The Occult Meaning of Now

As we confront an Apocalyptic threshold, what is the universe asking of us?

Stan Grof, painted by Alex Grey

With his theoretical model of the Birth Perinatal Matrices (BPMs), former LSD psychotherapist Stanislav Grof explored how the process of transformation mirrors the stages of fetal development and birth. Astrologer Richard Tarnas linked these stages with the archetypal meaning of the outer planets. There are four matrices, in Grof’s model, and each one corresponds to a particular psycho-spiritual experience. The first matrix or BPM1 represents the primordial unity of the womb, a Neptunian stage of contentment without boundaries. BPM2 is a state of anxiety, when the fetus feels the pressure of early labor, saturated in Saturnian dread. During this stage, the baby is pushed out of the safe womb, entering a dark tunnel with no way back. There is fear of suffocation and a sense of separation, doom, or despair. BPM3, the third matrix, is the Plutonian, life-or-death struggle to get out — to escape constriction. BPM4 is freedom, liberation, and relief as the baby is birthed into the new world, associated with Uranus.

Grof discovered these stages through his work with non-ordinary states. He found that his patients tended to return to these different phases of the birth process, as if they had to reintegrate what they went through originally, in order to heal. The process of fetal development and birth was a fractal that shaped the development of the whole person.

If the BPMs are helpful for considering the individuation process, do they also work on larger scales? It kind of feels as if, on a civilizational level, we are caught between BPM 2 and 3. We seem to be experiencing violent contractions and sense of no escape, caught against our will in a struggle that may lead to our destruction. We can’t see a way out of this tunnel. We know there is no way back, that transformation is inevitable, but the idea of undergoing this deep metamorphosis terrifies us: We yearn to hold on to what we know, but we can’t.

It was Richard Tarnas who connected the four BPMs to the archetypal characteristics of the outer planets, as defined by astrology. In Tarnas’ brilliant Cosmos and Psyche, he explored how the slow rhythms of the outer planets and their transits have structured human history and the Western Psyche over the last two thousand years or more. For Tarnas — among other thinkers — modernity’s disenchantment, our reductionist worldview which perceives the cosmos as a soulless void, is impoverished and incomplete. It removes the dimension of meaning from human life. Materialism, rational atheism, is a condition of existential entrapment, akin to BPM2. We can only overcome it through a radical reversal: A return to a worldview that recanters meaning, embraces mystery and transcendence.

This potential for reconnecting with meaning and mystery is available for us through the philosophical paradigm of monistic or analytic idealism, which argues logically and sensibly that consciousness, not matter, is the foundational layer of reality. After all, everything we know about reality we know through the medium of our consciousness. Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup calls materialism “a fantasy… based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning, and selective consideration of evidence.” The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for demonstrations of quantum entanglement, helped dismantle the illusion of separateness, revealing the universe as fundamentally non-local and interconnected. As our scientific understanding evolves, so must our philosophical frameworks.

Consciousness is not an accidental byproduct of physical process: Matter — the physical universe — is a manifestation of consciousness. The universe is like a dream-projection of this underlying consciousness. We, ourselves, are differentiated aspects of consciousness, experiencing and co-creating reality through our participation.

We need to make this ontological shift now. Heidegger noted that we find ourselves in a “world” defined by what he called the technological “enframing,” and wrote: “Even this doom of the gods remaining absent is a way in which world worlds.” William Carlos Williams observed, “A new world is only a new mind.”

Club of Rome theorist Donella Meadows explored the question of how to bring about or engineer system change. She noted that the highest leverage point for initiating system change is through the underlying paradigm or worldview. While it is difficult and cumbersome to change the physical infrastructure or the political and economic system, paradigms or worldviews — which only exist in people’s minds — can change instantly. They seem rigid and immovable until they suddenly transform, due to a shock of recognition, a breaking free of illusions, or some variant on the “hundredth monkey” principle.

Thresholds of paradigm shifts leading to systemic change are hard to predict. When they occur on a mass scale, they can lead to rapid — sudden and unexpected— transformations. “That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution,” wrote Hannah Arendt. When events take a revolutionary turn, it is often a surprise to everyone involved. The American Revolutionaries, for instance, simply wanted to restore a proper relationship with their King: Instead, they found they had to overthrow his rule and define a new political reality for themselves.

Microbiologist Lynn Margulis, co-founder of the Gaia Hypothesis, saw the Earth as an integrated, self-regulating organism made up of other organisms. She proposed that cooperation, rather than competition, is the fundamental principle of nature. She found that transformation from “greedy gluttony” to mutual symbiosis repeats over and over in biological evolution. For instance, trees are a much older type of species than we are. They perfectly model cooperation and symbiosis. Instead of taking from each other, they provide shelter and nourishment to a huge colony of different kinds of organisms, from bugs to worms to squirrels to mycelia and vines. Humanity now confronts a “meta-crisis” that will lead to our immediate extinction unless we undergo a similar shift, from competition and domination to cooperation and symbiosis.

Perhaps that is the gift of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, if we survive and somehow overcome the threat that their toxic combination of White Christian Nationalism, greed-based Capitalism, and techno-fascism pose to human freedom as well as our ecological survival: We are witnessing the full expression of destructive masculine egotism, which great wealth and great power exacerbate to a cancerous degree. We obviously need to redesign our society so that psychopathic or narcissistic personality types are not able to take charge. But how do we do that?

If humanity is to survive this crisis, we have to address the systemic crisis on three levels: