Category Archives: On Life the Universe and Everything

Before the Wimbledon Tennis Final last Sunday I was looking at the chart of Andy Murray with friends over breakfast.  They asked me whether Murray was going to win.  We had taken a copy of the Astrological Association journal with us to breakfast with our friends and it had an article about what it takes to be a great tennis champion.  This gave the exact time and date for Andy Murray’s birth and his chart.  Looking at the transits of Neptune and Chiron to his Mercury and given that the article had concluded that tennis was a game largely involving the air signs and the mind, I realised it was unlikely he would win, something my intuition had already suggested.  Indeed, I had been watching the way Life was setting the situation up for Andy to suffer the agony of defeat yet again with a degree of dread for the suffering it would cause.  Yet, noticing his Mars-Chiron conjunction in the tenth house in Gemini also got me thinking about something that has been affecting me when watching the occassional game of sport and parallels life in general, as sport has a tendency to do.  With Mars-Chiron in the 10th house opposite a Uranus-Moon conjunction in Sagittarius Andy is renowned for his taciturn Scots personality (very much Mars-Chiron in the 10th), and as a whinger who lacks charm.  His family contest that we don’t see the real person (hence the opposition to the Moon-Uranus).  Furthermore, Andy attracts with his public 10th house Mars-Chiron in Gemini, voluminous amounts of journalism analysing his lack of mental toughness and his inability to win at the highest level.  No-one can talk about Andy Murray wihtout opining on whether he will win a Grand Slam tournament and what he needs to do to overcome the best.  He is also seen as having the misfortune to be playing in era when arguably three of the best players ever to play the game are playing at the same time.  In any other era, people say, he would have won.  Yet all this is to miss the point of the real game that Andy Murray is playing.  He is not meant to win; it is not part of his game in life.  With Mars-Chiron in the 10th house his game is not about success but rather coming to terms with and understanding the nature of losing where it matters most to us.  Over the last few years, as this has intensified, he has employed Ivan Lendl – someone who understands his predicament having lost four grand slam finals himself before going on to be successful.  During this period, Murray has learnt to control his emotions and to stop beating himself up and blaming his own coaching team during matches – all good Mars-Chiron stuff.  Had he been winning, would he have learnt so much or developed or changed?  The thing he thinks he is changing is whether he wins a Grand Slam tournament, but this is just the fuel that makes the real game of growing and evolving through the pain of not winning work.  Indeed when Andy Murray choked back the tears, paid tribute to the support of the crowd and expressed the pain of his disappointment, he won the hearts of everyone.  It was such a beautiful expression of humility and genuine sadness that all our hearts went out to him.  This was Mars-Chiron expressed with such humility and vulnerability that it opened all our hearts.  So did he lose?  Not at the real game he was playing, as far as I can see.

And what of Roger Federer?  Roger Federer’s game involved winning, he was always going to beat Andy Murray.  Yet watching his face when Andy Murray was expressing the pain of losing, one could see the conflicting emotions playing out.  What is it like to always be winning when it means others are losing around you?  Had he learnt or changed as much as Andy Murray over the last years?  Indeed Federer himself could not but help being swayed by Andy Murray’s speech and his tributes to Federer.  Federer responded in like kind with generosity towards Andy and perhaps everyone won.  It was somehow showing us with this current painful Neptune Chiron conjunction and Pluto-Uranus square, how to respond to the transits.  There is something about Chiron which while painful in the vulnerability and direct pain it brings has the potential to be the key in opening our hearts to others and causing us to deepen and grow.  We might never chose it ourselves or choose it for others, yet it is difficult not to recognise the impact in terms of our development or evolution.

I was thinking about this when I went on a business trip to Bratislava to coach two close friends, who had both been through the selection process for partnership at a large law firm which is one of my clients.  Like I did with Andy Murray, I experienced a sense of slight dread when I went to coach them both for the first time some four years ago.  They were both interested in the I-Ching and keen to learn more about it and also receptive to Astrology.  I was intrigued to see what Life was up to taking me to Bratislava to meet two such wonderful people so keen to take a wise approach (it was not necessarily the norm in a major global law firm!).  Yet my dread stemmed from my intuition about what Life might have in store for two such close friends, I suspected it was going to test the friendship and see how it responded to competition.  This was not what I wanted, I loved these two wonderful men and the last thing I wish for any of the people I coach in these situations is for them to be unsuccessful, yet often those who are, are the ones who learn and grow the most. When we did the I-Ching at the end of my first visit, one threw Oppression on its own and the other threw the The Preponderance of the Small.  I could see that for the one who threw The Preponderance of the Small, he was such a big personality and so full of confidence that the I-Ching was warning him to be careful (he had the Sun rising conjunct Venus in Virgo and according to Chrissy Philp’s model Virgo equates to Preponderance of the Small – cf. http://www.chrissyphilp.com) that he didn’t get carried away with himself.  This proved prophetic on the I-Ching’s part because he failed the first time round at the event but then passed the next year.  His friend threw Oppression on its own and Chrissy reminded me that according to the stages of development outlined in The Great Treatise in the I-Ching this stage is one where we are tested to come to terms with our fate no matter what life throws at us.  Given this it was clear that the experience for him was not going to be an easy one and indeed he did not get put forward the following year and the year after that, last year, he failed again.  Over the last year I had been coaching the one who made partner each time I came and he told me that the one who had failed was fine and was concentrating on his family and the birth of his third child.  It is an irony here that the two’s peronsalities are in direct contrast to their physical appearance.  The one with the big, confident and dominant personality is physically small and slim, whilst the one with the more naturally modest, receptive personality stands at six feet five inches tall with a large muscular frame.  I could see that the temptation was for both to put the disparity in their positions under the table now and the bigger personality wanted very much for the one who had failed to be fine with it, but I could see this was dangerous, that the sadness he felt at not being successful and the difference now in their roles needed to be aired or it would undermine their friendship.  For the one with the larger personality he felt uncomfortable, like Roger Federer, it was no good pretending that he had not been successful or stopping being such a big personality so that his friend did not feel hurt, he wanted to somehow “solve” it and coach his friend into what he needed to do to succeed, yet from my own experience of being a big personality (I have the Sun rising in Sagittarius), I suggested that all he could do was empathise and be aware of the impact of his personality.  It was no good suggesting that he change.  Instead could their friendship encompass the potential difficulty of the situation? At the same time for his friend, we talked about recognising that his was not a personality that could dominate or lead but instead was a quite beautifully kind and receptive personality.  He also needed to see that being a partner, like Andy Murray, was not his game at the moment, instead he was learning, like Andy Murray how to express his disappointment and to come to terms with not succeeding.  Thus it was possible to provide the opportunity for their friendship to encompass the awkward situation of their different positions and be able to take the learning for both of them, rather than to deny the painfulness of the situation and risk the friendship.

I realise that when watching sport now, I have lost some of my sense of anticipation of the event.  I recognise that it is more akin to watching a film, where you know the ending is pre-determined.  Most matches turn on small incidents of luck or sometimes inaccuracy by officials or technology.  Were we skilful enough astrologers or scientists we would be able to predict the outcome if we could see all the variables.  Yet, we write and think about sport and many other aspects of life as if the individuals involved are affecting and controlling the outcome.  If the latest scientific thinking that we are living in a hologramatic world is right, and given that Astrology is in many ways a hologramatic framework, it is more like we are watching a 3D film.  I suppose that, as with films, we get emotionally involved with the action but yet we know that we cannot influence the outcome and neither can the actors, the script is already set.  Thus in sport, much is written about the reasons why X team won by the smallest of margins over Y team analysing the qualities that brought it about but it seems like an illusion, like Andy Murray, his script never included winning Wimbledon this year.  I suppose that we have to be conned into playing the game of life and learning our lessons through the motivations of our personalities but I am interested in seeing and playing the game of consciousness that the motivations of our personalities serve rather than get stuck in taking too seriously the game of personality.

At the same time as these events I was also attending my last meeting as Chairman of trustees for the Steiner School that I have been involved with for the last thirteen years.  When my fellow trustees and staff were thanking me at the end for all I had done, I noticed that they described the way I had been able to lead the school to a position where the relationship between the staff and trustees was one of complete trust and openness.  The Chair of College (the closest equivalent to a Head teacher) described the fact that having worked in many Steiner schools (as she is now approaching retirement age), she had never worked in one where she felt she could be completely open about her views without having to be careful in anyway and where she also felt able to hear others views without feeling criticised or defensive.   What it prompted me to question was “what can we change?”.  The school still faces many of the same challenges and themes, with powerful personalities, difficulties over organisation, wavering numbers given the economic situation, yet what struck me was that the school cannot escape its chart, or personality, it regularly attracts similar characters and painful situations, yet the relationships, co-operation and goodwill and the ability to learn have all transformed dramatically.  Applying this to business or to the many challenges facing the world at the moment, I realise we cannot escape these challenges, or perhaps ever escape them, yet somehow we can change how we as human race work together to respond to the challenges; the tolerance we have for each other, the goodwill, the commitment to learning together.

The painful myth that business is exploding is that somehow, we can control our material success, that if we work hard enough, manipulate others, manipulate the system we can become rich and that will make us happy no matter what the means we used to get there, but more on this next blog (hardly a cliffhanger more a pause!).

Astrology provides an extremely sophisticated framework for understanding ourselves, others and the patterns inherent in the world around us.  Often when presented with a chart, it is difficult to know where to start to describe the complex and overwhelming information to someone who has no knowledge of it but is interested in understanding more about themselves.  It can be used simply to provide insight about the psychodynamics present in an individual’s personality but I also notice that its real value lies in shedding light on the dilemmas that face people and how to approach these dilemmas.  Today a client of Dawn’s arrived, a young man who was coming to the end of his Saturn return.  Saturn is currently at 23 degrees of Libra and his Saturn was at 15 degrees of Libra, but it was connected by a large stellium in Libra which extended to 24 degrees so in some ways his Saturn return was still active.  He had, in the last year, been through a divorce and had found this very painful but had concluded that he had no other option than to end the relationship because he and his wife simply could not operate together.  He had concluded that he had taken responsibility for the fact that he was so controlling – he had the Sun and Moon conjunct in Scorpio and Saturn, Mercury, Pluto and Jupiter in a stellium in Libra – by opting out of relationships.  Given that he also had Neptune and Venus conjunct in Sagittarius he could see clearly that he had chosen freedom with concomitant loneliness as a preferable alternative to commitment and the intense emotions this created.  Earlier in the day, someone else, who is currently struggling with some difficult transits had rung me to discuss a conflict over whether to go on holiday.  As part of the discussion he had also been discussing some differences of view between he and his wife over understanding of spirituality.  His wife, with Sun and Moon in Pisces with the moon opposite Neptune takes a very spiritual approach to life and advocates the necessity for belief and transcending one’s ego.  The person ringing me, a Sun-Chiron conjunction in Gemini in a t-square with Neptune and Saturn is somewhat more sceptical and requires a more intellectual approach through the organisation of a body such as the Anglican Church.

After speaking to my him, I consulted the I-Ching to understand its perspective on the situation and threw the beautiful 5th line of Fellowship with Men in a situation of Li (Clarity).  Whilst Astrology described beautifully the situations being faced by this person and by this young man who was Dawn’s client, how did this convert into something of pratical value and wisdom which would serve them in their dilemmnas?  To describe the dilemma has some value in reflecting back to us our situation, but more than that, for me, Astrology helps provide insight into what might block us and how we might wisely deal with a situation.  For the young man it became clearer as we looked at his chart that he was still dealing with his Saturn return and my experience of this is that it is a conscious choice that we make to come to terms with reality in some way and to let go of the dreams of youth.  In his case, with Saturn in Libra, it was about relationships and he began to see that in throwing away his relationship he had shied away from a commitment and gone for the Venus-Neptune in Sagittarius dream of some divine goddess who would fulfil his dreams and not taint them with being human and involving him in difficulty and problems.  In this context, the Astrology could be used practically; one of his main issues had been that his wife wanted them to sleep in the same bed but he found this all but intolerable.  Looking at the chart, we realised that for someone who was Sun-Moon conjunct in Scorpio he desperately needed control over his own bed.  He was amazed that the chart could describe how he felt so accurately.  Yet his conclusion had been that this made him incapable of sustaining a relationship and that he should get away from being so controlling.  We all explained that being a family with lots of strong Pluto aspects we were all very controlling in our own ways.  My daughter Ind was brilliant in pointing out with a broad smile that no-one else was allowed to ride her horses but her.  Our point was that he was not going to change his nature but rather needed to accept it and find a practical way to take responsibility for it.  Astrology’s ability to shed light on what can and cannot be changed in our own natures, what we have to accept we might never resolve or change is one of it’s greatest gifts.  In this instance it provided insight into the fact that he was unlikely to change having a controlling nature or having a need from freedom as well.  It had not occurred to him that it was ok to search for solutions such as having his own bed or having twin beds that could be moved together and apart.  His wife had also reflected that perhaps her insistence that he be contained was not accepting his nature.  At this point it is valuable to understand the I-Ching’s perspective.  The I-Ching’s perspective is that relationships are important and more importantly that loyalty is the key to this – as hexagram 37, The Family describes.  In Hexagram 53, the Marrying Maiden, the I-Ching also describes relationships and talks about the need to keep a long term goal in mind – the health of the relationship, so that we are not put off by short-term emotions or difficulties.  Yet the I-Ching is also interesting in suggesting in Duration (another hexagram about courtship and marriage) that the way that we embody our principles and keep them in mind is through a flexible approach.  As it states, this appears to be contradictory, but it is not, it is that we keep the long term goal in mind but are adaptable in how we respond in the present.  Thus, for this young man, he came to see that he had missed his Saturn return and thrown away a wife who, even when divorced, was still concerned to learn how she might have contributed to the difficulties in the relationship (a wife by all accounts well worth holding on to).  He could also see that to avoid difficulty was to avoid relationship and have to embrace loneliness; that the pursuit of some divine image of perfection and going for the drug of romantic love was never to make a relationship with a flesh and blood human being and live in the lonely world of dreams (to understand how to approach relationships and romantic love We – The Psychology of Romantic Love by Dr Robert A Johnson is required reading). In this sense, the chart’s value was in providing the keys for understanding his predicament and generating insight.  In the other person’s case, the dilemma he faced was a sense of disloyalty and the fear that the relationship might be broken or lost should he hold a different perspective from his wife.  Yet, the differences that charts highlight are not indications of incompatibility but just that: differences.  Most of the difficulty with soaring divorce rates, I can’t help feeling, stems from misconstruing difference for incompatibility.  But even if there are elements of incompatibility this does not preclude a relationship, rather these very elements are the work and growth that relationships entail.

In itself Astrology has no wisdom, it can be used to provide information which can then be translated into insight and used wisely and for me, this is it’s greatest value, otherwise it is like a mass of interesting data, fascinating in itself but of little direct value.  I have come across some people who are brilliant astrologers but whose interest is in the data and descriptive qualities not in applying the insights to help others learn and grow.  The I-Ching hexagrams I threw, I realised, were describing the relationship between Clarity and how to apply it to relationships so I leave the last words to the I-Ching:

 Nine in the fifth place means:
	Men bound in fellowship first weep and lament,
	But afterward they laugh.
	After great struggles they succeed in meeting.

Two people are outwardly separated, but in their hearts they are united. They 
are kept apart by their positions in life. Many difficulties and obstructions 
arise between them and cause them grief. But, remaining true to each other, 
they allow nothing to separate them, and although it costs them a severe 
struggle to overcome the obstacles, they will succeed. When they come 
together their sadness will change to joy. Confucius says of this:

Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts,
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

What is the ego? No doubt a very egotistical question to ask!  I wonder about this as many millions of words have been devoted to this elusive entity.  It occurs to me that I have no real idea what the ego is.  I rarely seem to refer to it except in the broad and general terms that most of society will refer to someone very concerned with getting their own way as being egotistical.  This is odd since I have spent most of my adult life reading a plethora of books concerned with the ego.  Instinctively I find myself shying away from individuals and groups bent on conquering their egos.  Why is this off-putting for me?

My own experience of coming to terms with my own personality began some twenty-five years ago.  It came through my connection with Chrissy and the many people who visited her to consult her for advice on their problems and their lives in general and to do the I-Ching and astrology with her.  At the time Chrissy lived in a cottage in the middle of the welsh countryside.  This cottage at the time had no electricity, no central heating and an outside toilet.  Yet, whilst sitting by a fire consulting the I-Ching and reading wonderful books by firelight created an unforgettable ambience, it was not this which was the most magical and valuable element of the experience.  Instead it was the feeling that was generated for all of us by the experience of being there.  This was a feeling that no matter how difficult our situations might be, everything was ok; it was a feeling of deep peace and reconnection, a feeling of coming home.  This was odd in some ways since there were often tears and fights going on and the deepest and most difficult problems were often being dealt with and people’s personalities with all their tricks being openly discussed and exposed to the light.  Indeed, my friends and I often went with a gut wrenching dread in the pit of our stomachs as we knew that our personalities and all their tricks could be quite ruthlessly exposed.  As my friend Ali would relate, he knew as soon as he saw the gravel of the drive that he would be in tears by the end of the visit.  So what made this experience so special since it involved some very difficult experiences and regular tears and fights?  What made it so special was that no matter how hard the learning and how much our personalities might be exposed everything would be ok and more than that, that we were all accepted and loved for exactly who we were.  The impact was remarkable and all of us would rush to be there whenever we were stuck or struggling, or in many of our cases, whenever we could without imposing (and often when we were imposing!).

What was intriguing about this environment was that it did not seem to conform to most people’s expectations of an egoless environment.  Indeed, in some ways it was quite the reverse; people interrupted each other, we all boasted and showed off, people would argue and sort out quite nuclear and explosive fights between them, we would compete for attention and Chrissy reserved the right to lose her wisdom and fall in a black hole.  What made it so different and magical was that everything was out in the open; nothing was hidden.  It was challenging; there was little room for people to get away with not being honest about themselves but there was also a great deal of love. We would all show off, but everyone would enjoy each other’s showing off – we were all allowed to be special and we would humourously compete to see who could show off the most.  Nobody would mind about interrupting each other, because the key was that no-one was taking themselves too seriously, rather everyone shared in enjoying and valuing each others personalities.  We would even compete about whose personality was the worst – “you think you are manipulative, you should see how brilliantly I’ve managed to punish my friends whilst maintaining my sense of self-righteousness”.  We were all learning to take our personalities less seriously, to be less identified with them and to revel in them with humour and to revel in each others as well.  We were not being asked to change, but rather to accept our personalities and be who we were without any preconcevied judgements.  We were being trained also to take responsibility for our personalities in their full glory and to be honest and objective about them.  There was always a sense of play – of playing with our own personalities and each other and there was a lot of humour.  I learnt that I was hyper competitive, that I was very sensitive and that I could be pompous at times.  I wasn’t asked to change this but rather to accept these traits in my personality and to take responsibility for them.

I get the feeling that an ego-less state is often seen like a perpetual nirvana where we live in a constant transcendental bliss, modest and receptive, loving everyone and never interrupting, competing, boasting, arguing or losing our temper.  We are constantly mindful and therefore never lose our keys, burn our toast, forget what someone was saying etc.  My own concern with this is that it seems to come up with a lot of judgements of what is good and what is bad.  Indeed there seem to be a lot of “shoulds” and “oughts” involved and I meet many people who are absorbed in judging themselves and finding themselves and others wanting.  It can feel a very painful, constricting environment where everyone is watching out for egos.  Yet paradoxically this description of the ego-less state feels a very egotistical state to me.  It seems to be a construct or mind-picture about how we have to be, even if it is at odds with our nature.  Don Juan in the Carlos Castaneda books says that the only enemies of a man of knowledge are self-importance and self-indulgence.  Somehow the hunt for our ego seems a somewhat self-important and self-indulgent activity, a search which seeks to make us perfect in our own or other people’s eyes.  Perhaps it is driven by the sad fact that we all often feel inadequate, that we must be better if we are going to be loved or accepted, that we are not spiritual enough.  I remember Ram Dass saying that he worked so hard to be spiritual yet he noticed that more and more people would thank him for being so human! Accepting our imperfect natures with all their creative energies and flaws seems to involve less pride.  Trying to not be something we see as bad (take your pick from competition, greed, jealousy etc.) always seems to hold the danger of driving it underground and making it come out in shadowy unconscious ways.

Is it possible that trying to eradicate our egos is a construct created by the ego?  Certainly the pre-occupation with being good and all the things we should be doing to be enlightened seems to catch people in a competitive spiritual materialism – who can be the “goodest”, most mindful etc.   I realise that perhaps I was lucky to be introduced to an environment where the focus was on accepting everybody and ourselves just the way we were – including all the “worst” elements of our personalities.  Knowing the worst elements of our personalities and being open about them meant we could see them in plain view and so we could not kid ourselves when we acted from a closed heart or were jealous, hurt, competitive etc.  Strangely it meant we were less likely to hurt others and to accept them for who they were.  I can’t help feeling that much of religious and spiritual practice is caught in “trying” to be something, rather than simply being who we are; that really we are all children no matter how old we are and that we already are divine since we were all created just the way we are.  In the end the path of trying to be something is a boring one, it takes a lot of energy and a creates a stifling environment.  When I look at all this I realise that I even have to accept and have a sense of humour about the side of myself that wants to be perfect by not being perfect!! I realise there is no escape but to have a sense of humour about myself.  This is only my own journey and perspective; perhaps it is all a clever construct of my own ego or competitive nature?! I’ll leave others to judge from their own experience and hearts.

Having written this some weeks ago, I have been thinking about this further over the last few weeks and realised that this is in many ways a description of the Taoist concept of wu-wei – doing by not doing.  This also links in to Tim Galwey’s notion of interference.  That is that our role is not to try to become something – a saint, a perfect person, a good person, an ego-less person.  Instead our role is to be aware of ourselves exactly as we are and to accept that and be conscious of our personalities so that we do not try to make them do or be something they are not.  When we bend ourselves out of shape like this it ends up closing our heart down.  It is not that we need to focus on being spiritual and loving but rather be conscious of where we might close our hearts, to watch out for and be very aware of all that could close our hearts down to others so that we can inhibit it.  I know that I can easily get caught in feeling I ought to feel more loving, but if I pretend to be more loving than I am, I usually end up caught in closing my heart down.

As the I-Ching says;

where the moods of his 
own heart are concerned, he should never ignore the possibility of inhibition, 
for this is the basis of human freedom.

Whilst with my friend Chrissy today we were looking at charts depicting our transits over the course of 3 years as a chart.  This allowed us to consider the storylines in our lives.  Chrissy was also speculating on what the story might be for us collectively in terms of transits and in particular the generation who experienced the Neptune, Saturn, Uranus conjunction in Capricorn growing up.  It is interesting to note in this regard that Capricorn is again playing a significant role with Pluto currently being there.  At the same time Uranus is again involved being square Pluto.  So this got me thinking about what the collective story might be.

Everyone around me at the moment is experiencing a lull in work and money.  People’s pay is being frozen or they are being made redundant, for consultants there is less work around.  If we look back to the generation and events of the Neptune, Saturn, Uranus conjunction it was the during the 80s and early 90s that the conjunctions were taking place.  This was an era which gave us Dallas and Dynasty as well as power dressing – with big shoulders (very Capricorn – lots of ability to bear responsibility on our shoulders!).   It was an era when the Berlin wall came down – the capitalist west had won and a whole block of countries were exposed to the capitalist free market system.  Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street in 1987 said “greed is good”.  With Uranus now square Pluto in Capricorn and the banking system in disarray this no longer seems as accurate a picture!  Indeed the illusions of Neptune in Capricorn are giving way to loss and chaos as Neptune has moved into Pisces.  Whilst in Aquarius Neptune seemed to expose us to the virtual world of computers.  Neptune has also been conjunct Chiron.  Somehow the love affair with money has turned sour.  Yet at the same time, something interesting is happening.  Whilst no-one seems very happy and life has turned sour in material terms,  I notice that people are getting more interested in a spiritual perspective and they seem to be having more compassion for each other.  People seem to be turning away from ambition and hierarchical advancement as the road to fulfillment.  No-one seems to be enjoying life as much but in all the coaching I am doing people seem to be looking for deeper answers or answers outside simply work or work progression.  I wonder if we are weaning ourselves off being so attached to money to provide a sense of fulfillment?  In the work context, speaking to a client yesterday they were describing that the motivation in their department is at an all time low and everyone feels down.  This has produced a blame or scapegoating effect where everyone is sure it is someone else who is to blame for the fact they are feeling miserable.  They seemed to think that in the long term it may be no bad thing, in that everyone is having to adjust to not seeing money as so primary.

Certainly my own journey seems to reflect this.  With Saturn and Chiron conjunct in the second house squaring my Sun and opposing Pluto-Uranus, fears about money and having enough have always been a source of anxiety, despite the fact that I have earned well over the years.  Recently, with Chiron in Pisces touching my Saturn I have been experiencing a fall back in my usually very dependable abundance of work.  Initially the shock of this was a fright, but as I have adjusted I have watched myself becoming more interested in the day to day interactions I am having with others and having more time for friends and people that needed my help or that I could share a common experience of how difficult things are at the moment with.  Somehow, this giving up and going with the flow feels very liberating and it is easy to see how the abundance of work had its dangers.  At the same time, it is creating a fresh set of challenges about the nature of dependence with so many people feeling desperate and wanting to grab or attach themselves to others.  I have also been struck by the commonality of challenges and potential black holes that close friends and I are encountering.  We are even throwing similar lines and hexagrams in the I-Ching.

I recognise this is only my story or description, yet it is clear to me that stories are the way we make sense of the world, our ability to store learning and to take meaning from our context.  One of the tests of mental illness is that people lose their ability to tell stories – their ability to make sense of their world.  I borrowed a way of using stories from a seminar with Liz Greene.  She talks about the Sun being our hero, the Ascendant being our Journey and the Moon being our resources.  When I run programmes with people I ask them to describe themselves as if they are a hero from a book or film and to describe their journey and their resources; what fatal flaw they have and what obstacles and monsters they have to overcome.  The results are always quite remarkable.  We ask the individuals to share their stories and everyone is amazed at how accurate the stories are about the individual and their lives.  What is strange is that usually the individual does not see it at first, they are unaware how deeply accurately their unconscious has described their own journey and motivation.  I also ask people what the role of stories is in our lives and they are very astute at describing the way that they convey meaning, create vehicles for learning, carry and re-inforce culture etc.  They are also very insightful about the role of heroes, monsters and magic.  Heroes reflect our aspirations in life but they also allow us to play with aspects of ourselves through analogy and imagination in order to become more than we are, to fulfil our potential.  Monsters reflect our shadow, our fears, illusions and negative aspects.  It is no co-incidence that in so many fairy tales the hero or heroine embraces the beast, the ugly crone or the frog and through their embracing of them, transforms them into something beautiful.  We can see this in practice in being able to embrace our own shadow, our negative sides that we would hate to identify with, that once embraced makes us a fuller and deeper human being.  Also, it is often light – clarity and insight, which disperse the shadowy monsters of our fears or anxieties.  I think that magic in books and films is about awareness or consciousness.  It is interesting that magic takes difficult situations which appear unsolvable and transforms them.  I think this parallels our experience in life, somehow awareness and the perspective it brings transforms situations, even though the situation itself might not change, how we understand it and see it changes.

What always baffled me about films and stories was how unrealistic it was that the hero would take on vast armies single-handedly and defeat them.  Yet, having experienced periods at work when recessions happened, I began to see the truth of this.  When working at Ernst & Young at the turn of the last century (I love saying that, it sounds like it was a hundred years ago!), the dot-com bubble burst, Andersens collapsed and Enron went into self-destruct.  The accountancy firms went into turmoil.  I saw at that time that the Lord of the Rings with Aragorn and others taking on vast orc armies was an accurate analogy for life.  I watched the effects of fear and anxiety transform vast swathes of people in the firm, like a marauding orc army, changing people into their worst aspects.  It was intriguing that the only thing that did stop this rampaging army was individuals.  These individuals were the ones who were brave enough to get the fears (particularly their own) out into the open and not be caught by them.  They prevented those around them being injured and were able to be honest and challenge the fear based actions and negative emotions surrounding them.  Their impact was astonishing.  Not only this, but I began to see that the stories people used provided unique insights into their journeys in life and that stories in general were really describing important aspects of these journeys.  For instance, taking the Lord of the Rings again, I saw that each main character in the Lord of the Rings has their counterpart who represents what they could become if they are corrupted by power.  For Gandalf it is Saruman, for Frodo  it’s Gollum, for Aragorn it’s Sauron, etc.  Not only that but Frodo takes Gollum as his guide in letting go of power.  This is interesting for me as my own learning about power is that it is not being good which is important in not being corrupted by power, but rather being aware of all in us that could corrupt us – our desire for power, greed, competition etc.  If we have the more primal sides of our personality follow in view, they become our guides in preventing us being corrupted by power and being able to choose not to act on them.  It is a similar picture in Harry Potter.  Harry Potter’s shadow is Voldemort, they are the same person.  This is clear from the fact that their lives are so intertwined and they share their link through an old wound which never fully heals – a modern Chiron myth!   It is also intriguing to note that Harry always has to face his most dangerous moments without the support of those parental figures who could help him.  Dumbledore has always been called away to the ministry when things come to a crisis, each figure that Harry becomes attached to is systematically killed off – first his parents, then Sirius Black, Dumbledore and finally even Snape.  It is a journey about taking responsibility to deal with our own difficulties in Life.  What is fascinating is that those people who chose Harry Potter as their hero invariably had lost parents at a young age or had a journey where there had been little or no support for them and they had been unrecognised for many years (like Harry in the real world).  Yet they had not been aware of these connections consciously when they chose the story.

Another level where stories play a significant role is in reflecting our current level of evolution.  Having not watched television or films for many years I was struck by the fact, when watching films again recently, of some of the dominant themes and how they reflected very closely the actions we were taking collectively.  For instance, it was clear to me that most American action films shared a common theme.  The ‘good’ guy was wrongly hurt by the ‘bad’ guy and then set about attacking the ‘bad’ guys and destroying them, in order to protect everyone, or simply for revenge.  This was the same plot that informed films liked Avatar which was haled as somehow groundbreaking but depressed me in repeating the same myth.  The essence of the myth is that if you are the good guys then it is ok to use power and violence to achieve your ends and defeat the bad guys.  In effect that “might is right”.  I couldn’t help feeling that this was dominant myth prevailing in the approach to Iraq and Afghanistan and the response to the Twin Towers.  I watched the way that films manipulated you into feeling that it was great that the heroes were killing the baddies – that they deserved it and it was somehow justified but of course by the end there was no difference between the goodies and the baddies; both were violent and destructive and both justified their violence and power to themselves.  This didn’t strike me as much of evolutionary step.  So perhaps we should be paying attention to the stories we are telling and what they are telling us about ourselves and our own individual and collective evolution.

When at work I use a model for helping people integrate into new roles and new organisations.  This model has three stages; Dependence, Independence and Interdependence.  I first came across it when at Ernst & Young.  At the time I had just been promoted to a new role as part of a small group of partners running a firm wide change programme.  The move involved transferring from the Bristol office to the London office.  Yet despite the excitement of being promoted and in a new large role the first six months were terrible.  I ended up being expected to pay for my travel to London and being on less money than I was on before being promoted and the more I highlighted this the more resistance I got from my boss.  The insightful points I raised a team meetings were argued with and rejected and gradually I began to feel more and more on the outside.  I was definitely in a black hole.  I considered leaving and tried all that I could to try and change things.  In the end, this model of Dependence, Independence and Interdependence came to my aid.  I realised that if I wanted to succeed I first had to be included.  In order to be included I was dependent on others.  I realised that my attitude had been one of “finally they have recognised my brilliance and promoted me” whilst they seemed instead to be excluding me and rejecting my brilliance (strangely I’m not sure they defined it as brilliance!).  I realised that I had stumbled over the issue of how to make transitions.  If I was going to make a contribution, I first had to find a way of being accepted and this brought me up against the issue of modesty.  I decided that even if I just made tea and coffee for everyone at the beginning of the meeting, it was an expression of my modesty and interest in them.  If I wanted them to be interested in me, I was first going to have to be interested in them.  Things began to change quite rapidly.  At the same time, we also had the difficult event of our second child being still born a week after he was due.  This re-inforced my position of vulnerability but it also opened everyone’s heart to me tremendously.  Somehow my vulnerability and dependency on others was the key to everyone’s heart opening up to me.  I also gave up on asking to make changes to my salary and simply accepted the situation.  What amused me to notice was that within a year my boss was fighting to get my salary raised as high as he could whilst I had genuinely given up and was less concerned.  Once I really felt that I had been accepted (and I had accepted others) they began to really listen to the unique or independent points I was making and to value them.  I found my own independent role and within time a strong sense of teamwork and interdependence was created.  A few years later, when I went on secondment to a new organisation as coach and change manager for a high profile transfer of a local education authority to private ownership, I found myself in a similar position, pushing to show my worth and value and make a contribution yet this time after two weeks I could see that I was stuck in the same black hole and changed my approach to work on modesty.  The difficulty with being included is that we are dependent on others to include us, we cannot make ourselves included.  This is why modesty is the key attitude to a situation of dependency and being included.

A few years later in the midst of another transition, I found myself in a similar black hole, but this time, it only lasted half a day.  In my coaching of others, I have found this model of Dependence, Independence, Interdependence (or Inclusion, Assertion, Co-operation as it is sometimes called) very valuable for helping people understand the black hole they often fall in when joining new organisations or taking on new roles.  The temptation and pressure is very high to prove oneself, so we often go into assertion mode of proving we have a valuable contribution to make and showing we can stand on our own two feet, but this only leads to frustration, competition and conflict.  Once people see that they need to do the modesty or inclusion stage first they are able to adapt and put right their poor start within quite a short space of time.  I have been surprised that this has been the basis for most of my coaching where I have been asked to work with individuals who are on the verge of being rejected by their organisations.

Recently, I have been experiencing (with Neptune squaring my Mercury) the nature of this in a different respect.  My son at nineteen, is a fully grown male, standing some inch and a half taller than me.  He wants his space now and to be respected as an adult, yet he lives under my roof, supported by me.  In January he went to Tignes in the French Alps to ski for the season.  Having been independent for three months the return to being at home was not easy.  My friend Chrissy told me that I was being a wimp when I was disturbed by this and that I had to explain that since I was head of the family and supporting him, he was going to have to be respectful or he could set up his own household and become independent (for information on this see the following: www.chrissyphilp.com/heart/What_we_need_to_know_%28I_think%29….html).  I explained therefore that I was top dog and expected to treated with respect but that he was free to set up his own household and be free.  Luke being an Aries responded well to this direct approach and has been a quite brilliantly helpful and dutiful son ever since.  He said he found it very helpful to have it clearly spelled out.  I realised in this, the nature of our interdependence.  I was dependent on him to play his role as a son and not make my life untenable and he was dependent on me to still support him and help him make the transition.  As long as we understood this, all was well.  The I-Ching places great emphasis on this in Hexagram 37 The Family it states that “When the family is in order, all the social relationships of mankind will be in order”.  This is in many ways what we are struggling with globally at the moment, what is the right relationship between dependence, independence and interdependence.  As the nature of the world through global business marketplaces and the internet become more global we are increasingly recognising our interdependence.  We have made attempts to create a sense of interdependence through structures such as communism but this was flawed because it sort to eradicate independence (individuality).  Europe is struggling with the same issue, if you don’t allow countries a degree of independence or ask them to be independent in being able to stand on their own two feet, you create a mess.  Fortunately, getting in a mess is the very thing needed to learn about it and put it right.  Luke and I would not have learnt and put the relationships in their right relation if we had not first got in a nice black hole.  We are in a collective black hole currently with the financial position in the world and also with things like global warming but it is important to understand they are part of a growing process where we are learning about interdependence.  The recent disputes over rivers and dams in China and other countries illustrates this learning stage we are going through.  If a river runs through a number of countries all are dependent on it and the river cannot be said to belong to one country, China’s damning of major rivers from their sources in Tibet is causing havoc in Bangladesh and they are not the only ones doing this.  We are getting to a stage where we are being challenged to learn how to get this balance of dependence and independence right so that we can make the transition to genuine interdependence.

I suspect as we begin the process of exploring space further (as is bound to happen now that space exploration has been taken out of government hands and released into the private sector) we will encounter increasing pressure to agree on how we manage interdependence.  If asteroids start to be mined then who owns them?  Who owns the moon?  Who owns Mars when we get there?  We have started to address this with areas like Antarctica but the challenges will increase.  Bodies like the United Nations are likely to become increasingly important.  On the financial side, it might well take a global solution to deal with our financial issues and at the very least we will be much more mindful of our interdependence from now on.  The internet poses similar problems with its virtual nature and the fact that no one country can legislate about it.  Interdependence is intriguing, it seems to me that the key is how the individual and perhaps the most vulnerable individual is treated.  When we can treat the country or person who is most vulnerable with the greatest respect or compassion then everyone can trust us.  In this respect how we are now treating Syria is critical.  I am not sure that we are doing it well.  We must have compassion for everyone and be on everyone’s side to get this one right.  I noticed that when I first heard about the recent attacks and killings of families and children it came in the same news bulletin that detailed a family in Afghanistan having been killed by bombing.  I struggle to see the difference between these two.  If we are going to generate the trust to achieve true interdependence then both must be a source of sadness to us and learning so that we work to make sure neither happen again.  Recognising that the west is as culpable as the leaders in Syria would be an act of genuine interdependence because it would recognise our common ground of complicity and need to change and we would not be condemning the leadership of Syria whilst perpetrating the same acts ourselves.  We would instead, recognise it is all us and acknowledge our common humanity.  It would be intriguing to see setting the example of what we want to become and mutual learning being the currency of global influence rather than military might and power.

Personally I love Star Trek and I would love to think that we are taking our first baby steps towards a collective view of earth; a federation of every country and person.

If Pim van Lommel is correct (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeLJCdHojU) that consciousness is non-local (ie. exists outside time and space) and he is not the only one who is providing evidence that this is the case, then it has some interesting implications for how we learn and become wiser.  Pim van Lommel describes the brain itself as a transceiver or interface to consciousness rather than a generator of consciousness.

As one of Chrissy Philp’s students, I learnt to distinguish between my personality and my “owner”; my “owner” being the part of consciousness that could stand back from identifying with my personality and see it more objectively.  I have tended to think of this “owner” as being like a parent for the personality; it’s role being to understand, take responsibility for and get the best from our childlike personality.  Ram Dass, from a spiritual perspective, talks about how we become identified with our “space suit” in each incarnation and that part of the goal of enlightenment is to be able to separate our identity from our spacesuit so that we can be both “in the world but not of it”.  He describes consciousness as the “witness” and this is common in many spiritual writers such as Ouspensky and Rudolf Steiner.  It is also common in most religions where meditation attempts to still the mind and allow us to step back from the “mind chatter” of our personality in order to connect with the pure consciousness of being.  There are also interesting implications for astrology.  Is the personal horoscope describing the shape of our transceiver or the nature of our connection to consciousness?  Perhaps it is both.  And what of mundane astrology, is this describing the nature of consciousness more generally – the whole frame? Or is it describing the framework or field on which consciousness plays out?  Perhaps, again it is both.

I have long considered that consciousness is separate from the body because of the realisation that consciousness does not age, most people describe the fact that they feel no older despite the years passing and it occurred to me that this was because consciousness itself lies outside the aging process; it is eternal.  Thus our consciousness is no different at seventy than it is at seven.  If our brains are transceivers (and perhaps given recent evidence our whole bodies) then what does this mean for our development?  What I learnt from Chrissy was the importance of keeping my heart and my mind open.  The heart and the mind are, as I have discovered, almost the same thing.  What I mean by that is that they influence each other so symbiotically that it is almost impossible to separate them; when our heart is closed to someone our mind tends to close towards them and when our mind is closed our heart tends to close down too.  To test this, imagine the person you find most difficult to deal with coming down a path towards you, there is no way to escape and you are going to have to interact.  Now notice your thoughts, how long would the conversation be, what chance is there that it would be open and fruitful?  Now imagine someone you really love coming down the path towards you and notice the difference in your thinking and assumptions.

So why is keeping the heart and mind open so important.  Given Pim van Lommel’s conclusions, keeping the heart and mind open is critical because it keeps our connection to consciousness as pure as possible.  When our heart and mind close down it is like interference on a radio station.  This echoes Timothy Galwey’s concept in the Inner Game where he describes the fact that the role of helping or coaching others is to reduce interference (which is internal not external).  Galwey describes our ability to use our talents as a function of our potential minus interferences.  Our role he posits is not to work on potential but to clear away interferences.  This also fits with Don Juan’s idea in the Carlos Castaneda books, where he talks about the tonal and the nagual.  The tonal is everything that exists and is knowable in the material world and the nagual is the creative agent that works through the tonal.  Again, he sees the role of wisdom as being the cleaning of our tonal, in order that we are a perfect receptacle for the nagual.  Pim van Lommel states that the those who have had a near death experience (NDE) are more trusting of their intuition and operate from closer to a position of unconditional love.  This seems to fit with the idea of an open heart and mind.  One of my lessons as a student of Chrissy’s was that the intuition cannot be trusted if our heart is not open, that if it is closed our intuition gives us faulty data.

All this brings me to the I-Ching and taoism.  The Tao-Te-Ching states that “the great man does nothing and yet nothing remains undone” which fits with the notion that the role of the brain is not to generate or lead but rather to be an open receptacle for consciousness which has its own purpose.  The I-Ching itself in Work On What Has Been Spoiled (Hexagram 18) talks about our role being to clear up that which has been spoiled or gone wrong – to clean our connection, ie. to open our hearts and minds back up again so that our connection to consciousness is purified again.  The I-Ching also states that “all men are one in their hearts” – that there is only one heart.  If our minds or hearts are closed by interference then all we hear is a fuzzy static rather than beautiful music.  In this context the black holes that we experience are the signs of where there is interference in our connection and also perhaps where new channels can be discovered, that is new areas of consciousness can be opened up to allow us to evolve. Armageddon has long been feared as the end of the world, but perhaps, like all good black holes, it is the catalyst for evolution and new understanding.  Certainly in our individual lives experiences that feel like Armageddon are ones we look back on as having been key periods of learning or experience in our personal growth.  Looking up the origin of the word Armageddon, it is believed to relate to the mountain of Giddon, yet the mountain here is a tel, a jewish word for a man-made mound where each civilization built on the previous ones until a hill or mound was formed.  In the same way, the Armageddon prophesied by Revelation and feared by many in the shape of ecological destruction, nuclear war etc. may be no more than the transition to a new understanding or level of civilisation – a new city built on the old one.  This new understanding of consciousness may be just such a moment in our evolution as a human race, particularly as we are moving from the age of Pisces-Virgo, to Aquarius-Leo.  Surely separating the brain from the mind, or consciousness from the individual must be symbolised by the Aquarius-Leo axis?

The current t-square with the sun coming up to square both the Chiron-Neptune conjunction and Mars has been creating a lot of painful situations and a lot of blaming and scapegoating for people around me.  For me, it has generally been my old chestnut of an ailing body.  However, I decided to try a new experiment.  My knee has been bad for a couple of months now and this has prevented me going to the gym and doing any exercises using my legs but I have still been able to do exercise for my upper body.  However a few weeks back, my shoulder started playing me up badly in a way it did some years back and from which it had recovered sufficiently (it’s never going to be fully right again) to not be much of an issue.  Since this blocked me fully from exercise I decided on this new experiment.  So I said to Life that if it was the case that it wanted me to give up on the gym, then I would do that but could my shoulder stop being a problem.  Since I knew my shoulder was pretty bad and that it was unlikely to recover for some time (last time it had taken two years to settle down), I was quite shocked to see that within days it was almost back to normal.  I realised that ever since getting involved with the I-Ching some twenty five years ago (and before that even), my body has been blocking me from my natural love of sport and physical activity generally) and I have vacillated between semi accepting it and fighting it. Perhaps it was time to finally give up this fight?  I am fully aware that a large part of my desire to go to the gym is governed by vanity and fear (fear that I will become fat and more incapacitated).  Watching my body a bit more carefully, I noticed that on Wednesday this week it was a nice day and having worked very long and hard on Monday and Tuesday and being due to do so on Thursday and Friday I decided that I would spend a large chunk of the day gardening.  However, pretty much from the moment of waking up my back was on the verge of spasming and I was barely capable of bending over let a lone gardening.  I decided that Life clearly did not want me to spend my time gardening.  As it turned out, I had work that needed to be done and also much of the day was spent helping friends and family with black holes they were in.  At the end of the day, I went to the Chiropractor who sorted out my back so that it was not a huge problem.  I couldn’t but notice how beautifully it had been crafted, stopping at the beginning of the day, being able to get an appointment at short notice but not till the end of the day.  So what does all this body stuff have to do with unconditional love you might ask, and that is a very good question and one I am wondering about too!  It just sort of crept in there…!  However, it is connected because giving up on being concerned with my body and instead simply seeing it as directing me, linked into the transit in my chart but also to a video I watched the following morning on my iphone whilst setting off for Luxembourg at twenty past four in the morning.  This video was of an interview with a cardiac surgeon called Pim van Lommel (this is the link to the interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeLJCdHojU).  The interview describes the work he did in researching the near death experiences of a number of his patients.  The interview had a profound effect on me since it described his discovery that consciousness is not a product of the brain but rather the brain is a transceiver or interface for consciousness.  He described the fact that these people who had had near death experiences described the same experience of connectedness and no longer feared death, that it had been like a coming home to somewhere they already knew and that this experience existed outside space and time.  On coming back, they trusted their heart and intuition more, experienced a sense of compassion for others and a greater willingness to help others.  Since my friend Chrissy had had one of these near death experiences, I was already familiar with all of this, yet somehow, in this instance, it bought a number of things together and a pressure was released.  Before this on the Wednesday, I noticed in dealing with my family and a young student of mine how much I loved people and cared about their black holes.  It seemed easy to express this and it seemed to make a big difference to them (although it didn’t feel very unusual to me).  I have learnt about wisdom all my life and particularly as student of Chrissy’s over the last twenty-five years, whilst I seem very able to help people, I have often wondered whether it might not be a fraud who has just learnt the form and intellectual structure of it so well that it is almost a perfect act.  The reason for this, is that I have never really felt the level of love of people (or only from time to time) that I notice very wise people expressing.  Suddenly, on the Wednesday and then particularly after the Pim Van Lommel video something seemed to have shifted.  What seemed to have shifted was the culmination of some months or years.  Somehow none of the normal pre-occupations or worries seemed important.  There was just people and trying to help because I really did love them.  Since death was nothing to be scared of and since we only have a limited amount of time, wasting it on anything other than this simply did not seem important.  I had been noticing for a while that giving up on my body and sliding into old age where there is no pressure to be anything or get anywhere has been seeming an increasingly attractive proposition.  Somehow, watching the Pim Van Lommel video was like a final bursting of this and I realised that none of it mattered anymore – all the pre-occupations that people generally concern themselves with; the sense of looking for something that will make them happier, more fulfilled, less anxious, more confident etc.  I realised that I did not care anymore.

At the same time, I am sufficiently well versed black hole game player that I realised that this was probably just a transit and would not last.  This evening came my first obstacle as I went with my daughter to get a chinese take-away.  I was feeling particularly full of love for humanity and there in the chinese take away were three late middle aged me who had been drinking all day and could barely speak or prop themselves up on the counter.  The chinese woman behind the counter had to beckon me round them to the other side of the counter since they were clearly incapable of moving.  They were all heavily tatooed with various piercings and were busy talking to each other and chanting songs in a bleary-eyed way whilst they tried to hold on to the the spinning bar and focus on each other.  They were even talking to the young chinese girl about why she wouldn’t marry them.  All my prejudices were beautifully stacked up and I contented myself with watching the cricket on the small tv screen at the end of the counter whilst noticing how cleverly life had caught out my new found unconditional love!  As they attempted to banter with the young chinese girl behind the counter and started singing racously she told them to shut up and be quiet, but I noticed that she did it with humour and a smile and genuinely engaged them good naturedly, laughing at their responses.  I felt very small hearted in comparison.  At this point one of the drunks turned to me and said that he thought that I looked like a cricket man and started asking me questions about the cricket and I began to answer as I realised that even in his drunken stupour he was somehow picking up on my frosty lack of engagement and suddenly I could hear the child like desire in him to make a connection and when we came to we wish each other goodbye we did so with genuine warmth.  Life had come as a tatooed drunk to teach me the real meaning of unconditional love.

In discussions with a friend recently we have been talking about the nature of happiness.  He has recently been on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh where the focus was on being happy.  This happiness was focused on the present moment and on being.  I was also pondering this when listening to Ram Dass a few months ago discussing his experiences with his guru Neem Karoli Baba.  I was further prompted to think about this during a discussion with friends on a journey back from Oxford.  I ought to point out that this experience was an interesting one in this context.  I had just finished four very long days in London running programmes and fitting in some informal coaching in the evenings with people who were stuck and wanted help.  The last day finished at just after five o’clock and I calculated that I might just be able to make the 5.47pm train to my home station of Kemble in Gloucestershire.  I got to Paddington station at 5.42, just in time to catch the train to Kemble.  Rushing through the ticket hall of the Underground I squinted at the screen showing departures and platforms (the world has become noticeably hazier over the last 5-10 years and everything seems to be in smaller and smaller fonts, a fact attested to by everyone of a similar age to me but strangely rebuked by the younger generation) and could not see the train to Cheltenham Spa.  However, on further squinting, I noticed the train to Worcester Shrub Hill (the final destination is always changing over the years as they play with trains going via Cheltenham Spa on to Worcester).  I noted the platform and headed for the train, making it with a few minutes to spare.  Once settled on the train, I requested an upgrade from the ticket inspector who seemed a bit surprised but provided me with one.  After some time reading I looked up to check where we were.  I assumed that we were somewhere between Didcot Parkway and Swindon and looking out at the houses I assumed it must be Swindon, although, as I pondered I began to think that the houses did not look familiar.  A dawning sense of dread came over me as I realised that somehow I had been tricked and I wasn’t on the train to Kemble.  I asked the person sitting opposite me where we were to hear that we were just coming into Oxford.  Suddenly my sense of relief at heading home after a tiring week had been replaced with a new adventure.  How on earth was I going to get back home from Oxford?  Fortunately, the guard told me that a train was departing for Didcot Parkway from the opposite platform in 15 mins so I crossed over and began to wait.  At the same time, I began to question why Life might have arranged for me to end up in Oxford.  I was due to meet my friend Mario the next day and it occurred to me that he often works in Oxford so I texted him to ask if by any chance he might be in Oxford and heading home soon (since it was 7pm and Mario works less and less in Oxford, I was dubious that this was likely).  The train to Didcot Parkway was leaving in 5 mins time.  I received a text back from Mario to say that he was indeed in Oxford and was at that very moment just coming out to head home.  On our journey home with another friend of ours we were discussing taking leadership in situations.  Both my friends noticed that they were in positions were they were taking leadership but they were left with a discomfort about the implicit immodesty and power of doing so, who were they to lead?  And yet, the situations they were in demanded leadership and nobody objected to them taking it, indeed they welcomed it.  Our discussion explored what it was in my friends that caused their discomfort and for one of them it was having been bought up in a spiritual tradition where to put oneself forward and to try to lead is seen as egotistical.  I offered the thought that perhaps it is the reverse and not to lead for fear of appearing egotistical is egotistical because one is more concerned with creating the right appearance (of being “good”) rather than responding to what the situation demands or others need.  We then went on to discuss what it is in us that causes this and were talking about the pictures we hold and the attachments to being seen in certain ways.  My friend Claudi, suggested that the real issue was resistance – we all agreed with this.

Spiritual disciplines and practices are concerned in many ways with conquering the ego.  Certainly for my friend who had been on retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn, he was engaged in trying to be in the present moment, where, as he points out, there is no worry.  Worry is only generated by thoughts about the past and the future.  Yet, in a review of a book in New Scientist there was reference to someone whose hippocampus had been badly damaged and who had no memories from early childhood onwards and who could not envisage the future.  The individual had lived in a mental institution unable to cope with life, which as the writer concluded, put paid to the notion of “living in the present”.  As I reflect on this, it also occurs to me that almost all animate life, lives in the present without an ability to conceive of the future or the past, indeed we often curse our fate as humans and wish we were more like other animals in not having to worry about the future or past.  Yet, do we really want to give up on being human?  I have to admit, that I think there is something special about being human and I do not want to give up this curriculum and become a dog instead.  However, when I look around me, I do not see that life seems to be about happiness, or at least, it seems to be one factor among many.  I remember coaching someone who was going through a difficult stage at work.  She was in a very precarious role, with lots of very powerful figures and in the end was asked to leave.  She had a tricky personality to contend with and various sadnesses including loving children but being unable to have them.  She had explored adoption but for a variety of reasons had been unable to adopt.  She said to me that her focus over the coming year was going to be on being happy.  When I enquired, she admitted that this had been her focus for most of her life yet that she had been far from successful.  The concern I expressed for her was that I wasn’t sure that focusing on being happy was a very valuable goal since I wasn’t sure that she controlled this.  As I pointed out, what if Life had an agenda next year for her of her husband dying? She was hardly likely to be happy.  My concern for her was that she might be caught, as she had been so far, in setting up an opposition to the way her life actually was to try and control things she could not control.  Her picture was of herself serenely floating through her life untroubled by any difficult emotions.

So if we are not in control of happiness and if we look around life does not seem to be composed of events designed to facilitate our happiness (death, violence, arguments etc., aging) what is it designed for?  As far as I can tell it seems to be designed as a learning experience. Thus I am not sure that trying to control an ephemeral emotion like happiness is likely to be terribly successful.  I think perhaps how we feel is not important per se.  It is only part of the data in the game.  So it does not matter if we are depressed, angry, sad, happy but rather that we are not resisting these emotions or thinking that they should not be there.  Instead, I think perhaps we are learning instead to understand these emotions and not be so identified with them.  Much of time, working with people seems to consist of simply reassuring them that whatever they are feeling is normal and ok.  Particularly when they are having difficult transits – paranoid? – yep Pluto on your Mercury I remember that one, yes paranoia is pretty normal then.  Something about sharing our experiences allows us to step back from identifying with them, we see that everyone else has similar feelings.  We are all in it together, wrestling with these problems and difficulties.  Indeed one of the biggest indicators that it is all ok is that we can laugh together at the absurd experience of life.  I found myself the other day meeting up with a client who asked me how I was.  I thought about it and I told her I was depressed.  She was immediately worried and asking me what was wrong and what she could do to help, I explained why I was depressed; it was cold, my joints were hurting and something else I can’t now remember had happened but I told her not to worry it wasn’t important it was just how I was feeling and it would probably be gone fairly soon (as it turned out, within a few hours).  I told her that I thought Life was pretty depressing at times so it seemed fairly normal to be depressed about it.  Don Juan says that the only enemy of wisdom is self-importance and indulgence: taking our emotions (and ourselves) too seriously and I think he is right.  The trouble I realised with the pursuit of happiness is that it makes us think that any other emotion we are feeling is somehow wrong and then we have set up an opposition to our life as it is and we are truly stuck.

Following a request to help a friend of mine whom I having been coaching and who felt well and truly stuck, we met up to discuss his situation and to do the I-Ching.  He asked me to summarise in a email what I had been saying to him about his situation so I thought I would share these:

Don’t count on the harvest while ploughing.  That is, do everything for it’s own sake because it is the right thing to do, not with an eye to where it will lead.

The people on your agenda are there not to get in your way but for you to learn from and work with.  They will often reflect your own shadow and so working with and aiming to help them (without being attached to the idea that they will change) is worthwhile because you will learn from it and you will transform them in your own mind from obstacles to challenges.

When you are stuck the mind isn’t to be trusted in saying that if you provide me with all the data I will provide a solution.  Often it just chatters and analyses us deeper into a black hole.  Distracting it onto worthwhile activities is often a better route (as the I-Ching says – the best way to develop is to make energetic progress in the good).  I notice that my obsessively analytical mind works better thinking about other people and helping them with their black holes and this has the advantage of using up all the energy so there isn’t much left to obsess about myself.

The value of the Astrology is that it helps us realise that we cannot escape our fate by changing our external environment.  Our personalities are our fate in that sense, we cannot escape them.  At the same time they are not “soluble” as such.  All we can do is learn to develop our owner (the conscious part of us that is less identified with them).  The astrology also shows us that everything is perfect, our personality and all that we are currently experiencing as part of a transit – there is nothing wrong.  You are coming to terms with your fate and realising that you can’t escape it, any more than you can escape yourself.

Accept and expect that you will “lose it” (your current clarity) but just recognising this means that you will not get stuck and attached to keeping your clarity which means that it will come back again.

I have had a lot of people talking to me with difficult Pluto transits recently.  In each of their cases, they are struggling with a battle within themselves, almost as if their own personality is at war within them, engaged in a power battle to the death.  Any attempts to gain peace simply fuel the battle.  How do you cope with this – it can be very distressing and debilitating?  My own experience (and it is only that, others may have better ideas) is to expect to get stuck and to go with it.  That is, if you are awake for 2-3 hours in the night, then instead of fighting, be awake and do something else with your time – write or do some activity.  Most of all, expect to be awake and consider that “normal”.  The second thing I find helps is distraction, each person I’ve worked with has noticed that they are stuck or getting into a negative spiral, only when they have time to, so getting the mind involved in something else prevents it from focusing on trying to “solve the emotion”.  My own experience was that I realised that my mind was a liar when it said that if I thought about the problem it could review everything and provide a solution.  Instead, thinking about and analysing it simply heightened the emotion, which made me think there was a bigger problem which my mind really had to solve and so on ad infinitum.  The only way out was to take my mind off the situation until my emotions calmed down again.  Now, I tend to just notice that I am stuck and assume that I have a few days or weeks of a bumpy ride without thinking that I am going to solve it, but rather just, like a plane ride, to let the turbulence come and go again.  Once I have let it pass, I find whatever realisations were important tend to arise naturally of their own accord.  The illusion is that if our mind can just find the magic bullet the emotions will be dispelled in one fell swoop.

Recently I was running a programme in Frankfurt and over lunch on the second day I was chatting to one of the participants and asked them where they had learned their English since it was particularly good.  She replied that she had been an au pair in her late teens in Ireland.  I asked her about this experience and how she found Ireland.  She said that she had very much enjoyed it.  I commented that the Irish had a reputation for being very friendly and she agreed with this, but added a proviso that sometimes she had encountered people who reacted very strongly against her because she was German.  In one instance, she and her young German friends had been refused entry to a pub and suffered some pretty strong verbal abuse on the grounds of being German.  Following this theme, I asked her if this was common and how people in Germany felt about this.  She replied that young German people were fed up with constantly being blamed and stigmatised for something they had not been involved in or responsible for (the war).  I recognise that many people say we must not forget the holocaust.  Yet, I have always felt uncomfortable with the constant focus on Germany’s role in the war and the continuing emphasis on the holocaust.  I do think that recognising our capacity for appalling treatment of each other is valuable to remind us all of how terrible we can be, but I am wary of the implicit assumption that it is not us but others (the Germans) who are capable of this.  It smacks of dividing the world in a very black and white way into us and them.  It seems to me that it was this type of thinking that caused events like the holocaust.  I also feel that looking on the war in such a black and white way fails to really take responsibility for events.  Our story in Britain is that the Germans were evil and we were the brave good guys along with our gallant allies yet I wonder how much the crippling and inhuman reparations that were imposed on Germany by the allied forces following the first world war contributed to the seeds of the second world war?

If we look at the situation in relationship terms, how might any of us feel about a friend who continually brings up past mistakes and parades them in front of us and everyone on a regular basis?  If the past were germain to some current argument or discussion we might accept it but if it were for no other reason than to parade it in front of us we might wonder about the friendship – particularly if it were the mistakes of our grandparents for which we were being held accountable?  In friendships and relationships, I have found it valuable to cultivate a poor memory for hurts on the basis that the relationship is not then weighed down by the baggage of the past and I am able to keep my heart open.  I wonder if perhaps it is time to forgive and forget?  Certainly it would be very hard to find any people who had not been guilty of past atrocities – most European countries held colonies which treated indigenous people appallingly.  All countries have their past of violent tribal conflict or conflict between ethnic groups and how far back should we go in apportioning blame (the Celts drove the indigenous British to the edges of Britain and were then themselves driven to the fringes of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, who were conquered and oppressed by the Normans).  Indeed the history of man is riddled with violence.  The danger is that we use past hurts as justifications for current violence and oppression. Perhaps it would be more valuable if we wish to commemorate past events for us to be sad for everyone who has died or suffered and remind ourselves collectively that the capacity to hurt and kill resides in all of us.  I remember being struck a few years ago by a young woman in an Amish community who was raped and killed by a man who then killed himself.  The parents of the young woman invited the parents of the man who had killed her to the funeral of their daughter, for, as they pointed out, they had lost a son as well and were in grieving.  It struck me that if we could evolve to this level of common humanity the world would truly be a compassionate and enlightened place.