CHAPTER SIX
Human Cycles of Unfoldment - 4
The Uranian Cycle of Individualizing Transformations
The meaning of the eighty-four-year cycle as an archetype of man's life span has been discussed in various books to which the reader is referred.(2) Thus, during the first thirty-five years, the building forces in man operate biologically and psychologically at the physical-personal level. What should be emphasized here is the transformative character of the cycle. It becomes operative wherever man is either ready and willing to raise, at least to some extent, the level of the foundations of his consciousness, or is driven by the pressure of a civilization stressing intellectual faculties and artificial city-living to changes which his mind may not actually understand. When the vibrational quality of the 5 becomes accentuated as an overtone of the basic natural rhythm of the Earth's biosphere, the tendency consciously, or only half-consciously, to accept the Uranian-Promethean principle of transformation as a dominant factor is bound to appear. But it may take many forms.
The Vedas, whose earliest origin should be traced to the source of our Fifth Root-Race in central Asia — even if the recorded version known today was written at a much later date — are coded witnesses to the appearance of this principle of transformation; but they must be understood in the manner suggested by the modern Indian Seer, yogi, and poet, Sri Aurobindo, in his fascinating book On the Veda. In the Upanishads and subsequent writings, we see an intense drive toward biopsychic transformation and the emergence of consciousness at a transcendental level taking many forms, some quite extreme and based on a misunderstanding of what is to be accomplished — an accomplishment in which the whole of mankind should be involved in so far as that is possible.
Our Western civilization, since its origins in ancient Greece, has followed an approach to transformation which polarizes, and in this sense complements, the Aryan-Hindu approach. By stressing the development of the rational mind and of an aggressive individualism, European culture has aimed at effecting a theoretically universal transformation of natural man. The development of the typically American way of life, feverishly taking hold of the vast resources of a sparsely inhabited continent — and in the process destroying most of its natives — accentuated the European drive toward this universal transformation by glorifying ego-aggressiveness, material success, and in general all the transferable products of the operations of an intellect intent upon subjugating nature in order to satisfy man's craving for comfort and power. Money is transferable social power; and an education stressing the "how to" kind of knowledge — matter bent, earth-bound, analytical and statistical, then computerized knowledge — is also transferable in the form of textbooks, and university degrees.
The whole atmosphere of American living has been blatant with an ever accelerated drive for change and instant fulfillment at the material-social level; but it is an intoxicating atmosphere which has spread around an increasingly polluted and often devastated biosphere. Intoxication and pollution are inseparable; and so is the artificial prolongation of man's natural life-span inseparable from overpopulation and the exhaustion of natural resources. Considering our present state of affairs it certainly would seem that mass-individualization — as we have sought it — is not the solution. The kind of equalitarianism which actually turns out to be equality between egos, does not usually reflect the ideal of spiritual equality of which Buddha and Christ spoke. The transformation of humanity inevitably must have a hierarchical character, if it is based on individual efforts and understanding, and is not dependent upon transferable recipes for every one sheepishly to memorize and apply in a spirit of competition and greed for success and social prestige.
Individual transformation operates, exceptions notwithstanding, in a dialectical sequence of three phases. These phases, archetypally considered, last twenty-eight years; and, as already stated, 28 is the number of Man for it expands at the level of the conscious mind the implications inherent in number 7. Twenty-eight is also four times 7, and eighty-four is twelve times 7 — 12 being the symbol of cosmic completion, whether one deals with macrocosmic or microcosmic processes.
The first twenty-eight years begin with physical birth and the embodiment of consciousness in a world of bodies. The second twenty-eight years begins with a more or less accentuated kind of rebirth, and we may speak of "birth in individuality." However, in a great many cases, the human person is not able to experience such a rebirth; if so, the rhythm of the seventy-year pattern is the only one worth considering. Even if the process of individualization has begun, the natural rhythm of generic man still keeps operating at the biopsychic level of unconscious activities, but the individualizing mind and the ego-will nevertheless can begin to gain strength as overtones of the fundamental vibrations of human nature. Gradually they are able to assert their power of transformation and to offset to some extent the entropy of natural processes.
Around the age of twenty-eight, two important astrological cycles are concluded: the cycle of the "progressed Moon" (twenty-seven and one-third years long) and that of Saturn's revolution around the Sun (twenty-nine and one-half years long). Both refer to the parental past, the Moon being the Mother-symbol, the Sun the symbol of the Father-image — that is, the image which a person makes of his or her father as a result of experiences in family-living. These experiences may be either positive (fulfilling the natural need for a father) or negative (frustrating the fulfillment of the need). What this means is that from age twenty-seven to age thirty the "would-be-individual" is potentially able to become completely objective toward his physical parents, his racial ancestry, and even his culture; and being objective, he can be free from the compulsive pull of the past. He can act as a creative source of the future.
This does not mean that he has to (or that he may want to) entirely repudiate all natural attachments to his past. He may even cease, at that time, to indulge in a subjective and emotionally compulsive rebellion fashionable or ego-motivated against this past, because, having become more objective to the situation, he may be able to gain a better perspective on the actions of the protagonists involved in it. Nevertheless we can speak of the second twenty-eight-year period of the gradually self-transforming and consciousness repolarizing individual person as the "antithesis succeeding the thesis represented by the first period of his life." The thesis is human nature in its generic mass vibration, or the collective tradition, the particular society, culture, and religion in which the individual has grown up. The antithesis represents an attempt at a basic differentiation and individualization of consciousness, feelings, and behavior. Such an attempt inevitably implies a separation from what the individual is emerging from; but the separation need not be physical for it refers essentially to the level of consciousness and self-realization.
The stage of "synthesis" theoretically occurs with the start, at age fifty-six, of the third twenty-eight-year period, though evidently in most cases the new emergence (third birth) is a gradual process requiring a gestation period. I have spoken of it as "birth in light" for in the white light of the sun all the colors exist in a state of unity or multi-unity.
In the light of the spiritualized consciousness, the preceding phases of thesis and antithesis are seen to interpenetrate and interblend. The person is no less an individual for realizing then more clearly and vibrantly his dedication to humanity. In this realization, the ego surrenders its opacity and becomes a clear lens focusing into personalized consciousness and activity the quality of existence (or, one might say, the mission or dharma) which, from the very beginning of his existence as a particular human organism, it has been his potential destiny to actualize.
Most human beings are not able to experience a truly effectual "third birth." Indeed, even those whose minds are repolarized through a really individual process of rebirth around the age of twenty-eight still constitute a relatively small minority if one considers the entire population of the globe. Yet, in some manner, what remains a potentiality may cast fleeting and at times perhaps quite definite reflections upon the consciousness of still opaque and rigidly bound egos. The Saturnian father-image that took form during childhood and adolescence can be transmuted into the inner center of a personality to some extent responding to the still clouded presence of the Father within of whom Jesus spoke, and that Presence may be increasingly felt during the second Saturn cycle from age twenty-nine to fifty-eight or fifty-nine.
At the age of about sixty, Saturn and Jupiter return to the approximate zodiacal positions they occupied at birth; and because these two planets symbolize the social consciousness of a person — and, at a higher level, his approach to religion and the integrative energies of his psyche — their joint cyclic reappearance at their natal places evokes the possibility of a new beginning at a new level of mind and soul activity. As the possibility of establishing the center of his being at the level of the "divine soul" is inherent in every man — remote as this possibility is for most human beings in our present society that age of sixty may witness the hesitant beginnings of such a spiritualizing process, open to individuals of all races and cultures. It may of course begin much earlier in supernormal cases.
Many persons after sixty — and not a few before display crystallizing tendencies in mind and feelings, together with a loss of vitality and organic resilience. These are natural tendencies; but these manifestations of biological entropy can be given a harder and more actively negative form if there has been a real degree of individualization during the second twenty-eight-year cycle and if this individualization has allowed the shadow aspect of egocentricity to take control or has led to frustrating and embittering experiences. Then "old age" can lose the glow of radiance of wisdom it so often has in a society and culture built on the overtones of natural living; it can lead to depression, hostility, and tragic sense of futility, emptiness, boredom, and alienation from the life that still surges ever fresh in the new generations. This then is the negative or shadow aspect of the spiritualizing possibility available to all human beings.
2. cf Rudhyar's
New Mansions for New Men, Part One;
The Astrology of Personality (p. 212-222 Doubleday edition);
The Astrological Houses (p. 144-150).
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