Ajna

The Ajna centre is one of the nine centres of the Human Design bodygraph. Human Design is a modern esoteric system, originated in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu (born Alan Robert Krakower, 1948-2011), who presented its content as received teaching rather than as an inherited tradition. It is roughly four decades old and is best read as a contemporary synthesis, not as ancient wisdom or established fact. Ra Uru Hu combined four older systems that had never before been joined: the I Ching supplies the sixty-four gates, the Hindu chakra model the nine centres, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life the connecting channels, and Western astrology the method of calculation.

Where the Hindu chakra model it draws on has seven centres, Human Design maps nine, a difference the system explains by a claimed mutation in human form, a claim about the species that has no support outside the system and should be reported as its own, not as fact. In the model the Ajna centre is classed as a "Awareness" centre and is the centre of conceptualisation and mental awareness, where ideas are formed, held and reviewed. A centre may be "defined" (consistently active) or "undefined" (open and conditioned by others) in a given chart. These are features of a contemporary esoteric framework dating from 1987, described here as the system presents them.

Sources The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower) with Über den Tellerrand, ein Blick ins Human Design System (HDS)Petra Stute, Virineya Würgler and Johnny Würgler

The Ajna is the one centre in the Human Design bodygraph that kept its Sanskrit name, and the naming is the clearest single sign of where the nine-centre scheme came from.

The name

In the classical chakra scheme, ajna is the brow centre, the sixth of the seven counting upward. Human Design places a centre in the same position and uses the same word for it, where every other centre in the bodygraph carries an English name.

The arithmetic of the borrowing

The classical scheme usually cited in modern Western usage has seven centres. The bodygraph has nine. Two of the nine, the G or Identity centre and the Spleen, have no classical counterpart and are additions. The remainder correspond by position, with varying closeness of function.

Human Design does not claim to be a chakra system, and describing the relationship as an adaptation with two additions is more accurate than describing it either as a transmission or as an unrelated invention.

A caution on the other side

The sevenfold scheme is itself one arrangement among several. Indian tantric traditions describe systems with different numbers of centres, and the standard seven of modern Western usage is a settled popular version rather than a single original. The comparison above is between a 1987 construction and that popular version.

Human Design was published by Ra Uru Hu in 1987 and is recorded here as a contemporary system rather than as inherited material.

Sources Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland with The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth CenturyGeoffrey Samuel, The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)