The German Romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke, perhaps, said it most fully. In his Book of Hours, written between 1899-1903 (following an experience of ‘inner dictation’ in a Russian monastery) he writes

“All becoming has needed me

My looking ripens things

And they come toward me, to meet and be met”

This is a theme worthy of our deepest attention, as therapists and practitioners engaged, beyond reductionism, in looking into the ‘more than’ of our experiences and those of our fellows creatures. In this brief piece, I would like to explore the frayed edge of this thread, as it is woven into the wider cloth of contemporary life, tracing it back and catching ‘the thread of all sorrows’ as Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye names it.

Could it be, as psychiatrist Ede Frecska suggests, that we are living in a time marked by a profound crisis, manifesting not only in the material world, but in meta-symptoms such as Scientism “the negative schema of a depressed culture”? Decades before Frecska formulated his diagnosis a similar trajectory had been mapped for us in the vibrant but neglected work of Owen Barfield (among his many life roles we find those of scholar, Inkling-companion of Tolkein and CS Lewis, lawyer and Anthroposophist).

In works such as Poetic Diction (1928) and Saving the Appearances (1957) Barfield unpacks the relationship between language, meaning and consciousness with the insight of a depth psychologist (no accident he was a major underground river in the thought of James Hillman) and the deftness of a poet. He openly breaks into psychology with his critique of Freud (the plumber) and even Jung (‘laden heavily with R.U.P (residue of unresolved positivism)’), but his most telling insights concern our words – simultaneously the lifeblood of our talking cure, and the ‘prison-house of language’ (Wittgenstein). Barfield believed in the evolution of consciousness through time, of a basic threefold pattern moving from Original Participation through the Objective Idealism born of Descartes, Comte and others, and towards a future state of Conscious Participation, reunification of imagination with world, polarities married beyond the ‘subjective emptiness’ of contemporary experience.

This basic triple map bears echoes of other tripartite lenses from the revelation of the Christian Trinity through to the psychological technology of, say, Ken Wilber’s ‘pre/trans fallacy’. However, in Barfield the synthesising imperative is always explicitly serving beauty, as in ‘that metanoia, or turning about of the mind, for which the heart’s name is repentance’ (Saving the Appearances, p180). Such a direct and robust, yet open and beautiful, form reminds us also of other metaphors for our time, such as that of the great Twentieth Century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, who spoke of his teachings as ‘thorns used to remove other thorns’. Is that not an image to make any therapist’s heart surge?

Returning to my thread, I would like to propose that, as the non-dual teacher Adyashanti puts it

‘Awakening to Reality is no longer a possibility; it is an imperative. We have sailed the ship of delusion as far as she can carry us. We have run her ashore and find ourselves shipwrecked on an increasingly desolate land. Our options have imploded. “Wake up or perish” is the spiritual call of our times. Did we ever need more motivation than this?’

Evidence for this state of affairs is everywhere, from the increasingly disastrous seizures of our ailing biosphere to the centrifugal abstractions of political and economic systems; the ‘myth of endless progress’ (as applied in medicine, space travel, limitless free energy or any other thought horizon) is pulled over on the hard shoulder of its particular linear motorway, and the long expected emergency services aren’t answering the phone. In the consulting room the twin orbits of anxiety and depression weave their dual misery in larger and larger gyres, lit up with the brightening tails of self-harm, addiction, meaninglessness, and the thousand displaced horrors of the alienated self. We risk Heidegger’s insight ‘what mortal can fathom the abyss of his confusion?’ (Early Greek Thinking, p57)

And yet, the sheer and existential surface of the abyss walls is not the insurmountable end. As Nietzsche told us, if you stare at the abyss the abyss stares right back; it is our part to blink first, to redeem the implacable stand-off inherent in our species-pride and to move in new, forgotten ways. Barfield left us a clue in paragraphs like this:

“modern psychologists claim to give us an unmetaphorical account of the soul, but their technical terms such as ‘complexes, repressions, censors, engrams, and the like’ are metaphorical in origin, so that they are speaking of ‘tying-up, shoving back, Roman magistrates and scratchings’ “

As we give words to experience-in-the-world, so we, with Rilke, ‘ripen things’ that then come forward ‘to meet and be met’. Heidegger says somewhere that ‘everyday language’ is just a forgotten and ‘used-up’ poem, neglected and despised, carelessly falling from the collective tongue, an atrophied neural pathway or dying tangle of synaptic plaques. Before we act well upon the outer, we need an established inner sense, a verticality corresponding and intersecting with our horizontal life motion. The apparent abyss is our own; its meaning is ours alone, if we can bear it.

It is as if psychology, the ‘butterfly speech-thought’ of the human mind, is ripening once again to break through the crust of arid objectification and to put forth new shoots from her rhizomatic depths. Her mode of utterance will not be contained in rigid methodology, nor will she mindlessly obey the tired laws of the Newtonian paradigm; rather, she will come out of the sterile glare of diagnostic abstraction, a flaming DSM in her left hand, a diamond-flash in each heart, and whatever she chooses to whisper, it will flow on four levels, as the Kashmir Shaivists document; she will remain in her absolute undifferentiated wave (Para-Vak, in Sanskrit – the voice gone beyond, silence) even as she melts into a quiver of formless desire (Pashyanti, – the causal body glimpsing the sound of eternity); the quiver she now is descends into a middle mind-realm (Madhyama – the thoughts and dialogues of our human mind) before she emerges in our throats and keyboards (as Vaikhari, the form-world of speech). As sages of this tradition have long witnessed (for example, in the synthesis of Yoga and Psychology given through Sri Aurobindo and his work with the Mother) thinking in words is Vaikhari, with ideas is Madhyama, thinking with direct experience is Pashyanti, while Para remains transcendent of mental activity, beyond mind. The wave function collapses (decoheres, in the sci-babble of quantum physics) along its probability curve, drawn by its own nature and the attention of an observer – contracting into the specifics of a given form, as an individuation inside a single mind, where the particular life is lived through. Never is the particle other than a wave, nor the wave reducible to the aspect of a particle – its experience is simultaneously one with the continuity of flow, marked by non-local dynamic field (perhaps, in our analogy, a good-enough metaphor for the perceptible edge of psyche herself, as she quivers toward form).

Apart from the ‘fearful symmetry’ of quantum mechanics with ancient Vedic wisdom teaching, we might also observe that here are expressed two modes of knowing experience – the first as a grid map, abstracting, mathematical, geared for efficient understanding and action; the second as a story map, inclusive of elemental possibilities, a cartography of the self in felt tones and sensuous precision. Thus is the landscape of soul apprehended, rather as we may approach outer landscapes, the natural world all about us:

“Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive” (Robert Macfarlane, p59 The Wild Places)

So I will finish with a plea for the refreshment of metaphor, the purging away of irrelevancies, of the consciousness of lack inherent in the denial of imagination, the progressive realisation that matter is “the occasion of spirit, or at all events, the occasion of spirit’s awareness of itself as spirit” (Rediscovery of Meaning, p 148). Romanticism, come of age, is a symbolic form, a transpersonal link between the high-tide line of Western individualism and the non-dual East. As Ezra Pound said, the best Romantic writers were the ‘antennae of the race’.

I leave us back in the agreeable company of Rainer Maria Rilke, more eloquent than I

How surely gravity’s law,

Strong as an ocean current,

Takes

hold of even the smallest thing

And

pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-

Each stone, blossom, child-

Is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

Push out beyond what we each belong to

For some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

To earth’s intelligence

We could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

In knots of our own making

And struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

To learn from the things,

Because they are in God’s heart;

They have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

To fall,

Patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

Before he can fly.

Bibliography

Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Open Gate Sangha, San Jose California, 2012

Barfield, Owen Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Barfield Press UK, 2010

Barfield, Owen The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, Barfield Press UK, 2013

Barfield, Owen Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Barrows, a & Macy, J. Rilke’s Book of Hours – Love Poems to God; Riverhead Teade, 2005

Frecska, Ede How Can Shaman’s Talk With Plants and Animals? The Topological Roots of Plant Consciousness & Interspecies Communication, In: Strassman, Rick Inner Paths to Outer Space, Park Street Press, 2008

Heidegger, Martin Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, HarperCollins, London, 1985

Macfarlane, Robert The Wild Places, Granta, London, 2008

White, Kenneth The Wanderer & His Charts, Polygon, 2004

Mark Jones & Keith Hackwood
March 2009

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As Pluto moves into Capricorn we are essentially experiencing the end of a Pluto Era and the beginning of a new one, and all the signs are there in the world of profound change in process.

Pluto represents a range of possibilities as wide and as profoundly diverse as compulsive attachment and deep emotional stuckness, through to direct experiential knowing of fully transformational potential. This is so because Pluto represents the deepest unconscious security within the Soul. To understand this we must move beyond our mundane notions of security, (how do I pay the mortgage, does what I am wearing suit me, did I say too much after the second glass of wine at last nights party?) and strive instead to imagine the element of consciousness incarnating in multiplicity in order to experience itself in a variety of different ways. We must in short imagine why we are here. This is not always so easy.

Crucial elements of our deeper psyche remain unconscious – remaining by definition outside of our awareness. So whilst our day to day dilemmas may contain an aspect of the story there is always another dimension with Pluto. For example, what you said at the party last night may point toward a deeper truth, even if it feels overwhelmingly embarrassing in the cold light of morning. Taking it further, the Pluto in Virgo soul coming to maturity and still struggling to find the right work may be bringing into awareness the limitations of the existing types of work ‘out there’, and precipitating how things might need to change up to and including the level of the civilisation that provides said work. Alongside any personal insights about commitment or individuation that such a person may need to take on board, they may be groping towards an act of ‘seeing through’ at the collective and transpersonal level too.

Pluto represents our deepest, primarily unconscious sense of security: as individuals our most primary motivations, as societies, our deepest potentials and prejudices and as a civilisation, our primary sense of direction. All of this depth of possibility applies now to the Capricorn archetype, as Pluto occupies its early degrees. Capricorn is the mid-heaven of the archetypal zodiac, it is the zenith of the chart and in a natal chart we would look to the 10th house, Saturn and Capricorn to understand the potential in an individual’s relationship to the world, their career, to the parent who goes out to work or represents authority, (traditionally read as the father). We would also note issues surrounding emotional maturation, responsibility (or guilt) and how a sense of personal boundaries gets defined. Essentially how an individual structures their consciousness, the conditioning patterns that inform that understanding of their own consciousness and the capacity of the individual to take responsibility for their own life and experiences, is to be uncovered through this process. From certain perspectives (including the materialism of our prevailing culture), this might seem to be the place of maximum agency and action in a chart analysis, since it is full of information relating to the apparent interface of self and world, the contact boundary through which meaning is generated on the basis of ‘mine’ and ‘other’. Yet this dualism is but a part of the whole story.

On a collective level Capricorn represents the nature of civilisation, the man-made world and the expectations and conditioning pressures that such a world exerts upon its citizens. Such conditionings are fed to the individual through the family system, the localized community and the larger country/society within which the individual lives. Pluto in Capricorn, from 2008 until circa 2023, implies an intensification of the issues represented by conditioning, by the direction implicit within society, and the issue of responsibility for both individual and collective levels. Individual and collective responsibility is the capacity expressed through maturation to accept the implications, joys and burdens of one’s personal and collective life, and this field is highlighted as critical for the next decade and a half. How do the choices I make impact upon You? How does your government/company/city make choices upon your behalf? What if no-one is making those choices consciously? And what if the massively complex webs and interpenetrating systems of commerce, governance, military power, science and technology prevent anyone from ever ‘being in control’?

That this is a critical transition or tipping point in the nature of civilisation itself is clear with an understanding of the nature of planetary nodes. The most well known and discussed nodes are of course those of the Moon. The north node of the Moon when its rises above the ecliptic (the ovular pathway of the constellations) and the south node when it falls again below that line, in its observable position. So the nodes are essentially abstract points in space representing the moment when a planetary body rises or falls against the line of the ecliptic. All of the planets have nodes. The descending, or south, nodes of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto are all in Capricorn. From this we can draw a number of conclusions. Firstly, the original nature of these planets, their past (south node) if you like, has roots in the origins of the civilisations symbolized by the Capricorn archetype. Secondly, for these planetary agencies to function coherently within the life of an individual in this era, the issues of maturation and existential responsibility are at the forefront of necessity, and, critically, for that maturation to occur it is essential that the nature of any and all prior conditioning is understood clearly.

In essence how we structure our consciousness comes about in two primary ways: from our familial imprint and early childhood experiences and then from the collective dimension of the society and civilisation within which we live. Whilst the two levels obviously interpenetrate in a number of critical ways, it is useful to distinguish between them. Within the Psychosynthesis model of psychotherapeutic healing these two levels can be named the personal and transpersonal levels of synthesis. The personal level is mainly revealed through the emotional body, populated by the various sub-personalities that we develop in order to live our lives, along with the critical sub-personality (or archetype) of the Inner Child, and through transferential material within the therapeutic space. The personal unconscious is the primary vessel in which the alchemical work of personal psychosynthesis occurs. Beyond this space-time point, the transpersonal level of synthesis work occurs within the realm of the larger world dynamic within which we all exist, politically and socially, but also, critically, in terms of subtle dimensions, spiritual qualities and invisible presences.

The other critical point to draw from this confluence of planetary south nodes in Capricorn is that over the next fourteen years or so Pluto will actually conjunct these planetary nodes, including, most interestingly of all, its own south node. That we know Pluto is sensitive to its own planetary nodes is evident in Pluto’s own discovery chart. Remember that when Pluto was discovered (through the assiduous work of Clive Tombaugh) it was conjunct its own north node. That it will soon conjunct its own south node implies a confrontation with its own karmic past, and the origins of that karmic past lie in the origins of our present civilisation and the conditioning imperatives that civilisation has produced and supported. This holds no less a potential than for a confrontation with the meaning of the social experiment that we have collectively undertaken for close to the last 10 000 years – starting with the origin of the first agricultural communities and proto-city states following the last major ice age. Certainly it bodes for a confrontation with the meaning implied since the last time Pluto conjoined its own south node in the 1770s, when the foundations were laid for the industrial revolution that has shaped society so profoundly ever since (through the rise of technology, science, urbanisation, specialisation, alienation, rationality, speculative capitalism, imperialism and the increased exploitation of natural resources, to name but a few major threads of that weave).

In the coming period we will need to examine whether this experiment, this myth of ongoing progress implicit in the movement of civilisation, has fundamentally worked out for us as a species, as human beings. Furthermore we are going to be asked to make personal and collective decisions pertaining to our role within the coming changes within civilisation. A critical issue contained within the earth triad, as Pluto in Capricorn relate back to Taurus and Virgo, is a survival crisis emerging on a planetary scale. Taurus as an archetype relates to biological survival, Virgo to crisis (and the resultant mental analysis stemming from such crisis, the search for techniques to enable emergence from the other side of crisis). Pluto in Capricorn emphasizes the power and the specific issues involved within the meaning of the earth triad, for which Capricorn is the culmination.

To illustrate the point, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on exactly what is meant by examining the myth of ongoing progress, since this conflation of cultural memes is so well rooted in western materialist culture as to often become invisible (or to be viewed as ‘common sense’, or ‘self evident truth’). So, briefly, what are we to make of the period since the Industrial Revolution (since the last time Pluto conjuncted its own south node)? Certainly there has been ‘progress’ in a certain manner – the rise of science and technology has undoubtedly brought many benefits in medicine, agriculture, housing and so on – but it has also had massive unintended consequences in terms of pollution, degradation of the environment, alienation of human from nature and from other humans. War has not been eradicated (in fact, its everywhere – and of course the scale of technology now leaves us with the option for total planetary annihilation), neither has poverty, nor disease, nor the ‘boom and bust’ cycle of economics, nor a thousand other things we were promised. Freedom is not the norm, and everywhere states continue to condition, repress and engage in activities such as torture. Yet the myth of progress tells us ‘things can only get better’. This, in so many ways, is simply untrue. Whilst en masse, we in the first world may have become used to living like minor royals of a previous age, such a ‘lifestyle’ is based upon some deeply unsustainable activities, and a set of equally questionable assumptions and schemas of conditioning. For example – our human population stands at around seven billion at the time of writing, an unprecedented number that is still growing apace – there is an elephant in the living room.

This simple situation has enormous consequences, since it has been achieved only through the relatively cheap and abundant food supply allowed by massively bloated agricultural practices dependent upon huge fossil fuel inputs (something like ten calories of fossil fuels in the form of natural gas derived fertilisers and sprays, and oil-based transportation systems, per calorie of food produced and eaten). These same practices deplete the natural resource base (not only fossil fuels, but topsoil, landbase nutrients etc) and create dependencies upon the continuation of the cycle (the psychology of previous investment, as it has been termed). However, the cycle cannot continue. The resources which have fossil-fuelled the 250 year party, are themselves depleting and dwindling. Our peak energy moment may well be behind us, a rapidly receding shimmer in the rear-view mirror. What we have taken to be ‘normal’ may now be revealed as little more than a brief window of history, and the cycles of the future may look a lot more like our deep past than we have cared to consider. In the meantime, there is a profound denial afoot, especially among the political classes, and ‘business as usual’ is the great rallying cry. Yet we have seven billion plus mouths to feed (and growing) as the systems that created the scenario begin to fail. We have a human race in which, for the first time, now more people live in urban settings than in rural ones (i.e. more dependency and specialisation, less self-reliance and survival skills). Old diseases are making a come back (cholera, TB, smallpox) and new ones are manifesting (bird-flu, BSE & CJD etc) from our systemic failures. Meanwhile we are promised nuclear fusion power so cheap it won’t be metered, flying cars, ‘clean coal’ (ha!), a cure for cancer, in fact a cure for death itself – eternal life, just around the corner. I think you can see how, as the law of diminishing returns begins to assert itself, the factors inherent within Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Aquarius begin to play themselves out.

Assuming that we are where we are, and that we cannot return (as some suggest) to a pre-civilisation state of existence (as a permaculture teacher put it, even the aboriginal people cannot live aboriginal lives nowadays, since the very foundations of such lives are gone – the traditional foods or landscapes or ecosystems are not present now). So much has been lost. We stand in the midst of the largest species extinction event in planetary history – plants and animals pass from existence in their thousands each week, with barely any notice. Cultures and languages dwindle and die annually. Suffering of the grossest and most repugnant type increase year on year (torture, repression, persecution, punitive war, ‘simple’ starvation). This is a different world than the one the myth of progress promised us. And so that myth switches to its religious corollary – progress, which has been defined almost exclusively in materialist terms (better, faster, bigger, stronger, higher, richer etc) suddenly gets defined in apocalyptic and eschatological terminology. Within the power shadow that is one possible manifestation of the Pluto in Capricorn archetype, the moment of the elect, the elite, the chosen, the special – those whom the gods favour and choose decide all. Progress is now an afterlife deal, a deferred gratification. The daddy-god-in-the-sky – Pluto in Capricorn – (and his representatives on Earth) is angry and the fear/desire process is fully hooked up to the death-machine. One press of the button and we will be free – those worthy of saving will be saved, those others will get the hell they deserve. And so it goes on, in a mad spiral of denial, despair, futility, fear, desperation to the final curtain falling on the circus of horrors. Collective and personal levels get conflated and confused – an inflation occurs – these issues are too big, surely my life is exempt from these events? Yet this is another aspect of the conditioning, they, He, will sort everything out, not me, not us.

The conditioning is perhaps never stronger than when we face the very thing we are most conditioned to fear and despise (so, according to the myth of progress, in the face of the ‘reality’ of our current world and the broken promises of technology, the response is to recommit to technology – soon we’ll all be aged 400, drinking bio-nectar on Mars, driving our solar-merkabahs and laughing about the fools back on Earth who said we’d never make it).

We have said nothing about the subtle levels of loss, or, for example, the psychic costs of living in a society where the average ‘man in the street’ can probably tell you in detail about what Angelina Jolie has tattooed on her buttocks, but will look at you blankly if you ask him to name three native plants indigenous to his area, or to show you where the nearest stream is.

These are vast movements and themes, and we have no wish to pretend that they are otherwise, nor any chance at all of dealing with them all in such a short essay. We are just naming some complexities and offering a few tools to begin the life-work of engaging with the converging crises (the ‘clusterfuck’, if you will) that will be defining of the twenty-first century.

A salutary thought comes from the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, known for her work on grief and death. Her oft-quoted five stage model of grief is useful to consider here, moving as it does through denial (‘you’re lying to me, this isn’t so’) to anger (‘how dare the world be so partial, I’ll fight you if you keep on saying it’), on to bargaining (‘OK, OK, well, if I can keep the SUV and fly whenever I like, I’ll stop eating GM foods and give a tithe of my salary to charity’), depression/grief (‘my god, what have we done? How can we have been so blind? We’ve lost everything, and for what – a lousy handful of dollars?’) and finally acceptance (‘we are here, what is important now? how can we move with all that is towards a better balance?’). Could it be that this process holds at the level of civilization itself, a human cycle, as well as for individual nations, cities, families and people? Where are we within this cycle in relation to the Pluto/Neptune themes? Where are you?

Pluto represents the intense nature of the psychological attachment; our deepest security patterns tend to orientate us compulsively towards certain experiences, certain relationships and patterns of behaviour (because of the devastating insecurity that would emerge if we were to stop the pattern and really tune into ourselves). Neptune represents the ultimate dream or ideal that we chase, and of course anything less than enlightenment or returning to the source of all that is will ultimately prove temporary or unsatisfactory, and therefore produce a resultant state: disillusionment. Disillusionment is arguably the most painful psychological experience one can undergo, since it represents a doubling of loss (thing and self, mundane and transcendent, immanent and ethereal). In this way the archetypes that the planetary functions in astrology represent are the core archetypes of life and as such we can respond to them in any way we chose, or in whatever way our unconscious chooses for us. In this sense archetypal human experience is characterized by the level of understanding or karmic potential of the individual in relationship to the archetype. For one man fishing is the ultimate Neptunian goal, alone and quiet by the water. For another it is jazz, another heroin, whilst yet another searches endlessly for a woman who will somehow manage to continue to embody the ‘in love’ feeling he is hooked on. Yet another travels the world in an endless segue from spiritual retreat to ashram, and so it goes on. Archetypes contain potentiality, people live with the dilemma of how to represent or live through this potentiality.

Neptune in Aquarius reveals that the ultimate issues of painful disillusionment and despair against hope and aspiration constellate around the Aquarian themes of the nature of humanity (its shared experience and common goals). The questions are around the nature of trauma and how to heal from trauma, the nature of detachment from purely individual concerns or processes in consciousness, and the nature of Individuation, of how, in essence, to become a whole person. The process of becoming one’s own person is a process that once again, by definition, returns us to the issue of how to liberate oneself from conditioning (or at the very least – it being rather hard to escape from the time and society in which one lives – to understand the nature of that conditioning and develop choices based on that knowledge). This is one of the ways that Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Aquarius relate to each other at this time. Pluto in Capricorn holds to the level and depth of conditioning influences on the individual and the collective, and Neptune in Aquarius reveals the impulse towards painful awakening from such influences. This is painful in part because it is always a process of progressive disillusionment to realize who or what has shaped one’s unconscious processes, and painful because the nature of society appears essentially conservative, and in many cultures throughout history any form of liberation has been achieved only through deep struggle.

The last time Uranus was in late Pisces was in the build-up to the Wall Street Crash (Oct 24 1929 it begins with Uranus Rx in Aries, Uranus in late Pisces 1925-27) revealing its capacity to represent waves of unrest, experimentation and ultimately evolutionary change within the collective. In this period hyper-inflation due to intense speculation within the marketplace had catastrophic effects ultimately on the economies of the western world, a theme not entirely dissimilar to the ‘trial by fire’ burning through the banking sectors of the western economies today. Here the mutual reception between Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces reveals that the intention within these changes is to produce awakening… We may note in this sense that from an ecological and conservationist perspective economic slowdown may be the one way to guarantee the reduction of the impact of the Industrial world upon nature and the earth’s resources. We may also note complex issues around the nature of the personal and collective conscious and unconscious in this symbolism whereby Neptune/Pisces (collective unconscious) and Uranus/Aquarius (personal individuated unconscious) are so intertwined. They are beyond the scope of this present essay to articulate but essentially illustrate that the life of the individual always has a role in some way in shaping the collective, but in transitional times this role may be emphasized or even magnified.

Jung’s working definition of an ‘archetype’ was a “preconscious psychic disposition that enables a (person) to react in a human manner.” and we argue within this essay that the astrological archetypes function in such a fashion by describing the range of potentialities existing at a subtle level just beneath our conscious awareness. As such how we choose to work such existing potentials is essentially to decide how we will live our lives within the life of the time in which we live (the zeitgeist). In this time we hope to illustrate that via Pluto’s transition of Capricorn, its own south node and the south node of Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, we can observe that as a civilisation we have arrived at some kind of fulcrum whereby we have to come to terms with the trajectory of society. In particular, we must attend to society as it has emerged since the Industrial revolution and through the planetary nodes, even further back, to the origins of the first settlements, and the first agroculturalists. The nature of this confrontation with our own past, just as when we are confronted with challenging material from our own personal past, leaves open a variety of possibilities: we can run screaming, bury our heads in the sand, party as the ship sinks, or we can take in our surroundings and make a choice. Society will always change, these changes may be far reaching, but how we respond is down to us. As a trainer or ours, a grey lion of a man once emphasized, you cannot decide your fate necessarily but you can choose whether you will undergo the process that will allow you to claim that fate as your destiny. When you say yes to your fate, it becomes your destiny. These words, from a man who has since died, illustrate the crucial nature of responsibility in a world where there is no ultimate control: you may not stop what will happen but that does not necessarily make you a victim. You may die of a long term illness, as he did, you may fall in the worlds many wars or in peace time atrocities, however this life is book-ended there is always the capacity for the human being to transform the material of their life into their story, their meaning, the healing fiction of their dance with fate becoming destiny, bringing meaning from the chaos, activating spiritual will.

In Psychosynthesis terms, such a process could be represented like so -

As a star growing out of chaos around the still point of the I-Self axis, with access to the personal will (and its six major areas of activity and personality functioning) and to the transpersonal (collective, spiritual) aspects in which they are nested.

Which brings us back full circle to Nietzsche, who once wrote, intuiting and anticipating these things:

Books By:

Roberto Assagioli

Jeffrey Wolf Green

Richard Heinberg

Derrick Jensen

C G Jung

Friedrich Nietzsche

Web-based:

http://www.futurescenarios.org/

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

Film & Video:

What A Way To Go ( http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/)

The End of Suburbia

Evolutionary Astrology & Personal Psychosynthesis
by Keith Hackwood & Mark Jones

Meaning & the Multidisciplinary Mandala

In this article it is our intention to eavesdrop on the interesting and engaging dialogue that is ongoing even now, between the therapeutic modality of Psychosynthesis and the visionary totality of Evolutionary Astrology (EA) as expressed in the books ‘Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul’ and ‘Pluto II: The Soul’s Evolution Through Relationships’. In so doing we will be paying our dues to the founders of each tradition, the little known Roberto Assagioli and the largely unknown Jeffrey Wolf Green, two men very much of their time whose scintillating ideas and systems have yet to have their full impact upon our world, and whose obvious differences draw a quality of harmonic resonance, one from the other. It is this complementarity that we wish to explore in the following article, rather than any specialist technical or overly fastidious accounts of the operations of astrology or therapy as modes of knowing the world.

Firstly, let us say something about astrology in general and Jeff Green’s system of Evolutionary Astrology in particular. The zodiac, upon which all western astrology depends, carries twelve signs or constellations made up of archetypes grouped in six pairs of opposites (such as Leo-Aquarius or Aries-Libra) which hold the creative tension and spectrum of possibilities engendered therein. In the fullest sense, the zodiac is therefore a symbolic representation of the totality of consciousness in potential. All possibilities and manifestations of consciousness are representable (and, so, knowable) by means of the zodiacal wheel.In much the same way as Assagioli’s Egg diagram is a model of the operation of consciousness and the movements of the psyche, so the zodiac describes similar movements within a cosmic field, knowable via an individual birthchart, but always placed in the trans-human context of apparently vast movements of time (for example, no human being will experience the full cycle of certain planets used within astrology, since the period of their orbits around the sun is greater than that of a human life; for example Pluto takes 244 years to complete one orbit and hence is said to operate in generational, as well as purely personal octaves. Contrast this with, say, Mars, which takes 2 years to orbit the sun, and therefore has a much more ‘personal’ cyclic influence). Also like the Egg diagram, the zodiac is a map, and as we all know useful as any map certainly is, it is not the territory. Astrology, and especially Evolutionary astrology then, operates by means of wheels within wheels – creatively angelic, like the descriptions of Ezekiel and like the observed motions of the heavens above our benighted heads.

All civilizations and cultures have made use of astrology and often developed its precision and effectiveness to levels of refinement to rival anything our projective technological worldview has manifested. It is in this tradition that we wish to place Jeffrey Wolf Green and EA, and for this reason that we will argue for EA as offering much to the psychotherapeutic endeavour. So what makes EA special?

Firstly, we would do well to note its focus, which is primarily placed upon the distant planet Pluto. Pluto, god of the underworld in Roman mythology (Hades in the Greek pantheon), twinned with its moon Charon (the ferryman), speak deeply of intensity. Pluto rules the eighth zodiacal sign Scorpio, which is often characterised in newspaper or ‘cookbook’ astrology as being about sex, death and inheritance. For EA the Pluto/Scorpio archetype is the soul. The soul is viewed through the lens of Pluto, in all its incarnational history, with all its stored potential and wounding, without taboo, without judgement, but with absolute honesty, necessity and intensity. Simply put, this is why EA is of interest, not only to astrologers or even transpersonal therapists, but to clients – to us all. It provides a methodology by means of which we can engage with the language of soul – the logos of soul, psychology. Hence, for EA Pluto is the natural psychologist, who brings penetration and depth to the experience of being a soul. From a psychosynthesis point of view we might call this experience whereby soul integrates into personality, the I. Similarly, the dialogue between an individual soul and the archetype of Pluto as Soul mirrors our understanding of the I-Self axis, an inseparable double-mirroring of the timeless Self within the lived body, the wave and the particle simultaneously participating in an indivisible revelation, the generative mystery of which we could call, with Keats, conscious soulmaking.

The question now arises, to what extent does EA impact upon or inform therapeutic work?

The Sky (Right Now) At NightLet us begin to address the question we have set by means of a tour of the major thematic emphases to be found in the night sky at the time of writing (Easter 2005). The most striking notes, from an EA perspective, are sounded by Pluto (currently in Sagittarius), Uranus in Pisces, Neptune in Aquarius and Saturn’s movement from Cancer into Leo.

That Evolutionary Astrology provides a clear methodology to identify these prior life traumas is an enormous gift. That so many have developed such therapeutic precision and insight over the last century of the evolution of modern psychotherapy is another tremendous gift. The proposal, at least in part, of this analysis of the planetary positions in the sky and their meaning for us as human beings is that there are the beginnings of a cross fertilisation between these two disciplines. The work of Robert Sardello in such texts as ‘Love and the World’ and ‘The Soul of the World’ have shown what kind of interchange can occur between thinkers as profound and diverse as Jung and Steiner. In this essay, encouraged by some of the initial meditations on the nature of the transpersonal planets we propose that extending this dialogue toward Evolutionary Astrology and allowing its intense reply could open up whole new areas that as Synthesists we wish to nurture.

Just as in an individual’s chart Pluto is our bottom line so within the collective picture does it contain an underlying theme of the evolutionary dynamics of any given time within the collective. Pluto in Sagittarius speaks powerfully about the nature of truth, the experience of faith and the fundamental or natural laws underpinning creation. Jeffrey Wolf Green’s work in bringing EA into the world has emphasized the seminal notion of natural laws working within the totality of creation (as symbolised by the 12 archetypes within Astrology). A natural law may be contrasted with a man-made law. It is a man-made law for example in Britain that one must pay 40% tax if one earns over a certain figure, it is a natural law, for example, intrinsic to Psyche that we do not encourage children in our care to go and play on a motorway! At points man-made law and natural law co-incide, for instance in the realization that there is always a cost or price to pay for taking another’s life; at points they depart, in for example the notion that this cost is reversed as a prize in examples of genocide throughout the world. Without wishing to pin these fundamental natural laws to anything as clumsy as a list Jeffrey Wolf Green traces the origin of these laws and our dialogue about their use or our judgments about them through an analysis of Pluto’s Nodes.

Very few astrologer’s much less the general reader are aware that all planet’s have nodes, not just the famed example of the Moon’s nodes. The Nodes themselves represent an abstract point in space where the orbit of the planet intersects the ecliptic on which the circle of wheel of the zodiac resides. The upward or ascending motion of the planet creates the North Node the descending motion the South Node. Just as in EA we are able to trace the history of any given person through the south node of the moon so we can trace the history of any planetary function through its own nodes. In the case of Pluto the South Node is in Capricorn, which leads us to meditation on the underlying history of Pluto, the issue of the unconscious and depth security within the Soul stem at this time, from within the Capricorn archetype. Within this archetype, through the phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes, the shift from astrological age to age, most famously in the much heard cry in our own time of the transition from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age, Green notes the phenomena of sub-ages: that half-way through the approximately 2,000 years of each age its sub-age, or polarized archetype comes into influence. On this calculation the age of Capricorn as a sub-age of Cancer would be seen to predominate around 6,500 B.C. a time which Green links (via for example the anthropological work of Riane Eisler in texts such as ‘The Chalice and The Blade’ and ‘Sacred Pleasure’) to the rise of a patriarchal society from the vestiges of the prior matriarchy.

With the South Node of Pluto in our time in Capricorn we could posit on a larger collective level that we are all born with deep security issues stemming from this transition and the resulting imbalances that this transition has brought through culture and religion. Is this born out through our experience today? By this reckoning some of the fundamental struggle for truth, for a living definition of religious experience or faith, that comes through Pluto moving through Sagittarius would include a massive struggle within patriarchal systems of political and religious thought, the difference if you like between natural and man-made laws. I think most of us would agree that this broad backdrop contains many of the issues that dominate our time with the rise of the Christian right and the neo-conservatives in the U.S, with the rise of fundamentalism in that form and through the Islamic world. On a more personal level it can be sensed within the ongoing struggle for equality within the world, for at the heart of the Sagittarius archetype
is a nomadic experience, a tribal origin in the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, itself a patriarchal branding. As books such as Marlo Morgan’s ‘Mutant Message Down Under’ clearly echo the work of many anthropologists that the ‘primitive’ cultures held a wisdom within their relationship to the environment and to each other that is simply breathtaking in its complex harmony with the consciousness of the earth. Indeed the phenomena of this consciousness, that James Lovelock called ‘Gaia’, is another correspondence with the Sagittarius archetype in EA. The movement of Pluto, harbinger of death and transformation through Sagittarius denotes a clear shift in our recognition of our involvement with Gaia as we struggle to surpass the history of our involvement as simply takers from the earth (Pluto South Node in Capricorn) through the illusion of our supremacy through the Industrial revolution and our cataclysmic attitude to the earth’s resources.

It is within this collective picture that we see our clients who are appalled at such injustice, who vent their anger on protests against war and the rape of the third world. Here we place our own dialogue with what is true, against the memories of so many distortions of that truth. Within Sagittarius at its most realized spirituality is a natural phenomena of existing within the earth’s love on a conscious level, through Capricorn and the resulting distortion of patriarchy the earth is like woman, a secondary force that must be held subservient to the priest/man and his needs. The earth and woman must be covered or else bowed before the phallic light. Indeed from this perspective all consciousness emerges from this solar light energy, even as evolutionary biologists begin to discover that creation needs only heat in the depths of the ocean to create from her womb.

In the archetype of Neptune we find the collective unconscious in EA, we find the divinity, the final surrender to the totality within the final archetype. The South Node of Neptune is in Aquarius, at a point where Neptune has just been transiting the last few years, returning to its own origins. These are origins, to follow Green’s meditation on the ages that stem from the last Aquarian Age 25,000 years ago! A time that in his far meditation (not dissimilar to the level on which Rudolf Steiner based the parameters of his teaching) Green associates with the culmination of the matriarchy, its high cultural phase. Green’s vision of the matriarchy is held within certain native cultures still alive today, even partly their glories lie in the imagination such as the native American Indians or the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin etc – a life characterized by living within the boundaries of what the earth can provide, characterized by giving, sharing and inclusion. In such societies being ostracised from the tribe represents the ultimate punishment and often-literal death. Within such cultures equality was key -from the shaman to the humble fruit picker all were respected, as all were essential to the good of all. It is this loss within patriarchy of the sense of connection on an essential level to the others working with and for you that is so causal in the alienation so much a part of the Aquarian archetype in today’s world. Whilst Green is inviting no simple return to primitivism a la Rousseau he certainly challenges through his meditations on the origins of Planetary functions (through their Nodes) the complacency of the modern consciousness in its tenuous grasp on the more existential concerns.

Much of the alienation coming through the Aquarian archetype today stems also from the relation of Aquarius and Uranus to trauma. This is one of the key insights within Green’s Evolutionary Astrology relevant to all today, and maybe especially therapists, with Neptune in Aquarius at the same time as Uranus is in Pisces. This is what Astrologer’s call a mutual reception – because the ruler of Pisces (Neptune) is in Aquarius at the same time as the ruler of Aquarius (Uranus) is in Pisces. At its highest Neptune corresponds to healing through reconnection to spirit. Aquarius/Uranus corresponds to far memory, a memory of the earliest events of this life, memory of inter-uterine experiences so carefully recorded through Stan Grof’s extensive research and his identification of Basic Peri-natal Matrices, and also, through EA, a memory of other lives, the prior lives of the Soul or mind-stream as it manifests extensions of itself throughout the space-time continuum. Within this far memory Evolutionary Astrology delineates the impacts of history, both personal and collective, in the development of each self as held within the natal chart and influenced by the planetary conditions in the sky at each time.

With this mutual reception of the Piscean and Aquarian archetypes we are pointed to the highest goal or potential of healing and reconnection to spirit (Pisces/Neptune) which takes place through the individuation journey or reintegrating the self within all its experiences contained within far memory (Aquarius/ Uranus). Green’s genius in Evolutionary Astrology has been to identify a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder effecting people from prior lives. A Vietnam war veteran himself whose encounter with a Vietnamese Buddhist monk whilst serving with the U.S. Marines led him after the war to several temples in the U.S. and a reconnection with his teacher Paramahansa Yogananda, Green is no stranger to the issues of trauma. Whilst serving within the war he was exposed to vicious Agent Orange poisoning which leaves him even now too weak to travel and teach as he used and led to one of his children being born with a genetic disorder congruent with the kind of damage he himself suffered. Yet in his analysis through his own profound relationship to the astrological signatures Green has been able to identify the causes of many issues and traumas in the present life within prior life events. For example in this life he was born with a strange birth mark on his chest and a residual anger that led him into the Vietnam war in the first place (in a kind of ‘prison or fight’ deal offered by the American authorities). He would later understand through prior life recall a life as a native American Indian rushing home from a successful hunt to see his family butchered and find himself shot in the chest as vainly he tried to save them.

Outside of his personal story, which we recount partly here simply as context, Green has been able to explore the Plutonic question ‘why?’ within astrology to take western astrology to a depth that previous only eastern modes held – i.e. a direct understanding of how prior life causes shape the current life and destiny. If we take the meditations on the planetary placements in the sky now in Easter 2005 and their history of origin through the planetary nodes we can see a general healing and therapeutic concern for all of us working in the healing professions whether we work directly with it or not. This is a crucial point for by working intensively with the issues in the present, by allowing the archetypes of that work through dreams and visualisations or just through the intensity of the encounter, we build the temenos in which such healing can occur. Not that direct work is unnecessary, as Psychosynthesis therapists we may open to, say, hypnotherapy to explore these very avenues for the benefit of the experiential integration of those we work with. Yet even with the less direct approach we are concerned here to make the case for how serious this enterprise of integration
within the far memory can be – so many of our clients today have issues and are profoundly stuck upon themes and problems that originated and were often compounded through trauma in previous lives. The condition of the planets in the sky at this present point make clear that acknowledgment and the initiation of healing modalities to work with and through this realisation are part of the shift required as we move from the Piscean to Aquarian Age.

In analysing the South Node of Uranus we return to the theme we began with as it resides in Sagittarius – i.e. the nature of our individuation (Aquarius/Uranus) lies in our capacity to experience our own truth, our inner wholeness. Just as Ken Wilber in his multi-dimensional model of the human psyche identifies the centauric stage as the integration of the body-mind (only possible through retraction or awareness of the persona and relative integration of the shadow) so through Sagittarius, the centaur, the teacher of the hero’s, the being who integrates animal (horse), man (upper body) and spirit (through the flight of the arrow of truth) are our may aspects unified into the field of our personal truth if we can find a way to be with that truth within the world. As Sardello so simply and so radically pointed out it is no good simply to enter therapy as a fantasy, a recollection with our innerness, such innerness is inert or as so much candy floss where compared to a lived experience within the field whereby such innerness is simply openness to the sophianic stream of the Soul of the World rushing back to meet us as innerness steps outside. All our individuated power stems from our relationship in truth with the natural laws of this living Cosmos, all trauma originates in the breaking of this tryst between our individual being as it exists with the being-of-all. All trauma is simply and ultimately a lie, all lies whether from oneself to another or simply within oneself will generate trauma…

In Evolutionary Astrology in distinction from most other Western forms of astrology, Saturn/Capricorn is perceived as the structure of consciousness, both from the level of how we structure our own individual consciousness to the nature of the space-time reality in which we inhabit the 3D world. In its polarity, Cancer/Moon, we have the nature of the individual ego, the formative experiences of the early home-life, the nature of emotional imprinting and via the polarity, Saturn, the structure of the emotional body, the nature of the ego type. As Saturn makes the shift from Cancer to Leo we see symbolically a collective shift in the structure of consciousness from one of individual security, true security coming essentially from within, from an acceptance of the self and the particular formative experiences that shaped it into a need to engage with the endeavour of building or actualising that self through its own creative engagement with the world. In this way, for the next two and a half years, the structural principle of consciousness as it manifests through the collective (and by definition we can thereby only talk of generalised influences in this context) invites us to an increased engagement with our creativity and the feedback such creativity engenders between ourselves, the community and world in which we live. In a way this essay, a collaboration between two friends in their mutual encouragement of each other’s creativity, is a statement within that general shift. A desire to put one’s creativity on the line, to risk a response from the world in whatever way it may choose, to risk to think and create from multiple platforms in a way that sustains the multiple ways in which the self has perceived its own creative evolution within the world and the myriad of different teachings that have aided such a project. Whilst this is always an issue in life, just as there is always a Saturn and always a Leo archetype, whilst Saturn lives inside Leo such issues are focussed and highlighted within the collective psyche.

So what?So what, indeed. What opinions might we be able to form in relation to this information gleaned from a quick tour of the night sky at this time? How might it be helpful to us as busy, professional therapeutic practitioners with heavy client-loads and little enough time as it is? Well, in lieu of personal answers to these relevant questions, the first evident point to make is that the sky provides us with information out of which we can decode archetypal context for any individual life (our own included) on earth at this time. We can begin to place ourselves and our clients within a specific matrix of energies being triggered and shaped through cosmic motion and soulful intervention within the collective. This may in turn give us an unique perspective from which to view the issues being brought to us, the themes developing in our own professional and private lives, and the ‘thing most needful’ (where such exists and can be known). It is also a wonderfully elevated platform from which to study cultural psychopathology, but more of that in Part 2.

In the interests of grounding this starry gnosis, gleaned as it is from way above our heads, it is important to speak of the body. Not just the physical, cellular body, the locus of activity for soul interfacing with world (for bioPsychosynthesis), but also the emotional body, and for what some healers have termed the ‘knowing field’ generated between therapist and client in a successful enough I-Thou state. We have all had the experience, be it alone or with an Other, but what is the content we access at such times? What is it we see-feel, that is bigger than our I-personality, more vivid than our subpersonalities and yet doggedly elusive and mysterious, even as it affects us in the moment? For EA the answer is simple – we are encountering the stored residues of our own prior lives as information in the here and now. The soul (Pluto) remembers, and since soul is no other than body in a state of natural law (only distorted patriarchal monotheisms insist upon a splitting off of soul from body, and a subsequent dualistic masochism of body hatred and transcendent yearning) the body, in its cell-structures, also retains the information of all life, morphogenetically resonant and available right now. For the same reason (patriarchal distortion) we can also posit the notion that many of our prior lives within the gestalt of ‘history’ have included deep woundings – deep trauma – through the misshaping of the natural by the transcender hierarchy (for example, a life lived as a native forcefully taken from a culture of matriarchy and suddenly subject to the impositions of empire manifested in religious terms (one god not many) as well as social/economic terms (slavery), producing pain, trauma, perhaps brutality and death, certainly confusion, despair, maybe guilt, anger, fear – all of which the soul remembers and seeks to work through, not only alone but also in relation to those other soul’s whose paths intertwine with ours). This is where we discover the ‘evolutionary’ part of Evolutionary Astrology, in the notion of the soul evolving in relation to the personality through time, not only within the span of a single life, but across many, many lives. Jeff Green proposes that because of this we are all born, to some degree, already traumatised – trailing not only Wordsworthian ‘clouds of glory’ but also personal and collective traumas of the deepest, most impenetrable kind.

At this point we should also note the ways in which EA connects very well with certain other therapeutic modes, most notably that of prior-life regression work as that carried out under the ægis of post-Erickson hypnotherapy. Also worthy of note is the work of the Dutch regression therapist Hans Ten Dam, whose incredible book ‘Deep Healing’ ties in very precisely with the operation of EA, as well as offering much to the Psychosynthesis approach.

The emotional body, the physical body and the knowing-field create a matrix through which the therapist can assist the client in orientating him or herself in relation to their prior-life trauma. The prior-life trauma in and of itself, is no different than the issues which they present (or obfuscate) in their current life, this is not about some highly wrought mysticism or baroque psychism, but rather the concrete operation of healing through time via the only time that exists, the Now. One tell-tale sign of the proximity of prior-life material, which again we have, no doubt all experienced, is that of the response-that-is-out-of-all-proportion-to-the-apparent-stimulus. In other words the client whose thoughts and feelings seem excessive in relation to the trigger – the woman who knows her husband is cheating on her no matter what the assurances of ‘reality’, or the man who feels inadequate in his inner-life and cannot form relationships, no matter how supportive his environment or how perfect (or ordinary) his childhood. There are countless variants of course, but the emotional tone and the frequency of repetition within the clients’ awareness are clear significators of prior-life trauma. As is current life trauma, since in evolutionary terms we often get stuck where we always got stuck, or become enmeshed in the archetypal patterns we have not yet ensouled. In EA these issues are often referred to as ‘skipped steps’ and they show up regularly in the birth charts of clients – pointing clearly at ‘the elephant in the living room’ from the soul’s point of view, and requiring the conscious resolution of current and prior-life traumas in relation to the specifics of the original wounding (be it learned guilt, sadomasochism, an overpowering sense of lack, a need to dominate and oppress or whatever other form it might manifest within). The soul mediates time through the language of psyche – in other words, when we are in the place of our I we have access, through the Self, to all of our karmic experiences in all apparent times – when we are fully ‘in the now’ we are, mysteriously, in every ‘now’ we have experienced – not as Keith Hackwood or Mark Jones, but as a soul. From the soul’s own side (which ego and even I can never know) time is a sort of play-dough, colourful, useful for making shapes, expressive – but prone to dry out and become dead and useless, and utterly foul to the taste!

Me, Myself & I-ThouAs we have seen, from the larger sweep of the transhistorical perspective we can trace a human movement from prehistoric hunter-gatherer nomad to agricultural matriarchy, in which certain principles of natural law appear. From this point the story becomes increasingly one of patriarchal dominance, reflected in the increasing usage of metals, the technology of weaponry and the organisation of priest-king and state structures. The necessary balance sought by the individual soul occurs within a context of global, generational and cosmic soul patterns and cycles, and within the individual soul level another useful calibration can be posited. For EA this calibration is grouped around nine divisions in three broad stages – the so-called evolutionary stages. It is important at this point to note that
these stages are described primarily in terms of state, not station – so in their application to a client, or to ourselves, or for that matter, to the varying dynamics of our subpersonality populations, it is the basic state where our consciousness resides on a day to day level that we are aligning with and naming. Hence, when we learn that there are three major categorisations of soul, Consensus, Individuated and Spiritual, and that each has three stages (first, second and third) we take the lid of a host of self-judging and fantasising dynamics (‘I must be first stage spiritual’, ‘I can’t possibly be in the consensus’ or whatever), hence it is important that we use our critical distance, our deepest and highest sense of where our soul is, in its manifestation through our relationships and activities in the world. All souls are equal in potential, the spiritually realised state is always possible and available – and yet the workings through of karma, the resolution of ‘skipped steps’, the healing necessities of our unresolved trauma in relation to self, world and other all affect our state and colour the nature of our ‘ground of being’.

It is said, very broadly and imprecisely, but by way of clarification, that at any given time 80% of souls manifesting on Earth will be in the broadly consensus state – meaning that their concerns will primarily be with the here and now of material existence, of this life and this life alone, of power dynamics that are most at home in dominating others or projecting needs outwards. This state resembles the herds of the animal kingdoms, with its higher ends representing leaders of the state, much as modern politicians do. In the consensus there is nothing to be gained from seriously questioning anything – reality stops at the end of the nose. A good example of the consensus state is the way in which people believe what they are meant to believe, without question or personal enquiry – astrology is hokum, say the astronomers – and so it is for most people.

A further 15-18% of souls will be in the individuating state – which in turn is said to be the state in which the soul spends the longest amount of time and undergoes the most desperate afflictions, tests and sense of alienation. Here we find everyone from the terrorist to the psychotherapist, engaging with the forms of a social and global structure, which will largely be experienced, as marginalizing and threatening to the emergent sense of ‘I’. The key threshold of the individuation state is to realise the necessity of the spiritual (not the religious, since organised religion largely exists in the consensus state, as a means of mass control more than a means towards enlightened soul-realisation). The final 2% or so of souls incarnating at a given time will be those in the three spiritual states, moving through karma of teaching, of releasing guru projections, of developing the purity of their teachings and agency in the world.

From a therapeutic point of view it is highly unlikely that the bulk of people who are primarily identified with consensus reality would ever present for counselling or therapy (or an astrological consultation, for that matter), except where such activities are culturally sanctioned (witness, say, the mainstream ‘acceptability’ of yoga in the last decade or so – and the way in which it ceases to be about the royal road to conscious evolution through dedicated yogic practice and becomes more a lifestyle choice, a marketing opportunity, a diet/exercise fad for ex-Spice Girls, and ultimately, a pale imitation of what ‘yoga’ truly means. This is how the consensus operates, to retain control in a small hierarchy and maintain the status
quo at all costs). Similarly, it is equally unlikely that anyone in the higher spiritual states would ever present for therapy, both because of their relative rarity, and due to the fact that their basic evolutionary state would, by definition, be developed beyond the psychological. This is not to say that any individual great teacher or guru does not still have issues, emotionally or psychologically, regarding control or value, or desire energy – however, such issues are encountered through the vaster parts of the being that are already connected with realised spiritual states (interestingly, it is within spiritual organisations that this dynamic most surfaces as something potentially workable by means of psychotherapy, an opportunity for group Psychosynthesis as a counter to the anti-shadow, pathology of the sublime that can arise in and around highly spiritualised teachers and communities).

The vast majority of any practitioner’s clients will emerge from those 18% or so of souls currently identified with the individuated state, so it is these we shall concentrate on a little deeper. Whilst all souls are equal in an absolute sense, some are more equal than others from the relative perspective of any given moment in time. Those in the first stage of the individuated state will largely be characterised by the dynamics of the ‘inner lie’. In other words, their outer lives may relate very strongly to the consensus, they will generally have jobs (often good jobs) and be outwardly attached to the culturally acceptable goals of success, the accumulation of wealth, security and so on. However, their secret lives will mirror the growing split between the outer appearance and the inner reality – the swelling gnosis that what was once enough no longer suffices. The right job, house, car, partner, holiday, hairstyle, diet, friends or clothes increasingly fail to paper over the cracks apparent in the psyche. It is as though the soul knows that these objects are not where life’s focus needs to be. Often there ensues a series of life events or crises to ‘force the issue’ and bring the soul in question into confronting itself in the light of these issues. This leads us to the second stage of the individuated state, perhaps the point of maximum isolation and alienation from the soul’s perspective, and often the most confusing and painful point on the journey of the personality self. Here it is as though everything is broken. Consensus reality no longer works for the individual, it seems little more than a hollow sham. However, the crisis ensuing from leaving the herd has not yet resolved itself – the state mirrors that of the caterpillar inside the pupæ, melting its form and yet not yet unfolding the blueprint of the form to come. Hence, it is a time of maximum vulnerability, and a place wherein many souls have received much wounding, as they work to shed prior-life conditionings, and yet, typically, meet with no validation from the world around them or the people they share their lives with. This is the archetypal place of terrorist leaders, for example, acting out their alienation and, often, inherently more evolved than the political leaders they seek to overthrow. What matters most here is freedom, absolute radical freedom. And yet what manifests is often a distortion, an enactment of the woundedness rather than the healing potential of the situation, and hence often retraumatising occurs (for self and others).

Therapeutically, building trust and the good-enough therapeutic relationship with person’s whose primary identification is with the second stage of individuated consciousness is a substantial challenge. These are souls in extremis, some will take a suicidal trajectory, some will act out in self-harming, eating disorders,
addictions of all kinds and a host of other gnarly psychopathologies, railing against the existential meaninglessness of human suffering and angry to the depths of their being. However, it is precisely this client group that a modality such as Psychosynthesis (which allows individual freedoms, holds its own models lightly enough and with a fly-by-wire subtlety and precision, and yet also offers the maps through which a soul may encounter its broadest dimensions in a safely non-dogmatic way) can serve most effectively. It serves us as therapists to realise that, at least from an EA perspective, this is what we are often engaged with in the counselling room – the business of soulmaking, soul-reparation, prior and present life healing and the envisioning of uncensored potential pathways towards the stabilised ‘I’, and beyond. The deepest need of the second stage individuated person is to find their own freely chosen and inwardly validated spiritual path. Few (if any) will use this language or frame their issues this way, and yet the application of even basic EA techniques, as shown here, demonstrates the truth of the assertion. We are, as someone said, midwives of soul; and as someone else said, no community is complete until it can hold its own births and deaths consciously – so, as a community of transpersonal therapists, we are not only in the midwife business, but if we are authentic, we also often perform the functions of the executioner, the headsman, removing false hopes of a return to regressive consensus states, or flights of superego fancy. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the client pays us – as in the past one paid the hangman or axeman, to ensure a noble, swift and clean death. The stakes in our work are often that high, whether we are always conscious of them or not.

Let us conclude this section by talking of the third stage of the individuated state. Natives of this state will be seeking to understand their unique individuality as distinct from society and to act accordingly in authentic and integrative ways, whilst also attending to their ‘baggage’ – their relationships to others (who may or may not share their evolutionary state), their need to become congruent in all the major areas of their lives (issues such as creating ‘right work’ or resolving longstanding difficulties with parents for example). Again, a therapy such as Psychosynthesis has a great deal to offer to people in this state, especially as they move to explore the leading edge of their innate spirituality and to generate forms for expressing this in authentic, worldly ways. It is also a highly creative state, and often responds well to the kind of visualisation work found in, for instance, Pierro Ferucci’s work.

Would You Believe?Evolution, broadly speaking, happens in one of two major ways – either through a cataclysmic event or crisis, or via a continual growth. This is as true for the soul’s evolutionary journey as it is for the origin of species from a materialist point of view. The shaping and growth of the soul through time, as described through the techne of EA, coupled to the mapping of consciousness and the therapeutic applications made possible through modes such as Psychosynthesis, together constitute a threshold moment for psychology itself. The potential exists for the founding of principled, open and synthetic means of arriving at human understanding of the totality of consciousness through the lived experience of an individual life in relation to the cosmic context, the marriage of the vertical and horizontal axes. This (and other) form(s) of spiritual technology equips us to work multidimensionally with our own experiences, as well as those of our clients. As the soul is divided for the sake of consciousness, so it returns to a unified state in the name of that same consciousness, now fully expressed and cyclically ripe to dissolve. This is the story of separating desires moving through the desire for reunification with oneness – the soul’s story, the story whispered by Pluto, who sometimes speaks of Love and Will. Let’s conclude this first part of our exploration of EA/Psychosynthesis, with its emphasis on the personal journey, with a quote from the guru and inner-teacher of Jeffrey Green, Paramahansa Yogananda.

“Mankind is engaged in an eternal quest for that ‘something else’ he hopes will bring him happiness, complete and unending. For those individual Souls who have sought and found God, the search is over, He is that something else.”

Man’s Eternal Quest

15.3.05

Works CitedEisler, Riane; The Chalice & The Blade, Thorson’s, London 1990
Eisler, Riane; Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth & the Politics of the Body, New Paths to Power & Love, Element Books, Shaftsbury, Dorset, 1996
Green, Jeff; Pluto Volume 1: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul, Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota, 1998
Green, Jeffrey Wolf; Pluto Volume II: The Soul’s Evolution Through Relationships, Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota, 2000 Morgan, Marlo; Mutant Message Down Under, Harper Collins, London, 1994 Sardello, Robert; Love & the World: A Guide to Conscious Soul Practice,
Lindisfarne Books, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 2001 Ten Dam, Hans; Deep Healing: A Practical Outline of Past-Life Therapy, Tasso Publishing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1996