There are 3 major types of energy in the world, Tribal, Collective and Individual. Understanding these energies and how they work is a helpful foundation in understanding your interaction with others. Understanding your energetic makeup and the makeup of those around you can make it easier to predict how people are going to react in certain situations.

Tribal energy is all about the survival of the tribe. A tribe has rules and roles that everyone in the tribe is expected to live by. Members of the tribe often sacrifice personal freedoms to be a part of the tribe. A tribe can be a family, a team, an organization, a country and all of these may express a lot of tribal energy. Most of the conflicts in the world are caused by two or more tribes with conflicting beliefs. These can be as simple as two tribes believing they own the same piece of land or tribes having different religious views. Tribal energy  tends to be black and white with little gray. You either fit within the rules of the tribe or you are out of  the tribe.

Individual energy is unique to the individual. It is an expression or understanding that is uniquely ones own. Because of this it can be hard for us to understand individual energy or expression. Art is a common form of this expression. Often when we look at art, we either get it or we don’t. If you are having a person with a lot of individual energy explain something to you, you may get it or not. It can be frustrating for someone with individual understanding to explain something because the way they understand is so integrated within them that it is hard to come up with context to explain it to us.

Individual energy is often mutative. The individual takes an existing thing, like a dance step, and transforms it into something new like Michael Jackson when he invented the moon walk. Now I think most of us understood his moon walk, but it was so individually talented that not many of us could imitate it.

Collective energy is having harmony with everyone doing their own thing. Think of a big city where there is a neighborhood that is a real mix of cultures. Each family carrying out their own beliefs and traditions in this neighborhood everyone is okay with the other families doing their own thing. In another similar neighborhood, there are problems as the tribal energy creates distrust over the others being so different.

Collective energy doesn’t care it is really about the experience. Individual energy doesn’t care it is all about the expression. Tribal energy cares deeply that the ways of the tribe are kept.

Ultimately most of us are a blend of these three energies. Some of us lean more toward one then another. Usually it is the situation that will bring out a particular type. On the sports team we are tribal but out for a social get together we may wear a purple shirt and flash our individuality or take in the array of different people and relish in the collective.

Here is a chart of 6 of the 7 circuits in the Human Design system. The 3 energies are labeled by color. (You can click to enlarge it)

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.