Oh I know this torment as well as I know anything. Having an open Root Center is really quite a phenomenon. A lot of people have it. And what it brings into your life is an unbelievable pressure. The Root Center is a pressure center like the Head Center. So you have all these people under pressure to think about things that don’t matter. And with the Root Center being open you have all these people under pressure to be fast, to be in a hurry, and get things done. The kind of people who can’t stand having something hang over their shoulder that they have to get rid of it.

Oh, I remember a classic example of what it is to be an open Root Center. When I was a teenager I had a summer job, a very odd one, working for the railroad and building railway track; that is, in switch yards where they bring in the trains and they switch the trains. They have all these different kinds of trackings that have to be put in. And I worked with a gang of Mohawk Indians. There were about 20 of us in this crew. I spent two months with them which was quite an experience being the only white person and we lived together in train cars.

I can remember my first day on the job. I’m under pressure, I have an open Root Center and I have a defined ego so I do have something to prove. So, there I was and we were putting the rails down with spikes. It’s sledge hammer work. There is a rotation and all of this kind of thing. So, I start doing my thing. And after about 10 minutes one of the workers came over to me and stopped me and just looked me deeply in the eye and he said, “Too fast.” It was my first lesson. There was no way I could do that pace because then they would have to do that pace and so forth and so on and all of these things about working with crews.

But it was my memory when I began to understand the nature of my own design; it was one of the first things that came back to me, this memory, because the way he said “Too fast” to me was really scary, this being under this incredible pressure. Think about all these people under pressure. The moment that anything is in front of them they’re under this enormous pressure to deal with it, to do something about it, all of that. And they become explosive. You think your life is your own and you think you think you know what your life is. This is such a vanity. Most human beings are nothing but the layers of conditioning that make up their not-self.

I want you to grasp something. I’m deconstructing here as I take you through one at a time. Think about these people like me, for example, who have four open centers. There are all the combinations of those particular strategies that are all at work in the way in which the mind operates. I’m under pressure never to know when enough is enough. I’m under pressure never to know when enough is enough when it comes to thinking about things that don’t matter. All of these start adding up and they become the framework for the way in which your whole mind operates, but it’s not you. It certainly wasn’t me.

Yet, at the same time, I do understand that if I take away my mind being the decision maker, just take that all away, and I watch what happens through my open centers it is very much a core of my wisdom; that is, my eclectic knowledge of so many things and so forth and so on. But you can’t get there until you free yourself from the control that your mind has.

~ Ra Uru Hu