Your life involves self-awareness and the learning of thoughts, feelings and impulses that you didn’t know you had.
The development of your intelligence and ability involves struggle and overcoming problems and that means living without effort isn’t beneficial, useful or rewarding.
You bring out the best in yourself when your intelligence and ability contribute to the common good amidst harmonious environmental conditions.
Your mental and emotional attitudes toward the events and conditions you experience are by far the most important factor of your existence.
That’s because they constitute your mental reactions to all your environmental circumstances which include objects – animate and inanimate; visible and invisible stimuli – astrological and otherwise; and all the people (family, friends, associates, work mates and bosses) in your local and distant environments.
Attitude determines your soul’s destiny and ability to contribute much or little to universal welfare. That’s why the quality of your thoughts and feelings receive the lion’s share of consideration in Hermetic astrology.
When added to your soul the harmonious conditioning energy of a constructive mental attitude or the discordant conditioning energy of a destructive mental attitude influences both your physical and spiritual wellbeing.
Your objective is self-mastery
The achievement of self-mastery is the ultimate goal of your existence. Behavior management has as its primary focus self-mastery aka self-control.
Self-mastery enables you to direct your thoughts and to induce those emotions that are necessary to ensure progressive personal development. It allows you to purposefully advance to a continually more comprehensive role in cooperation with the eternally evolving divine plan of life.
Your degree of self-mastery at any given time equals your degree of ability to cooperate with the divine plan. And the degree to which spontaneous, rather than self-determined, attention influences your mental behavior indicates your degree of inability to successfully direct your thoughts and feelings towards such cooperation.
Undisciplined thinking does not favor intelligent assistance.
Those who subjugate their feelings of sympathy towards suffering and hardship can become cold, inhuman brutes; but to imagine your individual self, with your purely material aims, to be greater than, and to supersede the divine whole we call God, is the surest way of working against self-interest.
The most intelligent mental attitude embraces the relationship to, and specialized function in, the divine whole.
Building spiritual attributes
You’re here to acquire and develop intelligence and ability through experience.
You have mental, emotional and spiritual qualities but with your attention focused on the demands posed by your daily life your spiritual progress is likely to be an incidental afterthought.
Yet, you can, with enough self-knowledge and self-understanding visualize yourself continually adding spiritual qualities to your soul.
You can look forward with pleasure to the opportunities your everchanging environment presents for true spiritual progress.
You can mentally picture yourself using your spiritual qualities to assist in humanity’s progressive evolution toward a progressively better civilization.
Through experience you live and learn and part of the price you must pay for spiritual progress is learning how to use your mind and its powers for the benefit of yourself and humanity as a whole.
At this moment in time relatively few people have learned to use these powers with a high degree of efficiency. However, both the powers and the ability to use them efficiently are latent.
Mental alchemy is the practice of changing or reconditioning discordant desires in the interest of a better life outcome; and spiritual alchemy is the practice of building character by handling life events with a personal best, constructive mental attitude.
And to effectively practice mental and spiritual alchemy you must understand the energies of your mind and your relationship to God and cosmic society, for without understanding usefulness is impossible.
So, you must understand the energies of your mind, know how to use them constructively, and then through directed thinking and induced emotion build an intense desire to work with God in the Divine Plan.
The arrow of attention should keep your consciousness tuned in as much as possible (with full consideration of physical needs) on the Creator’s Divine Plan, and on fitting yourself to be a better worker and better partner in the fulfillment of cosmic needs.
Your existence has a God-given purpose
The fact that you were brought into being to fulfill Deity’s need for a particular worker in the divine plan is something you should never forget.
The thought that you are necessary to God is of vast importance to your aspiring soul. And the fact that God is necessary to you and to creation as a whole should help you to realize that as part of creation, you are co-existent and co-eternal and should therefore cooperate with God.
It’s highly likely, due to a lack of time, fear or whatever, you have failed to take advantage of your opportunities to start to work to develop the powers of your mind and put them to use for your own benefit.
But if you compare your attitude to that of an acorn that just did not want to become an oak tree because of the work involved, or because it was afraid that in order to become an oak tree it would have to give up its little hard shell, that you prefer to be a nut throughout eternity, rather than grow into useful tree.
Little hard shells of fear are very effective in inhibiting growth and so long as they are maintained they act as a bar to intellectual and spiritual progress.
Some invent various escape mechanisms in order to avoid the necessity of facing themselves as they really are. They try to avoid facing their responsibilities as part of creation and the necessity of facing the facts of their relationship to God and to society.
The surest method of building your will power which is so essential for the effective use of directed thinking and induced emotion in intellectual and spiritual progress is to overcome obstacles.
These obstacles (the square aspects in your birth chart) actually afford the finest opportunities to develop intellectual ability and a more spiritual character.
It is an error to view any aspect as bad.
Your latent potential for intellectual and spiritual growth is as boundless as the eternity of which your soul is an integral part.
You don’t need to go on surrounded by a little hard shell of fear, afraid to grow and develop your potentials. You can realize that you are one with God, and by keeping that fact ever before your attention, banish the little fears from your mind and live a much more happy and useful life.
You don’t need to use the powers of your mind in a negative manner and continue to demonstrate everything you don’t want.
Rather, you can awaken the God within your consciousness and begin to demonstrate the most desirable of all human achievements: unity with God and conscious cooperation in the fulfillment of the Divine Plan.
You’re always standing at the Two Paths of Major Arcanum VI, of the Sacred Tarot, each day deciding which is the best path to take. And when you have developed some of the latent powers of your consciousness and awakened to some of the realities of life your choice will always be the constructive pathway.
You study to learn, and you learn to study, so that your immense potentials may bring happiness, understanding and fully conscious union with God.
Your live and learn and the struggle and effort involved in developing your intelligence and ability ensures that you earn it. It’s all about attitude and you should choose not to give up.
Spirituality benefits others
Your spiritual development is best measured by your ability to benefit others.
Hermetic astrology teaches that you can only become spiritual by using up your energy doing spiritual things.
It recognizes that the world will only become a better place through the intelligent efforts of people who do things; and that successful effort by you requires a desire to benefit the world guided by adequate self-knowledge and intelligence.
Spirituality expresses as time and effort devoted to the welfare of others without thought of recompense. It requires a spiritual adjustment to the way you live.
Your birth chart reveals your spiritual potential: you can benefit your fellow travelers by contributing to their welfare. But to reach your highest spiritual potential requires birth chart knowledge and the facts of astrology, extrasensory perception, induced emotion and directed thinking which have to be applied.
You have to use birth chart knowledge and work with your progressed aspects to guide your efforts more successfully.
You can use extrasensory perception to receive help and inspiration from higher sources in the particular work that you’re doing for the benefit of humanity. And you can habitually induce and cultivate noble emotions to maintain an attitude of constructive thinking.
Rather than idle your time away or be content to let the world drift along you can do something to make the world a better place in which to live.
You can work vigorously, with intelligence, to benefit others.
Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge
