← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 42/164
Circuitry
Circuitry sorts the 36 channels into three families, or currents. Every channel belongs to exactly one. Where the type says how a person's energy works and the inner compass says how they decide, the circuitry says something about what the energy is for — and, in practice, how the person tends to sit in a group.
The partition comes from the Human Design tradition the Embodied Energy Chart follows. It is one of the better-agreed parts of that structure: independent sources give the same three families with the same counts, and every channel lands in exactly one of them.
The three currents
- The individual current — 15 channels. Mutation and empowerment: the wiring that makes something new. It tends to arrive as a knowing that cannot be explained on demand, on its own timing. Its mood is here to be different, and to make a difference by being it.
- The tribal current — 7 channels. Support, bargains and belonging: the wiring that keeps people fed, held and looked after, and that expects something back. Its mood is here to look after their own.
- The collective current — 14 channels. Sharing: either patterns worked out and tested, or experience gathered and told. What is learned is meant to leave the person who learned it. Its mood is here to contribute to everyone.
Streams inside the currents
Each current divides into finer streams. They are a weaker claim than the currents themselves, and we mark them that way.
- Individual: knowing (insight that surfaces on its own timing), centering (identity, love and direction) and integration (self-preservation, and moving as one body).
- Tribal: ego (will, worth and the bargains that carry them) and defence (protecting what and whom the group depends on).
- Collective: understanding (patterns proven by repetition) and sensing (meaning gathered from experience over time).
Where accounts differ
Two points are recorded rather than settled:
- Integration. Some accounts treat the six integration channels as a fourth current of their own. We keep them as a stream inside the individual current, which is how the sources whose counts give individual fifteen treat them. It is the same six channels either way.
- Three disputed streams. Every source agrees on the current of channel 1-8, channel 2-14 and channel 19-49; they disagree on the finer stream. We file 1-8 and 2-14 under centering (one implementation says knowing) and 19-49 under ego (one source says defence). An entry for one of those channels says so.
How it is read
What makes circuitry useful is the proportion. A chart whose complete channels all run on one current tends to read very differently from one spread across all three. A person weighted toward the individual current may be a poor fit for work done by consensus, and exactly who a group needs when a direction has to change. One weighted toward the tribal current tends to notice at once when an arrangement is one-way. One weighted toward the collective current may feel uneasy keeping what they have worked out to themselves. A chart with no complete channels has no circuitry of its own and samples whatever current the people around it are running.
None of this ranks the currents. They are different jobs, and most groups need all three.
In your chart
The reading of your chart counts how many of your complete channels run on each current and names the one that leads, if one genuinely does — a tie is reported as a tie, because a balance says something too. Each channel entry gives its current and stream.