Head centre

Meaning

The Head centre sits at the very top of the bodygraph, drawn as a triangle pointing up. Human Design calls it a pressure centre. It does not act and it does not decide: it pushes. Its pressure is the urge to wonder, to question and to make sense of things.

The Head produces the questions, and the Ajna below it works on the answers. Together they are what the tradition calls the mind. The Head has three gates, and each opens a channel down to the Ajna, so the Head never reaches the rest of the body directly.

The tradition reads a different kind of question in each gate. Gate 64 presses to make sense of images and memories from the past. Gate 61 presses towards what cannot yet be known, an inner mystery. Gate 63 presses with doubt, the need to test whether a pattern really holds.

Defined, the Head has its own steady source of inspiration. The same big questions return for years, each time from a new angle. The person tends to bring ideas into a group rather than pick up other people’s. Human Design adds one caution: this pressure is for thinking, not for deciding, and no authority sits here.

Undefined or open, the Head takes in the mental pressure of the people nearby and amplifies it. One may end up chasing questions that are not really one’s own. The tradition also sees a gift in this: a wide, lively curiosity that can sample many minds. Its kind test is simple: does this question still matter once I am alone and quiet?

In practice

• Defined: one of the three Head channels is complete. Since the Head joins only the Ajna, a defined Head always comes with a defined Ajna.
• Undefined, with active gates: a hanging gate here gives a lasting flavour of questioning. Meeting someone with the partner gate in the Ajna can complete the channel for a while.
• Open: none of the three gates is coloured. Thought is borrowed from the surroundings, which can be a resource, as in a library or a lively conversation.
• Type: the Head is not a motor, so it never makes a Manifestor or a Generator. A chart whose definition runs only through the Head, the Ajna and the Throat belongs to a Projector.
• Authority: such a Projector has mental authority, also called environmental. Clarity comes from talking things over in the right place, not from the Head’s pressure.

Across traditions

• The chakras: Human Design says the Head grew out of the crown chakra, Sahasrara. Yoga pictures it as a thousand-petalled lotus at the top of the skull. In the yoga texts the crown is where rising energy finally opens. The Head reverses the direction: a pressure that bears down on the mind.
• The I Ching: the Head holds the last two hexagrams of the book, 63, After Completion, and 64, Before Completion, with 61, Inner Truth. The classic ends on an unfinished state, a fitting home for open questions.

Origin and history

Ra Uru Hu presented the bodygraph after an experience on Ibiza in 1987. He taught that humans had changed from seven-centred to nine-centred beings, and dated the change to 1781, the year Uranus was discovered. The crown chakra kept its place at the top and became the Head. The tradition also gives the Head a biological correspondence, the pineal gland. This is a correspondence the system teaches, not a medical finding.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune colours a gate when any of a chart’s 26 activations stands in it. They are the 13 bodies at birth, the Personality, and the same 13 in the Design. A channel is defined when both of its gates are coloured, from either layer. A centre is defined when a defined channel touches it, and in no other way.

For the Head, that means it is defined exactly when channel 64–47, 61–24 or 63–4 is defined. Otherwise Ulune calls it undefined when at least one of gates 61, 63 and 64 is coloured, and open when none is. A defined centre is filled in gold on the bodygraph. The Personality and Design views repeat the test with one layer’s gates only, while type and authority always read both.

Correspondences