Zeno Dickson (also known as Ma Vedant Zeno)

Co-founder of the American school of Human Design; Ra Uru Hu’s exclusively contracted U.S. representative (1993); director of New Sun Services America; teacher of the original mechanics without interpretive overlay until 2017..

Legal birth name

Karen Cox

Teaching name

Zeno Dickson (also known as Ma Vedant Zeno)

Born

1952, California, USA. Died: March 25, 2020, Taos, New Mexico, USA. Age sixty-seven.

Birth time note

Birth data not published in the public record.

Type / Authority / Profile / Definition / Cross

Not published. Note: Zeno described herself in Ra’s framework as a Projector with a defined emotional nature (a defined Solar Plexus).

Active in the system

1993 (first trained by Ra in Taos) — 2017 (last active teaching; by her own account her voice had become too weak to continue). Died March 25, 2020.

Role

Co-founder of the American school of Human Design; Ra Uru Hu’s exclusively contracted U.S. representative (1993); director of New Sun Services America; teacher of the original mechanics without interpretive overlay until 2017.

Trained by

Ra Uru Hu, Taos, New Mexico, fall 1993. Among the first American cohort. Certified as a licensed Human Design analyst by Ra by end of 1993. Awarded a life-long teaching license by Ra at the first Teachers Training, Ibiza, end of 1994 (scored 199 out of 200).

Country

United States (Taos, New Mexico)

Website

humandesignsystem.com (Zen Human Design — operated by Chaitanyo Taschler; Zeno’s teaching archive preserved there) IHDS listing: Removed from all IHDS records following the July 25, 2003 “Misrepresentation” letter from Ra Uru Hu. See /record Section 3 and /history for documentation.

Teaching focus

Zeno Dickson (born Karen Cox, 1952, California) was, by any measure of the documentary record, the person most responsible for building the Human Design System’s American school. She and her partner Chaitanyo Taschler organized Ra Uru Hu’s first American visit in November 1993, hosted him in their Taos, New Mexico home for six weeks, organized every class and lecture and tour through 1999, and certified the first generation of American Human Design practitioners. A contract Ra drafted in their kitchen and signed in his own hand named Zeno and Chaitanyo his exclusive U.S. representatives. The organization that contract established — New Sun Services America — trained many of the teachers who would later become the infrastructure of the IHDS: among them Lynda Bunnell, who took her Basic and Advanced Trainings through New Sun Services by correspondence in 1999, then traveled to Taos for the Analyst Training that fall.

Zeno was not primarily an administrator. She was a teacher. What she taught, across more than two decades, was the original mechanics of Human Design — the bodygraph itself, the centers, gates, channels, definition types, the calculation mathematics — without the interpretive overlay Ra introduced beginning in 1997 with the Four Types designation. When Ra introduced Strategy and Authority as absolute behavioral rules that year, Zeno and Chaitanyo’s alarm bells “went off loudly,” as Chaitanyo later wrote: the terminology covered up the underlying mechanics and installed behavioral rules where Ra had originally presented a tool for self-observation. They continued teaching within the overlay for a time, then set it aside. By 1999 their relationship with Ra had broken irreparably. Neither ever saw him again.

The break cost them institutionally. Ra’s July 25, 2003 open letter — sent to every certified Human Design practitioner worldwide — named Zeno, Chaitanyo, and Eleanor Haspel-Portner as frauds, called their organization “a so-called IRS non profit” (the IRS designation was real; the organization was the New Sun Services entity Ra had himself named in their 1993 contract), and issued a deadline: practitioners had until September 1, 2003 to publicly disassociate from their organizations or be deleted from the IHDS professional register. Most of the names they had trained went with Ra. It was, as Chaitanyo would later say, very hard years.

In a later video responding to a correspondent who had asked her view of the institutional Human Design program, Dickson set out her own account in the first person. She reaffirmed that she and Chaitanyo Taschler developed the original teacher training over roughly five years of close work with Ra Uru Hu, that the collaboration ended after she told him the training had not achieved what they intended, and that they were quickly replaced. She stated that Ra had incorporated material developed by others, naming Martin Grassinger’s work on resonance, which she associated with what became the Profile material, and Richard Rudd’s Living Your Design, and she pointed to the archive at humandesignsystem.com as the record of the period. In the same video she was sharply critical of Ra and of the program taught in his name, characterizing him in her own words as “not an honest man”; the archive presents these as Dickson’s own characterizations and renders no judgment on them. Where her account asserts facts about others, those claims are documented, where they can be, on this archive’s /record and /history pages with their primary sources.

In the same video, titled "The Problem with the Jovian Program," Dickson stated her assessment of Ra Uru Hu directly: “I think Ra was a fraud. He suffered from his narcissism and his egoism, and it is very clear that he didn’t want to pay the price because he screwed up. He wanted to avoid getting in trouble, and that was a tremendous central theme in his life.” The archive reproduces this verbatim as Dickson’s own characterization, in her own words, and renders no judgment on it.

Zeno continued teaching. By 2013 she was teaching from a wheelchair, her hands moving in arcs of two to three inches when she tried to aim at a keyboard, recording classes via video because it remained within her capability. In a series of YouTube videos made between 2014 and 2016, she systematically critiqued Ra’s Four Types designation — Reflector, Generator, Manifesting Generator, and Projector — on mechanical grounds, showing where the behavioral strategies did not honor what the chart actually showed. The Manifestor was the only Type designation she let stand as mechanically honest. She died in Taos on March 25, 2020, aged sixty-seven. The archive she and Chaitanyo maintained — newsletters, recorded classes, the first Human Design website, the bodygraph calculations — remains publicly accessible at humandesignsystem.com.

Their testimony This record documents what Zeno Dickson (also known as Ma Vedant Zeno) did. What they say about the founder, with the sources and the interest weighed, is kept separately in the witness dossier, under the register “Estranged”.

Documented contributions

• Co-organized Ra Uru Hu’s first American visit (Taos, November 1993); hosted him for six weeks; organized all subsequent American classes through 1999
• Named in the 1993 contract Ra drafted and signed as his exclusive U.S. representative, alongside Chaitanyo Taschler
• Director of New Sun Services America — the first and, for years, only Human Design organization in the United States
• Certified the first generation of American Human Design analysts (1993 onward)
• Awarded a life-long teaching license by Ra at the first Teachers Training, Ibiza, December 1994 (scored 199 out of 200)
• Co-authored The Course in Human Design (1998) with Chaitanyo Taschler — the only complete presentation of the system Ra had taught before the Four Types overlay; Ra attempted to use it as international curriculum without crediting Chaitanyo’s design work; refusal precipitated the final break
• Trained many of the teachers who became IHDS infrastructure, including Lynda Bunnell (Basic, Advanced, and Analyst Training, New Sun Services, 1999)
• Maintained systematic critique of Ra’s Four Types behavioral overlay on mechanical grounds from 2013, documented in a YouTube video series 2014–2016
• Taught the original mechanics of Human Design without interpretive overlay until 2017, when — by her own account — her voice had become too weak to continue teaching (three years before her death in 2020)

Primary sources

• Chaitanyo Taschler, About page: humandesignsystem.com/about/ (preserved account of the 1993–1999 period)
• Zeno Dickson, New Sun Services America archive: humandesignsystem.com/archive/newsletters/
• Ra Uru Hu, “Misrepresentation” letter, July 25, 2003 (preserved in Chaitanyo’s archive; quoted in documentary record)
• Eleanor Haspel-Portner, The Science of Human Design (2025), “Introduction and History,” page 2: describes studying “privately with Zeno, an early student of Ra Uru Hu’s and director of New Sunware America”
• Zeno Dickson, Type critique video series, YouTube, 2014–2016 (humandesignsystem.com)
• Zeno Dickson, “The Problem with the Jovian Program” (video, YouTube): youtu.be/2iUU1ftq8UY
• Osho News, “Vedant Zeno” (memorial, 9 April 2020): www.oshonews.com/2020/04/09/vedant-zeno/ — Memorial in the Osho sannyasin press. Records that she took sannyas from Osho in late 1980 and received the name Ma Vedant Zeno, lived in the Zurich commune from 1982 and at Rajneeshpuram, and “had done Human Design charts.” It documents both her standing in the sannyasin community and her Human Design work, and reflects the sannyasin world as an early conduit for the Human Design System.
• Photographs of Zeno Dickson — Osho News retrospective: www.oshonews.com/2020/04/09/vedant-zeno/ — A photographic record of Zeno across her life, including an image captioned “September 1998, teaching Human Design.” The photographs are presented here by link rather than copy; they remain the property of Osho News and the original photographers. The full set can be viewed at the source.
• Deconditioning from the Caste System and Jovianism — a curated reading path — curated path through Zeno & Chaitanyo’s Transmission newsletters and Zeno’s videos