Gifts Of The Spirit

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

NOTE 3

DEDICATION 4

PART ONE—SPIRIT AND HUMAN NEEDS 5

PART TWO—THE TWELVE GIFTS 9

ADAPTABILITY 9

DETACHMENT 13

THE ART OF LETTING THINGS HAPPEN 18

KNOWING WHERE ONE BELONGS 21

SIMPLICITY 25

TOLERANCE 29

EASE 33

NON-IDENTIFICATION 38

COMRADESHIP—THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 43

PERSONAL INTEGRITY 48

SERVICE 53

COURAGE 58

PART THREE—THE GREATEST GIFT 62

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

by

DANE RUDHYAR

NOTE

Much of the material incorporated in this book was included in a series of articles printed (1945-46) in the magazine AMERICAN ASTROLOGY under the same title. It has been recast in an altogether new mould and much has been added to it.

DEDICATION

TO NICAELA

May her life be blessed, and a blessing—a gift of the spirit!

D. R.

PART ONE—SPIRIT AND HUMAN NEEDS

Throughout the past centuries, philosophers and wise men pondering over the many and varied ways in which human beings react to their experiences, have sought to define a few basic types of men according to the characteristic nature of their most familiar responses. Today, psychologists and biologists, anthropologists and endocrinologists propound in great detail their own classifications of human types. But what these new categories have gained in precision and analytical subtlety does not suffice to make obsolete the ancient classification of twelve zodiacal types of human beings, with its deep root in a metaphysical and cosmological understanding of the universal patterning of the tides of life and of the creative answer of spirit to human needs.

We do not know where the concept of a twelvefold cosmos appeared for the first time. We find it abstractly and geometrically defined by Pythagoras and Plato, who probably had inherited it from Egypt or Chaldea, perhaps from still more ancient civilizations. It is logical to assume that the men of the vitalistic era of culture and religion, completely absorbed by problems resulting from the cultivation of the land and the raising of yearly crops, found it obvious, in their attempt at grasping the secret of periodicity in nature, to consider the solar year and the cycle of the moon’s phases as a basis for calculation. On these two cycles, agricultural man established his calendars; which in turn gave him a sense of mastery over time and seasonal activity—a sense that he had become able to fathom the rhythmic pattern of all creative processes in nature. Having acquired the power to harness the life-force in crop-raising and cattle-breeding, the next step was for him to extend his understanding of nature’s rhythm to human nature, for he believed that the universe was one organic whole controlled by divine Powers, and that humanity was an inseparable part of the harmony of this whole.

Because man’s universal experience showed him a basic contrast between the ordered pageant of dots and discs of light in the sky and the confused, unpredictable and fearful happenings so frequent in the jungle, the forest, or the plains menaced by storms and inundations, the wise men of old quite logically thought that the realm of the sky was the habitat of those Powers ruling over the ordered creative processes of life. Because agricultural communities had come naturally to worship all that related to the propagation of life, men were led to regard the two Lights of the sky, the Sun and Moon, as the focal points for the release of the two great creative poles of the universal life-force, male and female. The combination of their yearly and monthly cycles of displacement and transformation gave thus an approximate basis for a twelve-fold pattern: the twelve soli-lunar months.

The Sun, as the male polarity, symbolized the creative power of spirit; the Moon, whose countenance forever varied and, thus varying, seemed to be related to periodical phenomena in the biological and emotional behavior of women and all receptive organisms, was the symbol of organic needs in nature. Twelve times during the year, the Moon vanishes, absorbed as it were in the radiant being of the Sun. Each New Moon came thus to represent a time of spiritual fecundation, when nature was being impregnated by spirit in answer to nature’s need. Twelve acts of fecundation—twelve basic needs that had to be filled by appropriate solar gifts. The progeny of these creative acts was life on earth; but as well the ebbs and flows of feelings, moods, impulses and inner realizations which sway the inner nature of human beings.

It seems evident that such was the origin of the solar Mystery-cults over lunar rites. Chaldea may have been the place where the solar pattern of the creative processes gained first its most definite ascendancy; where the solar year prevailed over lunar calendars, and the twelve-fold zodiac to which the Western world has become heir was finally developed. The twelve signs of the zodiac were considered as the twelve gates through which the creative power of the Sun flowed, each gate defining a phase of the total power necessary in the creation of any microcosm, that is, of any organic whole.

In these ancient days, the earth as a whole was considered the microcosm—a small concentrate of the entire universe. Humanity, as a kingdom of earth-nature, was the soul of this microcosm; and humanity had to be likewise twelvefold—twelve types of men corresponding to the twelve zodiacal signs. Each type was considered necessary for the development and the harmony of the social whole. Each type had a creative solar function to perform; and this function could be determined by the season of birth of this individual—that is, by the position of the Sun at birth with reference to the spring equinox, symbol of all creative beginnings.

This constitutes the foundation of astrology, in its simplest form. But we are not concerned here with astrology and the problems it poses to the rationalistic intellect or the credulity of modern man. We are dealing only with psychological symbolism in its most universal and most ancient aspect, with man’s attempt to understand human nature and to bring some order in the multiplicity of its responses to life and experience. We are dealing with great Images which are deeply rooted in man’s collective unconscious; with universal ideas or archetypes so vital that our Western intellectualism and all the scorn of the modern scientific rationalism have not been able to dim their significance in the eyes of countless millions. We are dealing with spiritual processes which every man can experience if he chooses to open his consciousness to their fecundating and exalting power.

Every human individual, in so far as he can be considered truly a complete and relatively independent whole, is in himself a zodiac. In him can be found all types of human responses to life. In him the characteristic qualities of each of the twelve zodiacal signs operate in varying degrees. However, one, or a very few, of these qualities—these modes of response to the demands of bio-psychic living on earth—predominate. It is such a predominance which determines the type to which the individual belongs—his dominant zodiacal type—just as it is the predominance of similar traits of character which makes of him an extrovert or introvert, a thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition type, according to the psychological classification presented by Carl Jung.

Because each type demonstrates the preponderance of some kind of reaction to life and of some mode of behavior, feeling and thinking, there is always a tendency in every type to exaggerate its characteristic attitudes. This produces disharmony through over-emphasis, illness of body or soul through congestion and malformation caused by the over-development of one function and the resulting under-development of a complementary function. A region of extreme fullness finds itself compensated for by one of emptiness. Brilliancy of mind may cause dullness or darkness of feelings. Health, psychological and biological, can only be regained if some power seeks to re-establish the disturbed functional balance of the total organism of personality by vivifying the underdeveloped function. This power, in its essential and original manifestation, is spirit.

Spirit, as we use the term in this book, is the active outpouring of That which is wholeness, harmony, absolute equilibrium. Spirit is the power whose character it is to seek forever to re-establish harmony and functional balance wherever these have been disturbed; and this power thus must operate where-ever there are wholes—which means, everywhere. Spirit is that which must always attempt to fill all zones of emptiness, to bring together and integrate through an adequate structure the polarities of being which had drifted apart. In its most deeply and vitally experienced aspect, spirit is the answer to all human needs. It flows toward every human being who has need of it, as electricity flows from higher to lower potential, as wind rushes from zones of greater pressure to zones of relative emptiness, as water seeks to