The Design Itself

The Design Itself (Oakland, CA, 1952: and the reckoning, 2020–2026)

She was born April 12, 1952, at 5:05 in the morning, in Oakland, California. The sun had not yet risen. The bay would have been dark.

Her Design date (the planetary positions eighty-eight degrees of Sun before birth, when the body becomes ready to receive its personality crystal) fell on January 15, 1952. The body that would become Zeno was already being shaped before the spring.

Her chart shows Triple Split definition.¹ This means her defined centers form three distinct clusters, each internally connected, with gaps between them, bridges that only complete when another person or a transit fills the empty gates in between. She was, by design, not self-contained. She was built to be completed by the conditioning field, to need the presence of others to feel whole, to register the difference between what she was in isolation and what she became when someone else closed the circuit.

This is a design that learns, above all things, about conditioning. A person with Triple Split definition does not carry a stable, unified internal field. They carry three fields, each consistent within itself, with the spaces between them as the curriculum. Every person who walked into Zeno’s classroom was potentially closing one of her bridges. Every relationship she navigated (with Ra, with Chaitanyo, with her students, with the Jovian apparatus) was a lesson in the difference between being genuinely bridged and being pressured into apparent wholeness by a conditioning field she had not chosen.

She spent thirty years teaching this. She lived it simultaneously.

* * *

She was a design to wait. No motor connected to the Throat. No initiating energy. A design that functions best when recognized, when someone whose energy moves outward encounters her and invites her perception in. When that recognition is absent and she pushes anyway, the cost is specific and documentable: the undefined Sacral and Heart centers amplify the conditioning field without generating their own sustainable momentum, and the body pays.

She named this herself, in the 2010 newsletter, without recourse to any Type label: “I didn’t understand how high a price I was paying with my undefined Sacral and Heart centers. Though my body doesn’t function well, I still feel joyous.”

She read it through the mechanics she taught. She had been defending her practice against an organized opposition for a decade, operating in a field that was hostile to her, and, in her own account, drawing on something other than initiating energy, because by the system’s terms she had none. What held her, as she described it, was clarity: the consistent access to knowing she attributed to her defined awareness centers, and the particular stubbornness of someone who had spent twenty-two years learning to look at what is rather than what she wished were true.

But the body kept the account. By 2010 her left hand was weakening. By 2012 the decline was clearly progressive. By 2017 she could not walk, could not type, could barely speak. The book makes no claim about the cause of her multiple sclerosis; that is not a question its method can answer. What can be said is what she said herself, that she had paid a price, and that she understood it through the system she had spent her life teaching.

* * *

Three awareness centers defined. This is the structural rarity of her design, and the one that explains most directly what she was able to do.

Most people have one awareness center defined, some have two, very few have all three. The Ajna: mental clarity, the capacity to hold and process ideas without being swept away by them. The Spleen: body consciousness, the moment-to-moment instinctual knowing of what is healthy and what is not. The Solar Plexus: emotional depth, the full range of feeling, the wave that requires time and movement before clarity arrives.

All three defined simultaneously means a person who has consistent access to all three modes of knowing at once, and who conditions everyone around them in all three domains simultaneously. Mental clarity, body awareness, and emotional depth, all generating a stable field. When students sat with Zeno and reported feeling, often for the first time, that they could see their own charts clearly, that the mechanics suddenly made sense in a way they hadn’t before, some of what they were experiencing was instruction. Some of it was the effect of her three defined awareness centers on their undefined ones. She was, in the most literal mechanical sense, a field of perception.

Her Design Sun was Gate 61.5: Inner Truth, the Mystery. The pressure, at the level of unconscious orientation, to know what cannot be fully known. The I Ching names this hexagram “Inner Truth.” Its fifth line carries the quality of a person whose knowing is genuine, but whose communication of that knowing, the transmission of inner certainty to those who have not arrived at it themselves, remains the central difficulty. She spent thirty years pressing toward what could be known about a system whose origin remained, by definition, mysterious. She arrived at genuine knowledge. She spent thirty years also trying to communicate it to people whose vocabulary had been built by someone else.

Her Personality Sun was Gate 43.1: Insight. The conscious identity as the person who sees something others have not yet seen, who carries a breakthrough knowing that arrives suddenly and whole. Gate 43 is the gate of the individual mind, the mutation in the circuit of knowing, the thought that does not derive logically from prior thoughts but simply arrives, and must then be articulated carefully or will be dismissed as eccentric or wrong.

She was a person whose knowing arrived complete and whose communication of that knowing was perennially difficult. She was also a person who understood that difficulty was built into the structure, not a failure of delivery. She kept trying anyway.

Her Personality Earth (the ground of her conscious orientation, the foundation she returned to) was Gate 30.5: the Recognition of Limits. She knew where things stop. Where the wall is. What the system can and cannot show you without honest observation. She built a career on this: identifying the precise boundary between the mechanic and the interpretation, between what the body graph actually shows and what Ra had decided it meant.

* * *

Her Uranus Opposition (the transit when Uranus returns to its opposition from its natal position, the midlife reversal) fell in 1990 and 1991, with a midpoint in April 1990. She was thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. She was in Switzerland with Chaitanyo. Their house burned down in January 1992. They moved to the United States. They settled in Taos. In the summer of 1993, their friend brought the hand-drawn charts from Switzerland.

The Uranus Opposition is, in design terms, the moment when the conditioning pressures of the first half of life reach their maximum and then break. What was held together by external structure, by conditioning fields that substituted for genuine self-knowledge, becomes unmanageable. What remains after the break is what was actually yours.

What remained after Zeno’s was twenty-two years of awareness practice, a partner whose design closed her bridges, a willingness to start over in a new country, and the readiness to encounter a genuine mechanical system with the precision it deserved. She was prepared for the body graph in a way most people who encounter Human Design are not, because her Uranus Opposition had already forced the question: what is actually mine, and what is conditioning?

She spent the next twenty-seven years answering it.

* * *

What the chart shows, in the end, is not a person built for comfort. Triple Split definition, all three awareness centers defined, a Design Sun in the Gate of Mystery. Such a chart is built to perceive clearly, to persist without initiating energy, to see the system and wait to be recognized, and to carry an unresolvable pressure toward knowing what cannot be fully known. It is not a design that rests easily.

She did not rest easily. She stopped when her body stopped.

“The vehicle that carries my spirit seems to be wearing down,” she wrote, with the quiet observation she applied to everything. Not a complaint. A report. She was watching herself the way she watched everything: with the steadiness of someone who had spent a lifetime learning not to flinch.

She kept watching until she could not.

What Remains

In January 2023, Chaitanyo published a newsletter about the Heart center. He was sitting in a restaurant in southern Mexico when he saw a Mexican matriarch at a long family table calling everyone “Corazon”, my heart. He wrote three thousand words about why calling the Heart center the “Ego center,” as Ra had done, was a fundamental misreading of what the center actually is, what the chakra research had known for millennia, what common sense had always understood. He ended with the threshold image he returned to most: the Heart as the crossing from animal to human. Its blossom is the love of the other and compassion.

He was seventy years old. He had been working with Human Design since 1993. He was writing better than he ever had.

This is what the work looks like now: one man, traveling slowly through inexpensive countries, writing when the words come together, maintaining the archive, running the sessions, keeping the software alive. The Notables database in Auracle holds more than two thousand eight hundred designs and grows. The recorded classes remain on the website. The book (Human Design Revealed, the only textbook built entirely on the original mechanics) is still in print. The pocket ephemeris, published every year since 1994, has reached its thirtieth edition.

Zeno’s voice is still there in the recordings. Shaky hands, failing voice, the fumble-factor that made it hard to aim a mouse, and underneath all of it the precision of thirty years of looking at body graphs and comparing what she saw to what actually happened in actual lives. Students still find her. They arrive (often after years in the Jovian system, often with the Christmas ornaments and no tree) and they sit with the recordings, and something clicks.

On the fourth anniversary of her death, Chaitanyo set down the moment itself: “I remember well the moment of her death, snuggling my head next to hers, her last exhale. The following minutes of silence.” What was left, he wrote, were memories “of her brilliant mind and her ruts, of her grace and her stumbles, her strength and her fragility, her wisdom and her fallacies, of her fierce certainty of right and wrong.” And a verdict: “Hers is the sane Human Design… a lone and persistent voice for decades. Zen Human Design would not exist without her. Auracle would not exist without her.”²

* * *

In December 2024, a popular Human Design Substack called Mystical Heretic published an essay titled “The Cult-Like Behavior in the Human Design Community.” Its author, Chiara, was a longtime HD practitioner in the middle of leaving the system. The essay drew sustained engagement from inside the practitioner community in the months that followed. The comments section filled with practitioners who recognized themselves in what she described, the absolutism, the elitism, the language as brainwashing, the shaming of those who left. Toward the end of the piece, she mentioned that a friend had recently lent her a book.

A friend recently lent me the book Human Design Revealed, which was written by two early followers of the system called Chaitanyo and Zeno. They purport that Human Design diverted significantly from its origins as soon as Ra started coming up with specific language, phrases, and keynotes. As I was skimming through the book, I realized how boring and unsexy the basics of Human Design really are. There are no simple solutions given. There are no “do this and X will follow.” The authors focus on awareness as the only gift of this system. They do not believe in the laws of Type or Aura — they tell you to figure your life out for yourself.

Chiara was decades younger than Zeno had been when Zeno first met Ra. She had never met either Zeno or Chaitanyo. She had arrived independently, through her own observation of the institutional pattern, at the diagnosis Zeno had made in 1997 and held for the rest of her life. The book had been published twelve years before the essay. It had been waiting on a shelf, lent by a friend, available to anyone who looked.

That is how this kind of work survives. Not by going viral. By being there when someone is ready to find it.

* * *

The Human Design world in 2026 is enormous. It is also, in Zeno’s analysis and Chaitanyo’s continuing documentation of it, almost entirely built on the overlay Ra introduced in May 1997. The labels have become the language. Type and Strategy and Authority and Profile and the Not Self and Deconditioning are now the vocabulary through which most of the world understands what Human Design is. Courses sell for thousands of dollars. Certifications proliferate. Social media algorithms amplify whoever speaks most fluently in the established vocabulary.

None of this would have surprised her. She had watched the same dynamic at Rajneeshpuram: a teacher with genuine insight whose followers replace direct observation with the teacher’s words, until the words matter more than the thing they pointed at. She had spent thirty years trying to hold the pointing finger still while the world looked at the finger.

What she could not do was stop it. She could only be an alternative. A small practice in Taos, a handful of students who understood the distinction, a partner who built the tools and kept the archive and kept writing after she could not. A body of recorded work that will outlast the decade that tried to ignore it.

* * *

She was not looking for a large audience. She said so explicitly, in several newsletters, in the video where she introduced Zen Human Design to the camera: this is for people who are committed and in love with making the world a better place. Not everyone. The ones who want to actually see.

The Friends and Colleagues model that Chaitanyo is building is the institutional form of this: not a school, not a certification mill, not a hierarchy of levels and prices and titles. A small group of people who have done the work, who can look at a body graph and say something true about it in their own words, who stay in contact, who grow. The goal is not scale. The goal is that the work survives.

Real Human Design doesn’t tell you how to behave. It tells you how you behave. Chaitanyo wrote this after Zeno’s death, but it is her sentence. She said it in different forms for thirty years. The body graph is a map of your actual function, not a prescription for your ideal function. You have been living your design since the moment of your birth, without anyone’s help. The chart does not improve you. It shows you what you already are.

She believed this completely. She taught it relentlessly. She demonstrated it by living a life that corresponded, with uncomfortable precision, to exactly what her chart showed a life with that design would look like, the clarity, the cost, the stubbornness, the joy.

When an online post after her death recycled the institutional reading of her temperament, Chaitanyo answered it on the record: “Zeno was not ‘moody,’ her emotions didn’t ‘go up and down like a wave,’ as Ra and his parrots insist. In fact, she was always a calming, balancing and upbeat emotional presence. You can take that from me: I’ve had 30 years of experience being very close to her, longer than anyone else.”³

* * *

She died in Chaitanyo’s arms on a Wednesday evening in March 2020, in Taos, New Mexico, with the sun already down. She was sixty-seven years old. She had spent the last three years of her life in a care facility, unable to walk, unable to type, barely able to speak, and in the report of everyone who visited her: good spirits, telling stories, laughing, pleased about small things.

The archive is there. The recordings are there. The software still works, maintained by Erik Memmert in Augsburg since 1993. The book is in print. The ephemeris is in its thirtieth year.

She made the work independent of herself. That was the last thing she had left to do, and she did it.

* * *

She did not live to see the European court ruling. It came ten weeks after she died.

On 3 June 2020, the Tribunale di Firenze (the Court of Florence, Companies Section, presided by Judge Niccolò Calvani) issued an ordinance in case R.G. 2756/2020. The plaintiffs were Nicolas Caposiena and Human Design Italia S.n.c., the Italian licensee of Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. They had sued the Italian publisher AAM Terra Nuova S.r.l. for releasing Chetan Parkyn’s book Human Design, Scopri la Tua Vera Natura in June 2019, claiming exclusive rights in Italy and the Italian language to the Human Design System.

The court rejected the claim and ordered Caposiena and Human Design Italia to pay €6,750 in costs.

The reasoning matters. The court did not find that Jovian Archive had no rights to anything. It found something more specific. Under both U.S. copyright law (raised by the defense) and the Berne Convention, copyright protects the form of expression, books, writings, specific works. It does not protect the underlying ideas, procedures, or methodology a work describes. The Human Design System as a system, the court found, falls into the latter category: it covers ideas, procedures, methodologies of representation that can be freely talked about, mentioned and illustrated even by those who are not the creators, without this infringing intellectual property rights.

Krakower’s specific writings could be copyrighted. But Krakower could not hold a copyright over the system itself, only over the books he wrote about it. And whatever specific work-rights might have transferred to Jovian Archive, in the court’s words, “neither it nor its assignees could prevent others from publishing other works on the Human Design System.”

The decisive sentence followed: “there is no evidence that Krakower has sold any rights to JA.” The plaintiffs had assumed the chain of title from Krakower to Jovian Archive to Perrucchetti to Caposiena. The court found no documentation that the chain existed. The defense had also raised the question of whether Jovian Archive even refers to a single entity, three separate companies share variations of the name; the claimants insisted it was always the same; the court found the question “irrelevant at this point” and moved on.

The ruling vindicated what the documentary record had always shown. The original bodygraph rights had been held by Jürgen Saupe until his death in 2002, then passed to his family. The original software, Neutrinos Through Windows, had been built in 1993 by Erik Memmert in Augsburg and was still being maintained there three decades later, independent of any Jovian license. The Human Design Graphics still carried Erik Memmert’s copyright. The 2000 research paper still carried Rave Life Sciences, LP’s copyright. The first American school had been built by Zeno and Chaitanyo with the 1993 contract Ra had drafted in their kitchen. The institutional narrative, that Jovian Archive held exclusive rights to the system Ra had transmitted, had been a construction. The Florence court named it that.

The Florence tribunal was a court of law making a finding about specific facts, not a believer in Human Design. The findings were narrow and precise: no evidence Krakower sold rights to Jovian, no exclusive rights over the system as a system, no infringement of Caposiena’s valid trademarks because Parkyn had not used them as trademarks of his own product. And in one line that does not appear in U.S. case law but appears in this Italian ordinance, the court named what it was looking at: in our legal system the representation of ideas is free and is not subjected to cult-like behaviors.

The defense that produced that ruling was not built by Terra Nuova’s lawyer alone. The Florence attorney who argued the case, Donato Nitti, had assembled a coalition of witnesses and document custodians whose names, by the time the ruling was issued, traced a complete map of the documentary record this book has been following. Eleanor Haspel-Portner contributed the research record. Chaitanyo contributed the historical archive at humandesignsystem.com. Karen Curry Parker contributed the post-Ra teaching record. Erik Memmert contributed the software and the Human Design Graphics copyright. Chetan Parkyn was, of course, the named defendant’s author. The case that overturned Jovian Archive’s claim of exclusive ownership was built by the same people the institution had been trying to disown for two decades. They knew what they had, they kept the documents, and when the moment came, they brought them.

The European ruling was not the only public record that disconfirmed the institutional narrative. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has been doing the same work, more quietly, for longer. Between 2004 and 2023, the Jovian Archive enterprise filed a succession of U.S. trademark applications on the Human Design System and its imagery, under three different corporate names: Jovian Archive Corporation in 2004, Jovian Archive Media Ltd. in 2018, and Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. in 2023. Every attempt on the name failed. The 2004 filing on the words THE HUMAN DESIGN SYSTEM was abandoned in 2006 because the applicant could not file a Statement of Use, the document required to prove that the mark was actually being used in U.S. commerce. A companion 2004 filing on the mandala-and-bodygraph image fared differently: it registered in 2007 (Reg. 3264277, held by Jovian Archive Media, Inc. of Toronto), then was cancelled in February 2018 when the registrant failed to file the Section 8 declaration of continued use. Four months after that cancellation, Jovian Archive Media Ltd. refiled on the same image; the new application registered in July 2019 (Reg. 5797541), its own Section 8 declaration was accepted in June 2025, and the mark stands live on the register. The Singapore entity then refiled the words THE HUMAN DESIGN SYSTEM once more (in two separate applications, covering educational services and electronic publications) and abandoned both. Behind those filings the corporate entity itself kept moving. An Ontario company, Jovian Archive Media Inc., had been registered in 2004, with its headquarters listed in Ibiza, where Ra lived. The Singapore entity that today claims the worldwide rights, Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd., was not incorporated until 16 November 2016, five years after Ra’s death. The marks the Singapore entity did finally secure, both in 2025, were brand-name marks only, MYBODYGRAPH HUMAN DESIGN (Reg. 7724676, registered March 11, 2025) and JOVIAN ARCHIVE HUMAN DESIGN (Reg. 7892431, registered August 12, 2025), and each registered solely on the condition of a disclaimer entered, in identical words, on both registrations: “No claim is made to the exclusive right to use ‘HUMAN DESIGN’ apart from the mark as shown.” A trademark disclaimer is precisely that concession: the registrant keeps the composite mark but states, on the federal record, that it claims no exclusive right to the disclaimed words on their own, which remain free for anyone else to use. In disclaiming “Human Design” in both of the registrations that carry the words, the institution conceded, on the record, that it cannot own the term. On the U.S. trademark register, in 2026, Jovian Archive holds no live mark on the Human Design System as a name or on the name Ra Uru Hu. What it holds is narrower: the design registration on the mandala image and the two disclaimed composite logos. A design registration protects a specific image used as a brand; it does not reach the methodology the image depicts, and it does not prevent anyone from computing a chart, drawing a bodygraph, or teaching the system. And trademark rights are territorial in any case: these were United States filings, reaching at most the surviving image mark and composite logos within the United States, not the words, and not the world. The only durable live marks on a Human Design term belong to a different entity entirely (Inner Human Design Inc., the California corporation Lynda Bunnell registered in 2002) and cover the BG5 business-coaching brand (the marks BG5 and Base Group 5, for “business advisory services”), not the Human Design System itself. The institutional claim that has been printed at the bottom of jovianarchive.com for two decades is not supported by the federal record it gestures toward.

Marga, the Italian Human Design teacher who wrote the contemporary account of the Florence proceeding for Osho News a few weeks after the ruling, named what the case did at the level practitioners would feel it: “this Court Order is an important precedent for any other lawsuit that might be initiated by Human Design Italia, Jovian Archive or any other organization or individual claiming intellectual property on the HD system. And it is important also for all the independent HD readers, teachers and writers — many! — that have been bullied through the years.” That was the practical consequence. For twenty years, independent practitioners around the world had been operating under the shadow of an institutional claim that their work required a license from a corporation in Singapore (or Canada, or somewhere) and a certification from a school in California that the corporation had blessed. The Florence court found no evidence that the corporation owned what it was licensing. The U.S. Trademark Office never let it register the name of the system. The independent practitioners had been bullied with a stick that, when finally examined under bright light by people who knew where to look, turned out not to be there.

That, in the end, was what Zeno had been saying for twenty-five years. Not that the system was wrong. That the institutional claim to own the system was unsupported. A European judge looked at the documents Jovian Archive could produce and reached the same conclusion she had reached from inside the original circle: the claim had no basis. The mechanic belonged to whoever could see it. The interpretation belonged to whoever offered it. The institution had been claiming what it could not prove.

She did not get to read the ruling. She would have nodded at it.

* * *

The body graph is a crystalline structure. It shows you, in the most honest language available, the refraction of totality that arrived as you, the specific pattern of definition and openness that has been your design since birth. It is unchanging, available to be studied, available to be tested against experience, available to teach you something true, if you are willing to look at the picture without needing it to say what you already believe.

This is what she offered. This is what remains.