Friday, April 27, 2007

Human beings throughout many cultures of East and West looked to the stars for their first cosmic maps

The most profound critique of astrology is that its knowledge of the soul has not kept pace with millennia of evolution Joe Perez Thursday, April 26, 2007
Close your eyes and imagine a single moment in time. Try this: Open your eyes and be who you truly are in every dimension of your being. Imagine that you can see everything in that direction from your eye to the far reaches of the cosmos. Look forward. What do you see? Look behind you. Look above. Look below. Imagine yourself looking in 360 degrees around a circle, clockwise and counterclockwise. If you were a telescope you could see the entire ecliptic of the Milky Way.
Imagine in this moment that you can see all the constellations of the elliptic at once--from the stars of Aries to Taurus on up through Pisces. You see all directions at once. Inhabit every perspective. Beyond thought, open yourself to Big Soul, a Grand Imagination that passes beyond the limitations of sight and senses to encompass the Whole.
Allow the Cosmos to represent (however partially and imperfectly) the fullness of Spirit in all its infinite and paradoxical dimensions, the unfolding of evolution in a grand and massively extensive Cosmos. Imagine each degree of the circle as occupied by a star, planet, nebula, galaxy, or other celestial bodiy.
Thousands and thousands of years ago, at the rising of the magical level of consciousness, human beings throughout many cultures of East and West looked to the stars for their first cosmic maps. What remains of those maps is reduced to dust in astronomical science. (What doesn't fit in scientific models is relegated to the wasteland of contemporary astrology, neglected by most serious students of human nature.)
But astrology is not primarily a technique of personality analysis or fortune-telling. It is a poetry of the night sky, a melding of the Cosmic and the cosmic, seeing the soul and nature intertwined and connected at every level of our being. Astrology is poetry in the sense of poetry as an expression of Big Soul, psychic-level knowledge.
But the most profound critique of astrology is not that it is bad science or bad psychology. Most profoundly, the human soul has expanded beyond the symbols and myths of the astrologers. The deep connections between the cosmic and the Kosmic have been lost, replaced by superstition and simple-minded psychological stereotyping.
What is needed is a new vision of the relationship between the soul and Cosmos, a vision that will not embrace what astrology has been but will move forward to new connections. We need the imagination to realize new constellations of our hopes and dreams.
We need new signs, and new interpretations founded on universally accessible symbolism, derived from psychic and astral levels of consciousness. We need an astrological outlook that is truly astronomical and logical. It must be big enough to hold all that astrology has ever been, and then raised exponentially in its scope and applicability. Biology, psychology, and cultural studies would support the new symbolism, which above all else would simply be a subtle vision of the potentials of human nature.
Such an enterprise has rarely been attempted (though there are astrologers who have been working on the esoteric mysteries for many decades). My own efforts to reimagine the cosmos as Kosmos I have begun to call Kronology, an epic poem of the Universe Electromagnetic--Form alive as a timeless Spirit, captured for the imagination in a single moment in time.
Kronology is a poem expressive of a new myth: the myth that the Kosmos can be captured in time as a vision of Spirit's descent into matter. As myth, it demands an integral intelligence but is not constrained to theories constructed as generalizations out of cross-cultural research. Kronology includes an effort to reconcile its vision with the fruits of modern sciences and holistic maps of human nature. It's a poem of poems, a meta-poem if you will, wrapped in a coat made of stars. Save to del.icio.usSphere: Related ContentSubscribe to this feed posted by Joe Perez at 4/26/2007
2 Comments: Cole said...
Joe-On the topic of post-metaphysics astrology, here's a snippet from A Modern Shaman's Guide to a Pregnant Universe by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. and Antero Alli: "The following twelve Styles convey access points to various colors and facets of your MULTIDIMENSIONAL SELF. The neural engagement of your personal resonance determines the depth of access...

I like their interpretation of the triplicities particularly. Antero refers to the planets as Forces, the signs to Styles and the houses to States to emphasize their descriptive component and remove metaphysical baggage. At which point of human development do you think goes outside the symbol set provided by astrology? I remember feeling astonished reading Spiral Dynamics for the first time and seeing how the colors of the stages seemed to match one for one with the traditional planets. Magic/Purple/Moon, Power Gods/Red/Mars, Mythic/Blue/Jupiter, Reason/Orange/Mercury, Pluralism/Green/Venus, Integral Self/Yellow/Sol. I could never decide whether Saturn fit more appropriately with Beige or the entrance to third tier. If you include Chiron and the transpersonal planets, then you have enough Forces to describe every stage that has unfolded; I do not have enough information about either the planets or the stages to attempt that though. I keep you in my prayers, Cole 6:03 PM

Tusar N Mohapatra said...

[Lift your eyes towards the Sun; He is there in that wonderful heart of life and light and splendour. Watch at night the innumerable constellations glittering like so many solemn watchfires of the Eternal in the limitless silence which is no void but throbs with the presence of a single calm and tremendous existence; see there Orion with his sword and belt shining as he shone to the Aryan fathers ten thousand years ago at the beginning of the Aryan era; Sirius in his splendour, Lyra sailing billions of miles away in the ocean of space. Remember that these innumerable worlds, most of them mightier than our own, are whirling with indescribable speed at the beck of that Ancient of Days whither none but He knoweth, and yet that they are a million times more ancient than your Himalaya, more steady than the roots of your hills and shall so remain until He at his will shakes them off like withered leaves from the eternal tree of the Universe. Imagine the endlessness of Time, realise the boundlessness of Space; and then remember that when these worlds were not. He was, the Same as now, and when these are not, He shall be, still the Same; perceive that beyond Lyra He is and far away in Space where the stars of the Southern Cross cannot be seen, still He is there. And then come back to the Earth and realise who this He is. He is quite near to you. See yonder old man who passes near you crouching and bent, with his stick. Do you realise that it is God who is passing? There a child runs laughing in the sunlight. Can you hear Him in that laughter ? Nay, He is nearer still to you. He is in you. He is you. It is yourself that burns yonder millions of miles away in the infinite reaches of Space, that walks with confident steps on the tumbling billows of the ethereal sea; it is you who have set the stars in their places and woven the necklace of the suns not with hands but by that Yoga, that silent actionless impersonal Will which has set you here today listening to yourself in me. Look up, 0 child of the ancient Yoga, and be no longer a trembler and a doubter; fear not, doubt not, grieve not; for in your apparent body is One who can create and destroy worlds with a breath.

Yes, He is within all this as a limitless ocean of spiritual force; for if He were not, neither the outer you nor this outer I nor this Sun nor all these worlds could last for even a millionth part of the time that is taken by a falling eyelid. But He is outside it too. Even in His manifestation. He is outside it in the sense of exceeding it, s^td^^ii^^ ; in His unmanifestation. He is utterly apart from it. This truth is more difficult to grasp than the other, but it is necessary to grasp it. There is a kind of Pantheism which sees the Universe as God and not God as the Universe; but if the Universe is God, then is God material, divisible, changeable, the mere flux and reflux of things; but all these are not God in Himself, but God in His shadows and appearances ; they are to repeat our figure the shadows and figments of Shakespeare's mind, Shakespeare is not only vaster than all his drama-world put together, he is not only both in it and outside it, but apart from it and other than it.] Document: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > The Upanishad Volume-12 > The Ishavasyopanishad 10:18 PM

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