I am in Valencia Island, Ireland, visiting Yogananda and Rina (the one from First Steps of an Emotional Manifestor). We had been talking about Artificial Shores – the Environment I have in Human Design. Environment means just that – the sort of place you will thrive in, that is natural for you. Yogs says that Environment is an inner experience too, and not just an outer place, and that he will take me somewhere so that I can experience this for myself. He says that Environment in a person’s chart is very important.

What can be more poetic than to be taken on a ferry across the short expanse of water – so that it feels like the car is driving across the sea – then fast along curving Irish roads, between tall hedgerows; not knowing where I’m going? Sun bathes the sea, the far islands still wrapped in mist about their mountaintops. So beautiful! There are ruins of ancient stone structures far below us as we climb – the hills above all mottled with moss and stone. The sky is kindly today to this spread-out land – sweet and sunny, yet sheltering too with cloud. I find that I am so glad the view is big, for that means there is more of this wondrous Ireland. We drive and drive, stopping sometimes to gaze at a particular view – jagged stones rising from the water, a puffin preserve, or a rock with a monastery on it, out there in the lit-up mists.

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Finally we went inland up and up, and down through jungle, and out into where low hills ring a bowl in the land. Here is a perfect circle of stone laid on stone, mortarless, to form a fort, 30 metres through and 10 high, with walls 1½ metres thick. One enters through a very narrow door – the only way in or out. Several stone staircases go up the inside of the ring. A sign in the center of the space says an ancient chieftain must have built the fort, and it would have been full of dwellings. Now there is only grass, and a pair of French tourists admonishing their children not to walk atop the walls.

I understand the project immediately – Yogs doesn’t have to tell me. I see steps going up about 2/3 the height of the wall to a sort of window-seat-type space – a shelf of stone where one could sit and look out over the top of the wall. It is delicious to mount the warm stone steps, to settle neatly in the corner of the stone shelf, back supported by the wall above it. I look around me at the whole circle spread out and so strongly held in its protective intention. I see the green grass, the few people. I look out over the wall at the hills rising nearby, and their endless reach into the surrounding world. Then I close my eyes.

Yes – here I am, on the edge of civilization. I am sitting, not doing anything, on a shelf at the edge of the Tribe. The Tribe is down there in the middle of the fort, having babies, cooking, tending wounded men, being wounded men. I am worried that people will demand that I go down into the thick of the throng and participate, work, earn my bread, become a mother, lie there in the middle of the ring giving birth upon a pallet in a rude tent. That is not what I want to do – I want to sit right here at the edge of the tribe, safe within the wall but able to look out or in. I don’t want to be bothered. And sometimes, if the spirit moves me, I want to dash out into the scary world and feel the cold wind and the danger, and then dash back in again.

I run some archetypes by the scene to see what happens: The Mother. I just want her to go away; I am grown for myself now, and I don’t want to be a mother at all. The Father: he is dying of a battle wound, writhing in his agony. I do not want to be mixed up with it. The Brother: he is a warrior, out there, fighting. Let him fight – I want nothing to do with it. The Sister – she goes to different places, interesting lands and worlds, and I am getting doors opened through this. The Wise Man: I am nervous he might try to get me to do something I don’t want to do.

I feel again and again what it’s like to perch here, idle, on the lip of the border, and just Be. It is just right – this is my configuration, inside and out. It is like riding in a train or a bus, looking out the window. So how is it in a purely inward sense? It’s like this; I rest, sit, in a certain Looking position – and then there are all the feelings, energies, pictures, that go by. That is how my Self-Healing technique is: An event takes place, and I am of it yet not of it. I am watching; yet my watching allows the event to be very full, to be not interfered with by me.

There is so much dread, here on this wall, that somebody will try to interfere with me, make me into a productive member of society! But there is no place else for me to sit – this is my place, and if I would go down into the midst of them I would get sick, and maybe die. What to do if they see me and try to get me involved? Well, right now I am ok, sitting here looking out, looking in! Delicious how the sun has warmed the stone.

I go down the steps and across the grass. As an experiment, I lie down in the center of the circle. It is oppressive with intentions of busy-ness required. I get up and go to Yogs where he sits on an opposite wall.

As we walk out I tell him what I felt. “You don’t want to participate,” he says, “because it’s your job to sit by the side and watch, so that you can tell the stupid generators what to do with their energy!” (He is a generator himself! So it’s not just a careless slur!) And we get back in the car and go driving off through the land of Mystery, discussing and falling silent, discussing and falling silent.

When I’d thought before about my Artificial Shores I’d seen it more as an outer space, to conform to for unknown reasons; but now I know it, body and soul. I know now that it is not a rule for me, an arbitrary assignment – it is a mirror of my own being, just as it really is. And this is the real poetry of Human Design – it is not just the words, or the depths or the quirky strangenesses so dear to my heart, which open hidden windows that were right before my nose – it is the land the map is of, it is the breathing rock I sit on and the cloud-softened sun on my face and my position in this living landscape. What could be more poetic than a fort in a misty land, and the poet poised one foot in, one foot out, watching?

This is our world – wild tangle of elements, a physics of wind. We can watch it, or be drunk, or both – we can describe or fight or be confused. Are we not figures on the page of a book of poems, bent this way and that? Trying with our arms and legs to make some sense?

Yogananda adds:

My comment to Madhuri about “stupid generators” relates to the understanding that a mutation of human consciousness is happening where the intelligence about how vitality is engaged in life belongs to projectors and the vitality itself belongs to generators. When we don’t understand this and fail to live according to the current reality, generators waste their energy, not having the wisdom to use it well, and projectors, who need the energy in exchange for sharing the wisdom they have about using it, suffer from the absence of access to vitality and ‘annoy’ the generators with endless unsollicited communication of wisdom that the generators don’t have the capacity to hear. The situation is a strategy of evolving consciousness to “encourage” projectors and generators to cooperate, thus opening the way to wellbeing for all.
Read more about Human Design: Uniquely So
Madhuri for Osho News