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Toward an Astropoetic Language of Soul
in the Face of Glacially Slow Paradigm Shifts
Both my previous books – Tracking the Soul With An Astrology of Consciousness and Astrology and The Archetypal Power of Numbers, Part One – and this one are part of The Astropoetic Series, in which my goal is to develop an astrological language of soul. In the precursor to this series – The Seven Gates of Soul: Reclaiming the Poetry of Everyday Life – I define soul as embodied Spirit, and Spirit as the omnipresent, immanent Intelligence that infuses Life on this planet with natural order. It is the embodiment of Spirit that makes possible the experience of consciousness, which in turn makes possible a conscious life informed by Divine Intelligence, lived in harmony with natural law.
Based on these assumptions, I view the journey of the soul as the lifelong effort of each individual to align herself with Divine Intelligence and natural law. This journey necessarily entails addressing all impediments to this alignment – wounds, core issues, and seemingly external obstacles to forward momentum, as well as the limitations of time and space, and conditions of gravity, entropy, and mortality that are unavoidable conditions of an embodied life. In addition, the journey of the soul involves a process of gradual self-discovery, learning and growth, as an individual reaches toward a more evolved depth of creativity that mimics the capacity of Spirit to order and transform the world. In this way – through self-healing and self-actualization – the individual soul participates and contributes to the collective evolution of the anima mundi at the heart of the embodied world.
The Seven Gates of Soul
In The Seven Gates of Soul, I suggest that astrology can become a powerful language of soul – with which to describe and further explore the soul’s journey – provided it is first relieved of certain patterns of conditioning. This conditioning is intrinsic not just to it, but to a world dominated by the reductionist thinking of monotheistic religion and Newtonian science. Religion tends to confuse the mortal soul with the immortal Spirit and unnecessarily restrict the trial and error learning process of the soul with moral judgments. Science disavows the notion of soul altogether, essentially replacing it with the more limiting concepts of mind or brain function, and dismissing or attempting to negate the subjective nature of human experience. Furthermore, science insists that whatever does not fall under its purview – including most of the essential experiences of soul: the exercise of consciousness, creativity, love, healing, awareness of beauty, self-reflection, and self-transcendence – is either unworthy of investigation or must be distorted to fit the scientific paradigm before it can be considered real. Psychology – which evolved as a science in the late 19th century – finds meaning only in the measurable aspects of human behavior, which it then casts in quasi-religious judgment as “normal” or “abnormal.”
To be sure, religion, science and psychology are all slowly evolving in hopeful directions – although the key word here is “slowly.” As former professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thomas Kuhn pointed out half a century ago, paradigms shift at glacial speed against the entrenched inertia of old, previously accepted ideas (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed., Enlarged, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 176). The upside of this conservatism inherent within the scientific community is that paradigms shift only when sufficient evidence has accumulated to tip the scale toward the new worldview. The downside is that institutionalized investment in the old paradigm – in terms of money, reputation, and established infrastructure – often elevates mere hypotheses to the level of belief, and can then produce outright denial in the face of evidence that refutes it.
Thus nearly one hundred years after Werner Heisenberg postulated his Uncertainty Principle – casting doubt on the reliability of all scientific measurement – science still insists that only measurable evidence is acceptable. Nearly fifty years after Bell’s Theorem has shown “that, at a deep and fundamental level, the ‘separate parts’ of the universe are connected in an intimate and immediate way” (Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1980, p. 282), most scientific researchers still proceed as though it were possible to study reality as independent observers. More than fifty years after University of California psychologist Robert Rosenthal began documenting the effects of researcher bias in understanding human behavior, experimental design in the social sciences still pretends that only objective truth – that in which all subjectivity has been negated – matters. These entrenched scientific attitudes not only fly in the face of the newly emerging scientific paradigm, but also continue to condition the way we think about ourselves, and the way we practice both psychology and astrology.