Our experience of ourselves is significantly modified by interaction with people and circumstances around us. As shown in competitive sports, through overcoming obstacles and observing others' efforts to rise up, animated to meet their own challenges, we are able to learn much of our greater potential.

Convention binds together a group of individuals and so helps the formation of society to rise to common challenges. Conventionality therefore is a measure of our willingness to abide by social constructs because we think we will gain personal advantage in doing so.

There is pressure to conform, and our adherence to terms may feel like a self-betrayal because of the loss of individuality. It is a question of balance: the urge to express a radiant self in harmony with our need to participate in society.

Conformity arising out of fear of authority is ill-founded and false. Self-perception of powerlessness requires us to look again in the depths of our being and awaken the confidence to overcome any pressure that attempts to deny us self-expression.

However, it is natural to gain experience and skill in the creative act of supervision. The calling upon like-minded associates, to a joint action that favors our required outcome, is evidence of self-competence on the level of practicality. It is supported.

Also natural is a disciplined sense of responsibility, which embraces the ethic of serving oneself in alignment with the common good. Community response is therefore felt to be useful, authentic feedback, whether presented as punishment or reward.

In adapting through this process of socialization, we learn acceptance and tolerance. Thus our own ideals are constantly revisited and upgraded. This is to reflect society's newly-discovered potential for dramatizing a set of principles higher than previous generations were able to demonstrate.

Capricorn 16