Alokanand Diaz Sharing About His Early Life, How He Came to Human Design, and His Relationship With Ra

SEASON 1: EPISODE 7

Published 05/24/2020

Amy: We had the great pleasure of sitting with Alokanand Diaz, a deep and dedicated Human Design teacher who’s been working with the knowledge for nearly 30 years. The sharing was so rich that we’re presenting it in two parts. In the first, we hear about his life before discovering Human Design, his experience with Astrology and Osho, how he came to meet Ra Uru Hu, the founder of the system, and the early years of his experimentation with it. We also get to hear about his first readings, his close relationship with Ra, and how he’s impacted by it. Alok is a Triple Split, 1/3 Emotional Manifestor, who is a compelling storyteller, and a masterful practitioner and transmitter of knowledge through his unique frequency. We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did. Thanks for doing this with us.

Alokanand: I appreciate it. It’s like you said, it’s a fractal. It’s only natural. It is the spirit of correct sharing. There are things that have a price, and there are things that don’t have a price. Fortunately for me- they rarely come together so deeply in the same life as they did in mine. What has a price in my life is the same thing that doesn’t have a price. The truth of Human Design, at least in my experience, is that the information is something else. It’s like, how much of my time do I need to sacrifice to share with you the information in a way that you can make something out of it? That was my line of the day on Facebook, that the truth is never to be found in the information. The sun is in the Second Gate, the Gate of higher knowing, the Fifth Line Universal. The Not-Self has always identified truth with information. Now, I’m pleased to share this with you. It has also been a pleasure for me. I told you already when we did the ABC training, I somehow felt challenged to share with you other perspectives. Of course, those perspectives, the way it was there, were just also the expression of all the work or the processing that is behind and it was very nice.

Amy: I’m glad. We certainly felt that way. We certainly felt very lucky and that it was a very special kind of coming together for us. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what kind of state you were in, how you were feeling, or where you were in your life when you stumbled into Human Design. What were those first couple years like after encountering it?

Alokanand: I’m a jack of all trades with an Open G-Center. I met Human Design when I was close to half a year away from turning 33. I had done a lot of things, but basically, all I did was survive. I’m fully experiential. I dropped out of school at 15 and I started to work. I just kept going. After my second Jupiter, Return 24, I came to Ibiza, and it was a trampoline to India and Osho. Something happened there. The sense that making money was no longer so deeply connected to survival, to be able to make it to the end of the month. There was an excess that would allow me to travel to another continent. Coming to Ibiza was definitely deeply transformative. Ibiza and Human Design. I knew the magic of this island before Human Design.

I spent seven years in Ibiza selling pictures to tourists, basically telling a few gentle lies. The kind of lies you tell the clients so that they go away happier than they need to. Nothing bad; the kind of stuff you tell them so they don’t go and buy from the next shop but they buy from yours. With the money that I saved in the summers, I used to go to India and invest all of that money in me, digging in the shadows of me. All the stuff that seemed to be going on in me that I had no control over. I did not even know how much of that was me. It was dark. It was just the not knowing, the demand for answers. Answers to questions that I didn’t even know I had, because remember, I’m emotional. I was always moved by feelings, even though my mind was always there rattling. I have a defined mine, so the rattling was loud and heavy at moments.

Puna and Osho, there was a lot of fear and repression energetically that went away. It changed my life in many, many ways. I was no longer a slave to survival. I found a way to dance with this, working five months a year for a few hours a day. In a way, I was okay, I didn’t have a lot of stuff on my shoulders that I had to shake off. I wasn’t married and I didn’t have responsibilities. I was as free as you can be. However, since freedom is an illusion, I didn’t feel like being free. To me, it felt like I was just lost. I didn’t know what that had to do with my life.

The last thing I did was in the relationship that basically took me through my Saturn Return. We had built something in Spain. We started doing therapy there and we were actually more successful than I would ever have expected. I guess this was from the impact that I didn’t know I had or could have. However, I didn’t like my role as a therapist. I didn’t like people calling me like I was their dad. I didn’t like feeling responsible for them. I did not like feeling responsible for them to know what I meant. I could just see that there were contradictions in the work that I was doing. The relationship also wasn’t going well, which was not news for me. I had never had relationships that worked well. Now I know that no one has a relationship that works well, but at that time, I had no idea.

I was driven by whatever my mind could make out of my always unstable feelings. I was deeply contradictory and chaotic. I guess because of my roots and spleen, I always was grounded enough to not lose touch with reality. Someone wouldn’t just say, “Something’s wrong with that guy, let’s lock him up,” or something like that. I wasn’t at all stable. I didn’t have roots inside of me. I didn’t have emotional roots. I have powerful emotions, but they were basically just driven by outside forces, driven by my open centers. Even though I’m deeply independent, when I used to engage in relationships, when I used to fall in love, I became deeply dependent. I was more codependent, almost the one that invited codependency. I didn’t really know where clean love ends, and where toxic love begins. It all came together in the same soup.

There was a lot of drama. I was 33 years old. The best I had ever done, best in the sense of being comfortable in life, was what I was doing at this time as a therapist. Work was going well, but I wasn’t okay and I did not know why. For the first time, I decided to come to Ibiza. I had a couple of clients here that I used to do massages for and they knew that I could sustain myself. For the first time, I decided to take some time for myself and look at my life to see what I wanted to do and what it was that I didn’t like.

There is a little loop in time, but I’ll take you back there. I took an apartment in San Juan, which was the village where Ra used to go every day to have his coffee and get his mail and stuff. One day, there was a terrace where people would sit, and I was coming out with my coffee, but all of the tables were taken. The only table where I saw some space was at a bigger table where only one guy was sitting. I approached and I asked the guy, “Do you mind?” He says, “No, sure.” So, I sat there, we started having a conversation, and of course, it was Ra. Very soon, I realized, “This guy knows something. This guy’s got something to tell me.”

Let me tell you, back in the looping time that I did, the relationship that I had was one of those difficult ones, on and off. One year before, this woman and I were not together. I was a non-smoker, I drank no alcohol, I meditated, I did massages during the day, I took pictures of the tourists during the morning, and I took tennis classes in the morning as well. I was a busy man. I was living with a bunch of freaks and we had a big house rented. These guys had money, I was the only one who had to work to make money. They were staying home drinking and smoking joints. Oftentimes, they would offer some to me, forgetting that I don’t smoke. I would always say no because almost five years ago, I had given up smoking altogether.

One day, a good friend of mine, who divides my G-Center through exactly the same two channels that my mother defines my G-Center, offered me this joint. I don’t know why, but I took it. In the moment of having this pot- because I had been a continuous smoker during my teenage years and my early 20s, it was like recovering a sensitivity that I had lost. Something like having eyes in your back, having this surround perception of me and whatever was around. I was too high to go work and sell pictures. Because I sold on commission I was free to just not go if I was tired. No selling, no earnings.

I decided to join these guys who were going to some Full Moon Party up in some mountain here in the San Juan area. I decided to join them. I get to this party place with music. The beautiful sun was setting and the full moon was coming out. There was a circle, which is very common in Ibiza houses, in the back, from when they used to do something with hay and corn. Freaks that have such houses use this as a dance floor for the parties. This was surrounded by little rocks and on every rock there was a symbol painted. Some of the symbols I recognized because they were the planets, but others I didn’t, and I think that they must have been the Bases.

In the middle of that circle, there was this guy dressed in black, looking at the sunset like the sun was his. I didn’t like the guy, I was like, “What kind of blackbird is that?” That was an Osho sun. I had my guru, so he was the most opposite you could find. To anyone who has any faith in gurus, he actually opened my eyes. Well, he tried. I guess my eyes just opened over time, but he definitely gave me a few keys in this regard. However, when I saw him there, I didn’t like him. There was this party and when the party started, I started dancing.

That night, I met a young woman there. young woman obviously I was so young. We were kind of sexually loose, so we ended up going home together. It was like, “Wow, love.” When she found out that I loved Astrology and that I was studying it, she said, “Are you going to know about this Human Design System? It’s Astrology, but it tells you which chakras you have activated.” The moment she told me this, I could feel my mental curtains dropping down completely. Let’s change this issue as quickly as possible. If it was hard to believe in Astrology on its own, to mix it with chakras was definitely too much for my rationality.

That was one year before I met Ra. In between, I moved back with this woman, we moved to this place in Spain, we started the whole therapy thing, and it worked wonderfully. There was a whole year in between that second. I didn’t recognize the blackbird guy who looked like this nice guy- open, light, and easy. There are interesting people in Ibiza. It was Mr. Who, and we obviously ended up making an appointment because of Astrology. He just didn’t tell me about chakras. He spoke a totally different language. Anyway, we had to reschedule the appointment three times. This was because finding his house was like being lost in places where only the Safari Tours go with some tourists to show them how wild the island can be. By the third time, I found it, and we did the reading.

Amy: Did you know right away as you were in that exchange with him that there was truth in it that was there for you? Were you skeptical?

Alokanand: We sat at the table in this coffee bar. I just knew that the guy knows what he’s talking about. It was the only time that I did not come back to the island to make more money from the tourists. I came back to the island to reflect, to look into myself like I had only done when I went to India. My life was like six months in Ibiza making the money and then six months in Puna nurturing my own spirit. It was always coming back to zero. This was the only time I came to Ibiza, to see what this was. What is it? What’s missing? What the hell am I doing? Why am I not liking what I’m doing when it seems like I’m doing it well because people love it? What is it that I’m not liking?

I didn’t really understand. I’m a triplet split, so, contradictions are a joke compared to the level of chaos that I can experience in my psyche. It’s literally a cooking pot under pressure. I just knew that he seemed to know. I was not someone who would go to anyone who seemed to know or claim to know, I was not. However, when I was open, I was open, and I went. I went as a 1/3. That was not a reading. That wasn’t laser surgery. That’s how it felt to me.

When he did that reading, I had been in Puna for seven years looking deep into where nobody could see. If you are hiding, you are the last line where you can actually know if you are hiding or not. I had been looking for seven years, deeply guided by some good people, and this guy who didn’t know me had in 45 minutes told me everything I had found out in a way that no one could have ever, ever, ever put it all together like this. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing is wrong. It’s not what we think it is.

Of course, that opened up cracks right away. I was never again the same person who entered his house. I could never enter any space that was populated by other humans without being aware of where I placed myself. Do I go towards them or not? Actually not just being aware of it, but not interfering with what my body does. If my body feels I don’t want to go towards certain people, I do not force myself to do so only because they’re part of the group of people that I call friends. In someone as open as me, that can be anybody on a sunny day.

My Design is about loyalty and openness. I had to learn to actually be someone. I had to be someone who is not just blindly driven by his own mind and doesn’t even notice. It’s not like I stop being driven by my mind, I can still get into it. I just don’t indulge myself in it any longer. I don’t have pleasure in it. I have now developed a sensitivity towards myself and my signature, things like that. This summer, it’s going to be 27 years. If I make it through, I’m coming close to a complete Saturn Return. Living by the Foundation of something I guess makes you an expert. I mean that in the experiential sense, in the sense that, I can really tell you the before and the after.

Then again, the joke is that I’m not more of myself than I was on that day, I’m just much more grounded in it. I’m much more aware of it. I am not missing information. I’m not missing anything. I don’t think anymore, “What the hell does he mean when he says ‘I’m watching the movie.'” I know what it is now. We called it ‘The Movie’. Others called it an ‘Illusion’. I have the Channel of Transitoryness. It’s why if you have this Channel, the very mechanic of this Channel tells you it cannot be anything other than an illusion. Nothing is permanent. I have always felt like this. Today, I look at the options I have mentally. I only seem two, to accept things as they are, an illusion, or to go into any kind of self-deception.

I can make up this and that. Sure, I know how to do that, but it’s a waste. I’m not going to do that with my life. I’ve done that enough. That’s exactly what I was doing. That was mindfucking all day. Even though I was not smoking, I needed my drugs. I was a compulsive meditator. If I didn’t meditate, I felt like good Christians who don’t go to church on Sunday, or don’t confess. I felt impure. Of course, I was never pure enough. One of the first things he told me in the reading was, “Meditation is not good for you.” He obviously knew I was a meditator because we had friends in common.

This woman I had fallen in love with a year before was helping him and his wife deal with his first son who was only six months old. She was helping out with the house. She gave him my data to figure out what the hell was going on. By the way, I told you this would never work. The first crisis we had, that was it. It was the end of it. However, we still remember each other with grace and delight, and surely thankfulness.

These kinds of events made me aware from the beginning of how easy it is to deceive yourself with something like Human Design. It is easy to do that with Astrology, and I was never sure to which extent I was doing this with Astrology. I was aware that if you take a Uranus or Venus square- do you know how many interpretations I can give you of this, good and bad? It doesn’t matter what star signs they are in, by the way. Sometimes I would meet people who asked for a reading with me, and years later, they would tell me about something I had told them. It seems to have some power.

I guess that’s why I never considered myself a professional astrologer. Actually, when I did, I was already in Puna, and the sessions there- there were no readings. It was a beautiful Astrology, which was very much in the spirit of Human Design. The guy that I learned it from used to lay the Zodiac on the floor. Let’s say it was a six-meter diameter so that you could move inside of it. Then, you would look at my Mars-Saturn opposition, in Cancer and Capricorn. He would have me sit in Cancer with my eyes closed and holding the Mars symbol in my hands. He would ask me something, or say something and watch my reaction. Then, he would move me over to Capricorn and give me the symbols of Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus. I would answer myself and kind of realize that I’m not just this one line of thought. There’s consistency in certain aspects of me. They’re not right or wrong, they are just angles inside of me.

Astrology, for me, was a first step in accepting that life is about diversity. There is no one truth or one way for everybody. I distrusted the concepts and the way it was used, so I loved this other approach. When I started doing it myself, people would actually change their body posture. They would change the way they would sit when in Cancer. The way they would sit in Capricorn was not the same. The body language was transmitting other things and putting Puna there was a lot of that. Everything was through the body. Even meditation had a big dynamic with the body and then the relaxation could come by itself easily.

When I met Human Design, it was like what it says it is, its synthesis. It brought everything that I had done in my life, even the plumbing. This body graph reminded me of one of those plumbing maps where you have the tubes, and the places where you can lock the key, and then it won’t go through. It was also like an electronic system. It’s a system. It’s something that’s tangible. It’s something that, unlike Astrology, you do not need to interpret. You have an idea what level of relief that meant for me. I’m not giving you my own interpretation of a Uranus-Venus square. This is a function, this is another function, and when they meet through the channel, they do this other function. This is not Uranus, and this is not Venus, this is human. This is what it does and this is how it works.

You have no idea how liberated I felt, to have something that I could present and not care if anybody believed me. I’m the first one who expects them not to. They have to see for themselves because if you don’t see it, you don’t get it. If you don’t see the simplicity of what it says, but it’s consistent, what is reliable, and what cannot be reliable as a source to define yourself consistently. To have a consistent relationship with yourself. Human Design gives me many things. It transformed my life on many levels, but the most cherished gift it has given me is the one thing nobody can ever pay for. It’s the relationship it gave me with myself. It’s priceless, I’m always in good company. Now that’s quite something for a human being. Be amused, exactly what Ra said. It’s not just that life is a movie, it’s a movie that can be very entertaining.

Amy: I can certainly relate to a lot of what you’re saying. It’s actually quite an experience for me to just get to feel it as you tell the story.

John: Alok, in that initial reading with Ra, what did he focus on? Did he talk about the Definition? There wasn’t Type at that point was there?

Alokanand: There was no Type. There was no Authority. There was no Profile. There were no Incarnation Crosses. There was only Definition or not. He was very methodical, and he worked with the Rave I Ching there in front of him. He would move back and forth to show you that the lines were written. He would explain what it means for you. He would make a little introduction of the red and the black. He would make sure that you understand the logic of this so that you are not tempted to believe anything. If there is a place where you don’t see the logic, you can ask an intelligent question, because there’s an answer to it. He tells you not to worry because it is all going to be recorded. It’s logical. He’s reading, he’s not interpreting. He doesn’t have to think. He probably looked at the chart for a few minutes before.

Anyway, it was the wrong chart. It was the wrong chart by an hour. If there were Types, if there had been Types, he would have defined me as a Projector. There were no Types. If you prefer, there are only two Types, doers, and non-doers. I was a non-doer. I told you how busy I was, and I was coming from this place in the therapy where I still did massages. I had these therapy groups, I had this relationship that didn’t really let me live in peace, so I was with an Open Sacral. I was living like this Emotional Manifesting Generator. I have a defined Ego. When he told me that I needed to rest, something in me went like, “Yes.”

What happened was, I did that right after the reading. A couple of weeks later, I decided to go to my village to ask my family to support me in getting a loan from the bank. I was going to translate this book, and I was going to dedicate myself to this. It was just a matter of, “Can I get him to do a course even if there are not many of us?” That’s what I ended up doing.

It still was my chart, the only difference was that I had an Open Throat instead of a Defined Throat. The Design Moon would move from the 36/6 to the first line of Gate 25. Sure, he focused on the definition, but also on the lack of definition and on the split. He did what I guess most people would classify today as an overview reading. As I just told you, it was surgery.

I remember sitting down where he was going to do the reading and the very first sentence he told me was, “Everything in your life turns around patterns.” You have no idea the impact this sentence had on me. I have two definitions of the understanding circuit. One and a half of them are totally unconscious. My Personality Sun, in a Logical Sacral Gate- I remember myself in my teenage times, my body doing things compulsively on the street. To compulsively follow a pattern that was basically based on the Five. The way I would touch everything as I was passing through it was kind of this 1-2-1-2-1, 1-2-1-2-1. I was doing this all the time, besides other things like memorizing the plates of every car on the square in my village. There were maybe 25 cars, and I knew them all in order. This photographic memory- I used to play, just challenging myself. “Am I getting better than yesterday or not?” He tells me that everything in your life is about patterns. It was just like this, “Fuck yes.”

I can remember- I’m a feeling person. Every time I see something that doesn’t fit the pattern, something in me goes, “Uhh?” I’m designed to detect mistakes in patterns. Patterns that don’t repeat or when you break the pattern. Remember, I did all this compulsively. It was a lot of fear of God. I was raised Christian, Catholic. Even though my parents would send me to church, they would only go themselves when there was a wedding or something like that. Most Christians do this, hypocritically. The God concept is heavy. Humans fear God, even those who think of themselves as atheists fear God. That’s why many turn around at the last minute, just in case.

Amy: It seems like after that first experience, that first reading, you immediately knew that you had to dedicate yourself to going deeper into this.

Alokanand: I do not remember if it was right there, that I bought the book in English from him, or if I asked him about this later when I met him again in the village. From that moment on, my interest and the pressure that I had drove me. He was just starting, so he was happy to find someone who was passionate about it, especially someone coming out of the social group, the people that he had met at parties, on birthdays, and with common friends. I manifested very quickly my interest in translating the books into Spanish. There was an English and a German version at the time. I went and took this loan, and for the first time, I stayed in Ibiza over the winter and did not go to India. It’s translated; the Black Book. I was living with people who had also supported him, so we had personal relationships with our partners. I acquired the Spanish rights. An incredible journey had started.

Let me tell you a story because it completes what was told before about my Chart being incorrect. Most of it is still the same, the only thing that changed is the position of the Moon, and the fact that this defines my Throat. This was not a big change, considering there were Types and Profiles. Everything else was basically the same. The winter went by, the money from the loan was spent, and I soon realized, I still had to give this loan back. So, I either have to do something with this stuff, or I throw it into the basket and go make money in some of the ways that I knew how to do because I had done it before.

These were the only two options and it came together with some infection that I was carrying along with me. It was like an open wound that I had, precisely in my Open Sacral by the way. That was the other thing, I had been carrying around this wound in my Sacral that wasn’t healing. He showed me in my chart, there was my Personality Sun and this Open Sacral under pressure from above. I couldn’t believe it, the physicality of the reading. Not only that, it was as if he was seeing it from inside, the way I see myself, the way only I could look at myself. I wanted to be able to see this way. I wanted to know how to see this way because of the grace of being able to show someone what he had shown me about myself. That seemed to be something worth dedicating my life to. My passion was immediate.

Now I’ll tell you this story. I was translating the Black Book, the first part, the second part, the Lines, everything. Then, we come to the third part about the Bases. When I read about the Bases, they were beautiful and deeply poetic, but I couldn’t figure out where the logic in this was. The moment I couldn’t see the logic, all of my doubts started coming in. It was like a waterfall of doubts. What if this is all subjective? What if I’m just crazy for believing in somebody who’s crazier than me, or the other way around? Maybe I’m crazy. How do you know that this is true for anybody other than for yourself or even for yourself? Are you really really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really sure? If you have a mind like mine, it’s really, really, really, really endless. It’s just endless. You live with that cynic inside. Cynical if you have a Fifth Line like me, sarcastic if you have a Third Line, as I also do. I can be cynical and sarcastic, but that was not new. It was there before Human Design. I knew how cynical and sarcastic I could be. Anyway, money was out and this infection was there. I had to do something. So I did. I called up this woman who I knew was organizing courses and events for Osho people like me, people who were on the same wavelength. I called her up and I told her, “Listen, I’ve got this new thing. It’s mind-blowing. If anybody likes Astrology, this is going to kill them.” Since she was into Astrology herself, she was turned on. She was a Manifestor, by the way, 12/22, very open and smart. She had a defined Ajna Head like me. She organized a tea table in her living room. There were seven ladies and me there. I introduced Human Design to these seven ladies and I ended up doing 30 readings.

Of course, my Defined Ego was looking at my sarcastic, ironic mind, like, “You better shut up now.” These women were very, very happy to pay me for what they had received. I don’t know what they did with it. It was my experiment. Coming back to Ibiza, I was happy. Ra was there, and when I came back, he told me, “I have a surprise for you. You are a doer.” I said, “What? Really? Don’t tell me because I just came from doing.” For me, it was clearly this. I don’t know if this stuff is true or not, but I was used to doing what my feelings told me to do. There was only so much I could turn my back on against the material reality of my life. It’s just not something I could afford to do for very long. I wasn’t going to do it just because there was a nice theory. I just followed my drive.

As I come back to the island, “You’re a doer.” That was my spirit with Human Design, whenever I found situations where my feelings were moving me in a direction that contradicted the Human Design Theory. I would say, “Fuck the theory.” Then again, I learned that even though there are no answers, it does not mean that the Theory is wrong. That was my way and I was allowed to test it. I was certainly going to do that. I was not going to take second-hand logic as an absolute that I apply, not just to me but to everyone, to my daughter, as if it were a religion. No, I’ve never done that.

The funny thing is, I stayed with Human Design because I could move on and I never needed to believe in it. I never needed to believe in it. I just needed to continue. I had to look at what was happening through the lens of Human Design, to become wise and stop struggling with what is futile. Like Ra told me in the reading, “Stop struggling with your mind. Struggle with your body. If you really want to change something, then do something. Don’t discuss.”

Only Human Design can give you the truth, that is not open to discussion. I do not discuss my truth. I’m happy that most of the time, my truth doesn’t really matter that much. It does not mean that I’m not truthful. What I mean is that if anything goes against my truth, you’re not going to get me. If I have to deny my truth to do or get this, you’re not going to get me. My truth is what I am for myself and there’s nobody else. My truth is knowing I’m going to die no matter what happens to the rest of humankind. Am I okay with the fact that I’m going to die and that humanity is probably not going to remember much of me? Am I okay with that? This is what you get, it’s exactly what Human Design describes as a wonderful journey if you know how to appreciate it.

Human Design taught me to appreciate what I have. All I had when I met Human Design was life because I didn’t have anything else. I didn’t have children. I didn’t have anything. I just had life. Well, that’s really all I continue to have. Yes, my material life got a lot more stable. I became a father. It grounded my life in a form that’s obvious to anyone who knew me before and after. However, what it did to me was in a place of timelessness. The stuff I’m telling you, that’s the stuff I tell myself. That’s how I remember the story. It’s how I remember what brought me to the life that I wake up to now every day. Fortunately, this time, there’s not much to do.

Peace has such a dense texture. It’s not a thought, it’s a feeling deep inside of me. Within that, I live an ordinary life. Right now, we’re cleaning and painting the house. It’s like playing because I normally do more mental stuff. So, we put music on and we’re just grooving around the house. It’s nice to have a body. There’s always a sadness that most people do not enjoy the lives that they wake up to every morning. They wake up and there’s a problem that they would like to change. Then again, as you said in the beginning, it’s good luck.