Breakdowns And Breakthroughs: An Investigation of Saturn’s effects on A Spiritual Awakening

By sharing the details of a spiritual awakening that occurred during my first Saturn return, my aim in this paper is to convince the reader that the Saturn return — beginning at age twenty-eight and ending at age thirty — played a significant role in the type of spiritual awakening I had. In short, the spiritual awakening I had during this period of life resulted in not so much a temporary and mystical state of consciousness as much as it resulted in a return to the nature of consciousness itself, which is far more ordinary and experientially simple than a mystical state, yet utterly profound in its stability, quality of peace, and level of maturity. This type of spiritual awakening, which was of the abiding type that Adyashanti often refers to, also occurred after I reached a ‘breaking point’ in my psyche, in which my existential despair and psychological tension culminated to such an extreme degree that a tremendous breakthrough in my spiritual life occurred. I will write about why this is all relevant to the archetype of Saturn as well. Before I continue, however, it is important to mention that I am very much a novice when it comes to archetypal cosmology. And since I am limited to five pages, I have decided to stick to the basics, which means I am not going to get into the details of where my outer transits were located during this momentous occasion. That will be for another time.

At the very start of my Saturn return, I moved to Hawaii with my ex-girlfriend. But our relationship was in pure and utter shambles. No matter how hard we tried to make it work, the pull of destiny wanted to take us elsewhere. As many people who have been in a difficult relationship know, it is easy to ignore your intuition, even when it is screaming, because of how terrifying the idea of losing someone is. After a few tragic and painful encounters with each other, she asked for some physical space, and my abandonment wound rushed up to the surface, overriding my entire nervous system. I started gripping onto her and begging for her love, either consciously or unconsciously. This then triggered her to push me away even further — and I broke down the morning after while sitting on a wooden platform outside of her house that was surrounded by a natural landscape perfectly set for something prophetic to happen. There I was, in paradise, experiencing hell. The only choice that seemed worthwhile at the time was to pray and chant. So, I chanted my heart out and uttered a mantra my teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, shared with me in hopes that my suffering would miraculously disappear. I prayed and I plead for the end of suffering like a starved soul who had too many scars from too many past lifetimes. After a while, I got up from my seat and immersed myself in some cold and rushing water just below me. When I got out of the water, it was as if a thousand pounds of psychic weight had suddenly vanished from my experience, and for an entire week, I was stabilized in what Jesus called the “peace that passeth all understanding.” But this “I” which I am referring to is not the “I” of the skin-encapsulated ego or Iris Murdoch’s daydreaming psyche that protects itself from pain. The “I” I am alluding to is what Ramana Maharshi referred to as the Self, that ineffable, unspeakable, pure, vast space that is unconditionally free from the infectious duality and thought-chatter of the finite mind. I could wax poetic for another thirty pages and describe the details of what occurred during this week. I could write about it in a thousand different ways, but for the sake of brevity, I will just state the obvious and seemingly shocking fact that occurred to me at the time: it was spiritual enlightenment. This is a bold claim, of course, but I stick to it because of the quality it imbibed. What perhaps shocked me the most during that week was that it wasn’t a temporary experience or state of consciousness. Quite the contrary: I had transcended experience and become the background of all experience. I moved like a wave that knew it was the ocean and stood like a screen that was unaffected by the pictures flickering back and forth upon it. By waking up from experience I became its most intimate lover. Let us not forget the great Zen master, Dogen, once described enlightenment as “the intimacy with the ten thousand things.” Picking up a pen felt like I was doing it for the first and last time. There was a newness to experience, a sense of timelessness, immortality, and freedom — a type of freedom, dare I say, that was beyond the world. That was undeniable to me at the time, but only because the idea of “me” had vanished. That’s how I knew it was enlightenment: it didn’t come about because of something the “me” had achieved — it came about because the idea of “me” collapsed and dissolved. That is one of the reasons why I laughed hysterically the next day. There I was, the day before, weeping and beating the ground with my passionate sorrow, believing I was somebody that needed to be saved. How ridiculously absurd and cosmically humorous!

What’s important to note here is that, as I said, the nature of this awakening was far different from the awakening I had when I was in my early twenties, which consisted of something more akin to a prophetic vision that was temporary and mystical. It is not worth diving into all the details of that experience right now but let me just say that it was the perfect experience to fan the flames of my rebellious and ideological self in his early twenties. That spiritual experience opened the doors of perception and lead me down a rabbit hole of experimentation and intellectual curiosity. I read mystical literature, meditated, and challenged the status quo by dressing differently and becoming vegetarian. The awakening in my Saturn Return, however, got rid of all the doors, rooms, and structural foundations. It destroyed the spiritual ego that enjoyed being different from all the normal and mundane citizens who were so “unconscious.” Instead of having a temporary experience of God and dissolving in the light of a thousand suns, I had stabilized in God, become the light itself, and realized what Nisargadatta Maharaj meant when he said, “To know is to be.” God’s limbs became my limbs. His breath became my breath. No longer was I moving from a place of self-interest or selfish preoccupation. Every step I took came from wholeness, splendor, and spontaneity, so it was easy to feel like I was in flow with my surroundings. After the idea of Preston moved out of the way, The Way became my natural state. What’s more, events flowed like clockwork and synchronicities were no longer a surprise. I didn’t have to wait for some vast insight or flourish of cosmic artistry like I sometimes do while reading the very dense words of Alfred North Whitehead. The whale didn’t breach the surface, only to crash down again into the sea and disappear. I was the ground of all insight, and as a result, never had to wait for anything! (Only the mind does that!) Consciousness was in the here and now — always has been, always will be. The magical and miraculous nature of it all was so radically consistent and so profoundly irrational.

Now then, what does this all have to do with the Saturn Return? Well, absolutely everything. According to the distinguished philosopher and historian, Richard Tarnas, who has done an extensive amount of research into the empirical implications of archetypal cosmology, The Saturn Return is very much a period of letting go of one’s old and immature behaviors. In Psyches and Cosmos, he writes about leaving “the wanderings of youth to enter one’s mature calling.” (Tarnas 2006) As I said before, this awakening was far more mature in its quality than the previous one; it also dissolved a very immature part of me that was playing silly games in the shallow waters of existence by attempting to fill a void with obsessive weightlifting, all to look muscular and attractive to the opposite sex. In general, I noticed that many of the interests I had before this awakening dissolved because they were serving a façade that was keener for attention than truth and wisdom. Is it a coincidence that I received my first five clients as a life coach after this awakening, all of whom aligned with the vision of awakened consciousness that I shared? Is it also a coincidence that I was in my first semester of classes at CIIS studying the nature of enlightenment in the different traditions of Zen and the yoga sutras? If you embrace the disenchanted worldview, it certainly is a coincidence, but I hate to break it to such people: everything I am sharing is true, so true that I sometimes tremble while writing these words, so true that it is beyond an argument with premises and a conclusion. This truth is beyond a philosophical point to prove. In fact, the truth I am alluding to ends all philosophy. It wouldn’t be the truth if it were any other way. The ending of all seeking and all knowledge of the ego is the beginning of true, timeless wisdom.

But that is not all: remember previously, when I wrote about the connection between my spiritual breakthrough and emotional breakdown? Well, the tendencies of Saturn very much include “endings of things, “the passing of an era,” and “a decisive maturational threshold.” (Tarnas 2006) It also “functions as a kind of constricting birth canal that bodies forth the next stage of life.” (Tarnas 2006) I very much felt like I was constricted before being reborn during this frightening time. (For those who are curious about consciousness research, Stan Grof has done some fantastic work relating the stage of birth known as BPM II with these sorts of transcendental experiences.)

There is much more work to do here, and many more questions to investigate, but I think this is a good start to a more thorough analysis of everything I have pointed out. In conclusion, I find no reasons why we should limit the Saturn return solely to what happens in time, that is, within the period of biographical crystallization and the solidifying of the individual’s psychic constitution. Based on what I have shared, and some anecdotal segments about the awakenings of other teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle (who also underwent a period of immense transformation at the age of twenty-nine) I think we can apply the qualities of the Saturn archetype to the type of spiritual awakening that occurs outside of time. The difference between the two is important as we continue this investigation forward. Perhaps Saturn is as much a solidifier in time as much as it is a dissolver of time altogether. And perhaps it can create a center of personality as much as it can make it vanish. It is akin to a God, after all. By the way, did a wise man by the name of Niels Bohr not say that “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth?”