The Quest for Authentic Love

The Quest For Authentic Love takes a step-by-step demonstration of how inflations and other psychological gunk may destroy the potential for fulfilled relationship. The Quest is a recipe for creating conscious harmony, like the story of the rain maker repeated by Carl Jung throughout his Collected Works. Jung met Ricard Wilhelm, the son of missionaries raised in China and in the early 1920's the translator of the I Ching. He told Jung that during his travels in China he ventured into a small village where he observed the people suffered from drought. They milled about seeking an answer to their diminishing rice supply. Rain had to come or the village would starve. The bright skies held no signal for the moist clouds so badly needed, so the town council sent for the rain maker.

A little one-horse carriage brought a tiny old man down from some mountain in the region. This rain maker requested the delivery of bowls of rice and tea to his shelter, which was a humble shack in the middle of one of the dry rice paddies. He apparently meditated inside while the villagers watched, and came out only to receive his rice and tea. Three days later, it rained. The old man was about to mount the carriage when Wilhelm stopped him to ask, "How did you do that?"

The old man responded, "When I arrived I sensed that the whole place was out of harmony. It took three days for me to get myself back into harmony." With that he stepped onto the carriage and was gone.

Jung tells this story over and over throughout his Collected Works. He gave the quality of inner harmony a great importance. In a similar vein, this story also underscores the prospect of Love. Love is in the domain of the kind of personal harmony which is achieve with both humor and rigor. Without it, we toil alone in life. But, if we could master personal harmony, Nature and Love, would follow. The Quest for Love may be presented as a mythological path, but it is a narrative well-marked by the long experience of the ancients.

Once a woman in a bullet-proof attitude asked me, "You're the damn hot-shot astrologer, when am I going to fall in love?"

In my astrology practice, I have regularly predicted love in the future of a woman. It has become clear to me that the possibility for love and relationship is also a question of choice and consciousness, not just the right aspect from Venus.

So now, when Venus makes a nice aspect in the chart, I wonder if my client will accept her role. Quite commonly she wants to do as a man, and "Take Action." She wants to do something for love. The emphasis belongs with that expression, "to do," as it is a Yang expression. It implies action and effort. She wants to give him her attention, show him her feeling. But, in these small demonstrations, she is operating exclusively from her head, not her heart. In the ways of Love, the "head"is not necessarily how she may advance the priority of Love. Accepting that Love is from the Divine, she arrives more easily at the role she has of protection of her feeling, or keeping it still, witholding it for a while, finding later, in its evelation, it is itself a far more vast power.

So accustomed are we to "figuring it out," we women may persist in asking whether love is real. There is a kind of critical voice, like Psyche's sisters who are suspect. They decried Psyche's lover as a monster. They provoke and challenge Psyche to use her lamp, and arm herself with a knife (like a detective, on the hunt for clues) to ascertain whether the one she loves was in fact "real."

These "sisters" represent the promptings of a figure from the unconscious, known as the Animus. He may appear as both of two personas: the "Red Queen," or the "Dream Lover." Either way, the Animus operates as a ghost, an invisible presence always criticizing and measuring. This phantom may use whatever means necessary to remain completely undetected, operating "under cover" until the individual woman decides to challenge him-to become individual, and no longer under the sway of the archetypes. Most notably, what I propose is proven by our actual experiences.

A woman will increase her success in relationships achieving fulfillment in Love if she can locate the secret of her womanhood. The Animus is a proud tower of monumental intellectual capacity, but it does not hold a candle in Love. There is a secret in feminine consciousness which has been lost to us in the struggle for equality of the sexes. A search for inner peace and attraction is inspiredfrom woman's inheritance as formidable force of Nature. Her hormones and greater Yin can exceed or at least tonify the values of the Yang, brute force or willfulness, when given a chance.

Sometimes, long after a consultation, a woman reports (to my chagrin) that I predicted love and Love did not materialize. It is possible that I failed as an astrologer. Possibly, I was wrong. However another possibility says she will make me wrong for her personal failures, the same failures which plagued me before my discovery. I learned that over and over we must fail in love in order to achieve the right attitude toward it: that we cannot force any such thing as Nature; it is she which forces us.

The Animus, when unknown to a woman, can properly kill out her possibility of love. This figure which operates through her personality, who parades himself in her identity, represents the inferior mannish unconsciousness of women. Just as a drag queen is an inferior woman, so is a woman with her unconscious animus a bad mimick of a man. As an astrologer I monitor the Red Queen as a program to support a woman's Quest for Authentic Love. To begin, a direct assumption that some part of love's failure may actually lie within herself opens the "rabbit hole." By so doing, we admit to responsibility and "spiritual authority" over no one but one's self.

At first glance this may seem insulting. But, like Alice in Wonderland, we may have hit a wall and fallen into a pit of the unconscious. Things are a little "topsy turvy," in these regions. To steady our out of focus vision we must remember that in a descent toward the region of Soul, expectations are always in reverse.

Here's our advantage: by locating the source of the tension within, it suggests an immediate hope. It is possible that the conscious effort has the power to manifest the opposite conditions, and quite naturally. I am suggesting that imaginative consciousness is a magical act working in cooperation with the forces of Nature.

This occurs as a woman expands her self-knowledge to include in her Self-concept the figure of ALL Nature. This is the symbol of the Zodiac. If the context of a woman's life can be expanded by consciousness to the archetypal world, she is allowed a free-flow, from an inner fountain, her heart. She receives her missives from every direction, wind, stars and earth. This material, the seemingly endless inner dialogue, has as its source the same fountain from which Love also flows.

This Love is her birthright. But it is too confined in the narrowness of ego positions; When she opens receptivity she may become like the Sacred Chalice, the container for the Eros function. The flow follows also through dream, and their pithy bluntness elevates the context and honesty of our lives. The dreamer is directed toward a new feminine consciousness.

No opinion, argument or doubt expressed elsewhere will convince like dreams. They serve as a spontaneous oracle. Dreams offer the call and she must respond, answering like the mirror, mirror on the wall. Dreams cannot be penetrated by force either, we come to find. While the seed of consciousness takes root, sometimes mysteries remain.

Thus, a polarity emerges between a woman and her ego: the voice of the dreams and the voice of whomever it is that is directing her ego, may be in conflict. The Animus has emerged from the unconscious and is parading around, a virtual identity thief. He is hard working for the money but steals from the bed in the same effort. And if ever there was a time to capture such a persona vampire, it is now. This thief is in the midst of our warring international crisis.

Who is stealing peace, vigor and vitality?

The Unconscious Animus.