If it were true that any object/other existed separate from the mind of the one perceiving it, then every living being of similar intelligence and sense ability would know it in a similar way. However, if one hundred people of similar intelligence and sensibility were asked to describe any object put before them, they would give one hundred widely differing descriptions, or impressions, of the object. One’s good sight, good sound, good smell, good taste, good feeling, good thought might appear to be horrible to another. This is because the object is believed to be the cause of happiness or suffering dependent on the individual’s conditioned response to sensory stimuli.

Detong Choyin – Waking from the Dream

Astrology is popularly viewed as personal fortunetelling. While it can serve that function, I don’t believe that is its purpose. For me, its purpose is a comprehensive description of the reality we share (“the dream”).

The horoscope is a circle that contains all of the signs which represent all of the elements (fire, earth, air, water) and all the modes (cardinal, fixed, mutable).

We sit in the middle of the horoscope and look out, as we do sitting on the earth and looking out into our universe. If we look up at the sky and all the stars, we are seeing only the Milky Way galaxy. We are still in our small part of the unimaginably large universe.

You, me and everyone we know – we all have the same horoscope. We all look at the same sky. The sun that energizes you also energizes your friends and foes.

Then why do we feel different from others?

Our personality comes into play by the arrangement of the planets in the signs in the different areas of the horoscope. If our personality (described by the horoscope) is unique in this place and time, it also suggests we are alone in our perception. No other will be like us 100 percent and no one will agree with us 100 percent.

We are solitarily unique.

We seem to both attach to this unique identity yet at the same time want the rest of the people of the world to see the world in the same way we are seeing the world.

Chaos of Perception

Searching on the term “chaos of perception,” I discovered a paper by Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum entitled Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit.

The term “chaos of perception,” however, comes from Vilém Flusser whom Basbaum quotes:

The fiber with which man changes this ‘chaos’ into a ‘cosmos’ − an ordered structure which allows to catalogue all apparent phenomena, and relate them to a system of rules such as to give them a certain hierarchy − is language. It is language which turns the ‘chaos of perception’ into the ‘ordered cosmos’ which we call ‘reality’, with named things and causally related phenomena (in spite of systemic approaches, stochastic models, butterfly effects, chaos theories and so on).

Language is ruled astrologically by Mercury. But does Mercury actually create the order?

Saturn and Pluto Extremes

Structure is ruled by Saturn. Saturn represents the rules, time, aging and tradition. Saturn might also be said to rule traffic lights, highway systems, computer networks and the signs that tell you to clean up your dog’s poop at the park.

Saturn creates order so that you do not hit another car at the intersection or step in dog poop while enjoying a walk.

While language may create the order, babies can’t talk. We come into the world without language.

Which comes first, I wonder, the structure or the language?

In thinking about the chaos of perception, it occurred to me that what is considered totalitarianism might simply be an over-response to the chaos of six billion unique views. If structure is the normal response, complete control is an excessive response.

While Saturn likes ordered control and is happy when everyone simply follows the rules, I find Pluto, in negative manifestation, is the planet that wants nothing less than total, 100 percent agreement. The only way to get 100 percent agreement is to have 100 percent control.

Saturn is more like a fence or hydroelectric dam that both guides and controls while Pluto completely transforms its host like an invader that razes your home, forces its religion and institutes a new language.

Categorizing into extremes of “good” and “bad” might be another way to create order. With just two options, there will be more agreement. With 100 options, agreement will naturally decrease. Neither Saturn nor Pluto is nuanced. It might have been astrologer Jeanne Avery who said Saturn’s word is “should” and Pluto’s word is “must.”

In The Art of Dreaming, Carlos Castaneda’s mentor Don Juan says this regarding our inability to see the world energetically and only as object:

To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or negative value must have been utterly necessary for our ancestors’ survival . . .

Later he writes:

‘Our way of perceiving is the predator’s way,’ he said to me on one occasion. ‘A very efficient manner of appraising and classifying food and danger.’

Maybe that’s why the US has two political parties which force candidates into views they may not believe in so that their overall belief system corresponds to the party. With two parties, instead of ten, there is more forced agreement and less friction after an election for the candidates and for the electorate.

Because astrology is comprehensive, there are balances to the extremes of Saturn and Pluto. The top two balances that come to mind are Venus, which rules pleasure, and Neptune, which rules undefined spirituality, undefined life, oneness. Neither planet does well in the totalitarian state.

Neptune is the chaos that Saturn and Pluto are trying to control. For some of Pluto’s orbit around the sun, it is actually inside the orbit of Neptune. And since Pluto has been demoted by the astronomical world and is no longer a “planet,” Neptune becomes the most distant planet.

Pluto can’t control Neptune, not really. Pluto can’t carve its manifesto in a wall of fog.

Neptune has won.