a physical basis

[Bruce_Scofield]

I wrote a nice long, carefully edited piece and, apparently because my login - which I had done - flopped somehow, it was deleted. This happened a couple of times before when I changed screens - you'd think I'd learn this page is not like my email.

So first I agreed with John that system science, cybernetics, chaos and complexity were streams of thought in science that are still developing - but they need to mature in order to understand astrology which is a mapping technique for dynamic systems. I wouldn't hold my breath for a breakthrough as astrology seems to be very good at remaining outside the dominant society. So if non-reductionist system science, and its attendant complicated math, is eventually capable of putting a framework on astrology, then Plato and Pythagoras, and Descartes and Galileo, were on track.

Then I commented on Robert's question about scale factors in astrology by arguing that pods of people constitute a kind of separate system from the individuals in them. This was demonstrated vividly years ago when I played 5 nights a week with my band and correlated dance floor behaviors with planetary diurnal cycles. Pods of people are no different than flocks of birds. So if a group is a system, then it should respond to the same signals, resonances as Kepler would have it, as do individuals. I went into a thing about astrology and plane crash and 911 victims - but all gone down the cyberhole.

Then I elaborated on my explanation for how natal astrology works. Circadian cycles drive all organisms, from unicellular to elephants, and accounts for daily and yearly rhythms. The sun signal gets imprinted at birth - at a point in its diurnal cycle - which is the houses. So does the tidal lunar factor - again a house marks its diurnal cycle point. Then, as the physical and social self begins assembly in childhood, there are periods of imprint vulnerbility at the solar return, or demi-solar, or the planetary returns that occur in resonance with the solar return. This is when the planet signals are imprinted - maybe by a kind of magnetic resonance which would account for the geometric qualities of astrology. What happens at the time of imprint vulnerbility, the actual events and circumstances, becomes the content of a newly established neural network. Transits and progressions are a stimulus to the imprints and they fire up the appropriate neural networks - things are remembered, thoughts happen, choices are made - mostly unconsciously. It looks to us like destiny. Once the system is up and running, and the environment, personal and social, is being successfully navigated, then the system becomes self conscious and begins the work of figuring itself out.

[John_Townley]

Know the feeling, Bruce. Did the same in my ultimate post over on the “qualities of time” section, lost everything and gave up until the next day, recreated it, and by then everyone there had moved elsewhere …composing offline and pasting is the only way…

As you by now know, I greatly agree with your systems approach (Bob, too, I believe, as we kind of developed a similar version working together back in the ‘80s), but as one systematically breaks it down into parts (into transits, progressions, returns, and so on), I think it’s important to be consistent with the original concept and not stray off into linguistic traps -- and to explain the large suppositions that go with each step (some intuitively made from experience) before using them to bear the weight of the next step.

To begin with, there’s the concept of something getting “imprinted” at birth (or at any other step). Imprinted on what (a pre-first-breath system?), and how? That slip of thought both originates in and leads back to suppositions of separate soul essence, spiritual worlds, and the like which get so mixed with astrology. A system, by its nature, is the evolution of a set of initial conditions, which aren’t imprinted on anything (that would be separate, if at all). And, it is part of the same trap as the reflexive within most languages. When you look at yourself, what is doing the looking, and what is being looked at? Self-reference continuously implies something apart from that being referenced, and it’s the logical gateway to all sorts of inventions and projections, like a hall of mirrors.

It gets worse when you start to scale or fractalize. If, for instance, secondary progressions are a fractal “imprint” of the first three months of life, how and why do they turn up only later, at that particular scale? And is the solar return also self-similarity in another guise…does every hour past the solar return moment mirror roughly each two weeks of the coming year (I think it may, from having kept track of my own)? Then, of course (with progressions, returns, and transits all overlapping and reinforcing or canceling each other), it’s like building a chord where each note adds more than just another voice but completely alters the whole experience (though you can mathematically pull out a single note and its effects, giving us hope for better analysis). When you get to this level, it can become quite intransigent.

One of our major problems is that we keep looking for cause and effect from one direction only, assuming one thing imprints another, with transferring signals involved in a single time dimension, perhaps really artifacts of our own construction and limited observation. Perhaps it is only structural resonance, from the point of view of certain linked, overlapping sets of initial conditions. And of course, we learn them as we go and grow, we both are and become them. And regardless of the special set of descriptions we use to communicate information about any of it at any point, we are evolutionarily built to notice lots more than we can articulate, which is why anecdotal evidence that just feels right may sometimes be the most important kind. We know more than we can say or justify – a good thing, our past key to survival, born of survival. Locked in a sea of resonance, inside and out, we move within a limited range, always returned to base by the next recurring cycle, sensing its arrival. It’s forever natural to do it, only a recent thing to explain it.

The structure of your current language itself determines what you officially recognize (or can communicate – if there’s no word for it, it’s nearly impossible to think it, and once there is, it’s easy). Musicians get a leg up, in that music is an area where natural instinct and anticipation very tightly link with the mathematics of sound. In that vein, I share your observations on audience variability as well – ten years of weekly outdoor performances right over the East River made me acutely aware of what’s visibly going on upstairs along with on and below the stage, often tightly linked. Though, the flock/pod phenomenon is often more noticeable in confined club spaces where it feeds back on itself more (and you only later notice what the sky component was), illustrating local resonances.

The idea is old (with many musical analogies), but there may yet be more to draw on than has been done. Specifically, the pure mathematics of harmony (like the Pythagorean, fifths-extrapolated scale resulting in a stretched octave) don’t quite fit actual music (and life) as it is in any culture for various reasons, ranging from the key you’re playing in to the other instruments you have to blend with (hence tempered scales), and so on. The constantly-readjusting cyclic phenomena are right there, center stage. Perhaps some new light may be shed through our ears…

[Rab_Wilkie]

JT: To begin with, there’s the concept of something getting “imprinted” at birth (or at any other step). Imprinted on what (a pre-first-breath system?), and how? That slip of thought both originates in and leads back to suppositions of separate soul essence, spiritual worlds, and the like which get so mixed with astrology. A system, by its nature, is the evolution of a set of initial conditions, which aren’t imprinted on anything (that would be separate, if at all). And, it is part of the same trap as the reflexive within most languages. When you look at yourself, what is doing the looking, and what is being looked at? Self-reference continuously implies something apart from that being referenced, and it’s the logical gateway to all sorts of inventions and projections, like a hall of mirrors.

Rab: Although I know little about embryology and prenatal development, from what I gather
there's plenty of potential for imprinting during those 9 months, particularly at the earliest
stage following conception and at birth when the whole system is in shock. Also, we'd not
just be looking at imprint or influence on the embryo or fetus but also on the whole organism
i/e the mother, because they are effectively one until separation at cord-cut.

Percy Seymour (astronomer) has some interesting thoughts on this, in relation to magnetic
fields & pulses; and I think Michael Persinger (neuroscientist) would, too, if he applied his
findings on consciousness & identity ~ as affected by terrestrial magnetic fields ~ to astrology and embryological development.

-=Rab

[Michael Erlewine]

Dear John, Bruce, and Rab,

Enjoyed the above posts and have been following along with this thread. I only have one thing to add here and I will try to be brief.

I would draw your attention to the repeated use of the word (and concept) of ‘imprinting’ used in your posts. My problem with this concept of imprinting is that it reinforces implicitly what I consider a dualism that is not helpful, the idea of something imprinting or doing something to ‘us,’ as in “at the moment of our birth we are imprinted” etc.. Something ‘out there’ is imprinting on us ‘down here’. From my view, this does not serve us well.

Instead, I feel we could find another way to express what we are describing here, a way that would suggest that, rather than something doing something to us, instead we take on characteristics voluntarily, perhaps along the Wordsworth line of “But trailing clouds of glory do we come,” and so on.

The benefit of this alternate approach is that it makes us part of the creator and the creative process. It could just be my non-theist background piping up, but my instant reaction to describing this process as being 'imprinted on' is that we are losing some autonomy here. I may not be able to put this properly in words, but I hope you get the idea. Any thoughts?

[John_Townley]

I am afraid I agree with Michael’s slightly different way of saying that looking for “imprints” may be barking up the wrong tree, or an overly local one. In an attempt to graft astrology to classical biology and modern psychology, Seymour and others have suggested simple but yet-unobserved mechanisms to solve a set of connections that may require a more inclusive approach. Not that there aren’t plenty of classically vulnerable times when we might get somehow imprinted like a baby duckling to its mother and follow that around the rest of our lives. But that approach requires a virtual host of different mechanisms to explain every twist and turn, and hearkens back to the anthropocentric level of scientific (and religious) thinking that insists we’re the center of attention here, which constantly leads us astray. It’s a little like constructing complex epicycles to explain something much simpler.

The first and most intractible problem is that astrology doesn’t just portray the affairs of people, or even living organisms per se. Anything that has a beginning has a horoscope and all that entails: some directly or indirectly involve one or more living creatures (nations, businesses, ships, buildings) some entirely non-living (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis), and that is where imprinting fails and pure systems approach seems more promising. Living organisms, with their ability to quickly store and reinvoke environmental information and its cycles, seem like the main event, but that’s primarily because that’s at our scale and we’re viewing it with our available set of receptors.

I think we need to find some fairly simple, inclusive parameters that scale well and then compare them. I’ve suggested some of the possible how and why, and the problems involved, at http://www.astrococktail.com/moonondeck.html at perhaps too great length. But, for the beginning, I think we need to look at fewer but more inclusive sets of rules and principles and then see if the complexity we see around us actually might result from their interaction. If not, back to the drawing board. In the midst of the blindingly contradictory complexity of the moment, what we experience is primarily constructed by the interaction and extrapolation of fairly simple generators, whether it’s an endlessly-scaling fractal from a simple formula or a cacophony of sound built from a handful of sine waves. We need to find the order where it originates, not where it seems to have been just before we most immediately experienced it.

[Roy_Kirkland]

OK - I'll admit that I haven't read every post in this topic, but how about Quantum Physics? I haven't learned the math yet, but from what I've read, this school of thought seems to be a very likely candidate for developing a mathematical proof of astrology. I think that Quantum Physics may be the only branch of science capable of developing a model of the physical universe in which astrologers find acceptable explanations of the phenomena we work with every day...

ZPF - the Zero-Point Field - by lowering a particle's temperature (rate of vibration) as close as possible to absolute zero (which we cannot reach, or our mechanism of observation would fail since there is no vibration to be sensed), we have discovered that, within billionths of a degree of absolute zero subatomic "particles" emerge from nowhere, exchange energy with other newly emerged particles and disappear back into nothingness - a sort of primordial activity of the universe. These 'vibrations', or events, make up what we call reality, but there is something special about them. Emergent events, sharing that 10 E-23 (10 to the minus 23rd, can't figure out how to do a superscript) second of existence are 'entangled'. The vibrations they produce also become entangled into other particles and waves, clumping together and jumping from one energy level to another (the way planets jump from one sign to another). At one time, everything that we know of emerged together in what is called the big bang. Which means that everything we can know in this life, experiences some degree of quantum entanglement to something else. And that means that they are non-locally related - such that a change in one of two entangled items happens at the same moment as that change in another, regardless of their distance from one another. This non-locality lost Einstein, but it has been proven. So the correspondence lists of the old 'occult' textbooks (and the neo-platonist writings of Ficino, the medical textbooks etc.) seem, to some degree, to validate Quantum Theory, although in language that their authors understood.

Some even look at the ZPF (it's called the Zero-Point field because the net energy of these interactions is zero - they occur in one one-hundredth-sextillionth of a second) - as explaining both inertia and gravity - something the old physics could not adequately do, and a lot more like like what meditation teachers have to say than the guys who invent stuff like leaded gasoline and freon.

There is something called the Transactional Model which remote viewers (and physicists, like Hal Puthoff, who was involved in studying practical applications for psychic phenomena at SRI for years) are interested in, because it may be the key as to how precognition works. In this theory, particles can receive information from the future - it's a lot more complicated than this, and I am not in a position to write anything eloquent about it (because I am seriously time-challenged at the moment), but basically, photons (example) send information into the future and receive feedback from the future. As I read a paper on the subject, I thought that "this is the reality that I work with every day". I'll talk more about this in the future.

Amazing - multibillion dollar experiments with machines some fear will reboot the world; re-inventing metaphysics. Modern scientists believe that everything is vibration; things exhibit similarities and differences due to their varying rates of vibration; all things are combinations and therefore subject to separation (according to the frequency of a particular thing's synergetic existence); and that the present, future and past exist both simultaneously and separately (uh, and don't really exist - substantially).

Anyway, teachers of mine have pointed me in the direction of the experience of kunzhi - the limitless ground of being. From the way it is described by Tibetans, it seems a lot like the Zero-Point field; so does Azilut in Kabbalah. I'm not really big on valuing things by the perceived values of other things - I think that makes me kind of a postmodernist. Don't hold me to defending any of these positions - I'm just picking this stuff up as I have time, and I reserve the right to change my opinion by observing it more closely (a la Heisenberg).

[Michael Erlewine]

Lacking perhaps an Einstein or Heisenberg, we astrologers are content to follow the tangle of threads that modern physics and science extend in time for us. At least it seems we adopt their lingo, sophisticated as it is, and it is. Roy Kirkland’s smorgasbord post has something for everyone in there. I know I enjoyed my favorite morsel, the Tibetan = Zero Point comment.

Yet no matter how sophisticated and articulate we are, that sophistication doesn’t seem to push us over the top to where we think we want to go – whatever we could agree that is. Even a casual reading of the posts in this thread leaves me with the impression that we are indeed “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” At least we can’t seem to get there. And it appears to me that we have been here for a very long time, at least as far back as I can remember in astrology – many decades. In other words, why try to be so subtle when it appears there is nothing very subtle about the fact that we can't quite figure all of this out?

Years ago, in the Neo-Astrology conferences held at our center, we had some of the brightest minds in our field, astrologers like Theodore Landscheidt, Robert Schmidt, Michel Gauquelin, Charles Harvey, Charles Jayne, Robert Hand, John Townley, and dozens of others embroidering the edges of these same themes. Nothing is that new. It seems to me we repeatedly come up against a threshold we have yet to cross, which brings me to my favorite topic.

Isn’t it time we at least took a peek at ‘who’ is doing all this thinking and pondering, this research and speculating, the lens we all are peering through, our own mind? If we are interested to note that the Tibetans have some resonant concepts with modern physics, they sure did not come up with them through access to the fringe of modern science, unless it too has folded in on itself as some suspect. They came from the Tibetan preoccupation with the mechanism that does all the looking and searching, the mind itself.

To me it seems that we continue to peer through the same old obscured spectacles we have been looking through for most of a century, yet we are averse to cleaning those glasses, and it never occurs to us to add the mind itself to our list of science projects. Yet, the mind is what we use to perform everything we are discussing here. Why is this? The Tibetan answer is simple, and I quote from a Tibetan Buddhist teaching on Mahamudra:

“Our deepest habit is to (at all costs) avoid seeing our mind as it really is.”

In other words, ignorance, ignoring. We are whistling in the dark and the Tibetans are gently pointing out to us that even the flame from a single match will remove the accumulated darkness of ages. I suggest we get on the same page with them.

[Rab_Wilkie]

[quote="Michael Erlewine"]Dear John, Bruce, and Rab,

I would draw your attention to the repeated use of the word (and concept) of ‘imprinting’ used in your posts. My problem with this concept of imprinting is that it reinforces implicitly what I consider a dualism that is not helpful, the idea of something imprinting or doing something to ‘us,’ as in “at the moment of our birth we are imprinted” etc.. Something ‘out there’ is imprinting on us ‘down here’. From my view, this does not serve us well.

Instead, I feel we could find another way to express what we are describing here, a way that would suggest that, rather than something doing something to us, instead we take on characteristics voluntarily, perhaps along the Wordsworth line of “But trailing clouds of glory do we come,” and so on. //

=-

Imprinting & Autonomy

Is there a physical basis for astrological effects? That's the question.
So whether or not that basis involves autonomous acceptance or blind
fate seems to relate to another issue ~ the venerable fate vs free will
debate. (Or to the nature of karma, its results, and the role of Will or
Volition).

An extreme example of imprinting: somebody gets hit by a truck. Did
that person decide to take on the characteristics of broken bones?
(Which could result in being maimed for life). Not likely. More likely
the accident was due to a lapse of awareness. A mistake. Crossing
the road with a distracted mind.

But are we not looking at how such effects are registered (imprinted)
and how this impression shapes or limits experience and potentials
thereafter, irrespective of whether they were chosen/accepted or
accidental? And maybe the crux is not so much cause & effect but the
*medium* that translates the one into the other? The (missing) link.

This link can be very obvious and unmysterious. Give hot sealing wax an
impression and it will replicate thereafter what it has received. (If we
imbue the wax seal with basic awareness it will experience the process
and what it does, choicelessly.. according to its 'habit').

If I am a complete being, conscious of myself from head to toe, I understand
that within my makeup there are parts like wax and parts like air. In other
words, some parts get impressed and hold that impression for quite some
time; other parts are less impressionable and can shuck off efects rather
quickly, (or know how to duck).

Actually, I am a hierarchy of elements, from gross to subtle. (From Greek
basic to the Chinese five, and beyond unto the Vajrayana six or seven, or
the Qabalist Ain Soph & Aur; yea, even unto the Zero Point, the inscrutable
Alpha/Omega and the Druid I-A! in the wheeling rebirth continuum of AOUEI
- YHVH.. but I digress, trailing clouds of glory).

The happy domain of astrology, however, is among the lower ethers. We
might be looking up or down to figure out what's happening, towards grosser
or finer elements, but should we restrict ourselves and astrology to an
ethereal ambit, the isolation could produce many mystakes.

The thing is, we are immersed in all kinds of influences and being affected
and responding at all levels (at varying degrees of speed, from simultaneously
to never). And to be looking for a physical basis or mechanism means that we
have a long way to go, making several kinds of connection before we hit paydirt.
And get grounded. (Then, shazam! With dreadful thump, the lightning bolt
annihilates the rock. Having prepared the path, the result can be swift).

-=Rab Wilkie

[Michael Erlewine]

Rab Wilkie,

“And to be looking for a physical basis or mechanism means that we have a long way to go, making several kinds of connection before we hit pay dirt. And get grounded.”

A perfect statement that sums up for me what this thread is all about, trying to ground astrology in the physical. From the standpoint of esoteric studies, the standard dichotomy (if we divide things into two) is between those beings concerned with evolution (evolving or freeing themselves from the physical – getting out) and those beings concerned with involution (getting more into life and into the physical – getting in). In this forum, with a very articulate bunch of us concerned with the physical, we would (in the traditional esoteric language) represent the second type, those who find themselves not grounded enough and want to incarnate or become more physical.

Rab writes:

“… but should we restrict ourselves and astrology to an ethereal ambit, the isolation could produce many mistakes.”

Here again we see the concern with getting too ethereal or ‘far out’ and not grounded enough, perhaps making mistakes. The desire here is to ground or incarnate, to make sense, and to take possession of the physical and the flesh.

As it so happens, I am also of this same type, more interested in involution than in evolution, that is: getting my hands on some physical talisman for astrology, a touchstone, what psychics used to call “getting on your contacts.”

And my point here is not so much to psychologize as it is to point out that we astrologers, in general, tend to be ‘out there’ (like in the heavens) trying to make sense and ground ourselves here on Earth. It is probably no accident that this particular thread has more views than any other in the forum.

In this thread we are trying to find a physical touchstone for our astrology. How appropriate that is. And so, while I too would like to resolve this ‘physical basis’ concern so many astrologers share, I also find it interesting to examine how we view all of this while we are searching for these answers.

In other words, our concern for the physical underlines our somewhat disembodied state of mind, pretty much by definition. And therefore my concern with trying to get us to pay more attention to the mind itself is not intended to disengage in any way (get farther out) from the physical, but rather to lessen what we might term materialistic attachment (desire) for the physical, to perhaps develop some needed perspective, and simply to allow the mind to rest, much like we might release a tired grip in order to take a more relaxed one.

Forgive me if this is too exotic for this particular forum, but I thought I would add my two cents here, in case there was an interest in this kind of more esoteric perspective.

Anyway, this forum is where all the action is at. <G>

[John_Townley]

Thank you Michael, for naming this the subject of the hour, and recognizing its inward-physical-manifestation direction despite your inclination to go in the opposite direction. I also think, even if we are only trying to get more specific, we still have a “lens” problem and that is language, as I have said repeatedly, the gateway to the mind (or between minds). Definitions of what we are trying to investigate vary, from person to person, culture to culture, and generation to generation. We lack agreed frameworks on which to hang our investigations, such as they might be, and the result is we muddle around a lot without much progress. We tend to liken some of the more metaphorical conclusions of quantum physics (on the small side) and cosmology (on the large side) to astrological concepts and then just leave it there, as if that were sufficient, without connecting any real, hard dots. Yet another Tao Of Physics is just treading water…

Michael was also right to write earlier in the thread and again now that a lot of what we’ve been saying is a repeat of what was discussed in the 1980s ACT gatherings, lots of generalities and theories of possible causalities, but ultimately no place to proceed with it. Not that things haven’t changed some since then. The sciences themselves have changed greatly, with fractals, chaos theory, string theory and multiverses and lots more, in both physical and biological sciences (hey, Larmackism is creeping back!) all crowding for attention and seeming to border on astrological observations (or is it the other way round?). But still, we eagerly debate their implications without getting down to brass tacks, as before. I say “as before” advisedly, as back then I actually dragged George Salley, one of NASA’s best early AI developers (he did the Viking Lander software), into the midst of an esteemed group of astrological software developers (who shall remain unnamed) to make some suggestions where we could go to adopt leading edge programming, especially expert systems and AI. After much general discussion, George said OK, enough talk, let’s sit down and “write some code.” I never heard such deafening silence and confusion. After an afternoon of drawing a complete blank from everyone, he went home the next day, nothing accomplished, a major opportunity missed. But, that’s what happens when you talk only from what might or ought to be without getting down to some (any) specifics and working back to generalities and see if they fit.

In the spirit of clarification and getting down to writing some code, I suggest we spontaneously break into some separate sub-threads (as almost happened early on, but without much follow-up on anything but this “physical basis” thread). I particularly note that Ray and Bruce both have some very specific research projects underway that address both details and new methodologies of handling them. I’d love to hear more from each. And they are not alone. In the twenty-odd years since the last ACT gatherings, a lot of people inside and outside astrology have been quietly publishing research involving hard, specific data that we should be aware of and look more closely at. Like, for one, Bernie Taylor’s marvelous Biological Time (q.v. at http://www.astrococktail.com/biotime.html ) which gathers an amazing amount of funded research in official science that obviously links to astrology. Know of any other current gems we should be looking at that we’re missing? For a couple of decades there were often-surfacing, outside-world studies from the likes of Arnold Lieber to A. L. Brown, not to mention the Gauquelins (actually in the field), ranging from behavioral anomalies to lunar cycles of colloidal silver – but rather like studies of recreational drugs, the research slipped back into the woodwork to avoid unwanted attention from the likes of CSICOP and our own fringies.

One could break it up in several ways. Discussions of particular experiments or studies would be fascinating. So would thoughts on what would be useful places to study that might yield more fruitful results, along with better methodologies to apply to them so we would be speaking interdisciplinary language, in the interest of better articulating the “somewhat disembodied state of mind” (thanks, Michael!) we tend initially to bring to the subject. Current efforts within various subsets of the environmental sciences are probably fertile ground to look for such.

What say you, folks? Any place we should look for specifics to latch on to? Anybody we should be looking at publishing in other fields? Who’s doing the grunt work elsewhere which might (if properly repurposed) lend credence to our grander theories already expressed here? If there is new and palpable interface (however unheralded) between astrology and the sciences, where is it? And if not, where should it be encouraged, who to call and what to do to make it happen in real terms? I’m ready to take notes…