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THE TWO FACES OF ASTROLOGY
Before I begin to discuss the two basically different approaches to astrology I have mentioned, I should try to clarify what actually constitutes astrology and what it is for. Most simply defined, astrology is an apparently successful attempt to establish a complex set of consistent and reliable correlations between, on the one hand, the observed motions of apparent sources of light in the sky — Sun, Moon, planets, and stars — and, on the Other hand, equally observable series of changes occurring within the biosphere and, particularly, in the lives of human beings.
Such a definition does not present any interpretation either of what moving dots or discs of light across the sky actually are, or of the kinds of changes astrology relates to them. It does not try to explain why and how such correlations operate. It simply says that two sets of factors — one celestial, the other terrestrial — can be correlated, and that establishing such correlations seems to be valid inasmuch as it has been a consistently pursued endeavor wherever and as long as human beings have been able to use the mental (or psychic) processes it requires. But what has been the purpose of this endeavor?
The purpose of astrology is to use the above-mentioned correlations in order to understand the repetitive order observable in the processes of change experienced by all human beings living in the biosphere and the meaning of what occurs during these processes — so that, as the result of this understanding, human beings may increase their ability to cope with and benefit from the changes they experience.
It should be evident that, thus stated, this purpose of astrology can take different forms according to the level of consciousness and general character of the main activities of the human beings seeking such an understanding. With experiences limited and strictly defined by the narrow boundaries of the land on which primitive communities lived and to which they were biologically and psychically bound, tribal man used astrology primarily for agricultural or cattle-raising purposes. The interpretation he gave to the discs and dots of light he saw in the sky was conditioned by a type of consciousness operating in terms of animistic religious beliefs; it was essentially different from that of a 17th century European astronomer using a telescope in an observatory. It even differed from the interpretation which led colleges of priest-initiates in Chaldea or late Egypt to build complex astrological systems pervaded with the imagery of intricate religious myths, and in many instances with concepts derived from occult and/or magical practices.
Today the recent discoveries of astronomy and the use of new means of perception have induced, or at least are gradually inducing, an understanding of the universe radically different from that of Galileo and Newton. Astronomy has made a jump from the solar system to the galaxy and beyond; and the strictly mechanistic, atomistic, and rationalistic character of "classical" physics is now superseded by a transcendent and symbolic approach to physical reality, the meaning of matter and even of universal laws. As a new level of consciousness is being reached, an equally new type of interpretation of the celestial factors used in astrology inevitably has to follow, even if most people interested in astrology find it difficult consistently and effectively to think in terms suggested by the recent developments in nuclear physics, astronomy, and parapsychology.
The new type of interpretation presented to us by astronomy calls for what I have called a transpersonal approach to astrology. Such an approach contradicts in no way the fundamental definition of astrology I have formulated above: we merely have to give a relatively new interpretation to both what we can now observe in the sky with complex astronomical instruments and our generically human and individual experiences. On the one hand, the celestial phenomena our forefathers could only perceive with the naked eye are now understood and evaluated in relation to immensely larger formations whose physicality becomes questionable once matter is seen as merely a special state of energy; and on the other hand, the changes human beings are now experiencing — not only individually but collectively and on a planetary scale — are of such magnitude and so full of unparalleled opportunities for growth and transformation that they can be significantly interpreted only in terms of a far more inclusive frame of reference.
The fact is, nevertheless, that just as a vast majority of the people of the world cannot comprehend the world-picture of the most progressive "philosophers of science" and nuclear physicists — or the writings of great mystics and true occultists — so they cannot feel, think, and behave in terms of an ideal of life that would basically transcend their strictly personal and ego-centered interests, and even what they believe is their "spiritual" (yet very "personal"!) concept of growth. They can accept changes of attitude only from the perspective of greater personal health, wealth and happiness — a perspective not essentially broadened by the newly fashionable goal of what is usually understood as self-actualization and creativity.
There is, however, nothing wrong with an ego-centered type of consciousness and activity. It simply marks a particular stage in human evolution. The liberal idea that all men operate at the same level of consciousness is patently fictitious. At least today, human beings undeniably operate at several levels of emotional, mental, and spiritual development. Even though the outer circumstances of their lives may be utterly different from those faced by archaic man in the jungle or desert, truly "primitive" human beings can still be found in all countries, and not merely in New Guinea or other remote regions. In some parts of India, a most rigid type of tradition-worshipping brahmins live side-by-side with thoroughly Westernized Indian Ph.D.'s and spiritual revolutionaries like a few disciples of the great seer-philosopher Sri Aurobindo and his co-worker Mother Mira.
There is no absolute Truth or Value when applied to the life of an individual, only what, for that individual, is the fulfillment of his or her dharma — that is, of what his or her birth-potential allows to be actualized. There assuredly is, in every human being, a potential for self-transformation, for becoming more than what he or she is, according to the standards of the culture and period in which he or she was born; but the process of transformation has always to start from a particular level of sociocultural normality. One should not ignore the character and limitations of this level, for they condition the all-important starting point of the process. The inner pressure of the initial phase of a life-process represents the karma which the process has constantly (or periodically, stage after stage), to overcome. The spiritual Teacher or Guide, in one sense, provides the aspirant to transformation with an ideal Image of a higher evolutionary phase of the process. While the Guide's task is to impress this Image upon the consciousness of the one he or she helps, it is also to make very clear what is demanded of the aspirant in order to take the decisive step from the past to the future level of conscious development required for the actual transformation. Dharma can only be fulfilled when a one-pointed effort is consciously and willfully made to meet and neutralize the karma that had set the stage for the start of the process of transformation.
It is therefore very important for anyone who is seeking or dreaming of a "transpersonal" process — whether in the strictly psychological or the astrological field — to have a clear idea of what the personal stage means. It is necessary indeed for whomever claims to work for an often overly-idealized and Utopian New Age to understand what are and, from the start, have been the characteristic limitations of the Old Age he or she is so eager to leave behind. If this is not done, the Old Age will inevitably retain its grip upon unconscious and repressed areas of the collective psyche of the would-be New Ager.
For this reason, even at the risk of establishing too clear cut distinctions between what are actually gradual transitions, I feel it necessary to attempt to define four basic levels at which astrologers can interpret both their individual and collective experiences and needs, and the celestial motions from which astrology derives the raw materials for its interpretations, its predictions or great symbols of transformation. These levels — as we shall see — can be characterized as the biological, the sociocultural, the individual-personal and the transpersonal.
However, before I attempt to outline in some detail what the operation of the consciousness at each level brings to the interpretation of astrological factors being used, I have to state and to some extent develop a basic fact directly related to what I have discussed in the preceding chapter. At each of these four levels, astrology can be used for two basically different kinds of purposes. These two purposes can be related to the two basic ways of meeting life-confrontations already described — the Yang and the Yin ways. According to the Yang way of approaching the interpretation of astrological data, the astrologer seeks to gain information, and as a result, knowledge. On the other hand, the Yin approach is essentially for the purpose of developing understanding and as a result, a realization of meaning. Through knowledge comes a certain type of power, power related to the knower for him or her to use. Through the realization of meaning, a human being can obtain wisdom, or more accurately, sagesse — a special quality of openness of living in a full and positive consciousness of being.
1. An Astrology of InformationThe word information has lately become a keyword because the passion for new data and the classifying of these data, called facts, is one of the dominant traits of the modern technique-worshipping mentality. The "how to" books sell by the millions in a society in which knowledge is most often equated with the possession of computerizable information and memorizable recipes. In order to be made available, information has to be recorded in some manner. It is recorded by means of signs.
Anything that conveys definite information to someone can be called a sign if it deals with a fact or series of facts belonging to the level of reality that the person being informed can perceive, comprehend, and become actually related to. A road sign informs the driver of a car that definite conditions on the road can be expected, or that a particular type of behavior is required (slowing down or a special state of watchfulness), or that a definite number of miles have to be traveled before a particular city is reached. When a new machine or drug is bought, the buyer usually receives with it information concerning the use of what was bought. Words which describe a person's behavior or the shape and color of an object in terms of perceptible data are also signs. If, however, instead of clearly indicating precise features the words can and are meant to only suggest or evoke states of consciousness and feeling, or the presence of supersensible forces or conditions, such words become, symbols — and I shall presently define the meaning I give to this term, symbol, and its implications.
Signs fulfill a most basic need in any social mode of existence: the need for communication among the members of a community, or eventually of a particular, even if widespread, culture. The more complex the society, the more precise the means of communication must be; the more any doubt as to what the signs indicate must be eliminated, and, therefore, the more technical the character of the information. In our very complex and largely artificial kind of society, demanding the use of ever more intricate techniques, human beings have their attention constantly aroused by a multitude of signs or indicators. Nearly every change of situation we are to meet has been catalogued and described by specialists in factual, clear-cut terms. We live in terms of a "knowledge" of what we are to expect — in terms of precise sequences of sequences of cause and effects. When the word "meaning" is currently used, it refers to the strictly defined "indication" of what can definitely and unquestionably be known about something — something from which the knower is separate as an observer or a detached operator.
This kind of knowledge is communicable to everyone whose mind is able to learn and memorize the rules on which it is based and learn what the signs indicate that were used for the communication. When astrology is used strictly as a means to convey definite information, it is also considered to be such a form of knowledge. The position of a planet in a particular zodiacal sign or natal house, or its aspect to another planet, is known to indicate a variety of definite conditions or events. The "knowing" is traditional, inasmuch as it is based on transmitted records of generations of astrologers who (it is believed) established and checked the validity of the indications. It is memorized as well as consensus knowledge. We may also call it "factual" knowledge, and prove its validity by impressive statistics. The question one must ask is, however: what does the word fact indicate?
Etymologically this word refers to something being "made" (factum in Latin). What a person experiences may or may not be accorded the status of being a "fact" by other members of his or her society and culture. This status relies upon the common acceptance within a particular and at a particular time of history of the personal experience of all people supposed sane, or at least sufficiently trained or intelligent to be able to pass judgment. To the extent to which an individual's experience differs from the experience of the people of his culture, his or her "facts" may be considered by them to be fantasies or psychotic illusions. They fall outside of the field of knowledge of the community. If they are taken seriously by some people, it is not as "facts" and as "signs" indicating some aspect of a commonly perceptible and Intelligible reality, but instead as "symbols" evoking the possibility of the existence of another kind of reality. Facts do not have in themselves an evocative character; if for some people they have such an evocative character, they have become symbols.
These two words — sign and symbol — should be clearly differentiated from one another, otherwise different fields of experience, different levels of consciousness and different kinds of use are unintelligibly mixed; and the inevitable result is a confused mind. Similarly, when astrology claims to be able to state that every position of and relation between celestial objects indicates a clearly definable event or character trait, such a kind of astrology deals with "signs" (indicators) conveying more or less precise information, but not with "symbols". The astrologer who considers astrology a symbolic language whose function is to evoke possibilities of changes in the process of growth and transformation which is human life, and to deal with the meaning of the successive phases of this process from birth to death, cannot logically use, according to set traditional rules, astrological data as indicators of knowable facts. In other words, the consciousness of this astrologer and that of the followers of "classical" astrology operate at two different levels. Both levels, I hasten to say, can be considered valuable. Each is valuable if it answers the need of the person asking for astrological advice or guidance. As we shall see later on, the most difficult problem confronting an astrologer — or in his own field, any psychologist — is how to become aware of what the need of the seeker is, and what his or her consciousness is able to respond to and wholesomely assimilate.
Valuable as both approaches undoubtedly can be, it would be, I believe, very unwise to underestimate their differences. They are differences not only in the technical aspects of the practices, but also differences in the temperaments and mentalities of the astrologers who are inwardly impelled to follow, or at least find themselves more at ease in following, one mode of interpretation or the other. The great majority of college-educated people all over the world have been trained to depend almost entirely on precise technical procedures and memorized interpretations of specific data or factors essentially separate from each other.
For example, most astrologers take for granted that each planet has a definite character which it retains in all circumstances, somewhat as a human being is believed to have an inalienable and basically unchanging individuality. This is the atomistic approach. But the astrologer who holds a truly holistic position sees a planet as a symbol of a function which has meaning in terms of the whole solar system and, therefore, is fundamentally involved in a web of relationships with other planets. Similarly, such an astrologer approaches and deals with his or her clients in relation, if not to humanity, at least to their community and culture, whether they passively accept, rebel against, or are quietly determined to overcome the pressures and question the value of the models that culture or community always seeks to imprint upon all its members.
In the first case — the atomistic approach — the astrologer deals with "signs" or indicators which always retain their basic character. The positions of these indicators — planets, nodes, midpoints, Parts, etc. — provide the astrologer with more or less clear-cut, yet theoretically reliable, information; and if the astrologer is scientifically inclined, statistics can be used to prove the validity or scope of the information. The client can therefore be given this information, possibly with a nicely scaled list of probabilities for the future. What the client feels about the information, how he or she will be able to handle or assimilate it, does not bother the astrologer very much; all he or she may try to do is to stress the positive rather than the negative implications of the "facts" — the objective information given by definite data whose traditional or statistically demonstrable validity is more or less established.
Such an atomistic astrologer behaves like any scientist or technologist normally does. The scientist discovers a "law", analyzes the components of a particular situation, and with no great interest in the ultimate consequences of what he has discovered, simply formulates a "truth" which the technologist- engineer will apply, if he can profit from the invention, or if he is paid by a firm to create new and sellable products.
Such an analysis of the astrological situation (when approached along the lines of objective information and technical discovery of what are considered facts and laws), may seem to many students or fans of astrology rather crude and unsympathetic. This was, nevertheless, exactly the way in which astrology was practiced in America before a more psychologically-oriented approach developed after the 1930s.(1) A good astrologer did not have to meet the client, whose life-circumstances he or she usually did not know or care to know. Merely on the basis of the time and place of birth the astrologer had to provide information as to what was going to happen to the person, what profession was indicated in the chart, what the financial and health situation would be, etc. To this, later on, was added an expected analysis of "character" and the "strengths and weaknesses" of the person writing or personally asking for information.
1) This is still the way astrology is practiced in India, in most of Europe and even in America.
This kind of information is in no way different from what General Eisenhower, planning the Normandy invasion in 1944, asked of weather experts and intelligence officers. The General then had to make his decision according to the facts he was given. He and his army were completely separate from these facts, just as for a traditional astrologer the client is separate from his or her birth-chart-an immortal, rational soul finding itself in an essentially alien situation on this earth in order to "learn some lesson" or to "work out his or her past karma," then to "return home" at death.
In saying this I am not passing judgment on the validity of such an approach and of the religious or metaphysical premises on which it is founded. It has been, and in many places for many people still is, the traditional and official approach. The consciousness of these people has been formed by it, and they may be able to respond only to it. What I am merely slating is that another approach is possible, and that today the specific character of the time and of the "human condition" makes the determined and insistent actualization of such a possibility a matter of crucial importance. It is, I believe, of crucial importance in all fields of human activity; and astrology today has become a significant field because it answers a basic need of modern men and women: the need for a new meaning to their lives. To impart this meaning, symbols are required, great symbols that — now as in all periods of human development — are integral parts of human experience and in their togetherness and interrelatedness constitute a profoundly meaningful mythos.
2. An Astrology of Understanding and Meaning
The words understanding and meaning are, unfortunately, generally used with little or no concern for what they should most characteristically refer to. "Understanding" basically differs from "knowledge", and "meaning" differs from "indication". Strictly speaking, "knowledge" is transmitted through "signs"; and "understanding" through "symbols." Knowledge implies a separation of the knower from the known. Knowledge is objective, while intuition is subjective. To understand, literally, is "to stand under" — thus to feel the weight and experience the "roots" (or causes) of what is being understood. We should not say that we understand a sign; we either know or do not know what it indicates. If we are asked whether we have met a person, we might answer, "Yes, I know him." We would not say, "I understand him" unless we are aware of his character and the basic way he usually acts and reacts. A scientist knows many things he does not actually understand.
Facts are observed and known; symbols should be understood if their meaning is to be "revealed", and understanding a symbol should always involve to some extent "feeling with" the culture or group of persons that raised a mere fact to the level of a symbol. We know as a fact that some criminals in old Palestine were crucified and adulterous women stoned. But the image of a crucified Christ in a Catholic church is not there merely to indicate an assumed historical fact, but as a poignant and potent symbol of a way of life, an ideal of supreme sacrifice and compassion. A fact is only what it is; it can be precisely defined. A symbol is far more than what it portrays, for it not only represents a single situation; it points to a complex group of feelings and values. A symbol is not an indicator; it is at least potentially a revelation of meaning and, through meaning, of an implied purpose.
Symbols integrate the separate experiences and aspirations of many people, and they are the foundations on which a collectively accepted culture is built. Symbols take events and facts out of the realm of the unique and the fortuitous — the realm of incomprehensible, meaningless chance and random activity — and into the realm of "universals", and of collectively valid principles and motivations. Symbols enable us to come to terms with situations we can only meet fully and meaningfully on the basis of collective experience and a collective set of values. Symbols arise out of the common experience of human beings in answer to a need they all, consciously or unconsciously share. But there is a hierarchy of human needs; some are more basic and common to all men, others are experienced only by individuals facing the possibility of some deep internal transformation, or of a radical change in their outer life.
When Gautama the Buddha came to the people of India, he became the Exemplar of away of life and a type of mentality that masses of human beings needed — human beings who had long been subservient to a rigid caste system and forced to follow an endless series of rituals controlled by a powerful Brahmin caste. The image of the sitting, meditating Buddha came to be the symbol of a new kind of wisdom and detachment which he had made available to anyone willing to follow his "middle way" and his practice of a few basic virtues in order to reach a new level of mental functioning - a new wisdom.
In Europe, the crucifix became the symbol of another approach to life emphasizing the feeling of love and devotion, and preparing human beings to meet their most transforming crises through total surrender and sacrifice and thus to reach an eventual rebirth into a higher realm of being - the Resurrection symbol.
The lives of Buddha and Christ were made into "myths" (or mythos). Every event in these lives was raised to the level of symbol releasing a universal or archetypal meaning, an example to "imitate". The religions built upon these symbols and archetypes ritualized the many aspects of these great myths, and many more symbolized phases of the process which their devotees were led to experience as they sought to "identify" themselves with the idealized image of the God-impersonating or divinely inspired being.
Astrology can also be understood as a great and (in the past) universally accepted mythos. What this mythos pictures and seeks to reveal in the most impressive manner possible — i.e., by predicting the future — is simply the orderliness of the universe in which human beings live. By so doing, astrology fills the most basic need of human beings, the need for order and security. For this reason, astrology has rightly been called "the mother of science" and indeed of civilization, because science and all manifestations of culture (religion included) cannot exist unless human beings can feel that whatever kind of rules and social regulations they devise to structure their collective social life in some way reflect (or imitate) a universal order. The belief in the existence of such a universal order arose in the earliest days of human evolution on this Earth when human beings were able to experience not only the day-and-night rhythm and the periodicity of the seasons, but also the amazing spectacle of clear night-skies and the repeated and reliable rise and setting of the brightest stars at certain times of the year.
Astrology has always been, basically, a religion founded upon the daily, monthly, and yearly ritual performed by stars, Moon, and Sun. Anyone even slightly acquainted with pre-Christian cults of the East-Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world, and with the Mysteries, has heard about the "solar myth" and the trials, death, and rebirth of a "solar Hero" symbolizing the descent and reascent of the "Soul" of Man. But actually, the Sky itself was the scene of the cosmic mythos. The sacred Mysteries were only reflections of what occurred in that part of infinite Space visible to human beings. To make the cosmic ritual of planets and stars and of the two Lights (Sun and Moon) experienceable, so that human beings could identify and "feel" themselves with its cyclic events, the Mysteries were founded. Astrology, when used at the level of the individual person, is actually a particular application of the Mystery concept.
We should never forget that modern science, with all its sophisticated instruments, gives us only the image of the universe our modern consciousness is able to picture. It interprets what man can perceive, directly or through his instruments — only what man perceives. We do not know what ranges of vibrations exist below and above our perceptions. What we call reality is our human reality — a projection of the limited awareness we have of what is. The modern universe of galaxies and meta-galaxies is as much a "myth" as that of the Ancients who saw, in what we call stars, the bodies of hierarchies of creative gods and, in the Milky Way, the womb of Souls. An imaginative scientist, Donald Hatch Andrews, wrote in his beautiful book, The Symphony of Life, that the world is more like music than matter, because everything in it is now, for us, resolved into vibratory frequencies. A classical European symphony is also a myth — a structured organization of sounds and thus of vibrations. Back of all these myths is man's essential need to believe that he lives in a world of order and — most human beings are compelled to add, in order to experience life sanely and securely — a world of meaning. Even if we cannot fathom or understand what the meaning essentially is, we have to believe such a meaning exists, and that the cosmos is an organic whole — a structured and harmonic system of immensely varied and complex but balanced activities.
Only embittered and proud human beings whose nervous systems and minds have been shocked by catastrophic and to them incomprehensible series of events can assert with the post-World War II Existentialists that the world is absurd, and that man alone is able to stand in the midst of this absurdity with the (to them) sublime power to project his own values and selfhood upon an infinite space filled with the meaningless motion of randomly produced aggregations of material atoms. But even such a tragic and senseless world-picture, and that of a forever identical "eternal return" of which Nietzsche dreamt on his way to actual insanity, were attempts to create a mythos, the only one with which its human creators were able to live significantly. These myths represented their personal answer to the need for order. Even disorder can be understood as a form of order, for negation is only an affirmation of the refusal to accept and conform to any positive statement known to the mind which denies.(2)
2) ln Medieval occultism, the Devil was said to be God inverted; and in Faust Goethe characterizes Mephistopheles as he who always denies. However, many a student of esoteric doctrines sees In "Lucifer" literally a "Bearer of light". This "Luciferian" light is believed to represent a rebellious refusal to accept the inertial rule of an "old" God. But the basic question is whether this refusal to conform is only engendered by Satanic pride and without any new and more inclusive vision of order to give It a positively future-oriented character, or whether it is founded upon a Promethean desire to begin a new cycle that will sooner or later reveal a higher field of consciousness and thus a new and greater reality.
Today, the rebelliousness of a youth dreaming of a Utopian New Age has often actually a Satanic rather than a Promethean character. In its extreme form it has led to terrorism. In its mild state it manifests as a confused and often drug-induced condition of unfocused consciousness recalling the famous "melting pot" ideal of our American society. A melting pot is not a "synthesis". It is chaos, not seed. The future is latent within the seed, not in the undifferentiated humus produced by the decay of leaves, even if both humus and seed are needed to produce new life.
This does not mean, I repeat, that astrology cannot validly be used also simply as a tool to give a particular and valuable kind of information. This is its empirical and, in the broadest sense of the term, scientific aspect. In the distant past among agricultural or cattle-raising tribes, astrology was certainly practiced to convey biological information. It can also today be used at another level in an attempt to analyze and describe the temperament and character of a person, and thereby add another dimension of knowledge to the practice of clinical and analytical psychology. The basic question I have been raising for many years is whether such an approach to astrology answers the most fundamental need of restlessly seeking and future-oriented men and women who have already consciously and deliberately entered upon a path of radical transformation, or who, most unconsciously and uncertainly, have taken hesitant and unsteady steps in that direction. These individuals seek far more transformation than information. They long for a clear vision of what is possible for them and what their entire life-pattern might mean as a process of metamorphosis, rather than traditional pat answers to the usual type of problems of day-by-day living.
I certainly am not alone in insisting that mankind today is in dire need of a new mythos, and of a reawakening of "the sense of the sacred". Such a need implies the realization that life, when lived in terms of meaning and purpose, is basically to be considered a ritual or, in more modern terms, a structured process whose every phase is filled with significance. This significance cannot be known as the result of a set of information or recipes; it can only be evoked by symbols whose deepest meaning has to be intuitively experienced through the interpenetrating activity of the mind and the feelings — for this meaning is both objective and subjective, transcendent, and immanent. Such an activity of thinking-feeling — clear and deep organismic feeling — has a sacred character. It is both holistic (for it involves the whole being), and creative (in the sense that it raises the possibility of beginning a new phase of the process of ritualistic living).
In a collective tribal-cultural sense, any creative rebeginning is a reflection in the personal life of the one Creative Act of the gods, or God. Thus everywhere man has imagined a "Creation Myth" as an eternal (ever-repeated) and sacred (divine) model and inspiration for all the great moments of rebirth that may be experienced, at first, by the tribe as a whole and, later, by a group of dedicated and even consecrated followers of a "great religion" celebrating a yearly series of festivals. Today — as human beings have increasingly developed a sense of individuality and independence and as an inevitable result have forgotten the sacredness of the feeling of participation in rituals reflecting the magic and theurgic power of a divine creative Act — each human being has to rediscover the potency of symbols and to seek for his or her individual Creation Myth.
What better symbols could be used than those of an astrology whose roots are nourished by the ever new experience of the Sky and the mind-awareness of the vastness of the universe that has recently been revealed to us? What more significant symbol of creative beginning could there be than the entrance of the potentially independent individual into the open world of the Earth's biosphere after the pro-human and pre-individual period of embryonic gestation?
Only as the newborn breathes in the air that serves as the link between all living organisms - plants and animals — and thus becomes a participant in the activity of the biosphere, can the individual man or woman be considered existing. Before the embryo's heart develops a regular and characteristic rhythm, the womb contains only an animal. At this moment of quickening, the animal becomes a human being. With the first breath, a new stage in the circulation of the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid is reached; the human being ceases to be only "human", having acquired the potentiality of becoming an "individual person". As such a potential individual, the newborn is also potentially able, sooner or later, to enter upon the sacred Path of transformation. Only potentially, however. The vast majority of human beings in our present world have not yet truly and actually become individualized. They are human beings whose consciousness, feelings, and capacity for action are mainly controlled by the dictates of a particular culture and religion, and deeply influenced by a climatic and magnetic biospheric environment.
The astrological chart erected for the moment of the first breath in a particular locality on the surface of the globe is a symbol of what is potential for the newborn, thus of how he or she can best actualize what he or she is born for. What the person is born for is essentially to reach the status of "being-an-individual", autonomous, centered in the consciousness of "being-l", and at least relatively free from a condition of basic subservience, to his or her culture and its paradigms. So considered the birth-chart is the "Creation Myth" of the individuality-to-be. It is a sacred symbol. As the celestial entities indicated in this complex symbol (the birth-chart) keep moving in their ordered courses, the symbol becomes a ritual — a sacred performance.
To see one's life as a sacred performance — and every moment and experience in it as a significant phase of the process of actualization of the birth-potential prefigured in the exact moment and place of birth — is to live, not merely one's individual "solar myth," but also one's galactic myth. It can now be a galactic myth, because the consciousness of the vanguard of mankind has come to demand for its symbols a frame of reference more vast than the solar system. The Milky Way should be considered in this frame of reference, because it represents the next step in cosmic organization beyond the solar system.
It is true that astronomers are now linking several galaxies into a metagalactic system, and there may be other similar groupings. But we cannot experientially know whether we should think of them as parts of an Einsteinian "finite universe" or as separate cosmic aggregations speeding through the infinity of space. Human consciousness can only significantly and practically evolve one step at a time. It can now pass from the level at which we can observe an all-powerful autocratic Sun surrounded by subservient dark planets, to that of galaxies which constitute vast organizations of radiant centers of light we call stars, each galaxy separated from the next by enormous distances.
Transpersonal astrology as I have formulated it deals with the symbolic passage of human consciousness from the level of the solar system (or heliocosm) to that of the galaxy considered as a vast Company of light-radiating Star-beings. Such a passage is a ritual drama in several Acts and many scenes. An individualized person today can consciously and significantly live such a drama, phase-by-phase, crisis-by-crisis. It is a modern Great Mystery. But this living-experiencing cannot be described by the words or images of a mind still structured by the demands and wants of biological and strictly personal existence; it can only be evoked through the power of symbols. To give precise "information" about the transphysical and transindividual type of experience would be only to force into a material mold symbolic pictures that have been impressed upon the mind in rare moments of clairthinking.(3) It would be to project the galaxy upon the cloud-covered surface of our planet.
3) This coined term is used in the same context as one would use clairvoyance (clear-seeing) or clairsentience (clear-feeling) or clairaudience (clear-hearing) with a meta- or parapsychological implication, above or beyond the norm.
What is projected is only a symbol of the transcendent reality; but because it is a symbol does not mean that it is "unreal". Neither does it mean that because there is such a transcendent, light-radiating, galactic reality, we, as physical beings living on a dark planet, are unreal. Every level of consciousness and activity is as real as any other — for the beings operating at that level, either because they are born at that level or have temporarily chosen to operate there for some purpose, perhaps a purpose we human beings can never truly understand. We can only reduce to terms of our own level of consciousness, words, and imagery what the purified and calm region of our mind has reflected — reflected rather than organismically experienced.
The glory of the human state of existence is that it is able to reflect such images of a higher level of existence. All human beings have this ability, latently, but few have fully actualized it. Man has this ability because Man represents a stage of transition between "life" and "light" — between planets and stars. Man is planetary matter on its way to the stellar energy we call light. This way, once it is understood and followed in clear consciousness and deliberate will, is the transpersonal way — the truly "human" way. What we usually think of as human is actually but "pre-human". Human nature, as we generally picture it, is animal nature experiencing the attraction of galactic being and as a result finding itself in the tragic situation of being — to use old religious terms — neither beast nor angel, but a battlefield on which the two levels of being interact, at times in bloody conflict, at others in the exhausted slumber of what we call social normality.
Only a relatively few individuals today can truly "understand" what this condition of life means. Most others either sleep in dreamless slumber or dream symbolic pictures which elude their understanding because the partially remembered dream is almost unavoidably distorted by refraction through the water of the emotional or cultural mind. For this reason, the individual who deeply feels the compulsion to move to the higher level of consciousness needs various kinds of help to remember, not so much the dream-scenes as their essential meaning.
More important still than remembering our "great dreams" — the vivid ones that seem suddenly to awaken us — is to understand all events, crises, and changes of consciousness and attitude of our life. This is necessary in order to discover and fully realize where we stand on the path of transformation, what phase of the process of trans-human metamorphosis we are now experiencing, whence we came and whither we are going. We can only gain such an understanding if we take the Yin approach to life; if we "flow with" life and let it whisper to us words that may evoke in our stilled and serene consciousness images of the road we are following and of the Holy City ahead still obscured by the smog of our forever extended intellectual suburbs, their vacuous comforts and insane distractions from the one thing that counts: to walk on-our mind, will, and emotions focused upon the glowing tower we see dimly outlined in the distance.
Astrology can be of real assistance for those who seek such an understanding of the transpersonal way. But it has to be an astrology that aims at the discovery of meaning — meaning latent in the symbols the astrologer has taken out of the wondrous experience of night-skies as potential guides on the road to the stars. It is a difficult, often tragic road, from crisis to crisis. But for a conscious individual, nothing really is of any importance save to walk on it — deliberately, undeviatingly and with total faith.
These two fundamental approaches to astrology — reflecting as they do two equally basic ways of living, feeling, and thinking — can be considered complementary as well as opposite. Each of them, if lived exclusively and dogmatically, produces negative results. We can reach a state of consciousness in which they are seen as complementary aspects of the human potential; but for an individual to intellectually and emotionally assert that at this time of history and in our Western world they are equally valid in actual practice is usually to fail to correctly assess and understand the situation in which we are living. It is to give in emotionally to the now-fashionable trend, according to which "every teacher really says the same thing" or that "we are all one" - and this is on the principle that we are now in an age of synthesis.
Synthesis, I repeat, is not chaos. Synthesis refers to the seed condition, for in the seed the entire potency of a vegetable species is condensed. There is no synthesis in the humus to which decaying leaves add only chemicals. Synthesis does not imply non-differentiation. Synthesis reveals the perfect form, not formlessness.
Unfortunately, the hippie and post-hippie generations which used psychedelic substances to start within their psyches a process of relative deconditioning have been made to believe that deconditioning is a positive state, and that purposeless and directionless living is an ideal way. Deconditioning is a necessary phase at the beginning, or rather before the beginning, of the positive path of transformation, but it is a phase to be passed through, not to luxuriate in or wander in aimlessly. To sing out ecstatically, "We are all one. Every teaching leads to the same Truth (with a massive capital T!)" is meaningless as a basis for practical action and formed consciousness. Unity is a necessary background realization; the facts we must face are differentiation and individualization. The goal, harmony, is the organization of differences, not their negation.
For the same reason, the kind of life of which Gautama the Buddha spoke as "the Middle Way" is but too often sadly misunderstood to mean lack of commitment in any definite direction, thus an unpolarized state of being, neither hot nor cold, black or white, but instead a meandering through undefined expanses of formless and tepid greyness. The path of the Buddhist Arhat and Boddhisattva is anything but grey or unpolarized. One cannot walk in two directions at once. Unfortunately, "consciousness" has been so extolled at the expense of "activity" and function within a larger whole that a condition of unformed and uncentered passivity — a negative Yin state — is often presented as the only alternative to an overly forceful (and therefore equally negative) Yang state of aggressive behavior and/or egocentric, intellectual thinking.
To tread the Middle Way means to avoid extremes; and all extremes are, strictly speaking, "negative" because they destroy the essence of the path one treads. Both ambitious over-activity (spiritually as well as socially) and mediumistically uncontrollable passivity and openness are negative states. The Buddha preached against the rigid, ascetic practices of some Yogis, but his Dharma (or way of life) was a way of most positive self-control with regard to food, sex, and bodily comfort. It was a way of structured openness and strongly oriented practices.
The practice of transpersonal astrology, like that of transformative living, should also combine structure and openness inasmuch as it should be based on cosmic principles of organization — organization in space (the study of formal arrangements) and organizations in time (the study of cycles and their phases). But the transpersonal approach is evidently not the only valid one. It is, in fact, an approach that probably befits only a relatively few people, if followed genuinely and without deviation, and if all its implications are consciously accepted. Above all, it has to be clearly understood, and in order to understand it clearly it has to be seen in a proper social perspective. The next chapter will attempt to provide some basis for such an understanding.
The Astrology of Transformation
