The Cyclical History
January 2010
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Could a Car Accident Be an Opening to Soul?
In my last post in this series, I discussed the limitations of interpretation as a platform for a soulful use of astrology. To illustrate these limitations, I chose an example from my own life – a car accident that occurred during a transit of Mars conjunct my natal Mercury – taken from my book, The Seven Gates of Soul.
After quickly exhausting the capacity of traditional astrology to shed light on this incident, I reviewed the sensory and emotional dimensions of both Mercury and Mars as I experienced them in the car accident, and suggested that my vulnerability and anger were potentially an opening to soul, were I in fact, willing to go through the opening.
In this post, I want to demonstrate how it is possible to do that.
Sorting Through A Cyclical History for Resonant Memories
To continue with my adapted description of this process in The Seven Gates of Soul:
"From an astro-logical perspective, the opening to soul presented by my car accident seems related to my natal Mars square Mercury, which is currently being triggered by transit, so it makes sense to begin with this clue, and see what else I might be able to discover. But a simple astrological interpretation of Mars square Mercury won’t do very much for me, unless I use my conscious understanding of the symbolism to take me into the realm of the unconscious, where the deepest metaphorical meanings of the symbolism are waiting to be discovered."
To move more deeply into this unknown territory, I might begin with a conscious inventory of similar experiences. Rather than reconstruct an entire biography, I can assume that this experience is but one station of a cyclical process, and using my knowledge of astrology, track that process with greater precision. More specifically, I can track the cardinal points (conjunction, waxing square, opposition, and waning square) of the Mars-Mercury cycle, and in this way, flesh out an entire history of experience, which is symbolically related to this one thread I am trying to follow into soul space. I call this process taking a cyclical history.
Now that I have identified a feeling tone related to the thread I’m tracking – a sense of vulnerability and anger – and an appropriate metaphor – that of being broadsided, I also have emotional and intuitive touchstone to take with me into soul space, around which additional relevant experiences will resonate. As I search through my memories of the cyclical history of Mars transits to my natal Mercury, I will intuitively feel a sense of recognition of those experiences that evoke a sense of vulnerability and anger in the midst of some prior state of relative well-being, and fit the metaphor of being broadsided. I call these experiences of recognition, resonant memories.
Obviously, it helps in doing this, to have a journal. Since I’ve been keeping one for 25 years, I have plenty of material to draw from, although I have found that whenever I take an intention into soul space – in this case, the intention to track the pattern related to being broadsided – memory tends to gravitate automatically to the relevant experiences, especially when I use the dates of the related cyclical history as a point of reference.
If, for example, I know that from December 24-27, 1986, transiting Mars was square my natal Mercury, and I can remember the general time frame – say, in this case, as the Christmas holidays, then more specific memories related to the pattern being tracked will begin to emerge. For the sake of this illustration, I won’t list every memory this exercise evokes, nor even every memory with which I resonate in relation to this thread I am tracking. Nor will every period of the cyclical history I am using as a template for my memory produce something of significance. Nonetheless, with just a few examples, the reader should be able to see where this is going, and how this approach to astrological symbolism opens up a fascinating portal into the more unconscious dimensions of soul space.
The next post in this series is Astrology, Dreams and Animal Totems
To read more blog posts, go here.