Their joint “definition” of evolutionary astrology is posted on Steven Forrest’s website: What is Evolutionary Astrology?Įvolutionary Astrology embraces paradigms and methodologies which specifically measure the growth of the soul from life to life. Yet another view is that since we are all connected at the deeper levels of being, our collective unconscious holds memories of all lifetimes of everyone - thus our valid “past life” memories can actually be memories of anyone who ever lived!Īfter the publication in 1996 of Jeffrey Wolf Green’s enormously popular work, Pluto, The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul, Volume I, Green joined with astrologer Steven Forrest to write Measuring the Night: Evolutionary Astrology and the Keys to the Soul, and to create a network of students and teachers focused on evolutionary astrology. Another approach holds that since time itself is not an absolute, it is quite possible that one’s “past life” is in the future … that incarnations can skip around freely in time, rather than following one after another. For example, Dane Rudhyar remained agnostic on the idea of sequential embodiment, and leaned toward a “genetic memory” view of reincarnation. There are actually many ways of conceiving the ideas of soul evolution that are not dependent on such a literal view of reincarnation. Like many spiritual concepts, however, reincarnation can be a limiting belief if it is taken too literally as a linear succession of physical embodiments by a single soul. Jeffrey Wolf Green, Pluto, the Evolutionary Journey of the Soul, Volume 1Įvolutionary astrology depends on the concept of evolution in a larger context than the life of an individual human being, and much of it depends specifically on the idea of reincarnation. Yet, the people who are in power in the dominant governments of this world are creating policies that lead in just the reverse directions, while paying lip service to the concerns of the people they lead. The common person in all lands truly desires peace and an extension of goodwill toward all. … in reality most people do have this level of awareness in varying degrees due to the media. As astrologer Jeffrey Wolf Green puts it:
Yet this fear - the fear of ego-death - is the strongest force that holds us back from reaching the higher levels of awareness that the Aquarian Age is pulling us toward, and which we can all see is a necessary step if we are to avoid the destruction in chaos that our competitive and ego-centered worldview is rapidly leading us toward. We will not lose our personal identities, we will simply no longer be trapped within them. When humanity as a whole has made the conscious evolutionary leap to the “global consciousness” of human unity - or even planetary unity, recognizing all life on earth as a single organism - this awareness will not exclude the personal, but will rather include it within a larger context. And finally, both approaches were predicated on the awareness that life is not a rare and isolated exception in an otherwise purely material and mechanical Universe, but that in fact the Universe itself is alive, and that it unfolds in an orderly way because it expresses the qualities of will, purpose and intelligence, even in its apparently “material” aspects. Both presented the idea that not only individuals but humanity as a whole is gradually evolving toward unity, and that each individual has a unique and specific role to play in the evolution of humanity … and that this role can be understood by studying the individual’s birth chart as a “map” describing his or her place in the grand scheme of spiritual evolution. Both presented the idea that there is a natural order or structure to the process of existence, and that this structure has purpose and direction - that it moves always toward greater awareness of unity and harmony through the balancing of apparent opposites, and that the specific realizations and experiences needed are different for each individual.
Both Bailey and Rudhyar presented the Soul as a particular expression of the underlying unity we call God.
The individual personality is seen as one’s limited identification with a single incarnation as a particular human being the higher self of the Soul is seen as the spiritual being who goes through these experiences in various incarnations in order to gain experience. Both presented evolution as a “journey of the Soul” through cycles of experience aimed at bridging the gap between the individual personality and the higher self of the Soul. As different as these two approaches were, they were united in several important ways.