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.
