Navigating Our Cultural Singularity

By Christine Payne-Towler
ArkLetter 45 -- November 27,  2008

I have been having a feeling very strongly the entire month of November, as if we were in the trough of a retrograde.  There's a sense of standing still and grinding gears, but in fact we are turning around internally to face an entirely new direction. A more active analogue could be drawn to the alchemical process of putrefaction, meaning the disassembly of old forms before re-assembling them anew. It's a messy, imprecise, challenging process, certainly not a job for sissies. Whew!  No wonder it has been nearly impossible to concentrate on 'normal stuff'!

This is not just about our recent election, although that is contributing to the mix of forces. Something much larger, more pervasive and more personally transformative is going on, beyond which figurehead we chose to be represented by over the next four years. My hunch is that we are all feeling the imminent passage of Pluto into Capricorn, and the very DNA in our cells is restless on account of it.  True, scientists have 'demoted' Pluto from his planet status, and I fully understand why. Be that as it may, but the truth is, nobody can 'demote' Pluto from the realm of the Archetypes!  Therefore anything that has through common usage become assimilated to the Plutonian function as defined by culture and history now 'belongs to' and 'corresponds to' the space-junk we have so named.

Commentators on history have wryly noted that whatever humans are going through, they inflict upon their gods.  That certainly applies to our celebrities, both the heroes and the villains, but it is even truer for our Archetypes.  (One has only to contemplate the cultural phenomenon that is Madonna to see the full spectrum of possibilities!) Therefore, the fact that 20th century astrologers have appointed Pluto the ruler of Scorpio (which was from High Antiquity ruled by Mars) means that the passage of this particular lump of ice into the heavenly quadrant that western astrology calls Capricorn is a big deal.  By trickledown, whatever is happening to Pluto is transferred to Mars, and also to everybody who has sensitive points in Scorpio or Aries.  (I take Pluto to be the ruler of the Mars/Venus pair, so this would apply to Venus and the signs Taurus and Libra as well.) To a lesser degree, it is also happening to everybody who has sensitive points in their 8th and/or 1st house (plus, then, the second and seventh houses too). Meanwhile, those who have sensitive points at the end of Sagittarius or the beginning of Capricorn have already been on tenterhooks for several years with Pluto drilling down on them, so I don't have to explain a thing to them!  (Hmmm, could there be anybody left who isn’t touched by this?)

The moment becomes even more pregnant with potential when we realize that Pluto's transit into Capricorn is the beginning of our nation's Pluto Return, the period when Pluto returns to the spot it occupied when our nation was born. These are the best of times, these are the worst of times, and apparently Pluto is throwing one heck of a party to celebrate his American birthday!  It really feels like we are being violently ejected from the womb that has kept us safe to this point.  I wonder what it is possible to know about the incoming future from looking at the patterns defined by our traditional esoteric paradigm being extended forward?

Does Tradition speak to Present Times?

I have spent plenty of time on the esoteric matrix that Tarot describes with its core equation of {(21 + 1) + (4x10) + (4x4)}. At this point, I'm just going to proceed as if everybody who is reading along understands that this internal structure is by no means arbitrary, that is inherently designed to conform to the letter/number/astro canon that has come forward from Antiquity. 

Over the years I have marveled at the theorists whose studies into the history of Tarot have failed to reveal for them the 'bone structure' of the art. There are still Tarot 'historians' promulgating the idea that the multiple bodies of esoteric symbolism (publicly corresponded to Tarot cards since their popularization in the writings of Eliphas Levi) were all superimposed centuries after the cards' first appearance in the early 1400's. Yet such a position can only be taken by a person who has no grasp of the long history of humanity's esotericism(s), despite whatever claims to 'scholarly accuracy' such a commentator might make.  This is similar to looking into the big end of the telescope and exclaiming "But this thing doesn't reach out into space at all!" 

The undeniable reality is that humanity has been self-aware of living inside the motions of the Planets and Lights around the Zodiac for as long as we had eyes to look up with. Every nation of humans everywhere is exposed to the same cycles; this is our universal 'ground of being'.  The regularity of the cosmic clock to denominate events upon the ground has not been overlooked by any civilization, even if some were 'only' following the Lunar cycle and weren't trying to reconcile the Sun's part in the process. As civilizations grew and started building permanent settlements with houses, henges and temples, we simultaneously upgraded our celestial-observation skills till we were practicing full-fledged astrology. It's from this time in history that formal priesthoods emerged, supporting ranks of monks devoted to the tasks of taking the measurements, making the calculations, interpreting the messages and advising agents of governance about the trends.

At different times and in different cultures, references to the shared astral matrix are couched in varying local culturally determined terms. In these ArkLetters we have discussed a number of ways these constants are encountered -- the Letter/numbers (e.g. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Runes, etc.), Cabbala Trees with Spheres and Paths, square and circular Horoscopic charts including the Ladder of Lights diagram, the Lullian Ladders and Wheels, the Druidic Runes, the Paracelsian healing images, the sigils of Geomancy, the Pentacles of Solomon, the glyphic symbols of Alchemy, the ratios of Sacred Geometry, and of course the Tarot.  All of these symbol-sets take the standard givens of the astral matrix as their baseline.  Somebody who knows this is already a long way into realizing that all these different disciplines are talking about the same thing at root, though each application of the core model gets ramified into endlessly proliferating forms depending upon cultural circumstances and the creativity of the user.

Were any of the current developments predicted?

I'm an Air sign, and of course that makes me fantasize that is possible to "understand" things. Therefore I betook myself to the internet recently to see if there were any business-focused or political astrologers who have been willing to go out on a limb and make some predictions in print about current events.  In the longer time context of the fate of nations, there are fertile fields for the analytical astrologer to make comparisons. Plus, computers have allowed us to calculate backwards and forwards in time by many thousands of years.   History books tell us this branch of astrology has always been around, but with the inclusion of the asteroids and the 'invisible' outer planets to the roster of possible influences, the number-crunching savants have received a new set of cycles to examine. Now it is possible to work out in retrospect those aspects of history that have been expressing according to the cyclical fluctuations of many different Archetype-constellating celestial bodies, especially those objects named after the ancient gods Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The people who have excelled in charting these cycles up for non-astrologers are following the Elliott Wave theory.

The traditional Jupiter/Saturn interaction has always attracted the attention of astrologers because that has a very predictable 20-year cycle that seems to correlate amazingly well with manifestations of cultural transformation 'on the ground'. Here's a 3000-year table of the Saturn/Jupiter conjunctions with a great essay for perspective at the bottom, created by Richard Nolle: http://www.astropro.com/features/tables/geo/ju-sa/ju000sa.html.  The 20-year conjunctions arrange themselves into 60-year, 200-year and 800-year epicycles, as Nolle describes.  No matter where a person is in the flow of 'earthly' history, we are always embedded in these larger cycles. Theoretically at least, we should be able to map out our individual relationship to the time-territory we are currently crossing, and make some kind of intelligent guesses about the moment's significance within the larger pattern.

The first shock of my search

What I didn't realize when I started this investigation is that the Witch Trials haven't yet ended, although nobody has appraised the history books of this fact yet. It turns out, if a person is too accurate with their understanding of interpenetrating cycles, they are just as liable to be incarcerated and lose their liberties today as they were in Pennsylvania during the colonial burning times!  In modern times the 'witch' is no longer hung, burned at the stake or dunked in the river till drowned, thankfully. Nevertheless, he is just as securely locked away. The difference is, nowadays the charges are lobbed from the government 'lynch mob' instead of a religious one.

I learned about this by reading George Ure's daily journal at Urban Survival the day after FullMoon (Thurs Nov 13th). He included a link to the PDF of a treatise called Its Just Time by Martin Armstrong. Please ignore the dramatic choice of words by Ure -- Armstrong’s writing is calm, cool, and amazingly apt:

"Best Read of the Day"

I mean besides UrbanSurvival, of course: Martin Armstrong’s latest (from in jail) is called “It’s Just Time” and will serve to convince even the most skeptical that the ‘end is nearing’.

If you don’t know about the Martin Armstrong case, you have not been studying real (non-quant) economics enough…"

Once it downloaded, I couldn't read this 77-page essay fast enough. Every few pages I was forced to look out the windows and catch my breath. My God, this man was jailed for studying these things?  Could it be that something this important and real is seen as subversive?  At first I imagined the feeling was simply a channel of sympathy between Armstrong and myself because we are both pattern-recognition people, and he obviously has a taste for history, as do I.  It became even more thrilling to discover that, like an astrologer, he's willing to track cycles of many different lengths running alongside and around each other -- unlike most writers, he's not trying to reduce all the complexity down to the simplest terms.  Further, Armstrong even draws in considerations from sacred numerology, Cabbala, and the Hebrew number/letter alphabet.  A man after my own heart is a joy to discover, especially in a treatise on global finance.  My mind wanders to Giordano Bruno and his trial before the Inquisitors that so taxed his trust in the Universe. My heart goes out to this man Martin Armstrong!  Then I see that the date on his article, released from jail and typed up on antiquated machinery, is October 10th, 2008.  It's hot off the press, so to speak.

But it wasn't until I ran into this image on p.  18 of this PDF   that I realized something magically synchronous was afoot.  This is Armstrong's "Great Convergence of Critical Cyclical Waves" diagram, mapping the converging peaks of multiple historical cycles all synchronizing between 1999 and right now. As soon as the image flashed on my screen, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that it bears a striking resemblance to a sketch I had made three weeks before, after a phone call with a friend.  That conversation had skimmed over the topic of how a researcher could recognize the difference between historical gossip versus what is known by the name of Perennial Tradition. Even after that conversation was over, I was still percolating with ideas for this article, which was as yet unwritten.  To retain the flavor of what I wanted to say, I make this "sketch of the territory" along with a few notes to help me retain the vista I was surveying. I am not an artist, and I had no idea this document by Armstrong existed yet. Yet here is my sketch:

I won't bother you with trying to explain my sketch here, as this article has taken its own path in directions I wasn't anticipating at the time. The AHA moment for me is that the "surface" of cultural time as Armstrong graphs it and the "surface" of evolving human consciousness as I was trying to map it (according to ideas I was getting from reading Rene Guenon), function for all intents and purposes very similarly.  (Only I put "fur" on my spiky peaks, to signify the overgrowth of public opinion that clouds the profile of the peaks and valleys).

Interpenetrating cycles

What Armstrong is picturing as intersecting cultural and financial cycles, astrologers label with the names of the Planets and Signs taught in the astrology textbooks. The measurements and ratios that he discovered, ruling the highs and lows of the cycles he highlights, reiterate values held as "sacred" by global astrological priesthoods since Antiquity. <<Link to my article on PI?>> Certain fractions that are recognizable from Pythagorean number theory, especially the divisions of the circle 360/5 (72) and 360/7 (~51.25), seem to repeat significantly in the calculations of our collective economic history.  The same ratios also result in unique developments when two planets find themselves linked by aspects formed with these same proportions  

Armstrong is also on target when he asserts that when we chart the cycles of national and international finance across the stage of history, we are not looking at "markets" or "money" per se, but "humans interacting through markets and money", meaning the ebbing and flowing of human instincts, writ large. It is the reactivity of humans moving through the astral matrix that we are studying, with both astrology charts and financial cycles being 'tells' within the system. As the millionaires and billionaires say, it's not that money itself is inherently valuable (certainly not our paper dollars, checks, or plastic cards), but that the principle of money makes a perfect way of keeping track of where human-defined value is accumulating, flowing, and possibly also leaking away.  Charts that tabulate the interrelations of the forces symbolized by the signs, planets and elements of astrology are portraying the exact same things, to one who knows how to look at them.

Further, notice the eccentric shape that Armstrong describes as the peculiarity of his economic analysis (p. 14). This is the peculiar shape of boom and bust cycles, which he has named the Phase-Transition, and which he says refutes the standard "bell curve" analysts. As I stared at it, the shape showed itself to be analogous to the classical, traditional explanation of the Earth's astral body or energy-body as it moves around its orbit, through Armstrong's image covers only a single season of the year.  Ancient sages would say that the planetary energy-body is at the peak of 'inhaling' at its solstices and equinoxes, having filled up and gained energy for the coming quarter. At the in-between points, 45 degrees after one peak and before the next, the planet has 'exhaled' completely, is fully empty and ready to begin the new (astral) respiratory cycle.  Traditionally, humanity as a group celebrates the peak astrological moments defined by the turning of the seasons. But behind the scenes, the shaman chooses the lowest points in the energy-cycle for her acts of power, preferring to exert her influence at the moment when outer resistance is the lowest. (And now, dear readers, you know why I release these ArkLetters at NewMoon!)

What I see in his image is a 4-way bell curve in motion around a hidden axis. Since his representation is squished down and flattened out into only two dimensions, showing only 1/4 of the cycle, what we see on the page is the shape of a wedge with an empty center.  But in fact, the full cycle (in 2D) shows a wheel with four spokes, which is the pagan's ancient Year of Four Seasons. It's the bell curve still, but plotted on a turning line, viewed from the tip of its axis (where, from this point of view, the axis looks like merely a point at the center of the circle).  From this angle, one cannot see the spiral-staircase motion along the time-line (the axis) at all, only the four peaks and troughs superimposed on each other.

The driving force running this pattern (which plays out in fractal fashion throughout the system) is explained this way by astrologers: Energy peaks and releases at the cusp of the new season (let's say the Equinox, as in Spring).  The start of a new season is always characterized by a swift discharge of potential into action, and we label the signs in which this happens as "cardinal", meaning "starting things off".  From here the energy descends swiftly into a fixed-sign trough of stasis, showing very low initiative but lots of stability, driven by preprogrammed repetition. Finally, the mutable sign that closes the season begins to seek novelty and creativity again, in so doing building up energy towards the coming Solstice. A new peak is hit on the cusp of the new season, characterized again by a swift emptying of all the pent-up creativity and experimental energy into the next cardinal action. The whole time our 'line of events' is unfolding through its ups and downs, it is simultaneously rotating around its axis with the turning of the earth. This places the peaks of the Equinoxes at right angles to the peaks of the Solstices in the Wheel of the Year. We end up with four "highs" at the Solstices and Equinoxes and their resulting troughs in the middle of the fixed signs. 

Armstrong is so close to the astrological paradigm, does he know this or not? Given the other topics he mentions in his article (Cabbala, sacred numerology), I cannot imagine that he has failed to encounter this paradigm somewhere along the line.  Perhaps he doesn't care to mention it in this essay, preferring to focus on trends that can be demonstrated to non-Initiates. If nothing else, this is another of many proofs that Reality trumps the blinders installed by the educational system and mass marketing every time!

Other Astro-Econ Links of Note

This page is called The Next Hundred Years in the Stock Markets, and it’s written from the Elliott Wave perspective:  http://www.amanita.at/e/reading/e-0005-jupsat.htm

Here is an excellent prognostication p. 33-34 and pp 39-40 of  The Financial Universe by Christeen Skinner. This little tome is textbook quality and so apt.  There is also a whole chapter on the Collapse of the United States that is downright spooky and utterly relevant! (See preview: 
http://books.google.com/books?id=iyviQ6if-RkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Financial+Universe&ei=9wUpSbjwHZTMkASfmoCyDA#PPR7,M1)

Here's a few remarks from Phillip Brown, about his recent book entitled Cosmic Trends: http://www.astrofuturetrends.com/id69.html

Another book on the subject, called Financial Astrology by LCdr. David Williams
You can scan through the pages here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3G8JddKfJsgC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=Jupiter/Saturn+cycle&source=web&ots=gjstp8sZLA&sig=cI624s1OnuFfvYg-hFfS5Maza0A&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPP1,M1

This is the point in the discussion to take note, just as the ancient astrologers did, that the endless combinations of forces and counter-forces being played out around us have more in common with a metabolism than a simple polarization of opposites. Envision the Taoist symbol of the Great Ultimate, chasing itself around eternity. Now contrast that to a seesaw or weighing-scales mechanism, which is constantly encountering built-in limitations to its free motion around the fulcrum.  Although both models portray different aspects of a closed energy system, the scales or seesaw perfectly describes a zero-sum game (for one side to gain, the other side has to lose), whereas the Tai Chi symbol is the symbol of perpetual motion in continuous dance.  Polarization of opposites tends towards extremes, chaos and stress; whereas the multivalent processes enlivening a metabolism, or an ecosystem, incline towards balance, harmony, and vibrant stability. What kind of world would you rather live in?  For that matter, what kind of psyche would you rather live in?  Because in truth, the cycles that are followed by the financial astrologers are not just happening to the masses, they are happening to each and every embodied soul,

Macrocosm to Microcosm: Capturing all of this for your Tarot cards

In the course of these writings, readers have become exposed to a number of interlocking ideas that nest, like sections of a collapsed telescope, inside of each other.  This type of thinking is the substance and essence of the so-called 'Doctrine of Correspondences', which employs a time-honored body of multicultural links and relations to tie the horizontal world of the material senses to the astral, divine, and infernal levels interpenetrating this embodied life "above" and "below" the level of awareness.  Building a mental matrix of multidimensional consciousness is the core work of the shaman, priest, or magi, both for his/her own sake, and for the sake of the tribe, who need expert help in decoding these cycles from time to time too.

In the spirit of this approach, the individual who wants to harness Tradition to their Tarot will study the roots of the Astral-magic paradigm, from the celestial (astrology) to the terrestrial (cycles in society and one's own life) wherever relevant data can be found. We can do this by studying our own charts, then watching the transits of the planets overhead as they cross those natal points and unleash the preset responses stored there. With an ephemeris, we can travel back in time and find out what was going on in our birth chart when specific life-changing things happened. Following those cycles forward in time, we can see the likely time periods when we'll have the next eruption of the cycle.  With time and attention, this process of making the links between the sky and the self becomes easier, and we begin to recognize our participation in the greater dance that Earth makes with the Solar System.

Meanwhile, once a person has chosen the Tarot pack and the body of correspondences they resonate with the most deeply, << AAN chart>> those values are brought back to the birth chart as well. Once you can make the connection between Venus and her two signs Taurus and Libra in the Tarot, and can also identify Venus and her two domiciles in your chart, you will begin to read your cards with greater attention to present astral circumstances.  I for one am often amazed at the information that is revealed when I correspond my Tarot spreads back into the current events in the sky, and in my chart. If we can maintain focus on the chart as an ecosystem, or a metabolism, we can embrace the energies that flow through our experience without resistance, using the Tarot suggestions to help us channel the events and situations characterized by the astrological transits.   In other words, the full depth and richness of a tool like Tarot is only be reached through undertaking multidisciplinary studies with it.

These cycles that we have been talking about work in the lives of individuals as well as collectives. The Sun and Moon aren't just the collective self-consciousness and collective dreamtime; they are also the personal extremes of "light" and "luminous darkness" within one's own awareness as well. Mercury isn't just an external symbol of the communication arts; he is the shape shifting pied piper of our imagination, leading us ever deeper into our own creativity. Venus doesn't merely stand for our cultural standards of beauty, truth and goodness; she holds the same position in the inner life of the individual as well.  Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are each symbolic of ways that we as individual egos can manage our actions and reactions (Mars), taking best advantage of the opportunities (Jupiter) we find, without jeopardizing the strengths and stability (Saturn) we manage to secure along the way.  Finally, the outer planets represent extended cycles we participate in collectively, whether within our own species or across many life forms. Once we begin to get a fix on these qualities as expressed by our own charts, we can then keep track of how our personal endowment of these energies is interacting with the astral circumstances of the moment. All these things blend together to create our unique field of attraction/repulsion opportunities.

The goal of a Tarot magus is to front-load our cards with these 'astral' values, so we can read our Tarot spreads at the greatest number of levels, granting us the most holistic insight into ourselves, our powers, and our times.

Let me also suggest that despite all the talk of Pluto returns and astrological cycles offered above, that is still no excuse to fall into the fatalistic attitude so popular nowadays, which posits that the results of charts and cards and other kinds of oracles are somehow "predicting the future".  The future is not written in stone somewhere before it happens!  There is no way of knowing the exact chain of stimuli and responses, of dominoes falling, leading to this or that result, even if we have a chart that shows us past trends in situations that are similar to the present.  Yes, a certain amount of momentum and predictability can be attributed to events already in motion. We also know that the law of cycle dictates that certain pulses will play out in a fairly predetermined manner. However, nothing predetermines our imaginations, our own unique and customized responses to the stimuli of history!  Despite every kind of vector pressing in on us from every direction of time and space, still and all we are sovereign within our own being, free to respond in our own characteristic mode, with our own choice of stance.  There will always be consequences, but we can be the authors of those instead of their victim.

Denominating and Navigating the Ship of State

The design of the full 78-card Tarot pack includes three layers of reality according to the different species of cards.
    The sequences 1 through 10 in each of 4 suits represents "the elements", read as the unfolding of impersonal, automatic natural laws expressing through chains of cause and effect. This layer of content is informed by the numeric consequences of sacred geometry, plus the planets corresponding to the numbers, with each sequence Ace to 10 expressing through a different element.  One could envision this as representing the level of the collective unconscious.
    The royalty of the four suits represents the celestial energies of the signs/planets expressing through the human personalities and roles most responsive to each.  One could envision the royals existing at the plane of ego, individuation, and willful activity, in short, the human sphere of culture, or collective consciousness.
    The Trumps represent the Archetypes (in the Paracelsian sense), those macrocosmic forces that rain down on us "from above" but also stir the forces within us and around us by virtue of long chains of correspondence running through all the levels.  One could envision the Trumps as representing the realm of the collective super-consciousness.

Once one has begun the process of tying one's Trumps to one's birth chart, the next piece of work is to look at the whole pips pack -- all the cards decorated with suit symbols -- and view it as your internal 'realm' or 'domain'.   This way, whether or not one chooses to associate the minor cards with subsets of the astrological paradigm, one can still utilize these cards as further extensions of one's own interior multitude, possessing all the attributes and qualities of humanity in microcosm.

Diane Mindon's concept of the Mamluk pack as a map of the world is spot-on, in the sense that the Tarot suits historically delineate domains and ranks within four elemental 'households' symbolizing the peoples and cultures of the four directions.  When the Mamluk pack entered Europe, it proceeded to mutate, sprouting a set of new archetypes that exemplify Nature's astral action/reaction matrix, building the full pack up and out of the flat map in a 3x7 pattern resembling a circular staircase.   We know from the many idealized "sacred city" maps given by the seminal thinkers of the different civilizations, that the envisioned "terrain" is ultimately an effigy of the land superimposed upon the body, and also upon the 'field of consciousness'.  The topography of the exteriorized realm is fractally reflected (or caused) by the topography of the interior life.  (See the Ten of Cups in this month's World Server's Spread.)

By internalizing a tool that is constructed to reflect all these dimensions of reality, one carves out a space in the mind-matrix  (the collective consciousness as a whole) that exactly conforms to the tool.  This is true no matter what types of tools you use and/or what kind of materials you are working on -- the user and the tool become welded together in their endless battle to make meaning out of the raw materials of chance and fate. This is one of the oldest of human discoveries -- the tool and the hand that wields it quickly become reciprocals of each other. It is also the basis of all the craft-guild mysticism that has existed around the world, from the earliest smiths and shamans to the Speculative Masons and Doctors of the 21st century. (Knowing this, look well to the tools that you take up every day! Make sure that the work you see emerging from your hands gives pleasure and value to your heart and mind and meaning to your life as well!)

We have to remember that Tarot in its 'modern' 78-card form is from the mid 1400's. Therefore its symbolism has to be re-thought and re-conceptualized by the modern user from era to era, just to make sure that the proliferation of modern metaphors doesn't cause the user to lose contact with their fundamental ground of being.  For example, let's look again at the quote we made last month from George Ure's newsletter. Ure's CEO friend was sharing his hiring system, naming out the four types of people he seeks to hire for his businesses -- farmers, fire-tenders, hunters and fishers. When those qualities and qualifications are distributed across the Tarot suits, they have an interesting effect on the inherited gender-based roles assigned to the suits, like so:

Swords = traditionally masculine = Hunters, who go out into the population and "make a killing" with sales or recruiting.
Wands = traditionally masculine = Fire-tenders, who in the CEO's model "stay home and tend the pots".
Cups = traditionally feminine = Fishers, who in the CEO's model "fish out the biggest and best ideas, and throw the smaller ones back".
Coins = traditionally feminine = Farmers, who take new ideas and grow them from seeds to full harvest.

I love the new light cast onto the suits by this model. It frees up the Elements from their historical gender-role stereotyping, which is quite refreshing to encounter and stimulating to the mind. It also levels the social playing field compared to the medieval 4-class model of military, royals, priests and laborers.  I especially love the reframing around the suit of Cups, which are given a more active and self-motivated context, and which therefore have greater scope for the special type of intelligence they are abundant with.  Since this paradigm is the experiential wisdom of a practical and successful person from the business world, there's everything to be gained from trying it on for size, especially in the arena of 'life planning'. 

Body as Realm as Planet as Cosmos

The central point I'm trying to convey with this essay is that each one of us as not just a metaphorical microcosm of the Earth and the Solar system -- the magical truth is, we are each a mini-Planet, a mini-Solar System, a mini-Cosmos.   This is not just a "way of thinking", but indeed is a "way of being".  It is not necessary to spend one's time immersed in calculations, studying ancient history, or watching the moon to find the perfect timing for this or that.  Even as you sit here reading these words, all the forces of Great Space are coursing through you, vectoring around you, and playing their cyclical rhythms into your flesh. There's nothing to "do" about it, and even if you could, what action would you take to remove yourself from these immanent influences? 

The better path is to sink down into these cycles and rhythms, study your own participation within them, and then make considered choices based on your own innate relationship to Being.  The ancients used to debate whether to view the Earth as an inanimate object, like our modern scientists do, or whether to view it as a huge animal that humanity lives inside of, as do all the other animals, vegetables and minerals.  I find it comforting and encouraging to think of our mother planet as a great, super-conscious creature, part of the family of the Solar System, and our own host organism.  Just as I can feel my own body surging with vitality, mending its boo-boo's, enjoying the seasons and expressing creativity through its fluctuations, so too do I feel the Earth doing the same thing.  I like to think of humanity as being a kind of 'nervous system' for the planet, noting and reporting back everything that is happening on her surface.  It seems to me that, if we could learn to bear the sensation of expanding into the larger web of life that we are part of, then as a species we could upgrade our understanding of the planet, of each other, and of ourselves.  There will still be rocky times, close calls and sudden upsets, but the more humans are aware of the larger cycles they are living in, the less we would need to panic and react blindly, falling into fits of self-preservation that only make the collective situation worse. 

ArkLetter 45
November 27, 2008
copyright christine payne-towler 2005-2008, all rights reserved

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