Individual circuitry

Meaning

Human Design sorts its 36 channels into families called circuits. A circuit is a set of channels that carry the same kind of energy towards the same kind of purpose. The tradition gathers the circuits into three large groups. Each group describes a different way of sharing energy with other people.

The Tribal circuitry shares within a circle of people who know each other: family, friends, colleagues, the bond and the bargain. The Collective circuitry shares with everyone, strangers included, through patterns and experiences meant for all. The Individual circuitry does neither in the usual way. It brings something new, lives it for itself, and touches others by example. Its keynote is empowerment.

The tradition reads Individual energy as the energy of mutation: what has not been done before and fits no existing pattern. It cannot be proved in advance, because nothing like it exists yet. So it has to be explained, at the right moment and in simple words, before others can use it. Human Design describes its rhythm as pulses, on and off, rather than a steady flow.

Between the pulses there can be flat or melancholic stretches. The tradition reads them as part of the creative process, the quiet before something new arrives, not as something wrong.

The group holds two circuits:

• The Knowing circuit, with nine channels, is the heart of the group. It covers inner knowing, sudden insight, mutation and an emotional depth that moves in its own way.
• The Centering circuit, with two channels, joins the G centre to the Sacral and the Heart. It is about standing in one’s own centre, and by doing so encouraging others to stand in theirs.

Close to them sit the four Integration channels, which the tradition treats apart as the wiring of individual survival. Their keynote, self-empowerment, is a near cousin of this group’s.

In practice

• Reading a chart. Ulune draws every defined channel on the bodygraph but does not group the channels by circuit. To find the Individual ones, compare the defined channels with the lists on the Knowing and Centering pages.
• A strong share. A chart with several Individual channels is read as carrying a lot of this mutative energy. The tradition sees such people as often feeling different, and as most influential when they simply live their own way.
• Explaining. Because the new is not obvious to others, Human Design stresses the art of explaining. An insight offered before anyone asked may sound strange. Offered when people are curious, the same insight can change how they think.
• Low stretches. The tradition counsels patience with the quiet between pulses, and reads it as a time of incubation rather than a failure.
• With other circuits. Individual energy can look unpredictable to a Tribal person and careless of proof to a Logic one. Human Design reads these differences as complementary, each group needing what the others carry.
• No channel. A chart with no defined channel, as in a Reflector, has no circuit of its own. The tradition reads it as sampling every circuit through other people.

Across traditions

• The I Ching. The Knowing circuit holds hexagrams 1 and 2, which Wilhelm calls The Creative and The Receptive. They are the first pair of the book. Human Design does not take its circuits from the I Ching, so this is an echo, not a source.
• Astrology. Modern astrology often divides the planets into personal, social and outer ones. The parallel with individual, tribal and collective is loose. Still, both systems separate what is one’s own, what binds a circle, and what moves a whole generation. See Jupiter and Uranus.

Origin and history

The circuits belong to the teaching of Ra Uru Hu, who presented Human Design from 1987. The Definitive Book of Human Design (Ra Uru Hu and Lynda Bunnell, 2011) describes the three groups and their circuits. Some teachers count the Centering channels apart from the Individual group, with the Integration channels. This encyclopedia follows the more usual placement, inside the Individual circuitry.

Correspondences