Pathways to Wholeness: Archetypal Astrology and the Transpersonal Journey

During my own three decades of research with workshops, consultations and personal experience, I have come to believe that archetypal astrology and holotropic exploration have the potential to revolutionize humanity's relationship with its deeper nature and help us to rediscover a more harmonious relationship with each other, the natural world, and

Holotropic research suggests that one of the major sources of this unnecessary or malignant pool of aggression is in the perinatal layer of the psyche, based on the life-and-death struggle during labor—archetypally related to both Mars and Pluto. As Grof notes, aggression is a natural response of any organism subjected to life-threatening suffocati

Wilber writes that our deepest inner yearnings are to reconnect with divine consciousness, and if we do not have access to genuine transcendent states, we will have an automatic tendency to fill the void with material and social substitutes. He calls this drive for wholeness the Atman project.8

Its entire experience is happening inside the mother's body, which for the fetus represents the entire universe, and thus, in the adult's later consciousness, reliving the loss of the womb is experienced as destruction of the world or of the universe. Grof observed repeatedly that full surrender to these sequences of death and rebirth leads to unus

Individuals engaged in deep self-exploration under the influence of BPM IV experience a cluster of themes centered around breakthrough and transcendence. The volcanic arousal and suffering of the previous stage of BPM III eventually reach the extreme limit, then culminate in a sense of total failure on every imaginable level—physically, emotionally

The next layer of experiences that people encounter in deep self-exploration Grof termed the perinatal layer (from peri, meaning “surrounding” and natalis, meaning “birth”). Perinatal experiences are based around the memories of birth labor and delivery, combined with dramatic encounters with dying and impermanence in human life. As Grof's patients

exploring the psyche can mediate a profound reconnection with the cosmic creative principle, helping people to heal a range of emotional and physical problems, transcend their fear of death, and reach a more integrated level of functioning in everyday life.

Some of the most fundamental problems in a human lifetime can be seen as a replay of birth, an attempt by the psyche to complete and integrate the experience—as if, Grof observes, we have been born biologically but not yet emotionally. The psyche has a relentless tendency to create and draw toward itself experiences that match the thematic quality

People who access these experiences can relive specific biological details of fetal existence such as hearing the mother's heartbeat or the peristaltic action of the intestines, as well as specific emotional states from her everyday life. These memories are overlaid with themes from nature that share with the intrauterine state a free-flowing lack