My Love for Individual Circuitry
I have one individual channel in my chart: the 51-25, Channel of Initiation. I know we’re not supposed to have favourites, but if I had to pick, it would be mine. The rest of my chart is deeply tribal. Interestingly, all three of my channels form part of the minor circuit the Mystical Way, which is currently breaking down due to the mutations happening in the solar plexus (the 49th gate is essentially being squeezed off from the 19th, which is predicted to set off a whole chain of events I cbf getting into here).
But I am fascinated by Individual circuitry. I suppose the Tribe and the Individual have a close relationship — we actually don’t mind each other. We have a mutual enemy, the Collective, who doesn’t really like us either. The Tribe needs new genetic material to keep a healthy gene pool within our community. The Tribe wants to be mutated. So, in enters the Individual freak, the traveling stranger, who the Tribe welcomes in with open arms, as long as they abide by our Tribal laws.
The Individual has always been an outsider, the black sheep, the one who doesn’t fit in, but for that matter doesn’t really want to either. They just want to be able to be themselves in peace. They don’t want to be controlled or subject to conformity, the Tribe or Collective killing off what it means to be uniquely them. They want to be able to stand on their own two feet: “here I am, I am me, don’t try to change me, but I will change you.”
They are naturally impervious to influence; they are designed that way. The three “deaf” channels we have are all Individual. It protects them from the outside trying to sway them this way or that, distracting them from their own inner knowing. They can be incredibly stubborn in following their own path, which is absolutely correct for them. Even if it sometimes leaves the rest of us baffled.
The 43-23 for example, the Channel of Structuring, is one of the funniest things to watch in action. Everything must be processed and heard as their own inner knowing. You can tell them anything and if it didn’t come from their own internal truth, they won’t hear you. In fact, they will tell you the exact same thing you told them days before but claim they came up with it. Thick headed, but hey, they’re geniuses. Or freaks, if they can’t explain their knowing.
Everything about being an Individual is about operating in a pulse. They don’t know until they know, and they don’t know why they know what they know. Ninety percent of the time, they are stuck in the “I don’t know”. This is the waiting, the waiting for the pulse, the moment of mutation, where all of sudden it’s there.
The space between the notes is where change happens. I think of my own Individuality and how my 51 will foolishly leap into the void, maybe landing on the other side in the 25. But it’s the moment in between which is pure magic; how on earth did change happen in a single jump? We don’t know why. It just did.
To be an Individual, to radically be yourself in the face of homogenisation, to potentially never be accepted for who you are, can inevitably be painful. It can make someone deeply sad, deeply melancholic. Melancholy is the chemistry of Individuality; it is something they will never escape. Nearly everybody has at least some individual gates activated in their chart and thus the potential for melancholy. And yet, it is not to be feared, suppressed, or ignored. The worst thing to do is put a label on it, a reason or cause for why it’s there. Sure, sometimes there’s an external circumstance we can blame it on. But often there is not; reason-making only makes it more painful.
Melancholy contains some of the richest, creative potential you will ever find. Oh, writing shitty poetry when I’m melancholic is literally my favourite pastime! Dimming the lights, putting on my sad playlist, and contemplating the meaning of life goes like bread and butter with the melancholic muse. Some of the best art we have has clearly been made in a state of melancholy. It can be the fuel and inspiration to find meaning, purpose, to create something which articulates your own individual experience. It is beautiful. It is cathartic. I lean in, I don’t resist, when I feel the clouds of melancholy begin to descend; I embrace it with open arms.
When the Individual honours who they are, radically and totally even in the name of being “selfish”, they empower everybody else to be themselves. The super keynote for Individuality IS Empowerment, the empowerment of self. Without Individuality there would be no such thing as change in society — this is the heart of what mutation really is. It’s about change; it’s about uniqueness. Uniqueness can’t be measured or compared. Once the mutation enters into the Collective, then it has the potential to be measured, everyone competing to be the best: nothing new under the sun is the mantra of the Collective.
But the Individual? They always bring the new. They have to; that’s their role. We all want to be brave enough to be ourselves, despite societal pressure and conditioning towards sameness. The Individual charts us the way. They shout out to us, “I’m going this way”, not “do you want to come?” That’s if they even bother to state they’re leaving at all. And some will follow them, even if they don't know if they can trust them. Other’s will run towards the Collective, towards what has been proven and true.
Human Design, in a sense, is the greatest Individual mutation — finally, the possibility to be able to live as ourselves. And the irony is, only one person can be changed at a time. We all have to be brave enough to step into the Individuality of the unknown.