The Seekers

The people who first carried the Human Design System were not, in the main, the curious or the academic. They were seekers in a specific and historical sense: members of a generation that had spent the 1970s and 1980s moving from teacher to teacher and movement to movement in search of an awakening that the established religions of their birth had not supplied. The founder’s own account names them. The early circle around him, he said, was not of his choosing; the first to gather were people already inside the spiritual networks of the time, above all the followers of the Indian teacher known as Osho.¹ To understand how a system received in a ruin found its first believers, it is necessary to understand the movement those believers came from, because its shape is stamped on the early history of Human Design.

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain and known for years as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, built through the 1970s one of the largest and most controversial of the era’s new spiritual movements. From an ashram in Pune, India, he drew tens of thousands of Western followers, who took initiation as sannyasins, adopted new Sanskrit names, wore shades of red and orange, and put on a wooden-bead mala bearing the teacher’s image.² The movement combined Eastern meditation with Western therapy and a deliberate provocation of conventional morality, and it grew with extraordinary speed. In 1981 its center moved to the United States, to a large ranch in central Oregon, where the sannyasins built a community called Rajneeshpuram. Within four years that community collapsed amid criminal prosecutions, and the movement scattered.³

The scattering is the part that matters here. By the second half of the 1980s, the years in which the founder was on Ibiza and beginning to teach, the sannyasin movement had produced a large, mobile, internationally networked population of experienced seekers, many of them now between teachers. They had given a guru their names and their devotion; they knew how to surrender to a teaching and a teacher; and after Oregon, many of them were dispersed across the same loose circuit of warm and cheap places, Pune again, Goa, the Balearic Islands among them, that the previous interlude described. They were, in the most practical sense, an available congregation: trained in discipleship, fluent in the vocabulary of energy and awakening, and unattached.⁴

This is the population the founder’s early teaching reached. The system’s later self-presentation, with its appeal to experiment over belief and its insistence that it asked for no faith, can obscure how thoroughly its first uptake ran through devotional networks built for exactly the opposite mode. The founder himself acknowledged the irony in his own terms, describing the early students as having been brought to him rather than recruited by him, and locating them within the sannyasin world.⁵ One of the figures who appears across the witness testimony in this book, the collaborator whose long relationship with the founder is documented in the chapter on witnesses, came out of that world; so did others in the first circle.⁶

Two features of the sannyasin movement carried directly into the culture of early Human Design. The first is the new name. The taking of a spiritual name, a public mark of having been initiated and remade, was central to the sannyasin practice, and the founder’s own renaming, from Ra to Ra Uru Hu in the course of the eight days, fell on ears already accustomed to treating a changed name as the natural sign of a changed person. A man who announced that an encounter had given him a new name was not, in that company, making an extraordinary claim about himself; he was speaking a familiar language.⁷ The second is the structure of transmission. The sannyasin world was organized around a single source, the teacher, whose authority was personal and whose words were recorded, sold, and studied. Human Design would organize itself the same way, around the founder as sole receiver of the knowledge and around an archive of his recorded teaching, a structure examined in the chapters on the system’s later institutional life.

None of this bears on whether the system is true, and it is not offered to that end. A teaching can be carried by devotees and still be sound, just as it can be carried by skeptics and still be false; the character of the first audience is evidence about reception, not about content. What the seeker population explains is something the documentary record otherwise leaves puzzling: how a penniless man in a collapsed house, teaching a cosmology he admitted sounded like madness, found within a few years a serious and committed following willing to learn a difficult system and to spread it across continents. He did not have to manufacture believers. A movement a decade older had already made them, and dispersed them, and set them moving through exactly the places he was.