centring the identity
Energies and Chakras The first of the implications of colour-work in astrology (see 'Astrology in Colour') is that, given one's four geocentric and three heliocentric charts transformed into pure colour, regular meditation on these will establish clearly for the intuitive individual the level at which they are living at any given period or moment. Charts given or shown to family and friends - most with scant or no astrological knowledge whatsoever - elicited emphatic, positive responses; there would always be one chart above the rest which drew its owner strongly, and with whose energies he or she could identify. It would not always be the one I recognised ... understandably, since we often mask the self we are by the self that others accept. Further, knowing which pattern corresponds to which part of ourselves, if we wish to develop at a certain level where we feel inexperienced, inadequate or at fault, then we have the energy-pattern before us to use as a mandala for contemplation or attunement. As we begin to respond to its colours, resonate to their vibration, the desired level of our being will start to awaken and come into function. This awakening will quite likely be experienced through one of the main energy-centres, or ‘Chakras’, aligned with the spine from sacrum to crown in the subtle body. Now you may realise the implication of seven zodiacal levels - each one has a natural relationship with a major chakra, and their natural upward order is in fact that in which I have (intentionally) been discussing them elsewhere, ie: Heliostellar (HS) - Crown Chakra Heliotropical (HT) - Brow Chakra Heliomundane (HM) - Throat Chakra GEOSOLAR (GSL) - HEART CHAKRA (Geo) Draconic (GD) - Solar Plexus Chakra (Geo) Sidereal (GS) - Spleen Chakra (Geo) Tropical (GT) - Base Chakra The GSL and Heart Chakra are deliberately emphasised, as they raise yet more issues for debate - the central one being, Is there a ‘True Self’? A truthful answer is that ultimately the true Selfhood lies beyond anything that an astrological chart can describe, as it is in essence eternal and of the substance of God. The Search for the True Self Yet that is not the reality as we experience it; for the Self was divine when it left its Source in bright unconsciousness and innocence, and the Self will return, fully divine, to that Source when its crucifixion in matter is fulfilled. But while it undergoes the long, painstaking processes of personal alchemy, struggling to turn the slumbering prime matter of its individuality to a golden, perfected Consciousness through pressures and waters and fires, it is no longer what it was, and cannot yet be what God sees under the veil. Therefore, somewhere in our seven-fold patterns a Self can be known which is authentic and undisguised, at whose consent this incarnation takes place; who can only come into being when the heavens describe him, and under whose pattern the six remaining are subsumed and relatively accidental. Having said this, I am sure that in any case a birth will take place when there is a ‘best fit’ of as many key levels as possible. Also, there will be one that is more important than the others: the Draconic, if the new-born is carrying much karma, or the Sidereal, if he or she has a major rôle to play in local or world affairs, for example. What contenders do we have for the "True Self"? A process of elimination might help. THE TROPICAL is important, in that here we are given our kit of fresh material with which to do our work, and it furnishes an identity; but by definition, being new to us, it cannot be our Self. THE SIDEREAL is so strongly oriented to the collective that the identity built here can have little individual foundation at all. THE DRACONIC might seem to be the closest to our truth, as it encompasses and summarises much or even all of what we have allowed ourselves to become over the course of many incarnations. It is nearest to our soul, expresses our principles, and informs the conscience. However, it is Lunar in its nature; ultimately the animating spirit of selfhood is surely star-stuff, and we still need to look toward the Sun. Now we come to THE GEOSOLAR, for which there could be a strong argument, since this is the central rung of the seven on our Jacob's ladder, and although Geocentric it relates to the Heart chakra and the Sun. "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Only Truth can win the Kingdom; only Love can live there. A return to innocence - yet in wisdom, a return to to harmlessness - yet in strength, to joy even amid pain, is the possible outcome of regaining the Geosolar. All this being so, then it is worthy of our attention; to live from the Heart is to give the nearest expression possible to the True Self in an illusory world. THE HELIOMUNDANE level, in its reference to the body of the Earth, cannot on its own express a central Selfhood, as it is concerned with the object of relationship rather than its subject. But THE HELIOTROPICAL takes us again to the deep heart of the Individuality, being the shining Centre of all we experience in our distorting mirrors as identity and personality. This is the undistorted identity, the authentic and originating pattern of the Being itself, which then uses (or abuses) what Earth and embodiment offer in time and space. Whether THE HELIOSTELLAR takes us even closer to, or farther away from this central Selfhood in its embrace of cosmic spiritual Reality, I do not feel qualified to say. Let us leave that question open for now, as part of our Mystery. All this highlights the dangers of relying solely on knowledge of the Geotropical chart, for "if the Mirror is seen as the extension of the self, the only apparent reality is the image seen in it by the self ", as the astrologer Abraham Abbadi said to us at a Beshara Trust weekend. We risk constantly seeing the reverse of our true situation, even to the extent - rampant nowadays - of assuming total independence and freedom of will (which of course we do possess in our Tropical selves) and ignoring our real dependence on God for our very existence and for the Grace of forgiveness when we admit to our mistakes and turn back, converted, into the Living Light. A sense of identity, born of descent into matter, is nevertheless vital; it would be no good for our spark, once breathed from Godhead, to remain there. For, still being virtually at one, there would be no concept of ‘other’, and therefore no ability to realise the Being of the Creator, or our true relationship to our Origin. So the ‘mirror selves’ with which we are so familiar - like the dancing shadows in Plato's cave - and the zodiacs which describe (and create?) them, serve their essential purpose. But to "know even as we are Known" we must look twice to the colours of the Sun. Humanity on the Ladder We can see our own process at work on the world scale: once upon a time, in the dawn of mankind's history, we were as innocent and as spontaneous as the beasts. This was our Eden, our cooperative, natural early consciousness. It may have been the men and women of this Eden who painted the caves at Lascaux and gave birth to the long culture of the Aborigines in Australasia. But we left Eden: we were thrown out of our paradise when human childhood gave way to adolescence and began its experiment with Personality. Mankind had descended from Geosolar to Tropical, from the pre-conscious Heart to the awakening Base centre, and in clashes of personal interest had entered polarity and the knowledge of Good and Evil. Many individuals and cultures have not yet progressed beyond this stage, but in the world as a whole there is not only a massive movement now toward love of the Neighbour, but even the beginnings of higher awareness among the spiritually-minded. This is the early stirring of humanity's Solar Plexus, its Draconic level of being: more and more individuals and groups are realising the truth of soul-development through repeated incarnation, and furthermore, acknowledging the importance of dealing with the legacy of the past as well as sowing good seed for the future. This is a world-wide effusion of knowledge once restricted to the priest and the adept. A curious symptom of this development - and I cannot think it is unconnected - is the increasing Western obsession with Heritage. Every town nowadays, that has any history of its own, has to have its Heritage Centre or museum; and if the area is blessed (?) with the right patronage, there is also the Theme Park taking the visitor on tours into a kaleidoscope of times and places. Clubs are formed in suburbia to re-enact old battles and re-live antique lives. Museums are no longer the static haunts of academics but working museums, bringing the past vividly into the present. Genealogical research has become the enthusiasm of millions in the 21st century, with easy access to expanding online databases of digitised historical records. It may possibly be that the race's unconscious is working to draw attention to our real personal connections with periods of history through these current fascinations - and even to resolve some of the old issues in the process. There is a second phenomenon involved in this, too. It is the return to play. It is only extremely recently, in the historical time-frame, that any culture apart from its privileged members has had any concept of Leisure, let alone regular times and special places in which to enjoy it; the pace of change in technology has so accelerated that we now are obliged to plan for leisure, and a very, very high proportion of the family income is now spent on its leisure pursuits, by comparison with any period up to the 1950s. Was Pluto in Leo the marker for this explosion in play-power? It has reached its peak during Pluto’s holiday in Sagittarius; but of course the move to Capricorn has slammed the playroom door again and reminded us that we all have a lot of serious growing-up to do. I am suggesting here that there is a real and extraordinary developmental acceleration happening to humanity; it could be seen in all that was going on in the world around me as I first wrote this - whole nations of ill-treated people were marching against governmental injustice, and miracles continue to occur every day as somewhere a fresh heart is touched and the chance of joy returns to a mass of human lives despite the inevitable back-lash of the ignorant and the wicked. The cruelty of which so many are still capable can only delay and interfere with an otherwise inexorable progress, however, not abort it. What may be happening is that we are fast being lifted yet again to the Heart level: mankind is going Geosolar, and being prepared to behold - and, if ready, to enter - the Kingdom. Whether we can thereby still save the life of the planet remains to be seen; I have great hope. Whether we can also anticipate a continued quickening into a global spiritual understanding is, too, matter for speculation - yet the rise of religious renewal in country after country in the face of modern and often militant secularism, clumsy though its form and comprehension may be, may signal the unconscious early stages of this vital awakening. The pace is so fast that great sections of humanity seem to be working on several Centres at once, some so far in advance of others that by comparison they are almost out of sight. We live in remarkable times. Coming back to our original theme and taking into account this much-heralded and apparently real, accelerating expansion of human consciousness, it is all the more important that we as individuals work as best we can to free ourselves of the detritus of our past, and fit ourselves for an inconceivable future. This means opening and cleansing and vivifying our own Centres; rising up our own levels; and for the astrologer, entering the vertical dimensions of the discipline, without which he or she can offer no useful insight to a new humanity bewildered and struggling in its birth-pangs. Also we must look carefully to the ethics of the Astrology we practise: if all we offer is essentially a manipulative astrology, then we are not practising in love. We have free will in this domain of actuality, and so we can if we wish use our privileged knowledge to affect the flow of events through forecasting and election; but the need to exercise these freedoms is based on fear of injury or failure and betrays lack of that trust which is akin to love. “Perfect Love casteth out Fear.” If we are living in love, our experience - which we should teach - is that amid the macrocosmic patterns all those circumstances will arise that are right for our needs, and the best exercise of our free will is to choose to recognise this truth and to live by it. Thus we, and those we would help, avoid the dangers inherent in self-fulfilling prophecy and ‘pilot error’, while opening to the possibility of grace. But by all means let us also grow in astrological wisdom; let us understand our nature in all dimensions and its relationship to God; let us develop and live a philosophy teaching the deep truths that maintain our psychological and spiritual health from incarnation to incarnation. Let us each go out to overcome our dragon, guarding a hero's gold! Heroic Journeys It is an ancient and universal story. It dramatises the heroism of the Soul risking that journey beyond Tropical self, beyond Sidereal homeland, into the dangerous haunt of a dragon that binds Desire - the imprisoned maiden, the Moon - until she is loosed by skill and courage ( and we are free.) Once the Lunar self is redeemed and healed and desire conquered, then the Draconic Past can be slain without fear, and the soul take possession of its golden treasure, the glorious truth of the Geosolar dimension - the divinity in the Heart. To the hero in us there remains then the quest for the Grail. To attain this we must climb to the Heliostellar in purity and faith: for only that communion, will finally by grace restore the life to our ailing spirit - the dying King in us. It cannot be done by material means, only by spiritual work. The goal is reunion, and joy. The Hindu symbolism of this highest, utterly transcendent human level is the thousand-petalled lotus. Here all forms of conscious experience are integrated and become holy. It is describable as ‘the heart of the Mind’, whereas the Heart centre itself is ‘the heart of the body’, and of this one author on the chakras writes, "In Tantric teachings ... the Purusha is first seen at the fourth Chakra, the heart Chakra Anahata. Purusha is the essence of man, the Supreme Man ... This is the first inkling of a being within one's physical existence that is not ‘oneself’; of a being within whom one is contained, greater and more important than oneself but which has a purely psychic existence." At the Geosolar Heart centre, the self is in a sufficiently pure state, authentic but unanswerable to the world's conditioning, to touch the hem of its own highest nature, under whose purposes all the lower, ephemeral drives are subsumed. The Child is father of the Man ... Between these two hearts lie the fifth and sixth chakras. At the fifth one has had to so purify the perception that one can at last distinguish between ‘the Actual and the Real’, between facts in the material and non-material dimensions respectively. The sixth in this system brings one to the state of perfected Personality in its fullest sense, and certainly to the level of selfhood which has supreme authority over all lower dimensions and manifestations of the self (Ajna, the Sanskrit term, means ‘Command’); a consciousness which has reached this level is fully self-aware and can have no other will than to over-master its short-comings and its entire lower nature. This we have also identified as equal to God's Will. The pre-eminence of this level over all lower levels is made clear in the commentary by the author quoted above, "The presence of the syllable OM within the inner triangle of Ajna ... is a clear indication that the associated symbolism is that of the origin, the beginning of all things and also of their end. OM is in equal measure the sonic vibration from which all things emerge, and that into which they must eventually be reabsorbed ..." This is the place of the Third, and single, Eye, which is "full of Light." Lower than these three chakras are the three ‘organs of the personality’ - first of which is the Base, the root of all physical experience, and strongly earthed. Only the wider, fuller consciousness imposed by life at the Sacral, second level counteracts the virtual automatism of the Base impulses. Mind, and the life-force itself, characterise the third chakra at the Solar Plexus, establishing a strongly self-conscious (but not fully self-aware) incarnate human identity. Bearing in mind what has been said of the Heart centre, above, it is not surprising that the transition from level three to level four can be exceedingly difficult as, according to Jung, “it means that the consciousness which you call yourself is at an end.” But the reward is to be granted on Earth a glimpse of the treasure in Heaven. Before we leave the chakra system it is interesting to note the number of petals on each lotus symbol. The two most earth-based, relating to the GT (Base) and HM (Throat) zodiacs, have respectively four and its square, sixteen, referring to the cross of matter, to incarnation, to effort and interaction. The Sacral/ GS has six, and suggests that making a contribution to the world eases our path; and twelve at the Heart, the GSL, can only represent the sense of joyous wholeness when central selfhood is consciously re-found. The Solar Plexus/ GD is interesting in having ten petals, for five and ten are linked to the moral use of gifts, to virtue and vice - and karma cannot be unconnected to these. At the highest levels complexity fuses into simplicity; the Brow (Ajna)/ HT has only two petals - the Self expressing and generating polarity - and the Crown/ HS is one glorious composite bloom. This age-old Eastern knowledge powerfully supports the intuitions gained from the seven zodiacs. And it would certainly appear that the Heliotropical patterns, descriptive of the essential Self, are those which must resonate with and admit the incoming soul over and above any other, vital though other expressions of this pattern may be. Work on Heliocentric Astrology has been going on for a good many years now in the United States; it is essential that it be more widely studied. ......................................................................................................................... "It is the acquisitive nature of Man that stifles his understanding. For example, in the Logoic sense of the word, truth is the relation of all parts to one another. Nothing can be wholly defined unless it is qualified to the nth degree - a process that embraces all aspects of the universe. But a man, by virtue of a finite existence and a record of associative memories, defines by isolating parts from their context. And as he abstracts and hangs onto these parts of a whole, he inevitably cuts out other parts from his understanding. It is only when he sees the limitations of his partial view and opens himself to an available whole that he sees from a new eye and a new energy can cut across the old." Herbert Whone, ‘The Hidden Face of Music’, 1974 |