Astrophobia: fear of the impersonal nature of the personality
DO YOU BELIEVE IN ASTROLOGY? Be careful how you answer – it’s a trick question – the sound of a disoriented, phobic mind trying to get you into its ordered, dualistic paradigm. My answer? “As much as I believe in Hunter.” Why must The Mystery be so ruthlessly and mechanically nailed? Because the ego feels so desperately ephemeral.
Face it: there is no such thing as an “outer” mind. There is only “the” mind. The breeds of anxiety and anticipation that float around in our two-eared fish tanks are anything but exotic. Why do we spend so little time studying and befriending this outrageously interpenetrating, archetype-intoxicated psyche? Here are three possibilities. Choose your option:
1) Because it might reveal just how unnatural and downright tiring it is to keep our “gray matter island” state fixed for a lifetime?
2) Because it might make all the astronomical masks theatrically gorgeous but interchangeably unreal, and thereby blur the line between the definitely nice and unpleasant reference points (aka “personas”) we so sadly depend on for our lives? sail our sad ship across this sad sea?
3) Why is a detached and bullying mind preferable to a provisional one, an expert in dreams?
Do you believe in astrology? I hope not. A conceptually believed or disbelieved (vs. directly experienced) Leo archetype is nothing short of a cult. Smearing our eyes with belief or disbelief in something is no different than stumbling under the influence of a world-numbing hallucinogen.
From the ego’s point of view, astrology is a nuisance because it depersonalizes the personality. The personality traits we used to call “bear” turn out to be on loan to billions. All the sinister, boring and supremely emulable bodies/minds in the world are squeezed together, like kitchen towels, in a humble puddle of beingness. Our best crack at the “specialty”? Being uncommonly and heartbreakingly aware of the divine presence that is badly spoken of and devoutly ignored.
The passing mood of emptiness
The most hateful thing about astrology is not that it dares to associate planetary positions with personality colors, but how it insults our self-made notions of who we are. Whether the way we appear in the world is a function of the passing mood of the Void (as indicated by the constellation mudras), we are descendants of gods derived from a universe-sized psyche, or we are space junk with a flattering self sentiment. concept. Either way, we’re screwed. Option one means our hard-hearted robotic habits will likely follow us from lifetime to lifetime, so we’d better get to work now. Option two means that the kindest gesture and most mystical union we’ve ever known is probably just the Apocalypse of good humor.
Over there. Now you know why the serious study of astrology is so intimidating, and why we’ll never stop flipping through those Sun Sign columns we don’t believe in.