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THE MARRIAGE OF MIND AND SOUL
The basic concept of transpersonal astrology, and also of a kind of psychology using the term transpersonal (in the sense I have used it), is that when a human being has reached a truly individualized and autonomous state of being and consciousness, he or she becomes a "place" at which two currents of opposite directions will eventually meet: the "descent" of spirit and the "ascent" of matter. These two currents answer a fundamental cosmic need which their union will solve. They are synchronous and essentially interdependent. They start operating at the beginning of a world-cycle when a "divine" creative Act ,occurs. What is then undifferentiated proto-matter — the dust of previous universes, scattered through Space and totally inert — begins to react to the creative Impulse.
This Impulse operates at first in large, simple, whirling movements incessantly repeated. These gradually overcome the inertia of the proto-matter which begins to follow patterns of atomic organization in response to the rhythms of the Creative Impulse. In time the impulse differentiates and a variety of dynamic motions develop, each representing a particular aspect of the vast cosmic idea — the Word or Logos — that had caused the creative Act to occur. Synchronously, material systems progressively evolve toward more complex states of organization within which gradually higher, more inclusive forms of consciousness develop.
When seen from a broad, cosmic, cyclic point of view, the development of material forms of existence and consciousness can be considered symmetrical with the progressive differentiation of the original creative Impulse, but the material entities — though possessing a rudimentary kind of consciousness corresponding to their own level of organization and activity — are completely unaware of the presence of the spiritual forces that are involving themselves into essences or archetypal qualities of being, while these material entities are evolving toward ever more complex and sensitive modes of existence.
When the process of evolution reaches the human stage, the involuting spiritual archetypes have become sufficiently differentiated for a one-to-one relationship between one of them and a particular human being to be possible. This constitutes a basically new situation. The "downward" current of spirit and the "upward" current of material organization have become, as it were, close enough eventually to unite. Yet enormous difficulties have still to be met, as the type of consciousness existing in the very first races of human beings is a strictly generic type of consciousness totally controlled by biological forces. Matter has become alive, but in the first humans, "life" is the absolute ruler. A new power able to serve as a mediator between spirit and life has to manifest. The spiritual current, having broken up into a multitude of differentiated rhythmic units (archetypal qualities of being), and the evolutionary current having then produced human beings totally dominated by a biological type of organization, still operate in opposite directions and with basically different rhythms. They need not only an intermediary to correlate their activities, but a "place" in which a process of harmonization may be given a definite form, and the purpose of their integration may be made evident to both of them. This intermediary and this place of meeting is what we call mind.
Mind simply represents the possibility for spirit and matter to unite within a definite area of experience, and by uniting to fulfill the purpose of the creation of a universe. The essential function of mind is to bring about and stabilize relationship. But the work of establishing relationships between forces of opposite polarities is enormously difficult, when these forces are manifesting as an immense variety of forms and tendencies, each displaying a resistance to change. It has to proceed by stages; and real progress can all too often be made only when a disastrous total breakdown — the flying apart of spirit from matter or vice versa — is clearly seen as the only alternative to at least one progressive little step in the process of union.
Mind has to be developed through an associative and integrative process which leads to the formation of a culture fostering the development of collective forms of consciousness. Mind requires a language and the participation of a multitude of human bodies in collective acts; it makes use of man's ability to transfer the results of his experience from generation to generation — the "time-binding" capacity which according to Count Korzsybsky characterizes the human state.(1) Mind requires the use of symbols that become, as it were, the "soul" — the binding factor — of a community. But besides the development of mind, another step is still necessary: the individualization of human beings as singular centers of consciousness and activity. Only a single individual can meet in a state of full, stable consciousness and offer a permanent foundation for an equally differentiated and individualized single manifestation of spirit.
1) Count Alfred Korzsybski, The Manhood of Humanity. (Institute of General Semantics).
After the final union — at first there may be only brief and temporary meetings — spirit as the positive factor determines the character and function of the being that results from the union of the two currents. This being presumably retains a human (male or female) form, but is now a transindividual being. The energies of life still operate in it, though in a profoundly transformed manner, because as long as the organism is made up of chemical earth-materials, it still functions according to the basic rhythms of the biosphere. Yet the power of spirit not only can repolarize and dynamize anew the waning energies of life, but even, if necessary for a specific purpose, substitute for them.
The mind of the transindividual being is even more transformed, at least in its deepest aspect, because it no longer needs the symbols which its culture had produced and forcefully impressed upon the child and maturing adult. The transindividual mind can use these symbols, but it is now consciousness free from the psychic bondage to particular, symbols and the need to formulate experiences in words, images, or external actions. It is a consciousness that belongs to a level beyond not only the personal ego, but beyond the individual I-center of a closed mandala of personality. I have referred to such a consciousness as pleroma consciousness — the Greek gnostic term pleroma referring to a superindividual and spiritual level of being which one could also characterize as "divine".(2)
2) Yet the term divine does not necessarily have to have a Judeao-Christian religious meaning, that is, to be applied only to the one end only God, Creator of the universe. In ancient religions, many gods are mentioned, who are different aspects of a supreme cosmic being. In his great book, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo evokes the possibility that humanity may one day be composed of beings who could truly be considered divine.
The mind that uses words and symbols according to the dictates of a particular culture — or today perhaps of a blend of several cultures — is actually responsible for the development and stabilization of the feeling-realization "I am". It gives to this feeling-realization a definite and often rigid form. Without this mind, the I-feeling would hate no lasting power, somewhat as the President in the White House has power because of the administrative and decision-enforcing bureaucracy and police (or army) that supports him. In a very real sense, the "I" is a symbol created by the mind on the foundation of a biological feeling or organismic unity and well-being. By contrast, the ego is simply one of the many functions of the physical organism, when the organism operates under the conditions of family, social, religious, and cultural living: the function of insuring security and conditions of existence as stable as possible.
Yet, in another sense, the experience of "I am" — "I am a totally integrated being functioning as an autonomous, Independent and responsible being" — means that the current of material evolution has reached its apex. Within the once scattered, inert, and indifferent units of matter, the universal power of integration, which I call ONE or SELF, is now a dominant Presence. But it is a power limited by the physicality of what it has integrated. It is power at work in dark substance and always confronted with the violence of biological forces and the conflicts of the sociocultural world. It works through a mind bound by the very symbols it uses — symbols which refer to experiences in the biosphere of a dark planet. This mind as yet does not realize that in the cosmic scheme it is meant to be the consecrated place — a sacred enclosure, a temple — in which a basically different and far more crucial type of integration, that of spirit and matter, has to occur.
This temple, however, has to be built using the symbolic materials — words and ideas — of a culture that arose out of collective experiences. The mind had to be collective before it could be truly individual. It had to be rationalistic and logical in order to attain an objective consistency before it could become, the intuition and vision of a Seer. Therefore, when the individual stage of human existence is reached, great questions — which most individuals try not to ask — arise: What is this mind for? What purpose are the psychic forms it has built to serve?
What makes the situation so difficult and confusing is that the mind itself has to formulate the answers to its own reluctantly-asked questions, for nothing else could. Yet, if left alone, the mind would give either a collective, biological, and cultural answer or, by glorifying the I-feeling as the absolute culmination of the universal process of existence, it would close the door of the field of consciousness to the downflow of spiritual forces. A factor existing within the human psyche beside the mind has somehow to act directly upon the mind, or to serve as a hidden gate through which "inspirations" of a spiritual nature may enter and gradually transform the mind.
I have referred to this factor (Chapter 4, p. 88) as a force that can operate as a counterpart to the principle of individualization. From the point of view of the individualizing person and his or her conscious and objective mind, this force acts in a quite mysterious and dark area of the psyche which psychologists like to call "the Unconscious". This area is outside of the field of consciousness of such a person because this field is entirely occupied with either the process of dealing with the biosocial and cultural environment, or that of furthering individualization through the use of intellectual operations. Nevertheless, this area outside of the field of consciousness is an integral part of the whole person and is most likely linked in some way with a particular area in the body whose exact location seems to be a controversial subject.
This counter-individual factor might be called the "soul", but this word is confusing since it has been used in so many ways. What Jung called the "anima" can be related to it, but anima has a more restricted meaning and belongs to a different approach to psychology from the one I am developing here. As I see it, the function of the soul is to serve as a base of operation for the higher type of integration — the integration of spirit and matter — during the periods in which the mind is entirely occupied with the processes of cultural, personal, and individual integration.
The soul has a collective, psychic aspect which operates in the religious sphere as true faith and devotion. It "ensouls" religious practices and observances. It is very active in the lives of the great religious mystics, the great dreamers of an absolutely transcendent state of unity, who, by intensifying their feeling-nature, attempt to by-pass the stage of individual selfhood and to raise their consciousness directly from the cultural to the transcendent (or "divine") level, and eventually to reach a "unitive state" of identification with what their religions call God in many languages. This mystic way and the bhakti path which has dominated the culture of India (and to a much lesser extent the European Middle Ages), seem to me to represent only one phase of the total process of raising human consciousness to a state beyond individuality. It should have to be balanced at one time or another — in preceding or subsequent lives — by the development of the individualizing mind.
As long as the autocratic power of the I-center totally dominates and controls the closed mandala of personality, the mind is most often blinded by that power. The mind can only begin to become aware of the deepest and ultimate purpose it is meant to serve when the "I am" power of integration tends to break down, finding it too difficult to cope with crucial problems of life as an individual in constant conflict with other individuals within an increasingly chaotic society. When, at the same time, another kind of power operating through the soul exerts constant pressure upon the mind and perhaps is able to penetrate its rigid structure with flashes of inspiration and intuition, the mind gradually — or in some cases suddenly — realizes its bondage to the "I am" center, and the nature of its higher function. It begins to work at building the inner temple under the impulsion of the power it dimly senses operating through the soul. This power is, symbolically speaking, that of the zenith-star — a light-radiating entity belonging to a more-than-individual level of existence — the level at which the spiritual reality of Humanity-as-a-whole has its being.
In astrological symbolism, this is the level of existence represented by our galaxy, the Milky Way. The star whose light and power first radiates through the soul and eventually illumines the mind represents the trans-individual state of existence of the human being. The potentiality of that state has been inherent in every human being for perhaps millions of years; but it is still, for most human beings living today, only a distant potentiality. The greatest part of mankind is still hesitantly, and most often blindly, working to actualize this possibility. The process of actualization which began at the biological level proceeded through the sociocultural level to the stage of autonomous individual selfhood. This state does not constitute the final "human condition". The I-consciousness can and in time will lead the whole of humanity to a "We"-consciousness — pleroma consciousness.
This "We" is totally different from the biological "we" of the family group or the social "we" of an aristocratic class responsible for the maintenance and glorification of a particular culture. In the pleroma state, the consciousness of all participants interpenetrate. There are no more individual barriers, yet the resulting unanimity should not negate any sense of individuality. The pleroma is a totally integrated orchestra of beings who nevertheless can act as individuals in the fulfillment of the role that each is to play in the performance of Man.
At this time in human history, the relation between mind and soul is of particular importance; much depends upon how it is interpreted. Because our Western society has so greatly stressed the development of the objective, analytical mind, a strong reaction to thinking has lately developed, inspired or at least strengthened by the spread of Oriental philosophy and the fascination exerted by various types of "spiritual Teachers" from Asia. Mental activity has been downgraded, and the word soul is used to glorify a non-mental type of either emotional feeling or of a "spiritual" way of life. If we return to what I have stated in the first chapter of this book, we could readily interpret this resurgence of all that can be covered by the word soul as an indication that the Yin approach to life has begun to rise in strength after, the Yang approach had reached its apex. Characteristic expressions of the Yang principle are the Euro-American collective mind, with its intense eagerness to control the material environment through intellectual knowledge, and what Oswald Spengler called the Faustian spirit, a restless spirit intent on the conquest of whatever is beyond the familiar and the known. Thus we can see in the soul a principle of compensation for the mind's tendency to dominate the field of activity and the consciousness of modern human beings. Such an interpretation, however, does not give a complete picture of the situation.
A mind is simply a form of consciousness. More precisely, it is a more or less clearly and sharply defined "area" (an awkward term to be understood symbolically rather than geometrically) within the total field of activity we call a human being. When this field is not only well-organized at the biological level as a body, but also at the sociocultural level as a person embodying in a particular way a collective psyche, a new trend begins to develop. The process of individualization starts. This process uses the mind to achieve its purpose, for mental activity is necessary to build a complex structure of consciousness from which the new principle of individual selfhood, the "I", can operate. In principle, the "I" operates simply as a centralizing and integrative factor; but as the necessity of overcoming the inertia of what biology and culture have built is felt, the "I" also apparently finds it necessary to act forcefully or cleverly to rule, and to enforce the laws and regulations the mind formulated. The "I" becomes a more or less absolute king or monarch.
Such a domination requires the individualization of consciousness. Consciousness, which was collective and psychic at the sociocultural level, becomes individualized through an enhanced operation of the objective, analytical mind. This individualization of a consciousness and psychism which had been almost entirely collective during long periods of human evolution quite obviously produces resistance. This resistance to the individualization of consciousness by the collective psyche gives form to a "soul". Within this soul two distinct forces are at work, though most people do not differentiate them. One of these forces is the power of tradition — the power of what still operates as collective psychism in the community in which the individual-in-the-making was born. The other force emanates from a higher collectivity — the "greater whole" in which all human beings live, move, and have their being, though for a long time they are not aware of this fact. This higher collectivity is Humanity-as-a-whole as an all-inclusive plane of reality of which the world of physical matter is only one several aspects.
This higher collectivity exists in a state of consciousness that transcends both the collective consciousness of a culture-whole and that of human beings having reached the status of truly autonomous individuals; yet, both the cultural and the individual stages are necessary to its actualization. I have already referred to this transcendent state of consciousness as pleroma consciousness. The power that operates within the soul is the energy and light of this pleroma consciousness. In other words, the light and power of the greater whole Humanity (in the all-inclusive sense of the term) acts within the soul of every individualized person. It has to act in order to counteract the individualizing trend; for if Humanity-as-a-whole did not act, the drive toward the fulfillment of individual selfhood would inevitably develop an irresistible momentum and crystallize into a rigid and tyrannical power — the unchecked power of the individual self, the "I am".
To say that this power is that of the ego is, I repeat, to fail to understand the difference between the sociocultural and the individual levels of activity. Such a failure often leads to much psychological confusion. It clouds up the nature of the soul.
The soul — I repeat — has a collectivistic, traditional aspect; and all institutionalized religions are based on and thrive from it. But it also serves as a base of operation for the greater whole Humanity in its attempt to keep the force of individualization (the Yang power) from producing an unyielding, utterly proud "I" backed, and also to a large extent controlled, by the patterns and devices of a bureaucracy of the mind. Thus Yang and Yin do not refer primarily to mind and soul. They rather symbolize the power that produces the emergence of individuals out of collective culture-wholes, and the power of the greater whole that seeks to bring all these individuals to the realization that they are potentially, and therefore have to become, co-participants in its vast field of activity and consciousness far transcending the individual state of existence.
Let me stress again that both powers are equally necessary in order for the process of transition from level to level to take place. A human being must pass through the stage of conscious individualization before he or she consciously and responsibly participates in the activity of Humanity-as-a- whole. Human consciousness has to become focused through a clear and individually centered and structured mind; but this focusing and centering and individualization of consciousness has also to be balanced by a drive for transformation and transmutation, or it could take a monstrous form which would negate the possibility of the development of consciousness at a higher, more inclusive level. Thus the individual should tone down his or her sense of achievement and the pride it engenders, so that he or she is able to listen to the "voice" of the soul, and by relaxing what Carl Jung graphically called the "cramp in the conscious" to open himself or herself to the downflow of light and transcendent energy which passes through the soul. I repeat, the soul does not generate this transformative current of spiritual power. The power comes from the greater whole — the planetary Being, Humanity-as-a-whole.
This planetary Being exists at a level that transcends the individual state, and therefore should be thought of as a pleroma of unanimous and spiritually integrated centers rather than as a supreme Person to whom the religious consciousness of human individuals gives the name God. Yet in relation to a human individual this divine pleroma actually assumes what to the individual is felt to be a "personal" character. When "God" speaks to a man or woman, He becomes personalized in terms of the particular need of the human being, or of the individual character of the cultural or spiritual work he or she may be charged to perform according to his or her special talent.
This fact, which has seemed so mysterious and awesome to many European thinkers and mystics, can be made more understandable — because it is de-glamorized — if we see it in the light of astrological symbolism. When an individualized human being is represented by the solar system as a whole, the transindividual, divine pleroma becomes symbolized by the galaxy, the Milky Way, in which the solar system is but a perhaps relatively insignificant atom or cell. Our Sun is a star. Thus every individualized man or woman is also potentially a divine being, a small unit within the divine pleroma, Humanity-as-a-whole — and symbolically a star in the galaxy.
We have seen that the principle of individual selfhood, the "I", is the center of the mandala of personality — the birth-chart. As this center looks up to the sky, it should be able to discover the galactic star it potentially is. The star is therefore symbolically the one exactly at the zenith. The transpersonal way is the pathway that leads from the center of the chart to this star at the zenith. On this pathway, the divine power and light of this "star" come down to meet the individual as the individual ascends toward it. A two-way, broadly symmetrical process is at work. In religious terms, God comes toward Man as human beings who have become conscious individuals aspire and reach toward God, in ardent prayer and all-consuming love.Seen from a purely psychological point of view, this I process takes the form of a coming together and interpenetration of soul and mind. The mind dominates the entire field of consciousness whose center is the individualized self, "I". Thus, as I have already stated, to this conscious I-center the soul at first inevitably appears to be outside of the field of consciousness. Whether this soul is said to be "in the depth" of the psyche or the highest part of it, it is still outside of the field whose contents can be referred to the I-center in conscious and more or less rationally formulatable terms — or if not entirely outside, then in an area that joins the field of consciousness to the unconscious.
What Carl Jung called the anima is defined as a function of mediation between the conscious and the unconscious — an intermediary, a link. In a limited sense, it corresponds to what I have called the soul here; but where Jung and I radically differ is in our conception of what operates through the soul — what is beyond it. He speaks of the Collective Unconscious and the realm of Archetypes; Goethe before him mentioned in a somewhat similar sense the realm of "the Mothers". On the other hand, according to the cosmic concept of "holarchy" I present, what is beyond the soul and uses it to serve as a base of operation at the level of individualized human personalities, is Humanity as a spiritual Being encompassing all individuals — a Pleroma of consciousness and activity existing at a trans-individual level. All individualized persons can reach this level, but only if their minds not only become aware of the reality of the soul, but accept to include this reality in the field of consciousness and persuade the I-center to open itself and welcome the unfamiliar and often disturbing experiences resulting from the admission of the soul into the field of consciousness. When this occurs, a psychologically transforming process which Jung calls "the assimilation of the contents of the Unconscious" and "the process of individuation" begins to operate.
It may operate relatively smoothly, but most of the time it requires a series of crises. In some instances, the mind may open itself readily to let the newcomer enter the field of consciousness, but feeling the resistance of the individual center to the implications of the soul's messages, the mind often subtly intellectualizes or personalizes the transcendent soul-revelations of a higher, "divine" state of existence so as to make them acceptable to the "I". The I-center might be willing to reverently bow before a higher, more powerful kind of individual person, but only if by doing so it still remains "I", king in its own realm. A king may bow to a still greater emperor, if his station as a king remains officially recognized. Likewise, a human being may devote himself or herself to a great guru, provided he or she is not asked irrevocably to give up his or her essential status as an individual, especially in relation to the other chelas of the guru.
When the mind and the soul fully interpenetrate, the light and power of the greater whole, the pleroma of Humanity, can fully illumine the field of consciousness. The I-center accepts to surrender its central station - its "throne". However beautiful and fulfilled the individual self was, it remained a solid and substantial reality with a physical base, the body. The mandala of personality with an enthroned "I" as its center is a closed-center mandala. It becomes an open-center mandala when the throne of the "I" dissolves, as it were, under the Neptunian light of the spiritual Pleroma of Man. Through that central void, the light of the "star" — which our consciousness interprets as our transindividual self — can be seen. Its rays transfigure the mind now united with the soul, and the power of the vast galactic communion of stars reaches down into the biological roots of the human being to gradually trans-substantiate the matter of the cells that life had bound and the mind had often perverted or filled with toxins produced by social ambition or individual vices.
When this process of trans-substantiation is completed, or at least nears completion, a transindividual being emerges from the metamorphosis. Such a being operates at a "transphysical" level. Biological forces no longer operate, or at least not in the way we today think of and observe their operations. The type of "matter" our senses perceive and our intellect categorizes as "physical" is transmuted into a subtler kind, to which the imprecise name "etheric" has often been given. This subtler matter may also refer to what the traditions of India called akasha — a word which has recently become popularized in our Western world, but which seems to be used improperly in many instances.
The existence of transindividual beings can be experienced once an unrestricted openness of the I-consciousness has been achieved, and the karma of the physical and emotional-mental personality makes such an experience possible and safe. It would be neither safe nor possible in a concrete manner if the individual had not first passed through a process of biological and "magnetic" purification, and if the mind were not fully open to and welcoming the experience without fear. There are, however, various levels of realization — various kinds of experiences that provide an increasingly solid and indisputable foundation for what, at the level of a strictly individual and I centered consciousness, is at first only an "intuition".
When I refer to a transpersonal individual, I am not speaking of a transindividual being, but only of an individual person who has definitely taken steps on the path of radical and total transformation. The transpersonal way refers to this path which symbolizes a long and arduous process that can take a great variety of forms, yet which has a definite, nearly universal structure — just as the embryonic development of a future human being, within the mother's womb, takes place according to a series of clearly marked phases. This process of rebirth is difficult and often requires intense phases of catharsis because of the inertia of the biological past and the sociocultural and individual karma that must be overcome.
All individuals whose minds have opened themselves to the messages or visions that the soul reveals in symbolic forms, and who have accepted the challenge of total transformation, have to undergo such a process of rebirth. In the life of any truly individualized person, a moment always comes when the implications of a basic choice are more or less clearly presented to the I-center. The "I" has to choose between self-fulfillment as an end in itself, or open-ended transformation. The choice is between straining after greater perfection of form through which the self would be glorified and perhaps immortalized among men, and entering an unfamiliar "mountainous" path whose end seems always to recede beyond the horizon, and whose challenges are so complex or elusive that the mind is never able precisely to formulate them and deal directly with the problems they pose.
On that path of radical transformation, faith is needed — a faith requiring humility, as well as the courage which can only be born of an inner realization of the irrevocable character of a decision whose source is more than merely mental, because it is in fact the progeny of the psychic "marriage" of the soul and the mind. The union of mind and soul is a marriage in the true and spiritual sense of a union consecrated by God, for it occurs in the presence, intuitively felt if not clearly perceived, of the star, symbol of the divine state that is latent in every human being. Yet the I-centered consciousness may still be so reluctant to give up its prerogatives that it may refuse to accept the new life-situation for what it is. It is therefore the mind's task to interpret this situation in such a way that the I-consciousness, seeing itself but a phase of a vast cosmic process, will serenely accept being absorbed, yet not dissolved, into a consciousness that encompasses the entire process and all its temporary phases and achievements — biological, cultural, and individual — yet does not repudiate or negate any of them.
This new task of the mind in union with the soul can be performed in several ways. I think of a transpersonal astrology simply as a significant way for modern individuals to gain a more objective, non-glamorous, and non-devotional understanding of the process of total transformation. In this kind of astrology, every astrological factor has to be referred, not to the individual "I" enthroned at the closed center of the mandala of personality, but to the process of transformation. Transpersonal astrology is therefore an essentially dynamic kind of astrology.
The birth-chart still remains a fundamental factor for it reveals what the process of transformation starts from and what conditions this process — thus the individual's karma and innate capacities. It also suggests by implication the order in which basic changes and crises are likely to occur and how they are interrelated. However, in terms of the relationship of the astrologer and the client, a greater importance is usually given to "progressions" and "transits", that is, to the process of change itself. The purpose of astrological interpretation at the transpersonal level is not to give precise information concerning events in themselves, or to solve problems of interpersonal relationships in themselves, but to reveal how everything in daily living can be consciously and understandingly used as a step forward in the transpersonal process.
The Astrology of Transformation
