EVERY EGO HAS A DIFFERENT style of resisting and succumbing to shepherding presence. One might even say that personality is, itself, little more than a real-time outpicturing of this tug-of-war between identity-grasping role play and relaxing into timeless presence enough to see who wants to show up. Why do we spend so much time refusing to relax into meditative relating? Here’s a few possibilities:
1) Because meditative relating sensitizes us to our soul-traumatizing jolts between mechanized role play and authentic openness.
2) Because meditative relating confronts us with how blithely we crush each presence-beckoning moment with the heel of our me-stories and thereby energetically abandon those we claim to care for.
3) Because meditative relating reveals how routinely we embody the same presence-numbness that is killing the planet.
4) Because others faces, meditatively encountered, reveal a war zone between naked seeing and “claiming ownership of seeing.” The result: the heartbreak of the human condition becomes impossible to escape.
5) Because meditative relating reveals that the best a believed-in personality can deliver is seamlessly pleasing contrivance. (Oh well…there goes 90% of what passes for “sexy.”)
But wait, it gets worse!
Faces are not just live footage from the bloody front lines of ego; they are paradigmatic trance states that entice and seduce others to join them in their fogs of self-forgetting and their flickers of timeless presence. In short, meditative relating reveals the contagious nature of how we inhabit consciousness. Yikes. Suddenly, the world is teeming with psychic disc jockeys whose sole purpose is to keep others grooving to the unexamined thump of their conditioned world views. Disturbing questions arise: What paradigmatic mood-music am I broadcasting? Do I really want folks twitching in time to my me-story play list?
Okay, okay, so egos secretly inject the pigment of their unexamined paradigms into other people’s eyes, and the mounting sense of accountability that accompanies this seeing makes waking up as tender witness of the movements of mind (meditation) absolutely imperative. But what does all this have to do with astrology?
My archetypal automation is more forgivable than your archetypal automation.
The above phrase captures, in one sentence, the presumptuous, underground assumption of all unwitnessed egos. We all have inborn archetypal bias (pro and con) that blinds us to the soul’s heartbreakingly positive intention. What stands between us and unbroken, soul-to-soul contact with divine presence? A mountain of judged (and indiscriminately esteemed) archetypes. Until we learn to feel the grace and grit of all archetypal styles of awakening as beautifully equal in their balance of wounds and gifts, we are, to some extent, impotent — floundering in a state of egoic reactivity. In short, archetypal literacy endows us with something rare and precious: a sliver of free will.
“Free will means you are the author of your actions and you could have done otherwise. The latest brain data, however, shows that the time at which a person consciously decides comes 1/2 to 7 seconds after the brain has already decided. Where do desires come from? A wilderness of prior causes– prior causes which one cannot inspect.”
~Sam Harris
Consider the above statement. What kind of mood-music accompanies these “it’s all brain chemistry” lyrics? Does it inspire you to feel more full-bodied presence or does it induct you into self-involved cognition? Are you more innocently curious about The Great Unfolding or does it push you in the direction of preconception and positionality? Then ask yourself, “Who wants to know in what measure we are free, or not?” Does not the quest for an unequivocal answer to “Do we have free will?” step us over a more vital question: “Who is the ‘I’ who wonders if it’s free?” Does not the free will question presuppose a solid and separate entity? Does not this supposedly deep and ageless existential inquiry exude a fowl odor: the insecure grasping for orientation, identity, a solid knower? Like all of the mind’s questions, the free will question hardens the sense of a questioner and thickens the soup of the manifest world. It’s hidden agenda is to dodge the deeper question: “Is my attention ‘free’ enough to awaken as the witness of the one who wants to know if it’s free?”
On the other hand, suppose the scientific materialists are correct: the bulk of our choices are the product of brain chemistry, heredity and conditioning. Suppose our only crack at free will is to choose which lens through which to view these largely preordained choices and details of our lives playing out? Is this not more than enough freedom to make life worth living? What if the only free will we have is to decide which of the following paradigmatic lenses we will look through:
1) The gesticulations of worldly phenomenon are dense and real, as is the separate somebody who views them.
2) The dance of separate somebody’s is a dream and the place from which we survey them is safe at home in the heart of god.
Enough free will for you? Still wanna play? The mind is afraid that if it’s too complete, it will have nothing left to do. The truth: our astrologically ordained style of awakening continues to play out, even as we relax like a baby in the lap of god.
One of the great blessings of archetypal literacy is the way it empowers us to smell the difference between personality traits that are being flopped out in automated, conditioned ways and archetypes that arise free of identity – like play clothes for the soul’s innocently arising presence. This increased ability to feel the difference between presence-born personality and egoic automation increases the amount of free will we have because we can then more quickly and shrewdly catch our own ego when it gets gripped by archetype and return to our natural state: beginner’s mind.
In short, the practice of archetypal seeing keeps nudging us to lean back into the seat of the witness of personality. From here, we see how these astro-automated me-stories numb us to our own and others’ timeless presence. At this point, there is but one life-affirming move left: resign as owner/manager of personality and practice abiding as eternity-with-eyes. Who are we? Incense wafting through the divine mind. What does “being real and authentic” look like? Having the guts to allow a refreshed, soul-honoring presence to arise, free of agenda, as we practice our mantra, “rid me of ego; replace me with You.”
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