Sometime during the evening, our thoughts turned to telekinetics — [...]]]> The other night my husband and I were discussing psychic phenomena and related curiosities with a skeptic friend. I enjoy these kinds of discussions very much because they force me to do some challenging mental acrobatics, to grapple with important concepts like doubt and proof and faith.

Sometime during the evening, our thoughts turned to telekinetics — spoon-bending, moving things with your mind, et cetera. Our friend said, “Moving things requires energy. How could something move if you weren’t applying energy to it?”

I pointed out that mental energy could be very powerful and, if applied correctly, who’s to say it couldn’t move things from a distance? I concluded my argument with what I believed to be ironclad fact: “After all,” I said triumphantly, “if we only use 10 percent of our brains, who’s to say what’s possible if we used much more of them?”

I got scoffed at.

Our friend challenged the “10 percent myth,” saying the claim is bandied about too much without any real evidence or backing. He said he doubted, very much, that it was true. I was flummoxed — no one had ever argued back on that point before — so we did what any self-respecting group of forty-ish Americans would do: We consulted the Internet.

Sure enough, my friend was right. Scientific American said so. The University of Washington said so. Even that sacred guardian of Internet truth and legend, Snopes, said so.

Yet I also know, from my work in early childhood development, that psychoneurobiologists have discovered that brain neurons are malleable — they can change and adapt according to input from the self and the environment. So although we might use all of our brains, our brains can also change. So I still contend that there is a possibility they can change in ways we’re not, as a species, even aware of yet, even to the point of bending spoons and lifting oak tables with our minds. I’m sure there are rules and structures and limitations governing how neurons can change (Saturn!), but for now I’d like to maintain my belief in at least the possibility of more than we know.

Interestingly, what the facts did, instead of dashing my hopes, was to bring me back to the sticky questions of faith, proof and doubt, to understand more about the nature of these things than I did before. I got, suddenly, how different people require different things for faith. There are a lot of people, our friend included, who require physical proof of things: “Seeing is believing”-type people. On the other end of the spectrum are the “I just know it in my heart”-type people — those who require no proof other than their own intuition.

These differing attitudes correspond to the Jungian typologies Sensate and Intuitive which, in turn, correspond to the astrological elements Earth and Fire. I would expect those heavy on Earth energy in their horoscope charts to require more solid proof of things and those with more Fire to follow their intuitive beliefs much more readily.

I think, though, that it is not an either-or question. We all have both Earth and Fire in our charts, requiring us to weigh which beliefs we approach from an Earthy perspective and which ones are more Fiery for us. Each of us carries a spectrum along which we fall according to the belief in question. Rare is the person who requires hard proof for everything, or for nothing.

What about you? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Do you require physical verification or strong intuition when it comes to, say, your beliefs about an afterlife? About God/Spirit/Divine? About human nature? About love?

How certain are you of your beliefs? What makes you so sure?

Photo: blondyimp

I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.

To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.

I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, [...]]]>

I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.

To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.

I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, French? Italian? — but maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the words are meaningful only in the turnabout pathways of the artist’s wandering mind.

The picture evokes the Mercury archetype and his tendency to show up in the in-between places, in those spaces of life where boredom looms, in the margins between more noticeable events. The Roman god Mercury — Hermes, in the Greek — was in constant motion, wings on his feet, traveling between Olympus, earth and the underworld to deliver messages between gods and monsters and humans. He was the only one who could slip in and out of Hades without paying the ferryman.

We all have Mercury in our minds, slipping between the layers of our psyches, moving from conscious awareness (Oh! I should be taking notes on what the teacher is saying!) to the mundane insects of thought that cross our paths (I wonder if they’ll have that pea soup again at the cafe today.) to the unconscious, often-unwanted depths (I really don’t deserve all the good in my life.) to the upper registers of love and connectedness (I feel so alive today!).

Though he is normally associated, in the astrological chart, with mundane thought, Mercury’s real power lies in his ability to connect things. On a physiological level, connections are brain neurons — that is, the ability to process information through our minds. On a practical, everyday level, connections are made through language: through the words we hear and the words we speak back (which, by the way, are processed through neurons).

But on an esoteric level, connections are metaphor. And Mercury is the master of metaphor.

Carl Jung said that metaphor-making is the primary function of the psyche. Metaphor means, literally, to carry between. Interestingly, both parts of the word, both meta and phor, are related in their roots to words meaning “childbirth” and “midwife.” So there is a sense, in a metaphor, of carrying and delivering something profound, creative and meaningful in the space in-between two people. The thing is not Person 1, and the thing is not Person 2. It is something entirely third, but which connects the two together.

Where Mercury is concerned, the quintessential example of metaphor is language. All language is a symbol of something else: the word apple is a symbol of the apple sitting on my desk; the word relationship is a symbol of the collection of interactions between us; the word run is a symbol of me moving fast using my feet.

And all symbols, or metaphors, and thus all words, are ways of mediating between two things: a real thing and a way of representing it with my lips, with my tongue; a real feeling and the connection I want to have with you through it; an idea I have and the way it will become manifest in life.

And so I look at the picture above and I see Mercury in the margins, some sketching or maybe doodling that is a symbol of what’s going on in the artist’s mind in some in-between space: a space where a gap exists between what is going on around him or her and what is going on inside him or her.

The pictures here look like something being born from the artist’s inside to the artist’s outside. I see symbols being made, symbols that represent something in the mind that wants to come to the fore, symbols that are more direct even than words, that speak directly to the psyche instead of through the often-twisting manner of language, symbols that evoke quiet and pensiveness and reflectiveness and perhaps age.

Perhaps memory.

Photo: La Eu la lia

Jung said our [...]]]> Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to describe the repressed contents of the personal unconscious — those parts of each of us that we’d rather not admit to harboring. The problem with shadow material is that it comes out when we’re not looking — or, more precisely, it comes out because we’re not looking.

Jung said our shadow elements could not be directly accessed but could, instead, be understood through dreams, complexes, projections and similarly sideways media. So a dream that you’re being chased by a lion might suggest that you haven’t integrated your personal power very well. The perception that someone else is a ruthless gossip might suggest that you look at your own gossiping habits. And so forth.

I believe the shadow can be seen most clearly in the horoscope chart, since the chart provides a graphic map of the individual psyche. Here are several ways we can detect the contents of the shadow in the horoscope:

• Knowing the dark and light of each archetype. Planets, signs, aspects and even houses carry energy that can manifest in positive, negative or neutral ways. Talking through situations, events, feelings and behaviors can begin to reveal how each archetype is being expressed on a daily basis.
• Attending to polarities. In Jungian terms, an astrological polarity would be called the “tension of opposites,” wherein two competing energies vie for dominance in the personality. We can see polarities in the horoscope in the form of oppositions (when two planets are 180 degrees apart) as well as imbalances — for example, many planets in the fifth house and none in the 11th.
• Noticing sign-house conflicts. These occur when an external force (house) demands that the person acts against the innate (sign) energy. For example, a Pisces Moon in the 10th house may suppress its natural softness to satisfy people who demand its leadership. (Of course, it may instead use its softness to be a “servant leader”-type; we won’t know without talking to the person.)

But perhaps the most powerful way of perceiving the whole of one’s shadow is by reading the nodal chart.

Developed by Bruno and Louise Huber, the nodal chart is the nerve center of astrological shadow material. In essence, it turns the natal chart inside-out, displaying, in full view, the suppressed contents of the personality — those traits that need to be accepted and integrated in order to move closer to the wholeness of the true self. In short, the nodal chart is a profound and transformative tool that can quickly shine a light on problems that have confounded you for years.

Want to know what your nodal chart says? Schedule a reading today.

Next up: Carl Jung’s nodal chart

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You know [...]]]> You know that drawer, or closet, or back room where you throw all the crap you don’t want to throw away, but don’t want in your regular living space, but don’t really have another place for? When I was growing up, it was the junk drawer. In my grown-up house, it’s mysteriously called the studio.

You know what I’m talking about. You avoid that space at all costs, and when you find you need something from there, you throw up a lot of resistance before going in.

Maybe you try to find a substitute for the serving dish that’s in there that you’d like to use for the party tonight. Or maybe you hope against hope that you haven’t really put it in there after all – maybe it’s just wedged behind a tray in the much-cleaner kitchen cupboard. But it’s not, and you know it, and finally you just hold your nose and open the door to the mess.

In Jungian psychology, that room might be called the “shadow.” It’s the part of you that has all the stuff you really don’t want to acknowledge, much less look at, deal with, dust off or throw out once and for all. You walk around life all day long as if your thoughts and words and consciously-chosen actions are all that exist of your psyche.

But then every once in a while you burst out in anger, much to everyone’s surprise. Or you hole up, encased in depression, not really sure why. Or you manage only a shallow little chuckle when you’d really like to bellow out with a belly laugh with the rest of the crowd. Or you’re tongue-tied when someone asks about your mother.

These unintended, often under-the-radar reactions belie a deeper part of the psyche that’s hinted at in a traditional astrology reading – but revealed much more fully in the Huber nodal chart.

If you’ve had only your natal chart read,  you’re in for a surprise with a nodal chart reading. Though the shadow reveals itself through other means, such as dreams, complexes, addictions and obsessions, I don’t know of another way to look at the full shadow head-on, to get a sense of its shape and purpose, to understand how its structure fits into the structure of your psyche. Where your conscious mind balks, the shadow may go ahead full-boar. Where you think your choosing west, your shadow may choose east. It can really screw you up if you’re not aware of it. Seeing it laid out graphically can help you bring it to consciousness, manage it better and be more in control of the choices you make.

The natal chart and the nodal chart intersect at two critical times in each person’s life: once in the first 36 years of life, then again in the next 36 years. The Hubers liken these times to “going through the eye of the needle,” times of transformation that may be exceedingly difficult but – if survived – can lead to a more conscious, grounded and successful way of life. Knowing when those times are coming can help us build an ark so we can survive it. Knowing when they’ve occurred in the past can give us new perspective on what might have seemed a random string of bad luck, or incompetence, or frustration.

Instead of allowing the shadow to overcome us, we can look at difficult, frustrating and frightening times of life as times when the junk drawer really needs a good, careful cleaning. A nodal chart reading can help you know where, and how, to begin.

Photo: Guillermo Esteves

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just [...]]]> Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

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