The First House

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THE FIRST HOUSE

Dane Rudhyar

In terms of a person centered approach to astrology, the act of breathing defines the first moment of individualized existence. At the moment of the first breath a valve in the heart closes, blood rushes into the lungs, and the two essential living rhythms of the human organism, the rhythm of the blood and that of the breathing, are established in a particular way. A third rhythm, of which we know hardly anything, may also be initiated, which refers to pulsations of die cerebrospinal fluid, itself related to electromagnetic — "etheric" — currents.

The identification of "life" with the breath is as old as human thinking. The Sanskrit terms prana and atman refer, at two different levels, to the breath. So do the Greek word pneuma, which signifies both breath and spirit, and the Latin word anima, meaning soul. In a still broader sense, existence itself implies motion, dynamism, rhythmic change.

In the biblical book of Genesis all existence is said to begin with God's command "Let there be Light." But this Light is not the Sun's light, as can be seen from succeeding biblical statements. It is motion, vibration, and therefore rhythm. The unborn foetus experiences rhythms, but this experience takes place within a closed environment dominated by the rhythms of the mother. It is only as the human organism emerges into the open environment of the universe that he can begin to operate actively and positively as an "individual person." To be born as a potential individual person is to breathe. It is for this reason that the yogi who aspires to merge his individuality with the universal Whole practices pranayama — literally, death of the breath. He willfully disindividualizes and depersonalizes his total being, or at least his consciousness.

Breathing is therefore the first act of independent existence within the open environment of the universe. It is the first assertion of being. The first house of a birth chart begins with the Ascendant, the symbol of sunrise, of the beginning of activity on our planet, and in general of all beginnings. Every experience can be a new beginning. Every individual can be reborn at any moment. He can relate himself to his universe in a new way, a unique way — his own way. This way constitutes, or at least manifests existentially, his identity — which also means the manner in which he is oriented to the universe.

What I mean here by universe is simply existence as this individual person is able to see, feel, know, experience it. We can speak of this universe on three main levels. Man is born within the Earth's biosphere — first level. He is also born within the solar system — second level. He can relate himself consciously to and participate in the activity of the galaxy, of which the solar system is only a small part — third level. Beyond the galaxy one can picture either a finite Einsteinian universe or infinite Space, and there is probably some truth to both concepts. For any realistic and experiential purpose, however, one should stop with the galaxy — and indeed it is always valid to know where and when to stop in one's intellectual speculations, lest one loses one's consciousness in an ocean of pure nondifferentiation and existentially empty abstractions.

These three levels — the Earth's biosphere, the solar system and the galaxy — are very real, at least potentially. They are capable of being experienced by us and, therefore, they can be used as symbols of a three-level process of development of the individual self. This development takes place theoretically in three phases, when it takes place at all, in terms of human experience and of the growth of the type of consciousness which can be formulated and translated into action. This three-level process can also be referred, at least in an archetypal sense, to the three basic periods of a human life individually and consciously fulfilled: from birth to age 28; from 28 to 56; from 56 to 84· The 84-year cycle is that of Uranus' revolution around the Sun and, as Uranus is essentially the symbol of transformation and metamorphosis, this cycle refers to man operating at the level at which constant transformations are possible. On the other hand, the traditional 70-year cycle of existence — three score and ten — refers to a human life dominated by biological and socio-cultural traditions, and by the 20-year cycles of the Jupiter-Saturn relationship, and it should be obvious that the majority of human beings are still operating at that level of existence and consciousness.

The number 28 has been considered "the number of man." It relates 4 and 7, and thus represents the full concrete workings of the 7-year cycle, 4 being the symbol of concreteness. Three 84-year cycles contain twelve 7-year periods, and bring this 7-year cycle to potentially full cosmic manifestation. In a more occult sense this 84-year cycle refers to the building of the immortal Christ Body, or in Buddhistic terminology the Diamond Body, the product of the "Marriage of Heaven and Earth."*

*Cf. my book The Astrology of Personality and An Astrological Triptych (The Illumined Road) for references to such a process — and works such as The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm from the Chinese.

I shall return in a later chapter to these cycles, for what concerns us here is the fact that the experiences to which each of the twelve houses refer can be met, at least potentially, and given meaning at three fundamental levels. An individual can be born and reborn at each of these levels. Likewise, he can experience and deal with what he owns in terms of several sets of values — second house — and he can correlate and think out his experiences, as well as develop his particular approach to his environment — third house — at three different levels as well. Then, as he seeks to find a base upon which to build a solid and secure sense of personal activity, he can find such a base either in the superficial relationships and traditional ways of his family, or in the deeper levels of his collective, national culture — symbolized by the taproots of great trees. He can also reach the symbolic core of the Earth, which means the very center of his "global" being — fourth house.

Returning now to the first house: A human being is born physically out of his mother's womb. He can — yet he need not — experience psychologically a "second birth" as an individualized person gradually becoming more conscious of his place and function in his community. This is his birth in individuality, while the first birth was a birth in "organicity." Some individuals reach the level of a third birth — a birth in Light or in spiritual reality.

If one considers this three-level birth process as a time sequence of developments, one can then refer these to the beginnings of the three 28-year cycles of conscious individualized existence — theoretically to actual birth, to the period between ages 27½ and 29, and to that between 56 and 59. But one can also think of these three levels of birth as without time referents for, potentially at least, the three levels are there all the time; man can function at each level and all levels if his consciousness somehow can attune itself to the vibratory rates of these levels and become aware of their specific horizons. Every man is living at the same time in the biosphere, in the solar field, and in the galactic universe, but few men are really conscious of all that this implies.

The first house of a person's birth chart indicates essentially the type of experience through which he will best discover who he is as a unique individual. He can make such a discovery at three basic levels of awareness, which may be called instinctual, mental-cultural, and spiritual-cosmic. These levels can be reached in an active, dynamic state of consciousness or reflectively and passively. Indeed, every astrological indication can always be interpreted positively or negatively, which here means reflectively. The first house and its origin or cusp, the Ascendant, indicates how the reaching can be done more effectively and significantly, in order best to release an individual's set of potentialities characterizing a particular person. Later on we shall see how one can interpret the presence of every zodiacal sign and every planet in the first house.

I spoke in the preceding paragraph of levels of awareness. Every experience can be seen as a test in self-awareness as well as a test in one's readiness and willingness to be born again. Most human beings, however — implicitly if not explicitly — refuse to be born again. A person may close his mental-spiritual eyes to the potential meaning of an experience — that is, to what it may bring that would impel him to perform an act of self-delivery. Hindu philosophy speaks constantly of liberation or deliverance from the maya of desires rooted in the basic "ignorance" of the human condition. But what is essential is not liberation so much as the bringing-to-birth of a new form of consciousness, a new mode of existence at a new level.

Every deeply and totally lived experience can arouse in the individual a will to rebirth and transformation or transcendence, yet certain types of experiences are more adequate, significant, and effectual means than others in bringing this about. We must look to the first house and especially the Ascendant to find what these may be. Natural processes of growth cannot or rather should not be forced, but awareness does not imply willful action. One can "watch and wait" — and, some will say, pray — without demanding from life that the magical experience come, without impatiently yearning for it.

The unexpected is usually the most revelatory, but one can polarize one's consciousness to the unexpected. One can create and maintain — which is harder! — a quality of ready expectancy — again one may speak of it, in a broad sense, as "prayer" — which avoids the pitfall of demanding a particular event, outer or inner, from life. What is first and foremost to be realized, however, is that one cannot breathe a truly deep and vitalizing breath without first emptying one's lungs and, at other levels of existence, one's psychic being and one's consciousness.

To be empty, to become filled, to respond to the influx of whatever is being experienced — these are three essential phases of an almost dialectical process. But in terms of human existence we should realize that what comes first is being full — full of unauthentic, unindividualized contents, full of the karma of homo sapiens, of a particular race, culture, and family and, one could add, of the unconscious vestigial remains of previous incarnations. The newborn is filled with mother stuff; the child who comes of age is filled with socio-cultural stuff. If he is to experience the second birth, he has to emerge from this collective social-cultural matrix. He has to discover the individual tone of his being, his own mantram, his celestial Name. And now that there usually is no Initiator to give him his secret Name he has to discover it in some deep surge of consciousness. Yet actually this celestial Name is his birth chart.

The power of that Name, while it individualizes, also isolates. The greater the intensity, the sharpness, the precision of the characteristics of that Name — revealer of individual destiny — the stronger the inevitable sense of isolation which follows the revelation. Jesus asked of his disciples, "Be ye separatel" The Patanjali yoga aphorisms stress what has been translated as "isolation." In olden days the Hindu chelas were forbidden to touch any other human being; they slept on mattresses filled with their own breath so they would be insulated even from the soil's magnetism.

Today we are operating at a different level. In old India what had to be overcome was the deep unconscious attachment to tribe and soil, while in this century, particularly in the United States, it is a poignant feeling of not belonging anywhere, of non-rootedness and psychic alienation. The focus of the new way of life is therefore total relatedness, and the ideal is life in a commune in totally open forms of relationship. In this situation the symbol of the Descendant — seventh house cusp — may be more validly stressed than that of the Ascendant. Yet the real "commune" of the days to come should be one in which individuals consciously and deliberately come together to reach beyond their socio-cultural egos and to experience the harmony of holistic interdependence, each being ready and willing to perform his destiny within the whole.

The word isolation is related etymologically not only to solus, "alone," but to sol, "Sun." Every Sun is isolated in space, the center of a group of planets upon which it radiates its vitalizing energy; yet a Sun is also a star, and as a star is one companion among many in a Brotherhood of stars in the galaxy. This is indeed a most revealing symbol. As suns, individual persons are, or appear to be and feel, isolated. This is the price one has to pay for individualization — an often heavy price required for an inherently tragic process. But to be isolated need not mean to feel lonely, and even less, alienated.

No Sun radiates life to its planets in empty space; no individual is born on an alien Earth. Every Sun is essentially a star in the galaxy, and every individual is born to fulfill a function, to answer a need of mankind and of the Earth, the one home of mankind. But in times such as ours, in order for a man significantly to live his dharma he needs to become, at least for awhile, separate from that section of mankind that mothered him. An old occult saying is: "When the son leaves the mother, he becomes a father." The seed must leave the plant that gave it form and substance before it can become the source of a new plant, perhaps on a distant soil upon which it was blown by winds of destiny.

The man who has thus experienced a second birth as an individual gradually more aware of his destiny must be, in some sense, different from other men still huddled within the matrix of their society. Yet difference can easily be a negative word, for many an individual tends to emphasize and to glorify his difference from the collectivity. The injunction "Be ye separate!" is valid only as a necessary means to an end; but once achieved, this end, as is so often the case, dismisses the means as valueless. The consciousness can no longer validly focus its attention upon these means.

A feeling of difference breeds a sense of separativeness, of distance, of incompatibility and perhaps fanaticism for what one has discovered. The positive counterpart of "difference" is distinctness. To be distinct is to stand out in the midst of a group — not because one wants to or one is proud of the fact, but simply because while the other members of the group may operate confusedly and in an unauthentic, unformed, uncharacteristic manner, the distinct individual lives an authentic and formed life which reveals the unique character of his being and his place of destiny. His life is a series of "Signatures" with which he marks all he touches with his own genius, in whatever area of activity he may perform his distinctive deeds.

Such a man is an origin, while the man whose great desire is to be "original" is mainly concerned with emphasizing, perhaps beyond the limits of taste and validity, the difference of which he is so ego-proud. The craving for originality embalms and mummifies differences, but underneath all differences stands the one ground of man's common humanity.*

*Cf. D. Rudhyar, The Planetarization of Consciousness (Part Two) for the metaphysical and cosmological basis of these statements.

The secret of rebirth — rebirth at the core of every experience — is to be empty of self, yet to maintain silently and in faith a formed receptacle into which the downpour of spirit may flow, then flow through. A source is a place through which water, hidden in the vast expanse of the soil, flows. Every experience can be the source of new and transforming — thus, creative — life developments. Every experience finds itself revealed at the Ascendant of the moment at which it happens.

To speak of the Ascendant and the first house as representing the "personality" conceived as an evanescent and mostly illusory fact of existence, as many theosophically inclined astrologers have done, and to glorify the Sun in the birth chart as symbol of the "spiritual Self," or Individuality, is to miss the central fact of the spiritual life as it can be lived today by individualized persons. The Ascendant is indeed the most elusive and hard-to-know factor in a birth chart, but just because it is the most fleeting and most individual, it is the point of manifestation of the universal spirit — or God. God acts only through particulars. Generalities and mere life power belong to the intermediary realms, to the level of cosmic building and formative agencies. The Divine incarnates only in the individual — He or It overshadows the group. The supreme responsibility always lies with the individual. At the exact moment, in the most definite manner Destiny speaks and acts through the individual.

The first house of a birth chart refers to the area of experience within which Destiny may speak at definite moments to impel the performance of specific acts. What is needed in the individual person who could be such a focusing agent for the Divine is total readiness, total openness to any and all circumstances and demands of existence. It is perfect availability, but availability oriented to that aspect of the world's life which, for this particular individual, has the character of authenticity.

One can often discover what zodiacal sign was rising at birth by studying a person's features, particularly the structure of his face and his facial expression. The head symbolizes the essential character of the individuality of the person as a conscious being. Everything "comes to a head" in the face, at least in normal circumstances, for the face exteriorizes the form of the individuality. It has been said that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but the head is the home that the individuality has built. It reflects the creative Word in the beginning.

The zodiacal sign on the Ascendant normally tells us much concerning the dharma of the individual — that is, the central potentiality which the person should seek consciously to actualize as a vessel or lens through which the Divine may act. If there are planets in the first house they indicate the kind or kinds of functions which will be most valuable in the process of discovery of one's authentic being.

To be, to breathe, to begin and always and forever to begin again, to meet and reveal the presence of God and the power of creative selfhood in every experience, to speak with authority in terms of one's dharma: these are words. Meditating upon these words may lead the perceptive individual to the very source of his or her own being.

The Astrological Houses