The Institutions

A system carried by a widening circle of personally licensed teachers is not yet an institution. It becomes one when the authority to teach, to certify, and to license is concentrated and formalized, when the right to call oneself a Human Design analyst or teacher is granted and withheld by an organization rather than by a man. The institutionalization of Human Design is the process by which the horizontal network of the early 1990s became the vertical structure of the present, and its central instrument was the school the system calls the International Human Design School.

The first trainings

The earliest formal training of teachers, as the previous chapters established, took place on Ibiza, where the founders of the American operation traveled in the winter of 1994 to 1995 to attend what they described as Ra’s first Teachers Training and to be licensed as teachers for life.¹ The phrase, licensed for life, marks the early model: authority to teach was conferred personally, by the founder, and was understood by its recipients as permanent. The early teachers were not employees of an institution. They were licensees of a man, carrying his system outward under their own names and through their own organizations, in Europe and America and, increasingly, beyond.

This model had an obvious instability built into it. Authority that flows personally from a founder is authority that ends, or is thrown into question, when the founder withdraws it, revises the terms, or dies. The history of Human Design’s institutions is in large part the history of converting personal, permanent licenses into institutional, conditional ones, a conversion that produced much of the conflict the later chapters describe. The teachers who believed they had been licensed for life by Ra would, some of them, find that the institution which succeeded him did not regard the matter as settled.

The International Human Design School

The institution that formalized the system’s education is the International Human Design School. On the simple question of when it was founded, the system’s own official sources contradict each other by eight years.

The school states, on its own pages, that it was founded in 1992:

“Founded in 1992 by Ra Uru Hu, the International Human Design School (IHDS) is responsible for The Human Design System education training standards according to the original teachings.”²

The founder’s own organization, Jovian Archive, states that he founded it in 2000:

“In 2000, he founded the International Human Design School (IHDS), the official certifying body for Human Design professionals.”³

These are not the claims of the institution and its critics. They are two arms of the same institution, the founder’s archive and the school it certifies, giving the founding year of that school as 1992 and as 2000. The discrepancy is not a matter of interpretation; it is printed, in the present tense, on the official pages of the system as this book is written. An archived capture of the school’s own site from November 2010 gives a third year, dating the founding to 1994 and 1992 only to the start of Ra’s first trainings; the school’s own domain was not registered until June 2010. Three official founding years, then, rather than two.

The point is not that one date is right. It is that the system cannot, across its own official pages, fix the founding year of its principal school, which means the institutional history was assembled after the fact and never reconciled. This book reports the range as it stands, 1992 on the school’s pages and 2000 on the founder’s archive, and treats neither as settled. The most defensible statement is the modest one: the IHDS took shape across the late 1990s and around the turn of the century as the formal successor to the early personal trainings, and the precise founding year is given inconsistently by the system itself.

However the date is fixed, the institution was, for most of its life, indistinguishable from the man who founded it. Ra himself put it plainly in 2008, writing that “the IHDS spent most of its existence as me.”⁴ The school that would, after his death, present itself as the impersonal custodian of a standard had been, on his own account, an extension of one person for most of the years it had existed.

What existed alongside his teaching was not a central school but a federation. Around 2000, Ra and his corporate vehicle, Jovian Archive Corporation, issued the first national contracts to representatives in seven countries, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Austria, each an exclusive national licensee with the right to teach the system and produce materials in its territory. The name of the body they formed was, tellingly, plural: the International Human Design Schools. The original IHDS was the collective of those national licensees, a federation of schools under contract, not a single institution radiating from one center.⁵ Ra said as much in the same 2008 email: the school had “spent most of its existence as me,” and only now, he wrote, would “September mutate the IHDS into you.” The mutation he announced was the centralization that followed, and it is the subject of a later chapter.

Certification and the structure of authority

The institutional apparatus the IHDS administers is, in form, a credentialing system. Human Design education is organized into levels, with certification at each, culminating in the credentials that authorize a person to practice as an analyst or to teach. The right to those credentials runs through the school. In place of the early model, in which Ra licensed teachers personally and for life, the mature institution issues conditional, renewable certifications governed by published standards, and it distinguishes sharply between licensed, certified professionals and what its materials call imitators and unauthorized users of the material.⁶

The disassociation language is a feature of the institution worth marking, because it expresses the shift from network to hierarchy in the institution’s own words. An open network does not police its boundaries; an institution that holds exclusive rights does. The standing instruction on the official materials, to contact only legally licensed organizations and certified professionals, is the institutional form of a claim that there is an inside and an outside to Human Design, an authorized version and unauthorized ones, and that the institution decides which is which. The early teachers, licensed personally by the founder, predate this distinction. Some of them would find themselves, by its terms, on the outside.

The family and the succession

The institution that formalized the system also had to survive its founder, and the arrangements for that survival concentrated authority in a small group around him. By the school’s own account, the IHDS was licensed to Lynda Bunnell, named as its director, in 2010, the year before Ra’s death.⁷ Bunnell was among the early students of the New Sun Services classes and became the founder’s co-author on the system’s principal reference work; her elevation to director placed the school in the hands of a long-standing insider on the eve of the succession. The governance body the school names, its standards board, is composed of Bunnell together with members of Ra’s own family, including his son and his widow.⁸

Bunnell’s own account is the loyal complement to this institutional record. She describes working closely with Ra for twelve years, “in effect his private student,” corresponding with him almost daily, and being taught “how important it is to maintain the authenticity of the knowledge he was given.”⁹ The school passed, on the eve of the succession, to a student who understood her task as preservation: keeping the teaching as Ra had left it. Her testimony, and the range of other voices that surround it, are gathered in the chapter on the witnesses.

The succession, in other words, kept the institution within the founder’s circle and family. The system that had been received by one man, and built with the work of several others, passed at his death to his director and his relatives, who held the school and, through the corporate arrangements the next chapters describe, the rights. This is an ordinary enough outcome for a founder-led enterprise, and it is reported here without surprise. Its significance is for what follows: the consolidation of Human Design under a single corporate owner, and the legal contests over whether the system could be owned at all, took place under the stewardship of the people to whom the founder had entrusted his institution.

The enterprise

By the time of Ra’s death the system had become a full enterprise, with the parts an enterprise requires. There were books, anchored by the reference work co-authored with Bunnell. There was software, descended from Memmert’s original and developed into the commercial chart-generating products the system sold. There was a school issuing graded certifications. There were national organizations operating under license in country after country, and a business-focused offshoot extending the system into the language of professional and organizational analysis.¹⁰ The destitute man who, by his account, received a system on Ibiza in 1987 had presided, by 2011, over an international educational and publishing enterprise bearing his name and teaching his framework.

By his own running tallies from the lecture circuit, the scale was considerable and growing. He said he taught the entire system in eight days, the same span he gave the original transmission; that he had trained “hundreds of analysts” and “over 24 teachers”; and that he had personally sat with thousands of people, a figure he gave as three thousand in the earlier talks and four thousand within a year or two.¹¹ He was unsentimental about who those people were. Most who came, he said, came because they were “ill,” troubled, or “desperate,” and the system in those years was reaching, in his words, “people who have the deepest self-hatred,” not the healthy or the merely curious.¹²

He came, in time, to find the readings themselves unbearable, and said so. Across thousands of them, he claimed, “the only thing that I ever met was the not self,” people who did not want to be freed of their conditioning but to make it more successful. What exhausted him was the moment that ended each session, the client who, having been told in detail what they were, asked only what they should do:

“I had to stop doing readings. What do you mean what should you do? I already told you what you are. Live it.”¹³

He gave up individual analysis rather than keep giving that answer.

He was, late in his life, strikingly candid about the commerce of it. Human Design’s appeal, he said, had always been pitched at the not-self, the conditioned mind chasing what it lacked, because there was nothing else to sell: “there are no ‘true selves’ for me to sell.” The irony he stated outright: “in order for Human Design to be a success, I had to sell the Not Self.” He described his own marketing in the same mechanical terms he used for everyone else: his open Head center sold “inspiration” and “the question,” his black clothes were a deliberate use of his “shadow” to “pull in the Not Self world,” and the parts of his design that would not sell he left unsold, “I have a defined Ego. I don’t teach anybody that they have something to prove. That wouldn’t sell.” He saw “no embarrassment in making money from the not self,” he added, so long as what was offered could transform them. The man a loyal student described as “selling it like soap” had, on his own account, designed the soap to sell.¹⁴

What that enterprise lacked, and what its stewards would spend the years after his death attempting to secure, was undisputed ownership of the thing it sold. A system taught by an open network in the 1990s, much of it by teachers who believed themselves licensed for life, could not be straightforwardly converted into the exclusive property of a single corporation without raising the question of whether such a thing as Human Design could be owned in the first place. That question, and the corporate consolidation that forced it, belong to the closing chapters. First, the founder’s life reaches its end, in March 2011, on the island where it had been remade.