Humanistic Psychology, we have to say, is revolutionary to some degree. It refuses to formulate personality theories like other psychological approaches, refuses to categorize people and to contribute that way to their compliance to the Establishment. It symbolizes the transition from the human who complies with laws to the human who transcends them and unleashes, literally, a burst of creativity to the world. Mental Cure for Humanistic Psychology is not the restoration of the individual to a “Functional” state but his encouragement in order to become as unpredictable as possible.
In order to to describe the issue of choice between social norms and individuality in astrological terms, a very successful method is what Dane Rudhyar described in his work as the four levels of consciousness. This, for example, explains why in astrology from a social psychology point of view, emphasis is given meaningfully to Moon and Saturn, whereas in humanistic astrology planets as the Sun, Uranus and Mars are the ones that promote human to stand out, and are therefore more important.
Indeed in his analysis, Rudhyar talks about four types of consciousness which classify human behavior and therefore also the interpretation of a natal chart, depending on the consciousness level of the person who owns it.
These types or levels of human experience and interpretation are:
• The biological level
• The sociocultural level
• The individual level
• The transpersonal level
At the biological level astrological interpretations focus on material issues and matters of survivor. The planets correspond to physical or alchemical substances and body organs or perhaps to elements, metals, and minerals. The most important effects are the Sun’s and the Moon’s which define the biological cycle of everyday life. Both the Sun and the Moon express energies, the Sun expresses the energy of vitality, and the Moon expresses the nature’s rhythm of change such us the tides or the human menstruation. At the biological level, the basic polarity of the chart is the Sun – Moon polarity, given yet, clearly with biological characteristics.
At the sociocultural level, the person is not considered anymore as a set of organs which work with each other and are affected by the various planets. Instead, the person is considered as an undivided biological unit and is treated as such. Having achieved biological unity the emphasis of consciousness now focuses on the psychology and the sociology of the person. The person now faces new dilemmas which are formed by social and emotional influences, influences which relate to the persons relations to other people. At this level social planets like Jupiter and Saturn become more important and the Moon as the power to comply and conform in order to be accepted has more power than the Sun in forming the person’s behavior. The basic polarity of this level is Moon-Saturn, Cancer-Capricorn or 4th to 10th house. This - if I might comment - is usually the level of interpreting when one is interpreting the chart from the traditional astrology point of view and mainly the seven traditional planets' model.
At the individual level, the person tries to escape from the group consciousness control and from the roles that are assigned to him by society or family or friends and tries to complete a process we call individualization. At this situation one takes individual decisions and also the analogous responsibility for them, even if he/she comes to conflict with his/her environment. At this stage, the person learns to differentiate between his individual interest and the ones of other people around him and shows a tendency to integrate his emotions under a unified will, creating a healthy or unhealthy personal ego. The Sun becomes again the dominant influence at this level, but this time hard aspects of personal planets to Uranus, Pluto, or Neptune, might indicate the process of breaking free from group consciousness.
The hardest level to understand is the transcendence of individualism or else the transpersonal level. At this level the person which has formed his own egoistic kingdom, is called to unite with something else beyond himself. Philosophically at this level, a soul is attributed to the person. It is however difficult to define the soul in psychological terms and what it does to human behavior at this level. Carl Jung tried to describe it by saying when one is influenced by the soul one is united with the collective unconscious. Rudhyar believes that it is not exactly that. He rather suggests the soul allows us to understand that in the human family, everyone has a position, if he voluntarily submits his ego to service of mankind. This sounds more Christian, but Rudhyar says that it is an experience that we feel in our organism. Unfortunately, for most of us, it remains unknown how it is experienced, as most of us operate consciously somewhere between the social and the individual level.
In any case, at transpersonal level, the human stops living for himself and doesn’t focus so much to what today we call the individual evolution. On the contrary, he puts himself to the service of the collective whether that is Humanity or the Planet and acts more as a conductor of a higher consciousness, than as a person, achieving in a sense a unity with the collective. The Moon again becomes more important indicating the Soul and a transition of planets to their higher octaves might take place (Mars to Pluto, Saturn to Uranus and Jupiter to Neptune, according to Rudhyar’s perspective)
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