IN PURELY ARCHETYPAL terms, there is nothing more commonplace than rape and suicide. Why are these two words so highly charged and disturbing? Because of how routinely we engage in subtle forms of both, every single day of our lives.
Indeed, it is the bitter taste of these masculine and feminine faces of violence in our everyday thoughts, feelings and actions that drive so many into meditation and self-inquiry. Why is sitting still so hard? Because it puts us face-to-face with these two twisted tendencies. (Hint: Don’t miss the heart-opening perceptual tasks at the end of this article).
But isn’t the choice of words here (“rape, suicide”) a tad melodramatic — even morbid? To the energetically obtuse, karma-numb mind, yes. To timeless presence — the One who instantaneously feels the eternal fallout of each outward forcing (rape) and inner abandonment (suicide) — absolutely not. I guess it depends on how serious you are about interrupting the automated habits of mind that society has trained us to call “me.” For me, these are positive, motivating, zen stick words that describe how Buddhist “craving and aversion” actually play out down here in the dirt.
How do we purge ourselves of these subtle perpetrations? By inquiring on-the-spot: What otherwise innocent and enlivening experience did I hope to taste in the throes of this subtle forcing or flaccidity, and how might I partake of it in ways that are more karmically elegant and soul-honoring? For this we will need a nuanced, ego-busting vocabulary and an understanding of not just “my” mind, but “the” mind. (This is where Astrodharma shines.)
An Astrological Understanding of Nonduality
The astrological new year (or wheel of incarnation) begins with Aries, the Ram: the madly assertive, risk-taking part of the divine mind that keeps punching body/minds through the spirit/matter veil for a chance at embodying “eternity-with-eyes.” Aries parts the legs of time in order to ejaculate timeless presence into it. It says, “I AM” so that we might, over time, learn to end the sentence with “the fullness of being.” In this way, the wheel of karma that begins with veil-punching ego assertion spirals through the seasons into a more oceanic and interpenetrated sense of self. The turning of the seasons keeps pushing us to be both Aries sovereign and Pisces surrendered, expressive of our uniqueness, yet yielding to the shepherding presence.
The headstrong Aries pole of ego is impatient for incarnation. It wants boots on the ground, not tentatively probing Pisces toes. The Pisces face of ego, on the other hand, is impatient for union. It longs for a seamless, psychically interpenetrated dimension where the steel-toe’d boots of personality are pathetic, clumsy and unnecessary. In short, Aries grasps for shore; Pisces grasps for ocean.
Does this make Aries and Pisces more deeply perpetrating than the other ten signs? Absolutely not! Aries is simply the template for how all twelve archetypes rape their way into personality and suicide the One Being and Pisces is the template for how all twelve archetypes suicide personality and rape their way into the One Being. In the service of ego, they are two faces of the same karmic coin: the coin that buys us another spin on the ferris wheel of karma.
Okay, so clearly Spirit wants to have an immanent and a transcendent expression. How can we stop see-sawing between them and allow Aries and Pisces to arise together? For that we will need to deeply realize:
God is not playing with you, He is playing as you. (Mooji)
We must practice abiding as the timeless presence inside of which somebodyness and nobodyness endlessly sniff each other’s butts. I like the way Ramana Maharshi puts it:
The I removes the I, yet remains the I.
This is precisely the nondual teaching of astrology. Our incarnating Aries fire and attention must be aimed at interpenetrating Pisces presence. This is the right use of will. From this relaxed, “you without you” place, right action flowers naturally.
Ah, but how to get there? Clearly, an entire worldview must drop away. But which?
Who dies?
What must die is our fantasy that there is any place in time where rape and suicide isn’t happening. Identity-hardening acts of force are all egos ever do. It must be so, because the dream of being a rogue personality broken away from the seamless field of sentience requires relentless upkeep and unnatural re-assertion. As soon as one lone wolf form of identity-assertion begins to lose its power to distract us from relating as awareness, to awareness, ego claws for orientation by applying a more forceful Aries “selfing” or a more forceful Pisces “no-selfing.” Confronted with the opponent of timeless presence, rape and suicide are the only cards ego has to play. Bottom line: Free will doesn’t actually exist until we become moment-to-moment aware enough to skip over these cardboard identities and “die before we die” — relaxing, at last, into creative engagement with a stage full of dream-characters dancing in the mind of God.
Need a Dharmic Nudge? Here’s an Astrodharma practice designed to help you see through all this rape and suicide and awaken as the imperishable, overarching consciousness in which manifest and unmanifest play:
PERCEPTUAL TASK: Awareness in Love with ItselfLook around. Notice the ones who seem unambiguously confident. Consider: What passes for sovereign Aries self-assertion is often fear of the disorienting identity-death that empathic Pisces merging might suck them into. Their self assurance: a paranoid flight from dissolution.
Now notice the sensitive, deferential types. Consider: What looks like gentle Pisces selflessness is often fear of showing up enough to wisely navigate their own and other’s emotionally manipulative egos. Their seeming humility: a paranoid flight from incarnation.
Allow these unconscious attempts to harden identity through swagger or spaciness to break your heart.
Having clearly seen how the story of the separate self is inescapably riddled with contrived bravado and fearful escapism, close your eyes and begin chanting (audibly or not) “Rid me of ego; replace me with You.”
Then, sit quietly, feeling deeply into the underlying nature of all human interplay: awareness in love with itself.
Perhaps all this shadow revealing is feeling a tad too sobering and heavy? I understand. Try throwing around some of the irreverent, ego-poking terms listed below. It may help you continue waking up as witness of ego with a tongue-in-cheek awareness that it is all divine play.
Three kinds of everyday “rape”:
1) Gait Rape: a speed and style of walking that aggressively parts the void as if it were dead, uncaring space, too stupid to host flesh and incapable of conscious interplay.
2) Rape Rapping: an irreverent, pause-free style of speech that pushes personality steadily outward so as to drown out the ego-softening ministry of silence.
3) Gaze Rape: a prematurely penetrating stare that strips people down to the underwear of ego, but fails to expose the contours of their true nature: timeless presence.
Three kinds of everyday “suicide”:
1) Glide Pride: a floaty, ethereal stroll — superior to destination and the commandments of gravity — announcing to one and all, “I am free from this sticky, slow-mo staging ground for the healing of past life wounds.”
2) Etherspeak: Depressed by the ego-hardening odor of opinion, this meticulously harmless, confrontation-phobic form of communication draws heavily on the opinion that the only thing worth speaking about is the un-sayable.
3) Nihil-eyes: Like an envelope with no address on it, the purveyor of this gaze is so relentlessly vast that others have only two options: surrender to their alpha-mysteriousness or feel foolish for having eyes at all.
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