I was reminded rather forcefully this week how sensitive I am to astrological transits post-awakening.  More correctly, I am aware of that sensitivity now rather than being buffeted by it unconsciously like I was before.  I didn’t see it coming because I’ve largely stopped paying attention to current astrology for personal reasons, but when this happens, I am afforded opportunities to reaffirm not my belief in astrology, but in my Knowledge that it’s a real thing.  I spent the first 23 years of my life as a scientific skeptic and haven’t lost that mindset, so if I adhere to a system based in seeming mysticism, it’s for a reason.

Because of that inner skeptic, I have spent a great deal of time wondering how and why it is that astrology works.  After all, “magic is only science we don’t understand”, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke.  I also believe that humanity continues to persistently believe in particular phenomena, such as astrology, because they have validity, the nature of which just hasn’t been determined yet.

It wasn’t until I began studying the works of Dr. Carl Jung in conjunction with my spiritual awakening that I began to formulate a logical working theory on the mechanics of astrology.  With my awakening came the realization of Universal unity, that in a very literal sense, everything in the Universe is connected on some level, either physically or energetically as a fact of the last 13.8 billion years of cause-and-effect since the Big Bang, when all energy and matter in the Universe was united in a singularity.

This unified nature of existence creates the collective unconscious, which is the repository of all psychospiritual Knowledge in the Universe.  It is a reflection of our collective psyches, and our individual psyches a reflection of it.  It is the Source of our dream imagery, and also the Source of our creativity both as individuals and as a species.  It is also the Source of Jung’s archetypes: the fundamental representations of objects and qualities that are common to all humans.  Mother.  Father.  Child.  Forest.  River.  Sky.  Love.  Hate.  Hope.  Everything.

The collective unconscious is also essentially a link to the mind of God, for lack of a better term, via the interconnected and unified nature of the Universe.  God is not outside of the Universe, they are a part of it.  We may be created on some level in God’s image, or the Universe’s, but they are also made in ours.  As the New Agers are fond of saying, we are the manifestation of the Universe trying to understand itself.  Our typical search for the Divine or for connection outside of ourselves is really the search for something special within ourselves.

When people practice or consult astrology, that Universal connectedness is what they’re tapping into.  Even just narrowing it down to our own Solar System, everything that exists within it, including ourselves, came from a giant cloud of 4.6 billion-year-old gas and stardust, itself the result of countless stellar explosions from elsewhere in the Universe.  The Sun, all of the planets, and everything upon them came from that cloud of gas and dust.  In a very real way, on an energetic basis if not a physical one, we are one with everything in the Solar System, not to mention everything we can see in the Sky.

Since the energy and matter of the Solar System are closer to us than anything else in the Universe, we have a stronger connection to them, and they to us by virtue of the symbolic meanings we have applied to them over the millennia.  We are not just a reflection of the Universe, it is a reflection of us.  We change as it does, and it changes as we do.

As such, humanity has made the planets themselves a part of our collective unconscious by applying so many stories to them over time.  These stories have been applied as the result of countless millennia of human observation of not only the skies, but our own internal psychological processes.  In the course of both of these sets of observations, we noticed correlating patterns between the passage of the planets across the sky and our own psychology on both an individual and a collective level.  I can only surmise that it is the interconnected nature of existence that has caused the same patterns to exist within us that exist outside of us.  As has been said for centuries, “as above, so below”.

It is not so much that the planets “affect” us, but have become as hands on a great celestial clock that can be read to indicate the psychospiritual “time” of an individual or event.  An astrology chart is a celestial snapshot of the energy patterns in place at the time of any given event, energy patterns that have a great effect upon us whether we realize it or not.  The inner planets are the faster-moving hands on this clock, while the outer planets are the slower-moving hands. The faster, inner planets symbolize the energies that affect us on a more individual level, while the slower, outer planets symbolize the energies that affect us on a more collective level.  They interplay with one another, the individual energies affecting the collective energies and vice versa.

So when someone (like me) says that a Mars transit is giving them trouble with internal anger, they don’t (or shouldn’t) mean that Mars is causing that trouble, but merely that its position is indicative of their own internal psychological and/or spiritual state as being affected by external life events or an internal problem.

Once one begins to understand astrology from the clockwork perspective, it makes more sense, although it does bring up the sticky philosophical conundrum of fate versus free will.  I see this debate as being one born of understandable shortsightedness, one that assumes the system of astrology is all-encompassing and therefore 100% accurate and precise.  As with everything in the Universe, this is not the case.  It is a primary cornerstone of scientific philosophy that it is impossible to know everything, and this applies to mystical matters as well.  There are undoubtedly bodies still being discovered within the Solar System that parallel psychological and spiritual forces within us that we do not understand yet.

This applies a thousand-fold to the Universe at large.  We are subject to the laws of physics just as everything else in existence is, and even within that very structured world there is room for randomness, chaos, and paradox.  While everything that currently exists and ever will exist is the result of cause-and-effect, we are still making active choices in the present moment that are constantly changing the future.  Not despite but because of the nature of cause-and-effect, we are not bound by fate or destiny: we mold it as we live our lives.  And yet those choices are still affected by the prevailing energies of any given time, by necessity, and sometimes the choices we’re faced with are not easy.

The celestial snapshot of an astrological chart is not a destiny set in stone, but a presentation of a set of choices that are available to a person, choices that can combine to produce a near infinite set of outcomes over the course of someone’s life, both good and bad.  These choices come in the form of the basic building blocks of an astrology chart: the planets, the signs, the houses, and the aspects.  Each one of these building blocks represents an archetype in the Jungian sense of the word: a fundamental representation of a concept that contains all manifestations of that concept.  For example, the Jungian archetype of Mother contains all manifestations of “mother” in our world, whether human or not.  It’s what “mother” represents that’s important here.

Mars has come to represent the more aggressive side of the human psyche because over time, humans noticed an increase in personal and collective aggression when Mars was prominent in the sky, hence the birth of the pertinent myths.  Mars does represent those qualities that humanity has come to apply to that planet, mostly through the telling of myths surrounding Mars, who was the Roman god of war.  Hence Mars is the archetypal symbol for aggression (amongst other things) in the astrological paradigm.  Interestingly, the archetypal qualities for each of the classical planets is largely the same regardless of what culture they come from or whether they had contact with one another.

The same has happened with all of the planets, with each of them becoming archetypes that represent whole sets of psychological qualities within human beings as individuals and as the various collectives we create, from neighborhoods to the entire world.  Because these archetypes represent every possible manifestation, it is the choices we make as individuals and collectives that determine how an archetype manifests.  Our astrology chart may indicate that we have an abundance of aggressive energy in our psyches thanks to various planetary placements, but that aggression does not have to rule our lives.  Choosing a different path may be more difficult than the one circumstance has laid out for us, but we are not bound to it.

My choice this week was between the way of my Old Self, which was the Way of Anger, and the Way of Compassion, which is the way of my New Self.  This internal choice was marked by the passage of the Sun and Mars through the end of the sign of Scorpio, which is also where some of my personal planets are.  Archetypally, the Sun represents our expressive Self, Mars represents what I prefer to call our “determined” Self, and the sign of Scorpio represents transformation and change.  Put it all together and I had a week where I got to decide if I was merely going to “express” Mars negatively by being angry all the time, or if I was going to “transform” that anger into “determination” towards the greater goal of “changing” from my Old Angry Self into my New Compassionate Self.

Really, the choice was in transforming Mars itself.  In mythology, Mars, or Ares in Greek mythology, was not always a slaughtering warrior.  He was once a pastoral herdsman who led a very peaceful life.  He was drawn into conflict by the gods, and in doing so became a changed god himself.  It is not the natural state of a human being to be in a constant state of anger and aggression.  Mars needed to be transformed back into his prior state of pastoral peace, into a state of compassion.  Due to my upbringing, I have never existed in a state of compassion, but in the course of what Jung called the process of individuation, my True Self is slowly emerging as my archetypal parts are slowly transformed and their true natures revealed.

This is probably astrology’s greatest value: as a tool of personal growth.  The celestial snapshot provides a map of one’s inner psychospiritual landscape and how one’s various archetypes interact with one another to create a unique individual.  It shows one’s strengths and one’s weaknesses, and how to play up one while shoring up the other.  It reveals the inner and outer cycles that govern our psyches and spirits and therefore our lives.

In improving ourselves by analyzing our inner archetypes, so will the world around us be changed as its collectives large and small become filled with empowered individuals, which is what the world so sorely needs right now.  Carl Jung made the observation in the 1950s that it wouldn’t be weapons of mass destruction or widespread war that would be humankind’s biggest threat, but its own group psychology.  You can see the evidence of this everywhere in the world right now, notably in the phenomenon of climate change denial.

Part of the process of individuation is a taming of the human ego, a necessary result of the realization of Universal unity.  It is ego and its group expression that is driving so many of the destructive social, cultural, and political forces in the world at the moment.  If more people engaged in activities that defused and disengaged their egos, such as the inner exploration afforded by astrology or psychospiritual systems such as Buddhism, many of these destructive forces would also be defused.

The tl;dr on my “how astrology works”: as above, so below.  Our inner lives are reflections of the outer machinations of the entire Universe due to the interconnected nature of existence.  By looking outward, we can see inward.  By analyzing and processing what is inward, we can progress and grow as individuals and as collectives both small and large.  We can make better choices that suit our True Selves rather than feeling forced into particular paths by the conditioning forces of life, and in doing so, we can change the world.