nature's zodiac

The following is an excerpt from the book I am writing now, Sun on Earth; A Handbook for the Individual in the Aquarian Age.

Picture yourself walking in a park. It’s a sunny summer day. There are people in conversation sitting on benches, children playing, and the air is fresh and sweet. All at once, you stumble over a large rock, almost all the way down to the ground. But your stomach registers this sudden shift and you manage to reorient yourself, to catch yourself.

You just became intimately in touch with one psychic center, located energetically in your stomach. This is the vortex that orders your energy with response to its environment. It is most felt in bigger gradients of change, going high up on a ladder, for example, or losing  your footing. 

This whirlpool can come alive with glee on a tilta-whirl or spun into a tizzy of nausea. This is your stomach, a place of psychic ordering in response to what is happening around it.

Funnily enough, there is another name for this center: the ego.

In his book Ego and Archetype, Edward Edinger writes that “the ego is the center of the conscious psyche”.

But there is another psychic ordering at play, the Self. He writes, “The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious).”

“Since there are two autonomous centers of psychic being, the relation between the two centers becomes vitaly important.”

Ego and Archetype. Edward Edinger

Let’s go back to that walk in the park and picture something else. Imagine that a gentle rain starts up causing the sudden emergence of a bright and glorious double rainbow. You hear people saying “look” and “wow!”. As you look up you are amazed by its vividness. You look around and see others beholding it in reverence. The shared moment is special, and you feel a different centering, high in the chest. This is the other psychic ordering place of the body. It is much fuller and all-embracing than the first.

This is the place of the Self, your full nature. The joy and magnanimity that is felt in a ‘rainbow moment’ is the sudden realization of a sun-centered universe, the dawning of a gravitational pull far stronger than the earth, where people are united in spirited reverence for nature, as nature.

The high chest is our place of identity; where we point when we say the word “me”.   

No one points to their stomach as “me”. The stomach, like the ego, is subordinate to the Self. It is here to serve the Self, not compete with it or try to rule over it. 

With our egos, we are separate. In fact, though it may look the same, that very rainbow is completely different for each person as they stand at different vantage points with different water droplets refracting the light. To go even further with it, without an observer, the rainbow doesn’t exist!

Yet, as we observe it, it does exist. As we share the experience, its existence is amplified as is our own.

Emerson said that “God enters each individual through a private door”. Separation is a prerequisite for real unity, real meaning.

We are blessed with rich and private perspectives. Just as it takes the right perspective to perceive a rainbow, it takes the right perspective to recognize real meaning for you.

Meaning, like God, is universal in its concept. Yet it enters through a private door.

The amazing thing is though, that it can then be shared, like fire or love, which is never diminished by giving it away. This magnitude is registered by that second center of psychic ordering, high in the chest.

Edinger writes about “subjective meaning” or “living meaning” which does not refer to abstract knowledge but rather to a psychological state which can affirm life.

“Living meaning, laden with affect, relates us organically to life as a whole.”

Ego and Archetype. Edward Edinger

Where do you find this living meaning? How does your ego support your Self in relating organically to life as a whole?

These are but a few questions to consider in the Age of the Individual!

Schedule a nature reading to learn more about your own special signatures!