Human Design and Money: Material Dignity—Serving the Fractal, Not the Market
Material Dignity: Serving the Fractal, Not the Market
In this article, I hope to help you on your way with finding the livelihood that's correct for you - whether you're considering starting your own enterprise, or looking for something new to do.
Per invitation by Ninna Amora, I'm writing a short article on the nature of the fractal with regards to one's service, vocation, profession - and target audience or market.
This is something that has come up from various directions; from clients, students and friends who are exploring how to apply the Human Design system as a means of establishing their interface with the material world, the mundane bureaucracies and many economic barriers that are part of living in a homogenised environment.
A prominent set of questions that I see many people asking themselves includes:
"How do I reach my audience correctly, when I do not want to do it from a place of strategic manipulation and typical sales tricks?"
"How do I connect to the material flow authentically, when I can barely articulate who I am or what I'm about?"
To make a living by earning a financial income, there needs to be an entry point into the marketplace at some level. This is where society tends to demand clear identification; a reliable product or service that promises certain results in exchange for a set value. If you've got an undefined or completely open Heart Center, especially in combination with an undefined or open G - the Not-Self mind is probably already getting desperate.
At some point in our growth and maturation process, we're put in the position where there are many questions with no ready answers, and no acquired experience either. Something seems to be expected from us in order for us to make progress, but we have no clue how to meet that.
Whether we are young and just starting out, or we already have a career trajectory behind us, as we follow our strategy and authority (perhaps even going through the four radical transformations) then we're likely to reach a point at which we barely recognize the person in the mirror. We've changed so much, we have traded knowing for not knowing, certainty for uncertainty, mind for inner authority - we've become much like an alien to most people out there.
Being truly different in this world is something we bear, not as a burden, but as an ongoing empowering challenge nonetheless. The most difficult part is communication, crossing the divide between the differences that separate us in order to bring our message across - without abandoning our truth. It isn't easy to understand and be understood while operating from an irrational body-based authority..
One of my Living Your Design students recently told me it feels as though he's undergoing a metamorphosis, like growing a new skin that is still delicate and very sensitive, and yet he has to meet social complexity and harshness with this unexpected sensitivity on a day to day basis. Suddenly dropping the Not-Self armouring can leave us feeling vulnerable and naked in the face of people who do not seem ready or willing to understand where we're coming from. If we add an undefined Solar Plexus to this story, the nervous system can be particularly apprehensive, touchy and nervous about being revealed for who we really are.
The pain can be significant to such a degree that there is very little bandwidth left for actually coming to understand the other, falling back on our own assumptions and projections rather than dialogue and listening - because it requires less energy.
Putting things into perspective: we are shapeshifting back into who we were born to be, reclaiming the gifts that are hidden in parts of us that were deeply wounded - once rejected by the world we now want to intimately connect to. By really grounding ourselves into the material plane. This is not simply a psychological adventure - this is as physical as it gets. It's a process that requires a lot of energy, and so we can expect to become more intolerant at first - it's a biological thing, nothing personal. Yet we have to be aware, or risk falling into contempt.
If you're recognizing yourself in this process, then it is your rite of passage of coming into spiritual adulthood. We are soon entering the next Global Cycle of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix, a time in which one of the keys to survival will be finding the spirit through materialism. For those of us who genuinely want to live in awareness and purpose, there is no sidestepping this anymore. Mother and Father's protection is diminishing and will start to be pulled away come 2027. It's time to emerge into the world on your own legs, in your own authority and in material dignity according to your unique spirit.
So far, I've mentioned three undefined Centers: the Heart, the G and the Solar Plexus. If, like me, you have all three of them undefined then you'll probably recognize they operate as a complex. In a recent post Laveena refers to them as 'The Big Three', and provides a simple step by step process to unravel them:
https://www.humandesign.live/posts/19899158
These three strong pain points can weaken one's self-esteem, sense of worth or value, and ability to confront emotional conflict and crises. Each of the shadows that we find in these Centers can prevent you from actually coming home to this planet, wandering endlessly through the mists of insecurity.
The Undefined Heart: 'I have to... in order to be valuable...'
The Undefined G: 'Fix an identity that secures direction and love...'
The Undefined Solar Plexus: 'Live a secret life (while avoiding the truth)...'
This complex brings the three strategies of these undefined Centers together into crafting what is basically a social caricature that reflects the homogenised environment. You shape yourself according to your conditioning in a way that secures you a place of belonging, compensation, and minimised hassle. 'Give them what they seem to want, so I can have and be something as opposed to nothing.'
Then when you get home you can look into the mirror (or every window reflection along the way) to check out the attributes you've adorned and misidentified yourself with to keep up your self-confidence. (Again there's no shaming in any of this, it's just the way in which these undefined Centers express themselves mechanically when conditioned.)
One of the manifestations of this is getting trapped and fooled by appearances. Homogenised society pollutes the collective projection field with all sorts of deceiving and distracting images that glorify the Not-Self. People hiding behind convincing facades of status, class, power, wealth - disguised in all sorts of material glamour in order to attract, seduce, distract and possess. This pollution does not only fill up our streets with advertisement, but it also fills up our minds with a plethora of conditioned ideas about what it means to be worthy of attention, support and financial compensation.
And the Not-Self makes its bargain plain: here are our ideal models, strive to look and behave like that and along the way we'll find something you can get paid for. If you don't, we'll ridicule or marginalise you. All homogenised conversation essentially ends every other sentence with 'good model' or 'bad model'. Thumbs up, thumbs down. I think we're all very aware of the mental judgment that goes on in everyone's heads.
To our own Not-Self mind, this is what the worry is about and it can trigger an identity crisis. We were raised to understand and express ourselves based on comparison with others, and this gives everyone else a reference point for mapping us onto their value hierarchy. The Not-Self defines relationships between self and other by contrasting the conditioned models that are being communicated:
You dress, walk and talk a certain way, which emulates a model that fits somewhere in the bigger picture of society where you think you should be in order to get what you think you want. Somebody else dresses, walks and talks a different way, you compare your models (totally subconsciously for most people), and you think they are 'that' and you are 'this' and therefore you 'should' or 'should not' interact a certain way - or can't even hope to interact. This is how we are divided and divide ourselves into social classes. It's how we give ourselves away to corporate behavioural psychoanalysts and algorithms because we're enthralled into a predictable pattern.
This is the conditioning we face when we are revamping our livelihoods from a place of unconditioned authenticity - and this is not a stellar issue for everyone. Some of us have a very clear and self-empowered sense of identity and role defined. Some of us have a very strong ego defined that can handle all of the above without losing themselves. Most of us do not.
What stood out to Ninna in our recent conversation, was a perspective on inequality that is not often discussed in Human Design circles. The conditioning that I just described above is not simply of the mind, unfortunately. We have concretised it into urban planning and law. This is where the Not-Self finds its juice, all the evidence it needs to back up its perceptions of not being good enough on the one hand, or feeling self-entitled on the other. It's the kind of context that leaves people struggling with the price tags of professional Human Design readings, and why you see certain geographic, economic and racial backgrounds dominate HD social media groups.
There is a limitation at work that we have to come to terms with, however distasteful it might be. The human population at large is segregated, and many people do not have access. And even when people do have access, a story in the mind often tells them they can't afford it or that they're being economically exploited just like everywhere else. As you probably heard Ra say - it's a dense Maya. So how do we cut through that?
In my work as BG5 Consultant, when I'm collaborating with people to find the work that is correct for them, a lot of energy is initially spent on discerning 'Who am I?' and 'What am I here for?'. The usual habit for people is to try and find some direct answers to those questions based on what I can analyse in the chart - followed by 'Now who can I sell this to and how do I go about it?'. Unless you're a 44/26 or a 1/8 with a bunch of third lines, from my perspective this is not the right approach - because we're playing right into divisive assumptions and conditioning.
I asked myself those questions for years, having acquired expensive business and economics degrees, having done a lot of introspective self-analysis and spiritual journeying - I had learned a lot, but gotten no closer to 'financial freedom' or articulating 'my service' in alignment with what I perceived my values to be.
The more I thought about these things, the more isolated I became, the more disconnected I felt from ordinary people. Not only that, but I also found myself more and more incapable of actually meeting genetic, cultural and economic difference. Regardless of the amounts of languages that I could speak. At some point, unless people were into Human Design, we basically couldn't sustain a meaningful conversation for more than a minute.
My Not-Self mind was roaring with assumptions that people wouldn't give me a chance based on what I looked like or how I spoke, while secretly rejecting everyone else by the same token. Feeling sorry for myself as 'a privileged white European dude on the Cross of Explanation' - haven't we had enough of those?
See, when people ask themselves "Now who can I sell this to?", chances are the mind is going to do some classic market segment analysis that reduces people to homogenised patterns. And though there is a place for that too, it isn't going to enliven your service and livelihood or help you understand what you're here for.
Taking a market approach like this follows an assumption that that's what your life is about - and it isn't. Your life, if you're here, is about expressing your Outer Authority as value for the other. That is something else entirely, and this is the only path to material dignity in alignment with who you truly are. If your way of making an income doesn't support that, you'll watch your spirit fade.
And this finally brings us to your fractal.
You are not here to serve a market, that's what it looks like on the surface and as we integrate into this mundane world, but that is not what your activity is. Don't let conditioning reduce you to that.
Just like everyone else, you're an aspect of existence itself. You're a differentiation of the Totality as it evolves and experiences consciousness within itself. As a nine centered form we get to share this process with each other in awareness. And because we are a fundamental part of the whole, we are intimately interconnected with everything else - according to very specific geometry. This geometry defines our innate place, and this place defines our value for others. All of this is coordinated by the monopole in the G Center and unfolds naturally.
There is nothing extra you have to do in order to be deserving, worthy, or competent enough to meet the forces that are here to nourish you. Just be yourself, doing what you love to do.
When you look at a fractal, what you're seeing is basically a self-similar form. A pattern that repeats within itself geometrically and connects all of its iterations in an underlying wholeness. There is a self-similarity like this that you share with everyone you ever encounter in life, at some level. This self-similarity is love.
When we analyse a chart, we can find fractals in many different ways. But for you to find out who you're here to serve with your Outer Authority, you have to find the fractal that corresponds to your correct trajectory through life. This is represented by the Nodes of the Moon.
Laveena teaches that the Design Nodes are 'Where You Be' and the Personality Nodes are 'What You See'. By bringing these two together with your incarnation cross, and by looking at this within the context of your chart as a whole, we can keynote and describe your place in the ecosystem - and how exactly you're here to bring value to the other in this life. These are the answers that catalyse significant breakthroughs for clients.
Ra Uru Hu was embedded into an environment where he was surrounded by other experimental 'freaks' who were ready to experiment with something new that he could initiate into the world. A shocking system rooted in his unique seeing about the nature of creative individual self-expression and mutative direction. A wisdom about the nature of limitation grounded in facts, voiced through his recognition of spirit - that innocence alone does not guarantee success. An impact that would allow future generations to survive the coming times. This was his fractal service.
It starts by understanding the difference between a 'market' and a 'fractal' (in Human Design terms):
A market is something you engage with in order to make money, to purchase something, or to leverage in order to build infrastructure.
A fractal, however, is your self-fulfilment through the other. It is who you are and where the illusion of separateness between self and other is eventually dissolved. The market is an abstract impersonal entity, the fractal is something you can actually care about.
When you can recognize your fractals by being correct in your own frequency, following your Type, Strategy and Authority into correct interactions, then you'll start to see what life is asking from you. You'll start to see the recurring themes in your life that you're here to learn about, you'll start to see Outer Authority being pulled from you to make a difference in someone else's life, and you'll start to notice what physically enlivens your spirit and body.
Putting this recognition into an articulate form that people can understand and compensate you for is a joyful and easy process. Whichever marketing strategies you then end up using, it follows correctness and awareness. And at the same time, your service is not strictly bound to the marketplace, it can occur anywhere anytime.
And so you'll notice something else too: the illusion of social class shatters. Who you speak or don't speak to is determined by correctness, not superficial appearance or preconditions. Whether the other is a beggar whose words you can't quite understand, an executive CEO whose experiential background intimidates you, or someone with a gender or skin colour you haven't seen before. When it's correct, there is value exchanged without effort. This doesn't mean you won't have to put energy into establishing a connection, a relationship, a mutual understanding - it may take work, but it'll be correct for you.
So as a BG5 professional, analysing a chart is one thing, helping someone identify how their fractal shows up in real life is another. And for yourself, receiving the analysis is one thing, but opening your eyes and ears to the world around you, putting your attention back out there to really see who is in your life - what enlivens them? This is something else entirely. (Shout out to Undefined G Projectors in particular.)
In the process whether we're moving through this ourselves or we're helping someone else find their way, we all find our edges. We encounter the limits to our empathy, our compassion, our understanding, and it's the relationship that provides us with the opportunity to grow by learning. We are mirrors for each other. Whenever you're listening to recorded lectures by Ra, pay attention to when he describes his own learning by relating to his students, given where he was coming from. It's quite humbling.
This is the trajectory of alchemy through relating, transmuting the shadows of our undefined centers into wisdom by living correctly. It's the only way you get to Outer Authority.
Your service is what characterizes the interaction and bonding along your fractal path through the material world (following your Profile). There is the enjoyment of correctness through cycles of pleasure and pain, cost and loss, profit and gain, and within that; the experience of flourishing as yourself - as you make a purposeful contribution to life and consciousness. Not because you have to. Not because it's the moral thing to do. Not because if you don't you're never gonna get what you want.
It just happens because you are who you are. And there is peace, satisfaction, success and surprise in knowing what that's like, and watching the material world roll out the red carpet in front of you.
Enjoy your movie,
Hagen
