Existential Astrology (Part Four)

So where does Existentialism fit in with astrology? Existentialism focuses on the process of becoming an authentic human being in a world that appears to be devoid of a benevolent God. It offers us a place to stand that doesn’t throw us into a place of philosophic despair, but instead tenderly holds our humanity and proselytizes courage instead of dogma. And in some ways, I see it as a precursor to astrological thinking.

If we see existentialism as an unsettling inquiry into the nature of life, and if we see it like many others have, as a sense of disillusionment and philosophic “dread,” then we might also see it as a beneficial stage in acquiring sound astrological thinking. In the past it has been seen as a dark night of the soul time, or a “morning sickness” or as Jean Paul Sartre said, nausea” in response to the inauthentic life of mainstream culture. I would venture to add that it feels like the place in our philosophic journey where we question our life and don’t try to insert easy solutions. We wait, we try to live authentically, and we work at becoming a person of integrity.

Existentialism can also be seen as a stage in the process of spiritual evolution if we see it as a reaction to the fantasy of ungrounded beliefs, hyped-up nationalism or pre-packaged religions. It can even perhaps be seen as a stage, like pregnancy, that is preparing for something greater. I see it as a philosophic stance between the naïve acceptance of unquestioned religion and the acceptance of the mystery of spiritual gnosis, or knowledge based on experience. This “existential” way of seeing and being seems to come before any openness to a “greater mystery” which could be described as the perennial philosophy that lies at the heart of every religion.

The willingness to be open to an experience of the “numinous” ---which could be understood as a sense of the holy or the presence of Spirit--- requires an attitude of both openness and critical discernment that existentialism often contains. (Although not all existentialists would agree---they’re an unruly bunch!) For those of us who do astrology, we struggle to discern what is real and useful and true, while also holding to the place of acceptance of the cycles, life rhythms, and the numinous idea of synchronicity. And we offer our clients an open “weltanschauung” or world view that allows them to place our ideas within their philosophy. So we can see astrology as not being a religion but an intuitive art of the Spirit where we can track the movements of Spirit in time.

I see astrology as being balanced between an attitude which is both Saturnian in its efforts at discernment and Neptunian. Existentialism is Saturnian in its no-nonsense approach to the harsh realities of life, and although the art of astrology is more Neptunian, it doesn’t make a case for a God of a certain creed or fantasy. Astrological thinking instead implies that in this Saturnian world we are poised and resonating in a balance between the heavens above and the earth below, and that here there are cycles, seasons, and predictable movements that allows space for Neptunian mystery.

Some people would say this is a ‘stretch’ but I like to think of the idea of existential astrology as the initial philosophic place we stand in, and from there one goes forward into one’s own Neptunian or astrological cosmology. I’ve chosen to embrace “evolutionary astrology” which posits the belief in reincarnation and the evolution and growth of the Soul through time---but this is not for everyone.

On my spiritual journey, existentialism played a crucial part in my transition from Catholicism to a belief in the Soul’s evolutionary journey. After leaving Catholicism I lived and waited in an existential space until life and astrology began to show me more. And what opened up for me was an awareness that the numinous spirit could never be bounded or understood completely by any one system or religion or even astrology. However, how delightful it was to find that there are prints left in the sand from the path of Spirit! That there are clues in the heavens and the seasons and the archetypes as to how to navigate a life. The markers are all around us, and astrology is one such pathfinder. The existentialists have a favorite mantra: “existence precedes essence” implying that we are always in the process of becoming who we truly are. I would add that living an astrologically aware life helps us to discern the essence of who we really are, thereby making the process of “becoming” a conscious one--and that is indeed a profound gift.
© Elizabeth Spring www.elizabethspring.com

Existential Astrology (Part 3)

I believe it sometimes takes a heroic effort to create meaning and love out of a life that feels devoid of both. We need a sense of purpose to hold us in hard times---as author and Auschwitz-survivor Victor Frankl wrote: “Suffering minus meaning equals despair”. He felt that if one has a sense of responsibility towards someone or some work, he will never feel the urge to throw away his life. He felt that if one knows the “why” one can bear the “how.”

The Existentialists wrote passionately about this kind of struggle to wrest meaning out of meaninglessness, and like a scrawny kid developing muscles, they believed we all have the potential to create meaning and live an “authentic life.”

The existentialists were writing to motivate us to consciously develop our sense of meaning and purpose, whereas the psychologist Carl Jung felt that the issues lay more in the realm of the unconscious. He developed a theory of consciousness in which he expressed his feeling that all neurotic behavior after mid-life was due to lack of a spiritual focus. He saw that most people turn to “spirits” rather than to Spirit, and told Bill W., the founder of AA—that only an experience of Spirit can counteract the spirit of alcohol---or as he said in Latin: “Spiritus contra Spiritum.” But today we take Spirit literally in religion and drink, and then find that aggression--- whether jumping off a bridge, abusing a child, or going to war--- is often a last resort, done half-consciously. Jung offers us other possibilities to consider.

Conscious change has a better chance of happening when we dare to look at things through the eyes of ‘Spirit’ and when we understand what Spirit uniquely means for each of us. Existentialists remind us that we create our essence with each responsible choice, and that there are innumerable ways to be authentically present. Jungians would point to the center of the circle-mandala (which shows up in all cultures as a religious symbol) and explain that there are as many ways to the center of the Self as there are people alive. Astrologers would spend hours talking about the relation between character and fate; arguing that a change in character alters one’s fate. But nobody has said that any of it’s easy. Even so, I invite you to look at things differently as you read through these musings, and ponder how these three ‘ingredients’ might change your life in subtle but profound ways.


Do you remember reading about those “French Café sitters” who would earnestly debate existentialism for hours over coffee? Jean Paul Sartre was the unacknowledged sage of the group. But his strident atheism and fictional dips into the theatre of the absurd were not endearing to most of his friends. Rather it was Albert Camus, with his humanist agnosticism and compassionate sense of the importance of “responsibility” that gave existentialism a heart.

The existentialists believed that we live in a world devoid of innate meaning, but that our free-will choices and decisions really matter. By attempting to live a life based on our values and not just the cultural norm, they believed we create an authentic life and create meaning for ourselves and others. “Existence precedes essence”, they would say, and they believed that the life choices we make need to come out of a deep connection with our personal values. For them, to live an in-authentic life, based on bourgeois unreflective values, would create such a false existence that our lives would begin to crumble as we saw our shallowness reflected in other people’s eyes….thus Sartre’s comment in his play, "No Exit" that “Hell is other people.”

Camus was not a stranger to these ideas, but embraced them and became politically and socially active in the French Resistance Movement in World War II and espoused a softer and more humane response to the radical ideas of these times. As a rebel with heart, this author of “The Stranger” was an outsider at times, but also perhaps a precursor to the beat generation in the US that evolved slightly after his time.

Both of these men, and the Existentialists that came before and after them, felt the uniqueness and isolation of the individual living in a world that so often feels hostile or indifferent. For them it didn’t matter if God did or did not exist because ‘He’ seemed indifferent to the plight of their time--- living during and between the World Wars--- when their Judeo-Christian backgrounds didn’t hold up well to the level of evil they were seeing, nor to the level of alienation they witnessed in the techno-industrial working world. They passionately caught on to the idea that what could possibly carry us out of this meaninglessness is our courageous use of freedom of choice--

Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus challenged the religious assumptions of their time and crossed a threshold of thinking after which they were mocked as being pessimistic, pedantic, and weird. They hadn’t invented these ideas, but popularized them in their novels and in their “café conversations” that were heard and documented around the world. Yet there were other thinkers who went before them who led the way. The basic tenets of existentialism were first presented by Soren Kierkegaard in 1843 in his book Either Or and later developed by Martin Buber in 1923 in his book I and Thou and then again in 1927 by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time.

Today, one could say that existentialism is the philosophy that underlies all our academic, scientific, and psychological assumptions. In polite society, there are no metaphysical assumptions allowed anymore. Existentialism could be called the current religion of the modern world. One could make a case that existentialism is the philosophy that most people really believe, no matter what their ‘religion’ is. This is because whether it’s the old American dream of “from rags to riches”, or Napoleon Hill’s power of positive thinking, or the New Age creation of our own reality, there is a sense that we have an almost terrible freedom, and that we are more powerful and responsible than we would like to believe. It’s uncomfortable to believe this, and most of us find economic or personal dramas to excuse us of the responsibility of this freedom. But as uncomfortable as it is, if we dig deeply we’ll find gold.

The early existentialists were like lonely heroes. They proselytized action and encounter with life as coming before any innate meaning. They urged us to heroically force life to mean something---to choose values and act from those values again and again against a culture that unwittingly tries to disempower and hypnotize us all into a collective sleep. The existentialists were champions of creative people and those who sought freedom in which to make their choices. And they knew how hard it was---as Camus said:

“If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that is given to us fully created. Rather it is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.”

In that long and painful bringing forth there’s a tendency to lose a sense of meaning from time to time, and just as you must stop the bleeding when an artery is cut, you must also stop the bleeding away of meaning. Otherwise, we lose energy and creativity as depression and inertia steels over us. And when we look to the creative giants of our day, we see that even productivity itself isn’t a guarantee against loss of meaning---Van Gogh was an example of that.

In the next post we’ll look at the link between existentialism and astrology, and particularly in navigating one’s life direction and soul purpose. ~elizabeth spring http://www.elizabethspring.com/ elizabethspring@aol.com

Existential Astrology (Part 2)

I was born in 1947 and will be turning sixty this year. I was born towards the beginning of this generation of “boomers” and grew up in the 60’s when astrology was beginning to have a renaissance, and in the ‘70’s when books such as Gail Sheehy’s: Passages was making the best seller’s list. Many of us in this generation visited Paris and sat in the cafes where the existentialists such as Sartre and Camus debated existentialism, and where women philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, and journalist, Anais Nin, sought to have a voice. We sat there, drinking our espressos for the first time, searching for our own words and true voices, and writing in our journals. We were often desperate in both our need for relationship and in our over-idealism about what relationships and life owed us. We wondered what would hold us spiritually in the years ahead, for many of us were just rational enough to have tossed off the religion of our fathers. Yet for so many baby boomers, we got off the flight from Paris and from existential freedom and got tossed right back into a less than heady stew here in the US. It was a lot less about philosophy and more about finding a job. But even back then, we thirsted for a guide for conscious living through the turbulent uncharted waters.

These posts are a beginning of a possible guide for living, and though some of it will be framed by the astrological language of mid-life transits, it will also be ‘informed’ as we like to say, by insights from the first guru of aging: Carl Jung, and by a few of the great existential writers and philosophers who have gone before us. You don’t need to believe in astrology, existentialism, or Jungian theory to ponder the theories presented here. But I offer them to you simply as mid-life experiments and I encourage you not to take them on face value but to test this new slant on these ideas in your own life. My hope is that you take what works for you and leave the rest.

We’ve all been exposed to the same kinds of current events and cultural trends, yet what I’d like to give you, the reader, is a way to see three of the large ideas of our time in simple terms, and to see how they are can be used in your life to nourish you. Perhaps I’m writing this---the book I’d like to read--- in hopes that it will make me think deeper and connect the dots of half-forgotten truths. The large dots—the concepts of existentialism, astrology, and Jungian psychology, can be broken down into some very essential and basic ideas that are useful and soul nourishing. And hopefully I can offer you, the reader, a new perspective as to how they are intimately connected and supportive of each other.

Because I am a professional astrologer, the astrological world-view will be a theme as it gives us a structural pattern for what to expect at the turning points on our mid-life journey. The existential world view provides another base with its motivating impulse for making meaning out of even our littlest actions, and the Jungian world view pulls it all together by drawing our attention to the numinous Self—what some would call God—and shows how what is unconscious must be made conscious, lest we act out our unacknowledged fears and compulsions.

Essentially, I’m challenging you to become a ‘meaning-maker’ by seeing how these particular ideas weave together into an invitation to create and live in a meaningful world. It’s likely that you have some “pre-judices” about these ideas---ie: that “woo-woo vibrations” from planets don’t effect us at all---you’re right! That those French philosophers were pedantic and a little arrogant---you’re right! And that Carl Jung was a rich man who slipped into womanizing and anti-Semitic thinking at times---you’re right! But there is a way to see each of these traditions differently, and to see how their gifts to us now far out-weigh misunderstandings and occasional human mis-behavior.

I believe we live in a time when one of the greatest dangers is not only global warming but global cooling; the idea that we are becoming numb and cool to the sweet vulnerability of human life. I fear that we are losing our ability to see the meaningfulness within and around us, and that this de-sensitization of ourselves and the demonizing of the “Other” is dangerous. Violent acts of entertainment and reactionary aggression threatens our ability to ‘grow our Souls’. The despair and polarization that we immerse ourselves in through entertainment and religious dogmatism is filtering down to our children, and causes despair. It flies in the face of the new paradigms we’ve been discussing. Let me tell you why I believe this to be true…

This spring, my friend Henry jumped off the city bridge. His suicide was a shock to our community as he was not only a well respected professional man, but a father of three, and someone who seemed to really enjoy his motorcycle, his guitar playing, and his friends. Henry was a good looking man and admired for his gentle and humorous ways. What some of us didn’t know was what lay below the surface of his life that erupted that particular day last spring when he took his life.

The minister at his Memorial service was wise enough to say that Henry didn’t take his life; his sickness took his life. True. Henry hid a lifetime of dealing with intense inner struggle and anger mixed with vulnerability---those qualities we label as anxiety and depression. Was his death simply a medical casualty based primarily on his biology? What other factors were happening?

If Henry had come to me as an astrologer, I would have said that he was in the particular life passage called the Second Saturn Return and would have talked to him about the challenges of this frequently ‘melancholy’ time. Yet because I see astrology as "the meaningful contemplation of change"--a phrase my friend and fellow astrologer Greg Bogart has used to describe astrology--well, I would have looked at Henry's birth chart, and looked for the highest expression of this Saturn Return in his life. And I would have looked at the evolutionary journey of his Soul in terms of not only his age, but what I call the “family karmic inheritance” and asked if he had considered his current anxiety in terms of his parental inheritance and expectations. I would have looked at the North and South Nodes on chart and attempted to describe the metaphorical parable of the gifts and challenges that he was bringing over from his past lives, and looked to see how this might have contributed to an “emotional hangover” from unresolved Soul-issues. Most of all, I hope that I would have stressed the temporary nature of this passage, and that no matter how hard it was for him to feel good right now, that there would be many more chances to make it right and feel better.

Henry’s situation was undoubtedly more complicated than I know, and I don’t think a few sessions with an astrologer/counselor would have made a huge difference. We don't know. I’m sure his friends tried to help him many times and in many ways. Yet still, if I had a chance for a time together with him, I would have encouraged him to read about the psychologist Carl Jung’s nervous breakdown and what Jung did to come out of it. We might have talked about how unconscious separation anxiety and rage can act out in destructive ways, and if there were any ways that following “doctor’s orders” sounded too close to following “father’s orders”? We might have talked about what Henry truly valued in his life and if there were ways he could make his ‘existence’ more meaningful by being more present both to himself and others. Did he feel responsible for anyone or anything? What would it take for him to be responsive to his deepest needs? These are the kinds of questions that would have woven together the astrological, the existential, and the Jungian language into a meaningful conversation. I never did have a chance to have this conversation with him.

However, no matter how well intentioned I might have been, the biological effect of accumulated stress and anxiety does not easily respond to ‘talk therapy’ of any kind unless it is consistent and accompanied by a change in life style and medication. Having experienced stress induced anxiety and depression myself, I have great empathy for Henry’s struggle, as well as the similar struggles of Vincent Van Gogh, William Styron, Hemingway, and many others. It doesn’t seem to matter if we are prolific and unseen in our creativity—such as Vincent Van Gogh, or prolific and acknowledged---like Hemingway. Perhaps what matters most is that we attempt, like the writer William Styron, to wrest meaning out of our experience, rather than grasping for quick and literal solutions to unconscious problems of meaning and psychological pain. For many of us, we simply use distraction, addiction and rage to make our way through hard times. We get divorced, start a fight, drive too fast, buy more ‘toys’ or worse. This writing is an exploration of other ways to approach all this. It is an attempt to entice people like Henry into “tasting” other ways of creating meaning, and reminding ourselves that we have innumerable chances to reach for meaning and joy in our lives. ~elizabeth spring www.elizabethspring.com

Existential Astrology

In the next few posts—maybe longer—I’m going to diverge a bit before moving deeper into the evolutionary Nodal story. What I’ll be writing about will circle back to the Nodes, but not before bringing in some other ideas.

Baby boomers---those born between 1946 and 1964---are attempting to do something that previous generations did not do the same way. We are trying to age well---that is, we’re attempting to do “conscious mid-life-ing.” It’s not just about staying healthy, looking good and staying connected. We’ve been told that it needs to be an ‘inside job’ as well, and yet we often feel at a disadvantage without the familiar grounding of traditional religion, unconflicted patriotism, and family rootedness that our elders had.

We still look to the trio of God, country and family to help us, but the assault of the evening news continually shocks us into a belief that we live in a meaningless world in which random acts of violence and catastrophe can happen daily.

At the same time, many of us are seeing something new and unusual happening. Some people call it “the New Paradigm” but it’s not just one theory or idea--- for there are many new paradigms, but what they all share is the willingness to look at things differently and to make connections between things that were previously seen as separate. In this paradigm that I’m inviting you to explore with me, it’s about saying yes to explore a mélange of ideas that strike at the heart of our creative and spiritual lives.

I’m challenging you to pause…. to look at the intuitive art of re-incarnational, or evolutionary astrology combined with the spiritual-symbolic psychology of Carl Jung, and the world view of some of the Existentialist philosophers. This Existential viewpoint, used by many creativity coaches today, seeks to inspire us to wrestle meaningfulness out of a world in which the presence or absence of a God doesn’t matter as much as the need to make authentic and creative choices.

The evolutionary time table of the Soul in evolutionary astrology can serve as a powerful guide as we move into aging through the deeper and deeper levels of individuation and authenticity as Elders. This paradigm stirs them all together in what looks like a heady stew with challenging chunks, but really is quite a tasty new recipe that I believe can nourish you in a surprising ways. It's not complicated or difficult to digest-- I have been circling around these ideas for a lifetime, and I love how the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke put it when he said:

“I live my life in growing orbits

Which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

But that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

And I have been circling for a thousand years,

And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm

Or a great song.”

In this case, the invitation is to circle around the musings of this new paradigm—of how three subtly interconnected world views—that of existentialism, Jungian psychology, and the astrological re-incarnational view of the Soul’s journey through time. It is more a poetic language of the Soul than a true synthesis or science. But perhaps that is what a language of the Soul must be---not a dogma but more a compelling metaphor---a suggestion! And if we become familiar with a language that speaks to our deepest needs and longings, I believe we will then have a guide to navigating the murky waters of meaninglessness that often accompany aging.

In astrology, we are star-gazing in the sense of being in awe of the patterns and scaffolding that frame a life and connects one to the larger cosmos. And there’s a hidden promise there that there’s something deep and mysterious that can hold us as we look into that ‘quantum’ area where physics meets metaphysics, where astronomy meets astrology, and into that luminous nebulae where the artists, philosophers, scientists and astrologers are subtly pointing us to...and it looks less like a black hole and more like a new space where the infinite cosmos meets the individual psyche. And it is at this point that something rather magical can happen....

...to be continued.....~elizabeth