Astrology background

These are my views on astrology. There are other schools of thought and other interpretations, but these are ones that work for me. I am happy to share with you an overview of the way my astrology works.

My astrology

I have always been fascinated by astrology, from the earliest age. I don't know why, it certainly wasn't part of my upbringing, but it always seemed so natural to me, so ancient, so wise. Perhaps because I am also a keen student of history. I took my first astrology course in the 70s, working with pen and paper and slow, complicated mathematics to manually draw up charts. But it's only in the last ten years or so that I have really devoted myself to it and while I still consider myself a student of this ancient discipline, I am drawn and have been advised to share my knowledge with other seekers of this enlightenment. I feel like it is part of something much more important, a greater understanding. I feel profoundly that we are the early awakened, tasked and privileged to bring a new age of spiritual awareness to a Western world disabled by urban coldness, disconnection from community, held in thrall by the small, pedantic dogma of science, locked into material avarice while discarding all that is truly important in our karmic journey.

A spiritual universe

This is my understanding. We are immortal souls from a spirit world filled with light and love, sent by the Infinite Spirit to learn and grow by incarnating many, many times in many physical worlds. We are here to learn lessons that will help us grow and we travel with a group of souls who incarnate together through many lifetimes and learn together and support each other. We are all one Universal energy and expressions of that energy can be found in patterns in the physical world to be interpreted by the enlightened. This is all as the Universe intends. We study our past life with our guides and seek guidance from the Ascended Masters, and we choose our next life to advance our set of lessons. We choose from the available circumstances in the world we wish to incarnate in, but this is not random, but part of the infinitely variable web of destiny the Infinite Spirit lays before us. We choose our parents and our place on earth, we choose the moment of birth. I value the work of Dr Michael Newton and Dr Brian Weiss, mainstream psychologists who used hypnosis to regress patients back to their childhood. Independent of each other, these medical men began regressing patients back before their birth and even into previous lives, making available much information on the nature of the spiritual world.

None of this is of any interest to what currently passes for 'science', and perhaps it never can be. How can we exercise free will and make spiritual choices if it performs to scientific formulas and the consequences of our choices can be weighed in a laboratory? I have no issue with science. It is part of our growth in this physical world to learn the structure of that world, and science must be bound by its own rules. But as is the nature of adherents of the Cultural Dominant everywhere, regardless of the time and place that may be, sceptisim and mockery are part of their predictable armoury in defending their vested interests. You will hear various 'scientific' objections to the ancient and wise practice of astrology. Personally I have no interest in debating astrology with rationalists. Their minds are closed, they are zealots of the holy church of science, they are unquestioning disciples of the Cultural Dominant. It is not that they don't want to accept anything that can't be proven in a lab, it's that they MUST not or their entire world view would disentegrate -- and that is understandably scary for anyone. But I occasionally like to enquire of rationalists if they believe in human consciousness, which also cannot be proven in a lab – in fact scientists have not the slightest clue how it operates. Perhaps that doesn't exist either? Perhaps we're all just imagining the real world?

A heavenly discipline

Beginning some 4000 years ago, Babylonian priest/scholars – the scientists of their day – observed the heavens at night and mapped out two sets of bodies. The first were fixed stars, the myriad points of light that remained in set positions relative to each other. The second were wandering stars – planetes in Greek – which followed variable paths. And of course they saw the paths of the Sun and Moon.

These ancient scientists observed and recorded the movements of the wandering stars on their regular journeys across the band of space around the horizon. This band of space they divided into 12 sections based on their calendar of 12 months of the year (roughly 12 lunar orbits) and 360 degrees (roughly 360 days a year). The 12 signs of this band of space were named from imagined groups of stars in the vicinity at that time, and we know them collectively as the zodiac; from the ancient Greek zōidiakòs kýklos, circle of little animals. Over centuries, these ancient scientists observed the relationships between these heavenly movements and human behaviours on earth. Perhaps they had guidance from even earlier wise people, shamans or druids from the countless thousands of years preceding, but as those people had no written records that is speculation only. In Western Tropical astrology, the zodiac is fixed to the seasonal calendar as the ancient Babylonians first ordered it; with 0 degrees Aries aligning to the March solstice.