*
TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: VIRGO
In Virgo, the evolving consciousness of man is mainly occupied with analyzing, reacting against or developing further all that occurred during the Leo period. In Leo, we saw a type of adjustment in which the Night-force as yet hesitant and unsure in its social adjustments often compels the individual to over-stress his own emotional projections. Having found a foundation in his home and "taken root," the individual is confronted with social responsibilities. He must participate in society on the basis of his home and his personal independence. He came of age symbolically at the summer solstice. Now he must play his part in society. He must produce, beget, create. He is poignantly aware — even if not clearly conscious — of that "must." He pushes himself. He assumes the responsibility of management. He sets policies. He is full of himself, radiant in his fatherhood — but he is not accustomed as yet to act in terms of social responsibility. His adventuring often leads to failure; his cocksureness, to blundering. He is hurt; his pride, wounded. He has given out so much that his body feels the wear and tear of overwork, overemotionalism — perhaps of excesses of all sorts. And if the Leo type is a woman, child-bearing and its consequent tasks may have led to bodily strain and psychic weariness.
Thus the discharge of home and social responsibilities may have left very deep marks. Procreation and creative activity, work and excessive enjoyment may have posited serious problems. In short, all is not well. What can be done about it? Questions without end arise in the confused mind. Who can give adequate answers? One must go on working, producing, teaching, investing, creating. That is the very essence of social living. But how can one go on with strength and faith vanishing? Who can teach the technique of activity in ease, of work without strain?
At this stage, the Virgo phase of the unfoldment of consciousness begins. It begins with a question mark. It may end with true Illumination at the fall equinox, as Libra begins. It should end with a greater understanding of the meaning of the social process, of the nature of the Night-force. It should end in beauty and peace, or at least in social adjustment.
Productive activity on the basis of strict individualism and emotional self-expression presents to man a riddle. How can physical and nervous exhaustion, emotional tragedy and disillusionment be avoided? In essence this is the question which man everlastingly asks of the Sphinx; and there is a fitting tradition which says that the point of the Zodiac which ends the sign Leo and begins the sign Virgo carries the symbol of the Sphinx. This mythical creature which still faces today the sands of Egypt has the body of a lion and the head of a virgin — this is indeed the meeting point of Leo and Virgo. It symbolizes the answer to the eternal query which we have just stated. What is this answer?
The answer is two-fold; yet the two sides of it should be integrated and that integration, difficult in practice though simple in theory, is the very secret of the Sphinx, which is two beings in one. One side of the answer refers to the wear and tear produced by the impulsive and stressful type of activity and its dramatic gestures. The answer can be summed up in one word: Technique. The other side of the picture deals with a repolarization of the emotional nature itself. Technique and emotional repolarization are the two keys to the secret of the Sphinx.
A technique is a method based on fundamental principles, the application of which enables a man to perform his work with ease, with a minimum of wear and tear, waste or destructive strain, and in the shortest time possible. The worker who understands thoroughly the foundation of the method and has built its mode of application in the very structure of his muscular, nervous and mental behavior — is a master of technique.
Technique must be learned. Barring very unusual cases, it must be learned from one who is a "master of technique." Thus he who wants to learn the secret of smooth, easy and supremely effective performance has to become an apprentice. He must become objective to his own ways of behavior. He must analyze them and refuse to be blind to their defects. He must be absolutely honest and un-glamoured in the evaluation of any performance: his and others also. He must learn to criticize dispassionately and without prejudice. He must be keen in discrimination. He must be "pure."
Purity is a much misunderstood term, loaded usually with confusing ethical and traditional images. For water to be "pure water" means to be water without any sediment, dirt or organic substances such as microbes and the like. It is to be nothing but what the chemist describes by the formula H20. Likewise, for a man to be "pure" is to be "nothing but" what he is inherently and by the right of his own individual destiny.
When a man contains in his nature elements and desires which "do not belong" to the pattern of his essential individual character and destiny, these factors act as "impurities"; and they cause psychological conflicts and breakdowns. If there are particles of dirt or water in gasoline, the performance of the car's engine is uneven and hectic. It causes wear and tear in the engine. Likewise, a man usually collects throughout his childhood and his school-days all kinds of "dirt" or substances foreign to his true individual nature. The alloy of his character contains impurities which will destroy the smoothness of his life-performance. Complexes, born of youthful frustrations and resentments or fears, act as water in the gasoline. They lessen his usable energy. They disrupt the delicate adjustment of his psychological and mental "carburetor." He gets it "out of tune" and his forces are wasted in useless strain and in unproductive expenditure of energy.
Technique means a method to eliminate all impurities which lead to waste of power; to make of the worker a "pure " agent of production, without conflicts, complexes or fears. A master-technician is absolutely sure of himself, because be knows that within himself there is nothing to inhibit, confuse or disturb his performance — nothing in his physical and psychological mechanisms, nothing in the flow of his power from source to point of effective distribution. His hands are sure because his nerves are steady; and his nerves are steady because his psychological nature is clear and unencumbered with waste products or crystallizations born originally of fear.
Technique is thus based on "purity." It also depends on potency and skill. Potency means that the performer has been born with unimpaired organs of action through which the universal life-force can flow in a condition of relatively high potential; it means, even more, that such life-potential has not been used up. Thus the symbolism of the "Virgin" — who is "pure" and "potent," because unpolluted and filled with unused energies.
Skill, born of adequate training, comes last. In a sense, training would not be so necessary, or at least the length of it could be considerably reduced, if the apprentice were really pure and potent; because the life-force, flowing then at maximum intensity and without corruption, would have the ability to adjust itself rapidly to any new situation. Unfortunately men today forget that fact. They put all the stress upon mechanical training; whereas, if all personal obstacles were removed and the individual had real potency, the most complicated mechanism could be mastered with a very small amount of practical experience. Life is intelligence. Men have obstructed that inherent intelligence by social and personal fallacies; thus they have to substitute tedious training for it. But give life a real chance, through a couple or more generations, and miracles could happen.
This is obviously not meant to lessen the value of training, but only to show that at least half of the apprentice's task is to clear himself from hindrances; the rest is relatively easy. Thus self-purification is the essential means to technical. In mastery. Man must become again a "Virgin." The past must be forgotten, eradicated — remaining only as an "essence of experience" giving depth to consciousness, but not affecting the structures of mind, emotions and body with crystallized memories which always mean blockages, thus waste and ineffectiveness. Self-revitalization ensues — the re-opening of the deep well whence power may once more flow through renewed channels of release. Then familiarity with new devices, from which skill will almost automatically follow. True skill however is not based on habits and memorized rules, but on the ability to adjust oneself immediately to any and all situations and to the requirements of any and all mechanisms.
All of the preceding analysis deals with the factor of technique; and the student of astrology will have easily recognized in these statements the several characteristics which astrological text-books attribute on the basis of traditional authority to the zodiacal Sign Virgo: analysis, discrimination, criticism, routine of work, purity, self-integrity, care of the body, hygiene, training, etc. But Virgo offers also another answer to the seeker after self-perfection; to the thwarted, bruised and embittered soul who after rushing, in Leo, after emotional self-expression finds itself empty and brokenhearted; also to the parents whose progeny turned ungrateful, to the creative artist whose creations aroused no social response, to the leaders whose following deserted him.That answer of the Sphinx is: emotional repolarization. "What caused your emotional disillusionment and bitterness?" — asks the Sphinx. And, looking into the hollowed eyes of the stone-image which turn into mirrors reflecting our innermost depths, we realize at last that our emotional failures have been due mostly to our lack of "social sense." We have ignored the meaning of the Night-force, of that cosmic power which gathers-in all units into greater organisms and dispassionately, un-emotionally establishes complex patterns of relationship into which everything may fit. We have insisted that our way of projecting our emotions was the only way; that we had the right to demand everything or nothing, the right to force our conditions upon life. And the Night-force turned destructive; we became lost in the dark and frightened by the broken echoes of our own desires.
"Look at me" — says the Sphinx — "become like unto me. My lion-like passions are strong. I am a huge feline in whose groins ardent power lies. But my head is that of a virgin. I am still, waiting for that which must come. I behold the stars. I wait for my time, which is written. In me, there is no pride and no haste. In me, power and purity are polarized toward the fulfillment of purpose and destiny."
The Night-force is the power of more-than-individual purpose. It is the womb of greater selfhood, of vaster life-organizations. It gathers-in the small selves in expectation of the Greater Self, which will come at the appointed time. The message of Virgo to the sufferers is therefore: "Look beyond yourself. Reorganize your desires, re-polarize your emotions, re-orient your impulses. Your energies are not yours; they are life's. You hold them in trust for humanity as a whole. Be sure they serve a purpose greater than your littleness, greater even than home and family. Consecrate them to the Greater Whole."
Virgo is thus, in one of its aspects, the realm of devotion and spiritual discipleship. It is the realm of the individual's subservience to a collective purpose and a collective discipline; the realm of service and self-immolation, of willing sacrifices — that of the seed become bread to feed the hungry one. It is the realm of the Army, because through the discipline and sacrifice of war, man learns forcibly to participate in a Greater Whole: the nation. It is the field of obedience to the structural Law of the universe, of the human species, of the community. In it, man may learn that he who loses his soul finds his divinity. And learning this, he becomes ready to knock at the gates of the Temple; to face the great metamorphosis which awaits him who, having become one with the Sphinx, enters the Pyramid for Initiation.
So much has been written of late about "Initiation"! Yet there is always more to say, because, as in any vital crisis of transformation, everyone facing its challenge and its problems must of necessity go to meet them on the basis of his own relatively unique life-experience. More than this, Initiation means different things to the different parts of the human personality. In terms of technique, it may be represented by the grant of a diploma from the hands of the "University" to which the "master of technique" belonged. In terms of emotional repolarization and of the individual's relationship to a Greater Whole in the life of which he is ready to become participant, Initiation signifies the end of being alone — if not quite of being lonely.
The lion is king of the desert because he is able, symbolically, to absorb or lord it over all lesser creatures. As he does this, he finds himself alone in the desert. The ego also is alone, because he can only see himself in relation to others as a master of slaves, or as a virtuoso performing for a receptive audience. He is thus alone on the stage, separated from all by the footlights of his pride, of his self-imposed mission — or by the pomp of his regal station. The Virgin is also alone, by definition; but it is a very different kind of aloneness. The Virgin is alone — and expectant. She expects the performance of a Mystery which will destroy both her aloneness and her virginity. She may be afraid of the Unknown. She may stare, Sphinxlike, into the night of the desert; but in her heart and in her womb she knows that He will come. That coming will make of the desert a fruitful valley. A people will be born. Libra will come: the communion of men, society, the promise of civilization, the "Mystic brotherhood" whose reality is revealed as a concrete fact in the deep chamber of the Pyramid.
When the virgin girl is fecundated by the beloved, it is not only that she mates with one particular man. She opens to human life as a whole. The entire past of the human race floods her expectancy, and she becomes a promise of the future civilization. Likewise, the Collective Unconscious rushes up to the threshold of the conscious in the man who is being "initiated." MAN enters a man. Libra enters Virgo. And Virgo is the expectancy of this advent, the long and arduous preparation for it.
First of all, however, this expectancy is to be aroused. It does not exist in Leo. The Sphinx is the symbolical expression of the crisis which must come at a certain stage of evolution if the creative, self-projective, dramatic aloneness of the human ego (Leo) is to become the expectant, potentially fruitful aloneness of the human soul (Virgo). This term "soul" is a rather unfortunate one because it has so many different and vague meanings. By it, we mean here the condition of the human psyche — of man's mind and feelings — when it begins to realize that the whole universe does not revolve around itself and that it is a participant in some vast wholeness of being whose seeming infinity is awe-inspiring, yet compelling.
The creative Fire which surges outward in whirling motions from the center of the individualized personality is Leo. Slowly, this Fire becomes aware of Space all around. It faces the cold of Space. It is compelled to slow down its vibratory intensity. Radiant atoms, in ionized states within the Suns, learn to operate as more steady chemical structures. Energy becomes substance. The power in the Lion's loins becomes reason and discrimination in the Virgin's head. Emotional and creative thought-dramas become reflective, analytical understanding. There is a constant process of cooling off. Space overcomes Fire. The Many overcome the One. Relationship triumphs over self-radiation. A sense of the greater Unknown makes all the known glories and all the emotional excitements of the ego-phantasms of questionable value. The expectation of That which would bring this Unknown into the soul is born. It does not matter how this mysterious That is conceived. Already the Lion has become the Virgin: the eternal question-mark.
Who is the eternal Unknown who will answer the "Why?" of the Virgin? It is he who, because He has no name, wields the power of Meaning and is the "bestower of names." He is the Initiator who ever answers the riddle of personality and conscious living; He who holds in His mind the secret of the "Measure of Man." But, to find Him, the individual ego must willingly become the neophyte. He must experience training and trial, emotional repolarization and the surrender of his tragic, yet cherished, aloneness. He must welcome the past in understanding, in order that the future may be created in wisdom. He must face the silence in the King's Chamber of the Pyramid — and not be afraid. He must die, and be reborn.
Stillness always descends upon the soul that searches and silently gazes upon distant constellations through the glamorous night of the desert. The Sphinx today still gazes on, though disciples are no longer initiated in the desecrated Pyramid and bombs bring meaningless death to cities nearby. Yet the reality of the Sphinx lives on. Humanity has become the Sphinx. It is asking the eternal question. It is seeking through the global crisis of our days the path to the new Pyramid and the new Initiation — the path to the "Plenitude of Man."
