Basic Mechanics of Human Design

Definition: Body - Mind

A human blueprint or chart consists of two different consciousness units ("consciousness crystals") that each received a different planetary imprinting. These imprints are specified by all the numbers you see in the illustration of your chart. The two consciousness units are imprinted with the gates that connect the energy centers in your body and determine the flow of your life force. There are 64 gates in a human chart and 9 energy centers (chakras). Aura type and inner authority emerge from the way your definition and energy flow is set up by both the unconscious design and the conscious personality sides.

The left side, illustrated in turquoise, determines the imprint of the body, our vehicle. It is mainly unconscious to us and it needs a lot of awareness to access it. Usually, we just happen to play it out without much awareness. Nonetheless, the unconscious body imprint is what holds the keys to navigate us safely through life. The body receives its imprint prior to birth.

The right side, illustrated in purple, is the personality, the witness. It is the programming of your eternal base consciousness that came into this body to observe and to grow.
It determines the way in which your perception and awareness have been programmed in this current incarnation. This is what we are mainly aware of and what we usually identify with. The personality side is what classic astrology is based upon, because in the same way as an astrological chart, it is derived from the exact moment of birth.
However, the unconscious design side is derived from a specific moment in time, approximately 3 months prior to birth. Classic astrology only looks at half of the chart. Classic astrology is not aware of the unconscious side's existence and importance. It is a true gift to combine all disciplines and to be able to look at both sides with so much depth of detail!

There also is another plot twist: the personality side is only the witness-consciousness. It is not what drives us and what can navigate us safely. Instead, this is the foundation of our mind. It is here to observe. It is who we think we are and it indicates how we perceive the world we live in. The personality side is just about perception and sharing our perception. The unconscious side is the body, it is the life.
What drives us and what guides us safely through this life is the body and its imprint, that we are given in this incarnation. It is a fully automated navigator if we let it navigate. But instead, we are tempted to navigate life by making mental decisions, even against our inner resistance and body wisdom. Because classic astrology does not include our inner authority and body wisdom, it can enforce purely mental decision-making, unless it is strictly used as a tool for mental growth. We easily let the mind and the personality witness interfere with the path that feels right for us. The personality is not here to decide where to go. Our personality can think up things, but if the body wisdom does not support what we thought up, then that plan or those ideas are not supposed to work. The personality is here to observe the life that the unconscious body side is programmed to lead us through. The more we relax into that automatic navigation by following our inner authority, the more capacity for wisdom opens up because our witness consciousness is freed to SEE once it stops trying to figure out what to do and where to go. This is the point in life where true wisdom begins to emerge.

Most of the wisdom in life will emerge out of our openness, the third component in the mix. (1: definition of the unconscious design, 2: definition of the conscious personality, 3: openness illustrated as white in the bodygraph)

Openness

Your definition, the turquoise or purple aspects, define you in a very specific way. These aspects are reliable and fixed.
Opposed to that, Openness is what you are not and where you are receptive and open to everything that comes from outside of you.
Those parts of your blueprint where you are not defined in a specific way are referred to as openness. Openness is illustrated by no color (white).

Your openness describes themes in which you are open to experience all the variety and variants that exist out there. These are themes that are temporarily activated by the planetary transits and by other people, but they do not belong to you. They are not at the core of what defines you. Do not identify with them, they are temporary guests. Openness shows you where you are vulnerable to the outside and it shows you where you go to school in life. In your openness you can really learn a lot from others and a lot about others.
If you identify with what is not you and if you let it influence your decisions, you will have a hard time. You will be living what you are not. Everyone has parts in their chart that are more vulnerable than other parts. In your openness, you can find your biggest vulnerabilities.
It shows us where we are conditioned to be who we are not. It shows us where we are easily warped away from our true nature and knocked off course.

You amplify the energy that you take in through your openness. It might be amplified by 150%, it might be amplified by 500%, that differs. But you will always feel it stronger than the person with the definition, who conditions you. You will amplify the other person's energy and that can be very difficult to handle.

Energy Centers (Chakras)

Energy centers are hubs in your body that connect to each other through different life forces. Energy centers are also called "chakras". Until around 1781, a human had 7 main energy centers. There exist a lot of old texts and mystic studies on the 7-centered human that preceded us. Since 1781, we humans have been born with 9 main energy centers. Now we no longer have 7 main centers, but 9. Although the 7-centered chakra system is still used everywhere, it has been outdated for more than 200 years and today there is no 7-centered person alive on the planet anymore.
We have evolved into a 9-centered being.

Just as the gates, the centers can be unconsciously defined (turquoise), consciously defined (purple) or open (white). When you see a center that is colored purple and turquoise at the same time, it means that there are conscious and unconscious gates defined in this center.
Two opposing gates activate a channel and form a reliable life force. When those two opposing gates meet, they define and activate the energy centers at both ends. The gates, that are defined in our rave chart, determine the channels that are activated in our rave chart. They determine the flow of energy.

Gates and Lines

Every gate has 6 sub-divisions. These sub-divisions are called lines. In other words: A gate consists of 6 lines. The lines do not change the energy flow of the channels from chakra to chakra. Only a change of the gate itself can do that. When a line changes within a gate, the bodygraph and the way in which it is colored stays the same.
Nonetheless, the lines deliver important information on how exactly the character of a certain gate plays out.

I Am Awareness versus Collective Shadow & Mental Reasoning

Evolution versus Involution

So far, we have looked at what you are (defined gates, channels and centers) and what you are not (open gates, channels and centers).
What you are not is totally open and very changeable. What you are is defined in a very distinct way.

When we further investigate the characteristics of the line within a gate, there are two ways in which the line can be fixed.
It can be fixed through the individual expression of the Self indicated through an upward pointing arrow (I Am Awareness).
It can also be fixed through the collective hive mind indicated through a downward pointing arrow.

It is important to recognize that this is collective, it is not your individual expression. We could also call it the collective shadow being a part of your personal shadow. It is a collective shadow archetype that lives within you, especially through your mind and through your mental process. When we are in a heavy emotional place, the emotions also fuel the shadows and problematic ways of thinking. When we are in difficult emotional states, we can easily talk ourselves into our shadow archetypes and cement them further through the stories that we tell ourselves. However, the more often we catch ourselves, the more we can pull back and attempt to see things more objectively. We can recognize that emotions pass through and that likely, or hopefully, things will look different the next day or the next month. We can catch ourselves when we tell ourselves disempowering stories that cement our shadows. Bit by bit, the shadows are being transmuted in that emotional process.

The shadow archetypes are places where you are extremely tempted to act inauthentically, to not follow your inner knowing and to make decisions motivated by the “this and that” of your mind, of your conditioning and your upbringing. There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing wrong with you, so please don't be harsh on yourself for carrying the shadow aspects that you carry. Everyone has shadow aspects and there is nothing that you can do to eliminate the predisposition from your design. These are the shadow archetypes that you are given to work with in this lifetime - not to get rid of them, but to help transform them into something much lighter and to help taking the collective heaviness out of them through raising your awareness. Every human being on the planet is a transformational agent for those shadow archetypes. We all are taking part in transforming them into something lighter and to bring them to a higher awareness. In that sense, we are all caught in the same movie, although it does not appear to be that way, and although we are all looking at the movie through differently colored glasses and through a different filter. The archetypes, that we are given to work with, are different in each one of us and they determine the direction and the purpose of our life.

While we are not responsible for inheriting certain shadow archetypes, we are responsible for educating ourselves and for working with these shadow archetypes in the best way possible. The more we avoid working with our shadows, the more we act out of ignorance in disregard of natural laws, and the more we will get punished by karma (cause and effect). It is in our own best interest to understand our shadows, as well as our openness, to understand how we operate and to understand how the world operates. That kind of understanding increases the quality of life.

The shadow aspects can be really difficult to handle. But it is of no use to forcefully fight against these collective archetypes - it is one person against the world. What you (and all of us as individual human beings) can do is to accept the shadow archetype, to keep recognizing it clearly and to integrate it into your daily awareness. That way, when the shadows come up, you can consciously remind yourself of them. With every month that passes you will take them less seriously and you will be less tempted to act upon them because you see with more and more clarity how these archetypes are trying to fool you.
The downward pointing arrows indicate the shadow side of the particular archetypes. They are the greatest places of mental and emotional maturation. If we start to recognize our shadow archetypes and work with them consciously, our mind and our emotions slowly start to turn into our strongest ally instead of being the self-sabotaging enemy.
The more trauma we have experienced as a child, the more difficult it can be to find a healthy process of emotional processing and mental processing. It is more difficult, but very possible. Trauma can be released from the body.
Trauma is stored as memory in the body. It can distort our frequency and steer the wheel into a direction that is not healthy for us. After having gone through childhood trauma or even abuse, regulating oneself becomes much more difficult when there is a constant inner battle with the trauma and fears derived from it. That is why it is so important that we raise our children in the most considerate ways that we can, and that we don't inflict our own traumata onto them. Later in their life, this will make it much easier for them to work with their own shadow archetypes productively, instead of inflicting the trauma they experienced onto others, and instead of continuing to be open to traumatic experiences because they perceive that as normal.

There are those kinds of shadows that aren't that big of a threat to ourselves and to others. And then there are those kinds of shadows that can be a real threat to ourselves and to others. Some shadows are simply annoying, some shadows can produce horrible results.
Some people are born with a set of less threatening shadows into a caring and nurturing family and thus have an easier time to surf their shadows.
Some people naturally have a more difficult time with deep-rooted and very threatening shadows that are further enforced by a lack of supportive and nurturing upbringing. These are the two extreme ends of the spectrum and most people are somewhere in the middle.
In case you would locate yourself towards the very difficult end of the spectrum, that does not mean that you are a failure. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means that you have a really tough job that requires a lot of diligence to succeed. It also means that if you manage to succeed, through your own transformation you embody the change that the world needs so much. Even if you feel you just do a mediocre job at damage control, that job of yours can already change a lot and prevent a lot of damage, that otherwise would have been inflicted.
If you come from a tough family background, you can see that as limiting. But at the same time you can also see the potential in it, to stop an ancestral line of trauma that has been inherited from generation to generation without ever having been overcome. In this day and age of the internet, of easily accessible available information and of deep social changes and advancements, you have a good chance at resolving that ancestral line of trauma and of not passing it on to your children unfiltered, so that they can have a better start into life. Since you know how it feels and have lived through hardships, you are already more sensitized to the issue than someone who has just been lucky. This understanding from experience can help you to make changes for the good. That is the deep, deep potential in it: to transform and annihilate very old dysfunctional lines of trauma.

No one knows exactly to the very detail how this works. There are very deterministic and pessimistic approaches, but then there also are very optimistic approaches that can almost be seen as naive whitewashing. Guided by studying all details of the mechanics and guided by experience, I try to find the most realistic middle ground that includes what is possible and excludes what is the most unlikely wishful thinking or a limiting trap. I want to find the most realistic and practical approach that isn't just a mental exercise, but that can truly help people transform while staying in touch with reality.
That being said, I take a more optimistic stand because I have experienced people with shadow-fixings living their individual higher expression instead of the shadow. When they live their shadow, they live it in ways that are either just weird and not damaging, or that even are productive instead of destructive. Generally, the shadow is where our demons sit, but through inner work, it can become productive and even beneficial. My understanding is that the more we find ourselves and the more we live ourselves, the more we can shift the frequency of our own shadow and of the collective shadow into a unique expression that becomes way less damaging than the shadow was. The shadow-fixing does not go away, but when we meet the shadows more consciously with awareness, they become a lot less damaging and much easier to live with. This happens because we stop living out the collective shadow when we stop mental reasoning and stop making unaware mental decisions. Awareness changes everything. This is the bedrock of what knowing the mechanics of one's own chart can do for a human being. Knowing oneself transforms the mind and its urge to be the ultimate authority. Self-knowledge can lead to a more balanced emotional life. It is likely to also transform the shadow-fixings and the way we approach them. The more we decondition, the more patience we gain and the less of a chance do our shadow-fixings have to fool us into taking actions and directions that are not ours. In my observation, we will shift from living the unhealthy aspects of the planet that fixes a line into the collective shadow consciousness, towards living the healthy aspects of that planet.

It is important to recognize that the collective shadow aspects are nothing that you are personally responsible for and there is nothing wrong with you in living them. We have no choice in that. We are given what we are given. But through practicing awareness, we can do our best in integrating the lighter aspects into our own lives for our own benefit and for the benefit of those around us. We can't integrate them by force, but only by contemplating them and by seeing the pattern behind them again and again. Through raising our awareness we can make the best of what we are given and we can do our part in transmuting the collective shadow. The first step in doing that is to accept the shadows that we were given, to accept that we have lived them out, and to accept that we are living them out. Acceptance of a limitation is the first step to transcending it. And if we never transcend it, that's okay too. There is no need to prove that we can be good humans. What awareness and transcendence can do though, is to take away a lot of the suffering that we experience and it can make our relationships more fulfilling.