Opportunist / Role Model

The 4/6 profile (Opportunist / Role Model) is one of the twelve profiles of Human Design, a modern esoteric system originated in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu and presented here as a contemporary framework rather than ancient wisdom. A profile is formed from two of the six lines, a scheme the system borrows from the six lines of an I Ching hexagram and reads psychologically: the profile pairs a conscious line with an unconscious one to give an archetypal role. The 4/6 profile joins the roles named Opportunist / Role Model. The line names and their meanings are Human Design's own twentieth-century reading, not a claim inherited from the Chinese classic whose six-line figures suggested the structure; they are described here as the system presents them, not as verified fact.

Human Design describes the fourth line, Opportunist or Networker, as needing an external foundation built from a fixed circle of friends, through which opportunity arrives; the sixth line, Role Model, is described as living a three part life, active and trial and error in roughly its first thirty years, withdrawn into a more detached, observational phase often called being on the roof through about fifty, and only afterward settling into the line's objective, lived wisdom. The 4/6 profile combines a personality built on fixed friendships with an unconscious pattern that, in the system's own account, only fully steps into role model authority once the sixth line's observational middle period has passed.

This profile pairs the fourth and sixth line positions of a hexagram, both of them in the upper trigram, and both with settled readings in classical Yijing commentary.

What the commentaries say

The fourth line is the bottom of the upper trigram, immediately below the ruling position, and the commentarial tradition characteristically reads it as anxious and cautious, close enough to power to be exposed by it. The sixth line is the top of the figure, past the ruling position, and is commonly read as excess or as a situation that has gone beyond its proper conclusion.

Neither reading is about a person. They describe places within a situation that the hexagram as a whole is about.

The modern layer

Human Design gives each of the six lines a role name and reads a profile from two of them as a description of someone's nature. Those names and that reading are the system's own, published by Ra Uru Hu in 1987.

The pairing rule

Of the thirty ordered pairs of distinct lines, Human Design uses twelve: those separated by two positions and those separated by three. The separations of three coincide with the Yijing's doctrine of correspondence between lines one and four, two and five, and three and six. This pair, separated by two, has no counterpart in that doctrine and belongs to the system's own arrangement.