Wednesday 28 May 2014

What is Astrology to me?

The following is something I wrote, some days ago, as the last exercise of module 3 of the Faculty of Astrology course study. I was asked to write what I think astrology means to me. I am posting it now for the New Moon in Gemini in my 4th house and very near my IC, as a new intentional seed I am lavishing in space and time. Blessed be!

I have been asked many a times why I am studying Astrology and how does it work. Whilst I do somehow know why I am using all my free time to study Astrology, I still find it hard to answer to the question “how does it work”.
In a way it is that same tricky question when my clients ask me “how does homeopathy work?”. It is that strange situation when one has used many a times homeopathy and has just as many a times delivered optimal results but there is no crystal clear cut, scientific answer that satisfies our modern urge and need of how we rationally interpret cause and effect.
Yes I can answer my clients that homeopathy works with the law of similitude, like cures like. But does that really explain mechanistically how it works? No not really.
Modern society has been breed to a very mechanistic and reductionist view of life. Every single thing needs to be explained in bits and pieces like the cogs in a watch. If that is not possible than that phenomenon is viewed as erratic, unorthodox and superstitious, so open to all kinds of attacks by the scientific world.
Any yet it is that scientific world, that fringe division of quantum physics, biology and chemistry that is bringing us back to a one big mystery in life: we are all inter-related, all inter-connected, that there is no you and me, that our mind influences, physically, so to speak, what we observe.
That out there is actually in here, in me.
That the whole of the Universe, if such a concept can be really envisioned, is like a huge nervous system, a matrix intricately linked, pulsing with life, with synchronicity.
That we are not exempt from that butterfly effect on the other side of the planet.
So if a butterfly flapping its wings can somehow have an effect on me, can I presume that a planet infinitely bigger than a butterfly, with its movement around the Earth, have an effect on me?
Is it the planet having an effect on me or does the planet represent something that I innately resonate within myself?
Why do I find it difficult to explain this to those who ask me about Astrology? Especially those who are already on the other side of the fence ready to spur at any false move.
Reading Article 6 was a at first painfully real. That is exactly what I get from that part of society who are against homeopathy and astrology just because they, ad priori, assume it does not work because it can't be reductionistic-ally explained, because science the new religion can't explain it. Interesting is the fact that usually those who are against homeopathy are also against astrology.
Astrology however has that added punch of irritating those who believe in the Catholic Church or any monotheistic religion. It seems you can't practice, read astrology and be a Catholic contemporary (at least in my part of the world).
Then as I started reading James Hillman, tears came to my soul. He has written albeit in an astoundingly articulate yet highly emotionally evocative manner what I feel astrology means to me. He starts from the same premises that has brought me to a more holistic vision of life.
I, a scientist to the bones have had my mind's eye opened when I read The Mind's I (pun intended) and The Tao of Physics as a science student and they were not part of my University reading list. I still remember the look of the librarian when I asked for a copy of The Tao of Physics.
And how synchronistic is that...The Mind's I was written in the same year I was born and The Tao of Physics a couple of years afterwards.
I was born embodying those energies that brought back the soul to science, the other half James Hillman so eloquently talks about in his speech.
I, probably, unconsciously living out my chart, the energies that constitutionally make up my wiring, have created situations to, first come in contact with homeopathy and then with astrology. For me they were huge turning points in my life, an added missing link and yet as I come out to people from my University or childhood days they all tell me the same thing: You were always interested in such things.
And yet I still can't explain such things.
I intimately know they work, I empirically tried them out, first on myself and then on willing friends and neighbours and I got my “scientific” results.
But honestly speaking, at the end of the day, does it really matter to know infinitesimally how homeopathy or astrology works?
Does science in the form of medicine really know how drugs work at that sub-cellular, sub-atomic level?
Macroscopically maybe, that a molecule binding to a series of receptors can elicit a certain response in the body but for many drugs the “real mechanism” is completely unknown, theory is used to explain the effects and many times such theory is changed several times.
Does this scientific uncertainty prevent us from using drugs? No
So why does such extreme rigour is unilaterally applied to holistic therapies under which I personally classify Astrology? Fear?
Fear of being empowered? Fear of accepting that we are all part of a bigger identity whatever and however we would like to define that identity?
So if I could simply leave behind all the judgemental baggage I still carry within myself, for me Astrology is the outer physical manifestation of what goes within us.
The planets are sort of wind compasses that macroscopically show what microscopically is happening within us. They are the visible notes of celestial music to which all of us internally tune in consciously or not, willingly or not.
Astrology helps making conscious what otherwise might be “left to chance” to uncover and life has quite a peculiar way of “helping us” reveal things. Sometimes not always in the most comfortable manner.
Astrology helps us become aware of who we are, to grow into the power of that precise geophysical moment in time we chose to be born in and with, to fully endow ourselves with the gifts we harbour inside.
Astrology tries to explain that intricate constitution of our being by showing the Zeitgeist of our natal chart and it is up to the astrologer to give such an interpretation as much as a homeopath meticulously gathers all the symptoms and peculiarity of the patient so to emerge with a remedy that is the quintessence of the patient in that point in time.
Astrology is a “scientific”discipline as much as it is a divinatory art slowly unearthing the meaning of the natal chart, a blue print copy of what we have decided to work with in this lifetime.
Becoming aware of where the wind is blowing from and how much force is likely to be expected, helps us choose deliberately which sails are better situated for the journey.
Astrology helps us grow in our individual role as conscious co-creators of our personal life and of that ever pulsating matrix we loosely call Universe.
Astrology helps us understand that we embody all of creation, each with his/her own declination, with planets situated in particular houses governed by particular signs and sagely interacting with each other through aspects.
Astrology helps us understand that as life unfolds so does our natal chart. Different energies, winds, planetary transits wisely show where our own innate energies, natal resonating planets, are being called to action.
To say the truth, Astrology fascinates me and being an apprentice to such millennial tradition makes me feel honoured and fills my life with sublime purpose.
And yet such honour comes with a lot of hesitancy, of the inadequacy that sprouts out of a finite person fully aware of one's own limitations and personal dilemmas to solve or at least serenely live with, in front of such immense wisdom.
Astrology for me is a constant and continuos means of self-discovery and self-empowerment. A tool through which navigate life as wilfully and hopefully as discerningly as possible and maybe in some kind of future be also a helpful tool through which I can responsibly be of a service to others.  

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