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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 on cd from the Norwac Conference website.

Notes – Towards an Astrology of Liberation:

Worldview or Basic Ground – as Astrologer’s we have some kind of interest or faith in human potential or we would not bother to look at charts, certainly for others, or really for our own development.

Ernest Becker – cultural projects as attempts at immortality – the ego seeking to deny death and establish significance. It is in this heroic project that the seeds of aggression and destruction can be sown on the individual and collective level. My immortality project, my religion, my science, my version of astrology is the way…

Death of the heroic ideal – Transformation of the heroic ideal as central to the Astrology of Liberation and arguably to the community as a whole.

Observations:

• The linear mind cannot conceive of the whole of reality
• We generate multivalent symbolisms to deal with this problem with reality
• The map is not the territory. A good map is just a doorway to the territory
• Astrology is, at best, a doorway to the real…

• People respond well to encouragement of their potential
• Astrology can encourage this potential, or it can become a defence against it

Astrology as defence:

• Rationalization as defence: with your Venus-Pluto it is so interesting that you were abused…
• The notion of abreaction: to cry or be touched is a problem to be cleaned up.
• The Causal delusion: overt – my Mars transit caused me to have a fight with my friend. Subtle – looking to chart to validate personal success or cosmic position.
• Magician complex – the astrologer seeks to prove astrology through their acrobatics – don’t tell me anything about yourself let me show you what astrology can tell you about you.

The Importance of Transference – Although it is obvious that a deeper transference will develop in long-term psychotherapy work it does apply potentially to the one off astrology consultation and it seems particularly remiss that this is not focussed on in the astrological community:

• Transference can begin with a phone call or even an email
• Transference can evoke a physical similarity with figures from a persons past, through looks, tone of voice or body language. Looking like someone’s relative can be a very mixed blessing.
• Transference can evoke sensitive gender issues. Someone maybe very uncomfortable or overly eager to discuss certain subjects with a certain gender astrologer or therapist.
• Simply by being the ‘Astrologer’ of ‘Therapist’ that the supplicant-client comes to for advice indicates the potential for parent-child transference in the power imbalance of the relationship.

The Importance of Counter-Transference:

• If I am treated like the client’s father I may through some unconsciousness of my behalf start to act the way that father used to act. I may find myself telling the client off in a manner that I never would normally do, as I am hooked in the pull of their transference
• The relationship in the room is a ‘third force’ – the relationship is a field effect and evokes the unconscious of the two participants as well as the consciousness.
• Where two or more are gathered in my name. The power of the field to hold the transpersonal dimension.

Science/Religion and Astrology: all are symbols, all are myth making. Religion overt mythology of a particular culture holds the revelatory potential of the transpersonal. Science uses mathematics as its own symbol language and attempts to formulate symbolic formula in order to create natural laws for the physics of nature. Standard Cosmological Model for example which can explain and predict how galaxies form with astonishing accuracy – yet has anomalies, so it cannot account for the level of spin the galaxies for which dark matter has to be invented….

Newtonian universe to a relative universe. Heisenberg’s uncertainty paradox. The limitation of the observing mind to catch the reality. Astrology is another such impossible attempt to capture the potential of each moment – not through the wave-particle paradox but through the symbolic formation of a map for every space-time event. Such attempts are critical to human evolution and understanding and yet they are always doomed to fail – reality itself in all its Mystery will always outshine the explanations.

The Human Factor:

• No matter how well prepared for a reading or class you are there will always be surprises – the surprise of the ‘other’. Can we allow the I-Thou (Buber) of that encounter or are we so narcissistically wounded and controlling that we try always to control the student or client to fit our will.
• No matter how brilliant your approach or how interesting the client the pragmatic reality of astrological counselling is that only a handful of key points from the reading will be retained. What are they? Can we help underline them for the client? Are we prepared that our very human response to their suffering might be a part of those key remembered points as much as a detailed analysis of their progressions?
• Most people who come for a reading are stuck in some way (this is slightly more overt in psychotherapy but only slightly…) Even if a person professes that they are coming just to be open to what Astrology has to offer is at least implying a certain degree of doubt or confusion about their future. And why shouldn’t they! Who does not experience such feelings?

Stuckness can refer to a number of important points:

• A core issue that the reading may actually help illuminate or even resolve. The Evolutionary Axis of the chart (Pluto and the Nodes) or the relationship between Saturn and Uranus can symbolically show a great deal about that potential. The chart of the exact appointment time cross referenced to the natal chart can show a lot of what is possible in terms of what the person might be able to absorb in the reading.
• Stuckness may refer what we might call generally existential issues, sexuality, spirituality, how to find meaningful work without joining the rat race which are simply big themes in many peoples lives. As often as not they need to be lived through as much as changed, though small adjustments might be realistic.
• Stuckness may refer to a personality disorder or mental health issue of a more serious kind. For example a borderline personality disorder. This may then become its own issue. Whilst an astrologer need not be a therapist – as both myself I would advocate that the astrological counsellor learn about the BPD, NPD and the various social anxiety disorders and eating disorders and have requisite literature on these subjects.

Astrology and Transpersonal Therapy: Hand in Hand.
September 14th, 2009
“I am dealing with…constructing thought forms which will embody the new techniques and ideas. These – during the next two centuries – will change the face of our civilization and inaugurate a period in human history in which methods will be tried and principles established which remain as yet totally unknown to the majority. This period will lead the race into a civilization and a mutual, co-operative interplay which will bring to an end the present era of selfishness and competition.”

This is a message from July 1935 given to Roberto Assagioli (the founder of Psychosynthesis) by the Master Djwahl Kuhl who also channeled the material collected by Alice Bailey for the Lucis Trust.

“We must remember that Astrology only correlates to reality, it does not cause it. Remember also that Astrology only operates relative to the observed and existing realty of anything – societies, world events and individual people. To accurately understand the past that has conditioned and defined the moment is to understand the probabilities of inner and outer future events.
…Most Astrologers recognize that we have begun the movement into the Aquarius Age. And as we move into the Aquarius Age it obviously means that the Pisces Age is now beginning to culminate. Anytime an Age comes to culmination, the opportunity and evolutionary intention is for the cycle of history relative to that Age to stop repeating itself. In order for this to occur, all the dynamics that are part of that Age come to a head within a relatively brief amount of time. This phenomenon thus creates a period of time in which the psychological experience of reality becomes one of condensed intensity, both individually and collectively.”

Jeffrey Wolf Green in an essay Pluto in Sagittarius published in Pluto 2 – The Soul’s Evolution through Relationships.

Dane Rudhyar, the great Astrologer and philosopher who was a close friend of Roberto Assagioli and who was a mentor of my Astrological teachers has a concept which he called – seed people – people who would bring the new paradigms and scatter them amongst the fields of as many open minds as was humanly possible. As Astrologers or Therapists (or both) in this cusp between the ages it is our job to sew seeds, to impregnate the soil of the collective with as many possibilities as we can contain.

While Pluto moved through Sagittarius the world had to come to terms with its conflicting notions of what it calls ‘truth’ and how much of that so called is just junk and lies and how much it is a touchstone for living a life unafraid to make relationship with the real, the deep and abiding natural laws that for countless ages have shaped the growth of plants and the stars, that has led the evolution of the earth, beasts, men and the angelic hierarchies (or devachon).

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Whilst watching a documentary on the breaking of the enigma code in the second world war (after the initial heroic efforts of Polish mathematicians something done by the British at an old manor house at Bletchley house) I discovered that the German high command created the ultimate encoder, with 10 separate encoding cogs, and they called it: secret writer.

Ironically a rather simple and profound image, the writer, in secret, the writing that is itself secret… and in this sense they created a phrase that seems oddly apt for the whole concept of the birth chart, and astrology itself. Surely in symbolic form a secret writing, not from one Nazi leader to his general staff, not at all, but from life to life itself. The birth chart is a hieratic language, a secret language, on one level because you have to really stay with it to even understand a little part of it… with the secret writer the encoder its messages were so complex that the British and Americans generated what was essentially the first computer, the aptly named Colossus (this was no notebook) just to play out the different potentials of meaning within the code and make decisions about which lines might hold real meaning.

Now if you approach astrological information on this purely linear level you might yourself find that you require a Colossus, or at least a colossal effort in order to even begin to understand the many ramifications of the symbolism of the birth chart. Indeed such an effort is almost always present in the initial phases of a person exploring astrology, or other corresponding symbolism. Yet it cannot remain a purely linear knowing, this code is a non-linear message, a container of multitudes… like an encoding machine, with 12 sets of cogs or wheels the birth chart rotates this 12 possibilities in endless unique ways in order to create a fractal of potential meaning of a particular moment in space and time, the birth of a human being.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst watching a documentary on the breaking of the enigma code in the second world war (after the initial heroic efforts of Polish mathematicians something done by the British at an old manor house at Bletchley house) I discovered that the German high command created the ultimate encoder, with 10 separate encoding cogs, and they called it: secret writer.

Ironically a rather simple and profound image, the writer, in secret, the writing that is itself secret… and in this sense they created a phrase that seems oddly apt for the whole concept of the birth chart, and astrology itself. Surely in symbolic form a secret writing, not from one Nazi leader to his general staff, not at all, but from life to life itself. The birth chart is a hieratic language, a secret language, on one level because you have to really stay with it to even understand a little part of it… with the secret writer the encoder its messages were so complex that the British and Americans generated what was essentially the first computer, the aptly named Colossus (this was no notebook) just to play out the different potentials of meaning within the code and make decisions about which lines might hold real meaning.

Now if you approach astrological information on this purely linear level you might yourself find that you require a Colossus, or at least a colossal effort in order to even begin to understand the many ramifications of the symbolism of the birth chart. Indeed such an effort is almost always present in the initial phases of a person exploring astrology, or other corresponding symbolism. Yet it cannot remain a purely linear knowing, this code is a non-linear message, a container of multitudes… like an encoding machine, with 12 sets of cogs or wheels the birth chart rotates this 12 possibilities in endless unique ways in order to create a fractal of potential meaning of a particular moment in space and time, the birth of a human being.
Read the rest of this entry »