The Mandate

The Mandate (Taos, New Mexico: Ibiza, Spain: 1993–1996)

The man Chaitanyo collected at the Albuquerque airport on a November afternoon in 1993 was traveling under his original name, Robert. He carried the manuscripts of a system he had received six years earlier from what he described as an encounter with a Voice. He was forty-five years old. He had spent the years since the revelation living in Ibiza, teaching school, attempting to put what he had received into a form that others could use.

He would stay in their house in Taos for six weeks. It would be the first of many long stays.

On that drive (Albuquerque to Taos, two hours through high desert with a man whose system he would spend the rest of his life arguing with) Chaitanyo had reservations from the start. He noted the guru attitude. He noted that Ra spoke as though the information he carried was final. Chaitanyo wanted the information, and so he went along.

By Chaitanyo’s account, the first introduction lecture in Taos drew close to sixty people, “the biggest live audience,” he would later write, “he ever had and would ever have.” The lecture is datable from the couple’s own magazine. The December 1993 issue of Taos Time reported that “On November 29, the Taos council chamber was filled with people who came to hear an introductory lecture on the Human Design System given by Ra Uru Hu,” and carried Ra’s first American byline, an excerpt from the Black Book, with the first advertisement New Sun Services ever placed printed beside it: a personal design chart, ten dollars, by mail to a post office box in Taos.¹

Ten people signed up for the Basic Training. Eight continued to the Advanced. By the end of December 1993, all of them had been certified as licensed Human Design Analysts. They were the first in America. Zeno and Chaitanyo were among them. The certification is physical: Chaitanyo’s certificate, preserved in the archive, reads “date of completion: 31.12.93,” signed by Ra Uru Hu for New Sun Services. The school’s first newsletter, mailed in February 1994, reported that the training “ended on New Year’s Eve with eight newly certified Human Design Analysts,” and recorded one piece of classroom lore: the only two gates missing from the group’s composite chart that week were the gates of Doubt and the Fighter, which “was taken as an auspicious sign.”²

In the photograph that survives from that first Advanced class, dated December 31, 1993, they stand in a line in the sagebrush with Taos Mountain snow-capped behind them: Josef, Liz, Zeno, Sarasvati, Ra, Ilse, Chaitanyo, Ivy, Lenny.³ Ra wears sunglasses and a patterned sweater. Zeno is third from the left, smaller than the men, her hair longer than it would later become. Chaitanyo stands on the other side of Ra. They are not yet who they will become. None of them are.

* * *

What Zeno built in those first weeks was a school. She did not call it that. She called it New Sun Services America, the name Ra wanted. She organized it the way she had organized everything since she was twenty-eight: as a container that could hold whatever was placed inside it.

She arranged the rooms. She booked the venues. She placed advertisements in the regional alternative press. She picked up students from the Albuquerque airport when Chaitanyo couldn’t. She cooked Ra’s meals and washed his clothes and procured his marijuana when his supply ran low. She made coffee for the morning sessions. She kept the kitchen stocked. She did the work that infrastructure always requires and that no one ever sees: the work of holding the conditions stable so the content can be transmitted.

The school’s growth is measurable in its own pages. In February 1994 the couple launched a monthly newsletter, the Human Design Network, hand-numbered print runs of a few hundred copies mailed from the Taos post office box. By April the newsletter had Zeno on the road as Ra’s advance team, San Francisco from the 12th to the 19th, Las Vegas from the 20th to the 22nd, booking venues city by city for his first national tour that fall: seven cities, from Fort Mason in San Francisco to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, ending with the Advanced Training at the Sagebrush Inn in Taos. A reading cost $120; the Basic Training was $200, the Advanced $500. The December 1994 issue introduced the first American analyst directory under the headline “Analysts from Rhode Island to Hawaii,” with the note: “These are the pioneers.”⁴

Chaitanyo was recording. He had been a recording artist before he met Zeno. He understood that what Ra was teaching either mattered or it didn’t, and that either way, the responsible thing was to capture it. The cassette tapes accumulated in boxes. Hundreds of hours of Ra teaching the original system, before the overlay thickened. When the technology caught up, they became CDs.

Most of that material no longer exists in any institutional archive. Zeno and Chaitanyo had it.

In 1997, Chaitanyo built the first Human Design website in the world, www.humandesignsystem.com, an address Zen Human Design still uses today. He laid it out himself. He coded it himself. He published the body graph at a time when most people did not yet know what a body graph was, on a network most people had not yet used. He would keep doing this work, alone, for thirty years.

* * *

That same year, in their living room in Taos, there was an incident Zeno would still be talking about a quarter-century later. She described it in one of her late videos, when her speech was shaking and her hands no longer worked.

She had done a chart reading for someone. In preparing it, she had used the Wilhelm I Ching, Richard Wilhelm’s translation, with Carl Jung’s foreword, considered for two generations the standard Western reference. She had been reading the Wilhelm I Ching for twenty years before she met Ra. She used it the way a scholar used it: as a primary source.

She mentioned this to Ra.

Ra yelled at her. He told her she was to use only his I Ching, the Rave I Ching, the version he had built, which interpreted each hexagram and each line through the lens of his Human Design overlay. The Wilhelm translation was not to be referenced. Only his.

Zeno would remember the moment with the specificity of an injury. He yelled at me, and he said you should only use my I Ching, she said in the late video. I was shaking (not like I am now, she added, gesturing to her trembling hands, but just) wow, with reacting to him yelling at me, that I wasn’t supposed to use any but his Rave I Ching.

The Rave I Ching, when she had time to look at it carefully, struck her as something other than scholarship. If you know what is there, she would say later, you realize how severely damaged he was, and how he really wanted other people not to see how the Human Design works.

She filed it away. She would go on without his blessing, using a classical translation of the I Ching, not his. She used classical translations for the rest of her life: her late articles cite the Taoist master Hua-Ching Ni’s rendering by name, and her shop sold Ni’s Book of Changes alongside her own ephemerides.⁵

* * *

In the winter of 1994 to 1995, Ra invited his American students to Ibiza for the first Teachers Training. (The school’s own record splits the date: a 1999 issue recalls the training as December 1994, while the February 1995 newsletter reported it as the previous month’s news and the couple’s December 2000 retrospective places their certification in January 1995.)⁶

The island is small and dry and Mediterranean. It sits off the eastern coast of Spain, an hour’s flight from Barcelona. Its hills are scrub pine, dirt and dust. Its towns are whitewashed against the sun. In December the tourist season has finished, the light is low and clear, the year has settled into itself. Ra had lived there since 1983, a hermit, schoolteacher with a quiet life, a routine and a drug habit. It was the place where the Voice had spoken in January 1987. It was, in some sense, the origin point of everything that followed.

What Ra had in Europe was already substantial. He had been there since 1983, longer than he had been anywhere else. Before Zeno and Chaitanyo, before America, his work had been organized by a man named Jürgen Saupe. Saupe was a German who had translated Ra’s first book, arranged his European tour schedule in the early 1990s, and would remain one of Ra’s closest associates for years. Around Jürgen had formed, in the recollection of one of those early students, Ilse Sendler in Austria, “a bunch of dedicated friends and freaks.” There was no organization. There was no school. There was a traveling teacher, one organizer, and a small circle of European students. The Teachers Training in December 1994 was where the European thread and the American thread first met.

The training brought together that small group of original students from both continents. Lynda Bunnell was not among them. She would arrive at Zeno’s school in Taos six years later, in 1999, take the Analyst Training there, and join Ra’s American operation after the split. Neither were the other names that would later define the global Jovian apparatus: Chetan Parkyn, Richard Rudd, Mary Ann Winiger. All of them would come through New Sun Services in the years that followed, through Zeno’s school, in Taos, in the house where Ra had stayed. They were, in a meaningful sense, Zeno’s students before they were Ra’s certified teachers.

The training was scored. Two hundred possible points.

When Ra read the results aloud, Zeno had received 199. Chaitanyo had received 198. They were at the top of the class. Ra granted them what Chaitanyo would describe as a life-long license to teach the Human Design System. The school’s February 1995 newsletter reported the result without the scores: “Over twenty Human Design Analysts from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and the United States” had attended the six-day training, and three Americans, “Zeno and Chaitanyo from Taos and Connie Schweifler from Phoenix,” had passed the certification examination and were licensed to teach.⁷

It was a license he could not, in the end, legally undo.

* * *

What happened between 1994 and 1996 was, by any external measure, success.

New Sun Services America was the operational center of Human Design in the United States. Students came from across the country and from Europe and Australia. Ra visited frequently, sometimes for months at a time, sometimes living in their guest room. The school ran. The archive grew. Chaitanyo was building and recording and laying out the materials that would later become the curriculum. Zeno was teaching and organizing.

Her ascent through those years is on the record in the school’s own pages. Through 1995 and 1996 she toured alone: Las Vegas, Sedona, Santa Monica, Sacramento, Asheville. By January 1996 the newsletter described her plainly as “a Human Design teacher of the first generation, the only teacher to offer Human Design trainings in America at this time.” By August 1996 the Advanced Training itself was split between them: “The morning sessions with Zeno are dedicated to studies and exercises. In the afternoons, Ra will share his wealth of knowledge.” And in November 1996 the newsletter recorded the succession in a sentence: the October class “was the last Advanced training given by Ra,” who “has delegated the Advanced trainings in the US to Zeno.” The photograph of that class carries the same caption. Twenty-two students. His last.⁸

The December 1996 issue printed the 1997 spring schedule. Between Zeno’s Advanced Training in early May and the Teachers Training at the end of the month sat a two-day class, announced without ceremony: “May 17–18. Reading charts with Ra. The fundamentals of chart reading. $350.”⁹

And Zeno was watching.

She would describe it later in the clearest terms she could find: studying Ra’s system for five years and hitting a wall. Not a wall in the ordinary sense of running out of material, but something more specific, a place where the information stopped yielding. Where the structure had reached the edge of what it could actually show you, and beyond that edge was only more of Ra’s interpretation, which was not the same thing as more of the system.

Nobody trained in the school, she noticed, could say anything other than what Ra said. They had his language. They had his keywords. They had his frame. But the frame was not the picture. And she was increasingly certain that she could see the difference.

She did not say so. Not yet. She was, by training and by chart, a person who waited until she was sure. She had spent twenty-two years learning to observe before she concluded, and she applied the same standard to this. She needed more data. She needed to test what she was seeing against more of what Ra would do.

She would get her test in May 1997.