Over these past couple years, I've come to accept much that I formerly felt was too far out to consider, but to be very honest, astrology is an area that is going to take a hell of a lot of convincing for me.
So in order to begin to understand why Dr. Grof feels the way he does about what many (including himself at one point) call a pseudoscience, I'm reading a book he highly recommends called Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas.
Since I'm only a few pages into this book, I'll refer to Publishers Weekly to provide an overview in its review.
According to Tarnas, acclaimed author of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a major shift, comparable to the one wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific one: an astrological turn that can only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years. Understanding planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires "a genuine dialogue" with the cosmos, by "opening ourselves more fully" to "the other," to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even "to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure." Filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler through Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan, Tarnas's book is not only sweeping in subject but dense and sometimes painfully slow going. It requires at once a strong background in the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life today and the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we consider as "legitimate knowledge" will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the more scientifically hardheaded. Perhaps my problem with astrology is that I've only known an astrological horoscope to be something that is read in the morning newspaper over cereal, or that astrology itself is promoted in displays of small booklets I can purchase at my grocery store checkout along with The National Enquirer and News of the World.I simply haven't been able to believe before now that anyone who calls himself or herself a thinking person can consider these newspaper space fillers and supermarket impulse buys to be serious reading.
So what is it that Dr. Grof discovered during his own and others' holotropic experiences that would have him incur the scorn of eminent scientists like Carl Sagan; a man who admitted to great admiration for Dr. Grof in other matters? This is what I hope to find out as I continue reading Cosmos and Psyche.
In the meantime, one person I know and greatly respect for her own very enlightened views is confident of astrology's claims and yesterday sent me a link to a website from which I can receive my own personal horoscope.
Since there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to receive information about oneself from whatever source it might come from, I clicked on the link and signed up for the site's free daily hororscope service.
I have to say here that I am automatically suspicious whenever the word free is used to promote something that many people have no problem paying dearly for. My position is that nothing in our culture is truly free--including Spiritual Enlightenment--which is another sore subject with me, but that is fodder for another posting.
Anyway, about five minutes after signing up for this service, I received my personal astrological profile. I was fairly excited about getting this despite my lifelong skepticism of the the wisdom of the stars.
Then I began to read it.
The first thing I saw was a list of people who shared the same star sign, Leo, with me; people like Sri Aurobindo, Carl Jung, Robert Redford and Madonna. At least, I thought, I was in pretty good company and that there was no Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Karl Rove or U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the list.
Next, I discovered that my strengths include being ambitious, courageous, creative, faithful, generous, honorable, humorous, open-minded, organized, powerful, self-aware and resolute.
Since these are all wonderful and positive traits, who wouldn't want to think of himself as possessing them, right?
Unfortunately, there are a few items on this list that just don't resonate with me and what I perceive to be my personality, but since the opposite of these strengths are nothing to brag about, I'll keep them between me and my evil twin at this point.
For all you who think you know me, you may now begin guessing which ones they might be.The next section of my personal profile was about my weaknesses, but did I really want to go there? Oh well...it was free.
So gathering my courage (which is one of my strengths, remember), I soon discovered that I am arrogant, authoritarian, egocentric, exaggerating, intolerant, jealous, narcissistic, proud, hypersensitive and vain.
Wow! That really hurt!
But wait! Since the opposite of these weaknesses are traits I'd like to feel that I possess, I don't mind pointing out what I disagree with from this unfortunate list of my supposed flaws.
First, I honestly don't think I'm arrogant. In fact, I tend much more toward chronic self-doubt than arrogance.
Next on the list is authoritarian.
Okay, I will admit that there have been times in my life when I was quite authoritarian. I'm thinking of when, as the oldest of seven children, I held sway over them both by physical proportion and by an unfortunate innate meanness. However, since I left my parents' home many decades ago, I've had little need or desire to dominate anyone. Evidently, in all my effort to control them, they went and tamed me! Those clever siblings!
Egocentricity, like arrogance (and we might as well throw in narcissism, pride and vanity here), can rightfully be claimed by those who possess a healthy self-confidence in most matters. And while I am loathe to admit it, this attribute is generally lacking in me. After all, who could possess self-confidence when one already entertains a basket load of neuroses?
Besides, from what I can tell, self-confidence can only lead to questionable circumstances like wealth, success, happiness and joy. I simply don't know what I would do with any of those things!
So far, then, my personal astrological profile was pretty much hit and miss. A batting average like this would probably bench a baseball player.
Further into my profile, I found out that I am the second of the fire signs of the zodiac, which means that I am "a strong-willed and courageous individual with great leadership qualities."
Damnit! I really like that, too!
But once again, their "knowledge" of me is pretty much dead wrong. Throughout my life, I've abhorred leadership roles because--again, as a person lacking a great deal of self-confidence--I just want people to like me. So, as a manager I was generally like, "Sure, go ahead. Enjoy yourself. Don't worry about doing your job well." So it should surprise no one that even thought I've had a number of these positions over the years, I made a terrible manager. Just ask all the business owners who inevitably fired me!
Feeling increasingly depressed about what I was discovering about myself because of this profile's erroneous analysis, I next read that "my aura radiates magnetism and dignity like the rays around the sun."
Once again, this is a wonderful and very attractive idea, but the only thing my magnetism attracts these days are swarms of mosquitoes. So if our native Culex species is looking for a new queen (would that be right?), then they've already made their choice, because those damn little critters are certainly crazy about me!
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Another possibility is that I simply don't know myself as well as the stars do.
This, then, is my problem. In regard to many New Age-y things (yes, I know that astrology is perhaps the oldest "science"), it is far too easy to con people into believing these things, and there are far too many charlatans and hucksters around who are only too happy to take advantage of this fact!
So to begin to separate fact from fancy, I am reading Cosmos and Psyche to understand the arguments made therein that Dr. Grof finds so valid. What I do hope to discover is that the newspaper and grocery store horoscopes, books on astrology and websites like the one I went to for my profile are just New Age versions of patent medicine.
If this is the case, then like some of the ingredients found in the dubious concoctions that were sold to unsuspecting dupes during patent medicine's heyday, there just might be kernels of truth within all the New Age flummoxery and bamboozlement that exploit our species' nsatiable need to know what makes us tick and how all the ticks of our lives will play out.
As I was finishing up this post, I stumbled upon a paper written a number of years ago by Dr. Grof about this very topic called--interestingly enough--Psyche and Cosmos.It is his review of the subject, he attributes much of his knowledge of it to the same Richard Tarnas stating that "the radical change in my attitude toward astrology has been the result of cooperation with psychologist and philosopher Richard Tarnas, my close friend and colleague of many years."
Therefore, before I end Part 1 of my exploration of astrology, I'll include this excerpt from Dr. Grof's paper:
Western science portrays the universe as an impersonal and largely inanimate mechanical system, a supermachine that created itself and is governed by mechanical natural laws. In this context, life, consciousness, and intelligence are seen as more or less accidental products of matter. By contrast, the basic assumption of astrology is that the cosmos is a creation of superior intelligence, is based on an inconceivably intricate deeper order, and reflects a higher purpose. The astrological perspective closely reflects the original meaning of the Greek word Kosmos that describes the world as an intelligibly ordered, patterned, and coherently interconnected system with humanity as an integral part of the whole. In this view, human life is not the result of random forces ruled by capricious chance, but follows an intelligible trajectory that is attuned to the movements of celestial bodies and can thus be at least partially intuited.
Another major obstacle for seriously considering astrology is the deterministic thinking in Western science. The universe is seen as a chain of causes and effects and the principle of causality is considered to be mandatory for all processes in the universe. One major disquieting exception to this rule, the origin of the universe and the question of the cause of all causes,” is seldom mentioned in scientific discussions. Causality is thus the only type of influence the critics of astrology can usually imagine and take into consideration. And the idea of a direct material effect of the planets on the psyche and the world is, naturally, implausible and absurd.
Finally, the emphasis that astrology puts on the moment of birth does not make any sense for academic psychology and psychiatry that do not see biological birth as a psychologically relevant event and do not recognize the perinatal level of the unconscious. This is based on the highly questionable assumption that the brain of the newborn cannot register the traumatic impact of birth, because the process of myelinization (formation of the fatty myelin sheaths covering the neurons) in his or her brain is not fully completed at the time of birth.
Several decades of systematic research of holotropic states have generated vast amounts of data that undermine these basic assumptions of materialistic science and bring supportive evidence for astrology. These observations reveal:
- the existence of transpersonal experiences that point to an ensouled cosmos permeated with consciousness and creative cosmic intelligence;
- the possibility of direct experience of spiritual realities, including archetypal figures, motifs, and realms, and empirical validation of the authenticity of these experiences;
- the existence of synchronicities that represent an important and viable alternative to the principle of causality;
- the critical psychodynamic importance of the birth experience for the psychological development and life of the individual;
- the extraordinary predictive potential of astrological transits for the nature, timing, and content of holotropic states of consciousness.
Finally, perhaps quantum physics and Carl Sagan together can help answer my questions about the validity of astrology.
If we examine Dr. Sagan's famous statement that "we are made of star stuff", we come to realize that every atom and every molecule and all the energy that exists in every one of us originated in the stars, including our own marvelous star, the sun.
If we then take into account the difficult, but proven, concept of quantum non-locality, we can begin to grasp that our atoms can still be connected in a quantum manner to the stars from which they were created. From there, it is not a great leap of imagination to understand that the stars can indeed influence our lives to an extent.
It's interesting to think that a scientist as brilliant as Carl Sagan couldn't make the connection to that theoretical possiblity while he was alive. This is certainly not an unscientific hypothesis. But then he was merely a cosmologist and not a quantum physicist. Specialization, unfortunately, can sometimes be intellectually limiting . And it is for this reason that I greatly admire Dr. Grof and his endless pursuit of truth and knowledge that can be found in whatever direction his research and experience take him.