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 We don’t forgive egos – only archetypes.
INSIDE EVERY FELT AVERSION is an unarticulated judgment – a facet of ego we find unforgivable. What we fail to appreciate is that this condemned facet is just one of many other cut faces on a greater archetypal jewel. In the throes of aversion, then, we don’t merely judge specific aspects of ego; we trash entire matrices – the very archetypal diamonds in which consciousness is embedded.
The advantage of becoming archetypally literate (see Styles of Awakening Training) is that whenever aversion strikes, we have the language and perceptual acuity with which to stop and identify the innocent, totally valid style of awakening that this judged person is so clumsily attempting to employ. We feel their positive intention and we know how to support them. In short, we learn to move more and more quickly from aversion to archetype to appreciation of the One Being in the throes of waking up to itself.
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 WHAT IF A ROADMAP TO AWAKENING was built into the very fabric of the cosmos? What if a pathway to the Buddhist middle path – the ego-dissolving center between mind’s wildly swinging extremes – was laid out for us in the pattern of the planets? This is the essential, but too often hidden, insight of astrology.
There is, of course, no formula for storyless presence; it has no precise preconditions. But there are archetypal hints – a grid of thematic extremes that, in their balancing, may help us collapse the duality of matter and spirit and return us to our storyless center. In simplest terms, this means learning to synthesize the six archetypal dualities:
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 Which of the following “motorist” metaphors do you find more appealing:
1) Driving merrily along, lost in the buoyant beat of some smooth jazz station– oblivious to your toxic wake and the incalculable plant, animal and human sacrifice that allows you to fly across eroding rock trails made bump-less every night at 3:00 AM by growling, dinosaur-sized machines manned by bloodshot souls so desperate for food and rent they trade circadian sunlight for freakish floodlight.
2) Inching tentatively along a dusty, deeply potholed country back road that gnaws on expensive, unknown parts of your car’s chassis, alternately triggering fears of a shivery, bone-crumpled night spent alone in the back seat and spontaneous prayers of gratitude for the durability of your vessel as it slows to a self-fumigating, but delusion-free idle that suddenly makes audible an awesome profusion of insects and birds crackling electric in the bushes and trees all around you.
I know. Not the most mouth-watering set of options. But these two gnarly combinations of dark and light describe the two basic topographies available to a soul firmly buckled into the seat of a body/mind.
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Learn to recognize and work with the archetypes, even if you never look at an astrology chart.
IF ONENESS or “divine presence” is ever to become more than a flickering insight, we will need to find a way of converting the everyday ego-field into a Buddha field. That means consciously confronting our archetypal biases and learning–through self-inquiry, meditation and compassion practice–to have a steadier experience of divine intent.
This psycho-spiritual training is designed not only to guide you into this personality-penetrating world view, but also trains you to facilitate this clear seeing in others. In this program, you will use your daily life as the laboratory for understanding how the archetypes manifest in the world. The material is presented through email and weekly, individual mentoring calls.
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THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS to justifiably protest against. But what, I ask myself, is the most fundamental, cross-cultural oppression – the “meme,” if you will — that gave rise to this rant against the great vampire squid called Corporatocracy? My guess: it has something to do with flawed community.
Thich Nhat Hanh once remarked that the next Buddha would, in fact, be a community. It’s a timely Aquarian age perspective that I cannot help but sympathize with. However, having spent a good portion of my life living hip-deep in these viscous group-mind experiments, I find myself substituting the phrase “compressed egos” whenever I hear those starry-eyed words, “intentional community.” For me, community without Sangha is nothing short of Orwellian.
Don’t get me wrong. The experience of community (including the squid-like, corpgov variety) is absolutely essential — not because of what it offers, but because of what it doesn’t. Disillusionment is the entire evolutionary point of utopian Aquarian experiments: it flips us fast into the next sign, Pisces. It kills off every last shred of hope in the possibility of horizontal, egoic harmony, sending us screaming into a more timeless, meditative way of relating.
Sound a bit harsh? Looking for a more graceful dawning? Good news. Astrology has a few tips.
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A NEW ANARCHIST MOVEMENT is forming. The crimes they push against are so unspeakable, so urgent, that the cleverest, most media-grabbing protest sign would only defile and spit upon their cause. Impossible to co-opt and more frightening than the Black Bloc, these protesters do something far worse than destroy physical property; they deface the walls of ego. Even now, as you read these words, throngs of them are pouring into town squares, and parks all over the planet to detonate the dirtiest of the dirty bombs: group silence.
They’re organized. They have sophisticated websites, recruitment teams and — believe it or not — these ethereal agitators of the police state are growing at an alarming rate. I dare you: click on this link, then scroll down to “locations.” Yes please, do it right now……..All done? Great. Now, shake off the shock and ask yourself:
“What if communion is the next Bob Dylan?”
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“There is only one problem, ever: your uninvestigated story in the moment.”
–Byron Katie
AS FICTION WRITERS KNOW, in Western literature there are only four possible stories:
1. human vs. human
2. human vs. nature
3. human vs. self
4. human vs. God
and they all move from conflict to climax to fleeting integration. In short, all stories are war stories.
But what about “human awakens as compassionate witness to the four stories?” Doesn’t this fifth story offer a kind of redemptive twist on our otherwise depressingly formulaic and adversarial mental habits? Not quite. The fifth story is a spontaneous, moment-to-moment realization that cannot be scripted, reproduced or understood at the level of mind. Sure, spiritual storytellers can (and must) point to storyless presence, but until the hearer of the story in effect, “disappears” (steps out of the time-bound sense of self), this so-called “spiritual” story is nothing but a souped-up reformulation of the third and fourth stories listed above. Thus, the so-called “fifth story” exists only by inference and does not transpire in time.
Okay, but what do these fiction formulas have to do with Astrodharma? Plenty.
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 SCROLL DOWN TO YOUR SUN, MOON AND RISING SIGNS. After you read each section, I invite you to recite the Prayer for Liberation that follows.
1. AUTOMATED ARIES
Attachment: Sovereignty
The automated Aries part of us is addicted to perceiving, evoking and overcoming resistance as a means of propping up an unnaturally sovereign, hard-edged sense of identity.
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 DO YOU BELIEVE IN ASTROLOGY? Careful how you answer: It’s a trick question — the sound of a disorientation-phobic mind attempting to induct you into its tidy, dualistic paradigm. My answer? “About as much as I believe in Hunter.” Why must The Mystery be so mercilessly and mechanically nailed down? Because ego feels so desperately ephemeral.
Face it: there’s no such thing as an “outside” mind. There’s only “the” mind. The breeds of anxiety and anticipation that drift through our two-eared fish tanks are anything but exotic. Why do we spend so little time studying and making friends with this outrageously interpenetrating, archetype-enraptured psyche? Here are three possibilities. Take your pick:
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THE ONLY healthy reason to peer at personalities through the lens of the astrological archetypes is that, upon doing so, we happen to find ourselves more compassionately attuned to their style of awakening– more able to hear and skillfully respond to their muted cries for love. Thankfully, as so many structures and paradigms topple around and within us, this uniquely Aquarian approach to parting the veil of ego seems to be gathering steam. In a time of inglorious collapse, an ancient, interior scaffolding is rising up to steady us.
Even as I celebrate this astrological renaissance, I am increasingly aware of the personal rites of passage that must be moved through before we wake up to a world where the one-size-fits-all dogmas of the past are replaced by ego-busting typologies wisely attuned to the stars and seasons. For unbeknownst to most beginning students of astrology, they are plunging themselves into an intensive, moment-to-moment inquiry into one of the most paradigm-rocking questions that exists: “Who am I?” In astrology, the answer begins at the level of personality.
Two kinds of personalities
Experience tells me there are only two kinds of personalities: the automated ones and the spacious ones; those who claim ownership of seeing and those who simply see. Indeed, meditation is nothing more than learning to slide lucidly along this continuum between dense positionality and spacious openendedness. Whatever we seem to be doing externally, the ultimate purpose of this “doing” (and, indeed, incarnation itself) is simply to provide a backdrop against which to practice balancing on this somebody/nobody tight rope. But why do we fall so disproportionately on the “somebody” side of the equation?
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“Hunter Reynolds is one of the most interesting astrological thinkers out there.”
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We don’t forgive egos – only archetypes.
