Intro to The Tao of Astrology
Tell me what happens to you when you read this! Please & Thank You!
Dear Reader. Hello and thank you in advance for your feedback. I am working on the final edit of my book, THE TAO OF ASTROLOGY. I present the Introduction here for your comments. My intention is to combine the ever fascinating qualities of Yin and Yang into the various esoteric traditions that come across my screen and desk. All comments and criticisms will be taken to heart, and carefully mulched in the garden of my perceptions.
“I see Yang plus Yin people”
And you can trust that when my emotional state gets rocked, I go to the beach where birds speak to me while I drag my toe callouses through the sand, then stand in the surf until my feet turn bluish. When my physical body is satisfied with these tactile events, I go back to the brain station and do the werk! of chasing Truth around the corners of my mind. I give this as an offering to the gods who have graciously granted me the joy of thought!
Introduction
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.”
― Joseph Campbell
Life is a recipe made from two foreign forces. Fresh Fruit and Water. We are a smoothie, water and fruit, mixed together into a sweet and sour drink. We drink it and it surrounds us. That water will never be clear again, and that fruit will never be solid again. They are enmeshed until they disintegrate to begin again. That’s Tao.
We are storied. In the past we recited our ancestral stories with faithful precision. We sang the songs from generations long departed. Now we write it down. Now the children sing their own songs and do not know or like the songs of their parents. One wonders, does that memory lapse have a price?
The loneliest people are the ones without story. Conquered peoples fall into depravity, depression and extinction when conquerers destroy their stories. A few hundred years ago Modernia adopted a story called Industrialism. This Industrial story is based on a pursuit called Science, bolstered as a religion that promotes Singularity as its ultimate, righteous God. The One God. The Big Bang God. This new religion, Science, has pursued a single story to the exclusion of many soulful stories that living beings have told for eons.
The religious goal in the New Age is to achieve Oneness. Industrialism requires knowledge of the parts. Oneism requires the opposite. It tells us to ignore the parts, “you are all the same.” Is the Melting Pot really what we were after?
“It’s all good,” said with a shrug of the shoulder and a casual smile, is the acceptable response to horrible acts witnessed on small screens everywhere. As shrieks of pain and cruelty pass by churches everywhere, we are told to “sing louder.” As the joke goes: “It’s relative. Better your relatives than mine!” Ha ha!
Each new generation invents its own shorthand for communication, but we lose balance when we ignore or despise the past on which it is built. Great storytellers show the connections that bind us to life itself. Each archetype/character has its place in our world. Each experience has an inescapable core, a core beyond words, a feeling, beyond the person. We see each other through story. What happens when we forget the songs of our own sweet mothers and fathers and prefer to invent our own songs?
Modernia moves fast and singularity is our mantra. The Hero does it alone, with grit and will. Huzzah! Semper Fi! It pops up in the One God religion, the Capitalist marketplace, the winners of tournaments, electoral politics (he must be good because he won), philosophy and even Astrology. Get as rich as you can! It’s God (Good?) to win!
In an age of equality we have discovered the wimmin can be anointed to the ruling class as well, and that we gals can be vicious warmongers along side the men when it comes to power. We play our parts according to the stories we tell. Anyone can play any part in a play, but some actors are more suited for certain roles than others. We call that "playing to type" or "playing against type." Actors who believe they have become their role are deluded, but an actor who knows the difference between herself and his part in the play is a rational person.
"The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions that are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche." -Carl Jung
Dr. Jung wrote that statement about one hundred years ago. Today, it remains the same. It is my hope that the current gender chaos is the final lunge toward a Quantum Religion that can speak to all.
Modernia’s religion of Convenience has made us hungry receptacles. We are hungry for quick fixes. That which is given without effort does not nourish. Cook your own food. Search your own heart. Make your own stuff.
When soul speaks, it is clear."Why me?" I asked myself. "What am I supposed to do here with this sterile concrete sidewalk, in this ticky tacky brick bungalow settlement? It looks sad and lonely." I was five. Soul doesn’t notice age.
It seemed that I came to observe suffering. My poor parents were chronically unhappy in the midst of their party life. I thought they could use some religion but they would not, so I tried some religions on for myself.
My first religion was Catholic in Italy, with the maid who took pity on me and took me to her house on the weekends. I was eleven. It was the sad cafe at "the dungeon." Mother was "unwell." Italian churches are marvelous and I took to it like a duck to water. During my teens we lived on Mother’s king sized bed, watched TV (you can talk during the commercials), and ate dinner off of trays. The entourage include Siamese cats and German Shepherds dogs. At nineteen I had to leave home because Mother had passed into a Mad Woman stage and I could not take it any more. Mother’s constant anguish had oozed over me for so long that I thought being alone and helpless without skills or life training (we were feral), would be better than staying and killing myself at twenty.
Psychology was my second religion and I clung to that for many years because during the 70s it was pervasive. Codepency and Alanon were fan favorites and I was a willing participant. When Anthropology opened it door to me, I thought that would be an excellent belief system because it went so well with Sociology, another favorite in the list of secular religious practices. I was always a devout Secularist, not at all interested in unproven religious thought. That was pure nonsense in my faith system.
Something happen when I reached forty. I found Astrology and it made sense. I suppose it became provable when I had a consultation with an Astrologer who got a lot of stuff right about me. Soon after that, Tarot got under my skin when I read the book, "The Rabbi’s Tarot" by Daphna Moore. I read that book so many times it fell apart. She described the colors and musical notes as having meanings beyond the obvious physical properties, so I had to learn more.
In 1997, Robert Hand blew me away with his Kabbalah talk. The Tree of Life seemed to be an ancient system of spiritual pin ball. It was amazing. I sliced open this veil and found that the 3 pillared Kabbalistic system was another iteration of the Tao.
This was when I began to draw the different Ancestral stories together under the Kabbalist system, using the keywords to connect them to their proper place in the pattern. The Tree of Life has three pillars. The Tao is a trinity, also. The Tao, often thought of as a black and white dualistic symbol, is not as it seems. The Tao is indeed an image of black and white. But that is not all. Consider the curved line between the two. That is a third thing. Trinity consciousness is the flow between dark and light.
We think we have opposites that are "not-us," but we are a blend that resides between The Two shades of God.
Modern Science tells us that men and wimmin see, hear and think quite differently. There are actual double blind scientific studies on the topic of sex differences. Ancient Astrology has been written and interpreted by men for thousands of years, and I am not one to poo poo their amazing accomplishments and insights. I’m just a girl with a brain that sees patterns.
Over the eons we humuns have exchanged roles and responsibilities in culture. Times change, life’s demands shift and our responsibilities contort and morph. Wimmin and men exchange roles due to famine, wars, weather and whim. But some things do not change.
Yin is in. Yang is out.
Yin is magnetic. Yang is electric.
Yin is enormous and pervasive.
Yang is instantaneous and persistent.
We are doomed to our beliefs if we don’t question their sources.
Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses.” ~ Carl Jung