Dancing

The Twelve Steps Of Soul

Exploring how astrology can impact
upon and inform therapeutic work

Keith Hackwood and Mark Jones

extracted from

PSYCHOSYNTHESIS
NEW PERSPECTIVES AND
CREATIVE RESEARCH

PS Avalon
ISBN 978-0-9562162-0-5

Glastonbury, U.K. 2009

 Dancing
The Twelve Steps Of Soul
Exploring how astrology can impact
upon and inform therapeutic work

Keith Hackwood and Mark Jones

Part 1: evolutionary astrology and personal psychosynthesis

Meaning & the Multidisciplinary Mandala

I n this article it is our intention to eavesdrop on the interesting

and engaging dialogue that is ongoing even now, between
the therapeutic modality of Psychosynthesis and the visionary
totality of Evolutionary Astrology (EA) as expressed in the books
‘Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul’ and ‘Pluto II: The
Soul’s Evolution Through Relationships’. In so doing we will
be paying our dues to the founders of each tradition, the little
known Roberto Assagioli and the largely unknown Jeffrey Wolf
Green, two men very much of their time whose scintillating ideas
and systems have yet to have their full impact upon our world,
and whose obvious differences draw a quality of harmonic
resonance, one from the other. It is this complementarity that we
wish to explore in the following article, rather than any specialist
technical or overly fastidious accounts of the operations of
astrology or therapy as modes of knowing the world.
Firstly, let us say something about astrology in general
and Jeff Green’s system of Evolutionary Astrology in particular.
The zodiac, upon which all western astrology depends, carries
twelve signs or constellations made up of archetypes grouped
in six pairs of opposites (such as Leo-Aquarius or Aries-Libra)
which hold the creative tension and spectrum of possibilities
engendered therein. In the fullest sense, the zodiac is therefore
a symbolic representation of the totality of consciousness in
potential. All possibilities and manifestations of consciousness
are representable (and, so, knowable) by means of the zodiacal
wheel. In much the same way as Assagioli’s Egg diagram is a
model of the operation of consciousness and the movements of
the psyche, so the zodiac describes similar movements within a
cosmic field, knowable via an individual birthchart, but always
placed in the trans-human context of apparently vast movements
of time (for example, no human being will experience the full
cycle of certain planets used within astrology, since the period
of their orbits around the sun is greater than that of a human
life; for example Pluto takes 244 years to complete one orbit
and hence is said to operate in generational, as well as purely
personal octaves. Contrast this with, say, Mars, which takes 2
years to orbit the sun, and therefore has a much more ‘personal’
cyclic influence). Also like the Egg diagram, the zodiac is a map,
and as we all know useful as any map certainly is, it is not the
territory. Astrology, and especially Evolutionary astrology then,
operates by means of wheels within wheels – creatively angelic,
like the descriptions of Ezekiel and like the observed motions of
the heavens above our benighted heads.
All civilizations and cultures have made use of astrology
and often developed its precision and effectiveness to levels
of refinement to rival anything our projective technological
worldview has manifested. It is in this tradition that we wish to
place Jeffrey Wolf Green and EA, and for this reason that we will
argue for EA as offering much to the psychotherapeutic endeavour.
So what makes EA special? Firstly, we would do well to note its
focus, which is primarily placed upon the distant planet Pluto.
Pluto, god of the underworld in Roman mythology (Hades in the
Greek pantheon), twinned with its moon Charon (the ferryman),
speak deeply of intensity. Pluto rules the eighth zodiacal sign
Scorpio, which is often characterised in newspaper or ‘cookbook’
astrology as being about sex, death and inheritance. For EA the
Pluto/Scorpio archetype is the soul. The soul is viewed through
the lens of Pluto, in all its incarnational history, with all its stored
potential and wounding, without taboo, without judgment, but
with absolute honesty, necessity and intensity. Simply put, this is
why EA is of interest, not only to astrologers or even transpersonal
therapists, but to clients – to us all. It provides a methodology
by means of which we can engage with the language of soul –
the logos of soul, psychology. Hence, for EA Pluto is the natural
psychologist, who brings penetration and depth to the experience
of being a soul. From a psychosynthesis point of view we might
call this experience whereby soul integrates into personality,
the I. Similarly, the dialogue between an individual soul and
the archetype of Pluto as Soul mirrors our understanding of the
I-Self axis, an inseparable double-mirroring of the timeless Self
within the lived body, the wave and the particle simultaneously
participating in an indivisible revelation, the generative mystery
of which we could call, with Keats, conscious soul making.
The question now arises, to what extent does EA impact
upon or inform therapeutic work?

The Sky (Right Now) At Night

Let us begin to address the question we have set by means of

a tour of the major thematic emphases to be found in the night
sky at the time of writing (Easter 2005). The most striking notes,
from an EA perspective, are sounded by Pluto (currently in
Sagittarius), Uranus in Pisces, Neptune in Aquarius and Saturn’s
movement from Cancer into Leo.
That Evolutionary Astrology provides a clear
methodology to identify potential prior life traumas is an
enormous gift. That so many have developed such therapeutic
precision and insight over the last century of the evolution of
modern psychotherapy is another tremendous gift. The proposal,
at least in part, of this analysis of the planetary positions in the
sky and their meaning for us as human beings is that there
are the beginnings of a cross fertilisation between these two
disciplines. The work of Robert Sardello in such texts as ‘Love
and the World’ and ‘The Soul of the World’ have shown what
kind of interchange can occur between thinkers as profound and
diverse as Jung and Steiner. In this essay, encouraged by some of
the initial meditations on the nature of the transpersonal planets
we propose that extending this dialogue toward Evolutionary
Astrology and allowing its intense reply could open up whole
new areas that as Synthesists we wish to nurture.
Just as in an individual’s chart Pluto is our bottom line
so within the collective picture does it contain an underlying
theme of the evolutionary dynamics of any given time within
the collective. Pluto in Sagittarius speaks powerfully about the
nature of truth, the experience of faith and the fundamental or
natural laws underpinning creation. Jeffrey Wolf Green’s work
in bringing EA into the world has emphasized the seminal
notion of natural laws working within the totality of creation (as
symbolised by the 12 archetypes within Astrology). A natural
law may be contrasted with a man-made law. It is a man-made
law for example in Britain that one must pay 40% tax if one earns
over a certain figure, it is a natural law, for example, intrinsic to
Psyche that we do not encourage children in our care to go and
play on a motorway! At points man-made law and natural law
co-incide, for instance in the realization that there is always a cost
or price to pay for taking another’s life; at points they depart,
in for example the notion that this cost is reversed as a prize in
examples of genocide throughout the world. Without wishing
to pin these fundamental natural laws to anything as clumsy as
a list Jeffrey Wolf Green traces the origin of these laws and our
dialogue about their use or our judgments about them through
an analysis of Pluto’s Nodes.
Very few astrologers much less the general reader are
aware that all planet’s have nodes, not just the famed example of
the Moon’s nodes. The Nodes themselves represent an abstract
point in space where the orbit of the planet intersects the ecliptic
on which the circle of wheel of the zodiac resides. The upward
or ascending motion of the planet creates the North Node the
descending motion the South Node. Just as in EA we are able to
trace the history of any given person through the south node of
the moon so we can trace the history of any planetary function
through its own nodes. In the case of Pluto the South Node is
in Capricorn, which leads us to meditation on the underlying
history of Pluto, the issue of the unconscious and depth security
within the Soul stem at this time, from within the Capricorn
archetype. Within this archetype, through the phenomena of
the precession of the equinoxes, the shift from astrological age
to age, most famously in the much heard cry in our own time of
the transition from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age, Green
notes the phenomena of sub-ages: that half-way through the
approximately 2,000 years of each age its sub-age, or polarized
archetype comes into influence. On this calculation the age of
Capricorn as a sub-age of Cancer would be seen to predominate
around 6,500 B.C. a time which Green links (via for example the
anthropological work of Riane Eisler in texts such as ‘The Chalice
and The Blade’ and ‘Sacred Pleasure’) to the rise of a patriarchal
society from the vestiges of the prior matriarchy.
With the South Node of Pluto in our time in Capricorn
we could posit on a larger collective level that we are all born
with deep security issues stemming from this transition and the
resulting imbalances that this transition has brought through
culture and religion. Is this born out through our experience
today? By this reckoning some of the fundamental struggle for
truth, for a living definition of religious experience or faith, that
comes through Pluto moving through Sagittarius would include
a massive struggle within patriarchal systems of political and
religious thought, the difference if you like between natural and
man-made laws. I think most of us would agree that this broad
backdrop contains many of the issues that dominate our time
with the rise of the Christian right and the neo-conservatives in
the U.S, with the rise of fundamentalism in that form and through
the Islamic world. On a more personal level it can be sensed
within the ongoing struggle for equality within the world, for at
the heart of the Sagittarius archetype is a nomadic experience, a
tribal origin in the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, itself a patriarchal
branding. As books such as Marlo Morgan’s ‘Mutant Message
Down Under’ clearly echo the work of many anthropologists
that the ‘primitive’ cultures held a wisdom within their
relationship to the environment and to each other that is simply
breathtaking in its complex harmony with the consciousness
of the earth. Indeed the phenomena of this consciousness, that
James Lovelock called ‘Gaia’, is another correspondence with the
Sagittarius archetype in EA. The movement of Pluto, harbinger
of death and transformation through Sagittarius denotes a clear
shift in our recognition of our involvement with Gaia as we
struggle to surpass the history of our involvement as simply
takers from the earth (Pluto South Node in Capricorn) through
the illusion of our supremacy through the Industrial revolution
and our cataclysmic attitude to the earth’s resources.
It is within this collective picture that we see our clients
who are appalled at such injustice, who vent their anger on
protests against war and the rape of the third world. Here we
place our own dialogue with what is true, against the memories
of so many distortions of that truth. Within Sagittarius at its most
realized spirituality is a natural phenomena of existing within
the earth’s love on a conscious level, through Capricorn and
the resulting distortion of patriarchy the earth is like woman,
a secondary force that must be held subservient to the priest/
man and his needs. The earth and woman must be covered or
else bowed before the phallic light. Indeed from this perspective
all consciousness emerges from this solar light energy, even as
evolutionary biologists begin to discover that creation needs
only heat in the depths of the ocean to create from her womb.
In the archetype of Neptune we find the collective
unconscious in EA, we find the divinity, the final surrender to the
totality within the final archetype. The South Node of Neptune
is in Aquarius, at a point where Neptune has just been transiting
the last few years, returning to its own origins. These are origins,
to follow Green’s meditation on the ages that stem from the last
Aquarian Age 25,000 years ago! A time that in his far meditation
(not dissimilar to the level on which Rudolf Steiner based the
parameters of his teaching) Green associates with the culmination
of the matriarchy, its high cultural phase. Green’s vision of the
matriarchy is held within certain native cultures still alive today,
even partly their glories lie in the imagination such as the native
American Indians or the indigenous peoples of the Amazon
basin etc – a life characterized by living within the boundaries
of what the earth can provide, characterized by giving, sharing
and inclusion. In such societies being ostracised from the tribe
represents the ultimate punishment and often-literal
death. Within such cultures equality was key – from the
shaman to the humble fruit picker all were respected, as all were
essential to the good of all. It is this loss within patriarchy of the
sense of connection on an essential level to the others working
with and for you that is so causal in the alienation so much a
part of the Aquarian archetype in today’s world. Whilst Green
is inviting no simple return to primitivism a la Rousseau he
certainly challenges through his meditations on the origins of
Planetary functions (through their Nodes) the complacency
of the modern consciousness in its tenuous grasp on the more
existential concerns.
Much of the alienation coming through the Aquarian
archetype today stems also from the relation of Aquarius and
Uranus to trauma. This is one of the key insights within Green’s
Evolutionary Astrology relevant to all today, and maybe especially
therapists, with Neptune in Aquarius at the same time as Uranus
is in Pisces. This is what Astrologer’s call a mutual reception –
because the ruler of Pisces (Neptune) is in Aquarius at the same
time as the ruler of Aquarius (Uranus) is in Pisces. At its highest
Neptune corresponds to healing through reconnection to spirit.
Aquarius/Uranus corresponds to far memory, a memory of the
earliest events of this life, memory of inter-uterine experiences
so carefully recorded through Stan Grof’s extensive research and
his identification of Basic Peri-natal Matrices, and also, through
EA, a memory of other lives, the prior lives of the Soul or mind-
stream as it manifests extensions of itself throughout the space-
time continuum. Within this far memory Evolutionary Astrology
delineates the impacts of history, both personal and collective, in
the development of each self as held within the natal chart and
influenced by the planetary conditions in the sky at each time.
With this mutual reception of the Piscean and Aquarian
archetypes we are pointed to the highest goal or potential of
healing and reconnection to spirit (Pisces/Neptune) which
takes place through the individuation journey or reintegrating
the self within all its experiences contained within far memory
(Aquarius/ Uranus). Green’s genius in Evolutionary Astrology
has been to identify a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
effecting people from prior lives. A Vietnam war veteran
himself whose encounter with a Vietnamese Buddhist monk
whilst serving with the U.S. Marines led him after the war to
8
several temples in the U.S. and a reconnection with his teacher
Paramahansa Yogananda, Green is no stranger to the issues of
trauma. Whilst serving within the war he was exposed to vicious
Agent Orange poisoning which leaves him even now too weak
to travel and teach as he used and led to one of his children being
born with a genetic disorder congruent with the kind of damage
he himself suffered. Yet in his analysis through his own profound
relationship to the astrological signatures Green has been able to
identify the causes of many issues and traumas in the present life
within prior life events. For example in this life he was born with
a strange birth mark on his chest and a residual anger that led
him into the Vietnam war in the first place (in a kind of ‘prison or
fight’ deal offered by the American authorities). He would later
understand through prior life recall a life as a native American
Indian rushing home from a successful hunt to see his family
butchered and find himself shot in the chest as vainly he tried to
save them.
Outside of his personal story, which we recount partly
here simply as context, Green has been able to explore the Plutonic
question ‘why?’ within astrology to take western astrology to
a depth that previous only eastern modes held – i.e. a direct
understanding of how prior life causes shape the current life and
destiny. If we take the meditations on the planetary placements
in the sky now in Easter 2005 and their history of origin through
the planetary nodes we can see a general healing and therapeutic
concern for all of us working in the healing professions whether
we work directly with it or not. This is a crucial point for by
working intensively with the issues in the present, by allowing
the archetypes of that work through dreams and visualisations
or just through the intensity of the encounter, we build the
temenos in which such healing can occur. Not that direct work
is unnecessary, as Psychosynthesis therapists we may open to,
say, hypnotherapy to explore these very avenues for the benefit
of the experiential integration of those we work with. Yet even
with the less direct approach we are concerned here to make the
case for how serious this enterprise of integration within the far
memory can be – so many of our clients today have issues and
are profoundly stuck upon themes and problems that originated
and were often compounded through trauma in previous lives.
The condition of the planets in the sky at this present point
make clear that acknowledgment and the initiation of healing
modalities to work with and through this realisation are part
of the shift required as we move from the Piscean to Aquarian
Age.
In analysing the South Node of Uranus we return to the
theme we began with as it resides in Sagittarius – i.e. the nature
of our individuation (Aquarius/Uranus) lies in our capacity
to experience our own truth, our inner wholeness. Just as Ken
Wilber in his multi-dimensional model of the human psyche
identifies the centauric stage as the integration of the body-mind
(only possible through retraction or awareness of the persona
and relative integration of the shadow) so through Sagittarius,
the centaur, the teacher of the hero’s, the being who integrates
animal (horse), man (upper body) and spirit (through the flight
of the arrow of truth) are our may aspects unified into the field of
our personal truth if we can find a way to be with that truth within
the world. As Sardello so simply and so radically pointed out it is
no good simply to enter therapy as a fantasy, a recollection with
our innerness, such innerness is inert or as so much candy floss
where compared to a lived experience within the field whereby
such innerness is simply openness to the sophianic stream of
the Soul of the World rushing back to meet us as innerness steps
outside. All our individuated power stems from our relationship
in truth with the natural laws of this living Cosmos, all trauma
originates in the breaking of this tryst between our individual
being as it exists with the being-of-all. All trauma is simply and
ultimately a lie, all lies whether from oneself to another or simply
within oneself will generate trauma…
In Evolutionary Astrology in distinction from most other
Western forms of astrology, Saturn/Capricorn is perceived as
the structure of consciousness, both from the level of how we
structure our own individual consciousness to the nature of
the space-time reality in which we inhabit the 3D world. In its
polarity, Cancer/Moon, we have the nature of the individual ego,
the formative experiences of the early home-life, the nature of
emotional imprinting and via the polarity, Saturn, the structure of
the emotional body, the nature of the ego type. As Saturn makes
the shift from Cancer to Leo we see symbolically a collective shift
in the structure of consciousness from one of individual security,
true security coming essentially from within, from an acceptance
of the self and the particular formative experiences that shaped it
into a need to engage with the endeavour of building or actualising
that self through its own creative engagement with the world. In
this way, for the next two and a half years, the structural principle
of consciousness as it manifests through the collective (and by
definition we can thereby only talk of generalised influences
in this context) invites us to an increased engagement with our
creativity and the feedback such creativity engenders between
ourselves, the community and world in which we live. In a way
this essay, a collaboration between two friends in their mutual
encouragement of each other’s creativity, is a statement within
that general shift. A desire to put one’s creativity on the line, to
risk a response from the world in whatever way it may choose,
to risk to think and create from multiple platforms in a way that
sustains the multiple ways in which the self has perceived its own
creative evolution within the world and the myriad of different
teachings that have aided such a project. Whilst this is always
an issue in life, just as there is always a Saturn and always a Leo
archetype, whilst Saturn lives inside Leo such issues are focused
and highlighted within the collective psyche.

So what?

So what, indeed. What opinions might we be able to form in

relation to this information gleaned from a quick tour of the
night sky at this time? How might it be helpful to us as busy,
professional therapeutic practitioners with heavy client-loads
and little enough time as it is? Well, in lieu of personal answers
to these relevant questions, the first evident point to make is that
the sky provides us with information out of which we can decode
archetypal context for any individual life (our own included)
on earth at this time. We can begin to place ourselves and our
clients within a specific matrix of energies being triggered and
shaped through cosmic motion and soulful intervention within
the collective. This may in turn give us an unique perspective
from which to view the issues being brought to us, the themes
developing in our own professional and private lives, and the
‘thing most needful’ (where such exists and can be known). It
is also a wonderfully elevated platform from which to study
cultural psychopathology, but more of that in Part 2.
In the interests of grounding this starry gnosis, gleaned
as it is from way above our heads, it is important to speak of the
body. Not just the physical, cellular body, the locus of activity
for soul interfacing with world (for bioPsychosynthesis), but
also the emotional body, and for what some healers have termed
the ‘knowing field’ generated between therapist and client in a
successful enough I-Thou state. We have all had the experience, be
it alone or with an Other, but what is the content we access at such
times? What is it we see-feel, that is bigger than our I-personality,
more vivid than our subpersonalities and yet doggedly elusive
and mysterious, even as it affects us in the moment? For EA the
answer is simple – we are encountering the stored residues of
our own prior lives as information in the here and now. The
soul (Pluto) remembers, and since soul is no other than body in
a state of natural law (only distorted patriarchal monotheisms
insist upon a splitting off of soul from body, and a subsequent
dualistic masochism of body hatred and transcendent yearning)
the body, in its cell-structures, also retains the information of all
life, morphogenetically resonant and available right now. For
the same reason (patriarchal distortion) we can also posit the
notion that many of our prior lives within the gestalt of ‘history’
have included deep woundings – deep trauma – through the
misshaping of the natural by the transcender hierarchy (for
example, a life lived as a native forcefully taken from a culture
of matriarchy and suddenly subject to the impositions of empire
manifested in religious terms (one god not many) as well as
social/economic terms (slavery), producing pain, trauma,
perhaps brutality and death, certainly confusion, despair, maybe
guilt, anger, fear – all of which the soul remembers and seeks
to work through, not only alone but also in relation to those
other soul’s whose paths intertwine with ours). This is where
we discover the ‘evolutionary’ part of Evolutionary Astrology,
in the notion of the soul evolving in relation to the personality
through time, not only within the span of a single life, but across
many, many lives. Jeff Green proposes that because of this we are
all born, to some degree, already traumatised – trailing not only
Wordsworthian ‘clouds of glory’ but also personal and collective
traumas of the deepest, most impenetrable kind.
At this point we should also note the ways in which EA
connects very well with certain other therapeutic modes, most
notably that of prior-life regression work as that carried out under
the ægis of post-Erickson hypnotherapy. Also worthy of note is
the work of the Dutch regression therapist Hans Ten Dam, whose
incredible book ‘Deep Healing’ ties in very precisely with the
operation of EA, as well as offering much to the Psychosynthesis
approach.
The emotional body, the physical body and the knowing-
field create a matrix through which the therapist can assist the
client in orientating him or herself in relation to their prior-life
trauma. The prior-life trauma in and of itself, is no different than
the issues which they present (or obfuscate) in their current life,
this is not about some highly wrought mysticism or baroque
psychism, but rather the concrete operation of healing through
time via the only time that exists, the Now. One tell-tale sign of
the proximity of prior-life material, which again we have, no
doubt all experienced, is that of the response-that-is-out-of-all-
proportion-to-the-apparent-stimulus. In other words the client
whose thoughts and feelings seem excessive in relation to the
trigger – the woman who knows her husband is cheating on
her no matter what the assurances of ‘reality’, or the man who
feels inadequate in his inner-life and cannot form relationships,
no matter how supportive his environment or how perfect (or
ordinary) his childhood. There are countless variants of course,
but the emotional tone and the frequency of repetition within
the clients’ awareness are clear significators of prior-life trauma.
As is current life trauma, since in evolutionary terms we often
get stuck where we always got stuck, or become enmeshed in
the archetypal patterns we have not yet ensouled. In EA these
issues are often referred to as ‘skipped steps’ and they show
up regularly in the birth charts of clients – pointing clearly at
‘the elephant in the living room’ from the soul’s point of view,
and requiring the conscious resolution of current and prior-life
traumas in relation to the specifics of the original wounding (be
it learned guilt, sadomasochism, an overpowering sense of lack,
a need to dominate and oppress or whatever other form it might
manifest within). The soul mediates time through the language
of psyche – in other words, when we are in the place of our I we
have access, through the Self, to all of our karmic experiences
in all apparent times – when we are fully ‘in the now’ we are,
mysteriously, in every ‘now’ we have experienced – not as Keith
Hackwood or Mark Jones, but as a soul. From the soul’s own
side (which ego and even I can never know) time is a sort of
play-dough, colourful, useful for making shapes, expressive –
but prone to dry out and become dead and useless, and utterly
foul to the taste!

Me, Myself & I-Thou

As we have seen, from the larger sweep of the transhistorical

perspective we can trace a human movement from prehistoric
hunter-gatherer nomad to agricultural matriarchy, in which
certain principles of natural law appear. From this point the story
becomes increasingly one of patriarchal dominance, reflected in
the increasing usage of metals, the technology of weaponry and
the organisation of priest-king and state structures. The necessary
balance sought by the individual soul occurs within a context
of global, generational and cosmic soul patterns and cycles, and
within the individual soul level another useful calibration can be
posited. For EA this calibration is grouped around nine divisions
in three broad stages – the so-called evolutionary stages. It is
important at this point to note that these stages are described
primarily in terms of state, not station – so in their application
to a client, or to ourselves, or for that matter, to the varying
dynamics of our subpersonality populations, it is the basic state
where our consciousness resides on a day to day level that we
are aligning with and naming. Hence, when we learn that there
are three major categorisations of soul, Consensus, Individuated
and Spiritual, and that each has three stages (first, second and
third) we take the lid of a host of self-judging and fantasising
dynamics (‘I must be first stage spiritual’, ‘I can’t possibly be in
the consensus’ or whatever), hence it is important that we use our
critical distance, our deepest and highest sense of where our soul
is, in its manifestation through our relationships and activities in
the world. All souls are equal in potential, the spiritually realised
state is always possible and available – and yet the workings
through of karma, the resolution of ‘skipped steps’, the healing
necessities of our unresolved trauma in relation to self, world
and other all affect our state and colour the nature of our ‘ground
of being’.
It is said, very broadly and imprecisely, but by way of
clarification, that at any given time 75% of souls manifesting on
Earth will be in the broadly consensus state – meaning that their
concerns will primarily be with the here and now of material
existence, of this life and this life alone, of power dynamics
that are most at home in dominating others or projecting needs
outwards. This state resembles the herds of the animal kingdoms,
with its higher ends representing leaders of the state, much as
modern politicians do. In the consensus there is nothing to be
gained from seriously questioning anything – reality stops at
the end of the nose. A good example of the consensus state is
the way in which people believe what they are meant to believe,
without question or personal enquiry – astrology is hokum, say
the astronomers – and so it is for most people.
A further 20% of souls will be in the individuating
state – which in turn is said to be the state in which the soul
spends the longest amount of time and undergoes the most
desperate afflictions, tests and sense of alienation. Here we find
everyone from the cultural revolutionary to the psychotherapist,
engaging with the forms of a social and global structure, which
will largely be experienced, as marginalizing and threatening to
the emergent sense of ‘I’. The key threshold of the individuation
state is to realise the necessity of the spiritual (not the religious,
since organised religion largely exists in the consensus state, as a
means of mass control more than a means towards enlightened
soul-realisation). The final 2% or so of souls incarnating at a given
time will be those in the three spiritual states, moving through
karma of teaching, of releasing guru projections, of developing
the purity of their teachings and agency in the world.
From a therapeutic point of view it is highly unlikely that
the bulk of people who are primarily identified with consensus
reality would ever present for counselling or therapy (or an
astrological consultation, for that matter), except where such
activities are culturally sanctioned (witness, say, the mainstream
‘acceptability’ of yoga in the last decade or so – and the way in
which it ceases to be about the royal road to conscious evolution
through dedicated yogic practice and becomes more a lifestyle
choice, a marketing opportunity, a diet/exercise fad for ex-Spice
Girls, and ultimately, a pale imitation of what ‘yoga’ truly means.
This is how the consensus operates, to retain control in a small
hierarchy and maintain the status quo at all costs). Similarly, it is
equally unlikely that anyone in the higher spiritual states would
ever present for therapy, both because of their relative rarity,
and due to the fact that their basic evolutionary state would, by
definition, be developed beyond the psychological. This is not
to say that any individual great teacher or guru does not still
have issues, emotionally or psychologically, regarding control or
value, or desire energy – however, such issues are encountered
through the vaster parts of the being that are already connected
with realised spiritual states (interestingly, it is within spiritual
organisations that this dynamic most surfaces as something
potentially workable by means of psychotherapy, an opportunity
for group Psychosynthesis as a counter to the anti-shadow,
pathology of the sublime that can arise in and around highly
spiritualised teachers and communities).
The vast majority of any practitioner’s clients will
emerge from those 18% or so of souls currently identified with
the individuated state, so it is these we shall concentrate on a
little deeper. Whilst all souls are equal in an absolute sense, some
are more equal than others from the relative perspective of any
given moment in time. Those in the first stage of the individuated
state will largely be characterised by the dynamics of the ‘inner
lie’. In other words, their outer lives may relate very strongly
to the consensus, they will generally have jobs (often good jobs)
and be outwardly attached to the culturally acceptable goals of
success, the accumulation of wealth, security and so on. However,
their secret lives will mirror the growing split between the outer
appearance and the inner reality – the swelling gnosis that what
was once enough no longer suffices. The right job, house, car,
partner, holiday, hairstyle, diet, friends or clothes increasingly fail
to paper over the cracks apparent in the psyche. It is as though
the soul knows that these objects are not where life’s focus needs
to be. Often there ensues a series of life events or crises to ‘force
the issue’ and bring the soul in question into confronting itself in
the light of these issues.
This leads us to the second stage of the individuated
state, perhaps the point of maximum isolation and alienation
from the soul’s perspective, and often the most confusing and
painful point on the journey of the personality self. Here it is
as though everything is broken. Consensus reality no longer
works for the individual, it seems little more than a hollow sham.
However, the crisis ensuing from leaving the herd has not yet
resolved itself – the state mirrors that of the caterpillar inside the
pupæ, melting its form and yet not yet unfolding the blueprint of
the form to come. Hence, it is a time of maximum vulnerability,
and a place wherein many souls have received much wounding,
as they work to shed prior-life conditionings, and yet, typically,
meet with no validation from the world around them or the
people they share their lives with. This is the archetypal leaders
of the protest movement, for example, acting out their alienation
and, often, inherently more evolved than the political leaders they
seek to overthrow. What matters most here is freedom, absolute
radical freedom. And yet what manifests is often a distortion, an
enactment of the woundedness rather than the healing potential
of the situation, and hence often re-traumatising occurs (for self
and others).
Therapeutically, building trust and the good-enough
therapeutic relationship with person’s whose primary
identification is with the second stage of individuated
consciousness is a substantial challenge. These are souls in
extremis, some will take a suicidal trajectory, some will act out in
self-harming, eating disorders, addictions of all kinds and a host
of other gnarly psychopathologies, railing against the existential
meaninglessness of human suffering and angry to the depths
of their being. However, it is precisely this client group that a
modality such as Psychosynthesis (which allows individual
freedoms, holds its own models lightly enough and with a fly-
by-wire subtlety and precision, and yet also offers the maps
through which a soul may encounter its broadest dimensions in
a safely non-dogmatic way) can serve most effectively. It serves
us as therapists to realise that, at least from an EA perspective,
this is what we are often engaged with in the counselling
room – the business of soulmaking, soul-reparation, prior and
present life healing and the envisioning of uncensored potential
pathways towards the stabilised ‘I’, and beyond. The deepest
need of the second stage individuated person is to find their
own freely chosen and inwardly validated spiritual path. Few
(if any) will use this language or frame their issues this way, and
yet the application of even basic EA techniques, as shown here,
demonstrates the truth of the assertion. We are, as someone said,
midwives of soul; and as someone else said, no community is
complete until it can hold its own births and deaths consciously
– so, as a community of transpersonal therapists, we are not
only in the midwife business, but if we are authentic, we also
often perform the functions of the executioner, the headsman,
removing false hopes of a return to regressive consensus states,
or flights of superego fancy. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the
client pays us – as in the past one paid the hangman or axeman,
to ensure a noble, swift and clean death. The stakes in our work
are often that high, whether we are always conscious of them or
not.
Let us conclude this section by talking of the third stage
of the individuated state. Natives of this state will be seeking
to understand their unique individuality as distinct from society
and to act accordingly in authentic and integrative ways, whilst
also attending to their ‘baggage’ – their relationships to others
(who may or may not share their evolutionary state), their need to
become congruent in all the major areas of their lives (issues such
as creating ‘right work’ or resolving longstanding difficulties with
parents for example). Again, a therapy such as Psychosynthesis
has a great deal to offer to people in this state, especially as they
move to explore the leading edge of their innate spirituality and
to generate forms for expressing this in authentic, worldly ways.
It is also a highly creative state, and often responds well to the
kind of visualisation work found in, for instance, Piero Ferucci’s
work.
Would You Believe?

Evolution, broadly speaking, happens in one of two major

ways – either through a cataclysmic event or crisis, or via a
continual growth. This is as true for the soul’s evolutionary
journey as it is for the origin of species from a materialist point
of view. The shaping and growth of the soul through time, as
described through the techne of EA, coupled to the mapping of
consciousness and the therapeutic applications made possible
through modes such as Psychosynthesis, together constitute
a threshold moment for psychology itself. The potential exists
for the founding of principled, open and synthetic means of
arriving at human understanding of the totality of consciousness
through the lived experience of an individual life in relation to
the cosmic context, the marriage of the vertical and horizontal
axes. This (and other) form(s) of spiritual technology equips
us to work multidimensionally with our own experiences, as
well as those of our clients. As the soul is divided for the sake
of consciousness, so it returns to a unified state in the name of
that same consciousness, now fully expressed and cyclically
ripe to dissolve. This is the story of separating desires moving
through the desire for reunification with oneness – the soul’s
story, the story whispered by Pluto, who sometimes speaks of
Love and Will. Let’s conclude this first part of our exploration of
EA/Psychosynthesis, with its emphasis on the personal journey,
with a quote from the guru and inner-teacher of Jeffrey Green,
Paramahansa Yogananda. “Mankind is engaged in an eternal
quest for that ‘something else’ he hopes will bring him happiness,
complete and unending. For those individual Souls who have
sought and found God, the search is over, He is that something
else.” Man’s Eternal Quest

Works Cited

Eisler, Riane; The Chalice & The Blade, Thorsons, London 1990
Eisler, Riane; Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth & the Politics of the Body,
New Paths to Power & Love, Element Books, Dorset, 1996
Green, Jeff; Pluto Volume 1: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul,
Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota, 1998
Green, Jeffrey Wolf; Pluto Volume II: The Soul’s Evolution Through
Relationships, Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota, 2000
Morgan, Marlo; Mutant Message Down Under, Harper Collins,
London, 1994
Sardello, Robert; Love & the World: A Guide to Conscious Soul
Practice, Lindisfarne Books, Massachusetts, 2001
Ten Dam, Hans; Deep Healing: A Practical Outline of Past-Life
Therapy, Tasso Publishing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1996

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