May 7, 2024

The Collective, Tribal Dance we Weave

There are 3 basic types of energy within the Human Design system, Collective, Individual and Tribal.

  • Collective energy is interested in the welfare of the entire collective. In a big city the collective would include all people from all walks of life and all ethnic and social backgrounds.
  • The Individual energy is interested in being the expression for that person. Often artists who do their own thing are expressing Individual energy.
  • Tribal energy is about what is good for the tribe, the family or the community. There is a common goal and set of rules that a tribe lives by. Outsiders or those who are different are not really tolerated.

When one expresses a particular energy from a gate or series of gates within your Human Design the expression it is going to take on the energy type of that particular circuit. A clear example of this is gate #37 of of the Solar Plexus. Gate #37 is the gate of family or community and is always going to reach out to create or enforce family and tribal values.

We are in the midst of a collective realignment. Triggered by events in the late 60’s and 70’s the collective movement gained ground and began the acceptance of collective rules for the countries to live by. Until that time much of the western world order was controlled by white men and essentially what ever country you lived in that was the tribe in control. They set the rules and if you were not part of the tribe you were on the outside.

But the 60’s and 70’s saw a lot of change with with the beginnings in breaking down the color barrier, moving on to the acceptance of homosexuals and Title IX that moved for men and women’s equality on the college sports fields. These changes unseated the tribal dominance and made way for a new collective order to be established.

As the new collective began to take hold in the 80’s and 90’s a new world order began to develop. The fall of the cold war and the opening of trade with almost all nations on earth hastened the collective in as the new era. As global trade increased so did the complexities of finance and the stock market. Since one of the guiding forces in the collective is acceptance of different ways of doing things, the door was open for some of the questionable and unethical business practices to gain control in the marketplace.

Now as a collective we are paying for some of these actions. In order for a collective to have cohesiveness and a presence there needs to be some rules and structure. Without any structure and commonality the collective has no bounds and begins to dissolve.  Nina and I belonged to a church for a while and because it was so collective that it was open to all beliefs there was this effort to not use any secular words so as not to offend anyone. However without using God or other words for a higher divine power, the spirtual passion became lost for us and we ended up seperating to find that else where.  

Ultimately the collective boundaries will be defined for the benefit of humanity, all life and the world. But we can’t hide our heads in the sand and expect that tribal influence will not strike out and try to take back or implement some measures of control. Rules often come from the tribe so they can’t help but have some tribal characteristics.

This is a delicate dance that we are in, adopting to individual expressions that have a resonance with the tribe, infusing tribal rules into the collective to keep it together and discarding tribal beliefs that are overly beneficial to individuals or certain tribes and detrimental to the collective as a whole. The dance is relatively new and we will make missteps as we learn but I have faith we can learn to twirl and spin like the earth, together.