When we first learn about Human Design, it is all mental. ‘If I learn about this, perhaps I’ll be happy.’ We learn a little about the mechanics, and then the mind adopts the language and knowledge of Human Design. The mind talks a good game, but there is no experience yet of living one’s design. It’s all – ‘you have this, which is why you are like that.’
Then, the mind determines that it needs to control our behavior and enforces the experiment of strategy and Inner Authority because we must do it, or we’ll never get the result we think we want. Like a prison guard, the mind says, ‘These are the rules; follow them.’ Then, it judges every action and decision as inferior, as a tricky way of maintaining control over our lives.
If we are lucky, we reach the point where there is actual surrender to the authority of the form and a letting go of the mentally driven life. There is a moment-by-moment realization (and forgetting) that the body is living the life and that strategy and Inner Authority are how the form navigates. There is a great challenge in this practice. It requires learning to wait and observe oneself—not the world, not what’s going on out there. We begin to explore: ‘What is my experience of myself?’
Waiting is an active state of awareness. It’s not just sitting around meditating all day. It’s actively observing within regardless of our circumstances. Can I notice my body’s experience beneath the mental conditioning? What does my mind have to say? What is my body’s experience?
We have been raised to treat life as a problem to solve, a result to obtain. What action do I take next to get what my mind says is most important to do, be, or have? It is a shattering experience to give up the life of the mind’s conditioning. In that shattering, there is no going back to what was, but there can also be a feeling of aloneness and desolation, a sense of emptiness, an inability to see the way forward.
The mind has kept us distracted so we don’t feel alone. It has kept us busy, so we don’t notice the emptiness of its promises. It has kept us on the never-ending search for more, which is focused on the future and what to do next. When we no longer run our lives from this mental drive, it is a shattering of a deeply held illusion that has been projected outward as the way of life.
When disconnected from the homogenized reality that the world has bought into - but we’re not yet firmly grounded in self-observation and the experience of awareness within, it can bring dissonance and a crisis of spirit. Like Neo in the matrix, the red pill has been taken, and there is no unseeing of what has been revealed. And yet, there is no comforting way forward, no god or belief to hang onto, no goal plan to keep us busy and distracted.
It is a kind of dark night of the soul. You know where you have been, and you don’t particularly enjoy where you are at the moment, with its great uncertainty and unknowns. There is no clear way forward. In the Sufi tradition, I was taught this is the Kamal point. The ancients navigated using tools like the Kamal to establish a point of reference by the stars; to discover where they were.
The Kamal point is the navigational read from the dark night of the soul—you are here. You are not where or who you have been, and you are not yet done with your journey. This is where you are—adrift on the sea, surrounded by ancient starlight, here, now. Breathe. You will be somewhere else tomorrow—and once again, you will not know where you are. Your journey is unfinished, but you will not be who, or where, you were yesterday.
At this point, we can think of ourselves as alone, empty, and disconnected, at sea amidst the unknown – that’s the mind’s story. But look up! We are here now. The planets are moving in an orderly way through eons of space and time, the moonlight is shining in our faces, and we are breathing, floating in the ocean of the embrace of the Earth herself. None of us are in control of what is happening, but we can experience ourselves within whatever is happening. We are all one within, full of life, connected everywhere with everything all at once. This is the Kamal point. Lost in a sea-change within ourselves, and finding our passenger within, once again.