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Yikes! more on typing…

Posted January 12th, 2012 by Charles Bowling in notes from a sign reader

Hi All,
 
Looking At and Looking As, can be seen as yet another form of typing. The Ancient Craft, as I like to call it, has an analogous two-sided coin of perspective. It's called the rising sign or ascendant. It’s often thought of as a sort of lens through which we see the world and the world sees us -sometimes it shows up in our physical appearance, choice of colors, etc.
 
If you're interested in a rough rule of thumb to approximate your rising sign here's a simple rule. If you are born at dawn, your rising sign will be the same as your Sun sign. (Note that this is a powerful position; it’s sort of like doubling down.) Now because there are 12 signs in this system and because there are 24 hours in the day, each sign gets more or less two hours to rise over the eastern horizon. This means if a birth takes place roughly 2 hours after dawn the rising sign will be the next one in the sequence of Sun signs, etc.
 
Note of caution here, this is only a rule of thumb, some signs rise faster than others, and obviously some slower. Best option is to get not just the hour of birth but the minute as well and have the proper calculation made.
 
Knowing one's rising sign may seem like a small matter; but consider that opposing the ascendant is the descendent, a setting sign if you will. It may well affect the type of one-to-one partner to which you are attracted.
 
So is there a serious side as well as a fun side to all of this, yeah I think so…
 
And finally the better we understand the various bits of typing that affect us, the more we are enabled to grow into our potentials. Think of a digital image, the quality of which grows through the addition of more and more pixels.
 
-Charles

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our holding of the ancient science

Posted January 13th, 2012 by Layman Pascal

Hi Charles,

It's tough to dig my teeth into the astrology.  Probably lots of people feel this way.  We don't doubt its potential effectiveness but we emotionally hold it "as if" we doubted its efficacy.  Maybe it's useful for me to unpack this feeling and see where it leads. 

First of all I was a huge astrology fan as a child.  My theosophical grandmother left me her books on meditation, occultism, hermeticism, etc. So I was precociously versed in these topics and horoscopics were among the most energetic parts of that.  So now I unfairly look upon astrology as a childish phase of my own.  This reminds of when I first became interested in trying LSD and everyone I knew who "used drugs" dismissed it as something pre-adolescent which they felt that had grown out of... obviously their use of it has been notably superficial.  As was my childhood astrology.

Secondly, on many occasions in my past, I have had to make an inner effort to deal with people who were insistent upon their horoscopes.  Obviously the were "newspaper sign sun" people who used it as little more than a faux-psychology, trivial social conversation topic or narcissistic form of indulgent self-categorization.  So the traces of these ordeals linger with me despite my many deliberate efforts to find ways of validating their interests and emotional enthusiasms.

Thirdly, I have been exposed to many sensible persons demonstrating the psychological self-deceptive involving in self-typing through symbolism & just as many sensibly open people who re-validate astrology as an "art".  This, of course, makes it sound like a placebo... effective but dubious.  Now it is well known, I think, that this all deals with the same cynical newspaper sun signs realm.  Even in Tarnas' book COSMOS & PSYCHE where he validates planetary influences, transits, etc. he comes down hard on the basic form which almost everyone in this culture treats as the sum total of astrology.

Fourthly I have learned to balanced my deep sympathy for ancient sciences & ancient sages with an equally deep skepticism of the intelligence, worldview and clarity of the ancient systems.  In theory this should leave me happily open to both sides (which it often does) but in practice it can also lead to a kind of ambivalence about archaic-sounding approaches. 

No doubt you have often faced these very issues and made peace (and occasionally war) with them.  I'm not presenting them as my own limitations and doubts to be addressed but there may be some kind of utility -- in the context of the integral online community -- for people to talk about the different ways that they resist and/or accept distinct styles of pragmatic psycho-cosmic mappings.

But of course I would say that... I was born March 16, 1976.


Thanks, I've been...

Layman Pascal

 

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