Richard Nixon's Bardo: Four Days in April

Ra Uru Hu taught the Bardo, the structured unraveling that follows physical death, using his own passing in 2011 as the illustration his students would carry forward. Richard Nixon’s chart brings this series one of its cleanest death times: announced by the hospital itself on the night it happened, to the minute, and carried by the wire services within hours.

What happened in April

Nixon suffered a severe stroke at his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, on the evening of April 18, 1994, minutes before sitting down to dinner. He was taken to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, awake at first but unable to speak, and over the next three days swelling deep in his brain pushed him into a coma he never surfaced from. He had put in writing that no extraordinary measures were to keep him alive, and none were used. He died on the evening of April 22, 1994, at 9:08 PM, eighty-one years old, ten months after his wife Pat (Deseret News, April 23, 1994).

Where transit Earth stood

In Ra’s teaching, physical death is the moment the two aspects of a design responsible for placing a person in their life, and for animating the body itself, separate from the physical form for good. What lingers for a while afterward is the personality: memory, conditioning, self-image, still present even though the vehicle it ran is gone. Ra taught that this doesn’t end all at once. It moves through a fixed, time-limited sequence, three line-positions in a row, in an order set entirely by wherever transiting Earth happened to sit, by gate and line, at the instant of death.

At 9:08 PM Eastern on April 22, 1994 (1:08 in the morning Greenwich time, already April 23), computed directly in Maia Mechanics, Human Design Professional Software licensed from Jovian Archive, transiting Earth sat in Gate 28, line one. Gate 28 is the Game Player, the splenic gate whose underlying fear, in this site’s own description of it, is a life ending before it has meant anything, and its first line is the one that “prepares before it risks, stacking the odds toward survival”: a grounding point that suits a man who had his instructions signed and filed years before he needed them. A line-one entry opens the sequence at its first stage: time, then surrender, then chaos, typically closing out over roughly a day to a day and a half.

What this doesn’t reach for

Ra’s teaching went a layer deeper for his own death, naming the specific planet exalted at the exact line his Earth held when he passed. That detail lives in the Rave I’Ching itself rather than in anything published here, so this piece stops at what transit Earth’s position was and what stage it opened, rather than filling in a layer this site doesn’t have a licensed source for.

What it leaves you with

None of this is offered so you’ll watch the sky for signs of your own ending. Ra taught the Bardo as evidence that the intelligence organizing a life doesn’t stop at the last breath, and a death timed to the minute by the hospital that announced it gives that argument one more place to stand on its own mechanics.

The mechanics behind this reading, the six stations and the three-stage run each death enters, sit on the Bardo cornerstone page, alongside every other case in the series.

If you’re curious what your own Moon, your own Earth, or these gates look like in your personal wheel, your free chart is there whenever you want to look.

In memory of an ICONIC Human Design,

LaVeena B. Archers, PhD