I was 20 years old in the autumn of 1965, and in the throes of a major life crisis. I had just started my second attempt at college and was once again on the verge of failure. Desperately lonely, with very little understanding of who I really was, I spent my days trying on different roles like one might try on suits of clothing on a shopping spree. Nothing I tried remedied my angst. I knew full well that dropping out would leave me vulnerable to the draft; but I just couldn’t seem to pull myself out of my downward spiral.
At my wits end, I sought help from the school psychologist. Dr. Marvin Herrick had received his professional training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Like most Jungians, Dr. Herrick was big on dreamwork; and so he became my guide in the wild and beautiful back-country of my dream-life. Gradually the understanding emerged that all my woes stemmed from studying what my father wanted me to study rather than what I was really interested in. So against his wishes I changed programs, and immediately my life began to turn itself around.
My successful mentorship with Dr. Herrick had peaked my curiosity about his mentor: the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. So I began to make my way through Dr. Jung’s Collected Works which, if you’re at all familiar with his writings, is no simple task. Again and again I would notice him making some favorable reference to astrology. Wondering why any intelligent human being in the 20th century would do that, I decided to look into the matter for myself.
WORK FOR OURSELVES: THE LESSER MYSTERIES
Well, that’s my story. So what’s yours? Why are you bothering to read this? Perhaps you too are searching for something, just as I was. Looking back from the vantage of my 68th year, I can see that in the midst of all that unhappiness and suffering of my early 20’s I was searching for two things.
The first was a vehicle for self-knowledge that was more direct than dreamwork, because our dreams clearly have a life of their own and don’t always shine their dark light on the issues one hopes they will. I needed a way to study myself that was more under my own control: something I could apply to specific problems, and that would give me better answers to the questions that were still burning their way through my soul. So I decided to follow Jung’s lead, and cultivate what I now like to call my ‘astrological awareness’.
Mention the word ‘astrology’ in any context today, and most Western-educated people dismiss you outright. Or, if anyone is at all sympathetic, they immediately think of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. As useful as the Zodiac can be, especially in helping to identify one’s basic ‘type’ - i.e., a person’s natural way of being-in-the-world - this wasn’t the information that convinced me to seriously study astrology. Typologies definitely can play a role in helping us understand ourselves; however they‘re often used to create a very static picture of a person or situation.
It was when I discovered that it’s possible to use the continuously-evolving pattern of planetary relationships to create a moving picture of ourselves and others that ‘the language of the stars’ really became interesting! So I made it a daily practice to attune myself to the cyclical movements of our solar system and their symbolic correspondences on Earth.
In other words: I became intellectually and emotionally at-one with the ever-evolving dance of the Sun, Moon, and planets; and then I set out to verify in my own experience the claim made by astrologers that the symbolism of this planetary dance mirrors the patterns of the earthly life-stream. In the next posting, I’ll give you a practical example of what this means.
By educating my awareness in the astrological manner, I was able to satisfy my need for better self-understanding. Being astrologically aware increased the degree of my consciousness. I became more conscious, more comprehending, of myself and others. And as the aperture of my consciousness opened, I was finally able to answer the question: who am I? - not in some abstract or theoretical way, but by appreciating how energy moves through me, and through my personal life, in uniquely patterned ways.
Astrology further taught me that these energetic patterns tend to get habituated. It helped me see my own habits, and showed me how to convert a life of being run by them into one of intentional cooperation with the energy behind and informing them. In other words: it isn’t so much a matter of eliminating undesirable habits as it is learning how to work their archetypal energy in more beneficial ways. Hence the title of this posting: Robots For Freedom.
WORK FOR OUR MOTHER: THE GREATER MYSTERIES
Having found a way to know myself, I knew there was still something else I was missing - a second piece of the puzzle; but at the time, I couldn’t really articulate what it was. All I knew is that I was wandering through my days haunted by a vague, uneasy sense of spiritual homelessness.
It took some time for me to realize it, but as I got increasingly skillful at attuning to the celestial cycles and observing what actually came to pass in my life and in the world as they unfolded, I began to experience something that was completely unexpected, but turned out to be the remedy I was seeking. As I became at-one with the movements of the solar system, I found myself experiencing a visceral, intimate at-one-ment with all of nature and all of life that the anthropologist Lucien Levi-Bruhl quite aptly terms participation mystique.
It was subtle at first; but as this participatory engagement in the world deepened, my consciousness was no longer simply expanding, it was actually trans-form-ing. No ecstatic conversion, no shattering revelation, no big enlightenment. Just my disconnected, alienated, literate form of thinking and consciousness gradually morphing into one of inter-connective belonging.
In Steps To An Ecology Of Mind, the communications theorist Gregory Bateson writes: “There will be no New Age until people learn to think in a new way.” So why should a new way of thinking, and a new form of consciousness, be more important than expanding the forms we already have? And why in particular is this experience of participation mystique not only desirable, but perhaps even necessary for our individual and collective survival?
LIFE IN THE DECLINE: THE DESOLATE EARTH
Some years ago now, The Sun Magazine published an interview with Kalle Lasn of Adbusters, who thoughtfully lamented: "It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that even the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.” Consumer-based economies like ours today definitely present an unprecedented sustainability problem; but is this the real problem, or is it just a symptom of an even deeper malady? Could it be that our consumer trance is largely the result of our current ‘thought-habit’, a manner of thinking that is so taken for granted in Western cultures that we don’t even notice it, much less ever feel the need to question it?
Our Western way of thinking was spawned by the invention of the Semitic alphabet in 1600 B.C.E. and institutionalized by the Literacy Revolution that soon followed. Today, alphabetic literacy continues to be championed by every Western-style educational institution in the world. It’s one of our most valued sacred cows.
The core feature of the pre-literate paradigm of human consciousness had been an instinctual at-one-ment with the natural world; but the core feature of the literate paradigm is what the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the ‘subject/object split’: an experiential divide between a subjective, perceiving self - i.e., ‘me’- and an objective, perceived reality separate from me - i.e., the ‘world’.
Every way we think about ourselves and the world today is a product of the split. Philosophy, for example, is one; science is a second; and capitalism a third. Objective thinking has become so pervasive because in some ways it’s been so successful. It has improved our physical lives through science and technology, and our spiritual lives through the contemplative value of literature and the humanities.
However, the psychology of the split has a shadow-side as well. It’s primarily responsible for the rampant hyper-individualism infecting our politics and economics and destroying our viability as a functional democracy. But more to the point being made here, the split alone is responsible for our unrelenting commodification of the natural world, and for the resulting desolation of our whole planet. In the blunt words of the naturalist John Muir: “Nothing dollarable is safe.”
The only thing that can change this is a revolution in human consciousness. And if we’re to avoid what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls the ‘zero-point apocalypse’ now looming up before us, it will have to be a broad-based revolution. But this may not happen, or happen fast enough. So I recommend you view Diane Bell’s indie film Obselidia in case it comes down to deciding how to personally come to terms with the negative consequences of our collective inaction.
For right now anyway, birthing a new form of consciousness doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our hard-won ability to think objectively, or that we have to give up reading and writing. What we do need to do is learn how to step in and out of the split at will - and I suggest you find some way to address this now, as it may already be too late.
A CROWN OF STARS
The Greeks got hold of the alphabet in 800 B.C.E. By 500 B.C.E., alphabetic literacy and the subject/object split had successfully launched the cultural miracle they’re so famous for. As a society, they managed to avoid many of the split’s shadow qualities that we today are falling prey to - such as hyper-individualism - because, unlike us, they had a functioning cultural institution that balanced the divisional tendencies of the split.
The Mysteria of Eleusis, was a two-part Bronze Age at-one-ment ritual that kept the split in check for 1200 years after the arrival of the alphabet. The first part, called the ‘Lesser Mysteries’ was celebrated each spring, and marked the beginning of a six-month period of intense preparation for the ‘Greater Mysteries’ celebrated each autumn.
Since Western societies no longer understand the need to foster cultural institutions designed to antidote the excesses of the split, we have to do it for ourselves. That’s why earlier I called the ‘Work’ of getting one’s personal house in order: the ‘Lesser Mysteries’, and the re-membering of the at-one-ment: the ‘Greater Mysteries’. It doesn’t really matter how you do it; astrological practice is only one of many ways. But if you’re bothering to read this you just might be the kind of person who’s searching for this kind of pain relief - whether you understand what that means right now or not.
You don’t have to study astrology to have it help you embrace the Lesser Mysteries, the personal work of becoming a fully functional human being. A good astrologer can help you do that, especially if they have some psychological and spiritual training. To use astrology as your vehicle for the Greater Mysteries, and not actually get into the practice, is another matter entirely. I suppose it’s possible with the help of the right practitioner; but let the buyer beware. The practice of astrology has been as co-opted by the subject/object split as every other profession in Western culture. So unless you can find an astrologer who understands this, and is practicing in a manner that overcomes the split, you might do better with another vehicle.
So we as humans are spiritual conduits/robots? Because these bodies aren't us, but our soul is clearly not ours to control. So do we even have a choice or free will? Mark.surette@yahoo.com is my contact
ReplyDeleteThe best answer to your question Mark is to quote a 20th century Russian spiritual teacher named G.I. Gurdjieff,
Deletewho said: "The best way to keep a sheep a sheep is to convince it it's an eagle!"
Free will is a very high human possibility, not a given. It must be won thru what is traditionally called: 'The Work', which is the effort required to become conscious of all our unconscious habits and patterns, our psychological conditioning, which at this time in human history, especially in the United States, is at an all-time high. Are you aware that the people who invented the advertising industry after WWII were all retired military intelligence officers trained in psychological warfare?
True choice is a rare thing. Most of the time, we're just going along with what circumstances have already set in motion, much like a driver on a highway that banks to the right might think he or she is turning right when, in fact,
the bank itself is making the vehicle go right. Reading Eckhart Tolle's book A NEW EARTH is a great way to begin
to understand what living in free will really entails. Otherwise, another German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche's all-too-cynical observation is all-too-true: "Free will is an invention of the ruling classes."