THINKING ASTROLOGY...

Food for Thought!

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All texts were chosen to stimulate the thinking about important astrological & life issues.

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"I have always stressed that astrology rests on objective and subjective foundations. While we don't have a problem dealing with the fact that there is a real physical world around us, or that we live in a solar system in a very large universe, the fact is--we only know that world through our perception of it. Philosophers talk about sense-data; they say we can't know the world directly, there has to be something between the outer world and our ideas of it. Our minds take in sense-data through our organs of perception, and our ideas are based on this information. When astrologers talked about astrological symbolism, I always assumed they were referencing the subjective side of astrology, and that the objective side was somehow not involved. But the truth is that all the planets and stars are really just sense-data, and how the mind wants to interpret this "data" is something for psychological theories. As it turns out, all concepts of astrology are based on symbols, and the language we use to describe them."

THE POWER OF THE SYMBOL

By JohnK Hammelton

"Here are the basic ideas I ask you to entertain as working hypotheses. You are, as an individual, the sum total of all your actions, all your experiences, and everything and everyone that is in your life. Theres is no split between the self and the not-self. (...) Whatever split you may feel changes location within your field of consciousness according to where your attention has turned and what kinds of issues you are dealing with. In other words, the apparent split that you feel is only relative, not absolute. Equally important is a second principle: you are, in the totality of what you are, the creator and focus for divine energy within your universe. This is not to say that there is no God higher than you as an individual. More accurately, you are the channel for that entity's energy coming into your world. Before challenging this, you should recgonize that you do not experience the universe as it is in the ultimate sense, but as it is channeled through your senses and modified by the sum total of yours previous conceptions and past experiences. What you create, therefore, is really your experience of the universe, and your experience is yours and uniquely yours."

HOROSCOPE SYMBOLS (Introduction)

The Horoscope: A Map of the Psyche

ROBERT HAND

"As a way of interpreting reality, astrology originated tens of thousands of years ago before the first agrarian societies. even parts of the formal system we use today date back over a thousand years. Thus, astrology is not pristine. It has no clean edge, but instead has evolved in harmony with civilization through various stylistic phases of perception and philosophy. As a result, separating the wheat from the chaff, knowing wich presumptions to keep and which to shed, is no simple matter. Although the fundamental principles of astrology are easy enough to learn, ours is not a perfectly logical system. It demands a different approach, for, unlike, science, it is need straightforward nor concrete. Instead, astrology is enigmatically shrouded in the cloak of its own peculiar evolutionary background, and thus more like us than science will ever hope to be. This is both a great strenght and a severe weakness. It is so much a reflection of historical development in the quest for meaning that it becomes as difficult to fully understand astrology as it is to understand ourselves."

HOUSES OF THE HOROSCOPE

Chapter One: Introduction/Astrology versus Science

BILL HERBST

"SYNCHRONICITY - A term originated by the psychologist C. G. Jung to designate a psychic parallelism of events which cannot be related casually. The parallelism, or `connectedness', between such non-causally related events and happenings, he termed `synchronistic'. Jung quotes astrology as an excelent example of manifest synchronicity - though many astrologers would mantain that astrology is in fact causalistically based, when it is understood in the light of esoteric truths. Jung himself recognized astrology as representing `the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity', and so it is difficult to understand why he should feel the urge to coin a new term to represent the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Could it be that the term `synchronicity' is to be applied to those parallelisms in events which cannot be understood by the intellect? The interesting thing is that the origin of the principle of synchroncity is linked with Jung's (somewhat limited) acquaintance with the Chinese philosophical machine, the I Ching - the Chinese themselves regard the working of the oracle not in terms of an oriental equivalent of synchronicity, but in terms of operation of spirits: i.e. animistic causality!"

THE ARKANA DICTIONARY OF ASTROLOGY

FRED GETTINGS

"Astrology is not fatalistic. Astrology does not say that you must do this or must do that. Astrology is simply a guide which can give you a powerful means for interpreting and understanding things about yourself and life in general. Astrology is a language which conveys information in the same way a road map describes a locality. (...) A person traveling through the rigors of life can choose to ignore the knowledge shown within a natal horoscope, but knowing something about that information can save much time and energy when choosing among the various options to which life exposes us. Astrology does not judge that character traits are good or bad. Astrology is very impersonal and does not care whether it is proven in a scientific sense. Its a language and it conveys information. As with any language or information it simply exists. You can not scientifically prove that Spanish or German or Japanese are technically valid."

MIDPOINTS - UNLEASHING THE POWER OF THE PLANETS

MICHAEL MUNKASEY

"For me, astrology is a symbolic blueprint of the human psyche. The patterns of the heavens are like a mirror, reflecting back for us our own potentials - strenghts, weaknesses, abilities, talents and conflicts. I assume that there are positive options within every part of the horoscope and every part of the human psyche".

COMPLETE HOROSCOPE INTERPRETATION

Putting Together Your Planetary Profile

MARITHA POTTENGER

"... Those who believe in astrology will probably consider the conclusions of this study terribly obvious. The skeptics, on the other hand, will probably think that Francoise finally succumbed to the charms of astrological traditions. Opinions do not matter. For the first time, scientific proof of the existence of the astrological reality of some planetary symbols has been clearly demonstrated. The fact that astrologers continue to misinterpret the horoscope is another issue. Francoise has brought to light the cold, hard statistical data that holds out to us, the scientistis, a somewhat "different" universe. The planetary symbolism described twenty centuries ago by Claudius Ptolemy, is not an image, but a reality. People born under Saturn really are saturnine, under Mars, really martial, under Jupiter really jovial. Who can explain how ancient people possessed these strange clues to the universe? Possibly, in a later book, Francoise?"

Quoted from the foreword by MICHEL GAUQUELIN to

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PLANETS -- FRANCOISE GAUQUELIN

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