Rave Cartography starts exactly where Rave ABC ends. In the Rave ABC we learned to take the Rave Body Graph apart, isolating different pieces in order to recognize the mechanical value of each single centre, gate or channel. We also learned that there is a structural order that organizes the mechanical functionality of all the pieces, which reveals the way in which the most important cognitive human potentials, whether tribal, collective or individual, are designed to function within certain biological rules that are inherent to our common nature. In other words, we learned to recognize that every human being’s life, without any exception, is unavoidably conditioned to confront very similar dilemmas and will sooner or later be determined by the decisions that they make when those dilemmas appear in their individual development. The reason why Human Design is such an incredible tool for individual transformation is because, through the agency of the Rave Body Graph, it provides a graphical and precise way to illustrate which human characteristics allow us to see ourselves as an ‘equal’ to others and which carry the potential to drive forward whatever is unique about us. I cannot imagine a simpler way to put it. You see, if you look at our individual potential for uniqueness from this perspective, then the homogenized vanity of humankind easily becomes visible, because it makes it obvious that what makes certain individuals appear to be ‘special’ in front of everyone’s eyes is not ‘who they are’ (certainly not who they are for themselves), but it is the social status that they occupy in the mundane circumstances of their material lives. I could describe this homogenized vanity as a ‘VIP Syndrome’ that unfortunately we all seem to share to a larger or lesser extent. This is where Rave Cartography comes in, providing tools that have the potential to allow us to recognize a quality of uniqueness that is not rooted in social comparison. You see, what makes us unique is not something that carries any social privileges, nor does it place us ‘above’ any of the general human limitations, but rather what makes us unique is the natural grace that emerges in each of us as we learn to wisely accept ‘the role’ and ‘the nature’ that we were given at birth and that best define our individual human condition. We all have a role to play in this life, and we all have a nature that sustains that role in the material life. What is actually amazing is that with Human Design we finally have the tools to be able to measure and describe the practically infinite diversity of ways in which we are all uniquely predisposed to go through (surrendered or not) exactly the same experience; existing as a human being on the mundane plane of life. Moreover, Rave Cartography does not just provide a set of tools to deconstruct the different aspects of the individual predisposition with which any human being is born, but it actually teaches participants how to see all of those tools play together in a mechanical juxtaposition that reveals the backbone of an orchestrated and differentiated human synthesis. The 12 Profiles The first tool that Rave Cartography offers us is what is called ‘Profile’. Profile is surely the most significant of all mechanical keys from a cognitive point of view, because it represents the most concretized manifestation of the two crystals of consciousness with which we are all endowed; the Design Crystal and the Personality Crystal. The only way in which the Design and the Personality can come together is through the agency of the Magnetic Monopole, which is the driver inside the vehicle and, as we all know by now, has its residence in the G-Centre. It is not for nothing that 4 of the 8 ‘profiling’ gates are located in it. The G-Centre drives our behaviour, and in doing so it unavoidably reveals the potential alignment (or the lack of it) between our personality (who we think we are/the passenger) and our body (the vessel without which the journey could never take place/the vehicle). This mechanical dependence that the crystals of consciousness have from the Magnetic Monopole becomes our best ally in recognizing our own correctness (or lack of it) in the daily experimentation with our individual design. You see, when you are not operating in accordance with the holistic nature of your individual form, both your personality and your design manifest in distortion, and you frequently get to see how you misrepresent yourself, by acting and expressing yourself in ways that you yourself do not really approve. Ra used to say that ‘Profile’ is like a natural human ‘costume’ that simply does not fit you well, when your behaviour is driven by the distortion of mental choices (always rooted in the design’s openness) rather than by inner authority (always rooted in definition). As there are only 12 profiles, and none of them represents any sort of advantage in comparison to the others, the problem is obviously NOT in the specific profile or ‘costume’, but it can only be in the way you are wearing it, in the way you tread from one circumstance to the next; in your behaviour, to say it with just one word. Behaviour for us humans is an equivalent of movement. As you start experimenting with ‘Strategy & Authority’, you stop being blindly determined by your thinking in the way you move, and as a consequence you become more and more attuned to a quality of movement that does not feed resistance nor identifies with that of others, because your determination starts coming out of a place that carries no conscious mental ‘agenda’; your body and its natural way to align itself to the material circumstance that it finds itself in on a moment to moment basis. This transition of the authority from the rational mind to the physical form has the potential to bring about a deep transformation in the alignment of the forces that move within the individual psyche, as the solidity of mental barriers and the powerful attachments slowly but surely start to fade away. What changes is the identification with ‘what is not ours’, and as we learn to trust our own innate human characteristics, we also discover that our ‘role’ and ‘nature’ seem to have been tailored to match our personal sense of what ‘perfection’ could possibly mean if it had any explainable meaning, which it does not have. This sense of potential ‘perfection’ in the way things work in life is what is possible to recognize and sense for anyone that is ready to look at the roots of the personal conditioning that they live in identification with. It is a state of mental liberation that you do not get for free. What you get for free in this world is everything that will load your spirit during your whole incarnation, but the liberation from such a homogenized burden is unavoidably something you have to consciously work for during your lifetime, otherwise it is simply not going to happen. Type of Definition If everything is structural and mechanical in the Rave Body Graph, then way in which the diversified characteristics that can be defined in any individual design are ‘organized’ would seem to be of utmost importance. That is, if all defined characteristics are integrated into one single flow of energy, then this should predispose the rational mind to develop in a very different way than it would if the defined characteristics present in the individual design are split in two, three or four different areas, where each ‘separate’ aspect of the definitions seems to want to drive the singular life into a totally different direction from all the others. You see, because you cannot really separate mind from the structure through which it learns to operate, the way we learn to rationalize as children is deeply determined by the overall structure of our defined life force. If you can understand that this is a law of the form principle, then it will be easy to follow the logic of the way this mechanical predisposition impacts, both positively and negatively, on the individual psyche. In Human Design, the total sum of every gate, channel and centre that is open is called the ‘mental body’. As a spokesperson for the Not-self, the rational mind identifies with the openness and simultaneously creates a ‘hypnotic’ state of mental ‘separation’, as a distorted way to establish its homogenized sense of being an individual with his own priorities in life. Now, the way the human mind will learn to do that will change from one type of ‘mental body’ to another. Learning to recognize the way your Not-self mind establishes its life priorities at the expense of keeping your life force in distortion is surely one of the most liberating steps in learning to live in alignment with what is most natural for oneself. Inner Authority One of the most important advances that neurology and other cognitive sciences have made in the last decades is in the discovery that the potential of human intelligence and awareness is something that reaches out a lot further than our rational thinking. As a matter of fact, enough experiments have been made that have successfully proven that the importance of our rational mind (conscious perception) in the process of decision making is highly overestimated. I could make you a long list of different forms of human intelligence, that have little or nothing to do with our thinking, that have been established by well know scientists. They have names like ‘spatial intelligence’, ‘linguistic intelligence’, ‘logical-mathematical intelligence’, ‘musical intelligence’, ‘bodily-kinesthetic intelligence’, ‘naturalistic intelligence’ and so on and so forth. If you read through the description of each of them, though they remain somewhat abstract it is not difficult to establish direct and obvious associations with the different sources of potential for intelligence and awareness that were described during the Rave ABC course. What they all have in common is that none of the signals that they trigger in our awareness are to be found in the linear thinking of the Not-self mind. They all stem from a very different source, which is the sensory potential of the physical body. It can sound, it can be taste, it can be feeling. It can be smell, it can be many different things, but thinking is NOT one of them. The mechanical structure of the Rave Body Graph explains exactly how each of those forces operates and how it tends to manifest in the physical form. There is nothing abstract about it. There is nothing one needs to believe in. There is only a certain range of ‘signals’ from the body that one needs to learn to remain attuned to, because those are the signals that allow us to recognize how close or far we are from our natural signature. The Four Views & The Cross of Life Anyone who wants to penetrate to the core of the human condition is easily going to recognize that the foundation of ‘who they think they are’ is made of a bunch of inconsistencies that fuel endless rationalizations of ‘this’ and ‘that’, and where the only consistent places to come back to in those rationalizations are the distorted emotions that emerge when one lives trapped in one’s own Not-self dynamics. The anger, the frustration, the bitterness and the disappointment not only seem to be real, but they actually go deeper as one becomes older, don’t they? None of this needs to end like this if one knows how to stand as oneself in the greatest battle of all; the one that exists between you and your own mind on the inside. Learning to use these tools that Rave Cartography provides, by seeing them in juxtaposition to each other rather than separately, is the only thing that help anyone to withstand the power of conditioning to pull us back into the old self, and continue to carry the deconditioning process forward. These tools can and will show you both the potential and the limitation of being born a human, and they will allow you to lead a life of ‘no fault being’, where shame and blame have no longer a reason to exist in you. Once the reliable surface characteristics have been recognized and mastered through ‘Strategy & Authority’, the mind is liberated enough to start paying attention to further nuances that make a huge difference in the inherent sense of purpose that emerges out of your Sun/Earth and Nodal polarity positions. This is where you learn to see the mythological spirit of what seemed to be just a mechanical structure, which is the ability to experience the essential nature of the human Self manifest directly through you. Alokanand Díaz