All the information about Human Design (HD) comes from one person, Ra Uru Hu.
For myself, I call this the canon or the dogma of HD — those parts where it’s pointless to ask, “Why?” Because. Because Ra said so, and the Voice told him so, or maybe he just made it all up — it’s a matter of faith.

To bring HD knowledge to the world and preserve its canonical purity, Ra created a school: the International Human Design School. It has a structured education program with homework, exams, and diplomas (or “medals”) at the end.

The first piece of advice a Human Design novice will receive from any representative of the official school is this: consult a specialist. Want a bodygraph reading? Go to someone certified by IHDS. Want to study the system? Enroll in their courses.

But the “appearance” of the official school immediately put me off. Because the website looks like the online version of a shopping network. And the structure feels like a sect: a course system where you can’t access the next one without completing all the previous ones. The cost increases as you go deeper… reaching the depth I was interested in costs around $6,000. How is this not a sect?

And all of that would be fine, except that the graduates of this sect — at least the side of them that’s presented online — … I can’t speak for everyone, but on average: They all say the same thing. There’s no trace of the famed uniqueness. What were you studying for three years to then parrot, word for word, about avoiding confrontations?

Strategy and authority are the answer to every question. Why create such a complex and profound system of knowledge just to reduce it to a primitive formula?

Flirting with science. “We want to appear scientific, so we’ll refer to the fact that neutrinos have mass, which means they can transmit information and imprint DNA.” But no one seems bothered that the difference between the “diameters” of a neutrino and a DNA molecule is 15 orders of magnitude (15 zeros). Neutrinos are so small they literally pass through us without interacting with a single atom in our body.

Okay, neutrinos can also participate in weak interactions, with a radius of 2 x 10^-18 meters. There’s at least some chance of that. But the joke is that mass isn’t necessary for weak interaction. Photons don’t have mass.

From the perspective of modern science, HD is heresy. Letting people who fell for all of the above teach me something, and charging me money for it? No way.

But what a joy and luxury it is to study what genuinely interests you. All summer, which, let me remind you, was completely free, I didn’t touch programming. Not once. That was very telling. It seems that, for the first time in my life, I’ve found something truly mine, my own passion.

On the one hand, I didn’t trust the analysts. On the other, I didn’t want to deprive myself of the pleasure of independent exploration. If we imagine information about HD as a giant crystal ball, the way a beginner sees it online is like tiny shards scattered in an autumn forest. Beautiful, alluring, but useless until they’re assembled into a complete picture.

The more pieces you collect, the more tangled it becomes. But that only spurs you to keep going.

I’ve quit many times, and the only thing that brought me back was the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the end, I assembled my own puzzle.

But the truth (and irony) is that I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t stumbled upon professional courses from that same official school. Without depth and structure, the information remains a shaky cloud of tags.

What matters is that without personal experience, without practical application, without honest experimentation and observation, the information remains naked. It never turns into knowledge, never becomes a foundation, and certainly never leads to changes in life.

And it’s almost impossible for this to happen in one go, in a week, a month, or even six months. It takes time and crystal-clear understanding of where to look.

The even greater irony is that it all comes down to the same strategy and inner authority, plus individual nuances. But without experience, depth, and structure, it’s impossible to interpret them correctly.

No conclusions, just pure experience. But if someone suddenly asks me where to start with HD, I’ll probably say: consult a specialist. ;)