Seeing the Wholeness of Our Light and Life.

Following up on a semi-autobiographical article I posted a couple of weeks ago, on life’s journey we find that we and others are always moving forward, changing what we do and who we do it with along the way.

Whether we’re reasonably comfortable with what we’re doing, or whether we feel the need to change our job or elements of our life to something different, we all go through countless changes along the way. As I mentioned in that article, all that we do helps contribute to our understanding and wisdom, even if we don’t see how it’s all connected.

As I explained, whether we know it or not, just about everything significant we do serves our evolving consciousness. I’ve done a lot of different jobs and cultivated different skills over the decades, and looking back it seems that just about everything I've ever learned has served my expertise in being a counseling astrologer. And even though I’ve been doing my craft for over 52 years, along the way I’ve had to learn many other skills. I believe we all do best as we make our journey a life-long adventure in learning as much as we can.

I used to wonder why I was doing certain tasks and learning certain skills only to move on into a different direction which required that I learn new skills that seemed unrelated to the previous skills. Over the years, I’ve found that the perspective which comes with time allows us to see how the pieces all fit together, often in ways we couldn’t imagine earlier in life.

My clients have remarked that sometimes what I say and the analogies I use are perfect to help them understand how to translate the astrology of the moment into practical responses to life challenges. And of course, I could do this without having synthesized the many things I've learned and done throughout my life.

Being A TV Producer Taught Me About Internal and External Light and Shadow

As many of you know, back in the mid-to-late 1980s I spent a few years as a television producer, director, and editor. I logged thousands of hours in studios and on locations, as well as hundreds of hours in editing bays, and was trained in set design, lighting, camera and sound setup and balancing, signal routing in control rooms, character generating, and all the other minutiae of creating television programming.

As I’ve also written, I came to the world of television production quite by accident as a result of a temp gig I almost turned down, which is a strange story in itself. The magic of how I came to be an accomplished producer, director and editor allows me to say that we should never overlook an opportunity simply because it doesn't conform to our vanity, short-sightedness, or assumptions about what we should be earning or doing. That very low paying temporary job led me directly into a very fulfilling career in television!

My time in television allowed me to cultivate many interesting skills which have transferred to my life as a counselor. For example, a producer must learn all elements of the production, including lighting a studio set. Without boring you with details, when interviews are done on a set, each figure is lit from three angles so that there are no shadows on their faces. There is a key, fill, and back light, which fill the space in ways that almost all shadows are dispelled. This is related to the meditation I give you at the end of the Full Moon articles each month.

Even though in the 70s and 80s I had studied Jung and learned all I could about what is known as “the human shadow,” my television lighting skills allowed me to understand principles of light and shadow and how to eliminate shadows on a sound stage. Once I saw the physics about light and shadow, I was able to apply this understanding in my work as a counselor, since I understood how to dispel human “shadow material” by “shining a light" on personality problems from multiple angles.

Before learning about the principles of lighting a set in the mid-1980s, I hadn’t understood much about working with what we call "the human shadow." When younger, I had explored (and experienced!) a tremendous amount of difficulty, suffering, and frustration when dealing with human shadows, both my own and others, even if that term didn't exist back when I got my BA in Psychology in 1972. Carl Jung hadn't been "rehabilitated" in those ancient days, and the concept of "shadow material" was not taught in universities.

When Psychology Doesn’t Have the Answers, Astrology Does!

After taking all the classes I could find, including getting almost halfway to a MA, I realized I had 2 questions which could not be answered by psychology. Simply put, 1) Why are we instantly attracted to certain people, ideas, and behaviors, and instantly turned off by certain people, ideas, and behaviors, and 2) Why does something happen when it does? Why not yesterday? Why not tomorrow?

Because all I had studied in psychology and philosophy led nowhere in my search for answers about why we are or aren’t of a certain mindset or have one set of desires and not another, I unexpectedly found myself listening to someone who was reading my astrological planetary positions out of a book which blew my mind. It was 1971, and of course while some things were amazingly accurate, others weren’t so accurate, setting up the paradox of how it can be so accurate and why it isn’t when it isn’t.

I found myself wanting to know more about my inherent tendencies and why people are the way they are, and so I began learning astrology which I’ve pursued since then with a passion. It has made my life an adventure in learning a thousand nuances of life and the human psyche. Of course I still had to finish college when this was happening, so as I was completing my degree and studying astrology I also kicked around learning practical skills like cooking, making good coffee, even running restaurants, then wound up having a foundation, bookstore and school of astrology and metaphysics while producing a lot of concerts and cultural events from the mid-1970s through the mid-80s. I was bouncing between New York, Austin, mountaintops and hidden valleys, and communing with spiritual Beings all over the continent.

However, all good things come to an end. Bad ones too! I was done with producing concerts and cultural events by 1984, and didn't really know what I wanted to do next. I couldn't go back, didn't see clearly how to go forward or even where to put my energies, but still needed to make money somehow, since I had temporarily withdrawn from teaching classes and my heart wasn’t really into building my counseling practice. So I did pickup gigs for over a year, mostly word processing. (That led me into being a feature film consultant for some of the biggest movies of the time, another story in itself.)

After countless temp gigs, it segued into the television work I've described. After some years, that too ended, but I've never forgotten what I learned when I did set lighting, as it's the perfect analogy for dealing with human shadows.

The Technique For Dispelling Human Shadows

The analogy is specific and applicable. Usually when we confront shadow material in ourselves or another, we understand it from our pre-set point of view. That's one way to see things, and can be illuminating to some degree, but it still leaves other areas in the shadow.

Shadows are created by Light hitting a dense object. We humans are dense beings, with dense feelings and dense thoughts. That's the reason we have to deal with our own or others' intellectual shadows, or emotional shadows, or interpersonal shadows. I’ve found the best way to deal with a shadow is to illuminate the dense object of thought and/or feeling that is creating the shadow from multiple light sources. In that way we dispel those shadows that arise when we only view things from one point of view.

Illuminating anything from multiple light sources entails finding “enlightening” views toward whatever is shadowed. If we find enough enlightened views of a thing and have lit that thought, feeling, or action from key, fill, and back light angles, we dispel shadows and can see anything in its "unshadowed" state.

That's also why it's often not enough simply to know what we know. We are forever challenged to keep learning different angles of approaching human experiences on this dense Earth, so that we can view things from multiple angles. And because none of us individually is as aware or knowledgeable as we all are together, often if we wish to find a different way to illuminate something we must learn how others might view that particular shadow material.

Sharing Knowledge and Perspective Dispels Shadows

An added benefit to this is found in something our old friend the I Ching has to say about learning. From the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, a piece from Hexagram 58, The Joyous:

Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. In this ways learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.

As we interact with others on our spiritual wavelengths and share our insights, we all come to greater understanding of how to help ourselves and others. As we grow in our understanding of “enlightened views,” we can see clearly how to assist others to see clearly. As we all grow, we all become more aware and able to respond appropriately to any given life challenge.

As we see all our diverse experiences as contributing to the entirety of our understanding of how best to serve ourselves, others, and our world, then whatever we do gives us a broader range of skills we can apply to our work. It always amazes me how many things I’ve done and learned this life have contributed to my skill as an astrological and spiritual counselor.

While I’ve been practicing Astrology for over 50 years, I’ve also taken the many opportunities I’ve had to learn new skills I could blend in a holistic understanding of my evolving life. My experiences as an astrologer have contributed to my writing and speaking skills which in turn have made my experiences as an astrologer wonderful ground to learn and understand an overview of my life as the narrative of my “hero’s journey.” And in turn, my life experiences have contributed to my astrological interpretive abilities. Everything in our lives can contribute to all we do if we open to the spirit of learning and applying the knowledge we find in ways that we like.

At the very least I can say that having lit my life from so many different angles of experience, I'm not as troubled by shadow material as I used to be. And that helps me put spotlights on the charts and lives of my clients so that they also can view their mythos, or movie of their life, from different angles of vision.

Never give up learning and seeing how what you've learned can be applied in other ways, other fields, and other angles of understanding. If we are in fact the stars of the movie of our lives, then it's important to light ourselves in the right way so that we and the audience don't wonder what's in the shadows.

Reprinted on crystalwind.ca with written permission from Robert Wilkinson. Copying this article to other blogs is strictly prohibited. It is copyright protected. 

© Copyright 2023 Robert Wilkinson

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