The DK Foundation

As a question go ‘What is going on in my life?’ is a gift to a counsellor because it indicates that processes are doing their work and bringing a person very close to the point of accepting that there may be a need to questions basic assumptions about life. It indicates a certain level of awareness, implying as it does acceptance of the idea that there could be another reality, which is trying to communicate something through the confusion. In such circumstances a person is usually very receptive.

‘What is going on?’ becomes the question when, despite our best efforts to secure what we want and think should be the outcome, the desired result eludes us. It is frequently the first question put to me by clients; indeed, it is often the question, which brings them to the point of consulting an astrologer. A number have asked the question, seeming to convey by their manner that they know the game is up for the personality which has wanted to think that it could, rather than actually expected, to have it all.

There is a saying much circulated in the Findhorn Community in Scotland[[i]]: ‘If you want to give God a laugh tell Him your plans.’

The plans of the personality which has its centre of gravity in itself will be successful in accordance to the out-workings of the law of cause and effect. Put as St. Paul put it in his Epistle to the Galatians, ‘whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’, and the position seems very simple. Most of us can take that on board, and increasing numbers of Westerners are acknowledging the Law of Karma, i.e., the out workings of cause and effect across lifetimes.

The law is simple; it is our position, which is complex. The human being responds, potentially, to many different centres of consciousness and karmic redress. Regardless of whether the idea of the human family has any emotional call upon us or not, we belong to this grouping called humanity which is an entity, itself experiencing the outworking of the law of cause and effect; within the human family there are racial and cultural and familial groupings; humanity belongs to an entity called planet Earth which has its own karma. From any of these centres of consciousness can arise situations which are the product of karmic redress and which can sabotage the plans of the personality.[[ii]]

In addition to these impersonal causes, we have to contend with our own inner conflicts. We are rarely completely single-minded about anything: at any one time, with reference to any one matter or situation, we are usually juggling with a number of different agendas, arising in different parts of our being.

The conflict between the head and the heart is commonly experienced and widely understood.

It has been incorporated it into much post-war psychological theory and supplied its own terminology.

The ‘plurality of I’s’, the conflict between the head and the heart, call it what you will, frequently means that, consciously or unconsciously, we sabotage ourselves: the plans held dear by one part of ourselves maybe too costly to another. Caught in the conflict between the two, our intention weakens.

Another sabotaging factor is the perceptions that we have of life and our selves and of what we can and cannot, should and should not do. These assumptions form the bedrock of our personal realities. All too frequently these assumptions go unnoticed and unchallenged for the reasons that it is difficult indeed to see what one is standing on because the feet cover it; it is threatening to one’s very identity to abandon these all too familiar assumptions.

Inner confusion and perceived limitation become externalised, i.e., we meet them in the physical world. This is central to the rationale of incarnation on the physical plane: what we experience outwardly reveals what we are inwardly. Revelation can lead to understanding, which, by slow stages, can lead to liberation, but before this happens there is likely to be disappointment and disorientation. The human mind is an electromagnetic field. The personal reality makes a person more or less susceptible to impersonal causes. Negative attitudes, for example, will attract into the personal energy field negative situations from the impersonal world.

The more developed and stronger a personality becomes (this usually means that the heart and throat centres opening) then the more resistance he has to the outworking of the Law of Accident (i.e., impersonal causes) and the more influenced is he by the outworking of the Law of Fate (i.e., causes arising within himself). Under the Law of Fate a person meets his inner self externalised in the outer world: the ‘terrible stare of self meeting self’[[iii]]

A person who is free from the Law of Fate comes under the Law of Destiny, or the behest of the soul.

When a personality is struggling free from the Law of Fate, the Law of Destiny begins to kick in and then the plans of the personality really come under pressure. When the Law of Destiny is kicking in, as it is in the lives of many people now, the conflict between the head and the heart, goes up a gear and becomes the conflict between the higher and lower self. The soul begins to supervise the use of life and time, and if the personality still has a centre of gravity in itself then, as a result of intervention from the soul level, its plans can go haywire. This, presumably, is when God really gets His laughs.

These confrontations between the personality and the soul, or the personal and transpersonal, occur in the lives all of us.

Through the horoscope, the periods of confrontation are discernible and it is notable that people who have formally committed themselves to a spiritual path and may have assumed roles of some authority are likely to experience these standoffs as a profoundly challenging time. This is how the ‘ism’ gets removed from ego and the ‘ish’ from self. It is through such periods in which the personality perspective is so strenuously challenged, that the soul brings the personality to heel

The level of development and understanding which we have attained will determine not whether we go through the experience but, rather, the intensity of the experience and our capacity to make sense of what is happening, i.e., whether we view what is happening in our life as the workings of malign fate, or are prepared to accept that we are experiencing Grace in the form of guidance from a higher level.

In the language of esotericism, this process in its concluding stages is called Alignment. At this point, to use the terminology of Theosophy, the Angel of the Presence and the Dweller on the Threshold meet. The ajna or brow centre is then open and the integrated personality, an agent for soul purpose, is fully under the Law of Destiny. As the agent of soul purpose, he will be required to use his individuality and his personal capacities.

There are many, many people in the West approaching this stage now. And it is a confusing time until the personality comes to understand what is going on. This confusion is being made worse by the kind of standardisation process encouraged by so much recent thinking, which emphasises that it is ‘spiritual’ to be such-and-such a way, to live such-and-such a way and to be engaging in certain activities. This interferes to a very real degree with the capacity to listen to what the soul is trying to tell the personality. It cuts across authenticity, creates confusion about identity and anticipates the instructions of the soul, using inadequate and gross generalisations, based more often than not, on how spiritual awareness has expressed itself in different cultures in different times. Different levels of development require different kinds of input.

To anyone wanting to understand what is going on and what best to do, DK gave the following advice: Establish the exact moment of birth and consult a completely wise astrologer, if such a person can be found, or consciously assume the position of the spiritual Observer, and cultivate the power to respond to the soul. Then, from the angle of that soul, the personality must learn to control circumstances and the attendant reactions of the personality.

In either case we need to look at ourselves, not at some abstraction called the spiritual aspirant, and at ourselves as we really are, not as we would like to be or think we should be. Spiritual vanity, assumption and in authenticity are amongst the biggest obstacles to spiritual development. If wise astrologers do become more numerous then they can help us look at ourselves by supplying useful frames of reference because the question ‘What is going on?’ could be put another away: ‘What do I need to understand about myself?’

1. Established in Scotland in the1970s by Eileen Caddy, in support of a more conscious way of living.

2. This state of affairs in governed by what in Gurdieff called the Law of Accident. The more developed a person becomes the freer he becomes from accident i.e., impersonal causes.

3. Author unknown; from a poem called ‘The Mountaineers’.