Building a Global Immune System

What if we evolved beyond an individual immune system and into a new level of consciousness about health, well-being and purpose? What if there was such a thing as a Global Immune System? And how would we tap into it?

In Human Design the Spleen Centre correlates to our lymphatic system, including our T Cells, an important part of our immune system.

The immune system tells us what’s us and what isn’t us.  The common metaphor used to describe our immune system is a military one, an army ready to pounce on nasty intruders.

But there is another way to think about the immensely complex immune system.

The immune system connects us

Fritjof Capra describes the immune system in his book The Web of Life as a complex network of subtle interrelationships, and Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest, explains that recent research shows ‘it’s function does not depend on its firepower but on the quality of it’s connectedness’ .

This is a whole new way to exist on the physical plane, not in constant vigilance for survival against dreadful enemies, right down to the cellular level. Instead we can think of health and well-being as a creative exercise in building more and more meaningful connections with the world.

All this war talk wears grooves into our brain, telling us that we are constantly at war against the nasty outside bugs and other ‘threats’. We are moving from that place to understanding that our bodies are busy building excellent relationships with the myriad of life on this planet in the form of bacilli, fungi, proteins, antigens, occasionally even a live disease or pathogen.

Imagine that instead of ‘fighting disease’ we are creating a more complex and meaningful relationship with life. Imagine also how this extrapolates out into our world – as within so without.

These connections are not just about our own physical well-being. They represent the first steps towards building what we might call a global immune system, a grass roots early warning system that acts immediately should any one of us get out of flow.

I first started thinking about this idea during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened 10 years ago today, in 2010. While I was watching the struggle of the local people affected, their grief and loss and courageous actions, the management of BP and the US government were making strategic choices. For global corporations some level of environmental damage is acceptable, but for those watching dead baby dolphins washing up on shore, not so much.

I started to think about how each one of us has a ‘field of experience’, a kind of energetic space where our natural curiosity draws our perception to what is important for us as individuals.

The BP executives had a field that was economic, their perception (professionally at least) was on the balance sheet. This balance sheet is increasingly divorced from reality. The locals were watching the destruction of their environment.

We are here for the lived experience

Human Design is an experiment. It’s about the lived experience, how you choose, what you perceive, how you respond.

Each of us has a natural environment of lived experience and it’s really all we need to pay attention to. I suspect many of us are in overwhelm at all that seems to be going wrong in our world right now. The global immune system tells us one simple thing – pay attention to your unique individual field. That is what you naturally care about, authentically engage with, effortlessly transform.

Conscious awareness of the global immune system is not just about health or the environment. It speaks to purpose as well. What if you could relax into your own experience of life and not have to be constantly vigilant about danger elsewhere, because you had complete trust that others were looking after their local patch, just as you are?

What if your purpose, and your value within the global system, came from paying attention to only that which arouses your natural curiosity?

The global immune system is local in that we pick up what affects us personally.  It’s global because it’s power is leveraged through the immensity of our multi-dimensional connections – within our own fields and with others.  This newly emerging global immune system operates to ensure the sacred nature of the relationship between humanity (social justice) and the planet (environmental justice). 

Justice of course being a Libran concept based on fairness to all, that’s the Spleen Centre.

The Libran gate of the Spleen Centre

In the Human Design chart we can learn a lot about how our bodies function by looking at the Spleen Centre activations. Most of the gates in this centre are in Libra – 50, 32, 57, 48, 18. There are two Scorpio gates.

Gate 28 in Scorpio – a hexagram that teaches us how to come into balance within ourselves and in our relationships with others through the correct use of power.

Gate 44 in Scorpio – a hexagram that teaches us how to meet disruption and allow it to change us.

Libran energy is continually looking at the polarities to see how they can be brought together in a coherent relationship, a sort of ongoing homeostatic response to life.

When we move onto Libra from Virgo, we are shifting from the individual part of the zodiac wheel, out of self interest and self concern, and we begin to look for the meaning of life in the context of our relationship with the other.

So the Human Design Center that correlates with the immune system is all about the shift from self interest to a greater care for and relationship with others.

The Gentle Breeze

Every gate in the Spleen Centre contains the lower trigram Wind. Gate 57 is the most important, having the quality of double wind. This is a gentle energy that penetrates everything. Wind is invisible, but we can feel its presence. If we pay attention we experience wind as a gentle breeze, if we ignore the experience and its message, the wind becomes a hurricane, joining with Thunder to awaken us.

The quantum take

We are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation of what it means to be human. One way to view this shift is that we are moving away from seeing the world according to the old Cartesian ideas and towards a new quantum consciousness.

In the space between these two realities is a puzzle, how can we experience being both physical and energy at the same time? This is not so much a change in the world ‘out there’ as a shift in human perception about ourselves.

I could talk about a growing sense of oneness, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

Physicists believe the number 137 could be a link between the Cartesian (matter) and quantum (energy) worlds. Don’t ask me to explain it, I don’t get how a number can be that important but you can read all about it here.

One of my friends pointed out that there are two complementary gates in Human Design – 13 and 7.

137!

Gate 13 is Fellowship and Gate 7 is The Army. There is a simple idea inherent in the partnership of these two gates. I’m going to quote I Ching Master Alfred Huang:

The ancients thought that keeping an army would cause trouble. An army carried the potential of danger. Peasants are stable and military strength should not be stored in the army but in multitudes of people. To the ancients, war was evil. It should not be undertaken lightly, but only when absolutely necessary.

Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching

We live in a world where obscene amounts of resources are put into so-called defence. As if we would die without our weapons of mass destruction.

We have taken that belief into our own individual immune systems, defending our territory (ego self) against all comers, constantly alert to threats.

The number 137 in Human Design holds a key for our shift. We have to reduce our permanent investment in defence. We should absolutely be alert to anything that comes into our personal field of experience and threatens our well-being. But we can’t be vigilant about the whole world. We must trust others to do their bit. And they must be able to trust us.

Coronavirus and the global immune system

I’m writing this article in April 2020, when the world is experiencing the first global pandemic since 1918. Over a third of the earth’s population are in lockdown, connected only the internet. What does Human Design tell us about the timing of this pandemic in building a global immune system?

Read: The Hidden Human Design Keys of Coronavirus

A new world of connection

Between 2016 and early 2020, Neptune was in Gate 63. Along with its complementary Gate 64, these are the Gates of Transition. They represent a watershed of change, the place at which we shift from the old to the new.

When an activation to one of these gates comes to an end, we know the transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished.  That happened in January 2020, when Neptune shifted into Gate 22.

This is an internal shift rather than an external one, an intention to engage with the new energy. In principle everything stands ready and it is only the details that need still to be achieved. It can be a very difficult time, because everything seems to be in flux.

The role of the Head Centre in Human Design is to open us to inspired information, to shift our thinking. When we shut off this inspiration we tend to view reality as being what we think it is. We erase any evidence of a new world from our perception because it threatens the status quo.

If we are stuck in an individual immune system framework as we reach this tipping point, reality becomes the enemy. Shutting down on deep and full connections with our own internal discomfort, and with others, becomes a survival issue.

In January 2020, Neptune’s focus shifted to the Gate of Grace, where begin to appreciate culture and society, fashion, beauty and just hanging out with our friends. Neptune’s message here is that we have been sucked into a whirlpool of false culture and lost the message of the gentle wind.

This is a gate that represents superficial versions of beauty and ‘grace’. It’s complementary gate – 47 – says we have outgrown our current form and must withdraw to contemplate the last remaining lessons before we create the new form.

The global immune system requires us to pay attention to the gentle things, the tender breeze, the subtle message, the frisson of knowing, the ripple of discomfort, the small moment of recognition.

Ignoring the gentle, we put ourselves in the way of bigger interventions. And then we start to believe we must defend ourselves against a world no longer working with us. But she was, all along. We just weren’t listening.

The global immune system asks you to withdraw to your natural environment, to the place and way that are correct for you, and trust that others will also fill their natural space. When we fully participate with life in this way, we are no longer observers but gentle co-creators.