The Horoscope: A Study Plan For Life

THE HOROSCOPE: A STUDY PLAN FOR LIFE

The horoscope shows in symbolic form the quality of the moment at which an individual enters the world, in other words, how the primal principles are weighted and interrelated at that moment. This horoscope is his task and study plan which is there for him to carry out during the course of his life. Every so-called constellation (by which astrologers mean a grouping of principles) embodies a particular task or problem.

At this point let me make a few observation about the term “problem”. In reality there are no problems. A certain situation only becomes a problem for a person when he cannot integrate it into his consciousness. Multiplication, for example, is a great problem for a six-year-old child, but by the time a person has reached the age of thirty he will have learned how to multiply with ease. Every learning process is also an extension of consciousness enabling us to fulfill a task. Every time we solve a problem it ceases to be a problem and becomes an accomplished task. This process has the consequence that the accomplished task can never again present itself as a problem.

Let us never forget that a problem only represents the gap between a given situation and our level of consciousness. It should therefore be seen as a way of challenging us to bestride the gap by extending ourselves. Unfortunately in everyday life most people behave as if problems existed “per se” and were a condition of the environment that could simply be removed.

We said earlier that each constellation symbolizes such a problem and that the horoscope is a study plan for a person's life. All these constellations are there to be made manifest in life and transcended through apprenticeship and early participation. Constellations are still “problems” at the time of birth but the aim should be, if possible, to have transcended them by the end of one's life. Life is a learning process – though for many of us this is unfortunately not as self-evident as it should be.

What is the essential trait, common to all things in nature? It is that they develop. For esotericism as for science, evolution is the goal of all life. But whereas science tends to regard evolution as a product of “chance” mutations of genes, esotericism sees it as a development towards a definite goal. Both parties are agreed, however, that everything which lives develops. How does this development occur? Only by a process of learning. This is just as true of a worm as it is of a human being.

Learning can only take place through the solving of problems. But as this is always a strenuous process, human beings do not usually seek problems out, they have to be confronted with them. Seen in this light, problems emerge as the driving wheels of evolution.

What we call “fate” is the force which continually confronts us with problems and ensures that we never stop learning. And, since our horoscope reveals the study plan for an incarnation, it is said that in the horoscope we can read the fate of an individual. This sounds as though each individual were fitted with a strait-jacked of fate. But if we think in terms of a study plan or an allotment of tasks we discover a little more of the underlying meaning.