The Tool Without Interpretation

The Tool Without Interpretation (Traveling: 2018–2020)

Chaitanyo was somewhere in Asia when he published the first newsletter of 2019, a long, careful introduction to himself. Most of the people on the Zen Human Design mailing list had arrived after the years when he was visible, and did not know who he was or what his relationship to the work had been.

He had been traveling for five years by then. He carried a suitcase and a small backpack. He had sold everything in Taos, paid his debts, and left. His Swiss pension had begun. He had no fixed address and no particular intention to acquire one. He sat in cheap hotels in countries he had not previously lived in, connected to whatever Wi-Fi was available. He wrote newsletters when the words came together, answered questions from students and readers who had found Zeno’s recorded classes, and, from wherever he was, kept up the archive, the software, the shop, and the website he had built in 1997 and still ran.

Zeno was in a care facility in Taos. She could not operate a computer. She could barely hold a phone. When she managed to answer his calls, her voice was often difficult to understand. He reported that for their last couple of conversations, there had been a marked improvement in clarity. They had been able to talk until she got too tired to hold the phone.

A friend in Taos visited her on Valentine’s Day 2019 and sent him a report: Zeno was in good spirits, laughing and telling stories. She seemed, the friend wrote, “so accepting of where she is in her life stage and her circumstances.” She had just had a bath and was pleased to be shining and clean. She mentioned Chaitanyo might be coming back to visit in the spring. She sounded happy, the friend reported, with how Human Design was progressing in his hands.

What was progressing in his hands was, among other things, Auracle.

* * *

Auracle was the software that Zeno and Chaitanyo had always wanted and had never had the technical resources to build until the later years of her life. The name was hers before the software existed: in the early 2000s, by Chaitanyo’s account, she bought the domain auracle.com, paid more than a thousand dollars for it, and announced that this would be the name of their own Human Design software. He built it for her, and for the work, while she was still alive to see it. He showed her the first working body graph, he wrote later, “just at the onset of her rapid final decline. We enjoyed that moment, knowing well that without her determination the project would not have come this far.”¹

The design philosophy was embedded in the name: an oracle, but one that shows rather than tells. An instrument for looking at the body graph without the mediation of anyone’s interpretation. No Types displayed by default. No Profiles. No Authority labels. No Strategy prescriptions. The body graph as a crystalline structure, as Chaitanyo would write years later, “capable of refracting totality as human.”

The chart it produced was the chart Chaitanyo had been making by hand since the early 1990s: centers defined and undefined, channels activated, gates present, without Ra’s naming system converting each mechanic into a behavioral prescription. It was the chart that let you look at the picture. The one Ra had originally instructed them to look at, in 1993, before he forgot that instruction and began building a catechism instead.

Auracle also contained a Notables database: designs of public figures, politicians, artists, athletes, historical persons, with birth data sourced from the same careful standards that Zeno had applied to the Michael Jackson series a decade earlier. Not a collection of chart readings and interpretations, but a research instrument: two thousand eight hundred designs and growing, available free to anyone with an account, organized for comparison and study. The tool she had always wanted when teaching: a controlled sample of real lives against which to test the mechanics.

The software was built to work on computers, not phones. Chaitanyo was explicit about this and unapologetic. Human Design studied on a small screen, amid the interruptions of notifications and social media, was Human Design as Jovianism had made it, consumable, shareable, reduced to what could be conveyed in a post. Auracle required a screen large enough to see the body graph clearly. This was a philosophical position about what the work required, not a concession to user experience.

* * *

The first newsletter Chaitanyo published under his own name, in January 2019, generated a response he described as almost overwhelming. He had not expected it. He had simply started writing, without a goal, without an agenda, to see whether anyone was listening.

What the responses told him was that a significant number of people had been waiting for exactly this. They wanted someone to say clearly what Zeno had been saying from a wheelchair in Taos, in recorded classes, with shaky hands, in a voice increasingly hard to hear. The Jovian system was a trap. The labels were not the mechanics. The Types had never been the revelation. And there was an alternative: the original, the clean, the simple body graph that Ra had shown them in the beginning and then covered over with thirty years of interpretation.

He published more newsletters. Not on a schedule, not with a strategy. When the words came together. The response kept coming.

Among those who had been listening all along was a student who had been in the very first class Ra gave in America, in Taos in 1993. He had walked away from Ra early, unable to reconcile what Ra said in the reading with what he saw in the body graph. He had spent the intervening twenty-five years learning the mechanics on his own. Working at a health food store in Santa Fe, he watched the charts of the two hundred and twenty-five people he encountered daily, comparing the mechanics against the evidence of actual lives. He had understood Human Design, he said, by doing exactly what Ra had originally instructed and then stopped instructing: looking at the picture, comparing it to experience, arriving at his own conclusions.

He was the author of the letter to Zeno quoted in the previous chapter, the long testimony about what Ra had failed to recognize in her and what the system would have been without her and Chaitanyo’s work.

* * *

Zeno died on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, at 19:55 Mountain Daylight Time, in Taos, New Mexico.

Chaitanyo was there. He had come back from his travels to be with her. He wrote about her death in the newsletter that followed, in the clearest language possible.

My best friend of 30 years, my lover, my wife, my ex, my partner, my collaborator, my inspiration, my challenge, my teacher, my goddess, my love, has finally succumbed to the creeping devastation of her 20 year Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. Zeno died in my arms Wednesday evening, March 25, 2020, at 19:55 MDT, in Taos, New Mexico.

That was the entire newsletter. One paragraph. He did not elaborate. The archive simply noted: “Zeno dies March 25.”

She was sixty-seven years old. She had given twenty-seven years to Human Design. She had built the first American school, certified the first American analysts, produced the only textbook that adhered to the original mechanics without Ra’s overlay, recorded a complete curriculum of classes in the years before her body made teaching impossible, and built with Chaitanyo the software tool that would let the work continue without either of them.

She had been unable to walk since at least 2012. Unable to type reliably since 2014. Confined to bed in the care facility since 2017. She had spent the last three years of her life listening to Chaitanyo’s voice on a phone she could barely hold, being read his newsletters by friends who printed them out and brought them to her bedside, watching television, receiving visits from her little dog Sweetie three times a week.

She had died, the friend who visited on Valentine’s Day reported, in the presence of someone who found her inspiring to be with. Accepting. Clear. Happy with how the work was progressing.