Part Two:
Twelve Phases of Human Experience
GEMINI - Page 3 of 3
A full understanding of what is implied in the activity of the human person during the Gemini phase of his experience should rest on the recognition of two basic types of organic relationships. It is because, during that phase, there is for every man the possibility of transferring the center of his consciousness from one type to the other that the psychological problems particular to Gemini arise.
The first type of relationship belongs to the realm of Taurus. It is earth-relationship, symbolized by the fact that every plant that grows on the surface of our planet is rooted in the same soil. As there is only one continuous crust of the earth (continuous even under the oceans) all plants are related to one another by their roots. The fir tree in the Rocky Mountains, the pine in Georgia and the oak in the European mountains all emerge from the same solid and compact earth-surface. Such a type of connection characterizes essentially all relationships which come under the Sign Taurus: relationship through the "roots" of the being (physical contact, food, sex, etc.) — relationship defined by a common bondage to the earth, and in general to the factor of "fruitful substance" at any conceivable level.
The other kind of unifying relationship is relationship through the air; the air which all living organisms breathe — be they plants, animals or human beings. We are all, actually and in concrete fact, united with every breathing organism. However separate and proud we may be in our feeling of superiority and decency as we walk along Park Avenue, we take willy nilly in the innermost depths of our being (lungs and blood) the very same air which a moment ago has been breathed by a very dirty peddler, a prostitute or a criminal in the slums nearby. We might not ever think of being in the same room with these people, but the air they have breathed is now in our lungs. We cannot escape the relationship; for to do so would mean swift death. The narrow circle of our conscious relationships to other human beings is thus extended, against our will, by the air we breathe.
Air likewise unites us in our basic mode of expression, speech; for sound travels by means of air-waves. Air-waves relate us in our home to the airplane soaring a mile above, as we bear the sound of the engine. Air carries the pollen which gives us hay fever. However thick the walls of the fortified castle we build around our precious ego, however proud or selfish our "isolationism" — air laughs at these childish fancies of ours and compels us to be related, to be one with the very things we wish to escape. Air is therefore truly the element through which man may experience a basic "extension of relationships." And Gemini is known as the first of the "air signs" of the Zodiac.
A vivid extension of being through the constant search for ever new relationships: this is the essence of human experience in Gemini. This extension began at the biological level when the human hand emerged as a new evolutionary factor in the realm of living organisms. Indeed the hand — "ruled" by Gemini — is the primordial symbol of the human kingdom at the level of organic life. Through the use of the hand, man became a maker of tools. The variety of his experiences increased enormously as these tools enabled him to control and change his environment. New associations led to new patterns of relationship and to the progressive refinement of nervous reactions and nervous sensitiveness. From hands to nerves and to brains: this is a Gemini-controlled process of personality development. Along its course, man, the thinker-progeny of — man, the maker — is born.
In Aries, man does not experience thinking as an associative process based on the raw materials of his personal experience. He experiences "Ideas" — which strike him from above, or germinate within him as seeds from the past, seeds which belong to the phase of the previous cycle when the Night-force was dominant. Through Taurus, these ideas or inspirational revelations of meaning sink themselves into the substance of human feelings and organic reactions. Only in Gemini does thought really occur as a consistent and functional process of organic behavior under the direction of the Day-force.
Thinking controlled by the energy of the Day-force is quite a different thing from thinking dominated, in Sagittarius, by the Night-force. Gemini thinking is, on one hand, related to the needs of the personality, and on the other, it is something absorbed from the environment. It is learnt. At whatever level it might be, Gemini thinking is transmitted thinking; thinking which brings into concrete expression the impulses and inspirations experienced during the Aries period. It is verbal thinking conditioned by language. The Gemini thinker selects from the treasure-house of past civilizations words and concepts as means for him to grow as a personality. He thinks psychologically; whereas the typical Sagittarian thinks socially. And this is why Gemini is poet rather than philosopher. He builds with words, as the hands build with clay, stones and wood. But he builds because he personally must grow through that experience, because in that building he trains himself to function as an autonomous and consistent personality.
. . . College years; years of apprenticeship, of wanderings into new worlds, of being drawn and repelled by touch and smiles, deeply uncertain yet aggressively sure, the more set the less the flow of life seems seizable by hands and brains, projecting symbols, images, words to reassure oneself that one is knower and master — such is the Gemini phase: the entrance into the wide world of human society, the gates to the great experience of union with the Beloved.
By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1943 by David McKay Company
and Copyright © 1970 by Dane Rudhyar All Rights Reserved.
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