Witnesses · Devoted
JR Richmond
Projector analyst, privately trained by the founder; the IHDS examiner of professional candidates; a close friend of the Sedona years.
Relationship to the founder
J. Randolph “JR” Richmond worked as a psychologist before Human Design. He met the founder in Sedona, Arizona, was trained privately by him, and became the school’s examiner. Three recorded sources preserve his testimony: a tribute recorded on the news of the death in March 2011, a long interview conducted by the founder’s son Loki, and his eulogy at the system’s twenty-fifth-anniversary event in 2012.
What they say
His portrait is affectionate and unsparing at once. Ra “wasn’t a warm, fuzzy, people person”; at events he would send word to Richmond “saying why don’t you shut up and let people ask questions.” Yet the coldness was partly a pose: “he pretended he didn’t like people, and it was a pretense, because he really enjoyed people that were into Human Design, that was his tribe.” He confirmed the relentless labor: “this man worked, work, work, work… he showed up on time, no notes, no nothing,” arriving two hours early because “people will be there and they will have questions, and he wanted to answer.” He closed the 2012 eulogy with “tell him I found his stash and I smoked it all.”
In the interview with the founder’s son he called Ra “the best teacher professor I’ve ever had,” fixed the Sedona residency from the beginning of 1999 to May 2000 as the first stretch of teaching “consistently in English without translation,” and described the founder’s relationship to organization in a loyal witness’s words: “the most un-guru person,” a man “really freaked out by followers,” who “was an anarchist,” “believed in freedom and things for free,” and “was against organization… against systems personally.” He named a cost the celebratory accounts leave out: the mission was “very demanding… and I think ultimately very crushing.”
In the 2011 tribute he recalled Ra reading his chart on arrival and predicting his role to his face: he would be “one of these guys that are going to try to shoot holes in this,” to see “how much weight the branch can bear.” And he preserved the founder’s own forecast for the work: when Richmond insisted the system would be everywhere within two years, Ra demurred, “logic crawls,” adding that were it a belief system or guru-driven, “I’d be in Time magazine.”
How the account is weighed
Interest: Devoted Richmond is a named loyal eyewitness, and his affection corroborates several features the hostile witnesses report from grievance: the coldness, the relentless work, the marijuana. His two datings of the Sedona period differ slightly between recordings (1998 to 2000 in the tribute; early 1999 to May 2000 in the Loki interview), and both are recorded.
Sources
- Interview by Loki, “Randy and Loki talk about Ra Uru Hu” (posted May 2011) archived
- Recorded tribute on the news of the death (posted March 12, 2011) archived
- Loki interview, part two, “How Human Design Works” archived
- Remarks at the twenty-fifth-anniversary event (2012), recorded talk
This dossier reports attributed testimony from named, publicly available sources; it adopts none of it as fact, and it characterizes living people only in their own recorded words. To correct or update it, use the corrections process.