Zeno and Chaitanyo

Relationship to the founder

Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler met the founder’s work in Europe, settled in Taos, New Mexico, and collected him at the Albuquerque airport in late November 1993. Their operation, named New Sun Services America at his request, held the exclusive United States representation. The relationship ended in 1999; their first-person history remains online, and their site preserves the largest community archive of the early years.

What they say

Theirs is the harshest first-person account of the founder’s character on the record, and it is openly adversarial. From their own history: they had developed “reservations about his character and his guru attitude”; with the types and rules of 1997, “we had not signed up to follow an authoritarian false guru”; the end came with him “running out of our house, slamming the door behind him, never to be seen again”; and their overall verdict on the system’s later form is that it was “skewed by delusions of grandeur.” (“About Zen Human Design, Zeno and Chaitanyo,” humandesignsystem.com/about.)

The same account carries the founding chronology their archive documents: the November 24, 1993 airport pickup, the first Taos lecture, the certification of the first eight American analysts by New Year’s Eve, and the naming of the operation at the founder’s request.

How the account is weighed

Interest: Estranged This is the testimony of the losing side of a bitter rupture, and that interest is in full view; none of it is established fact about the man. It is also named, first-hand, and detailed. On the outline of his forcefulness it inverts the loyal witnesses’ valuation without contradicting them: what Bunnell calls authenticity, Chaitanyo calls authoritarianism, and both describe the same uncompromising will. The erasure of Zeno and her lineage from the institutional record is the subject of the companion volume ZENO.

Sources