A reader comments…
“We agree that the current astrology is encouraging us all to increasing Yintegrity (love that my spellcheck knows that word and to even capitalize it!). However, I’ve been reading tons of Brian Browne Walker’s I Ching and the entire premise of that ancient book is all about control in dealing with the exterior world. Perhaps it’s just what I’m asking about these days, but every answer seems to be about non-action, and it feels like the I Ching’s recommendation is to Hide Truth More.
“Now that interpretation by me could just be my Inner Child – having moved from shy, scared five year old to angry ‘I will cut your head off’ seven year old – sadly protesting ‘What’s the use of knowing Inner Truth if I can’t express it?’ but the balancing of Inner Truth and Outer Power in the World feels nearly contradictory. That’s Either/Or I suppose. Maybe it’s knowing your Inner Truth and then acting skillfully to achieve the results you want in the Outer World? Rather than the interpretation of Stuffing My True Self?“I’d really like you to say more about the Virgoan ‘Who, Me?’ I’m guessing that any time I say ‘I’d never do that!’ it’s a clue. And believe me, I’ve encountered some very angry, vengeful Inner bits lately. I am working hard to send Major Love Streams when I recognize them (either as Voices or in the Body), and generally they then fade, but it must be grooved neural pathways that keep lighting them up.”
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Yintegrity and Expression
You bet. The Yangtegrity Patriarchy is fading, but it’s still by far the dominant paradigm. Yangtegrity, by the way, for newbies, means doing what you said you were going to do, while Yintegrity means doing what you Feel like doing, moment to moment – that is, Trusting your Instincts. Yangtegrity does Plan-Execute, while Yintegrity does PIAVA-Change the Subject. To Live Yintegrity in a Yangtegrity World, in general we need to minimize our Commitments, be willing to Renegotiate often, and to Make Amends when Renegotiation isn’t possible and the Relationship is Important.
Scary, eh? Stretching our Yintegrity is a huge Risk, and one we’ve been warned against since we were infants. Many of us were programmed to control even our most basic bodily functions, and many of us are sick from doing it. So yes, of course the Olde Ego is going to come up with every excuse it can – from ancient Fears to manifesting coaches and friends and books, to literally disease – to warn us away from Yintegrity.
In my limited experience the I Ching is oriented toward “success,” which is an important term in the Competition playbook, so the I Ching may be, like Greek Mythology, a handbook for enlisting in the then-new Patriarchy. It sounds like you have a lot more experience with it than I – do you think that may be relevant? If so, then yes, it would not encourage Yintegrity, it would more likely encourage social and economic success over Self-Trust. Even its covert emphasis on morality is an Idealism, a spinoff of the Patriarchal mindset.
I’m definitely not advocating that we alienate a lot of people with our version of “Radical Honesty,” by any means. The bottom line about removing our Masks is about getting Honest with Ourself. So, for instance, if there’s a particular element of Pleasing that we’re programmed to perform for “success,” which creates a Reaction within our own Psyche – for instance, one of our Epiphanies might be to connect those headaches or indigestion that we get, with choosing to overlook the behavior of a particular client or co-worker or partner, which behavior we’d never tolerate in a close friend – then we might “Wonder how we can Change our Response to that person to eliminate the negative personal consequences, without losing an account or a job or a partnership.”
That’s a very complex sentence, but it says what I want it to say, so let me re-say it. Suppose we get headaches or indigestion once in while. And suppose we have a client or co-worker or partner whose behavior we tolerate in order not to rock the boat, but whose behavior we would never tolerate from a close friend. And suppose one day we notice that there’s a connection here – our headaches or indigestion are often preceded by interactions with this client or co-worker or partner, or initiated by thoughts about these interactions.
That would be the sort of Epiphany that wouldn’t surprise us here in this astrological province. In Response to our Epiphany we might “Wonder how we can Change our Response to that person to eliminate the negative personal consequences, without alienating the person.” Our interactions with people, or rather, the interactions between our Archetypes or Masks and their Archetypes or Masks, can literally make us sick. But if we can step outside the Archetype we can immediately see that there are a million ways to Change the dynamics of any relationship that are a lot easier than “Just get on the bus, Gus.”
Before we can step outside the Mask, we need to become Conscious that we’re under the Spell (or Curse) of the Archetype. A Pluto Mjolnir under an Eris-Uranus Initiation sets up very fertile conditions for that sort of Insight, especially with Nessus (Abuse/Privilege) and OR10 (Upwellings from the Deeps) Initiating Pallas (Boundaries). Wherever in our Lives we don’t Live in constant Ecstasy, that’s an neon candidate for a PIAVA like “I Wonder what sort of Archetype or Mask I’m not Conscious of here,” or “Ganeshi, please remove all Obstacles to complete Freedom of Action for me around this.”
I don’t expect to wake up in a Yintegrity World in mid-June. I’ll be delighted if I’m living my own Yintegrity ten percent more of the time, and that my close relationships have increased in Yintegrity. Once we replace Money with Community again (which the next four years of hard times may promote, and which the end of the Industrial Age may permit), then we’ll find that Yintegrity has begun to spread into what under Yangtegrity we consider “Livelihood.” Working on a Community task because it promotes the “wealth” of the whole Community may Feel a lot more Yintegrous than working for Money.
The breaking up of Society into opposing rhetorical armies, and the Internet’s role in it, which we usually see as a product of the Polarization in the 1/1/2000 chart, is actually a step toward social Yintegrity. We just haven’t done it long enough yet to notice that while someone might share my Reaction to The Donald, they definitely don’t share my Reactions to Freedom of Speech or Infidelity or Broccoli or Freedom to Exploit or Immigration or Uncle Milty or Abhortion or Capitalism or Glyphosate or the Color Puce or the Patriarchy.
Once we figure out that we actually have no control over other people’s Reactions to us, we suddenly get Permission to just be Effortlessly Honest. We’re able to maintain the illusion that we can successfully manipulate other people’s Reactions only because they were programmed in the same language that we were programmed in. When we move beyond Rhetoric to Communication, the World Changes. Much of our Lives will still run on Rhetoric, because it’s so much more efficient, but without the Masks we can be a lot more flexible.
The I Ching dates from the first several centuries of the third Millennium behind us, in the last half of the Age of Aries – the Age of Heroes. I doubt that we can date the Patriarchy to this era; more likely we can date the advent of written justifications for the Patriarchy to this era. Some folks assume the Patriarchy arose as a result of Agriculture, because it allowed the accumulation of surpluses and hence Greed and Inequality. That would date it as far back as the Age of Leo or before, though it may have taken a millennium or two to develop. Following Icke and Sitchin, we could make a case for the Anunnaki fostering the birth of the Patriarchy in its current form at the beginning of the Age of Aries.
The Age of Heroes would certainly have been a fertile time for Patriarchy to bloom. The quarter-millennium around the development of the I Ching was a very busy time. It would have been between the Phitile and the Waning Square of the Age of Aries, the time of its culmination. Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Gautama Buddha, and Homer (author or transcriber of the most germinal of the Greek Myths about the defeat of the Matriarchy) all lived in this era, and the earliest version of the Old Testament was written.
Between 575 and 577 BCE, a Triple Initiation occurred, between Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. That would have symbolized a huge shift in the Unconscious Psyche of Huperity, hence the birth of all the Patriarchal heroes.
The three Initiations occurred in 10-15 Taurus…
- Pluto Initiated Neptune in 577 BCE at 10 Taurus, “A Red Cross nurse.”
- Pluto Initiated Uranus in 576 BCE at 12 Taurus, “A young couple window-shopping.“
- Neptune Initiated Uranus in 575 BCE at 15 Taurus, “Head covered with a rakish silk hat, muffled against the cold, a man braves a storm: The courage needed to meet the crises precipitated by social ambition.“
The Neptune-Uranus (relationship of collective to individual) symbol reeks of Inequality; Pluto-Neptune’s (transformation of culture) nurse, while having perhaps some autonomy working for the Red Cross, would in general be constrained by their hierarchical superior, the doctor; Pluto-Uranus (transformation of the individual) is about material acquisitiveness that probably serves the Individuals more than their Community.
A Triple Initiation of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto will occurs every 4,000 years or so, the next one occurring around 3370, in Gemini, in the Age of Aquarius. Pluto has an eliptical orbit, so the span would vary.
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Yintegrity and “Who, Me?”
Yes, any comment with an “I” or “me” in it is a doorway to Consciousness of our Masks.
- I’d never do that!
- I’m one of those people who…
- I hate it when…
- How could they do that to me!
- I’d do anything for Love, but I won’t do that!
The only exception might be “I Feel <adverb>, or other statements about the present moment. And of course any “I sometimes…” statements. Anytime you’re labeling or implying that you or someone else is always a certain way, you’re looking at a Mask.
Remember though that Patterns – Habits – make Life possible. If we had to stop and think about which muscle to contract and which one to extend every time we needed to raise a hand to scratch our nose, we wouldn’t get much done. Some of us may have experienced something on that order while stoned – it makes you appreciate programming. It’s when one program always fires, or a program fires inappropriately, that we get in trouble.
Like that co-worker or client or partner that “makes us sick.” We always have an infinite number of options in the Present Moment; it’s when we aren’t in the Present Moment that we know we’re stuck in an Archetype. How can we recognize this? Well, any time we don’t have an infinite number of options, we’re not Present. So if we’re stewing about something, without imagining a hundred different alternative ways we could have responded, we just PIAVA, “I Wonder why I feel Limited here.”