32. Three defining factors

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

3:35 a.m. Yesterday’s session started quite a few hares running. I am still pondering the meaning of “psychic interpretational structures.” But you said we should begin today with the three factors I mentioned as limiting our view of the world as we come in. that is, the factors that provide the initial filters through which we see the world. What came to mind was our heredity of strands, the astrological conditions prevailing when we were born, and the beliefs accepted by whatever society we are born into. Thinking it over, these still seem valid.

As we said, a good place to begin.

• Your inheritance via strands. This is merely a special case of your over-all heredity. Physically you inherit your body, and that presents limits and opportunities. Mentally, emotionally, the same, for it is all one package. But then add to this physical heredity – which Yeats called your inheritance of race – the other inheritance, which he called your inheritance of soul: your “spiritual” limits and potentials. These come from the strands that make you. You might accurately say, you inherit ideas, attitudes, values, vulnerabilities. None of it is destined, in the sense of being rigidly and permanently fixed. But, like your physical heredity, it is a set of limits and possibilities that shape you.
• The astrological conditions. This would have been much better understood by the educated of many centuries ago, when it had not been relegated to the ranks of superstition. Because its nature and functioning are not widely understood today, the “scientific art” will need to be studied in order to see why a natal position will play out seemingly arbitrarily, to those who are not aware of the ground-rules. Year by year, a person’s life is a sort of moving interference pattern. That is, the birth-time (and place) conditions “set.” They fix. The rest of the person’s life is an interaction between that set pattern and the continually changing patterns it encounters day by day. If you were born on January 12, 1876, say, your pattern set, hardened, to the conditions prevailing at that moment; then that pattern encountered the conditions –the cosmic weather, so to speak –every moment thereafter. Obviously, every moment will produce a different interference pattern. We could go into this at some length, and perhaps at some time we may. The point here is twofold: 1) Life presents as an unending series of changes along regular determinable patterns, and 2) Everyone’s interaction with those patterns is structured by their time of entry.
• Societal constraints. Clearly, a person born at a given time into the United States will meet different conditions than a person born at the exact same moment into China, or Peru. Your family, your clan, your fellow citizens, all have unconscious and conscious beliefs that they inculcate into new arrivals. We don’t mean deliberate indoctrination: Is it indoctrination to believe and teach that things do (or that they don’t) “just happen,” or that life can be explained best, perhaps only, by the given accepted belief structures, or that God rules the world, or that chance does, or that the world is a set of impersonal laws, a great clockwork?

Any and all of these three types of constraint may be overcome by the individual in the course of life, but everyone, always, begins with limits that are unconsciously experienced, unconsciously accepted. There is no way to shape anything but to limit it. There is no way to accept form, but to accept limits. There is no way to act, to experience, without accepting form, which means accepting limits. Your destiny is what you are born into. Your freedom is what you can do within those limits or can do beyond them.

Some thought will connect this sketch with hallowed beliefs held by people over the ages. Karma, for instance. Can you see that karma could be seen as the new individual accepting the limits inherent in the strands’ emotional patterns?

I think you mean, at the end of a life, we are a certain way, as a result of our life’s decisions, and that pattern becomes part of the life we join as a strand. And of course this would hold for every strand, so the karma of the new individual would be a combination of past karmas.

Or, “unfinished business,” as we once said, but not quite as simple as “One unit becomes another unit, bringing its baggage with it.”

Another example would be, “The stars impel; they do not compel,” a recognition that we are born into patterns, but what we do within those limits is up to us. Astrology without free will would be the ultimate in wasted motion, for what is the good of determining the cosmic weather if there is nothing you can do with the knowledge?

Viktor Frankl said you can at least determine to have one attitude or another toward whatever comes at you.

And that was very insightful of him, for that is your true freedom – hence, your true responsibility. This is how you shape the karma that you will pass along.

And you can see, with a little thought, that societal beliefs create a good deal of variability. Someone born into the Jewish slums of New York City in the 1890s will experience a very different set of expectations and conditions than one born into Beacon Hill in Boston, or Nob Hill in San Francisco, or into the well-to-do or middle class, or the poor of other ethnic extractions in the same city. All these locations will imprint different ideas of the world, just as every moment will imprint different possibilities, gift, disabilities, and just as every strand will contribute psychological patterns.

The point of this analysis of conditions is to provide an understanding of the possibilities provided b the nature of the strands that combine, and the time they initially manifest into as a baby, and the place (physical and mental) they manifest into. As with astrology, if you couldn’t then do something with the knowledge, what use would it be?

Ponder this, because this is a good place to pause,. Think about it, get a firm sense of these three factors as determinants of the unconscious filters you begin with. Then we will resume probably with a look at the filters as they function, all of this aimed at providing you an understanding of what we mean by psychic interpretational structures.

Our thanks as always, for all of this.