Facts and the Shadow of Gemini

Close encounters with public reality often leave me reflective. For one thing, they remind me of what I have within (and help counter my usual undercurrent of self-doubt!) By ‘public reality’ I mean life as many people live it, where you accept as objectively real the values and ideas that you grew up around; and where people who don’t share those values are seen as a bit weird. Not that you’d say.

 I often forget how many people live in this unreflecting way. I’m more likely to compare their certainties with my uncertainties and find myself wanting. When I was younger I was very judging of people for not being reflective, not questioning; but that was just the same attitude that conventional people can have about unconventional people, that I’d brought with me and reversed. Nowadays I don’t mind people being like this, it is who they are, their lives are meaningful to them, I can enjoy their lives with them. It is just humanity and how it is. 

The arising of reflective ability is a mysterious process. I think it is crucial, axial. It often starts to arise when things go wrong, when our received values are inadequate to deal with our experience, and as an astrologer you can be part of that process for people.

You can be a brilliant Nobel Prize winner, yet be happy within the status quo, even be seen as a wise person within that status quo. And on the other hand you can appear as a ‘loser’, in and out of unskilled jobs, just about holding your life together, yet be very perceptive about the values people are driven by.

And there’s a thing about confidence. It is so much easier to feel confident and at ease with yourself if you accept the status quo and succeed within it, living your life by its simple certainties, buoyed by the values shared with those around you.

If on the other hand you are on a lifelong search for meaningful values, you probably won’t have the motivation to succeed very much on the world’s terms – maybe just enough to hold your life together – and it can be hard not to compare oneself unfavourably with the ‘winners’. Self-confidence when found, however, is very real, it is a Leo thing, that source of life from deep within. But I think most of us bounce in and out of that. Writers and artists are archetypal examples of this way of being.

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And now I want to turn to a favourite topic of mine, science, because it can be understood in a reflecting or an unreflecting way. Don’t get me wrong, I think science is a great subject, I’m not anti- it. But there is a crucial point about how we understand it. And it is to do with ‘facts’.

For example, is matter made up of atoms? Well yes, we all know that, it is an established fact, part of 'public reality'. But do we actually know it? No, of course we don’t, we have merely been told it by people whose opinion we respect. And we have been told it so many times, crucially we were also taught it at school, the culture generally is so automatically accepting of the idea that matter is made up of atoms, that we accept it as a fact, yes of course it is true, everyone knows it is true. It has acquired a firm reality as a ‘fact’, free of its original moorings in someone’s mind.

I’m not playing a game here. It is about intellectual integrity, it is about being true to experience – without those qualities, reflective ability cannot arise. The real situation is that we have merely been told that matter is made up of atoms, and that is a THEORY, not a fact, for no-one has or ever will see an atom with their bare senses. And it is a good theory, or should I say story, for it explains a lot of things.

It is an inner knowing that I am arguing for here, what do we really know within ourselves? That is the point from which consciousness grows, and the more you come from that point, the more you realise how much you don’t know. Real knowing has to begin with stripping away what passes for knowledge in public reality, but which is really just a bunch of stories that hold together well enough to provide a sort of coherent picture of reality, provided we don’t look too closely.

 And I find it a liberation to think of science in this sort of way. Scientific knowledge is so all-pervading these days, there is just so much of it, and it locates reality so firmly outside of ourselves, that the inner has correspondingly less reality. But all scientific notions begin inside someone’s mind, and then they spread to other people’s minds. Science itself has an inner starting point and foundation, and it gets detached from that, and to that extent we humans get detached from who we are. And science has such spectacular results that we are dazzled into thinking it is real in a way that it is not. It is a product of the mind, like all human creations. (I have a suspicion that the mind is so much the creator of the reality around it that science will pretty much always discover what it sets out to find.)

We live in a Gemini Age. Pluto and Neptune, the 2 outermost astrological planets, meet up every 500 years or so and define the age we live in. They last met in about 1890 in Gemini, and in Gemini again 500 years before that. Each sign needs its opposite to be balanced. Gemini is facts, information, and Sagittarius is the wider human context, the sense of meaning, within which we place those facts. The shadow of Gemini is facts without meaning, facts as the be-all-and-end-all, mere information as ultimate reality. Science at its worst. And it has been creeping up on us for 600 years (corresponding to the period of the growth of modern science) and has several thousand years to run! The blink of an eye in the history of humanity, but hopefully in that time we will collectively learn to tame the tyranny of facts, remember that all such information is the product of the human mind, and set it in that huge all-inclusive imaginative context we are capable of creating. We cannot let the muggles win!

I think it is about coming back to the mind, feeling the ideas of atoms or quarks or evolution, for example, as mind-created like any story, and letting the ideas float there, subject to the forces of the imagination, essentially inner things rather than hard external realities, which I think is a kind of corruption. Through treating stories as ‘facts’ we have created a huge weight that presses down on us collectively. ‘Facts’ are the modern shadows in Plato’s cave, that seem so real to those chained to its walls.

Is Astrology Scientific? Causal vs Mythological Thought

I don't know where to begin with this one. Astrology News Service, which claims to be sponsored by august bodies such as the American Federation of Astrologers and the National Council for Geocosmic Research, is rejoicing that more Americans think astrology is scientific than did a few years ago. It reminds me of the time the Sun newspaper took a poll of its readers as to whether Princess Diana had been murdered, as if those readers were qualified to make a judgement.

It's not just that. Anyone whose studies astrology quickly comes to see, in my opinion at least, that astrology is NOT a science, not in the modern, narrow meaning of the word. Nor are poetry and music and psychotherapy and a lot of other things.

That's why I said I don't know where to begin unpicking this one. Astrology sometimes needs saving from its friends rather than its enemies! Though personally I think those enemies can be a good thing, they keep us on our toes.

It would be interesting to find out what people mean when they say they think astrology is ‘scientific’. What they really mean, I suspect, is that they think astrology works, but science has such epistemological authority for them that saying astrology is ‘scientific’ amounts to the same thing. 1000 years ago they might have said they thought there was room for astrology in the teachings of the Church, and I can’t see there’s much difference in the two statements.

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I think what overlap there is between astrology and science is incidental, because their ways of thinking are inconjunct. Science is based on cause and effect and repeatability, along with an explanatory mechanism (except for the privileged disciplines of Evolution and Psychiatry). Astrology is based on sychronicity, "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related" (Wiki). In this case, earthly events and heavenly events.

Astrology is not based on cause and effect, you could call it 'mythological thinking', it is how early people thought. They would, for example, see some unusual behaviour in nature and reflect that it must therefore have a meaning for them. (Source: Chippewa Cree friend). I think that the reclaiming of this way of thinking is potentially astrology's most important contribution to the world. Astrology in itself is a rather specialised and improbable subject that I don't think will ever be mainstream. But I love it :)

Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, astrology and science need to learn to live with each other. I don’t think, however, that it is an equal relationship: astrologers can understand how science sees the world, but science finds it much harder to understand astrologers. We need to be patient, even indulgent. After all, we see reality through all 4 elements, whereas science concentrates on Air and Earth as means of knowledge, it is limited. Its basic method tends to disregard Fire and Water as means of knowing and valuing. The proper place for science is that of a speciality within a more all-encompassing culture that includes astrology. Causal thinking needs to take its place within the broader context of mythological thinking.

How Astrology Works Part 1: Making Room for Astrology

There’s a joke about Wikipedia, which says that the problem is that it only works in practice. The same may be said about astrology. Every astrologer probably has their own theory, if they have one at all, about how it works. What we do know is that astrology is not a science, not in the modern meaning of the word. If you try and pin it down in that sort of way, it’ll probably stop working, offended at what you are trying to do with it.

Astrologers can provide stories rather than mechanisms about how their craft works. Much like things were 1000 years ago, when if you were asked how the world came into existence, you’d have said well God made it of course. And that was enough for people, and why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t a story that is imaginatively appealing be enough? Even today, with our modern explanation of how it all came about – the Big Bang – at the heart of it you have something coming out of nothing. That isn’t a mechanism, that is a story, it has magic in it. Something out of nothing, who would have thought it?

Eurynome

A couple of the ancient Greek Creation Myths have a similar starting point. In their cases it was Chaos. In one story we read: “In the beginning Eurynome, the Goddess of all things, rose naked from Chaos.  She found nothing substantial to rest her feet upon, so she divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves. She danced to the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation.”

Now I find that more imaginatively appealing than the Big Bang story, because from the beginning the universe is alive. It is not just a bunch of hot particles that have to wait billions of years for that incidental phenomenon, life, to appear. No, life is there from the word go in the form of the goddess of all things, Eurynome. And that, in my view, makes it closer to the reality of things than the Big Bang story.

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As an astrologer, you experience all the time the intermingling of inner and outer, above and below, life and matter. On the final day of Uranus’ transit through Pisces, on 11 March 2011, there was a tsunami in Japan. The next day, with Uranus on its first day in Aries, a nuclear power plant exploded in Japan as a result of the tsunami.

I don’t think I need to unwrap the symbolism. It was one of those times when astrology describes events in the world with a raw, literal power. Awful as the events were for the Japanese people, for the astrologer they were a striking demonstration of the connections between heaven and earth. And people: at the moment of the explosion, Uranus was ½ a degree off an exact square to the Japanese Ascendant.

The ancient Greek Creation story continues, until we read: “Next, the goddess created the seven planetary powers, setting a Titan and Titaness over each…”

So there we have it. How does astrology work? It works due to the powers invested in the planets in ancient times by Eurynome, the goddess of all things. The planets have the names of Roman gods, but they were taken from the Greek – where for example, Hermes becomes Mercury. And, of course, modern western astrology has its roots in ancient Greek astrology.

As I said, every astrologer probably has their own theory/story about how astrology works. The above is just one story.

Traditional societies often have a number of Creation stories. The opening chapters of Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths are devoted to several of them.

I once asked a Chippewa Cree friend who is a story-teller if his people ever got fundamentalist about their Creation Myth, thinking of it as the way the world began, and he said no, that is because we have a number of stories, and they often conflict with one another!

So that is a very different mind-set to the one that, in the West, we have been used to for over one thousand years. A mind-set that says there is only one way that things are, and only one way that things began. That is a definition of fundamentalism, that there is only one reality.

Firstly we had it with Christianity, and now we have it with Science. That is not to say that all scientists are closed-minded and fundamentalist. Or indeed that all Christians are. Far from it. But built into the scientific method is the idea that things are only one way. If you have 2 theories – stories – then they are seen as competing, and sooner or later one of them must prevail. You can’t, for example, subscribe to both the steady state and the big bang stories of the origins of the universe. They are conflicting, and you can’t have that. I think well why not, they are both telling us different things about the cosmos, so let's have both.

I think there is something to be said for the American schools where they are required to teach both Creationism and Evolution. Let’s not get too hot under the collar about one of these being ‘nonsense’. If you’re reading this, you may well think that Creationism is nonsense. If you read Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, you will see how full of holes the theory of, and evidence for Evolution is. But that is not the point. In these schools, children are being taught two contradictory Creation myths, and in my opinion that can be very good for producing open-minded adults, who are able to consider alternative ways of seeing the world. Out of 2 closed systems has arisen something that, potentially at least, could be a good thing, and probably not what either of them intended.

So in this consideration of how astrology works, I want to get away from the mindset that says there is only one explanation for everything. We are deeply conditioned to think like that – previous generations, after all, have been trained that way for over one thousand years.

Once you think there is only one explanation, then the stories stop being stories and become literal events, set in stone, with little for the imagination to play on.

To insist on one explanation implies that the human mind is capable of grasping the whole truth. The universe is so large and complex, our brains are so small in comparison, how could this be possible? And even that which we do see and know is an interpretation provided by our brains at a very fundamental, deep-structure level. Up and down, me and you, time, left and right – all these structures we have for interpreting reality are contingent, they are created by the brain. They are useful, they work, but it means we need to put inverted commas around absolutely everything!

Three decades ago I read Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks is a neurologist who had patients with brain disorders/injuries that affected their perception. You’d get patients, for example, who could tell you generally what something was – a playing card for example – but not that it was the Jack of Hearts. And you’d get patients with the reverse problem. Or ones who had lost the sense of left. So they’d do everything with the right hand side of their body. They would even eat the right hand half of what was on the plate, unaware of the left half, and then pull the plate round to the right and eat the right half of what was there. And so on.

Reading this book was a philosophically powerful experience, much more powerful for me than studying philosophical idealism, which posits that reality is mentally constructed. This book gave me an experience, as opposed to a mere mental awareness, of that philosophical position.

Of course, if we do see reality as just one way and as literal, then it provides a measure of certainty in an uncertain universe. And that is probably a perennial human tendency. It makes the big questions a whole lot easier, but also a whole lot less interesting. After you die you go to heaven or hell. After you die you are extinguished. These are both the same answer, in that they are providing certainty to a question that has no certain answers.

If you can live with metaphysical uncertainty, then the universe opens up. There is the sense of awe at just how mysterious place the cosmos is. As the biologist JBS Haldane said: “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” And it leaves room for the Imagination to take seriously and delight in, for example, the story of Eurynome creating the world.

And it leaves room for astrology.

Science and Astrology

You’ve probably noticed I bang on about Science a lot. I’m going to do so again today, but with more astrology than last time. I think. Why do I bang on about it? Probably because I’ve got Sun in Aquarius, which gives a natural interest in science. But also because I have Sun opposite Pluto, which makes me acutely aware of anything I find disempowering. I struggle against it until my head emerges above the water.

Some people find it difficult to understand that one can be critical of something without being agin it. I find science to be a beautiful and useful creation. But I am strongly against its tendency to usurp its place, its evangelical tendency to oppose anything in society that does not see truth in its own narrow terms. And the collective brainwashing that comes with it, so that many people feel, maybe despite themselves in many cases, that scientific reality IS reality.

I don’t think views are that important. It’s the way you hold them that matters. A failing of the ‘alternative’ section of society can be to assume superiority because of the views they have adopted, usually green, left wing, ‘spiritual’ and often anti-government.

In my experience, these views can sometimes be rigidly held, not thought through, and adopted as part of a package. Much more impressive to me might be, for example, a wealthy Tory-voting businessman who has come in his own way to feel a degree of responsibility to society.

My job as an astrologer is to help people develop and trust their own judgement, rather than foist my views on them (which are many!) Human development has nothing to do with whether your political views are left or right wing or the degree to which you believe in green energy or alternative medicine. It is the degree to which you have made your experience your own that matters, and the degree to which you are able to observe and use, rather than unconsciously take on, trends in the collective.

So this is why I bang on about Science: because I feel it has a collective power over people’s minds that is not healthy, that is a form of brainwashing (just like Christianity was in the Middle Ages) – the Enlightenment idea that everything needs to be reduced to reason, and reason in the particularly narrow, lab-rat form that science takes for truth. Don't get me wrong - as an Aquarian I am in love with reason. But it has its limits.

This is why in my piece last Friday I was expressing delight that the speed of light appears to have been broken. Because it meant a foundation stone of modern science had been undermined, an 'immutable' truth was slipping away.
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What I wanted to do was to look at some of the astrology around current developments in Science.

First of all, Einstein’s chart. Charts of famous dead people continue to work because their influence continues. Einstein’s Mercury, his mind, is still around.

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Saturn can make you old for your years (or the opposite: you may need to wait till you are old for that aspect to come to fruition.) In Einstein’s case, his Mercury-Saturn conjunction gave him a precocious intellect (that became Saturn in the negative sense – conservative and closed to new ideas – as he grew older.) And this conjunction is in Aries (fresh and groundbreaking) and in a yod with the North Node in Sagittarius (universal vision) and Uranus (radical and original science).

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And what do we find now that his idea about the absoluteness of the speed of light appears to have been proved wrong? By transit, Uranus is conjoining his Mercury, and Pluto is squaring it. By Progression, Mercury is moving up to conjoin his natal then prog Uranus! And the Prog Node is moving towards opposing his Prog MC.

All this suggests to me that indeed the speed of light has been broken, and there is more to come over the next few years as the progressed aspects become exact. More of Einstein’s thoughts, so fundamental to the way modern science sees the world, will unravel.

Uranus is the planet that rules Science, and at present he is in Aries in a square to Pluto in Capricorn, which will continue for at least another 4 years. So this is the bigger picture behind the breaking of the speed of light: the destruction (Pluto) of established (Capricorn) science (Uranus) and the creation of a new vision (Aries).

But Capricorn is also about limits. Science is a model of reality, rather than reality itself. This gets forgotten. Maybe Pluto in Capricorn will have a lot to do with science realising its limits.

It is not just the speed of light that has been broken. In the last few weeks the evidence has started to go against both dark matter and supersymmetry, theories which are foundational to our understanding of the macro and micro universes. This is happening again under the Pluto-Uranus square, which suggests it is not just one or two theories being proved wrong, but something more fundamental that is happening.

To me, it is obvious that Science must sooner or later start to find its limits, because apart from being a mere a model of reality, it also confines itself to rationality. Maybe this is what is starting to happen. You push a model to extremes – in this case to the extremely large and the extremely small – and it starts to break down, it becomes harder and harder to make progress.

That said, in the ‘middle-ground’ where Science works very well and will no doubt continue to work very well, we are seeing a string of developments brought on by the creation of superior instruments. There have been a series of new space telescopes, and the building of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest ever atom-smasher, at Cern.

As I have said before, my dream is that every schoolkid will learn the wonders of Science, but will also be taught that it is just a tool that eventually breaks down, perhaps when faced with the extremely large and the extremely small.

For most of last year, there was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is particularly associated with scientific advance and breakthrough. This conjunction overlapped with a Saturn-Uranus opposition, the time when these new instruments were being built.

So Uranus as Science has been considerably activated over the last few years: firstly by Saturn, a time of planning and building; then by Jupiter, when the new instruments started functioning and results – such as lots of new exo-planets - started coming in; and now by Pluto, suggesting a radical overhaul of our scientific understanding, as well as an empowerment of Science.

The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction took place at the end of Pisces and at the beginning of Aries, the last and first signs of the zodiac, suggesting the beginning of a new era. If we were to find signs of life on other planets, now would be the time: the incredible newness of Jupiter-Uranus at the beginning of Aries, followed by the transformation of vision under Uranus-Pluto that would result. And the new, cosmic dream of Neptune in Pisces.

Some would say they know there is life out there anyway, because aliens have been visiting for years. I tend to think these experiences are real, no less real than material reality, maybe even more so, but they belong to Neptune. An Indian friend once told me that when you have a visionary experience, it appears at the time as just as real as everyday experience, and it is often only afterwards that you realise what it was. I think experience of aliens falls into this category. Otherwise it’s like why do they ALL play hide and seek?

It seems to me just a matter of time before we scientific evidence out there of life-as-we-know-it, as we are now finding so many new exo-planets. What you need to find is light that has the signature of complex organic molecules. It’s going to be inference, rather than actual sighting.