The Left Angle Cross of the Plane (Version 2)

Full breakdown

Crossing into the left angle brings us to the densest aspect of the world imaginable — the Plane. The left angle is, in a sense, the advertising agent for a cross's hexagram structure; that's its job. The fifth or first line offers direction, presumably resolving projected social problems, while the sixth line judges whether that direction is right. Underneath it all, these people are busy handing that informational field to others. The Plane matters here precisely because it plunges people deep into the material plane — carrying the understanding that the material plane genuinely benefits us, because we are material.

I remember attending university in the sixties, amid a huge socialist, anti-materialist left movement. The term 'anti-materialism' honestly terrified me — what would we do without the material? What does anti-materialism even mean? One of the most important things to understand about being human is that we incarnate to work. When I first met the Voice, that was the very first thing it said, and it scared me half to death: 'are you ready to work?' That's the job. We're here to work, to produce, to be productive — busy, busy, busy is simply the design of a human being; be busy! Three defined channels formed by the Wheel's oppositions mean most of humanity thinks like oddballs through channel 43/23, stays busy right now through 20/34, and prefers to belong to something through 40/37. Being in the world is the one thing that actually works. That's just how it is.

Teaching and presenting Human Design, I've learned to frame it many different ways over the years — sexually, medically, on the everyday level, and so on. The one framing I've never used professionally is presenting it purely as business, because, you see, it always comes back to the same thing: live in alignment with your Authority and your Type, and you get the material resources you actually need. That's not a promise of riches, and it doesn't mean having more than you need — but the reality is, live according to your nature, and you'll always have what you actually need.

Some people genuinely need more than the baseline, and they'll get it. Some need a little less, and they'll get that too, and neither will complain, because we belong to the world. Looking at the world, I'm genuinely relieved I'm not a humanist, because I'd cry constantly over how senseless it is that hunger and pain exist — that billions of people live on a dollar a day. It's senseless, truly. What matters is that we're naturally connected to the material world because we belong to it. We think we exist apart from it. We don't — we belong to it.

Once we start living according to our own nature, the material follows. Look at humanity and you'll see our greatest single difficulty plainly: seventy-five percent of women on Earth spend half their day searching for water and firewood. The whole point is living in alignment with your own nature, not taking from the rich to give to the poor — this isn't about socialism or anything like it. It's about understanding that there's enough for everyone who's actually living their design.

If you want to see your own material life change, live according to your design. Engage the material world according to your nature, and you'll see what comes to you — very different from what your mental Authority desperately wants and insists you should do to get there. Fall into that trap and you're caught in the Plane's maya, and it hurts. People born into this cross are built for exactly this; they don't suffer in the sense that they exist to guide us through the Plane. They suffer only when they want to leave it — when they want out of the body, to see what's on the other side; that's when it hurts, because they're built to be in the dense world.

That's simply what we are. I love photographs of Earth from space, because in a real sense we no longer exist separately — we return to the Earth's own matter; we are the Earth, and it is us. It's only an illusion that we're separate, that this is one thing and that another. We live in the world, and from there comes the natural energy of our geometry, flowing to all of us. Ever seen footage of a whale feeding? It swims through a school of small fish with its mouth open, doing essentially nothing, just cruising, and all the fish simply swim in. That's my own life too — I open my mouth, and things swim in. I do nothing; I just stay myself.

Material well-being, for us, is achieved simply — easy for me to say, since it's the product of a seven-year process, and you already know this, we've talked about it. But once you truly start living according to your nature, experimenting every day, especially with the material plane, engaging the material world as yourself, you'll see the difference. Yes, your mind may not like it — your mind has its own opinions about who you are, what you're worth, what you deserve and don't. But what does your mind actually know? You find all of this out through response, through engaging the world. You learn it by being yourself, and then you see what's really there for you. It genuinely works.