Realizing the Self

Our mind has a quality of self awareness that enables it to observes its own working. Through proper mind training, human can be turned into constant stream of thoughts. Mental impulses seem to well up from the ocean of the unconscious without apparent logic or reason.

When people discuss the question of fate and free will, they tend to forget just how deep in the past the root causes of our existence lie. As we deal with life day by day, and moment by moment, we are actually dealing with the consequences of actions that we took earlier, sometimes many years earlier, and sometimes, if you believe in reincarnation, many lifetimes earlier. Our actions in the current moment are completely conditioned by our view, and this view was in turn conditioned by individual perceptions and conditioning all the way back to birth. So-called free will is extremely limited under these circumstances. You are going to do what you have always done, because of the unstoppable dynamics of your personal psychology.
But there is a way.

No amount of rational analysis, decision-making or resolve is going to get you out of the prison bars created within your own mind. But the mind itself has a quality of self-awareness that - if all distracting thoughts and emotions are stilled - enables it to observe its own workings. The farther we go towards stabilizing this self-awareness through mindfulness or meditation practice, the closer we get to seeing the stream of causation in our personal history that robs us of the capacity to make meaningful change.

If, using mind training techniques, you tune in to the constant stream of thoughts, you will discover that in the beginning thoughts will arise all the time. There may be pauses for shorter or longer periods of time, but soon the mind latches on to a thought or idea, and off it goes. You can catch it, stop, continue to focus on your breathing or your body or some other kind of support, but off it will go again. Perhaps this constant electric flurry is what we understand as astrologers as Mercury. It is the trickster, and however you strive for mental peace, it will use your own meditation process to lure you off track.

Mental impulses seem to well up from the ocean of the unconscious without apparent logic or reason. But if you sit long enough you might discover, that as the world revolves on its axis, and the planetary angles activate your own planetary patterns in sequence, then there is a kind of logic to the thoughts and feelings that arise. If Mercury is at 20 degrees Sagittarius and square Mars at 21 degrees in aspect to Neptune at 22 degrees, perhaps when the moving Ascendant axis hits 20 Sagittarius, you start dwelling on an injustice - a situation that is in your opinion not right or fair - which you then get angry about, and then feel helpless and sad about. Every day. Every day you carve deeper valleys in your psychological landscape through the same series of thought processes. Where is free will here? And how much stronger and more intense will this be when a passing transit, Uranus conjoining Mars for example, shakes up the configuration?

Being aware of this process changes everything. From an astrological point of view the awareness itself has nothing to do with Mercury. Thought cannot monitor itself. It has to do with the Sun, which is the one constant in the busy spiral of activity of Mercury, Venus, Mars and all the other planets as they revolve around the sun.

The sun - or self - is in its basic nature untouched by the activity of the mind and Mercury, by attachment and Venus, by aggressions and Mars, and if you are centered there and observe the workings of the trickster and his associates, then a different kind of process starts to happen. Thoughts still unfold, feelings mild or violent still arise, but centered as you are, you observe them coming and going out of the corner of your eye, as it were. The difference now is that you are no longer giving them any energy. They will ultimately wither and die like a planet without water.

Astrology teaches that the sun reflects identity, and with the position of the sun in any one of twelve signs, the personal identity is circumscribed by the sign it is in. What follows is a description of the sun in the 12 signs, with an emphasis on the sense of self and its strengths as reflected in each of the signs. For More Information Please Visit Adrian Duncan Astrology Articles