Joseph on astrology and our lives

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

Open for business (8:10 a.m.) for anyone who would care to chat. Joseph? Either Joseph?

If you will list your acquaintances –

Okay.

Joseph the Egyptian

Clio, the diviner in fire

Bertram

John Cotten

Evangeline

Joseph Smallwood

David Owen Poynter

Katrina

Frank 

Much less known-

Sanji-san the Japanese monk

Yellow Hair the Indian

Robert McLean? in Skye

I have a feeling that I’m forgetting several. Anyway that should do to be getting on –

An even dozen counting yourself. Only two females so far, only one woman. An ancient Egyptian, an old Roman, a medieval Japanese, an Indian, two English, a Scot, three other Americans.

David might not agree to being counted among the Englishmen.

No. But the point is clear, if not new – familiar first, either in time and space, or in time or space, or in personal characteristics.

Yes, established. No more to say about it? Oh, maybe that’s by nature of – choose one? Well, Joseph, are you available and interested in talking?

Sure I am. It has been a few days now and so you are in a different place literally, though it don’t look it from your side, and so we can talk about different things easier than we could from where we were.

Meaning that at different times the conditions favor certain kinds of information exchanges and at other times they don’t?

Have you ever studied astrology? That’s said with a smile, you know – I know you did. Well, did you ever think at all why different times should be different? It ain’t because the planets are in different places or in different relation to each other – that is just the sign aspect of it. You know, like the Bible said God put the planets and stars in the skies to be a sign. Well what do you suppose that means, if it don’t mean that their positions and all as seen from earth shows something? Hints at it, more than shows it, because language ain’t involved and couldn’t hold it anyway, but it does all point you, if you’d follow where it’s pointing.

You could do this thought experiment, as you like to call it. Imagine all of space around the earth – as much space as the earth has passed through in the past hundred years, and the space it will pass through in the next hundred. That’s a lot of space. Now, you know the old earth is spiraling through, being dragged along by the sun, and it never goes through the same spot in space twice any more than you visit the same date in time twice – and for the same reason. But it goes back to the same relationship to the sun once a year, just like your calendar indicates. So you see there’s a sort of spiral being traced out in space. If you look at space as being unmoving but the solar system moving across it in one direction, you got the earth spiraling around the sun but never hitting the same spot in space twice, because the sun is pulling it. And of course you could think through the same for the sun, if you want, but that is just needless complication.

What you have got is two forces, or two factors like you say – one is the underlying nature of the space you are actually traveling in at any moment, and the other is the relationship between sun and planets and moons and all.

The second – the relationships between moving bodies – ain’t all that hard to figure out, given observation and mathematics, and it has been figured and laid out in tables for a good long time. Longer than any civilization you know yet. But the other – the place in space and the quality specific to that space, is another thing.

You know about the Age of Aquarius and the precession of the equinoxes and all. One way of looking at all that is, it is just an arbitrary set of rules designed to act as signs. It marks the big spiral in a way you can get in your minds. The constellations and the myths are all tied in together just in ways to help people get emotionally – or maybe I mean symbolically – what they can’t get in straight words because of the limitations of language.

Now that is all I’m going to say about astrology, probably. I didn’t study it even as much as you did — everybody “knew” it was just discredited superstition, in my day. But I know it will mean more to you, what I’ve just said, than it would have to me. In fact I don’t know that I would have listened to any of it. In my day we thought that one bit of space was the same as the next bit – and that’s a funny bit of blindness on our part, when you come to think of it, because nobody could think that mid-city Philadelphia, say, was the same as those endless plains of grass and sky between here and Oregon. We knew we felt different in different places. Of course, we just wrote it off as the effect of scenery.

All right. So all of that is just to put your mind looking in a certain direction when I tell you that at different times different kinds of information can be passed through easier than the same information at other times or different information at the same time. As Dion Fortune would say in those novels, “here is the key to many things.”

For some reason I’m tired.

When you tire, do other things, and all will go well. Be careful of diet and exercise, or you will have to fight against your body’s troubles, instead of having your body support you.