Dane Rudhyar - One Is Never Too Old To Begin Again.pdf - adios39

Today, in 1967, in the United States there are close to 20 million men and women

above the age of 65 . We are told that by the year 2000 there will be 34 million. The life

expectancy for any new-born baby is now age 70; it was 50 or less in 1900. And by the

year 2000 it could easily reach age 75 or more.

These figures do not tell the whole story, for what we have also to take into account is

the very fast trend toward automation and the expanded development and use of new

technologies. Automation may decrease the number of jobs and, thus, release people for

retirement at an earlier age; but it also demands highly trained workers with an ever-

increasing amount of technical skill and intellectual knowledge.

This, in turn, has a twofold result; young people have to go through a longer period of

study either to get a technical job or to be able to understand the impact of this advanced

technology upon what we call today imprecisely "the humanities". If advanced degrees

become prerequisite for a growing number of jobs, a young man or woman may have to

study until perhaps 25 years old — and, in many cases, 28 or 30 — before he can fulfill

adequately his or her mature role in our ever-more-complex society. It means also that the

type of technical skill acquired at 25 may not be sufficient to handle the new techniques the

worker, thinker, or teacher will have to use or to understand when he is in his mid-fifties.

Thus, he will either have to pass through a new period of learning in his forties or early

fifties or else retire before he is 65. But retire to what kind of life?

The Saturnian Life Pattern of Man

The life of an individual person runs in cycles; and the more we are aware of the nature and

the meaning of such cycles, the better for all concerned. The time may well have passed

when a man's life was one monolithic whole — that is, a single process of development

along one single line and with one type of occupation. You learned a set of principles and a

particular skill before you "came of age" at 21 — and, in many cases, until you left primary

school for some special agricultural, industrial, or office job. You married once and for all.

You remained within some local family or communal environment and worked along more or

less the same line of activity until you were incapacitated or had made enough money to

enjoy the kind of rest which led you pleasantly or painfully to death.

This type of existence was given a rigid and, at the same time, a profoundly significant

form in old India according to the Laws of Manu. There were four great classes of social

activities represented by the four basic castes; and there were four phases in the life span

of a human being: the learning phase of the student; the phase of biological-social

productivity according to set family patterns and trade patterns; the phase of

disengagement from possessions and attachments through retirement and meditation, but

also in some cases of broad participation in the over-all affairs of the community as a public

servant; and finally, the preparation for a significant death, perhaps as a totally unattached

wanderer.

Such an approach to human life meant that the person was born to fulfill one simple,

precise role and that he learned it, performed it, withdrew from it so as to realize his own

spiritual selfhood, and prepared himself for a new step in his spiritual evolution through the

gates of death. It was a unitarian concept of personal-social existence in a society which

practically did not change. The person, himself, remained what he was, just as a yearly

plant germinates, flowers, brings forth fruits and seed, and dies according to a stable

generic formula. Such a life pattern operates under the astrological influence of Saturn; its

over-all process of energy unfoldment is conditioned by the rhythm of what I have called

"the progressed lunation cycle" — i.e., the recurrent phases of the soli-lunar relationship

established at birth. In its social aspect, it is deeply marked by the 20-year cycle of the

conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn.

After three such conjunctions, both Jupiter and Saturn return to their places in the

birth-chart and, thus, repeat their original natal aspect. The human being is about 60. As

each progressed lunation cycle lasts 30 years (this, because New Moons occur actually

every 30 days ), the progressed Moon and the progressed Sun repeat their natal aspect also

at about 60. In China and ancient Greece, 60 was said to be the "age of philosophy." Man

was theoretically ready to look upon his life and the life of his community with a detached

and objective understanding. Relatively few men or women reached that age. They became

the patriarchs or elder statesmen, and the respected and very powerful matriarchs ruling

over large families — during the few years leading them to the occult "three scores and ten"

period which was considered the limit of man's life.

These may have been the good old days; but unless our modern society collapses, they

are gone forever. Human life is no longer one simple process, plant-like in rhythm. During

one life span of their body, men and women appear fated to have to experience perhaps

two or three different lives — to die to the first and to be reborn into another which

demands a basically new start — and, in a very real sense, a new education. The old Saturn

and Jupiter-Saturn cycles are no longer adequate clocks beating the hours and minutes of

existence. We have to seek new ways of measuring the living time of human individuals;

and it is the motion of Uranus which reveals to us at present the most significant pattern of

changes in our long and complex lives as modern individuals.

The Uranus-Patterned Human Life

It takes Uranus 84 years to complete its revolution around the Sun. Uranus reaches the

opposition to its natal place, thus, at the age of about 42 — which is the time at which a

definite psychological, if not biological, change is experienced today by a very large majority

of men and women. These men and women have, to some extent at least, become

"individuals" in their own right; but these modern individuals more often than not are

experiencing anxiety and frustrations, and they are ready for a more or less accentuated

"crisis of the forties." I have in past articles characterized this well-publicized crisis as a kind

of "adolescence in reverse."

When a human life was supposed to have the archetypal length of 70 years, 35 was the

midpoint of such a life span. This was theoretically the great moment of maturity — that

is, the time when a human being was in full possession of his productive power and with

enough past experiences to use this power validly in terms of the performance of his social-

personal role in his community. If, on the other hand, we consider that the archetypal

measure of a man's life is 84 years, the situation changes. It changes because we are

dealing now with a Uranus-conditioned life, one in which change rather than stability is

the keynote. We no longer live in a static type of society. Modern living is essentially and (in

the deepest sense of this word) "tragically" dynamic . . . and far more exciting!

Indeed, men and women in our Western society are very often living not one but at

least two lives during the life span of their body; and it is almost evident that this pattern of

multiple successive lives will become more widely experienced as our society becomes more

technological and more complex. In other words, the rhythm of individualized existence of

the modern man and woman is moving at such a fast pace, and starting so early , that the

whole pattern of human existence has to at least divide itself in two if it is to meet

significantly the challenge of this new age.

At some period in our mid-life, we tend almost inevitably to feel the need of starting life

afresh on a new basis — and the spread of the most recent forms of technology will force us

in many cases to do so, in perhaps subtle yet none the less powerful ways. It is because

society today still does not recognize this to be a fact and because it retains its old dualistic

patterns of morality (which are neither significantly valid any longer nor enforceable) that so

much psychological and social chaos is being experienced and hypocrisy and intellectual

dishonesty are practiced everywhere at all personal and social levels.

Today, almost at once after adolescence, if not before, the child begins to function as

an immature adult . The reasons for this are obvious. We need only mention the way in

which modern families live, the psychological pressures experienced by children of disturbed

and emotional (or divorced) parents, sex-and-violence stimulating television programs, and

the general tempo of an existence revolving more around cars than around an integrated

home. Considering the way adolescents are brought up, it is most unreasonable to expect

them not to seek sexual experiences and to claim the right to participate fully in the society

of grown-ups; and this leads to early marriages in a large number of cases and to student

rebelliousness. As the boy may have to pass much of his twenties in some college and as

the girl also studies or works, it is obvious that new types of family patterns must be

developed — a new kind of relationship between children and parents, as well as between

the sexes.

In any case, at age 42 it is reasonable for the early-married parents to expect that

their children will be grown up, in college, or married. At this age, the technology learned at

the age of 20 may have already become partially obsolete. Around this age, too, the

husband-wife relationship tends to be deeply altered. Uranus is in opposition to its natal

place. The stage is set for a new life. The same persons may participate in it, but are they

the same persons they were at 21 — granted that they have not been divorced years

before?

The Seven-Year Cycles

The 84-year cycle of Uranus divides itself into twelve 7-year cycles — and also seven 12-

year periods of a Jupiterian nature. The most basic, in a general sense, is the 7-year cycle.

Its rhythm has evidently a generic rather than an individual character; but we should

never forget (though we so often do!) that a person is "human" first, only later a social

being — and still later truly an individual.

The ages of 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 are, in most cases, very important milestones in the

development of an individual person. At about age 14, the child experiences adolescence; at

age 28, he or she usually is in some way challenged to discover more fully what he is as an

individual. I have spoken of it as the second birth, "birth in individuality." It may be the age

at which the youth increasingly ends his technological education (including perhaps training

of a practical nature in a job, world traveling). He then assumes his definite productive role

in society. In some fields (as in modern physics or in the arts), it may be the time at which

he makes his initial individual contribution to all-human knowledge — perhaps an intuitive,

fresh contribution which he will have gradually to develop and make fully productive during

the 7 or 14 following years.

Then comes age 42. This period is rather often a serious crisis only because the

individuals concerned do not want to accept the fact that they are changed persons. They

cling to old and now obsolete images of themselves, of "the other" and the family, or of

their place in society. Would it not be more in keeping with the accelerated rhythm and the

pressures of our modern society if people realized that at that age they are actually ending

at least the first phase of their life and that they are faced with the challenge of beginning a

new and perhaps quite different phase? Would it not be, in many cases at least, a

constructive social policy to allow for a few years of renewed education, psychological

as well as technical or intellectual , as a preparation for the beginning of a new life in the

late forties?

A New Life Foundation

Obviously, many objections and a probable storm of protest will greet such an idea; but the

actual fact is that it would simply bring into the open what, in many cases, is actually

occurring in terms of an often destructive crisis which may well poison psychologically the

remainder of the life of the persons concerned. Today, this remainder may well be the entire

second half of the life! Would it not be more significant to accept the fact that this second

half need not be merely a repetition or dull continuation of the first and that it can

essentially differ from the first phase? The type of interpersonal relationships and the quality

of knowledge which would become the foundations of the new life of individuals having lived

more or less independent lives since the age of 14 or 16 would assuredly differ from the

type and quality of the contacts and the learning which are possible to teen-agers.

If this were well understood and if it were generally accepted that the second half of

the life can be a new life started afresh and on a new psychological, social, and spiritual-

mental foundation, then people would not need to retire at 65 to a more or less socially

unproductive and useless existence around golf courses or bridge tables. They could have,

from around 48 to 70 or later, many years of constructive, truly mature, and

"contemporary" (rather than based on old precedents) productivity. They would produce —

after a few years of physical, psychological, philosophical, scientific re-education and rebirth

— on the foundation of a truly mature type of knowledge and experience. It should be a

creative foundation of wisdom, rather than one based on ancestral traditional knowledge,

mixed up with adolescent subjectivity, ebullience, rebelliousness.

When men and women would retire at or after 70, they would be able to look back to a

double — or it might be triple or quadruple — harvest of experience. Then they might be

challenged to try to integrate this manifold experience. As a result, they would leave to

their grandchildren or great-grandchildren the rich harvest of a very full, varied, and

encompassing life. The old static and monolithic Saturnian concept of life in a strictly limited

environment and in terms of narrowly focused interpersonal relationships would then be

superseded by a dynamic, multifarious, and multi-leveled existence always open to new

horizons — a truly constructively Uranian life.

Midpoints of Cycles

I have stressed in the foregoing the obvious fact that for modern individuals living under the

pressures of vast cities and of constantly renewed interpersonal contacts, the forties

constitute the most characteristic period of Uranian transformation. But in some cases, the

rhythm of consciousness changes might be accelerated even further. The three 28-year

cycles which add up to a full Uranus cycle establish a most significant threefold pattern

which is already appearing in the lives of a number of people, especially in the cases of very

early marriages. I have found in my more than 30 years' practice as a consultant that the

thirty-ninth year is fairly often a time when the seed of unrest in social or conjugal

relationships is sown; this germinates only a little later, during the mid-forties. The fourth

year in any 7-year cycle is the "bottom" (3 1/2 point) of the cycle. What has been started at

the beginning of that cycle can either lead to a fruitful consummation during the two

following years or it may begin to show signs of disintegration.

Dane Rudhyar - One Is Never Too Old To Begin Again.pdf

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