The Sky Within

Humanity has always contended with the unconscious. Spiritual, wisdom, and esoteric traditions have all sought to liberate us from its burden. But we live in a collective world that ensures we are also aware of the influence of the unconscious — where our instincts, our thoughts, our will and intent, our intuition and higher mind, and the superconscious all reside.

The age we live in is highlighting the misalignments that exist within and without. As within, so without; as above, so below — the low and high octaves of the same mastery. Any fragmentation in the above is an indication of fragmentation below, and vice versa.

Over the last hundred to two hundred and fifty years, psychology has become the thread that holds our material reality together — Jung, Becker, Tillich; Moore, Stein, Edinger. Of these, the Jungian model draws the greatest interest, because it offers the cleanest, clearest frameworks for individuation — integrating the alchemical, the Hermetic, the Vedic, and countless other religious images and symbols across the ages and epochs, across peoples, cultures, and traditions. Jung set the seed; his followers called themselves Jungians despite his own insistence that he did not want an organization formed around his name. And so the Jungians, neo-Jungians, and post-Jungians have systematically developed a comprehensive model of the self — one that integrates the whole of philosophy, the esoteric traditions, and comparative mythology and symbolism, for the analytically comfortable among us. What exists now is a comprehensive framework through which to access the contents of the unconscious — expressed in oneself, and in others.

The integration of the polarities — represented by the essences of the luminaries and their symbols in the collective unconscious — is the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And the Tree of Life is the intensity of life itself: the energy that flows through the various internal nodes of the system.

The influence of these luminaries and planets extends through all of our bodies, all of our states of being. The physical body (one), tied to action. The mental body (two) — mind, will, and intellect. The soul or psyche (three) — intuition and the higher mind. And spirit (four) — the superconscious. The mental body and the soul together carry our beliefs, including our core beliefs, our emotions, and our worldview. Spirit is our absolute identity.

Thus, like many researchers, teachers, and authors — Tarnas, Burgoyne, Kuhn — who built upon the work of the archetypal psychologists (Hillman, von Franz, even Jordan Peterson) and the astrologers, both the ancients (Ptolemy, Manilius, Vettius Valens, Firmicus Maternus) and the tropical, Chaldean school — and, in our own time, Dane Rudhyar and Liz Greene, who explicitly wed Jung to the stars — we can speak of the prescience, synchronicity, integration, alignment, and wholeness that become accessible when we use the rules, meaning, and symbolism of the celestial luminaries together with an understanding of their reflection in the archetypes of the collective unconscious. This is the key to anima integration and to the development of the mana-personality.

And in a world filled with noise, slop, and blind group psychology — with possession — this integration, alignment, and wholeness is what provides the sovereignty, agency, and authenticity that allow one to serve as an internal steward of the age: of collective transformation, through the need for unity amidst fragmentation.

Alignment and wholeness within the self — and, as above so below, therefore also without — removes the negative vibrations: the ego-grandiosity and hubris, the greed and wanting for the enhancement of self, the laziness, ineffectiveness, and incompetence. These are the greatest difficulties to overcome for the leverage of intent into manifestation. The greater the alignment and wholeness, the greater the power of manifestation of intent. This — unity over hubris, greed, and apathy — is precisely what the large incumbent states and democracies now need in order to adapt, integrate, and transcend the problems of our age. The complexity of our life conditions has far outrun the complexity of the worldviews, cultures, and institutions we built generations ago, in an age of lower complexity — when there were far fewer connected nodes of agency, information, and attention.

The point being: I've developed a framework for psychological integration — and for individuation, for those who are called to individuate — that incorporates Integral theory (the theory of everything), Jungian and neo-Jungian frameworks and models of the self, and archetypal, symbolic, and astrotheological studies.

We start here, with the most fun — and, admittedly, the most narcissism-feeding — of those frameworks: the one that develops the symbolic underpinning for soul-communion and anima (and animus) integration. The tropical astrology model.

So — let's begin with you.