Excerpt · A. R. Sayer
ZENO
Zeno Dickson and the Erasure of Human Design’s Teachers
Prologue
On May 17, 1997, in a small classroom in Taos, New Mexico, a teacher named Ra Uru Hu stood at the front of a room and began to explain that there were four kinds of human beings.
The system he was teaching was called Human Design. It was four years old in the United States. Ra had received it, he said, during an eight-day mystical encounter on the island of Ibiza in January 1987, in which a Voice had transmitted to him a complete description of the human energetic anatomy. He had spent the years since trying to teach what he had been given.
Ra was forty-nine years old. In four years of American teaching he had never introduced the Four Types as a formal framework.
He was now doing so.
Across the room sat a forty-five-year-old woman named Zeno. She had organized the class. She had brought Ra to the United States four years earlier. She had picked him up at the airport in Albuquerque, hosted him for his first six weeks of American teaching, and organized every visit and class since. She had recorded every lecture, and certified the first generation of American Human Design teachers. She was Ra’s senior American teacher.
She was also, as Ra spoke, sitting next to her partner Chaitanyo, looking at him.
Zeno turned to Chaitanyo, and he to her. Without a word, both understood what they were watching, because both had seen it before.
Zeno had been here twelve years earlier, at Rajneeshpuram, a 64,000-acre ranch in the high desert of Oregon. There she had watched a different charismatic teacher convert genuine insight into a system of behavioral prescription. She had watched the apparatus around him become a control mechanism. And she had watched the whole thing collapse under the weight of what it had become.
She had left Rajneeshpuram by December 1984, a year before the commune collapsed.
She had not left it to walk into the same room with different furniture.
This is a book about what she did next.
It is not a book about whether Human Design is a cult.
The cult question (Is Human Design a cult?) is among the most frequently asked questions about the system, by people inside it and outside it. The standard cult-screening criteria (charismatic authoritarian leader, isolation from outside influences, us-versus-them mentality, thought and behavior control, financial exploitation) map onto the documented institutional pattern with varying degrees of precision. Other authors, writers, and vloggers have made that argument. This book does not.
This book is a documentary biography of one woman. She built the American school of a global movement, then recognized the moment its founder began to change what he had transmitted. She refused to participate, and lost most of her students and allies to the institution she had helped create. For the next two decades (in a wheelchair, in Taos, in declining health) she taught what the system had originally been to anyone who came to her.
The documentary record is at the back of this book: contracts, letters, archived correspondence, public statements, archived classes, institutional self-descriptions placed beside what actually happened. The reader is not asked to conclude anything. The reader is invited to read.
Her name was Zeno. She was born Karen Cox on 12 April 1952, in Oakland, California. She took the name Zeno during her years with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, drawn from Zen, the practice of direct unmediated awareness. The Rajneesh lineage did not survive her. The name did.
She died on March 25, 2020, in Taos, in the care facility where she had been living since 2017. She was sixty-seven. She had been unable to care for herself or to speak intelligibly for most of the last three years of her life. The work was, by then, in other hands: the archive, the software, the recorded classes, the book she and Chaitanyo had built and rebuilt over twenty years until every trace of Ra’s interpretive overlay had been removed and only the mechanics remained.
Most people working in Human Design today have never heard of her.
This is the story of what they were not told.
From the Prologue of ZENO.