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THE TWO BASIC WAYS OF MEETING LIFES CONFRONTATIONS
When human beings live at a purely biological, instinctual, animal-like level of existence, their reaction when faced with potentially harmful and/or painful situations is to adjust as smoothly as possible to what is happening, opposing a minimum of emotional resistance to natural events, flowing with the tide of change which they trust will once more bring favorable conditions. They do not feel separate from nature and its tidal and seasonal movements; and not feeling separate, they move inwardly with the change, instinctively following whatever path to safety presents itself to their alert senses and their opportunistic minds.
An automatic ability to effect needed readjustments is inbred in all living beings that unquestioningly and unconsciously fulfill their parts in the organic processes of the nature-whole to which they totally belong: the Earth's biosphere. Man, however, has within himself the capacity somehow to separate himself from the flow of events and ever-changing life-situations; he becomes aware that they happen to him a "him" that has a degree of objectivity and permanence within the flux of unceasing natural changes.
Man not only remembers his past experiences, but he is also able to communicate these remembrances to other human beings and to his progeny, and to the progeny of his progeny. In so doing he takes a stand that separates him enough from the happenings confronting him to enable him to observe the regularity of most of their sequences. He begins to interpret sequences of events and repeated series of experiences as "entities" having a definite character. He "names" these entities, and he is then faced with the problem of discovering and consistently carrying out the best, most secure and satisfying type of approach relating to these entities which as we now realize are personifications of what we call "forces of nature."
Some cultures reach maturity by stressing, sooner or later, the special ability human beings generically have to develop an objective and distinct awareness of natural forces and phenomena, and the will to forcibly control these in order to overcome the dangers and inclemency inherent in living in the biosphere. Other cultures, perhaps because of a more favorable, less hostile environment, as they reach a state of mature consciousness retain the adaptive approach which is fundamental in all pre-human species; but such cultures nevertheless constantly strive to transform this instinctual and primordial attitude by raising it to the level of a fully developed consciousness able not only to respond to the biological rhythms of human existence, but to resonate to the far more inclusive and clear vibrations of a higher Nature.
Most human beings are deeply and usually irrevocably conditioned by the general collective attitude and the great symbols or paradigms of the culture in which they were born and educated. Yet, especially in times of widespread crises of transformation, there are people who, either because of their temperament and parental inheritance or because they feel an innate urge to assert their independence from the collectivity, come to adopt a type of living reflecting a basic philosophy radically different from that of their ancestors. Because all over the globe at the present time of human evolution these cases have become very frequent and have given rise to deep-seated psychological problems, it is imperative for us to emphasize the existence of two basic ways in which human beings meet and respond to their experiences.
Our Western civilization, especially during the last five centuries, has officially accepted and powerfully implemented by a variety of social and cultural institutions one of these two ways: the way of forceful control or mastery over natural forces through a special use of the mind. Unfortunately, the intensity and exclusivism of this implementation may have now resulted in a potentially catastrophic world-situation; and, as could be expected, a strong reaction against the still deeply entrenched, official trend has begun to surface. The result has been characterized as a "revolution of consciousness." It is leading to an ideological struggle far deeper than the political "cold war" between nations. It also manifests as a state of intense mental and spiritual confusion which has its repercussions upon all fields of human activity and consciousness including the field of astrology.
In order to help dissipate this confusion, it seems essential to make as clear as possible the difference between the two basic ways in which human beings approach their everyday life-experiences and react to all kinds of meetings meetings with complex social situations and unfamiliar facts as well as meetings with other people. These two ways can best be understood in their many implications if they are related to even more fundamental principles or polarities which can be seen operating everywhere and at all times because they are inherent in whatever can be said to exist. Existence, like electricity, is a bi-polar phenomenon. Long ago in China these two polarities were named Yang and Yin; and because these terms have recently been widely popularized in relation to the old book of oracles, the I-Ching, I shall use them to identify these most characteristic features of the two basic ways in which human beings act and react to either external impacts or internal changes. I shall briefly show how these two approaches affect the basic life-outlooks expressed in religions and philosophies and even in scientific theories concerning the nature of the world; and I shall also indicate how they condition the way astrologers look at the material they use and interpret the relationship between a person and his or her birth-chart.
I must, however, make it very clear that in using the terms Yang and Yin I am doing so according to their philosophical, cosmological, and psychological meaning, as I believe they were understood in the original Chinese tradition of the I-Ching. I am not using the words according to the Japanese system recently popularized in America and Europe as "macrobiotics" a system particularly associated in most people's minds with diet and food, even if it is also presented as a general way of life. This popular system may have validity; but it is hard to prove and justify classifying food and social attitudes as either Yang or Yin unrelated in practice to the original Chinese philosophical and cosmological concepts. In saying this I am not passing judgment on the Japanese system; I simply want to stress that in this volume, or any other of my writings, I am using the old Chinese terms in a way that does not correspond with their macrobiotic meaning.(1)
1) The word macrobiotic is a strange neologism, especially when applied to a very Japanese type of system. The combination of the Greek prefix "macro" with the term "bio" (meaning "life") hardly seems significant. Life can neither be characterized as "macro" or "micro". It is a polarized mode of energy which, for all practical purposes, is associated with conditions prevailing on a particular type of planet, but which has also been given a cosmic and metaphysical meaning as "the One Life" of a universe considered as an organism.
The Yang Way
Yang type of activity is essentially outgoing, forceful, and aggressive. It is archetypally associated with the "masculine" attitude and character. The basic Yang philosophy sees the universe as a stage on which force meets force, and at the biological level, most often fights against force. The Yang type of personality tries to use superior force to control, and in many instances, to dominate and subjugate whatever it meets, especially if a confrontation is involved which upsets the status quo or seems inimical to it. Whatever happens has to be controlled, then put to use in order to fulfill the needs, or often the personal wants and perhaps the greed or ambition, of the human being responding to the event.
Such a type of control requires the combined use of the mind in planning and the will in mobilizing the energies of the whole personality. When the individual deals with a repetitive situation and an either constant or periodic need or want which clamors for satisfaction, a technique has to be devised. The technique may be applied to the control of material energies and substances, of inner emotions, moods, or states of consciousness, or in ancient times, of astral entities or personalized forces of nature; in all cases, the mind is called upon to invent and precisely formulate the technique.
At the animistic level of tribal societies, the techniques of control had a radically different character from the ones used in our modern world. Yet both the medicine-man or shaman and the modern technician act in much the same spirit. They intend to make nature subservient to their wills. If the technique of the two types radically differs, it is because the human beings who formulate and apply them operate at two distinctly different levels of power, and their consciousnesses are structured by widely divergent philosophical and cosmological assumptions.
These assumptions are derived from different ways of experiencing the world of nature internal and psychic as well as external nature. A shaman and some still exist under one name or another perceives the universe and deals with what he experiences at a biopsychic level in his own characteristic, and to the academic modern mind, very naοve, puzzling, and irrational manner. Our inventors, engineers, and technicians deal with another kind of universe whose nature reflects the character of the type of mind the analytical intellect our Western civilization has so strongly (indeed almost exclusively) developed since the 6th century B.C. and especially since the European Renaissance. The Western mind finds it easy to operate in a universe of physical matter which, because of its susceptibility to fragmentation, can be broken up by analysis and controlled by destructive agencies in highly concentrated form. As it is being destroyed, or rather destructed, we can observe matter dissolving into energy; but that energy operates at a level basically different from the one at which the shamans and true ceremonial magicians of old were able to exercise control and produce definite results. What they controlled is the life-power in its psychic and biological (or "metabiological") operations. They were able to observe these operations thanks to special "senses" (or perceptive agencies), just as modern physicists are able to trace the motion of subatomic particles in cloud chambers after the binding (or structural) power of atoms has been violently disrupted.
The atomic physicist gives a variety of names to unknown entities whose existence he infers from traces left on photographic plates; the magician spoke of various categories of "elementals" whose existence he also inferred from their activity. The magician seemingly personalized these entities, giving them many names and projecting their structural character into hieroglyphs, magical seals or mantrams; but this personalizing approach is only superficially different from the theoretically impersonal methodology of modern technology. Magical formulas are not unlike the structural patterns of molecules, genes and atoms now in common use in chemistry and atomic physics. And different as the techniques are, the intent of these techniques is the same. This intent forcibly to control natural processes is what makes technique any technique - necessary.
A technique implies that the technician has acquired "knowledge". Knowledge, however, requires objectivity and therefore a state of separation of the knower and the known. In a world which we basically experience as a process of unceasing change-as a constantly flowing "river" of impacts and impressions within the limiting "banks" of our senses and internal feelings-whoever seeks precise scientific knowledge has, in some manner, to arrest the flow and isolate a moment of it for objective inspection; or else he has to record in some objective form a series of observations of repetitive events assumed to be "the same". Yet repetitive events are never the same if we do not isolate them from the context of the whole universe in which they occur, because this universe is always changing. We say that at the summer solstice the Sun rises at the same point on the Eastern horizon every year, but while it is the same point if we see it exclusively in reference to the relationship between the Earth's equator and the ecliptic, it is not the same point in cosmic space, for the solar system and the galaxy in which it is but a small speck, have been speeding away. Nothing is ever exactly in the same place in relation to the whole universe unless we accept Nietzsche's concept of the "eternal return" and thus refuse to think of infinity.
Knowledge is possible because we separate some facts from the whole universe and we freeze a particular moment of the vast process of universal change for precise observation. Such an act of separation implies a resistance to change, and all forms of resistance imply some kind of violence. By isolating a few variables under aseptic laboratory conditions, the modern scientist performs experiments which are even more separate from the universe. In the aseptic experiment, every possibility of intrusion of the universe into the laboratory is forcefully resisted against. What is the end result of such behavior? The possibility of a global suicide of mankind and an at least temporary destruction of the biosphere. Suicide is the logical end of a process of resistance to life. But such an end is an illusion the great materialistic illusion. The universe always wins, because what is stopped at one level continues at another, from which it is eventually once more precipitated into a living organism at the level where the previous form of resistance had occurred.
I repeat that knowledge separates the knower from what he or she wants to know. Similarly, what I shall presently define as ego-centered and ego-ruled consciousness separates a particular "field" (or area) of acceptable observation from the total possibilities of response to human experience. Such a separation is necessary at an early stage of human and personal evolution in the childhood of both the human race and any member of it. It is necessary in order to make it possible for a particular center of consciousness an individual to discover, stabilize, and clearly define itself in terms of the feeling of being I-myself. Definition at first implies exclusion, because to clearly formulate what one "is" requires the realization of what it "is-not". But if the defined and stabilized conscious entity or the logically formulated type of knowledge does not come to understand or refuses to admit that it is part of some larger whole which (consciously or not) it operates, then consciousness, and knowledge become rigid and forcefully resist growth, evolution, and the universal process of change.
When a large rock is placed in the midst of a swiftly running river, a resistance to the flow of the water is generated; an eddy or whirlpool is formed. Some of the power of the current is deviated into that whirlpool. A human being similarly resisting life draws power from his resistance, but it is a tragic kind of power. In its extreme form it is the power associated with "black magic"; and any violently egocentric and proud form of conscious resistance, if kept long enough, eventually turns into some kind of black magic, there being many kinds carrying other names and considered acceptable in a society having for centuries officially extolled a Yang way of life, a blatant or "rugged" individualism.
To understand how this acceptance of egocentricity, aggressivity, and pride as a matter of policy has developed in the Western world, we should go back to its Biblical roots: the first chapter of Genesis in which God, having made Men in his image and after his likeness, blessed them and said unto them: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."(2) A literal interpretation of these words and of the concept of being a "chosen people" has pervaded not only Jewish culture, but the whole of Western civilization.(3) To this aspect of the Yang ideal of mastery or dominion, Greek culture added another as powerful incentive to the development of Euro-American pride (the "white race" pride); the glorification of "Reason" and of objective knowledge based on analysis and formalistic logic.
2) Genesis 1:28.
3) The esoteric meaning of this statement can only be grasped if we understand that the first chapter of Genesis refers to the creative process at the level of Archetypes; only the second chapter deals with the biosphere, the realm of material substances dynamized by the "breath of life" into living organisms. In the first chapter, the Archetype "Man" is created in both its male and female aspects. This Archetype "Man" is a manifestation of Mind (in Sanskrit, manas); and Mind, in the essential meaning of the term, corresponds to the Element Fire. What God states is therefore that Mind-Fire is superior to and can transform by controlling the other three Elements: Air (birds), Water (fish). Earth (cattle and serpents). In the second chapter of Genesis, God has Adam the concretized prototype (and no longer Archetype) of embodied man give "names" to every living thing he encounters. From the old magical point of view, by knowing the name of an entity, the entity can be controlled. But by so doing, Adam has separated himself from what he has named and he is lonely. Then woman is created. In Hebrew she is Isha, and man Ish: the knowledge of the I-consciousness evokes its opposite, the intuitive faculty which (as we shall see in Chapter 5) brings to the ego promptings from the unconscious and dark area of the total psyche. Archetypal Man was meant to have control over the Earth Element (the things that creep upon the earth), but, when confronted with the power of that Element, the woman is said to succumb to it. In a sense, lsha refers to the nature of feeling which develops as a projection of the inner realization of being a separate "I". Through his feelings, man is drawn to the level of matter at which the principle of duality (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) controls every activity. When mind becomes dominated by matter, it becomes the argumentative, either/or type of mind.
Cf. also my book. Fire Out of the Stone (Servire B.V. Holland: 1963) especially pages 123ff in regard to the above.
Western man thus developed as a worshipper of personal power, aggressive ambition as an elect of God, and the rational-intellectual mind. He felt, and in the great majority of cases still feels, empowered and selected by God to bring to the rest of mankind the "blessings" of civilization and its by-products. The question here is not whether Western civilization has or has not brought great blessings to mankind, but whether the price paid for them has been so extreme that it is raising a strong possibility of bankruptcy and, in a sense, fraudulent bankruptcy because of the means required for the development of these "blessings". No wise person should deny all value to the Yang approach to life; but also no really sane human being should find value in a nearly exclusive use of this approach. The universe itself will inevitably give rise to a reversal of the tide, for neither Yang nor Yin can be allowed to overpower the other beyond a certain limit. Existence itself depends on the balance of these two principles, and an extreme of disequilibrium is bound to lead to a compensatory reaction.
Such a reaction is now beginning. It is given a mythic character in the dream of a coming "New Age" an Age in which the Yin way of life will gradually assert itself and thereby bring about a transformation of mankind. What such a transformation implies and entails, however, is not clear to most of those who long for this New Age. To clarify what the Yin approach actually means, what it leads to and how it can be implemented in practice is therefore of the greatest importance today. To do so is evidently a most difficult and comprehensive task. All I can attempt here is to outline basic lines of approach, and to concentrate on the topic of astrology. This is a significant topic, not only because of its present popularity and the attraction it has for would-be devotees of New Age ideals, but because it reflects quite accurately the general state of personal restlessness and the confused thinking of the more dynamic groups of people who may be ready to experience a basic change of consciousness, even though still clinging at least unconsciously to the traditions of their now obsolescent culture. And it is to these people that all my work is addressed.
The Yin Way
The Yin type of response to what life brings is essentially receptive and adaptive. It is archetypally associated with the feminine attitude and character. In a culture that upholds the Yin ideal, philosophers and wise men tend to consider the universe as an immense network of relationships linking and integrating a multitude of centers of consciousness and activity into a dynamic fullness (or pleroma) of being reflecting a transcendent and ineffable "Unity" that can only be symbolized by inadequate names or concepts such as the Absolute, Space, an infinite Ocean of potentiality, or in religious terms, by God or the Godhead. While the Yang type of philosophy leads to a pluralistic, personalistic, and atomistic image of the universe, the Yin type is essentially holistic, seeing component parts of a cosmic Whole in every manifestation of a universal "ocean" of life.
A Yin type of person is essentially characterized by its acceptance of what "is", and by a willingness to experience every aspect of the ever-unfolding process of change. Such a person is thus free to meet whatever this process brings, and adapt to every new situation. A Yin type of person is primarily concerned with the relationship between the entities or forces involved in a meeting, rather than with what this meeting will do to his or her self or ego, because the person seeks to understand what function this relationship is meant to perform within a larger frame of reference a family or community, a nation and its culture, mankind and the whole Earth, and ultimately the process of evolution of the cosmos.
Relationship and meeting are words that describe the coming together (convergence, commerce, or communion) of two or more spheres of consciousness and activity two entities or persons within a particular area of space; and space here may mean either the external space of a meeting of physical bodies or the internal space of the mind in which images and ideas are associated or in which they clash and refuse integration. Any meeting, in either kind of space, produces a "situation". The Yin type of person tends to be focused upon the total situation, whose meaning of the person tries to understand rather than to be concerned with his or her own reactions and those of the other parties to the meeting. Any event is seen as a "meeting". For example, if a person walking in a storm is struck by a falling branch, the happening would be interpreted as the meeting of the person and the tree. If attacked on a deserted street by a drug-addict in desperate need of money, this too is to be understood as a meeting. The respectable citizen and his attacker are performers in a situation for which, in different ways, both are responsible; the entire society is also responsible for the state of affairs which produced social conditions which gives this meeting its character.
Whatever the situation is a boxing match, a Judo contest, a love affair, or baby-sitting with an aggressive child the Yin-manifesting individual will not react to it instinctively or indignantly by trying to oppose superior force in an emotional outburst of violence and anger which might lead the attacker to use still greater violence. He or she will try to "flow with" the situation, to adapt to what it implies. He or she will use "intelligence", and intelligence is essentially the capacity to adapt to ever-changing types of situations.
To adapt is, first of all, to accept and not to resist the change. It is, in the deepest sense, to try to understand the meaning of the happening. Why did the meeting occur between the attacker and the attacked? Why does the person who built a home near a river known to have flooded often find himself washed by the torrential waters amid the wreckage of his home? Why?
The search for meaning may come only after the experience is lived through, but the immediate reaction of the Yin-motivated individual is nevertheless one of essential acceptance of the meeting with whatever produced the crucial or painful change. I repeat that to such an individual the relationship between the experiencing self and the tormenting or disturbing factor whether it be "natural" or the result of personal enmity or social stress is the essential element to be concerned with. And it may be a very pleasant meeting, love at "first sight", or a deeply moving experience to which one normally would attach the qualificative "spiritual". In all cases, the experience is a meeting, even if it be the meeting of two biological or psychic or other (but equally "internal") processes. The Yin-ideal of response to such a meeting is no longer "mastery" but sagesse (a French word that has deeper implications than "wisdom").
The Sage is not a "master" in the Yang sense of the term; for the very word master implies slave as a referent just as to be a mother implies having a child. The Sage uses control only in the sense of being in control of the aggressive and/or rebellious tendencies of human nature within his or her biopsychic organism, especially when this human nature has produced the solid, unyielding, and rigidly self-centered entity we call "ego". The Sage does not seek to exert superior force upon an attacking power; he does not live in a world where every change and event are interpreted as referring to a force-against-force situation the world in which our modern Western science and technology exclusively operates. In that world even man's most superior mind and willpower is in the end always defeated. The Sage is not defeated because he seeks no victory. He does not fail because he courts no success and has no ambitions for achievement.
While the simple, natural, and instinctual type of human being displays a primitive and unconscious kind of sagesse in dealing with crises, he usually can do so only within a particular and well-defined set of situations. He is attached to the soil of the land of his birth, to his cultural ways of feeling and reacting, and to his personifications of natural energies as gods to be placated and worshipped. The Sage is totally unattached to anything in particular. He or she allows all life, all events, all human relationships to pass through his or her consciousness indeed through the whole of his or her being at all levels of activity. The consciousness of the Sage could almost be called a "sieve", for the vast flow of life's experiences pass through it; but the sieve has form, an individual form. It is a structured mind. What flows through it acquires meaning. This is the supreme mystery of la sagesse. It gives a meaning to everything that flows through the unresisting, yet totally focused, consciousness.
In this sense only can it be said that the experiencer and the experience "are one". The instinctual and intellectual reactions we call resistance vanish; where resistance was, meaning now arises: resistance is transmuted into meaning. In the same sense, one can describe an "Avatar" as a field of activity through which cosmic or spiritual motion operates without any resistance. What in any human being is a subtle or crude form of resistance is, in the Avatar, meaning. The Act, the Actor, and the Meaning of the Act merge into a composite mystery that is both act and consciousness at whatever level the action occurs for it may be biological or cosmic activity. We may call it "constructive" or "destructive", but the name one gives simply reveals the specific character of the namer's resistance to universal Motion-his or her objectivity, and thus, separateness from the Act.
Where the Sage is, motion occurs. It is not even "spontaneous" because spontaneity etymologically refers to what is "one's own". In the Sage, there is no longer any owner and only a release of dynamism which is consciousness at the center of the release. This center is the Sage; but it is not a "he" or "she"; it is simply the centrality of the motion, the "tone" that is one of a myriad of overtones of the cosmic Fundamental of the field of activity to which the action refers. Quantitatively speaking, the existential field may be small, or an immense one of the planetary (or even galactic) scope. But quantity does not matter or rather, quantity is materiality. At all levels (even at cosmic levels), the essential character of matter is resistance.
The Sage does not go after what we call knowledge, because, as I have already stated, knowledge is a function of resistance. In knowledge, something separates itself from its acts in order to analyze them objectively. But in doing this, what has become the object of knowledge is inevitably colored and affected by the subject (the mind, the ego) which immobilized it as an external and separate entity. In turn, the subject is likewise given a specious yet very definite character of objectivity by the very fact that as the one "flow" of existence became arrested thus resisted against the observer and the observed were created as two distinct, objective entities.
Knowledge freezes the flow of universal Duration into moments that thereby acquire a particular character. They become particularities of what then becomes "time". Time, in this sense, is a quantitative, measurable factor which attaches itself to the Actor and Knower, for whom every experience becomes particularized because he or she has also become a "singularity" in the universal whole. The Actor glorifies these time-particularities ("moments") into a mysterious, seemingly transcendent Now. But Now at least as this now fashionable term is being used-implies a resistance to change.
The particularity (or singularity) can be expanded by the mind into a generality, but this hardly modifies its character; a small, limited resistance has become broadened into a class of resistances. Then, this type of resistance is related to a more or less large group (or set) of resisters. It no longer applies to one person, but to a psychological type, a nation, or a biological species.
True, "wisdom", in contrast, is not based on an absolute separation between the experiencer and the experienced object, force, or entity. It brings the meeting to the state of meaning a meaning which strictly refers to a particular situation and does not allow itself to be turned into a standardized and classified form of knowledge: the knowledge of what should be done by anyone whenever a situation appearing to have the same character occurs.
For the Sage, there is no "whenever" and no truly valid categories of events, because every situation is a unique, unrepeatable meeting once it is referred to the universe as a whole within which it occurs; and as I have already pointed out, the universe never repeats itself. Its cycles are spirals, not circles; and in a still deeper, more transcendent sense, one should not speak of recurrence, because there are no fixed, rigid "entities" to which anything happens. There is no meeting between self and not-self, because there is no separatable self, but only the one ultimate principle of Selfhood, SPACE, always in motion, yet never really changing. SPACE does not really change because its Motion is harmonic, ever-balanced; every movement is at once, timelessly, compensated for by another complementary movement.
The ideal of the Sage I have pictured may seem far beyond the reach of all but a very few human beings, but so is the ideal of the omnipotent and all-knowing Master. Both ideals are, like the two cosmic polarities of universal existence, Yin and Yang, unattainable in their absolutely pure states. They are ideals, not existential realities; yet they point to states of being, consciousness, and activity which may have an attractive and indeed compelling power, if an individual person has reached a stage in his or her evolution at which a deep-seated crisis demands an inner change of direction and a repolarization of the capacity for action and the mobilizing central will. Such a crisis may have only an individual character, but it may also occur in terms of collective, cultural, or political situations. It may refer to a seemingly isolated, even accidental event as being attacked on a city street but the situation may also be the end result of a long series of failures to act or of actions performed in a state of egocentric ambition, weakness of character, or attachment to obsolescent values and ideals, whether by an individual or a tribe, kingdom, or nation.
The Yin approach to a physical situation involving a sudden confrontation with a hostile force or person is the foundation of various Asiatic disciplines, often referred to as "martial arts" yet having a much broader kind of relevance to interpersonal meetings in which one is faced by aggression, either moral or physical, mental or muscular. These disciplines are based on the principle of non-resistance and self-effacement formulated in Lao Tze's Tao Teh Ching. They teach the student to oppose "space" (emptiness) to an external act directed against him. Becoming sharply aware of the physical place toward which this act is aimed, the student swiftly moves away from it, and the attack, finding only empty space, extends itself into a "nothing" that forces the attacker into an over-extended and out-of-balanced position. The energy of the attack is used, as it were, to suck the attacker into a void where his strength becomes the power that defeats him and makes him fall.
Such a technique is more than mere technique, for it implies a basic reversal in the usual polarity of human consciousness. It does not refer to some procedure to be memorized by the mind after an analysis of the situation; it has to be an instantaneous and unself-conscious reaction in which the motive of the aggressive act one faces is negated. One does not resist the act, one accepts it and turns it against the attacker by refusing to be involved in it thus by opposing to it only an inner void of response, by not being there (physically and/or morally and psychically) at the place the attack is aimed.
The principle of "not-being-there" when confronted with violence so that the violence has no object to meet and thus to absorb or react to thrust, is what Gandhi meant by ahimsa, non-resistance and non-violence. This is the Yin principle to which the much misunderstood and presumably mistranslated words of Christ refer in the Gospel: "Agree with thine enemies." The word "agree" should be understood to mean "do not use force against the force of the enemy and refuse to be the object of an aggression by "not being there" where the aggressor expects you to stand."
An aggressor bent on attack will naturally aim at the point where a person is weak or unprotected. In such a situation, a Yang type of individual will rush reinforcements to meet the attack by opposing force to force. From the Yin point of view, this is senseless or at least exhausting; the consciousness becomes involved in the state of violence, and a long series of actions and reactions follow. What one should do is to refuse to be identified with that state of violence and counter hate with love, by opposing only space and emptiness (or egolessness) to the aggressive movement; thus, "not being there" where the attacker expects a resistance to his attack. "Not being there" may be physically impossible; but it is always spiritually possible, in the sense that a person being attacked may not be active in the situation as an ego. Even if the physical body suffers, the consciousness remains unaffected, secure in its own center and intensely aware.
The Sage meets such a type of situation according to the wholeness of what it implies. If he is weak, he accepts his weakness as he accepts the strength of the adversary. He understands the causes of this weakness and this strength, and is ready to let the energy involved in these causes exhaust itself. He transmutes what in him could have been resistance into meaning and understanding. He grows in wisdom through non-resistance against the karma of his past. By consciously allowing the dynamism of life which is unceasing change-to flow through his consciousness and whole being, he is able to use this power of transformation as his own; yet, it is far more than "his own", for he possesses nothing except the ability to centralize in consciousness and total understanding whatever is all there is, without refusal and without exception even the deepest darkness. He can calmly face this darkness, because he is unshakably centered in light. The only way to oppose darkness is to be more light. The vaster the space the consciousness illumines, the more it can afford to allow impacts of dark forces to enter and become lost in the light.
Meaning is produced by the relationship between opposites. In any attack or confrontation two opposite interpretations can be given. The aggressor has his own meaning for the aggression an emotional and ego centered meaning. If the intended victim reacts by also giving to the situation an emotional and ego-centered meaning fear, anger, hate a cyclic pattern of action-reaction is built or strengthened, which sooner or later will call for more violence. But if the aggressor's attack meets only "space", he eventually comes to see aggression as an empty gesture. The Sage has robbed it of its meaning; and however unevolved or hurt the attacker may be, he is "human", and no truly human being can long hold even the crudest form of strength against the total loss of meaning in what he is doing. To live without the personal ability of investing one's activity with a meaning of what one's culture has considered meaningful, is spiritual death. It soon leads to actual physical death.
In the foregoing description of the Yang and Yin approaches to life's encounters and challenges, I have undoubtedly weighed heavily on the Yin side of the scale. The reason for this, as already stated, is that for centuries our Western society has extolled and glorified the Yang ideal and the practices derived from it.(4) As a result of this one-pointed concentration, spectacular material results have indeed been achieved, but they have nevertheless produced a situation in which violence has reached an explosive and perhaps uncontrollable character on a worldwide scale. Violence at the strictly biological level of existence and in terms of the satisfaction of the basic life-situations for self-preservation and self-reproduction has to be accepted as the law of the biosphere affecting all life-species; but when the human stage of planetary evolution is reached and the conscious mind and ego-will bring to these primordial drives a means to satisfaction enabling them insatiably to increase the intensity and scope of their modes of operation, we are facing a most critical situation.
4) ln my book The Pulse of Life (written in 1942 and now available free online at the Rudhyar Archival Project), I studied the seasonal cycle of the year the series of twelve zodiacal signs in terms of the Interplay of two forces which I called the Day-force and the Night-force. These two forces wax and wane in turn; they are of equal strength only at the two equinoxes. They correspond respectively to Yang and Yin. Our Western world is now historically at a point which should probably be located shortly after the maximum of the Day-force (Yang), when the Yin principle begins to wax in strength. In the year this would be shortly after the summer solstice. Is this why the symbolic and official "birthday" of the United States is July 4? On the other hand, ancient India structured by the Laws of Manu is said to have been ruled by Capricorn, the sign of the winter solstice, when the Yin force, the collective factor, has maximum power. The spiritual individualism of Hindu yogis and seers would represent the complementary Yang-factor seeking to express itself. In America, the Yin-factor can be seen at work in the Increasing dependence of individuals upon collective fashions of thought, feeling and behavior.
To fight against it in a Yang-like manner can only exacerbate the issue, even though a tendency to fight "for the sake of righteousness" has been inbred in our collective mentality. We should rather meet the world situation as well as personal situations in which the elements of conflict, impatience, jealousy, and gnawing frustration are so often present with understanding and an unceasing search for meaning. And nothing in itself has meaning unless it be seen in relation to something else, and particularly in relation to its opposite. The deepest value of any action derives from the fact that it is needed to polarize another action of opposite character. The ultimate ideal is "equilibrium" a multi-directional balance of activities operating at several interrelated and interpenetrating levels.
Always activity. What makes it difficult for most people trained in our Western modes of thinking to understand the Yin way of life is that they associate this way with inaction and passivity. An unbalanced Yin type of attitude will lead to passivity and inertia, just as an unbalanced Yang attitude produces the ruthless, egocentric ambition and craving for any kind of exciting activity we often find in our present world. If it is difficult for us today to understand the character of the Yin type of activity, it is because we have been programmed to give value almost exclusively to the kind of behavior which brings to the ego the satisfaction of achieving what our senses can measure and our mind can manipulate in order to gain always more power over something or someone. Material results and today this mostly means money and social connections are considered almost the only proof of success in life, because no one can concretely measure and assess spiritual results.
Material results are possible because of the divisibility of matter. The achievements of modern science have been based on this characteristic of all material compounds which allows a full play to the operations of the analytical mind; and the ultimate products of this trend have been atomic fission and man's research into the behavior of the broken pieces of atoms he had subjected to an extreme of violence. "Divide and conquer" is not only the motto of diplomats and politicians, it is also that of the man who seeks to rule all that is not himself. Today we speak glowingly of "synthesis", yet this much abused term refers mostly to recombining in a new way what had first been atomized or pulverized.
Until quite recently, an "atomistic" interpretation of the universe and all it contains has dominated science and the greatest part of philosophy. The opposite approach, "holism" a term first coined by Jan Smuts around 1920 is only now gaining a sudden favor, particularly among the still small minority of progressive thinkers and creative workers striving to build at least stepping stones, and perhaps foundations, for a much-idealized New Age. It would be unwise, however, to identify the duality of "atomism" and "holism" with the Yang and Yin polarities of existence I have been discussing. These two pairs of opposites belong to two different conceptual levels. But it is evident that the Yang approach tends to develop an atomistic philosophy and cosmology; it pictures a world in which a fantastic number of "billiard balls" the atoms are essentially distributed in a random manner, yet are also linked, pulled together or violently rushing away from each other according to the play of forces which in themselves have no meaning and no purpose. In such a world of "force against force", individuals-atoms of human consciousness, egos-are supposed to be as indivisible as physical atoms were once thought to be. At the metaphysical and "spiritual" level, these human atoms of consciousness have been called "monads", each essentially separate and independent as well as immortal.
The world of holistic philosophers has an utterly different character. It is an immense Whole-and some say a supreme being or pantheistic God. This Whole cyclically differentiates in a multitude of parts which themselves are wholes having parts which are also wholes; yet the fundamental Unity is ever-present because every whole large and small, atom, manor galaxy is related to every other whole in an infinitely complex network of relationships. Through all these wholes, a unifying type of power flows which mystics and occultists, heirs to the traditions of the Vitalistic Age of mankind, have often called the "One Life". It is the life of the universal Whole that always remains essentially "one", even though it superficially seems broken up into the myriad of little wholes that are but temporary condensations of the energy of Space Space considered as fullness of being, consciousness, and harmonic activity (in Sanskrit, Sat-Chit-Ananda).
Atomism and holism are not only two different and basically opposite ways of picturing the universe in terms of philosophical concepts and scientific procedures; these two approaches to "reality" are to be found in nearly all fields of activity. They constitute two fundamental forms consciousness can take in coming to terms with human experience, just as Yang and Yin are the two poles, opposite yet complementary, of human activity. Both are needed in every field of experience that draws the attention of the ego the "I am" principle centralizing the field of consciousness and the motives for action. Yet one of the two polarities most of the time plays a decisive role, and in our individualistic and technological modern society the Yang principle and atomistic, personalistic, and achievement-oriented way of life are still so overwhelmingly in control that, in whatever field it manifests, the Yin approach seems to most people totally alien and incomprehensible.
The field of astrology is no exception. At least since the classical Greco-Roman period, astrology has been dominated by an analytical, personalistic, and fragmented type of consciousness, even though it dealt with concepts that once had integrally belonged to a vitalistic and profoundly religious system of beliefs. Today-particularly in America but also increasingly in Europe-two trends have developed out of the classical tradition mainly represented long ago by Ptolemy and more recently by 17th century astrologers in England, Germany, and France. One of these trends is oriented toward the development of a "scientific model" for astrology through the use of empirical research and statistics. The other trend has sought to align astrology with the remarkable transformation of Western psychology since the days of Freud, particularly since the work of Carl Jung and the subsequent growth of "Humanistic psychology" with Abraham Maslow, Anthony Sutich, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, et al. Because it soon became clear that the Humanistic and Human Potential movements have their limitations, a new trend developed along lines related to a growing interest in parapsychology and mystical experiences, and the term transpersonal was used to characterize this entire field of psychological investigation of what seemed to be at the borderline of consciousness.
At about the same time, I realized that the development of an almost exclusively psychology-oriented and "humanistic" astrology, which the publication of my book The Astrology of Personality in 1936 had stimulated, was still following, in most instances, a mainly descriptive and strictly informative line. This realization led me a few years ago to initiate and formulate in general terms a transpersonal type of astrology.
This transpersonal astrology is meant to meet the often largely unconscious need of a vanguard of individuals who are now feeling at times almost compulsively moved to seek a type of guidance and inspiration that would throw light upon a process of radical transformation they believe necessary for them to go through because of their eagerness to become pioneers in a New Age and a new life. It is true that in the distant and recent past much has been written by the mystics and occultists of all cultures concerning such a process of human metamorphosis; but what had been said can be more confusing than helpful to the modern minds of individuals who now start from a point totally different from the starting point of Asiatic or even old European aspirants. The Yin approach to life which forms a background for this transpersonal orientation is still completely foreign to the typical Western mentality; and the religious language in which "the Path" was described in the past is so difficult for academically trained individuals to assimilate [merely memorizing its terms is not enough] that the outcome of the search is often either a repeated state of frustration and disappointment, or a binding subservience to the outer forms of disintegrating cultural molds.
In dealing with this Yin way of life, symbols have to be used, because our Yang-oriented modern languages become awkward and confusing for the purpose of guidance on the path of radical transformation, not only of consciousness, but of our motivations for action. Just as the symbols of higher mathematics and group-algebra have proven necessary for an understanding of the non-rational series of events following the violent release of nuclear particles once the structure of the atom is forced to break down, so astrology, as a strictly symbolic language, can be used to bring a sense of order and sequential meaning to events and the inner experiences of individuals who have consciously taken upon themselves the momentous and dangerous task of transforming all the implications of human existence in their own lives, or who have been unwillingly caught in a maelstrom of social disruption. Astrology can also help the individuals who expect a new departure in human affairs to discover the cyclic meaning of the worldwide series of events which have marked our tragic century and to place their own expectations in a correct time-perspective.
Nevertheless, astrology can confuse the seeker with an insignificant and unconstructive mass of information and a plethora of data having no relevance to the basic process of transformation. The traditional interpretation of these data may even distract the attention of the aspirant and take him or her away from the straight-and-narrow-path eventually leading to a "transhuman" state of existence, by inducing him or her to find easy solutions to life-problems in ancestral attitudes defined by simplistic or overly-abstract concepts.
In the following chapter I shall therefore try to establish a clear contrast between two basic approaches to astrology and between two interpretations of generally used astrological data so that the alternatives are made as clear as possible. Then the reader will be better prepared to deal with what is involved in the practice of transpersonal astrology.
The Astrology of Transformation
