History reveals a tremendous current of resistance to the past, a current which is in turn swiftly reclaimed by memory – the new is quickly overlaid with custom which destroys its revolutionary impact. The twentieth century has fortunately given rise to remarkable breakthroughs in psychological knowledge on the one hand and in spiritual knowledge on the other. We aim to build bridges between what are currently relatively closed domains in order to formulate a liberating synthesis. Contemporary authorities offer us new clues to authenticity, but they are as yet not widely recognized and people still willingly prefer to loose themselves by following principles steeped in several centuries of legend which claim to offer us the key today based on a lost heritage. Admittedly, if we abolish the sequence of time we can see that things have not changed and every era, for at least three thousand years, has sought discoveries beyond the disappointing world of the past and its structures. Revolutionary new ideas have even undergone huge expansion in the West in the twentieth century, although the East has already experienced similar things for a very long time, and in the absence of original texts with their difficult or debatable translations we follow dangerous or all too conventional paths. I feel strongly that it is important to separate psychotherapy from the spiritual quest, while emphasizing their similarities, to show that therapy can become an appropriate springboard for a deeper quest and that progressive asceticism - which involves consecration to the mystery of being and divine principles - can benefit from the realizations which therapies produce. There is definitely something to be healed when one ventures towards the ultimate meaning of things aided by the testimony of the ancients. The Greeks told us to heal the soul. I would say heal the mind, if you believe that the mind, our common instrument of higher perception, is not working well – that it is mired in conventional principles, lasting memories and compulsive movements.

Transforming the mind lies at the heart of every religion, gives rise to a need to purge a life devoid of any deep meaning and leads us to question our needs. Every person searching for healing or elevation becomes more and more preoccupied by the possible links connecting the past, present and future as the need for a supreme path emerges. The future is by definition shapeless and built on fantasy. Its virgin substance fascinates us; we project our wishes into it and would like to see it fill us with satisfaction. The past, however, has fixed forms which can pursue us even though they have had their day. The present, which is so dear to us, is as enduring as it is elusive, like water which freezes irreversibly into the ice of memory. In order to move towards the Divine, or towards an authentic life if one prefers initially, one must simply give up trying to go anywhere oneself. Firstly, this avoids crushing the present between memory and expectations. Secondly, we may find along the way that other destinations are worth a detour, since the path is an end in itself. The revelation that only the present exists is not an intellectual one. It is a limitless, extremely gentle feeling which whispers that this eternal moment is all there ever was in the little forgotten child and that it is all there will be in the old man who is drawing closer. The spiritual quest and the process of psychotherapeutic healing share this same paradigm – uncertainty. Opening is experienced as being better than the status quo and highly dangerous and unpredictable territory replaces the best of maps.
Even if we do not know how and when things will change, or if we only assume that change is probable, this has to be better than a dead-end present subject to unbearable repetitive loops which undermine our existence. We realize that the eruption of the unknown is necessary to dissolve outdated structures and fragment blocks of belief and trust without any ulterior motive welcomes the absolute of the day with all its information in order to draw its own enthusiasm from it.

A quest which points in one direction hides other possibilities. One ascribes a domain to the truth and the trick is complete. One then channels curiosity, which is stupid, but only primitive human nature, organizes values, teachers and doctrines into a hierarchy based on insufficient but polite criteria and many more uncouth underground reserves. Our race prefers a well-signposted dead end to a path without any landmarks on which we would have to find clues for ourselves. While each avatar is merely trying to re-establish the one universal religion, humans let themselves get snared by form and context and take advantage of this to feed their old demons, wage war and wreak destruction. Even the best of them turns a blind eye to what is happening at any given moment under the pretext of searching for the truth, if the landscape does not fit neatly into their principles. We have treated ourselves to luxury blinkers, a philosophy, a religion or even a so-called ‘path'which it is difficult to follow without being locked in. On the other hand, with blinkers one is guaranteed not to get lost; one just follows the supposed best path and this may be why officially approved truth, which is a huge con, has so many followers. One will go round in endless circles on a gently curving straight line and one can spend a lifetime going round this circle which always looks like a straight line on account of its size, and find oneself back at the starting point – ignorance. What a fatal strategic error it is to imagine that spiritual fulfilment is subject to a direction.

The impatient among you might ask what they are supposed to do. It is so simple that we cannot see it. If there were something to do it would simply be a case of identifying it, implementing it and waiting for the results. It does not work that way, except for in little things, of course. An aspirin cures the occasional migraine, but does not treat the hidden depression which triggers an inexplicable headache at the slightest setback. As for the crux of the problem - obtaining release, achieving permanent peace of mind, receiving liberation - according to conventional utterances there is nothing to be done in the sense of developing one's decision-making capability in a context, or jumping through all sorts of hoops. It is not a case of changing one's behaviour, replacing one's partner, trying out a new religion or reading one or two books a month bought intuitively in an esoteric bookshop. What we are revealing here is a system which offers a panoramic and vertical vision. The quest to evolve is purely interior, it is a new process which the self carries out on itself, devoted to self-examination which is open and directed towards hitherto unexplored potential with observation referring all our perceptions to our inner requirements. This is where the work is carried out. Then the non-self, i.e. all that is external to us supplies new messages, reveals unsuspected truths, gives rise to unpredictable movements and opens absolutely in the integrity of each moment. Only subsequently can physical, emotional and mental techniques be used to connect the self to the non-self more accurately. One cannot practise anything at all unless the necessary groundwork has been done. The only guarantee of progression is radical inner commitment.

The second analogy between the quest and therapy is technical: both processes invert the movement of the mind. The new process takes control of gasping inner objects. In spiritual asceticism one no longer thinks of God but of what He represents for us, just as therapy asks us to forget the other person (which we think that we do in order to love them or flee them) and truly to draw closer to what he represents for us. This is a Herculean task since the affects locate the other person on the inside but we continue to see them as external. For mystics, the Lord can also only be perceived inside when the self abandons trying to apprehend Him on the outside. We continuously swallow up the non-self to transform it into the self with the mind, emotions and feelings and it seems deceptively like food. We can experience insatiable hunger pangs for the quest for happiness or the Divine, which are difficult to satisfy, just as we can become saturated and unable to bear any form of contact with others or the non-self in certain circumstances. It is not therefore necessary to lose oneself in metaphysical reflections in order to approach a path of some sort. The only question is: what are the links which unite the self with the non-self? The term ‘mind'refers not only to the mental faculty, but to an invisible, holistic organ which connects the whole of our being with the non-self. The mind buries itself in matter and becomes the subconscious and it is its hidden part which plays tricks on us, gives us psychosomatic reactions to emotional harm and dwells in regions that we do not yet know, like the higher chakras, for example. It works alone without our consent below the level of our consciousness using shortcuts which connect it to the emotional and then the physical body and above that through secret processes, some of which take place during sleep such as those which transform our aura, for example, or give us higher intuitions when the brain is accustomed to turning its intellect inward and seeking self-knowledge. Given all the layers which make up the self, ranging from the darkest subconscious to the purest solar wishes, and the diversity of the non-self we must be quite lucid about this to-and-fro movement between the self and the non-self and use it as a driving principle for asceticism as well as for progression in therapy. The mind is in a process of constant high-speed renewal and this allows it to have psychosomatic reactions or to liberate itself at any time very quickly. In my case, it was contact with the supramental which definitively demonstrated to me just what this mind is, whose powers are far wider than humanity imagines. Its rhythm is beyond us. It runs right through us, coordinates the feelings which abandon us to the non-self with a global feeling of selfhood.

In this book I am defending the following hypothesis: the mind within us has an independence which is partly beyond our control and this is what governs our existence at certain moments when the self leaves the framework imposed on it by nature. In other words, if we make mistakes the mind automatically begins to malfunction unbeknownst to us, resulting in a spectrum of personality disorders ranging from the psychiatric to the pathological. Between 'madness'and physical illness lie a considerable number of mental disorders which can be tolerated or acknowledged to varying degrees and which keep psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in business. These problems of unknown origin cause people compulsively to seek out inexperienced fortune-tellers, psychics and astrologists. If one believes that the mind descends into the body then this explains the cause of psychosomatic illnesses, and if we believe that it moves upwards to subtle, invisible planes, this explains the insights, illuminations and miracles of the saints. In order to provide a framework for this study we would focus on the following predicate which runs right through our thinking: the mind lets itself to be appropriated by the self up to a certain point. Beyond that point it allows itself to go solo and can destroy the organization of the self and the sense of identity using every means at its disposal: organ and brain disorders, cell dysfunction, imbalances in hormonal fluctuations, depression etc. In our transcendent optic the division between the self and the mind which leads to disorders is intended to re-establish a higher unity, as the atheist psychoanalyst, the holistic psychotherapist and the spiritual master would all agree. The split between the self and the mind causes suffering and since the subject has been pushed to his limits there is an opportunity for him to ask himself without evasion the question taken so seriously by the ancient Greeks and belittled by twentieth century materialists: who am I and where am I going? Some educated people find themselves unable to understand why life suddenly no longer seems to obey them, because their selves are so structured and accustomed to having the upper hand. They had always believed that the mind was at their service, that it was their property to use as they wished. They could not be more wrong!Because they cultivate their feeling of failure it descends into the subconscious, producing a psychosomatic reaction. Mental information has passed into a different jurisdiction, where things happen differently and thought is rendered powerless. A huge force works, gives signals and warnings and triggers disorders and then pathological conditions On the other hand, those who know that there is no success or failure, or who do their best, without stress to coincide with the Whole have fewer psychosomatic reactions. They are not attached to the fruits of their labours as is stated in the Hindu bible, the Gita and while they feel less guilty about failure they are also less vain when they are crowned with success. Their subconscious is less weighed down with dross because they dramatize less. The secret of good health, as the Taoists imply, is perhaps the equivalent of living with a minimum amount of ego. Because the Earth is in an era of transition, the individual in a state of crisis can dissolve his ego at the same time as restoring his health if necessary in order to heal. The turning point in the process of progression is borne of suffering as well as bliss.

Mental disorders force us to retrace our steps, find another place and transform our personality. However the ordinary mind is greedy for the object and has no reason to tire of it without stern warnings. If we do not learn to invert the movement of the mind with the help of a spiritual master, sage, ancient teacher, shaman or therapist, the intellect which animates the mind is underused and it still seizes objects with which it identifies and does not know how to do anything else. We are drawn to what is gratifying. The obsessive little self which bears the legacy of the whole evolutionary chain defends its territory above all else, cultivates its desires and fails to address the source of its fear head-on. It waits to see what it wants to see in what happens. Homo sapiens sapiens wants to choose his reality like a cake in a cake shop. It must be that one and no other will do - this reality and definitely not that one. And what if the universe was just one big a cake shop?
If we let go of objects and abandon greed as Buddha stipulated, then the pure intellect of the moment is limitless.

To be ignorant is to be separated. Separated from what? There is no shortage of theories – separated from one's true identity, from the Tao, the Self, feeling outside the true unity of the indivisible universe of which we are a part, or hemmed in because too many things are beyond us for our perception to be able to reassure us of what we really are, separated from one's dormant inner sun which shines in harmony with the mystic sun, separated from the Truth with a capital T which establishes the foundations of the world in perfect correspondence, separated from one's potential for light. In short - separated. If we knew what the object was from which we are separated, we could run towards it, catch it, seize it and the job would be done in a few months or in two or three years, or as long as it takes to define the missing object and to obtain it. However it is impossible to buy knowledge and non-separation on credit. Two hours of obligatory meditation, after which one returns to normal life, or twelve years of total chastity, the period of abstinence reputed to bring liberation by some age-old doctrines from the Indian subcontinent. Veneration of a master to whom one must bow and scrape - and who knows what else - quickly becomes mechanical.
The root of the problem is that knowledge is not an object — but a state.

Autobiographical aside

As you will agree, it is absurd to pursue an object which does not exist. I pursued the Truth myself like a Canadian trapper camping in the snow to catch a few animals for their fur in order to survive, and it was no walk in the park. I was eighteen years old and I had a nagging feeling that something was missing and I was still on its trail. I persevered in collecting the slightest shred of evidence for Transcendence and the means by which to achieve it. I was like a sleepless police officer on the trail of a serial killer who has already claimed ten victims in three weeks in his very own neighbourhood. In December 1967, I was transported to a different, extraordinary state of consciousness in which everything made sense: it was dynamic, flooded with light and full of answers. It was quite unlike what I had known before. Then after three days it began to fade and four days later I was back to my normal state. By the end of the week there was nothing left. From then on I devoted my whole life to recapturing this state. The following year I was a border at a school preparing students for entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which trains teachers for higher education. I could not care less about most of the classes, which I could not follow because they seemed so hollow to me. I spent hours at second-hand booksellers near the school. I laid siege to mystery, like a tearful lover unable to eat or sleep who stations himself under the window of the beloved who haunts him day and night. I was like a mother searching for her kidnapped baby who is prepared to take any risk. Shortly after, I even pushed my brain to its boundaries with illicit but sacred substances, having first taken the precaution of reading Henri Michaux, aware as I was that things had not turned out well in the end for Arthur Rimbaud or Artaud either. In short, I looked in every direction, mixing the paranormal the occult, esotericism and traditional ideas in fascinating aesthetic confusion for a while. Bergier's famous work Le matin des magiciens [NB: published in UK as The Dawn of Magic, in the US as The Morning of the Magicians] had just been published in a prestigious series and it showed me the way forward in 1966. I found everything fascinating, and everything was a mystery, nothing was fixed anymore. If I did not go astray, it was because I was already lost. I could either stay lost or find a way out. Like a prisoner with a life sentence who escapes, I had nothing left to lose. This is what saved me. I could not get it wrong again as I was living day and night in total error – i.e. ignorance. When you really know that you are in Darkness, you follow the slightest glimmer of light. I was fortunate to be able to sink so low, to a place where even the bluest sky is hidden, because something was lacking – union, unity and a stage of non-separation. At last, on January 4th 1974, the veil was torn. It was high time. I am not revealing my path as an example or model. Each person has their own inimitable version and now that I am over fifty I am beginning to accept that my early spiritual awakening was an exceptional event and that it is my responsibility to share it with the less experienced. My path serves to reveal paradoxes. Even a sincere individual burning with the fire of truth goes about things in the wrong way. He pursues what does not exist, tries to catch the wind, to name what has no name and to capture something that has no shape. The mind encourages us to create representations, choose values and to dream of an absolute before embracing it. Let's play the game.

Knowledge is not an object and yet we expect to catch sight of it somewhere and cast doubt on ourselves when it eludes us. Masters who persevere in trying to describe it say incompatible things about it – i.e. incompatible when seen from below of course. "It is the absolute and you are that absolute" says the liberated Bombay tobacconist. "It is a huge void containing phenomena" chorus the professional Buddhists. "When you get there, there is nothing more to attain", say the yogis on the banks of the Ganges as they idly read the Upanishads. It is silence, the breath of God, his spirit, says Christian mysticism. "It does not exist" say those who have persevered throughout their lives to find this thing only to lose it in inexpressible peace. "It is what defies all representation" announces Lao Tzu, for whom "the principle characterized is not the immutable Tao". What is knowledge? "It is where no trace of duality exists any longer" says a Chan grand master. "It is what allows us to stop reincarnating" say hopefully those suffering, pious seekers who want to leave the Earth with their heads held high, their eyes firmly fixed on the emergency exit.
We cannot gain possession of knowledge, it is not an object and it has no shape. The enlightened person sees it differently, having passed through the mirror... and is struggling to show the way. Some, but not all, write poems. Dante, Kabir, Rumi, Gibran, Omar Khayyam and a few others have written masterpieces, whether they are from the North, South, East or West. Some show the path and others do not. Some practise chastity, others do not. Some teach ancient Chinese or Hindu techniques, others lecture from their own experience and others simply hide or remain silent. Some dispense totally with psychology, I flirt with it. Knowledge!It is difficult to discuss. It is a state of consciousness which allows the self to be all things at once, which implies that it must also by the same token be nothing. One cannot become Everything if one does not first become nothing. For Nothing and Everything are exactly the same thing. No shape, no objects, no distinctions. No good or evil, suffering or pleasure, just an abyss which renders all things equal, a burning, incommunicable absence. However total absence leads to total bliss. This is obvious. Sri Ramakrishna carried the mark on his back of the lash of the whip given to the ox beside him. Ramana Maharshi was warned that an assassin could no longer commit any misdeeds or that he may even be dead. "Yes, but he was clean", he remarked and he could not help himself from empathising with the man since he was in a sense him. If we fail to understand that that knowledge is another way of perceiving Reality, no transformation worthy of that name can take place. We might as well stay on the mental plane and apply the term liberation to any aesthetic change or poetic flight of fancy. A personal desire for liberation which used to be the hallmark of the path which was termed spiritual is now obsolete. It is the Earth which we must liberate and It is seeking sincere instruments. There have always been seekers of higher egos who believe that they can grasp consciousness by persevering in feats, practices and commentaries, but who are incapable of relinquishing their ambition to seize hold of Reality. Lao Tzu denounced them as early as chapter 55: "walk on tiptoe in order to seem taller, but you will not go far". They become false masters. They corrupt the interpretation of the Scriptures. The only way to avoid them totally is to become one's own master, to practise alchemy.
It is easier to follow oneself since there is no path, by combining psychotherapy and asceticism.

Throughout this study we shall demonstrate that we personify forces which manipulate us. However they are not really us, and they are not you - liberation is possible. Non-conventional psychology, astrology updated for the twentieth century, psychoanalysis, the traditional vision of René Guenon, the principles of Lao Tzu and, crowning them all, allusions to a new progressive path proclaimed by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Satprem – these are the tools I use to dissect nature and restore it to the Mind. This may seem to be an odd assortment, but is indicative of my aspiration to liberate all my conditioning. The aim of spiritual alchemy is to find a pure identity, experience the life of the self and to collaborate in a transparent deep-cleaning exercise on our mechanisms of perception – this even includes answering those questions left unanswered by our ancestors, those questions without answers which create disruption in certain organs. Everything must be transformed and that is the price of our survival or that of our grandchildren. Never before in historic memory have progressive and regressive forces been engaged in such warring manifestations. We are entering an era of double or quit, winner takes all, all or nothing, divine instrument or persevering monkey.

Archaic powers can sometimes contrive to use their wiles to strike down our faith, wound our sincerity and stifle our aspiration. However, I believe that one can always climb back by a mysterious process after having touched rock bottom, and this may well prove to be the progressive strategy par excellence – one which does not invent anything before it is required. When we touch rock bottom we see the superfluous past as it really is, on pain of death. After failure, the mind can open to a more harrowing, but also more free form of questioning which will take it into the inner maze of the self hitherto locked by habit.
The impasse is the major progressive fact which forces us to seek out new strategies, unknown or abandoned paths.

Since Freud, modern psychology has established that we are justified in acknowledging existential dissatisfaction if it arises. On the analyst's couch we discover what the intellect which is subjected to the self wants to avoid seeing – the bad times, a father's inappropriate sexual molestations, a mother's screams of sexual pleasure interpreted as pain, especially as father sometimes scolded mother during the day until she cried. Let's keep things simple.
The non-self can sometimes be unpalatable.
While the stomach is able to vomit, the mind can only repress and pretend to forget. Since the mind is designed to be conscious its attempts to push aside painful perceptions leave their mark in the workings of the brain. This is a crude and direct method of interpreting things, but it sums up everything. The neocortex wants to prevail by being aware of everything and to progress through realizations. The neocortex accepts all kinds of information and will use this to learn facts detrimental to the self, even the very worst ones. However some processes in inferior brains find it more practical to hide anything frightening, to avoid deep-seated wounds and to conceal those dangerous case files in order to survive. We cannot digest everything and so what is indigestible resurfaces later. Children who were never shown much physical affection or love struggle to find their place. In adulthood sudden separations fragment the self because it has merged and become one with the other person who belongs to the non-self even though we have swallowed them through our feelings. Some parents never recover from the death of a child and some divorcees take ten years of separation to recover, ten wasted years, whereas the lucky ones get away with just three. These facts demand not only that we observe them, but that we understand them and by understanding them we can see that we cannot control time. Not only does the past leave traumatic scars from shocks and bitter disappointments, but it also gives rise to nostalgia if it was better than the present. Hence the inappropriate sequences which cause disruption in the present. As for the future, to avoid being afraid we must to court it assiduously. Duration, the supreme means of access to the non-self cannot really be manipulated and all our efforts to appropriate it by our own means are foiled at certain times.

Those of us who are awakened always repeat the same thing: the self can identify with the non-self so why not yield to the whole universe and accept the non-self as an absolute partner at the price, which some may consider exorbitant, of truly distinguishing what we are from what it is. The price to pay is respecting the mind by letting it observe the emotions and granting it the right to ascend towards the solar wishes of the being. Thus rampant and inevitable, down-to-earth identification with territory and fetishes which are characteristics of the human race are replaced by knowledge through identity. Even if the process between gaining progressive awareness and experiencing its first results is slow, it is the cosmic process par excellence, the next step in the progression. To be everything, without being identified with anything – the supramental is able to produce this type of consciousness. The ego takes a beating, but the supreme intellect is at work within us because we open the door. If we do not open it wide immediately with the intention of going right through to the end and becoming a sage as they say, then let us leave it ajar for therapeutic purposes.
The essential process lies in guiding the mind towards what it does not wish to see.

Ever since the 1960s, Americans, who have always been more pragmatic than European practitioners who are hampered by their culture, have developed new treatments to overcome certain compulsions (uncontrollable negative repetitions) without even discovering their cause - much to the horror of Freudians. One can sometimes discern a ritual, magic quality in behavioural therapies developed in Palo Alto, as if rational psychiatrists had unintentionally stumbled on traces of the effective methods of former traditions!Furthermore, the results can sometimes be fast. In fact, using simple techniques they manage to get the subject to look in an exterior and psychological direction which had become taboo by circumventing barriers!I was stunned by the concept of finding effective processes which did not even take into account the precise details of the past in order to treat its obscure persistent legacy. I was still stuck in symbolic thought based on psychoanalysis and Jung, yet Watzlawick and his colleagues were following another path which dispensed with all that analytical baggage which is quasi-sacred to Europeans! After giving this a great deal of thought, I am convinced that one can use all sorts of means and stratagems to direct one's gaze in that forbidden direction from which the mind has turned away to protect itself after an accident or a series of repetitions of the same harmful event. The mind is infinitely fluid. Whether one forces it to look at what was forbidden on pain of opening old wounds to promote better healing subsequently (the symbolic method of traditional psychology), or whether one makes do with empirical methods to re-establish trust in an area in which it has been lost after a series of traumas - the key is to release potential for progress and to stop the broken record. Unbeknownst to us, the self, which is involuntarily structured by events which bury themselves in the subconscious, creates intrusive means of perception. Since we are all in the habit of over-structuring the mind, i.e. treating it as a closed circuit instead of leaving it to its own devices, it becomes suffocated.
Hence the appearance of malicious programs which reject realities which we find disturbing or impossible to understand in order to work in economy mode, as if air were scarce. We are all subject to intrusions from false reactions in certain sectors or subjective projections in others. However if we access a more authentic present which is less burdened by thoughts and emotions, then the mind can breathe, and if it has been suffocated it can draw the strength to want to continue to free itself.

I found my own personal study of psychology fascinating and I was expecting to gain insights which would help me in my practice as a (humanist) astrological counsellor, which I began in 1985. I thought that this study was necessary to gain an in-depth understanding of diagnostic materials and of the correspondences between planetary positions and psychic tendencies. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Rudhyar, a pioneer of astropsychology, whose works I devoured, especially as he concurred with me in viewing Sri Aurobindo as the wise teacher of the future. I needed a complete set of maps to which I could refer each individual case as defined by the their birth chart. I was satisfied with astrological systematization, whose use requires superior intellectual abilities, since all material in life can be arranged in a precise hierarchy by simply calculating a horoscope. It is a joyful, deep exercise requiring the patience of a Greek philosopher and an unusual love of thought. I was particularly interested in the idea of exonerating the individual from his weaknesses by blaming the dynamic oppositions naturally creating conflicts in decision-making which surfaced from reading the chart - by pitting the conscious and the unconscious against each other.
Rather than blaming the individual, I wanted to make nature responsible for their personality and to invite a deeper self to take responsibility for transforming psychological tendencies.

Just being born in itself carries with it the inherent risk that the mind will become disenchanted and attack the self under certain circumstances. Modern culture shrugs off this truth as it needs to believe that man is not vulnerable, as if this could in some way confer extra strength on him. However, since not everybody in Europe is all that happy, we have been forced to acknowledge the reality of psychic problems, while blaming upbringing and context as factors which coerce and penalize us. Traditional culture, through Hinduism and Buddhism in Asia, justifies existential problems initially by blaming the karma, then the samsara, a life filled with the illusion of desire, fear and death. In reality, human beings are vulnerable because they are subject to the laws of balance. Vulnerability motivates, accompanies, inspires and assists them. It forces them to adapt constantly. Human beings do not have thick skin like a rhinoceros.

Four independent factors combine to create a variety of connections between the conscious and the unconscious. Firstly, during early childhood when the brain, mind and self are loosely formed, what one receives from the moment itself predominates. Whatever the event itself might be, its repercussions, interpretation and consequences are largely formed by the character found in the astral signature, i.e. the energies of the universe at the moment the subject was born. The horoscope does not contain the whole character as this is partly defined by genes and at the moment we have no way of evaluating the relative proportions of these two factors. We would be right in thinking that the end phase of existence, from about the age of fifty-seven, enables us to carry out some fundamental work on the mind of which we are the custodians and to skim the surface of karmic content to be corrected. Categorical proof that genetic conditioning is very powerful is found in genetic diseases which appear at a later age, around forty, when time-bombs go off and diseases affect a previously healthy body. New studies and scientific disciplines appear every day which show that the mind retains ancestral information.
The present work emphasizes more particularly psychological tendencies which form a seven-year cycle identical to that used in astrology, which is governed by the solar function, since it is this factor over which we have the most leverage in the end.

With hindsight we can liberate our childhood and we shall perhaps be able to transform our DNA, especially with supramental energy. We can, with some difficulty, find our karmic dross, but we have full control in the area of the energetic structure of incarnation, as is symbolized by the horoscope.
Further analysis uncovers evidence of amazing organization. Each psychological tendency corresponds to a particular organ, hence the intuitive revelation for the alchemist that there is a high chance that defective psychological tendencies (which we will learn to characterize later) will reveal themselves through disease in the corresponding organs. From a traditional point of view there is nothing startling or new about these ideas, but I would ask you to reflect on these simple sentences for practical purposes, with the aim of practising evolutionary alchemy. We are made up of layers, each of which has a degree of independence. The conscious part of our perception does not comprise the whole of what our mind is processing - a parallel process is at work which is responsible for our health, emotional state and physical condition. The mind only explores a small proportion of the interactions and information going between the self and the Whole. Hindus say that the prakriti, the natura naturans binds the witness - purusha or Self - tightly in the bonds of life, samsara the repetitive vital energy with its twin sources of fear and desire.
I wanted anybody leaving one of my consultations who was still in the grip of a difficulty or challenge to feel on the one hand like a victim (under the yoke of the senses, as it says in the Gita) in order to lighten the burden of guilt. On the other hand, I wanted them to be committed to putting an end to what they were enduring using the tools which I had given them, since lead turns to gold as soon as the moon is placed at the service of the sun. I had to convince them that they were made up of multiple parts and that without greater vigilance they would not find the centre, unity, the enduring self before being torn apart in a range of psychological tendencies linked by subterranean, obscure and supreme pacts characterized by their commanding authority.

Improving my knowledge helped me in practical terms, but I was surprised to experience a transformation of my own vision of subjectivity and objectivity and to see that there were many intermediary states and nuances. We all distort reality in certain areas, hence the necessity for correction through psychotherapy or in the freedom offered by asceticism. Tradition has always stated that is necessary to adjust in order to escape our animal legacy, but what has changed today are the reasons for doing so. The Earth is evolving rapidly and needs conscious individuals to enable it to go through an unknown evolutionary phase. Many human beings want to improve because they are akin to the incarnation. The notion of saving one's soul and discovering the truth seems so distant when one is deeply aware of the dangers which currently threaten the Earth. It is the current urgent need for rescue that calls for the measures which are emerging: rapid spiritual progress for those who love the Earth, deep regression for those who hanker after obsolete material, defence of territory and the subjective straitjacket of religion or philosophy which are immune to change. I am sharing these discoveries with you since you may well be experiencing conflict between the subjective and the objective. If we accept the subjective without renouncing the objective at all a new form of intellect of the self and the non-self is revealed and fearlessly explores our behaviours and psychological structures. This is the only way in which we can continue to trust emotions, which we suspect are responsible for a number of ills because they are too subjective or because they often manifest themselves without the consent of the self. We must welcome them when they manifest themselves, but it is a mistake to cultivate them. Pure emotion ends of its own accord once it has delivered the information it bears.

Every author, whatever their discipline, turn situations to their own advantage. The psychological universe is so huge that everyone can find rules which fit what they are looking for, believe or are attempting to demonstrate. I have even amused myself by drawing up astrological birth charts for Freud, Jung and Adler, only to realize that you find in psychoanalysis what you bring to it and thus it reflects the intellectual outlook of its founders. This was a fascinating experience, as if Freudianism were largely a projection of the energies of Freud's birth chart, and this was also the case with his two accomplices. As the inner sphere had not been the subject of investigation in the Western world, or at least in secular terms, very different men made their own subjective contributions, each discovering a few deeply divergent objective rules. The sexual theory to which Freud wanted to reduce everything is already contained in his own vision of the world which is highly influenced by his dominant Taurus/Scorpio axis, the axis of instincts, as if the instant of his birth with all its particular energies had somehow been regurgitated by its custodian in intellectual form, with both its intellectual genius and corresponding blind spots. This astrological experience continued to encourage me to reflect on our ability to draw real objective truths from our particular way of being. Can we find a way of viewing things which prefers to see them as they truly are, rather than as we would like to believe or expect them to be?

We suffer because we are using preconceived scales for interpreting results. Events are judged on the basis of success or failure, yet at the time at which we experience them they constitute only one of many possible ways of being connected to the non-self. Success and failure are not facts, but closed interpretations coloured by euphoria or resentment. Failure does not cut us off from the world to the extent to which we imagine and success is not a cure-all. It is a mistake to tie them down to their emotional repercussions. We ought to suffer purely provisionally from having missed something and this feeling should then pass quickly, without breaking rhythm with the vital movement. We should know how to accept failure intellectually, especially as its cause can easily be understood, and pass this information down the line to ease the emotional hurt. This is what we ought to do, it would be much less painful, but it is wishful thinking as the human race as a whole does not know how to do it. The Taoists know how to do it, along with a few others who reflect deeply on their experiences and their being and play at no longer confusing them.

How can realizations take place if the framework for representation conforms to the past, if everything is labelled as failure or success, gratifying or non-gratifying, when events are a law unto themselves and may convey thousands of other meanings and stances?


Progressive opening transforms the moment into a paradoxical, quantum situation – one is and is not what one believes oneself to be at one and the same time, since each piece of data can either contradict or correct everything which we thought that we had acquired. The mind surfs continuously on the wave of the present without falling backwards into the past or plunging forward on the breaker which is the future. This is the method used in supramental yoga (in which experiences are fast, uninterrupted, unexpected and contradictory) and one should get used to it from the outset.

I would also recommend straightaway that state of perfect receptivity where the moment can invalidate what we were expecting without it disturbing us. This is an objective state which is so far removed from the mechanical state of projection that few human beings experience it. They are unanimous in stating that absolute receptivity is a prerequisite for awakening. It is a remarkably flexible state which refutes prejudices and avoids repetitive reasoning. Prejudices are based on lack of information, misunderstandings or unfounded expectations, which are very common at the outset. For example, it used to be a crime not to earn enough money and we were afraid of being short. Now we know that this fear was instilled in us by our parents who did not have enough money for food during the war, and that nowadays we can live a full life without being rich. We settle ourselves firmly in the present and that is enough to no longer experience that fear of the future which may even be deeply rooted in our genes. The Whole is a magic universe in which nearly everything is beyond us.

Blind spots do not just disappear because we persist in denying that everything is beyond us; this merely encourages the supreme heresy of placing our trust in control.

Although total opening is extremely rare, it enables us to transform the present into food which is always fresh, which allows us to accept what is beyond us while remedying it. Otherwise each new day cannot bring its complement of new truths, solar trails, non-separative progress and shooting stars if the self remains too structured, too yang, too sure of itself. However, without spiritual alchemy it is always tempting to close the breach as soon as we are satisfied with a few little excursions towards the truth, with our progress like a thinking ape, which we find stunning. Now that we are already sated, having opened the doors and windows and taken a big breath of fresh air, we rebuild our territory on new foundations. We progress at cruising speed. Our critical faculties become less acute in respect of ourselves, while naturally increasing towards others. This sort of stubborn pride which feeds on its progress towards humility is irresistibly funny and pretentious; it is a subtle but highly effective monster which is common among spiritualists and those who claim to know what is what. Having escaped from the generic environment, we create a made-to-measure sphere and defend it with as much enthusiasm as the old territory which was abandoned, just because it is a territory. We believe our tradition to be better than other people's, our own teacher superior to any other, our own spiritual lineage to be the only authentic one, our own approach more sincere and our warnings more well-meaning – even though they are only threats. The new gold-plated self stands proud over the past but does not really offer itself to the heavens. Why does the ascension stop here for most people? We have to acknowledge this spiritual failure. How many awakened ones and teachers are there per thousand seekers? Not to put too fine a point on it - why is so much effort wasted in activities which claim to serve the truth and which create individuals who are just slightly more conscious than others, despite their spiritual efforts, practices and the copies of Lao-Tzu on their bookshelves?

The best solution is to get rid of this problem by recourse to the karma - this is the theoretical point of view. It is easy and doubtless partly true. If we approach the problem from a practical angle it matters little why so many lives are (virtually) wasted in efforts which yield nothing or nearly nothing. What we see here is the sacrifice of the Divine Himself, rising unhurriedly towards fulfilment and Omniscience through individuals. While nobody can be blamed on the one hand, on the other hand the only appropriate response is to make awakening more accessible. There is no better solution than combining one's quest with a therapy which is able to liberate the ego by clearing out memories.

Many vertical seekers have good aspiration, a brilliant esoteric frame of reference, but they lack access to transform the unconscious. Conversely, some people, women in particular, know how to progress by cleaning up the past, adopting a new approach while anticipating the satisfying feeling of being superior and more authentic. However, they lack a clear vision of the transcendent principles which govern the holistic approach. This is the point at which one should encourage progression and warn of the dangers while praising the benefits of obstacles which aid revelation. My aim is to make your sadhana, quest or therapy clearer and more focused.

We are constantly going to draw closer to obstacles to progression and the outlook may seem gloomy. We do not know how to achieve an in-depth transformation and I am simply demonstrating just why it is difficult. As soon as men have conquered something, they start to crow about it and the ape in them resurfaces. As soon as a women win, they shift from foot to foot. Our vital energy strokes the mind in a quasi-erotic fashion while a heady or at the very least simplistic sense of satisfaction takes hold of the self and instils in it a sort of superior smugness. This is rather common.

What the Earth which loves the Heavens asks of us and can offer us is perpetual progression made up only of stages, where as soon as each aim is achieved another step is revealed. It is not a case of consulting a doctor, teacher or psychiatrist.

A prison is a prison and Bob Dylan was right:

when God is on our side,

we forget that He is

also on the side of all the others

– of all the other messiahs

of good and bad disciples.

Autobiographical aside

What I ended up feeling after several consecutive months in India was that a whole number of separate perfect things form total chaos. Nothing works well because everybody is convinced that they are doing exactly the right thing by following the rules. Each person has their own absolute area of competence, but is oblivious to all else and does not step outside it. Priests do exactly what is necessary, but they sleep; parents do what is necessary, everyone does what is necessary, while racking their brains to find their form of religion, but nothing is working anywhere. Everyone does exactly what they have to do, but there is no communication. Krishnamurti complained about this towards the end of his life. He saw his native India becoming attached to the letter of the law and losing its depth and generosity of spirit and abandoning its spiritual courage. We can get lost in forms, procedures, labels, politeness, rituals, rules, castes and sub-castes, castes among the Untouchables, which is the absolute limit, in clearly demarcated areas of responsibility, but chaos is ever-present in ordering which is as precise as it is superficial, because everybody is obeying things which they respect without understanding, checking or experimenting. Everyone is looking after their own little speciality. Even the spiritual quest is artificial and forced. Reappraising yourself is easy when you have learned to do it for generations for a ceremony or when a saint or teacher comes to visit. However it is just a show, a performance. Self-reappraisal is a habit; it goes unheeded and is an obscenely smug ritual. It is the supposed three-thousand year-old sacred process after which you carry on exactly as before the very next day. In India you can challenge everything without any sincerity as it is simply a custom and custom is a cradle which rocks us to sleep, except in the case of true initiation. Gurus are indispensable and they alone can enable one to distinguish between a token reappraisal which is certified as authentic and socially acceptable and the real process of self-confrontation which aims to strip the individual bare and brings insecurity.

Once the mind has been opened and some benefits have been accrued, it is a common ploy to close it again and this is the most widespread cause of lack of spiritual progress, of endless analysis or dubious therapy. One pretends to continue to advance or, from a technical point of view: the further down one goes into the archaic layers, the more difficult it is to free oneself from them. The whole aim of this study is intended to enable us to sink lower in order to rise higher i.e. to explore the subconscious while letting the Supraconscient [NB:traduction utilisée dans la version anglaise de The Integral Yoga, qui serait traduit par le mot supraconscious en anglais en dehors de ce contexte précis] manifest itself. This is the fruit of the supramental experience. One cannot take place without the other: ascending enables one to descend and vice versa. The great news, which it has taken us several centuries to understand, is that the Divine can now do the work for us – when we have dragged ourselves up to him. Let us meditate on Sri Aurobindo's vision. Yes, it is possible to clean up the ashvatta, and that is what is necessary today. We are going to climb down the evolutionary tree, encounter the mechanisms of nature, interference and a sort of ancestry which is still hidden in our frail organs – but the supramental is not afraid of any of this. We shall encounter personal interference - malicious code hidden during unbearable events, and discover genealogical interference - our descendents'negative states of mind which certain circumstances can invoke like ghosts. Finally we shall catalogue generic interference, walls of disturbed energy which are common to all of our species and which rise up in front of the Supramental – a stage which is of particular concern to the individual who receives divine energy into his body and lets it ‘work'in his cells. The Supramental drills away slowly, unhurriedly and reveals everything which evolution has swept under the carpet. It can be unbearable one second and marvellous the next. Life-matter is thoroughly pulverized. Divine power is present there and it is huge.

A large proportion of mental disturbances requiring analysis and therapy and which are not technically pathological diseases since the body remains perfect, are caused by interruptions in the process of psychological maturation. The patient has placed himself in a position which prevents him from moving forward and from which he cannot extricate himself and is asking for help. The self and the non-self no longer interlock; since this is a deep, natural, automatic process where the pegs have locked themselves together over the course of time and fused into one, the only way to change tack when necessary is to reverse the process. For patients, retracing their steps this seems like walking towards the future backwards. This is not the case if an impasse occurs.

We crystallize things without suspecting that order cannot last without regular metamorphoses.

This is what the Chinese discovered and preserved in Taoism, what the Western world learned from Heraclitus but does not apply and what Sri Aurobindo confirms when he says that knowledge becomes an obstacle if it prevents us from moving forward. Living is a mutual process of adaptation between the self and the non-self and between the non-self and the self. We get bogged down on principle in beliefs which freeze the self and ambitions, which paralyze our relationship with the non-self. We accumulate things to throw away and signpost our territory. One day the speed of time catches up with us, makes us jettison the dead weight and tramples on our carefully delineated borders. We then suffer from depression, diseases, malaise – the whole jumble of things which will enable us to reconnect with the real movement, but which we had wanted to appropriate, keep within the self, fix into our structures and lock in the closet.

Every natural hierarchy is permanently made up of new heterogeneous elements which it tries to homogenize, disposing of dated material. This is how life works. The body works in this way too, without seeking our permission, using catabolism and anabolism, but the conditioned self prevents the mind from aligning itself with this model. The mind therefore suffers and exacts its revenge. It spills out of the conscious self and reacts by sending signals to the body which cannot be ignored. Beyond this point willpower is ineffectual and disturbances and diseases occur which cannot be overcome through autosuggestion. The body questions the mind and the self must make amends.

It is this form of psychological constipation which drives so many people into therapy or analysis and which those aspiring to spirituality want to rid themselves of using their own initiative by renewing their values and perceptions and by dialogue with their self-image - that ray of sunshine which acts as a reference point. Admittedly a few fanatics are ill because they are tortured by the opposite complaint - mental diarrhoea. They cultivate exasperation and so they do not retain anything from the passage of time and are lost in each instant. However they represent a small minority, whereas those suffering from psychological constipation beat a path to analysts'offices, psychics and psychotherapists. They want to live with their memories intact, preserve the past; they complain about what is over even if it caused them suffering, they cherish their suffering with pride, making them feel like exemplary victims deserving of a medal. They would like to be somewhere else without leaving their present location. They want to accumulate privileges without any of the accompanying inconveniences, because they are afraid of shortages in old age.

Chaos embraces order and stimulates it to renew itself. These are in fact one and the same thing, a permanent movement which destroys some arrangements and creates others, but we rarely see these orders collapsing as we tend to arrive after the event. The same could be said of love, which withers if we do not pay attention to the other person, or of a spiritual doctrine which we still believe we are following even though its practices and principles have become habitual, mechanical, and inoperative. We would argue that time passes too quickly for us to follow its permanent revolution. What we are experiencing therefore is not time, but sequences. We become chameleons, change colour, activity, role, but the self at the centre of all this is too weak to go along with this game. Centrifugal force draws the subject towards activity, haste and ever greater adherence to events – right up to the inevitable point where he is torn apart and admits that he has lost something which cannot be found.

One of the factors which can motivate us to undergo therapy or to take the plunge towards awakening is the recognition that all areas are functioning, but that they are not communicating sufficiently between themselves. The holistic tendency is frustrated and the self is ill at ease, even though it is satisfied with the way in which it has managed successive activities in its diary, and is competent in each particular sector. When it asks itself what it really is, in a timeless sense, the only reply is the shriek of its constantly reshuffling identifications which tell it that it is nothing. We have filled every moment and collected them all together, but we do not know what to do with them. The involuted supraconscient mind is perhaps fed up with being repressed to this extent.

Alternatively, if we try to describe a diet for time - a balanced diet involves paying attention to the self and the non-self in equal proportion and reconciling the two sides of the brain. We must agree to structure, organize and choose on the one hand and on the other hand we must agree to let go, lose things, jettison ballast and simply feel what is happening without looking for meaning.

What happens and what we want can sometimes be identical, similar, or compatible with a few accommodations. But what happens when the occasion and the will do not have any point of correspondence? The self sinks into the non-self through desire, attachments, the affects and will; the non-self sinks into the self through emotions, constraints, duties and demands. This intertwining can be amorous and then come unravelled and sometimes the principles draw apart or even fight. Realizations which can stem from crises are only virtual and are not recorded anywhere. For a long time professionals thought that uncovering the cause of a serious psychological disease would enable one to free oneself of it. Psychoanalysis had as its aim to bring key events to the surface which could be shown to have turned the identity away from itself by pinning it to compulsions, deficiencies and complexes which give rise to inhibitions and false representations. However many patients, despite going back to the origins do not heal, or heal so slowly that it does not really prove the effectiveness of the system and so it tends to be replaced by countless forms of therapy which pursue other trails. Investigations have continued to diversify since Freud and the main trends bear the hallmarks of their founders, who project their own principles into their approach. A psychologist who retains his own ego can never use a therapy of the type practised by Roberto Assagioli in order to bring the spiritual being to the surface. Similarly a psychic convinced of the determinism which he detects, as his name indicates [supprimer? pas vraiment le cas en anglais], in every event, will give a very different consultation from a spiritual visionary also using synchronicity (astrology, I Ching, geomancy) to guide his client beyond things which will happen. Objective elements surface in subjective approaches as there are not many of them. Can one infer universal laws from specific cases?

Just for fun, let us draw a map of a territory in which the mind does as it pleases, using every possible means, including radical opposition which requires us to change our values.

Everybody, from Freud right through to Laing, has churned out their hackneyed version of the intimate relationship between desire and feeling, the astrological Mars/Venus pairing, without exploring the issue from every angle, while giving a passing nod to the fact that women naturally try to join the two while men distinguish between them if need be. Rank challenged Freud by stating that desire is personified, i.e. that the sexual urge does not seek out any object with which to become involved, but that it operates on the basis of well-known, deeply subjective preferences, although this is naturally a generic function which therefore applies to the whole human race. Desire and feeling are polar opposites: desire expresses feeling and the self moves towards the non-self; feeling absorbs desire and the non-self penetrates the self, but they are sufficiently independent to be opponents at times.

Anyone with any shred of intellectual honesty rejects broad generalizations in the social sciences in the knowledge that each individual is unique and has huge scope for manoeuvre in the way they live out their generic tendencies. It is specifically this individual scope for manoeuvre which interests us, because it is so broad and so unpredictable that each individual's could not be more different from their neighbour's. No two people will ever be in total agreement about something. There are therefore only two solutions: either they agree that it does not matter and base their relationship on something else such as the heart, or one brings everybody into line and dictates the mandatory truth. The latter concept has been played out unsuccessfully in many forms ranging from religious imperialism to totalitarianism and fundamentalism, incorporating inquisition and flame-throwers along the way.

When astrology is properly understood it reveals an infinite variety in its scope for individual manoeuvre, which justifies domestic disputes, divorce and war by the same token. The ingredients of our psychological tendencies are all the same, but the recipe varies. We are all strikingly psychologically distinctive and yet we form one single race. Evolution tries to form a homogenous race, while respecting each person's own uniqueness. This may seem impossible, but that is wrong. We can universalize the psychological functions within us which correspond to the planets, sun and moon, by freeing them from their obscure animal roots. We must understand that they obey the same laws as in the solar system and support each other. Each individual can then use them as they will, but at a higher level, liberated from the compulsions of our race.

The sun and moon, which are obviously complementary in the physical world, are radically opposed and totally complementary in the psychological sphere. The lunar function acknowledges the systems on which the self depends (ranging from emotion to sensitivity), whereas the sun tries to homogenize the self by favouring it, even if that means freeing itself unduly from the non-self in order to from a stable identity. If we push this concept to its limits then the moon leads straight to dependency factors and is sometimes swamped by them, whereas the sun leads to autonomy, integrity and independence, even if that means having a narrower scope and being much too inward-focused. If we transpose things, then the will, which must always oppose something, is solar, and abandonment, which incorporates things by absorption is, lunar.

The huge domain of Saturn opposes Jupiter, the moon and sun equally and is a universe of rigid rules which acts in isolation, causing deep crises. Saturn represents authority and one's personal value system, including blame, rejection, deep denial, and cultivated obsessions. It represents the basic structural principle underlying the values of the self, which organizes beliefs and behaviours into a hierarchy and permeates every layer of the psyche from repression to the superego. It represents the father figure in childhood. I imagine it in symbolic terms changing water into ice, revealing magnificent harmoniously arranged points on a hexagonal snowflake - the most perfect geometric pattern of its type. Saturn crystallizes then fossilizes. It partly manipulates the mind which permanently creates crystals by linking psychological tendencies into a chain. Each one works for itself and for the whole at the same time in what one might term an instant, fragile equilibrium – the equilibrium required by the tightrope walker over whom Saturn holds supreme power.

The final astrological signifiers – Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Chiron – which we shall mention later, allow one to construct a complete spiritual alchemy. They reveal History in its contemporary energetic framework and it is on this basis that I feel the future and condemn the past. The whole Earth is experiencing an era of unprecedented evolutionary acceleration. I personally feel spontaneously before everyone else what is truly obsolete in the Manifestation, since it is specific to the Supramental, through isolated experiences which I will not describe here, but which have been a major source of inspiration. Just as Sri Aurobindo revealed the limitations of traditional teachings, divinely inspired by the Supramental which transcended them, so I too experience forces which must disappear and which I expose to the influence of the Supramental - an experience which enables me to establish the true evolutionary conditions of the human race and to condemn certain psychological processes to death.

Of course, I respect the sadhana as described by Sri Aurobindo, which can disregard astral forces without even listing them in the knowledge that we can liberate ourselves by a correct approach to opening to the Divine. Within the framework of this study in which we present the scope for manoeuvre of divine aspiration as a force which opposes determinist materials in order to transform them, naming the obstacles which impede us, examining them and welcoming them enables us to draw up a map and to practise more easily.

Using metaphors, we can understand that the moon plays tricks on the sun (emotion sometimes harms our identity or overwhelms it), Mars destroys what Venus builds (desire and feeling can rarely coexist happily for long), and finally, Saturn shows us our limitations without worrying about our ability to acknowledge and overcome them, at the risk of condemning us to drowning in depression or guilt. Jupiter makes us to want to develop, to enrich ourselves, to expand our territory, but his methods of defending our interests can sometimes be rather archaic and mundane. Saturn can therefore show him, by being persistent, the path towards that huge expanse - the sky, in order to free him of his material attachment to his environment. These events relate to psychotherapy, the conflicting interplay between the self and the non-self whose mechanisms we simply amuse ourselves by dismantling. It is the complementary interplay between the self and the non-self, the positive side of the picture, which characterizes sadhana, or consecration to awakening.

With reference to just a few categories of symptoms and tendencies, which I will list in outline here, real-life experience systematically shows the same essential content as lying at the root of all inappropriate behaviours. Therapists, spiritual teachers or instructors and experienced psychologists always all come back to the same factors forming the basis of the rift between the self and the non-self –

fears, disappointments, expectations, shocks, involuntary strategies, (the natural repertoire of the subconscious) and their mental and physical symptoms.

The same patterns repeat themselves.

We had known this since Freud and the advent of psychogenealogy confirms it. There are ruts on our path which could not care less about our ‘free will', deep ruts, psychological family furrows, which at a given point keep us going along in a direction which was not of our choosing or, more subtly, which we chose without being able to do otherwise; which we believed that we had chosen when in fact we could not go anywhere else. I would ask you to re-read the previous sentence very slowly – it is very important.

This paradox is brimming with lessons and is one of the deepest subjects for reflection that we can identify – a puzzle. Pascal and Nietzsche nearly drove themselves to distraction by labouring over the issue of free will. With hindsight, if we link up all the causes, Becoming seems to stem exclusively from the past, like a film played backwards – depriving us of any choice in favour of obligatory alternatives. Admittedly, it is a mind game which would drive you crazy, and the only thing you can infer from it is to be supremely wary of explanations, all of which are equally relevant when you are sailing up the river of the past on vessels of criteria which are not watertight.

By contrast, it is certain that our actions have corresponding consequences, whatever the reasons for our choices. False healing leads to relapses, false new hopes lead to inevitable true disillusionment, bad decisions trigger lacklustre results and lies do not transform the truth, but merely betray it. If we are condemned to reproduce a family pattern then things will happen in roughly the same way as for our parents or ancestors and the accursed line will never be broken. Alchemists stress corresponding causes and effects: "although all seeds produce fruit, do not expect to produce philosopher's gold if your raw material is not good. Discover your materia prima and all you will have to do is heat it. I have already said too much".

What is needed is a systemic vision which allows you to slot small realities into larger ones, to show the colour of a psychological tendency, and, at a higher level, to show the inconsistencies, turbulence and mixtures which form new hues in which the base colour will be lost. All we need to add to this system is a horizontal interference meter in order to obtain all the possible variations. Our psychological tendencies have an overall given configuration which can be stimulated by personal events surfacing from a traumatic past, then by recorded family events, i.e. ancestral memories, followed by very deep collective events, indescribably obscure generic memories.

This systemic thought is much used in the physical sciences, quantum mechanics and doubtless also in electronics to create new programming languages. Social sciences have not yet used it to build representations or directories for the very good reason that the mind is so homogenous that we will always be dubious of the merit of conventions which attempt to represent it. It cannot be cut into pieces and it is impossible, for example, to claim that a patient's suffering is imaginary since his pain is real. We do not know where physical illness begins, since different criteria define it and physical symptoms may not be present in psychic disturbances. In general terms, materialist society is forced to acknowledge a multitude of manifestations of malaise whose origins it struggles to discern and which it perseveres in treating without any in-depth knowledge.

Only Supramental culture, which is still embryonic, reveals the true dimensions of the mind, as it is always present in one form or another in feeling, emotion and of course thought, while also operating secretly in physical matter through the nerves. What happens when the mind doodles away and the self is divided? Life never matches up to our expectations, or very seldom, and this makes it all the more favourable for putting in place adaptive processes and encountering evolutionary obstacles which stimulate our consciousness. Did Antigone have a choice? We shall never know, but as far as our own personal conduct is concerned, we can make the decision to explore our mind. It is fluid and mobile; it perceives duration as its own territory and thoroughly enjoys collecting a few fabulous memories which it polishes constantly, or cultivating a few dreams or plans which it takes exquisite pleasure in modifying. It moves about so well and so easily that it find it unacceptable to be ordered to stay still. Absolute constraint throws it into a panic. Urgency traumatizes it. Memories and wishes are as real to it as observing the present moment.

Professional counsellors assimilate this truth better than others. Doctors, therapists, analysts and astrologers, ranging from the greatest charlatans to the most initiated, fortune tellers ranging from the most enlightened to the most manipulative, are dealing with urgency and they know that time is not the uniform substance which the calendar divides into homogenous segments. Time is elastic. Brief moments can go on for ever and long periods can seem short. Minute instants can point a whole life in one direction through decisions, opportunities or accidents, just as routine can rattle around in a closed sphere.

The ancient Greeks were already contrasting passions with wisdom: the quality of immediacy which wants to perpetuate itself deliciously with total impunity and the pearly quality of distance, seeking balance, stability and calm equality. Psychological functions within us are ready to discuss all sorts of sacrifices -

those which the future must offer the present,

those which the present is willing to concede to the future.

Life exerts a fascination which can draw the subjective faculties into excessive experimentation. To use our terminology: the moon and its emotions, Venus and its feelings and Mars and its desires will form a chain and stimulate each other mutually. The body quickly pays the price for what went on earlier. Sexual excess weakens the kidneys, alcohol ruins the liver and the blood, and smoking damages the lungs. When Mercury tries to look like the top dog, intellectual overwork, which seems all the more noble in our culture for being perverse, surreptitiously attacks the nerves and accentuates the mental ego. The slow vibrations of higher spiritual waves cannot penetrate it any longer to enable the brain to undertake new intuitive processes. Excessive food intake, to which women, the yin, are often prone, produces intellectual laziness under the auspices of the moon and problems throughout the body. Men, who continue to think about work while eating an appropriate diet, develop cardiovascular disease, as if their hearts were compressed and crying out for help. If we abandon ourselves to permanent structuring and checks, our mind, which is unnaturally rigid, unfailingly causes bone or joint diseases, variable degrees of backache and a few manias. One could even go into more detail and say that exuberant, cultivated emotions will eventually affect the stomach, chronic fear will affect the kidneys and endless sadness the lungs.

In a society whose principal activity consists of generating new needs in its members, psychotherapy can teach us to free ourselves from our fascination with the object and is developed through the intuitive quest. In the outside world, you run the ridiculous risk of being thought of as a person who likes to waste their time when you free yourself from utilitarian behaviour and when the pleasurable intensity of meditating, reflecting, contemplating nature and taking physical exercise complements one's interest in the testimony of those who have accepted the progressive breach.

In his work The Instinct to Heal [titre complet: The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress without Talk Therapy], Dr David Servan-Schreiber specifies that the loss of the body's natural feeling, which is essential to the profit ideology that alienates us at work, causes a large number of diseases which could be avoided using simple means such as proper diet and regular exercise. The consequences are simple. Objects which fascinate us make us ill. Our attachment to money, pleasure, work and even happiness when it is considered as a biddable slave - everything which monopolises the mind - harms it, compresses it and encloses it. The mind wants to be free, to embrace the sky, support the body and love the Earth. It passes through our higher mind and chances on intuitions which in the space of a few seconds resolve difficult or incomplete reasoning. It animates our contingent mind which is always in the grip of decision-making and alternative choices and even hides in the physical mind in a form of conscious death, which the Supramental yogi finds by sinking ever deeper and which it is useless to try to describe. We can only learn about it through experiencing it. It is this power which is the most difficult, the most unconscious and probably the oldest of all, which the Divine tries to transform in order to render Matter divine and free it from death. Subconscious powers work in a number of modes – operative, functional and opportunist. Mistakes must be paid for, even though they are not faults. We are full of good will and intentions which are not our own, which are living memories, energy processes, interference, living fragments of semi-consciousness and yet at the slightest rift they set to work and send us tests, challenges and emphasize the limitations of our will through a feeling of impotence. Evolution is the only path.

A deliberate, yang attitude enables us to create areas dedicated to personal development, devoted to recharging our batteries and to the path, in which the mind will find respite. It will be established that the moment, the only intermediary between the self and the non-self, will be freed from its petty purposes. Once they have been created, these playgrounds will provide an opportunity for in-depth receptivity. It can be difficult to find spaces in which to really let go, but once they are established what develops on the inside is that we abandon personal prerogatives in order to learn to listen, to see and to feel without ulterior motives, without seeking for results, to learn to unlearn, as Lao-Tzu was already saying.

The overall movement aimed at freeing oneself from control can be shared in a group or take place in moments of solitude. Letting go enables mental, emotional and psychic energies to circulate better and reconciles the two sides of the brain. The Chinese are familiar with these techniques where only the impulse is voluntary and the resulting gestures draw on non-muscular energy or consciousness of the physical body. Yoga requires a lot more practice to achieve the same results because control is much more important. At a level of mastery which is rare and difficult to attain, the positions should come of their own accord and confer states which an unpractised body cannot know. Many sports requiring a looser sort of skill such as long distance walks, swimming, and snorkelling in warm seas can also lead to positive exchanges between the different parts of the being and in certain cases can even trigger natural, regenerative meditation without the slightest technical effort.

Large-scale housing developments prevent people from having a healthy lifestyle, hence the exponential rise in healthcare costs in Europe and the popularity of chemists, because we are losing our natural immunity to a worrying extent and are getting rid of all sorts of symptoms which are alarm bells with mind-numbing chemicals. In this way we put off the corrections suggested by the global mind which manipulates the subconscious to warn us. This cultural state of affairs stems from the 18th century mind and still persists, grasps History and believes in the fragmentation of Reality – without realizing that if you keep cutting a large jigsaw into smaller pieces then the chances of putting it back together get slimmer. By contrast, the Chinese vision of the world, the only truly holistic vision since the dawn of time, as certain western doctors are finally daring to establish, offers acupuncture. This cares very little about endless examinations, but is capable of sensing loss of balance or homeostasis, and re-establishing it by simple means.

The conditioned self takes very little account of all the constraints which bind us to nature and which determine the necessary conditions for good health. The physical body demands more attention than our upbringing claims and at the end of the day repressing our emotions in order to save face in every circumstance proves to be a stupid strategy which induces psychosomatic reactions. When we reject intuition in favour of Cartesian thought and experimental proof, we mutilate an entire part of the brain. It would therefore seem to be accepted that it is necessary to examine the forces on which we depend much more closely, in order to respect their work, understand it and to avoid sudden reversals caused by stress and false conceptions of the self or the non-self. This is an unsettling undertaking at first. Seeing that we are made up of several aspects is disturbing and realizing that we are no more or less than biological shelving and that each shelf wants to cultivate its own objects of desire drives us towards a season in hell. Then it is party time. The competing selves seduce each other and confront each other. The centre identifies the self who never wants to take the plunge, the one who wants to stall, the one who always wants more, the one who abandons and gives up and the one who sorts things out by twisting them to suit himself. The evolving self wants to welcome fragile, but desirable, transformations which will be rejected or put off in the lower stages, such as affects, emotions and addictive habits.

This is a new paradigm which therapy and the path have in common: both approaches identify several inner players. Agreeing to watch their interplay is no more dangerous an attitude than suddenly being subjected to catastrophic conflicts or reactive behaviours which take us where we do not want to go, when realizations have been deferred for too long. We are a real rainbow. Identity is not just will, thought, living memories, feelings, organized sensations and emotions – it is a whole made up of multiple functions. We are now going to familiarize ourselves with the materials of spiritual alchemy, the psychological powers corresponding to the principle bodies in the solar system, and this list can both provide clues to carrying out one's own therapy or to clarifying one's ascetic progress. Different movements arrange themselves, complement and rival each other in order to seize the moment – we are now up against the wall.

Let us name the psychological tendencies symbolized by the bodies in the solar system. Let us keep the same ones to make things simpler. The Mars tendency wants solutions which are fast, resolvent, frank and direct. It rushes ahead and clears the way, sometimes brutally. It is yang. Muscleman is easily bored because he has an answer for everything, as long as he keeps moving. He would rather do too much than too little. He does not stop to think and he would rip apart packaging which is difficult to open at the risk of damaging the contents. The lunar tendency tries to keep us in contact with the non-self at any price. It is the adhesive principle which dictates that it is not very easy to put an end to an emotion which disturbs us, to build a strong wall between a desired person and oneself, or to leave the fridge door closed when we are anxious. The moon is yin. She transforms a sunset into mystical ecstasy if Venus helps her out when she scents a sea breeze. We could call her Mrs Superglue and throw her out when she really lays it on a bit thick, but she has a habit of climbing back in through the window, or even just going ahead and digging tunnels, if she has not been dismissed in the right way. She constantly reminds us of our territorial consciousness and sets us back in context using emotion, complaints, needs and physical sensation. The Saturn tendency is somewhat separate, because it is complementary and opposed to both the moon and sun and to Venus and Jupiter. It is a subtle, flexible yang, quite different from Mars'cutting, trenchant yang. It would even like to slow everyone down, on the pretext of checking their direction at every instant. It brings chronic melancholy, worships unachievable perfectionism, sees the tiniest scratch on the bodywork of a new car and wants to kill the culprit. However, Saturn is highly commendable in his own area of influence. He is extraordinary in abstract things – it is just life which disturbs him. What suits him down to the ground is arranging things, hierarchies, channels of communication, vision which works in stages, maps which dispense with the need to go out into the field. This consciousness-energy reaches a peak when asking himself what to do. If we want to imagine Saturn as a person, he is a dry old man. He is never sad on his own. He lives in caves and does not need any form of entertainment. Perhaps he patiently counts stars, remembering the sectors he has already memorized in his head, to avoid making mistakes and having to start all over again. It would be out of the question to forget to count one, or to count one too many, in a section of sky. Unlike Mars, who dreams of seizing them through desire, he has plenty of time. They do not come much more serious than him. He finds jokes offensive and feels soiled by them. If he has taken control, he sometimes tries to drive everybody away and he ejects inner characters one by one. He depicts duration as an omnipresent monstrous maw. Mr Structure is very powerful and he lurks at corners and derives a certain degree of pleasure from showing you everything which you are incapable of doing. If you call on him, he can help you, otherwise he just twists the knife in the wound. He forces us to acknowledge the authority of the Whole. He is a fierce adversary, but he pledges allegiance when faced with a powerful sun. After all, Saturn loves you by putting as many obstacles as possible in your path. Perhaps he wants to make you a champion of life, a connoisseur of laws against your will, but he will only allow you to rise that high if you have some merit. I am avoiding describing that darling Venus as I could go on for ever. She constantly repeats the mantra: the world would be a better place if everything there were as beautiful as me. She is quite right because she is really seductive, beautiful, attractive, spontaneous and highly imaginative. She adds beauty to what is already beautiful and is therefore frustrated by ugliness which she does not know how to deal with. She reproaches it for existing. What is gratifying reassures her and she cannot live without it, but she requires it to be aesthetically pleasing and in this respect she is far more refined than Mrs Superglue. She flirts with duration, seduces it and strokes it; she loves the non-self, colours, music. She only fears black and does not like large amounts of red. She feels very deeply that life is a gift; she can give and receive and easily accepts that that the self and the non-self must marry. Because she is very sharp, she knows that the marriage between the self and the non-self depends on the quality of the moment and so she seeks a present worthy of that name which is light, beautiful, charming and free of suffering. It pains her to see evil. She knows how to forget, but she is nevertheless quite easily disconcerted when the non-self changes appearance and becomes ugly or sombre. She is very appreciative and grateful, sometimes without even knowing why. She is perhaps a bit emotional.

Here then is some material which portrays our condition with its impulses, questions, and its weather forecast with the blue sky of «desire/pleasure» and the «thought/duty/constraint/clouds» which herald variations in the weather as well as some inclement weather, in highly schematic form. I should of course complete the picture with Jupiter, that well-meaning, opportunistic, tubby fellow, who is not the same in the different storeys of the house of the self. Up there on the terrace he has taken a shine to the stars because his own territory merges with the expanse. He is generous, unconcerned with material things and full of higher impulses which encourage him to learn and organize better things and to travel to spread the good news. On the ground floor he likes to conduct business and knows exactly how to buy at the best price, as his territory becomes more mundane. He is reassured by prosperity and he likes to spend without stinting himself. However down in the cellar of the house he gets drunk, lets go and swells up to get pleasure by any means because he abandons himself basely to the non-self. Jupiter looks for our place by taking our abilities into account and by encouraging us to improve them – like a true coach.

After all, why should we not carry in our energy baggage all the tricks used by evolution to survive? These tricks complement each other – compulsive Jupiter wants everything, compulsive Saturn wants to die or to control everything, the compulsive moon complains and makes a mountain out of a molehill, the compulsive sun is jubilant, compulsive Venus drowns in feelings, compulsive Mars boasts then smashes everything in a towering rage, compulsive Mercury imagines things. What a merry bunch, believe you me!In fact when we understand that these powers do not have the same interests, this encourages us to balance them. To this extent inhibition is never far from stimulation, adhesion to the non-self always sees distance, thought, detachment, doubt and procrastination in the background and the mind dances in the shimmer of the different possibilities, juggling with balls and cubes, yeses and noes.

Fear, seduction and opportunism all lie within us. The stake in spiritual alchemy, which combines a therapeutic approach with evolutionary aspiration, is to discover the extent to which underground forces work on the surface. The claws of the fearful old beast still lurk beneath our fingernails, whereas the angel nests, as it were, in the pineal gland. What is pure on the surface is less so down below, with all the memories which cling to matter. Obviously, what is heavy will fall and our resistance lies below, not in the conscious part of the mind, but in the material zone of the body subject to gravity and to territorial laws. Astrology, that chasm of knowledge which quantum mechanics is just beginning to reveal, models our behaviours and catalogues our tendencies with the same range of uncertainty as runs through Heisenberg's physics. A saint or a swindler can be born at the same instant with the same birth chart and I would particularly like to emphasize this straightaway so that it is understood that this treatise on spiritual alchemy is quantum too. What it reveals may well be true, but you have to commit yourself to the experience to test it. Once a map has been drawn up and some landmarks established, the jungles may be located using compass points, but it is up to us to cross them. A compass is all that we have, but it does not scare off wild animals or mosquitoes. Everything is still to be explored: the past, the present, the self, the era and the non-self. Abandoned temples must be revisited, the naïve faith of our virgin childhood, quickly damaged by lack of love, and crushed by sorrow, mourning, or disappointment which cannot be effaced by time.

Les sanctuaires abandonnés sont à revisiter, cette foi naïve de l'enfance encore vierge, bientôt froissée par un manque d'amour, terrassée par un chagrin, un deuil, une déception imprescriptible.

Like a wild beast, time scratches
the soft, loving self
a wound appears
to teach it to heal

The moment can nourish us like fresh water. Duration stimulates the areas of influence of the self with their different expectations. These brief caricatures of psychological powers are sufficient for us to begin spontaneously to get our bearings, to see the connection between an object and what it represents. If you really leave your mind to its own devices, you will see that you are not in the same state when you buy a bunch of flowers for a date as when you buy a wreath for a funeral. Yet you are in the same florist's shop. Look more closely, through the event itself framed by an objective context, at what it truly represents. No situation is purely immediate; it represents one thing for our memory, and another for our wishes and expectations – as if the present event reached out towards the past and the future simultaneously, using unknown mental powers.

Facts bring as much conscious content to the surface - accepted and recognized states of mind which are therefore current - as they do latent, unconscious interior content, whose manifestations in anger, fear, resentment, anguish or burning desire spring from our psychological structures. The present is constantly stimulated by the subtle undertow of the past and the iridescent expectations of the future.

Inner moods are drawn up towards what is happening and events summon up forgotten inner content. The self can free us from this mechanism. This principle forms the basis of spiritual alchemy: seeing the past which underlies the present, the archaisms which sometimes govern decisions in many scenarios where a conscious solution is lacking through force of circumstance. This succession of moments covers up our temporal identity which we can, nevertheless, rediscover through appropriate action. This identity is expressed through an impersonal self, which manifests itself when our natural ego collapses. This is the famous satori, or transcendent awakening, which many people discuss without having experienced it, as they are pursuing or evoking it in the hope of achieving it and because they know the formula for attaining it – cross through your psychological background in order to thrust the Present into the centre of the Self.

Emphasis is placed on the moment in Zen in particular, where meditation causes certain content to surface which prevents spontaneous attention and then dissolves it. In therapy this content emerges by other means and commenting on it enables us to free ourselves from it. Alchemy fights this human tendency to get rid of problems by simply changing scene. By accumulating postponed issues, we end up causing a crisis which the mind cannot bypass, since the physical body no longer wants to lie.

Patients who are in a hurry to find solutions to serious or recurring problems behave in a manner which perpetuates the very stress which they think that they are fighting. They are generally under the influence of emotional signifiers - the moon, Mars and Venus - who frame the earth and rule over purely subjective domains. If we move away, we find greater light and fluidity towards the centre (Mercury and the sun) and greater weight, matter and crystallization towards the outside of the system (Jupiter and Saturn). The last known orbiting bodies such as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto bear spiritual and material seed which can change History. Each evolving human being broadens their field of consciousness in both directions at once and therefore represents the universe in a deeper way. Spiritual Alchemy causes the self to expand in the direction of the galaxy towards a supreme Saturn to evaluate the cost of necessary changes and counteracts this centrifugal movement by meeting Mercury, the shining one, on the path to the inner sun. Motivated by self-esteem, the golden star will decide to make all psychic agencies revolve harmoniously around it.

This expansion causes our territorial consciousness, which determines all our reactionary responses, to explode.

In other words, the dharma must triumph over the karma, accept it, recognize it and liberate it. It is useless to oppose the dharma and the karma, but the presence of a teacher is often required to help us understand that they basically collaborate, that mistakes act as a stepping stone to evolutionary progress and that ignorance forms the very basis for divine aspiration. Beginners are in no doubt that parts of the being want a real transformation, but that others, which are silent at first and seem to agree, will come and intervene to retain the past and to prevent a solar future.

This valuable observation establishes the fact that certain psychic materials which are homogenous in theory have the power to become heterogeneous, to separate, to turn against the whole and attack it, then to divide the self to facilitate a transforming movement – to which they are opposed by their very form. The obstacle becomes the ally, in the words of the famous Supramental formula, since those undergoing a change draw on all resistances which occur in order to render matter divine. We know that we are moving towards an earthly man, with universal values, even if some singularities remain to give each individual their spark of light.

To transform is to move towards the unknown — or, to be precise and concrete, towards tomorrow.
The unspecified deadline for «healing» in therapy or for awakening through asceticism is accepted without opposition, yet a supreme intention guides us through events. We welcome a rich period in which meanings and values are transformed by realizations, by feeling our way and looking for varied, experimental solutions – not by persevering in trying to unearth rigid, reliable recipes. Nobody can estimate the timescale for overcoming an inner problem which has become established. It can take three days, three months or three years. Neither the therapist nor the subject can hazard a guess on the matter. The same goes for the quest for awakening, whose end point cannot be fixed; the two protocols fundamentally decapitate the past to avoid it coming back to disturb the present, although one emphasizes pure quality and the other just clarifying the self. Healing a disease without any physical symptoms involves taking a gamble with a therapist. Healing our ignorance and wanting awakening are the premises which underlie our absolute, tacit pact with a teacher, the universe or the Divine. Whatever help we are receiving from outside, we alone have the power to transform ourselves. We leave behind for good our territorial consciousness, which is satisfied with the incurable, clumsy, cruel, petty, well-intentioned human being, who is in the grip of compulsion and only too delighted to do battle over trifles, to curse for nothing, and to complain about what it cannot change. It is our mind which is ill and we cannot even blame the brain. It is the organ of perception which coordinates the senses and the sense of self, a huge conscious power which assimilates the non-self in the self, just as the digestive system transforms food into energy for the body. This mystery extends beyond the bounds of our will; it is beyond us and belongs partly to nature. This enigma has always been reduced to its simplest form in all cultures. The only people who really know their mind are the men and women who have devoted themselves completely to the mystery of consciousness, ready to surrender everything in order to observe, understand and to trace their existence back to its source. Evolution demands that a higher proportion of human beings fall into this category. This mystery can do as it pleases, especially if we want to close it in, become its sole owner, to manipulate it like a simple machine. The human animal will see his mind go into decline if he no longer knows how to feed it with the moment, duration, in a way which satisfies the laws of the universe. If this image evokes a response in you, then perhaps you are overestimating the power of your freedom - replace it with the following.

If one planet in the solar system decided to go it alone, it would bring about the collapse of the whole system. Hugely powerful laws prevent it from leaving its orbit. It is the same for your mind. You can drag it here or there and apply your scope for manoeuvre to an ever greater extent, but if you step outside the universal framework whose laws are beyond us, the self is called back into line. From a metaphysical point of view, the traps, wanderings, mistakes, detours and even faults all end up bringing us back into line because the mind suffers and gives up and transforms so-called free will which has gone astray. The involuntary higher mind, the subliminal self, throws us into the arms of the angel, but the involuntary, lower, physical mind, obeys death and produces ever more psychosomatic reactions.

It is a sort of law. Real transformations are not based on the past, therefore we cannot expect to consider them to be an extension of what has been, as an excrescence of the past – thus we welcome the sharp turn and the leap, the impasse, the chicane and the process of shedding our old skin. Feeling our way will support our search for order and the unpredictable and the immutable will dance around the pyre of the past. We are witnesses to an exploratory approach, the instruments of Consciousness. Broad expanses replace grid lines and inspiration replaces thought. Patience starts to take shape.

The memory of the relationship between bodies in the solar system is recorded in a very precise and subtle form in our own matter and this therefore enables us to conduct productive psychological investigations. I personally found it very difficult to accept, as my whole education rejected the idea that a simple diagram consisting of a few lines on a circle divided into twelve could represent so much. However, having replaced an astrologer in a specialist fair in order to set my mind at rest when I was studying this art in 1984, I was forced to face the facts. Tradition is right. We do not know why it works, but that is not a good enough reason to stop the principle from working. Just as numbers lend themselves to arithmetic, algebra and geometry, so a horoscope can be read in a quantitative, qualitative or virtual manner and different levels of interpretation can be applied to the same signifiers. By restricting our study to the great archetypes, we can be certain of their validity, which has been tested over thousands of years. The genius of recent astrologers has been to change the terms of reference for interpretation in order to escape from determinism by transforming the planets into psychological powers. In this new outlook, we free ourselves from predicting in order to explore the birth chart in greater depth and to use it as a constant reference point, which is open to transcendental possibilities, as well as to subconscious dross.

Since everything is connected, it is natural that a baby should be the mirror of all the forces which comprise it, independently of what it feels. Dane Rudhyar, the inventor of humanist astrology, has presented studies which confirm that we belong to the Whole in a way which is precise and unique and of which we are not aware unless we try to discover how our own personal combination of talents is indeed written in the cosmic order – it is up to us to find the collaboration which we need. It is certainly not necessary to map psychic agencies or to use a horoscope to open oneself to divine mystery and Mother and Sri Aurobindo have not, to my knowledge, recommended this approach, but the principles which form the basis of sadhana and therapy are clearly expressed in every birth chart. Our scope for personal manoeuvre is set in the wider framework of the fundamental geometry of the relationship between the self and the non-self with its four figures:

confusion between the two
a natural constructive alliance
conflict which generates experiments
radical opposition, source of procrastination

Astrologers who are capable of an evolutionary interpretation are very rare and, as is the case with analysis, they cannot convey anything if they have not been through astrotherapy which corresponds to their birth chart, through a process of exhaustive commitment. Nevertheless psychotherapists and instructors can sometimes sense the conditions required for awakening or healing in a disciple - without always being able to communicate them.

Our culture is resistant to evolution. The western world likes speed and reveres it and many people find themselves ending up in therapy because they live too fast and do not have time to assimilate their social life anymore, to bury the non-self properly in the self, since duration brings the two into contact without reuniting them. Crisis is a means which forces us to come back to changes in our decision-making which arrange the way we use of time. When a voice speaks up and says I don't want to be what is happening to me (because it is unbearable!) the higher powers of the mind can manifest themselves if we are open to being vulnerable. However one must not be stubborn and this inner process is sometimes difficult as some psychological feelings are convinced of the absolute reality of the wound. If the mind does not go deeper to find powers which are independent of the non-self, which are able to abstract themselves from facts, then harmful events will be treated seriously and with utmost gravity, as if only our environment had the force of the law.

Horoscopes show us a sensitive self, filled with the constellations of the context and moment, the lunar self, which finds things «unacceptable» and hones our resistance to Reality, is responsible for the dictatorial little self with its forthright indignation which does little to improve matters. The lunar self conceals a sort of fundamental self, upstream from events and which not only refuses to submit to them, but can also transform them. Hence the proportion of lunar and fundamental self, which becomes solar through sadhana, varies from one individual to another. Some people are too heavily influenced by events and nothing can tear them away from them. They live in a world of expectation and fear. Others are so focused on themselves that they believe themselves to be invulnerable, but they run the risk of become hardened in a number of areas on account of their selective strength, authoritarianism and narrow-minded determination.

This approach yields the same results in different traditions, due to lengthy practice to avoid distinctions and to find the whole of psychology in the distribution of the roles of the seven symbols. The ancient theory of correspondences has advanced analogical reasoning so far, as expressed in the famous phrase of Hermes Trismagistus: what is above is the same as what is below, through the miracle of one thing. This means that reading events in a certain way can reveal the principles which manifest them.

Merely stating the psychological structures obtained from a horoscope does not enable you to transform them easily, but it does have the advantage of establishing a hierarchy of existential problems for each person, pinpointing natural preferences and hatreds and revealing which types of event will be welcomed or rejected according to their nature – thus enabling transformation work to begin. This is what we call a psychological process in therapy today or a process of detachment in the context of the quest. The stakes arise naturally and it is simply a question of becoming aware of the energies codified in the horoscope in order to ward off fate. Certain existential «programmes» will emerge. However, if there are two things which are significant for us all then they are the sun and the moon.

The sun refers back to the self proper, outside time; the moon refers to the sensory way in which the non-self, supreme otherness is received by the self in successive instants. These considerations are in fact very important, since individuals struggle to heal these two functions which are in the front line of assault. The solar function is concerned with non-temporal identity, with the self which resists the passage of duration, which, rightly or wrongly, believes it is immutable and which knows how to represent itself to itself and wants to do so by abstracting itself from the succession of time – this is, of course, gold. By contrast, the lunar function takes care of dealing with facts, with feeling them and linking what is ephemeral to the stable self and this should, in theory, be characteristic of silver. I have observed that it is very easy to heal a wounded sun or moon, but rarely both at once. To heal them both, the yin and the yang must be reconciled because they lost their complementary nature when the shock or crisis took place.

Some people can overcome harmful emotions caused by a shock and think that they can easily move on, but their identity can remain wounded. A deep wound, called a narcissistic wound, leaves a sore which is slow to scar over. This is the case with strong individuals who have a clear image of themselves which is independent of events and who like to manipulate time. They hate letting themselves down and feel that they are capable of imposing their decisions on their lives by merging their own lives with life. Pride, vanity and self-esteem help them to put down roots, and thus they often pretend to have resolved a problem because they have resolved it in the outside world. However, traces remain in the inner world, as if the fact of having let themselves down were unforgivable. Others, by contrast, who are not deeply affected by yang qualities of determination, will-power, ambition and dynamism, but who are sensitive to the instant and amenable to the factual, do not feel that their identity is affected by a major ordeal because they are not that attached to it, since they are always in close contact with the non-self and trust it. On the other hand, they drag traumatic memories around for too long. The past comes back at regular intervals like aggressive living memory to remind them of a flaw, wound or shock of which they were a victim.

The polarity or balance between active/passive, masculine/feminine, rigid/flexible, open/closed, clear/unclear must always be analysed and understood in alchemy, therapy or a healthy intuitive quest, which does not worry unduly about liberating the past. In every case, unnecessary harshness creates a rigid, hard, authoritarian and excessively obstructive attitude. Excessive flexibility gives rise to a slack, feeble attitude which is subject to circumstance and dangerously negligent. The notion of letting go, which Lao-Tzu used in Chinese metaphysics as the basis for the theory of non-action, stems from an era which was spiritually superior to our own, in which it was common to rely on the benevolence of Heaven to solve personal problems. The Hindu concept of naïshkarma also reveals that what comes from above us is superior and that openness to transcendence is better than hard work turned in on ourselves which is inadequate because it scorns the help which we can receive from the cosmos, as intellect, and underestimates the power of the non-self over the self. We do also have the concept of grace, but it is nearly always contaminated with religious connotations which diminish it. It is essential to practise letting go in order to treat the inner sun and moon simultaneously. Everybody finds it more difficult to let go of one than the other, be it the self - sun aspect - or the non-self moon aspect which makes the phenomenon real.

The yang, the intrinsic subject in relation to itself, must be disinfected from its narcissistic wound by forgiving itself. The yin, the self which is stuck to the non-self, i.e. the self laid out in successive sequences, must have its traumatic memories cleaned out and must be capable of forgiving life and other people. Each individual is best placed to forgive themselves and others. Knowing how to forgive the self as well as others is part of a deep process which cannot be appropriated by a few tricks. The lower mind likes revenge, which ups the stake of defending its territory, and it works on endorphins to make them an impulse directed against those who caused the harm, be they real or imaginary. Forgiveness would seem to be the method, par excellence, of liberating memories, perhaps not on a physical level - which requires rest, massage and breathing exercises - but on an emotional and mental level, where it is appropriate to begin in order to avoid repeating the same patterns. The body liberates traumatic memories much more easily when the work has been done above the surface by forgiveness, which is a means of authorizing, with hindsight, what had been forbidden: being offended by others, by life, by the contingent context which is always ready to threaten the inner order of wishes and expectations.

One of the essential informal aims of all meditation is to abstract oneself from the slow movement of time and see who one is without it. The solar self and the lunar self only differentiate and contrast themselves in order to become all the more closely united in an infinite dialectic. They form one single mystery. Our life experience boils down to dynamic oppositions which by definition create conflict, to several alembics of interpretation which distil liquor or venom and meet up in one single place where we struggle, suffer or question ourselves with harrowing, uncontrollable, terrifying intensity.

If the sun represents identity, it also comprises its image – all identity is willingness to be – to be one thing rather than another. Failure, trauma or sometimes a difficult ordeal can prevent access to the process of personal differentiation. The sun forces us to stick to ourselves. The self-image which we possess or cultivate is rudimentary, so we should take advantage of crisis to explore it, look at its foundations and appropriate it for ourselves. It is often contaminated by the image that others have of us. Adversity systematically causes us to reappraise it. If this image is suddenly disfigured, it forces us to revise what we thought we were – moreover, this is the only method to find a new way to fit into the Whole.

The moon, with its supremely adhesive qualities, forces us, by contrast, to feel each present event with an inevitable impact, which triggers emotional reactions, sentimentality and complaints. Sometimes we are caught in a vice, when we can no longer adhere to ourselves while recognizing at the same time that we are actively involved in the moment. It is moments like these which tear the self and times apart, which separate the self from the non-self and the most symbolic example of this rape. Factors of this sort can drive a subject into therapy, but through the very subtlety of the mind, the vice has already been in place for a long time without one actually realizing. A sudden accident or, by contrast, a long period of drifting can equally easily cause radical separation or crisis. A fundamental, concrete incompatibility has manifested itself in the principle of the relationship of the self to the non-self. Two fundamental truths have been separated and the path to return to unity is not recorded anywhere.

Many external factors and countless inner factors combine and govern the formation of what we call «psychological content». My aim is not to drive you to see a psychotherapist, but to let you access the skill which certain professionals have the opportunity to be able to develop - a vision in which the mind finally appears to obey certain general laws.

We had established that there were only the self and the non-self!
But as in any couple, there is the relationship between the two and it is quite a feat to balance the self and the non-self using the different types of exchange which take place, ranging from sensations to abstract values.
That is the work of the mind.

This is why it is accepted that seven different fluxes leave the self and emerge in the field of the non-self, where they flow, each looking for their own objects. This gives us a general method for investigating the three players in our existence – the self, the non-self and the moment which flows through them, separates them or reunites them. Conflicts, choices, the necessity of dividing exterior time into activities and inner time into values and priorities – that is the picture, if you like.

The number seven naturally also refers to the vertical axis of the chakras, or the subdivision of the spectrum of light into colours. Rudhyar advised us throughout his life to collaborate with these psychic fluxes by discovering the conditioning which structures them through education, environment, and repressed traumas, the whole host of facts which have not been assimilated and which distinguish our identity. He continued the Rosicrucian quest for a ‘pleroma', a humanity of love, liberated from territorial consciousness.

The image of the self and the image of the Whole frame our mechanisms of perception. The image of the other is both inner (Venus) and linked to sexual experience (Mars), which raises the question from the outset of how to make them correspond. Family patterns and their inner images interfere with relationships and interact and reinforce each other (moon/Saturn relationship). A ‘bad'father, for example, will seem even worse because the child's Saturn will be cursed, to use the old technical terminology. Excessive or insufficient authority will develop the inner Saturn. Although we would like to bathe in unity, and awakening is presented as accessing the unity of the indivisible Whole, our entire existence depends on duality, the objective non-self is filtered through the stencils of individual psychological structures.
Freud blazed the trail, Jung went further and Rudhyar, who was more of a philosopher than an astrologer, sowed the seeds of evolutionary and unique potential for each individual, which his knowledge of traditions and his reading of his contemporary and elder Sri Aurobindo enabled him to devise. The subsequent expansion in different forms of counselling forces us, on the one hand, to acknowledge that certain technical terms in therapy have a universal value and are becoming part of everyday language, and on the other hand, it is useful to reduce them to their most essential and qualitative form in order to use them in any context. Blockage, repression, transfer, inhibitions and projection, i.e. dressing an object with one's own values – are all terms which are gaining ground.

The self is both one and many simultaneously. The initiated could argue amongst themselves over how many fundamental invariants there are; the Hindus still do it and the ancient Greeks loved to discuss it. We can reduce the seven down to three - the body, soul and mind ternary - and claim that this is sufficient to explain everything. We can juggle with yin and yang and describe all the possibilities in terms of fullness and emptiness, or even interpret everything just in terms of conscience and energy, like the supramental. These are just conventions, all of which come up against the obstacle of mystery, the homogeneous unity of the self, which centralizes sensations, desires, emotions, wishes, thoughts and feelings, which confuses the issue and is still not satisfied.

The multiple self is arranged in a manner which escapes it, but it is arranged. Freud did not contradict this and Lacan confirmed that «the unconscious is structured like a language». The replies which we do not want to give, but which we give anyway because they pass through us and attain our speech, come from a hierarchized subconscious source which expresses mechanisms. As soon as we behave in a manner which we would rather not (anger is generally the typical example of this situation for teachers and psychologists) we let a powerful order surface, which catches our little personal form of organization out, an order which overflows the boundaries of the self. The majority of people find their limitations quickly; men tend towards anger, aggression and violence and women towards fear, deceit, flight and dissimulation. Men are predominantly manipulated by an archaic sun – they like to crow - and by an equivocal Mars - they get angry very easily. Women are subject to a moon, which is often cunning – they change mood and opinion quickly – and to a short-sighted Venus who seduces and lets herself be seduced on the strength of appearances, who gets carried away by being biased in favour of everything which could be gratifying, on the basis of very little.

The I escapes us and is often translated into anger, for example, in spite of us, since we acknowledge later with pique that we were not ourselves. Other examples prompt questions. If we say I am suffering with tears in our eyes, we are implying that we cannot help it. Sometimes verbs are forced on us, and endured and that is annoying. A verb conjugated in the first person conveys a fact - I am in pain, I am suffering - but it does not convey the extent to which the phenomenon being described is accepted, recognized as real and assimilated. Emotion comes to the rescue and embeds arbitrary observations expressed in words into the moment. We try to avoid saying ‘I'in a way which humiliates us and emphasizes our vulnerability. The habit of not looking at what is painful becomes a value, just like changing channel when a massacre is shown live on television. A part of us does everything necessary to block our ears and cover our eyes. However, the mind does its job, (partly without our volition) and provokes the necessary emotions to emphasize the facts which we refuse to address, and if we get round this barrier and refuse to admit them, then it will go down into the body and will present us with a fait accompli – in the form of nervous, mental or physical illness.

The mind is intangible and sometimes only represents a part of our being in which the body is saying something different. We should silence all of this; man is just a clumsy rough sketch, a defective upright animal, a royal predator whom nobody threatens, but who threatens everybody including his own species, a beast who is overwhelmed by the power of thought and who talks too much to exact his revenge. We are just a rough draft. Unless we look at ourselves passionately, we will just be the nth reject who will not change anything, buried alive in a repetitive past which takes place in a mechanical present. The mind constitutes a force for separation, a manufacturer of high-quality fences; when we listen to the work of the mind above us in the higher chakras, which makes us aspire to the Divine, and to the subconscious down below, which shows us the limitations of nature and the boundaries of our territory, than a transformation takes place.

The question which arises is whether psychology can serve a transcendent purpose, like Teilhard de Chardin's Christianity, Sri Aurobindo's divine evolutionism, Rudhyar's Pleroma, or Krishnamurti's man without ties. If by psychology we mean studying mental processes from the outside, then it is impossible. We cannot truly understand a fact or experience unless we have lived through it ourselves. However, if by psychology we mean know-how available to all, which allows us to explore the mechanisms of perception, then we can indeed spread new patterns of comprehension such as clearing up our emotions (PURIFYING THE LUNAR FUNCTION) and seeking our inner guide (ASPIRING TO THE SOLAR FUNCTION) – the two basic approaches of psychotherapy, which support each other and bring about a transformation of all the other functions. The whole psychological range drawn from correspondences with the solar system is a systemic shortcut giving immediate access to the main materials of our being.

The I is sevenfold
and the self is a rainbow.

We diffract solar consciousness into a number of powers which correspond to bodies in the solar system which have become psychological functions. The inner planets perform their job of weaving more and more links between the subject and the object and it is entirely up to us to discover how best to use them.

Mars wants satisfaction at all costs, as he is the master of desire.

Venus wants mutual love, but also stable gratification, because she seeks to adhere.

Mercury wants to exchange and understand in his own way, which is often opportunistic, light and versatile. He thoroughly enjoys positive and negative possibilities, but it is not his role to decide one way or the other.

The moon wants to feel and adhere to the moment and to hide it away from the Whole in order to turn it into its own personal drama.

Jupiter develops us and ties us down; he gives us a shared territory and invites us to play at being grown-ups who can improve our knowledge, daily existence and life.

Saturn holds the whole show together in a structured form of status quo with its laws and rules. He maintains some form of authority among all the other powers, an authority which is recognized as the right one to follow in order to stay where we are in the bottom of our pit. It is an authority fashioned by a mixture of fear and idealism. This system can run like clockwork for a lifetime, and only the sun can change things and demand a different arrangement. However, nothing can force the sun.

When will it finally make its mind up to shed some light on the inner system?

Unbearable suffering on the one hand which prompts the subject to replace actual experience with obligatory opening (welcoming the unknown out of sheer necessity) and the presence of the absence of awakening, knowledge and of the Divine on the other hand, will carve a path towards the Whole and the Self, with the inner sun setting off in search of his father, the sun of Truth.

The quest or crisis always prompts the same questions:

- Can I get through this and if so, how?
- What should I do? Can I get help without being influenced or isn't it better to try on my own?
- Should I follow my own path against all advice, or give in for the sake of preserving love, gratitude or security?
- What can I give up without running the risk of losing everything?
- Can I resolve one particular problem without dealing with the rest of them?
- Is it in my interests to heal my malaise if, for example, it might incite me to get divorced or change profession?
- Won't a change in one area bring about a whole series of metamorphoses for which I am not really ready in other areas in which I am happy?
- How can I welcome further doubt, when my already uncertain position is uncomfortable?
- How do I get through this and retain as much of what I call my identity, while conceding as little ground as possible?
- Do I have to abandon all notion of knowing where I am going in order to evolve better? How much control do I have and what will people think of me?
- What sacrifices am I ready to make to change my life in a truly satisfying way?
- To what extent is the game worth the candle if I decide to really evolve? Won't I encounter even more or worse obstacles?

Inner suffering can be sanctioned by the mental status quo, but by practising alchemy we try to identify which fundamental wound affects one of the seven powers. The wounds, which we will identify in more detail later, are necessary. They allow the self to recognize the complexity of the non-self – existence and objects – and to distinguish time from the sphere to which it connects us in order to obtain a new understanding. They also open up the chasm of the self, of investigating oneself, which will separate the yin powers of identification from the yang powers of differentiation.

Buddhism denounces desire and fear and asks us to observe our mental processes, whereas Hinduism, which contrasts Consciousness with Energy, emphasizes the supremacy of the eye which is not subject to impulse - purusha or consciousness-witness. India emphasizes the fact that we are prisoners of impulse and advocates extreme vigilance to avoid getting swept away by the speed of life. Chinese doctrines, which seem less ambitious, suggest that we make the (automatic) impulses of the body and mind conscious in order to recover their natural purity – the final term in the cosmic order – by simply advocating alertness at all times, i.e. being capable of differentiating whether we are emitting (yang) of receiving (yin). Impulse is welcomed, especially as it can be considered from a metaphysical point of view as the essence of the Manifestation. It is therefore the same psychic reality as is explored by therapy and disentangled by tradition: it is an uninterrupted mixture of what is perceived and what perceives. When everything is going well there is no point in differentiating between the self and the non-self, the subject and the object – identification and spontaneous recognition of the environment occur without encountering any opposition. Duration is manipulated. The Sunday fisherman whistling on his way to the river forgets who he is and abandons himself to his leisure time while daydreaming. Newly-formed couples who are still euphoric have desires and concerns which correspond. A priest who forgets himself during his sermon and who is filled with enthusiasm and inspiration spontaneously expresses the essential elements of his life on Sundays quite effortlessly, as if it were completely natural. However the same fisherman can lose his cool if his children annoy him and if the priest falls in love, he will blame himself and tear his hair out. Couples tear each other apart for the first time once the honeymoon is over. The self and the non-self can become incompatible and time refuses to bind them. The force which manifests itself is one of distinction and it therefore implies a multiplicity of things – the subject, the object and the factors which interfere between them.

The only problem is that what disturbs us is not necessarily heterogeneous (but only considered as such by the ego), whereas what suits us is sometimes truly heterogeneous (although we refuse to see it) as is common with destructive passions, addictions, compulsions and complexes. The self deceives itself more and more in its relationship with the non-self and otherness and while it can invent imaginary harmful incidents and make them materialize, it can equally well ignore real wounds or downplay their importance. However, the body will remember them through the mysterious activity of the mind, which serves it independently of our volition and consent and which will sanction this imbalance. A split with factual reality, shock or the inadequacy of the ego in the face of a catastrophe or a sly act of sabotage directed against ordinary happiness are a source of evolution which creates transformation. When a baby eventually realizes at the age of about six months that he is separate from his mother, or that his mother is not him – which is the same thing – this sends him into a terrifying rage as he realizes for the first time that the object exists and can thwart his expectations, so too a split with factual reality creates an identical form of suffering – the isolation of the self.

In every case, we find that that permanently drowning in adherence to the non-self is not the only evolutionary process – although it predominates in nature. This comforts our yin, moon and Venus tendencies and to some extent Jupiter, as well as Neptune. However the forces of distinction, the sun, Mars, Saturn and Uranus transform viscosity, adherence and identification. The yang has its place; it forms the basis of the subject, the subject heals through psychotherapy and the Self, i.e. oneself heals through the divine quest. Consciously playing with the Yin and Yang or practising sadhana is the same as carrying out one's own psychotherapy and this is fundamentally what tradition advocates.

As an astrologer I foresee the statistical occurrence of these major moments when the self and the non-self become incompatible – such as in the case of rape. Few people can avoid difficult cosmic configurations, which are highly probable, in the longer or shorter term, according to their horoscope. If humanity becomes aware of actual transformations in the atmosphere, such as transits of Uranus, Saturn or Pluto, then opportunities for being rejected by the non-self, for being disappointed with oneself for not rising to the occasion will increase. Even if the subject is not responsible for them, he can suffer pressures which he does not know how to face up to, such as natural catastrophes or wars. Opportunities for crises, and consequently for evolutionary assistance, will increase.
The non-self becomes a provisional adversary of the self.

Patiently differentiating what we are from the concentric contexts with which we identify – territory, family, self-image, image of the world – enables us to rebuild the self based on new expectations. They will be more pared down, informal and essential. Personal responsibility will be more alive and the scapegoat will have vanished, since the victim will have been expelled too.

The plural self-I is falsified by the triumphant totalitarian self-I of thought which cheats, has pretentions and draws up ambitious plans – but is overwhelmed by genuine suffering or when faced with the unvarnished truth. The subject possesses complex psychological apparatus which is not restricted to the self and to the Freudian id and superego – but which he must learn to use by himself since nature only directs it towards identifications and a few insights into the character which animates him and preserves him with a few recalcitrant tendencies. Collaboration with the self is required for the elements which must be disentangled from psychic agencies to be used appropriately, and in this respect the principle clearly appears to be the same in sadhana and psychotherapy. The identity seeks to pierce the veil which prevents it from seeing reality, taking into the account the fact that it is understood that this veil is not on the outside since the eyes can see, but on the inside like a subtle pair of glasses. It is easy to cite examples and although they are presented here in a particular form of jargon, they tally with the experience of teachers and therapists wrestling with their disciples'or patients'psychological conditioning.

The sun, which gives us our sense of identity, can be weak and trap a person in dependency and keep them subject to many influences. (It is simply a case of using astrological criteria to find people whose sun needs to be enhanced because it will not or cannot shine, who knows which. The self allows itself only to keep a low profile and to mistake humility for cowardice). Helped by supramental consciousness, which I have been practising since 1977, I try to liberate the solar potential of people whom I meet, by helping them to get involved in their lives and recognize their psychological structures. In this way they can control relations between the self and the non-self, while letting go – by attributing the supreme power to reveal, make decisions and contradict to the moment.
If all the handicaps revealed by reading birth charts were ever specially studied for evolution, this would mean that the sun progresses using obstacles and multiplicity.

The closed powers of light are present in the Vedas, the mystery of the mind which wants to pierce the veils and embrace the Whole is characteristic of the Upanishads and praise of consciousness which is superior to the works themselves fills the Chinese sacred works of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu, and Lai-Tsi. The idea of going beyond surface appearances can also be found in a surprisingly large number of the best ancient Greek thinkers. Plato decreed that phenomena are not reality, but merely a backdrop, which is a similar to a myth exposed by the rishis in the Vedas, a tale which is peculiarly reminiscent of samsara and Maya. Perhaps it is first and foremost necessary to feel enclosed, limited, shrivelled up, confined and a prisoner of the gods - or of the planets if you prefer, since it boils down to the same thing - in order to launch oneself on the trail of virgin time in which all the crossroads are solar, whether they lead to relative failure or easy victory, on an infinite path free from fear of what is non-gratifying and childish expectations. Perhaps light cannot be recognized as necessary unless darkness has made us die once first.

Spiritual choice would therefore be an evolutionary necessity rather than a personal decision. In states of consciousness where the whole of life is experienced as a manifestation of the Supreme, it is clear that human beings restrict themselves to what provides genuine satisfaction. If choosing the path is a necessity, then the self will not cheat and will commit itself unreservedly, guided by the intuition that it is the only thing to do. If it is just a luxury, some sort of pretence or an impulse dictated by external influences, the demands of the work required will soon seem unbearable. It is also necessary to approach psychotherapy in a state of emergency so that it is not merely an ego trip or a source of vanity. Danger is the lever for all change. As Satprem says, the obstacle is your ally. Sri Aurobindo and Mother discovered Mind-Matter through a process unknown to man - supramentalization - which crowns evolutionary ascension by enabling human beings to receive energy-consciousness of the universe through the subtle centres of the body. Their conclusions are identical. Nature exerts its imperious manipulation on generations and only exhaustive exploration of the self by the self can free the race, shatter genealogical alienations and bring about a blossoming of our being.

As a result of Kepler's work on geometry, traditional astrology can sketch the outlines of practical astrology and provide clues to evaluating planetary powers, i.e. psychological forces, using aspects and angles. Initially it is quite astounding and it takes several years to understand it. What happens inside and outside coincides, which is disturbing for the seeker, but Jung had already discovered this through the Chinese I-Ching. The appeal of correspondences comes into play and in order to explain the theory simply one could say that when something unusual occurs we do not know if we should look for its origins in the Heavens, which might provide some facts, or in the psychological realm which would create a corresponding opportunity. The planes superimpose and dance and it is actually wonderfully coherent: Saturnian events trigger Saturnian states of consciousness and vice versa. The mind would prefer to decree either that the inside produces the outside, the feeling causes the event, or that the outside produces the mood, i.e. the opportunity triggers the appropriate feeling. Let us look at an example. Cartesian thinkers believe that 'bad' events rule and are always lurking around the corner – that bereavement happens, causing sadness and melancholy, which are Saturnian emotions par excellence. In this optic chronological Saturnian events summon up corresponding psychological content and the non-self is in charge of the self. Humanists assert the contrary: psychological functions have cycles, and it is often in a Saturn phase (for which there exist different criteria for definition) that we will lose a parent, spouse, child, or job, unless we are feeling another kind of loss very deeply – that of loss of trust in existence. Our inner moods in accordance with the criteria of the cosmic clock attract physical, concrete events with which they are in tune. In this case the non-self obeys the self.

Everybody is right.

It is the same principle.

Some people assert that subtle vibrations of the being in tune with the cosmos cause key events to materialize, such as bereavements, accidents, marriage or serious illness, for example. Others believe that uncontrollable fate, which is written into particular moments, deals out concrete facts, catastrophes or major contracts and that they therefore involve similar psychological content because the mind aligns its feelings logically with the nature of events. This harrowing vision is contained in the emerald tablet (what is above is like what is below) used by alchemists who were also by definition astrologers, since it was already accepted in ancient cities that the positions of Mars and Venus, which were visible to the naked eye, were far from innocuous in politics. Nowadays, everybody (especially psychotherapists and instructors) accepts that we attract certain types of event simply by our attitudes, just as certain others which come of their own accord force us to find an inner strength to overcome them which we did not know we possessed. Both theories are correct: the planes fit together; the object refers back to the subject and the subject to the object. Our inner preoccupations and motives determine a large proportion of our decisions and hence of our daily lives. The process of adapting involves removing the cursed part of life and replacing it with constant vigilance.

If the distinction between the self and the non-self is not maintained by natural examination of conscience, then one day malaise will establish itself and open the door to revision. The body cannot lie any longer and the emotions bear witness. This is the last time that we will be victims, after which we will become responsible.

It is the king of the Manifestation and it does not miss a thing. It insinuates itself into hunger and thirst, into sexuality and causes envy - it is the devil, so to speak, of Buddhism. Its place has never been clearly established and it is a subject on which women have so much to say, but men have never let them speak. Desire transcends all paradigms through its infinite subdivisions, its deep animal roots, and through the wish to attain the pure Being which are its flowers and leaves.

Going beyond its name, is it possible to enter into contact with this emotional flux which is sometimes physical and to see the workings of the self manipulated by desire? The astrological division invites us very openly to do so, because we find that desire is associated with the sun and the moon, but in a very specific and derived way, and also with the planets Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, with Saturn even comprising anti-desire desire!It is everywhere, either clearly visible or in disguise, honest, sly or paradoxical – it is present everywhere in the very senses of the mind. Desire pushes up against Mars and draws its originMars, master of Aries and of house I, or the house of the self, and master of Scorpio, or house 8, the house of the non-self from it, but it passes through Venus, whom it encourages, seduces the sun, manipulates the moon and tortures her so that she preserves the desired object, makes Mercury jubilant and Jupiter enthusiastic. The whole of psychoanalysis can be summed up in the psychodrama between the planets (psychological functions) and Greek myths seem to form a dynamic of the tendencies of the self for those who can read the tragedy of the impulses of the psyche into them.

Calculating the radical or birth chart for an individual who is experiencing the fact that nothing is separate can be used primarily to slot them into the great cosmic cycle and to draw from it some definitions and colours which will serve as landmarks. These definitions are flexible and room for manoeuvre can remove the solar self from the cosmic tangle of the powers of the self; desire must constantly be purified and become the desire to be, which transcends all others.

Supreme Neptune plays in our minds. The feeling of osmosis between the self and the non-self varies in degree between individuals and we confront it in different ways - alcoholism, drug abuse, accepting mystic feelings in an eccentric and dangerous manner or being dependent so as to ‘take things easy'. A whole range of processes and behaviours enable Neptune's power to increase, from the most degrading, such as excessive drunkenness, to the most luminous such as enstasis. The strong urge for close bonding, which is largely unconscious and governed by a strong Neptune, will express itself in every possible way. The self can chose whether to vary its forms, to tame it, to endure it or to use it in a marvellous way in order to become more conscious. By contrast, a person influenced by Uranus, who is allergic to rules and authority, will be forced to live out his tendency by one means or another, be that as a gang leader or as a transpersonal genius who plunges the forces of the future into the present. Neptune types live for everything and adhere to everything and experience bonding protocols. Uranus types are always anti – they live in opposition to everything and find it natural to oppose and suspicious to approve; they experiment with different recalcitrant approaches, are instinctively provocative and try to distinguish themselves by every means available. The spectrum of each psychological tendency is so broad that thousands of opportunistic forms correspond to it with a whole range of behaviours bound to occasions and a timeless range of motivations.

The evolutionary urge can be brutal or so tentative that it is almost blind. Falling for the great Yin, Neptune or the great Yang, Uranus opens up non-conventional fields of consciousness, but the work needed to assimilate them still remains after we have corrected our enthusiasms with all their grubby impulses. We project the structures of the chart onto chosen objects, which seems to be conscious, but energy disperses around about like a vibration, bounces back and sometimes expresses unconscious constellations.

Leaving behind the childish state of self/non-self confusion is a challenge which few human beings take up. Unity is our embryonic state and perhaps we carry a memory of it or nostalgia for it within us. We can rediscover the ecstasy of this prenatal unity at a higher level. It is realization of the Self which René Guénon calls Deliverance and which we now call Awakening, in order to tally with the experiences of different wise men and teachers who have been there. The subject and the object are identical, just as when a baby below the age of six months still mistook himself for his mother. As Lao-Tzu put it, we will have completed the journey home. Child development shows that the homogeneous mind which is identified with the non-self through the moment itself (moon), splits in two with the acquisition of language at about the age of two (Mercury), which allows it to act out its experience and to use the imagination. It then subdivides with the appearance of the sense of self through the personality at about the age of seven (Saturn), which is followed by the appearance of sexual desire in adolescence (Mars), closely accompanied by the appearance of existential idealism (Venus) which contrasts an inner frame of reference with lived experience in order to govern it. The temptation of roles (Jupiter) will reconcile the agencies which have already appeared.

The mind has its own form of embryogenesis. The different areas of influence surface, whirl around, manipulate the moment and sometimes snatch it away from each other. This is demonstrated by primordial moods ranging from sadness to joy and passing through all sorts of nuances. We have always catalogued the impulses of the mind be it as cardinal virtues and deadly sins, or as typical emotions such as those classified, for example, by Dr Edward Bach. However, few human beings practise sadhana or alchemy which restore the mind's original power to unite with the non-self, gathered together with the sun, which has triumphed over the forces which tear us apart from the centre outwards.

When I was six, my mother used to show me off like a performing monkey to her friends at the hairdressers because I had huge eyes; they all used to burst out laughing like at the zoo and an inscrutable expression of annoyance would make my eyes even bigger when I sulked. My mother used to do this trick with me systematically, yet she must have realized that it upset me. None of the friends she met at the best hairdressers in the village, and least of all my mother, paid any attention to the fact that their stupid chatter disturbed me, even if I began to cry. I got used to not being listened to or taken into account, but at the same time I realized that words did not mean much and I stopped seeing the world through language and since sensations were not enough, the presence of absence became my constant companion between the ages of seven and twenty-three. If we accept the malleable nature of a child and the absolute power of the non-self over the self through shocks which leave behind traces, we are much less surprised to see so many adults around who are incompetent in matters of consciousness. Consciousness may be excessively specialized in some areas and will remain weak in others, but overall it ensures that we are adequately adapted to our society for life to function with men and women who are incomplete from a supramental perspective.

It is salutary to review one's childhood when a lot of mechanisms causing psychological functions to seize up occurred, when events of the moment took a form which the self found indigestible and which the subject could not express or prevent from causing harm. Seizing up is totally natural and we shall cover its main forms later. The pure present always has the power to cleanse the darkness of a very distant past, but the patient or seeker is not always sufficiently convinced of the benefits of going so far back. The supramental does it on its own authority, and it is therefore certain that rehabilitating one's early childhood enables one to rediscover spontaneity which is conducive to seizing the eternal moment. The aim of analysis is, among other things, to try to extract harmful episodes and traumas from the emotional plane, to render them abstract and objectivise them, then to assimilate them into a higher part of the being which is better equipped to transform or dissolve them than the parts working below. However, it is not necessary to attach oneself to a form of therapy and the work can sometimes be carried out alone, especially by those who know how to breathe properly and who can easily recreate states of mind from their distant past.

When the self is separated from the non-self it is affected in all its parts – suffering is mental (I cannot find a solution), affective (something is missing), emotional (evoking the missing or lost object provokes tears or anguish) and finally physical – evolutionary pressure causes psychosomatic reactions and one part of the body will bear the brunt. By contrast, premonitory signs appear in the adept, who does not wait until all the planes are contaminated before intervening. Since the quest is attentive it averts many problems, but it stirs up resistance from the past, family, karma or the configuration of planetary energies to be modified, which would otherwise remain dormant.

True character cannot express itself until powerful oppositions have been resolved and they appear systematically when the horoscope is read, since psychic tendencies tear themselves apart in all four directions, challenging us to find the sun or the self at the centre to harmonise them. Major changes in direction occur throughout our existence in order to balance the forces better and to initiate a more subtle way of feeding ourselves with time. Unity is revealed at a more conscious level after splits with factual reality which forced us to carry out profound reappraisals from which our consciousness will have benefited. People who have come close to death (as I have recently) often find that those who have not had a similar experience quibble over the slightest thing. Fighting death tends to knock complacency on the head, with a few exceptions. Those of us who have pulled through recognize each other, sometimes just on sight, and we have an enviable progressive tool: we are both more alive and more distant with regards the moment. I would not encourage anybody to play Russian roulette on the grounds that it would reassert the true value of life, and so let us find other ways of learning from survivor's perspective.

At those times when many people would make a mountain out of a molehill or tear their hair out, a survivor on the one hand and a spiritual aspirant on the other go about things differently. A false sense of urgency, little practical panics and pressing desires no longer exist. Mars is tamed and the moon is calmed, while the compulsive expectations of Venus have fundamentally diminished. Alchemy does indeed begin with the planets which frame the Earth. The inexhaustible moon which corresponds to the emotions, sensitivity, but also to sentimentality, has rid itself of its fear of insecurity; desire is no longer keen to find its object, decisions are considered and defensive reactions are on the decline. Mars is more enlightened and its actions are more homogeneous. All the impulses which seek very close adherence to the non-self, which idealize the moment and novelty, are now filled with loftier demands and with haughtiness which spares them from identifying shamelessly with gratifying appearances and Venus finds a shortcut to Neptune. If really painful events force the mind to retreat (calling on the sun and Saturn to arbitrate) they operate like meditation which allows us to distinguish ourselves from the non-self.

If the subject meditates, he draws the curtain in order to observe his behaviour in a detached manner, but sometimes it is life itself which teaches us this lesson, like a child who learns to swim by falling into the water in order to survive. Human beings suddenly find themselves harassed by their own minds, without any way out, for want of having known how to use them previously for regular reappraisals. Human evolution is the self which transforms its position with respect to time, which it swallows and which also swallows it. The two feed off each other and this is the theme which underlies the Bhagavad Gita, in which pure action, inspired by non-action takes the soul of the fire seeker away from Kala, the predator of time. Everything which happens becomes a means of intervening in depth in our own existence by exploring the forces which pass through us. We refuse to eat time indiscriminately and we deny time the privilege of swallowing us up according to its whim. The marriage of the sun and moon, once they have been identified, separated, opposed and reconciled, is the primordial alchemical experience which is termed conjunction in ancient texts. Those who refuse the lessons to be learned from an accident, failure or bereavement are missing new thresholds of adaptation and run the risk of seeing certain psychological functions grow in them which take up the living space of others, ceding the present to the obsessions of the past and to all sorts of compensations, whereas a simple moment of sincerity would enable them to access the psychological building site.

Topsy-turvy medicine or ‘midecine'– what if Dr Hamer was right? Le grand dictionnaire des malaises et des maladies, Jacques Martel, Editions ATMA. Analogies between the search for awakening and psychotherapy in whatever form are of interest to us at this point, since in both cases the multiple organization of the self displays heterogeneous materials, which must be identified, rejected or assimilated by transforming them into homogeneous unity. In both practices it is necessary to examine our behaviour, but we would stress again that we should not expect anything in particular from this examination because that would constitute false rather than liberating observation, responsible only for imposing new checks in line with the past. Checking our minds when everything is going to pieces enables us to pull the wool over our eyes, to reassure ourselves prior to letting go fully. In difficult times, the mind can rear up like a wild horse, throw the subject and reveal to the self that its identity is just a subjective excrescence crowning the life of the body and its vital energy. How humiliating depression, crisis, serious illness or a major drop in social status can be!The ailing self holds out for as long as possible before conceding defeat and this is why a spiritual teacher used to be considered essential for asceticism. He denounced reclaiming spiritual principles through the mind or ego in adepts and helped his disciples to apply doctrinal truths without reclaiming them. The same applies to crises. The identity which has built itself is unable to admit to its weakness in time, clings to itself and wants to harness the mind to its own moribund survival. The mind yields for a while and then rebels. Malaise can no longer be denied; it has become rooted in the body through unknown channels such as the subconscious and the physical mind. Depression or serious illness ensues. This is an opportunity to transform our identity by creating a tabula rasa. For many people this is an extreme vision to be rejected since it implies that they have always suffered from the disease of ignorance without being responsible for it – like a curse – and that the situation worsened because they did not know how to cure it until they got a serious wake-up call at forty, fifty or sixty years of age. It is a purely evolutionary technical vision. For those who feel that the human race is no longer capable of guaranteeing the future of generations to come, a harsh but healthy diagnosis is called for. If cancer testifies to a separation or loss which has not been digestedTopsy-turvy medicine or 'midecine'– what if Dr Hamer was right? Le Grand dictionnaire des malaises et des maladies, Jacques Martel, Editions ATMA., then presenting the situation as I do confirms the need for greater involvement in managing one's mind, to discover the circuitry existing between intellect, vitality and body and to anticipate its defence and alarm mechanisms through opening.

The main theme of this work is to reveal the deepest coercions to which we submit in order to keep ourselves in repetitive cycles when a spiritual call or crisis would allow us to break free from them. I set these obstacles in a precise framework and suggest a way out. I have paved the way for this exploration using theoretical insights, but in order to bring them to life I would like to speak about my own experience which has confronted me with different ‘false doors'which were difficult to identify. Each one is different from the others. We can be endlessly creative in the ways in which we deceive ourselves and behave by providing inappropriate responses. For two years I experienced constant deep regressions and during this period I experienced the full depth of the tricks which nature played when trying to preserve her territory while preventing me from establishing supramental consciousness within my body. I identified three very distinct, particularly deep types of response to non-gratifying events – each one being more appropriate to a particular field, according to the history and character of the subject:

curling up or closure
aggression and violence
flight and non-commitment

These different ploys, which are very different processes from each other by virtue of their forms, work in the same direction – the past. These adversaries dwell within us. As soon as the principle of self/non-self viscosity no longer operates naturally and we lose sight of ourselves in the immediate experience of existence, then the evolutionary menagerie comes to the rescue. Depending on the circumstances, the same individual will flee in one area, curl up in another or attack in a third. These processes are very useful for preserving our archaic territorial consciousness and for enabling a compromised form of survival and the average man pulls through well. However they prevent individual consciousness and we must study them more closely to really differentiate them, since their reactionary aim is the same. Perhaps the easiest method is to use myself as an example.

Autobiographical aside

I have observed it in myself because the supramental sometimes pushes me into an almost unbearable corner in which I touch and feel all the archaic forces. Since my childhood was not particularly happy, I adopted a strategy of non-commitment towards the reality of family life, which allowed me to avoid making a situation which I intuitively knew I could not change even worse. I pretended that it did not exist. I minimized my parents'responsibility as much as possible so that I would never have anything to blame them for. By contrast, it often saddened me to come home after a day spent with my best friend's family, where I felt more loved and respected than in my own home and I was almost sorry not to be his brother. I was sad when I came home after spending Christmas with my aunt, my father's sister, who had a very close relationship with her husband and their three much-loved children. In short, I have dwelt on this throughout my life, but now the supramental sometimes descends into my oldest memories. Just a fortnight ago I felt unwell. While I was coming back from the beach on my scooter the liberating emotion which had been trying to get out since I woke up found a way. «I was really treated like s..., when I was little was the uncontrollable sentence which came out and made me sob for two minutes with total sincerity, after which I rediscovered an unusual feeling of bliss which will last until a similar process occurs again one of these days, without me expecting or dreading it. This liberation, of which I had already had some recent premonitory signs, encourages me to think today that I might serve as an example to others. Ever since my emotional deprivation has resurfaced and liberated me through violent short-lived emotions, my aim has been to transmit my evolutionary experience better, instead of searching for a kind of autarchy or distant sort of commitment like before. In fact I can easily access these types of deeper and deeper and more and more repressed reminiscences and I only quote this experience in order to illustrate the discovery of the three bolts and to establish it, whilst being convinced that everybody will experience it one way or another to pass through the generic compulsions which imprison our inner sun. I have been reshaped and yet my whole past never stops resurfacing.

With regards my mother, I always countered her aggression with aggression because she pretended to understand me and a feeling of unfairness used to engulf me as soon as I spoke to her. I had always felt that my mother treated me unfairly and our quarrels were deafening and imitated those of my parents. This attitude lasted until my mother was very old because I was only able to stop it when she no longer lived at home but in a retirement home where the cycle was finally broken. My father had a beautiful deep voice and sang very well and he often lost his temper and the whole house shook. I treated my mother in more or less the same way as him, doubtless for the same reasons; I never knew how to do anything except lose my temper. I was often able to leave before losing my temper, but my mother needed conflict and the more I tried to defer arguments, the more she managed to make me lose my temper the next time.

When I am disappointed with myself, by contrast, it is the third strategy which manifests itself and it is really very different from the two others. I do not close my eyes or harm myself, but a third alternative appears – I curl up and focus on the problem which does not go away. The outside world fades and a strange sort of solitude which seems able to cancel everything out manifests itself and mulls over the question from every angle.

Each time the self is forcibly separated from the non-self, the moment seems to become the enemy, duration becomes a malign power and a sense of our own limitations surfaces with an appropriate degree of clarity which would be avoided if we just sat thinking in front of the fire in our slippers. Naturally if we refuse to learn lessons from our limitations then complexes set in. Aggression, curling up or flight become second nature, as if nothing else existed. We can prefer to sharpen our claws, grow a shell, or invent abstract wings to fly away with the wind by fleeing the real problem and cancelling it out. By contrast, the progressive individual rebels against his animal nature and its resurgences, so that he no longer depends on archaic resistances and then finds a way to perceive the non-self by a sort of detached adhesion which is so powerful that traumatic events will only give rise to a signal of violence, curling up or flight – but not to their actual manifestation. This is an art that takes a lifetime. With practice, the signal remains as proof that we are indeed grappling directly with the non-self and that the moment is connected to the situation. Because we are vulnerable, we are ready to transform the context so that it matches who we are more closely, or to let go in order to experience it fully. It must be said in passing that people who seem to be able to distance themselves from these signals, who are totally unaffected by anything, have generally replaced the three bolts of nature with one of their own. Cultivated impassivity, which has been learned off by heart and is the result of fakir-like willpower or control freakery, is often just a ploy used by the spiritual ego to protect itself from anything that could compromise its supremacy – an avatar of curling up, albeit a gold-plated one. I would like to state two things in order to guide your alchemy: nature's ruses should neither be repressed nor encouraged. If you want to understand, I would ask you to think about balance and to imagine that you are a tightrope walker. Accept signals of violence, curling up or flight. They are easy to spot since they all have a definite emotional colour. To eliminate them by force is a mistake made by many willing ascetics, who are naive about the power of nature to manifest itself against our approval. By welcoming them, we can maintain a relationship with the Whole which is totally open, hypersensitive, i.e. acute. If we are able to, we can be satisfied with the signal and prevent nature from projecting its animal energy, that is to say we must avoid identifying with the manifestation of strength which wants to establish itself, while retaining the information which has been gathered in this way. This is possible if we can look at it hostilely from a distance.

If violent or angry energy takes hold of the brain it is a good technique to let it take its course and to be patient. If we verbalize the situation then we have to do it to the second degree, i.e. to play the role without really believing in it. This is the real old technique of gobbledygook, which rescues Mercury from becoming an emotional hotchpotch. It is a liberating form of energy. Shouting, moving, insulting and cursing, but with a hint of a disbelieving smile, and then redirecting our anger into a punch ball to avoid taking it out on the person whom we blame, who would receive its subtle charge. A lot of systems exist to counter the aggression/violence ploy as it is a clear movement from the inside towards the outside.

Things are more complicated with the flight/non-commitment ploy because yang has given way to yin, which is always diffuse by comparison with yang. We are saturated with problems and it becomes impossible to want to confront them; we no longer know what to do and we derive a certain sort of satisfaction from this, even though we know that it is the wrong solution. It is better to accept things, at least temporarily. We should let things drop and go out for some fresh air, acknowledge honestly that we could not care less, get our breath while owning up to our impotence and realizing that the quality of the moment prevents us from answering without feeling guilty. We should own up to those close to us that we are sticking our heads in the sand because we cannot do otherwise and that we are experiencing something strange. It is generally during these spells that an unwary person will take up smoking or drinking again, or phone up an ex-mistress. Confronting the non-self is heartbreaking and by turning our backs on it we think that we can get through it by channelling our energy into taking the easy way out. We like to waste time by getting our revenge on it for not reuniting the self and the non-self appropriately. With distance, neglect - that satanic imitation of letting go - wears itself out and the need to restore order can resurface. In order to climb back up the slope we can realize all the disadvantages of being on the run by consciously simulating the situation which we are avoiding. This gives us the strength to accept the obstacle. This practice requires a considerable amount of distance, a split in two in which defeat is accepted as a possible option, without dramatization. The mask can then drop and dangers can become imaginary then dissolve.

Curling up casts us into inertia and inhibits a lot of functions and so it is difficult to recommend a strategy. When gloom sets in, it is often wiser to grasp its less obscure forms and to hang onto them rather than to aspire to stop the harmful event which would easily come back. Even closed and discouraging introspection can yield one or two nuggets of gold, a few untimely flashes of light, a few genuine moments after hours during which we feel we have been put through the mill. We can turn archaic energy around in this way, but it is an exhausting fight, like in Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea, where an old man holds a huge fish on his line all night in his boat. The self can be attacked by Saturn or lose the sun and Venus.

We can try to experience this mood like a baby who is dropping off to sleep and welcome it by sucking our thumb, in order to just go straight ahead and help the regression and take charge of it. We can take advantage of this to rediscover memories of denial, shame and discouragement and to let them out. Curling up is governed by Saturn and we must not expect to get through it easily. Sometimes we can even wonder how it is creeping in, since no particularly striking incident seems to have summoned it. It invites us to go down into ourselves, down the stairs to an unknown cellar, to touch the unbearable depths and to see why we do not love ourselves enough to ask the impossible of ourselves.

Evolutionary DIY is still not practised much. Archaic forces invade the moment and the self is challenged not to identify fully with them. For a warrior of the light, the element of surprise in these attacks diminishes with practice.

These latches move against our will and only unlock if we fundamentally want them to, without trying to force them using violence, obsession or casualness, which are similar in nature to the processes against which we are fighting. When gloom manifests itself it can only affect the self by reference to itself (the sun) or by contact with the non-self (the moon), or both at once. Once the usual viscosity with the outside has been destroyed by conflict, loss, absence, failure, a mistake which is deemed unforgivable, or an insatiable need, the individual apportions the blame between the other person, the context and himself. Denials combine with each other, but generally in the event of a crisis human beings organize the objects against which they bear a grudge into a hierarchy: themselves, a given person, or life in general. In this case the self begins its rehabilitation by the least difficult means. Yet we still have to unravel this hotchpotch.

Some people bolster themselves with the fleeting feeling that they have to discover all about life and its mysteries in order to start again from scratch and life becomes rosy again, counterbalancing the latest sources of contention. Others need to define themselves in relation to themselves, in the mysteries of the self, which is a secret, often difficult process, before they can open their eyes again. Others must resolve a situation with a specific person who is at the root of a serious crisis because they have let themselves believe that relationships take precedence over their affair with the Whole on the one hand and with themselves on the other hand – thus favouring a fragile position, in which the other has fabulous powers conferred on him. In this case progress in relation to the Whole and the self will come to nothing without human reconciliation.

These three options are common and resentment will inevitably appear naturally and in a dominant manner either in relation to oneself, to the other, or to life in general and if the combination of all three is predominant, then one should separate the least obscure universe and emphasize that one. Resentment prevents forgiveness and it is therefore essential to seek it out, identify the object to which it applies and dissolve it.

Healing or awakening is easier when the mind is rehabilitated at the same time with regards the world and itself, while forgiving sins, although an appropriate order of appearance can be found according to each individual. Certain therapies or spiritual approaches drag on forever because the progress achieved on one side is undermined by the other - either the self becomes stronger without avoiding being threatened or destroyed by the non-self through uncontrollable circumstances, or enthusiasm and love for the Whole, however powerful they might be, cannot compensate for character weakness or a relationship trauma. The deepest problems keep coming back until they have been resolved, since they recur at the weakest points of connection between the subject and the object, the self and the non-self, volition and context, intention and its manifestation.

Sri Aurobindo spoke of cleaning the ashvatta, the evolutionary tree. The phrase appealed to me because my first experiences of this type in 1980 were short and gratifying, but it would now seem that the process cannot be interrupted and that I am reaching deeper and deeper layers of memory, which are not moreover always personal. I am not the only person to have these sorts of experiences. We are all called upon to delve back into the past in this way, where we can also see family compulsions surfacing which we would rather not have inherited. The evolutionary map cannot be confined to the horoscope alone. For certain people who feel a degree of interference, studying the family tree can be invaluable. Without going into any detail, certain laws do emerge. Serious things which have been left unsaid and family secrets which carry an echo of guilt or shame can give rise to unconscious mechanisms by mysterious means. The majority of our genes, which are of no use to contemporary researchers, are possibly used to encode dynamic memory as is demonstrated by peculiar events such as the appearance of a serious disease or a suicide at the same age on the male or female side of the same family over several generations. Astrology already provides us with information about important cycles which legitimize favourable or unfavourable circumstances and psychogenealogy and psychosomatic medicine add new information through different investigations. The intricacy of the non-self emerges as more and more ordered, rigorous and immutable, although it still holds many secrets.

Any incursion into the pure Present without disguise, masks or filters exerts pressure on what must be abandoned, whatever its origin. Emotions are useful because they release energies which are imprisoned in the subconscious. Liberated memory can be understood during the emotion, but can also precede or follow it.

Every event refers us simultaneously to identity
which, despite accidents, crises and, disturbances,
is summed up in a unit - the sphere,
and to the polygon and its faces -
the multiplicity of psychological functions.

Just as some metals change shape
with a variation in temperature alone,
so we move from the sphere to the polygon without realizing.
As the expression goes, when everything is ‘turning over nicely'
we are spheres experiencing different psychological facets in a naturally
harmonious whole.

The obstacle which separates the self from the non-self
brings us face to face with ourselves,
momentarily deprives us

   of a clear view of the other, the environment and the whole,
and transforms this sphere into a polygon,
then a face surfaces, which joins up with the event
and monopolizes it

When the mind subdivides,
we find in its initial diffractions
archetypal forms of the psyche.

Wounded desire (mars)
forbidden love (venus)
the decapitated role (jupiter)
the lost law (saturn)
flawed self-image (the sun)
compulsive dramatization (the moon) which bends and distorts sensitivity and receptivity
cheating or the cult of subjectivity (mercury) which uses facts to its advantage to find an interpretation which exonerates the self.

A certain amount of thought is required before this assertion can be assimilated by the mind, after which all sorts of investigations and diagnoses flow from it. Capital letters have been removed from the names of the celestial bodies in order to characterize them in this way as inner functions, or facets of the unique mind. I am thus going to tackle the themes of feelings, fluctuations in transparency and disturbances in the concept of viscosity which inform us how to tune into the present and the Whole through context. Major events of the mind are tackled which impose or create changes, either with or without our consent, and which combine the conscious and subconscious into a particular pattern. Research can also be undertaken to try to limit a harmful event to the function which affects it in order to avoid contaminating other tendencies. However, since the mind is homogeneous, a shock is like a pebble which is thrown into water - ripples form and spread further away. It is useful to establish which part of us has really been injured by an event in order to concentrate suffering in that location and to separate it from the other tendencies. At the time, this solution may seem worse because suffering increases in its place of origin, but soon, when the rest is separated, a wonderful alternation of good and bad moments replaces the horror of diffuse and constant suffering which poisoned nearly every day with the weight of permanent traumatic memory.

Of course this practice requires us to respect the paradigm of the plural self, at least in the way in which it experiences duration, despite the apparent overall homogeneity created by speech. The archaic solar function walks hand in hand with the lunar function to dramatize events which at the end of the day are trivial. However the generic self is attached to its rudimentary identity and considerers incidents along the way which are perfectly in keeping with the order of things but merely limited to one psychological colour, to be personal insults.

Fundamental wounds occur either in sectors of the seven powers which have been seriously neglected and which suddenly actualize themselves in an untimely manner or, by contrast, in sectors that are so well explored that our whole personality has poured into them and mingled in an abnormal excess of subjectivity. A serious event, comparable to the straw which breaks the camel's back, can produce a loop of activity in the affected function, which seizes hold of the mind. Therapy becomes necessary when the areas which the mind explores live side by side, but the individual does not feel responsible for arranging them into a hierarchy or combining them and the subject can no longer do anything to fight this ownership which is forced on him.

The path to awakening deals only with the essentials and suggests that all sectors of existence be given the same attention, vigilance, love and the same circumspection which prevents crystallization. Standard notions and reflex behaviours will blow up in our faces one day and shatter the screen which routine made us erect between this sector and us.

Fundamental wounds are generally inflicted by a serious external event, whilst psychological compulsions which correspond to the same powers and celestial bodies come from the personality – from an astral and genetic combination. These compulsions are therefore independent of events and in any case constitute a way of colouring them. They are so natural that the generic self becomes accustomed to them and does not try to transform them at all before they become worse. They can serve as a locus for actual wounds and even summon them by their provocative attitude, or satisfy themselves with animating the mind in a recurring and chronic fashion. If these compulsions are encouraged, they will eventually become traps for fundamental wounds, with a negative frame of mind summoning up an opportunity to materialize the accident which will reinforce them in the course of astrological cycles. I have represented them in their essential forms, and if this list seems to border on exaggeration, it is drawn up with the aim of identifying them easily.

Those who do not see their emotional complaint for what it is can be swallowed up by it and mistake themselves totally for it by refusing to separate it from their identity. This is none other than the (lunar) disease of complacency, which is characteristic of those whose yang is drowned in their yin. They get into the habit of coming back to the plaintive rut, and the more they return to it, the deeper the furrow becomes. The more they imagine that solutions must come from the outside, the more factual reality overtakes intrinsic identity.

People who constantly sanction their desires, reactions and violence end up by developing a (martian) disease which becomes the substance of the self and the phagocyte. There is the threat of an irreversible act, which is characteristic of people whose yin is sucked dry by their yang, or simply just burned by it. The deeper the furrow becomes, the less that person can bear things happening except in a way which they understand and they exhaust themselves by veering between anger and authority. The more the individual believes that solutions will emerge from his way of controlling all events by force and determination without ever letting go, the more threatening he will be in order to succeed.

Those who do not bother to isolate their need for ideals and their capacity for love from the rest of the self can become false, permeable beings characterized only by the need to do the right thing and to project the pink and pale blue colours of the compulsive need to love onto everything which appears to them – without making the slightest distinction between objects and their own projection. This is the idealistic (venusian) disease in which the affected subject believes that he has reached the sublime shores of universal love when he is simply paddling about in a childish need to make all things homogeneous by taming, recognizing and seducing them. The deeper the furrow becomes, the more the individual comes back to it, convincing himself that ‘things ought to be different', which will eventually deprive them of all real critical awareness, as ought to be replaces that's the way it is. The yin covers all that is yang. The individual believes that solutions should fall into place gently, as a result of his ability to let his listening skills be recognized, but without changing anything about his relationship with himself, even if a difficult confrontation with himself is called for. He often lives in the memory of exemplary people whom he did not dare displease.

People who invent reality by bending interpretations of the facts, who refuse to see them as they are and tangle them up instead with imaginary causes and subjective ends in order to avoid losing face and to preserve their wrong prerogatives without ever evolving, can get out of their depth and live with lying words without realizing it and pull the wool over their eyes using the trick of well-wrought arguments. The less events lend themselves to subjective interpretation, the more the individual makes things up in order to grasp them anyway in the way which suits him. This (mercurial) subjective drift is fairly common and difficult to dislodge, since the self confuses seeing and interpreting to such a great extent. The deeper the furrow becomes, the more the individual comes back to it and declares that reality is made up of elements of the outside world which receive his consent and approval, whereas the rest is quite simply unreal or illusory. The spirit of objectivity deserts the individual for good and they are capable moreover, of living in serene madness which is an ivory tower from which they see only those elements which suit them or agree with them, whereas the others no longer exist. Yin and yang lose their properties and dissolve into each other. The self ends up by no longer being able to distinguish when it is active or passive. It is homogeneous but monstrous. Reactions have got into the habit of structuring themselves and emotions, feelings and the mental structure of the self have merged. These people are often fortresses. They think that solutions must conform to what they believe and they sift through all situations keeping only those where they are dominant. By contrast they can be quite light and seem open with an ethereal mind which is fast on the surface.

There are a great number of denial (saturnian) states in which the self prunes, destroys and rejects everything which gets in its way until it retains just a few obsessive aspects of reality and of itself. Different types of fundamentalism originate when this superior denial of reality is supplanted by some powerful mental structure which lambasts, condemns and quashes in the name of a higher reality to be established. The deeper the furrow becomes, the more the individual returning to it believes that his laws should be well-established, that his own rules should contaminate those around him and that he alone loves the truth. The yang eliminates the yin. The world is nothing but a conflict of authorities. The individual eliminates solutions which do not stem from rigid personal structures and rejects compromise, even if that means pushing everybody away. He is bitter or lonely and, unlike in the mercurial example, he does not try to make things up and imagine things. He justifies himself according to strict principles and is not at all eccentric. He can be consumed by a steely critical sense which monopolizes the mind, revealing only injustices, misfortunes, faults and mistakes.

Complexes relating to the persona (jupiter) which are quite appealing, are very widespread in our society. The self thinks that he is what he represents and identifies ever more closely with his role and only rarely goes back over his own identity. He has been swallowed up by the non-self, but seems to take pleasure in it. The subject and his social projection have merged, for better or for worse and the self is prepared to make amazing sacrifices to preserve his image, career and prestige. The deeper the furrow becomes, the more the individual really believes that he is his social incarnation and loses touch with other affective, structural and sometimes emotional aspects of himself, whereas the self no longer seeks to differentiate itself as an entity from the events with which it identifies. The yin and yang have collaborated, but only in one register and have seized its energy. The individual thinks that all solutions are based on relationships and finds it difficult to commit to questioning his identity.

Those who think only of seducing themselves use every last trick in succession to achieve their ends and cherish the notion of their own superiority which they try to establish around them, even finding accomplices ready to admire, obey, listen or serve. Since the (solar) complex of self-inflation is synthetic, it can develop from any function which is given responsibility for it – venus for mythomaniacs, mercury and saturn for intellectuals, mars for men of action and sportsmen, and jupiter for people of note and leaders. The deeper the furrow becomes, the more energy one devotes to holding one's head high and saving face, using changes in tactics, environment, partners and jobs. The yang is paradoxical because it seeks approval and the yin is only reserved for seduction, losing its listening skills and flexibility along the way. The individual loves himself via the reflection of positive images which he arouses, but ignores the inner sun.

The seven powers'compulsion ends up by summoning a wound, which is more serious, but a wound can also occur on its own in a healthy psychological area on an isolated occasion and the subject therefore sees himself as a victim. If he persists in feeling this way, the wound will cause the corresponding compulsion to appear. If the wound is redirected to the non-self, then healing is faster. A therapist, counsellor or teacher must offer the means to exorcise wounds and to heal compulsions from within. These are two different processes.

Life sometimes reflects back an image of ourselves for which we are not prepared and a wounded self-image, like the reflection of the inner sun, shatters cooperation between the psychological powers. The feeling of cohesion will have disappeared and been replaced by an emotional or physical missed opportunity, which is not always translated into mental terms. We can also suffer without knowing why and without being able to blame any function, but in the majority of cases it is a deep saturn process, which requires the self to mobilize all its efforts towards the inside. This revelation brings us back to traditional notions - the supremacy of the Whole over the self and the total ambivalence of duration, which acts as much to reunite as to separate the self from the non-self. Excessive development of a compulsion from the seven powers can give rise to an existential crisis. The self vaguely admits that the psychological powers are no longer collaborating and that they cannot converge any more. Heterogeneous materials appear.

The bonds which unite the tendencies have become looser.

The self has lost its bearings, but in fact there is an opportunity to broaden consciousness using this new uncertainty. Without fear from an ancestral past on the one hand and without the will to succeed which woos the future on the other hand, it is easy to live through this phase during which the psychological tendencies become looser because this impulse allows us to rearrange profoundly those psychological energies which are in displayed the horoscope. The majority of crises stem from a refusal to accept all the factors on which we depend, or from the will to exercise absolute control over events, which boils down to the same thing.

Recognizing our limitations does not mean that we will submit to them, contrary to the notion peddled by materialistic, individualistic, bourgeois culture, for which any form of deep questioning constitutes prevarication and which wants to create a triumphalist man who only exists in its own dreams – a cosmic boaster who succeeds by following the most direct route, a «go-getter». Accepting the many fields of experience to which life exposes us, recognizing our particular skill in some of them and our neglect in others and learning to face up to all these strong points interlocking with weak ones requires precisely that quality of courage which we have lost in our culture and which traditional civilizations have preserved in their heritage. If nobody around us is suitable to provide encouragement, then a wise man, elder or therapist can show that it is possible to cross over and rehabilitate what is essential – the vision that the self and the non-self can become homogeneous again by discovering the path of necessary metamorphoses (changes in decision-making stemming from renewed motivation). Awakening and therapy both enable us to define better what we can expect from the non-self, and what we should expect from ourselves, by clarifying the relationship between the two, using processes which are sometimes different.

Major events and also the main changes in direction in our lives have been identified in the fortune-telling cards of the Rom for thousands of years, as well as in astrological symbolism, the I-Ching, geomancy, the sephiroth of the Kabbalah and transpersonal tarot. We must achieve an in-depth understanding of the principle. The sequence of time distributes different types of fundamental experiences which cannot be experienced at the same time with the same intensity. Depending on the era, one thing will detach itself, be it love, work, family, a search for values, the need to be of use to others, the search for meaning, inner solitude, overall ease etc. Duration is the major source of primordial fields where the self will meet the non-self through varying forms of contact and it has been asking itself the same question for thousands of years: are we free to specify the moment when we will distinguish the presence of a psychological power? Astrological cycles indicate opportune moments, but in spiritual alchemy, consciousness of all the powers develops spontaneously under the influence of the sun.

Developing the energy which corresponds to mars enables us to accept the feeling of being in danger, opens us up to urgency and the unexpected and this function is developed in the army, police and in sporting organizations. Physical exercise of any kind feeds and maintains this tendency. Developing the mars tendency by whatever means always helps decision-making and creates great sportsmen and lovers of competition. It is essential for adventure-seekers and enables us to express our resentment without fear. It should be developed in hesitant people who keep their feelings hidden for fear of disturbing others or of having to justify themselves. When it is atrophied it produces individuals who shun all physical effort and despise their bodies. When it is overdeveloped it exaggerates masculine characteristics. Consciousness of this function is not that easy as it is a steely, sharp, dynamic power at the service of the self and the body and can easily tear the adhesion to the non-self by its combative character, which is prone to violence, aggression and destruction. Mars and desire are involved in a deep relationship, but the function is far broader and moves towards initiative, need and the satisfaction of action, but its ability to think ahead is weak or archaic. It is a power rooted in the present.

The venus function uses receptivity as a flexible tool, if it is developed without constantly projecting itself onto objects, people to love, different forms of attachment to what is gratifying or pointless idealization. This function develops in the early years of marriage and allows us to catharsizec.f. Scott Peck's undisputed masterpiece describing his spiritual adventures, The Road Less Travelled. the other person (bring them inside ourselves). It requires and seeks out harmonious feeling and avoids conflict. Developing the venus function enables us to ‘smooth the rough edges'in relationships, by accepting the legitimacy of character configurations which differ from our own. When it is experienced in a conscious fashion it does not lead to bad compromises because it maintains a taste for higher harmony which is not satisfied with submission. When it is experienced unconsciously, the self lets itself submit to those whom it loves. It is characteristic of the musician, painter and the artist in general who has developed the ability to listen closely to the world and tries to mix inspiration with the higher impulses which pervade him. It can rise very high and produce a feeling of real, universal, unconditional love which is independent of all objects and it therefore allows us to recognize and assimilate the supreme authority of the universe through unforced submission based on gratitude. It is a very flexible power which treats duration casually; it has strong ties with the past, the present and even the future which can come into conflict with each other, thus creating tragedy.

Saturnian power is difficult to summarize. It can be used skilfully not to reduce the world to one's own notions, but to isolate its true principles and to describe their morphology. The saturn function fights emotional projections, but nevertheless creates a few more subtle ones in the name of principles, morality and values. It allows us to create hierarchies and to order things. All mental activities develop it, but personal thought is essential if it is to become a proper tool. We are always dealing with it in one way or another and if we put it to one side it can spring out forcibly from the subconscious and trigger numerous guilt processes which are conducive to initiating a process of disidentification. Its power lies in rapidly crystallizing things that have been gathered together haphazardly and the ultimate would therefore be to use saturn in a fluid manner which can be rapidly renewed. We can build coherent systems, but reassess them constantly and gain the higher shores of saturnian waters, which are highly rigorous and describe immutable realities which are protected from contingency. It is an abstract power which tries its hand at timelessness, favouring the long term over the short term if it is more attractive, which means that is diametrically opposed to mars.

The lunar function is so huge that it cannot be broached without imposing restrictions on it. Reducing it to the principle of viscosity between the self and the non-self synthesizes nearly all its component parts. Instinctiveness, pure emotivity, emotional reactivity, sensitivity and a primary attachment to the appeal of the factual – this function works to keep the self in its environment in the most practical and easy way. It is the eye of nature which is fearful on the one hand and yet on the other is aware of the unusual things that every moment brings. It is, therefore, a huge function, both positively and negatively. It takes care of what is close by; it is a feminine function and the moon represents the mother and sometimes woman. From other perspectives, it distributes the light of the sun and represents growth. It can be associated with memory and the unconscious. Being at the end of the chain, it is a difficult function to master because it presents the identity with numerous emotions, thus reminding it that has characteristics of its environment and of the moment. It roots us in the present, but also in the ephemeral. It is the most attentive ambassador to what the non-self brings us in the way of pleasure or suffering and it is, therefore, a subtle sense which finds it very difficult to detach itself from appearances, desire and expectation. It is a power of the past in the present, which can become a power of the present after a transformation.

The sun is to some extent its opposite. It is not an identity which feels, but one which wants, wishes and one for which the future will always be more of a promise than a threat, come what may. Whereas the moon keeps us rooted in the Earth, the memory of the world, the family, the tribe, the tangible, cycles of life and finally the contingent, the sun anchors us to the Heavens, to primordial things which duration can neither provide nor endanger - spiritual conquests, the victory of immutable identity over the changing world of appearances and access to inner spaces which nothing can disturb from the outside. The sun has several names in Sanskrit to emphasize its symbolism. It is a synthetic power, which perpetuates the triumphant past of the self, and uses victorious memories, but opens itself to the present and the future by aspiration or intensity and searches vaguely for what escapes duration, in order to establish the being. It is the true decision-making power, but choices are hatched further down the line in the generic consciousness as a consequence of planetary combinations.

The two light sources must develop jointly or character caricatures will appear – either of a strong, determined personality without any sensibility, which tends towards triumphalism, or of a permeable personality which is mindful of the moment but intermittent, weak-willed, too sensitive to events and which pretends to adapt to everything, but in fact gets lost in complaining and seeking refuge, without being able to confront anything.

Jupiter encourages us to find our place as a unit dependent on a group, whereas the sun targets the individual as a unit for the self alone. It enables us to recognize ourselves as members of a community and encourages value-sharing. Unlike saturn, which is depicted as its opposite, it is an open function. The jupiter function adapts the self to the otherness of the group using the most effective compromises. It is a major, dynamic, socializing force which does not try to complicate matters. Jupiter's intelligence is opportunistic, even hypocritical, benevolent, conformist and sensitive to the interests of the group. It allows us to feel that we belong to a human group which we support and by which we will be supported in return. Jupiter encourages us to share collective values and makes us want to belong to organizations based on predicates shared with others. It is also a force for pure development which can reinforce the attachment to objects of our senses. It is an intelligent power in the way in which it deals with the past, present and future, which it tries to conciliate whilst knowing how to make opportune choices.

Mercury reveals the hustle and bustle of things, actuality and constant renewal. It is a mental function which derives satisfaction from exploring the mysteries of interaction, communication and ideas. Mercury favours writing, intellectual collaboration and oratory and can develop a love of learning which never ends. It is difficult to genuinely encourage the mercury function, which is full of sly opportunism, because this function offers its services to everybody, be they the ego or the soul, the honest or the deceitful mind. It is difficult to learn without copying or imitating or to free oneself from models quickly. Mercury is too strong and suggests means of escape in which solutions are seen without being applied. Mercury is the power who works the least hard in theory to conserve the past. It is in tune with the imagination, for better or for worse, which can compromise its ability to think ahead. However since very few human beings are aware of it independently of the other functions, it is nearly always subordinate to critical conservation rather than real innovation and tends to be at the service of a dominant tendency or two rather than at the total disposal of the self. By contrast, it knows how to vary the forms of faulty processes to test them to their limits. It looks towards the near future, to open and volatile abstraction and information and can be caught out at its own game of understanding for the pure pleasure of it, without drawing any conclusions. Although it is very wise, it can evade the present, but those two guardians of nature, the moon and Mars make sure they anticipate its escapes and flights.

Every individual therefore feels a particular predilection for developing one or several psychological impulses and ultimately it is the inner sun which should make the most of this development and assimilate the qualities displayed in the depths of its personality, sometimes in a contingent or artificial context. When one aspect of the personality is excessively well-developed this can lead the self to always view itself "in the same way", so that it becomes unable to change its view. Not just medicine, but also everyday life provides us with information on fluctuations of the self, diseases and crises relating to factual events or, worse still, identity crises which impose a form of disidentification for which the subject is not ready. Life is governed by the subtle meteorology of order and chaos existing between the psychic fluxes. If the self tends towards order and does not succeed in achieving it, then chaos manifests itself and division which cannot be overcome with the artifice of will establishes itself between the different masks. Certain events then demonstrate through the accumulation of memory that imbalances have formed.

Those who are very sexually active and decide to cut back will find it more difficult than those with less excessive behaviours. (mars/uranus/pluto). This can even lead to very serious inner conflicts when the person is repulsed by the sexual act but feels compelled to keep returning to it. Alcohol and drugs raise the same issue of addiction (moon/neptune), namely of the formation of an inner quasi-autonomous «second nature» which is in conflict with the core identity. Mercury loves tobacco and this is the reason why it is so difficult to give it up. The situation is the same for feelings (venus). Sentimental love, which differs from universal love which drops the object, wants to become closely involved with another being. Many people suffer more than they expected after a relationship break-up even if it was what they wanted and agreed to, just as mothers and fathers are swallowed up by their role as parents if it is a difficult one, as the family player represses the intrinsic self (moon and saturn). Our human condition tries to fill itself with unity and achieves this by archaic means such as affective identification, addiction or an obsessive second nature. Our race seeks unity passionately, but through very ordinary means which are bogged down in the impulses of the evolutionary menagerie, in an animal nature which defends its territory and the self with its claws, shell and its ability to flee, hide or disguise itself, which are all wonderfully well adapted.

The path seeks unity between the self and the Whole based on a deep deliberate decision to understand Reality and to share in the wonder of Consciousness, which naturally implies exploring the mind which connects the subject to the Whole. The path takes into account the need for essential unity, which it nourishes and develops through examination of conscience, systematic reappraisals, meditation and other secret protocols belonging to tradition or recommended by traditional methods. Profound insights sometimes reveal immutable worlds where consciousness of the self rests and builds up its strength. From these fields the impulse itself can reveal its own laws, structures and cycles. Nature becomes submissive there and we can proclaim like St Luke that the truth will set you free. Constant change is required in order to stay stable because nothing is immobile at the heart of otherness - the non-self. Movement and rest are connected, but are not opposites. Order and chaos live side by side and entwine. Searching for immobile stability causes us suffering. Stability is dynamic and this is the secret of sadhana which is on the lookout for metamorphoses.

Recreational aside

Yin and Yang are in a boat.
Yin falls overboard and splashes about, not really bothered that she cannot swim as she thinks that she will take this opportunity to learn and that if she cannot manage then Yang, who has an answer for everything, will come and save her. But Yin feels that water is a wonderful thing and she is so taken by surprise while contemplating it that she forgets to move in such a way as to stay afloat. She knows that she will become exhausted and sink and she is waiting for Yang to come to her rescue. But he does not. Yin sinks, but is rescued by a giant turtle, who carries her back to the shore. When she is joined by Yang she cries «Thank goodness the turtle came along or I would have died!» Yang does not react. Eventually Yin asks him «Why didn't you come and save me, I'm sure you can swim, or you are so strong that you could have brought the boat closer!» «You didn't ask me» said Yang, whose conscience was clear. «I was watching you closely and you had more than enough time to call me». «Yes, but shouldn't it be obvious in a case like this that I shouldn't need to call you to come to the rescue?» replied Yin. «Maybe to you, certainly, but I am called Yang and I don't get involved in anything unless I'm called. I've got enough on my plate with the things that concern me».

Yin and Yang are on a boat.
Yang falls in the water. He is not all that good a swimmer and although he stays afloat, he realizes that he does not like this intangible element, water, on which he cannot get a grip. He tries to keep still in order to think, but he has not found the right position or taken a deep breath and can see that it is not working and his movements become uncoordinated again. ‘Damn it, even dogs can swim', he says to himself. He feels so humiliated by his impotence that he cannot manage to look good. However, as he is very strong, he swims too hard, splashing everywhere and does not get frightened straightaway. Nevertheless, he cannot make his way to the boat and the shore is even further away. It starts to irritate him. He gets tired. He wants to shout «Yin, get over here quickly with that boat, you fool», but the thought of admitting that he needs Yin makes him ill and he wonders if he wouldn't prefer to drown. Of course Yin could not bear it any longer and had even started to bring the boat closer ages ago in spite of the current and with a huge effort and totally exhausted, she eventually manages to come very close with the little boat. With a final effort Yang clings onto the boat, breathless, just when he was really and truly about to sink. Yin is amazed by Yang's silence. «Aren't you going to thank me for saving you?» Yang looks at her disdainfully. «My time hadn't yet come; it's got nothing to do with you. And anyway it was in your interest to save me. Where would you be without me?» Yin could not believe her ears, snivelled a bit then rallied, «It's true, I don't know what I would do without you, but I saved you out of love, so that you would live, not because I needed you».
Yang is annoyed that he is indebted to Yin when Yin doesn't even take the credit for saving Yang - all that counts is that he is alive.
Thousands of years ago, Yin and Yang communicated through a series misunderstandings, but this is what makes the world go round.

The planets dance if the sun shines forth
and no's become tangled up at the mercy of yeses..

Identity cannot be acquired, but must be uncovered and this is a critical point which is misunderstood by the modern mind. The notion that truth is covered by falseness and authenticity by illusion constitutes the true spiritual paradigm. The idea that one fights against the other is shown in practice by behaviour and demonstrates that nature wants to use desire to rule over jurisdictions which we want to submit to a higher authority. As far as the actual morphology of things is concerned, tradition states that the impersonal mind, the self, lies within each being, covered by sheaths of psychic fluxes which soar outwards, while it occupies the centre without the subject noticing. This is the reason, moreover, why most of those who are awakened choose to take action and bear witness. They consider that it is natural to rediscover the impersonal spirit concealed by nature and this fixes their propaganda in an objective vision. By contrast, in its temporal activity the self has several distinct and unusual faces, which are masks when they appropriate the self with unconscious content, or when they usurp other functions by even appropriating the space of the mind.

These inner operations are delicate and subtle and the picture which we paint of them serves simply to draw closer to a diagnosis, to understand the flexibility of inner impulses under pressure from external circumstances. The seven functions get along together either naturally or mechanically, when the self gathers them together under its jurisdiction and manages to live as it wishes or with what it is capable of bearing. Room for manoeuvre is, therefore, very substantial since the individual constitution can withstand great variation between what is desirable and what is unbearable without showing signs of disease. Everyone lives in an average state in which everything could be much better or much worse, without this having any direct effect on the body. In this economy the seven functions are tools for prehension. The seven mysteries can accomplish their task really effectively, with total confidence and conscious satisfaction.

In the Tradition, there are seven principles which are the necessary and sufficient dynamic forces required to express the supreme Tao. If you want to use my system and merge it with Chinese tradition, the seven can be reduced to three – a yin category, a yang category and a neutral power - mercury. The moon, venus and mercury open the way to the non-self, recognize otherness and incorporate the self into the non-self by adhesion. The sun, mars and saturn preserve the self or use the non-self without abandoning themselves to it and introject as it were, the non-self into the self by manipulating it with action, willpower and a feeling of autonomy.

The great upheaval brought about by Freud was the discovery that there lies a very broad range of levels between the healthy state and physical disease in which illness does not manifest itself in any physical form. Psychiatry could have limited this issue to serious mental illnesses, but it seemed in the twentieth century that the mind could be unwell whilst being sustained by adequate physical health. Modern civilization has not yet assessed the full scale of this discovery, although dozens of consulting rooms are opening up everywhere to treat people who are not frankly ill, but who feel overwhelmed by malaise. For the time being the response to the issue is largely chemical, with an impressive array of sleeping tablets, antipsychotics and antidepressants. This calls for close scrutiny. The self, does not know by definition how to manage the mind in all cultures and the loss of traditional roots has a large part to play in causing social ills. The notion that the individual is answerable to the universe has vanished completely in the West. In the supramental optic this is a totally false situation. Connections have been lost in both directions – towards Earth and towards the Heavens. The proof lies in the fact that a civilization based on profit condemns life on Earth to a brief span.

The key to evolution is to know exactly what the Whole represents for the self, what is represented by the other and what the self represents for itself, using the more or less faithful mirror of self-image. The self's commitment in relation to these three distinct worlds is rarely conscious and it is common for us to expect something from one universe which can only come from one of the other two.

Reality, the non-self, is fantasized about as becoming.

The human race expects impossible answers from it. Yin functions naturally expand to be captured by the non-self and to derive satisfaction from this combination. Spiritual alchemy allows us to locate our expectations in legitimate places where they are situated by the horoscope reading, primarily in the sun. This is where the self grasps what is at stake in evolutionary terms, accepts the laboratory environment and rules over the alchemical building site.

The melancholy of old now drifts towards nervous breakdown and stems from the same increase in objective (saturnian) consciousness in the self, which brings the other planets under its thrall and rules over them until the subject as a whole begins to suffer from this heterogeneous takeover. At the same time, the subject cannot do much about it: saturnian power has always been a very profound part of him, but in the depths of his being, as it were, with a more or less explicit (inner or external) authority principle to which it submits.

The self does not know how to rebel against this sudden increase in objective activity which undermines the processes of perception and wrecks the delights of subjectivity. Whichever way the subject turns, the planetary powers are contaminated. Mars can no longer act, venus can no longer create values and love, mercury can only manage negative logical reasoning, jupiter shrivels up and the moon is offended. Things become gloomy and the future is rigged; the subject no longer recognizes itself in this state of resignation, but it comes from inside and it is therefore forced to identify with it. Many new illnesses appear around depression proper which are controlled by saturn, whose aim in a way is to push the individual towards a less eccentric vision of Reality, or one which is less culturally conditioned, which would allow him to take care of himself as a human being. If we work too hard and think that this is normal we can end up by being called to order in our forties because nervous concentration and vital energy are saturated with always being projected towards the outside and not serving the welfare of the body of the individual in question. New diseases appear, but they are only the most external expression of a mind which is ill. Without recourse to subtle diagnosis there is a risk that it will be very difficult to treat chronic fatigue, for example, the new blight of urban life, which affects individuals who are socially well-integrated, but do not have time to discover themselves.

Metaphysical astrologers agree that Saturn can be the best and worst of things – the worst if we reject its power and the best if we respect its intelligence, which works in accordance with the most secret principles which facilitate the Manifestation, whether we like it or not. This is why we only deal with a small part of it, the part which allows us to assert that if certain laws are not observed, this will lead to non-gratifying events which are open to reappraisal. Whether we scorn saturn's rules deliberately or unintentionally is irrelevant. The system works on its own, at a higher level than our choices, using processes which are not always recognized by medicine and science. It is a fundamental power without any trace of complacency, which is prone to suddenly revealing the all-powerful nature of life over what we are and it is one to which we can short-sightedly attribute countless ills. This power has numerous modes of action using our own identity, which is an unpleasant truth if ever there was one, and one which is in fact only accepted or perceived by a few human beings – those who embark on a spiritual quest and are ready to submit heart and soul to a higher principle and those who must carry out an inner battle on the analyst's couch in therapy or, even sometimes in a psychiatric hospital.

This power creates new combinations in the physical and energetic sphere, as well as in the subconscious mind. Despair, an intimation of death, a feeling of the uselessness of life in general or of one's own existence can manifest themselves in a being wrestling with this objective energy, which is already structuring him with a view to the end of life. Manifestations of severe crises are often connected to astrological cycles and occur most frequently between the ages of forty and sixty when a major transition takes place.

Through the sun, each individual establishes his own identity as being more important than anybody else's, but stays closely connected with the non-self through yin forces. In the event of conflict, saturn belittles the self, judges it, brings it into line with external principles and shakes it up as soon as it falters. It then offers the wounded self, which has become its own orphan, every possible father imaginable – guides representing heavenly law, custom or moral law and means of support which penalize independence. War between the sun and saturn heralds the evolution of the self through crisis. Saturn will accuse the sun, which is a synthesis of the self, of not being up to scratch, while the inner bright star will defend itself and find excuses by using all those ploys which consist of making the other powers agree with it and identifying scapegoats. Saturn allows us to stand back from ourselves and to see ourselves without complacency, outside time, through an unstoppable succession of meanings from which unforeseen reactions will occur, which are called for by this process. We can state with confidence that the self has not yet had access to the individual saturn function in truly primitive societies. It will be experienced passively according to the clan mythology, in fearful observance of the law of taboos and proscription. Revealed religion and writing encourage the development of the inner saturn function which forms through a process of decanting and pruning. An appropriate image for saturn is the germination of purely abstract thought which moves forward infallibly by detaching itself from impressions, sensations and emotions to establish a discourse beyond forms, to seek a truth which transcends context.

The transition from the self towards the individual is facilitated by differentiating between the solar function and the saturn function. Jung recognized that this process gave rise to the Shadow, i.e. that in order to evolve, the self must confront the archetype of the father, find the law within itself and separate itself from its generic tendencies. It is therefore likely or normal that we will see Saturn rising up within ourselves when the inner sun wants to leave and reunite with the sun of Truth. Saturn does not let us move on to the next stage if the alchemical process is superficial or incomplete.

My experience increasingly inclines me to think that diseases, even the most physical ones, have their origins in the mind, i.e. they stem from a flawed relationship between the self and the non-self, because the mind coordinates them both. It is difficult to tell when a crisis can move from a benign to a malignant state, but if we trust in evolution's ability to adapt, then the mind becomes less rigid and welcomes serious or gloomy spells in order to transform the image of the self, whereas the lower planes are generally more sensitive to the impact in the heart, emotions and body. Psychotherapy can become a privileged means of encountering the path to awakening because it requires us to analyse what we think we are and to intervene, thus bringing us the presence of absence of awakening into the light. Crises of conscience are almost blessings or alarm bells, Divine calls which lead us to the path where He will be revealed after having led us to believe that He did not exist just long enough for us to grow up in a form of artificial autonomy where the yang will have proved itself. The alchemist goes through his beliefs with a fine tooth comb and retains the yang to differentiate himself and feed his sun, but he has become deeply receptive and therefore uncovers all sorts of evolutionary clues at every instant. The great process of the identity of immanence and transcendence is being fulfilled.

Many people admit that if they had not had a serious illness such as AIDS or cancer they would have spent their entire lives in those psychological ruts which were swept away by illness. If, like Rudhyar, we believe that the celestial bodies are mirrors and that they become active from the moment they are first observed, then since 1930 when Pluto was discovered, we have been experiencing accelerated evolution which demands deep changes in which construction and destruction can only entwine – like pain and happiness. The evolutionary journey can sometimes contain terrible suffering, a means by which we can make an extraordinary leap both by relinquishing the childish suction pads which keep us connected to the non-self and by finally agreeing to move back up to the inner sun to modify our mechanisms of perception and bring our yin and yang into harmony. As an evolutionary process, pain is on exactly the same plane as happiness and what is gratifying. Its role is to warn us, but it is only an alarm bell. Seen from below, it is the worst possible thing as it can utter loud threats. From above, it provides a link with otherness and the non-self; it is a principle above indifference, which isolates the self from the Whole.

The way we view malaise transforms how we experience it and its meaning and, at the end of the journey, crisis dissolves into a new timetable. The moment is essential food for the mind and I would, therefore, emphasize all the small positive breaks which can come and insert themselves into permanent malaise. Clean, healthy, authentic moments, however brief, can provide the mind with new instructions and it can bring itself into line with the clear, distinct things which it is receiving and rehabilitate the way it works. If the struggle is a deep one, it is a good tactic to be satisfied with pure moments. Accepting their loss without being affected by it is all part of the process. Some phases are so deep that recovery periods can be followed by difficult times again and we can imagine that we are not making any progress. Letting go totally enables us to experience these strong alternating periods of regression and renewed energy without being damaged by them. Saying farewell to something can sometimes seem like an impossible task and this is why periods of respite can be used as levers and given a therapeutic role. This is possible if lunar sentimentality has been burned, if the feeling of victimhood has dissolved under the touch of evolutionary potential and solar faith, if venusian attachment makes way for universal love which is free to be expressed without an object and which retains the unalterable memory of the person who has died and if the sun finally manages to love itself and to assimilate loss and death into the absolute of existence. There is nothing to contraindicate a full recovery and once one gets to know saturn and pluto's energies we can understand that their transformation is a ‘galactic'privilege, an exceptional experience of consciousness which liberates matter so that the Spirit can triumph.

Nature does not like pain, but our being can accept what is unbearable if necessary as concrete proof of our commitment to the path in Taoist terminology, through sadhana, alchemy, or also genuine therapy. Trying to abolish suffering only intensifies it, as anything which has to be torn out by the roots will put up a struggle. Although Jung does not represent anything spiritual as such (apart from counteracting Freud's sexual theories) he wanted to train individuals to at least confront the mystery of existence, whatever else they might then draw from it. He is, therefore, an extraordinary writer if we view him in the light of the Tradition, who respects the freedom of each individual, is mindful of universal categories and who really gave us to understand that the mind easily becomes ill or weak, or falls under the thrall of worlds which manipulate it, such as the collective unconscious, for example. Whereas Freud only wanted this to happen through lower agencies such as the id, or falsely superior ones such as the superself, Jung blazed the transcendental trail by intimating that human beings could also be manipulated from above.

Man would no longer be just an animal who has become aware of himself through great effort and is stuffed with archaic memories, but an amnesiac god who has descended into matter to transform it. With his vision or theory of the subliminal being, Sri Aurobindo invites us to consider that we all possess a counterpart to our subconscious stuffed with dark memories - an involuted supraconscious, which manifests itself when evolutionary memory is cleaned up - a process which begins in therapy, continues with awakening and is constantly confirmed in more advanced stages.

Spiritual Alchemy points out the path to liberating the subliminal being which is bigger than us and already within us, capable of forming wishes so strong that they can even bend the laws of nature, since nothing is immutable and everything is just made up of habit. Holistic therapy can wake the subliminal being and begin to produce altered states of consciousness: the ephemeral but burning sensation of existing so that we never die, the violent feeling of being deprived of one's being or of playing hide-and-seek with it, the profound intuition that the self is only just starting to express itself, like a mere child discovering language, or also evolutionary intuition, which is a sensation experienced by the mind when it has gone beyond the world of thought and the brain acts out its role in a different way. Cleaning out the memory is the goal in therapy, but in the quest it is a means. Cleansing the past unbolts the door.

Predominant psychological functions fight to occupy more and more space and to trample those forces which are fragile during crises even further. Those who govern want to impose their strategies in order to govern according to preconceived plans. Receptive types are too easily influenced and are followers and volatile; they prefer casualness to making artificial corrections. Active types are too determined and constructive and avoid the sphere of totality by cultivating a priori assumptions about what is useful and what is not and by using these to build strategies which are so full of their past and ambitions that they can only effect modifications, without any real change of consciousness.

Self-image, which determines what we expect of ourselves and of our relationship with the cosmos, can be too yin, vague, plastic, sinuous, volatile, or too yang, straightforward, spuriously precise, fixed and caricatured. Therapy establishes the self first of all, seeks out its integrity and subordinates the non-self to this approach and the work which it recommends on the self-image is less demanding than in the path. The quest or sadhana calls for potential solar transcendence which depends on the Whole as a prerequisite for treating the self and self-image. The passage of time is the only thorough instructor.

Planetary combinations require us to meditate deeply on the mind's powers since through the seven powers and several other simple criteria, such as understanding the Elements, we can see the One splitting into powers which are distinct and therefore different and dispersing across the expanse using the turbulence of duration which submits colours and psychological tendencies to constraints, unforeseen factors and unknown scenarios – all of which require the self to find solutions which it does not have to hand in its repertoire of past answers. Everything is hanging in the balance at this moment: the evolutionary stake which consists of confronting the non-self and adapting one's responses on a blow by blow basis using intuition, which has become a superior intelligence, or historic regression which merely consists of supplying existing answers to new problems. By following Lao-Tzu's principle that we should Darken what is already gloomy to find its subtle origin, we bow down before the huge reality which has created us and which is beyond us. We feel that we owe our very existence to a supreme and inscrutable mystery and this feeling gives us the necessary humility to accept what is unpredictable, indeterminate and provisional. We accept the evolutionary imperative symbolized by powerful commitment towards the light of the Spirit. By evoking the difficulties in achieving this, or of even undergoing successful therapy, we are able to define the conditions which are necessary for them possibly to succeed.

In specific circumstances, an event can bring out an individual's deep structure. We then plunge even deeper into nature's stranglehold since it eventually reveals the dominant structure of the self. Factors leading to revelation lie outside the norm and present themselves in the form of extreme circumstances, terrible ordeals, shocks, illness or, by contrast, as periods of exceptional luck in which euphoria establishes itself in a sort of excessive happiness which must be controlled. In rare moments of extreme coincidence with the non-self or, by contrast, of serious conflict, the dominant trait imposes itself and leads the self to reveal itself in a deep form in which its compulsions and talents are mixed together. I would like to approach the issue of the repetitive mode again from a different angle and would invite the reader to place himself in one or more of the following categories.

Affective types often want to reduce everything to wishes and feelings and strive to resolve their problems with even more wishes and feelings which they have taken the trouble to modify. This is a disastrous strategy if the origin of their malaise lies in a wounded affective tendency which is finally laid bare and cannot redeem itself on its own by simply substituting the object.
(Working on the self, letting go of the non-self and liberating our self-image from the opinion of others).

Pragmatic types persevere in trying to achieve concrete things and can struggle to understand that transformation can stem from something other than an action, fact or procedure. Even if they have a mental block in life due to hyperactivity, for example, or a lack of subjective life, they will still try to cope by using the same strategy which got them into a mess - a practice or procedure responsible for magically resolving their problem, without examining in depth the materialistic attitude which plunged them into malaise through neglecting their feelings. What would be welcome is a real inner resolution which is informal, vigilant and fixed, but they consider that it is impossible or inappropriate and want facts where only inner effort will show the way out.
(Work on the self, let go of behaviour and the idea of success, accept the role of chaos, which complements the order of the non-self and discover one's inner sun).

Rational types reduce their strategies to methods and do not always know how to learn lessons from feelings, which they find embarrassing because emotions are often uncontrollable. They want to cope by putting to one side those elements which do not fit into their personal vision which they hone to perfection, always avoiding the same blind spots. They are looking for a way out on the map rather than out in the field. They are ready to make numerous sacrifices to resolve a situation by applying their narrow logic and they fail to take their own yin into account.
(Accept that the non-self is chaotic, enlarge the self, relinquish the will to control, do not repress emotions or be ashamed of them, liberate past emotions, welcome uncertainty calmly).

Emotional types are firmly attached to harmonious feelings and want to change, but only if they do not suffer, which most of the time is frankly incompatible. They want to be flattered and if they are not, they cherish the hope of coping by miracle or through the intermediary of another person (like a little tugboat). They reject difficulties, even if they are necessary.
(Transform the feeling of victimhood, seek a self-image which is independent of circumstances).

"Psychic" types place their trust in intuition and dreams, plans and impulses and only want to act on the basis of inspiration and without discipline, which is not adequate. They have no decision-making criteria and operate in a broad emotional register, which they have a wonderful ability to make even broader in a crisis, veering from laughter to tears in the same day without being affected by it. However, they are apprehensive about having to structure themselves, which is commendable from a certain point of view. Non-intervention means they leave the fight between Nature and divine evolution open and incur substantial risks.
(Forge structures to unite the self and the non-self, even if they are only provisional, differentiate between the stable self and inspirations and impulses).

The self depends on psychological functions each of which acts according to its nature as surely as planetary orbits depend on their relationships as a whole and on the masses of others in order to circle around the sun in a state of equilibrium without crashing into it or getting lost outside the solar system. Therefore, as soon as the self stays attached to one facet and as soon as a problem recurs and absorbs the psychic flux, it is no longer a sphere – just like a drop of mercury which rolls along a slope without worrying about a thing, but becomes a polygon. The face which is connected to reality, to the Whole, seizes the moment and monopolises it with confusion. The solar system also functions as a unique whole, just like the self which splits itself several ways and returns to the centre. When we are healthy, each individual function's authority is relative, but it can nevertheless be excessive as a result of complacency or deficient if the function has been padlocked by nature after having been wounded in the course of action. By following the seven powers it is possible to assess the likely risks, to understand the transition from sphere to polygon as a property of the mind which it is better to follow wherever it leads us rather than to try to control in vain.

Desire and initiative can withdraw from the self after we have made a disastrous decision. The need for love to project onto another person or to experience unconditionally for life and for all human beings may never come back after a failed upbringing or love affair, or a bereavement which feels particularly unfair. Sensitivity can withdraw after a period of uninterrupted suffering and a hard personality replaces spontaneity. Deep humiliation or failure can paralyse jupiter and encourage the individual to become desocialized or to wound the sun and cause it to abandon the will to be exclusive to the self, to be what it is. Behaving erratically or becoming a fundamentalist are two types of saturnian reaction to shocks which have shattered the function which structures values. Failure at school or at work can wound mercury and make the subject turn away from reading, thought, the intellect and from the need to communicate properly. Events leave subconscious traces. An upbringing which was too authoritarian or not authoritarian enough diverts the saturn function. Too much or too little love diverts the venus function and too many or too few verbal exchanges divert the mercury function (mental representation). Too much or too little security diverts the jupiter function and too much or too little in the way of physical contact in early childhood diverts the lunar function.

A return to the past is manifested by excessive, involuntary, liberating emotions which restore the authentic function. Crises and serious diseases are living and organized quasi-autonomous processes, which are destined to make us lose agility by force because it is impossible to do it willingly. Illness is often a life-saving process, but one based on principles which we are at huge pains to identify because the form and content are opposed. Some diseases are safeguards, others are calls to order, but all of them are a springboard to a deconditioned identity. Nature does not care about our vision of the world and amuses itself by destroying us or making us change it. Reactionary responses which block evolution stem from major prejudices which call for one of the three archaic modes of treatment – curling up, attack or flight – and sew the self to the non-self by a given form of behaviour. A whole range of responses is available, with four different modes.

Overwhelming guilt (saturn),
or casualness (the moon),
or rushing and escaping into action (mars),
or refuge in an idealized imaginary world (venus).

These four types of inappropriate, very primitive and deep responses correspond in astrology to planets which rule over the four angles, that cross which determines the fundamental spaces of the archetypal chart.

Guilt naturally accompanies curling up, but it can make do with attack and tries to hide in non-commitment (compulsive saturn).
Casualness corresponds to flight or non-commitment, which it confirms splendidly, but it can often quite easily add a gloss to attack, particularly in the case of aggressive women and gladly accompanies curling up. (Compulsive moon).
Escape into action often imitates attack and violence, which suit it totally, but it rarely teams up with curling up (or only in the case of a rare and compulsive form of compensation), whereas, by contrast, it can make masterly use of lack of commitment by filling it with artifice. (Compulsive mars).
Taking refuge in an imaginary (ideal) life corresponds perfectly to non-commitment, which it feeds with expectations, but can be easily associated with a policy of attack in a closed environment, with the individual moving from lethargy to violence with no middle ground and it can sometimes ease intense curling up. (Compulsive venus)
When these four reactionary tactics are combined with the primordial compulsive ternary, they yield twelve fundamental scenarios – generic processes of refusal to evolve whose timeless power is felt in all sadhana or psychotherapy. These mixtures combine a sort of emotional, material and physical attitude - attack or violence, flight or non-commitment and curling up - with a state of mind, something more abstract or mental, which justifies and lends its support to emotional states. This subtle collaboration of forces seeks a perverse sort of harmonization of the mind and behaviour which becomes homogeneous in pernicious and unhealthy drifting. The self is both the victim and the instigator at one and the same time.

Our magician's hat is our vision of the world and it is up to us to constantly create and destroy it. This work accompanies and complements our thoughts on self-image. As you will have guessed, the magician's wand is the imagination which mends the holes in the fabric of reality when it tears, for we cannot live without a representation of reality. We cannot bear to throw the magician's hat away when it is all battered and full of holes and make another one. This crisis should allow us to get rid of it, it is designed for this purpose from an evolutionary point of view, for breaking the frames around things and opening up the wide expanse, but since this old moth-eaten hat is all we have left, we hold onto it anyway. We are as attached to it as to a childhood teddy bear. We therefore patch it up with higher illusions, which is better than nothing at all. I would like to take the liberty of providing the tools for transformation to facilitate this task and to avoid the two major pitfalls:

Getting too involved and shutting oneself away in asceticism without knowing how to get back to the viscosity of synchronicity, the principle of adhesion of the self to the non-self which makes each day an oracle because so many clues abound.

Getting too close to the non-self and losing oneself lovingly in it like a passion, without knowing how to find the independent, conscious, present self when synchronicity no longer works and we really need to know who we are without objects in which we have invested emotionally, crutches and maps of the truth. We cannot understand otherness well if our understanding of the self is embryonic. We cannot love our children if we are not sure enough about ourselves to accept that they do not resemble us. We do not understand our spouse and prefer instead the image created by our attachments which provides us with food for own identity to a greater extent than the real being. We reject otherness and search only for what is identical. We strive after the mirror-world, i.e. the world of family, tribe or our own navels. We are able to share what is familiar wonderfully well, but we cannot share difference.

Accepting difference, welcoming what does not suit us and adopting the unacceptable – this is the process which leads to self-recognition: the absolute legitimacy of Reality. Evolution requires us to look more closely at the magician's hat which came from our grandfather or from who knows where and asks us to study our self-image. Working with the magician's hat is about prehension of the non-self and how it feels and tastes, whereas work on the self-image is concerned with the search for identity in the first instance.

If we want to pursue our evolutionary investigation, to question the Divine about ourselves, to plunge our sadhana, asceticism, or alchemy into the mystery, then reflection on the cosmos is called for and a consecration will arise to assist the self-image in the quest for the absolute. Evolutionary acceleration exerts pressure on human consciousness. Holistic intuition, i.e. the feeling of taking part in life and the cosmos in some way beyond the family or social function can only increase naturally now that supramental contagion continues and that powerful energies are contributing to changing subtle conditions on Earth.

There has been something different in the air since 1967. The walls are going to crumble. The time has come for the self to examine itself and pay sustained, direct, spontaneous attention to its modes of perception, just as it is necessary for it to take note of its deep dissatisfaction which no object can satisfy.

May Indra reveal to you how all things are pervaded by the same sense.

Natarajan, January 2004.