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Thursday, August 27, 2015

Mercury enters Libra



Astrologers are nothing more than poets of real time.  They take organic time and space and turn it into story and verse that make these alien phenomena which we understand less since the invention of clocks, even though we continue to be created and shaped by these limits as in the days when we studied the changing heaven to see how our lives evolved under the lights in the darkness turning around and around us; they make these intimate realities, so strangely alien and frightening to us, a delight at least as often as a horror to ponder.  They talk about the comings and goings of heavenly bodies as though we really are all one.  They elevate us to the whirling variations, syncopations, reversed ambulations, little dropping or hopping perturbations, among and over all the determined directional constants.  Plato called them the circle of the same and the other.  He talked about how they cross each other and make an X which they referred to in his time and place as Chi.  Kai?   

He talked a lot about psyche.  No kidding.  I was surprised to see someone so associated with early scientific thinking so thoroughly expostulate on psyche like it was some kind of cradling breath of the universe or something;  psyche is actually one of the main concepts discussed from many perspectives in Timeaus.  I’ve always wondered what exactly that word means.  I was in psychotherapy for a couple of years all together with two very cool, professional therapists.  I learned more about love from them than anywhere else except among loving friends and family.  I learned a lot in church.  But there were a lot of things that baffled me, and it was these two very sober minded therapists with a glimmer in their eyes, who helped me learn to reconcile the welter of thoughts swirling around in my restless mind.  Since they were called psychotherapists and what we were doing when we got together every two weeks was called psychotherapy, I had some idea that psyche had something to do with the mind.

Then there is the word psychic used nowadays I guess to refer to someone who tells you what is in your mind.  Plato refers to something along that line when he discusses the oracular priests at Delphi.  He explains that someone else is trained to interpret what the oracles say.  The interpreters sound a bit like government trained psychoanalysts.  Reading someone else’s mind or predicting which ship will sink sounds like aggressive advertising.  Most actual stories that I’ve read from those times make it sound like the Delphic pronouncements appeared unrelated to the upcoming events that seekers were anxious about.   It was only after the events unfolded that a definite meaningful connection was made between the words of the oracle and the outcome of events.  This sounds like hindsight being more accurate than foresight. 
Geez, now I am thinking about the difference between Aquarius and Scorpio.  Aquarius is far seeing into the eastern heaven, with little view of the western heaven, while Scorpio is the opposite.  In Scorpio the future’s field of view is short compared to the view of what’s disappearing under the horizon.

The Aquarian scientist and the Scorpio sleuth of the past, especially a past that is sinking lower and lower under the horizon. 
I know I will be horrified if I live to see my dream come true, still I wake every morning thinking of how to make this language as thrilling to people as learning to do a set of sun salutations from a yoga manual.  I don’t know how I will be horrified but a few Edgar Allen Poe stories flit regularly through my mind.  I know the whole experience will be far more complicated than anything I can imagine, that there will be at least as many parameters that I did not consider in my hopes and fears as the ones whose direction and speed I tried to control.  I know the ones I failed to think of will surprise me and make me rethink my best laid plans.  This is learning to live as a limited individual with a certain amount of time to experience existence in a certain way, under the unique perspective of a certain set of chronic limitations, different in some ways, in others similar, to those of my peers.  Others like me, but not exactly like me.

That’s my meditation today for Mercury entering Libra.