nature and be part of nature.

All of those responses are either drawing you towards something because it supports that living quality within you. Or it’s going “Ugh, ugh no, this is a huge distraction,” But the power of this Center is magnificent. It’s extraordinary. It demands full consent. And the stronger it is about that full consent, the better. There are no halfway measures with the Sacral Center. It greets that Root pressure and it says, “okay, now let’s slow down a little bit.”Like the fabled horse whisperer. Those animal speakers who have some special skill to be able to get close to that energy that everyone else is terrified of.

So when we’re talking about the Spleen and the Solar Plexus and they’re filtering the Root Center, it’s a little bit amusing when you realize the degree to which that adrenalized energy can drive those Awareness Centers. And fill them with a certain sense of emergency. The Spleen is going “oh no, no” The Solar Plexus is going “yeah, I’m into wanting new experiences, but maybe this is just way too dangerous.” But the Sacral Center in this case is like that horse whisperer that knows how to get close to that Root Center. And through the channels between the Root Center and the Sacral Center, it has the power to tame that wild animal, that raw adrenaline. It has the power to take it in. And if you’re thinking, “oh my God, I don’t have a defined Sacral Center,” you still have a Sacral Center. And you also have friends who do have a defined Sacral Center. And as I said, this is planet Sacral. This is the planet that has the life force flowing in it. We are all part of it.

We all can take guidance from the Sacral Center, and particularly with regard to the anxiety that the Root can inspire. If we let that Root Center run wild in us, we can become very, very frightened. I can tell you about that, personally. But the Sacral Center knows how to tame it and to bring it in line with the life force because of its consistency, because of it knowing about rhythm, because of it knowing about tenderness, it’s knowing how to nurture, knowing how to stick with what is important, to say no to distractions, to encompass energy within itself and bring those energies into relationship with its power. Oh, it’s magnificent. It’s magnificent.

You can see this in people : Sacral Authority Generators. You go, “wow,” that sacral Center knows what it wants. And the more it takes a stand upon it, the better: No, it operates through this kind of gravity. It understands the Magnetic Monopole, “Aha” means you move towards something; “Ugh, ugh” means you move away from it.

Is it possible to encompass this situation? Is it possible to encompass this adrenalized pressure from the Root? If it’s your Root, you don’t have much choice about it. Yes, of course you need to master it. The interesting thing about this is that when the Sacral Center befriends the Root Center, because they really can be friends, it’s all based upon the power of this Sacral Center. Ultimately, of course, within every Design, it is the Authority that calls upon the Sacral Center to master the Root, and it can call upon the Sacral Center of other people. Authority is quite powerful and quite clever actually. But these two Centers, the Root and the Sacral Center are friends. And as that friendship develops, then they join forces. And when these two Centers join forces, there is nothing that can stop them. There is nothing that can take them away, and they have several goals in mind together.

First of all, the Root Center is greatly relieved to make that alliance, unbelievably grateful, to make that alliance. To finally relax, to finally be put into a position where it can bring to the world what it really wants to bring, which is joy, which is enthusiasm, which is a true love, energetic love of living and of bringing that living, that adrenaline into alignment with who you are and what your purpose is. And to have the privilege of having this friend to connect with and to bring that energy into alignment with life itself. And then the Root can bring its joy.

Just let that in for a moment. To bring joy to life and to bond with this Sacral Center, to empower the most vulnerable of all beings: the mutant. And it is the Sacral Center that has the power to mutate, to change the genetic code iin every life. In fact, it does so in every life. For every human reproductive event, there are at least 100 mutations and they accumulate from generation to generation. The Sacral Center brings new kinds of people into the world with every generation.

The Spleen and the Solar Plexus both have to adapt to those different kinds of people. It’s most difficult, of course, for the Spleen to do but that’s why it upgrades its logic. That’s why it evaluates risks. That’s why it examines how to slow things down and to live out its traditional values. And this is why the Solar Plexus matures over time and learns that not every exciting experience is a good thing, that maturation is a superpower. But all of this is in relationship with the fact that the Sacral Center brings new living beings into the world, and the Spleen needs to adapt, and the Solar Plexus needs to adapt. And this friendship between the Root Center and the Sacral Center join their forces and empower the Magnetic Monopole through these channels that go from the sacral Center up to the G Center.

The mutation happens between gate 60 and gate 3 on the bottom of the Sacral Center, and it brings its empowerment on gate 14 to the Magnetic Monopole on the bottom of the G Center on gate 2. This is the empowerment of Individuality. Now, Individuality sounds great. We all want to be individuals, we all want to be special. But the actual experience of being a mutant, which we all have had, that’s what’s so difficult about being born. On some level, we are a different, unique human being. And even in our own species, the tribal customs have not treated mutants well. If you looked a little different a thousand years ago. 2000 years ago, there was a good chance you’d get hit on the side of the head with a rock the day you were born. Just think about that. But the fear of that difference, both in oneself and in other people has never gone away. It is scary being a mutant, and we all are. The Sacral brings generations of unique new kinds of people into the world with every generation. The Spleen and the Solar Plexus have to adapt to this. The Root joins with it to empower the Magnetic Monopole.

And so we have this progression. We’re coming down from the top. This is the downward motion in the central column, and then we land there in the middle, and now we’re going up in the central column and this whole central column of six Centers here going up through this central column. What’s this all about? It’s about the empowerment of the individual person. And so the Sacral Center, known for its consistency, known for its regularity, known for its gentleness and nurturance. Suddenly, we can see it in a different way, that it’s also its job to stand up for the mutant — to defy historical law that says, “knock it on the head, put it out on the hillside to die in the sunshine.” Stand up for it, protect it. And this is one of the strongest aspects of the Sacral Center, which is to be powerful and charismatic, to be empowering of the individual, and to stand up for the rights of the individual. You’ll see the Sacral Center make extraordinarily unpredictable decisions, all in the interest of rising up in this central column to support the individual person, the mutant to flourish, to be unique. To bring its role model connection, creative connection to expression in this particular life that everyone deserves that chance.

Now, nearly everything in the Body-graph is symmetrical. We have this central column that goes right up the middle, the mental forces that come down the middle, the Root and Sacral forces that go up, and they meet in the G-Center in the middle. That’s all six Centers, all in a row. And then we have this juxtaposition between the Spleen to the left and the Solar Plexus to the right, the past and the future.

New experiences come in through the Solar Plexus. We learn how to deal with them. We hopefully establish some new life ways, and those new life ways end up in the Spleen.

And then the Spleen defends them as we move further into the future. And then we have this Center, the Ego Center, and you can see how incredibly asymmetrical its position is.

Now, the Ego Center is our personal willpower. The part of us that when we speak of ourselves, we say “I, I do. I am. I have this willpower. I change the world for better or for worse.” It’s the will. And that willpower in this Ego Center has a full spectrum of motivations, all the way from the most noble and valorous bravery to a selfishness and a kind of nature as a scoundrel. Dark motives that most people care not to admit. In fact, most of the time, we try to be in deep denial about the darkness that this Center can have.

Of course we all know the problem is the ego and its mixed motives. But the most important thing about the Ego Center, is that it is one of the, if not the most rapidly evolving Center, in the body-graph. The most exciting part about it, the most important part about it is its potential to transform itself.

The Spleen wants it to do well, and the Solar Plexus wants it to distribute its wealth to the more needy. There’s a force that flows into this Ego Center under the pressure of the Root, through the Spleen, that says, “you must achieve, you must do well, you must excel, you must accumulate resources.” And there’s an equal and opposite stream that goes from the Root Center to the Solar Plexus that says, “oh, come on, you can be more sensitive. Don’t you realize you have enough?” In the world population, we are royalty. “Don’t you know that you have enough?”

But the Ego Center is horribly insecure. It doesn’t matter how much it has, it still wants to hold onto it for dear life. And this is the pressure it brings. This pressure that the Ego Center is under, particularly from the Solar Plexus, to improve its communication skills and to evolve and to learn to be generous.

All of that leads to something very, very important, which is the awakening of the human conscience. This is where it happens in this Center. The Center that has that full spectrum of motivations from the most high to the most low — the most high being valor and bravery, the most low being criminality. It’s all there, but its potential for growth and for development and its desire to do so.

We can all pretend we don’t have an ego. Oh I have my ego undefined; I don’t have an ego. In fact I think I’m too good to have an ego. Of course, you can recognize the irony of that statement. What part of you is thinking you’re too good to have an ego? Oh, the Ego. But its potential for growth is truly extraordinary.

And you can see there’s this little bridge from this little Center over to the G Center that’s called the Channel of Initiation. This is the issue that needs to be first in our study of Human Design — that it’s about the experience of initiation and that experience of initiation happens when the Ego crosses that bridge. We could call it the bridge of initiation or the rainbow bridge. Whatever strikes you as cogent with the way you like to think of it.

If we go across that bridge voluntarily, we encounter the G Center and what the ego encounters in the G Center is a world it could never previously have imagined. It is breathtaking -that initiation. We were talking about Ra Uru Hu earlier today. He crossed that bridge and for him it was quite a difficult situation, quite a difficult experience. It was not easy for him.

The Ego is seeking guidance. This is a good sign, a very good sign. It’s like “I am so sick of myself. I really don’t know how to ask for help. I really don’t know how to behave, but I have this cousin, this older sibling, this uncle, this wise person, this teacher who brings me this Higher Self perspective and helps me to learn how to behave.”

So it may be that the Ego crosses this bridge out of desperation. There’s nothing, this Center dislikes more than humiliation. It is quite significant. It is a driving force, a merciless force to try to avoid humiliation. And that is quite the adventure, to cross the bridge to an expansion of consciousness. But this is what this Center needs, most of all, and it does so eventually, in some life, most likely this one. Or else we wouldn’t be here together because Human Design is about crossing that bridge where this part of us that has this spectrum of motivations from things that are so shameful to things that could be so ennobling crosses the bridge and says,  “I need guidance.” And it goes to that G Center and it asks for help. And the G-Center has a lot of help to give. It knows how to behave. It knows how to play Higher Self roles. It knows how to listen, it knows how to lead, it knows how to awaken to Higher Principles. It knows how to be an example of itself. All of those things, the Ego, so needs, and therefore we know that the Ego eventually is going to cross that bridge.

What it sees is breathtaking, truly awesome. And eventually it goes over into what’s called this whole integration field, which is also way ahead of where we are actually in our course. But it’s the other asymmetrical part where the wisdom of the Spleen additionally guides the Ego and the Ego realizes there’s certain things in the world that need to be done. This is in fact the Center of the will that willpower realizes it can evolve and it is the one that needs to do it because none of these other Centers are gonna take the initiative to become a reformer of the very institutions and attitudes that it previously represented. It is the Ego who is the hero in the hero’s journey that discovers true wisdom, reforms itself within its own willpower, and then takes up the process of bringing valued wisdom and values forward into the new nine-Centered being.

In other words, in short, the Ego becomes the most unlikely of all heroes, but this is its potential. And in fact, in both large and small ways, even as we speak, it is doing just that, becoming the most unlikely of all heroes. And so you can see that the Ego Center, as small as it is, (oh look at it there, it’s very tiny) is such an important Center. In fact, the whole evolution of our species hangs upon the awakening of the human conscience and what we do as a result of that awakening conscience.

And for something like the Ego to have its conscience awakened and to look at itself is a very, very painful experience. But that is also what motivates it to form a bond with the G Center — to be initiated, to grow up and to realize that if I don’t reform those institutions and attitudes that I previously represented, then who is going to do it? I guess it’s gotta be me, the unlikeliest of all heroes.

And so with that, let me stop share and just say “Hey, I’ve been wanting to teach that class in a long time, my friends.” “

Lasita :” Can I ask you to bring in the fact that the Ego has two names?” “

Genoa : “Yes, thank you. Lasita. Yes. The Ego is the only Center with two names. It’s the Ego Center and it’s the Heart Center. Obviously pointing to the very evolution that we’ve just been speaking about, that it is very,very capable of evolving into the Heart. In a way, it’s the combination of the Ego and the G Center, isn’t it? In the Seven-Center Being, the Ego and the Heart Center were bonded together as one Center and the Heart Center, the Upper Heart Center was considered to be so elevating, loving and wonderful. And the Lower Heart Center we’re not so quite sure about that. And in the Nine-Center Being, they’ve separated. So we deal with them separately, but at the same time, we get to map out this journey that we’ve been talking about.”

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