A Working Life

The biographies that introduce Ra Uru Hu to new students move quickly through the years before 1987. They establish a career, gesture at its scope, and hurry toward the island and the Voice. The career is treated as a thing he left behind, a prelude whose only function is to be abandoned. This chapter slows at the point the others pass over, because the working life is the part of the record that can be examined, and because the man who described a transmission at thirty-eight is more accurately understood as the professional he had been than as the founder he would become.

The official accounts agree on a shape. By the phrasing his own organizations use, Krakower was an advertising executive, a magazine publisher, and a media producer.¹ To this they add a lifelong engagement with music. The biography published by his school states that the arts mattered to him and that he expressed himself as a composer and performer; another official page describes music as an avocation he pursued until his death.² These are the categories of the working life, repeated across the sites that present him, and they are consistent. What they are not is specific.

The limits of the official account

The difficulty for a documentary account is that the official phrasing names no firms, no magazines, and no productions. The claim that he was a magazine publisher appears without a magazine. The claim that he was an advertising executive appears without an agency. The categories are asserted; the particulars are withheld, or were never recorded in the materials that reach the public. A biography that respects its evidence has to mark that gap rather than paper over it, and the gap is real: the bulk of the working life is known only at the level of its job titles.

One source reaches below the level of category to a named institution. The public astrological database that catalogues him, drawing on its own biographical research, records that he worked in sales and promotion and was appointed a vice president of a firm named Alpha Data Ltd. in June 1973, in Victoria, British Columbia.³ This is the single named company attached to his name in the accessible record, and it is worth pausing on for two reasons. First, it places him on the western coast of Canada in 1973, in a corporate role, which complicates the impression left by other accounts that locate his business life in Toronto.⁴ Second, the role it describes, sales and promotion, is adjacent to but not identical with the advertising-executive and magazine-publisher titles the official biographies use. The record, examined closely, does not resolve into a single clean career. It resolves into a capable professional whose specific path is documented in fragments that do not fully align.

The same database, and the official school biography, also supply the educational fact that anchors the working life: a Bachelor of Arts, taken in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, the institution that would later merge into Concordia.⁵ An education in the arts, followed by a career across advertising, publishing, media, and music, describes a recognizable kind of mid-century professional life, creative and commercial at once, the work of a man comfortable in the business of communication.

One claim about this period comes not from the record but from the man himself, and it does not fit. In his later lectures he told audiences that the system had been given to him as “a logical system” because, as he put it, “they knew that I’d studied physics,” and he spoke more than once of having been “trained as physicists.”⁶ He sometimes claimed the title outright: on his first American tour, around 1995, he prefaced the physics passage of his standard lecture with the recollection that “twenty-five years ago, when I was a professor of physics,” a student had asked what he thought of astrology, and he had answered, “prove it.”⁷ No physics training appears in the documented record, which gives a Bachelor of Arts and a career in advertising, publishing, and media. Nor was the claim his alone: the system’s own early literature repeated it, an introduction to Human Design published in the British magazine Kindred Spirit in 2000 describing him as “a professor of physics in Canada.”⁸ The discrepancy is small but characteristic, and it is the kind the later chapters meet again: the founder’s account of himself tends to claim a little more than the record supports.

Late in life, interviewed by his son, he filled in the outline of the early years in his own voice. Montreal he remembered fondly as a hip and unusually European city, “a great place to grow up,” and his home as cultured and comfortable, with “lots of music and art,” upper-middle-class and well-educated. What he remembered most, though, was pressure, the constant question, as he put it, of “what are you going to do, what are you going to be,” to which his own answer was that he “had no idea.” Of the career he was more specific than the official biographies: he ran a media company, he said, making television commercials and television specials and rock-and-roll videos, work in which he counted himself “a pioneer.” And running beneath all of it, then and ever after, was music. “The one thing that I’ve done all my life is play music,” he said. “I play music every day. I love to sing.”⁹ The musicianship began, by his account, in a houseful of it: he was the youngest of four in a musical home, his eldest sister a teacher of piano technique. He resisted the piano his parents pressed on him and the violin his father bought next, until his much-older brother brought home a big red guitar, lost interest in it within minutes, and left it for the boy to claim. He taught himself on it, tuning it not as guitarists do but “to my ear,” inventing his own fingerings over the decades, so that, as he put it, “nobody else plays guitar like me.”¹⁰ One thread of his self-description reached back further still, to the child he said he had been. In the system’s own vocabulary he placed himself among those with a wholly unconscious mind, and he described the experience of it from the inside. Praised as a bright child, he had not recognized himself in the praise; he had never, he said, trusted his own mind; and he had grown up unsettled by the way words seemed to arrive in his mouth before he knew what they would be. He taught, decades later, without notes. He traced the habit to the same source: a lifelong sense that he did not author his own thoughts so much as overhear them. The account is given here in his register, as the way he explained himself, but it is worth recording, because the man who would build a system on the claim that no one chooses their own thoughts said he had felt the truth of that, uneasily, since boyhood.¹¹

His own memory of childhood ran to friction. By a later account he was a poor fit for the classroom, “generally smarter than my teachers” and quick to say so. He recalled, at twelve or thirteen, a confrontation with a mathematics teacher that ended with him striking the man and being sent home; the next morning he received the strap, twenty-five strokes on each hand, a punishment he had so dreaded through a sleepless night that he arrived before the janitor and asked the principal to administer it at once, only to find, as the blows fell, that the dread had been worse than the thing. He told the story late in life as a lesson about the fear of tomorrow, but it reads, in hindsight, as an early instance of the temperament the rest of the record shows: a refusal to grant an authority he had not tested for himself.¹²

An earlier memory ran the same way. As a small child, four years old by his telling, he simply opened a door that led from the garden into a forest and walked off into it without a word to anyone; hours later, by his account, half the city’s police and fire services were out searching, and he was found asleep under a tree, returned to relieved parents and a punishment that did not take. He told it, decades on, to illustrate the type he assigned himself, the Manifestor who acts without informing, but it doubles as the earliest scene in the record of a man who, all his life, did what he did and explained himself afterward, if at all.¹³

The family receded from his account as the years passed, surfacing only in fragments. His father, he said, was killed in a car accident in his eighties; some years later, on a North American tour, Ra stopped to visit his mother, by then living in Hamilton, Ontario, and she and his eldest sister drove him to the cemetery to see the grave. He stood at the stone, read its inscription, “Father, Grandfather, Great Grandfather,” and felt, he said, nothing, until his mother and sister stepped back into range behind him and the tears came; he attributed them, in the system’s own terms, to their presence rather than to his own grief. Whatever the mechanism he assigned it, the scene is a rare glimpse of the family he had left behind in 1983, intact and aging in Ontario while he built his system on a Spanish island.¹⁴

It was not idle: in Taos in 1997 he recorded an album of thirteen songs, voice and guitar, released as Going Ashore: 10 Years Sailing Neutrino Seas, and his own organization preserves his music among his works, calling it a lifelong passion.¹⁵ The songs themselves carry dates from 1987 through 1997, the decade the title counts, and the album’s dedication thanks, half ruefully, the musicians he counted as teachers: one who “reminded me that I was a musician,” another he called “the only artist I have ever truly collaborated with,” credited for “insisting that I was neither a good musician nor a good singer,” and a third who taught him “that the Arranger creates the finished product.” The note is a small and uncharacteristic admission from a man whose later authority rested on a received Voice: about music, at least, he was content to keep in print a collaborator’s verdict that he was not very good at it.¹⁶

A second album followed in 2005. The Dog Queen’s Penta, ten of his songs recorded at a studio called Son de Mar on Ibiza and released, like the rest of his work, through his own company, set his words and voice over a small band; the arranger and guitarist was J. P. Pasquier, the same “J. P.” the earlier album had thanked. Its liner notes return the music to the beginning of everything. “Music has been writing me since I was a little boy,” he wrote, and of the system’s origin he gave an account he gave nowhere else: that on “the morning after the ‘Voice,’” empty and dark, he had woken “aching to make music,” walked up above his ruina, found “a red cowboy guitar lying on the ground with five working strings,” and, taking it up, had written the song “Package Tour to Eden,” the same title his first album dates to 1987. By his own telling, then, the first thing the transmission produced was not a doctrine but a song.¹⁷ The lyrics carry a melancholy and self-mockery that ran beneath the public certainty. The album’s opening song casts him as a man who can “read the signs in space and time,” then undercuts the claim in the same breath: “I’m raving and you think it’s true,” he sings, “well, I love you… in the end, the joke’s a you-know-who.” Whatever the Voice had given him, the man who set it to a guitar heard the comedy in it.¹⁸

What the working life does and does not establish

It is tempting, knowing what came later, to read the advertising career as preparation. A man who would spend the second half of his life building, naming, packaging, and selling a system of self-knowledge had spent the first half, on this account, in the business of persuasion and publication. The temptation is to treat the early career as a hidden apprenticeship in exactly the skills the later founder would need: the framing of a message, the design of a brand, the management of a small enterprise.

The record permits the observation but not the conclusion. It is accurate to say that the man who later built Human Design into a branded, licensed, trademark-protected system had a documented background in advertising, publishing, and media. It is not accurate to claim that he pursued the early career in order to acquire those skills, or that he understood himself, in the 1970s, as preparing for anything at all. The documentary method holds the two facts side by side without drawing a line of intention between them. He had the background. The background is visible in the later work. Whether the one caused the other is precisely the kind of interior claim the evidence cannot support, and this account leaves it unmade.

What the working life does establish bears on everything that follows, and it is this: the founder of Human Design did not arrive at his system from a life of religious devotion, monastic withdrawal, or esoteric study. He arrived from advertising. He arrived from publishing and media and music, from the commercial creative world of late-twentieth-century North America. Whatever happened on Ibiza in January 1987 happened to a worldly professional in middle age, not to a mystic in training. The biographies that frame the early years as a spiritual prelude reverse the actual sequence. The record shows a businessman first, and the seeker, if the word applies at all, only later.

A small enterprise

The founder’s own organization adds a detail the bare job titles omit: that he ran a successful advertising agency and a television production company in Toronto.¹⁹ Ra’s own later telling, preserved in a 1998 teaching recording, is more vivid and more specific than anything the official biographies offer. In 1983, he said, he was running a combined advertising agency and television-production company of about a dozen employees and “making a lot of money.” He lived in an old Victorian house in which everything was black, the walls, the furniture, the dishes, the tables; by thirty-five he had been married three times; he drove a big white Cadillac with a red leather interior, ate eggs Benedict every morning, used marijuana in the daytime and cocaine at night, and called himself “a busy male and a loner.” He lost his driver’s license to repeated speeding, he said, and by his own account never held one again.²⁰ The portrait is the founder’s own, given fifteen years later, and it is reported as that: not the seeker of the conversion narrative but a prosperous, restless, hard-living adman in a black house. It is included because, if accurate, it sharpens the portrait in a way that matters for the later story. A man who has run a small creative business has done more than hold a job. He has built and managed an enterprise, set its direction, carried its risk, and answered for its results. The founder who would later assemble a school, a publishing operation, a software product, and an international network of licensees would not have been doing any of that for the first time. He would have been doing it again, on a different subject, with a different claim of authority.

That continuity, between the businessman of the 1970s and the founder of the 1990s, is the most useful thing the working life offers the biography. It does not explain the Voice. Nothing in the advertising career explains the events of January 1987, and this book does not pretend otherwise. But it does explain, in part, what happened after the Voice: the speed and competence with which a reported eight-day experience was turned into books, courses, software, trademarks, and an organization. The transmission, by his account, came to him. The system, by the record, was built, and it was built by a man who knew how to build things and sell them.

The man who would leave

By the early 1980s this working life was, on every account, behind him, or about to be. The professional who had taken a degree in Montreal, held a corporate role in British Columbia, and worked across advertising, publishing, media, and music was approaching the decision that ends this chapter of the record and opens the next. The biographies describe a man increasingly at odds with the life he had assembled. They describe, in 1983, a departure.

The name belongs here too, or at least the first half of it. By his own account the man who climbed to the ruin in 1987 was already called Ra; what the Voice added, in his telling, was the Uru Hu. The official biographies leave the origin of Ra unexplained, a matter of the encounter. One account from inside the system supplies a plainer derivation. Steve Rhodes, whose 2012 study of the system was drawn, by his own statement, from the recordings and material collected by Jovian Archive over more than twenty years and written with the support of Ra’s son, states that the name was simply a contraction of the founder’s given names, Robert Alan, “Robert without the bert,” adopted after the 1983 disappearance, and “not about the Sun god or anything silly like that.”²¹ The account is that of a writer aligned with the institution rather than a critic, which is part of why it is notable: the mundane reading of the name comes not from a skeptic but from a friendly source with access to the archive. The book records both, the mystical title and the contracted given name, and adjudicates neither; what the sequence establishes is only that the part of the name that preceded the Voice, the Ra, attached to the man during the years of the disappearance, and the rest came after.

The departure belongs to the next chapter. What belongs here is the summary the working life supports and no more: that the founder of Human Design spent his first three and a half decades as an educated, capable, commercially successful professional in the Canadian creative economy; that the specifics of that career survive only in fragments and a single named firm; that the categories of the work, advertising, publishing, media, and music, are consistent across the sources even where the particulars are missing; and that this background, whatever its relation to what came later, is the actual ground from which the man stepped when he left for the island. The record gives a businessman. The mystic, the founder, the named messenger of a global system, none of these had appeared yet. In 1983 there was a man with a career behind him and a crisis ahead, and the documentary account, holding to what it can show, leaves him there on the edge of the decision that would remake the rest of his life.