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THE USE OF ASTROLOGY IN THE PROCESSES OF INDIVIDUATION AND CIVILIZATION
We hope that, throughout the whole of our discussion and reformulation of the philosophy, the symbolism and the technique of astrology, one thing has been made to stand out in clear relief: The fact that the validity and power of astrology depend primarily on the manner in which it is made to serve the universal goal of "more wholeness" the goal of individuation for the particular man, and the goal of Living Civilization for humanity as a whole. As a system of coherent symbolism, astrology is a most fascinating intellectual study; as a system of divination, it is a remarkable tool for scrutinizing the fringe of future events; as an historical phenomenon it is unique in allowing us to fathom the mentality of more or less distant cultures in space as well as in time. And yet, unless astrology is put to use as a revealer of vital significances and of patterns of organic (or generally, holistic) relationships, as a means of probing the secret formulas of all beginnings with the view to leading us to a better consummation in other words, as a technique of personality-integration it remains a merely intellectual speculation (as would be an algebra which could not be applied to any group of empirical data) or else a dangerous game of fortune-telling.
In many ways and in many places we have expressed this view. On the basis of it we have stressed the connection between astrology and psychology and, had we had the space for it, we might have discussed the relations between astrology and all the arts of physical healing; or else we could have studied the place which astrology might occupy in other arts, which all together constitute the foundation of "culture" from agriculture to the fine arts. We say here purposely "arts" and not "sciences." For applied astrology, being an art of interpretation based upon: 1) scientific data; 2) a logic of symbolism it deals essentially with the artistic approach to life, rather than with the scientific. There is no real "science" of living. Medicine, for instance, is not a science, properly speaking, but an art based on the interpretation of data scientifically determined. Analytical psychology is not a science, but an art of interpretation of empirical facts scientifically collected and analyzed. The term "science" should be reserved for so-called "exact sciences," such as physics, mechanics and astronomy, on one hand, and on the other, for "abstract sciences," such as logic and mathematics. Every applied science becomes an art whenever the element of individual interpretation enters in. The more predominant it is, the more truly it is an art an interpretative art.
Be this as it may, the fact is that astrology, as we have studied it in the second part of this book, is essentially related to psychology, and its main purpose is to contribute to the successful completion of the Great Work of man that by which man reaches fulfillment and operative wholeness, and as a result becomes an organic function or cell within a greater Whole the "Greater Individual" or the "Planetary Individual," or the Seed-Manu, or the Logos, or God as one may wish to name this next greater Whole of which the spiritually perfected human personality becomes a part. In this concluding section we shall define, more completely than before, the relation between astrology and psychology, especially in terms of the complementary manner in which both may serve toward the above-defined goal. Then we shall outline more specifically astrology's contribution to the achievement of that goal: 1) for the human personality treading the path to individuation; 2) in reference to the new civilization in the making, and to the process of group-formation which is to play so important a part in it.
The Astrological and Psychological Viewpoints Correlated
We refer the reader, first of all, to the chapter: "Individual, Collective, Creative," etc., in which the basis for a correlation between astrology and analytical psychology is established; also to the preceding chapter in which the basic elements of Jung's psychology are briefly stated. In the former we produced a formula which defines the various phases of any and all life-cycles, and we isolated the three basic terms of the Cycle: beginning, middle and end, corresponding to the One-that-is-in-the-beginning the process of becoming the seed-synthesis (Cf. Chapter Three, Individual, Collective, Creative and the Cyclic Process "Summing up"). Without attempting to repeat our statements, we shall now say that the main difference between the astrological and the psychological approaches is that while the latter sees nothing but the "process of becoming whole" as it unfolds in Bergsonian duration through myriads of transformations, the former claims that the ultimate wholeness reached at the end of the process is already there at the very beginning of the process, but only as an abstract ideal and a mere potentiality.
If we refer to the trinity of elements which we then defined (Cf. Individual, Collective, Creative and the Cyclic Process) quality, structure and substance we shall realize that quality or monad at the beginning relates to, or is projected into, substantial elements which slowly organize themselves as organic bodies through an evolutionary process. This process lasts throughout the cycle and ends, if successful, in the perfecting of a body (at the physiological level) and a Soul (at the psycho-mental level) which are the very exteriorization and manifestation of the initial monad, now operating as the Self. Thus the beginning and the end are identical as far as the quality is concerned; but in the end this quality is fully manifest in a substantial body, while in the beginning it is only an abstract potentiality.
From the point of view of spirit (unity), the purpose of the process is to give to the monad a new creative experience and to fulfill relationships unfulfilled in the past cycle or cycles. From the point of view of substance (multiplicity), the purpose of the process is to organize the many elements that constituted the residua of past cycles into a perfect body built in the likeness of God-the-monad. From the point of view of structure, or form, or mind, the process is an esthetical experience of beauty and rhythm.
Analytical psychology takes the point of view of substance, as all empirical sciences do. It deals with the ever-changing process of relationship between individual and collective. All psychological conflicts, repressions, sublimations and assimilations are results of the working out of this process; all evolution likewise. But the initial quality, which antedates the process, does not fundamentally change. The individual structure exteriorizing this quality does not change during the span of the cycle. The wholeness of the end is latent in the monad of the beginning. It is not only latent. It actually is at work within the very heart of the process as the central power of individuation. The energy of the One operates at the core of every one of the Many issued from this One even though the Many know it not. Thus, in a definite sense, the wholeness of the future whole is acting upon the progressive building of this whole. Past and Future as one operate within the present. The finished end of the process is latent in the beginning; but only provided the process is successful. And no one can tell whether or not it will be successful in a particular cycle.
The last statements have an essential bearing on the nature and value of astrology. More than that, they are the key to a reconciliation of the old enemies: free will and determinism. They are implied in the philosophy of Time which we sketched out in the first part of this work.
We wrote that every monad is the creative projection of a moment, the initial moment of this monad's cycle. The potency of the moment exteriorizes itself in the monads which at that very moment begin their individual cycles of becoming. It is as if Time held a bag of seeds, from which at every moment seeds would drop which would be formed in the likeness of the nature of that moment. Each seed is a dynamic and structural potentiality of being. Each drops, as an individual unit (monad), into the soil of the collective; just as moments drop into the past. All these seeds are acted upon by a multitude of influences, which either help or hinder the process of their development from potentiality to actuality, from seed to fulfilled and blossoming plant.
Myriads of seeds never develop. Myriads of seeds begin to develop whose growth is stunted, thwarted or ended by the unsuccessful working out of the relation between their individual selfhood and the collective. That is to say, the personalities are stunted, thwarted or destroyed. In the personality there is a certain amount of free will, insofar as the monad (which is pure, free and spontaneous creative activity) is active that is, insofar as the individual factor dominates the collective.
If the seed develops into a complete plant, then there is no way for the plant to be anything else in actuality save what the seed was in potentiality even though the plant may be either more or less sturdy and perfect in its proportions. There is no outside agency or God to determine beforehand: 1) whether there will actually be a full-grown plant; 2) how perfect this full-grown plant will be, if it is at all. But the seed determines the organic structure and characteristics of the finished plant.
The acorn is not free to become an apple tree; and the seed of the oak is absolutely certain to be an acorn. But no one can tell whether a particular acorn will become an oak. It may not even matter. What seems to matter is that a certain number of acorns will keep the oak species manifest, perhaps in a definite numerical strength. Likewise prophetic books, for instance, are wont to say that one-third of the men will be saved, two-thirds lost. It does not seem to matter who in particular will be saved or lost at least not to the whole of the species. It matters very much, of course, to the individual who is free to choose free to choose whether he will become what he is potentially, or will not. No one is ever free to become successfully what one is not. To become what one is not always means to fail to be at all. Either fulfillment of potentialities or failure is inherent in the monad (therefore in the birth-moment). These potentialities inherent in the monad and in the birth-moment can be found symbolized in the birth-chart.
Most people have an "individualistic" but not an "individuated" conception of "freedom."(2) Freedom is the inherent capacity of fulfilling the potential characteristics of one's individual selfhood. It is not the power to do what it may please one to do. For "pleasing" here refers merely to the ego at its stage of rebellion against any life-contents. Such rebellion means often the desire to do the most silly, meaningless things. This is not freedom, but the result of that phase of "individualization" which is purely negative and separative. "I shall not have anything to do with collective values," says the budding individual. But the mature individual says, on the other hand: "I shall bring the collective to the focalization of my own selfhood, and give it my own significance."
The birth-chart of an individual is the symbol of his freedom, because it is the symbol of what he is. The more free an individual, the more perfectly and sharply (sharp, as to outlines) he is what he is, the more clear-cut the form of his individual selfhood, and thus of his behavior. The collective always tends to blur the outlines of any individual selfhood. Therefore it works against the freedom of the individual unless the individual can "assimilate" the collective contents of his surroundings and his ancestry that is, unless he can make them "similar to" what he, essentially and archetypally, is: a tremendous task in our Dark Ages, or as the Hindu has it, Kali Yuga; a task the nature and magnitude of which are hardly ever recognized, yet which conditions the entire spiritual development of the personality and the success of the individual in being at the same time true to his structural pattern of selfhood and rich with living contents all of which had to be assimilated.
These considerations determine the scope of astrology. The birth-chart reveals the potential structure of the monad; that is the purely individual element in the native; hence the element of freedom and significance, which is the spiritual endowment of every human being. But the birth-chart will not tell whether this potentiality will ever become an actuality, whether or not the process of individuation will be successful. Nevertheless, as we have already written in the chapters on "Progressions," the birth-chart will tell what will be the form and quality of the Soul, if it comes to be; also what will be the general cycles of unfoldment of the personality and its crises of growth. But it can never tell, from purely astrological factors, and barring the use of prophetic faculties, whether the crises will be successfully met, and if they are met, what will be the psychic residua accumulating in the personal unconscious as a result of the stress and strain.
What astrology cannot tell on purely astrological grounds analytical psychology can often infer from the data it investigates. The analyst deals directly with the personality, as it becomes and has become. And if the personality has reached a certain age, and if its individual selfhood has been little active, the analyst can quite accurately deduce what the rest of the life will be. The astrologer could tell the analyst when the next crises will come; but cannot tell him, from the birth-chart and progressions only, how the personality will meet these crises. The analyst cannot say when the crises will come, but can surmise how the personality will meet certain inevitable crises. In other words, the astrologer and the analyst look at two different aspects of the total human being. Their points of view complete each other. And they complete each other in the same way in which empirical science and religion (or occultism) complete each other.
Such a statement does not invalidate the conclusions of earlier chapters as to the analogy existing between the relation of mathematics to physics, and the relation of astrology to analytical psychology. Both mathematics (or logic) and astrology deal with "pure form," which exists only "in the beginning" as the abstract structure exteriorizing the quality-monad which is the nucleus of the future life-process. On the other hand, physics and analytical psychology deal with the realm of phenomena and becoming, with the constantly changing formations of the life-process. Abstract "form" does not become but evolutionary "formations" and bodies do constantly change and thus, from the point of view of spirit (Hindu philosophy), they are the result of the deterioration of primordial being and truth thus they are false and illusory.
But from the point of view of substance, "abstract form" is merely an intellectual idea, a product of the will to stability and preservation which is inherent in man and which leads so often to a shrinking from reality. Reality, for substance, is the changing world-process. But reality, for spirit, is the changeless (changeless insofar as the whole cycle is concerned) monadic structure.
This duality of point of view is an expression of the eternal ineradicable dualism of all living. In Psychological Types, C. G. Jung studies critically many aspects of this basic dualism as for instance realism and nominalism in medieval philosophy. He points out that they are two basically irreconcilable attitudes which are the outcome of two fundamental psychological types: introvert and extravert.
In other words, he attempts to effect a kind of reconciliation between opposites of thought by referring them to differences in psychological types. Then he tries to show how the basic impulses motivating each type can be integrated within the personality through the operation of a "transcendent function," through "creative phantasy." This fits in well with our trinity of individual, collective, creative. The introvert is a personality in whom the balance of forces shows an emphasis upon the process of individuation. The extravert is a personality in whom collectivation is the dominant process. But in the true "creative act" individual and collective join hands. The collective ideas of the past become focalized and individuated within the psycho-mental womb of the creator, and at the same time are released creatively as new collective elements, as the "stuff of civilization," thus becoming eventually the very substance of the ultimate synthesis of Man-the-whole. In the introvert, life operates inward; in the extravert, outward. But in the creator, it operates "in and through." The creator, at his highest, is what Hindu wisdom names an "avatar." The avatar is not only the "hypostasis" of a "greater Individual." It is the answer to a collective need; it is the answer, through an individual, to a collective need which the individual focalized within himself a need, by fulfilling which, he overcame.
Speaking, now, strictly in terms of practical method, we claim that astrology could be most helpful to the psychoanalyst, to the psychiatrist, and as well, of course, to the educator, who, if successful, must be, first of all intuitively if not intellectually a psychologist. It would give them something objective to depend upon, and with which to check upon subjective data, such as dreams and the details of a person's life-story. It would coordinate all these subjective data in terms of structural tendencies of the psyche; tendencies, the cycle of manifestation of which would become objectively apparent, with their waxing and waning movements and their critical moments. It is true that foreknowledge of psychological or physiological crises may be very dangerous and disintegrating to the person in whom they are to occur dangerous in proportion as he is not an individual, and therefore is neither free nor creative of meanings; but it would be of vast significance to the analyst or "life-counsellor" who, in this century, is taking the place of priest-confessor or guru. Even if such "guides" are to be endowed a priori with a keen intuition if they be true "guides"! yet the birth-chart and progressions of those they attempt to lead toward fulfillment would in most cases be invaluable adjuncts to and checks on their intuitive perceptions.
This may be even more obvious in the case of the "child-psychologist;" for here there are practically no subjective data to go by, except those given by the parents. The charts of the parents, when correlated with that of the child, would reveal matters that only a thorough "analysis" of the parents would uncover. We shall again discuss this matter of correlations between two or more individual charts; but we can see at once how conjugal problems could be solved much more easily if the psychologist could compare the charts of husband and wife. In many cases, the knowledge obtained by the psychologist through astrological means and generally speaking by any type of "healer" would not be discussed as such with the patient; but it would add a new dimension, as it were, to the understanding which the analyst gains of his patient. In other cases, with patients convinced of the validity of astrology, reference to definite astrological factors would probably "bring a point home" in a more impressive way than do the usual suggestions.
In such cases, however, it should be clear that whenever a person feels that Planets are entities that influence him and cause things to happen, good or bad, such a person is psychologically hurt by such a belief. The same injury, psychologically speaking, would be caused were the person to believe that a "black magician" is pursuing him or her, or that a "white brother" is providing him with soul-salvation or other boons of one type or another. All such beliefs in outside powers influencing, or (as is usually the case) compelling, the personality in this or that manner constitute deteriorations of individual selfhood; they lead to psychological slavery through fear or through transference of the power of initiative, or colloquially speaking, through "passing the buck" to some entity outside of the self.
If Mars as a tangible planet is influencing or compelling you to be angry, what is there you can do about it? Can you fight a planet? Can you hide from it? Perhaps you will do as did a Brahmin who thought of escaping a death-dealing planetary aspect by remaining immersed under water during the exact moment of the aspect's maturation, because water is supposed to insulate from certain planetary magnetic influences and was drowned in the process. Perhaps you will try to "buy" protection from some spiritual agency, church or whatnot. And all the time the fear will be there, working in you subconsciously, if not consciously causing the very things that are feared. The more a baneful astrological factor is made into a definite entity, the greater will be the fear of it. For there may seem to be no recourse against such an entity even though one might repeat a hundred times: "The wise man rules his stars'" Can you "rule" a tornado or an earthquake? Can you forbid an eclipse to occur on your birthday? Can you "rule" cosmic emanations, waves and the like, that sweep from the Sun and "hit" this or that sensitive center in your charts if those are actual, concrete, measurable forces?
There is indeed no logic in the concept unless it be taken to mean what Paracelsus said it meant in an excerpt quoted in our first chapter: "The stars force nothing into us that we are not willing to take . . . They are free for themselves and we are free for ourselves . . ." In that sense, what is established by astrology is merely a holistic correspondence and a synchronistic relation of process between macrocosm and microcosm, between the universal Person that some call "God" and the particular personality that is man. The life-process, in other words, runs through the universal at the same time as it does through the myriads of particulars. Both are geared, as it were, to the creative moment, of which the spirit in man is the very expression. The moment operates through man's monad and through man's essential archetypal structure (which is his karma). That moment contains in potency the whole of the celestial pattern of planetary and spatial relationships. When we read the "chart of the Heavens" we merely read the symbolic structure of the moment and therefore of our own spirit, if the moment considered happens to be our first moment of independent existence, i.e., the beginning of the cycle of our individual selfhood as an organism integrating Earth-materials.
In other words, what "influences" us is only the moment, and above all our first moment of selfhood. We can read the characteristics of this moment by interpreting the pattern constituted by the celestial bodies surrounding the place of our birth; this pattern represents the visible structural projection of the universal Whole, insofar as this Whole of which we are a part concerns us. But no material celestial body affects us as an individual. What acts upon our personality body and psyche is the creative power of the moment. And this creative power of the moment of birth is our very monad.
Of course there are myriads of moments that follow for us this first moment of selfhood. Such moments are parts of our "life-process" of development, and must be differentiated from the birth-moment which is our individual monad; and also from the death-moment which is a recapitulation and a synthesis. They add contents to our personality; but they do not basically alter the archetypal structure of our individual selfhood.
These moments of the life-process are symbolized in astrology by the transits. And transits do not affect the structure of our individual selfhood; they symbolize the power which every successive moment of the life-process after our birth has to modify the contents of our personality. Such a "power of modification" is not fate! No more than is the fact that each season and geographical location offers to you its own foodstuffs for eating and assimilation. Out of a variety of foodstuffs you can extract by digestion the same basic chemicals which your body needs in order to preserve its organic structure intact. True, some foods may fatten you, others cause you physiological ills and in that sense you, as a psycho-physiological organism, are affected by the foodstuffs which season and geographical location provide. But if your organism is originally healthy, it will have the power to maintain itself and to function creatively on almost any kind of food and in almost any kind of climate; for the healthy organism can extract what it needs from the food provided, and if necessary can transform what it gets to suit its organic purpose. For instance, Arctic explorers have lived exclusively on animal food for over a year, their organism transforming chemically the animal protein into chemicals which normally are derived from starchy foods.
The same applies to any astrological transit because it applies to what any moment of our life, as it were, projects into our psycho-physiological personality. Each moment provides us with "psychic foodstuffs" (or more generally, experiences), the nature of which we can ascertain from a study of the pattern of celestial bodies at that moment. Some of them may "agree" with us better than others. Some usually tend to cause indigestion; others, we seem unable to assimilate or perhaps even to ingest. And so life is made more or less satisfying to our personal tastes.
Yet this does not mean fate; for in proportion as we are originally whole (healthy), so shall we be able to extract from the food of every experience the psychological elements which we need in order to complete the process of life-fulfillment and individuation. And therefore, to that extent, we are unaffected by and free from the power of moments and of their symbols, the stars. To the extent to which we are whole as "lesser individuals" to that extent shall we be unaffected by and free from the conditioning imposed upon us by our position in the organism of the "Greater Individual" of whom we are a part.
But what if we are not whole and originally healthy? This then refers to our monad and its karma; and karma is nothing more mysterious than the archetypal structure exteriorizing the particular quality of this monad, which quality in turn is an expression of the first moment of individual selfhood the One-that-is-in-the-beginning. This, then, is our "fatality": that we are what we are. Obviously, the term fatality in this sense is rather meaningless. Spiritually speaking, I cannot realize myself as what I am not. I can, of course, make intellectual pictures of my personality being different from what this personality actually is. But I am making these pictures; and I am not going out of myself by making them. I am merely playing with colored phantasms, building castles in the air; "compensating" for certain psychological conditions which are integral parts of what I am. Therefore the "compensation," as well as all my dreams, are integral parts of what I am. My sense of being oppressed by fate is part of what I am. It is merely the reaction of some parts of my total being to other parts with which they are in discordant or dissonant relation.
In another sense, this is the same situation which Bergson discusses at the end of his Creative Evolution, when he proves that we cannot really conceive "chaos." Chaos is to us always the absence of a particular order, and a type of order which compensates for all the types of order which we normally expect. Likewise all the things "we should like to be" are merely reactions of certain parts of our total being to other parts thereof; and these reactions themselves are thus parts of our total being.
In other words, selfhood and destiny are two aspects of the same whole, which, to use modern terms, is a time-space continuum within the greater time-space continuum which is the universe. These two continua interact at every point; just as whole and parts always interact at every point of the organism. If a part is originally weak. it will tend to break down easily under the pressure of the demands made upon it by the whole. On the other hand, because of that, the whole will tend to protect more carefully that part which is the weak link in the chain of its organic relationships, and is thus a dangerous point an "Achilles' heel." Therefore, as already said, an "easy" birth-chart means little release of power from the greater Whole in which we are parts; a "difficult" birth-chart, a great release of such spiritual power. The principle of compensatory action which is basic in the consideration of any organic whole is here exemplified.
The sense of fate is thus merely the reaction of a part of the whole being to a situation which involves a priori this very sense of fate. It is merely a sense of internal pressure: just as the sense of freedom is a sense of external release. It is an organic sense usually both at the psychological and at the physiological level but at times with an emphasis upon one or other of them. The fact remains that I am what I am. But, let us not forget, this I am-ness refers to the form of self, not to the contents of personality. This form may be so universal and adaptable that it may give room to a vast multiplicity of contents so that the personality may seem truly all-encompassing and all-understanding in its universality. But a form it must be; and that form is the structural conditioning of the wholeness that is the fully developed I-amness. That form is the exteriorization of the quality which emanated from the moment which was the initial point of the cycle of that I-am.
Why, then, can a Christ-like person and an unprepossessing human being be born at the same moment or about the same moment? Because in the first case, the structure of selfhood focalizes and releases universal energies from the "Greater Individual;" whereas in the second case, such a structure is a heavy armature, which does not allow any adaptation to universal conditioning, and practically no assimilation of life-contents. There may be a relative identity of structure (many scoundrels look just like Christs, as far as the structure of the head goes); but in the first case that structure is filled in with glorious light; in the second case it is empty and burdened with its own weight. Can astrology ever determine from a birth-chart whether the personality it symbolizes is glowing with universal contents or is empty and dark? Astrology cannot. Any more than astrology alone and unaided can say whether a given chart refers to the birth of a cow or of a human being.
Astrology does not deal primarily with life-contents, but only with the structure of individual selfhood. It is, strictly speaking, as formal a system of knowledge as algebra. Its formulas apply to any contents therefore they do not embody fate. For this reason, astrology needs psychological analysis, which deals with empirically determined personal contents. Astrology is the male element: that which gives the formula. Psychology is the female element: that which gives the substantial contents. Thus they complement each other in the determination of, and for the purpose of serving the integration of, the whole man: the Living Person.
Astrology and the Process of Individuation
The formulation of a technique by means of which astrology could serve as an essential factor in the process of individuation is outside the scope of this book. It is even doubtful whether mankind at large is prepared to make a constructive use of such a potential technique of integration. As in the case of all so-called "esoteric" techniques of spiritual development or personality integration which are featured in Theosophical, or Rosicrucian or, in general, "occult" groups, it seems necessary for those who would use such a technique to go about it in a steady and careful way, which requires some sort of personal guidance, or at least someone to answer questions and to check up results physiological as well as psychological. This does not mean that techniques of integration are mysterious or veiled in glamour. They are, on the contrary, very matter-of-fact procedures; but relatively speaking, they are forced psychological processes depending, for the most part, on the use of creative imagination and they may as easily "go wrong" as any type of psychoanalysis. Unless those who attempt them are either already integrated in their very depths, or are ready to go persistently and steadily "all the way," it would be much better that they did not begin at all.
This is quite evident even where the mere use of astrological symbolism and the casual reading of birth-charts and progressions are concerned. A little astrological knowledge is one of the worst things that can come to one who is not altogether solidly established in his own selfhood. The usual beginner in astrology often gets the queerest notions. He has not, as yet, digested the fundamentals of astrology how few people really have! and he is handling promiscuously, at home and in the company of his friends, psychological acids and explosives. That more harm is not done is due only to the fact that even those who read about or vaguely study astrology do not usually believe in it in any vital sense. They are therefore protected by their relative unbelief.
Any deliberate use of astrological symbols, and of one's birthchart and progressions, for deep and vital purposes, would involve even more psychological danger. It should never be attempted unless one is thoroughly grounded in and convinced of the validity of the attitude which we have developed much too briefly in this book: the symbolical attitude. For this reason we cannot present in these pages a very coherent, and still less a complete picture of the way in which astrology could be used deliberately as a technique of individuation. However, various suggestions and leading points can be offered; and the following excerpts from some pamphlets of ours on Harmonic Astrology and Harmonic Psychology may prove valuable:
"We live in a world of symbols. Every object that surrounds us, every form of Intelligence, every soul, is a symbol. The Creative Principle perpetually produces living forms, forms which are truly works of art, which are symbolic representations of one or the other of the infinitely varied aspects of universal, all-encompassing Being.
"Contemporary psychology deals essentially with the interpretation of symbols. It attempts to free the psyche of man from the depressing and perverted images of the race subconscious, that is, from wrong interpretations of the essential symbols of human life be it individual or collective created by the past.
"In order to release in every individual the capacity for the unhindered interpretation of the symbols of his own living, in order therefore to give back to man the freedom to interpret life spontaneously in terms of his own creative center of living, the new psychology reaches to dreams and other symbolical representations of the unconscious; for in those may be found the striking images, the self-revealing pictures which will establish a contact between the confused, inhibited personality and its creative source. As this contact occurs, as this revelation of the submerged creative activities of the inner life-center stirs the soul into realizing its own god-like identity, a process is started which burns up the refuse and the crystallizations of the past, and which releases the creative energies of free selfhood. This is liberation.
"Man's consciousness, enslaved by fetishes of all sorts, can be liberated only by the power perpetually and spontaneously to create symbols, and thus to give meaning and nobility to life. This is the secret of the Art of Living. It is the foundation of true psychology. Only the creator is free; because he alone need not depend upon the symbolism of the past, but is able to live in the act of creating ever new symbols.
"This process of liberation can be started by breaking down the hypnosis of the past and freeing the individual from his hypnotizer, the race's subconscious; or by revealing to him the all-compelling Image of his own selfhood: the seed-Image of his destiny. The first method can be pursued by the use of music and vibrations of a certain character, which reestablish the circulation of the spiritual life-force by burning away obstructions, and so bring back the tone of the psyche to its fundamental harmony or diapason. The second method has been used in the past in the Mysteries, where the symbolic Image of the candidate's Soul was evoked to his outer consciousness by the Hierophant's magical power. But such a procedure does not belong to the field of generalized public application.
"However, what can be accomplished along this line is to interpret to the individual in words this living Symbol of his own Soul-being. This symbol occupies in relation to the sequence of varied events which constitute a person's destiny the place which the tonality of a musical work does to them any notes of the composition, or the place which the seed holds in relation to the plant and the multiplicity of its organs. Thus the term 'Harmonic Psychology,' or as we might also say: 'Seed-Psychology.'
"While psychoanalysis deals analytically and empirically with the many elements that together constitute the human psyche, harmonic psychology operates by synthetic perception, establishing itself at a point whence the soul and destiny of man are seen integrated into a fundamental Chord of life-forces, a seed-form, an organic symbol of selfhood. Thus we substitute the vision of the unity of a life-process for the psychological vivisection of man into symbolic fragments.
"Such a synthesizing perception can be reached by using astrological data as symbolic materials. The astrological birth-chart can be considered as determining the morphology of the soul. It is the signature of the birth-moment, the form taken by universal Life according to a particular set of time-space values. It pictures the seed and general structural plan of growth of the human being: his destiny. It defines the basic relationships which determine man's identity and character, the harmony (consonant or dissonant) which in its wholeness is heard as the tone of the soul.
"The difference between such a use of astrological references and the ordinary fortune-telling variety of astrology is just as great as that between the dream-interpretations of the soothsayer and the use of dream symbolism in the most scientific psychoanalysis. The symbolic use of astrology is just as legitimate as the symbolic use of dreams. The former is a much more scientific and impersonal tool for the synthetic appreciation of a man's essential nature than the latter, colored as dreams are by the patient's superficial reactions and also necessarily fragmentary.
"Astrology has been debased as fortune-telling and usually deals only with concrete events. But events in themselves are not important. What matters is the significance we bestow upon them. It is only by giving to events the meaning centered in our own Soul, that we make them real. There is no reality except that which we create by the very activity of continuous living. Thus events do not happen, we happen to them; we make them constructive or destructive. We must, therefore, know what we are, rather than what events might be. Harmonic Astrology deals with the integral Form of Man, with the symbols of his wholeness of being, with the archetype of his destiny on earth. It is the means whereby the Image of the soul can be interpreted, outlined and made manifest to the outer personal consciousness. It is thus able to start the creative process of inner combustion and repolarization which if the individual is really intent upon the task of regeneration leads to liberation. It will lead to liberation not by virtue of something external entering into the individual, but by means of the power which the true form of the soul possesses to compel the blurred image of the personality to shape itself in the likeness of its archetype, once the latter is brought out of the Unconscious into the Conscious where it begins to operate as a creative reality."
The foregoing approach to the subject is completed by the point of view described in the following paragraphs, which state in a concise manner ideas which can be found scattered through this book:
"Harmonic Astrology deals entirely with the problem of form. It is thus a secure foundation for the 'art of living.' It deals with form not as a merely esthetic element, but as a vessel of integration for evolving forces. The philosophy of astrology is thus the philosophy of form. No one can approach the findings of astrology in a completely integrating way who does not understand the purpose of form in life, and the results accomplished by life in the building, maintenance and disintegration of forms. Everything in astrology may be said to revolve around this three-fold operation.
"What is a human body? It is a relatively permanent form in which biological forces are brought to a focus and made to serve a single purpose. Circulation, digestion, breathing, reproduction, are functional processes resulting from the harmonization and integration of many vital forces. When disintegration sets in and the harmony of the forces operating in the body is disturbed, disease occurs and ultimately death.
"Ages of terrestrial, collective evolution have brought the human body to a point of relative perfection as an organic whole. But the evolution of the psycho-mental organism, or Soul, of man is very far from having reached such a point, generically speaking. Man should be the builder of this psycho-mental organism. It is built by harmonizing and integrating collective elements, 'soul-forces,' all that we inherit at birth or assimilate throughout life so that these elements become an organic 'web of energies' properly differentiated and interrelated: a living whole, the wholeness of which is the Self (in Jung's sense of the term).
"Man should be the harmonizer of the forces of his Destiny, the builder of his own 'Temple of Solomon.' But how can he do so permanently unless he knows: 1) the nature of the energies he has to deal with, and the laws of their cyclic activities; 2) the plan of the building? If he does not know the former he is likely to be wrecked by the unexpected rush of energies; if he has not seen the plan of the building, how can he know where to fit the materials he has assimilated? He is likely to build a wall where a pillar should stand; and dig caves under columns destined to bear the weight of cupolas.
"Astrology helps us to see at least intellectually the vision of our archetypal Form. It tells us what to do with the energies which work in us through our days; not how to destroy or even 'rule' them with an iron hand, but how to balance the one against the other; especially it teaches us that these energies have no right to usurp the prerogatives of our selfhood and proclaim themselves as 'I' for they are parts and not the whole, and 'I' when truly understood and operating is the wholeness of the whole. The real 'I,' however, is the wholeness not so much of the contents of our total being, as of the archetypal form of this total being. In that sense it is a relatively changeless 'I'. It is in fact the monad, the abstract quality that we are, as particular manifestations of universal life. This 'I' the essence of our Archetypal Form is not however actual, until this archetypal Form is made into a substantial organism both at the physical and at the psycho-mental level."
Much of the foregoing may have to be understood in a purely symbolical sense; but one idea ought to emerge clearly, and that is the idea that the birth-chart of an individual is the "signature" of the cyclic identity, the Form or Image of his essential divinity. Considered as a whole, that is esthetically, it is the symbol of that which he must strive to become. It is therefore his "magic talisman." He, as a fluctuating and evolving personality, must identify himself with the wholeness of this birth-chart. But and this is essential the birth-chart is never to be regarded as indicating life-contents, but only a structure of selfhood. No planet should ever be regarded as an entity or a thing in itself, representing particular life-contents; for to identify oneself with one planet, would destroy or at least tend to destroy the wholeness of the personality. Identification can refer only to the whole Pattern of the chart.
This distinction is absolutely essential; for all (temporary) evil in a life arises from the fact that one type of energy in the personality has grown so strong as to impose its will upon the whole personality. Thus we say: "I hate" "I am angry" "I love," which shows identification of the "I" with one function or energy of the psyche. The man who is integrated is no longer subject to such accidents or catastrophes. He can say: "There is hate, or anger, or love rising within me. But I the essence of the archetypal Form see and watch this onsurge; and I shall pit against it the combined weight of the other functions which are operating within me; and so the total harmony of the whole of which I am the wholeness will not be disturbed; there will have been only an inner re-adjustment of equilibrium of forces and such readjustments are fruitful, for they help to avoid the crystallization of a particular internal set-up of energies or functions. If I am a strong intellectual type I shall welcome a strong emotional surge; for it will give to my intellectual function something to do besides thinking intellectual thoughts about this or that. It will force them to combine with long unused forces of my depths, to balance the rise of the strong emotion; and that will vitalize my intellect."
To balance never to destroy. The strong emotion means power. It summons vital contents from the living organic depths. These contents are needed for the completion of personality. Everything there is is needed but in its proper place and with proper emphasis in relation to the purpose of the whole. A man minus anything cannot become a "god." Neither can he do so with too much of anything. The fulfilled personality is an organism: that is, a balanced, operative whole.
There may be, there are other paths toward stages of being that may be said to transcend man, as we know him. If we postulate the principle that any whole is eventually to find itself a part in a greater Whole, then man's destiny is to operate as a part in the "Greater Individual" however we may choose to define and circumscribe the latter. If this be true, then there might be various "paths," following which, this identification of the "lesser individual," as such, with the function that he may, or should, fill within the "Greater Individual," can be effected. Thus occultism mentions several "paths" of spiritual development, several margas or yogas, following which man may reach more nearly to a cosmic level of functioning within the "Greater Individual."
However this may be, the approach which we are stressing in this book and which, we believe, is the typical and natural approach from the standpoint of astrology can be summed up by the words: harmonization, integration, fulfillment. It is based on an understanding of form, equilibrium, balanced operation and synthesis. It is crowned and made significant by the operation of the creative, through which alone the conflict between individual and collective is solved solved by significant, symbolic, creative, power-releasing action. It involves the use of creative imagination. It involves an esthetic, as against an ethical, approach. It demands of the individual that he have the courage to stand as an individual, to assume conscious responsibility, to face the future as a father and (mystically speaking) as a sacrifice to the cycle that will be ushered in by his creative act. It demands, moreover, understanding and beauty: intuition and self-culture. Being a creative whole, he should know how to face, as a whole, whole situations: which means intuition and that understanding which passes intellection. Being a projector of his own image, he should fulfill the duty that every person has to reveal, and image forth in his own life the maximum of beauty of body, soul and mind of which his inheritance has made him capable.
This is the path of personality-integration, the path of creative significance, the path of release of power through Form. The occult quality of this path may be looked for in the numbers 1-4-7; which, by kabbalistic addition, add as we already saw to 28. Symbols again. But by using such symbols intuition is developed. Intuition leads to true "seership" and the seer is he who sees in every thing of Life a living significance. All things reveal to him their archetypal form, their essential "birth-charts." All things are known by their vital "names." And this alone gives to a man power; for to name correctly is to have power over the thing or process named and it is also to understand with that "creative understanding" which alone, as Keyserling so beautifully reveals, can give birth to the "new world" for which all men of understanding and nobility and spiritual vision not only yearn, but work.
Astrology and the Process of Civilization
Living civilization is a process; not a thing. It is the process of the gestation of Man the seed-condition of perfected mankind. A fallacious theory, product of the earth-bent European mind, has made of civilization a death of living values. But the seed is not dead. Civilization is not to be referred to the crystallized, straw-like stalk of a plant as the fall begins. Such a civilization is not the true, living civilization; it is merely the end of the cultural cycle.
Culture is the equivalent of the process of change of the personality, which is an ever unstable balance of individual and collective factors. It originates in a spiritual-monadic Impulse; which is the One-that-is-in-the-beginning, the "Avatar," the great Universal Person who, as it were, winds up the spring of the cycle-to-be because He is a direct agent, an embodied act-of-will of the "Greater Individual;" the Planetary Being. Then culture develops through endless vicissitudes and transformations; just as germ, stem and root, leaves, and finally flower and fruit grow grow from the earth, bound to the earth and its physiological, positive-negative energies.
At last the seed forms itself within the fruit; and as this occurs the seasonal plant already begins to die. The stem hardens. Culture becomes a set of stereotyped formulas of thinking, feeling and behavior. Presently the seed falls to the ground. Already the leaves have begun to disintegrate earthward, to become later on the manure which releases chemical substance collective elements to feed the new plant which will rise at the call of the new Spring. But the seed does not disintegrate. It lives; and this life is one of concentrated and relatively permanent wholeness; for in the seed is contained in potency the whole sum of the characteristics and the power of the species.
Living civilization is the seed of Man; but it is also the process that calls the seed into being the process of individuation; and the process in which the seed dies as a seed that the new plant may be the process of sacrifice. Living civilization is the creative principle operating through the human race as a whole. It is especially manifest in the "last moment" of the cycle, when all that is living and true to the archetypal pattern that is in the beginning is gathered together into a seed-synthesis which will be food to a humanity as yet to come. According to prophetic symbolism, two-thirds will be lost that is, they will disintegrate as leaves and stalk, and even as fruit. But one-third will be saved. These will constitute the seed the Shistas: those in and through whom the creative principle will play a new symphony of being as Spring rings the call and leads the performance.
These performers who, as a group, constitute the seed, the orchestra, are those that have become "separate;" those that have experienced a "second birth" birth out of the realm of decaying leaves into that of the consecrated seed. These individuals are trained eventually to perform their group-work. They are trained individually and as a group. They are not to be soloists, but players in an orchestra. They must give up something of their "personality" (in the usual sense of the term) in order that a "group-personality" may be born: the orchestra. They have to do so, if they are to remain in the orchestra, because the orchestra is some day to perform a symphonic score.
A score is a formula of relationship, a pattern of symbolic entities, called "notes of music." A score is the raison d' etre and purpose of the performance, and of the orchestra. The score is the abstract entity which is the form of the group-personality which is the orchestra. We may imagine that the orchestra is gathered and trained to perform only one symphonic score. If so, then this score is the structural archetype of the orchestral group-personality. For it is the score that will determine what instruments are needed, and where and when each shall have to sound out, to play the part reserved to it.
True, there may develop personal relationships (friendship, dislike, etc.) between the players as emotional human beings; but such relationships must ever be subservient to the one goal of the orchestral group-personality: the performance of the score. The basic and permanent set of relationships between the performers is one determined by the score to be played. It is an archetypal relationship of work and of purpose a creative relationship; and not a personal or individual-collective relationship of feelings, dependent largely on moods and on the ever-changing influence of natural or momentary conditions.
Such an illustration which is accurate enough shows very clearly the part that astrology can play in the process of living civilization, and especially in the process of gathering-in, in the future, performers who in turn will have to become "individuated" into a group-personality: the orchestra. Astrology reveals the score of the symphony, and the place which each performer has to occupy in the orchestra.
The kind of astrology which can reveal the score of a coming civilization is not yet known, at least to ordinary men of the present generation. Whether some "Adepts" are proficient in it or not, is not for us to say. We have touched, however, upon the subject of such a planetary astrology referring to the "planetary creative," in our chapters: "The Key to Astrological Symbolism" and "A Classification of Astrological Viewpoints." It is doubtful whether much more can be stated at present, though there may be there are, if we believe Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine men who at all times have been trained in the knowledge of the intricacies of planetary and cosmic cycles. The Great Polar Cycle and its so-called "zodiacal Ages" such as the Piscean and Aquarian Ages indicate very broadly the characteristics of great civilizations, as they wax and wane on continents which are their physical bodies. Most interesting attempts at correlating the precessional Ages and past civilizations, and at relating the zodiacal signs to zones of geographical longitudes, have recently been made. But claims are conflicting, and the final key may not yet have been discovered. It may depend upon a consideration of the seven-fold or seventy-fold division of the Great Polar Cycle itself, as we have already suggested, rather than on that of the twelvefold precessional motion of the equinoxes along the zodiacal-equatorial belt; or better still, on a correlation of both of these points of view.
But there are other planetary cycles which are just as important as the one created by the gyration of the Earth's polar axis in about 25,868 years. A 10,000-year cycle, which might be called symbolically that of the Buddha, because it deals with the planetary process of, let us say, "cosmic individuation" again, a symbol has been hinted at in theosophical literature during the life of H. P. Blavatsky (Cf. The Mahatma Letters). It presumably refers to the same thing at a planetary level with which our previously studied 28-year cycle dealt at the level of the human personality. And there is the same difference between three 10,000-year cycles and the 25,868 Polar Cycle as there is between three 28-year cycles and the three score and ten traditional measure of mans life-span.
Five thousand years have elapsed since what the Brahmins call "the beginning of Kali Yuga" (3102 B.C.). Twenty-five hundred years have passed since the coming of the Buddha (around 602 B.C.). And the year 1898 (or the period 1891-1898, which
witnessed the death of H. P. Blavatsky as well as that of Baha'u'llah) has been said to mark the beginning of a new era an era which can be conceived as the period of spiritual gestation or perhaps early babyhood of a new type of human individualhood at the psycho-mental level. The diagram above will interpret such a cycle in terms of the conventional astrological figure, and may be of interest to minds interested in such cosmic symbolism. A new spiritual history of mankind may, some day, be attempted on the basis of such planetary cycles. But our knowledge thereof is obviously too incomplete at present.
The Integration of Group-personality
However, what is of a much more practical significance in our present-day human lives is the use to which astrology may be put in bringing about real and harmonious group-personality. This subject is particularly timely, as there is so much emphasis laid in so many quarters upon the factor of the "group." As a complete theme for discussion it is far beyond the scope of this book; and therefore we cannot attempt to evaluate the significance, importance and validity of this modern trend toward group-behavior and ultimate group-personality. This trend, however, is a fact, and astrology has much to say on the problem of devising a technique for the gathering, harmonizing and integrating of such groups.
In the most real and valid sense of the term, group-personality is a factor of reconciliation between individual and collective, insofar as human society is concerned. For this reason we may consider two types of groups: 1) groups which are collectivities of individuals; 2) groups which are individualities made up of collective elements. In the first type, the emphasis is upon individuals; in the second, upon the collective nature of elements dominated by one entity, or ideal, or book, or image.
The second type of groups is the one usually found at this present stage of human development. Such a group is often an aggregation of barely individualized and still less individuated personalities, drawn closely together either by an actual leader or by a leading belief and authority. The less individualized are the members of the group, the more homogeneous and permanent it is. The more powerful the leader, visible or invisible, the more emotion-arousing and faith-compelling the leadership the more stable the combination of personalities.
The first type of groups is only beginning to appear in the modern world, and that, often, where one would least suspect it. Here, the group is really an association (or companionship, or cooperative comradeship) of differentiated and self-reliant individuals brought together for a common work and in order to further a common purpose and demonstrate an ideal held valid by all. The group is held together by a common realization, and, in a sense, a common "quality" of being, rather than by a common belief. It has very little to do with personal feelings in the ordinary sense of the term. It admits of no compulsion, save that of the common purpose and of the need of the jointly undertaken work. Its basic postulate is that every individual should be free to work out his own destiny in a natural and individual manner; that he should do what he can best do, and that group-operation is not only not to hinder the play of the individually creative, but on the contrary is meant to stimulate and enhance it, to give it more significance, more power, a greater scope and permanency of action.
The difficulty is, obviously, that unless one individual's free creative actions fit in with other individuals' free creative actions, unless all these actions work into each other harmoniously, in time and space relationship, without sacrificing the essential value of spontaneity and ease there is bound to be conflict and struggle. Briefly speaking, unless the individuals composing the group fit together structurally, as do the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, such a type of group cannot operate satisfactorily for any length of time. For if there were to be real cooperation (working together) of individuals not fitting together structurally and a priori, then some of these individuals would necessarily have to alter their creative rhythm, and in this become what they are not granted of course that they actually were what they archetypally are, before they met to constitute a group.
This last sentence emphasizes the two-fold problem: First, the individuals who are to constitute such a group are most often not actually individuated. They are not completely true to their own monad and archetype. They are as yet incompletely formed and unintegrated personalities. Because of that, there is no definiteness and unadulterability in their behavior and their creative processes. They are neither solid nor steady. They follow moods, feelings, and all sorts of unformed imperatives. They are unknowns to themselves as well as to their associates. To constitute a real group with such persons is like playing a symphony with musicians who are not sure what note will actually sound when they perform on their own instruments.
The other difficulty (in case of the associates being very definite and fully individuated personalities) is how to find a number of such individuals who will structurally fit together at least insofar as their creative relationship to the common goal is concerned. Short of some super-normal intuitive and direct perception of the structural characteristics of all the individuals from whom those who are to constitute the group could be selected, astrology is the only solution to the problem.
Here we are dealing with the complex problem of establishing and correctly interpreting valid relationships between the birth-charts of two and more than two individuals. To study how this can be done is also beyond the scope of this book. All that we wish to state now is that, theoretically at least, it can be satisfactorily done. In practice there are numerous difficulties to reckon with.
The first one is to ascertain the exact nature of the contemplated relationship. We have often seen two persons coming with both their charts, for advice as to whether they should or should not marry. Our answer to this is always: What do you want to marry for? What kind of marriage-relationship are you contemplating? For what purpose? Not all people marry for the purpose, consciously or unconsciously, of making a home, raising children, and all that goes with that. Marriage can be regenerative. It can produce spiritual repolarization. It can free both partners from complexes and inhibitions. All of which may not include home, children or even the usual kind of happiness. Marriage can be a dissonant harmony, or a consonant harmony. It may be meant to be permanent; or only for a period. It can include deep conflicts and oppositions of attitudes and yet be the very salvation, the very need of both partners. Who, then, shall wish to take the responsibility of advising two persons not to marry because strong conflicts and contrasts are shown by comparing the two birth-charts?
This is one difficulty. Another is the usual uncertainty about the exact birth-moment of an individual even more so of a dozen or two persons. There are still other difficulties which are related to the fact that the psychology of the kind of group we are now considering is very little understood; that in such groups secondary relationships are almost necessarily formed, and those at various levels. Yet, in spite of it all, one can say that astrology, by comparing birth-charts, can define the kind of relationship to be expected between the individuals symbolized by these charts. Various other astrological methods, too intricate to detail, can also be used in dealing with this matter of relationship.
The result is that one might be able to select, by studying their charts' relationships, let us say, twelve fully developed individuals, who would be able to cooperate toward the furtherance of a common purpose overshadowing them all, in such a way that the activities of each would remain exactly true to his or her individual selfhood and destiny, and yet in such a way that all these activities would fit together just as the individual performances of musicians composing an orchestra fit together in the orchestral rendition of a symphony. In this orchestral analogy, to be a first violin or a second French horn or a first bassoon would correspond to the generic selfhood of the personalities composing the group (their racial type, their background occultly speaking their "Ray" of development); while the individual selfhood would be symbolized by the written musical part which the player is to perform and which is the "signature" of his function in the group.
Astrology cannot tell much, if anything, as to the generic selfhood; but it can deal satisfactorily with the "score" or the ''blueprint" of the individual selfhood. In the case of the formation of a group-personality, the unknown factor is the "score" of this group-personality itself; but even there astrology might interpret significantly the birth-chart of the group, taking as the moment of birth either that at which the first move toward the formation of the group was made, or that at which the first concrete manifestation of group-activity or group-relationship occurred.
If we carry on the illustration of the orchestra, shall we have to say that the orchestra needs a leader? It needs obviously a leading factor, or principle, or purpose; but not necessarily a leading personality. Conductor-less orchestras have proven successful. But the point is really beside our present discussion, and could be discussed only by considering what relation there can be between human personalities and the "Greater Individual" at the planetary level.
What counts for us now is the fact that astrology may solve the basic dilemma in the constitution of groups, or of any relationship between two or more personalities. If the persons related are by nature followers, believers and devotees, astrology is of small service. The relationship will be strong and enduring if there is a strong power dominating the relationship. In the typical marriage of physiologically-emotionally centered beings, this power is sex: the race-purpose and social purpose dominate the relationship. In the ordinary groups whether they be called "occult," religious or political, or even, at the limit, a gang a leader, visible or invisible, dominates with his strong individual-personal power an aggregation of followers. Such groups, as well as the emotional marriage, are parts of the karmic pattern which rules men who are not yet individuated, just as biological urges and instincts rule the animal and the plant. All these relations and combinations of desires, impulses, loves, hatred all this birthing, dying and rebirth, belong to the collective, to the vast ebb and flow of the life-process to that infinite, incommensurable sea of becoming which goes on and on.
Astrology can do little in relation to such collective factors. It may reveal the unavoidable future crises and end of the relationship. But of what good is it to tell someone who is helpless, because he is not really a one, that he will be shot in so many days! Where there is no freedom and there is little freedom, indeed, in relationships controlled by biological urges or by the blind psychic force of belief astrology is usually more destructive than constructive. And freedom exists only in function of the individual. Only that which is whole can ever be free.
In terms of groups, only groups of actual individuals have any need of astrology, because in those groups only is there a problem of how to balance inherent individual freedom and the efficiency of the group; how to retain individual form within the group-structure. No group of individuals is possible unless this problem is solved. And to solve this problem does not mean that a leader should select the members of his "orchestra" astrologically; but it should rather mean that individual performers should come together on the basis of such a structural-astrological knowledge of relationship.
We have referred elsewhere to such a significant relationship between creative individuals as an "air-relationship," in contradistinction to "earth-relationship" or "blood-relationship" which binds emotionally and tends to reduce the relata to a heavy mass powerful perhaps, yet neither free nor significant in terms of individuals. We have called for "an aristocracy of Living Persons integrated by a common will to serve Life and Man; a creative aristocracy; an aristocracy of Equals in terms of Soul-equality, not of body similarity or likeness of duty; an aristocracy which would be a group by virtue of the unanimous self-consecration of its units to a common purpose self-evident to each and all. This group would be dynamic, mobile, always in action by thought or deed: a web of centers of force and releases of power, radiating the energy of intense living and strenuous interrelationship, shirking no responsibility, ready to serve in utter self-dedication to the Cause, always creating values, individually and in group; always stirring and fecundating minds and souls. Not a static body rooted in self-complacent isolation, but a unanimous Idea operating concretely in utmost diversity through many individual centers acting as foci for the greater Whole in widely different conditions; in all states, countries, classes, religions; ubiquitous, plastic, self-regenerating, unbound by dogma, rooted only in Life and Purpose, universalistic a moving force of Free Men and Free Women who dare to assume the creative responsibility of a New World. With a somewhat different emphasis, Alice Bailey has been holding before her students, and before the vast number of the readers of her publications, the ideal of a universalistic and spiritually creative "New Group of World Servers;" and modern Theosophists have spoken for over fifty years, with varying degrees of comprehension, of a ubiquitous "White Lodge" of Adepts which as a group constitutes the Seed-Being of the Last Day of our human-planetary cycle.
In these cases, and in others which more or less approach a similar type of group-ideal, the basic emphasis is always to be put upon the creative significance of the individual. Individuals cooperating, co-creating; companions who (etymologically speaking) "eat of the same bread" of significance, "friends" who have made of their personal relations a vast relationship of living friendship but always individuals, because the "greater Whole" that is the end of human planetary evolution can be formed only by the creative interaction of men who are whole, and thus individuals.
Astrology, when symbolically and structurally interpreted, can guide and give full significance to such a creative interaction of individuals. It becomes, as such, an art of interpretation of symbolic forms of relationship; and it can serve the purpose of the formation of groups, because it itself deals with groupings of symbolic factors, and is a practical method of perception of the meaning of groups in the process of their becoming fully individuated as integral personalities.
Personality, in this sense, appears as the final stage of the life-process; and it can mean either the Christ-like human Personality, or the "Greater Person" whom we may call the Planetary Whole; or, in between the two, any Group-Personality which has cyclically permanent and creative individual characteristics. But it is these individual characteristics which give form and significance to Personality, because in every case Personality is the stage of complete actualization of individual Form. It is the cyclic end which is the fulfillment in a substantial organism of the cyclic beginning. The individual is the potential structure; the fully individuated personality, the actual organism.
Meaning resides in this consummation of the Last Day of the cycle. It is a function of the wholeness of the individuated whole. It resides in the individual pole of being, as against the essential meaninglessness of the vast tides of the collective. In wholeness alone is there intelligence and understanding for in it only, because it is an end-moment and fulfillment, is there form conscious of itself, and is there beauty. The world-process has no meaning. No event has meaning, save as man gives it meaning; man or any being, or wholeness of related beings, in whom there is intelligence and form and fulfillment.
The life-process has no meaning, save in terms of the "last moment" of its every cycle; for this protean "last moment" is Meaning itself. Neither has the life-process form, save in terms of the "first moment" of its every cycle; for this "first moment" is Form itself. As for the myriads of events which crowd in serried ranks from beginning to end of innumerable cycles, these are but the "happenings" of collective elements, save for him who is able to relate them to his own "form of destiny," to fit them meaningfully into the structure of his own individual selfhood. This individual selfhood is in the beginning, and it becomes ever more manifest and concrete as integrated Personality, as each moment is related to it and stamped, as it were, with the creative symbol and signature of the "I am."
"In the beginning was the Word" and the Word is the individual structure of Self. In the beginning was Form. Astrology, as "the science of all beginnings" (Marc Jones), is therefore the one revealer of the "form" of all things that are in process of becoming. Meaning is completed when the potential form, and back of that the quality of the One-that-is-in-the-beginning the Monad is actualized as a fulfilled, integrated organism. In integration alone is meaning made real and creative. The process of individuation is that universal process which ends in the realization of meaning. It starts with Form and ends in Significance; and all meaning is born within the innermost of the individual, but of an individual who, after constant assimilations of collective life-contents, has reached a condition of fulfillment as integrated Personality.
There is the individual and there is Life. And Life is a vast, limitless, formless flux of energies which obeys but one Law: the Law of Equilibrium, of balance or of compensatory action. Out of this Law, which involves the trinity of motion, space and duration, arises the type of activity which we called "cyclic." All cycles are essentially pendulum-like oscillations or call them "vibrations." And all these oscillations, infinite in their smallness as in their vastness, are aimless, meaningless. They are and that fact is the substratum of all, and yet means nothing in particular. These oscillations have obviously four basic moments, exemplified by the four cardinal moments of the Sun's yearly journey: solstices, points of farther disequilibrium, equinoxes, points of unstable equilibrium. These are the four great symbols of the cycle of change, the cycle of natural, biological energies which wax and wane, meaninglessly.
But for the man who has become individuated, and who has established individual consciousness at the mental level of being, where Form is revealed and Significance rises out of lives lived in fulfillment, the meaningless Four become the Three, in which there is meaning. This meaning is the realm of beginning, middle and end. This is the realm of the alpha and the omega integrated in the living Christ the man who is whole and full of seed. As this Christ-state is reached, the Three merge into the eternal One; and the realm of spirit is born anew. It is born anew in every Christ-being; for it is not a postulated fact, but a reality that emerges only from within the individual structure of fulfillment, out of the individual bestowing of significance upon every moment, experienced in beauty.
It is this fulfillment in beauty and in the harmony that is peace, which builds spirit ever anew. Spirit is the creative consummation of every moment. Spirit is the integrating of beginning and end in a synthesis that is reborn and made significant at every moment. It is the cycle concentrated into the Now. It is the Creative Now.
May the power of this Creative Now illumine our every moment with significance! Indeed there is beauty and meaning in every moment because in every moment the individual may reach integration and joy that is creative, that fathers forth new cycles and affirms toward the unknown the noble will to destiny. The skies above are no more radiant, the form of constellations no more luminous and revealing, than is the realization within our deepest selfhood that we are whole; that in wholeness which is creative, everything that is and ever will be is fulfilled in the Now. Oh! Indeed NOW all is beautiful! The Whole is beautiful.
1. For a distinction between "individualization" and "individuation" read again just after the middle section of Chapter 2, "Astrology and Analytical Psychology."
