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Dane Rudhyar's Rules of Life

Daniel Chennevière (03/23/1895 – 09/13/1985) from his youth felt like a "seed" of a fading European civilization and wanted to "germinate" in a New World. Therefore, at the age of 21, he moved from Paris, where he was born, to America. There he took a pseudonym for himself by the name of the Vedic deity – Rudhyar – and began to actively "sprout", enchanting Americans with his characteristic strong French accent, which he did not get rid of throughout his life in the United States.

Over time, Rudhyar achieved a lot in America: he took place both as a modernist musician, as a reformer of astrology, as a philosopher, as a writer, as an artist, and as a poet. American journalists, who were impressed by the performances of the young Rudhyar, wrote:

“While the accent and intonation of Mr. Rudhyar … made it difficult to understand him when he read his verse, his rhythmical delivery, striking appearance, and exotic personality made an evident impression upon his audience. Of medium height, Mr. Rudhyar is slender, dark, with long black hair combed back from his face. Swaying lightly back and forth to the rhythm of his verse, this poet musician delivered his verses, written in English, with a decidedly French accent.”

The key to Rudhyar's creative self-realization can be found in his life philosophy, his rules of life, which he not only described in his books, but also implemented in practice.

At the age of 13, Rudhyar suffered a serious illness and surgery, lost one kidney, severely undermined his health. This blow could have broken the young Dane, but he survived and lived a busy long life, because in time he came under the influence of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who owns the phrase "What does not kill me makes me stronger!". Echoes of this philosophy of life can be seen in Rudhyar’s interview, taken on the day of his 89th birthday in 1984.

“Disease may kill most people, but the few who survive may emerge much stronger. Because I had to fight against certain conditions in my early youth, I have built a certain kind of resistance to things which probably affect other people.”

Rudhyar believed that if a person cultivates a positive, constructive, and not a defeatist attitude, then with the help of “creative (i.e. rebounding) power” he will be able to overcome any obstacles and withstand any blows of fate:

“In proportion as the individual uses his inner powers for a creative purpose he may be vanquished but not defeated; he experiences objective defeat, but does not develop a subjective sense of defeat and ultimately a defeatist attitude.”

Rudhyar urges remembering that when faced with a new experience, a person always has enough strength to meet the challenge, because a person is "equal to the occasion."

By themselves, life problems do not cause psychological complexes in a person. Only the reaction to the crisis matters. As PR people say, "crises come and go, what remains in memory is how we react to them.”

“If the person considers his gain in subjective values and in creative self-development the one factor having essential significance, this positive attitude utterly transforms what could have been interpreted as a crucial defeat.”

A person moves from trial to trial, and the integrity of his individuality is at stake. Gaining experience, he becomes either stronger or weaker. The attitude to the challenges of fate, to failures and to defeats determines the result.

As an illustration confirming his words, Rudhyar spoke about Dante's love for Beatrice, believing that if the poet had married his young beloved muse, he might not have written The Divine Comedy – “for lack of an inner Woman-Image to lead him to Paradise."

By the way, Rudhyar himself was married four times. The age difference with his last wife, Leyla Raël, was 53 years. In several of his articles, Rudhyar, from the standpoint of synastry astrology, spoke about the great value of couples in which the spouses have a large age difference.

“Each age has its own basic possibilities and tasks; and the first thing young people should learn today is not to be in a hurry, and not to think (as some do) that at 20 or 25 they have already wasted their lives and have no more chance!”

In his basic work "A Seed", Rudhyar postulated an aesthetic approach (harmoniously connecting all the constituent parts within the whole), which he contrasted with the ethical one.

“We need a new type of human being. We need something which is based no longer, so much, on conflict, but on a full acceptance of the total human being – body, mind, soul, feeling – everything.”

Rudhyar did not like that Western civilization was excessively carried away by "quantity, norm and statistical averages", behind which the individuality, the personality of a person is lost. He believed that "truly ‘human’ values are individual values."

“Every man has his life-potential to actualize. Every man and every destiny (dharma) is valuable in the harmony of the whole.”

According to Rudhyar, one is not born as an individual, one becomes an individual by realizing one's potential received at birth and symbolically displayed in the form of a horoscope.

And the realization of one's individual potential is only part of a person's ultimate goal. It is also important to feel and realize "the why of one's existence as an individual person", born at a given time and in a given place. It is not simple, because a person's consciousness is fettered by fear, uncertainty, attachments, selfish desires…

Fulfilling one’s “cosmic-divine purpose” is an ever open opportunity. One’s individual spiritual path is to be consciously and completely devoted to one’s main purpose.

Following the ancient mystical traditions, Rudhyar spoke about the possibilities of a person to become "a greater being" and go beyond one’s personality through sacrificing it:

“…the true meaning of sacrifice is ‘making sacred’; and this implies a complete dedication of one's thoughts and actions to what one may call either God or mankind – or to a specific group, culture or ideal. This means a surrender of the ego-will.”

Rudhyar considered art to be one of the most important ways of divine revelation of man. It is curious that he considered astrologers less important to society than artists, musicians, and writers. In order to be really useful to humanity, astrologers, according to Rudhyar, must fit into the same category together with "priests, family-counselors, psychologists of various schools, and the many types of spiritual healers.”

Rudhyar himself was engaged not only in astrology, but also wrote music, paintings, poems… And he did not just write, but (in accordance with his philosophy) directed his art to change people's consciousness.

“Art, when true to its inherent spiritual destiny, is a ‘release of power.’ Every great poem is essentially a mantram, a form of power. Art is magic or theurgy.”

Rudhyar believed that any qualitative change in society should be preceded by an internal transformation – a radical change in the consciousness of people.

According to Rudhyar, “humanity is, at the mental level, one vast organized system” to which individuals tune in using their internal "radio".

Rudhyar traced consciousness (in one form or another) from the atom and molecule to plants, animals and the Earth as a whole, with its "all-encompassing and ‘eonic’ planetary Consciousness." If people make efforts to develop their "Planetary Consciousness", then this will become the basis for the formation of a new type of human society corresponding to the ideals of the New Age.

Dane Rudhyar's Astrological Aphorisms

The most influential astrologer of the XX century Dane Rudhyar wrote music, paintings, poems, books, developed his holistic philosophy in all possible ways, and astrology was only one of them.

Perhaps this is the secret. In order to achieve success in astrology, it’s not enough to study astrological textbooks. A priori, astrology has been and will be the highest discipline. An astrologer should study astrology being prepared by other disciplines such as mathematics, history, dialectics, philosophy, geometry, psychology, medicine, in order to know astrology’s practical application. An astrologer does not have to be an astronomer, but needs to know astronomy within the framework of astrology, not within the framework of the natural sciences.

The astrological works of Dane Rudhyar, especially his repeatedly reprinted first book "The Astrology of Personality" (1936), became classics and determined the development of astrology in the 20th century in its connection with psychology.

Rudhyar belongs to the branch of astrology, whose representatives consider celestial science as a symbolic language, as a method that makes it possible to understand human nature. From the point of view of symbolist astrologers, astrology is a response to the human desire for order, it is an attempt to bring harmony into the chaos of daily life by correlating internal experiences and external events with the observed cyclical movement of celestial bodies.

1. Astrology is a technique for the gaining of wisdom through the understanding of the order in human nature and in all phenomena perceived by man: a technique in understanding.

It does not mean that astrology cannot be used for prediction (for example, with the help of horary techniques), but for forecasting an astrologer must have not only technical skills, but also a developed human understanding. As Rudhyar said:

2. Knowledge, in astrology, in medical or psychological therapy, is not enough. Wisdom is needed. It can only be acquired through actual living, through pain, through the discharge of responsibilities, through the courageous and honest putting forth of the whole of oneself in whatever experience is seen as significant.

Wisdom, according to Rudhyar, is based on the purposeful use of mastered knowledge. Therefore, when studying astrology, it is necessary to clearly understand its nature and purpose.

Astrology uses a certain set of astronomical data, which are considered as indicator symbols and are used to analyze "organic wholes", i.e. living organisms (cells, plants, animals, people), a country, a company, a group of people forming a “one whole”, etc.

3. The main subject-matter of astrology is the individual human person considered as an integral organism including bodily, psychic, mental, social and spiritual activities of many types and at several levels.

Every organic whole has a set of functions. They can manifest themselves both on a physical and psychological level. Functions are interconnected with each other and with the whole, like organs in the human body. At the physical level the integrity of the organism is achieved subconsciously, but at the psychological level people often face the problem (especially In the modern world with its social and political upheavals) of integrating the personality and its constituent structural elements and functions into a single whole. When a person integrates his personality and lives in harmony with himself and the world around him, he begins to gain wisdom.

4. The basic purpose of astrology is to bring order to the apparent chaos of man's experience, and thus help the individual or the group to achieve a greater degree of integration, health and sanity.

Humanity is a small part of a Planet, of a Solar system, of a Galaxy. Transpersonal level of existence means that a person can be open to the influence of the larger Whole and thus become an active conductor of its intentions.