Will and the Self-Maintaining Power of Form

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WILL AND THE SELF-MAINTAINING POWER OF FORM

Dane Rudhyar

The foregoing statements should not be taken to mean that a person should take a passive attitude of laissez-faire toward the drives operating within his body and psyche, and especially toward the cravings and reactions, or the automatisms and self-indulgent desires which are conditioned mainly by the person's environment and the examples it has provided since birth. The astrologer studying a birth-chart win perhaps see that a particular function (represented by a planet) tends to be strongly accentuated in the nature of the person to which the chart refers. Such an accentuation defines a specially important aspect of the person's life, and serves the purpose of the whole life. Yet it can be at times over-accentuated, as changing factors (progressions and transits) stimulate it intensely.

Evil appears when the individual "I" who should be the wholeness or overall harmony of all the functions and drives of the total person identifies himself with a particular function which has become especially intensified and powerful. When a man says, "I am angry, I want you, I am depressed to death, etc." what actually happens is that the whole balance of functions has become disrupted. Analogically speaking, a "special interest" has managed to put such a pressure upon the legislative or executive body (to which belongs the task of keeping the State in a condition of dynamic yet basically stable operation according to its "Constitution"), that the power of the State has abdicated, at least temporarily, in favor of the special interest.

What can then be done? According to the dualistic and ethical picture of the human being which is traditional in our "Christian" society, the will of the individual should exert itself and "rule" the overpowering urge. But the question is, what is meant then by "will"? Is it really the will of the whole? In most cases it is the power which the ego has, as an autocratic king' or the dictator in a police State, to rule over, confine or destroy the offending release of energy. However, what does this intensified energy offend - the purpose of the self, or some traditional social-cultural or religious standards? Is the willful control actually the result of the wholeness of the bio-psychic organism - the total person - struggling against the over-emphasis of one of its necessary and legitimate organic functions, or is it not rather the result of an arbitrary decision of the ego which has been conditioned by external pressures (family-indoctrination, traditional morality, etc.) or is fearful of losing its authority over organic energies? Is will the mobilized power of the whole individual seeking to maintain the particular character of his wholeness - his essential identity - when an explosive release of energy occurs within its boundaries, or is the repressive will an instrument to preserve the rule of the conscious ego and the traditional beliefs which have molded this ego from the outside? This is a crucial question and we should well understand what actually is the "mobilized power of the whole" - what is the source of this power.

When a contractor assumes the task of building a house according to the detailed blueprints of the architect, his basic concern is that the finished building should be a perfect actualization in concrete materials of the blueprints. I have stated that the birth-chart of an individual constitutes what we may analogically call the blueprint for the building of a fully developed person. What does this actually mean?

We can follow the example of Free Masonry and call God "the Great Architect of the Universe." This is a most legitimate personalization, but for our present purpose we need only say that a person born at a particular time and place in the universe constitutes a focal point for the actualization of one particular aspect of the immensely vast harmony of the universal Whole. At this point in time and space an individual with a particular capacity is needed to fill, a particular function in the all-encompassing field of activity which we call the universe - and in a more restricted sense, in relation to the Earth-field. This individual is charged, as it were, to play a role in the evolution of mankind.

His birth-chart defines his role. It defines a set of potentialities. These potentialities are gradually actualized at the biological level by what we call "life" operating through complex formative processes and through biochemical drives and "instincts." The pattern defining all the operations of the human organism is apparently what is now named a "genetic code." It remains what it is throughout the life of this organism because it has the power to maintain its integrity, at least within certain limits. This means that it presents an inertial resistance to change, except to changes which are implied in this genetic code as necessary phases for the total development of the organism's innate potentialities.

The term, "inertia," means resistance to change. Inertia is a kind of will; and, in terms of this discussion, is the power to maintain the integrity of the original structure of the individual person. It has been said that when we speak of God's Will we should not think of the vacillating type of will related to a man's conscious ego, but to something like cosmic inertia. This cosmic inertia is the power that maintains the integrity of the original creative Word - that is, a particular type of order which is immanent in that particular universe.

Changes occur everywhere at all times, yet something does not change - an overall internal structure or tone which remains what it is throughout the cycle of this universe. When we seek to analyze this cosmic structural (and structuring) order, we speak in scientific terms of natural laws and of universal constants; but laws and constants only refer to modes of activity. They are but parts of the workings of the universal pattern (the Word, or logos) which determined the overall cosmic structure, and also the character and timing of the basic process of transformation, of which the universe (which we see it today) constitutes only one phase.

We have to differentiate clearly in astrology between birth-chart, progression and transit; otherwise, confusion is inevitable.

The birth-chart is simply the whole universe focused at one point in time and space. If we feel that some "scientific" explanation is necessary to explain why it defines the role of a person in the universe, and thus the pattern of his individual selfhood, it is because we have a fragmented and mechanistic view of the universe; that is, we fail to realize that the universe is and operates as an organized Whole of structured activities. It may not seem to operate exactly as a "living" organism - every cell of this organism enclosing within its nucleus the "genetic code" of the whole as well as whatever defines its particular function in this whole - but this depends only on what meaning we give to the term "living," and how restricted this meaning is.

Just as the structuring genetic code in a human body has inertia - i.e., it tends to maintain its structural integrity and the original schedule of transformation needed to pass from embryonic to fully mature existence - so a man's birth-chart has inertia and the chart's progressions indicate the way in which the viable newborn organism develops his psychological potentialities (his "intelligence," as I have defined this word - cf. The Practice of Astrology, page 123) during the days following birth. A normal ninemonth-long period of gestation is followed by some ninety days (three months) which refer to the development in seed of these psychological potentialities. This development can only occur after the newborn enters into relationship with his environment for a real person cannot be considered only as an individual operating in vacuum. He must be studied - as I have already stated - as an "individual-in-his-environment."

Once we realize that it is the relationship of the individual to his environment (a two-way relationship) which is the essential human fact, we can understand that a man is born to fulfill a function on this planet; but such a realization is difficult for most people because we live in an age of over-emphasized individualism, and this extreme individualism expresses itself in the belief that the "real man" is a mysteriously transcendent and essentially separate entity. In its most exaggerated aspect this attitude to man, the universe and God is expressed in the world picture of Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher. According to this picture the universe is a huge machine - man and God being transcendent to it. By the use of his transcending "free" will and of his God-given reason, man can win over the mechanical forces of the universe.

The nineteenth century mechanistic, individualistic and materialistic approach to existence is still very much in evidence in the ordinary mentality of our day. But the most progressive physicists and a few philosopher- scientists have thoroughly upset this entire approach. A well-known physicist, Schrodinger, and several of his colleagues, think of the universe as an expression of mind. In his excellent book, Accent on Form, the great English scientist, Lancelot L. Whyte, emphasizes the fact that there are two basic attitudes in the pursuit of knowledge, the atomistic and the holistic, and he believes that science has largely failed so far to deal with the principle of form which refers to the holistic approach.

Of course, there are immensely complex energies acting upon the Earth's biosphere and making their impact upon men. They operate within the mother's womb and throughout the person's whole life; and in astrology these forces are taken into consideration under the name "transits." But the fundamental reality of man, as a living bio-psychic organism, is not a bundle of forces, but a form of selfhood. This form is the result of the focusing of the whole universe at the time and place of the newborn's first breath - the beginning of his relatively independent existence within a particular environment, the need of which he is "meant" to fulfill.

Any living form is a particularized manifestation of the universal principle of order, of cosmic Harmony. At every moment of the universe's existence, this principle of order and form takes on a new meaning - an "overtone" of the fundamental meaning of this particular universe. There are no doubt myriads of universes in infinite time and infinite space, and each of these universes is a structured field of activity. Each begins with an implicit original "Word" (or formula of relationship) which becomes explicited and concretely actualized through a cyclic process of unfoldment. What is basic everywhere is the form (or "fieldstructure") of any particular whole, each of which plays a part in the total harmony of the universal Whole.

The Greek word, "cosmos," refers not only to a principle of order, but also to beauty (d. the word, cosmetics); and today the mathematician insists that his mathematical demonstration should be "elegant." Lancelot L. Whyte writes: "Physics seeks to penetrate the music of the atomic spheres, biology the harmony of the organism, and neurology the melody of thought, and though they do not yet know it, these three sciences may be seeking to discover the same universal principle of elegance."

To this revealing statement, I would add that Humanistic astrology seeks to understand and to picture the movie depicting an evolving personality. The scenario of this motion-picture has its condensed and symbolic expression in the astrological birth-chart. The actors in this movie should play their role so as to make clear and convincing the meaning of the story. They should not try to hug the spotlight or to unbalance the interplay between the roles by acting as if they were each the "star" of the whole show. So should the cameraman conform to the spirit of the story in creating a pictorial atmosphere for its sequence. And the director should see that everything falls into its proper place according to the proper proportions, instead of indulging in spectacular showmanship and perhaps so imposing his will upon the actors that they lose all spontaneity and human convincingness.

We live in a universe of existential wholes. Any existent is a whole and everywhere there is order, purpose and meaning. But because we find ourselves immersed in a realm of life in which conflict and pain are ubiquitous features of the biological-social relationship between living wholes we tend at first to have only a "partial" or fragmented consciousness of existence. We are involved in our partial status. Our consciousness is not free because it is dominated by the biological and social pressures of the struggle for existence under the principle of scarcity. As a result our brains build up images of conflict and chance happenings - the kind of picture that a cell in the stomach or the duodenum might draw when trying to interpret what it is subjected to.

Metabolism is a harsh process; but to the healthy man the eating, the digesting and the assimilating of living substances poses no problem or concern. A consciousness which can encompass the entirety of such a process - of any process in the universe - realizes the harmonic character of all the activities which this process implies and requires. Our task, therefore, is to develop a holistic consciousness (whole-consciousness). It is to see the universe as a whole, the Earth as an organized system of interdependent activities within which humanity-as-a-whole fulfills a definite function, and ourselves as a structured whole-person unfolding through a cyclic process of selfactualization.

What we have to actualize are the potentialities indicated in our birth-chart; how this process of actualization should proceed at the level of the development of our conscious ability to relate to our environment (our "intelligence") is indicated by the progressions. What birth-charts and progressions reveal is not what will occur in terms of events, but the sequential steps which it would be best for us to take in order to gradually actualize our innate potential and to fulfill the purpose which is defined by our birth-chart. Everything in the chart indicates what the universe of God expects us to do. Nothing is superfluous or evil.

However, the "transits" can be considered in a negative as well as a positive manner. As they represent forces at work everyday in the entire biosphere, these forces could tend to disturb or disrupt by their impacts the essential form of our fundamental structure of being - the essential form of our individual selfhood. Transits, in this sense, tend to upset the pattern which the birth-chart represents; but whether we give to such upsets the meaning of "good" or "bad" depends on our biases and the mentalitiy of our society. On the other hand, transits can - and should - be seen as indicating the new contents of the experiences which every new day brings to us. As we assimilate these new life-contents, the form of our individual selfhood becomes filled. If this form is strong, it can contain these new experiences - and our mind can assimilate their messages to us. If it is weak, it may become distorted by the impacts from these forces. They may invade us, and we may lose our individuality. In extreme cases this means psychosis.

This is, I believe, the type of approach to life on which a Humanistic astrology can be most significantly based. The world-picture it implies has its roots in ancient vitalistic philosophies; but its formulation, and the practical approach to the interpretation of all astrological factors, are definitely new in that they refer to conditions of existence and possibilities of development of consciousness which did not normally exist in archaic times.

This humanistic attitude is an antidote against the poison of extreme individualism which has posed to our present society problems that are practically insoluble, unless a new world-viewpoint is very soon developed and it spreads broadly through the collective mentality of mankind. This does not mean that even "rugged" , individualism and dualistic transcendental philosophies were wrong or accidental products of chance circumstances. They filled an essential historical need and they still do so partially for most people. But every trend becomes exaggerated and produces disharmonic results at one time or another. Then it has to be reintegrated in the whole process of evolution, and to become harmonized with its opposite. This is the Middle Way. It is the way of integration through form - the way of harmony, and beauty. Today a new humanity is emerging out of the pressures of "ethical" dualisms and is eager to follow this way.

At a time when astrology is becoming widely accepted and misused as much as used, and when conflicting tendencies are developing as to how it should be incorporated officially into today's social and educational Establishment, it is necessary to face straight forwardly the problems all this poses. There is no need to court favors from static minds or to bow down to a tradition pervaded with the type of Classical mentality which produced a Descartes. Great minds today are pioneering along a new way of understanding in physics and philosophy. They could show us a way to a complete reformulation of astrology based on a new realization of what man is and of his place in a harmonic universe.

Person Centered Astrology