It is 1996. I am becoming more interested in astrology and reading about it, trying to decide if it has real value as a discipline. We will move house on 1st June.
I liked astrology, I saw that it had form and meaning and it reached out far into the cosmos. It has been around for thousands of years, older than science and technology, it reaches back to mankind's beginnings when the energies at play in the world around us were felt more powerfully. The patterns and numbers of astrology are the same as those of astronomy, but in addition to the astronomical facts, and based on them, astrology offers interpretation and explanation for each individual. This is where the controversy begins.
Although astrology can confirm and explain why a life has taken such a turn, and what might happen in the future, it cannot tell you what to do or how to proceed. It identifies parameters inside which one still has to make personal choices.
To be an astrologer or to be a writer of philosophical and religious ideas is to be immediately limited by the system of definition either one employs, and restricted within a certain framework and by the use of certain tools, like language. It is possibly hopeless, but I hope not, to try to define something which is mystical in content. It is an attempt to reduce the irreducible, for that which is mystical exists on another plane, in another dimension. We do not have either the concepts or the language to describe it, by virtue of the fact we exist in the physical. We are groping towards an understanding.
Astrologers and writers and anyone who is on a spiritual path, all are trying in their own way to express what is so far inexpressible, but we only find it to be inexpressible because there is no consensus of definition, and there is no consensus of definition because everyone views and interprets the world differently. However, if each expression of the mystical and spiritual is a correct expression according to the individual, then everyone’s view is right. There is no single, unified ‘right’ in the way we understand the term; no absolute that we will all eventually agree on; but together, because we are all right in our own ways, we create the one, single, unified, absolute right. Together, we are well-appointed; separate we are often disappointed.
Life is all about evolving, developing, transforming through constantly encountering new challenges - the more difficult the challenge is felt to be, the greater the potential for progress.
I thought about what my astrologer had said about experiencing life rather than being ‘pointy-headed’, but thinking, analyzing and questioning was, for me, experiencing life. It was existentialist thinking - I formulated my thoughts and put them in order onto paper discovering some temporary clarity at least, if not some certainty. The act was creative and I liked it and did not want to stop.
Existentialism is a: "philosophical theory concentrating on the existence of the individual who, being free and responsible develops his essence through acts of the will (which in the Christian form of the theory leads to God)." To ‘develop his essence’ implies purpose and meaning. Actions are the end products of thought or being. Why say that experience is more valuable than thought? They are part of the same "movement" or gesture; they are part of a process. An action reveals something about what a person has thought and possibly believes. Where is the value in going ahead and doing something without giving it thought? Is it even possible? Is it possible to only think and never act and experience? There are degrees of thinking and acting, and degrees of their relative amounts.
We find ancient man's explanation of the world in myths and superstitions. For explanations of why the sun shone and why it rained and so on, he invented the sun-god and the rain-god. Three thousand years ago in ancient Greece, when the use of slaves gave citizens lots of free time the superstitions began to be challenged by man using his reason. Socrates asked questions. He provided the original method of philosophy by stating "I know nothing for sure so I will ask questions", (like I do). He made people uncomfortable by this approach (as I do) - people do not like to have their solid beliefs challenged - and as a result he lost his life. (I have lost the life I had before I began to question.)
This outraged his student, Plato, who, to accommodate the problem, distinguished two worlds: the world we live in and the ideal world. Realism and Idealism. The Platonic ideal was a world of ideas. But Aristotle said Plato was wrong, there was no separate realm of ideas. The road to wisdom, he said, was through the senses. He became known as the world's first scientist, the first one to try and make rational sense of it all. So when we talk about common sense we mean that which comes to us through our senses. This was apparently the first debate between reason and the senses and it continues today.
Because of all this questioning, by the time Christ arrived there was much cultural uncertainty, men were preoccupied with death and the afterlife (as I am), and with prophets, and there were still those who believed in miracles and magic. Jesus challenged everything that antiquity represented. He said that God was not to be reached through reason; he was a personal God. This introduced the ingredient of love to the debate which is what a person feels in addition to what comes through the senses. Love includes faith. Some call it intuition. Some call it chemistry, "love's alchemy". In any case, everything we are resides in or around the body and uses the body as a vehicle.
By the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had asked: could God be approached by reason as well as love/faith? Could we be united with God by combining the senses and understanding of the world outside and then adding belief in the Holy Bible?
Up to the time of the Renaissance everything was done for the sake of God, but by the 15th century man began to delight in himself for his own sake: music, art, science, individual religious meditation, astronomy, biology; where did he come from and how did the universe work? The focus was on science, nature and man. Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Isaac Newton threatened the foundations of the medieval world by discovering that the earth went round the sun and that there was a force called gravity. The immutable laws that kept it all in balance were like a great machine. This was the mechanistic world view of Newton which led to the idea that all thought and matter must be predetermined which led to a time of great turbulence. It was a difficult problem to resolve. Transformations can be painful: both personal ones and ones that are in the national consciousness.
In 1596 Rene Descartes built a new system, he was the father of modern philosophy. Plagued with doubt, he felt that we could not even trust the senses, only one thing was certain and that was that he doubted. And he doubted because he thought. And he thought because he was a thinking being - "Cogito, ergo sum" - "I think therefore I am". He said there were two substances which were independent of each other, one was thought and one matter. This became known as dualism. It led to the idea that life could only be dream.
When the British Empiricists spoke out in the 18th and 19th centuries, they said that there was nothing in the mind that had not first been experienced in the senses; knowledge was comprised of single sensations which were built up into complex ideas over a period of time. Even our individual identities were composed of single sensations built up to form the living picture we call reality. So, if mankind could never experience reality, only sensations, then what is God?
Bishop Berkeley said that everything we see and feel is an effect of God's power, that we only exist in the mind of God, that there is no material reality, no independent time and space - just God - and us as figments of his mind. (If we only existed in the mind of God, in whose mind did God exist - and so on?)
This gave birth to what came to be known as existentialism, the idea that "I have no meaning". The German philosopher Kant agreed with the empiricists that our knowledge came from our senses but said that the way our mind works rationally shapes our conception of the world. He was a rationalist. He saw the world through reason and through time and space: das Ding an sich - "the thing in itself". Therefore we could never know the answers to the big questions because we could never rid ourselves of "reason"; we could only ever see through our perception. This notion opened the floodgates of Romanticism where the poets and musicians and artists used their individual imaginations to make sense of the world.
Hegel saw the method of philosophy as having the pattern of "thesis, counterthesis, synthesis", the synthesis providing the next thesis, and that it was leading towards a knowledge of the world's spirit.
The existential philosophies of action come next. Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx were radicals who would use Hegel's synthesis as their thesis: so far philosophers had only interpreted; now they would try to change things using philosophy. Marx wanted the workers of the world to unite.
By the 20th century there was no God, no meaning and no rules, we were now free to build a paradise or tear the world apart - only our actions could, and can, give meaning to ourselves and the world. Actions speak louder than words. We live in the shadow of existentialism and thinkers like me continue to ask: is there free will or not? Is there a purpose or not? A purpose implies a goal and a goal implies a lack. Our self knows its connection with God and lacks nothing; only the ego wants. What is the counter thesis to the synthesis of the existentialists which has become our thesis? If the world has no meaning is it therefore a game? For the self, perhaps it is like a game. If there is design does that make it a pattern like a dance to be played out and enjoyed for its own sake? For the self, yes, but the ego continues to seek for the purpose and unity which the self already knows.
Modern philosophy ponders on the power of thought....
"A Course In Miracles", is contemporary Christian psychotherapy, channelled by the Christ, showing a way to diminish ego and surrender to God to effect the Atonement, which is the bridging of the gap that makes a person feel separate from other people and the world. We see the world through our personality, our ego, through a glass darkly. My problem had been that I had let go of my firm ground, the ground I stood on to see the world which had been formed by playing the roles of wife, mother and schoolteacher. As soon as I had let go of this I found myself in a new environment playing an undefined role. I did not feel as if I fit in to this new situation. I became more isolated than I had ever been before. I received no approval from people in any area of life. I had not realised that I needed approval, validation. But I continued to live with Jean in this impossible situation because being with her was all I had to cling on to as I continued the process of finding my new self, of ceasing to be one person and becoming another. Transformations can be painful.
My problem was not too much freedom because I was not free - although to those who were bound by restrictions on their time and purse I would have seemer more free - I was limited by my view of the world which I saw as disapproving of me. My early conditioning had taught me that it was better to have the approval of society. No-one but me knew that I was drowning in time and space, unsure of who I was becoming, terrified at night and angry and depressed during the day. My only certainty was of the way I felt about Jean which in the mainstream of English society was not acceptable.
Old friends kept their distance, threatened by my early "success" in life, or confused by my "anti social" behaviour; and potential new friends, when I let anyone come near, sniffed the air around me and sensed the fear.
"A Course in Miracles" told me that in order to feel "at one", at peace, I must forgive: forgive myself, forgive everyone. I had to learn to like myself, to become my true self rather than the ‘person’ others expected me to be. Everyday for 365 days the workbook offered a lesson designed to help me see that I am connected to God, to the universe. Take one of the following examples per day:
"I am upset because I see what is not there."
"I see only the past."
"My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts."
"I see nothing as it is now."
"My thoughts do not mean anything."
"My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."
"I am upset because I see a meaningless world."
"A meaningless world engenders fear."
"God did not create a meaningless world."
"My thoughts are images that I have made."
"I have no neutral thoughts."
"I see no neutral things."
"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing."
"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts."
"I am determined to see."
"I am determined to see things differently."
"What I see is a form of vengeance."
"I can escape from this world by giving up attack-thoughts."
"I do not perceive my own best interests."
"I do not know what anything is for."
"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."
"Above all else I want to see."
"Above all else I want to see differently."
"God is in everything I see."
"God is in everything I see because God is in my mind."
"I am not the victim of the world I see."
"I have invented the world I see."
"There is another way of looking at the world."
"I could see peace instead of this."
"My mind is part of God's, I am very holy."
If I could see no need to do anything then should I do something or nothing? When I try to do nothing, finally I erupt effortlessly into action like a pustule; and when I heal up I wait to erupt again.
The less I feel the separation, the better I feel. Illness reveals the nature of the separation. When I am imbued with the feeling of wholeness, I am a healer. When I feel disconnected, I feel alone with many problems and fears and others drain me easily.
The spiritual self and all which is seemingly outside the self - i.e. nature, people, the earth, the energies of the planets - it all integrates and has mutual meaning if we remember that what we perceive is all personal projection, all illusory. Time and meaning and purpose are synonymous with ego. The self is already at one with God and therefore needs no purpose. The constant remembering of this returns us to our centre. It helped me to remember to accept responsibility for, and learn from, all my experiences. If life has meaning then objective values exist and man is not a creature of chance but part of a design.
We seem to have no capacity for "apparent" freedom - the sort of freedom my friends thought I was enjoying - freedom defined as space and time and the means to enjoy it. As a species we are best at responding to lack of freedom. Freedom reveals our lack of purpose.
Some people enjoy the sensation of an expanded consciousness, of letting an awareness of life flood in, when it doesn't they feel deprived, bored. Others find the sensation of focus and concentration more enjoyable, the filtering out of the great mass of sensory data and thoughts, ideas, imagination; they prefer to keep it out because it causes confusion and fear. I am the former sort of person and Jean is the latter. Jean enjoys the focus of whatever she is doing - a jig-saw puzzle, listening to or playing music. I have never liked to focus, to concentrate, for this reason I was told at school that I was undisciplined.
Now, however, I find that I do like to focus on something. It takes me away from the tedious world of samsara, from material stuff and social responsibility, and onto and into the world of ideas, which I like to reduce to words on a page for a feeling of release, and a sense of security.
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