Tag Archives: Bardo

Responsibility: New Moon in Gemini

24 Saturday Jun 2017

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Responsibility is nothing other than how we heed our calling. Commonly confused with duty, it is rather only indirectly an element of the ethics of our response to others. At the deepest level of being, it is where we integrate self and the product of behaviour, the world as we perceive it. From our beginning, we obey in every action a call, to obey or disobey, to gratify or deny, to emulate or invent, to laugh or cry, to love or fear. Where this call comes from has been debated for millennia. Is it the voice of God? The Earth? Our species? Our ancestors? Whatever it is, we can all agree that it commends effort. It does care less for disinterest and boredom. It may evolve towards activism or submission, but the last thing it means is that life doesn’t matter, that it makes no difference what you do, for you’ll soon be dead.

But we will soon be dead, and notwithstanding the nobility of ‘responsibility’, there is more than a touch of absurdity in it, and when we judge it in others, madness too. Am I not mad to devote myself to reconfiguring a mediaeval world-view? Is it not madness to dedicate one’s life to preparation for the next life, or to perfect oneself in the knowledge that there won’t be one? Is it not madness to shake one’s head at the obsessions of others which have turned the world into a madhouse, believing that only one’s own responsibility is sane?

Idolator Big Hill Jun24Yours

The Bardo is just like a huge department store: in every direction rows and rows of identical white display cabinets all the way to the hexagonal walls which announce its realm if only you could see that far; and on your way to a wall every cabinet reveals in its compartments, identical compartments, an infinite range of character inhabited by personality and opportunity changing as you pause and behold the particular combinations of compensation and destiny you can recognize as the madness of everyone you have ever known, as well as your own, even though you still haven’t been able to identify the department. Everything seems, like an expanding universe, to radiate from wherever you are.

Iconoclast Big Hill Jun24Yours

In many ways, the midwinter Moon is the Big One, the cyclic root of discrimination and prejudice. The entire history of the human race has enacted our reaction to winter: will it kill us, what will we eat, what is it for, whose fault is it, what have we done wrong, will it end, when will it end, how will we prepare for its return, how can caring be so cruel? Actually, midwinter crosses the sky every day. Rug up your feelings, and contemplate the panorama of country on this occasion eclipsed by cold sunlight.

Gemini New Stawell Jun24

Saturday’s iconoclastic child works hard for a living while her shift-working idolizing sibling sleeps, because she lives a life of anguish. Benoit‘s third type, her being is strong in both animal and abstract nature. The twins complete each other in a self tending to overcome the not-self, but each, the brighter one deferent—deferential in the Ptolemaic sense—and the other subservient, reduces the other’s individuality to a not-self. What is unconscious is terrible in its imperative.

Yet the twins stand on the banks of the Lethe, and the self’s struggle to overcome fear of annihilation is blessed thereby in the imagination. Not in the law is human survival to be sourced, but in the instinctive assertion and satisfaction of responsibility. Reason determines it, but responsibility in the gut is what drives human resilience in community through the signs of winter and spring. God help you if you get in the way of human resilience!

Zealot Signs 2017Yours

The problem is, responsibility, that primeval driving force of humanity in the face of death and meaninglessness, constellates the self in opposing directions, as we know. Fracture is built into community, as separation is built into love. The autonomous principles of rationality and instinct are not united in Malkhut, but in Yesod, which has no existence other than as a rung on a transcendent ladder. Radicalization is a probability as immanence is a probability. The physical world was always a fetish for humanity, always a commodification, always a consumption.

Esmeralda, the transgender judge of the high court, is an activist in the rehabilitation of the suppressed gender which underlies all miscreance. Igor, the Eastern European-Aboriginal saint of the public bar, is hell-bent on refusing to accept less than he deserves. Uki, the fool of the Tarot deck, lives in a magical world of continuous transformation of human flesh and spirit engendered by what the latest cultural implant is selling at the corner store. Meanwhile, country is a usurpation of indigenous culture, and ‘centering‘ prayer is sold by Amazon. Is there a way towards a cultivated space in which voices all speak the same language? Can the world we leave our grandchildren transcend madness, thanks to our effort?

Shawwal St Kilda Jun25

How to be responsible by not speaking out and causing offence. How to enjoy a Sagittarian cup of tea with the twins. How to submit to a culture of mental illness, consuming the culture of others and teaching only consumption to your children. How to project mental illness as the condition for rejection without defining it, and therefore without judging it. How to be in good mental health by excluding others not of your caste who might reveal your shadow. How to do something for youth by teaching the culture of an outcast. How to live and teach a complete life without reading a book of ideas or listening selectively to music, or learning to fish and hunt and cook. How to invent a life in the spirit. How to be responsibly irresponsible.

Incidentally, the opposite of responsibility, the irresponsible, is boredom. There is no other place to find your vocation than right where you’re standing, in the centre of the landscape, though you might never get to read the sign on the wall.

Full Moon in Virgo: the Artisan

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Moon Phases

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For fifteen hundred years, through the ages of conflict following the decline of the Roman Empire, the struggle of indigenous Europeans, Americans, Australians, Africans and people of the Pacific to connect “pagan” and Christian identity, the rise of democracy and Islam, wars ongoing over who owns the cradle of The Book, and the commodification of birthplace and burial-ground, and everything in between, the Full Moon after the Northward Equinox has shone in Virgo, at Easter, when Spring stamps her leporine foot in Early Winter.

Easter Moon

Ok, the Moon is in this moment when Christians celebrate the resurrection, the forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life, and when non-Christians celebrate very awkwardly the arrival of symbols of regeneration in Autumn, easter eggs. Signs of faith surround the Moon, symbols of the confrontation between human will and divine spirit, and of the perennial subjugation of women and the magical quality of their self-belief. Some of these have been hitherto invisible to astrologers. The Sun meanwhile, and remember she started all this with her perspicacity and perfectionism, has become straight like you wouldn’t believe.

The Moon’s done this gig so many times he’s got it down pat. He might spend a good deal of time offstage–behind clouds, as it were, because at this moment of rebirth winter is just around the corner–for some of the crew can’t quite get what he’s on about, and you mightn’t either. However, at some point, because it never rains at a full moon, he begins.

First, he announces the theme of the show: “Convention”. Then there’s a long procession across the stage of flamboyant crones and skeleton-costumed heterosexual white males, of homophobes, queers, Ku Klux Klan figures and shrouded Islamists carrying placards that read, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, shrieking contempt and hatred into megaphones. Following that, an electronic band comes on playing arhythmic dance music at breakneck tempo, which is when a naked old guy hauling a cross stumbles across the stage. By now, the audience is normally in uproar, fights break out, and you can’t hear yourself think for the megaphones which have descended into the stalls. Shell road maps for the long weekend are in many an eye as suddenly a large rabbit hops nervously into view. The megaphones and electronic band fall silent and fair dinkum, all you can hear is a communal female voice breathing, aaaahhhhh, and oooohhhhh! The Paedophile gets hauled up, roped to the cross, and the megaphones resume with “Nails! Nails!” An emu trots up to the cross and seems to be trying to get at the acanthus stems woven around the priest’s head. Here and there a person shouts to another, “What kind of way cool convention is this??” The finale is a crow which shifts shape into a burly woman in goddess costume who walks on her hands through the audience with a collection plate like you see in church lashed between her thighs. The Moon purrs into the microphone, “Thank you, thank you! See you for next year’s Virgo installation passion, mushrooms. Thanks for taking part!”

An artisan is defined as a craftsperson, one who applies a traditional skill to produce a hand-made article of utility. Examples of such articles made and used in an earlier time are called artefacts in archaeology. A distinction exists in modern cultures between artisans and artists, but this ought to be tempered with the awareness that artisans in traditional cultures create art, and modern artists acquire traditional skills. What each produces can be called ‘artefact’, as can tools and appliances created by mass production.

The Moon’s artefact is best defined as an artificial construct by method extrinsic to the conventional perspective of the observer of Virgo, in particular that of the astrologer. The Moon is of course looking at you against the backdrop of the sky behind you. (The Sun is also behind you, or else the Moon wouldn’t be fully lit.) As well as being aware that the Sun has changed her position from perfectionism to compromise, and that you are preparing for Autumn while he cavorts with Spring, the Moon sees two striking phenomena: the stars to your left and right are to his right and left, and the Southern Cross, towering invisibly behind your secular orientation towards the meaning of marriage and gender as the crow morphs into goddess, is a perfect symbol of death and resurrection. The fact that you are turned away, or craning your neck backwards so you see it upside-down, does not lessen its importance, or the striking coincidence of its apparition at a moment of profound confusion of Autumn weather and Spring rituals, and of strident antagonism between political left and right. (Or is that right and left?)

Artisan Moon Mar23

An artefact is a moment in the internalisation and development of a tradition, a creation at the very least, whose originality can celebrate transcendence, whose innovative technology can bring a new appreciation of what it is to be human. An artisan can refine beauty, Sun!

On the other hand, artefacts are representative of ultimate reality, and are empty even if the ultimate reality they represent is emptiness. Artisans are shamans returned from a dream to delusion. Crow and Cross are talismans, each against the other. Homophobia and Islamophobia are artefacts, no less than Safe Schools and “tolerance of intolerance”. Left and right are bullying each other.

How is it that the most unconventional youths become the most judgmental seniors? There is no formalist psychological mechanism, as there so seldom is, but rather a transformation of the conventions the youths stimulated us by flouting. Surely the answer is that the most uninteresting people in themselves, the most unentranced by the world as it is, those with nothing to share but a depiction of prison walls, these are the only ones left in advanced age who believe in the spectacular artifice of their youth.

Seeing only black and white is the original sin. Success and failure, right and wrong, are in the eye of the beholder, and it needs to be blared from megaphones that the person who doesn’t agree with you is not a moron! Every life matters, and God forbid that a bigot never come across a simple artefact which awakens him or her to the manifold expression of the human response to existence! God forbid that a single generation arise which holds fast to fixed opinions, to oppressive definitions of offence, to divisive cultural norms, or to any tradition for its own sake!

But if it does, try to show respect. It’s history!

Full Moon in Leo: the Counsellor

22 Monday Feb 2016

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‘By “infinitude’s despair” Kierkegaard means the sickness of the personality, the opposite of health. And so the person becomes sick by plunging into the limitless, the symbolic self becomes “fantastic”—as it does in schizophrenia—when it splits away from the body, from a dependable grounding in real experience in the everyday world. The full-blown schizophrenic is abstract, ethereal, un-real; he billows out of the earthly categories of space and time, floats out of his body, dwells in an eternal now, is not subject to death and destruction. He has vanquished these in his fantasy, or perhaps better, in the actual fact that he has quit his body, renounced its limitations.’ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, Souvenir Press, 1973, p.134.

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” George Santayana.

Counsellor Moon Feb23

Moon: Your referral indicates an anxiety problem. Would you like to speak about that?

Earth: Well, I am tearful all the time and I can’t sleep, and the hope I had for this relationship I’m in with people is not working out, and some blame it on me, and say I haven’t done my work on myself and I need to see you.

Moon: Shall we talk about your relationship, or the work you need to do on yourself?

Earth: I suppose my relationship might be working out better if I didn’t have so many contrary habits, the most problematic of which seems to be the way I love. My existence is imprisoned in time. I recover from each loss by attaching myself to something new, which in turn matures and dies. Eternity, the big picture, beckons as a solution, but what is that really but a craving for the end of loss?

Put it this way: in the immensity of the universe everything seems insignificant, meaningless and futile, but my heart breaks for the brevity of human life, and the meaning people try to create. And I have such vivid, horror dreams, which some say may be my struggle with my ego and a sign that I’m on the verge of letting go, but letting go of what? War? Attachment? Time? Or loss…and love…and tears?

Moon: We can explore your dreams in another session, and in the meantime, it might be helpful to focus on some negative thoughts you seem to have and see if we can’t identify them, and change them into positive ones.

Earth: You mean, don’t you, that perhaps my anxiety arises from not feeling good about myself, not being grateful for just being here, having unrealistic expectations, being needy?

Moon: Perhaps. We are in this space-time thing together. If we are unperturbed, there’s no reason we can’t reach out to eternity in harmony, each of us cooperating with the other in ways that work to our mutual satisfaction, such as my libration and your tides, and all we have to do is feel good about that.

Earth: If only I were just a rock in spacetime, but I’m not! I am humanity’s home, and its burial ground! I realise I am not the author of existence, that you and the Sun and the galaxies are as much part of it as I, but the oceans that fishermen work are of me, the gardener’s rain falls on my soil, and the rubble of war is my ruin. I have hopes; I have regrets. I am made of the aspiration of generations, to transform me, to use me in their heroic quests. I have been their perspective and their disappointment.

In the long run, none of it matters, I know that. Form is a figure of speech; ambiguity rules. But if nothing matters, harmony doesn’t matter, nor does eternity. Perhaps it does all come down to habit, but habit is real, my sleeplessness is real, and the fullness of emptiness is real!

Moon: What do you mean by ‘the fullness of emptiness’?

Earth: There is a war going on inside me, and it seems to get worse the wiser I get. First it was spiritual versus material, and then capitalist against socialist: people trying to expand their inside, their subjective experience, against people trying to perfect everybody. None of it was real, but many generations were consumed by anxiety, hatred and war. Out of it emerged an uneasy stalemate: the spirit of the universe has evolved as the projection of egos which regard themselves as delusions. Even you are not much more than a rock these days, reflecting light from the nearest star from different angles, and if I weren’t here you wouldn’t even do that.

Moon: I am ok with however you want to see me.

Earth: Precisely! Any definition is a delusion, including that one, but defining is real, and so is ambiguity. That’s the fullness of emptiness! Your ‘ok’ does respond to how I see you. That is the war going on inside me as it has evolved. Bullies are looked upon as pathetic creatures of reified belief, and yet they cause suffering, which does not seem empty to the perfectionists. The age-old solution was to negate a bully’s belief by standing up to him, thereby validating the belief system which informed the bullying. The new solution is to teach emptiness to the bully, and in effect indulge the victim in a compassionate validation of irresponsibility. No?

My anxiety is about compassion becoming a habit which entails a kind of heat-death, the dissolution of ego’s energy into an anti-heroism content with an aspiration to gratitude for inherited cocoons. My anxiety is about the fullness of this emptiness. Empty bullies hurt!

Moon: It is difficult to resist your impression of the root of your anxiety, but I perceive another possibility which I suggest you deliberate on between now and a next session should you request one. In affirming a tension between finitude and infinitude one merely states the conditions of existence. There is no cause of anxiety here. Anxiety arises in despair: the refusal to be finite in relation to the infinite, but alternatively the refusal to be infinite in relation to the finite. In familiar terms, we share the characteristics of hurtling and falling, and each exists as a determinant and effect of the other. Freedom is the relation to the relation of possibility to necessity. Your anxiety may result from the relation of infinitude to finitude, as you seem to believe, or in your self it may be arising from a refusal of the denial of that relation that is being transferred to you by the despair of others. It may lie in the relation of your love to an imbalance towards abstraction and a denial of limitations in those you love, or its relation to an obsessive absorption in the everyday which denies possibility, in other cases.

Fullness, as I take your meaning, can be likened to the heat which creates the steam. Remember, as the old saying has it, a watched pot never boils.

Your anxiety may arise from your sanity in a sick world, or your own sickness…and on that note we must interrupt our conversation.

Earth: …!

End of Session.

My definition of astrology is rather loose, if not perverse: it is a gaming of reality — feeling, time and form — which enhances meaning and expands it until it implodes for lack of, you guessed it, objectivity.

The world is made of subjectivity, not objects, and that is where astrology properly begins and ends. Unfortunately, as practised by many astrologers, it affirms the belief that we have an essential nature as subjects and can therefore be understood like objects as having independent existence.

We may feel no enmity, but as object to some we would befriend, we have become ’the enemy’. How is equanimity attained? Is it really despite yourself that you are someone’s enemy? Will you die at peace, or simply already dead to poverty and devastation?

You can find a SHA chart of the opposition of the perfectionist Sun in Aquarius to the confused Moon in Leo here, and the cast of my “Astrology” characters here. Game on!

Bardo, Lilith and Thou

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in Bardo

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Bardo

I’ve been reading Chӧgyam Trungpa’s Book, Transcending Madness–very appropriate subject matter for Southern Hemisphere Astrology! My whole enterprise is mad, it seems, dropping breadcrumbs in the moonlight towards the mouth of a cave–of identity, of conventional astrology–people don’t want to leave, with birds as my only retinue.

In the process of reading, I recognized the realms of existence and the Bardo states as mapping the same terrain as my interpretation of the astrological Houses. My first merger of the two maps was this one:

BARDO

Like any map, it took a while to orientate, and playing around with it, I came up with this one:

BARDO3

This one satisfies me for now. You can see how the resonances of the Constellations align with the Zodiac and the seasons, and with their opposites across the chart. You can also see the effect of my chosen Ayanamsa of (currently) 27.73° (whose origin is Iota 1 Scorpii at 0° Sagittarius–so important to preserve the tail of the South’s most prominent constellation!) on the Sun’s sidereal location throughout the year.

Lilith

The title of this post mentions Thou, and that’s what I want to get onto, but because of its importance in my understanding of madness, and because of its prominence in the chart above, I will tell you a little about my concept of Lilith, Black Moon Lilith, whose glyph appears in each Constellation above.

Lilith is a strange compartment of the psyche, buried so deep as to have no real location, and yet its ghost lingers in the shadows of every corridor. Mathematically, it can be found as the hypothetical apogee of the Moon, bouncing around all over the place as the Moon’s orbit lurches through the turbulent influences of Sun and Earth (and Venus and Jupiter etc.). Astronomically, it can be identified by measuring the Moon’s distance at its greatest. Psychologically, it symbolizes our earliest, most distant but fundamental emotional experience, separation.

What was our first experience of emotional pain? How did we come to define it? How did we react and perceive the response to our behaviour and our training to overcome it? How did we understand the sanctions of our early training and internalize them? How did the chaotic feelings of frustration and anguish translate into behaviour? How did that behaviour contribute to the form of our early relationships? How did we modify it ourselves as we came to evaluate the behavioural models before us? Along what path to attitude did we remedy ourselves? What are we made of: remedy or pain?

Aren’t we mad, the way we’re so sane?

In the chart I suggest keywords for the possible ways in which you could differentiate behavioural pathways according to personality type, and perhaps more importantly, how you could find the seeds of personality in fortuitous behaviour type. Here is a link to some fine work on Lilith: http://www.expreso.co.cr/centaurs/blackmoon/lilith.html

Thou

The graphic representation of sidereal/tropical date-difference of Sun entry of the Signs and Constellations in the Madness chart got me thinking about what I now know as ascension difference. My question was, how long after the ascension of the first point of a constellation does the ascension of the next sign follow? It turns out that because of the tilt of Earth’s axis of rotation, and the inclination of the horizon to the Ecliptic, the relationship of sidereal and tropical zodiacs in time varies markedly. Here is a representation of that:

Ascension Difference

The times given in hours:minutes:seconds are of how long each Constellation takes to cross the Ascendant at my latitude. The time it takes the next associated Sign to rise after the first point of each Constellation varies between 5:27 and 11:18 (mins:secs). At the extremes, it takes Aries 2:29:46 to cross the horizon and 11:18 for the Sign of Taurus to follow; but Virgo is across the horizon in 1:14:04 and the Sign of Libra follows 5:27 later.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, what you see above is the opposite to what occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, where our short ones are all long and our long ones are all short. Furthermore, because the Ascendant takes longer to pass through the long ones, the likelihood is that more natal horoscopes will have Ascendants in long Signs than in short Signs.

The Wikipedia entry on the Ascendant includes this juicy morsel:

“Some astrologers, such as Richard Nolle, consider the preponderance of Ascendants in signs from Cancer through Sagittarius (known as the western signs) to be symbolic of the highly relationship-oriented character inherent in a complex or civilized society as found today in the northern hemisphere but never developed in equatorial or south temperate latitudes where eastern (Capricorn through Gemini), individual-oriented Ascendants are equally or more common.”

I can’t at present find in nature a basis for differentiating Eastern and Western Signs, other than that depicted above, but thanks for focussing me on the western hemisphere, Richard. It’s where the interesting things happen down here too, such as the behaviour of the Vertex.

Referring to the Ascension Difference chart, and bearing in mind that the Equinoxes are at 2.27° Virgo and Pisces, the Ecliptic in all of the Constellations below the horizontal line crosses the Western Horizon north of due west, so that the Vertex is below the horizon. The configuration of the Constellations as shown, with the Southern Summer Solstice in Sagittarius at the top, occurs 3min 56sec earlier each day, this morning at 08:52:49 EDST. For several hours beforehand, the Vertex, as astrology refers to another imaginary point at the intersection of the Ecliptic and the Prime Meridian (or due west), looped through Gemini, Cancer and Leo.

As the projection onto the Ecliptic of the Descendant or Shadow, the Vertex, which has been named Destiny’s Gate by one astrologer, lurks in the western, afternoon and evening Houses, in which relationship reveals the nightmarish difficulty of merging consciousness with others, and when flagging egos often suffer more than glancing blows. It symbolizes both the danger and the blissful anticipation of that most intimate Other, the Beloved.

As I configure the resonances of the Constellations in the Madness chart above, associating them with their opposite Zodiac Signs, the Vertex had quite a journey! (Lilith was in Cancer.) It ultimately reached a tense conjunction with the Shadow at the time stated, and clambered above ground like the ghost of Sadako in The Ring, lurching into the earnest spiritual materialism of Virgo. The journey will repeat itself tomorrow.