Facts and the Shadow of Gemini

Close encounters with public reality often leave me reflective. For one thing, they remind me of what I have within (and help counter my usual undercurrent of self-doubt!) By ‘public reality’ I mean life as many people live it, where you accept as objectively real the values and ideas that you grew up around; and where people who don’t share those values are seen as a bit weird. Not that you’d say.

 I often forget how many people live in this unreflecting way. I’m more likely to compare their certainties with my uncertainties and find myself wanting. When I was younger I was very judging of people for not being reflective, not questioning; but that was just the same attitude that conventional people can have about unconventional people, that I’d brought with me and reversed. Nowadays I don’t mind people being like this, it is who they are, their lives are meaningful to them, I can enjoy their lives with them. It is just humanity and how it is. 

The arising of reflective ability is a mysterious process. I think it is crucial, axial. It often starts to arise when things go wrong, when our received values are inadequate to deal with our experience, and as an astrologer you can be part of that process for people.

You can be a brilliant Nobel Prize winner, yet be happy within the status quo, even be seen as a wise person within that status quo. And on the other hand you can appear as a ‘loser’, in and out of unskilled jobs, just about holding your life together, yet be very perceptive about the values people are driven by.

And there’s a thing about confidence. It is so much easier to feel confident and at ease with yourself if you accept the status quo and succeed within it, living your life by its simple certainties, buoyed by the values shared with those around you.

If on the other hand you are on a lifelong search for meaningful values, you probably won’t have the motivation to succeed very much on the world’s terms – maybe just enough to hold your life together – and it can be hard not to compare oneself unfavourably with the ‘winners’. Self-confidence when found, however, is very real, it is a Leo thing, that source of life from deep within. But I think most of us bounce in and out of that. Writers and artists are archetypal examples of this way of being.

--------------------

Ad Break: I offer skype astrology readings (£60 full reading, £40 for an update). Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk

---------------------

And now I want to turn to a favourite topic of mine, science, because it can be understood in a reflecting or an unreflecting way. Don’t get me wrong, I think science is a great subject, I’m not anti- it. But there is a crucial point about how we understand it. And it is to do with ‘facts’.

For example, is matter made up of atoms? Well yes, we all know that, it is an established fact, part of 'public reality'. But do we actually know it? No, of course we don’t, we have merely been told it by people whose opinion we respect. And we have been told it so many times, crucially we were also taught it at school, the culture generally is so automatically accepting of the idea that matter is made up of atoms, that we accept it as a fact, yes of course it is true, everyone knows it is true. It has acquired a firm reality as a ‘fact’, free of its original moorings in someone’s mind.

I’m not playing a game here. It is about intellectual integrity, it is about being true to experience – without those qualities, reflective ability cannot arise. The real situation is that we have merely been told that matter is made up of atoms, and that is a THEORY, not a fact, for no-one has or ever will see an atom with their bare senses. And it is a good theory, or should I say story, for it explains a lot of things.

It is an inner knowing that I am arguing for here, what do we really know within ourselves? That is the point from which consciousness grows, and the more you come from that point, the more you realise how much you don’t know. Real knowing has to begin with stripping away what passes for knowledge in public reality, but which is really just a bunch of stories that hold together well enough to provide a sort of coherent picture of reality, provided we don’t look too closely.

 And I find it a liberation to think of science in this sort of way. Scientific knowledge is so all-pervading these days, there is just so much of it, and it locates reality so firmly outside of ourselves, that the inner has correspondingly less reality. But all scientific notions begin inside someone’s mind, and then they spread to other people’s minds. Science itself has an inner starting point and foundation, and it gets detached from that, and to that extent we humans get detached from who we are. And science has such spectacular results that we are dazzled into thinking it is real in a way that it is not. It is a product of the mind, like all human creations. (I have a suspicion that the mind is so much the creator of the reality around it that science will pretty much always discover what it sets out to find.)

We live in a Gemini Age. Pluto and Neptune, the 2 outermost astrological planets, meet up every 500 years or so and define the age we live in. They last met in about 1890 in Gemini, and in Gemini again 500 years before that. Each sign needs its opposite to be balanced. Gemini is facts, information, and Sagittarius is the wider human context, the sense of meaning, within which we place those facts. The shadow of Gemini is facts without meaning, facts as the be-all-and-end-all, mere information as ultimate reality. Science at its worst. And it has been creeping up on us for 600 years (corresponding to the period of the growth of modern science) and has several thousand years to run! The blink of an eye in the history of humanity, but hopefully in that time we will collectively learn to tame the tyranny of facts, remember that all such information is the product of the human mind, and set it in that huge all-inclusive imaginative context we are capable of creating. We cannot let the muggles win!

I think it is about coming back to the mind, feeling the ideas of atoms or quarks or evolution, for example, as mind-created like any story, and letting the ideas float there, subject to the forces of the imagination, essentially inner things rather than hard external realities, which I think is a kind of corruption. Through treating stories as ‘facts’ we have created a huge weight that presses down on us collectively. ‘Facts’ are the modern shadows in Plato’s cave, that seem so real to those chained to its walls.

The Outer Planets, Nietzsche and the Madness of Groups

Last week’s blog turned into a 5000 word article on the Underworld, so I thought I’d see if I could first publish it elsewhere, a mag or something.

Meanwhile, Christina has a piece which begins with a quote from Nietzsche, one version of it being: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” 

 I found another related one by Nietzsche: "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

So I wondered about describing crowd behaviour, or the behaviour of a nation, astrologically. I think what happens in a crowd is just an extreme form of what is going on all the time. We believe things, we are in the grip of dreams, that the group around us hold. It seems like Neptune.

You see it with the nationalisms of different countries. People deeply in the grip of certain beliefs, which cannot usually be justified, about their nation and about themselves as members of that nation. It is part of our identity. Americans, Israelis, Russians, Chinese, Germans, British, Japanese – all in the grip of something particular to their nation. And you see it as soon as one country is threatened or affronted by another, a crowd reflex that is an instant siding with one’s own nation right or wrong. And this is a different thing from loyalty, or patriotism, which is a thoughtful appreciation of what your country has given you and the things it is good at, and no illusions about your country’s shortcomings either. Reflective vs unreflective Cancer.

So Nietzsche would see nationalism as collective madness, patriotism as individual and sane.

I’m not saying that all aspects of a group are mad all the time, some good things sometimes happen through collective action. But I think there is always some madness there, even if it’s just a degree of demonization of other groups. It’s very noticeable in protest movements, whether against the excesses and injustices of capitalism, environmental degradation, GM foods, nuclear power etc: the protests are necessary, but they get very mixed up with anti-authority rebels-seeking-a-cause type stuff, people who find it hard to imagine that there exist bankers and fund managers who are reasonable open-minded people doing a job that is necessary and useful. Or GM technicians who aren't Monsanto-monsters, creating plants that may be of help to the world. And that polarisation is self-defeating, cos once you've demonised the opposition, they ain't going to listen to you cos they'll rightly think you're a nutter.

As Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” 

_________________________________

Ad Break: I offer skype astrology readings (£60 full reading, £40 for an update). Contact: Dharmaruci71 (at)hotmail.com.

_______________________________

In an astrological chart, there are the personal planets, which are the Sun through to Saturn, and the collective planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. When you get a group, there is less room for the personal planets which separate us and make us distinct, because they are all bumping up against each other. It is much easier for that which we have in common, the collective planets, to take over. And it has its own momentum which is hard for an individual to resist. 

If we had been born in Germany early last century, how many of us would not have felt thrilled and uplifted by the Nuremberg rallies? I know I would have done, they were so overwhelming (and terrifying) if you watch them on film, which I highly recommend (‘The Triumph of the Will’). I would also have had a side of me going hang on a minute, well as I grew older I would have, but as a teenager? Who knows. And academics, supposedly thoughtful people, were just as vulnerable to this human tide, this tsunami.

We all have that bit of us that longs (Neptune) to join the collective in this sort of way, to lose ourselves in that warm sense of belonging and certainty, that connection with the old myths (‘The Chosen Race’) that hold the group together and make it special.

I’m going to assert that if you think you don’t have that side, if you think as a German you wouldn't have felt to some extent the allure of Nazi Germany, then you are probably kidding yourself, you would have been among the first to have been swept up in it. It is only by recognising that collective animal within that we begin to have a choice not to act on it.

Of course these days we make Hitler and Nazi Germany entirely ‘Other’, it stands for exactly what we think we are not. That, at any rate, is the respectable group attitude, and in so doing we remain just as vulnerable to those collective forces. The crowd thinks in simple, black and white terms.

The outer planets describe different aspects of this crowd consciousness. Pluto is the survival instinct, that aggressive reflex when another group threatens us, and the ability to throw away our own life in its service. On this level, the survival of the individual does not matter, all that matters is the survival of the group. Pluto also gives us the ability to surrender our life for another on an individual level, but that is different, that is something that

rightly awes us. You see this collective throwing away of life in war, where soldiers on both sides are willingly brainwashed into thinking that right lies solely on their side, the enemy are the bad guys and that makes it easier to kill. Of course within that you get individual acts of self-sacrifice by soldiers who still also think the enemy are the bad guys, so it gets slightly complicated.

Pluto is also the group secret, that which you must not name.  A group casts a shadow, and the more rigid a group is, the more highly it thinks of itself, the stronger the shadow, the more they need to reject certain others as ‘not us’. You get this in 'spiritual’ groups a lot, as well as in nations. And the secret is some attribute of the group which they would rather not admit to and which is seen as belonging outside the group. A simple example would be a marriage within a wealthy family. Money is nearly always a factor here, the marriage would not take place without the presence of large amounts of money and/ or social standing. Does anyone really think Kate would have married William if he hadn't been a prince? Of course she wouldn't have. I’m not damning her, it’s normal behaviour and always has been. But you are not supposed to say it. It’s other people who marry for money or position, not Capricorn Kate. (That’s why royal marriages are fairy tale marriages, because in them it’s all right to marry someone just because they are a prince/ess.)

On a ‘spiritual’ Facebook group recently I naively pointed out that dividing members into those who could post anything and those who couldn't was creating inhibition, and maybe that distinction should be removed. Nobody said anything, the silence was deafening, like I’d said something I shouldn't.  I'd thought I was being helpful. Actually I was pointing out something at the heart of the way they are, a division into 2 classes of people, and the higher class want it to remain like that, it's their secret.

Nietzsche: “Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.” 

Neptune on this group level best describes the specific aspect of insanity that Nietzsche was referring to. Neptune is the ocean, he is the breaking down of the barriers of ego-consciousness (which we need for day to day living), and so he is the dissolution of the thinking individual in the group dream. And it’s that recognition that you are in someone else’s dream that is not your own that is crucial to the development of consciousness. Of course, none of us thinks we are, we all think we are our own person.

Nietzsche with his notion of the Superman was ironically taken up by the Nazis with their notion of the Master Race. But Nietzsche’s Ubermensch or Overman was precisely the person who has broken free of the group, rather than the sub-individual subsumed into the group dream that characterises a member of the ‘Master Race’.

Uranus is the creative spark, he is active at times of change. When the herd in its madness needs to go from one insanity to another, Uranus is the catalyst. (Like I said earlier, the group is not all mad all of the time, but I think there is always some madness there.) Uranus is the planet of democracy, and in democratic government you see this continual division/split into different parties, with politicians arguing a position for party reasons, rather than because sanity requires it. 

And if you have stepped outside the collective dream, the group can see you as the mad one. Nietzsche again: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” 

BEHOLD THE PROPHET!

From an essay by Tom Wolfe called ‘Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died’:

“The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the 20th century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth”, wars catastrophic beyond imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt… The blind and re-assuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines… of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly” – he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations – “are hurled into the people for another generation... then nobody should be surprised when… brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers… will appear in the arena of the future.”


Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the 20th century “on the mere pittance” of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of the “total eclipse of all values” (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of “revaluation”, in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”

Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as “the total eclipse of all values”? Because of man’s track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the 20th century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man’s powers of prediction?"

--------------------------------------------------

Nietzsche was born Oct 15 1844. He had Moon in Sag, which is philosophically inclined, and said to be found in many teachers. He had Sun in Libra opposite to Pluto in Aries. Oppositions often engage us with the world, we find one end of it ‘out there’; in Nietzsche’s case, it was a new vision (Aries) that would transform the collective (Pluto). He also had Mercury in Libra conjunct Mars, opposite Uranus in Aries, so again we have the new vision after the death of God, expressed with force (Mars) and original insight (Uranus).

One qualification on Mr Wolfe’s analysis: he suggests we can’t have a moral code without an external authority, without a god who points the finger. I think this is actually true on a collective level, for people by and large inherit their values and ethics from their families and from the society around them, their sense of authority is external. We can see this in the vulnerability of the collective to fashion, to advertising, to cries of war from the government, to witch-hunts created by the popular press. But it is not true for the minority who claw their way out of the received wisdoms and find it within themselves to stand alone, who can live without the unconscious sense of solidarity with the herd-mind. This sounds terribly patronising, but I don’t mean it to be, it’s just how things are.