Astrology to me isn’t a belief system but simply a description. But like all descriptions or belief systems, it can get in the way of direct experience. Creativity, I believe, is the key to having descriptions, thoughts or beliefs but not getting trapped by them.

A local aura reader quoted her late husband as saying that people are like light bulbs and that every belief is like a sticker put on that bulb. The more stickers you put on that bulb, the less light that shines through. To shine fully, you need to remove the stickers.

Astrology has symbolism for this very idea in the planet Mercury. Mythological Mercury takes messages between the gods. Astrological Mercury delivers messages between the parts of your personality.

Imagine being dropped in a new country and not speaking the language but being provided an interpreter. While it’s nice to have an interpreter who will tell you not only what everyone is saying but what everyone is doing, you still wish you could speak the language and directly experience this new, interesting country.

You might even get tired of having an interpreter around all day. You might get the urge to run into the town square and eat something unknown from one of those food carts forgetting that you can’t be understood.

What’s interesting, too, about belief, is how it projects our own fears right back to us. Thinking the other day about doomsday prophecies that come from the new age movement, religion, science and technology (interesting – they come from all disciplines), I was struck, again, but how most of the scenarios of our doomsday prophecies arise from our own actions.

If we examine closely our beliefs, it’s interesting to see how clearly they match our personality. Are our beliefs simply a projection of self?

The prevalence of doomsday prophecies would suggest we don’t think as highly of ourselves as we’d like to believe.

All of the inner planets in astrology represent the personality as we define it – moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn are where we connect with society and bring those characteristics into our personality.

Astrology also contains symbolism for a way out of the personality – the outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Uranus creates a crack in the egg of the personality. Neptune dissolves what’s left and then Pluto transforms this into new energy (which some call evolution).

Does that sound fun or terrifying?

Astrology has the symbolism for its own dissolution. Astrology is a ship with an escape hatch. Fascinating.

Creative astrology, then, might be a path that takes us into our personality then out the other side, like a black hole, into direct experience.

While trying to understand why we get trapped in what’s called dogma, a friend provided the analogy of fishing. The key, he said, is to take the food off the hook without getting caught in the hook.

One way of not getting caught is to have creative fun with your beliefs. The image that comes to mind is of the house cat chasing its food around like a toy. The cat protects its food and surely takes it very seriously; but at the same time, it’s sometimes just a toy.