Mars and Free Will

If we really believe we are all one, then Free Will becomes a very complicated concept that cannot be understood independently of other complicated concepts.

As Mars reaches the 7^th stage of partnership with Pluto, following the 6^th of apprenticeship, I am thinking about Free Will.

Free Will makes me think of a story my son told me about his job as a mechanic.  He was sitting around with a work mate one day, shooting the breeze while the boss was out of town.  There was no pressure to generate billable hours, and neither of them was on fire to complete a project on one of their own cars.  They really didn’t have to be at work, they just liked being in the shop while the boss was out of town.  The slightly older but very experienced mechanic with a deep affection for cars, especially old ones, said, “I’ve got an idea!  Let’s get a bicycle tube.”  They located an old tube lying around the shop.  They don’t just work on cars there; the boss is a very creative guy and encourages the few workers to bring in any project that requires welding or shop tools.  He likes to tell people that they are more than just a mechanic shop, and this is evident by the works in progress sitting in the parking lot and work bays.  One example is a hand built bike standing near the front bay that was built by a third worker, also out of town the day this little adventure took place.  The contraption is spray painted silver and does not appear to be ride able, but my son assures me they have ridden it to the railroad tracks. 

Well they cut the tube and clamped it on the tail pipe of the slightly older mechanic’s old Saab.  My son describes it as looking like a professor’s car.  What is that?  Modest but respectable?  Any way I don’t remember if they tied the dangling end of the tube to make it harder for exhaust to escape or not.  I’m sure some folks reading this will be familiar with the gag.  They were ready to go to lunch!  When they stopped at a light in front of the local patio café, the new hip place up the hill from the railroad tracks, they gave the idling engine a bit of extra gas to let that tube waving from the tail pipe do its thing.

I enjoy a hearty laugh when my son tells these stories.  Then, like a good wet blanket, I say, “couldn’t you get in trouble with the cops for that?”  But I am imagining that tube flailing around and the sound it must make.  My son gave a hilarious rendition of the fluttering putt putts, but I don’t trust him.  When he mimics people he uses the same voice for all women and can be sloppy with his accents.

That to me is free will.  No, I’m not thinking of the mechanics’ public display for amusement, but the sputtering tube waving from the tail pipe.  When we get puffed up about something and feel it must be done and we do it by God we do it!  We are exercising free will, just like that tube connected to the exhaust pipe.  As long as we pretend we are not connected to each other, to the planets in heaven, as long as we pretend that we are individuals in control of our own lives we can say we are exercising our very own personal free will, or that a person we’re observing is exercising theirs.

We can even look at someone whose tail pipe is not idling very high and wonder why they don’t use their will.  “Use the will GOD gave you!”  Like the characters in Tolstoy novels that beat their horses in a rush to abduct some sweet young, red cheeked girl they just have to have from the latest formal ball.  The gambler beats the horses and flies to meet his buddies and the horses exercise their will and I probably am rewriting Tolstoy but this is not about him.  Or maybe it is.  Free Will. 

Free will is blind.  It is nothing but a bicycle tube stiff with exhaust trying to escape from a tail pipe.  Self control, imagination, memory, intellectual processing of perceptions are different words.  If we really believe the universe is one and we’re not just parroting words that we’ve heard repeated in uplifting songs sung among people that agree with us (or at least pretend to) while we are in church on Sunday or practicing meditation on Wednesday, if we really believe we are in fact and deed all one, then free will becomes a very complicated concept that cannot be understood independently of other equally complicated concepts.

We follow the planets that were here since like forever (you know, like a California TV character with her gum smacking and her painted toenails would say it, “Like-for Evverr.”)  We have had electric light for like not forever.  We have had controlled fire for like not forever.  But we have had the Moon and Mars for like 4 evverrs.……. 

 

When I think of blind will I am reminded of the medical hero who said “geez this opium is really addictive, let’s just inject it directly into the veins so it can kill the pain at the source.”  Not.  Or the following generation of scientists who said if we can just isolate the parts of the molecule that kill the pain maybe it won’t be so addictive.  So now people crave pills instead of laudanum in an elixir or opium smoked from a pipe.

A careful astrologer follows Mars to understand will, with no pretensions to mastering anything.  She only hopes to see how the story of Free Will looks, when blindly played out in our individual lives against the unfolding heaven that surrounds us.  And though an astrologer may focus for moments or days at a time on Mars and its relationship to her and her Earthly comrades, she always has the other planets in the back of her mind; Venus and Kindness, Saturn and Self Discipline, Mercury and Perception, Jupiter and Imagination. 

Our bodies are like bicycle tubes attached to invisible exhaust pipes.  Some people get tubes shaped like a peace symbol and the air goes round and round in circles escaping through a bunch of tiny outlets and we see a nice rhythmic pulsing of peaceful smiles.  Some people get other kinds of bodies.  The tubes might be formulated with a different combination of chemicals, resulting in funky forms that stretch or pop, or blow up into frightening shapes.  If we really believe the unity myth, like one god, and all humans created in that one god’s likeness, then there must be some function for each one of those tubes wagging from the air of some invisible exhaust pipe.  And what about the invisible engine expelling air through the invisible pipe?  In other words where is Mars when each person starts breathing in that universal exhaust?  The goal of astrology is to sort that out according to where and when we take our first breaths. 

In order to know whether there is a connection between what’s happening with our will and the lesser malefic known as Mars we have to actually follow Mars….  In that way we live with knowledge of what is happening in the sky that holds us, or as Plato said (transliterated from the Greek letters) Con Sciencia. 

 

To live consciously in this sense means knowing where Mars was when we were born and where it was when we lost it or when we couldn’t stand a situation anymore and took action to change it; where it was when an event came up in our life that forced us to take action that we really wanted to avoid. To gain a universal understanding of will we study Mars, among the other planets, in the map of heaven for the moment of birth and in maps for moments of crisis.  Each person decides for herself if she can perceive a connection between Mars and the uncontrollable urge, subtle or crude as it may be, to make something happen.