To Realise One’s Nature

Post by Wanda Smit

Wanda Smit explains the significance of astrological psychology for her own path of personal growth and development, in this extract from the introduction to her ebook One Cosmic Day.

“We are all deprived; we are all disappointed; and therefore we are all, in some sense, idealists. The need to link the real and the ideal is a perpetual tension, never resolved so long as life persists, but always productive of new, attempted solutions.”

Anthony Storr in The Dynamics of Creation

Why do I spend so much time with others and so little by myself?
Why do I clash with my father when my brother and sister don’t?
Why am I always disappointed in my relationships?
Why did I look after my parents for thirty years?
Why don’t I ever reach the goals I set for myself?

You can continue asking questions like these throughout a lifetime. Some people never find the answers. Some people never ask the questions. Rather, they suppress unsettling thoughts arising from their unconscious. Yet to find the pearl – of wisdom, hopefully – oyster divers have to descend to the darkest depths, more often than not on their own.

Perhaps it was these thoughts that led me, at the age of 40, to write in my journal:

“Rather than return to my therapist, I shall unravel the dense web of mystery, word for word, sentence for sentence. Once I believed, like the psychologists, that if language was at the root of one’s disease, then language could cure one. And although I no longer know whether it is true, I shall do it anyway. ‘En bonne foi’ – in good faith – as Sartre would say. But on my own. I shall find the end of one strand in the tangle and pull it out of myself, undoing the knots it has formed with others, setting it free, giving the others the space to reveal themselves in a linear fashion.

“Linearity is a masculine concept,” my friend Leanne reminded me.

Yet without it, the dancing star will not be produced from the chaos in me, but remain stillborn forever (Apologies to Nietzsche).”

But how do you unravel lines of thought and action when you don’t know where they began in the first place? Some people spend years in therapy trying to make sense of their lives. Others ask questions that might never be answered. Which is exactly what I did for most of my life: my journals teem with questions. At age 46 I wrote:

“What I want in my life is the time and the talent to write about all the emotions I’ve been through, all the people I’ve met and all the places I’ve been to; the time to assimilate everything, to see some underlying structure. Or is life just a happening with chance encounters, unresolved questions, and random insights?

At what point in life does one see any reason, any sense? Why do things change so fast? Why is change the only certainty? Or is our consciousness so underdeveloped that we can grasp nothing? Perhaps this is the downside of Homo habilis: that there is ultimately nothing to hold onto despite his immense dexterity.

Is everything in vain?”

Sometimes I did see the light, but only some years after the experience. Then, in my fifties, I studied Astrological Psychology which gave me an accurate compass to retrace the steps of my personal development.

At last I had found a methodology that worked for me in my search for meaning, albeit for my personal truth. I don’t believe there is an absolute meaning which is the same for every person. Rather, that humans create meaning in their lives based on their motivations, experiences and faith. Putting this meaning within the less subjective and more objective context of Astrological Psychology has helped me greatly on my quest to make sense of my life.

After all, we all want to live the life we were meant to live, no matter how unusual it might seem to others. As Oscar Wilde said,

“The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.”

This is where the principles of Astrological Psychology can be a guide to anyone wishing to make sense of the twists and turns of their lives. It is not predictive as prediction – what’s in the stars today? – often leads to a fulfillment of the prophecy, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Neither is it judgmental. Aspects and planetary energies in the chart are not good or bad; they stimulate, challenge or maintain growth.

“… we must be willing and able to work on ourselves, to try to see reality as it is: opportunities for individual development offered to us at different times of our lives. We must mature into reality with an awareness which is free of deception, free of protective illusions and fearsome prophecies.”

Bruno and Louise Huber in LifeClock

Featured image is an extract from the cover of One Cosmic Day.