Earth Stars (photo from February 25, 2018)

“The idea of counterparts somewhat shatters that old concept, yet you still want definitions for the self so that you know where you “stand.” You are so taken with the idea of labels that many follow astrology blindly. You are born at a certain time, at a certain place, under certain conditions — but consciousness always forms the conditions. If it is to some extent affected by those conditions, then, it is because the effects follow in the same way that a painter is affected by the landscape that he has himself created. So you decide to be born, say, in a certain month when the planets are thus-and-so. Ahead of time, you choose the seasons of your birth.

Now: Dictation: When you think in conventional terms about astrology, it is as if you are looking at the cover of a book, not realizing that there are many pages within it.

Some persons will be much more affected by, and sensitive to, other probabilities — which, for instance, do not show at all in conventional astrological “charts.”

The emergence of consciousness into those physical conditions automatically alters them — a fact not recognized by astrologers. Each child born alters the entire universe, and changes the world of its time and birth by bringing into it action not there earlier, in your terms, and by impressing the universe with the stamp — the indelible stamp — of its reality. Each child chooses its own probable version of any given birthdate. Such dates are obviously not just points in time, pinpointed in space. In the first place, since all time is simultaneous, you are always dying and being born, and your later experience affects the time of your birth.

Give us a moment … Using conventional astrology, you will find certain correlations, because of particular events occurring, that are indeed interrelated. Yet many individuals will not discover semblances of themselves in the charts of astrology simply because their chosen probabilities are, qualitatively speaking, so different from the “norm.”

When astrology works, it works because the astrologer is using his or her creative and psychic abilities, and then projecting that knowledge into a pattern that is of itself too small to contain it. The chart then simply becomes an aid.”

“An imaginary ant, a philosophical one, might sit and in its own way contemplate how often you walked the floor in a period that might seem like a year to it. It might try to calculate your next passage ahead of time, so that — prudent ant! — it could run “out of the way” in time to avoid your footsteps.

Your rumbling tread might shake its tiny home beneath certain floorboards, or in the crevices between. I admit that I am stretching our ant tale here, but imagine further that our little fellow becomes familiar with everyone in, say, an apartment house, learning to recognize all of the footsteps that go up and down the stairs. Our philosopher keeps in touch with the other ants, until with time and work and patience, a chart is made and calculations drawn. An ant born at three o’clock in the afternoon, when Miss X comes home with her boyfriend, is apt to have a hard time of it — for the couple runs about exuberantly, shaking all of the establishment, and tumbling the dust in the inner crevices.

I am not comparing astrologers with ants. I am, however, trying to show you that you are not ruled by the stars — and that when you behave as if you are, then you are showing as little comprehension of your true position as our ant did. You are small in relationship to the stars, also, but when you seek to place your fate in their hands, figuratively speaking, then it does seem as if you have little control over your own destiny.”

—UR2 Section 6: Session 729 January 13, 1975 (courtesy of Jane Roberts/Seth Quotes Facebook page)