Old sea captain rocking

This universal idea is best expressed through planets in

13th degree of Leo (12° - 13°)

PEACEFUL CONTEMPLATION
The lessons and messages of life are complex and
we gain much from reflection and assimilation

In time, the child's innocence and the adult's sophistication give way to the peaceful realty of old age, a time to contemplate our personal history and the ups and downs that punctuate all life journeys.

Rudhyar:
AN OLD SEA CAPTAIN ROCKING HIMSELF ON THE PORCH OF HIS COTTAGE

An old sea captain rocking himself on the porch of his cottage

Retrospect

By contemplating the past we add value to the future

The warning given by this image of a potentially impotent has-been is not to live in the past. If we surrendered to nostalgia, we would lose touch with the realities of our current circumstances, which are equally valid – in fact infinitely more valid than what no longer exists.

Yet in his memory, our Sea Captain fights his battles over and over – and thus gains greater mastery over the world since, through retrospective contemplation, he develops a much better understanding of the implications of strategy, cause and effect.

In any moment, there are people and things in relationship to us and each other, and our task is to bring them into an elegant, productive, unified whole. We use the same technique – we need to think about what has happened before in order to gauge what might happen next.

This enables us to optimise our degree of competence by fully grasping any latent opportunity. We tend to love reliving our best experiences through the agency of selective memory. This indicates which of them we give special value – and that is how we know what we appreciate most of all.

Only by the realisation of inevitable consequences can we learn to perfect our plans for successful outcomes. Although retrospect is backward looking, the way we process this activity can enable prospect – or forward looking. We can see certain key aspects of new situations in advance.

Events tend to repeat themselves and we can obtain some measure of control over the future by managing our knowledge of what happened before. They say hindsight is 20:20 vision; it is rarely true. We have received feedback and we need to employ it wisely.

The wisdom here is that each of us can call up fresh powers through what we have gained through experience, and the struggles we overcame in our journey towards self-fulfilment. Previous moments were similar to now in crucial ways, and it is only the child or the fool who does nothing to improve their chances by careful contemplation of them.