Astrology updated

It's been awhile since I felt I had anything to say.

What follows are several ideas that I wish to share with readers. Please do not suppose that I am claiming that they are actually the truth of things. My position is simply one among many models for understanding what it is to be human and astrology’s relation to it. Various models for understanding acquire their value not from their truth qualities but from their usefulness in helping people get along in their world. After all, we all believe what we need to believe in order to make it through the Night.

Astrology is a discipline that provides a framework for imagining a profound intimacy between a person and their world. This relationship can be discerned by examining the architecture of the birth moment as mirrored by the pattern occurring in the sky.

The astrological natal chart is polysemous in nature. Not only is it a two-dimensional graphic representation of the planets in the sky as seen from a particular time and location on earth, a frozen instance in the processual nature of reality as it were, that demarcates a relatively enduring, pattern of intra and inter-relationships that we call an organism.

 The chart is also regarded by some astrologers as a set of cosmic instructions, a roadmap, an image of the seed potential of the person whose birth it reflects, and can also be imagined as a reflection of a coherent and fluid sense of self with multiple organizing centers (planets) in relation to one another (aspects) that have a host of perspectives (signs) contained in various life contexts (houses) and situated within the parameters of moment and place. It is an image of psyche reflecting the interiority and exteriority of the person.

The idea of a single organizing Self is deemphasized in favor of a polycentric self or community of selves. There is no grand solitary overarching control center. The person as a quantum of unique experience, whose chart is a mirror for every existential situation, is seen as a focused expression of the local environment. Furthermore, in contrast to Sartre, existence and essence arise mutually. Another way of saying this is, body and soul, two sides of the same coin, begin in the same moment. There is no preexisting essence incarnating nor is there a disembodied essence surviving death. As the newborn emerges out of this world into this life the first breath that sets the organism apart from its previous environment immediately sets up unique circulatory, respiratory, cardiac, gastrointestinal, renal, hepatic, and immunological changes that shift the organism from a state of dependency to a state of greater independence.

As it turns out then, astrology is a discipline that is not so much to help us improve ourselves or to allow us to catch a glimpse of what may be around the bend but rather astrology provokes us to ask, “How are we relating to this present moment, how are we engaged with this one and only life?”

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