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Abstracts of Gerry's astrology essays
Abstracts of Gerry's transpersonal theory essaysSuch an on-going project of an inter-disciplinary explication of its archetypal principles reveals the holistic synthesizing capacity of astrology to reflect an infinity of "point-of-viewness" without collapse into postmodern relativism or nihilism. I believe that although the fundamental universal principles of astrology stand firm, the astrological language will continue to evolve in its capacity to embrace and express the complex dimensionality of human experience in relation to the natural cosmos.
In our time, the relationship between what is and what we humans experience things to be has become obscured; theory and fact have become inseparable. Rather than simply being one way of thinking, one imaginative system of self expression, one technique of self transformation among many others, astrology reveals itself as an overarching universal mother language -- the quintessential interface of that which is given in nature and that which human creativity continues to bring forth.
Along with transformational meditational techniques from Eastern disciplines, indigenous shamanic practices, relational encounter, and deep experiential and transpersonal psychotherapeutic methods, a multi-disciplinary astrological vision can provide the intersubjective and universally connective dialogue necessary for a collective manifestation of shared individual spiritual experience celebrating the biosphere, the noosphere and the theosphere. On primal, mental, psychic and transpersonal levels, embodied consciousness is directly interwoven with the planetary structure yet is not reducible to it. To phrase it in perennialist or Neoplatonic terms, astrological meanings do not reside in the planets but in the ever evolving totality of Consciousness as it unfolds from original unconsciousness toward Cosmic Consciousness or the Absolute Nondual where the planetary formations, formed by the same overarching archetypal principles as consciousness itself, trace the time/space interface of all events within the Great Chain of Being.
In the essays, my debt to the pioneers and the current researchers, therapists, thinkers and teachers in the field of psychological astrology is obvious. From Dane Rudhyar through Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, Stephen Arroyo, Robert Hand, Glenn Perry, Richard Tarnas and others too numerous to mention (bibliography), the inherent truth value of astrology stands revealed in powerful contemporary psycho-spiritual terms. I am especially inspired in my particular interdisciplinary project by the claim of Richard Tarnas, author of the acclaimed Passion of the Western Mind and Prometheus the Awakener, that astrology is the most adequate and unique of all "new paradigm" strategies constituting "a cosmic avenue to a new world view." In his words:
If astrological correlations are real, then the underlying Copernican, Cartesian, and Kantian bases of the modern world view cannot be sustained. The whole modern world view is undermined at its very foundation....For astrology attacks all three dimensions of the modern prison of alienation right at its core -- the epistemological, the ontological, and the cosmological....There is a legendary object called the philosopher's stone, something that alchemists believed could turn base matter into gold. More broadly, it was something that could bring illumination to the great philosophical riddles. I believe that many people are now drawn so strongly to astrology because they suspect that astrology itself may be the philosopher's stone.In association with renowned transpersonal researcher and psychotherapist Stanislav Grof, Tarnas, in addition to his scholarly expositions of the interconnection of natal and transiting planetary configurations with biographical personages and historical events, has empirically established correlations among the outer planets and the archetypally appropriate non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC), specifically, the four "perinatal matrices" explored in Grof's holotropic therapy.
According to Grof, there are four stages of the intrauterine state and the birth process which experientially reveal four essential structures of the unconscious which constellate, in a non-causal and non-reductionist manner, later human experience. The planetary transits corresponding to the re-experiencing of the birth process in holotropic regression therapy, namely, BPM I with Neptune, BPM II with Saturn, BPM III with Pluto and BPM IV with Uranus, provide additional evidence for Grof's overall map of consciousness and its deep structures as well as providing another source of evidence for astrology.
Richard Tarnas describes the archetypal process implied by Grof's findings:
...the archetypal sequence that governed the perinatal phenomena from womb through birth canal to birth was experienced above all as a powerful dialectic -- moving from an initial state of undifferentiated unity to a problematic state of constriction, conflict, and contradiction, with an accompanying sense of separation, duality, and alienation; and finally moving through a stage of complete annihilation to an unexpected redemptive liberation that overcame and fulfilled the intervening alienated state -- restoring the initial unity but on a new level that preserved the achievement of the whole trajectory...In psychological terms, the experience was one of movement from an initial condition of undifferentiated pre-egoic consciousness to a state of increasing individuation and separation between self and world, increasing existential alienation, and finally an experience of ego death followed by psychological rebirth; this was often complexly associated with the biographical experience of moving from the womb of childhood through the labor of life and the contraction of aging to the encounter with death. (Ref. 8)But Grof's grand model of consciousness and Tarnas's account of history in terms of a transcendent concept of archetype which goes beyond the Jungian psychological idea of archetypes as the shape of the instincts, like Jung himself, have not gone unchallenged within the transpersonal community. The renowned transpersonal theorist and grand synthesizer Ken Wilber, himself no friend of astrology, has established himself along with Stanislav Grof as a leader in the field. Along with trenchant critiques of neo-Jungian and Romantic accounts of history, Wilber has challenged the logical adequacy of Tarnas' account and the adequacy of Grof's categories to explicate the realms of culture and the transcendent.
While genuinely acknowledging the profound contribution of Stanislav Grof toward deep experiential therapy and a transpersonal mapping of certain dimensions of the unconscious and non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC), Ken Wilber, in articulating his evolutionary and "perennialist" (or Neoplatonic) account of consciousness synthesizing Eastern and Western Wisdom teachings and Western developmental and depth psychology, argues that Grof's account of the perinatal matrices, as valid as it is in the primal and bio-physical sphere is, like the much touted new science, insufficient to account for the mystical or higher transpersonal levels of consciousness. Similarly, Tarnas's account of Western History is claimed to be flawed in that it effectively reduces the causative factors of the stages and levels in the Great Holarchic Chain of Being to biophysical factors and relies upon a Romantic view of psyche, in common with many other Jungian, feminist, and "web-of-life" theorists, which is essentially regressive rather than evolutionary.
A vigorous and on-going debate has ensued around the ever more influential work of Ken Wilber and the post Jungian, feminist, goddess, astrological, archetypal, ecological, and indigenous spirituality schools of thought, all of which he strongly criticizes as collapsing the great hierarchy of Being while regressively seeking higher truth by attempting to resurrect lower and more primitive levels of being.
It is in this whole area that I believe, along with Richard Tarnas especially, that astrology has such an important role to play in forging a more adequate model of consciousness, one that can incorporate archetypal, Jungian, Romantic, Idealist, Neoplatonic, holarchic, and feminist perspectives. The model of the Kosmos revealed by astrology promises to synthesize and resolve many of the conflicts among competing models while being able to ground and verify the "theory" through empirical observations and experiential practices.
This article appeared in The Astrological Journal, Nov/Dec 1995 (v37, n6)
This article appeared in The Astrological Journal, May/June 1996 (v38, n3)
Published In:
The postmodern period and its prevailing though transitional zeitgeist is symbolically
captured by the mutable cross; centrally by the 6/12 (Virgo/Pisces) axis primarily in direct
dynamic tension with the 3/9 axis. Upon the basis of the generally agreed-on meanings of
the four mutable principles and their archetypal correspondence to the essential features
of the postmodern mind, a case can be made which deepens our understanding of the
principles. But more ambitiously, through astrology's capacity to map postmodernism (in
relation to other historical stages and consciousness structures) within a larger historical
and developmental perspective, I believe we can establish the astrological mandala as an
effective key to understanding the greater evolution and structure of consciousness.
Essays in Astrology
This essay examines the psychological dimensions of the eighth principle in
the light of certain concepts from James Hillman, Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn, and
Stanislav Grof. In terms of an overarching model of consciousness revealed by the
twelve-fold mandala, the eighth principle, while at one level signifying the primal
dimension of the Great Mother, is, at a higher turn of the spiral of evolution, pivotal in
the transmutation of the personal egoic dimension into the perinatal and the
transpersonal. Such a transformative interpenetration of primal and trans-egoic
dimensions unfolds through an encounter with the "underworld" a la Neumann or Jung
and has appropriately been referred to by Michael Washburn as a "regression in service of
transcendence". Transpersonal Perspectives and
the Eighth Principle
In response to Richard Tarnas's thoroughly researched and incisively argued
case that the character of the mythic Prometheus demonstrates a more convincing
correspondence to the archetypal nature of the planet Uranus than that of the sky god
Ouranus, Robert Chandler (AJ, 1996 v38, n1) mounted a most interesting set of counter
arguments in favour of the original historical synchronistic appropriateness of the
planetary naming. In turn, I attempt to refute Chandler's arguments, while upholding the
greater adequacy of the archetypal Promethean/Uranian resonance as articulated by
Tarnas and at the same time arguing that indeed Uranus is a planet of rational and trans-
rational evolutionary development which ironically implies, in part, a transcendence and
transmutation of a strictly mythopoetic perspective. Uranus, Prometheus or Just
Plain Herschel?
In his Hymns to the Ancient Gods, Michael Harding, from an
existential and phenomenological viewpoint, mounts a rather formidable case against the
equating of astrological principles with Jungian or Platonic transcendent archetypes, a
philosophically idealist position unacceptable to Harding, especially as exemplified in what
he recognizes as the
otherwise exemplary work of Richard Tarnas. Defending the logical necessity of a
Neoplatonic archetypal perspective as the only alternative to an inadequate, even though
new paradigmatic subtle naturalism, I try to suggest a way in which we can understand
the planets in archetypal terms while remaining consistent with a generally perennialist
view of the Great Chain of Being. In this holarchic view, especially as articulated by the
transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber, the planets would be seen as material forms at the
lower levels of the Great Holarchy, engaging only the biophysical dimension and calling
for a postmodern scientific, though not idealist, paradigmatic view of the cosmos as
adequate for explaining any astrological effects. But in light of independent perennialist
arguments for an archetypally informed Kosmos, plus an agreed-on validity of astrological
symbolic interpretation at non-reducible levels beyond the bio-physical, an astro-
archetypal and holarchic perennialist account is both called for and possible to
conceive. Metaphor or Archetype? ~ the nature of the astrological symbol
The Mutable Cross and the Postmodern Ethos
"...a study of the way in which astrology's inner logic can illuminate mankind's
direction in a period of postmodern confusion." Suzi Harvey, editor
Orpheus: Voices in Contemporary Astrology. Frome, Consider, 2000.
Essays by, Andre Barbault, Liz Greene, Charles Harvey, Gerry Goddard, Lindsay
Radermacher, Otto Rheinschmiedt, Suzi Harvey, Brian Taylor.
Currently available from:
Wessex Astrologer
Midheaven Books
Abstract:
Contemporary developments in culture and consciousness along with disconcerting
changes in socio-political and economic institutions are enfolded within a newly
emerging archetypal deep structure, which at this point of its unfolding, we are
characterizing as postmodern. What we tend to see as both positive and negative features
~ a cultural renaissance yet an increasing economic disparity, 'leading edge' or 'high'
culture along with popular or 'mass' culture ~ are to be understood in the same archetypal
terms. Genuinely higher developments along with changes that might be deemed even
pathological, bear the signature of the deep structure unfolding in history, a structure
appropriately illuminated by the archetypal lattice work of the astrological mandala
viewed from the perspective of the mutable cross.
This article, here in a slightly modified form, appeared in The Astrological Journal, July/August 1998 (v40, n4) The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche ~ an astrological portrait
Uranus, Neptune, Pluto: Our Contemporary Evolutionary Challenge
Essays in Transpersonal Theory
This paper serves as an introduction to transpersonal theory, arguing that transpersonalism establishes a more adequate account of evolutionary
process than modernist and postmodernist naturalistic explanations.
It situates the
transcendent and perennialist perspective in relation to postmodern cultural relativism while certain narratives of
individual and historical development are explored as they are exemplified by, on the one hand, the
holarchical stage model of Ken Wilber and, on the other, the more dynamic dialectical
and Jungian depth perspectives of Michael Washburn, Stanislav Grof and Richard Tarnas. A synthesizing perspective is called for which can resolve certain
foundational differences between the Wilberian and the more Jungian dialectical depth
perspectives.Perspectives in Transpersonal Theory
In the field of transpersonal psychology and theory, three related though
significantly variant grand overarching models of consciousness stand out above the
others, namely, the perinatal model of Stanislav Grof, the perennialist and evolutionary
model of Ken Wilber and the Jungian dialectical model of Michael Washburn. It is here
argued that any possible model which purports to adequately synthesize and reconcile
these overlapping yet often conflicting accounts is required to satisfy certain foundational
features which incorporate the essential truths of each of the models. The critiques and
suggested syntheses in this paper, though an exercise in transpersonal theory completely
independent of astrology, form the transpersonal theoretical foundations of the
astrological model which I outline in In Search of the Philosopher's
Stone.Airing Our Transpersonal Differences
Holonic Logic and the Dialectics of Consciousness: unpacking Ken Wilber's Four Quadrant Model
Consciousness and the Holonic Infrastructure--This will take you to
The World of Ken Wilber's Reading Room. Then, just follow the links.
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