Your article caught my attention because part of my work includes using astrology as a tool for my clients. Sometimes I use astrology as a tool for myself. And your title made me laugh: Using an external filter (astrology) to remind oneself of one’s existence. But never mind that for now.
Your piece evoked in me so many questions and interests that I am brimming with attention deficit epiphanies. I plan on reading “Parable of the Sower” — thanks for the nod to Octavia E Butler.
I was born a humanist — believing men and women are equal. Later I reframed my “humanist” perspective to declaring myself as a feminist both for women’s liberation and the liberation of men from the yoke of hierarchy. As women liberated themselves it was only logic that men would follow — a naive view.
My training as a man has been the use of the rational mind and its partner the will. I reference this because many of the themes in your writing were at first alien to me.
A woman’s body determines their future. Ludicrous!
It’s never occurred to me that a woman’s body dictates her future, nor should it. I understand this sexist statement now that I’ve reflected on it. And of course I didn’t recognize it immediately due to the meta cultural inculcation of the man’s mindset towards women, children, people of color, LGBT, oppressed peoples, plants, animals and Earth. In short the patriarch teaches men (and all of us) that every body has a value and is objectified.
[An aside: When I completed my undergraduate degree I wrote a letter to my father thanking him for supporting my education and concluded with: “I have taken the training of the rational and logic frames of thinking to their logic extreme and have found them lacking. Its time to take the leap into what’s next.”]
I believe women are leading the way both by intervention and example to men who have opened their hearts to explore the world emotionally and begin to identify the interconnectivity of all peoples, the networks we travel and the glue that holds us together and/or separates us.
My experience has shown me that no one has free will from a larger context. It’s possible to shed the illusions and work towards “a place” where free will can be exercised. I’ve caught glimpses of that “place”. Many people operate (including myself) from a place where free will exists and in a smaller context within the oppressive systems of the patriarchy free will can be said to exist if we forget about or pretend that X, Y and Z don’t exist.
Danielle Morgan you write: “We’re all navigating the world looking for clues about who we are, who the people in our lives are, and how our lives are going to turn out.”
Maybe I’m lucky. I have never navigated the world looking for clues. Well, admittedly I did in my 20s. Your perspective seems particularly Western — which may be more true throughout the world today. However from a Buddhist perspective we already know may who we are by looking within.
We are fulfilling our destiny to humanity and ourselves. But because we are continuously looking for clues we are in “the pursuit of happiness” we look towards a future that is never fulfilled. The past exists as memories that exist in the present and the future exists in the present as expectations, assumptions, hopes, dreams and visions.
Self-reflection, spiritual practices, therapy and /or astrology can assist in further defining what we already know as who we are.
One reason why astrology (or any system of thought) is challenging is its projective quality and therein lies the play and fun of consciousness.
An Astrology Aside: Many of my clients have asked about the underpinnings of astrology. I used to give the answer that it is a large system of correlates where archaic astronomers linked developmental myths to people of the earth. I still believe this is true and in an article I read by a physicist / astrologer described a different system. Astrology is an electromagnet study of the “relationship” of the body of galaxies, solar systems, planets and people.
