Pentas show off. Pretentiousness is not personal to humans. You will not find a single Line in the 384 Lines of the Rave I’Ching, and I know because I wrote them, that says anything about pretentiousness. It’s a Penta attribute. It has nothing to do with us. Pentas are pretentious. They show off their new cars, the clothes of their children, all of this kind of stuff. In other words, the Penta is always demonstrating to everybody that: “We are the gene pool.”

Think about classic suburban neighborhoods—wow, is that frightening—but anyway, think about it. You have all these Pentic families there and they’re all in competition. I had one of the most bizarre experiences of that. Years ago, I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was there for three weeks. I was doing a series of teaching. I was staying in somebody’s house in one of these new suburban areas in Santa Fe.

The day after I came there, I watched out the window a whole bunch of kids all excitedly putting up a basketball thing in a driveway of one of these houses. By the end of the three weeks, there were six or seven of them that had been put up on the street. This is Penta.

Do you know what that’s like? You live in one of these areas and you’ve got a neighbor that never paints their house, never cuts their lawn, do you know what kind of problems that creates? The whole Pentic thing comes to the surface. “We’re here to demonstrate. Our viability and success as a biological group and this one’s no good.” It’s Penta. They’re incredibly competitive.

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.