People are akin to ants in a massive colony.

Planets have no interest in the personal affairs of human beings, any more than you are fretting right now about a particular aphid on a rosebush in your backyard.

Astrology — when distanced from its function as a psycho-spiritual practice — becomes, then, the art of tracking cycles that impact hives. Human hives. Be it the outer planets marking glacial permutations or ‘personal’ planets allowing for hive events to register, to possibly find their way into the consciousness of those so attuned.

An example of what I’m talking about:

Here’s a news story from today, The World Economy Seems Trapped in ‘Death Spiral’ that’s a great example of the current Venus Pluto conjunction — which is presently abuzz amidst the chattering astrosphere of social media — bringing into focus the glacial qualities associated with the slower moving transits of Saturn and Neptune, and the even slower waning square between Uranus Pluto.

A ‘world economy’ in a death spiral would impact sundry hives and then, via trickle down, one might experience how, say, unemployment or starving to death would influence his or her relational (Venusian) life with other humans.

Love, which has been assigned in astrology’s lexicon to the planet Venus, is radically different from the hive’s relationship to love as some kind of melodrama lifted from a Harlequin romance novel. Love, as related to the planet Venus is, for lack of better words, conscious love; love as a function from within the cosmic dimension. Gurdjieff‘s student A.R. Orage describes conscious love, as experienced by human beings like this:

“The conscious love motive, in its developed state, is the wish that the object should arrive at its own native perfection, regardless of the consequences to the lover. ‘So she become perfectly herself, what matter I?’ says the conscious lover. ‘I will go to hell if only she may goto heaven’. And the paradox of the attitude is that such love always evokes a similar attitude in its object. Conscious love begets conscious love.”

Hive ‘love’ — love based on the instincts or emotionality — only understands love from childish notions of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ or ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ — preferences colored by what Freud deemed the overlay of Family Romance, i.e., the fact that men and women do generally marry their mothers and fathers — an oddly creepy, but not surprising condition, that’s part and parcel the mechanisms within a smaller hive structure — one’s family system and gene pool.

Here’s another way of putting it:

Once accustomed to the coping mechanisms that allowed you to survive your mother and father you will then find safe harbor, seemingly, with someone else that allows for the same sort of behavior that allowed you to survive your neurotic parents. This is living predicated by the instincts — in this example, the survival and social drives.

As Gurdjieff mentioned, astrology is applicable through the study of types for those aligned with essence. We have a hint about types when we consider the twelve types of the solar Zodiac and also the twenty-eight lunar types associated with the lunar cycle’s ‘mansions’.

Gurdjieff noted that before psychology can be applied to a human being there must first be a complete understanding of the laws governing mechanics.

As he explained to his primary student P.D. Ouspensky:

• The Truth About Mercury Retrograde
• Planetary Ennui: The Nostalgia for Samsara
• How To Make Facebook Your Slave and Preserve Your Creative Drive
• The Power, Beauty, and Wonder of the Horoscope’s 12th House
• Imbeciles at the Gate: How The Internet Destroys Astrology
• How To Escape From the Torture of Self-Help Hell
• Depression and the Solar Consciousness
• Secrets of the Heart: Love is an Action Not A Feeling
• Create Your Own Archetype & Call It You: An Escape from Evolutionary Astrology
• Redefining the Oxymoron of Sex and Marriage
• Death is the New Black
• How To Write About Astrology (Especially How Not To)
• Astrology, Ants, Hives, Essence, and Types: A Gurdjieffian View
• Final Notes About the Life-and-Culture-Changing Uranus-Pluto Square

Every year at the end of the year I try to pull together a mix that celebrates the music tracks that I revisited throughout the year. Without time to do a proper mix this December and with February breathing down my neck as I type, I resorted to a Spotify playlist — just to keep some semblance of my aim.

Enjoy!

Frederick

Question: In what sense was it said in an earlier lecture that the earth is alive?

Answer: It is not only we who are alive. If a part is alive, then the whole is alive. The whole universe is like a chain, and the earth is one link in this chain. Where there is movement, there is life.

If we now look at the relation of the earth to the universe, we shall see that on the one hand the earth’s satellite is included in the sphere of its influence, while on the other the earth enters as a component part into the planetary world of our solar system.

The earth is one of the small planets turning around the sun. The mass of the earth forms an almost negligible fraction compared with the whole mass of planets of the solar system, and the planets exert a very great influence on the life of the earth and on all existing and living organisms — a far greater influence than our science imagines.

The life of individual men, of collective groups, of humanity, depends upon planetary influences in very many things.

The planets also live, as we live upon the earth.

But the planetary world in its turn enters into the solar system and enters as a very unimportant part because the mass of all the planets put together is many times less than the mass of the sun.

The world of the sun is also a world in which we live.

The sun in turn enters into the world of stars, in the enormous accumulation of suns forming the Milky Way.

The starry world is also a world in which we live. Taken as a whole, even according to the definition of modern astronomers, the starry world seems to represent a separate entity having a definite form, surrounded by space beyond the limits of which scientific investigation cannot penetrate.

But astronomy supposes that at immeasurable distances from our starry world other accumulations may exist. If we accept this supposition, we shall say that our starry world enters as a component part into the total quantity of these worlds.

This accumulation of worlds of the “All Worlds” is also a world in which we live.

Science cannot look further, but philosophical thought will see the ultimate principle lying beyond all the worlds, that is, the Absolute, known in Hindu terminology as Brahman.
 

From Views for the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff In this book Mr. Gurdjieff discusses the obstacles and deceptions faced by anyone in search of inner truth and spiritual guidance.
 

“This limitless cosmos is full of Presences, full of Persons — full of angels.

We have to discard all our trivialized and anthropocentric conceptions of the nature of such beings. They are personified metaphysical presences, the movers of the worlds, and they provide the connection between ourselves and divinity.

There is no question of anthropomorphism. The personality of these beings is not derived from ours; ours is only a dim reflection of theirs.

The hermeneutic ability of the creative Imagination to transmute all things into symbols destroys the distinction between psychology and cosmology and unites them in a psycho-cosmology in which Creator and creature participate not as opposing terms with an unbridgeable gulf separating them, but as complementary poles of a divine drama.”

–Tom Cheetham from The World Turned Inside Out

The divine drama, it’s worth all of the effort — heart and soul — we commit to translating its dance. I’ll help you connect the dots! Join me on the following social media — whichever suits your particular style, temperament and art.

 
Illustration by Ilonka Karasz from William Maxwell’s The Heavenly Tenants (Harpers) 1946

Man is a plural being.

When we speak of ourselves ordinarily, we speak of ‘I.’ We say, ” ‘I’ did this,” ” ‘I’ think this,” ” ‘I’ want to do this”—but this is a mistake. There is no such ‘I,’ or rather there are hundreds, thousands of little ‘I’s in every one of us. We are divided in ourselves but we cannot recognize the plurality of our being except by observation and study.

At one moment it is one ‘I’ that acts, at the next moment it is another ‘I.’ It is because the ‘I’s in ourselves are contradictory that we do not function harmoniously. We live ordinarily with only a very minute part of our functions and our strength, because we do not recognize that we are machines, and we do not know the nature and working of our mechanism.

We are machines. We are governed entirely by external circumstances. All our actions follow the line of least resistance to the pressure of outside circumstances.

Try for yourselves: can you govern your emotions? No. Read more

I created this mix several years ago — a collection of hymns, chants, Medieval carols and songs — a music compendium to mirror and celebrate this sacred moment in the Earth’s time cycle.

The Solstice, the night of the longest night, also marks the return of luminosity, as Winter begins in the Northern Hemisphere and radiance gains prominence.

Light has always symbolized awareness and consciousness, as well as life-giving, creative properties. And in a real way we are each bodies of light, with the Sun Absolute as both our source and sustainment. And that bond is not simply symbolic, it is literal.

For many astrologers, the Winter Solstice is a demarcation that defines the start of the New Year. How we experience the longest night provides an essential hint as to the theme or signature of the year ahead. Both universally and personally. It’s my wish that this mix of music can tune you into a vector that’s off the beaten path, especially for this time of year.

Solstice Blessings to each of you!