Monday, February 28, 2022
3:10 a.m. Should we take the day off? I didn’t intend to do so, but as I sit here, I wonder.
Set your switches and let’s see how it goes. We can always abort.
True. All right, setting them. F,R,C,P. Go ahead, if you know how you wish to proceed.
So at the time of the revolution, America as a political entity did not yet exist. “America” was a geographical expression, and a state of mind, and a common experience – in fact many different common experiences, not all cognizant of one another – but not yet, nor for some time, a political unit nor even, quite, a political federation. A country’s soul does not depend upon its political or economic or social development. It precedes them; helps shape them.
I meant to ask – but it is a cumbersome question, requiring some explanation if readers are to be able to follow it – how is a country’s birthtime calculated? For astrological reasons, you know.
Yes, it is a complicated question, though the answer is a little simpler than the question. The answer is, depending upon where you begin, what you see will be a different aspect or set of aspects. But, set out the background for the question.
There is a branch of astrology known as horary astrology that seeks to determine, from the quality of the moment in which a question is asked, what the answer is to the question. Senseless, according to assumptions that the world is an unconnected chaos, but merely common sense if you assume that every moment of time and everything in it, and every moment relative to every other moment, is all connected.
Similarly, genethliacal astrology seeks to illuminate a person’s nature by looking at his or her birthdate, time, and place, and of course this goes for anything that may be said to have an onset. You couldn’t do a chart for a river, I suppose, or anything that flows without a known beginning, but anything that has a start can have its chart drawn up: a business, a government, a voyage, anything. The practical difficulty is to find the correct date, time, and place, for these are often either unknown or are debatable. Is the birthdate of the United States the time of the Declaration of Independence? The ratification of the Constitution? The inauguration of the first president? The convening of the first Congress? Should we cast back to the landing in Virginia in 1607? In Massachusetts in 1620?
But I see that your answer clears up the difficulty admirably. What you see depends upon where you look from – as in most things. I don’t know that I have ever seen an astrology text that makes that point. It’s even true that different societies calculate a human onset differently. Some begin at birth, which is an obvious, time-able event, but some begin at conception, which is somewhat more speculative, or let’s say debatable. Since either system works, I’d say your variable approach is validated in practice as well as sensible as a theory. (I do wonder if anyone ever compared someone’s horoscopes based on birth and on conception. But that’s a side issue at the moment.) Is this what you wanted?
Let’s use this thought as a springboard. You can see that various peoples – to confine it, for the moment, to a question of race or ethnicity or even of community composition – are going to have different destinies within the overall experience. Just as each 3D individual has his or her own birthdate, hence a separate destiny within that of the communities he or she lives in, so for any layer of abstraction that has a soul. A city, for instance, founded at a certain time, is going to have its own definite destiny within the larger destiny of the state or country; within it, municipal enterprises, and people, will have their destinies affected by the city’s. That is one reason why you can change your life by changing your place of residence; you are thereby changing the influence of the larger souls within which you live.
So, no one in his right mind would argue that white, black, red, brown, yellow America – to say nothing of admixtures of the races – have had identical experiences of America. They are all equally part of America; they all contribute to the whole; they are all affected by the whole. But that’s a far cry from pretending that the experience of any is identical or even similar to the experience of any other, let alone all the others. And naturally this is true of any other way you can conceptually examine Americans experiencing America. Class, national orign, gender, etc.: Any way you slice it, you’re going to find the same thing: Different segments have a different experience.
And simplistic analysis looks at any one factor as if it were the only one that counts, which can never be, in real life.
No, of course not. Once you get through analyzing someone’s life experience as part of 20 different segments, you see the uniqueness of that life’s experience, even though the uniqueness is made up of many layers of group experience in different groups.
And, I get it, the same holds true for group souls like America.
In general, the most misleading mistake people make is to jump between individual and overarching abstraction without remembering that a great sea of different levels of abstraction exist between them. Yes, as a white female Portuguese citizen of Maryland, of a rich educated family, Catholic, conservative, scientifically oriented, etc., etc., you are going to have the life you as an individual make of all these building-blocks – but you can also be analyzed as a member of any one, or of any combination of factors, and you will look different. It will be a simpler, more abstract, portrait, perhaps enlightening in some respects, certainly misleading in others and as a whole.
But bear in mind, the same may be said of America per se, or of any level of soul. Considered in one context, it will look one way; in another context, another way. People who can only see things one way are going to disagree, perhaps very bitterly. Those who see many sides tend to be caught between the extremes, seen as weak or stupid or even viciously wrong-headed by the extremes.
Abraham Lincoln comes to mind.
Yes, good example. Expound.
Lincoln said throughout his career that the one issue was that one side thought slavery was wrong and one saw it as right. But, he said to his fellow Illinoisians, if we were in the place of the Southerners, we would probably think as they do, and if they were in our place they probably would think as we do. In other words, he didn’t divide the political world into angels and devils, but saw perplexed individuals on every side of the issue – other than the one-idea men, who obtained a terrible power by their very inability to put themselves mentally in another man’s place.
Lincoln was not weak, but strong. He waged war unrelentingly rather than let the Union go. But he never hated. Rather like Robert E. Lee in that: Maybe that’s why we see Lee as Lincoln’s counterpart, rather than Jefferson Davis, who did hate. But this gets off the topic.
Not necessarily. Part of America’s soul is the opinion people had and have of Lincoln and Lee, for instance.
Hmm, this could easily hare off into a diatribe against political correctness [i.e. re-writing the past], which I regard as censorship and self-censorship and play-pretend. I doubt you want to go there, though.
That wouldn’t be a dead end, or even a detour. It’s all part of the examination of how you, here, now, interact with the soul we are calling America. Only, remember that this is not the only soul you are interacting with. You, Frank, exist within (so to speak) Virginia and Charlottesville; also within Italian-Americans and history majors; also within left-handers and would-be artists; also within lovers of cats. You understand; you are all at one and the same time members of many abstractions, some of which may be thought of as group souls, some as threads, some as personal extensions of the shared subjectivity, some perhaps as extensions of the vast impersonal forces for their own purposes (not quite the same thing as the shared subjectivity as we are using it here). It is no advance to see life as simpler than it is, merely because it is easier to draw a simpler picture.
I won’t even ask where we go next. Today’s theme?
“Individuals within a shared experience,” maybe.
Maybe. All right, thanks for all this, as usual. Till next time.