The education of students, from basic through professional, improves as the continuing experience from the last years teaches us what works well, what doesn’t work so well, and what is difficult to get across.

As a logical system, Human Design requires no belief and you can test it yourself. But the experiment takes time and patience. So it is incredibly tempting, and perhaps even unavoidable, to simply repeat what has been heard, without questioning its truth. Here's the danger of turning Human Design into a sophisticated belief system, whereby phrases get repeated from one person to another, without direct evidence.

This is not to say that students don’t have to take its premises as hypotheses. It’s the only means by which one can see whether it works or not. But at a certain point in self-observing Design in your life, it is necessary to distinguish your own experience from the inherently limited viewpoint of the person who introduced you to your chart.

Each of us comes to understand Design through the unique refraction of our own crystals. We are different from each other. The analyst education therefore has been shifting into more of a discussion group that aims to question and to perceive through ourselves, so that we might cast a clearer light on the Designs we read for others.

It is so seductive to repeat cool and catchy phrases without actually understanding or deriving meaning from them. The aim of the school is to instill the habit of checking one's understanding by asking the question “what does this really mean?” even for the Basic training students and certainly the analysts. Without satisfactorily answering this question, go cautiously before repeating something as fact.

As the analyst trainer, it is important for me to foster critical thinking in students, beginning with the discrimination between logic and belief. The logical process begins with doubt as its inspiration. All students, from just meeting Design through to the analysts need to remember to test and challenge their conclusions, check premises to see if they hold up over time, experiment to find whether any given description can be substantiated or contradicted.

Human Design's value to humanity is potentially enormous. During these formative years, we benefit ourselves and those we introduce to this knowledge by staying sharp, questioning fully and looking for answers through observation of Design as it manifests in life.

August 2000, Human Design Network Newsletter

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