Dane Rudhyar - Astrological Timing.doc

It seems hardly necessary to emphasize the fact, now so evident to all perceptive human minds, that we are living in a period of tremendously accelerated change, a period of unparalleled technological, social, cultural and psychological upheavals and transformations. Yet, while this fact is widely recognized and constantly publicized, only a minority of human beings are not only really aware of its implications, but ready and willing to face these implications, both as individual persons and as members of a national and cultural collectivity. This evidently is not a new situation; for whenever a society has been confronted with some radical changes only a minority of its people have ever been truly aware of what was happening or ready to reorient their minds and patterns of personal and group behavior. But today the situation has implications not only more far-reaching than ever in recorded human history, but also more catastrophic if nothing "unusual" happens to repolarize and redirect the present world-wide trends. These world-wide trends of themselves can only lead to an orgy of violence and dying born of the senseless pride, hunger and despair which today are fast reaching an apocalyptic climax.
      In our era of world-wide communication and at least superficial mass-thinking, no human being can be willing and ready to face the prospect of radical reorientation and social reorganization on a global scale unless he or she at least dimly understands what is happening and the process which led to such compelling and apparently irreversible events. The only alternative to understanding is an almost blind faith in the teachings and an equally blind obedience to the dictates of some religions leader around whom an aura of divine power, wisdom and love has been built in some more or less spectacular manner. But even in this case it is clear that today such a leader is more or less compelled to give to his words some sort of intellectual, moral and historical background in order to re-set into new patterns of response the restless and distracted minds of the men he must reach in order to fulfill his mission. He must explain the historical process, interpret the facts of today, present a vision of the future — however irrational his approach may seem to more sophisticated, college-trained and science-worshipping minds.
      How can we really understand what has been happening in the world of human beings since a hundred or two hundred years? Superficially, of course, it is easy to list transforming political events, new concepts, new discoveries, growth of industry and technology at a totally unprecedented rate, the fabulous increase in productivity resulting from the release of ever more tremendous powers and from the consequent redistribution of population and the prolongation of human lives leading to an almost catastrophic increase in population, all over the globe. The question remains in the inquisitive mind refusing to be over-awed by scientific achievements: Why this almost sudden outburst? This question demands some kind of answer, and what is happening to mankind has to be, if not "explained," at least interpreted in terms of a large evolutionary, biological or spiritual, and if possible cosmological or metaphysical picture.
      An interpretation is necessary, I claim, even though the strictly existential bias and the "scientific" agnosticism of our day may insist that all that matters is to face the facts as they are now, and to respond to them with the best of our mental capacities, perhaps with the help of some mysterious intuition or creative power which somehow seems inherent in human nature. But "facing the facts now," although it sounds good to many ears, actually of itself means very little. Who is to face the facts — or rather what in a human being is to do the facing?
      A man may want to respond wisely and creatively to a new situation; but what is it that does the responding? There are cases undoubtedly in which an individual confronted by a life-or-death emergency unlike any one he has met before will perform the "right action" — and he may thank for this either divine Providence, a Guardian Angel, or a Soul intuition, or some form of biological or psychic instinct of self-preservation. But when have we seen collectivities, even when confronted by a life-or-death situation, do the really right actions at the proper time and with total courage — rather than "too little and too late"? Did the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century, or the Russian aristocracy of the twentieth century, or post-World War II France facing a new situation with regard to her colonies in Indo-China and Algeria face historical-social facts which were of crucial importance to healthful survival, or survival pure and simple? Are we in the United States today, confronted with the plight of our Negro population inherited from centuries of slavery and (later) of prejudice and neglect, meeting "instinctively" and with success the facts of our national life?
      The privileged classes in our modern cities (acting like the aristocracies of the past), or indeed all nations now playing poker-games on the brink of almost incredible nuclear disaster, are apparently unable (and mostly unwilling) to give constructive and radically new creative answers to the totally new problems posed by a couple of centuries of vertiginous changes which are putting everything human into question. Why is it so? Simply because the minds and emotions of human beings are set according to social, cultural and religious-ethical patterns which mold the socio-biological and spiritual environment within which these minds and emotions must develop from infancy up to a more or less conformistic maturity.
      I repeat: What is it in a man that can make the right and creative answer to an almost completely new situation when the mind, the feeling-responses and the bio-psychic drives of the man are set according to a tradition dominated by past values and an obsolete approach to change? Here and there strong individuals may question and rebel against these traditional values and patterns of living, thinking and feeling; but if these men are not to be satisfied with wild and senseless acts of revolt born of tragedy, frustration and despair — or, among the more intellectual class, produced by a feeling of total emptiness and boredom — they inevitably have to base their conscious and enlightened action on an objective study of the past, a study which can also reveal something of the future.

How can we gain a valid (even if only tentative and incomplete) knowledge of the future? How can we orient ourselves today toward some expectable future, and make a constructive, sensible and as little wasteful as possible transition from this today to tomorrow? This is the great problem confronting at this time all perceptive, responsible and creatively oriented individuals. To this problem two basic solutions can be given.
      The first, and today most "official," solution is to extrapolate what we know of the past into the future just ahead of us. A whole science, called in France "prospective," is being built, and its perhaps slightly less formal equivalent is spreading fast as well in our country. A number of organizations and specialized firms are busy with selling to large corporations (and as well to the Government and to city-planning commissions) "profiles" of expectable future trends in this or that area of our national economy. These estimates of potential growth (of production, group-behavior and population) and of probable discoveries or achievements in specific fields (industrial and military, here and as well in other countries) are based on statistics, on curves of previous growth, and on various more or less imponderable factors (for instance, what would the Russian Government do in this or that situation, or how would the general public react to this or that new promotion scheme or new gadget). The analyst establishes the speed at which human productivity and social changes have occurred in the past centuries and millennia, and from these data they calculate what the situation will be ten or fifty years ahead.
      This can produce evidently very interesting and valuable results; but it takes for granted that processes already started will unfold at a rate determinable by past performance. There is, however, a major flaw in this entire procedure. What the flaw is can be most simply illustrated by taking the example of the physical growth of a child from birth to, say, age seven. Suppose that some beings from another world who have never seen mature human bodies happen upon a group of children between these ages, steal them and leave our planet. Their scientists might determine the rate of growth of human bodies from birth to seven; but if they were to project this rate into the future they might believe that at the age of 30 human beings are great giants.
      This illustration may sound very fanciful, yet it actually applies to modern science's approach to the universe. We speak of "universal laws," and on the basic of our calculations we somewhat pontifically give expert opinions concerning the age of the universe, what has happened and will happen to our solar system and the structure of our planet, the drift of continents, etc. All of this is based upon the concept that "evolution" (cosmic, planetary, biological, mental) progresses more or less in a straight line (even if with relatively small ups and downs in the process).
      But how do we know that these "laws," not only apply unchanged to the whole universe, but are the same today as they were at the time when this universe was just "born"? We take for granted this unchangeability of our "universal constants"; but why should we? Nothing around us suggests that we should, simply because all that we see, and experience has a beginning and an end, and the process of unfoldment from beginning to end proceeds according to varying rates of growth and decay. Why should we believe, for instance, that the force that we call gravitation has always the same strength?1 Is the "vitality" of a living organism the same in its infancy as when it approaches organic disintegration?
      Our official mentality retains still the basic character of nineteenth century thinking. New scientific cosmologies are challenging these old concepts, but only hesitatingly and without really accepting the possibility that our universal constants might be dominated by the rhythm of an immense cosmic process which introduces "cyclic" patterns of change. We still believe most of the time in a straightforward ascent of humanity from primitive "barbarism" to ever more glorious "civilization."
      This concept is a typically "Western" concept. In contrast to it we have the more characteristically "Oriental" picture of a "cyclic" universe or even more of a multiplicity of universes, each of which is a cosmic Whole which is born, develops, matures and disintegrates after a moment of perfect fulfillment — a fulfillment which nevertheless leaves "ashes" — that is, waste material, drop-outs and "karmic" residua — to be reincorporated into another universal Whole, a Whole different from the first, but not essentially "superior." Each universe represents the working out of an immense set of potentialities; but as potentialities of existence and of cosmic Wholes of existence are infinite, there is no end and no beginning to the process of existence. The concept of progress — in the usual, ethically colored sense of the word — can be applied to the vast cosmic and planetary movement which leads to the perfect actualization of the initial birth-potential of the cosmic or planetary Whole; but, symmetrical to it, there is also a process of "devolution" or disintegration, that is, a constant dropping out of unusable waste materials and of what one might call (relatively speaking) evolutionary failures.
      The basic fact is that the entire process is cyclic. Unfortunately since the Council of Constantinople in the fifth century, Western thinkers are conditioned by their culture to think of cycles in terms of exactly repetitive sequences of events; and Nietzsche, (to satisfy his own psychological need) glorified and popularized this type of thought in his poetic picture of an "Eternal Return." I believe, however, that a reformulation of the concept of cyclic process is today of crucial importance; for without a clear and sound understanding of what the concept of "cycle" implies — and especially does not imply — our present attempts at orienting ourselves toward the future of humanity in terms of "prospective" will lead us to conclusions, and make us depend upon procedures, which are likely to prove both useless and destructive.

1.     That this idea that I have often stated for many years is no longer too startling for the modern scientist is shown by the great physicist Fred Hoyle's new book Galaxies, Nuclei and Quasars (Harper and Row) in which he says that gravitational attraction between bodies may not be a universal constant and the behavior of matter may vary with different planets or solar systems.

Structure vs. Contents
The concept of cycles makes little sense, in terms of any broad cosmological picture of existence, unless we differentiate clearly between structure and contents. This concept refers to the structure of the vast flow of existence, but not of the contents of this flow. Existence is a process of unceasing changes. But man has realized for many millennia that the forever changing events which affect his senses and the organic rhythms of his body and psyche display certain definable patterns of recurrence which make the events yet to come to some extent predictable. What is predictable, however, is not the total existential situation including all perceptible or conceivable events in the world, but only certain configurations or gestalts relative to special sets of events isolated by the mind from the total picture of existence.
      This is a very important statement which obviously cannot be verified in any absolute sense, but which is at the very root of man's experience of existence. When we speak of cyclic processes in nature, we are isolating definite sets of events the pattern of which recur. For instance, we speak of a lunation cycle because every so many days we observe a recurrence of the new moon and full moon in a particular relationship to the horizon — i. e. a full moon always rises in the east when the sun sets in the west. But while there are recurrences of full moons, these full moons change their position with reference to the stars. Moreover as each full moon recurs it throws its lights on events and situations on the earth's surface which are never the same. Likewise we can expect and safely predict the return of spring, but no two springs occur under exactly the same weather conditions and bring into identical living organisms the same chemicals.
      in other words, events never repeat themselves exactly; and history never repeats exactly the same events. The beginnings and ends of every solar year, of every century, of the great cycle of precession of equinoxes (approximately every 26,000 years) occur in always different regions of the galaxy, which itself has brought its billions of solar systems and stars to ever-new regions of cosmic space. What this means is that you can never speak of two identical events in the existential sense of the term, event, simply because the infinitely complex network of relationships between all "existents" — whether they be solar systems, human persons, molecules or atomic particles — can never be precisely the same; unless we choose to believe that the potentialities of existence and existential relations are finite. Such a belief, however, seems to run against every ingrained human expectation and practically against all that religions and philosophies have ever conceived. Whatever the term, God, may refer to, the fact is that whatever and whenever this term and its equivalent have been used by human consciousnesses, it has always been associated with the feeling and/or the concept of infinity. A Nietzschean type of totally repetitive "Eternal Return" would indeed be the negation of the God-idea. It would also be the total negation of meaning in human existence and of any possible freedom of choice for man.
      What repeats itself is not the event, but the pattern of relatively closed series of events with reference to a particular field of existence. In other words, the flow of everchanging events is an ordered and structured process. As an illustration let us consider a river. This river, seen in its totality from mountain spring to sea, has a characteristic structure which we can see on a map, and we give it a name; but the water itself, whose unceasing flow is normally contained within the structuring boundaries which the particular features of the land make for it, is never the same. The often quoted Zen saying that you can never bathe twice in the same river is untrue or at least confusing in its imprecision, as so many so-called mystical statements are. You can bathe in the same river, but not in the same water. The distinction is most important and far reaching in its implications.
      I can bow reverently before the sunrise everyday; but while it is correct to speak of the occurrence as "sunrise" — i. e. as a formal configuration relating the sun, the earth, and the horizon of my place of residence — everything at the existential level that participates in this sunrise scene differs each day in some degree. It is not actually the same sun, nor the same horizon, nor the same human organism — though the mind within this organism may insist that the "I" is a permanent entity. What is permanent is a certain structure of living processes, a gestalt. The name is the same, but the existential reality of every sunrise scene differs in many ways.
      This factor of "structure" when generalized and abstractized, is actually what we mean by time — that which can be measured by clocks which in turn work according to the motions of the earth (its axial revolution creating the "day," and its revolution around the sun creating the "year"). There can be no process without time; there can be no thinking or feeling (as we normally use these terms) without a time-sequence of events in our body. Whether the time-sequence seems to our consciousness fast or slow has nothing to do with the reality of time, in spite of the fashionable arguments to the contrary — arguments based on an inaccurate or needlessly paradoxical use of words. And if the present scientific concept of the relativity of time with reference to the speed of an observer has any meaning at all, beside its convenient use in formal algebraic reasoning, this would involve a metaphysical concept of the universe which so far does not seem even to have been formulated.

As all processes of existence imply a time factor, time has essentially a cyclic nature. Time, in its most basic sense, is a structuring factor. For instance, the motion of the earth both establishes the reality of time for our consciousness and primarily structures our organic and psychic growth. The length of an organism's life-span conditions fundamentally its character and the possible scope of its responses to its environment and its awareness. As the life-span increases for man there is little doubt that extremely important changes in human society and human psychology will occur — indeed, are occurring.
      Of course from the strictly existential point of view of the official modern mentality, what appears as the important factors in the change are a vast number of new "events" and new types of interpersonal, social-cultural, economic and political relationships. The historian trained in our present day universities is almost exclusively focusing his attention on these existential, factual events — and on every bit of information that can be gathered concerning such events. Thus this type of historian sees only ever-changing and almost unpredictable happenings. He does not dare — and perhaps could not afford to, if he wanted to keep his college job — to present to the academic fraternity vast structural concepts such as have been thought out by "generalists" like Spengler and Toynbee, to speak only of recent historians. Yet, without such encompassing and "cyclic" historical concepts, what meaning is to be given to the chaotic facts and the confusing events of our century?
      Academic historians usually retrench themselves behind the hackneyed statement that history actually does not repeat itself. Of course it does not, if we are speaking of precise events — though even at that level of existential happenings many very striking parallels and analogies can be pointed out. But if we think of the structure of a cycle of civilization, of definite turning points, crises of growth, collective decisions and characteristic failures of nerves or class-blindness, etc. — and even of the type of personages who focus as it were the meaning and direction of crises and decisions — then we can indeed see emerging before our mind's vision the over-all time-pattern which beats, as it were, the basic rhythm of historical changes.
      We can visualize such time-structures as well in the field of planetary evolution; and the periodical motions of the planets are the percussion players. The whole universe is indeed filled with rhythm. It is an ordered universe, and this order, in time, manifests as rhythm. The universe is a symphonic structure of infinite complexity; yet within man's field of experience a multitude of rhythms can be recognized, each of which establishes cyclic processes. Some of these processes affect the whole biosphere; others condition the growth and disappearance of human societies and civilizations; lesser ones form the warp and woof upon which the life-patterns of individual lives are embroidered.
      It is by studying such structural factors that we can gain the kind of perspective upon the present trends of our society which permits us to foresee the structural outlines of history-in-the-making. What such a study can reveal is not precise existential happenings, but rather the rhythm of observable processes. Knowing what these processes have produced up to now, and knowing their structural character and basic rhythm, we can gain a "structural knowledge" enabling us to time rather accurately expectable crises and turning points, and to understand what is at stake in these crises — thus the meaning of whatever concrete events will take place at these nodal points of a history yet in the making.
      Knowing this meaning can be of tremendous psychological value, especially to individuals caught like seemingly helpless corks in the momentum of bewildering whirlpools of events. As Victor Frankl, the great Viennese psychologist, has stated in his books (cf. From Prison Camp to Existentialism), a man can stand almost any terrible situation, including torture, if he can see in it some kind of meaning and extract from it the feeling that it is structurally related to some larger pattern of growth, perhaps as a "test"; but men will break down and collapse if even much less strenuous events can only be seen as totally meaningless. The search for meaning is the most vital function of the mind and the feeling-intuition of man.
      Most men of course accept unquestioningly the set of values and meanings with which they have been provided since birth by family, religion and culture. But when this set of meanings falls apart and loses its convincing and will-mobilizing power, then psychological chaos is impending. The individual will seek escape in neurosis, psychosis or hallucinogenic drugs — or else, finding in his own individual depth (and perhaps in the very acuity of his tragedy, despair and emptiness) a driving power that as yet had been latent, he starts on his own upon a crucial and often crucifying search for meaning.
      Then, however, he may become an easy prey for charlatans, pseudo-teachers and fortune-tellers; for he must at all cost try to establish within himself a new sense of direction. He must strive to get a clue as to what some to him very mysterious, yet psychologically needed, Power expects of him. He hungers for a knowledge of the future — whether it be his own personal future, or the future of his people and even of humanity as a whole — for in this future lies perhaps the revelation of a life-purpose for him, of his place, function and meaning in the universe.
      Statistical knowledge and the extrapolation of the past into the future offer very little that makes sense to the individual. Will such a "scientific" approach make much sense to mankind as a whole, if perchance some vast planetary cataclysm, or the coming of far-advanced "space people," were to render totally useless and meaningless all the curves of predictable growth for the establishment of which millions of dollars are being spent? The basic question today is indeed whether or not the social, psychological and biological or telluric processes and modes of human response which we have known in our limited experience of the past may not be made obsolete and superseded by basically new developments. We can perhaps expect a totally new "mutation" of mankind or a basic transformation of society. Without such a most radical development is there indeed any hope for a humanity faced with massive hunger and nuclear disaster? Any type of extrapolation from the past along lines pursued by official computer-based calculations of probability lose all validity if we are at the threshold of radically transforming events which result from the operation of cosmic or planetary forces, or of transcendent superhuman minds. And our academic, political or business mentalities have no way of relating to even the possibility of this kind of operation or "intervention."
      There is nevertheless a way of discovering the manner in which planetary and cosmic processes reach points of crisis and as a result may play havoc with all our modern scientific prospects for the future. It is a way as old as thinking man; but unfortunately today a way so filled with distorting accretions and so compromised by psychological vagaries and abuses that it seems unacceptable to minds trained in the logical and analytical techniques of rigorous thinking. It is the way of astrology.
      Let us try to see what is actually the essential nature of astrology, and how a combination of basic astrological and historical thinking can be used as a truly meaningful, broad and inclusive method for a deeper understanding of the vast process of change in the midst of which mankind is presently floundering in a state of utter confusion and dismay.

Astrology and History
Astrology is essentially the study of the structuring power of cyclic time over existential events. It is the study of those cycles for the measuring of which the periodical motions of celestial bodies offer us a complex but effectual type of "clock." Astrology is a method based on the assumption, generalized from the most obvious facts of human experience, that every existential process has a beginning and an end, and passes in between these two events through a series of recognizable and measurable phases or critical points of transformation.
      If all cosmic, planetary, biological and psychological processes are inherently "cyclic" as they unfold in time, they can theoretically be approached as "wholes" having a definite and measurable structure of growth. If we can isolate these wholes and study their internal specific time-structure, we can gain a knowledge of their schedule of development; and if we are looking at a particular phase of this development occurring today we can surmise what the coming phases will be in terms of the structural character of the whole we are observing. We can at least time approximately the next turning point and the rate of the process. We do this, however, not in terms of particular events, but in terms of the structure of the whole processes. We are considering the entire cycle; ours is a "holistic" approach.
      Let us take an example: If a biologist studies a ten year old girl and tries to tell what she will be in five years, he knows that she will have then passed through the crisis of puberty — a very basic bio-psychological crisis of growth. He knows this, because he knows how the structural pattern of the life-process of a human female operates. He has before his mind the whole structural development of a woman from birth to death; his approach is holistic.
      By contrast, if a modern type of facts-cataloguing historian from some other planet who is entirely unacquainted with the structural development of a woman's organism were to try to picture what the girl will be at age 15 merely from studying the sequence of events in her life from age seven to ten, he would have no reliable way of making such a picture. The "historical" events of the girl's life from seven to ten may be plotted on a curve, but extrapolating the characteristics of this curve into the future at age 15 would be a rather useless operation; it would not be able to foresee the effect of puberty on the girl's total person. It could not predict puberty; because puberty as such is not to be adequately foreseeable by an intellect which has no understanding of the whole life of a human being from birth to death. Puberty is a structural change inherent in the entire process of existence which we call a human being. Around it an immense variety of events can take place — some happy, others quite destructive. Back of these events — the tapestry of life — stands the structura...