The Wilderness Years

The Wilderness Years (Taos, New Mexico: Vienna, Austria: 2000–2010)

On the morning of July 25, 2003, an email arrived in the inboxes of every certified Human Design practitioner worldwide.

It was from Ra Uru Hu, in Ibiza, Spain. The subject line was “Misrepresentation.” It contained a deadline.

The letter named three people specifically: Zeno Dickson, Chaitanyo Taschler, and Eleanor Haspel-Portner. Of these, Zeno and Chaitanyo were Ra’s senior American teachers. They had organized his first visit to the United States in November 1993, hosted him for six weeks on that trip and for long stays after, and organized every class and tour through 1999. They had recorded every lecture, created every piece of curriculum and print material, built the very first Human Design website on the internet in 1997, and certified the first generation of American practitioners. Eleanor Haspel-Portner was a clinical psychologist who had run, between 1999 and 2002, the only large-scale statistical study of the Human Design System known to have been conducted. Ra had commissioned the study. He had been her formal business partner.

Ra now claimed all three were frauds.

I am a 5/1 and as such, a transpersonal being. To be transpersonal is a double edged sword. Allies are not choices and given the nature of duality, they don’t all turn out to be valued partners. I have been disappointed twice in my transpersonal relationships in America. Twice I trusted individuals with this knowledge only to see them abuse their privilege and responsibility. I am not designed to be a policeman. I am a teacher of awakening. Yet, I see now that my years of silence regarding these beings have only added to their boldness.

The couple, Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler, operate a so-called IRS non profit organization based on claiming to represent Human Design in America. This is a fraud.

Ra’s version of how the partnership began followed.

In 1993, I had yet to visit America and a client of mine suggested a couple he knew. I contacted them and arranged for a visit. At the time, they published a local giveaway magazine where my first visit was announced. I worked with them for five years. They claim to have started Design in America. It is simply not true. I selected them, and supported them financially in the beginning. They were very poor. I paid my own expenses to travel regularly from Europe. They took my teaching revenue and began recording my teachings to transform into products.

And his account of the break.

I did not ‘drift away’, I broke with them and moved to Sedona, Arizona and formed a family corporation, Jovian Archive to protect the knowledge. Despite what they had done, I still offered them a license to legitimize their relationship with me and Human Design. They never signed. They are heartless and unscrupulous and the greediest beings I have ever met. They are still arrogantly stealing from my family.

And, in the final third of the letter, the mechanism.

Jovian Archive does not in any way support these individuals nor does it recognize any of their teaching. The IHDS (International Human Design Schools) does not recognize them or any of their students. Any IHDS registered professional publicly listed with these organizations has until September 1, 2003 to end their association. After this date, to protect the general public from confusion, professionals listed with these organizations will be removed from the IHDS official register of Human Design professionals.

The deadline was six weeks. Practitioners had until September 1 to publicly disassociate from Zeno’s and Chaitanyo’s organizations, or be deleted from the official register of Human Design professionals.

The letter closed: “Love Yourselves, Ra Uru Hu, Ibiza, Spain.”

* * *

That word (Schools, plural) appears in Ra’s own letter. The IHDS he was writing from in July 2003 was the International Human Design Schools, with an S, a federation of national organizations he had formalized three years earlier. The institution that would later represent itself on its public website as the singular IHDS, founded in 1992 and licensed to Lynda Bunnell in 2010, had not yet collapsed itself into one name. In 2003, the plural was still operative. In Ra’s own words.

The collapse is visible in the institution’s own website. The Internet Archive preserves Jovian Archive’s directory of national organizations from this period: as late as October 2000 it stood under the heading “New Sun Services World Wide” and listed the United States organization under its own domain, humandesignsystem.com. By April 2001 that entry had been changed to jovianarchive.com, the family corporation’s domain, and within months the directory vanished from the site altogether. The plural masthead did not survive the redesign either: by 2002 the homepage no longer carried the words “International Human Design Schools” at all. The singular school came later still: the domain ihdschool.com was not registered until June 2010. Step by step, the plural federation Ra had written from was absorbed into a single corporate name.

One passage in the letter is corroborated, in part, by the couple’s own record, and the book sets it out for that reason. Ra wrote that in 1998 he and his family had left Europe to settle in America; that two months after arriving, his wife, seven months pregnant, was rushed to a hospital in Albuquerque; that the baby spent months in intensive care; that “The costs were astronomical and payment was demanded… I was wiped out financially overnight”; and that when he asked his Taos neighbors to arrange a tour so he could earn money, “They refused on the grounds that it would be unprofitable!”¹ The medical and financial catastrophe is documented on both sides: the couple’s own February 1999 newsletter reported that Ra’s son had been “delivered several months prematurely,” that “the financial cost has been enormous,” and that Ra was offering a $1,500 package of readings, with the school noting that the proceeds would go directly to Ra.² On the refused tour, the couple’s record is silent. The catastrophe was real. The use the letter made of it is a separate question.

The letter’s history of the partnership fares worse against the record.

That Ra had not visited America before 1993 was true. Most of what followed (the framing of who had selected whom, who had supported whom financially, who had taken whose teaching revenue) was reversed.

Per Chaitanyo’s preserved account, corroborated by the contracts, correspondence, and physical archive he and Zeno had maintained: in the summer of 1993, a Swiss friend had visited them in Taos. He had recently met Ra in Europe and recognized in the bodygraph descriptions in Ra’s Black Book a description of his Taos hosts. He brought their hand-drawn charts back from Europe. Zeno and Chaitanyo recognized themselves. The friend returned to Switzerland, told Ra, and Ra contacted Zeno and Chaitanyo to ask whether he could visit. They paid for his ticket. He arrived in Albuquerque in November 1993, was picked up at the airport by Chaitanyo, and stayed in their house for six weeks. He returned for many long stays in the following years.

Zeno organized his classes, his lectures, his accommodations, his travel logistics. She cooked for him. She washed his clothes. She procured his marijuana. She welcomed his guests. Chaitanyo, a trained graphic designer and recording artist, created the teaching materials, the course materials, the print advertising, the published newsletters. He recorded every class onto cassette tape and later, when the technology became available, onto CD. He took the photographs. In 1997 he built the first Human Design website that ever existed: humandesignsystem.com.

In Ra’s account, this was Ra supporting them financially. In the documentary record, the reverse was the case. Zeno and Chaitanyo had been the financial and logistical infrastructure of Ra’s American operation since November 1993. They had funded most of it themselves. They had built every piece of curriculum that would become the international standard.

Ra’s letter called their organization “a so-called IRS non profit.” The IRS designation was real. The organization’s name was New Sun Services America. It was the name Ra himself had requested in the 1993 contract he drafted in their kitchen after the first six-week visit, which named Zeno and Chaitanyo as his exclusive representatives in the United States and which he signed in his own hand.

That directorship is corroborated outside the couple’s own archive. Eleanor Haspel-Portner, the third person named in Ra’s 2003 letter, would write in 2025 that she had encountered Human Design in The Mountain Astrologer in March 1996, and described her training in her own account:

When I saw Human Design in The Mountain Astrologer magazine in March of 1996, I knew what it was because I had trained as a Jungian Analyst and recognized all the parts of the Mandala. I was fortunate to study privately with Zeno, an early student of Ra Uru Hu’s and director of New Sunware America at the time. I learned the basics in a traditional and grounded way.

The account places Zeno at the head of the American organization in 1996, from a named contemporary witness who was not herself party to the contract dispute. Haspel-Portner renders the entity as “New Sunware America”; the 1993 contract preserves it as “New Sun Services America.” The variance is consistent with an evolution of the name across the 1993–1996 period or with related entities under similar designations; it is treated in Appendix, Section C.

Most of the names Ra now positioned against them were names they had trained. Lynda Bunnell had taken her Basic and Advanced Trainings through New Sun Services by correspondence in 1999, then traveled to Taos for the Analyst Training that fall. Chetan Parkyn, Richard Rudd, Mary Ann Winiger, Genoa Bliven, Randy Richmond, all of them, in the language of Chaitanyo’s later account, “started out with New Sun Services’ classes.” The names Zeno had certified were now, by 2003, the infrastructure of the organization working to discredit her.

The accusation that Zeno and Chaitanyo had “never signed” a license offered to them after the 1999 break was accurate. They had refused. What the letter did not say, what Ra knew and they knew, was that they already held a license. The 1993 contract Ra had drafted and signed named them his exclusive American representatives. The “new” license offered after 1999 would have downgraded them to sublicensees of an institution that was consolidating around his interpretive overlay rather than the mechanics they had built the school to teach. They refused because the existing contract was better.

One sentence in the couple’s own record requires care here, and the book quotes it rather than working around it. Their January 2001 statement says they had been working “since 1994 without a written contract” when the May 2000 document arrived.³ The 1993 instrument Chaitanyo preserved was a representation agreement; what was never put in writing afterward, on the couple’s account, was a contract governing the training materials and their copyright, the subject over which the 2000 negotiation collapsed. The two statements describe different instruments. The reader should see both.

The “family corporation” Ra described in his letter as having formed in Sedona did not, in the documentary record, exist as he described it. The entities that would later claim the rights were registered elsewhere, at different times, under shifting names, a corporate and trademark record that did not fully surface until after his death, and that is taken up in Chapter Eight.

The accusation that they were “still arrogantly stealing” from his family had no documentary basis. The cassettes and CDs they sold were recordings Chaitanyo had personally made, of classes Zeno and Chaitanyo had organized, in venues they had booked, with their own equipment. Ra had been paid for those classes when he gave them. Chaitanyo was, under the 1993 contract, authorized to record and distribute the teaching as Ra’s American representative. The recordings were his work.

The closing of the letter contained one further note. “Personally,” Ra wrote, “I am appalled at their lack of grace and humbled by the fact that they were on my fractal.” In Human Design terminology, fractal refers to the orbit of beings within one’s personal destiny, transpersonal karma, or fixed fate. Ra was framing Zeno and Chaitanyo as having been in his sphere by design. The framing did not survive contact with the record. They had been in his sphere because they had built it, in their kitchen, with the contract he had drafted.

* * *

The third name in the letter was Eleanor Haspel-Portner.

She came to Human Design from a different direction. She was a clinical psychologist, trained at the University of Chicago, with decades of practice behind her by 1999. She had not taught the system, and she had not built a school. Ra recruited her for what was, on paper, the most ambitious institutional project of his American period.

In 1999, after the break with Zeno and Chaitanyo, Ra asked Eleanor and her husband Marvin Portner, a physician, whether they would host him in their California home. He arrived without his family. He had an idea. He wanted the Portners to form what he described as a research arm of Human Design, a body separated from the Human Design community, free from what he called its contamination, that could test the system scientifically.

The legal vehicle for the project was Rave Life Sciences, LP, a limited partnership established between Ra and the Portners in 1999, with technical infrastructure built by the German software developer Erik Memmert. Its stated purpose, in the language of the 2000 publication that would emerge from it, was “the documentation and validation of the Human Design and associated systems and to prove that these systems can stand the rigors of testing.” Marvin would integrate the work into his medical practice. Eleanor would integrate it into her clinical practice. Erik Memmert would build the specialized software, Neutrinos for Rave Life Sciences, that allowed the statistical work to be done. Across the next two years they co-authored thirteen books with Ra, transcribed from web seminars and in-person classes. In them Ra acknowledged (in his own voice, on the record) that the system as he had been teaching it was incomplete, and that without Eleanor’s work to flesh out the dream matrices and integrate the psychological architecture, he could not have taught the layers he was now teaching.

Eleanor ran the study. Across the period of the partnership, using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, she analyzed thirty thousand cases in five matched samples of five thousand birth records each. Cardiac deaths. AIDS patients. Fertility cases. The full structural apparatus of what Ra had built (centers, types, gates, lines, profiles, the open-and-closed-center hypotheses he had built clinical claims on) tested at population scale.

The first results were published in 2000 under the title “Preliminary Research on the Human Design System and Health,” co-authored by Eleanor Haspel-Portner, Ra Uru Hu, Marvin Portner, Erik Memmert, and Charles Haspel. The paper is preserved on the German Human Design archive and on Rave Life Sciences’ own domain. The copyright line, in 2000, reads: ”© 2000, Rave Life Science, LP. All rights reserved.” Ra Uru Hu’s name is on it as co-author.

What held up was the foundation. The centers were statistically real. Type was statistically real, at confidence levels beyond ninety-nine percent. The body graph as a structural system survived the analysis.

What did not hold up was the interpretive overlay. None of the medical or psychological gates and lines that Ra had hypothesized showed statistical significance. The open-or-closed-center claims, the hypotheses he had taught for years about what an open Heart Center or open Spleen meant, did not survive testing. Five thousand cardiac death cases showed no significance for open or closed Heart Center. AIDS patients did not cluster by the centers Ra had predicted. Fertility patterns did not align with the gate activations he had named.

And the published research, signed by Ra himself, named five types: Manifestor, Generator, Projector, Reflector, and Manifesting Generator, with Manifesting Generator classified as a sub-type of Generator. The structural concession to the data was on the page. Ra signed it. But in his public teaching, the framework remained at four. The Manifesting Generator he had acknowledged in print he continued to fold quietly back into Generator in the classroom. Eleanor would later report that he told her, in the words she has repeated for two decades since: “You found scientifically that there are five types. I’m going to keep teaching that there were four because my ego won’t let me change.” The book treats the quote as her testimony of what Ra said. The discrepancy between the published paper and the public teaching is documentary.

She refused to falsify. The Human Design community wanted her to release the data and misquote it to confirm the existing claims. She could not. Her clinical license was at stake. In 2002, she broke from the community and from Ra. She continued the research on her own terms.

In her account, the July 2003 letter that named her alongside Zeno and Chaitanyo was retaliation for that refusal. It arrived approximately one year after her break, the same temporal pattern that had marked the public attacks following each break with the Ibiza office. The grievance was private; the response was institutional. Eleanor would not falsify the data. So she was a fraud.

This was the third name. Her story did not match Zeno’s, they had been in different relationships to Ra, doing different work, breaking with him for different reasons. But the structural shape of what happened to her was the same. She had refused to do what the institutional apparatus required. The institutional apparatus declared her invalid. The book offers no opinion on the metaphysics of what Eleanor calls the four worlds, the framework she would spend the next two decades developing on the basis of that research. It records that the 2000 research paper is an extant document with Ra’s name on it. The partnership corporation (Rave Life Sciences, LP) is named in its copyright line; Erik Memmert is on the record as the partnership’s software architect; and the chronology (partnership in 1999, paper in 2000, break in 2002, smear letter in 2003) is documentary.

* * *

What the July 2003 letter made public, Ra had said to Zeno in private four years earlier.

In late February or early March of 1999, Zeno would later place the date approximately, Ra had told her, in a conversation she would describe many times across the remainder of her life, that without him she was nothing. He told her, in her account, that he was to destroy her. The phrasing was characteristic. The verb form, “I was to destroy”, was the construction Ra used for actions assigned to him by the Voice. He framed it as the role he had been given, not as a personal choice. She was, in the cosmology he had constructed, the assignment.

She did not at first believe him. She believed the voice he had channeled, she would later say. She did not believe everything that came out of his mouth.

What happened after was something she would frame as confirmation of his power, and which others might frame as coincidence, and which the book makes no claim about either way.

In August 1999, six months after the conversation, Zeno experienced the episode of optic neuritis that would eventually be identified as the onset of multiple sclerosis. The disease that would slowly progress over the next decade (that would put her in a wheelchair by the late 2000s, that would shape every photograph of her later years) began that summer with the loss of vision in her right eye.

Zeno believed Ra had cursed her. She said so explicitly in her late teaching recordings. She did not believe she had simply gotten sick. She believed, on the basis of the timing and the content of the February conversation, that what Ra had announced he would do, he had done. She had spent twenty years inside a system whose central premise was that the cosmology was real. She did not now find the discipline available to draw a line between Ra’s metaphysical authority and his personal capacity to use it as a weapon. She believed both things were what they appeared to be.

The book offers no opinion on the metaphysics. It records that Zeno held this belief, that she held it consistently for the rest of her life, and that the chronology (the threat in February, the symptom in August) is what she said it was.

* * *

Most people complied with the ultimatum.

The social dynamics had not changed since the 1999 break. Ra still had the audience, the infrastructure, and the authority of the man who had received the revelation; Zeno and Chaitanyo had a small mailing list in Taos and a book Ra wanted to use without crediting its creators. For most people the calculation was not difficult.

What made it harder was that many of the people who went with Ra were people Zeno had trained. She did not call it betrayal, at least not in print. She called it conditioning, applying to the students who left the same analytic language she had taught for two decades. In her terms it was a diagnosis, not an accusation: people behaving as the system said a conditioning field would make them. The book takes no position on whether that language describes anything real; it records that this was the language she chose, and that it was not the language of betrayal.

It cost her something anyway.

* * *

What Zeno and Chaitanyo could not see clearly from inside the Taos smear campaign was that they were not alone in what they were experiencing.

Three years earlier, in September 2000, well before Ra’s ultimatum letter went out, he had extended formal national contracts to a handful of original European and Japanese students. Germany. The United Kingdom. The United States. Italy. Spain. Japan. Austria. Seven countries, seven national directors, seven official representations of the Human Design System in their territories. Each director had been with Ra long enough to remember the system before the Types had been introduced. Each was offered, in essence, what Zeno had been operating without contract since 1993: a formal authorization to run a school.

The Austrian contract went to Ilse Sendler, who had been with Ra since the early 1990s and had spent the previous years organizing his lectures and trainings in the German-speaking world. The German contract eventually extended to her colleagues there, including Martin Grassinger, who had been part of the original German-speaking circle. There were directors in Italy, in Spain, in the United Kingdom, in Japan. Each, in their own country, was beginning what would become a parallel version of what Zeno had built in America.

Not every original European had signed. Jürgen Saupe, the publisher who had produced the printed bodygraph in 1992 and held the image rights, was not among the September 2000 signatories. Per the German Human Design archive, Saupe held the rights to the bodygraph itself from 1992. He did not assign them to Jovian Archive.

The year 2000 was the actual formation of what would later be called the International Human Design School. At the time it was the International Human Design Schools, plural, with an S, exactly as Ra would call it in his own July 2003 letter. Each national director ran their own school, organized their own classes, certified their own students, kept their own archive. Ra was the source. They were the implementation. It was a federation.

Lynda Bunnell was not part of this network. In September 2000, she had just completed her Analyst Training at Zeno’s school in Taos the previous fall. She would not appear in any formal role in the global organization for another decade.

What this meant for Zeno, when she was able to see it clearly years later, was that her experience after the split was not unique. The dynamic she had identified, a teacher converting his insight into a control system, an interpretive overlay replacing direct observation, original students being displaced by people more loyal to the institution than to the work, was happening across seven countries, in parallel, with seven different directors discovering it at roughly the same time. She did not know all of them. She would never meet most of them. But they were there. The pattern was structural, not personal.

* * *

On July 13, 2002, Jürgen Saupe died in Germany. He was sixty-two.

He had been the original publisher of the system, the man who had taken Ra’s drawings of the bodygraph in 1992 and produced the printed version that became the international standard. He had been part of the original European circle, the small group of teachers and operators who had built the system’s first audience in the German-speaking world before the system had a name in America. He had been close enough to the source that the rights to the bodygraph image were registered in his name. He had not signed the September 2000 national contract that bound the other German-speaking representatives to Jovian Archive.

Zeno, when she spoke of Saupe in her late teaching recordings, was clear about what she believed had happened to him. He had died of a broken heart, in her account, the heart of someone who had loved the early work, who had built something he believed in, and who had watched it become something else. She did not soften the framing. She had watched the same thing happen to other people in the original circle. Saupe had simply not survived it.

Per the German archive, the rights to the bodygraph image passed to Saupe’s family on his death. They did not pass to Jovian Archive. Whether and how that succession was ever resolved is not a question the book has access to answer. What the record shows is that the image Jovian Archive would later represent as its proprietary asset had a different documented history than the institutional narrative assumes. A year after Saupe died, still holding the rights to the image at the center of the entire system, Ra issued the letter that consolidated the institution around himself and erased the rest of the original circle from the official record.

* * *

Also in 2003, Zeno and Chaitanyo divorced.

They had been together for thirteen years. They had burned down a house together, crossed an ocean, built a school, raised a daughter through the years of the commune, weathered the Ra years, and then weathered the aftermath. The strain of the split from Ra (the loss of allies, the legal pressures, the financial difficulty of rebuilding a practice from scratch against an organized opposition) had taken its toll on their relationship in ways that professional partnership cannot always absorb.

Chaitanyo would say later, with the same flatness he brought to difficult facts, that they discovered after the divorce that they became better friends to each other than they had been during the marriage. He continued to support her work with his design skills, his technical capacity, his archive. She continued to teach. The partnership that had built Human Design in America persisted in a different form, quieter, more durable, stripped of the things that had been held together by circumstance rather than choice.

They were, in the end, collaborators. That was the relationship that lasted.

* * *

The years between 2003 and 2008 look, from the outside, like retreat. The newsletters tell it differently. She did not stop teaching. She ran weekend workshops at the mineral springs at Ojo Caliente and at Harbin Hot Springs in California, taught free teleconference classes from 2004 onward, kept a hilltop classroom that one newsletter described as “overlooking the Taos valley with 360 degree views of the surrounding landscape,” and rebuilt the entire curriculum from the ground up. The intellectual break had been stated publicly before Ra’s letter ever arrived. In August 2000, in the school’s own newsletter, she had named the danger: “turning Human Design into a sophisticated belief system, whereby phrases get repeated from one person to another, without direct evidence.” “The logical process,” she wrote, “begins with doubt as its inspiration.”⁴

The fullest account of those years is her own. In October 2005 she published an open letter to her fellow sannyasins, the most autobiographical document she ever wrote. In it she turned the judgment on herself: “from the beginning we were creating a very sophisticated belief system that relied on ‘this is what Ra says.’” And harder still: “I felt that I had compromised my own inner being far more than ever I had allowed myself on the Ranch… It was quite revelatory to acknowledge turning over my life in the service of someone else.” The recovery she credited to “wise women who reminded me not to relinquish my spirit,” and to “a journey into the elements of the system but without Ra’s mechanistic interpretation.” In 2008, describing the reconstruction, she claimed its originality plainly: “I don’t think anyone else did what I did, which was to completely remove the entire structural overlay of Ra’s initial interpretative bias to expose the revelation is all its glorious simplicity.”⁵

She was also sick. The August 1999 episode of optic neuritis had been the first that could not be missed, but it had not yet acquired a name. The disease that would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis progressed slowly through the early 2000s, in the discontinuous way MS does. Episodes. Partial recoveries. Each cycle leaving new deficits that did not fully resolve. By 2009, in a photograph taken on September 15th in Taos, she was already using a cane. By the late 2000s, she was in a wheelchair more often than out of it. By the final years of her teaching, the wheelchair was permanent.

The first signs, as Chaitanyo wrote about them years later without drama, had appeared toward the end of the last millennium. Small things at first that were only legible as symptoms in retrospect. The body knows before the diagnosis does.

What she was doing during the wilderness years, in addition to surviving them, was thinking. Specifically, she was continuing the project she had started before the split from Ra, the excavation of the original mechanics from beneath the accumulated weight of the Jovian overlay. Without Ra’s presence in the room, without the social pressure of his following, without the constant noise of the certification industry that had grown up around his teaching, she could hear the system more clearly.

What she heard, when the room was quiet enough, was that the body graph worked. Not because Ra said so, and not in the way Ra described it, but in the empirical, observable, testable way that a map works when it accurately corresponds to the territory. She could read a chart and tell someone something true about their life. She could look at two composite charts and explain why two people found each other easy or impossible. She could look at the planetary transits and predict the quality of a collective conditioning field with the reliability of someone who had been doing it long enough to know when she was right.

What she was increasingly certain did not work was the interpretive layer. The Types. The Strategy. The Authority labels. The keyword system that Ra had built around the gates and channels and centers until the original structure was almost entirely hidden beneath the terminology. She had watched students learn these labels and mistake the labels for understanding. She had watched them become incapable of saying anything about a chart that Ra had not already said, because the keywords had replaced observation and the keynotes had replaced contact with the actual mechanic.

Among the most consequential of these labels was the Not-Self.

Ra had taught, from the earliest classes, that the undefined centers were the Not-Self. The places in the body graph where conditioning entered. The sources of pretense, distortion, frustration, bitterness, anger, disappointment. The architecture of suffering. The defined centers, in Ra’s teaching, were what could be trusted: consistent, reliable, the genuine self. The undefined centers were what had to be observed and identified as foreign. The whole therapeutic frame of Human Design rested on this distinction.

Zeno taught the opposite.

The undefined centers, in her teaching, were not the not-self. They were the learning ground, the place where consciousness most reliably encountered what it was not yet, and therefore the place where awareness had the most work to do. To call them the Not-Self was to teach students to disown half of their own design. She refused to use the term in the Ra sense. Her newsletters, her classes, her readings returned to this point repeatedly across the next decade. The undefined centers were where you learned. They were where you lived. They were not foreign. They were yours.

This was the doctrinal split that would define the rest of her teaching career. The Jovian system pathologized the undefined centers. Zeno reclaimed them.

* * *

The recordings left their hands in stages, each stage documented in the newsletter. In August 2001 the business itself was offered for sale, owning “masters and stock for 30 titles on audiocassette, 73 titles on CDs, and approximately 120 hours of unreleased materials.” In April 2002 the transfer completed: “All the recordings Chaitanyo made of Ra’s classes in the US from 1993 to 2000, released and unreleased, are now in the hands of GeneKeys in the UK.” GeneKeys was the company of Richard Rudd, who had come through New Sun Services’ classes. In September 2003, five weeks after Ra’s letter, Chaitanyo auctioned his complete private collection: 130 CDs and 42 cassettes, “the teachings that were closest to his revelation (and are therefore not as interpreted as what came later),” starting price nine hundred dollars, the whole collection or nothing. And in July 2011, four months after Ra’s death, Zen Human Design “re-examined the commitment we made and after long consideration decided to make the entire archive finally available”: thirty-three titles on 359 CDs.⁶

The original teaching survived, in other words, because the two people who recorded it kept placing it back into the world, by sale, by auction, and finally by release. No institutional archive did that work. The original was exactly what was inconvenient.

* * *

In May 2008, Ra sent an email to a group of professionals and teachers, including the national directors who had been operating under their 2000 contracts. The email contained a sentence that would later be quoted, as documentary evidence, on a website Ilse Sendler would create to preserve the record of what had actually happened.

The IHDS spent most of its existence as me. In the last years this has begun to change and September mutates the IHDS into you…

Ra was acknowledging, in his own words, what the national directors had always known. Until that moment, the International Human Design School had not been an institution at all, only Ra teaching under a brand name. The September 2008 mutation he was announcing, the point at which the IHDS would become an organization with structure and continuity beyond himself, had not yet happened.

The institution today describes itself as founded in 1992 by Ra Uru Hu. The dated record places its origin later, and the institution’s own materials say so. By its own 2010 account, 1992 was the year Ra “began training the first students,” not the year a school was founded. What existed by 2000 was plural: the International Human Design Schools, a federation of national licensees rather than a single body. In May 2008 Ra wrote that the IHDS had “spent most of its existence as me.” The singular school that carries the name today enters the record in 2010. The domain ihdschool.com was registered on 16 June 2010, and the page captured that November described the IHDS as “currently licensed and run by Lynda Bunnell.” That page dated the founding not to 1992 but to 1994: “In 1992, Ra Uru Hu began training the first students in Human Design and in 1994 the International Human Design School was founded.” The 1992 date entered the institution’s self-description only afterward. A school whose name was not registered as a domain until 2010, whose founder in 2008 still described it as having spent most of its existence as himself, and whose own website as late as 2010 dated its founding to 1994, now places that founding in 1992, a year its own records mark only as the start of Ra’s first teaching, never as the founding of an International Human Design School.

What Ra was setting up in 2008 was succession. He was sixty years old. He had been teaching for fifteen years. He had a system, a following, and an income stream, but he did not have an institution that could survive him. The mutation he was announcing would create one. Within two years, he would name its successor.

* * *

In August 2009, zc design changed its name to Zen Human Design.

The name had been implicit in her approach from the beginning (Zen: self-observant, present, empirical, stripped of mystification) but making it explicit was a statement. She was no longer positioning what she did as an alternative interpretation of Ra’s system. She was naming it as something distinct. The body graph was the same. The mechanics were the same. The interpretive frame was not.

That same month, something small happened that she documented on the archive page with the careful neutrality she brought to unpleasant facts. Chaitanyo had recently joined Facebook, privately, to stay in contact with family and friends. A few weeks after joining, he received a friend request from Lynda Bunnell Stone, who within a year would be handed the IHDS.

He declined it. A few days later, he noticed that many of his Facebook friends had suddenly become friends with Lynda Stone as well. She appeared to have been systematically working through his friends list, sending requests to everyone on it, his daughters, his ex-wife, his brother, people with no connection to Human Design who had simply been in Chaitanyo’s network. People tended to accept friend requests without investigating them. That was how it worked.

The archive entry notes that Chetan Parkyn’s friends list had been similarly harvested. It records the fact without editorial comment beyond a triple asterisk separating it from the next entry. The triple asterisk was doing considerable work.

* * *

In June 2010, Zeno wrote what she called a personal message to her mailing list. It is among the most unguarded documents she published.

She wrote about finally understanding, in the preceding months, what it had meant to be conditioned by Chaitanyo and to act from energy that was not always beneficial. She wrote about entering a state of not doing. She wrote about the toll that years of defending her practice against the Jovian apparatus had taken on her body.

Defending myself against the Jovian Goliath has taken a toll on me.

She could not type well anymore, she noted near the end. Her left hand was getting weak. She was taking that as the sign to stop writing.

She was fifty-eight years old. She had been teaching Human Design for seventeen years. She had built a school, lost most of her students to a smear campaign, survived a divorce, renamed her practice, watched the system she helped establish become a global industry built almost entirely on the overlay she had rejected, and continued teaching in Taos to whoever came to her. She had three defined so-called awareness centers in her chart (mental, intuitive, emotional) and a Triple Split definition that left her needing consistent connection through others’ auras to synthesize information according to Ra’s version of the system. By the late 2000s she was largely in the wheelchair. She had spent the past decade without the connection, and increasingly, without the compliance of her body.

Her body, which had been signaling something for years, was beginning to say it louder.

“Though my body doesn’t function well,” she wrote, “I still feel joyous. The mastery in my work is exhilarating, while the breakdown in my body has been and is a huge teacher for me.”⁷

She had been a student of awareness for her entire adult life. She was apparently willing to learn from this too.

* * *

One month later, in July 2010, Ra completed the institutional handoff he had begun in his May 2008 email. He named Lynda Bunnell as the new caretaker of the IHDS, gave her, in her own later words, “complete authority,” and stepped back. The mutation was complete. The IHDS was no longer Ra. The IHDS was Lynda, a 4/1.

Across seven countries, the national directors received their first communications from the new administration.

None of those communications were friendly.