Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG http://www.esonet.ORG 1

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
Astrology became widely misused because its cyclic foundation was not understood
or was conveniently ignored by those who were concerned only with predicting existential
events and favorable or unfavorable times to perform definite acts. The situation is
actually the reverse; for what the knowledge of cyclic structure may reveal is what a
particular phase of a cycle calls for in terms of types of events, rather than whether a brief,
passing moment (or more broadly a particular phase) is favorable for a particular action.
Astrology essentially deals with the structure of cycles — of wholes of time — not with
concrete events. Moreover, it deals with time (as I have defined this term), not with the
continuum of change itself, because the astrologer can be aware of this continuum only
from the point of view of a human being on the surface of the earth. Moreover, the
astrologer's awareness also is conditioned (in most instances) by the culture's particular
approach to change and by the approach inherent in his or her temperament and personal
character.
The condemnation of astrology by the councils and officialdom of the Christian world
logically followed that of any cyclic interpretation of human existence and spiritual
destiny. Instead, existence came to be considered a "historical" process starting with the
creation of the world and ending in a glorious consummation, which Teilhard de Chardin
envisioned as a supreme moment of total incandescence and spiritual oneness with the
glorious Christ. At the individual level, existence was thought to begin with birth — a
totally new beginning for a newly created soul — and to end in a death leading to a
timeless ("eternal") blessedness, or perhaps to total failure in hell. History was conceived,
ideally, as a one-directional process of spiritualization. But most historians of today are
not concerned with the entire one-way process, leading up or down; they are interested
only in gathering a mass of information about existential events which (they assume)
reveal the mood of a particular generation, at most of a century, in a particular culture and
religion (as James Joyce in Ulysses was concerned only with one day in the life of an
ordinary man). Arnold Toynbee's attempt to discover a cyclic pattern in the structural
development of "civilization" is now considered fanciful and unrealistic.
Nevertheless, the fundamental question is always, what is reality? For the materialist,
it is a basically random sequence of events having no meaning in themselves or in relation
to one another and leading to an unknown, perhaps unknowable conclusion some billions
of years hence. For the mystical philosopher, reality is "Now" — all appearances absorbed
into an ineffable, changeless state of unity. For every human being facing the unceasing
continuum of change in the spirit of the philosophy of operative Wholeness presented in
this book, reality is the Movement of Wholeness; it is the cycle of being, the foundation of
the complex interplay of elements and ceaseless transformations of which what we call
bodily existence is but a phase.
The hours of daytime also are but phases of the total situation caused by the rotation
of the earth; and spring and winter, phases of the yearly cycle of seasons. Each noon
presents to the consciousness at least slightly different causations, contacts, or feelings; the
rose of this spring is not the same rose as that of a year ago. Yet the cyclic appearance of
green leaves and rosebuds in the well-kept garden, and the fall of fragrant petals and
brown leaves, can be understood on the basis of an annual process of growth and decay —
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