Teachers · Record

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 her death..

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 defined ego architecture.

Active in the system

1993 (first trained by Ra in Taos) — March 25, 2020 (death, still teaching)

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 her death.

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.

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.

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 until her death; documented in YouTube video series 2014–2016
• Taught the original mechanics of Human Design without interpretive overlay until her death in March 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)