What is Magic?

The Four Faculties are four stages in the evolution of human consciousness.  Ancient humans were principally acting on a level of Creative Mind – ancient people were far less individuated than we modern humans are.  The descent into individuation through Mask, Body of Fate, and finally Will is a process of increasing isolation, disconnectedness, and alienation (this is what the cycle of 28 lunar phases in Yeats’ A Vision describes).  The process of socialization is a matter of increased screening out of available information in order to focus with greater intensity on an individual lower self.  As awareness decreases, self-reflection is heightened and the individual comes to feel more and more isolated in a lower self and cut off from any sense of belonging to something greater than this self. 

Life purpose – which is what is shown by the symbolism of the 28 phases of the moon, i.e., the struggle towards (from Phase 1 to Phase 15) and back (from Phase 15 to Phase 1) from individuation-separatedness-isolation is a matter of Will.  That’s the focus, the level on which each individual decision is made. That’s why Will is placed at the apex of the inverted cone – it represents the Now moment.   It’s the fulcrum point, the place of conscious awareness in most beings.  Will is everyday life. 

 The point of magical training, such as listening to the Voices of our Ancestors (Creative Mind); running past life regressions (Mask), probable reality progressions (Body of Fate), and recapitulations (Will), is to expand conscious awareness to include the three higher faculties as well as Will by connecting to the feelings of these thought forms.   Most people are consciously aware in their daily lives only of Will:  they make their daily choices based wholly upon the thought forms of a particular life history (their social training and reaction to same).   Most people don’t understand that thought forms – the things which happen to them – are beside the point, and actually don’t matter in the least.  Events are merely symbols for feelings.  If we can feel the feelings directly then we can activate our higher Faculties in the Now moment.  When the higher Faculties can be brought to bear on the Now moment, then it is possible to make more intelligent decisions in the Now moment than can be made using the Faculty of Will alone.  Will is a definition of self which involves very little reflection or intelligence – it’s a level of knee-jerk reactivity. 

Actually, each Faculty – each level – is a more and more expanded view of the Now moment.   The Now moment is a feeling – that’s all it is.  And that feeling is the product of infinite interactions on infinite levels.  Just as on a level of daily life we arbitrarily divide our consciousness into three parts – waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep – so too on a more encompassing level of our being we divide our consciousness into four parts:  personal life history, sum total of probable realities for a lifetime, sum total of past and future lives, and sum total of human experience. This is all merely a manner of speaking, of making sense out of the senseless. There aren’t any “Faculties” out there in the real world; this is just a way of speaking about the unspeakable, of dividing chaos into four arbitrary categories.   

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Mask is the Daimon’s sense of personal significance:  whatever dreams, hopes, ambitions the person holds in his or her heart of hearts   Where Body of Fate operates on a level of mind, Mask operates more on a level of feeling; where Body of Fate connects the Daimon to other people in individual relationships, Mask connects the Daimon to other people in group relationships.  Mask includes the person’s responsibilities, loyalties, dedication, competence, and sense of social duty, which are offered voluntarily out of a sense of connectedness to nature and to future generations.  Mask is not a level of fantasies but of purpose:  it seeks to understand what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.  This is a weightier part of the person than Will or Body of Fate.  Mask refers to a moral sense – a sense not so much of social responsibility (Body of Fate) as of responsibility to truth, to one’s own heart.  Mask is what leads people to stand up for what they know is right in the face of certain rejection or death.  Where Will is lower self, Mask is higher self; and Body of Fate is like an intermediary between these two.  Mask is the ultimate individualized part of the Daimon (memory above this level – Creative Mind – is no longer individualized but shared amongst all humans).  Mask is what you discover when you run a lot of past life regressions and come to know the feel of who “you” are in your totality; of what you keep coming back in human form to accomplish; the overall mood which informs the totality of your past and future lives. 

Creative Mind is the part of the Daimon capable of awe and wonder.  It is the most humble and self-effacing aspect of the Daimon:  a feeling for the sacred and holy, whether this be considered a matter of patriotism, religious devotion, or philosophical meditation.   Creative Mind is what we have termed the Voices of the Ancestors – our role in the panorama of human evolution and history.  It has nothing to do with us as individuals but has everything to do with our true purpose in incarnating on this earth at this time.  It is – as Desiderata put it – our right to be here.  It is our sense of connection to an ongoing process that unites us to the eternal.  Creative Mind is our solidarity with the human race from the beginning of its evolution.  Creative Mind is like a wind that blows across the earth and orients all people this way or that.  It’s like the mood of the times – the Zeitgeist – the unfolding of human experience as directed by the spirits of our ancestors; and also each individual’s personal adaptation to this Gestalt.   It is precisely because our decadent, degenerate society has lost its ability to listen to the Voices of the Ancestors that it no longer cares about future generations or our mother, the earth; and it is therefore headed for self-destruction.

The point is that a person’s moment-to-moment decisions in any lifetime are made on one or the other of these four levels.   For most people, 99.9% of decisions are made on the basis of Will, or socially-conditioned actions and reactions.  But every now and then everyone has affecting moments – moments of consciousness or conscience or conscientiousness – when they sense that probable realities are branching off this way or that; or they can feel echoes from other lifetimes and realities; or they obey voices from deep inside them.  At these poignant moments people feel connected to something deeper than their usual everyday routines and habits; and that something is their true purpose in this lifetime. 

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The Four Faculties: 

Will is the socially conditioned person who is awakened by the alarm clock and goes to the bathroom and showers and dresses and has breakfast and goes to work etc. etc. every day.  It includes the prejudices, mores, and taken-for-granted assumptions of the person’s social group, and it is driven primarily by fear.   Will is the robot which is wholly governed by routines and knee-jerk responses; which has given up personal feelings and choices to do what is expected by society and to submit to the daily grind.  Will is the Daimon’s level of social conditioning:  the good citizen who represses his or her true feelings for the common weal, and who as a result will go to heaven when he or she dies.  It’s the level of approval and approbation, of our reflection in the eyes of other people.  It’s both our “goodness” or our “phoniness”, depending on how you want to look at it.   

  Will is the socialized person, the one who has asked no questions but has bought into society’s ready-made solutions willy-nilly.  Will manifests through a conviction of rectitude; hence it is completely self-centered and self-important.  Decisions made on the level of Will usually do not take into account other people’s viewpoints, or much sense of responsibility for ultimate consequences.  They are animated principally by hiding shame (running from the past) and seeking personal glory (striving for an idealized, fantasy future).   

Body of Fate is the part of the Daimon which gazes outside the classroom window on a spring day – it’s the person’s wistful longings, ideals, romance, kismet; his or her daydreams and fantasies.  It is on a level of Body of Fate that we connect to others:  on a level of Will other people are just there to serve or impede the purposes of the lower self.  Body of Fate relates to other people in both negative (expectations) and positive (affection and unselfishness) ways.  Body of Fate refers to openness to new experience, willingness to take into consideration hunches and intuitive guidance – echoes from other probable realities – and also other people’s points of view.  When Body of Fate predominates over Will people are willing to take risks and to fly with their impulses.

Body of Fate is the mood of a particular lifetime in all its probable realities.  It’s the level of empowerment in our own right, apart from what other people think about us.  The more people let their choices be made for them by other people, the more their Will dominates their Body of Fate.  The more they follow their own hearts, the more their Body of Fate – or individual destiny – will dominate Will (the expectations of society and other people). 

Note that the Body of Fate is what is shown by the astrological horoscope:  the horoscope reveals the Daimon’s highest (and lowest) potentials in a given lifetime.  Attempts to use the natal horoscope to describe Will – the precise sequence of thought form decisions which make up our personal history in this present lifetime – often lead to incorrect predictions.  The birth horoscope of the Daimon is valid for all of his or her probable realities rather than for any particular one of them.  The birth horoscope shows tendencies, propensities, possibilities; but not facts (although sometimes these can be intuited by a psychic astrologer).    All probable realities for a particular lifetime start from the same birth moment:  they are all variations on a theme begun at the same moment in time.  Both Will and Body of Fate begin from this same moment.  Mask, by contrast, has no beginning or end. 

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 The Four Memories of the Daimon, or Ultimate Self of Man

The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot.              – A Vision, by William Butler Yeats 

Irish poet and Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats proposed a novel theory of reincarnation in his occult treatise A Vision.  According to Yeats’ view reincarnation does not occur within a framework of linear time.  Rather, all of a person’s past and future lives are happening at once, in an eternal Now moment; and the decisions made in any of these lifetimes influence all of the other lives (and are influenced by them). 

                According to Yeats there are four different levels of human memory (which he termed “Faculties”) which impinge upon the present moment.  The scheme of the Four Faculties is an arbitrary way of describing four types of memories, four different aspects of the principle of memory:

Memories from this present lifetime (i.e. the thought forms of this present personal history) make up WILL.  This is what we access in the technique of recapitulation of present-life memories.

Will together with the memories of all probable realities related to this lifetime make up BODY OF FATE.  This is what we access in probable reality progressions. 

Body of Fate together with memories of all of an individual’s past and future lives make up MASK.  This is what we access in running past life regressions. 

Mask together with memories of all human beings in all their incarnations make up CREATIVE MIND, or collective unconscious.  This is what we access in listening to the Voices of our Ancestors.

The Four Faculties symbolize four levels of motivation in everyday life – four levels from which a person may act in making everyday decisions.  Decisions made in one lifetime affect all lifetimes.  Every decision impinges on the totality; and the totality impinges on every decision.  Every decision ever made affects and is affected by an infinitude of lifetimes in an eternal Now moment. 

When not affected by the other Faculties (Will) has neither emotion, morality, nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility.  It seeks its own continuance.   Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon’s memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas – or universals – displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives.                                                          –  A Vision

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I am a devotee of the primary directions technique of astrological prediction.  I’ve always found these directions to be pretty accurate, particularly the conjunctions, and therefore I’ve always been puzzled about why the converse direction of Neptune to my Ascendant in the fall of 1980 produced no event whatever.             

About the only thing that was happening in my life then was that I was eleven years into an unhappy marriage which was progressively deteriorating and would end nine years later; and I had a three-year-old son.  Then an extremely attractive (Leo rising), single, hard-working and dedicated, witchy Scorpio woman, whose natal moon precisely conjoined my natal sun and who fulfilled every image I had of what I wanted in a woman, moved into town.             

Looking back it’s kind of funny:  my wife met her before I did and, being very psychic, she immediately picked up the vibe – meeting this woman really raised her hackles.  Anyway, from the beginning this woman and I were super turned-on by each other.  She came onto me big-time and made little effort to conceal her feelings.  I was torn to pieces, since although I would readily have dumped my wife in a second – even if this woman hadn’t appeared – I couldn’t justify to myself abandoning my son. It got so bad that I purposely avoided this woman whenever I could because being in her presence forced me to stifle impulses that were raging out of control.  I have never had to clamp down upon myself so hard in all my life.  Eventually, a few months later, she moved away and that was that.  The marriage continued downhill, two more kids were born, and in the end we split up.  So, not much of an event that I can point to happened at that time to correspond to the Neptune direction to my Ascendant. 

But my guidance has told me that there is another probable reality in which I did abandon my son and leave with this other woman.  This present probable reality, in which I stayed with my wife and son, is no more nor less real than the probable reality in which I left with the other woman.  And the birth horoscope is an indicator of all possible probable realities:  the chart of the “me” who stayed with my wife is the same as the chart of the “me” who left with the other woman. So, if this is true, then at least the Neptune conjunct Ascendant direction worked in the probable reality in which I left (if not in this one, in which I stayed).             

Then recently I was channeling to ask the question of whether I’d made the right decision in staying with my wife, since the thing fell apart in the end anyway. And this is what my guidance told me:  “It wouldn’t have mattered. That’s something you still haven’t figured out – that there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; all there are, are different decisions, different lessons to learn, none of which ultimately matter in the least. That was a great sacrifice you made for your son, which he’ll never understand or appreciate, but which definitely made you a far more selfless person – hence a better father and husband, and a more spiritual person. You lost a lot of selfishness on that one. And, if you’d left with K., it wouldn’t have been any bed of roses either. That’s what the Neptune conjunct Ascendant – which you’ve never understood – means.  In some probable realities you left with K.  In this one you made a tremendous sacrifice for the sake of another person, which put you squarely on the spiritual path.  Or another way of putting it is:  splitting with K. may or may not have destroyed your chances for spiritual advancement, just as leaving the ranch (a job I hated but which I sensed was a spiritual test); or leaving during the guerrilla war (another test: a situation in which I never knew from one day to the next who would show up to kill me, but which my guidance told me to stick out) might or might not have destroyed your spiritual aspirations.  But staying in your marriage – honoring the commitment you had made to your son (and wife) – definitely moved you forward on the spiritual path. Shirking your responsibilities and taking the easy way out would have left you right where you were. And that’s what Neptune conjunct Ascendant meant.”  

Will the human race be able to save itself in the coming century, let alone prosper?  Or will it self-destruct and drag the planet down with it?  There are probable realities which go either way.  Which one of these we find ourselves in – or place our children in – depends upon which one we choose for ourselves.     

We call the outer circumstances of our lives – the situations and relationships in which we find ourselves – for some reason; and we can also change that reason if only we don’t lose sight of (feeling for) the ultimate goal.  This means reaching out to probable realities in which there is joy, no matter how improbable they may seem at the moment, rather than to ones which will only reinforce our self-pity and self-hatred.  Hope is the fuel that propels desire forward.  This means faith not in ultimate success, but in ultimate self-worth.   

(parts of this article are excerpted from Bob Makransky’s book Thought Forms, which includes an in-depth discussion of probable realities and their relation to reincarnation.     To subscribe to Bob’s free monthly astro-magical ezine, just send an e-mail to: MagicalAlmanac-subscribe@yahoogroups.com). 

The sum total of all the probable realities which branch off from a person’s present lifetime is what William Butler Yeats termed the “Body of Fate.”⁸   This is what the astrological horoscope shows.   Attempts to use the natal horoscope to describe what Yeats termed “Will” – the precise series of events which occur and occurred in this present lifetime – often lead to incorrect predictions.  The person’s birth horoscope is valid for all of his or her probable realities rather than for any particular one of them.  The birth horoscope shows tendencies, propensities, possibilities; but not facts.  Exact prediction is sometimes possible when there are lots of indications pointing the same way – e.g. lots of Uranus transits and directions happening about the same time, which indicates sudden and unexpected shakeups in the life.  But the only way to make exact predictions in the normal course of an astrological reading is to use intuition.  This is the only way to cut across all the possibilities and get down to the one that will be chosen for this present life history.  And this is done by reading the client – by psychically anticipating his or her already-made subconscious decisions – not by astrology.⁹ 

All probable realities for a particular lifetime start from the same birth moment:  they are all variations on a theme begun at the same moment in time.  Astrology merely suggests; it doesn’t command.  All astrology per se shows or ever can show is the wind speed and direction at a given moment, but not where the leaf will land.  There is always a greater or lesser element of chance involved.  Astrology doesn’t have the mechanistic surety of physics or chemistry, and it never will.  All claims of exact astrological prediction that I have investigated have proven false.¹⁰   Exact prediction is only possible by using inspired intuition or psychic ability.   The existence of probable realities means that even physics and chemistry are not and can never be as mechanistic as materialistic scientists would like.  We astrologers must not make the mistake of the materialists, falling for their incorrect assumptions about the nature of reality (in particular that time is linear).¹¹   We are not unitary beings who live our lives in linear sequence, but rather infinitely ramified “waves” who can only remember one single line of personal history at a time (although our memory can be expanded to include probable realities using a technique similar to past life regressions). 

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NOTES

⁸ William Butler Yeats, A Vision, Collier NYC 1966 page 83 ff.

 ⁹ You can psychically probe a client at a distance; even one you’ve never met.  But this is intuition, not astrology, although the practice of astrology sharpens intuition.  See Intuition in Astrology – The Sunshine House System, posted at www.dearbrutus.com => Makransky Miscellany => Astrology Articles.

  ¹⁰ Bob Makransky, Inexact Astrology, appendix to the book Primary Directions (available as a free download from www.dearbrutus.com.  This book also explains the primary directions described in this article). 

¹¹  Time is not linear.  Rather, everything that has ever happened and ever will happen, in all past and future lives and probable realities (what William Butler Yeats termed “Mask”), is all going on at once, in an eternal now moment.  Linear time is an illusion, similar to the illusion of motion produced by the series of still pictures which make up a movie.    Babies (and even young children, who sometimes talk about memories from other lifetimes) are not as centered in a one-track existence as adults are.  Babies and young children are consciously impinged upon by influences from other lives and probable realities which most adults have learned to ignore.   The same socialization process which props up a baby’s sense of being a unitary, abiding, separated individual also imprisons that individual in a furrow of inexorable linear temporality.  For more information see Bob Makransky, Thought Forms, Dear Brutus Press 2000. 

            Which probable reality we find ourselves in at any given moment is largely a function of what conscious choices we are making for ourselves, or else what conceptual thought forms we are letting live our lives for us.   

Consider, for example, a desire for joy.  Suppose our mind has attached to that desire the thought form of “getting a raise”.  Since most of us have thought forms working at cross purposes, there are various probable realities in which that basic “getting a raise” thought form could be physically realized.  If we truly feel in our hearts that we deserve the raise because we’ve done a good job and we want our world to reflect our joy in accomplishment, then we’ll take a probable reality branch in which we receive the raise and are joyous about it.  However, if in our hearts we know we don’t deserve the raise but are only desiring it for our own glory, then we can either take a probable reality branch in which we get the raise and feel false joy about it, or else we don’t get the raise and feel disappointed about it.  In the latter two cases our true feelings are trying to steer us to true joy by making us feel shame (false joy or disappointment).  Just because we block the natural action of the feeling with our thought forms doesn’t mean that the feeling isn’t still operative and calling all the shots; all it means is that we experience the joyous impulse as shame rather than joy.   

            In the above example, all three probable realities are equally real.  Which one we choose for this lifetime (this personal history) is a function of which choice of the three we decide to make for this lifetime:  one choice we make by going along with our true feelings, and the other two we make by going along with our glory thought forms, at the moment when the universe pops the possibility of getting a raise up before our eyes. 

            A child’s anger at a deceased parent for having abandoned him; a woman’s feeling of guilt for having been raped; a parent’s self-recrimination for an unavoidable accident suffered by her child; are all valid feelings because those probable realities were indeed chosen in preference to happier ones.  For example, the parent whose child died in an accident, who spends weeks thereafter ruminating  on  “If I hadn’t done this … ”   and   “If  I’d  only  done that …”  is actually reviewing all her decisions (branching points into other probable realities) which led up to this reality.    

Some psychologists believe that it is infantile for a child to blame himself when his parents divorce; yet the child is absolutely correct:  he chose that probable reality.  This is what is meant by “taking responsibility for our already-made decisions” or “taking responsibility for the situation in which we find ourselves”; because that is what we have chosen for ourselves:  that is our intent – the place we have to start from.  In Viktor Frankl’s book about his experiences in Auschwitz, Man’s Search for Meaning⁷, he described the various opportunities he had to leave the concentration camp or to obtain advantages which, had he accepted any one of them, would have led to his death.  And the chain of events – the miracle – which led to his ultimate survival was the decision he made at each branch point to consider the needs of his patients above his own needs. 

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NOTES

⁷ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston 1963 

According to the theory of probable realities, every single desire and memory that we have or have ever had creates unto itself an entire probable reality.  Every feeling is an entire universe.   Everything we desire creates an entire world in which that desire is realized – i.e., every desire creates its own future.  We don’t desire something for the future, or in the future; but rather the future only exists as there is a desire reaching out to it and creating it.  And our minds choose which possible future to go with, out of all the possible futures. 

            Similarly with memories.  Every memory is a thought form record⁵ of an entire universe (a decision we have made).  We believe that we have had a linear personal history – a series of events which began at birth and led up to where we are right now – and from here we will have a linear future.  And there is one “me” who has had this personal history and who is going to have this personal future. 

            In fact, there are infinite number of “me’s” who had an infinite number of probable pasts, and there are an infinite number of “me’s” who will have an infinite number of possible futures.  The action of mind is to select a path going backward and forward:  it selects one particular set of memories going back, and one particular set of desires going forward, out of the culture and Zeitgeist (i.e., thought forms) it finds at hand. 

            All of the thought form material that’s left over – all of the “could have beens” and “might have beens” and “should have beens” – are the probable realities for a given lifetime (and are in fact consciously accessible via a technique similar to past life regressions).⁶   Probable realities are parallel lifetimes which branch off from this one at each point where a decision, large or small, is made.  That is why we must stand by our decisions; otherwise we are draining the energy we need in this lifetime to realize our true desires off into other probable realities.  Probable realities are no more nor less real than this lifetime.  There are always probable realities in which we get (or got) what we want (or wanted).  Mind picks which probable reality to go with from the smorgasbord of possibilities. 

For example, consider a person diagnosed as having some fatal disease (e.g. AIDS).  The person chooses a moment in which a doctor says to him, “You have AIDS; you’re going to die”, and he makes that thought form of fear into an overwhelming belief when he could as easily – after the initial fear – just laugh it off and refuse in his heart  to believe it.  But instead, he makes the thought form into an overwhelming belief by assigning tremendous importance to it, and he then carries that belief through the rest of that probable reality. 

            At the moment the doctor said, “You have AIDS”, another probable reality branched off in which the doctor said, “You don’t have AIDS”.  These two probable realities interact on each other:  in the AIDS branch, there is a wistful longing for the non-AIDS branch; and in the non-AIDS branch, a constant fear of the AIDS branch.  The wistfulness of the AIDS branch may send messages to the non-AIDS branch like:  “Enjoy your health!  Appreciate what you have!”  And the non-AIDS branch may send messages to the AIDS branch saying, “Cheer up!  Life has its bright side too!” 

            If at any moment the AIDS patient realized that the AIDS is just a belief he could change – only a reality that he is creating by believing it every moment – then at that instant it would collapse and the person would be cured.  But this becomes harder and harder to do as the person becomes “sicker and sicker”; i.e. believes more and more in his sickness, thus making it into an overwhelming reality (of course, this is a greatly oversimplified example; what is really going on out there in the universe is far more complex and infinitely ramified than anything the human mind could ever conceive of). 

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NOTES

⁵ “Thought forms” can be defined as monads or homunculi of awareness; momentary observer / observed dualities.  There are two kinds of thought forms:  “sensory thought forms” which consist of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings; and “conceptual thought forms” which consist of thoughts.   We are born with sensory thought forms (we are born knowing how to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel); conceptual thought forms are everything we have learned since birth from our parents and society.  Conceptual thought forms are similar to what some cognitive theorists have termed “memes” (cf. Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Oxford NYC 1976 p 192 ff, and Daniel Dennet’s Consciousness Explained, Penguin London 1991 p 200 ff); and other theorists have termed “schema control units” (cf. Michael Gazzaniga-Richard Ivry-George Mangun,  Cognitive Neuroscience, Norton NYC 1998 p 458 ff). 

⁶ The past life regression entry technique given on www.dearbrutus.com => Past Life Regressions can be adapted to viewing probable realities as well.  When you are “up in the sky”, intend (ask) to come back down into whatever probable reality you wish to examine.  This technique can also be run off into the future, to view the probable result of making a decision.  For example, to see what it would be like if you married a certain person, use the past life entry technique to access the probable reality in which you are married to this person.  This technique is really, really easy to do.   

A good intuitive description of what probable realities are all about is found in the Seth books by Jane Roberts:   

            “In your daily life at any given moment of your time, you have a multitudinous choice of actions, some trivial and some of utmost importance.  … It seems to you that reality is composed of those actions that you choose to take.  Those that you choose to deny are ignored.  …  If you wanted to be a doctor and are now in a different profession, then in some other probable reality you are a doctor.  If you have abilities that you are not using here, they are being used elsewhere.  …  These probable selves, however, are a portion of your identity or soul, and if you are out of contact with them it is only because you focus upon physical events and accept them as the criteria for reality.”⁴ 

Practically everyone has experienced bleed-throughs from other probable realities into this one at one time or another, without realizing what they were experiencing.  Wistful longings; quasi-memories or presentiments; events which produce a deja-vu-like sense of connectedness to another “me” in a similar but different reality; are often feeling connections with other probable realities.  Once when I was deeply in love with a certain person, I went to a party expecting and hoping that she would be there.   While she never came physically, I could feel her presence there beside me the whole time.  My guidance later explained this sensation to me as follows: 

                        “What keeps you glued into one track or lifetime is the sense of familiarity.  To break that track is to feel all your lifetimes and probable realities at once, just like you felt C.’s presence at that party in another probable reality.  That’s an example of how you can have two different memories of the same event:  going to the party with C., and going to the same party without her.” 

Me:     “Did the same things happen at both parties?” 

“Yes.  Eduardo sang at both parties, but not the same songs.  What do you think, stupid?  Of course different things happened at both parties.  That’s not the point.  The point is that life consists of feelings.  You can only get to those feelings directly by getting past the screen of thought forms of importance and familiarity that hide them.  There was a feeling at that party.  Remember when you suddenly felt that you had to return immediately, and you jumped up and raced out of the party without even saying goodbye to anyone, and when you got to the pier – by a weird turn of events – you missed the last boat back to Panajachel?  And the next day you learned that it was at that precise moment that C. had left for

 The theory of probable realities can provide us with a good intuitive idea of how astrology works, and what its limitations are.  The idea of probable realities, if not the term itself, has become a common theme in popular culture in recent years.  For example, the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the films The Family Man, Sliding Doors, and Déjà Vu can be considered allegories for how events happen to the same protagonist in different probable realities. 

Gary Zukov’s book The Dancing Wu Li Masters summarizes the theory of probable realities as follows:  “The orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics is that only one of the possibilities contained in the wave function of an observed system actualizes, and the rest vanish.  The Everett-Wheeler-Graham theory says that they all actualize, but in different worlds that coexist with ours!  …“According to the Everett-Wheeler-Graham theory, at the moment the wave function ‘collapses,’ the universe splits into two worlds.  … There are two distinct editions of me.  Each one of them is doing something different, and each one of them is unaware of the other.  Nor will their (our) paths ever cross since the two worlds into which the original one split are forever separate branches of reality.”¹           

It might be argued that even if probable realities do exist on a level of subatomic particles, that doesn’t necessarily imply that they exist for humans – at least not in any consciously accessible or meaningful way.²   However, this is precisely what astrology is all about.  Astrology doesn’t seek to examine and measure accomplished events (although sometimes it can do this) so much as tendencies and potentials.  Probable realities are not a question of the size of the particle involved.  Rather, they are a question of the nature of time itself.  Time is not how we perceive it to be in our normal, everyday consciousness.³  Although human perception and cognition make sense to humans, the universe itself doesn’t make sense in a way that humans believe.Where materialistic science sees time as linear, astrology sees time as rhythmic, as an emanation consisting of birth – death – rebirth.  What we see as linear time is but one way of apprehending this emanation, which is useful for certain purposes but is a terrible distortion of what time really is.  We apprehend time as linear because our thinking is linear, and we are constantly thinking-thinking-thinking from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we go to sleep at night.  Animals and human babies don’t apprehend time in this fashion, and neither did ancient human hunter-gatherers.  Time is not linear, but to see this directly one has to stop thinking.                

Materialistic science measures points and intervals along a well-ordered continuum, whereas astrology measures cycles upon cycles.  The moment of birth can be viewed as a point along a linear continuum, as it is in materialistic science; or, conversely, it can be viewed as a stage in the unfoldment of potentialities on various levels – i.e. as the intersection of many different interpenetrating cycles, as it is in astrology.  Astrology can identify decisive points in which things could go – or could have gone – this way or that.   

(continued …)

NOTES

¹ Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Bantam 1980 page 83²

³ Our normal, everyday consciousness is a highly distorted view of how things actually are.  Our sense of the passage of time, for example, is a socialized phenomenon, whose distortions become apparent when we enter altered states of consciousness.  Indeed, the slowing down of time is a good definition of “altered state of consciousness.”   For example, in life-threatening situations, such as while we are having an automobile accident or during a big earthquake, time slows way down.  We can see everything that is happening with great clarity, in great detail, as if it were unfolding in slow motion.  This slow motion perception of time is closer to the truth.  It is closer to how babies experience time:  more like dream time perception and less like our adult, gloss-over-things-quickly-and-superficially-and-not-pay-much-attention-to-what-is-going-on-around-us perception of time.  However, we are incapable of acting in the normal way in this slow motion perception of time because we can’t think.  If we are going to act or react in this frame of mind, we can only do so on intent, on our gut-level instinct, not on thought.  Therefore the slow motion perception is not as useful in performing all the humdrum tasks of everyday life as is adult time perception.