Everything to understand about these Lines is to understand it in the context of an audition, where you’re going to audition for a part in a film. They’re going to take all of these people who are going to be auditioning and they’re going to give them the exact same dialogue. In other words, they’re going to give them the same Lines to express.

They’re going to give them a particular circumstance, they’re going to give them some kind of fundamental motivation. But ultimately, they’re there to express that Line, and they’re all going to read the same Line. Yet, we all know there is an extraordinary difference from one actor or actress to another in doing the same Lines, because it isn’t the same Line.

I don’t want you to get stuck there. It’s important to understand how they work, but it’s important to understand something about the Line. The way a Line lives is through your holistic life. It doesn’t live alone as an aspect. We deconstruct it and look at it as an aspect, but it isn’t an aspect. It is alive within the construct that is you; that thing that is held together in the illusion of its separateness.

The only way that a Line can truly be expressed is through the life. Think about the nature of the life. Human Design is about coming to grips with what it is to be a binary consciousness; what it means that we have two ways in which we are designed to operate in terms of our cognitive potential. One is the Design, the Design Crystal. One is the vehicle itself; the vehicle that is the life. The other side of that is the possibility of the self-reflected consciousness, the possibility of being aware.

When we deconstruct and break down all of these things, we get all these neat little aspects. But in fact, the whole surface, the whole reality is what we live holistically. When we look at somebody’s design, when we see their openness, when you know that that openness is going to feed not-self strategy into their mind that is going to be their decision maker, then you know how these Lines are going to be read. They’re going to be read in the same way.

It’s like having all of those actors and actresses on that stage and they all deliver their Lines in the same homogenized way with no uniqueness and no spirit. There’s nothing that gives you a sense that you believe what they are doing, what they are saying, what they are trying to live out in the role that they’re given.

This is us. Something to grasp about these Lines is that they’re your script. And it doesn’t matter how well you understand the script itself. It doesn’t matter whether you have the intellectual tools to parse it down to its minutiae. That isn’t where the movie is. That isn’t where it comes alive. It comes alive in your life. And it means that you have to be correct for it to be correct.

Excerpt from The Lines of Consequence

Ra Uru Hu was the Human Design System’s founder and messenger. Ra dedicated 25 years of his life to the development and teaching of the System around the world until he passed away in 2011.