Genoa Bliven

Relationship to the founder

Bliven encountered the system, by his own dating, “the day after the new Moon in August 1995,” met the founder soon after, and “participated with his teaching through its completion in 2011.” “In 2003,” he writes, “I became director of Human Design America.” His recruitment is a scene he tells himself: a dying student of the founder’s saw his chart, summoned him, read the chart cold across her table, and pressed a stack of Human Design books on him with the words “you study this.”

What they say

He tested the system for a year and a half before he ever met the founder, of whom his summary is flat: “He would accept no followers.”

His fullest account is on tape, in a long interview for the system’s streaming service. He describes a Ra the public image concealed: a man who “really loved being appreciated” even as he “would make fun of you if you did it.” Behind a forbidding stage manner, on Bliven’s account, Ra “listened to everyone” across years of his call-in radio shows, caring less for how evolved a caller was than for “one microsecond of them living as themselves,” which, Bliven recalled him saying, “that’s what I live for.”

He preserved the founder’s own gloss on a line in his chart, the “verbal gunslinger” of the 43rd gate, and noted, as a mark of his own standing, that while most radio contributors eventually got a letter from Ra correcting something they had said, he never did.

How the account is weighed

Interest: Devoted The account is reverential, the testimony of a man who built his own school within the lineage, and it is weighed as that. What it adds is a second devoted witness, independent of Richmond, describing the same distance between the cold persona and a man his intimates found warmer in private than in public.

Sources