In Kurt Vonnegut's futuristic novel The Sirens of Titan, the lone human representative on a pan-galactic space flight is summoned by the captain, who Vonnegut describes as a Portuguese man-o-war floating in a tank of sulphuric acid, and who says to the earthling: "Son, I'm sorry to have to inform you, but there's been a death at home." Shocked by this unexpected bad news, the young man anxiously queries: "Is it mom, is it dad?" "No son," replies the captain, "it's your whole solar system."
Our world does sometimes shift like this - suddenly, and in some completely unexpected way. When it does, our initial reaction is usually denial; and given our strong instinctual need for psychological stability, this is actually quite understandable. In its most extreme form, anthropologists call this: the 'disaster syndrome'. Emergency responders have been known to find individuals sitting in the midst of catastrophe calmly reading a newspaper, as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring.
Institutions, nations - even well established intellectual and spiritual traditions - can also at times find themselves facing situations that trigger the disaster syndrome response. The conceptual foundations of physics, for example, were profoundly shaken at the beginning of the 20th century by the emergence of quantum theory - which yanked the rug out from under the feet of many classically trained physicists. And right now, an equally momentous and challenging change is in the works for those of us interested in the study and practice of astrology.
SINGING THE BODY ELECTRONIC
This isn't the first time that astrologers in the West have found themselves in the throes of a game-changing mutation. A huge shift in the form of astrological practice took place in the final centuries B.C.E., when traditional Egyptian astrology collided head on with the Greek alphabet. After perhaps 20,000 years of relative stability, it took the Literacy Revolution less than a century to produce a completely new form of practice, and for this emergent form to become the creative wellspring for what would grow into the entire 'Western' astrological tradition.
Now the winds of change are howling once again, as the Western form of practice pioneered by those Greek-literate Egyptians - the form that we today are still most familiar with - collides with the post-literate communications technologies of the Digital Revolution. These new technologies are changing astrological practice because they're changing you and I by re-configuring the way we perceive the world, the way we think, and the very form of consciousness itself.
Technology accomplishes all this by extending our senses, brains, and nervous systems in new and often poorly-understood ways. Your high-speed rail link, for example, is extending the reach of your foot. Your smartphone or tablet is extending not only the visual field of your eye, but the range of your ear as well. Your computer is both extending the operational capabilities of your brain AND providing the global techno-culture with its most powerful metaphor not only for mind/brain interaction but also, for better or worse, for the very definition of human nature itself! I say 'for better or worse' because this whole transformative process does have its shadow side. For more on this I suggest you view the three one-hour programs from the BBC available at: http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/.
The result of all these sensory and cognitive extensions is a transformation in what neuroscientists call your experience of 'peri-personal space', meaning: the way you experience yourself in the world. When you log onto the World Wide Web, your personal nervous system instantly merges with the global nervous system, and the whole world becomes your body. Little wonder that more and more of us today feel like citizens of the Earth, rather than citizens of any particular country; and why when we watch those images of some atrocity being perpetrated in a distant locale, we feel like it's happening to us.
The Digital Revolution may even be responsible for your interest in astrology. Prior to 1965, attendance at major astrological conferences in the USA usually numbered less than 50 participants. In 1972, when the American Federation of Astrologers met in Dallas, they had over 2000 attendees - most of whom were well under 40. Why such a sudden surge in youthful interest after centuries of dwindling interest?
OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD
We know that human perception isn't just a passive registering of the world, but an active constructing of a world. Our brains select certain stimuli to process from a much fuller range of incoming information. So we really do create our own realities, even if it's all done largely beneath the threshold of our awareness. In a similar vein, when the psychologist Charles Tart began his ground-breaking work with altered states of consciousness (ASC's) in the 1960’s, he posited a normal state of consciousness (NSC) as a baseline. After ten years of research, he realized that there is really no such thing as an NSC. In other words: we all live in varying degrees of ASC all the time!
The philosophical term for such perceptual magic-making is: 'participation'. The Literacy Revolution gradually turned human participation away from the incredible richness of the natural world - with which it had been engaged for over 100,000 years - and directed it towards the linear, sequential array of alphabetical signs on the written page.
But today the non-linear, simultaneity of electronic communications - the Digital Revolution - is re-directing our participatory engagement back to the larger world. Referring to the youth culture of the 1960's - the first generation of Westerners to have grown up in homes where both a radio and a TV were simply part of the furniture - the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter observed: "Young people today want a participation mystique with the cosmos." (Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld.)
Now a participatory entanglement with the cosmos is precisely what the practice of astrology is all about. So many of us who came of age in the 60's had no problem whatsoever taking astrology's ability to do this quite seriously - despite the fact that our doing so made our literacy-conditioned elders more than a little uncomfortable. We believed that if we just explained ourselves properly, these literacy-conditioned minds would understand why we were so enchanted with a practice that they had relegated to the boneheap of history.
How wrong we were! What we didn't understand at the time - and what most astrologers today still don't understand - is the extent to which the delineating (i.e., 'to put in a line') and objectifying (i.e., 'to make an object of') psychology of literacy works against any kind of participatory entanglement other than with the written word. Most of us, after all, had just spent the majority of our young lives immersed in an educational system whose sole aim was to foster the skills of literacy, and wherein learning to think in the disentangled paradigm that these skills condition was the ultimate goal.
So when in my electronically-incubated intuition of the interconnectedness of all things I was drawn to astrology, I quite naturally pursued my new interest in the manner I'd been taught to do by my literate education. What choice did I have? I didn't understand any of this in those days. How else could I possibly have proceeded except in the way modeled for me by all those generations of literate thinkers and astrologers that had preceded me? So I simply carried on, and assumed that my alphabet-entrained manner of astrological thinking was universally human rather than what it really was: uniquely literate.
RE-SETTING OUR ASTROLOGICAL MIND-SETS
It's now clear to me that putting all the time and energy I did into my astrological studies gave me a vested interest in not only the information I had acquired but, even more significantly, in the way I had acquired it. For a very long time, the literate mind-set hadn't been a problem because it had no competition. But that's no longer true because now we're in one of those rare moments in time when technological change requires that we re-set our conditioned mind-sets.
The way you, I, and all techno-cultured humans today think isn't the way humans have always thought. It's just that we've been thinking in the way we now do for so long that we've come to assume that it's just the way it is! This is what the term 'mind-set' means. Our minds, and by resonance our entire fields of consciousness, have been 'set' in a particular form or manner of operating by specific determining factors in our cultural environment.
Of course there are always personal factors that make each individual set unique. But underpinning these personal variations, like the bass-line in a musical score, is a powerful cultural template. This template is very complex and multi-layered, but two factors dominate. The first is the grammatical architecture of our 'mother tongue' - the language we learned first, and employ the most. And the second is the conditioned perceptual bias of the dominant communications technology.
For a very long time now, the mind-set of anyone who's been educated in the Western fashion has been fundamentally shaped by the common grammatical structure of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes, but isn't limited to: English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek. We'll discuss what this means, and how the grammar of our language influences our approach to astrological practice, in the postings entitled: Language I&II.
In addition to language, the Western-educated mind-set has been strongly influenced by the experience of alphabetic literacy. Like language, the alphabet is a technology. Working in synergy, language and literacy have been entraining your and my perceptual and cognitive faculties since the day we were born. Together they’ve produced a form of consciousness that we call: the 'literate paradigm'.
For 2000 years now, the literate paradigm of human consciousness has found expression in the literate paradigm of astrological practice. Even though we're no longer living in the literate environment, virtually everything we have access to in the way of astrological information today - in books and magazines, online, or by way of personal instruction - has been colored by the literate manner of thinking. The history of Western astrology, as we currently understand it, is the history of literate astrology since all the astrologers of record are the authors of books. Do you really think it’s pure coincidence that the astrologers of the book 'read' astrological charts and call doing so a 'language'?
Since most Eastern astrologers today have also been 'educated in the Western manner' - matriculated through a curriculum designed around alphabetic literacy - what I'm suggesting here applies as much to them as it does to Western practitioners. And in the special case of Jyotish (Vedic astrology), both Sanskrit and Hindi are members of the Indo-European family and therefore share a common perceptual and cognitive bias with many Western languages that only serves to reinforce the unique psychology conditioned by the experience of alphabetic literacy.
Neuroscientists today like to refer to the brain's 'plasticity', meaning: its operational flexibility. If our neurobiology is capable of supporting different expressions of mind - as the concept of plasticity possibly implies - what else besides ignorance or habit is keeping us from exploring the possibility that astrological thinking can proceed in ways other than we currently understand?
WHAT'S THAT ELEPHANT DOING IN HERE?
Any mass communications technology - like, for example, the alphabet - becomes a structural element of culture to the degree that it becomes pervasive. When it does, it becomes a functional environment. Members of the culture swim in this environment like fish do in water; and it's as invisible to its constituents as water probably is to the fish. When some new technology becomes even more pervasive, the 'environment' re-arranges itself to reflect the nature of the new technology. Our psychology and manner of thinking adapt to the new environment, and our consciousness morphs into a new form.
This hasn't occurred in the West in a very long time - which is why it's so difficult for us to understand what's happening, and why we're seeing the 'disaster syndrome' response becoming more common. Millions of fear-based individuals retreating into fundamentalist belief systems - be they religious, political, or economic - is one end of the spectrum; and the other end is the increasing number of individuals retreating into electronic hallucinations: "getting lost in that hopeless little screen." (Leonard Cohen, Democracy.)
Even though our perceptual faculties are now completely immersed in the new digital environment, our minds are still deeply enmeshed in the old thought-habits of literacy. For many of our interests today - such as, for example, philosophy and science - the dis-entangled nature of the psychology of literacy isn't a problem because these interests are themselves creations of this psychology. But astrology's different, and here's why...
Humans have been astrologically attuned now for a long, long time. Exactly how long? One compelling piece of evidence is known as the ‘Venus of Laussel’. This bas-relief carving was done in the Upper Paleolithic somewhere between 20,000 and 27,000 B.C.E. - at a time when, in Nicholas Campion’s words: “a simple, archaic astrology, as embodied in the goddess figurine, was part of a wider ecological religion” (Nicholas Campion, The Dawn Of Astrology.)
In this carving, the goddess is noticeably pregnant. Her left hand rests on her ballooning belly; and in her right hand she holds a crescent-shaped bison horn inscribed with thirteen notches, believed by most scholars to be a simple lunar calendar. If this archaeological inference is correct, then the Venus of Laussel is our first indication that humans are becoming aware of a correlation between celestial and human rhythms, and proof that some expression of astrological awareness has been part of the cultural life of Homo sapiens now for at least 22,000 years.
And yet our modern form of astrological practice only began to emerge in the 2nd century B.C.E. - which is slightly more than 2200 years ago. So if we were to apply a baseline of, say, five generations per century, then we today would be members of approximately the 110th generation of 'literate' practitioners. Projecting the same baseline back to 20,000 B.C.E. would suggest then that the literate form of astrological practice is a mere 10% of our entire history! So what were those first 990 or so generations doing for the remaining 90% of the time that astrologically aware humans have been contributing to the development of culture?
The point I want to make is that the practice of astrology didn't originate as a product of the literate paradigm in the same way that philosophy and science did; but it's been processed through the literate paradigm and fundamentally changed by it. The fact that a pre-literate form of astrological awareness once flourished, and did so for thousands of years longer than the current literate form has done, is very much the elephant in the literate astrologer's study.
So why is this particular elephant so important? Why should we in the 10% on this side of the Literacy Divide pay any attention to what the 90% on the earlier side did? Because for reasons we'll soon see, reasons that are completely unique to the Digital Revolution, the only thing that can give us practical clues to who we're becoming in the electronic aftermath of literacy's untidy demise is an understanding of who we were prior to its spectacular ascendancy.
IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY
The literate world-view reached its peak of influence in Western culture in the latter half of the 19th century. Throughout the first half of the 20th century it plateaued. In 1965, under a rare conjunction of Uranus and Pluto (‘shocking transformation’), IBM released its first commercial computer, and the Digital Revolution was officially launched. Now it’s fifty years later, and the electronic environment grows stronger and more pervasive by the day.
And yet in the midst of all this change, the literate paradigm of astrological practice still appears to be going strong. Observing the field, one would think that the established paradigm was doing just fine. The shelves in the metaphysical section of bookstores are full - even if the stores themselves are closing in record numbers. The astrologically-based academic programs are expanding, and the number of astrologers with the letters ‘PHD’ after their name is increasing.
In the practice itself, for better than thirty years now, the focus has been on the restoration of the literate record and the refurbishing of the literate form of practice. But in the culture at large, it’s a very different story where, one by one, the institutions of the literate world-view are all collapsing like the empires of summer do each year in the first frosts of autumn.
The internal integrity within the field of astrology during the current literacy-driven renaissance has grown noticeably stronger. But whatever hope the astrologers of the book have had that by cleaning up our own act we might win a greater degree of acceptance by mainstream Western culture does not appear to be being born out. The truth is that astrological practice never has had a very good fit with the literate paradigm of thinking anyway, which is why astrology has always remained something of a pariah.
What's most ironic is that astrology's greatest curse in the literate environment - its chronic outsider status (remember: it was the child of a very different environment) - may just turn out to be its greatest blessing as the vacuum created by literacy's implosion intensifies. Time will tell whether or not the concerted effort to rescue the literate paradigm of practice will be successful, and what in the end this might actually mean.
A new form of astrological practice uses the form it’s replacing as its content. Just as long ago the literate form took the old archaic practice for its content, the post-literate form will now take the literate practice for its. It’s important you understand that I’m not talking about jettisoning the literate form of practice. I’m just suggesting that we need to repackage the information in a form that’s more congruent with our digital environment.
The fact that astrology was thought, languaged, and practiced differently once before means that it could be thought, languaged, and practiced differently once again. Does the possibility that we could enfold the information contained within the Western astrological tradition into a medium of communication that teaches us how to be more in harmony with nature, in a way that re-entangles us rather than dis-entangles us, intrigue you as much as it does me? If so, the you just might want to keep reading.
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