Mark Jones Astrology Blog

The following is trasncript from the Astrology University Podcast with Mark Jones & Darby Costello on the topic of Astrology and Life Purpose. You can listen to the podcast here.

Tony Howard: Tony Howard here with Astrology University and we're here with another episode of the Astrology University podcast. Thanks for joining us. And today we have Mark Jones and Darby Costello with us to talk about some really big topics. We're going to talk about astrology, life purpose and destiny and the intersection of astrology with those big picture questions about life, and how we use astrology to approach those questions to find the answers to those questions, or not. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. So thanks for joining me, you two. Great to have you on the show. And so I thought we’d open up with a question about whether it's really appropriate or possible to ask these big questions of astrology and whether it's possible that astrology can provide answers to these questions. What are your thoughts about that?

The following is a brief excerpt from an interview I did with Adam Sommer - followed by some current reflections.

AS: I love that idea. I’ve thought a lot about how astrology helps us to evolve as human beings, and what comes to mind right now is its ability to contextualize a person’s life experiences. Astrology can help people begin to see past events in their lives as meaningful, even though they often appear to be random and challenging.

MJ: I feel that’s an incredible service. One of the primary things to emerge in my astrology readings is the acknowledgement, and then validation, of what’s already happened to someone. It provides a seemingly objective, archetypal validation of the soul issues and psychic material they’ve come into this life to resolve. This is even more important when I work with older people who have lived a large part of their lives already; the reading is not going to be about a new star on the horizon, or what will happen when they grow up. They’ve already had many life experiences that they may or may not understand.           

So, I think you’re right about the sense of meaning the chart can bring. I read a science book recently where the author compared a sensible idea to a stupid idea. The example cited astronomy as the sensible idea and astrology as the stupid idea. It was an otherwise good book, but, yet again, astrology gets ridiculed! It’s ironic to me that in our materialist, rational culture, the things that get ridiculed often carry enormous beauty and meaning. I experience over and over in my therapy sessions with young, intelligent, kind, moral people with successful jobs that they’re struggling to find a sense of their own meaning, of who they are and why they are here. What we’ve lost in all the brilliance of these vast technological advances in our world is our sense of meaningful participation in the larger cosmos.

This interview was conducted by Adam Sommer for his podcast Jan 18, 2021 - you can listen to the podcast here

An Interview with Mark Jones

“The Planetary Nodes, Pt. 3”

by Adam Sommer

Adam Sommer:  This is Holes to Heavens, a show dedicated to cosmos, to mythos, and to psyche. Mark, how are you?

Mark Jones: I'm good, Adam. Thanks for having me back.

Adam: Yeah, I think this is going to be our third planetary nodes talk.

Mark: Yeah, and what is it, fifth conversation ever or something like that?

Adam: And well, even if I was in the UK, we would technically not be able to even do this one in person. Isn't that amazing?

Mark: What a world, what a world.

Adam: What's your main way of occupying your lockdown time Mark?

Mark: Since the second week of March, when the UK lockdown and Wales in particular locked down until the end of July, which not many not that many people realize. And then we had this brief period of openness that changed you know, relatively speaking ,openness that changed just before Christmas, and is now extended till the end of March another total lockdown no essential goods or services. I have been as it will not surprise you, Adam, in my beautiful spacious office cave, talking to people around the world in this very seat. And enjoying the phenomena that as the world went quiet, a number of very sincere people, some of whom were working with me already and some of whom reached out to me had this incredible ability to focus on their personal transformation, their process. So amongst the frustrations of barely any normal life occurring, they've had this tremendously rewarding psychic journey with people for the last nine or ten months of even more intense work than normal, people who found lockdown quite conducive to the quietening of the cultural noise, the quietening of the pool or demand of the world or other people has allowed some people to open up. Internal chasms are like portals to the underworld if you like, where they've been able to get into that deep material, that compost at the heart of their being from their childhood or from earlier events in life. So it's been a very rewarding time.

Once again, I wish to touch on the power of astrology, held within a compassionate therapeutic space, to speak of the divine self, lodged deep within the being of both self (the astrologer) and other (the individual coming for a reading). Martin Buber speaks powerfully in I and Thou about the powerful YES that the individual yearns for, so powerfully, to come as a blessing from the other person. This profound affirmation seems the crucial vantage point for the astrologer to find, before speaking forth on the nature of the birth chart and the soulful mystery contained within.

I share here some sections from The Soul Speaks: The Therapeutic Potential of Astrology:

“We can contrast the inherent divinity of the I-Thou perspective with the technological salvation myth, or the medical fantasy where, in this privileged world, no one should be allowed to suffer; we can rest assured that clever technicians will create a new pill to ease our pain. The shadow of such a model falls far across the face of the therapeutic venture, turning a person into an “it” for which a mechanical tune-up will satisfy. But if you rob a person of the meaning of her suffering, you steal a portion of her soul, her deeper self. Suffering, depression and questions about the meaning of the individual (and collective) life deserve recognition as the valuable parts of the human experience they are.

In this podcast with Adam Sommer, Mark talks about psychosynthesis. 

This month, I would like to share with you part of the draft conclusion from my forth coming book on the Planetary Nodes of Jupiter Outwards, due to be published later this year – a section that I feel summarizes some of the more crucial elements of my work.

“I have shared aspects of my work that focuses on the outer planets as symbols of the transpersonal identity and the subtle energy field. From that perspective the archetype of Uranus and Aquarius that it rules correspond to the nature of the transpersonal memory and the nature of the mental body. It is this part of the energy field that corresponds to what I call soul memory. This term implies that we are born with already existing material prior to the crucial uterine, birth and developmental initiations without having to get into the complex metaphysics of reincarnation, the soul’s origins etc. The birth-chart is the ultimate symbol of this reality: it implies from the point of entry the material that the being is already carrying.

“The philosopher of mind Phillip Goff points out with particular verve that since Galileo, the physical sciences have proceeded by putting aside the ontological question (the is question) and focussing only on the behaviour or structure question: ‘All the properties physics ascribes to fundamental particles are characterized in terms of behavioural dispositions. Physics tells us nothing about what an electron is beyond what it does.’ ” -The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge by Jeffrey J. Krippal

In a public lecture held at the Bristol Science Centre, I asked theoretical physicist Brian Greene a question on the possible multiverses that comprise our universe: what do we know about or think about reality prior to the Big Bang or the reality that the Big Bang emerged from? He smiled, recognizing, I believe, my attempt to elucidate a metaphysical point as he readily admitted that even the most experimental modern astrophysics does not go there. It was when I was travelling in Los Angeles the following year that I realized the author of the book I was reading on George Harrison was Brian Greene’s brother, a Krishna devotee. Somehow this seemed apt.

I'm thrilled to share this new podcast with me and Adam Sommer. In this episode we discuss the planetary nodes and what light that sheds on our current world situation. We also discuss the charts of parents and their child (including my family) as well as the Pluto ingress into Capricorn and the economic problems of the West - The USA especially.  Even though we are going through challenging times we leave off on the idea that life always has a crisis of meaning present in it and our current situation may just expose it more...