Dear Joseph,
Thank you for your for sharing your thoughts with us; i find your question to be truly in the spirit of your Saggitarian Moon... i'll add it takes one to recognize one, and i've been on the same quest since i was initiated on this mysterious and fascinating path called astrology.
The dance between free will and determinism is THE question, right?
My grandmother, my first astrology teacher, who's life was devoted to meditation and yoga, told me , at the very begining of my encounter with the stars: 'las estrellas disponen pero no obligan'. The translation in english would be something like, 'stars dispose but do not force'; which i understood as the stars are disposed in a way that is like a map, but your are not forced to follow it; or in another way, the chart offer you many ways of approching the stars dispositions, but you are the one making the final decision of which way to take.
While she said this to me, she made a gesture; it was a mixture of looking at the sky and putting her hands together in front of her chest, as a reverence. She told me years later that there was the chart and the stars, yes, but above all, was God. So, in her world as an astrologer the devotion to a higher intelligence, or dimension, was more powerful that the position of the stars.
You call it love, and i agree.
Years later, i was studying with a vedic astrologer; we were discussing the different levels of karma in the vedic chart. I was fascinated by terms like neutral karma, and positive and negative karma being measured by percentages, and levels of evitability and inevitability. The idea was that you might have a 60% of inevitable negative wealth karma in your chart, meaning that you had a 40% of hard work to balance it. Although i got the idea pretty clear, and it made sense, i felt very uncomfortable with the categoric statments of evitability and inevitability. Fate or karma, for that matter, felt like a non breathing space, and (as a Moon in Sagg girl that i am) very antagonistic with freedom and a sense of positive fair play that i feel is an inherent part of life.
My teacher's answer was: 'with the constant practice of meditation and devotion you can transcend the determinism of the planets'. He added, when you meditate and you truly want to change your karma, that is from the heart, all your planets energies start to shift and move. And he made a gesture with his hands as if all the planets were revolving around, looking for a new position to operate from... at least that was what i felt. I thought this concept went well with my grandmother's ideas.
Love is the answer, but it's not nearly as easy as it sounds. World peace will only come when we love our neighbor as ourselves, but therein lies the problem. We fail to love ourselves with every negative thought we hold, everything unhealthy thing we ingest, everything act we perform that isn't aligned with our true loving nature. To contemplate changing the world is overwhelming, but I can change myself, one bad habit and one day at a time. Each day that I succeed in making a positive change, I feel lighter and happier.
Me too.
When i read this i am reminded of the polarities within the chart. Instead of looking at the houses and signs as twelve separated units, why not approach them as six units with two expressive dimensions interconnected? What you say just above, rings a bell in the Leo Aquarius and Virgo Piscis energies: on one level, my heart is part of the collective path to unconditional love, so taking care of my heart is taking care of everybodies heart, that would be Leo working with Aquarius; and, my individual thoughts are the builders of the humanities spiritual reality, tapping into an aspect of the Virgo Piscis dinamics. So, using the chart as a tool to see how my individual consciousness participates in the overall well being of the world is one way of shifting the chart's direction. Ghandi did it, right?
The moment you step out of the polarity, and think in terms of union, you are connecting with the higher dimension of your chart; this allows you to approach life in terms of service: whatever i go through on a personal level, is part of the collective process. This allow us to get off the egoic mode, which sees us sepparated, isolated, vulnerable and disconnected; instead, it connects us to something higher than ourselves.
So, the chart can be a map of an egoic approach to life, based on self gratification, material possessions, attachments, emotional struggles, etc, and it can also be a map on how we approach and deal with these instances. So you are the actor and the observer at the same time. At some point, one can tap into the soul level of the chart, the part that transmutes this energy into service and feel the karmic shift. Usually outer planets transits will push this process into one's chart.
Usually the fear and pain we carry with us is just a memory process that comes throught our geneaological tree; we inherit patterns that once made conscious in our mind free us from a weight that does not belong to us. Freeing this past karma, to put a name to it, allows us to work with new energies within the chart: it is the wheel that transforms the karma into dharma (Lunnar Nodes).
The weight of the ancestral moira is, in my opinion, what we can called determinism. If you do not move the wheel, and live your inherited script, there is little space to evolve, and it is very probable that free will, will feel elusive. But, if you do the work on bringing awarness to the past, you can choose who to be in relationship with your story; you have a perspective that gives you a space for will to act.
Free will is about having choices, and using them. Most of the time we don't know we can choose, right?
My two cents.
Again thank you for this fascinating subject. It is the core of the matter!
Yours,
Paloma
