The Head Center

In the Human Design System, the Head is the uppermost of the nine centers of the BodyGraph, sometimes called the Crown. The system classes it as one of two pressure centers — the source, in its model, of mental pressure: the drive to make sense of things, to wonder, to be inspired, and to seek answers. It is described as anatomically tied to the pineal gland.

In the system’s terms

The system draws the nine centers as a reworking of the classical seven-chakra scheme, and it places the Head at the crown, the point it associates with inspiration entering the mind. Crucially, the system frames the Head as a source of pressure rather than of certainty or awareness: it generates the questions, but the answering is assigned to the Ajna center below it. Pressure to think is not, in this framing, the same as clear thinking.

A person whose Head is defined (colored in) is said to have a consistent, self-generated way of being inspired — a fixed manner of producing the questions their mind turns over. A person whose Head is undefined or open is described as taking in the mental pressure of others and amplifying it, feeling compelled to resolve questions that originated outside them.

Open centers and the not-self

That last claim is where the Centers connect to the wider doctrine the system is built on. The Human Design System holds that the open centers are where a person is “conditioned” by their environment — where they take in and distort energy that is not consistently their own — and it names the resulting pattern the not-self. The Head is offered as a textbook case: an open Head is said to chase answers to questions that do not matter to it. The practice the system prescribes for working with this — deconditioning — takes the open centers as its starting point.

It is worth noting that the framework organizing all of this — types, strategy, and authority, the layer that gives the centers their practical meaning — was introduced by Ra Uru Hu in May 1997, years into his teaching, a history the archive documents in ZENO and The Voice on Ibiza.

Sources: the nine centers and the not-self doctrine are described in the system’s own literature, published by Jovian Archive; the 1997 introduction of the type framework is documented from the primary record in ZENO and The Voice on Ibiza. See also the five types and deconditioning.