Hello everyone. I'd just like to make a quick announcement. I've been working on a book for the last few months, and I'm excited to announce that the major work is complete and the book is now in the editing process. The book is tentatively titled: Healing the Soul: the Lunar and Planetary nodes in Evolutionary Astrology. We're hoping to release the book near October, just before the next Evolutionary Astrology conference this fall.

“My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like steel shavings around the magnet. But a work of art does not necessarily have at its center a single long floating leap. The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem. A poet who is ‘leaping’ makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance.”

So wrote Robert Bly in a pamphlet in the 1970’s reissued recently in Leaping Poetry, a magical essay on art, interwoven with many of his free flowing translations of poetry from around the world. This is his statement of the meaning of freedom, of a spacious movement inside one’s being that resides at the heart of a poetry that has the capacity to move us. This is the space, the impulse towards soaring inner freedom, that I propose lies at the core of the Capricorn archetype, a principle normally associated with the structures of society and consciousness and the nature of conditioning: within the heart of the home of Capricorn lies the deep seated yearning for inner freedom.

So powerful is this need that many defenses (Saturn) are created by the psyche under the aegis of Capricorn, many armoured layers of protection against this potential leap of consciousness, this impulse for freedom. One part yearns for the leap, another part, fearful of chaos and all that might ensue in the new life (born free) generates restriction, born from anxiety. In this way we psychologically chose to participate in the strictures of conditioning that appear around us. By implication just as we chose them through fear, we could un-chose them as an act of liberation.

In recent posts I have been discussing the issue of lack of meaning in the modern world and that Evolutionary Astrology in its radicalism (claiming insight into the nature of the Soul’s desires and the present and past life selves it manifests to explore those desires) can only be understood by a return to meaning implied by the understanding of symbolic correspondence epitomized by the hermetic maxim, “As above, so below”.

Now I wish focus a little on the meaning of the term ‘evolutionary’ and by exploring that as a theme in and of itself, how that might illuminate the context overall of a truly Evolutionary Astrology.

I was recently introduced to Henryk Skolimowski, a Polish professor of Ecological Philosophy, in whose writing I’ve discovered a free-thinking, mystical utterly reverent radical viewpoint about the spiritual dimension of our current struggles as a civilization.

He offers a supremely optimistic counter to the lack of vision implied in the idea of world-as-machine that is so implicit in our technological fantasies and waste. As part of this vision Skolimowski honours the importance of evolution, the problems it poses to our understanding in the face of its scale and the joy of the life force that, in its dynamism and variety, shine forth:

“Yet we have a problem with evolution. It is so large. It cannot be contained in any definition. It is expressed in everything, but it cannot be expressed in words. In wanting to catch evolution in a net of words we are chasing the continually evasive phantom of becoming. How can we comprehend the totality of evolution, while we cannot express its meaning in crisp definitions? By pointing at this Enormous Phenomenon of Life in its various processes becoming. The glory of evolution is the slimy little amoeba beginning to react to the environment semi-intelligently. The glory of evolution is the first eagle stretching its wings. The glory of evolution is the first monkey using a stick as a tool. The glory of evolution is the Vedic hymns conceived in silence and expressed then in ecstatic rapture. The glory of evolution is the monumental Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis of Newton, attempting to express all visible nature in quantative laws. The glory of evolution is our reflective mind reflecting on the glory of evolution."

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Guiding Stars Radio Show

Listen to this interview with Mark from Kristin Fontana's Guiding Stars Radio show March 2011

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"(Some people think that the) movements of planets in the heavens cannot influence the lives of men on earth. It would be rather a crude definition of astrology which said that they could; the real interpretation is more vast and more profound: that the entire universe is one tremendous harmony, that the same forces are at work in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the cosmos and the individual, that the tendencies in a man and the events in his life flow to the same rhythm as the planetary movements in the skies; that, although the intricacy of the arrangement would make a mathematician's mind reel, no individual can be born except at the moment when the position of the heavens is such as to mirror his nature and destiny. It is a typical misunderstanding which led some people in camp to argue that a man's character is not formed by the positions of the stars at his birth but by heredity. Actually, it is never said that the positions of the stars form a man's character but that they indicate it; and heredity is one of the influences which they indicate. It often happens that several members of a family are born at about the same time of day or have birthdays at about the same date, and both of these are varieties of family likeness which would show in a horoscope, though, of course, by no means the only ones. "

-From My Life and Quest by Arthur Osborne

In my previous post I addressed the problem of meaning. In a necessarily brief but I hope important way, I suggested that the issue of meaning and purpose is critical to both the individual and to the collective if we wish to co-create a more harmonious world. I then posited that astrology is one the great gifts of symbolism that allows us to participate within a Cosmos that has presence, or meaning in and of itself and for us. In the quote above, Arthur Osborne, the great follower and interpreter of the teachings of the sage Ramana Maharshi, describes what I see as the essence of the role of Evolutionary Astrology. That is that it presents a method for interpreting the symbolism of the perfect cosmic accord between the mathematics of the movements of the planets at the precise moment in space and time of the birth of an individual consciousness and how that symbolic map of the sky is in resonance with the karma of the individual coming into being.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, dictated in the months following his release from a concentration camp, Victor Frankl delineated one of the seminal theses of the modern era: he noticed that people’s loss of a sense of meaning was the critical precursor to their death. Of course the camps were a machinery of death - Eichmann’s accounting was in essence the mathematics of evil and statistically millions were to die: the dice evidently were loaded. Yet Frankl saw something unfold in his experience that taught him about the inner workings of that process as it happened to individuals around him: as young women had their head shaved and in so doing are robbed of their beauty and femininity, as others could not cope with separation from their loved ones and fear of the fate that might have befallen them, their ‘will to be’ faded and within days they would pass away.

Frankl himself, separated from his wife (whom he would discover only after his release had died in another camp), was of course highly stressed but his moment of confrontation with this inner precipice came at another moment. When a guard bullying him tore apart his jacket, revealing his dissertation - on which he had spent years of his life researching and writing, sewn into the lining - he destroyed it, shattering Frankl’s will in the face of the loss. Frankl saw before him an emptiness which if he gave way to, he would die. Something inside him, some other aspect of his will was lit and he walked away from the loss and chose not to find it meaningful enough to die for. Instead the torch paper inside him burned with a new sense of meaning and purpose, something inborn and inherent arose in him, the life force celebrated for its own sake, dis-identified from any one form. And he was able to live on that fire for the rest of his incarceration.

“Tradition indicates that three levels of consciousness are available to us: simple consciousness, not often seen in our modern technological world; complex consciousness, the usual state of educated Western man; and an enlightened state of consciousness, known only to a very few individuals, which is the culmination of human evolution and can be attained only by highly motivated people after much work and training.”

So says Robert Johnson in the first words of his book Transformations and he goes on to explore Don Quixote (literally Sir Codpiece) as an example of simple consciousness and Hamlet (a text penned within a few years of the Cervantes marvel) as the entrance into the dilemma of modern consciousness. The possibility of an enlightened view is represented for him in Goethe’s Faust. Don Quixote literalizes his own perception and imagination and his resultant magical thinking is his joy and his exuberant downfall. He charges ‘giants’ that are windmills spinning in the sun in order to please his princess, a local peasant girl. Hamlet receives the message from the unconscious, from the archetype, the ghost speaks to him of hidden truth and yet this information sends him into the crisis of how to act to return the natural and correct order of things. He is crippled by the terror of the rotten state being also his family, the lingering smell of death on the family bedspread, the trauma of the primal scene as conceived of by the sensitive and absurdly youthful Freud – the thought of our parents in the act that made us. The modern man like Hamlet is anxious about his origins and at times terrified about the future: every ache is a potential cancer, every commute another joyless surrender to auto-pilot, a state that threatens to lead us for more of our lives than we may feel entirely comfortable in.

The position of our Galactic Centre is at 27 degrees Sagittarius and so if we were to fire a red arrow (like a good Centaur) from the earth pointing at 27 degrees Sagittarius we would meet eventually the super massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. In 2006-2007 Pluto transited this point, the author’s natal Ascendant is on this point and Mars is transiting this point as I write and post this in December 2010. The galactic center, as perceived from earth is in Sagittarius. What might this mean?

I have shown in my previous writing my enthusiasm for the Archetypal perspective – a view that I will endeavor to follow here. To begin with the archetype of Sagittarius, the Centaur, we find a creature part horse part man/archer in which the embodiment of the animal self and the human self (with its aspirational shot at the future) are combined. Here we find the correspondence to a state that Ken Wilber in his ongoing anatomy of consciousness aptly refers to as the ‘centauric stage’ in which the naïve persona has encountered shadow (that which it denies about itself) and in its initial dialogue with this shadow has begun to transcend initial limitations to forge a relative mind-body unity.

To further meditate on the Archer/Centaur we find that from the union of man with nature celebrated in the form of the horse (the untamed spirit and nature co-operating with man as helper) leads to the archer pointing his bow to the stars, a bow-bough to the lights above.

Every couple of months I get sent the Mountain Astrologer and the great majority of the time it gathers dust in a little box I have for the purpose of retiring copies of the magazine. It is not that it is not a great magazine, I would not get it otherwise but I am lazy, I get sent a lot of professional therapy literature (much of which gets even less attention) and in trying to develop my own approach from my client work and my previous astrology studies I figure I am not always looking for more input, no matter about quality. Recently, Richard Tarnas and Caroline Myss interviews and the essays of a conference buddy and another lady working to fuse astrology and therapy who had sent me a prior version of her essay led me into reading more of it. Often when the weather was good with a cup of tea on the decking at the back of the house, on one such peruse I came across the following passage:

“The outer planets, however, are forces outside our personal experience as individuals. We can neither embody nor master these energies. When we encounter these energies, all we can do is surrender to them, keep our heads down, and ride out the storm.”

This is from an essay by an astrologer I had never previously come across, a perfectly well written piece which as I ruminate upon in the pages of this website I in no way wish to single out for any kind of special treatment, negative or positive. Rather this quotation, ostensibly as part of an argument for classical rulership (ignoring any of the discoveries of the planets outside of Saturn when assigning rulers for the Signs) got me thinking about the planets beyond the personal and what kind of relationship we can ever have to such energies as represented by Pluto, Uranus and Neptune – planets that even as words have the capacity to evoke the far flung and cold outer reaches of the solar system.

I recently returned from a personal workshop and talk with the wonderful Stars community in Minneapolis and from a very successful time at the Norwac Conference in Seattle where I gave a small workshop, some talks and a keynote talk. In addressing the entire community I attempted to draw meaningful observations from my experience of being an Evolutionary Astrologer alongside my experience of being a Transpersonal Therapist and Hypnotherapist in private practice. I made some notes before the keynote talk. I never normally do this but I sensed the importance of the topic. Of course when I got into my flow during the talk I never even looked at the notes. I enclose, unedited the notes I made below. They now look like a related but different topic than the one I spoke on and I enclose them here. The actual keynote talk can be purchased in my web store.