The thesis of this post is to give brief descriptions of what led me to astrology and of its main advantage over other personality systems on account of its being an “open system”. I will also mention in the conclusion what I believe to be its purpose. This is not a technical description of any aspect of astrology, nor is it an account defending its validity. There will be more on those topics later!
For the last 10 years, I have been independently researching the human personality in its many conceptions, including but not limited to Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Enneagram, Big 5, and Hermann Brain Dominance Indicator. One of the reasons for my interest in this is to give myself an intellectual framework within which to understand other people. The reason I need an intellectual framework within which to understand people is because I almost completely devoid of empathy.
OMG!
It’s true. I don’t care about you.
This doesn’t mean I don’t value your existence, however, nor does it mean that I’m not intuitive of morals and intentions – that I don’t know things that transcend the facto-linguistic realm. Not at all. In fact, I’m probably more intuitive than most because I lack empathy. At the end of the day, the truth doesn’t care about how you feel, and since I can’t feel what you feel, then I can’t be distracted by it, and so I can intuit the truth unhindered. I can tell quite clearly when someone is behaving in a way that is directed by their emotions and impulses, completely devoid of thought. Although I cannot share the experience of those feelings, I can still observe them and “play the role” of some beneficial course of action. Intuition and feelings are not the same. Personality systems have given me secret knowledge that helps me to do that.
One thing that I intuitied growing up as a virtual-sociopath is that people’s words and actions almost never lined up. I couldn’t simply ask them why they act the way that they do. They’d just lie, usually for ego-preservation.
‘Maybe they just don’t think before they speak or act.’
‘Maybe they’re just animals, and I’m the only rational being on the planet.’
‘Maybe they’re just less intelligent. I mean, I’m the only one around here in a “gifted” program, right?’
‘Maybe this is just how humans are, and I’m actually an alien.’
These are all thoughts that I had as a child. I didn’t get it. I could put patterns of behavior together, but I didn’t get why those patterns were so. Adults were kids to me, and kids were infants. I was an old soul, an impartial observer looking down on everyone. I couldn’t share what I cared about with people in the way I wanted to: e.g. my thoughts, my jokes, my music, my writing, etc. Interest would spark for a moment, but they would quickly lose attention like a dog getting distracted by things of impulse, completely devoid of thought and substance. Their lack of understanding forced me into isolation. I was used to and naturally inclined toward being alone, and I found solitude at a very early age, but did I need to be alone always? That didn’t seem right.
It wasn’t all premature narcissism, by the way. In fact, to be clear, I’ve never had a superiority complex that outweighed an inferiority complex somewhere else in my being. So, as I was looking to understand others more, I knew I had to try at least as hard to understand myself, where my inner balance was to be found. There were certain norms that I just didn’t understand or abide by: I think before I speak and act, so why would I apologize if I meant it? Giving should be a reflection of your understanding of and love for a person, so why would I exchange presents with someone just because it is Christmas and when I don’t know or like them? Why would I date or be intimate with someone before understanding myself? Wouldn’t I just fuck up their life? This all seemed like reckless behavior to me, and it still does to a large degree.
Fast-forwarding to young adulthood, I had found a personality system or two (starting with MBTI) that made it all begin to make sense – why I was the way I was and how those ways were different from others. I began to practice those foreign social norms a bit more frequently as I tweaked my social value structure ever so slightly to accommodate this new knowledge. I became a more likable and outgoing person overall. I became much more balanced. I became much more aware of other value structures that people lived by and more forgiving of them for being wrong (and for not caring that they were).
However, I came to exhaust the systems I had been studying. I knew everything about them, but I still didn’t know everything about people. They were closed systems. I needed more if I were to know the full truth.
The problem with a closed system is that what you can learn about its subject is limited to that system’s structure while the subject, especially in the case of human personality, is virtually unlimited. What happens in research within a closed system is that when you gain precision, you lose the probability of accuracy. The more detailed a rabbit hole you go into, the less generally-true it becomes because the more conditional that truth becomes on the unquestioned, and false, general theory. Whatever actual truth is found is by a stroke of luck and often not recognized. That “knowledge” will therefore be severely limited in usefulness for individual cases. The point of knowledge is to be used, right?
Carl Jung is known as the founding father of MBTI because of his work in “Personality Types”, but in the preface to that book, he warns of the limitations of taking the “cognitive functions” at face-value, formulating rigid types on their basis, and then stuffing every individual into one of 16 boxes. The more boxes, the more accurate each will be for some individual, but these typing systems should be taken with a pinch of salt when in fact, if the point of personality psychology (as with any science) is to be generally accurate as well as precise, then there are as many personality types as there are people on earth. Closed systems lack depth and substance despite their frequent utility. Jung acknowledged that his system was a closed one and would probably bawk at where MBTI has taken his ideas, though he wouldn’t be surprised.
I share Jung’s sentiments, and I could say that astrology found me more than I found it. It found me, perhaps cosmically, because I actually care about what is true (and maybe that’s all I care about), and that truth is best for everyone whether or not one wants it. Astrology immediately began to account for all of the mistakes of the other systems I had studied, and it seemed to have infinite substance beyond that. It seemed to be metaphysical as well as quantifiable on the local level. How could it “do it all” philosophically and scientifically?
For one, astrology is not a closed system and is therefore virtually un-masterable. My mastery of the other personality systems forced me to grow out of them. I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about people simply because I know everything there is to know about those systems. That would be foolish. Those systems are rational conceptualizations with limits and flaws as obvious as the people who created them. In realizing those flaws, I had to move on to discover astrology. It was just the natural progression that my interest took me in. It contains all of the knowledge of the other systems combined more holistically, and it has an abundance of additional knowledge that is intended to be useful as long as one is truly open to learning without ego. Each astrological natal chart is unique to that person. It cannot on the whole apply to any other person on earth when it is properly understood. As I began to study mine, I began to see the openness of the system. It seemed like a “system of systems” in fact, as its micro-theories remain fluid. It can afford this fluidity and still remain consistently oriented toward general truth because it has no general theory governing it. The general theory, if any, is simply “that Truth-itself and about oneself matters”.
Astrology does not contain a general theory, nor is it a religion, nor is it a belief system of any sort. As astrologer Edwin Learnard says, “the stars may impel but do not compel.” It simply regards humans as ancient, spiritual beings possessing a unique and unlimited degree of complexity, which we obviously are, and goes from there. We can still willfully direct our lives despite where our nature may incline us. Our complexity must be fleshed out in both specific and general ways. Most scientific approaches to understanding human personality are only specific or general, but not both. Again, when you gain precision, you lose the probability of accuracy. Astrology becomes more accurate in detail, however. It challenges one to constantly go between dilating and constricting focus every time a new bit of information is presented. The more you do this, the more you can see in detail, and then the bigger the picture you can gain of the individual as a being who transcends the sum of those individual parts. Because of this, Carl Jung himself regarded astrology as representing “the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity” although he never wrote a formal work on the subject.
The last point that I will emphasize – and there will be more technical posts to follow – is that the will to learn is vital when it comes to astrology. There is no rational argument that will convince the most intelligent person in the world to take astrology seriously if they are unwise and unwilling to look inward. Yes, there are many people who learn about it in its shallow, pop-horoscope manifestations for self-validation purposes, but that is neither its purpose nor will that be its effect if you take learning about it seriously. That is not what looking inward affords you. Astrology presents what is, allowing you to make the choice to look inward, and that will destroy you before it validates you, hence the fear surrounding it.
Of course, by looking inward, one also is forced to look outward. One should always be doing both – dilating and constricting focus from general to specific and back. There are qualities within us that are both general and specific, as well as we individuals are specific parts of our general reality. Without understanding yourself, you cannot know how to fit into reality as it is. If personality research is your preferred means of gaining self-awareness, that most local part of “that which is”, astrology is the best of those means. I know because I have studied them all, and after just one year of researching astrology, I find that I know more about myself and about people in general, yet I simultaneously discover every day how little I know about astrology, about people, about the universe, and about what is most true. If you’re learning in the right way, then the more you learn, the more you find that you don’t actually know.
The truth is a skittish, feral cat. You cannot act too quickly. You must sit without attitude and expectation, and let it come to you if and when it is meant to. Astrology, as it seems to me, is the only avenue toward understanding human nature and the self that is systematically without hubris. It simply presents all that is, leaving you to discover why.
Overthought Consulting 