Sandbox

Participatory Astronomy

John Heron

I have for many years sought to live awarely and intentionally within the solar system and its galactic setting, opening myself somatically, aesthetically, intuitively and spiritually to its multidimensional entities and changing patterns. I have called this practice participatory astronomy simply to differentiate it from astrology. At my Centre in Tuscany I had in the grounds several planetary sites for this practice. And when running workshops or launching inquiries I simply have a chart of the current dispositions of the solar system and invite people to be aware of it as a pattern of significant entities, without providing any interpretation.

At this time of year at the summer solstice here in the southern hemisphere, I find the relationship between myself, the earth, the sun and the galactic centre empowering. I think this empowerment is to do with my creative participatory enaction. I believe that I (and any human being) can choose an idiosyncratic mutual engagement between self and earth and a unique pattern of two or more local heavenly bodies (including deep space entities), and find in that engagement a distinctive qualitative transformation of being. It is an existential mutual dialogue of co-creative participative resonance. For me the significance of celestial bodies and their patterning includes some rough appreciation of the relative distances of the bodies concerned from the earth, and some appreciation of their relative size, motion, moons and other physical attributes, so I need some modicum of astronomical knowledge. I find that for this practice of participatory astronomy to work I need to be mentally free of traditional notions of aspects and planetary attributes, bracketing them off without either accepting them or rejecting them. I let the presence – both physical and subtle - of each celestial entity, the astronomical pattern and planetary data, co-create their significance with me. Instead of applying ancient rules, I discover liberation in active imagination engaging with the living chorus of entities in space. The practice also requires good astronomical (not astrological) software, which provides a window in microcosmic space to prepare my mind for co-creative engagement with bodies, patterns, powers and presences in macrocosmic space. For some years I used RedShift on a PC. Currently I am using Voyager 4 for the Mac and find it better in its presentation of data.

Psychocosmic co-creativity

As I see it, the only relevance, within the ancient rules of astrology, of working out correlations between planetary aspects and historical events in the past, is the pragmatic implication of this practice for the present and the future. And the implication of traditional astrology for the future is clear: we sit around and wait for the rule-bound alignments (personal transits or world transits) to occur and for our psyches to be in synchrony with them, and then we can start co-creatively to engage with the predefined archetypal dynamics associated with the alignments. Our cosmic co-creativity is bound by ephemeris watching on the one hand and textbooks on archetypal astrological interpretation on the other. I find this - both experientially and theoretically - a limiting and constrained account of co-creative participatory engagement with our cosmos. By contrast with this, I believe such co-creativity to be capable, in awakened and potentized humans, of a rich, dynamic, diversity of idiosyncratic empowering enactments in which the unique nature of a human being finds its synchronous correlate in a unique macrocosmic pattern, which is not rule-bound, but liberated by unpredictable personal engagement with awe and beauty and cosmic drama. Another way of putting this is that there are many new psychocosmic transfigurations awaiting to be enacted. And they are first sensed by spirit immanent in the body, by an empowering bio-spiritual dance of the somatic being in co-creative resonance with a unique cosmic configuration of self, earth and solar system entities and deep space entities beyond.

This psychocosmic co-creativity is one way of engaging, through their physical manifestations, with powers and presences that have their primary home in the subtle universe. But it is not the only way or even the main way, just one way. It is also possible, I believe, to engage with powers and presences directly in their primary home. By powers I mean archetypal formative principles of creation; and by presences I mean elevated sublime superpersons who refract and mediate powers.