Motivation (Variable)

Meaning

Motivation is one of the four arrows of Variable, the finest layer Human Design reads in a chart. It comes from the Sun of the Personality, the Sun at the moment of birth. In the tradition’s drawing it is the arrow at the top right.

The Personality is the layer Human Design reads as the mind, conscious, the side of a chart a person knows in themselves. Its Sun carries the most weight there, and Ulune’s reading gives the Sun about 70% of the whole imprint. Motivation is the Personality Sun’s finest shade. The tradition reads it as what drives the mind: the deeper reason it moves towards one thing rather than another.

The arrow carries two things. Its colour, one of six, names a motive with a single word, such as Hope or Desire. Its tone, one of six within that colour, gives its direction.

• Pointing left, tones 1 to 3: Human Design reads a focused, active mind, at its best working from a clear, specific aim.
• Pointing right, tones 4 to 6: a receptive, open mind, at its best letting its aims take shape as things come in.

Neither side is better. The tradition reads both as styles of the same function. Some colours carry names that sound heavy at first. Human Design treats every colour as a valid motive, with no better or worse among the six.

In practice

Human Design offers Motivation as something to observe over time. Teachers suggest working with it only after a long time of living by type, strategy and authority. The mind, in this tradition, is valued as an observer and an adviser to others, not as the one that decides. The arrow describes how it does that work.

• Someone might recognise, looking back over choices, a single motive running through them.
• With a left arrow, the tradition would read that motive as something to hold clearly and act from.
• With a right arrow, it would read it as something that becomes clear only after taking in a situation.
• The arrow says nothing about what a person should want. It describes how wanting tends to move in them.

Motivation is read together with its partner on the same side, Perspective. The two Personality arrows describe the mind: what drives it and how it sees. On the other side, Determination and Environment describe the body.

Origin and history

Ra Uru Hu founded Human Design in 1987. He divided each line of the wheel into colours, tones and bases, levels the I Ching does not have. Motivation belongs to the later, advanced part of his teaching. His school teaches it, with Perspective, in its course called Rave Psychology. Some teachers call this arrow Awareness.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the Sun’s ecliptic longitude at the moment of birth. It subtracts 302°, where gate 41 begins, and counts the result in bases of 18.75″. From that one count come the gate, the line, the colour, the tone and the base. A colour spans 0.15625°, a tone about 1′34″.

The colour gives the word shown with the arrow. The tone sets the side: 1 to 3 left, 4 to 6 right. The Personality Earth, exactly opposite, shares the Sun’s colour and tone. Ulune computes the base but does not read it.

The arrow sits on the Sun row of the Personality column, on the right of the bodygraph. Choosing that row opens its reading. In the Keys table, Motivation is the first letter after P: in PLR DLL it points left.

With Determination, this is one of the two arrows quickest to change with the birth time. The Sun crosses a tone in about 38 minutes, and one side, three tones, in about two hours. Ulune therefore casts the chart half an hour before and after the given time. If the colour or the side changes in that hour, the arrow is marked as unsteady. The Variable line of the Keys table is then marked ~. Without a birth time, Ulune shows no arrows.

Correspondences