Astrology and Synchronicity

Insights

Part 3 of Phoebe’s series, Synchronicity: a Wake-up Call; “We live in a meaning-laden and purposeful universe, a cosmos coherent with our deepest spiritual and moral aspirations.”

Milky Way

Astrology works through synchronicities, the big one being the fractal correspondence between the microcosm of human life and the macrocosm of the universe. “As below so above, and as above so below” runs the piece of ancient wisdom carved on the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. It’s the touchstone that explains how astrologers can use the visible sky above to reveal the invisible contents of the human psyche below. (Ref. Phoebe Wyss, Inside the Cosmic Mind, 2014)

The courses of our outer experiences in the world and the continuum of our inner thoughts and feelings run like two parallel rivers side by side along the whole length of our life path. The former presents us with ever-changing situations in space and time triggering the actions we take in the world, and the latter represents timeless and spaceless, our stream of consciousness  – a babbling brook of surface thoughts, disturbed by deeper eddies and whirlpools that surface from its dark unconscious depths.

A canny astrologer, when he looks at our chart, will be able to see the symbolic significance of our outer and inner experiences at any point in time within the framework of the astronomical time cycles. And, by placing our experiences within wider contexts of archetypal meaning, he may go further and offer us explanations of their significance in relation to our life path.

In this life I’ve spent over four decades working as a consulting astrologer, during which I had the privilege of interpreting the charts of hundreds of clients. Thus I experienced the synchronicities of ‘as-above-so-below’ daily and it never got boring! Each chart is unique and so becomes a fascinating source of new learning. The reactions of my clients (especially those who said they didn’t believe in astrology before their first session) have proved to me that experiences of synchronicity can be mind-blowing, even life-changing. Their shock effect can shake people out of their mental groove and also be deeply moving, which is why I always had a box of tissues close at hand.

Today astrology remains my own most important tool for living. I’m always opening my ephemeris to check what the planets are doing, and relate their current positions to what’s happening in my life. Especially in times of mental stress and physical pain, a knowledge of astrology helps us understand the current life lesson. And it’s such a comfort to be able to look ahead and see when the planets testing my patience so sorely will have moved on.

However, I prefer not to work with predictive astrology. The only certain thing in life is change and each moment is unique and never returns, which is why I don’t try to foretell the future. The circular paths of the planets round the sun may suggest eternal return as a cosmic principle but there are no repeats. For example every year on our birthday the sun returns to the same degree in the zodiac as on the day of our birth, but it is not the same sun. It has moved forward on its course round the centre of the galaxy and has a different energy. “You can’t step into the same river twice,” as Heraclitus wisely said.

What the canny astrologer can do for his client through his knowledge of the archetypes is point to the tendencies, with some outcomes being more likely than others. Good that the future is not set in stone! We have a choice to make when standing at a crossroads, and we can also exercise our free will later when we deal with the consequences of our choice. This indeterminacy is due to the astrological archetypes being multivalent.

The prominent mundane* astrologer Richard Tarnas described the astrological archetypes as multivalent. In his book Cosmos and Psyche he shows how they have moulded the course of human history through correlating major alignments of the outer planets with historical events in the human sphere, weaving over time a vast unfolding order of meaning in which human life is embedded – as above so below. (Ref. Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 2006)

The reason why astrology is often rejected outright by intelligent people is they cannot conceive of the universe being alive and conscious. Their thinking is stuck in the materialist paradigm whereby we live in a universe composed of purposeless matter and ruled by chance and necessity without any intrinsic meaning. The synchronicities explained astrologically through Tarnas’ research prove that the opposite is true. We live in a meaning-laden and purposeful universe, a cosmos coherent with our deepest spiritual and moral aspirations. Synchronicities could not occur if the universe were random and purposeless.

* Note by ed.: Mundane astrology is the branch of astrology whose subjects are the events of geographical regions, places, countries and the whole world (as opposed to individual astrology).

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Phoebe Wyss

Phoebe Wyss is a regular contributor for the monthly horoscope and is the author of various books on astrology. astrophoebe.com

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