In the last post, I talked about developing a healthy relationship with the unconscious. This week I will discuss the importance of integrating that work into a better relationship with the “Universe” (Cosmos, Purusha, God, source etc. Whatever term you are comfortable with for working with your higher entity). It doesn’t really matter what form your belief takes, you still need to have a good relationship with it to live your best life. Working from a psychodynamic model (which is my preferred orientation), this relationship can begin to be explored by the usual method: exploring the relationship you had with your initial caregiver growing up. This primary attachment not only serves as the template for your future relationships, it also serves as the basis for how you conceptualize “god”, how you believe it influences your life, and the feelings generated from your attachment style (anxious/avoidant/secure). For example, believing the Universe is all loving or believing it is punitive and “out to get you” will influence the way you act and feel accordingly. The next way of exploring this relationship, is to discover new ways of seeing and experiencing it and looking for the unhealthy ways in which you might be acting in relationship to it.

In Richard Tarnas’s, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a new world view, he offers a lengthy but useful discussion of the modern conflict between our spiritual/psychological subjectivity (internal) and the nonspiritual materialism and reductionism of modern science (external). “Because of science’s sovereignty over the external aspect of the modern worldview, [our] noble spiritual journeys are pursued in a universe whose essential nature is recognized-whether consciously or subconsciously-to be supremely indifferent to those very quests. These many spiritual paths can and do provide profound meaning, solace and support, but they have not resolved the fundamental schism of the modern world view. They cannot heal the deep division latent in every modern psyche. The very nature of the objective universe turns away any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.” This prevents us from experiencing being part of a “whole” and leads to feelings of isolation. He goes on to suggest that we challenge the pervasive projected assumption that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is centered in the interior of the human mind. He describes the development of our knowledge of humans moving from external to internal exploration and suggests that it would follow logically, that what we see of the external Universe is not “it”, but that there is also an interior to the whole of what we are seeing. He asks us, “Might this not be the final, most global anthropocentric delusion of all? To presume that the universe utterly lacks what we human beings, the offspring and expression of that universe, conspicuously possess? To assume that the part somehow radically differs from and transcends the whole?”

As we learn in Ken Wilber’s, The Theory of Everything, the parts make up the whole and the whole transcends and includes ALL parts. So, if we have an interior consciousness that creates meaning and purpose, then of course the “whole” would also have it, as it must be included as well as transcended. His integral theory states, “’Holon’ means that every entity and concept is both an entity on its own, and a hierarchical part of a larger whole. For example, a cell in an organism is both a whole as a cell, and at the same time a part of another whole, the organism. […] Each holon can be seen from within (subjective, interior perspective) and from the outside (objective, exterior perspective), and from an individual or a collective perspective.” This would certainly lead to a logical next step that the universe does indeed have an interior dimension of consciousness of some sort that is interacting with us as we are interacting with it.

Carl Jung believed that we were embedded in a dance with the universe due to his time studying astrology and alchemy and wrote about it in his famous paper “Synchronicity” in which he describes and explains, “As the etymology shows, this term has something to do with time or, to be more accurate, with a kind of simultaneity. Instead of simultaneity we could also use the concept of a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” He describes events within the psyche corresponding with external events in the world. This is the realm of the unconscious described in my previous article as the feminine/negative/simultaneous/experiential perception. Modern quantum physics also agrees that what we are experiencing right now as matter is inseparable from our own mind.

The word coincidence is misunderstood in our culture, and somehow became associated with random chance and unrelated “accidents” due to the modern world view of an uninvolved exterior-only universe. But coincidence literally means, “correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence”. Two or more similar things happening together (coinciding). A psychic state in a person with a coinciding, simultaneous, objective, external event. The alchemists sought to transform the material within their own personal psyches and unconscious matter, so that they could then transform and influence the universe in return. Perhaps by effecting this possible “interior consciousness” of the Universe? In Paul Levy’s article, The Sacred Art of Alchemy he states that “the unconscious is revealing itself through its very projections onto the world, which is to say that the unconscious is synchronistically revealing itself through our experience of life itself. The unconscious is its own self-revelation. All we need to do is to recognize what is being revealed.” If people encountering each other evoke unconscious emotional responses from each other’s unconscious, then why not the encounter between the universal consciousness and our own. Who is to say that when I sit and watch the rain, that it is not feeling and responding to my presence in return.

This concept is a large part of why indigenous cultures lived more harmoniously with their environment. Nature has much to teach modern man in the ways of being. Many indigenous and native cultures used oral storytelling (in contrast to the written word which favors linear logic processing see The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain) and saw this interior consciousness of the universe behind every exterior and honored and respected it. They saw the omens in the environment and new how to relate them to what was happening within. This is how astrology and other divination arts work. Even though most of us may only experience one thing at a time with our dominant, reductionist, linear way of perceiving, the world is happening all at once and so whatever we are experiencing inside of our psyche can be seen reflected in the rest of our environment. We must learn to be sensitive to it. Our unconscious will be drawn to what matches our internal unconscious state, thus we choose the card “by chance” that is most meaningful to us right then. The planet’s positions at the time of your birth show the forces at play in the consciousness of the universe and those are reflected in the creation of your psyche at that specific moment in time. The transits then reflect what the motions and dynamics of the universe are at any given moment and how they react and respond to your dynamics.

Using astrology and omens won’t make your life perfect, it won’t make you blissfully happy, and it won’t get you everything you want (that’s the other type of processing: the ego). But it will teach you to interact with the possibilities available to you in the moment and allow you to understand more deeply the ebbs and flows of the suffering and joys you experience. It can let you know what developmental cycle you are currently in or what lesson you could be learning. It can help reduce the feeling that you are just adrift in a meaningless dead subjective world. It can open you up to amazing amounts of growth and a deeper appreciation of life and harmony.