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.Every teaching leads to the same Truth (with a massive capital T!)" is meaningless as a basis for practical action and formed consciousness.Unity is a necessary background realization; the facts we must face are differentiation and individualization.The goal, harmony, is the organization of differences, not their negation. For the same reason, the kind of life of which Gautama the Buddha spoke as "the Middle Way" is but too often sadly misunderstood to mean lack of commitment in any definite direction, thus an unpolarized state of being, neither hot nor cold, black or white, but instead a meandering through undefined expanses of formless and tepid greyness.The path of the Buddhist Arhat and Boddhisattva is anything but grey or unpolarized.One cannot walk in two directions at once.Unfortunately, "consciousness" has been so extolled at the expense of "activity" and function within a larger whole that a condition of unformed and uncentered passivity � a negative Yin state � is often presented as the only alternative to an overly forceful (and therefore equally negative) Yang state of aggressive behavior and/or egocentric, intellectual thinking. To tread the Middle Way means to avoid extremes; and all extremes are, strictly speaking, "negative" because they destroy the essence of the path one treads.Both ambitious over-activity (spiritually as well as socially) and mediumistically uncontrollable passivity and openness are negative states.The Buddha preached against the rigid, ascetic practices of some Yogis, but his Dharma (or way of life) was a way of most positive self-control with regard to food, sex, and bodily comfort.It was a way of structured openness and strongly oriented practices. The practice of transpersonal astrology, like that of transformative living, should also combine structure and openness inasmuch as it should be based on cosmic principles of organization � organization in space (the study of formal arrangements) and organizations in time (the study of cycles and their phases).But the transpersonal approach is evidently not the only valid one.It is, in fact, an approach that probably befits only a relatively few people, if followed genuinely and without deviation, and if all its implications are consciously accepted.Above all, it has to be clearly understood, and in order to understand it clearly it has to be seen in a proper social perspective.The next chapter will attempt to provide some basis for such an understanding.3.This coined term is used in the same context as one would use clairvoyance (clear-seeing) or clairsentience (clear-feeling) or clairaudience (clear-hearing) with a meta- or parapsychological implication, above or beyond the norm.CHAPTER THREEFour Levels of InterpretingHuman Experience and Astrological Data - 1Signs and symbols are produced in order to answer human needs.But there are various kinds of needs.The psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of a hierarchy of needs, some very basic and a manifestation of what in my book, The Faith That Gives Meaning to Victory (1942), I called "man's common humanity", others less vital or crucial.In my recent book, Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation(), I speak of a hierarchy of functions rather than of needs, for the basic fact is that human beings can operate at several levels of activity and in terms of a consciousness whose scope and power of mental association and abstraction increases at each successive level.Four Levels of Human Functioning 1.All human beings operate at the biological level as physical organisms, as bodies.They act and react in order to satisfy a few basic organic functions such as oxygenation through breathing, blood circulation, metabolic food-assimilation, adaptation to changing temperatures and existential situations, self-protection through a complex system of nerve impacts and transmission, and self-reproduction through sex.Each of these fundamental functions has what we might call psychic overtones manifesting as drives, emotions, and an overall sense of being a particular organism whose singular characteristics differentiate it from other human organisms. Synthesizing, as it were, all basic biological needs is the need for security, not only as a particular person, but more deeply still as a member of the human species; for, at the biological level, the preservation and expansion of the species as a whole is actually of greater concern � unconscious though it may be � than the safety of any particular body belonging to that species.As in all animal species, the single organism (the specimen) is always expendable; what really counts is what might happen to the species.This is the real basis of our concern with what happens to babies, or even embryos, and the very deep unconscious foundation of mother-love � for the child symbolizes the perpetuation and future of the human species.Even in our period of complex and intellectual civilization, people go to great lengths to try to preserve the remaining specimens of an endangered species; and this concern is a faint reflection of what remains in the modern mind of the purely biological state of consciousness � a sense of biospheric guilt. 2.When, on the basis of the need for security, human beings find in themselves the urge to come together and unite their strength against inimical forces or animals � not merely according to biological descent (the family grouping), but beyond or outside of the deep organic and psychic bondage to such strictly biological types of relationships � the sociocultural level of functioning is reached.At that level, the human being is more than a biological organism � a "body" � he or she becomes a "person".No human being should be called a person unless he or she has become a functional participant in a social collectivity.Social participation at the level of physical activity produces psychic overtones, which, being common to all the participants, are gradually and inevitably organized, into a particular "culture", or to use a modern American term, a "way of life" But a culture is really far more than a manner of living [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Every teaching leads to the same Truth (with a massive capital T!)" is meaningless as a basis for practical action and formed consciousness.Unity is a necessary background realization; the facts we must face are differentiation and individualization.The goal, harmony, is the organization of differences, not their negation. For the same reason, the kind of life of which Gautama the Buddha spoke as "the Middle Way" is but too often sadly misunderstood to mean lack of commitment in any definite direction, thus an unpolarized state of being, neither hot nor cold, black or white, but instead a meandering through undefined expanses of formless and tepid greyness.The path of the Buddhist Arhat and Boddhisattva is anything but grey or unpolarized.One cannot walk in two directions at once.Unfortunately, "consciousness" has been so extolled at the expense of "activity" and function within a larger whole that a condition of unformed and uncentered passivity � a negative Yin state � is often presented as the only alternative to an overly forceful (and therefore equally negative) Yang state of aggressive behavior and/or egocentric, intellectual thinking. To tread the Middle Way means to avoid extremes; and all extremes are, strictly speaking, "negative" because they destroy the essence of the path one treads.Both ambitious over-activity (spiritually as well as socially) and mediumistically uncontrollable passivity and openness are negative states.The Buddha preached against the rigid, ascetic practices of some Yogis, but his Dharma (or way of life) was a way of most positive self-control with regard to food, sex, and bodily comfort.It was a way of structured openness and strongly oriented practices. The practice of transpersonal astrology, like that of transformative living, should also combine structure and openness inasmuch as it should be based on cosmic principles of organization � organization in space (the study of formal arrangements) and organizations in time (the study of cycles and their phases).But the transpersonal approach is evidently not the only valid one.It is, in fact, an approach that probably befits only a relatively few people, if followed genuinely and without deviation, and if all its implications are consciously accepted.Above all, it has to be clearly understood, and in order to understand it clearly it has to be seen in a proper social perspective.The next chapter will attempt to provide some basis for such an understanding.3.This coined term is used in the same context as one would use clairvoyance (clear-seeing) or clairsentience (clear-feeling) or clairaudience (clear-hearing) with a meta- or parapsychological implication, above or beyond the norm.CHAPTER THREEFour Levels of InterpretingHuman Experience and Astrological Data - 1Signs and symbols are produced in order to answer human needs.But there are various kinds of needs.The psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of a hierarchy of needs, some very basic and a manifestation of what in my book, The Faith That Gives Meaning to Victory (1942), I called "man's common humanity", others less vital or crucial.In my recent book, Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation(), I speak of a hierarchy of functions rather than of needs, for the basic fact is that human beings can operate at several levels of activity and in terms of a consciousness whose scope and power of mental association and abstraction increases at each successive level.Four Levels of Human Functioning 1.All human beings operate at the biological level as physical organisms, as bodies.They act and react in order to satisfy a few basic organic functions such as oxygenation through breathing, blood circulation, metabolic food-assimilation, adaptation to changing temperatures and existential situations, self-protection through a complex system of nerve impacts and transmission, and self-reproduction through sex.Each of these fundamental functions has what we might call psychic overtones manifesting as drives, emotions, and an overall sense of being a particular organism whose singular characteristics differentiate it from other human organisms. Synthesizing, as it were, all basic biological needs is the need for security, not only as a particular person, but more deeply still as a member of the human species; for, at the biological level, the preservation and expansion of the species as a whole is actually of greater concern � unconscious though it may be � than the safety of any particular body belonging to that species.As in all animal species, the single organism (the specimen) is always expendable; what really counts is what might happen to the species.This is the real basis of our concern with what happens to babies, or even embryos, and the very deep unconscious foundation of mother-love � for the child symbolizes the perpetuation and future of the human species.Even in our period of complex and intellectual civilization, people go to great lengths to try to preserve the remaining specimens of an endangered species; and this concern is a faint reflection of what remains in the modern mind of the purely biological state of consciousness � a sense of biospheric guilt. 2.When, on the basis of the need for security, human beings find in themselves the urge to come together and unite their strength against inimical forces or animals � not merely according to biological descent (the family grouping), but beyond or outside of the deep organic and psychic bondage to such strictly biological types of relationships � the sociocultural level of functioning is reached.At that level, the human being is more than a biological organism � a "body" � he or she becomes a "person".No human being should be called a person unless he or she has become a functional participant in a social collectivity.Social participation at the level of physical activity produces psychic overtones, which, being common to all the participants, are gradually and inevitably organized, into a particular "culture", or to use a modern American term, a "way of life" But a culture is really far more than a manner of living [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]