Pathways to Wholeness: Archetypal Astrology and the Transpersonal Journey

As self-discovery reaches the perinatal realm, the archetypal Neptune acts as a homing beacon, pulling journeyers’ awareness back toward the numinous ground of being. As Tarnas recognized, they will have special access to the feelings of oceanic connection that Grof refers to as the Basic Perinatal Matrix I—The Amniotic Universe and Union With the

Later, in adulthood, Pluto also governs the process that pushes this unresolved material up into awareness where it can be finally worked through and completed. Pluto's driving energies must be faced on an emotional level to be released. When left buried inside, the ego must consume enormous amounts of energy to suppress them, squandering the body'

People who adhere to the old materialistic, Newtonian understanding of the world may be pragmatic in their everyday lives, but their inner experience will over time become dry, barren and dissatisfying, and without higher meaning. In order to be truly healthy—embodying what Grof calls “higher sanity”—people need to learn to be comfortable in both w

As well as personal aspects and transits, a third category of alignment is referred to as world transits. World transits occur when two or more planets align with each other in the sky, representing an activation of their corresponding archetypal impulses in the entire collective psyche of humanity and in historical events.

According to Grof, psychedelic substances can be properly understood as non-specific amplifiers of psychological processes. They actively complete chemical and neural circuits in the brain that are usually interrupted—filling in the antenna, so that emotional material which is normally inaccessible can now flood into consciousness. Thus the content

Tarnas discovered remarkably precise and detailed correlations between Grof's perinatal matrices and the archetypal meanings observed to correspond to the planets Neptune, Saturn, Pluto, and Uranus.

Grof's discovery and systematic mapping of the perinatal layer of the human psyche is one of his most important contributions to Western psychotherapy and psychiatry, and we can now consider this research in more depth. He found that perinatal sequences tend to emerge in four broad, overlapping clusters of experience, which he termed the Basic Peri

People's birth charts record the “cosmic state” of the archetypes at the moment of their birth, reflecting patterns of experience that will unfold and express themselves in many different forms throughout their lifetimes.

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