The Iconoclast

The Iconoclast (Taos, New Mexico: 2013–2017)

In May 1997, at the weekend class in Taos where Ra introduced the Four Types, the Chart Reading Seminar, Chaitanyo had been one of the few in the room. He remembered the anticipation, the sense that something clarifying was about to happen after four years of teaching a system that still resisted complete articulation.

What Ra introduced that weekend was a replacement, not a clarification.

The labels came first: Manifestor, Generator, Projector, Reflector. Then the strategies: to inform, to respond, to wait for the invitation, to wait a lunar cycle. Then the authorities. Then the profiles. In the years that followed, more terminology accumulated, keynotes for every gate and channel, names for every cross, a vast interpretive architecture that had the appearance of completeness and the function of enclosure. You no longer needed to look at the body graph carefully. You needed to know your Type. The Type told you what to do.

By 2013, Chaitanyo would describe looking at the landscape of Human Design with despair. The system he and Zeno had helped establish had become, in his assessment, a catechism: a set of rules for behavior dressed in the language of mechanics. It was maintained by a hierarchy of certified teachers who derived their authority from proximity to Ra rather than from independent verification of anything. The students who came to Zeno’s classes increasingly arrived from that landscape, bewildered, reporting that they’d been studying Human Design for years and still couldn’t read a body graph.

“All the information I got through the Jovian approach fell short,” one of them wrote. “It was like Ra handed me a box of Christmas tree ornaments, all flashy and captivating… for a time, until I realized I had no Christmas tree to hang them on. Now, thanks to you, I am seeing the tree take shape.”

The tree was the body graph. The ornaments were the labels. Zeno had been teaching people to see the tree since 1993. By 2013, most of the Human Design world were blinded by the shiny ornaments on the tree.

* * *

The critique became more explicit in the newsletters of this period. Zeno had always been willing to name what she saw, but in the earlier years she had framed it pedagogically: here is what the centers actually do, here is how conditioning works, here is the mechanic underneath the keyword. By 2013 she was naming the source of the problem directly.

The issue was not that Ra’s labels were imprecise, though they were. The issue was that the labels had replaced observation. Once a student had a Type, they had an explanation for everything that happened to them, an explanation that came pre-interpreted, pre-approved, calibrated by a dead man’s opinions about what their design meant. The labor of actual self-knowledge (the patient, honest, often uncomfortable work of watching your own conditioning over time and learning to distinguish yourself from it) had been replaced by a vocabulary.

A body graph described how a person actually functioned. It was never a caste system, and it was never a license for one person to dictate how another should live.

She drew the distinction with surgical precision in her classes and in the newsletters, and Chaitanyo sharpened it further in his own writing. Take the label “Manifestor.” It invoked gravity, competence, authority, creative leadership, the pinnacle of evolutionary function. Strip the label away and look at the mechanic: a person with a motor connected directly to the Throat, capable of initiating without waiting. Two of the four channels that produce this configuration connect power and ego to the Throat, without awareness centers in the circuit. Another two connect the emotional Solar Plexus to the Throat, meaning that action is frequently guided by emotional energy rather than clarity. The label implied superiority. The mechanic revealed vulnerability, a specific kind of vulnerability, worth knowing about precisely because the label had hidden it.

This was what Zeno meant by the dead space. Not an absence of material but an obstruction. The labels were not bridges to the mechanics; they were walls. Students on the other side of the wall did not know there was anything to see.

* * *

What the school stood for instead was stated most completely in a single newsletter from March 2013, published as Zeno prepared what was billed as possibly the last live run of her foundation class. The occasion was the name of the official curriculum. After the collaboration ended, Chaitanyo wrote, Ra had needed new teaching materials and a new name, “Since we own the teaching materials we developed for the Human Design School,” and the name he chose was Living Your Design.¹

The newsletter took the name apart. “Here lies the core of the misunderstanding: Of course you are living your design, always have been and always will be. You cannot help but live your design.” A curriculum built on the premise that students must first learn to live their design “will inevitably mislead you.” The comparison that followed was the sharpest the school’s pages ever printed: “It’s just like the old game of religion, convincing you first that you are fundamentally flawed and then selling you the remedies needed for your redemption. There’s wealth and power in that game!”

Against it, the same page set out the positive doctrine, the closest thing to a manifesto Zen Human Design ever published:

Zen allows you to relax in the knowledge that you have always been and will always be the person you are born to be. There’s no distance between you and the truth. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no need to become. The only need is to be aware, an ability to witness your own life. Therefore, Zen Human Design doesn’t offer you strategies to become a more successful person, just a tool to better reflect and see yourself and your environment, a tool to be a more aware person.

The practice it prescribed was observation, not compliance: “Take a deep breath and observe the truth of what happens in your life, in real time, from moment to moment, without interference or judgment.”

A month later, in April 2013, the companion essay took on the doctrine’s central term. The undefined areas of the chart, Chaitanyo wrote, describe most of a life: “This life is described by the entire body graph, all 64 gates, all centers, all channels, all awareness, not just by the colored parts. It consists of approximately a third natal imprint and two thirds of experience and conditioning.” To label the white areas the Not-Self was to ask a person “to reject approximately two thirds of who you are,” which he called “a recipe for an unhappy and burdened life that unnecessarily expends far too much energy fighting itself.” The white two-thirds of the body graph were not foreign tissue but “the placenta that connects you to the other, to life itself.” The essay closed on the sentence that holds the school’s whole teaching in one line:²

There is no “not-self,” there is only lack of awareness and acceptance of the totality of self that you are.

It was the final form of the argument Zeno had been making in her own newsletters since 2008. The same April issue measured the audience the argument was finding: the spring run of her foundation class had drawn almost forty participants, her largest group ever, from the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Israel, India, New Zealand and Australia. A teacher who could no longer walk, in a small town in New Mexico, was being heard in thirteen countries.

The economics matched the doctrine. The class was offered at three prices, full, medium, and low, with a note that anyone who could not manage even the low price should say so. The newsletter quoted Zeno on her pricing directly: “Because I have been cash-strapped much of my life, I want to honor anyone’s desire to study Human Design with me affordably, so I offer three prices for my live classses and you can decide what you can afford. Please understand that I am always glad to have your support if you can pay full, but less is also support and fantastic.” The school that had once printed a two-thousand-dollar teacher’s certification on its 1997 schedule now let students name what they could afford. That, as much as any doctrinal statement, was the difference: no strategy to sell, no redemption to withhold, no price of admission to the self.

* * *

That summer, with her voice going, she assembled the most ambitious teaching project of her late career and handed most of the speaking to others. The Planets, eight Saturday webinars running from September into November 2013, put a roster of professional astrologers in front of her students: Caroline Casey, Chris McRae, Dena DeCastro, Alexandra Karacostas, Arlan Wise, Sandra-Leigh Serio, alongside her co-host Hal Bahr and her longtime colleague Bettina Gribben. She was open about both of her reasons. The first was the body: “If you’ve been following the story of my decline or have been taking class with me, you know that my voice has gotten very weak, and this idea of having true astrologers give us their wisdom was something I wanted to do much longer ago.”³

The second reason was older than the illness. The culture of Human Design had carried, from Ra’s earliest framing, a condescension toward the discipline its calculations were borrowed from; Ra had said, in her recollection, that Human Design would put astrologers out of business. Zeno, who had read the stars for decades before she ever saw a body graph, presented the class as an act of repair. She and Hal Bahr had designed it, she wrote, “to go a long way to healing the old fracture borne out of disrespect for astrologers and an inflation of superiority as to what a Human Design chart shows.” She put her own authority behind the point: “Look, I know how amazing and profound Human Design is. I have spent the last twenty years studying it, but that is not in any way diminishing how fantastic astrology is!” And she reordered the hierarchy in a sentence: “I consider astrology and the synthesis with the I Ching the interpretative basis and as such, it’s advanced Human Design.”

Her sign-off that July had none of the decline in it: “This class will be so exciting! I hope you will be able to join me.”

* * *

By 2014, Chaitanyo had sold his house in Taos. He had spent years supporting Zeno’s work while barely sustaining his own finances, and the sale gave him enough to leave. Not permanently, but in the way a person leaves when they need distance from a life entirely organized around someone else’s crisis. He traveled in Asia and South America, living inexpensively, waiting for his Swiss pension to begin. He maintained the website, the correspondence, the technical infrastructure. He edited her newsletters from wherever he was.

Zeno, in Taos, continued teaching from the wheelchair.

By 2014, she could no longer walk at all. The fumble-factor (his word for it, offered without irony) had made it difficult for her to operate a computer mouse or hit keyboard keys with accuracy. Her hands moved in arcs of two to three inches when she tried to aim at anything on a screen. She recorded short videos instead, posting them to YouTube because they were still within her capability, sitting at her computer, voice recognizable, hands out of frame.

The videos were not polished. She said so in the newsletter, asking viewers to be mindful and forgiving of her disability. What they were was clear. She knew what she was talking about with the completeness of someone who had spent more than two decades doing one thing very carefully, and the knowledge did not require a steady hand to come through.

Josef Velten, one of the eight certified in that first American class in 1993 (present at the beginning, still watching decades later), wrote her a letter that the newsletter published in November 2015:⁴ “His failure was his inability to either recognize you, or if he did, to fight you and to disparage and to demean you, rather than to encourage you in your endeavor. So ultimately he may have done more harm to the system he was chosen to introduce to the world. Please know the impact that you have made is indescribable. Without all your and Chaitanyo’s work and effort in those early days and subsequently throughout this time, Human Design would be just a sliver of what it is now.”

Then: “I can tell from your YouTube videos that your health is declining. I wish you well, Zeno.”

* * *

Ra died on March 12, 2011. He was sixty-two years old.

She had seen it coming. In January 2011, seven weeks before his death, her newsletter had carried a section titled “A prayer for Ra.”⁵ A week after he died she published the closest thing to an epitaph she would ever write for him: “It was a week ago today that Ra departed this earthly paradise. I hope his death was a peak illumination moment.” He “was the person who brought Human Design to my life and while I think his interpretation was flawed, he was the person who initiated my exploration and life path. I’m glad I did a prayer for him to wish him everything that he wanted.”⁶ Then the newsletter returned to the schedule of classes. The archive’s timeline records the event in a single line: “Ra dies March 12.”

There was no celebration in it and no mourning performance either. Ra was gone. The system he had built continued without him, managed by the institution he had created, teaching the overlay he had spent the last fourteen years of his life elaborating.

The overlay, in other words, had survived its author. Which was exactly what Zeno had expected.

* * *

In the three years that followed Ra’s death, Zeno made the institutional critique fully and publicly on the record.

She had decided, with the time she had left, to do this. Her speech was slowing. Her hands could no longer reliably operate a mouse or a keyboard. The medium that remained available was video, sitting at her computer, the camera on her face, speaking until the throat tired and she had to stop. She used it.

What she made, between roughly 2014 and 2016, was a series. The series had a structure. Each video took one of Ra’s Four Type designations and named what was wrong with it. Not stylistically, not as opinion, but mechanically, what the chart actually showed versus what Ra had told people to do because of what their chart showed.

The series opened with the Reflector.

There’s quite an error in types, she said into the camera in 2014. And so what I’ve decided to do is talk about the errors. And I start with the Reflector because I tell you, I think this is the saddest and worst crime that we could possibly do.

Reflectors, the people with no defined centers, were, in the original mechanic, the rarest design. They were also the most open, the most field-conditioned, the people whose work was specifically to register the quality of the environment they were in. Ra had given them a strategy: wait twenty-eight days, the full lunar cycle, before making any significant decision. Watch the moon. The moon was their authority.

Zeno called this artificial. She named the methodological problem: Having no definition, the one thing you want to get right off the top is, you are not a mental person, period. A person without mental definition, watching the moon transit through hexagrams and lines, trying to track each Gate change every ten hours, this was viewing one’s design through exactly the mental lens the design did not have. The strategy required the very thing the person was structurally without. This having the strategy of watching the moon, it is ridiculous.

She did not stop there. I have no idea whether Ra did this on purpose to screw up these people, or it was just in his narcissism, arrogance that he thought it was alright to just play around.

Ra had been dead for three years. She was naming his narcissism by name, on YouTube, in 2014, years before Neo-Narcissism would surface in the wider HD discourse as a Jovian Archive doctrine Ra had himself published.

The Generator video followed. Generators are roughly two-thirds of the population, the bulk of the system’s audience, the people for whom most of Ra’s teaching infrastructure was built. Zeno opened with a private observation.

I heard Ra disparage people with Sacral definition for years. He considered these people the slaves of our society.

In public, Ra had taught Generators to “wait to respond”, to anchor their decisions in the Sacral gut sound, the audible “uh-huh” or “uh-uh” that signaled correct alignment. In private, per Zeno’s late-career recollection, he called them slaves. The teaching had been designed for people he privately disparaged.

The Manifesting Generator video came next. The MG designation was Ra’s later addition to the original Type system: Generators who also had a motor directly to the Throat, capable of initiating. Ra had eventually redesignated them as “designs to wait” rather than “designs to do.” Zeno called this one of the stupidest decisions [he] made. She traced the change to outside influence on Ra rather than to the original revelation, a doctrinal shift, in her analysis, made in deference to a follower rather than in fidelity to the system.

Embedded in the MG video, she handled the Projector critique. Projectors had been given the “wait for invitation” strategy, wait to be recognized, do not speak until spoken to. Zeno, herself in Ra’s framework a Projector, had spent years being a Projector practitioner under that instruction. By 2014 she had stopped accepting it. Waiting to be invited, come on, we’re in 2014. It is evident that we don’t need everything to be determined by somebody seeing us on the outside. If the other person is not paying attention, she said, that’s what you get to know, they aren’t interested. Shut up. Leave it. You don’t need that.

The fourth Type, Manifestor, she did not address. The series stopped at four videos. Ra had given Manifestors the strategy “to inform”, to tell others before initiating, and the underlying mechanic (motor directly to Throat, capacity for initiation) corresponded to what Zeno’s own framework called a design to do. The label and the mechanic aligned. There was nothing to correct. The Manifestor was the only Type designation Zeno’s late-career critique let stand.

The systematic absence was itself documentary. She had not been making a general complaint about the institution. She had been targeting the specific Types where Ra’s behavioral overlay contradicted the underlying chart, Reflector, Generator, MG, Projector. The four designations where, in her assessment, the strategy did not honor the design.

* * *

In another video from this period (undated, recorded in the same wheelchair-era voice) Zeno took her diagnosis past institutional critique and into the personal.

The video was framed as a response to a viewer who had written to her asking for an assessment of various Jovian-affiliated classes. She did not answer the question. Instead, she explained why she could not recommend the curriculum at all.

I think Ra was a fraud. He suffered from his narcissism and his egoism, and it is very clear that he didn’t want to pay the price because he screwed up. He wanted to avoid getting in trouble, and that was a tremendous central theme in his life.

She used three nouns: fraud, narcissism, egoism. She had given herself room to take them back. She did not take them back.

She also said the diagnosis was not lightly arrived at. I didn’t understand that he was a psychopath. It was only when, I mean it still would take me more years, I thought the first thing when he dropped out was just money. It had taken her years of meditation and thinking to arrive at the assessment. By the time she said it on YouTube, it was her considered, late-career position, stated cleanly, in her own voice, to a small audience that would still listen.

That autumn she went further, in two videos she did date. The first, recorded on October 20, 2015 and titled What was the slander?, put the money at the center of the break. In the school’s first years, she said, there had been no capital: Ra advanced money so that venues could be rented and classes advertised, to be recovered, on the understanding of the time, through his own book and reading sales. Years later she asked him to repay what was owed, and he signed a note acknowledging the debt. It was the repayment, in her telling, and not her critique of the training, that turned him. Once the money came due he recast it as theft and told people she had been stealing from his children.⁷

The charge inverted something she set out two weeks later, in a video recorded on November 4, 2015 and titled Ra’s Crime. The system itself, she argued there, could not be owned; his books, and the interpretation inside them, could. The names he coined, the crosses, the Rave I Ching, the fixing of the lines, were in her account the copyrightable layer, assembled so that he would have something to leave his children. It was those children he then said she was stealing from. The financial particulars rest on her recorded testimony alone; no note or ledger is in the public record, and they are set down here as her account.⁸

The Jovian apparatus did not respond. There was no public acknowledgment that one of Ra’s senior original students, the woman who had built the American school and certified the first generation of analysts, had named his character by name three years after his death. The institution continued as it had: selling certifications, training analysts, expanding the global footprint, treating Ra’s recorded classes as the source material.

She had said what she had to say. She did not say it twice.

* * *

Four years after Ra’s death, what the institution looked like without him was visible in a single email exchange.

In late 2015, Lynda Bunnell granted a teaching license for the Differentiation Degree Program (the culmination of Ra’s work, the program he had been developing through the last years of his life) to a German practitioner named Peter Schöber. The DD Program had been left unfinished at Ra’s death. Andrea Reikl-Wolf and Alok Díaz, the two co-developers Ra had named, had completed it, and were its only qualified teachers. A third designated teacher, Josette Lamotte, had been authorized by Ra before his passing. That was the complete list.

Werner Lessmann, a graduate of the DD Program in Germany, wrote to Lynda Bunnell to ask on what basis Peter Schöber had been certified to teach it. Peter had not trained with Andrea. He had not trained with Alok. He had not trained with Josette Lamotte. Werner had paid a great deal of money for his own training in the program. He wanted to know how Peter Schöber had been licensed to teach it without that training.

Lynda’s response, preserved in the German-language documentation that Ilse Sendler maintained on her website, was unusually frank.

In my judgement and the judgement of Jovian, Peter was and is ready to step into the role of DDP teacher. We do not take these things lightly. They are thoroughly considered. There was also a demand from the public for an additional teacher of this program. We are growing and the fractal is becoming wide.

We do not need the approval of you or anyone else to make these decisions. We are looking out for the best interest of Human Design from our vantage point. And this was a correct decision.

Peter was one of Ra’s first students and was highly respected and regarded by Ra. The selection of Peter to fill this role was not taken lightly nor was it “given” to him. He has earned it.

He had earned it, in the institution’s judgment, without training. Without certification by any of the three designated teachers. Without any documented demonstration of competence in the material. He had earned it by being highly respected, by being one of Ra’s first students, by being available when the institution needed a German-speaking teacher to meet public demand.

The institution had reached a point at which the explicit teaching credentials Ra had himself established were no longer binding. What mattered was the institution’s judgment of who was ready. The teaching role, like the Type label, had become something the institution could assign, a position in the system rather than a demonstrated mastery of the material.

This was what Zeno had spent the previous twenty years saying would happen.

* * *

The work she was doing (the videos, the classes, the newsletters, the readings from a wheelchair in Taos) was aimed less at Ra now than at what his system had produced: a generation of practitioners who had been taught to read labels instead of body graphs, who carried a vocabulary without the original foundation, who recognized, when they encountered her work, that they had been given ornaments without a tree.

Chaitanyo, traveling, began writing his own newsletter entries during this period, sharper, more polemical, with the distinct voice of a man who had held his tongue for a long time and had decided to stop. He called the Jovian system the JOV-97 virus. He described it as a parasite, camouflaged, tricky, devious. He said he had watched bright, intelligent people turn into zombies in its thrall, unable to see that they had been captured. The capture had been gradual, and the vocabulary of the capture was now the vocabulary they used to think about everything.

It’s like an alien parasite in a movie, a predator. It’s camouflaged, it’s tricky, it’s devious, it seduces. I’ve seen plenty of bright, intelligent people turn into zombies in its thrall. And of course, they don’t realize that they’re zombies. They think they are the real thing.

He wrote this after Zeno’s death. But the analysis had been forming for thirty years, and she had arrived at it independently, in her own language, through the same evidence.

* * *

In May 2017, Zeno lost her house, the ending she had seen coming since the mortgage letter of 2011.⁹ She moved to a care facility in Taos.

She could not write. She could not operate a computer or a phone. She had increasing difficulty speaking for more than a few minutes at a time. Chaitanyo flew back from wherever he was traveling, spent several months helping with the transition, then left again, not because he was indifferent but because there was nothing more he could do and because she had, years before, prepared for this.

The recorded classes existed. Two years earlier, understanding what was coming, she had recorded everything she could still record while her hands and voice still held. Centers, Conditioning and Consciousness. Imprint. The Channel Classes. The foundational arc of Zen Human Design, captured on video, available on the website, independent of her continuing presence.

There was one more video, a short goodbye to her students, recorded while she could still speak to a camera. It was posted on September 26, 2017, with the newsletter in which Chaitanyo announced that she had passed Zen Human Design to him.¹⁰ She sat in front of the camera and said goodbye.

The transcript does not exist, the video was not captioned, and the audio has not been publicly transcribed. What Chaitanyo reported in the newsletter that followed was that responses came in immediately, dozens of them, heartfelt, from people who had found her work after years in the Jovian system and had used it to start over. He collected all the responses in a file and sent them to a friend in Taos who printed them out and read them to her at her hospital bed.

She felt touched, the newsletter said. She sent her deepest thanks.

The newsletter was the last one she would have any part in. After that, Chaitanyo wrote alone.

What she had wanted to say, she had already said. It was in the archive. It was in the recordings. It was in the book she and Chaitanyo had built and rebuilt until every trace of Ra’s interpretation had been removed and only the clean mechanics remained. It was in the students who had come to her from the Jovian system, understood what she was showing them, and started over. It was in the software that Chaitanyo had begun building, a tool for looking at the body graph without labels, without keynotes, without the intermediary of anyone’s opinion about what the mechanics meant.

She had spent thirty years trying to make the system independent of its teacher. She was now, at last, making the work independent of herself.