Hermetic astrology teaches that you have one mind or soul and some of its thought content accesses your brain to become objective consciousness. This is a unique perspective. Mind scientists today commonly acknowledge two or three minds and the story of mind can be traced back thousands of years.
The two mind theory gained popular notice in 1893 when Thomson Jay Hudson (1834-1903) published his book The Law of Psychic Phenomena. He wrote of an ‘objective mind’ and a ‘subjective mind’ and explained his theoretical position:
‘Our mental organization was such that it seemed as if we had two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; with each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action.’
Hudson, after observing various types of psychic phenomena, came to the conclusion that people possessed an ordinary everyday consciousness which he called the objective mind and mental abilities and mental processes of which they have no knowledge which he termed the subconscious mind.
But this duality of the mind is not a modern conception. Even Homer knew something about it, and his Greek information was derived from still more ancient Chaldea.
The duality of consciousness: Castor and Pollux
These Greeks were more given to artistic expression than to argumentative discussion, and thus what they knew, instead of being dryly stated as fact, more often than not was clothed in the beauty of legend or the grace of sculpture. And because their profound conceptions came to them from Chaldea, where ideas were inseparably bound up to their starry correspondences, star lore was not absent in their finer expression.
To them, as to the earlier Chaldeans and genuine astrologers today, the zodiacal sign Gemini ruled the mind. This section of the zodiac, in turn, is pictured in the sky by the constellation of the Twins, the chief stars of which are Castor and Pollux.
According to Greek legend the twins, Castor and Pollux, engaged in battle with rivals for the hands of certain fair maidens and during the combat Castor was killed. Pollux, who was immortal, was so tenderly attached to his brother that he was unwilling to survive him and besought Zeus to restore Castor to life. Zeus consented, but with a condition: only one of the brothers was permitted on earth at a time, the other being detained meantime in the underworld.
Homer relates it: ‘By turns they visit this ethereal sky. And live alternate and alternate die.’
Thus did the old Greeks express their opinion in the legend, that Pollux was immortal and could not be slain: that there is a mind or personality which retains its character and cannot be destroyed. And in Castor, who was slain, they present an accurate account of the vulnerability of the objective mind.
While the objective mind is awake and active, the subconscious mind finds meager opportunity for physical expression. It remains in the underworld. But when the objective mind sleeps, or for other causes is no longer active in physical affairs, the subconscious mind takes charge.
You continue to breathe, your heart pumps blood through your arteries, assimilation proceeds, and you have mental experiences, some of which are dreams, after your objective mind has shut down for the day and relinquished control to its brother Pollux, of subconscious import.
The subconscious mind becomes sublime and then unconscious
After the time of Hudson experimental researchers into psychical phenomena such as Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes applied laboratory methods of the most exacting nature in their tests and they also found that there is a section of the human mind which functions below objective awareness but they gave it a different name. Joining the Latin, limen, meaning threshold, to sub, meaning under, they termed it the subliminal mind, signifying those states of consciousness which are below the threshold of everyday consciousness.
Up to the time of Freud the subliminal mind was the current terminology for what Hudson has christened the subjective, or subconscious, mind. It was coined as a strictly descriptive scientific term. But certain popular metaphysical writers jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that it was used to denote sublime, in the sense of lofty, and was therefore a very superior thing to the subconscious mind.
To their imagination, but not to scientific men, there existed three minds: The ordinary objective mind, the rather despised subconscious mind, and the god-like subliminal mind to which they looked to demonstrate whatever they desired; even, without giving value received, money into their own pockets which other people had worked hard to acquire.
Not that they wished to be dishonest. They merely lost sight of the fact that wealth is the product of labor applied to material, or its equivalent, and that even when wealth is demonstrated by the power of the subliminal mind, someone works to produce it. Money is not materialized out of thin air, but when one person acquires it, another is deprived of it, which is fair enough, if the consumer is given its equivalent value in return.
With the coming of Freud and the vast literature on psychoanalysis which followed him, a new fashion in terminology developed, and what had once been called the subconscious mind, and later the subliminal mind, became commonly recognized by psychologists as the unconscious mind. And that in it reside all your lower and higher impulses and yearnings.
The ancients, under no illusion that Pollux was divisible, or that the consciousness that functioned on the four-dimensional astral plane was dual, nevertheless grouped those impulses relating to selfish advantage and gross desires into one category, which they called the animal soul; and those which relate to the welfare of others and to worthy aspirations into another, which they called the divine soul.
But however the motives are classified the unconscious mind, including its high aspirations and its most deplorable Freudian wishes, is an organized unity. And as the result of experiments and observations, by expert Hermetic astrologers into human behavior in its response to planetary energies, a much clearer picture of its formation and composition has emerged than that given by purely psychological schools.
Your unconscious mind is not a mere nothing, for it accomplishes remarkable things. It has energy, because it takes energy to perform work. And it retains a memory of all the experiences you have ever had and some can be recalled under special conditions.
Your astral body
According to astrological and psychological experiments, it appears that every experience of life, every thought and emotion is recorded within your astral body.
Your physical body is built up of physical cells, each having independent consciousness. And your four-dimensional astral body is also built up of cells, each possessing an independent consciousness. But on the four-dimensional plane, which is the plane of the unconscious mind, physical substance has no existence. Nor does four-dimensional substance respond readily to three-dimensional forces.
Instead, its most marked attribute is its response to thought.
Physical energy moves and molds the substance of the three-dimensional world. And in like manner thought-energy moves and molds the substance of the four-dimensional world.
Thoughts and emotions, therefore, are the foods which nourish your astral body. They form combinations, according to the law of association, to build up thought-cells.
Your astral body is composed of these thought-cells and it is their activities which are termed the processes of your unconscious mind.
So, your unconscious mind has ceased to be the mysterious thing it once was. It is a thought-built form and the thought-cells within it are organized in a definite manner.
While you are awake this form is closely associated with your physical body but in sleep and at the dissolution of your physical form it has the ability of continuing its conscious existence.
Your character according to this conception is the sum total of all your past experiences, as these have been organized as cells and structures within your four-dimensional astral form. And because new experiences are constantly being acquired your character undergoes change.
But the thought-cells, as previously mentioned, have a certain independent existence. They can do things. And when directed by your suggestions, or when stimulated by planetary energies, they work toward the accomplishment of definite results.
The demonstrating of a certain condition, through the power of thought, is really a process of directing the four-dimensional activities of certain thought-cells within your astral body toward a definite accomplishment.
Likewise the fortunate or unfortunate events which you attract in response to astrological influences are in reality brought to pass through the activities of thought-cells within your astral body which have been stimulated by planetary vibrations. If they feel harmonious they work to attract pleasing conditions, but if they feel discordant their four-dimensional work tends to attract misfortune.
Your character is built of your responses to the conditions you contact in life and it determines the type of events you will attract in the future. Planetary vibrations or other outside stimuli can only give additional energy to such thought-cells as are already present within your four-dimensional astral form.
These thought-cells and thought-structures within your astral body compose your unconscious mind. And your birth chart provides you with a map of its thought-cell organization. It is unconscious only in the sense that very few of its impressions are commonly registered by your physical brain, which is not due to its limitations, but to those of your brain through which it tries to express.
Your physical body is not the seat of consciousness, but merely the avenue through which you – the individual – gain impressions from the three-dimensional world.
Consciousness and character are not physical attributes. They relate to the thought-cell organization of your astral body, which, when freed from the limitations of the three-dimensional world continues to progress, learn, enjoy and express itself with all the additional opportunities which are opened up by entrance into a world having an additional dimension.
Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge
