Human Design Profile
Few things matter more—or feel harder to reach—than a sense of purpose. Life here is difficult, and the not-self dysfunction that permeates humanity leaves many people in dire straits.
Only a few have the resources—and the education—to explore deeper meaning, and privilege can sharpen the question: What is the point of this life? Human Design begins a journey through your differentiated traits, which can mature into a true role.
Your profile is your role—the costume you’re here to wear—and it becomes real only by living your truth.
Can you see the value and purpose of that role? As both mystic and mechanic, I know everything is endowed with purpose. Our dilemma is recognizing it—and claiming it. We’re all in motion.
As we move, we have the chance to mutate and evolve. Each of you has access to something humanity has never had before: a basic entry code.
This code helps you work with your nature—the open centers and gates, the program’s impact, the not-self, the mind’s turmoil. With it, you can gain a clearer view of what it means to be here. I told someone recently it’s a good time in my life, and after all these years in this work, I find real beauty in being in the world.
She didn’t know me through Design—she was a mother of one of my child’s schoolmates—and she said, “Nobody ever says that.”
Nobody says it’s a wonderful, good, beautiful life—exactly as intended: an extraordinary ride for passenger consciousness, a ride of non-interference.
Sit back in the vehicle and let it follow its course. When you drop resistance and allow the course, the purpose is automatic.
You go through your deconditioning process, and at the end, your purpose takes you over—not the other way around. It carries you the way you would carry a newborn, because that’s what you are: a newborn.
At the end of the next seven-year cycle, you’ll see what it means to be taken by your purpose—and how extraordinary the view is from the back seat of the limo. We begin with 1.3, the basis on which life finds its foundation: the foundation of all incarnative processes.
It’s also unusual in configuration. Of the twelve profiles, ten have personality and design in different trigrams. Only 1.3 (and later, 4.6) are fixed in one trigram—1.3 in the lower, 4.6 in the upper. The lower trigram matters because it never extends toward the transpersonal.
In other words, it’s the most self-absorbed of all profiles, beginning with first-line absorption. Remember the nature of a first line.
All first lines carry insecurity, which becomes fear: of the unknown, the unknowable, and especially of ignorance. The drive of investigation and introspection is to go deep enough to find a solid foundation. Without it, insecurity persists.
When we discuss profile, we’re looking at two separate things that become something else when they meet: personality and design. Personality is who you think you are.
It’s what you can consciously access. With a first-line personality, you identify with insecurity and fear, the need to dig in, and the need for a foundation.
But design—the unconscious—is inaccessible. It’s a mystery. Only over many years do we begin to recognize unconscious traits as genuine aspects of our nature.
With 1–3, the unconscious carries a third-line theme: trial and error on the material plane, the possibility of difficulties—what people call mistakes and failures. Consider what happens when you bring together two very different things.
The personality is framed by the “one,” the design by the “three.” Held together as “you,” they become more than either alone. A personality built to fear what isn’t solid ends up meeting all kinds of things that aren’t solid.
That’s the 1–3 life: discovery—finding out what doesn’t work.
I’ve said it many times, but it’s worth repeating: we’re dualistic.
We are this and that. Most people care only about what works, and they invest heavily in delusions about what can work.
Few are truly interested in what doesn’t work. Without that balance, we don’t find the way—and we waste enormous resources. We need those who can say, “I’ve been there. I tried it. It doesn’t work. Here’s why.”
Instead, we get insecure people who don’t feel worthy, who slip into pessimism and conclude life can only be bleak.
They believe the best can’t be achieved, dreams can’t be reached—on and on. That’s the great not-self disease of the 1–3. But when a 1–3 operates correctly and enters experience without inferiority, they build an extraordinary résumé of lived knowledge. Shared with others, it saves enormous waste.
Don’t go there—it doesn’t work, and I know it doesn’t work.
So don’t believe people who claim it does. We need our 1–3s. Welcome to our 1–4 day.
When you look at the 12 profiles, they can be divided in several ways. One useful split is two groups of six: six foundation profiles.
The foundation profiles are 1–3, 2–4, 3–5, 4–6, 5–1, and 6–2. The other six are changing profiles, recognizable because the personality and design lines are harmonics.
Today’s 1–4 is a changing profile. Changing profiles are roughly one-seventh as common as foundation profiles. If you look at the Human Design Global Survey, you’ll see the six foundation profiles dominating the distribution.
The six changing profiles sit below, at about one-seventh the size. At the personality level, foundation and changing profiles can look similar: what a 1–4 thinks they are is close to what a 1–3 thinks they are.
The difference is simple. In 1–3, the unconscious stays in the lower trigram: personal process, trial and error. The 1–3 child challenges parental authority the moment it sees cracks.
But 1–4 has a fourth line unconscious—upper trigram, already transpersonal. Fourth lines are here to influence the people they know.
Where 1–3 unconsciously cycles through falling and rising, 1–4 looks outward: Who can I influence? The 1–4 isn’t designed to focus on what doesn’t work; it’s designed to take a foundation and externalize it.
In other words, this child doesn’t challenge parental cracks; they express influence. Very different.
With 1–4, you’re dealing with something fixed. This first line investigates not just to know, but to communicate—to move information to others.
As you move from foundation to changing profiles, remember: at the personality level they can be very similar. What changes is the underlying chain—how information moves through genetic/cross/profile structures.
So the 1–4 is an investigator with real potential to influence, because the opportunity exists. Those opportunities depend on who is in their life.
Now we shift in personality. We’ve looked at first-line personalities through 1–3 and 1–4; now we meet the second-line personality.
This is a real difference: the first line digs inward for security; the second line isn’t interested in that. It’s guided by hopefulness.
In many ways, the second line is the natural. Its theme is the hermit—not in a romantic sense, but as: leave me alone.
I don’t want to be bothered. You can be near me—even live with me—just don’t bother me.
That’s the second-line theme. Because it’s a line of projection, it’s ultimately about receiving the call. In the lower trigram (personality lines 1, 2, and 3), gifts aren’t transpersonal.
They’re absorbed in their own process and don’t naturally orient to the other or recognize what the other can bring. The second-line personality says, “Leave me alone—let me handle my business.” Yet it’s designed to receive the call.
The other can see into them, which is why second-line beings often hide. “Hide” takes many forms.
It can be living behind closed doors, the way you dress, even your weight—anything that protects privacy by keeping others from seeing you.
It’s less about hiding inside than about demanding privacy. The second line is like a window: the other looks in and sees potential.
But being second line doesn’t mean you can study that potential into being. It’s simply there.
And the other wants to call it out. Second-line beings don’t like to study; it’s not their nature.
Yet the call is everything. I call the 2–4 the missionary: the fourth line underneath continues the chain.
We have the same unconscious theme as in 1–4: opportunism, and the potential to connect with others in order to influence.
With 2–4, once the call is received, the reticence disappears—like the smoker who quits or the alcoholic who quits and then becomes relentless in trying to convince others. A practical note: if you’re invited into a 2–4 home, don’t move anything.
Don’t shift the furniture. If you live with them, accept how fixed they are about their inner life. All of it points to the 2–4’s potential to be transformed.
No other profile carries the same depth and influence of transformation as 2–4. Today we also introduce the fifth line: heresy, seduction, paranoia, practicality—and constant pressure.
The fifth line is subject to positive projection—sounds great, but it starts immediately. A mother looks at her fifth-line baby and assumes it will be the most wonderful baby ever.
But life isn’t like that. The first bad day can damage that baby’s reputation for a long time.
It won’t be “the greatest baby.” If you look at fifth lines in the Rave I’Ching, you’ll see an exalted quality—because it’s projection.
It’s a projection the whole hopes will be fulfilled, so paranoia is natural to the fifth line. Now think about a 2–5.
That’s where we are today: a changing profile with a second-line personality.
So we have the hermit—“leave me alone”—yet also the personality meant to be called. But unconsciously there’s paranoia, and a reticence to be involved.
The 2–5 is the hermit in the cave. Even if it’s enlightened, when someone peers in and says, “Oh my God—look what’s in there,” the response is: go away, leave me alone.
The 2–5 lives a dilemma. The fifth line is seductive because it draws positive projection.
So the 2–5 pushes away with the personality, while calling with the unconscious. In the not-self, this creates deep dilemmas.
If you’re not operating correctly, you’ll never reach where all 2–5s must: self-motivation. They must find a way to get themselves going.
Because the fifth line harmonizes the two, it brings a twist: where the second line is here to be called, the fifth line is here to do the calling. So the 2–5 archetype must call itself. It isn’t someone else’s call.
It might be someone else’s hint, but not their call. This isn’t someone you can rouse to their feet. That’s not what they’re about.
Unless they rouse themselves, they won’t come out of the shell—nobody else can do it. You can’t motivate them into motivating themselves.
You can’t. Helplessness is extraordinary.
The closer we come to surrender—recognizing inherent helplessness—the easier everything becomes. In the end it’s mechanical correctness: if a 2–5 operates correctly, they will motivate themselves, sooner or later. That’s how the vehicle is meant to run.
It’s how you’re imprinted, and the only way you’ll fulfill your purpose here. Profile is a costume—but it doesn’t mean it fits.
In conditioning, 2–5s suffer whatever is tied to their type—anger, frustration, bitterness, disappointment—whatever it is.
They’re trapped, trying to be motivated by outside forces, when it’s only ever up to them. That isn’t selfishness; nobody else can do it for them.
There’s nothing out there that “turns them on.” They turn themselves on. I call them the black sheep.
You know, this is the black sheep profile. And I’m talking about the 3-5. And of course we have had a change now in our movement, in our journey through the profiles.
We have now entered into the realm of the third line personality. We saw the third line at the unconscious. But think about the difference.
If you have a third line at the unconscious, the trial and error process is not something you’re identified with. It’s just something that your personality tries to figure out. But when you’re dealing with it at the personality level, everything that you think of as yourself is on trial.
Every day, every moment, all the time. Who you think you are is a third line trial and error being who is fundamentally pessimistic about the nature of being. You know, look at the 13th gate third line.
You know, there is this belief that the best can never be achieved. It is inherent in the third line to discover that life isn’t all it’s made up to be, whether that’s about love or career or anything. And at the personality level, one is deeply identified with one’s mistakes and failures in this process.
Oh, third line personalities suffer a great deal in this life. And they suffer a great deal because their process of discovery is not understood. Not only is it not understood, but in fact they are punished for being what they are.
You know, they are punished for discovering that things don’t work. They’re told they were supposed to find out that it does work. You know, they’re accused of not doing it right and on and on.
It is their process. It is a process of trial and error. The advantage that they gain is often the last laugh.
Because the third line personality has a grasp of the material plane and can do very well financially in this life. When we’re looking at the three-five, we have already seen the nature of the fifth line, its combination of being projected on, so having opportunities in this life to have impact, and yet at the same time being paranoid because their reputations can be easily damaged. Think about what it’s like to be a three-five.
The reason that I call them black sheep is when I first arrived on the island of Ibiza in the early 1980s, there was a whole subculture that was here. They were basically outsiders in their own societies who, by the serendipity of geometry, ended up in the same place in the Mediterranean. And years later, when I would go through my process and I would begin to collect data and do charts of people that I knew, one of the things that was amazingly clear is that there was a disproportionate number of them who were three-fives.
I mean, you know, the three-five is born and the parent immediately projects on that fifth line that they’re going to be a wonderful child, that they’re going to be perfect. And, of course, they’ve got a third-line personality, so they’re going to mess it up right from the beginning. Anything that could go wrong will go wrong, and, of course, their reputation is going to suffer.
They’re going to be seen as a problem child, and if not a problem child, they’re going to be seen as an underachieving child, and if not an underachieving child, they’re going to be seen as a disappointment one way or another. And, of course, for these beings, how difficult it is, that pain. After all, it’s not their fault.
This is their nature. They are designed to go through that. After all, the great theme of the fifth line is its practicality.
The only heresies that ever have an opportunity to transform the planet are those that are practical. And one of the great advantages of the three-five is that they have deep potential for scientific merit. Their ability truly to be able to dig deep enough in to get past all the things that don’t work, to be able to finally find something that’s solid because they can’t break it, and that in that being able to fulfill the projection of the other with what is practical, and in doing so, call them with their power to call them.
So three-fives have this capacity for enormous transformation in the sense that they themselves, if they are psychologically balanced in this life, if they’re not living a life of runaways who lose their reputation and change their community and change their society and change their religion, it goes on and on and on. When they stop running, we’ll know that they’ve had parents who’ve been able to recognize them for the beings that they are and have treated them according to their nature and have honored them for the gift that they bring. The three-sixths is a changing profile and it is quite an experience to come in with the three-sixths as your vehicle in this life.
So much of that has to do with the fact that you’re dealing with a sixth line at the unconscious level. And of course, tomorrow we’re dealing with a sixth line in the profile. We’re dealing with the mutative structure of the sixth line profile life, that is a life that’s broken up into three parts.
And that when we’re dealing with the first part of that life, that is the first Saturn cycle of approximately 29 years, that what we’re dealing with is a process in which the sixth line actually lives out its harmony. In other words, it lives out a third line theme. All sixth line beings, through the sixth line itself, go through this process of moving from the subjective experience of their first cycle to the objective development that they have in their interregnum on the roof between the Saturn return and the Chiron return, and then the potential of flowering in the final stage, that is the off-the-roof stage where they can transcend the observer and observed and simply be, in that sense, be correct as themselves and thus fulfill their purpose as a leader.
And yet when we’re dealing with the three six, we’re dealing with a phenomenon in which the personality is a third line personality. It is already a personality that is here to deal with trial and error in this life. It is not a personality that’s here to only deal with the trial and error in the first 30 years of life.
In other words, this is a personality that’s always going to deal with the ups and downs of the third line life. And so in the first part of their life, in this first Saturn cycle of the life, the three six has to live out the three three theme. Now, at one level, there is a consistency in it.
It is rare in terms of profile, only the three six and the six three have this phenomenon in which there can be this true resonance between what the personality and what the design has to go through. But given the nature of the not-self, the advantage of such a serendipity is rarely taken. The not-self in dealing with 30 years as a three three gets deeply, deeply, deeply pessimistic about the nature of being.
I mean, they are simply pessimistic. You know, that the credo of the 13th gate, the third line that the best can never be achieved becomes the credo of their life. And yet at the unconscious level, they’re not there to be stuck with that third line.
There is this movement that’s going to take place in their 30s that is a movement that’s going to change from the unconscious level. In other words, despite the concerns, for example, of the personality, that the personality will no longer have this pure resonance with its unconscious. The unconscious isn’t going to be as concerned.
The unconscious isn’t going to be as subjective. Now, most three six beings who are not-self, who don’t have the opportunity of this knowledge, that the difficulties that they have in the first 30 years are difficulties they never get to transcend. In other words, they never escape them.
They never escape the pain that is inflicted in that process. And again, it goes back to my deep concerns about anyone who carries a third line theme or six line beings who live this theme in the first part of their life, to really understand the nature of the third line and its extraordinary beauty. That this is all about discovery.
It’s all about finding out. And it’s all about finding out the truth in many ways. Because the truth can rarely be kept from a third line being.
You know, sooner or later, they’re going to see what’s wrong. Sooner or later, they’re going to find out because that is their way. And that if we raise our third line children positively, that their third line process is not one of failure and mistake.
It’s one of search and discovery. Then we are going to have healthy third line beings and we’re not going to have these dilemmas. The 3-6 child needs to be nurtured in a very special way.
They have a great potential to explore, an enormous potential to discover, and a tremendous material potential in their life. The 4-6 is the close of the right angle process. And it is a beautiful mirror to the beginning of the process that we looked at when we examined the 1-3.
When we looked at the 1-3 right angle profile, we saw that it is unusual in that both of its lines, both the personality and design, are in the lower trigram. It gives the 1-3 that special quality of self-absorption that is in their nature. And when we come to the end of these 7 right angle profiles and we come to the 4-6, again we come to the same configuration on the other side.
In other words, what we’re dealing with is the only profile that has both lines in the upper trigram. One of the main differences between the lower and upper trigram is the way in which they deal with the other. When you look at your design and you look at an activation in your design, if that activation is a 1, a 2 or a 3, then you’re really focused on the gate itself.
You’re not in any way particularly interested on what’s on the other side of the gate, which means that you can often be quite surprised by being conditioned by it when it arrives. And when you’re dealing with the 4 and the 5 and the 6, the 4, 5 and 6 being upper trigram have a transpersonal quality. And if you have those activations in a gate, it’s looking across to the other side.
So when we’re dealing with a 4-6, despite the fact that it is right angle and has a geometry of its own personal destiny, it has tremendous transpersonal skills. And the key, of course, to the core of those skills lies in the fourth line personality. Now here we meet the fourth line personality for the first time.
The fourth line is the line of influence. It is the foundation of the upper trigram, the harmony to the first line. And so it is fixed.
But it’s not fixed in its pursuit of knowledge. It’s not fixed on investigating. It’s fixed on influencing.
What it wants to be able to do is take a foundation, not examine it, but take it and pass it on. And so the 4 is influential, and the 4 operates through opportunism. In other words, fourth line beings find their way in the world through those that know them, that can help them.
They are the ones who, their friends, their acquaintances, the circle of associations that they make up in a lifetime. Out of that lies their potential for opportunity and to be influential. A fourth line being can only influence people it knows.
No sense being a fourth line being and trying to sell things to a stranger. It’ll never work. But if you’re a fourth line being and you’re selling to somebody you know, then you’re going to be invariably a success.
And so everything about the fourth line opportunism is so important. That is, don’t leave a lover till you have another lover. Don’t leave your job till you have another job.
In other words, the opportunist must wait for the opportunity to come. Now, of course, having a sixth line unconscious means that the 4-6 will go through a 4-3 phase when it’s young. And this is the great danger for them.
And the danger is that they will associate with the wrong people. Remember, no 4-6 can truly be a success in this life without its allies. If it does not have the right allies, it will never have the right opportunities.
And so if you have a 4-6 child, one of the things to be concerned about is the friendships that it develops, the group that it runs with, so forth and so on. It also means that for the 4-6 being, the first 30 years can lead to pessimism about influencing others, can lead to pessimism about the nature of friendship. This is, after all, the line of brotherhood and sisterhood.
And yet for the 4-6, going up on the roof is one of the most important opportunities for them. When they’re about 30, this space between the Saturn and the Chiron, this is the opportunity for the 4-6 to take on its voyeuristic quality. That is, to be able to move towards its objectivity, to be able to see the subjectivity of its first 30 years truly in perspective.
And again, whenever you’re dealing with a sixth line in the profile, you need to see that as young people, as children, they need to understand their process so that they don’t get lost in the pessimism and take on, you know, the clothing of the third line martyr. A changing profile that has a very special name and purpose is the 4-1. And this is juxtaposition.
And you’ll notice that as we went through the right angle progression, on the design side, we were always staying within the same hexagram. 1-3, 1-4, 2-4, 2-5, 3-5, 3-6, 4-6, and then 4-1. And of course, this is the shift that’s taking place away from the right angle.
What it really means is that at the design level, we’ve actually entered into another hexagram which changes, obviously, the configuration of the cross and its meaning. And here in the 4-1, we have what’s called juxtaposition. And it is the juxtaposition cross that sits between the right angle and the four profiles of the left angle.
Now when we’re dealing with juxtaposition, we are dealing with a 4 and a 1. So again, in looking at all changing profiles, we see that they are harmonies. So we have already looked at the harmonies that have been there, for example, in the 2-5 and the 3-6. Here we’re looking at the 4-1 harmony.
We have a fourth line personality, the personality of the opportunist, the brotherhood, sisterhood, the ability to influence, all of these things that we’ve seen. But no longer do we have this 6 underneath. No longer do we have this upper trigram, tripartite life process.
Underneath what we have is a new foundation, a new foundation out of a different hexagram. And this new foundation, this first line unconscious, this is an introspective, investigating unconscious. And one of the things about the nature of the 4-1 that makes them so interesting is that they’re very, very different from other kinds of 4s.
You see, in most cases, the 4 is only interested in the transmission of the foundation. It is not interested in its investigation, its development, its creation. It’s not interested in those things.
It’s interested in seeing how it can get it across to the other. And in the configurations of the 4 that we see, all of them operate that way except the 4-1. Because the 4-1 is very unique in the way in which it tries to express its influence.
It tries to express its influence based on its own investigation. And as such, there is nothing more fixed than a 4-1. The other thing is that the 4-1 has a different geometry than the right angle.
Right angle geometry is a geometry of personal destiny. Personal destiny. But the moment that we reach the 4-1 juxtaposition, this transformation that has taken place at the design level, what we have here is fixed fate.
Now what’s so interesting about the nature of this fixed fate is that it’s really rooted in the 4-1’s inability to take influence from the outside. It cannot. It has that deep, deep 1 underneath that will demand that only what it investigates, only what it is secure in, is what is going to be expressed.
You know, it’s one of those things about a 4-1, if you have a 4-1 that has come to the conclusion that the world is flat, there is absolutely nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. It doesn’t matter whether you show them photos, it doesn’t matter whether you take them into a spaceship, it doesn’t matter what you do, they are not in the end going to accept that, because that’s not what they’re here for. It’s not what they’re here for.
They are here to be a unique bridge, a unique bridge between the right-angle process and the left-angle process. They are the juxtaposition, and their unique influence is what makes that bridge possible between the two. And in that sense, is the key ingredient to the chain of what this genetic construct is in that particular or whatever particular hexagram.
Now we come to the beginning of the left-angle process, the four left-angle profiles. And the geometry of the left angle is the geometry of transpersonal karma. It is the polarity to the right-angle process, the right-angle process and its self-absorption, its personal destiny, the fulfillment of its process through itself, and the left-angle process, the transpersonal karma, in which the fulfillment of purpose can only be achieved through interaction with the other.
And so this is a very different configuration in the way in which it operates, and you can see that mostly through the personality of the left angle. When you’re dealing with the personality of the left angle, you’re always dealing with upper trigram lines. You’re dealing with the 5-1, 5-2, and then of course the 6-2 and the 6-3.
So in dealing with these upper trigram lines that are already transpersonal in their nature, that the who-you-think-you-are aspect of the left-angle profile is always focused on the transpersonal at one level or another. And yet when we’re dealing with the way in which the hexagram operates, and it’s something that I’ve stated many times in looking at hexagram structure, that in many ways the hexagram stops at the 5th line. The 6th line process is quite different.
Like in the illustration of the structure of the hexagram, the 6th line sits on the roof. It really isn’t part of the structure itself. And when it comes to looking at the nature of hexagrams, even going back to the traditional I Ching from China, you will see that 5th lines carry a very special quality.
It is in the 5th line that the real potential of the left angle is expressed. In other words, that the 5th line is designed to be pulled into a position of calling out the other. And not so much calling out the other within the context of the hexagram, but expressing, propagandizing, however you want to describe that, the nature of the hexagram to the outside world.
And the advantage that is built in, in order for this to be possible, is that the 5th line always receives positive projection before it receives negative projection. You know, it’s one of the mysteries of the 5th line. In other words, whenever you meet a 5th line, it makes a connection to you and your design that the first projection, the first projection is this person can.
You know, and if this person can’t, or if the person doesn’t, then there is automatically the negative projection that follows. And of course, as we well know, negative projections can be enormously powerful and very hard to deal with. So the 5th line in its nature, because it is subject to that kind of projection, learns very early in its life, as an infant as a matter of fact, that this is something it has to deal with.
And inherent in that is the development of paranoia. In other words, the paranoia of the expectation of the other and the fear of not being able to fulfill that expectation that punishment is certainly going to follow. We’re dealing with the line of the heretic.
So when we’re looking at the 5.1, we’re looking at the heretical investigator. In other words, deep at the 1st line level, there is a foundation. And here what you have is that you have the basic foundation of the hexagram and you have that basic foundation coupled with the dream.
In other words, you have this expression of what is possible. So the 5.1 as a profile, when you meet them, you’re often really surprised that they do not have the kind of demonstrative personalities that you would expect. In other words, that the 5.1 child that comes into the world that cannot be the perfect child, no child can, is going to have to deal with the projection that it is lesser than what it can or could be for the rest of its life.
The not-self is devastatingly cruel. So when dealing with the 5.1, one of the real keys is practicality. And the practicality which is always associated with the 5th line, but more so the practicality in knowing what investigation is worthy of calling out to others.
As you will see, that it is left pretty much to the 5.1 to handle the propaganda of the hexagram. Because the moment that we move to the 5.2, what we’ll begin to look at next week, you will see that because of the hermit unconscious, the whole process is very, very different. In the left angle game, it’s the 5.1 that does the marketing.
The 5.2 is a changing profile. You can see that again in the harmony between the personality line, the 5th line, and the design line, the 2. And when we’re looking at the left angle, we have seen that the left angle geometry is transpersonal karma. And yet one of the things to be clear about in terms of the way in which the 5.2 operates is that they’re very similar in that sense to what we saw in the right angle opposition of that, that is the 2.5. We saw that this is the profile where self-motivation, self-motivation is the whole process in life.
Now it’s a very different procedure when you come to the 5th line personality because the 5th line personality, because it receives projection, because it has an inherent concern, even a paranoia, about whether or not it can fulfill the projection and the fear of being punished if it does not fulfill the projection, that it’s not so easy to get a 5.2 to stand in the window and call out to others. That is the role in that sense of the way in which the 5th line operates as a call to the other. So here in dealing with the 5.2 we have a totally different phenomena.
We have a second line design. And that second line is the hermit. It’s withdrawn.
It is in itself waiting for the call. And here you have the core of this whole process of self-motivation. That is the personality must call its unconscious.
It must call itself to action. It must call itself to go out and to fulfill its role. And it means that it is not open in any way to the pressure of the other to drag it out.
So many 5.2s are reclusive in their lives. And not simply because they have a second line design that brings out the hermit in them, but this combination of the 5th line personality with the second line unconscious, there is an enormous concern about the risks of going out beyond the cave. How risky it can be.
And so when we’re dealing with 5.2s in the world, and again we’re going to see that given the population of the planet, there are a lot of 5.2s, that everything about raising them is clearly leading them towards moving themselves. The more you try to goad them, the more you try to push them, the more you try to pull them out, the more difficult it’s going to be. And one of the things about children, like 5.2 children, if you want them to be turned on about something, leave it around, leave a brochure on the table, a magazine open in exactly the right place, the kind of thing where they can run into it themselves and motivate themselves to it.
But the moment that you try to push them, the moment that you try to pull them, there’s going to be this enormous resistance. And of course, unlike the 5.1, that can get to a place where it is secure in its foundation, there is no security in the foundation for the 5.2. They are, at the unconscious level, naturals. And it takes a tremendous amount of courage for them to stand and make the call, when in fact they can do nothing better than make the call because it’s very difficult for them to back it up, to substantiate it.
Which is why when you look at the exponents of the hexagram, that it’s the 5.1s that dominate. These are the true heretical forces that the average human community is going to have contact with. Rarely are they going to meet or rarely are they going to be attuned to that 5.2 heretic.
Rarely are they going to emerge in society and take on the role of the heretic. What’s so important for them is that they find a way to motivate themselves to enter into this life correctly. In the end, for 2.5s and for 5.2s, their strategy is truly an extraordinary blessing.
The sixth line is truly different from other lines. It is, in that sense, not part of the hexagram. It’s the roof.
It is the view from above looking beyond. And we know in the context of human design that the sixth line in and of itself embodies a deep mutative force. It is human beings that have the sixth line in their profile that are carrying this very unusual mutation of the change in the human lifespan.
That is, since 1781, since the advent of the nine-centered being, we have moved out of the Saturnian cycle into the Iranian cycle. A vast shift in the way in which we develop, in the way in which we mature. No longer are we on a 39-year wheel.
We are on an 84-year wheel. And as such, we have a totally different process in this life. Rather than the midlife crisis being at 15, which is why we still have such a high incidence of teenagers who are depressed and who want to be free so that they can look after their own lives, because that’s basically the way we’ve been operating for about 70,000 or 80,000 years.
And now we have this new process in which, in fact, maturity isn’t even something that one can get to until one’s midlife. That’s 40 years on the planet. 40 years, in a sense, of being a child man, a child woman.
So it’s something to keep in mind that when we’re dealing with the Sixth Line, we’re dealing with this vast transition in the way in which we live out the life process, and Sixth Line beings are carrying that mutation. And the way in which that mutation is expressed is that they have a tripartite life process. Three aspects of their life.
The first being the Saturn cycle. And, of course, the nature of the Saturn cycle, this is for the Sixth Line being, they live out the qualities of their harmony. And that harmony is the third line.
That third line of trial and error, of pessimism, of the potential of failure, mistakes, the whole process of discovering the pain of what it is to live in the world. And for most Sixth Line beings, this is a deeply chaotic time in their lives. By the time they get beyond their Saturn, there is an interregnum.
We call it being on the roof between the end of the Saturn cycle and the beginning of the final cycle, which comes at the Chiron return at around 50 or 51 years of age. For those approximately 20 years, there is a movement towards the thematic of the true Sixth Line. That is a movement for what was traditional objectivity, to move away from pessimism, to move to optimism.
In other words, there is this shift, and it’s a shift to the polarity, from the intensity of the Third Line First Cycle to an aloofness that comes with disengagement in the Middle Cycle. And yet, that’s not enough. It’s not enough to move away from the pessimism and find the optimism.
As a Sixth Line being, by the time you reach your Chiron return, that’s the time you have to come off the roof. And in the most mystical sense of the word, to come off the roof as one’s own true authority. You know, neither observer nor observed, but simply a being in the act of being.
And as such, to take on the qualities of trust and leadership that are there for the Sixth Line to claim. When we’re dealing with the Sixth Two, we are dealing with the archetype, if you will, of the Sixth Line process. We have this powerful Sixth Line in the personality, and of course it’s going to go through its three phases.
With the Second Line unconscious, we know that there is a hermit in them that is waiting for the call. And one of the great difficulties for Sixth Twos is that these beings, in operating as not-self, that their lives usually are so distorted in their first 30 years, that they really never have an opportunity to right themselves. And if you look at their dilemma in the beginning of the process, you see that the dilemma is they are a Three Two.
In other words, they have trial and error in the call. And so, you know, these are people up until around the time that they’re 30, that can be turned on by things, called to things that are truly not good for them and get stuck there. The most obvious, without being dramatic, is simply what you’re going to study, for example, as a career in your life.
And you get the call in your Three Two stage that you’re going to be whatever, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, you name it. Only to discover that by the time you get to your Saturn that the whole thing depresses you and you don’t want to have anything whatsoever to do with it. In other words, there is trial and error in what you can accept as the right call for you.
Now, we know very well that without a true inner authority, it’s not possible for anyone to operate correctly, other than through occasional serendipity and good fortune. The fact of the matter is that for a Six Two being, those first 30 years are instrumental in what their lives are truly going to become. The Six Two on the roof can be enormously successful in this life, but often they are so deeply scarred from their process in the first part of their life that all they can really do is indulge in the relief that their life is no longer so intensely negative, that they’re slowly beginning to find the positive in their process.
It is a warning that I give to all Six Line Beings that you need to operate correctly as yourself by the time you get to your Qiran, because the pressure of coming off the roof is really profound. And Six Line Beings, because they are mutative beings, are vulnerable. And so this is a time for you, if you’re a Six Two, regardless of where you are in the drama of your cycles, that now’s the time to experiment with your strategy and to truly honor your inner authority, because it is the only thing that will bring you through to the place that will really make a difference.
The Six Three is the end of the profile structure, and it’s the beginning of the next one. After all, it is a chain. And when we move from the Six Three, we will move to the next One Three, and we will have the shift to the beginning.
The Six Line is a line of transition. The Six Three is a transition or changing profile, and it is at the end of the structure. And one of the most difficult things for a Six Three when it comes into the world is to be here and not somewhere over there.
It’s the great dilemma for them. They are always, they are always looking somewhere else. And because of that, so often their life is on a kind of third-line automatic pilot, particularly in the first 30 years.
Whenever you’re looking at the Three Six or the Six Three, you’re looking at a Saturnian cycle that is fundamentally a Three Three theme. And there is a deep potential, a deep potential through the resonance for an underlying pessimism, an underlying belief that truly the best cannot be achieved in this life, and that it stays so deeply that it can never really be dealt with. And one of the things to see about the Six Three is how different they are from a Six Two.
You know, this transition that takes place at the design level is a huge transition. The Third Line is a line of trial and error. It’s very different than being the hermit waiting for the call, and that this trial and error never goes away.
You know, the Six Two deals with the Third Line theme in the first 30 years of their life, and then basically it’s gone. You know, because it is not, in fact, their true theme. They are, after all, a Six.
The same is true for the personality of the Six Three, but at the unconscious level, that Three never goes away. There never is this real transition away from the pessimism. It can never be possible.
It is in their nature. And no matter where they go in terms of their personality, you know, when the personality is sitting on the roof, is trying to move away from its pessimism to its optimism, it still has a very, very pessimistic, in that sense, vehicle. And yet, there is enormous experiential and material potential in the Six Three.
They grasp and can grasp not simply the nature of the world, but in many ways, they’re the ones that can see ahead. They can see what’s coming. They can have a taste for trends.
They can have a feel for the direction that things are moving, because that’s them. And the great difficulty that we have is that while they have that ability to look and see in that way, they are so vulnerable in their own lives, deeply vulnerable in their own lives. After all, they sit at the end of a process.
You know, there is no place to go but to the next process, which is quite different. There is a fascination with what is beyond, what is the other, what is over there, that will always be part of the Six Three consciousness. Whenever I deal with designs, whenever I deal with any subject in design, it always comes back to the same thing.
The Six Three child can have a very difficult process. It can be deeply misunderstood by its parents. It can be seen in a very negative light.
It can end up being the so-called problem child. You know, there are so many things that can go wrong through the ignorance of those that raise someone like a Six Three. And yet, like everything else, the moment that they can operate through their inner authority, yes, they’re a Six Three.
There is much for them to experience and discover in this life. And yet they will find this balance, this perfect balance, between their optimism and their pessimism. And again, the whole process of the Sixth Line being is that in eventually having to come off the roof as themselves, that they have to go beyond those two polarities that have dominated in their lives.
It’s not this or that. It’s not either or in terms of the optimism and pessimism of their process. It’s something else.
It’s something else. It is an ability to let go of all of that in just being correct. And herein lies the importance of the Sixth Line.
It is here to lead us. Not to lead us in the sense that it is the director or the general leading us. That is really a Fifth Line theme.
It’s not. It leads by example. By example.
This is its great power. The power of the Sixth Line is that ultimately the rest of the structure must trust it because it is the only true representative. It’s the completion of the process.
It doesn’t have to call or be called. It is simply here to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
To be the embodiment of the process itself. When I began this series of looking at profile, I began with the concept of the signpost. Then I want to return to that.
It’s one of the illusions that as an example, if you learn more and more and more human design, you’re going to get closer and closer to being awake. It really doesn’t work that way. It’s not like you can take the information of your profile, study what your profile is and simply be that.
It is somehow a choice that you’re going to make. I’m going to decide to be exactly the way my profile suggests that I’m supposed to be and feel like I am once in a while. It doesn’t work that way.
It isn’t about that. In being able to understand just the simple aspects of your profile, what you’re really given is a signpost to the quality, if you will, of the correctness in your day-to-day life. It’s really what it’s there for.
You see, the only way that you’re going to operate correctly, the only way you’re going to operate correctly is if you’re operating according to your type, its strategy, and you’re honoring the inner authority that is there in you. There is no other way. I mean, there is no other way.
You can study your whole life. It isn’t going to do any good. So many human beings are lost in the pursuit of truth.
You know, they’re just lost. I mean, after all, 71% of humanity has an open head center and they think about an enormous amount of stuff that really does not matter to them in this life. If you’re a first-line being, if there’s a first line in your profile, and you’re entering into anything without having depth, without feeling secure, without having done your homework, you’re not following.
You know, the signpost that’s going to show you very clearly that’s not what you’re about. It’s not. You know, if you’re a first-line being and you’re goaded into doing something or seduced into doing something or persuaded into doing something before you are ready to do it, there’s that signpost standing there and saying, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I didn’t do my introspection. I didn’t really find my secure foundation. And if I don’t have a secure foundation, it’s not going to succeed.
And you’re only going to be doing that if you’re not following your strategy and honoring your inner authority. You’re not. You know, this is the thing to understand about the nature of the signpost.
You’re a third-line being. You know, you get involved in something. You’re very excited about it.
And the moment you get into it, all hell breaks loose. Now, if you’re a third-line being and you understand something about the third line, you’re not going to fall apart in that moment. You’re not going to start moving to the negative side and saying, oh, I’m in over my head.
I shouldn’t have done this. This was a terrible mistake. You know, I’m not worthy, blah, blah, blah.
And if you are saying all of those things, there’s your signpost saying to you, excuse me, excuse me. This is not a mistake. This is about discovery.
If something has gone wrong, figure it out. That’s all you need to do. And out of figuring it out, you will find an advantage.
It’s just there in the signpost. It’s what it’s about. And what you will see is that as you enter into your experiment and you begin to make more and more those decisions as yourself, you will see that you begin to live your profile, that you’re in harmony, that you’re in resonance, that you are one with the nature of who you are.
And remember something. This is the whole struggle towards awakeness, is that the first struggle is with your characteristics. That is your design.
You know, to no longer be ruled by your open centers and their not-self strategies and the authority that you have given to your mind to make decisions in your life. That the first battle is to find your true authority. And in finding your true authority, you start moving relentlessly towards your purpose.