Part Three:
The Creative Release of Spirit - 3

What is implied in the foregoing is nothing less than a technique for becoming acquainted with the timing of the manifestations of this creative Spirit; also for preparing oneself consciously to meet these moments of equilibrium during which the possibility of Spirit-conditioned activity is present. A possibility — not a certainty. Moments of unstable and dynamic equilibrium come according to the law of cyclic and polar change, but these moments do not last; and unless man faces them with awakened consciousness there can be for him no experience of Spirit-conditioned activity. The "gates" open, but he who has fallen asleep while passing in front of the gates does not experience the vision which the gates reveal; for experience presupposes consciousness of a sort in a more or less individualized experiencer.
      Spirit can and does act whether there is consciousness or not. But where there is as yet no formed structures of personality to experience it consciously the activity of Spirit operates in the darkness of the realm of Roots, where sunlight does not reach. It operates through the instincts, through channels of direct, but unconscious, expression — and this is symbolically the Spring equinox, Aries. Where, on the other hand, a conscious and formed personality has been built (through the symbolical six-month process at work from Aries to the end of Virgo), the creative activity of Spirit operates in terms of conscious realizations within the expectant total organism of man. It releases, then, Meaning. It operates, symbolically speaking, as the Seed at the Fall equinox, Libra.
      The higher function of astrology, known to mystics of all ages and all races, is to reveal to the evolving personality the Seed-moments of his cyclic experience: those equinoctial moments during which Spirit can act within the human soul in terms of new cosmic Impulses or of creative Meaning. Such moments are revealed in a number of ways. In a universally human sense, they are the seasonal turning points of the year when the Sun actually and concretely crosses the thresholds of Aries and Libra. At such times the whole of nature — terrestrial and human — receives a Visitation of the creative Spirit. They constitute days of maximum potentiality — for birth or rebirth, for emotional outgoings or sacramental self-offerings to the community, for building or transfiguring the forms of our human experience. And such spiritual openings were celebrated by rituals in ancient civilizations which were close to the pulse of seasonal life.