In the Collective Logical sense, that moment of being still is the beginning of the growth of your consciousness. Logical consciousness, the ability to look at life and where it goes, only when you begin to look at your life logically and see where it’s taking you, do you realize deep within you that you’d better do something quick to make it better and different. Unaware beings, not-self beings, can’t afford to be still. It’s a great risk for them. ‘I don’t have any time to learn this,’ they’ll say. It’s a great risk for them, because what the stillness will do is show you your pattern. When you see your pattern from the not-self perspective, when I looked at my life before any of this was going on and I would have that moment of looking, it was like ‘oh shit, this is the way it’s going to be—chaos, pain, meaninglessness,’ all of that stuff.

So, sitting still has its risks. The first thing about being still in the Logical sense is that if you are not-self, and that’s the vast majority of humanity, that what sitting still should bring you is depression. Remember, I started by saying that depression is not a bad thing; it’s not good or bad, it’s a thing. It’s just a thing, it’s an “it.” And how magical it is—it isn’t in the sense that the way in which we treat depression today is very dangerous, because we treat depression as a sickness, particularly in the cases of Individuals in which melancholy leads to depression. All of that can be healed through understanding.

But, depression in this context is a necessary goad—it’s an old biblical word—it’s a prod. It’s pushing things. Depression is there to actually push us to accept the fact that we are righteously depressed, because what the pattern shows us is a meaningless life. Remember that the Formats are here to expand our consciousness. As you will see by the time you get into the rest of the Circuit, it becomes less and less powerful, unfortunately. It gets caught up in whatever those Channels and those Gates have to do. But, when you’re at the very core of the Format, you’re looking at something so beautiful; because for me it’s so obvious: no Format, no grace. And, then I understand pain. I understand the pain of seeing the meaninglessness of your life. After all, this is what I’ve been doing for nearly 20 years, dealing with the pain of people’s lives.

And yet, to understand that unless you feel the pain there is no hope. Ignorance as bliss is just Tribe. You can be blissfully ignorant within the Tribe; it’s allowed. But, the moment you sit still, and you really look at your life, if you don’t get depressed, I’m really worried about you, because you should be depressed. This is what the Formats do; they’re wonderful. I know, I have a 60th Gate, I know what that 60th Gate did to me—we’ll get there. No greater gift, at least for the expansion of our consciousness. I’m grateful to the Tribe every day. I like my Tribal life. I have no objection to the mechanism of partnership, children, home, and all of this stuff. I enjoy it. And yet, at the same time, I recognize that I only enjoy it because of the level of my consciousness. I lived that way before in my life and didn’t enjoy it; didn’t like it at all. All of this is because of what the Format energies bring to us, they bring us the power to compete with Tribal necessity, basic necessities of life.

Excerpt from The Logic System | Formats & Transcendence

Ra Uru Hu was the Human Design System’s founder and messenger. Ra dedicated 25 years of his life to the development and teaching of the System around the world until he passed away in 2011.