Monday, June 08, 2020

THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

If you are an astrologer, then you are inevitably thrown up against the ideas of Fate and Free Will, and their apparently contradictory nature. I don't think they are contradictory. Both are true. And it is a good exercise to sit with them, like it is always a good exercise to sit with contradictory ideas, without reaching after certainty - Negative Capability, as Keats called it. It enables us to sit with the Great Mystery that is behind everything, because really we know nothing. I wrote a blog on this subject some years ago.

Meanwhile, I have been re-reading a wonderful memoir "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig. He is a vivid and compelling writer, and this book is richly descriptive of Europe from a cultural point of view, from the end of the 19th century to the early 1940s.

And here is what he says about Fate: "Only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination."

Or as Heraclitus said: "Character is Fate."

Or as Jung said, "Free Will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do."

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