Last Quarter Moon today, in Pisces…will quickly enter Aries. Meanwhile Mars continues to oppose Uranus.
A meditation today on fate and free will in astrology…
I get this question a lot from clients and students, as well as people who read my horoscopes, “Does the birth chart tell me what will happen to me?”
It’s an important question to consider and respond to, over and over again, as astrologers.
I believe we should sometimes create temporary bans on popular ideas. I don’t mean to be cynical or bitter. It’s no different for me than simply turning the radio off when Katy Perry gets played for the billionth time. Ideas are just as popular and trendy as billboard toppers. We don’t realize it because we think that art and ideas are very different from each other when they’re not. They are both expressions of the imagination…both a part of how we create and express soulfulness.
Chart Topping Ideas Surrounding Fate and Free Will:
1. The universe is conspiring through each act to create the best possible future for me, for everyone. It’s ALL good. (Made popular by the Universe in your inbox but written originally by the band Polly Positive).
2. It’s all as it should be, everything is always happening exactly as it needs to happen even when it sucks: aww shucks. (A new age version of the Leave it to Beaver TV show).
3. Create your own reality. Manifest your own destiny. (Made infamous by Hitler, and turned into a pyramid scheme by quantum mechanics).
4. The Universe gives you opportunities, but it’s up to you to act on them. (Written by anonymous and sung by Eager Eddie and the Jets).
5. It’s a balance between fate and free will (the answer that won the million dollar question on who wants to be a millionaire–a lifeline call to a yoga instructor–even Regis was impressed and is now doing yoga!).
The point being….we don’t make fun of our spiritual ideas enough. We don’t know how to turn the radio off when our truth claim gets played for the one too many-th time.
The Greek word for fate, “Moira,” meant something like a “part or portion.” The word also has an etymological relationship to the word “contemplate.”
Say you’re about to finish law school, and right as you’re about to finish law school you realize you love fishing. More than anything. It all dawns on you suddenly after a fishing trip you take on spring break…celebrating your upcoming graduation from law school. This unexpected breeze has come up and knocked something off your “I’ve got it all figured out” shelf. So what do you do next? What do you make of it? That’s the question you’ll be asking yourself, “What do I make of this odd turn of events?”
To the Greeks this was fate..a god…only a “part” of life…the one that forces us to stop and contemplate something happening out of the blue…and then, by the very nature of the event, make something out of it. Maybe we go forward with our law career, dismiss the fishing trip, and then for the rest of our lives we regret the decision and look forward to retirement like its the horizon over an ocean…waiting for us with a line and a bait box and a purple sunset. On the other hand maybe we take a risk…give up the legal career and purchase a small sail boat. Maybe it never works out, even though we DID take the risk!
The other god the Greeks talked about was necessity. Necessity accompanies fate. So we get this strange feeling…like we “must” make a decision..should we keep going with the law career or should we take the risk of the sail boat fishing life? Necessity insures that we don’t have a clear sense of which path is right or wrong, or what will happen…only that we MUST choose and that no matter which way we choose necessity will help us to see how it “had to be so” later down the line. So that regardless of whether we’re in a boat in old age retirement, looking back on how we denied ourselves for so long, or whether we’re in the sailboat looking back on how we let go of the legal career, pleased we took the risk, necessity is the feeling that it could have gone any which way, any number of OTHER ways, and yet there is the sense that it “had to be so.”
Necessity and fate together throw us curve balls like these, and they demand our participation. They negate the idea of there being only one destiny or one right choice, and yet they give us the paradoxical feeling that “it must have been so.”
We lose all this subtly, this real time relating and negotiating with the gods of fate and necessity, when we mistake this intricate paradox for some kind of benevolent universal conspiracy. In fact we lose the dynamic relationship with these goddesses of fate when we flap trap too much and too often about how “everything is meant to be” or how “we’re creating our own reality.” Often enough people who completely sell out on these ideas end up hating them and turning to equally extreme but opposing ideas like “there is no purpose whatsoever.”
If we could only stop from time to time and recognize that ultimate answers about fate and free will, ultimate philosophies about conspiring universals or creative sovereignty, are often neurotic defenses of a paranoid ego who can’t perceive anything beyond the literalness of the “problems” its answers are being designed to address.
Looking at this right now is especially relevant as Mars is opposing Uranus and the subjects of freedom, change, necessity, and fate are potentially very alive in the collective.
Prayer: Thank you fate and necessity for pulling us into radical uncertainty while simultaneously insuring us against the fraudulent claims of ultimate purpose OR purposelessness.
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Image courtesy of Capes Treasures, at Creative Commons Licensing.