*
ASTROLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE OF MIND
Not only the average person of our present time, but many people who are involved in activities regarded as "scientific," fail to recognize that the field of science is not monolithic and that a very basic difference of outlook exists among the most eminent scientists, especially among those who seek to understand the philosophical implications and the human value of the methods they use and the discoveries they make. Some of the most fundamental concepts and intellectual attitudes of science have become radically altered since the beginning of this century. The mechanistic picture of the universe which has been built since the days of Newton and Descartes is retained only by those men who are busy merely at the fringe of scientific enquiry and in terms of technological applications. A new world-view has been unfolding. Thus one should not be over-impressed by people who are brandishing the word "scientific" as a magic wand to do away with unfamiliar and perhaps "occult" ideas which in fact may parallel the latest concepts of the great physicists and philosophers of our day.
In his remarkable book, Accent on Form, the English scientist-philosopher, Lancelot L. Whyte, points out that "since the time of the ancient Greeks, thinkers have shown a tendency to fall into one of two camps which for convenience can be called the Atomistic School and the Holistic School." In the Atomistic School he places Leucippus, Democritus, Gassendi, Newton, Boyle, Dalton, Rutherford, Millikan; in the Holistic School Aristotle, Goethe, Bergson, the Gestalt psychologists, Whitehead and the Smuts. He says that "the classical atomistic doctrine asserts that the universe is made up of ultimate particles, each of which is simple, indivisible and permanent — that all observable changes are due to the reversible spatial arrangements of these particles resulting from their motions and mutual influences."
In the holistic view the universe is "a great hierarchy of wholes each following its own path of historical development. Each pattern, whether it is a crystal, an organism, a community, the solar system or a spiral nebula possesses its own internal order and is part of a more extensive order, so that the universe is regarded as a System of systems, a Grand Pattern of patterns. . . . The holistic thinker's model of the universe (is) an organism in which every part is harmoniously related to the processes characterizing the system as a whole." While the atomist finds perfection in analysis, precision and quantity, the holist seeks it in form, order and unity. The former tends to start with the detailed facts, the latter to think intuitively, using a direct sense of general situations and the relationships involved.
Another eminent scientist, a biologist with a remarkable vision of the universe, Donald Hatch Andrews, discusses extensively the concepts of wholeness, identity, form and synthesis in his recent book, The Symphony of Life, and he likewise stresses the difference between the holistic and the atomistic approaches to every type of human experience and empirically ascertained fact.
He writes (page 91):
". . . At one extreme we have the philosopher and the scientist who say that reality resides only in the fundamental particles of which the universe is constructed. To this school of thought it is meaningless to say that man is any more than a little machine made up of these individual bits of reality. When life terminates, dust returns to dust and the particles go on their way in new combinations, but the illusory whole that was the personality has vanished forever. At the other extreme of this spectrum there are philosophers who maintain that it is only in the wholes that we have reality. Even with respect to matter it has been asserted that atoms exist only in the laboratory when, under very artificial conditions (as in the beam of the molecular mass spectrograph), we break matter up into individual atoms with controllable paths and make atoms really exist. These scientists maintain that the atom's existence in a mass of matter is just as illusory as the human personality is claimed to be by the atomist thinkers.
"How one feels about such questions is perhaps determined by the extent to which one emphasizes analysis or synthesis in thinking."
and page 92:
". . . As we shall see in delving more and more deeply into the nature of matter, the new wave perspective shifts the emphasis strongly from parts to wholes, an emphasis of links. . . . I quoted Hermann Weyl earlier, pointing out that we must recognize in atomic physics that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Whitehead also emphasizes this: 'But in all analysis there is one supreme factor which is apt to be omitted, namely, the mode of
togetherness.'..."Of course, it is all very well to talk of reality residing in the wholes, but is this a perspective in which we can do constructive reasoning? When we talk about parts instead of wholes we have the advantage of being able to count the parts and set up quantitative laws in terms of numbers. Assemblages of parts can be combined with the help of the laws of arithmetic. For the study of wholes we need an algebra of form rather than an arithmetic of numbers. So we have to study the relations that restrict putting things together and turn to combinatorial analysis.
"Coming back to the atom, we are more and more aware that we are dealing here with dynamic forms and that we have to study the relations of forms to one another. We have to see how these forms combine. Because we are dealing with vibrating wave patterns, these forms are dynamic, and this means that we are involved in a kind of combinatorial analysis far different from that involved in combining static geometric forms (though the relations in the latter process do have a most significant bearing on the combination of dynamic forms)."
and page 94:
". . . Our new discoveries reveal these unexpected aspects of the nature of matter and point emphatically to the need for revising our basic concepts of what is real. They tell us that reality lies not in the tangible, but in the intangible, in the unseen and the unheard. We have to think about the behavior of atoms in terms of dynamic form."
The dynamic aspect of these forms consists largely of vibration with harmonic relations that are in many ways similar to the harmonic relations found in music...."
And he adds in his Preface (page 9):
"The familiar vocabulary of ideas based on the particle obeying the laws of Newton's mechanics in Cartesian space and time has been replaced by a syntax of dynamic forms operating in a space-time domain the nature of which is still largely a mystery. To sum up the nature of this scientific revolution in a single phrase, we are finding that the universe is composed not of matter but of music."
I could add many similar quotations, especially if some of the writings by prominent European scientists were mentioned; but these should suffice to show that the "scientific revolution" which has taken place should be understood and accepted by some of the persons who are so eager to approach astrology "scientifically." They might do well to read, for instance, many articles appearing in the magazine Main Currents in Modern Thought in which well-known scientists and philosophers often discuss new developments along the line of a holistic and integrative approach to the problems of physics, psychology, sociology and education.
"A universe composed not of matter but of music": how close to the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres and to the "planetary spheres" of ancient astrology! The main point in the context of this essay is that, more important than the apparent unit of matter moving around in a vertiginous dance, are the actual patterns made by such motions. As long as we concentrate our mind on "particles" — be they sub-atomic or cosmic — we think in mechanistic terms. We think of a world in which a vast number of infinitely small or enormously large billiard balls move in empty space according to the classical laws of mechanics. The new picture of the universe is one in which we are dealing with waves rather than particles, or more exactly perhaps with extremely complex wave-patterns within the boundaries of "fields" which have — in the abstract sense of the terms — "form" and "rhythm." We are dealing with one basic type of energy operating rhythmically (which means also cyclically) in terms of significant forms — forms which can reveal "meaning" to the mind able to think holistically.
The great Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, has emphasized, out of his own tragic personal experience in Nazi concentration camps, that men can stand almost anything except total meaninglessness. It is mainly on this fact that he bases his "logotherapy." John's Gospel states that in the beginning was the Word — the Logos. A Word is both a sound (i.e., a release of energy) and a form infused with meaning. In the beginning of every existing entity, whether cosmic or biological, there is form and order. A pattern, or formula, of relationship defining the fundamental arrangement of functioning parts within a whole system of activities — a cosmos, a solar system, an organism, a cell, a man — is implied and inherent in the original impulse to existence which produced this whole. The biologist is able to perceive such a pattern as a genetic code. The entire concept of astrology, if it makes sense at all, is based on the intuitive belief that the universe and, more specifically in terms of man's existence, the solar system are ordered arid structured systems of activities in which meaning and purpose are inherent. Any astrologer who does not intuitively feel that there is meaning and purpose in the geo-cosmic pattern formulated in a birth-chart is at best merely a "fact-gatherer." The stage of fact-gathering could be said to parallel the phase of human evolution in which men were only "fruit gatherers." It is only as man began to cultivate the soil and became a "harvester" of the products of the process of seed-multiplication, both vegetable and animal, that culture and civilization developed.
Cultivation or culture requires not only the recognition of the presence of form and rhythm in the universe but also of a deep, at first unclear, feeling that man exists in a special and significant relationship to this natural environment which provides him with the possibility of agriculture and cattle-raising, and later on of industry. Man senses that there is a meaning and purpose in this relationship. Alas, in trying to formulate this meaning and purpose man, reaching the intellectual and egocentric phase of his development, often came to the conclusion that all nature is made for his sustenance and enjoyment. He proudly saw himself as the divinely intended master of nature; and he conveniently embodied such a conclusion in his religious "revelations"; God telling him that everything in the world was made for man, and therefore that the purpose of the whole universe is to provide man with food, raw materials, and experiences enabling him gradually to develop faculties so transcending the rhythms and the forms of nature that they can be called "divine."
Is it God's "Creative Intention" that earth-nature and what is more, the whole solar system, and galaxy, should be subjected to the proud will of man, doing with nature just as he sees fit, or is this concept, repeated today in various ways, a basic falsification of the meaning and the purpose of man's existence? We may think that this is a metaphysical or religious question which has nothing to do with astrology; but on the contrary, it has everything to do with understanding the difference between the event-oriented traditional Western astrology, and the person-centered humanistic and harmonic astrology which I have been developing for some thirty-five years. Should man try to "rule" his chart — to which he is external or is he intended to fulfill and actualize in every possible way this birth-chart and progressions, simply because the birth-chart is the seed-pattern, the logos, of his total being as an individual person operating within a particular and specific environment?
The Western Christian approach to existence implies that man is alien to the Earth, an angelic being "fallen" into this tragic and dark earth-nature and whose only valid purpose is to ascend to his original divine state. This approach gives a definitely negative meaning to the relationship between man and nature; and because it is so basic it has had and still has immense repercussions upon every human activity and every aspect of man's consciousness and personal development.
The humanistic, holistic and harmonic approach has a totally different character. According to it mankind belongs to the planet, Earth, as closely as the nervous system and the brain belong to the body. This nervous system has a definite function to fill in the total operation of this system of activities which we call a human being. In a somewhat similar sense, but of course not literally so, mankind is to fulfill a definite function in the total operation of this vast, yet closely integrated, system of activities which we call the planet Earth — provided we do not think of this Earth as merely a mass of matter. This function appears to be to extract consciousness out of all the activities within the Earth-field — a field which may extend at least to, and perhaps in a sense include, the Moon.*
*These ideas are developed at great length in Rudhyar's book, The Planetarization of Consciousness.
The process of extracting consciousness, meaning and value from experience requires a specific type of mental faculty. It is one thing to deal with events analytically and statistically and to place them into various categories based on the exclusion of unduplicated individual characteristics; it is another thing to be able to envision the form and meaning of their relationships, thus to see them as functional parts of a larger whole. Astrologically speaking it is easy to list the positions of all the planets and the aspects made by two of these planets to each other, then to go to a textbook and to find out what each of these separate astrological factors are said to mean. But this is only a "fact-gathering" process, for these textbook meanings (theoretically at least) are also based on gathered single facts — the observed correspondence between celestial and terrestrial events.
Let me repeat here that these correspondences are never exact repetitions of all the facts to which they refer. A particular planetary position or a particular aspect between two planets in most cases may correspond to a particular trait of character, let us say, a tendency to have repeated accidents. But "accidents" may be of various types and have many causes. Will it help a person to know in advance that he is accident prone? Will this make him more careful? But careful of exactly what? An accident occurs under a complex set of circumstances; and even if there is in the person some psychological or physiological factors which cause him to act in an inadequate manner when he is faced by a potentially dangerous situation, these factors can be varied and complex. They will not be precisely the same in two accident-prone persons, because these persons are not only human beings but individuals.
Two individuals may have in their birth-charts a factor which is usually associated with an early divorce, but divorce may not only have many causes, it may mean very different things to different persons; that is, it may result in two harvests" of value. Because of this, in most cases it is unwise to tell in advance to a person that he will experience a specific event because the basic factor is not the event itself but the character and state of consciousness of the person at the time he meets this event. One may indeed say that it is not the event which happens to the person, but the person which happens to the event. An individual meets particular events because he needs them in order to become more fully what he is only potentially. The event occurs in order to bring out of his unconscious being and into the field of his consciousness his total individual selfhood.
This "bringing out into consciousness" is what the psychologist, C.G. Jung, meant when he spoke of the "process of individuation." In a circular written in 1932 entitled "Harmonic Psychology" I spoke of such a process as leading to the revelation "of the all-compelling Image of an individual's own Soul — the symbol that Life takes within his 'self,' the seed-image of his destiny." I pointed out that in the ancient Mysteries the candidate to Initiation was confronted with this Soul-Image evoked by the magical power of the Initiator. Today the situation is different because of the egocentric character of our culture, and also because it is possible for an individual to develop positively and by himself spiritual-mental faculties which will in time bring to him the concrete and effectual realization of the wholeness of his individual being.
Such a realization may take various forms; it may be brought about by various methods, among which is the ancient technique of "meditation," provided its purpose is correctly understood in the occult sense of the term. Astrology can also be a means to the realization of one's individuality inasmuch as the birth-chart can be considered the symbol or seed-image of this individuality. But such a realization can never be reached through astrology unless the astrologer has developed a holistic faculty of perception — which means, at the very least, that he is able to see the chart as a whole, indeed as an Image of the universe focused in the individual person born at an exact moment of time and in a precise location on this Earth.
Because of this, one should consider astrology first of all as a discipline of mind. This discipline consists in learning to see and to understand all situations and all persons as wholes — that is, as patterns of interrelated and interdependent factors which become meaningful only if they are consciously apprehended in their structured totality. Nothing really exists except through its relationship to everything else. The individual and the environment cannot be separated; a human being has no truly significant meaning except in relation to the whole of mankind and to the planet, Earth — and of course, in an ultimate sense, in relation to the whole universe and to whatever "God" may actually be. Astrology dramatizes this fact when it brings to our consciousness the realization that every individual man or woman is the whole universe focused in an at least relatively unique manner. What the birth-chart reveals is the particular structural character of the focusing operation — which, symbolically at least, is the "first breath," the first moment of individualized existence within an environment in which the newborn can operate as a self-motivated organism.
Likewise, as I already stated, no planet has any meaning except in terms of its relationship to the entire solar system. The character of a zodiacal sign depends on its place in the closed sequence of signs which we call the zodiac, and the meaning of a House is derived from the fact that. it is the first, the second, the third, etc. We might paraphrase the well-known words of John's Gospel by saying: "In the beginning is the Whole." A complex human being begins in one fecundated ovum. The totality of his being is then latent in seed potentiality. Then, gradually, this one whole differentiates into a multitude of parts. The process of differentiation occurs according to an inherent pattern which will persist, as a genetic code, inside of every one of the billions of cells of the human organism, even though each group of cells develops so as to fulfill the function it embodies according to its meaningful in place in the original whole and its moment of appearance in the process of embryonic unfoldment.
If one understands these existential facts one should also understand astrology and its basic; techniques, PROVIDED one forgets altogether the traditional concept that planets or stars cause events to happen to an individual person and exert a direct influence through the emanation of; some mysterious "rays." Astrology is a symbolic language enabling us to interpret the interrelationships of all parts of any existential whole. It is a language based on the holistic perception of archetypal and evolving forms. The birth-chart is an archetypal form, and through the study of progressions and transits we can foresee its evolution, that is, the process according to which what is potential at birth becomes actualized through life-events.
Astrology informs us of the sequence of characteristic phases in the process of self-actualization — that is, of the individual timing and essential characteristics of turning points and crises of growth. It does NOT tell us anything directly about precise events. We can only infer the kind of actual events which will be needed in order to fit the character of the expectable turning points in the person's life. Such inferences are valid only because generic human nature tends to react in similar ways to similar needs and occurrences. If transiting Mars comes to the Venus of a woman one may assume that at this time it will be natural for the emotional nature of this woman to be aroused; but the precise events which will cause and result from this arousal are not foreseeable by astrological means. Essentially it is the character and inner needs of this particular individual person which will determine, or at least condition, the exact occurrences. These can only be deduced from the form or gestalt of the chart-as-a-whole through a holistic faculty which has to be trained. To train such a faculty is the basic raison d'etre of astrology.
But it is not only the chart-as-a-whole of a person which should be considered, for, as I said already, no individual person can be significantly studied except in relation to his environment — which means particularly in relation to other human beings with whom he closely associates, and to society as a whole. This obviously complicates matters, and therefore it is much simpler to believe that planets send rays which hit a person and cause him to fall and break his leg, to inherit a fortune, to marry or to take a long journey. However, we are living in a period of human evolution when a tremendous process of "complexification" (to use Teilhard de Chardin's word) is taking place. The seemingly naive conceptions of the past are being replaced by most abstract mathematical systems which exercise the holistic mind. Even young children are taught to think in terms of "sets" and group-algebra. As I wrote in my book The Astrology of Personality some thirty-five years ago, (closer to 70 years ago now) astrology should be considered an "algebra of life." It is a deductive, far more than an empirical science.
The astrologer can, and to some extent should, use both approaches; just as the physicist uses induction as well as deduction. He builds mental systems (or "models") the validity of which he then tries to demonstrate by carefully devised experiments. Unfortunately these experiments are often so "carefully devised" that they already imply the kind of results which the scientist wants to obtain. The formulation of a problem already contains the kind of answer which, consciously or not, the mind of the questioner seeks to obtain. The essential question is always therefore: what do you really want? Science is said to be the search for knowledge; but what exactly do we mean by knowledge — knowledge in relation to what? This "what" is always and in any condition of existence, what the searcher wants.
If he — and his society — want comfort and material well-being, plus a sense of intellectual achievement fostering ego-pride, then a certain kind of knowledge is sought after which, through its technological applications, will bring these desired results. If, on the other hand, an individual and his society want above all things the harmonious fulfillment of the fundamental nature of man within an equally harmonious and wholesome global environment and the possibility for the individual person to actualize his innate potential of consciousness through experiences of love and sharing, then they will seek wisdom rather than what we call today knowledge. They will consider the welfare of the whole rather than the satisfaction or one-pointed development of some parts of this whole. It is this quest for wisdom which I consider to be the essence of "humanism" — a search for wholeness, for that intuition which succeeds in evaluating at once the value and meaning of any whole situation without having recourse to the self-defeating complexity of modern techniques of data-analysis.
Assuredly knowledge can produce amazing and exciting results, like a landing on the Moon; but what if the social processes and the intellectual emphases which led to such achievements result almost inevitably in a catastrophic ecological situation as well as in chaos in our cities and in interpersonal relationships replete with egocentricity and neurotic behavior?
If I bring here such questions which seem to transcend the field of astrology, it is because, to the holistic and humanistic thinker, no single field can be significantly isolated from the whole situation facing mankind. No human concern can be validly discussed out of the context provided by modern man's mentality and expectable behavior. What is at stake today is the transformation of the collective mentality under-toning our Western society. The great event of the second half of our century is not traveling to the Moon but a slowly expanding revolution in consciousness. This revolution demands a new approach to all problems; which in turn implies a new discipline of thought and feelings along holistic instead of atomistic lines, in terms of relatedness — mutuality, sharing, harmonization, love — rather than in terms of the glorification of the proud, aggressive and acquisitive egos of isolated and insecure individuals.
In subsequent essays I shall attempt to present more specifically and concretely procedures which represent the application of holistic thinking to astrology and to the interpretation of birth-charts; but the astrologer is first of all a human being deeply impressed and conditioned by the general mentality pervading the social and educational institutions of his day — even if seemingly he takes an unorthodox stand on the issue of the validity of astrology. This stand may be unorthodox and scorned by the people who control our official approach to knowledge, value and education; yet one may bow to the "spirit of the time" even while dealing with unorthodox concepts and "far out" occupations.
This is just what is happening today in the astrological field, as many astrologers busy themselves gathering data and working out statistics to prove their basic subservience to the scientific mind — alas, not to the scientific mind where it is most creative, synthesizing and integrative, but rather, where it is still perpetuating the mechanistic concepts and the psychological fallacies of the past. For this reason, the issue at stake had to be presented in its broadest outlines and in terms of what is basic in our present revolutionary condition of existence: that is, a choice between two types of mentality. The choice includes as well one between two nearly opposite approaches to the way in which a significant and valuable life is to be lived.
