The Old Boy and the Third Puberty

Shouldn't you knock off for a day or two? Give readers a break? 

No, it's the other way around: since I write in order to find out what I think, I am the primary reader. Also, one doesn't need a "break" from retirement, which is itself a break. Therefore, writing is a break from the break. More generally, slack isn't just nothing, rather, --

Like the eternal void, filled with infinite possibilities?

Yes, much like this blank page. It is void of form, darkness on the face of the deep, just waiting for a helpful spirit to come along and pull some order out of it or put some light into it. To paraphrase Lao-tse, it is the emptiness of this cup that holds the coffee. Likewise, the empty page that holds the post.

By the way, Lao-tse, according to Mitchell, means "'the Old master,' or, more picturesquely, 'Old Boy,'" and it has only recently begun to dawn on this particular boy that he's getting rather long in the tooth. At some point it just can't be denied. It's almost like having to undergo another puberty, just as one was coming to terms with the previous one. 

Speaking of which, I was surprised that Wolfgang Smith speaks favorably of astrology. I won't go into details, but it is noteworthy that scripture not only takes it for granted, but tells us of those wise men from the east who presumably deduced from the stars the location of the newborn king. 

Now, I myself once dabbled in astrology. It was back in grad school, when I met a fellow student who was an actual practitioner, a "clinical astrologer," so to speak. He was also very smart, which made it difficult to dismiss his ideas out of hand.

He introduced me to a more psychological form of astrology that was more or less Jungian in its approach -- "archetypal astrology," so to speak. It had nothing to do with fortune telling or predicting the future, rather, with describing the configuration of one's personality, doing so with the language and symbols of astrology. 

After all, the human subject is as invisible as this blank page. How then do we talk about it? My friend did so via the symbolic language of astrology. He went on to be a successful psychoanalyst, and I don't know if he continued to integrate astrology into his practice. 

In any event, Wolfgang Smith's mention of it caused me to dig out a book recommended by my friend, called The Astrology of Personality: A Re-Formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals, in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy.

This book was pretty much the beginning and end of my dabbling in the subject. There's a lot of wisdom in it, albeit conveyed via the symbolism of astrology, somewhat analogous to the way our Unknown Friend uses the symbolism of the tarot to talk about man, God, the universe, and everything in between. 

If Rudhyar is deepaking the chopra, it is of a high-end sort. His wiki page says that his integration of astrology and depth-psychology

overcame some basic problems, including astrology's deterministic approach to life and the trouble of designating an agent to produce the astrological effects. Rudhyar postulated that the stars did not cause the effects seen in human life but were pictures synchronistically aligned to human beings. They detailed psychological forces working in individuals, but did not override human freedom in responding to those forces....

Arguing that astrology is not essentially predictive but rather productive of intuitive insights, The Astrology of Personality was one of the most influential tracts of "free-will" astrology, despite being written in the dense, circuitous style that characterizes much of Rudhyar's writing.

Is there a point to this dense and circuitous story?

Yes, I was about to get to it. Rudhyar makes the claim that time isn't just linear and "empty" -- like Newtonian time -- but rather, has qualities and cycles, much in the way that the I Ching purports to describe the qualitative "signs of the times," both personal and collective. 

Specifically, Rudhyar says that life unfolds in seven year cycles. I remember trying to see how the pattern of my own life lined up with these holofractal cycles, and there seemed to be something to it. At the time, I was particularly struck by the following passage, describing the fourth cycle (21 to 28):

At the middle point of this 7-year cycle, that is, at the age of twenty-four and a half, man faces the great crisis of discrimination between various types of ideals and companions. He has to "make up his mind" about what he is going to be. Usually this determines the nature and character of the "second birth" at twenty-eight; not, however, before a period of readjustment is passed through, perhaps at the cost of deep suffering...

Which -- gosh! -- precisely described the pattern of my own life. For reasons I still can't explain, it was indeed precisely in the middle of that seven year cycle that I left the old ideals -- which were no ideals at all -- and companions -- i.e., drinking buddies -- behind, and soon entered grad school. 

In short, at twenty-four and a half, my life underwent a 180º. I had no part in making it happen. Rather, it just happened, seemingly in spite of myself. 

I've written before of how my mind suddenly and unexpectedly "switched on" during that cycle, prior to which I had zero interest in ideas, reading, philosophy, religion, college, or basically anything more elevated than partying with my equally wayward and shiftless companions. For what it's worth, at the end of that cycle -- 28 -- I got involved with a new companion who turned out to be my wife, of all people.

For Rudyard, 7 x 7, or 49, represents the completion of a larger cycle, and here again, that's how it was for me: a book, a child, a disease (late onset juvenile diabetes), and even this here blog. Meanwhile, I am now careening toward the the completion of my tenth seven year cycle, and what's that about? It is in fact -- as alluded to above --

the "third puberty" [the second being the so-called "midlife crisis" at around 42] with the entrance into the new relationship -- which often means death.

Whether literal or symbolic, hopefully the latter, in which case "the organism" 

can repolarize itself according to a new rhythm of life contacts, then the real inner world may open; and man learns to be familiar with the rhythm of the "other world," with entities or energies of the "beyond" -- whatever may be meant exactly by the term. He becomes the wise old Sage..., bringing to earth visions of a world of pure and serene significance.

And you ask me why I blog!