“To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.”
(Oscar Wilde)
Coming of age as I did in the ‘70’s – with a predisposition to be a ‘truth seeker’ – all things ‘New Age’ were on the table for exploration and experimentation. (And yes, like Oscar, I didn’t and don’t agree with the consensus.) Of course, astrology was there in the truth-seeking mix; the language of the stars called to me in my early teens. In 2008 I caught the words of astrologer Melanie Reinhart at a workshop in Bali: “You can only work with what has been burnt into your soul.” She was referring to the astrological symbols. She was saying that you have to live the symbols to truly know them. You have to experience in the depths of your being what they are saying, how they feel, and what they mean. She was right. The only way you really know astrology is by experiencing it. Life, as it happens, is largely an experiential exercise. And we can’t take anyone else’s word for it.
I have long pondered how astrology works. When I started to learn it from my first teacher, I was frustrated because I didn’t have a big picture context. Yes, I knew it was real, that it worked….but how did the planets out there ‘cause’ things to happen down here ? In 2005 I was reading David Icke’s book “Infinite Love is the Only Truth…. Everything Else is Illusion” and came upon his explanation of how astrology works. This is what he said:
“Take astrology, a major New Age tool. In the right hands, it can be extremely accurate and sometimes very useful in a ‘this world’ sense. The movement of the planets and stars is a matrix program, a holographic version of the one projected on the ceiling of a planetarium. These planetary movements trigger vibrational changes that affect humans and other life on earth because it affects the DNA and the input/output system. The point at which we enter the Time Loop also impacts the DNA. Astrology is the interaction between the vibrational fields created by the celestial cycles and our DNA program is affected by where in the cycle we are born. But I stress that this interaction is not between our consciousness and the planetary movements; it is between the planets and our DNA, which includes the mind and emotions. At this level, astrology in its deeper and detailed form is certainly relevant, but when we move our awareness beyond mind to the consciousness of the ‘One’, we cease to be affected by the astrological ‘laws’.”
Brilliantly put. We might say that the astrological birth chart describes our psychological self. The finger pointing to the Moon is not the Moon.
“What is referred to as ‘fate’ is not the inevitable experience of consciousness; it is the inevitable outcome of the DNA computer program unless consciousness intervenes.” (!) (D. Icke)
The great Rudolf Steiner said that his lectures in mysticism were about knowing, that is, “knowing thyself in the large sense of ‘know yourself as an organ of divine-spiritual-cosmic cognition.’ The key was ‘Die and become’ (Goethe). Steiner believed that to truly exist as an ‘I’ one ‘must sacrifice one’s separate existence as determined by one’s organic, psychological circumstances.’ The self-transformation of ego-death is the essence of what the Delphic oracle required in its ‘Know Thyself’. Steiner said it does not ask us to know ourselves as psychological beings. In fact, the individual, separate personality must ‘die for the Self to come into the world.’
From the nutshell above on the mechanism of astrology and its DNA informing component, we can see that what we are looking at in the birth chart of an individual is that person’s mind-body personality self. Steiner says this is not the deeper meaning of ‘Know Thyself.’
This is what must be sacrificed. The symbols’ meaning being ‘burnt into our souls’ by lived experience is real enough, but the symbols themselves are just that. They are not the essence of who we truly are. They are the finger pointing to the Moon.
In the quote above from Icke what is implied here is that we have the power to alter or affect our ‘fate’ through our consciousness. Consciousness is everything. If we are relatively ‘unconscious’ – that is, living life in an unthinking, mechanical way, reacting to our changing moods and emotions from a place of ego – then the program that was encoded into our DNA at our first breath will run unchecked. Our DNA controlled mind and emotional programming will largely dictate our thoughts and behaviours. But, if we are more conscious, in New Age parlance, more ‘enlightened’, we have the capacity to ‘alter’ what would otherwise appear as our fate. Fate is character unfolded in time, as one of my astrology teachers put it; meaning we will attract circumstances and events into our lives in accord with our character. Character as I see it, is an amalgam of the psychological self (revealed in the birth chart) and consciousness. We cannot know the consciousness of a person through studying their birth chart alone, but we can know a great deal about their psychological self.
We feel we grow through the experiences that burn into our souls. We assume that is so because we have felt something deep and painful in our hard lessons; we have, if we are sufficiently conscious, become more enlightened, more evolved because of what we have been through. Or, is it that experience simply removes more of the veils of forgetfulness to reveal what we already knew and who we really are?
I’ll leave that thought for now.
There are many concepts of the religion of the ‘New Age’ that I find I no longer take as read. It seems in these tumultuous, chaotic, confusing and information over-load times we are in, there has been a revival in the religion of the New Age and every second person on the internet is talking about ascension, angels, off-planet saviours and the like. There are intuitives, channellers,and mediums aplenty. There are ‘teachers’ from the future, from somewhere else in the galaxy, from Texas. I get it. We are hankering to know ourselves as ‘an organ of divine-spiritual-cosmic cognition.’ As life in the ‘real’ world continues to dissolve the structures of our civilisation, structures that have heretofore given us a sense of security and comfort, we naturally seek the connection of our deeper selves with something else. Something spiritual. Often, anything spiritual. But we must tread carefully. If we cleave too tightly to any one ‘guru’, methodology or system we run the risk of missing the bigger picture. And it is the bigger picture we desperately need right now. We need to know ourselves as divine-spiritual-cosmic beings. That is the big picture. And we do not need to go through a middle-man. The New Age religion has its share of ‘priests’ and interlopers just as other religions do. We need to be discerning. I have always said, astrology is not the be all and end all. You can live quite happily not knowing your birth chart at all. Most people do. As we explored briefly above, it is a ‘program’, DNA software, and we are much more than a personality running a program. In order to know ourselves I believe astrology is a wonderfully helpful tool in that it keys us in to an awareness of the cosmos. It can objectify the emotional patterns that underpin our lives and it can trace their origin in early childhood events. Astrology can hint at wounds and issues that may have been ‘brought over’ from past lives – or chosen by the soul to develop a particular capacity. It shows us that we are indeed ‘creatures of the cosmos’, subjected to forces above and beyond this earthly realm. But it cannot show us our soul.
It sometimes looks like the whole ‘New Age’ movement, which really kicked off in the ‘70’s is just another program – with many parallels to conventional religions. You can spot it easily enough – the ‘archangels and ascended masters’ Gabriel, St Germaine, etc, when imaged, look exactly like earlier depictions of Jesus. There is the Great White Brotherhood, the Galactic Federation, Council of 9, living reincarnations of ascended masters and assorted alien Saviours. These off-planet beings have transcended earthly karma and are out there helping us, apparently, to ‘ascend’. Somehow I can’t and never have, subscribed to all of this. I accept there are ‘off-planet beings’ - naturally and the ancient wisdom has long taught of the angelic and elemental kingdoms, but for some reason all of these New Age entities sound like they’ve come from the same playbook. The New Age bible. It sounds like another ‘god program’. If we meditate and affirm and create little rituals and believe, we might be ‘saved’ by whoever or whatever program we are currently subscribed to.
We are all free to believe as we choose. If believing in the New Age religion floats your boat, then fine. For myself, at this age and stage, my gravitation is to nature and to what author Enna Reittort has called the ‘natural human esoteric’. The human esoteric is enigmatic – naturally - but not inaccessible. It is the integration, the bringing back together, the healing, of what it means to be human. We have been severed from the knowing of who we truly are through centuries of the god program and its latter day incarnations (such as scientism).
“Our integration is about more than just cobbling together our earthly and cosmic identities in some mental construct. It involves a transformation of the heart, for both to be united in re-membrance of the whole that had been dis-membered. The heart is where it happens physically, emotionally and subtly – the locus of the human natural esoteric that hears the song of the cosmos and is crucial to who-we-are.” (Enna Reittort –‘ Krivda’)
How beautifully put. And it brings me back to the theme of some of my earlier writings. The heart is where it happens baby.
The human esoteric is knowing the essence of who we are, individually, on the inside. It is not about subscribing to the teachings of some Johnny-come-lately who professes to have the wisdom to teach us how to become enlightened. It is knowing for ourselves – on the heart level. The heart has a knowing the mind cannot. This is what we must learn to trust. It is a process for sure and along the way we journey down many highways and byways – exploring, we truth seekers, many different teachings and systems (astrology is a knowledge system)……But now the time is ripe and it is running out quite frankly, to turn back to ourselves and back to our mother – Nature. It is time to let go of reliance on externals, on gurus and self-proclaimed teachers and rediscover our inner knowing. Our Earth, Gaia, the embodiment of Sophia (wisdom) is the only teacher we need. We can read the book of nature for ourselves. There is meaning in everything in nature. We can study her book for a lifetime. Our bodies contain infinite wisdom – if only we can quiet the mind and emotions long enough and trustingly enough to hear it. If we really want to grow our consciousness and reconnect with our mother and our true nature, this is what we will do.
Our bodies, as part of nature, are precious beyond measure. We do not need to ‘ascend’ anywhere. We are already here and this life, in this body, is the only one we need attend to. We may have lived countless lifetimes and have still countless more. But equally, we may not. The ‘wisdom’ we attribute to past life learning and experience may be our innate wisdom, given to us by virtue of being born human on a profoundly conscious and aware planet. The voice of our intuition, the one that we always realize after a harrowing episode in our lives was there in the beginning, trying to warn us, was perhaps not born of countless earthly lives and experience, but was there all along – our natural human esoteric, a gift from our compassionate creator mother. Over time and with conscious awareness we slowly begin to lift the veils that have been deliberately put in place to prevent us from knowing the truth about who we really are. We can spend our entire lives attending to the meanings and messages of nature and our bodies, in so doing we grow the capacity to understand the divine, the Soul consciousness that animates us and everything other living being on our planet. We may discover the true nature of light and dark (which is not what we have been told). And we may, finally know ourselves as ‘organs of divine-spiritual-cosmic cognition.’
So my message today is very simple and humbly offered. It is not necessary to befuddle yourself with an ever-expanding smorgasbord of ‘spiritual offerings’ from the new New Age community. Return to what is there already, inside of you. Deepen your inner journey and your connection with Gaia-Sophia; develop trust in your Self, in your own heart wisdom. All the rest is entertainment and distraction. It is all becoming a bit boring really, all the ‘spiritual teachings’ out there, vying for your attention, your ‘likes’, and your money. I guess it is all part of the journey and perhaps I shouldn’t be knocking it. Everything has its purpose right. And of course – different strokes for different folks. But, as I’ve said before, the hour is late. We may not have the luxury of endless highways and byways and decades to analyze the deepest meanings of the signs and planets that burnt their way into our souls. (Or that ‘got our attention’). We are not in the 70’s. We are not infants and Gaia-Sophia needs us to grow up and join with her. This is a conversation we need to continue. Please comment and let me know your thoughts. If you care to…. Thank you for reading.
Very thought provoking Linda. I agree with you on many things and then you have got me thinking about others. This is what is so wonderful about life and our continual quest for exploring and discovering more about the self and the world around us. Great article!!