Introduction to the Existential Soup...

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 allow a willing suspension of disbelief to look at the intuitive art of re-incarnational 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. And the evolutionary time table of the Soul in evolutionary astrology can serve as a comforting 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 promise you that! It's come together through sampling and tasting many paradigms and yet what has been created has no name or definiton. 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.

 I call this little book “musings” because there will be ramblings and personal stories and a little ‘off the beat’ synthesizing of these ideas. My hope is that you will be empowered in seeing how these three big ideas/theories are really quite simple, useful, and inter-related.  At some point I will also put on my astrologer’s hat and talk about what we don’t want to think about—that fear of end-times and the Mayan calendar that ends in 2012. But that’s for later.

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....

This is not a simple cognitive theory, nor a secret of positive thinking, but a confluence of new and old ideas that are best when put together in a particular manner. Like a new recipe, the ingredients that I’m choosing to put together are familiar, but the choice of ingredients are carefully chosen, and the taste of the recipe is fresh and unusual. I believe it could change your life, and I invite you to withhold your old tasty assumptions and to dare to try something new.

   Chapter One; an Overview of the Recipe---

So let me begin to muse a little: 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. 

This book is one such 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.

I imagine myself to be not very different from the reader of this book. 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 condered 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 book 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 offering him the idea that we have predictable times, and innumerable chances, to reach for it in each life.

 In the following chapters, I want to look what it takes to sustain meaning and the will to live---not only in a person who is biologically or karmically disposed to depression and anxiety. but for all of us.  I believe it sometimes takes a heroic effort to uncover the meaning and to create love in a life that feels devoid of both. Yet we need a sense of purpose to hold us in hard times. The Existentialists wrote passionately about this struggle to wrest meaning out of meaninglessness, and like a scrawny kid working on developing muscles, they believed we all have the potential to transform even a worse case scenario of an abused childhood into what they called an “authentic life”.

And we’ll also look at what the theorist and writer, Carl Jung, believed. Whereas the Existentialists were writing to motivate us to consciously develop our sense of meaning and purpose, 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. This was not about finding "God" as much as finding a way home to the God Within; a God of our own understanding. He saw that most people turn to “spirits” rather than to Spirit, and he told Bill W., the founder of AA—that only “Spiritus contra Spiritum” meaning that it takes Spirit to counteract the effects of spirits alone. But today we take Spirit literally in dogmatic religions and drink, and then find that we act out often unconsciously, as a last resort. So that what is buried in our psyche---the aggression and the shame, acts out in strange ways such as jumping off a bridge, abusing a child, or going to war. 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. Astrologers such as myself believe that our free will choices over-ride the tendencies of any potentially negative transit, despite the fact that we love to talk about the relation between character and fate, and arguing that a chnge in character alters one's 'fate'. And the  Jungians would point to the center of the mandala (which shows up in all cultures as a religious symbol) and illustrate how there are as many ways to the center of the Self as there are people alive.  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 unconscious but profound ways as you apply them to the stew.

    A Taste for Existentialism

What a big “ism” that word is! So many of us have heard it over the years, but like a half-heard conversation, we often don’t quite get it. We remember that those French Café sitters would debate it earnestly in the early 1900’s and that Jean Paul Sartre was the unacknowledged sage of the group. But his strident atheism and fictional dips into the theatre of the absurd was not endearing to most people. Rather it was Albert Camus, with his humanist agnosticism, and compassionate sense of the importance of responsibility to oneself and to others, that gave existentialism a heart.

The existentialists believed that we may indeed live in a world devoid of innate meaning, but that by our choices and our “authenticity” we 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 inauthentic 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 and in being responsible for the consequences of our actions.

It took courage to challenge the religious assumptions of their time and to cross a threshold of thinking in which they were mocked as being pessimistic, pedantic, and weird. There were no external authorities to back them up, nor guidelines, nor a sacred book. They were free thinkers, philosophers, and activists.

Today they feel to some of us 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 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, you 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.

Eric Maisel, a writer and creativity coach, has concrete suggestions for the “meaning crisis” that we all have to deal with occasionally. As a creative existentialist, this is what he says in his book The Van Gogh Blues :

“Part of the answer is the basic attitude you adopt, the basic heroism you show moment-in and moment-out. Part of the answer us understanding your self-talk and getting a grip on your own mind. Part of the answer is doing worthy creative work… work that pleases you, makes you proud, and inoculates you against meaning losses. Part of the answer is repairing yourself, rebuilding your brain, your body, and your personality in your own best image…..What will save you is your expert work at forcing life to mean…but meaning means nothing until you tell the universe where you stand.”

More to come...what do you think????????????????