Whilst in Prague recently I was talking to the managing partner for one of the european regions at one of my main clients.  She was interested in being coached by me and I had agreed to send her a document that we had been discussing on the five drivers from Transactional Analysis (Be Strong, Be Perfect, Try Hard, Hurry Up and Please).  Yesterday evening I sent this through to her.  At the same time, I sent a document on how to consult the I-Ching to another client whom I had been working with the day before.  In general, whilst I use astrology and the I-Ching regularly with my clients I am very careful about how open I am in terms of my approach.  I recognise that such things as Astrology and I-Ching are taboo in society and in business.  Whilst I receive little opposition to them, indeed most people are very receptive, I am careful to wait and see if the conditions are right to be open in using them with my coachees.  Some I use them openly with, others are completely unaware that I use them.  I also like to give the I-Ching space to decide who it wants to work with.  It was with something of a slight gut wrenching shock that I received an email from this managing partner to say that she had opened up the document that I sent but it seemed to be the wrong one.  I was bemused, I could not remember attaching anything in my email late last night, so I assumed it must have been that my logo had come across as an attachment.  When I checked, I realised that on automatic pilot and without the awareness of my conscious mind, I had sent her the guide to using the I Ching as well as sending it to my other client.  I hurriedly sent her the right attachment and hoped that the guide to the I-Ching had made little sense and she had not thought much of it.  I was therefore intrigued to find a second email from her telling me that she had consulted the I-Ching when a teenager about her decision to apply to University and that her sister had been involved with eastern religions for some forty years and it had had a very formative impact on her teenage years.  I realised that everything was being arranged beautifully with the complete lack of awareness of my conscious mind.  Indeed, it was interesting that I had been particularly careful not to disclose my use of the I-Ching with coaching clients in this managing partner’s region so that my cover would not be blown.  This experience was particularly apposite for me, as my work seemed to have been hitting a point where a number of things were falling away.  Instead of becoming fearful and panicking, I had been practicing waiting to see where Life was going to direct me next and holding back from fear and the temptation to push.  As usual, it came from a place I was not expecting and where I had been avoiding disclosing my approach.

It occurs to me that wisdom is not an easy thing.  I think that most of us know what is wise; the difficulty seems to be applying this knowledge.  For instance, our language is riddled with wise sayings.  Many of these have become quite hackneyed and certainly any trawl of facebook or the net provides plenty of wise messages for us.  One concept that everyone is aware of is the idea that if you love someone you have to love them exactly the way they are, you cannot change them.  Despite knowing this, most of us spend the majority of our time trying to change others, or at least wishing they would change.  I am going to take this as a theme to explore in terms of translating our knowledge into application.

When you look at what we control, I have always found Stephen Covey’s model of Circles of Influence and Concern valuable.  Covey represented this as two circles with our circle of influence embedded within our circle of concern.  His point was that it was valuable for us to differentiate between what concerns us and what we can actually influence.  Having worked with this a lot, I have tended to add a third circle that sits within the circle of influence and that is our circle of control.  Thus there are things that concern us that we control but we may or may not be able to influence.  My own experience tells me that all people sit outside my circle of control.  I cannot ultimately control anyone else.  They always have choice.  I might be able to influence them but ultimately that sits within their circle of control.  So if we all know that we do not control others and have to accept them and love them just as they are, why is it so difficult to do so?

The first argument that often comes up is that people confuse loving and accepting people with condoning or colluding with their actions.  At an extreme level, it is possible to accept human beings (and perhaps love them) like Sadam Hussein, Hitler etc.  People often get very angry and say that we must not accept them.  Yet really it is self-evident that we have no choice on this, we have to accept them.  We may choose not to condone what they do, but ultimately we do not have control or influence over them.  Our only choice, really relates to ourselves.  Do we want to love and accept others no matter how awful they might be?  Really this is a choice about our own heart: do we want it to be open or closed?  The irony here is that the subject appears to be other people but is really ourselves.  What sort of feelings do we want to experience?  A closed heart is a very uncomfortable place.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

A Poison Tree – William Blake

The second issue here is responsibility.  When we see others acting in ways that we find frustrating or are even self-defeating for them, are we colluding with them failing to take responsibility for themselves if we accept them as they are?  Here we are also touching on what the Buddhists call Idiot compassion.  Again, what is confusing here (or perhaps I lack a sufficiently loving heart – you can judge!) is that accepting others as they are does not mean you cannot act to help them or even point things out to them.  It means that you are not attached to them changing.  Again, it comes back to ourselves.  If we act to help others or even to point out areas they do not see about themselves, perhaps strongly challenge them, all of this is really to do with us not them.  We can do all these things with an open heart as long as we are not attached to them changing.  So sometimes people think that just loving people as they are means not challenging them, not relating to them with the full spectrum of human responses but just being lovely to them.  This is dangerous mostly for us.  If we try to be loving towards someone when we don’t feel it, the dangerous is that we repress our real feelings and our resentment builds.  This can lead to us acting in very unloving ways!  The element we control here is our choice of how to relate to other people and our own responsibility for the consequences.  If we are attached to them liking us, or to them responding a certain way, then we are in trouble.  My children are very skilled at teaching me and keeping me on the money on this one.  If they ask me to do something for them or see me doing something for them, they ask me “Can you do it without resentment? We don’t want the consequences of you being in a bad mood later when you feel you’ve done too much.”  It’s a very good challenge for me and I really have to examine my heart and be honest and even say no at times.

The third issue is being able to differentiate what others can and cannot change.  We all have wonderful abilities and skills but they are different.  This came out recently when I was in France coaching.  The person I was coaching had a chart with the most planets in Scorpio that you could possibly imagine.  Their energy was like nothing I have experienced.  They can (and do) regularly work non-stop with perhaps two to three hours sleep.  They are capable of quite extraordinary levels of competence and work.  The difficulty is that others around them cannot match this.  This person was coming to terms with the fact that others simply cannot and do not work like them.  This was very hard for this person as it seems to them like a lack of effort or simply being poor at their job.  This has always been a work in progress for me.  I am still, as I go along, working out and differentiating, where people simply cannot do things and where it is irresponsibility and sometimes just to confuse me, the two combine, so that sometimes the thing people cannot do is take responsibility for themselves!  What I seem to notice on this one, is that all of us seem to have fatal flaws that appear to be soluble so that for others relating to us, it seems self-evident that we should be able to address them yet we do not.  So thin people think that fat people just lack will power and should be able to diet, organised people thinking messy people should get to grips, active people think less active people should stop being lazy etc.  Personally, I have found astrology to be of enormous value here, because it provides a map of our own and other people’s personalities so it gives us much clearer indications of what people can change and what they can’t.  In our minds, it is analytically very clear what others should do to sort themselves out and make themselves more palatable to us, but what if, horror of horrors, they feel the same about us?

When you look at one simple phrase like “if you love someone you have to love them exactly as they are” you realise that it is a lifetime’s work and riddled with intricate wisdom.  We are often impatient and we feel that because we know this concept we must be able to apply it.  At twenty-six or twenty-seven I was confident that I had a good grip on black holes and wisdom.  It was a shock to discover that knowledge and experience were two different things and it took a nice juicy black hole to illustrate that while I did “know” a number of wise things, I would have to experience them to truly begin to fully understand them.  “yes, yes we say, I know all that” but do we fully understand it?  I think I am beginning to recognise that I am going to carry on learning about the simplest wisdoms for the rest of my life and still die with much to learn.

A recent New Scientist special was examining the role of religion in human evolution.  The research that had been undertaken demonstrated that the search for what they described as “super agents” (those factors which influence the environment in ways that we cannot immediately see) was innate.  It suggested that children at pre-language ages were able to differentiate between inanimate objects that were moving through time and space and animals and humans who moved for particular purposes.  It also suggested that children naturally look for super-agents – ie. those elements within their environment that are causing particular effects.  They posited the notion of a “natural religion” in all children; a drive to find purpose or meaning and to ascribe cause and effect to larger events and, interestingly, the idea that these super agents have greater knowledge or awareness than the humans around them.  The article focused on the difference between this faculty, which appears to be innate, and the belief in notions like Santa Claus.  The authors’ response to the notion that religion is a child like superstition that we should grow out of in a similar way to the belief in Santa Claus (as many scientists/atheists believe) , was that there are no examples of adults who previously did not believe in Santa Claus reasoning their way into an adult decision to believe in him, yet there are plenty of examples of adults who previously did not believe in religion reasoning their way in later life into a belief.  Thus, belief in intelligent purpose or design does not appear to be an evolutionary regression.  Further articles highlighted the fundamental role that religion has played in the evolution of society, in allowing groups of individuals to come together for a greater purpose than individual self-interest and to co-operate on collective enterprises.

Thinking about this, it is easy to forget how much of our society is constructed on trust and reciprocity.  Indeed our whole financial system operates on this basis.  We can travel all round the world, produce pieces of paper and based on a system of trust, people give us items and services in return.  They have no way of knowing individually whether we are trustworthy but collectively they trust.  When you consider the role that this trust and reciprocity play in our lives it is quite astonishing how much co-operation and trust exists.

One interesting mini-article also looked at atheism.  It pointed out research showing that atheists are the least trusted among religious people, more so than advocates of a different religion.  It quoted John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher, who suggested that atheists could not be trusted because their lack of belief in god rendered them incapable of having their word or promise believed in, in short, they because they could not be trusted.  What seemed clear from the research and articles was that the belief in a natural religion preceded indoctrination in any particular religion; that the religion that individuals then adopted was simply the framework that fitted their predilection for a belief in a greater purpose.

In reading the article about atheism, I was curious to understand why atheists should be so universally mistrusted and certainly why the concern was that atheists threatened morality and co-operation.  Most religious viewpoints and certainly the “natural religion” that the scientists noted was based on a notion of a power which sees all our actions no matter whether they might be visible to others or the external world.  Jonathan Haidt makes the point in his excellent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, that all social animals rely on the concept of reciprocity.  You act to help others because it is in your interests to do so because then others (not necessarily those directly affected) will reciprocate by helping you.  He demonstrated this through the example of vampire bats who, after hunting, share the blood they have accumulated with bats who have not left the cave.  The difficulty, he suggested, is how to deal with those who freeload or take advantage of the system because of personal physical power or as away of avoiding work.  In human terms, Haidt suggested that this was dealt with by reputation.  By this he meant that if someone is physically more powerful or cannot be held to account directly for not reciprocating, we regulate them by telling others about their behaviour and influencing their reputation so that others cease to co-operate with them or allow them to be part of the collective reciprocity.

In what way is this connected to atheism?  Well, it is clear that the fear with atheism is that atheists will break the bonds of reciprocity on which society relies.  Yet there is also a moral dimension to this.  In a New Scientist article last year there was information on research into a part of the brain thought to be involved in moral judgements.  When subjects who had damage to this part of the brain were asked to give scores out of 5 to acts in terms of how immoral they were, they scored differently to those with normal function in this part.  The scenarios were of someone who had accidentally poisoned another person and someone who had attempted to kill someone but had failed and the subject was not affected.  For those with normal functioning in this part of the brain, they scored the accidental killing as low on the scale of immorality and the latter high.  For those with damage to this part of the brain they scored the accidental killing higher than the failed intent to kill.  When normally functioning individuals had this part of the brain targeted with magnetic interference their scores, while not reversing, move a point on the scale towards those with damage to this part of the brain.  What was clear from the research is that intention is critical to morality.  The difficulty with intention is that it is not visible.  This is what causes many of the problems with our system of justice is that it is very hard to judge something which is invisible through only visible means (evidence).  Where does this leave atheists?  It is clear that the concept of a super agent who can see the invisible in terms of intention is a powerful deterrent morally.  If we feel someone or something is seeing our internal workings then we cannot evade justice.  Similarly, if the world is only material (ie. it is not alive above and beyond it’s constituent components (animals, plants etc)) and random then there is no consequence to our actions so no deterrent to acting on purely selfish motives to the extent of killing others if achieves our personal aims.

Whilst much of science is tending towards the view of life as essentially random and material and scientists are increasingly mistrustful of religion, what can hold the moral fabric of society together?  Why should we not cheat, lie, manipulate others if it is to our advantage to do so?  Here we come across a curious phenomenon.  Whilst much of the reductionist viewpoint sees only a material world which is not “alive” in any sense, most of our language, sayings and intuitions contradict this.  The phrase “what goes around, comes around” is ubiquitous these days and all our film and literature reflects a desire for symmetry of moral cause and effect – unselfishness or altruism is in the long term rewarded and those who act selfishly get their comeuppance.  Why is the scientific-material world view so out of alignment with the intuitive response of individuals?  It is because the scientific-material world view fails to take account of the emotional and intuitive part of our natures.  This is what is referred to as “the heart”, the seat of our intuition and emotions.  What we think of as the “rational mind” is the rational and material (sensing) function of the mind.  It is clear that, did we not have hearts (emotions and intuition), we could act in a callous and selfish way without morality.  Indeed, anyone who acts without heart or tries to avoid the heart is instinctively mistrusted.  Science has long posited the subjective, feeling experience of the heart as the obstacle to objectivity and clarity in the world, the thing we are moving away from, yet it is clear that the heart is intimately bound up with morality.  On Chrissy Philp’s model of the brain (cf. http://www.chrissyphilp.com/heart/Presentations.html) linked to the I-Ching the rational mind (Gemini) is part of a complimentary connection with Virgo which sits at the heart of the senses, while the heart (Leo) is part of a complimentary connection with Cancer which sits at the heart of the emotions.  Thus we cannot consider morality without considering the heart because transgressions are transgressions of the heart, they cause suffering or hurt (all emotional experiences) and furthermore usually cause suffering and hurt to those perpetrating the immoral acts in the form of guilt, remorse, self loathing etc.  So what if the heart is not the source of subjectivity which interferes with a wider perspective but rather a super agent which connects us to everyone through the emotional experience of being human?  If science (and the rational mind it represents) can respect and value the heart then it has the means of unlocking the universal super agent that could create individual accountability and responsibility without the need for an external super agent.  Perhaps the heart is a super agent which can see all our actions without the need for the intervention of an deus ex machina?

So coming back to super agents through the lens of the heart, what are they, since from the research they seem to be an a priori part of our nature?  When Chrissy Philp was first discovering her pattern of the elments she presented the framework of the astrological symbolism to a scientist through a scientific lens.  His comment was that she had found the perfect description of an artificial intelligence system rather than having discovered anything, not realising that this was the discovery!  According to her work, Cancer or the Moon represented the Read only Memory function – all those processes that still continue or remain embedded even when consciousness (or a computer) is switched off.  Leo is the monitor which allows visual information to be displayed and also the on-off button which switches consciousness on and off and so on.  On this model, Virgo was the ability to discriminate discrete details as in the ability to identify different types of tree.  However it needed a different function – Sagittarius to able to identify and “pattern match” to be able to recognise that the collection of individual trees was a wood.  I can’t help feeling that super-agents might well be connected to this function of Sagittarius or Jupiter since it is connected to the the ability to see larger variables which might be affecting discrete individual actions. Also, critically, Sagittarius is concerned with religion, not the spiritual oneness of Neptune but rather with universal laws and morality.  If Chrissy’s pattern is correct it is also represented by the first line of the Creative in the I-Ching which says “Hidden Dragon do not act”.  The previous points I have been making have all been concerned with the intangible elements of the heart (Sagittarius is a fire sign and on Chrissy’s model the closest to the the emotions – which puts it firmly in the realm of the heart) so this line fits perfectly.  Sagittarius or Jupiter is what gives us our thirst for meaning and purpose and to see the big picture, being fire it is connected to the intuition.  To perpetuate a view of the world as essentially random and only composed of discrete physical phenomenon is to deny the experience of our intuition and to fail to see the big picture.  For anyone arguing from this reductionist viewpoint they would have to conclude that there is no such thing as a wood because it does not exist – at a material reductionist level there are only individual trees.  Science itself is actually a function of this super-agent facility in the human brain – it is the search to see a bigger picture and to link events in a grander theory, pattern or framework; a set of variables which influence or link all the discrete data.  I think for Science to achieve this it will have to widen it’s search to include the very things that it sees as the obstacles – the subjective experience of being human and to be open to different ways of knowing and understanding the world.  In the same way that morality breaks down without the heart, a grand unifying theory of everything cannot be understood or contemplated unless it includes the heart as well as the mind.

In reading an article in the New Scientist recently about gaming I was led to wonder about the role of gaming at the moment.  It is a very widespread phenomenon at the moment with millions of people spending large chunks of their time playing virtual games.  It is easy to be judgmental about this and many of the parents and adults that I speak to are very concerned about it, feeling it is a dangerous and debilitating trend robbing children and adults of taking responsibility for their lives.  In much the same way, people are very judgmental about facebook and social networking feeling it is a dangerous medium that is detrimental to children and their evolution.  I know it is easy for each generation to condemn the activities of the next generation, feeling they are the seeds of decadence and decline.  The general consensus is that we are departing further and further from the source of nature.  But what if we are not?  What if we are evolving ever closer to the source of things?

The article prompted me to think: why are so many humans devoted to playing virtual games?  As I did this (I have a fondness for such inversions which makes me poor at the day to day detail of life but then I am a Sagittarian so I plead mitigating circumstances!), I began to think about the role playing in life.  Most animals, particularly mammals seem to indulge in play.  Yet it is clear that their play has a very real purpose – they are learning skills important to their future evolution.  What if this is true at a collective level too?  Perhaps through gaming we are playing in order to evolve something collectively.  Our children play with virtual reality but I wonder if they are evolving a world where our collective brain evolves, where our day to day reality becomes closer and closer to the virtual reality that we actually inhabit.  Ram Dass describes us as taking on a spacesuit when we are born.  This is his metaphor for describing the experience of being human, the fact that we are kitted out with a body (our spacesuit) and a personality in order to play the game of life.  The consciousness that inhabits it, he points out, does not need to identify with the body or the personality; indeed if we can be both in the world (or our spacesuit) but not of it then we can take the curriculum of being incarnated without getting lost in it and forgetting that we are all one.  My friend Chrissy spent time understanding the role of the imagination and through this came to the discovery that the role of the imagination was as our re-programming tool.  It is our imagination which means that we are not caught in the endless cycle of our acting on our instincts and being trapped.  We can change our reality by imagining a different way of approaching things – by changing the way we see things.  This is our ability to self-programme, to change the original design of the instincts.  Indeed if you think about it, we are already a long way down the road of living in a “virtual reality”.  As I look around, it occurs to me that almost everywhere I look I am confronted not by nature but by products of our imagination.  The houses we live in are constructs of imagination translated into form, the chairs, tables, desks, phones pretty much the whole lot is a construct of human imagination.  Ah yes, I here you say, but what about nature – the trees and fields etc.  Yet even here these have all been shaped by human imagination directly or indirectly – how we farm, the animals we keep and promote, the areas we designate as wilderness etc.  We have already shaped a virtual reality.

So what are we doing now with our imaginations?  Now, we seem to be moving to a world where the constructs of our imaginations are taking shape in a less physically tangible way.  Interestingly, this fits perfectly to a move to the Age of Aquarius (and its opposite Leo).  Many people associate new age with a return to nature, alternative therapies, hippies, love, living off the land, mysticism.  Yet really these seem to the evolution of the old physical (yin) age of Pisces (and its opposition Virgo) rather than the new software (yang) age of ideas and imagination embodied in Leo and Aquarius.

Taking the notion of game-playing further and its connection to evolution, I am aware that game playing appears to be harmless yet really plays a role in dealing with our strongest and most dangerous instincts and finding a way to hone and transform or control them.  Sport is embodiment of our aggressive and competitive natures.  It dominates much of the media and internet.  What is it’s evolutionary purpose?  I wonder if it might be as a substitute for instincts that would have been expressed in the past through war and fighting.  Nations now play each other at sport rather than go to war; I think I prefer this outlet for these instincts.  At the same time, those playing sport learn to control their aggressive instincts, how to cope with losing etc.  Plenty of rich learning.  We watch horror movies, films of killing people, most of the computer games involve killing others or fighting.  Could it be that initial evolutions express themselves through play first?  I am not in favour of the internet being filled with pornography personally but I have to keep an open mind, perhaps we are evolving an outlet for people to come to terms with their sexual nature now matter how dangerous – perhaps we will learn to understand and tame these aspects of our nature individually and collectively through using our imagination in this virtual world without having to translate it into physical reality.  It gives us a whole new dimension through which to explore and learn.

If there are masses of people playing games on the internet, it is almost as if our collective consciousness must be evolving at some speed.  Douglas Adams’ prophetic series The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy included a story line that he first dreamt up as a young adult for a Dr Who episode.  It was the story of a race from a world called Krikkit (cricket).  The people of Krikkit were unaware that their ridiculously fast evolution was being masterminded and provoked by a huge computer called Hactar.  This was a computer with a guilt complex for having betrayed his original creators who wanted to destroy the world.  Krikkit was subtly manipulated by Hactar to want to destroy the Universe but after a war lasting millions of years Krikitt was defeated and the inhabitants returned to their world and sealed from the rest of the Universe but one battleship survived and over billions of years re-built the wicket gate (key) to the sealed Krikkit empire. However, the protagonists of the Hitchiker’s Guide managed to release the Krikkiters from the influence of Hactar and they instead promote sporting links with the rest of the universe.  Looking at this story as the product of the human imaination – which was certainly very fertile in Douglas Adams, it is interesting to see that it the themes of transforming powerful instincts and emotions into sport comes through very clearly, as it does in his theme of the Planet Earth being a huge computer called Deep Earth which was designed to find the question to the answer to Life the Universe and Everything – 42.  42 is the I-Ching hexagram Increase, which is very much about evolution.

What if we need to be evolving virtual reality – what if we are designing a huge collective brain or computer.  It would need a lot of people to be involved in programming it.  Everyone seems to be on the internet now.  I think we are all programming it with our imaginations.  This new virtual reality also gives a more tangible form in which to play with and enhance our imagination.  It used to be stories that we used to develop and evolve collectively, we imagined changing our personalities or approaches to life through identification with heroes, monsters to overcome, etc.  Yet now, we can actually play with different realities and use our imagination in more complex ways.  We seem to be evolving at such a rate – and there are exponentially more and more of us.  We seem to be accelerating – like our universe – like the I-Ching hexagram 42 – constantly increasing.  We are now splurging everything in our rich, fertile minds, with no holds barred, into the collective brain of the internet.  To what end?  Two further articles from the New Scientist are revealing.  After reading the initial article and be struck by all these thoughts, I had a feeling of my thunder being stolen to read some days later the articles which followed the initial one about gaming.  They had come to a similar conclusion to me, in that they were describing how gaming is helping us to solve complex problems in new ways and even being used now to help people learn new skills and to re-programme their minds.  A second article in a later edition of the New Scientist explored what made us different from our closest relative the chimpanzee.  Interestingly it did not appear that between very young humans and chimpanzees there was a great difference in aptitude but rather what differentiated human children from as young as two years was their social brain – their ability to share and learn from each other.  This was what dramatically differentiated them from our nearest relative the chimpanzee.  Put that in the context of finding a way – through the internet and virtual reality – of allowing billions to connect together to share information and play together and you get some idea of the staggering power available to our evolution.  I wouldn’t bet against us finding the question to the answer 42.  Perhaps we are really heading towards the source through virtual reality not away from it.  Damn it, I guess we older models probably do have to die off after 80 odd years – we’ve probably become obsolete!

I’m stopping now, because I have important work to do for the universe – I’m off to have fun and play some games….!

I have written before about how we choose to see things or to frame them and the fact that I think this is perhaps one of the few things we actually control, or perhaps the most powerful thing we control.  I was reminded of this recently when skiing with my son and my wife.  We were coming down a difficult slope which, in the hot sun, had become very cut up and messy.  It was our last run and we were tired.  My wife in particular had very tired legs with her muscles burning at each turn.  She had stopped part way down the slope and I had continued and was waiting for her further down.  My son was with my wife.  As I was waiting a man skied past me.  He was striking in that he was perhaps in his fifties or sixties and had a huge white beard which was very striking.  He looked odd or out of place.  The next thing I knew my son was shouting.  I assumed he had dropped something over the side of the slope like his glove since he had stopped with my wife.  He then skied past me and I waited for my wife.  She explained that the man who had skied past her had aggressively shouted at her about stopping at an inconvenient  point.  My son was incensed by him being so rude and had skied down to remonstrate with him.

I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that I didn’t feel this man was real.  By this I mean that in terms of seeing life as a game, he was obviously planted by the game.  I notice on a regular basis that life makes things, if we are looking, stick out slightly – like a clue.  The ancient Greeks used to talk about the gods walking the earth and in this case, I could see this was the god Mars (or in Norse terms he looked more like Thor).  My son, by the time he caught up with the man, had lost some of his initial indignation and simply skied past him, at which point the man skied into him and knocked him flying.  For me, this had all the hallmarks of what Don Juan, in the Carlos Castaneda, books would call an ally, ie. someone who is their for a particular reason for us to learn something from and not just an ordinary human being.  In many ways, I see that all of life is an ally for us, but I see that in specific situations, there are particular allies.  It is almost as if we are being tested each day.  Now this may be complete illusion, a case of confirmation bias, where we fit the facts to our own pet theory.  However, it also occurs to me that it does not matter if this is illusory since it does transform the emotions we feel and the way we respond.  Once we see a person or a situation as a test, challenge or ally, we stop being offended and furious and start to think and feel differently.  A few years ago there was an article in the New Scientist talking about the work being done on identifying emotions and how we transform them and one of the emotions they listed was curiosity.  This was unusual as we do not normally describe curiosity as an emotion yet the more I thought about it the more valuable I saw this definition as being, in that once you have an emotion it is difficult wish it away, instead it is easier to transform it and I realised that transforming anger or indignation into curiosity does provide a very valuable way of shifting negative emotions.  My experience coaching people (and my own personal experience) is that the initial surge of frustration or hurt, does shift when we begin to question why the situation has occurred or what we might be learning from it, or being asked to address.  Having just spent a few days picking up manure to spread on my garden, I am struck by the fact that turning provocation and difficult emotions into a seed bed for creative learning, whilst never easy, is part of the work we are all doing to make the earth (pun intended!) more fertile!

When I was young my parents did not have a great deal of money and there was always a great fear about whether we would be able to make ends meet each month. I can remember the anxiety this produced and my sense of “what will we do” if we really ran out of money. Many years later, I discovered that my parents in fact had a savings account which they had managed to maintain with a float in it, so that the fear of financial meltdown was not as real as it had felt to me as a child. For astrologers I ought to point out here that I have a Saturn-Chiron conjunction in Pisces in the second house square my Sun on the ascendant in Sagittarius. Thus anxiety about money was already pre-programmed. It is interesting to note that my father has the Sun in Gemini conjunct Chiron in a t-square with Neptune and Saturn and my grandfather was Sun-Saturn conjunct in Pisces. So this seems to be a family inheritance.

As my father grew older he became wealthier, rising in local government and then setting up his own business. Yet I noticed that his anxieties about money remained constant. At age thirteen or fourteen, I remember asking him how much money it would take for him to feel secure. I was surprised that he had an exact figure in response, telling me that two hundred and fifty thousand pounds was the figure at which money made money and you no longer needed to work at it. I later discovered that this was the sum needed to become a Lloyds name. Indeed it was shortly before the whole Lloyd’s of London insurance market collapsed in a “wealth” of claims and inability to pay. At age eighteen I remember pointing out to my father that I reckoned he was now worth this magic figure of £250,000 given house inflation and inheriting from my grandfather. I was curious to know if it had done the trick and he now felt secure: it had not. He know felt that given inflation and other factors he now needed at least a million pounds to feel secure. Being patient (and a somewhat annoying son), I returned to the theme on my father’s retirement, at which point he had sold his business and was worth well over a million pounds. His reflection was that his thoughts were full now of the fact that he and my mother had many years of retirement ahead of them and, my mother being some seven years younger, the money might have to last some considerable time. He was also quick to acknowledge that the insecurity about money was unlikely to leave him no matter how much money he made and that in fact, the more he had the greater the concern about losing it. What I realised was that no external factors were likely to solve what was an internal issue.

Having knowledge is valuable, but it requires application and strangely still requires a level of insight gained through experience and deeper thought to really instill it. In re-reading the Carlos Castaneda books recently, I came across a passage in Tales of Power where Don Juan is talking about knowledge and the link to what he described as “personal power”. Carlos is desperate for Don Juan to tell him about the Sorcerer’s (check) Description but Don Juan points out that Carlos does not have enough personal power to understand it. Carlos begs Don Juan to tell him anyway and Don Juan illustrates his point by describing one of the most powerful truths that Don Juan believes can be known. Namely that we are surrounded by eternity and we can use that to – check and finish off. This means nothing to Carlos, for him it is only an intellectual description. It is why there is a distinction between information and wisdom. Information does not necessarily equate to awareness or understanding if we cannot generate the insight or understanding to translate the information into knowledge.

So my own black hole game has involved a large dose of understanding money and security. I have currently been stuck in a black hole about money for the last 18 months, plagued by concern about my retirement and going round in circles in terms of possible solutions. I am reasonably lucky with money, in that I work hard and am able to earn well, yet this has not changed my anxiety about being destitute, nor has the knowledge that this is unlikely to happen. To explain my black hole I need to provide some background. I worked for Ernst & Young for many years in Human Resources and whilst we had very little money when I was young and my son was a toddler – at one point we lived in a one bedroom flat costing £500 per month and my take home pay was £720 per month – my salary gradually grew until I was comfortably off. Yet, this did not stop my anxiety about money, indeed I was more and more deeply caught in a desire to get to point where I was free of having to earn and had enough to live on without having to earn an income. My idea was that I would gradually build up houses that I rented out until I had sufficient income to not have to earn. When I left Ernst & Young some eight and a half years ago, I took the decision to throw myself out into the void. Having watched my father wait until he was in his early fifties and made redundant before setting up his own business which he loved and only wished he had done earlier before being pushed by Life, I felt at thirty-seven, that if I did not take the chance then, I would miss the opportunity to overcome my fear and take a leap. It was a very valuable decision and my inheritance has been the chance to do work which I love. The transition, like any birth, was traumatic, mostly because of my fears and anxieties about money. I considered myself essentially unemployable except by the Ernst & Young who knew me, I had no work lined up, I had no network of people outside Ernst & Young and I had no guarantee of work from Ernst & Young either. In addition, I had a mortgage to pay and a family to support where I was the sole bread-winner. The one thing I had learnt from experience at Ernst & Young was that I did not want to take a conventional approach of trying to push and run round being fuelled by this anxiety trying to push to get people to give me work. Despite this noble resolve, I did nevertheless try this twice, with the results I had expected, ie. nothing at all came of it!

At Ernst & Young, my diary had become my barometer of security, the more it filled up the more secure I felt. Outside E&Y this phenomenon was amplified ten-fold. Each upcoming empty month tugged at my belly creating an anxiety. I had promised myself the opportunity to spend more time with my family and a more balanced and freer existence. Six months later, on reviewing my situation I was not overly surprised to find that I was working just as hard and as long hours as at Ernst & Young and encountering individuals who seemed like carbon copies of those that I had been dealing with throughout my life. I wondered where the freedom I had initially discovered on making the move had gone. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I did not work for a large professional services partnership any more, but then realised that I my major clients were large professional services companies. I realised plus ca change; that my life had changed very little for all that I thought I was changing it significantly. In the end I concluded that two changes were valuable, firstly that since I was now working for myself, no-one was responsible for the way I was working but me and secondly that I did prefer the illusion of freedom, even if in reality I was no freer (ie. to know that I could stop at any point I felt like it, even if I had always had this option). It cemented the realisation I had come to on questioning my father, namely that I wasn’t going to get free by changing my external reality but rather would have to change my internal reality. I spent the next years working just as crazily, driven by a cocktail of fear and anxiety, fearful of saying no to work and always with a background anxiety about my diary and the level of work I had. Throughout this period I worked on seeing my fear and it did become less dominant. My family and friends soon got bored with my cry wolf approach to work and stopped listening when I confidently predicted that my business was declining only a few days later to complain that I was overwhelmed with too much work and didn’t want to have to be working so hard. Yet I noticed that I never quite lost the sense of reduction in my anxiety when I had a full diary and was overloaded with work. The times I asked life for less, it inexplicably complied to leave my personality niggling with anxiety again.

Throughout this time there were constant epiphanies and I was able to watch the dynamics of my personality closely yet the fear never disappeared. Despite this, I do not subscribe to the fact that there is something wrong with money or earning a lot of it. It made it possible for me to be very generous with friends and with those who needed help and most of all it allowed me to set up my wife’s stables helping autistic children and providing others who needed help and had little money to be part of an environment with animals and a very nourishing environment. Instead of building up properties as I had planned when we bought the site, with its planning permission to build a holiday cottage, I gave the the barn away to my wife’s business and even bought another nine acre site with inheritance and a further mortgage to support it. Hence my current dilemma, where, having paid off my mortgage but not having made any contributions to a pension for the last eight and a half years I am wondering what to do about my retirement. The difficulty in this situation is that my promise to myself of building up properties does not seem the route that it did to freedom since it entails work – in the form of looking after tenants and property – plus it tempts fate in terms of difficult tenants, building problems etc. As I examined it, I realised that my current work is more enjoyable and fulfilling and my life is so full that I do not want extra work or responsibility. Investing in stocks and shares seems equally fruitless in the current environment and I feel wary about handing control to a financial adviser and the whole industry which seems geared to making money at your expense. However, to take it on myself exposes me to further work and responsibility. This conundrum has been going on in my head for some time, causing me to be unable to act. The added dimension being the fact that I have always wanted to buy somewhere in France and got presented with the perfect opportunity but it was just a bit more expensive than I wanted and also I discovered that in France the average house takes two and a half years to sell, which means if I take an experimental attitude which takes a risk, I can’t simply step out of it.

A number of factors came together however to provide a breakthrough in this conundrum. The first was a conversation with my friend Sam. Sam is coming to work at our venue to set up a school as there a few children who want to be educated there and Sam is a natural with children. However, the costs do not yet stack up, so I have agreed to underwrite the difference to allow him to make the move and give the school the chance. Sam was apprehensive about making the leap but in talking to me, he mentioned that I could have no fears about being destitute as he did. This struck me as odd, yet when he described his reasons made complete sense. From his point of view, the property and land that I owned meant that should I need to, I could always sell up and live in a very modest two bedroom house like his and have a considerable sum behind me. From my point of view, I explained that Sam had a room he could rent out and also would have little trouble matching his £20,000 per year salary. As I explained to Sam, I could see objectively that what he described about my position was accurate but that it made no difference to my feelings at all, whereas he lived with less (albeit with fewer responsibilities in terms of family) and was less concerned about money. The second was a conversation with my wife, where, as we talked it through, I realised that my desire to create something independent of my work as a source of income was really an attempt to control life, because when it came to money I did not trust life or like being dependent. Yet, in my black hole what stopped me moving forward was that all other directions involved a dependency on life. None of them escaped the bald fact that I cannot avoid being dependent on the universe. Given my Chiron Saturn conjunction in Pisces opposite a Pluto Uranus conjunction and square my Sun rising in Sagittarius, I realised there was no escape and I could not create a situation where I felt secure and free. Indeed the danger was that in trying to do so, I would end up destroying the very work I enjoyed and found fulfilling. What I decided I could do, however, in accepting this dependency and lack of control, was stop working so hard and pursuing an illusion of freedom, in the mistaken notion that I would somehow provide for a fulfilling old age by sacrificing my middle age or that I would ever finally get free.

I realise the real freedom is to spend less of my time and mental energy wrestling with something that is not going to change; that the only freedom lies in being less attached to my personality and to the topic of money.

Some weeks back I wrote about a situation at a client of mine where division and conflict were destroying the organisation.  These conflicts have now fully played out to the point where the two offices involved are splitting apart amidst much rancour and mistrust.  Everyone feels it is everyone else’s fault and blame and misunderstanding is rife.  It is a painful situation for everyone, agony indeed.

The conclusion that most of the people involved have come to is that it is too late now and nothing can be done; that it has gone too far and the broken trust cannot be rebuilt.

Recently among my friends we have been discussing the painful nature of life, no doubt prompted by the current Neptune Chiron conjunction.  My friend Chrissy asked the I-Ching about whether life had to be so painful.  She had been to watch La Traviata in which the heroine is dying of consumption and in which tragedy and suffering abound.  Despite this, the beauty of the opera is exquisite; the combination of orchestra, singing, drama is stunning and the ability of human brains to produce such beauty and complexity is testament to the brilliance of our evolution.  The audience was transported.  When Chrissy threw the I-Ching she received Enthusiasm and the second, third and top lines of Youthful Folly in a situation of Enthusiasm.  The lines read as follows:

° Nine in the second place means: To bear with fools in kindliness brings good fortune. To know how to take women Brings good fortune. The son is capable of taking charge of the household. These lines picture a man who has no external power, but who has enough strength of mind to bear his burden of responsibility. He has the inner superiority and that enable him to tolerate with kindliness the shortcomings of human folly. The same attitude is owed to women as the weaker sex. One must understand them and give them recognition in a spirit of chivalrous consideration. Only this combination of inner strength with outer reserve enables one to take on the responsibility of directing a larger social body with real success. Six in the third place means: Take not a maiden who. When she sees a man of bronze, Loses possession of herself. Nothing furthers. A weak, inexperienced man, struggling to rise, easily loses his own individuality when he slavishly imitates a strong personality of higher station. He is like a girl throwing herself away when she meets a strong man. Such a servile approach should not be encouraged, because it is bad both for the youth and the teacher. A girl owes it to her dignity to wait until she is wooed. In both cases it is undignified to offer oneself, and no good comes of accepting such an offer.

Nine at the top means: In punishing folly It does not further one To commit transgressions. The only thing that furthers Is to prevent transgressions. Sometimes an incorrigible fool must be punished. He who will not heed will be made to feel. This punishment is quite different from a preliminary shaking up. But the penalty should not be imposed in anger; it must be restricted to an objective guarding against unjustified excesses. Punishment is never an end in itself but serves merely to restore order. This applies not only in regard to education but also in regard to the measures taken by a government against a populace guilty of transgressions. Governmental interference should always be merely preventive and should have as its sole aim the establishment of public security and peace.

So what is the I-Ching telling us here about the nature of Life and suffering?  The second line suggests that Life thinks we are ready to take charge – that we are capable of taking responsibility and should show consideration towards the mistakes and follies of others – that it wants us to have compassion.  It is interesting to note here that we could not have compassion without suffering – that these two are linked.  Perhaps this is what we are learning under a Neptune-Chiron transit: that somehow our suffering is Grace – I will return to this theme.  So it thinks we are capable of taking responsibility and bearing gently with suffering caused by the mistakes of others; this sounds very different from blame.

In the second line it talks about the danger of having illusions, of looking to others to take responsibiltiy, that this isn’t a game where we are allowed to pass the responsibility to others – to unconsciously rely on some higher power.  It is also suggests that we have got to work this out for ourselves – to do the job of working to become more conscious and take responsibility for ourselves.  It also suggests that any pre-conceived ideas are dangerous.  As Chrissy and my wife were speculating – why is the game like a mystery without any guidelines, where we have work out each step of the way without prior instructions?

The top line, Chrissy suggested, seemed to be telling us that the point of suffering was not to punish us or hurt us per se but to help us learn.  So that whilst it is painful for us, would we learn any other way, that it is not cruel or malicious but simply correctional.  All of this was in a situation of Enthusiasm.  In Enthusiasm it says that “it furthers one to install helpers and set armies marching”.  Enthusiasm also talks about music as having a profound effect in clearing away obscure emotions and bringing people together in a unity of the heart.  So it seems to be suggesting that we are meant to helping each other and that there is a music at play through our hearts which unites us all.  At the same time it talks about the movement of the heavenly spheres and the fact that there are natural laws and patterns at work that if we understand them, allow us to bring everyone together and release the creative forces of the universe.  It is like a game and the I-Ching is saying it is up to us to discover the laws or patterns of the game and that in doing so we will be able to release the music of the spheres.

Is it possible that with this current Neptune-Chiron conjunction in Pisces there is a chance to transform or transcend the way we currently see suffering?  Certainly there have been a number of instances recently which have provided an opportunity to examine the nature of suffering and blame.  The recent bus crash in France which killed so many children, the sinking of the cruise ship off the coast of Italy and the on-going war in Afghanistan.

A recent article in the New Scientist reviewed the recent research on the brain in order to question whether we are truly responsible for our actions.  This prompted many worrying questions for our judicial system, yet, in the context of the pain of life, it raises an interesting perspective.  What if no-one is to blame?  The top line of the I-Ching suggested that the role of pain is corrective – ie. it’s motive is learning not punishment.

Let me digress for a short while to discuss the planetoid Chiron about which I am waxing so lyrical.  Chiron is the wounded healer and, as I have written about in previous blogs, seems to be about The Black Hole Game (cf. One Way of Looking at Man by Chrissy Philp), ie. the game of life – that we fall in black holes which are painful but which cause us to give up inaccurate pictures of life and to learn and evolve.  It seems that it is only through the imperfection of life (and the suffering it causes), that we learn.  I watched a programme recently about a young girl in the United States who had a syndrome where she felt no pain.  When they were interviewing the parents, they asked them what the hardest part was and it was fascinating to note that they said it wasn’t the horrendous injuries she had suffered – they showed pictures of horrific burns, cuts and breaks – but the fact she could not learn because there was no consequence to her actions and therefore no link between her actions and emotions.  Now this is fascinatingly paradoxical.  Here was a little girl who did not experience pain and yet our hearts went out to her – we felt sad for a little girl who suffered no pain because it was so painful…!  At the same time, I recognise that were it not for the pain (non-pain) of her situation, I would not have learnt so much.

If we go back to the situations that are causing pain at the moment, I noticed how quickly we condemn the captain of the cruise ship that ran aground.  A brilliant article in one of the national newspapers that I read shortly after the condemnation of the captain picked up on this theme of blame.  The author pointed out how quick we are to adopt a self-righteous tone and to blame the captain.  Implicit in this is the assumption that we would never behave in this way and yet, as he pointed out, which of us has not committed acts of bravado which we later regretted, which of us has not on a small daily level, run away from some mistake we made or failed to take responsibility for it?  Could we have compassion for the Captain – which of us would swap shoes with him?  Whatever the punishment in terms of prison we might devise it cannot be as bad as the knowledge of having caused so many deaths.  Today there were reports of soldier having left his barracks in Afghanistan and shot eighteen civillians.  We can easily condemn such actions, but we should rather ask ourselves how we come to put people into such a painful situation that they might commit such an act and cause such suffering for others?  In this there might be both learning and kindness or compassion.  Then perhaps, we can be the young son taking charge.

It seems with the “too late” refrain that we do not realise that we have the power to transform suffering to turn it into grace.  This morning, my wife and I argued furiously, it seemed initially that we could not understand each other and that the situation was impossible with both accusing and blaming each other.  Yet as we fought and wrestled with the situation, we reached a breakthrough and suddenly the love that we felt and the insights we gained seemed worth all the pain of the initial fight and our connection seemed deeper than ever.  I am indebted to my daughter India and to Chrissy for helping me to understand the meaning and application of the myth of Eriskigal in this context.  In the myth of Erishkigal, she is in grief over the death of her husband and Innana (her sister) goes down to see her in the underworld.  Being somewhat wary, she advises her friends to ask the god of wisdom (Enki) to help her if they have not heard from her.  She is killed by her sister and her friends petition Enki who sends down mourners to empathise with Erishkigal in her suffering.  After being empathised with and having others mourn with her, Erishkigal then heals her sister back to life.  What I could see in the situation at my client was that everyone was desperate to act to resolve the situation but it was not action that was needed it was empathy.  This would have transformed the situation.  It was true that it was too late to act, but it was perfect timing for compassion and understanding.  Have we evolved enough to recognise that no-one is to blame – that it is all part of the game and there really isn’t anyone to blame.  I think we could begin that now.

The following is a letter I wrote this week to my fellow directors concerning a small housing estate that the charity owns.  It contains about 9 houses all of which are in a state of some dilapidation and a number of which are pre-fabricated and past their sell by date.  The aim was to develop the site but it has hit obstacle after obstacle over the fourteen years that it has been in process.  Directors who were part of the Council (the board of directors for the charity – a Steiner School) set up a professional group to manage the development which was to be paid a percentage of the profits on completion of the project.  No-one had envisaged the obstacles which would hold this project up for fourteen years.  Having been part of the Council for thirteen and a half years and Chair for some ten years or more, I have now decided to resign and yet this last project felt like unfinished business as I outline in the letter.  Having asked for Life’s help in resolving this last loose end, in typical fashion, Life delivered by creating a crisis which forced me to think about it more deeply but which generated a insight about something which had baffled me for many years (I have changed a few of the names):

Brickwood – The Tale of the Golden Goose

The planned Brickwood Development was initiated the year before I first became involved with Council but has remained unfulfilled throughout my tenure. With my impending withdrawal from Council it was the last outstanding issue that felt like unfinished business and I wanted to resolve it as far as I was able.  With this in mind, I asked for Life’s help.  The result has been that Brickwood has hit crisis with Brickwood Development tendering their resignation and demanding payment for their services.  This was not quite the resolution I had in mind, but it has prompted a realisation about Brickwood which has eluded me all these years.

Like many before me, I put my time and energy into Brickwood and wanted to realise the aim of the housing development there, yet however much energy I put in and however many obstacles we resolved, fresh ones always cropped up and I could never see clearly why there should be such an impasse with the project, an impasse lasting fourteen years!  As you all know, my perspective on Life is that if something is blocked then there is usually a good reason and something that needs to be learnt or brought to consciousness.

It was only at the end of last year, that I began to see more clearly and my heart began to speak more fully.  In a conversation with Jim, following a Brickwood meeting, he pointed out that Brickwood was a contributor to the charity in terms of income rather than a drain (as had always been thought) and that we might well be better off developing it on a gradual basis and preserving the asset and income for the school.  At the same time, I realised that my heart was not comfortable with the proposed crowding of twenty nine houses on to a relatively small site nor the design of terraces that would have to be erected.  I realised that we were in danger of spoiling the site and creating something that no-one wanted.

In thinking about this more over the last few days, I had a breakthrough in terms of the pattern of Brickwood and why it was stuck; I could see a recurring theme.  Everyone who has been involved in Brickwood has been caught by a desire to profit from it; this desire has often run for a number of years but has then ended up turning to dust in people’s hands.  Phil and Jane at Homing House were caught by greed at the prospect of holding the school to ransom for the land needed for the sight lines and so was their agent, yet in the end their greed meant they ended up getting nothing as the sight line needs were changed by new planning directives.  John, our neighbour, held us to ransom for years over the need to move the road yet, again, his greed defeated him as the resentment at this caused others to challenge his right legally and it was proved invalid.  The initial residents at Brickwood were full of plans for how the development should be tailored to suit their needs even though they did not own it and again it came to nought.  Colin Ford and others wanted to create a community for themselves, but that also came to nought.

Thinking about Brickwood I realised it was a trap and the analogy that came to mind was the Grimm Brothers’ tale of the Golden Goose, where each person that sees the goose tries to pluck one of it’s golden feathers but in doing so becomes stuck to the goose or the other people.  It feels very much that this is the issue with Brookthorpe; everyone is stuck to it by their desire to profit from it.  Sadly, I fear that for all their best intentions, this includes Brickwood Development, but it also includes the the charity.  We have been blinded by our greed and are part of this chain of people stuck to the goose.  In our case, I think the covenant is a particularly dangerous trap.  Our greed and fear causes us to hold on to a covenant which has soured and continues to sour our relationship with our neighbour and our conviction that there is more gold to come than to simply restore the site and generate an income and provision for staff causes us to spend more and more money and neglect the site.  In selling the nursing home, I am conscious twenty years later that no-one now remembers where the profit was spent but everyone still regrets selling off a gift and asset.

I think the lesson I derive from all this is that profit should not be our motive; there are more important considerations.  Profit, as far as I am aware, is not one of our objects as a charity.  When I sold my last house there was a dispute over the land that came with it, which our neighbours had tried to buy before we moved in since it was actually connected to their house not ours.  We were not aware of this when buying but when we left the house, we sold the field (against the advice of our property agents) to our neighbours, because we wanted to leave the property cleanly without being responsible for perpetuating a conflict.  I am not against making money, but I am against putting it first in our considerations.  I think that if we build something which goes against the wishes of staff, which is out of keeping with the village, perpetuates the badwill with our neighbour and which ruins the gift given to us by the founders of the school then we will be responsible for that and it’s impact will far outweigh any monetary gain.

For Brickwood Development, my own perspective would be that to be involved with a charity must be free of a motive to gain financially on a personal level.  I know Martin and Chris have given a lot to the school and Chris continues to do so but I think they may have got caught in the Brickwood trap.  It is probably most painful for them, as I can’t imagine they will feel comfortable in their hearts extracting a payment of the level of £70,000 from the charity and they have also been caught for fourteen frustrating years.

The other and better known version of the Golden Goose is the tale of a goose that laid a golden egg each day.  The owners were dissatisfied with this and sought to find the lump of gold inside the hen that was producing the eggs in order to be richer (or to feed it to get it to lay 2 eggs a day depending on the version).  In each case they killed the Goose and lost the egg.  I think this Golden Goose tale also applies to us.

I recognise that others may disagree with my perspective and am willing to be proved wrong but, for me, Brickwood has served its purpose as a last lesson which I am only sorry I did not see more clearly earlier.  I do not think anyone is to blame, everyone has suffered (perhaps Brickwood Development most of all) but I am keen personally to learn so that we do not repeat this mistake or perpetuate it.

I am conscious that the tendency is to think of the world in a very practical framework of cause and effect.  Fairytales and myths seem part of a previous more superstitious world where we did not have such control over and knowledge of how to manipulate our physical environment.  Not making a profit, or putting making profit first seems somehow alien to us in this day and age and also the idea of emotions such as greed, envy etc. as if they are part of an old story.  The concept of a consequence for our immoral actions feels outdated, part of a child like existence (we often only tell myths and fairytales to children as if they are no longer relevant to us as adults who have grown up) in our cause and effect model of physical reality yet my experience is that fairtyales, myths and morality are very much alive and playing out in much the same way. Indeed I often wonder if it is our insistence on this material view of the world which is oddly fairytale like; a strange illusion imposed on a reality which it does not fit in a child like insistence that we are in control of our lives.

On my way to Dubai last week I sat next to a man who engaged me in conversation. He was on his way to be interviewed as a pilot for Emirates and currently worked for Ryanair. He was very talkative and this created a conflict for me since it was a flight of only 7 hours and we would be arriving at 7am at which point I would be then due to do a full day’s work. I did not want to be rude or hurt his feelings but I didneeded to work. This is not an unfamiliar conflict for me since my Sagittarian personality does not want to get tied down or trapped talking to people whilst my Cancer moon does not want to feel that I have hurt someone’s feelings. In this  instance I resisted engaging much beyond fairly superficial small talk and then tried to go to sleep at an opportune  moment when he was distracted by the cabin crew.  I did not sleep much and resumed our conversation for the last part of the flight. We parted on good terms having chatted whilst we went through customs.  Yet in my heart I knew I had humoured him without fully engaging with him.

Musing on my plans for my return flight I was thinking about how I would spend some time sleeping and then working on admin tasks that I needed to complete that day before going on holiday the following day. The next thing I knew there was a tap on my shoulder and my friend from the previous flight was there. We chatted on the bus and as we went up the steps my mind was wondering and speculating furiously on whether Life was going to place us together. However, I strongly suspected I knew the answer. What’s your seat number he asked me, I replied that it was 2B. With obvious pleasure he responded that he was in 2A. With some resignation I realised that Life had shifted the tables on me and all my plans to get ahead that day were going to go into abeyance. We chatted in our previous somewhat superficial way for some 20 mins and then I realised that I was going to have to really engage in the conversation. I did so and we began to discuss his relationships with which he was having a lot of problems. I was also able to do his chart, he turned out to be a Gemini with Sun trine Jupiter which was no great surprise for a pilot. Part of his problem was that he kept attracting girlfriends who is his mind kept turning out to be very jealous possesive and irrational. As we worked at this and knowing that he has Venus rising in Taurus opposite Pluto in Scorpio on the descendant with Saturn also in the seventh house in Scorpio. What he began to appreciate was that he was equally jealous and possesive and that whilst he accused his girlfriends of giving completely mixed messages which were unintelligible, they might equally accuse him of the same thing.  We looked at the charts of the two main women he had been involved with and even I, as a seasoned astrologer, was stunned by the similarities between their charts. We were talking about the black hole of feeling that the grass was greener. He began to see that he could choose as many girlfriends as he liked but he wasn’t going to escape the issues that were inherent in his own nature and fate (something the chart describes beautifully). He was currently contemplating a relatioinship with someone who was with someone else. She was telling him that her current boyfriend was awful and she hated him. His concern in relationships was that he ended up getting very suspicious and hated game playing. I did point out that if he got together with a girlfriend that was already lining up her next relationship and hating her current boyfriend, he would then be the inccumbent boyfriend and it might be wise to expect to feel paranoid and suspicious. We also talked about the value of starting and ending situations cleanly. He recognised he tended to go for women who were unavailable but then the relationship ended because they were suspicious of him and he of them. I realised that he had never been taughht about relationships. He said that most of his friends and colleagues told him that women were just irrational and messed your head up. He was amazed to understand that he could exercise some choice over his relationships, if only to learn how to inhibit the more negative instincts.

The learning here for me was about our reistance to the agenda of our lives. In this instance on both flights, I was convinced that I knew what the agenda was for my flight. Look, I have someone who needs input from you about relationships Life said. I’m sorry it’s not on my agenda i replied. Yes it really is Life responded and I’ve got work for you. In engaging fully with this man rather than resisting my concerns about being trapped disappeared and the time flew by. At a naturalpoint we both decided to sleep and I slept  soundly for 3 hours. When I got home my wife had kindly packed for me and I had time to finish my urgent admin.   The Great Way Is Not Difficult For Those Who Have No Preferences Hsin Hsin Ming says in The Book Of Nothing. Many people assume that this means that we adopt a passive attitude to Life living a life of bliss and laid back harmony but this is a preference of course. What it really means is that we have no resistance to the agenda that life sets for us. Sometimes our agenda is very difficult and the opposite of what we might choose for ourself. This had been a factor in the programme we had just run where  the participants were consistently frustrated that their circumstances did not meet the criteria for how they felt their lives should be progressing yet for each they were engaged in a power battle with Life trying to change these circumstances. With a number of them they found themselves back in the same place having tried to change jobs, countries, bosses only to find themselves back in the same black hole that they thought they were escaping.  Interestingly most of us can recognise the value of what we are really learning many years later when we look back and realise what valuable lessons we learnt. Yet I do not believe we need to wait until many years after th event to see the value or learning of our actual agenda, indeed seeing it at the time considerably eases the process, if it doesn’t eradicate the difficulty or pain.

Just to make sure that I got the lesson, Life prepared a number of examinations for us on our holiday, a 3 hour delay which lasted long enough to prevent me being able to get there in time to watch the England rugby match I had planned to get there in time to see. On our first day skiing the boots that we had bought for our daughter India at some expense were so uncomfortable she was in tears and throwing tantrums saying she wanted to give up on them and go home. I failed spectacularly to adjust to my new curriculum and threw a big tantrum, trying to cling to my curriculum of being on holiday and going skiing for the day. Having apologised and suffered the regret of having hurt my daughter, I realised that my relationship with my daughter was more important than my attachment to my idea of the skiing holiday.  The next day, having adjusted my mind to the idea that the day might be about boot problems or anything but skiing, I was not surprised to find that my knee was now so painful I could barely ski. I decided to go with it and adjust my expectations to ski carefully within my capabilities. It turned out to be a beautiful day where we all skied together and India had no problems with my boots.

So why is it important to adjust to the demands of Life? Religion has created a sense that we should do so, that it is a question of good and bad, somewhat like a cosmic school with points for good behaviour. Indeed the incentive is often some future reward in the form of a heaven and hell. Yet is this notion worthwhile with its message of conformity? It somehow does not feel satisfying either to be a self satisfied do gooder conforming to the rules like avoiding stepping on pavement cracks in case we get into trouble with a super parent or a supertitious conformer dominated by fears of retribution.  In the end I gave up my resistance in each case because it hurt my own heart not to do so. Perhaps it is in our own interests to do so: an enlightened self-interest. I did not act in either case because I thought that it would lead to a postive outcome or some reward but beacause I was uncomfortable with my own behaviour, the outcome could have been disastrous but I would have been comfortable in my heart with my response.

Having just returned from abroad where I was coaching a number of leaders in a large firm where there were some serious internal conflicts, I was struck by the fact that a number of people described the conflict going on in the firm and the behaviour of individuals as unacceptable.  Of course, it was always the behaviour of others that was unacceptable.  There was also much discussion of the fact that relationships had irretrievably broken down.  Both these elements make it sound as if there is a rule book somewhere that can be consulted.  Perhaps such a tome does exist and I have missed it, if so, I would be grateful to anyone who could lend me a copy.

The other thing that I noticed was that they described each other as “having a problem that they need help with”; implying a serious mental instability.  As I have mentioned before, my experience has been that for each of us, there is always someone who is a thorn in our side, but for whom our lives would run smoothly.  Much of my coaching involves trying to help people see these individuals differently to “accept” them in their lives and recognise their value – that they are usually the source of our profoundest growth and development.  Many people subscribe to this view but it is a dangerous path, we describe others as having problems that absolve us of the need to see their actions as human or understandable.

Since some of the individuals involved were also in the midst of painful divorces, it prompted me to think about whether a relationship has ever irretrievably broken down.  The leader of the firm, who had a balanced perspective on the situation, challenged my response that I wasn’t sure there was ever an irretrievable breakdown in relationships and said to me that sometimes relationships do breakdown irretrievably.  This prompted me to think about relationships that really have broken down in a spectacular way; the Palestinians and Israelis, Northern Ireland, South Africa etc.  Since the leader of the firm was Irish, we talked about the relationships in Northern Ireland.  Who would have anticipated that Gerry Adams and David Trimble, or even Ian Paisley could work together?  I think all of us might have suggested that that was a relationship that had broken down irretrievably, and yet, the breakthroughs in that relationship has brought the end of over four hundred years of violence conflict.

The implication in the instance of the individuals who were in the midst of the conflict I was trying to work with, was that there was somehow some imaginary formula or process for action when two individuals acknowledged their relationship had broken down irretrievably, somehow that they were now absolved of responsibility.  After talking to everyone who told me that they were exhausted by the conflicts and that a decision had to be taken and someone needed to go, I threw hexagram 47 – Oppression (Exhaustion).  Well, I could not fault the I-Ching here!  In Oppression, the I-Ching says that encountering an adverse fate is a test of character, that it is important to overcome the trouble inwardly and to be able to rise above one’s fate – to be like a tree that bends and has the capacity to return.  It recommends remaining cheerful so that we are not caught in the Oppression.  Oppression is a black hole, a black hole being a situation where we are stuck because our picture of how we want the world to be does not match the reality we are encountering.  Everyone in the office was stuck in a black hole.  I too felt exhausted by the conflict and how to help the individuals involved.  Having spent many hours the previous day with one of the protagonists, I could see they were very stuck.  Only at the end had I found a way of dealing with it creatively and beginning to make progress.  I felt as sad and stumped as everyone.  At this point one of the leaders not directly involved came to see me (let’s call him Peter) and he had a different perspective from all the others affected; he was someone I had been working with for some time and had started to work with the I-Ching. He was not exhausted like everyone else, instead he described to me with great clarity exactly how the situation had come about and the stunning symmetry in the way that the two main individuals involved had swapped positions so that the way that they were now treating each other exactly mirrored the positions they had started in.  The third person most directly affected by the conflict was also someone I was coaching: let’s call him Philip.  Philip was frustrated because he felt the behaviour of the woman involved, let’s call her Jane (none of them are English but I am going to use English names!), was unacceptable and that the firm needed to kick her out.  I pointed out to him that in the past, he had found himself in this position three times already and each time he had been sure that kicking out the person he perceived to be causing the trouble and distracting everyone from getting on with work would solve the problem, yet each time, a new person had popped up as the problem.  For me, it was like trying to chop off the head of the Hydra, each time you lopped one off a new one sprouted up.  For the first time, he could clearly see the repeating pattern.

In discussing all of this with my coachee Peter, we were relfecting on what a sense of humour Life had and how brilliantly it had orchestrated the situation so that everyone was learning what they needed to.  What had seemed a mess to everyone else was to him perfect and he saw that if he trod carefully he might be able to help everyone learn and shift the situation.  The I-Ching says that all men are one in their hearts.  I could see in this situation that Peter’s heart was open to everyone and critically to the situation – he had not closed down to the possibility of being able to work and to learn, quite the reverse.  Since we are all one in hearts, I have come to realise that if one heart closes down it is like losing an arterial road in the road network, it backs up traffic everywhere as people try to compensate for the blockage in this route.  Everyone is affected and everyone is blocked.  In this situation with the two individuals (Jane and Christopher), the whole firm in this country was sucked into the conflict and everyone’s hearts were affected.  Indeed the whole firm was in danger.  The fact that it was so dangerous for everyone, I could see was very valuable.  If it wasn’t so dangerous where would the incentive be for everyone to take it seriously and work on it.  Similarly, I recognised that it was great that everyone was fed up and exhausted by it, because it meant that they were ready to try a different approach – they had exhausted a way of acting that was not working.  Despite the difficulties and frustrations, there were more breakthroughs in coaching people than there had been for a while.

At this point, I want to take a slight detour to talk about my experience of organisations.  Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.  At one level, there is a truth in this similar to that of the old chinese proverb which states that if you want to change the nation, change the state, if you want to change the state, change the family, if you want to change the family change yourself.  I have written about the fact that organisations only change when individuals become more conscious.  However, I also recognise, as an astrologer that organisations like individuals have personalities (charts) and that it is valuable to think about what the black hole game might be for an organisation.  Most individuals do not consider that organisations have personalities, they consider that they can create the personalities of the organisations (in this sense I see cultures and personalities as interchangeable when it comes to organisations).  From my experience it has been far more valuable to see organisations like I see individuals, ie. that their basic nature is a given, in the same way it is for our personalities.  Our role then, is not to try and work against their natures but rather to understand and become more conscious of them so that we can get the best from them and learn how to develop and evolve them.  In this firm, the culture has remained the same for the many years I have worked with it.  There are always large flamboyant central conflicts in relationships which dominate the firm and it has regularly tried to scapegoat one of the protagonists and hope that this will solve the problem, but in the process it has become smaller and smaller as more and more people have to be cut out.  I have been working at helping people become aware of this and be able to handle conflict and competition so that there is a core of people who can help the firm move forward. This has had some success, in parts of the firm we have caught the seeds of conflict early and resolved them so that the individuals work co-operatively together and that part of the organisation thrives.  It is a critical time for the firm, everyone thinks it is disastrous but really it is an opportunity.  There is a chance to break the pattern inherent in the culture of scapegoating difficult people and getting rid of them and instead working with them.  I see in organisations (and individuals) that we are often tested by difficult situations and fail to be conscious enough to resolve them, they then do tend to come again and if we have worked at becoming more conscious we have a chance individually and collectively to put it right and to resolve the conflict.  The results are well worth the difficulty.  Northern Ireland was stuck for four hundred years and now it has moved forward.  Every situation holds the possibility of starting afresh for me, which is why I wonder about the finality of irretrievable or unacceptable.

Central to this issue of how to tolerate people is how we see business.  The I-Ching states in the top line of the Receptive;

Six at the top means: Dragons fight in the meadow. Their blood is black and yellow.

In the top place the dark element should yield to the light. If it attempts to maintain a position to which it is not entitled and to rule instead of serving, it draws down upon itself the anger of the strong. A struggle ensues in which it is overthrown, with injury, however, to both sides. The dragon, symbol of heaven, comes to fight the false dragon that symbolized the inflation of the earth principle. Midnight blue is the color of heaven; yellow is the color of earth. Therefore, when black and yellow blood flow, it is a sign that in this unnatural contest both primal powers suffer injury.

I noticed that in this instance a number of people said to me, that one had to be practical and the important thing was clients and the work.  The issue of the conflict was seen as a distraction that needed to be got rid of, that individuals did not have time for these emotional difficulties.  This for me, is an example of this line operating.  Most people felt that these issues and challenges they faced were the distraction that was getting in the way of business.  Yet my own experience has been that these issues and how to respond to them and work at them are our business, our most important business.  The paradox for this firm is that not having dealt with these issues is the factor that has most damaged the firm and where they have been dealt with wisely the business has thrived.  I recognise that in all businesses there are people with difficult and challenging personalities, I am interested to work out how we help these people not how we condemn them or scapegoat them.  Since some (mentally unstable) people would see me as having a difficult and challenging personality, I clearly have a vested interest in this respect!

So is there behaviour which is unacceptable or a relationship which is irretrievable?  In both of these cases, the real message was that these were excuses for not being willing to work at a relationship.  Saying something is unacceptable absolves us of the responsibility to understand it, to see if we might have contributed to it, to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.  Saying a relationship is irretrievable is a similar cop-out.  It is really saying, I do not want to work at it.  The latter is more honest because it takes responsibility for our choice, the former pretends that the choice is out of our hands.  I wonder if what is unacceptable is to say that anything is unacceptable – of course this statement too is unacceptable!

In the I-Ching Hexagram 54 The Marrying Maiden talks about relationships.

Thunder over the lake: The image of THE MARRYING MAIDEN. Thus the superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.

But every relationship between individuals bears within it the danger that wrong turns may be taken, leading to endless misunderstandings and disagreements. Therefore it is necessary constantly to remain mindful of the end. If we permit ourselves to drift along, we come together and are parted again as the day may determine. If on the other hand a man fixes his mind on an end that endures, he will succeed in avoiding the reefs that confront the closer relationships of people.

The end that endures is to keep our heart open and to work on understanding others and resolving conflict.  This does not mean that there will not be short term conflicts and difficulties, that our emotions will not feel overwhelming but that our short term emotions will not be a good base for the relationship working. Only if we can set our sight on making relationships work can we avoid being blown off course by short term conflicts.  Perhaps the saddest part of this situation was that the two individuals involved had once been the very closest of friends.  If we can love someone once can that really be lost forever?  Everyone in this situation was looking for who was to blame.  I told the two protagonists it was my fault; I should have done a better job of resolving the conflict between them from the start.  My maxim has been not to reject others.  I am prepared to challenge people to see the truth of situations, but I have never sacked someone yet from any organisation.  Some have left by their choice but I have made it clear that they are not being rejected, I have given them choice about whether they wanted to work at the problems they faced with my full support or whether they choose not to.  In the end, even if they have left, they have acknowledged that it was their choice for which they had responsibility.  I think something changes when we have choice.