Human Design Foundations

Crystals of Consciousness and the Magnetic Monopole

The passenger, the vehicle and the driver: Human Design's account of the three parts that make up a person and why the mind is meant to ride, not steer.

Underneath the chart, Human Design carries a story about what a person is made of. It is the most mythic part of the system, and you do not need it to read a BodyGraph. It is worth knowing because it explains the language that runs through everything else: passenger, vehicle, driver.

Two Crystals

The story begins with a division at the start of the universe into two families, a yin family that has mass and a yang family that is light. Everything that exists is said to carry a fragment of one or the other, which Human Design calls a Crystal of Consciousness. The word crystal is an image: it describes something structured that holds an orientation.

A human being carries two. The Personality Crystal, from the yang side, is what you experience as yourself, the mind, the one who thinks it is living your life. It sits at the top of the BodyGraph, in the Head Center. The Design Crystal, from the yin side, builds and runs the body. It sits in the Ajna Center. The black and red on your chart are the imprints these two received, three months apart.

The Driver

The third part is the Magnetic Monopole, placed in the G Center at the centre of the chest. It has two jobs. It holds the two crystals together for a lifetime, so that a mind and a body that would not naturally cohere experience themselves as one person. And it steers: it is what Human Design says carries you along your particular path through life, which the system calls your geometry. It only attracts, never repels, which is why it is described as the source of love and of the pull towards the people and places that are right for you.

Passenger, Vehicle, Driver

Put together, the three make the image the whole system rests on. The body is a vehicle. The Magnetic Monopole is the driver, and it already knows the route. The Personality, the mind, is the passenger in the back seat. Trouble starts when the passenger reaches for the wheel, which is what mental decision making is. Strategy and Authority are the practical means of letting the passenger settle back and watch the scenery while the vehicle goes where it was always going. That is the whole of Human Design in one picture: not a way to take control, but a way to stop fighting for it.

How Far to Take It

Ra Uru Hu presented this material as what he was told, and he was clear that nobody was required to believe it. The mechanics of the chart stand on their own. Treat this page as the backstory that makes the vocabulary make sense, and let the experiment of living by your Strategy and Authority be the test of whether the picture is useful.

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Created by Peter Low, Human Design Practitioner. Part of the Human Design atlas.