January 1987

Everything in this book before this chapter is documented, and everything after it is consequence. The chapter itself is neither. It is an account, given by one man, of an experience no one else witnessed, and the discipline of the book is tested most sharply here. What follows is reported strictly as what Ra Uru Hu said happened. It is not presented as a verified event, because it cannot be. The reader is asked to hold the same distinction the rest of the book holds: between the fact that he gave this account, which is documented, and the content of the account, which is his alone.

The account

By his telling, it began on the evening of January 3, 1987. He was on Ibiza, living in the marginal circumstances the previous chapter described. He encountered, on that evening, a presence he would come to call the Voice, an intelligence he described as far superior to anything he had experienced.¹ The account, as preserved by his own school, records the Voice’s first words to him as a question: “Are you ready to work?”²

What he said followed was a period of eight days and eight nights, ending on January 11, during which the Voice transmitted to him, in detail, the information that would become the Human Design System.³ He described it as a transcription rather than an inspiration, a dictation of mechanics that he received and recorded rather than composed. The official accounts describe the content of the transmission as a synthesis, the bringing-together of the I Ching, astrology, the Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system, and elements of modern genetics and quantum physics into a single framework.⁴ It is from this experience, by his account, that he took the name Ra Uru Hu; the name, he said, was given to him in the course of it.⁵

These are the load-bearing elements of the account, and they are consistent across the sources that present it: the date of January 3, the question, the eight days and nights, the end on January 11, the transmission of a complete system, the new name. They are reported here as the account, sourced to the organizations that preserve it, and framed throughout as what he described.

What he said it cost him

The account does not end with the transmission. In his later tellings, the departure of the Voice on January 11 left him in a state he described as desolate. The experience, by his description, had been overwhelming while it lasted and devastating in its absence, a darkness and grief at the loss of a contact he believed he would never know again.⁶ He described returning to ordinary perception, to the awareness that his body was his own again and the presence gone, and to the circumstances he had been living in: the poverty, the ruin, the near-total lack of possessions. He described his dog having been with him throughout.⁷

He told, too, of a moment from those depressed weeks that he cast as the beginning of his vocation. A few days after the experience, sunk in what he called the only real depression of his life, he watched a retired scientist friend drive up to the path below his ruina, leave two tied bundles of back issues of New Scientist on the road, and drive off. He carried them up the hill, sat under a fig tree, opened the older bundle, and began to laugh: here he was, by his own description, an absolute freak with no money and no one in his life, and in front of him lay two years of the world’s research, “tens of millions of hours” of it, as if the scientists had worked for him. It was, in his telling, the moment he understood his task as one of synthesis rather than discovery.⁸ He also placed the site of the experience with a concreteness the official accounts omit. Directly behind his ruina, he said, lay a Phoenician ritual gathering place with an old step-down well, and he took some satisfaction, years later, in reading that the island’s ancient settlers had believed in two souls, one for the body and one for the spirit, with separate rites for each at death.⁹

These descriptions survive chiefly in secondary transcriptions of his recorded talks rather than on the official biographical pages, and they are presented here with that limitation marked. The emotional aftermath he described, the grief and the darkness, is part of the account he gave of the experience and is reported as such. It is not independent evidence of anything except what he said he felt. The book includes it because the account of the cost is part of the account itself, and because the man’s own framing of the experience as something that wounded him as much as it gave him a system is a meaningful feature of how he told the story. It is not included as corroboration, because there is none to offer.

Holding the registers apart

This is the chapter where the three registers the book keeps separate are most likely to collapse into one, and where the collapse matters most. The first register, documented fact, can carry very little here. It can carry that a man named Krakower was on Ibiza in January 1987, that from this period he took the name Ra Uru Hu, and that he subsequently produced and taught a system he attributed to an experience in those days. The second register, his own account, carries the rest of what this chapter contains: the Voice, the question, the eight days, the transmission, the grief. The third register, the system’s own claims about itself, has not yet entered; it enters in the chapters on what he built.

The reason for the insistence is not skepticism for its own sake. It is that the entire later history, the books, the school, the trademarks, the licensing, the disputes, rests on the authority of this account, and the nature of that authority is exactly what is at issue across the rest of the record. A system presented as received rather than invented claims an authority that an invented system cannot. The question of whether the eight days happened as described is not one this book can answer, and it does not try. The question it can keep in front of the reader is the prior one: that this is an account, given by an interested party, of an unwitnessed event, and that the immense institutional edifice built on it was built on his word.

He understood this himself, by the evidence of his own teaching, more clearly than many of his followers. The instruction most consistently attributed to him is not that students should believe the account but that they should not. The saying repeated across the literature, in various forms, is that he told people not to trust him, not to believe in him, but to find out for themselves.¹⁰ Whether or not the exact wording can be fixed to a single source, the posture is well attested and is consistent with the central practical teaching of the system, which the later chapters describe: that Human Design is to be run as an experiment in one’s own life, not accepted as a creed. The founder of the system asked, on this point at least, for exactly the discipline this book applies to him. He asked not to be believed.

He drew the distinction himself, and early. In a course given in Munich in December 1995 he told students that what the Voice had given him was “two kinds of information”: one “logical and empirical, which I discovered for myself in working with it,” which became the Human Design System, and another he called “fantastic, because it’s not possible to prove it.” The unprovable part he had deliberately withheld when he first went public, he said, “because I didn’t want to start putting the focus of attention on myself… by having to believe in me, or having to believe in the nature of the Voice”; the value of the system, he insisted, was that “it doesn’t matter whether I’m alive or dead, it doesn’t matter whether there was a Voice or not.”¹¹ The separation this book keeps, between the documented system and the unverifiable account of its origin, is on his own testimony the separation he tried to keep himself.

In his own words

In the years after, retelling the story from lecture stages across Europe and America, he framed it less as a mystery than as a dare. He opened those talks, by his own account, by refusing the authority the story might have lent him. There was, he told audiences, nothing in what he was about to say that they had to believe; the system was empirical, something a person could “prove for yourselves.”¹² His own first instinct, he said, had been the same. He had set out “to see for myself whether it worked, because otherwise I would assume that I was quite mad,” and “the fact that it did work” had meant, he said, that “perhaps I wasn’t quite mad.”¹³

His own published account, in the foreword to his Rave I Ching, set the scene tersely. “I was conditioned to believe that science fiction was a genre of literature, that mystical revelation was simply a more antiquated form of the same, and that God, if not dead, was most likely a concept. On the evening of January 3, 1987, all that changed. I was ‘penetrated’ by a ‘Voice.’ It was a terrifying experience. My hair literally stood on end. In the shock, a flood of water drained from my scalp. The Voice said: ‘Are you ready to work?’ For eight days and nights, I worked, transcribing in detail The Human Design System.”¹⁴ The water from the scalp, the question, the eight days: the published account and the spoken ones agree on the load-bearing elements and vary, as such tellings do, only in their detail.

He was explicit, and repeatedly so, that he would not rest his case on the Voice. Had the system required him to stand before the world and say that his authority came from a voice, he said, “I would never, ever, ever do that”; the claim rested on logic and on a person testing it in their own life, and “it has nothing in the end to do with whether I’m good at it or not, or the right person or the wrong person, or a holy man.”¹⁵ Whatever the eight days were, he did not ask to be believed about them, which is the posture the rest of this book takes him at his word on.

He did, in the retellings, reach once toward the sky for corroboration. He liked to note that a supernova, the one cataloged as SN 1987A, had flared into naked-eye view weeks after his January encounter, and to fold its burst of neutrinos into his account of that year. The astronomical event is real, and the neutrinos detected from it in February 1987 remain the only such detection on record; the figures he attached to it, a particular flood of neutrinos over a particular span of minutes, were his own, and they grew between tellings. The coincidence of timing he left to do its own work.¹⁶

Two pieces of his own later reflection sharpen the portrait of the man the encounter left behind. The discipline he said it ended with, staring into the midday sun, he did not abandon: by his account he went on staring into the full sun for several hours a day for about four years, and remarked, dryly, that he could still see. And he came to describe the thing he said had entered him, the Uru, not as a guide but as a kind of tag. He likened himself to a brown bear that conservationists dart, microchip, and release in order to monitor from a distance: the Uru, he said, told him nothing and directed nothing, answered his occasional questions only in a limited yes-and-no, and otherwise simply rode along, as if he had been tagged and was being watched by “a much larger programming agency.” He ignored it most of the time. It was, he said, his one unbroken thread back to the eight days, and the only proof he had that he was “either the strangest man on the planet right now” or “really whacking crazy.”¹⁷

What changed and what did not

Whatever happened over those eight days, the man who emerged from them was, in the documented record, the same man who entered: a former advertising executive in his late thirties, living poorly on Ibiza, now in possession of a body of material he said he had received and a new name he said he had been given. Nothing in the outward record changed on January 11, 1987. He did not immediately become a teacher, a publisher, or the head of a school. The transmission, by his account, was complete; the system, by the record, did not yet exist as anything more than the claim of a destitute man on a Spanish island.

The distance between the two, between the completed transmission he described and the global institution that would carry its name, is the distance the rest of this book travels. It begins not with the Voice but with the years after it, the slow and entirely documented work of turning an account into a book, a book into a school, and a school into an enterprise. The Voice, by his telling, gave him everything in eight days. The building took the rest of his life, and it is the building, not the Voice, that the record can follow. The next chapter takes up the turn from the one to the other: the years in which a man who said he had received a system began, in the ordinary and traceable world, to make it real.