What Makes Astrology Difficult? © 2002 Charles Kipp

What makes astrology difficult is the immediate personal challenge it brings to those who practice it. This personal challenge really has nothing to do with scientific or religious opinions about astrology, although those are easily marshaled to facilitate avoidance of the challenge. The real underlying challenge of astrology is that it forces one to understand and accept change in one's life. This is very ironic, because hardly anyone would ascribe that as the basis for the unreceptive attitude of contemporary society toward astrology. The tabloid variety survives only as a titillating relic and a whipping boy.

The immediate allure of astrology, facilitated by its uncanny poignancy with regard to personal features, is soon allayed by a sense of constriction and determinism about one's life from an astrological perspective. One feels an apparent loss of control and a sense of submission to arbitrary forces. "Wait a minute," one says to oneself, "this isn't what I'm looking for." Coming to understand the greater structure of your personality in relation to the cosmos is no mean undertaking. Furthermore, the static nature of one's birthchart connotes a sense of confinement to very specific parameters that may or may not be to one's liking. "I can't let my life be run by this kind of hocus-pocus."

Starting to learn about your birthchart and the movements of the planets, however you go about doing it, is like strapping yourself into a space ship and learning how to maneuver it around the vicinity of Earth. It actually requires you to accept change in your life in terms that exceed your understanding. This is a common theme of all spiritual perspective, but astrology gives it a much more definite form, tied into existence itself in such a manner as to constrain one to one's true purpose. In order to learn how to drive your space ship, you have to be able to resonate with your True Will. Doing the astrology is the easy part. It's doing your True Will that's hard.

"Wait a minute," I hear protested, "Why should I yield over something so sacred as my conception of my True Will to the movement of bodies in space millions of miles away, when I have the immediate concerns and responsibilities of life on Earth directly in front of me." What one must realize, if one is to get beyond this immediate barrier to using astrology, is that the solar-planetary system is an organism; that the movement of the planets in their orbits are joined by quantum mechanics with everything that happens in the system. It is a cosmic organism to which we are a form of micro-organism. We draw meaning from the greater whole in which we participate. These are the parameters at which astrology operates. This is hardly what people are looking for when they pick up one of the pocket horoscope books at the checkout stand in the supermarket.

Astrology is allied to the great spiritual tradition of self-actualization that has guided the evolution of humanity from time immemorial. Therefore, the practice of astrology can be no easier than self-actualization itself. Full self-actualization constitutes spiritual illumination. Astrology is the backbone of spiritual study. Astrology takes spiritual study out of the realm of personal and even prophetic dispute. Interpretation may vary, but it cannot divorce itself from the morphological parameters of the existing solar-planetary system. Those parameters are not controlled by human artifice but rather resonate with human artifice in a manner observable by everyone.

By strapping yourself into your birthchart space ship, you consciously attune yourself to your wave-pattern in the cosmic organism of the solar-planetary system, whereby you can understand your life in those terms, as opposed to the feeling of being disconnected from the universe fostered by prevailing social traditions that exploit ignorance and ineffectuality for power and material advantage. If this matter is of no concern to you, then you have no real motivation to do astrology, because that is all it is good for. That goal is touted endlessly by spiritual advocates who do not employ astrology toward its accomplishment. Why don't they? Why do our spiritual leaders either eschew or pay only nominal homage to astrology? Why are our spiritual traditions at perilous and seemingly unresolvable crossroads? Where may we find a global solution?

We may all look at the whole solar-planetary system in the manner that we presently look only at the relationship of Earth, Sol and Luna through our conventional use of clocks and calendars. We can monitor the greater intricacies of time as they apply to us collectively and individually. We can do astrology. But this is a tall order, and that's what makes astrology difficult.

In a way that most have not thought through enough to realize, astrology challenges us physically to adopt a global frame of reference that dispenses with all the disputes among religious and cultural traditions, based on regional and racial conflicts. Furthermore, all religious traditions have at their core a mystical element that has honored astrology from time immemorial. Is it not time, in view of current events, that we look that deeply into our religious heritage? I am not saying that we will have to do astrology to develop a collective global perspective. I am saying people do not want a collective global perspective, or else they would be doing astrology!