The Woman Who Built Human Design

Prologue

On May 17, 1997, in a small classroom in Taos, New Mexico, a teacher named Ra Uru Hu stood at the front of a room and began to explain that there were four kinds of human beings.

The system he was teaching was called Human Design. It was four years old in the United States. Ra had received it, he said, during an eight-day mystical encounter on the island of Ibiza in January 1987, in which a Voice had transmitted to him a complete description of the human energetic anatomy. He had spent the years since trying to teach what he had been given.

Ra was forty-nine years old. In four years of American teaching he had never introduced the Four Types as a formal framework.

He was now doing so.

Across the room sat a forty-five-year-old woman named Zeno. She had organized the class. She had brought Ra to the United States four years earlier. She had picked him up at the airport in Albuquerque, hosted him for his first six weeks of American teaching, and organized every visit and class since. She had recorded every lecture, and certified the first generation of American Human Design teachers. She was Ra’s senior American teacher.

She was also, as Ra spoke, sitting next to her partner Chaitanyo, looking at him.

Zeno turned to Chaitanyo, and he to her. Without a word, both understood what they were watching, because both had seen it before.

Zeno had been here twelve years earlier, at Rajneeshpuram, a 64,000-acre ranch in the high desert of Oregon. There she had watched a different charismatic teacher convert genuine insight into a system of behavioral prescription. She had watched the apparatus around him become a control mechanism. And she had watched the whole thing collapse under the weight of what it had become.

She had left Rajneeshpuram by December 1984, a year before the commune collapsed.

She had not left it to walk into the same room with different furniture.

* * *

This is a book about what she did next.

It is not a book about whether Human Design is a cult.

The cult question (Is Human Design a cult?) is among the most frequently asked questions about the system, by people inside it and outside it. The standard cult-screening criteria (charismatic authoritarian leader, isolation from outside influences, us-versus-them mentality, thought and behavior control, financial exploitation) map onto the documented institutional pattern with varying degrees of precision. Other authors, writers, and vloggers have made that argument. This book does not.

This book is a documentary biography of one woman. She built the American school of a global movement, then recognized the moment its founder began to change what he had transmitted. She refused to participate, and lost most of her students and allies to the institution she had helped create. For the next two decades (in a wheelchair, in Taos, in declining health) she taught what the system had originally been to anyone who came to her.

The documentary record is at the back of this book: contracts, letters, archived correspondence, public statements, archived classes, institutional self-descriptions placed beside what actually happened. The reader is not asked to conclude anything. The reader is invited to read.

* * *

Her name was Zeno. She was born Karen Cox on 12 April 1952, in Oakland, California. She took the name Zeno during her years with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, drawn from Zen, the practice of direct unmediated awareness. The Rajneesh lineage did not survive her. The name did.

She died on March 25, 2020, in Taos, in the care facility where she had been living since 2017. She was sixty-seven. She had been unable to care for herself or to speak intelligibly for most of the last three years of her life. The work was, by then, in other hands: the archive, the software, the recorded classes, the book she and Chaitanyo had built and rebuilt over twenty years until every trace of Ra’s interpretive overlay had been removed and only the mechanics remained.

Most people working in Human Design today have never heard of her.

This is the story of what they were not told.

Chapter One

The Observer’s Apprenticeship (Oakland, CA, Switzerland, Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, 1952–1993)

She was seventeen during the Summer of Love.

The East Bay in 1967 was not a location so much as a field, charged, disruptive, full of people who had decided that the inherited version of reality was insufficient and were willing to make themselves uncomfortable to find out what was true. Zeno grew up breathing that air. She described it later as “enormously imprinting, changing my perception as to what was important, what life means, what consumerism and war have to do with each other.”

She was a fifth-generation Californian, the third of four children. She picked up trash off the beach before recycling was a word anyone used. She loved the redwoods. She studied philosophy at Humboldt State University, drawn to Socrates and what she called the wisdom traditions: yoga, Tai Chi, the I Ching, the Tarot, the stars. These were not hobbies for her. They were methodologies. Ways of looking that preceded conclusions.

This is the first thing to understand about Zeno: she was, before anything else, a practitioner of observation. Not mysticism in the sense of belief, not spirituality in the sense of surrender to an idea, but the disciplined practice of watching what actually happens and staying honest about what you see. She would spend the rest of her life trying to teach this distinction (between seeing and interpreting, between the mechanic and the slogan) and she would find it was the hardest thing in the world to communicate.

* * *

In 1980, she woke from a dream that told her to go to Poona.

She was twenty-eight years old. She had a daughter, Divo, who was three. The money appeared, she would say later, “through incredible divine synchronicity.” Eight days after the dream, she was sitting at the feet of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who would later rename himself Osho, at the ashram in India. She had not intended to be initiated. She only wanted to see if she would feel anything.

She felt something. He gave her sannyas and the name Ma Vedant Zeno, the Zeno drawn from Zen, from the practice of direct, unmediated awareness. It would be the name she kept for the rest of her life, worn down eventually to its last syllable, the one that mattered.

* * *

The commune years were formative in ways she would later understand more precisely than she could during them. She lived in Berkeley, in Zurich, and at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, the Ranch, on 64,000 acres of high desert in Wasco County, where the global Rajneesh movement had relocated in 1981 after pressure on its Indian ashram became unmanageable.

It had Sheela, the master’s personal secretary. Her increasingly authoritarian administration of the commune would become, by 1985, a textbook case of how the apparatus around a charismatic teacher metastasizes into something its original devotees no longer recognize as what they came for.

What Zeno saw at the Ranch, over the years she was there, was the slow conversion of a body of teaching that had genuine value into a system of behavioral and social control. She saw the followers become unable to distinguish between what Bhagwan had said and what Sheela was now requiring them to do in his name. She saw the language of liberation deployed in service of obedience. She saw an entire community of intelligent, sincere people unable to see what was happening to them because what was happening was happening through them.

She left before the end. In her own published account, the commune spent the fall of 1984 “organizing shelter and transportation for busloads of homeless people to become residents that would affect the elections,” and it “became increasingly clear that it was time for me to leave. By December 1984, I made my way to San Francisco.”¹ The 1984 salad-bar poisoning of seven hundred and fifty Wasco County residents (organized by Sheela’s inner circle to influence that same local election, widely documented as the largest bioterrorism attack on U.S. soil) would surface in court records the following year. Sheela would be indicted. Bhagwan would be deported. The Ranch would empty. Zeno watched the collapse from San Francisco, having read the signs a year early.

Zeno took the name with her. The lineage she did not.

What she had learned, she would say later in private and in newsletters, was a method of seeing. She had watched, in real time, the conversion of insight into prescription. She had watched the apparatus replace the teaching. She had watched followers’ field-conditioning override their direct perception, so completely that by the end they were defending acts they would once have found indefensible.

She had spent five years inside the experiment. She had a body of method she would never lose.

She saw it happen once. She would watch it happen again.

* * *

She returned to Zurich in January 1986, after a year in San Francisco. By the end of the decade she had been doing awareness work for most of her adult life. Her daughter was receiving “a poshy, wonderful education.” She had built a life in the European alternative community, moving through Zurich’s spiritual network with the ease of someone practiced enough to be both serious and unsolemn about it.

That is where she met Chaitanyo, in January 1990, at the celebration marking Osho’s death. He was at the time, in her later account, “the Swiss sannyas node.” Twenty-one years afterward she called the day the hinge of her life: “It was a huge moment for me that transformed my life in unexpected ways. It was the beginning of my relationship with Chaitanyo.”²

He was Swiss-born, a graphic designer and recording artist, a meditator of nearly fifty years by his own accounting. He had a Christian name he did not use. His meditation teacher had given him the name Chaitanyo, consciousness, and that is what he went by. They fell in love. She and Divo moved into his house.

Two years later, in the first days of January 1992, the house burned down. A photograph preserved in the archive, dated January 6, 1992, shows the two of them standing with the ruin.³

* * *

With the insurance money, they decided to start over somewhere else. They looked at California, but a 7.2 earthquake shook them out of Zeno’s home state, the 1992 Petrolia quake, which she would later describe as a fairly clear signal. They traveled until they found Taos, New Mexico: a small town with a big sky, two health food stores, and, as Chaitanyo noted dryly, “lousy graphic designers.” The former met one of Zeno’s conditions; the latter met one of his. They stayed.

They were running an alternative monthly magazine called Taos Time (a pun on the local attitude toward time, its first cover a Swiss watch without hands) when their friend from Switzerland came to visit.

* * *

It was an afternoon in the summer of 1993, in the kitchen of Chaitanyo’s and Zeno’s house in Taos. Their friend from Switzerland was sitting at the table with two pieces of paper in front of him.

The papers had been hand-drawn. They were diagrams of human figures with nine geometric centers arrayed up the spine and across the head, connected by lines that looked like circuitry, with numbered points scattered around the periphery in a configuration that resembled a zodiac wheel. One was labeled with Zeno’s birth date. The other with Chaitanyo’s.

Their friend had met a teacher in Europe a few months earlier. The teacher’s name was Ra Uru Hu. The teacher had shown him a body of work he called the Human Design System and had run their charts based on their birth data. The friend had carried the charts across the Atlantic in his suitcase.

He turned them around on the kitchen table and slid them across.

Zeno looked at hers first. Chaitanyo looked at his.

Neither of them said anything for some time.

* * *

What they were looking at was unlike anything either of them had seen. It was not astrology, though there was astrology in it. It was not the I Ching, though there were hexagrams. It was not the Kabbalah, though there were sephirot. It synthesized those traditions, and several others, into a diagram that claimed to describe (graphically, computationally, with the specificity of a circuit schematic) the energetic anatomy of an individual human being.

Their friend explained what he could. The system was new. The teacher who had transmitted it lived in Ibiza, had received the original transmission in 1987 in a mystical encounter that lasted eight days. He had been teaching it for six years, mostly in Europe. He had no presence in America.

He had asked their friend, when he saw the charts, what kind of people these were.

* * *

Their friend went back to Switzerland and told Ra about them. Ra wrote.

The first letter from Ra was an introduction. The second was a request. Could he come visit?

Zeno and Chaitanyo wrote back. They paid for his ticket.

He arrived in Albuquerque on the first of November, 1993.