The Event-Oriented Environmental Approach

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THE EVENT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENTAL APPROACH

Dane Rudhyar

According to this way of thinking (and feeling), astrology is understood to be the study of forces active in the cosmic environment of the Earth, affecting all living organisms and thus the life-events of human beings. The Sun, the Moon, the planets, the stars (individually and in those groups called "constellations") in some way exert a direct external influence upon all living organisms; they cause events and changes to occur. Such an astrology believes that it is dealing with actual, measurable energies. It believes in a world in which force acts upon force.

The idea of what "force" actually means has greatly varied since the dawn of human civilization. "Force" has referred to the will or formative power of gods or to the unbending power of Karma or Fate, or to some mysterious "influence" emanating from planets and stars (or sections of space). Today the scientific astrologer tends to think rather of the effect of solar winds, magnetic storms, cosmic rays, galactic forces upon the pulsations of the ionosphere surrounding the globe, and thus upon the whole biosphere and upon all human beings. But in all cases the situation is basically much the same; what has changed is merely the interpretation of the nature of the sources from which the forces to which man is subjected emanate. What is fundamental in this approach to astrology is that man, and every organized system of activities in the Earth's biosphere - his total environment - are subjected to the impact of external forces.

When these forces were thought to be the result of the will of celestial gods, there was very little man was able to do in order to improve his lot except pray to and propitiate these gods by means of religious rituals and sacrifices. The situation changed radically when man developed a growing feeling of being an "individual," no longer dominated from the very depth of his psyche by tribal taboos and by an inescapable feeling of unity with his kin and involvement in their welfare. Seers, mystics and prophets divinized, as it were, this newly found sense of individualistic separateness and egopower by teaching these emergent individuals that essentially they were spiritual-mental beings - souls transcendent to social and environmental conditions. But then new problems arose; for the biological urges and emotional desires or ambitions of these actually ego-centered individuals most often indeed opposed or perverted the expression of this transcendent Soul.

The Soul - the "real man" - was therefore seen to exist most of the time in an inimical and dangerous internal psychic environment, i.e., an inner jungle. The new kind of religious leaders were thus particularly concerned with the teaching of ethical principles and rules of conduct which superseded or gave a new meaning to the old rituals. And as the important thing for individualistic man was to control what was now regarded pejoratively as his gross, unrefined or sin-perverted "human nature," this altered also the whole astrological picture.

In the archaic tribal world, man defined the forces acting upon his external environment as "favorable" and "unfavorable" according to their effects upon his crops, his livestock, and his projects for expansion or for mere survival. On the other hand, the new type of human individual, because of his belief in the Soul, came to think of the forces acting in his own nature as "good" or "bad." They were good or bad from the point of view of the Soul and he was supposed to rule over them. Thus, man had to deal with two kinds of environment; his external geographical-social environment, and his internal biological and psychic environment. The body and the psyche had become, I repeat, an inner environment for the Soul and even for the "rational" God-given mind which made a man a reasonable, self-conscious, self-reliant being.

By holding to the concept of the correspondence between the. microcosm, man, and the universal macrocosm, it was possible to state that both environments were structured by planets and stars. Thus, the principle. of force against force was operating in man's bio-psychic nature as well as in Earth's biosphere where all men lived. The same forces were operative, physically as well as psychically, causing events to occur. These forces, in cultures that had evolved beyond the archaic ages, were no longer regarded by learned intellectual men as the manifestation of the will of gods in the sky, but nevertheless they were forces, natural energies, which it was man's function to control by his will, his rational mind and his inventive intellect. Exactly how the motions of the planets were able to exert force upon both the myriad of events produced by the activities of billions of living entities swarming on the Earth's surface and the bio-psychic drives or social desires of human beings, was never made clear. It has not been made clear up to this day on the basis of the action of specific "energies' , emanating from planets and stars.

There are today, and there have been throughout European history (especially during the Classical era between the fifteenth and the mideighteenth centuries), two types of astrologers. The great majority of astrologers deal with the forecasting of external events and the selection of the most "favorable" time to start a project; a minority are more specifically concerned with trying to advise their clients concerning their interior psychological problems and activities which result from them. In both cases the basic attitude is that the "real man" (the Soul, the will, the rational mind) is exterior to his birth-chart and that his duty is to rule, as well as he can, both external circumstances and the inner energies and biological or psychic urges of his more or less "unregenerate" if not evil - human nature.

The question of whether the real "I" of a person is to be considered exterior to his birth-chart is one that can only be answered by an overall philosophy of existence, indeed by metaphysical or religious postulates which cannot be proven true or false. The answer must remain a subjective one, based on individual feelings, intuitions, beliefs and the allegiance to (or the repudiation of) an ancestral tradition. And there can be no meaningful answer unless one understands clearly what the alternative position is; and it has probably never been made sufficiently clear or presented in a consistent and all-inclusive manner, at least in terms acceptable to the modern Western mentality though attempts have been made in recent years.

But what is important is first of all to recognize that when the astrologer speaks of "my" chart, "my" Jupiter or Saturn, etc., he takes implicitly for granted a transcendental position toward life and astrology. He accepts the idea that as a transcendent Soul, "he" was born in a body of earth-nature subjected to all kinds of forces beating upon "his" body and "his" psyche - and that he is in relation to the energies of "his" personality in the same position as an engineer-technologist sent to a tropical country to clean up swamps and build roads, airfields and cities.

This is a fine and quite challenging picture consistent with the technological mentality of our time; the difficulty with it is that, if we try to discover what these energies are, which the astrologers correlate with the ten planets (including Sun and Moon) and perhaps also with constellations or single stars, we find ourselves most embarrassed indeed. The scientist of our day realizes that variations in the intensity of magnetic electronic currents or modifications in the orientation of molecules of water (basis of all living organisms) can affect every living thing, and, through the nervous systems, the mentalemotional responses of men or women and children. But to the modern scientific mind this acceptability of electrically and chemically detectable and eventually measurable energies acting upon the whole biosphere, does not prove the validity of the practice of astrology and of predictions made to individuals on the basis of a variety of traditional procedures, many of which seem to be completely outside of the field of such a scientific explainability. I shall only mention here such techniques or forms of inquiry as horary charts, all progressions and directions and Arabian Parts.

All these energies which could be accepted as causes of astrological effects (" influences") strike the whole biosphere and not merely this or that individual person. A sudden release of solar energies may affect not only the weather but subtler conditions which would react on the mentality of perhaps a large section of mankind. But the question of why the impact of solar, planetary and cosmic energies upon the newborn (or the ovum being impregnated) should result in the establishment of a pattern of characteristics set for the entire life of a particular individual is not easy to answer through the type of scientific explanations available today.

Why the conjunction of Mars and Saturn at the degree of the zodiac occupied by the Sun in Aries at birth should produce a barely avoided serious injury to the head, and a couple of days later a sudden case of jaundice cannot very well be explained on the basis of a science of cosmecology or "biospheric astrology." (These events occurred to me personally at the age of 42.)

What has to be explained in such a type of occurrence is why the conjunction of two presupposed currents of energies from Mars and Saturn should cause both an accident (the unexpected breaking of a string holding a heavy glass-covered painting hanging just above my head while sleeping at night) and a physiological illness - thus operating at two seemingly unrelatable levels. Astrological books say that Aries rules the head, and that a conjunction of Mars and Saturn on a person's natal Sun may affect his liver (and many other things); thus, the occurrence did "fit" astrological expectability; astrology was proven to "work" in this case. Did the conjunction produce similar effects on all or even a "significant" proportion of persons born with their natal Sun on the third degree of Aries? This is what should be investigated.

The crucial difficulties in all statistical investigation is, of course, that astrology deals with many "variables"; so that even the most successful determination of a high percentage of correlations between an astrological occurrence and a certain kind of life-situation, event, or career can at best indicate only a tendency. That there is a strong tendency for a person caught in an insurrection to be hurt, needs no particular explanation. Likewise, if some strong release of energies from the solar system or the galaxy hits the entire Earth's biosphere on a certain day, it should be easy to accept the concept that individuals which for some reason are "more sensitive" to this kind of energy have a statistically significant probability of being affected by some kind of "event."

But is that all that astrology is meant to tell modern individuals? Is there not a far deeper, far more personal meaning to astrology a meaning which can clarify basic issues concerning the very nature and purpose of an individual's whole personality by revealing the underlying patterns of his or her unique individual selfhood?

This is what the person-oriented astrologers believe implicitly, and in most cases merely on faith - a tradition-based, quite irrational and dogmatic faith. It should be the purpose of a humanistic, person-centered astrology not to be satisfied with a mere assertion of belief, but to provide a consistent basis of philosophical-metaphysical thinking as a meaningful foundation for such a kind of faith and such a psychological approach to the basic problems confronting a present-day individual person.

Person Centered Astrology