Advanced 1: Left, Right & the 16 Variables

Variable is the layer of Human Design that explains why two people with the same Type, the same Authority and a similar Profile can still run on very different operating systems. Jovian Archive has gathered Ra Uru Hu's lectures on Variable into its largest single path on the subject: 38 lessons, about 37.5 hours, delivered as audio, video and an ebook.

The arrows come from the Tone beneath four activations: the Design Sun and Earth, the Design Nodes, the Personality Sun and Earth, and the Personality Nodes. Each one points left or right, so the four arrows work as four binaries, and that is where the sixteen combinations come from. Left orientation is strategic, focused and active. Right orientation is receptive, peripheral and passive. On the Design side the arrows speak to the body, and on the Personality side to the mind. Because Tone sits so deep in the calculation, an accurate birth time matters here more than almost anywhere else in the chart.

I say at the top of every class I teach on this that Variable is an advanced area of the knowledge and never a starting point. It sits on top of Strategy and Authority. Someone who has not yet spent real time experimenting with their own decision-making will hear the arrows as another set of labels for the mind to manage, which is the opposite of what they are for.

When I teach it, I put the sixteen combinations on a grid and have students find their own place on it before we go further, because the grid reads as an evolutionary picture, from the older, strategic orientation toward the receptive one the species is moving into. Ra placed the discovery of leftness and rightness right after inner authority in importance, and a path of this length gives that discovery the room it needs.

Listen with your own Variable in front of you. The four arrows also point toward the four transformations (Determination, Environment, Perspective and Motivation), so this path makes a natural foundation for Advanced 2.