I thought I'd share something that came from a talk I gave not long ago when I was asked just what astrology is. While I could not possibly explore the full implications of that question, this is a part of what I had to say. I'll post the text as well, but for those of you who want to hear what I said, here it is.

Levels and Dimensions in the Quest for Understanding

Astrology is the art and science of the cycles of life. They begin at our first breath, and continue until our last. We have many cycles that affect us, some short, some long. Some cycles last so long that we never experience the whole of them unless we become fully realized Beings, as in the case of Neptune and Pluto, outermost two of the three invisible “Spiritual” planets. We would have to live for 250 years to experience a complete cycle of Pluto in our chart. However, there are other cycles that we all experience many times in our lives, and through these we come to know key themes and lessons related to why something happens when it does and how that impacts the way we are shaping our “destiny.”

We are the ones in command of our responses to life’s challenges. This is our true “response-ability.” If we know what is happening and why at any moment in time and experience, we have the ability to adjust our responses consciously within the many cycles that work across the personal, interpersonal, and the transpersonal dimensions. This helps us fulfill old karmic patterns while offering opportunities for us to transmute our energy in positive ways, generating detachment, dispassion, discrimination, and bodhichitta, or goodwill.

In the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal dimensions we have many cycles going on simultaneously on four levels, those being the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, or archetypal realms. Thus we have personal physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual cycles going along with interpersonal physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual cycles going, as well as transpersonal physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual cycles of activity, with all 12 “bandwidths” functioning simultaneously. We can also call the transpersonal realm the realm of truth, of archetypes, the quest for the higher or greater self, or the realm of higher service we do for our world. So you can see that our life lessons and transformational experiences work out through different cycles operating on each of these 12 bandwidths, or frequency zones, throughout our lives.

Most people think that astrology concerns only such things as “I was born at such and such a time, and that gives me the times to get married, buy a house, get divorced” and so forth. It is mostly regarded as a predictive tool. While that is true, it is also true that there are much larger cycles of change going on that affect all of us regardless of whether our Sun is in Taurus or we have a Sagittarius Rising a Moon in Gemini, Jupiter in the fifth house or Saturn in the ninth. This is the Transpersonal level of existence, the cycles of things beyond our immediate control or creation that sweep across large populations of people, regardless of their individual cycles of activity.

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