The Pedagogue of Centers

The Pedagogue of Centers (Taos, New Mexico: 2009–2013)

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009. He was fifty years old.

Within two weeks, Zeno had published two newsletters about his chart. Within four months, she had published six. It was a sustained analytical effort, six consecutive newsletters, each one excavating a different undefined center in his design, using his documented life as a case study in what it costs a person to be conditioned without understanding.

She had not planned it that way. She had planned one newsletter. But the responses came back immediately, readers writing to say they were beginning to look at their own undefined centers differently, and she kept going because the example was too good to abandon. She had been teaching Human Design for sixteen years by then, and she had never had a subject this large, this publicly documented, this complete.

Michael Jackson’s chart showed seven undefined centers out of nine. Sacral, Spleen, Root, G (Identity), Throat, Ajna, Head, all white, all open to conditioning from whatever field he was in. Only the Heart and the Solar Plexus were defined. The two centers most associated with will and emotional depth were the only stable ones in a design that otherwise had almost no consistent floor beneath it.

For Zeno, the chart was a lesson about what happens when a person with profound openness encounters a world that does not understand what openness means.

* * *

The newsletter series opened with the Sacral center: life force, creative power, the generative energy that drives sustained physical effort. Michael Jackson’s was undefined. He reflected the Sacral energy of everyone around him, which meant on stage, surrounded by dancers, he appeared to overflow with vitality. The Thriller video. The moonwalk. The impossible physical precision of thirty years of performance. All of it amplified from outside rather than generated from within.

The undefined Sacral center, Zeno wrote, does not have a sustainable reservoir of its own. It fills from the conditioning field and empties when the field is gone. Michael Jackson could not sleep, could not stop, could not let his body rest because the habits of pushing had been built over decades and the underlying signal (I am depleted, I need to stop) was not reliably available to him. He had been conditioned since childhood to perform, to sustain, to continue past the point of his own energy. His father’s defined Root center, driving and ambitious, had been the field that pulled him forward since he was a boy. By the time he was attempting one final tour, the conditioning field was gone, replaced by debt and the machinery of an industry, and there was nothing left underneath it.

The undefined Sacral center was his undoing. His life force was depleted.

Part Two covered the Spleen center: body consciousness, the immune system, the moment-to-moment warning field that tells a person when something is physically wrong. His was undefined too. The Spleen center, when defined, provides an instinctual alarm, this is harming me, this is not healthy, stop. When undefined, those signals are inconsistent, unreliable, easy to override or miss entirely. Zeno noted that during the filming of a Pepsi commercial, Michael Jackson’s hair had caught fire. He had not felt it in time. He had not smelled it. The warning system had not fired.

She compared him to Heath Ledger: also dead young, also with an undefined Spleen, also with documented difficulty sleeping, also dependent on the narcotics that finally killed him. Both of them had sought relief from pain in the only way their bodies could find it, because their bodies could not tell them clearly enough when they were crossing from relief into danger.

Part Three: the Root center, where survival instinct lives, where the adrenal system generates the pressure to act, to move, to endure. Also undefined in his chart. His father’s driving ambition had conditioned it for decades. Without that conditioning field, the pressure disappeared, but the habits it had built did not. He kept performing past the point of performance because that was the only life he had ever known how to have.

Part Four: the G center, identity and love and direction, the place in the body graph that corresponds to the chest, where a person points when they mean themselves. Also undefined. An undefined G center, Zeno wrote, can magnify the love in whatever conditioning field it enters, and can just as easily reflect back whatever rejection or hostility is present. Michael Jackson performing for stadiums full of people who adored him: the G center reflecting and amplifying that love until he appeared to be made of it. Michael Jackson at a press conference, alone, trying to assert his innocence, the same openness now reflecting back a world that had decided he was guilty: “these charges are utterly false,” he said, and no one believed him.

Put all his undefined centers together — the Sacral, then Root, Spleen, G, Throat, Ajna, Head — and you might get a picture of enormous confusion. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t relax — Michael Jackson had a message of love, kindness and humanity. But his openness made him very easy to attack.

Part Five was the Throat center: manifestation, communication, the ability to be heard. Undefined. She watched the footage of him attempting to hold a press conference and understood it in mechanical terms. An undefined-Throat person was trying to convince a room that had already decided, while the conditioning field of their collective certainty made his words simply fail to land. “How can anyone believe this?” he had asked, and the answer was visible in the chart. They couldn’t. He didn’t have the energetic structure to make them.

Part Six was the Ajna and Head centers, the mental field, the capacity to hold and defend a logical argument. Also undefined. The paranoia reported throughout his later life was, in mechanical terms, the predictable result of a person with no stable mental definition operating in a world that had assigned him a narrative and would not revise it. His undefined mental field received everything, filtered nothing consistently, and could construct elaborate internal architectures from whatever conditioning it absorbed.

* * *

What made the Michael Jackson series significant was the method, not the celebrity. Zeno was using a documented life as a controlled experiment in the mechanics she had been studying for sixteen years, and his chart was an almost perfect instrument because the data was so public. Her own summary of that life, in the newsletter on the Ji center, was a single respiratory image: “I pictured a long 25 year inhale, beginning with that darling boy, then an attractive young man, every year expanding until peaking with Thriller. Then the long sucking out of juice, money, reputation, health…”¹

Every undefined center she described, she grounded in something verifiable: the Pepsi commercial fire, the press-conference footage, the documented insomnia, the last rehearsal footage from This Is It. In that footage he appeared diminished, careful, saving his voice, explicitly including the cast and crew, as if he understood, somewhere, that the field he needed was the collective rather than the stage.

The teaching underneath the series was the same teaching she had been doing since 2008, when the newsletter archive began: the undefined centers are not broken. They are not the “not self.” They are not the enemy of awareness. They are the learning ground, the place where conditioning enters and can either be observed or mistaken for the self. The tragedy of Michael Jackson was not that he had seven undefined centers. It was that no one had ever taught him what they were.

You are not just what’s defined. The concept of the Not Self some people use is very misleading. Though there is merit in recognizing what’s conditioned in you versus what is stable, the conditioning field is your experience. It’s not as though undefined centers are not you. They just operate differently.

This was the argument she had been making since the first newsletter in July 2008, and she would make it for the rest of her career. The Jovian system taught students to identify with their defined centers and regard their undefined centers as the Not-Self itself, the source of pretense, distortion, and dysfunction. Zeno taught the opposite: the undefined centers are where you learn the most, where consciousness has the most to do, where the real work of self-knowledge happens. They are not the not-self. They are the wider self, the self that knows something about being human beyond its own natal imprint.

* * *

There was a parallel pedagogy being published during these years.

Around the same time Zeno was teaching her Saturday classes from a wheelchair, Ra was publishing a one-hour audio lecture and accompanying eBook through Jovian Archive titled Neo-Narcissism. It was offered as a Valentine’s Day product. Its table of contents included sections titled “Self-Love,” “Be for Yourself First,” “We’re here to be Selfish for our Lives,” “The Vehicle Is Narcissistic,” and “Homogenization’s Nightmare.”

The lecture opened with an acknowledgment Ra had never quite made in public before.

I grew up as a deeply conditioned not-self Ego Manifestor and have met in my life, many times actually without that being an exaggeration, accusations of not specifically narcissism — I don’t think too many people have that rolling off their tongue — but all the pejoratives that go with narcissism — vanity, conceit, selfishness, egotism, all these things that are associated with narcissism.

He had been hearing these accusations for years. He was now ready to reply.

It’s obvious that I am a neo-narcissist, about as narcissistic as one can get, in essence. I do very much love myself.

The reframe was philosophical. Narcissism, as the mainstream world used the term, was a clinical diagnosis, a pathology. But in the context of Human Design, Ra explained, narcissism inverted. It became self-love, the recognition of one’s own correctness, the act of seeing the beauty of one’s own process. I’m a narcissist, but I’m aware, he said. It’s the difference between the not-self narcissist as it is clinically understood.

Further into the lecture, the doctrine became more specific.

I know my unique Authority to the point of which it challenges the very existence of anything to have an Authority over me. I am not somebody that accepts for a moment that there was intent, a creative intent to the totality, to the universe. It’s not like the finger of God is going to have Authority over me, it does not. None of it does.

And, addressed to followers:

Hey, you’ve got a clean slate. You don’t owe anybody anything, nobody does.

This was the foundation. No one had authority over anyone. No one owed anyone anything. The only law was internal authority, the only correctness self-correctness. In this doctrine, terminating a loyalty when one’s interests had changed, what Martin Grassinger would later describe as Ra’s mastery, was the correct application of self-love, not a betrayal.

There was one further refinement. The narcissism, Ra explained, was not him.

It is not my passenger that is narcissistic. It’s my vehicle that has to be narcissistic. It’s the vehicle’s life, after all. I’m only an observer. I am nothing else.

The split, the personality observing while the vehicle behaved, was, in the doctrine’s terms, a description of how Human Design worked. The observer was not responsible for what the vehicle did, because the vehicle’s behavior was mechanical. It was the design.

Zeno was teaching a different doctrine. Her classes during these years insisted on a different relationship with the body graph: the undefined centers were where learning happened, the defined centers were what could be relied upon, and the consciousness that observed both was responsible for what it did with what it saw. There was no doctrine in her teaching that absolved a person of consequences by attributing their behavior to mechanics. The mechanics were the description, not the alibi.

She had been teaching that since 1993. Ra had developed Neo-Narcissism over decades but had not published it under that title until late in his career. It would become a curriculum offering. In time, it would become the doctrine the institution inherited.

* * *

While Zeno was producing the Michael Jackson series in Taos, the institution that had once been her school was being consolidated under new management.

In July 2010, Ra had named Lynda Bunnell as the caretaker of the IHDS. Within months of taking the role, Lynda issued her first major directive. A new sublicense agreement, sent to every certified Human Design Professional. The terms were specific: a five-hundred-dollar annual fee for the right to do online work in connection with the system. A Skype reading counted as online work. Most readings, in 2010 and 2011, were conducted by Skype.

The contract was, in legal terms, an attempt to convert a community of independently-licensed practitioners into a sublicensed network, one paying ongoing fees to the IHDS for the right to do what they had been doing all along. Many of them held active prior contracts with Jovian dating back to 2000.

The national directors responded with an open letter, co-signed by Ilse Sendler and several other holders of original 2000 contracts. They asked on what legal basis the IHDS could impose a fee on professionals whose original contracts contained no such provision. Within hours of the letter’s circulation, Ilse Sendler was deleted from the official IHDS listings of certified professionals, along with the entire HDAustria organization she directed.

She had been the official Austrian representative of Human Design since September 2000. Her existing contract was, per her own legal review, still valid and undissolved. She had simply ceased to exist on the official record.

That was how it worked. The institution that had once been a federation of national schools (plural, with an S) was now centralized. Membership was conditional on payment. Disagreement was met with deletion. The professionals who could not be controlled by this method were the ones, like Zeno and Chaitanyo, who had already been deleted years earlier.

In Taos, in a wheelchair, Zeno continued to teach. The students who came to her had usually been somewhere else first.

* * *

The body’s decade kept its own dated record, in her hand, in the newsletters.

On New Year’s Day 2010 she described a fall in a shop: “I stumbled and fell, propelled into a row of magazine racks… my left hand weaved through the wire racks before I came fully crashing to the ground with my hand still trapped.” The wrist took a plate and twelve screws. “A small bone in my pelvis also cracked.” The sentence she found for it set the tone for everything that followed: “This is a transformation of my identity as I embrace a walker to move about. It brings me into the Now as an unexpected benefit.”²

In April 2011, under the heading Truth Be Told, she told her readers the house was going: “My very cool house with 320° views of the horizon, mountains framing the vista, lets go of me. There’s no money for mortgage payments.” The same letter disclosed “three autoimmune disorders that have sort of stabilized with diet, exercise and supplements,” the walker, the neurofeedback sessions, her mother’s death from early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the sentence that carries the whole decade: “while I imagine myself upright and dancing into my eighties, I no longer count on my ability to determine my outcome.” It also recorded what the mission had cost and why she had accepted the cost: “I felt that I was given a mandate to start over again with the revelation and rescue it from the ill-conceived, one-way; the only way bias that is the dominant form of Human Design on the planet.” Of the years when almost no one listened: “I was this lone voice in the wilderness.”³

Three weeks later, answering readers alarmed on her behalf, she refused the picture of suffering. “The entire breakdown of the body for me was that I got to really learn about the centers of the body graph and most especially, the undefined Sacral center,” she wrote; she had come “to recognize how I had pushed myself since ever, and then, the body just said ‘no, this doesn’t work.’” She closed the subject the way she closed most subjects: “Life is the gift. We should not miss it.”⁴

In June 2012 she told the mailing list she had scheduled a “mobility assessment” for a wheelchair: “yes, I know that sounds bad, but at this point, it looks easier to me than my walker.”⁵

* * *

In November 2012, Chaitanyo published a newsletter that Zeno had not written. She had broken her left elbow and needed surgery. She was already using an electric wheelchair, the walker had become impossible when the strength left her arms. The elbow surgery meant she could not operate the wheelchair either. She was in the hospital for weeks.

He wrote about her illness then in the careful, factual way he wrote about everything that was painful: clearly, without dramatization, with the precision of a man who believed that honesty was the minimum form of respect you could offer someone.

The first signs had appeared almost fifteen years earlier, he wrote, sometime around 1998 or 1999. By 2002 it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. The diagnoses had accumulated over the years: Myasthenia Gravis, Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme disease, Hashimoto’s, Osteoporosis. He did not think she had all of these diseases. They were names for a cluster of symptoms that no one fully understood, an immune system that had turned against the body that housed it, a slow and steady decline that no form of medicine had been able to arrest.

Her left side had started to become paralyzed first. Then the cane, then the walker, then the wheelchair. The elbow broke because she had fallen trying to hold herself upright with a walker she no longer had the strength to use, and the wheelchair that had been prescribed hadn’t arrived yet because the healthcare system moved slowly when it was reluctant.

Chaitanyo included a line Zeno had written about her own condition: the vehicle that carries my spirit seems to be wearing down.

He also included testimonials from students who had found her. One, from someone who had spent years in the Jovian system: “Zeno so far is the only person who I feel is totally open and honest without any hidden agenda. I love her and I admire her for her dedication and strength to keep going. She kept her integrity. I was on the path of losing mine.”

Another, from a student named Lisa who had received a reading after two unsatisfying Jovian analyses: “Your reading made me so happy. This is the way it should be, how these charts can be brought to life.”

Despite the wheelchair, despite the broken elbow, despite the exhaustion that usually overtook her by noon, Zeno resumed her Saturday classes within weeks of returning home. Her one public comment on the hospitalization was in character: “I am grateful to all who have assisted me but I confess, it’s not nothing to be such a basket case.”⁶ She taught with shaky hands. She taught with a failing voice. She taught people how to read a body graph without reference to Type or Profile or Strategy or Authority. She taught them to look at the picture and see what it actually showed, as Ra himself had instructed in the early years, before he forgot his own instruction.

“It’s the picture, stupid, it’s all in the picture,” Ra had said in the early Clinton years, and Chaitanyo had remembered it. By 2012, almost nobody in the Human Design world was looking at the picture anymore. They were looking at the labels in software. Zeno, in a wheelchair in Taos, was one of the only people still teaching them how.

In December 2012, she recorded a series of online classes. Chaitanyo had persuaded her: if the body was going to continue its decline, the teaching needed to exist independently of it. He filmed her at the computer, voice still recognizable, hands unsteady. Centers, Conditioning and Consciousness. Imprint. The Channel Classes. She recorded everything she could still record.

Her first letter after the hospitalization, in late January 2013, measured that winter plainly: “lots of things are coming back, like swallowing (this choking issue is the main reason I thought I might just get yanked out of the story on earth), digesting, balance, and standing.”⁷

She was sixty years old. She had been teaching for nineteen years. She was out of time in ways she could not yet fully measure, and she was using what remained with the precision of someone who had spent a lifetime learning to observe without flinching.