The only time I began to understand how significant the Abstract process really is, was when I began to look deeply into the relationship between Human Design and genetics. It took me a long time because I do not have an Abstract mind at all. I have a very Individual mind with touches of Logic. The Abstract ideas and belief systems for me are things that feel truly alien—not because I do not respect them, because I do not know, but simply because it’s not something on the mental plane with my intellectuality that I can grasp. So, it took me a very long time to come to grips with the power of the Abstract process. It took me a long time to understand that it is not the antithesis to Logic, but it is the ally of Logic. I slowly began to see the beauty of the structure itself. It’s the beauty of the BodyGraph, this symmetry between Logic and the Abstract. It’s an incredible symmetry. It’s like you can fold them together and they meet.

Of course, this is one of the great jokes of quantum. If you live in a Newtonian world, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That is the great law of linear truth. Yet, the fact of the matter is the shortest distance between two points is to fold them together. If you have a piece of paper and you have a point here and you’ve got a point there, the long way is to draw a line. The easiest way is to just fold the piece of paper and bring the two points together. This is quantum, this is something else entirely.

This is the only way that you can begin to understand that when you’re looking at Logic and you’re looking at the Abstract it’s like somebody sliced a watermelon in half, because that’s what it is. It’s just something that got sliced in half. And, until you understand that it is one thing, only then can you begin to see that transcendence is not about just patterns, because it can’t be. It’s not enough. The transcendence in and of itself is the pattern established through experience over time.

This is the secret to anything. If you have a logical theory and theoretically you put it into a controlled experiment, that is not the same as letting it loose in the world to open experience. We have seen that over and over again, with drug tests and these kinds of things where you have a control group and you think you understand what it does and you end up with thalidomide babies, because in the experience there are things that the pattern, in and of itself, cannot predict. That’s the magic of the experiential way.

Excerpt from The Abstract 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.