Finding our Life Direction

​The first batch of 5 degrees having been transited and to some extent assimilated into consciousness, Chiron enters the second expression of Aries. The name given to this Expression is ‘Direction’. The thrust of desire began with self-centred action – and the five stages of this process are outlined already. Now the focus becomes making some accommodation within ourselves in order to relate to society, and thus benefit from the support and fellowship that that offers. Cultural norms impact upon us in an emotional way – we are offered both opportunity and penalty and are subject to the ups and downs of our feelings according to whether our expectations and desires are being met or disappointed.

Determination of a Life Code

​Jones called this particular degree A SQUARE BRIGHTLY LIGHTED ON ONE SIDE, whose keyword is ‘SET’. This image employs traditional symbolism: a square indicates materiality, and the light is spirituality. It focuses upon the need to bring steadiness into our lives and settle the emotional ups and downs to an acceptable level. This occurs when, and only when, we adopt a spiritual code of some sort, in other words by SETTING STABLE LIFE PRINCIPLES.

Importance of Creativity

​Because we have a desire to establish ourselves as a unique person, the need exists to resist the force that tends to pull us back into the undifferentiated state of pre-existence; this force of resistance is seen as our urge to be diverse in our self-expression, to be a creative individual.

Conformity as the Foundation of Creativity

​Being different begins first at the level of family and tribe – WE are not like THEM – so we adopt the behaviours, beliefs and practices of our fellows to underline how different WE are from THEM.

Bubbling Up of Creativity

​Yet our yearning to be expressive as an individual bubbles up as the drive to achieve our own special goals and have our own special attitudes to life, which give rise to our own unique set of experiences.

What Does it All Mean?

​We are, however, confronted with the need to understand that without the gift of knowledge experience is meaningless. We are all challenged to set ourselves upon an enlightened path as we struggle with physicality.

The Meaning of Knowledge and Experience

​Understanding our life is only possible when we give meaning to our experiences; a path must have meaning, or events are disconnected and lack depth of purpose. Without knowledge, experience is meaningless, yet without experience, knowledge is two-dimensional. Can we see that knowledge is the symbol of experience, and experience the symbol of knowledge? Each is the meaning of the other, and neither has meaning alone.

Synthesis of Wisdom

​With the 5th degree of any batch of 5 degrees we look for a synthesis of the wisdom suggested by the previous 4 of the set. In this example, Chiron is taking us through a process of reviewing what we are doing and who we are as we embark on another cycle of shifting perception.

Awareness of the 'Other'

​If we were able to bring ourselves in Aries 4 to a heightened awareness of ‘the other’ we can step into Aries 5 with an advanced level of consciousness, wherein all polarities are reconciled, all ambiguities are resolved, and harmony is found. As was made strikingly clear during the Brexit process, it is very difficult to see things from the other’s point of view.

The Golden Rule

​Nonetheless, on a personal level, some of us aspire to do exactly that – to practice the ‘Golden Rule’ and see things simultaneously from two points of perception. We need to do to others what we would have them do to us. This teaching is not just for Christians, it is present in all spiritual belief everywhere and throughout history.

Transcendental States

​When we do then a higher state of being unfolds for us, and we can see more, understand more and feel more empathy. We can even expect occasionally to touch into transcendental states of consciousness.

Triangle With Wings

​Aries 5 is called A TRIANGLE WITH WINGS. “Through processes of development and refinement, our impulses lead us towards self-realisation”.

Essence of our Life Journey

​We come to see ourselves differently, as parts of the whole, and totally enthusiastic about reconnecting with the Source, which means having access to the transcendental aspect of self. We come to recognise that this is the essence of our life journey.

Skills, Loyalties and Values

​We learn of three fundamental aspects of who we are and what we are made of. Described by Marc Jones in terms of our skills, loyalties and values, these three bits of us relate to the animal, human and angelic components of self. The animal part is motivated by the four features of the gene’s survival imperatives: fight, flight, feed and fecundate. We develop skills so that we can survive in a harsh environment. Loyalties connect us with the two bloodlines of our roots and so connect to the push of family goals. Values speak to our soul’s sense of what is the right thing to do.

The Next Chapter

Chiron’s complete zodiac journey, which began as it entered Aries recently, is mapping out the individual steps through the 360 degrees. Each step can be studied by examining closely its Sabian Symbol.

The Two Lovers

Between April 11th and May 30th Chiron will transit through the 4th degree of Aries. This degree is called ‘Two lovers strolling through a secluded walk’ and the keyword Jones uses is ‘Enjoyment’ whereas Rudhyar suggests ‘Polarisation’. ​ Jones’s keywords tend to be more to do with our personal experience and speak to the qualities that can be developed; Rudhyar’s have more to do with lessons for a seeker on the path to realisation.

The Golden Rule

Chiron’s teaching is basically that a perceptual shift is necessary and sufficient condition for healing. To put this differently, Chiron teaches us how better to see things. We can, for example, see that our enjoyment reaches spiritual heights when we hold on to our awareness of both aspects of any polarised position. ​ This attitude is the essence of the fundamental principle of spiritual awareness, the Golden Rule, reflexive self-consciousness, ‘Do as you’d be done by’.

Pleasure is not Joy

It differs completely from the selfish principle of pleasure. Pleasure is the hollow echo of joy. If we simply take our pleasure, for example in casual sex, in ruthless ambition, in manipulation of others, in excessive food-lust, then the momentary buzz soon fades and one day soon turns into its opposite emotion of disappointment. Joy, however, is sustainable and wholesome. It may lack the exciting temporary buzz but it builds an grows and becomes a solid foundation of life.

Sharing

The essential difference between pleasure and joy is that pleasure is for me and joy is for us. When we find that our own pleasure is optimised though another, then we are closer to joy. Think of how we are with babies or a new romance – we get so much more joy through sharing our experience. This is general truth that doesn’t always require offspring or a lover. When we care for another, joy deepens.

Accepting both sides

The more mystical, philosophical aspect of Aries 4 is that we will be able to know how to experience this level of joy only when we recognise, acknowledge and celebrate our own polarities – the masculine and feminine, the light and the shadow, certainty and doubt, love and fear – and embrace both sides with awareness. ​ Having accepted and healed our inner polarities it becomes inevitable that our relationships with others are also healed. The reverse is also true that we cannot hope for a deep and peaceful, joyful connection with another until we have found such qualities within ourselves.

Dealing with inner ambiguity

Chiron’s new initiative in Aries 1, met by a contrasting response in Aries 2 and an understanding, in Aries 3, of the importance of responding to community needs, now, in Aries 4, shows up our own personal inner ambiguities. We come to see that we have been wanting two things that cannot be reconciled, to be both involved and free, to have our cake and eat it or, during the Brexit fiasco, to enjoy Europe’s wealth and yet be free of responsibility to share its problems. In the name of a higher, joyful, shared purpose, lovers resolve such ambiguities with caring compromise.

Desire and Action The first 5 degrees of Aries is about taking action to express desire and, according to Rudhyar, every batch of 5 degrees follows the formula: Affirmation of an idea Countering and contrasting that idea Reconciliation and the combined result Change mechanism Synthesis and progression

Personal Journey If we are able to make this work on a personal level we have to identify a seed, something totally new, that occurred between these dates: 18 February 2019 to 8 March 2019, or if not then 17 April 2018 to 7 May 2018, or 3 September 2018 to 26 September 2018. This could be a new idea, a new project, a new person, a new way of being – the seeding of a very significant new chapter of life.

The Seed of Possibility Although we are looking at Aries 3, let’s consider the preceding steps. Aries 1; we see that the woman who has arisen from the sea represents the receptive principle coming out of the undifferentiated sea of humanity’s collective unconsciousness. The seal, which rises up to embrace her, shows a rather similar image of something rising out of the unconscious, yet with a more masculine, rather phallic sense. At this first point in the story, both aspects could very easily simply sink back into the sea and return into unconsciousness. Indeed most of our ideas and possibilities lead nowhere; they pop into our awareness for a moment, we have our little fantasy about what could happen, and then we forget all about it.

Comedian Aries 2, (the comedian entertaining a group), the second within the batch of 5 degrees, is the polarising principle to the first idea. In society it is the comedian’s function to make it clear that our own exalted self-perception is not shared by society.

Reflexive Self Awareness This symbol shows us that an idea we may have of who we are, or what we are doing, cannot be properly understood until we have also taken into account the way our community views us. We will only ever be effective within a background context, and that context is the social group within which we circle. An important aspect of who we are is the community’s take on who we are.

Making Adjustments

Social Context of What We Do In Aries 3 (A profile of a man outlined by his country), we have to marry what we want for ourselves with what we want for the community with neither side taking advantage, and both gaining benefit. The power needed to realise any idea comes from those who support it and do work to bring it into form. To some extent this idea, and any other project, must become a communal project because in fact we can do nothing alone. This fact requires us to win support, to persuade, to communicate and negotiate, and eventually to find an overlap between our personal vision and the collective need.

Power of Participation Participation is powerful, alienation is ultimately disempowering. ​ Those of us who feel we can complete a project alone may need to think again. We love the idea of independence, the freedom from the need to compromise and being forced to interact with potentially tiresome people – but here the wisdom is very clear, unless we align with the community to some extent we will not succeed to realise anything much, and our ideas will come to nothing.

Introduction

One less-well-known fact in astrology is that sometimes planets go beyond their normal limits. People with these in their charts can behave in an exceptional manner, occasionally showing surprising and even extreme qualities and behaviour; later we will look at what to expect if you have such a planet. In the general sense, when a planet is Out of Bounds you may look for feelings, thoughts, events and situations in your life to become noticeably out of the ordinary according to society’s ideas of normality. OOB Planets Qualities

Technicalities In your horoscope, technically speaking, a planet’s position is given in the form of degrees and minutes of a zodiac signs. My Sun for example is at Taurus 15:38. These numbers, which can be between 0 and 30, are measuring the degrees of longitude. Another dimension of the planet’s position (up or down rather than side to side) is its declination, which is the measure of its angular distance above or below, (North or South), of the ‘Celestial Equator’. More technical explanations are on this site.

Definition: Out of Bounds Planets are almost always found within the range between 23:27 North and 23:27 South because they circle the Earth in a band around the equator rather than being dotted about randomly. However sometime they exceed this angular distance (which is the same as the Earth’s tilt on its axis) and when they do they are said to be ‘Out Of Bounds’. For example if your Moon’s declination is ‘24:00 North’ then it is OOB.

Which Planets Go Out? Mars and the Moon are often OOB, and Jupiter is seldom out. The Nodes and four planets never go out – Sun, Saturn, Neptune and recently discovered Chiron, which is already very ‘out there’ in its meaning and behaviour! As an example of a person with OOB Moon we can see how the celebrated Japanese artist Ruby Fumizki’s paintings are very subtle and hint at, rather than fully express, their intended meaning.

Multiple Planets A person with three planets will very likely be seen as a real odd ball and could be innovative and creative – or rebellious and unsettling. A person with four is so rare that analysis is impracticable, but we can be sure that such a person would be seen as very weird and probably would live on the margins of society doing very unusual and creative things for which they go unrecognised.

Off Limits The phrase itself is very descriptive. As children we would be told where we were allowed to go and which areas were off limits, and sometimes we would even see a sign saying ‘out of bounds’. A child who wandered out was a naughty child and risked penalty, especially if they did it repeatedly.

Not Good Nor Bad Similarly with the behaviour of a person with any OOB planets – they behave to some extent in a way that society considers antisocial, disruptive or eccentric, and this can be just mildly so or extremely so, even to the level of criminality, depending on distortions of basic personality. However there is no evidence that OOB planets are essentially bad; good guys and bad guys have the same percentages, as do famous people and the rest of us. Yet whether helpful or harmful they tend to be radically different in some way, depending upon the qualities of the planet itself and also the extent of its OOB-ness.

Finding Your Planets You can find out about some of your planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter by visiting Café Astrology, otherwise you would need some skill at reading an astrology table (it requires an ephemeris for declinations).

Qualities and Celebrities I am including here are a few of the descriptive qualities of OOB planets, and if you want to read more about them you can check out a fuller list of characteristics on my website Sabian Mysteries. Some celebrities with OOB planets clearly display certain of these qualities and I have recorded an example of that after the description:

Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars

Pluto and Uranus When Pluto and Uranus go out they are effective in shaping history because they influence a whole generation. We cannot really say what Pluto means on a personal level because it is poorly researched and anyway already well beyond our day-to-day understanding; however it will have something to do with an extreme, and possibly dangerous, inclination to push boundaries around questions of taboo like sex, death and personal transformation.

Uranus OOB Generation To some extent this is also true for Uranus but an interesting quirk is easily identified in history. The ‘Uranus Out of Bounds’ generation, which was born within a few years around 1948, had a very powerful impact upon society when, in the late 1980s, their Uranus oppositions were also OOB. OOB Uranus is extremely eccentric, obsessed with the spirit of discovery, revolution, experimentation, and with unrestrained imagination and creativity, demanding freedom of thought and action, and displaying very rebellious behaviour.

Ageing Hippies

One small step for man... We had integrated the juddering shock of rock and roll, The Rolling Stones, Nobel-Laureate-to-be Bobby Dylan, and the Fab Four, and were now dressed in outrageously bright and loose clothing, in open rebellion against suits, parents and convention generally. Also we were, for the first time ever, wielding unimagined power as young spenders. ​This was already massively powerful; yet Chiron entering Aries kindled some events that grew into so very much more than they seemed at the time. These included “One small step for man and a great step for mankind”; Jumbo jets; the incorporation of both IT-giants-to-be…Apple and Microsoft; electronic music; anti-Vietnam marches, Luther King’s shameful murder, and the West experiencing unheard-of riots.

A New Age

Jumbos brought tourism, and so reduced the xenophobic paranoia that white people generally had towards foreigners, especially dark-skinned ones; space exploration brought an iconic vision of Planet Earth as an unprotected little ball in a limitlessness expanse of space, which prompted much more awareness of environmental science and ecosystems. The High-Tech age came with its laptops, The Web, Facebook and cell phones – which until that point were just silly science-fiction toys.

Sex, Drugs... And the rebellion inherent within “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” forced everyone, including politicians, to become a little less reactive, more tolerant and open to minority groups. However bad it may still be today it was so much worse then.

Rainbow Bridge Known mainly as the ‘wounded healer’, Chiron is also termed the ‘Rainbow Bridge’ since its unprejudiced attitude tolerates all rainbow colours, and its capacity to modify perception bridges the division among those of differing opinions and ways. Only when we see things from another person’s perspective will we know how to walk the road to peace and harmony. Looking for a different viewpoint is the path for all seekers today.

Marc Edmund Jones Jones describes Aries 1 as follows:  ‘A woman rises out of the water; a seal rises and embraces her’. We can easily see that the ocean is a familiar metaphor for the instinctive, intuitive knowledge and actions of our species. From this unconscious state ideas arise like the waves of the sea. Equally our every utterance could have a knock-on effect, word upon word, light upon light, which might lead to lasting changes. But most initiatives fail, almost none live on, and we simply do not know until time passes which ones might persist and have any consequence.

Learn to Listen Yet there are some creative possibilities, many not well-formed nor lucidly explained. They may be vague feelings not even real thought. If we want to support such nascent imaginings, we may need to improve our listening – to our own inner voice as well as the vaguely described feelings of a friend. We can also encourage children’s silly ideas – they are freer from judgement and outworn old standards.

This is the beginning... It must be obvious that we will have solved our concerns to do with population, global warming and the abuse of Mother Nature by 2070, or we’ll have suffered a hefty price for failing to do so. Chiron’s teachings offer the safe and clear bridge to that future time. Astrologers might look back to this very year when we discovered the first glimpses of a way out of the bewilderment and misrepresentations that presently shadow our understandings.

Being Aware So, between 18 February and 8 March, look out for a very subtle new direction unfolding, so subtle that its lasting repercussions may be obscure. If you’ve felt you were waiting for something – that exceptional person or opportunity – then it is now time to be really expectant, and imagine this can and will occur. We should manage each new circumstance with a hopeful attitude, and broaden our view of what exists in the realm of possibility.

Miracle and Magic

Free Will as a life path

Reincarnation and peer group approval

My free will chooses to have the authority and power to determine all of my experiences on this Earth and all other planes of existence. I do not care very much whether anyone agrees with me; I am responsible for my own outcomes - and peer group approval or disapproval is simply a facet of the kaleidoscope of my life; it adds colour.

Reincarnation and Fellowship

Since I enjoy a measure of resonance with other thinkers I have sought out a group of people who follow this line of thought. However I don't believe that it, or anything else, is 'true' for everyone - but for me it is good. I simply choose this way of thinking as a path because it feels right to walk along it.

I am a mini-Sun

I conceive of myself as a ball of energy like a mini-sun with a focus and also with radiance, so that who I am interacts with all and everything to some extent. My beingness is unending; I choose not to die. Yet certain constructs exist within each of the worlds. On this Earth plane there is 'cause and effect', there is limitation and there is death. Yet it is quite possible to reside in a condition of awareness of 'soul-self' and then we can employ death as a traveller does an airline - to take us forward to our next chapter when we are ready.

Need for incarnation

As the soul matures it takes on further qualities and appetites for experience. These effectively are 'attitudes of magnetism' and attract the experiences needed in order to gain further knowledge. Some of these require immersion in the Earth realm since this world has unique laws that bind us into committed interactions and so accelerate our spiritual development.

Reincarnation and Parenting

Arriving into the physical world is quite shocking for the soul, whose essence-nature is pure and very sensitive indeed, so it is very easily unsettled. Inevitably parenting is imperfect, and the soul gets impressed strongly by inappropriate forces such as impatience, anger, sentimentality and even blame. These distort the balance of the incarnated soul and so its subsequent life journey is negatively affected. In other words we all have some degree of neurosis. These neurotic patterns need to be released for us to know untarnished joy.

The Golden Rule

A path that clears neuroses and brings us joy is one where we are perpetually of clear conscience, always truthful and always optimistic. This path is to follow the Golden Rule. (Do as you'd be done by).

Practice and Prayer

Piled onto this simple spiritual wisdom is a load of religious embellishment and social control, but such philosophy and regulations are only temporarily helpful for the seeker; in the end we must go our own way. Spiritual practices such as breathing, mantra, dance, visualisation and prayer most certainly help - and by prayer I mean but one thing only, we just say to life " Wow, thanks!"