Cosmophilia: An Approach to Astrology and Existence In 1984, an evolutionary biologist named Edward O. Wilson published a book called Biophilia. As he developed and used the term, he meant it to describe the affinity of life for itself -- of living creatures for other living creatures. The word, and the idea, was first used in a 1964 book called The Heart of Man by psychologist Erich Fromm (also author of The Art of Loving and Escape From Freedom).
Wilson in his book describes biophilia as an instinctive bond that exists among everything that's alive. While you might look out at the world and see so much strife, division and competition as to really make you wonder how that might be true. You might think the planet was overcome by biophobia. Yet there's plenty of evidence that he's right -- such as how people feel about their kids, dogs, cats, bunny rabbits, goats, gardens and house plants. Wilson, by the way, is a specialist in ants. He spends plenty of his book describing the incredible ways that ants work together as a kind of superorganism, then extends that idea to all of the life that surrounds us. We know there are people who can subvert biophilia within themselves, somewhat like a high-wire artist subverts the fear of falling. For the most part, we all crave life, and we want to be surrounded by life. This may be reduced down to a very narrow flow of appreciation, perhaps of a single person or of a tree or any one living entity…but at some point everyone feels this, many people profoundly. Continue reading →  The difference is you don't really have a choice. This is often a response to the world you live in, though it's also you that's initiating the changes in your environment, as if by some kind of psychic alchemy. You have become an inventor of your own life. And in a way that will become more apparent over the next year and beyond, technology -- especially that of language -- is your magic substance; your catalyst; your vector. But all technology counts, especially if it plugs into the wall. What changes this year as opposed to prior years is that you've invested considerable time and energy catching up with the accelerating changes in the environment. Those include the realm of business and profession, which have been in a state of implosion; your personal relationships; and most recently, your inner environment. What you may be wondering is the extent to which you have become more than your environment can handle. You've always run on the hot side, always been the one to assert yourself and unafraid to push some buttons. You've never been able to stand apart from your own individuality. Yet now you appear to be riding this one to some unknown result, though you seem to have little choice in the matter. To the extent that you've done this as some kind of follower or one who must respond, you're taking your place as an innovator and as a leader. This is especially true in your own life, but it's having repercussions on the world around you. Every day that you awaken, you simply must reinvent yourself, lest you get stuck in some stagnant corner of the past, some meaningless or outmoded idea about life. Quaint holds little appeal to you. What you want is what is to be relevant now. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.  Once you decide to focus and act on your own agenda, you'll discover that you have developed some unusual creative abilities -- that is, the power to change your world in ways that seemed impossible before. To some extent this is happening whether you focus on it or not; but the more you bring your will into the picture, the more you will be able to choose where you want to make your improvements. Rather than being compelled to respond to situations outside yourself, you get to respond to your inner changes and act as a builder following the architecture of your own personal discovery process. Being compelled to respond to seemingly external forces has been a theme of the past two years. It's as if you had to constantly adapt to situations outside of your control. During that time you've been going through such profound inner changes that you took these developments in stride. Everything became fodder for your growth. That growth has long been focused on an ongoing, profound reevaluation of everything you believe, everything you took for granted, everything that you were taught by various authority figures. Many factors suggest that you have the strength, energy and determination to do whatever you want -- acting as the initiator rather than as one who is merely subject to external circumstances. Yet no matter how much you strive to arrange, change or improve your world or the world, everything that happens remains the expression of your deep inner journey. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 There is a passionate aspiration in your charts for creative vision and the drive to create something that nobody has ever seen or experienced. Yes, there is some desire for worldly success mixed in with that impulse, but it's not the thing you're after. To my reading of the charts, it seems the thing you're wanting is to aspire to excellence, and to shape the world with some living, urgent, creative vision you have. Some days this feels inevitable. Other days it feels like grasping a cloud. Other days it feels like your ultimate responsibility. And some days you get the idea that if only you could have perfect faith in yourself, you could accomplish anything. To some extent all of these things are true. Yet there is a higher calling, which you might say amounts to accomplishing the impossible. To get there -- and I have no doubt that you will -- you need to blend your idealism and your determination with an extremely grounded approach to existence. Most people who have indeed achieved what was once considered impossible will tell you that the way they accomplished it was a little at a time, one day at a time, day after day, step by step. It is this discipline that you need -- patience, persistence and the ability to focus on one thing for what in your perception may be an unusual amount of time. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 What is interesting is how you've discovered and come to accept something that you may have doubted -- change is possible, it's necessary, and you can do it when you need to. It helps considerably if you work with the psychic and cosmic forces within you and around you. It helps if you leave the growth of other people to them and not concern yourself with their resistance. Being the nurturing person you are, you might involve yourself with that. You might think it's cold not to get too involved. Yet for others to make progress, they must to some real degree be left to their own choices. And you're feeling strong enough about yourself to know that if they want to choose you, or some experience with you, they will. I would guess that you've seen a good few times that it's pointless to try to convince people of anything. What exactly is responsible for this progress? We could look to many factors -- Pluto is one of them. Its counterpart Uranus is another, which is flooding your professional ambitions with vitality, inventiveness and a stop-at-absolutely-nothing attitude. There are other factors at work. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 You have faith in your ability not just to succeed, but also to be supportive of the people around you: your idea of love is love expressed in tangible ways. You have come to terms with how much of what you offer, tangible though it may be, is not noticed by most people. So often, the best of who you are disappears into the background of existence. And still, you give yourself credit for what you do for, and give to, other people. That is the important thing. Sometimes it seems like the right thing to be making your best contributions in the background, even though the natural impulse of Leo is to shine like the Sun. Now you no longer want to be in the background -- you want to be known and respected for the abundant good that you offer. I think this is a reasonable desire; to be valued by your community is one of the most basic human needs. It manifests in shadow form as the hero worship that characterizes the post-9/11 era of history, which allows these heroes to get away with all kinds of bullshit. I would draw a stark distinction between being valued and being a hero. As far as I can tell you will still do your best work behind the scenes, regardless of any common interpretations of your sign. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 But right now this mission, or background activity (however you're experiencing it), may have you under some unusual strain. You may be feeling the overload, wondering how you're going to keep your conduits open wide enough to handle this influx of data. Since you cannot change your environment (by which I mean the world itself), nor are you in a position to crawl under a rock or likely to relocate to a hut by the beach in Indonesia, the one thing to focus on is your perspective; another is how you respond to your environment; a third is how you define your mission. You can also learn techniques for data overload, including methods like pattern recognition. Whatever you do, an understanding of your situation will be vitally helpful. This means understanding your relationships to your environment and the people in it. Most of all it means having enough inner awareness to know how you feel, and to discern whether your current strategies are effective. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 By this I mean an actual electronic extension of the human senses and brain wraps and surrounds the planet more thoroughly than anyone besides a science fiction author could have predicted. This is chaotic, exciting, interesting and challenging. And you are feeling its effects; you are in this environment; you are involved. You may feel involved as a consumer; that much is inevitable these days. Even a rice steamer comes with an IP address and USB port. You are likely to have work responsibilities that have involved you as a participant in the digital revolution, and your old-fashioned streak may resist that as much as you find it interesting. What your charts are saying is that you're moving into some position of accomplishment and artistry, and that this has a relationship with technology. Yet this is a maturing relationship, in many ways a spiritual relationship, which is at its essence about being in harmony with your environment. Currently your role in that harmony is about mastering the technology of language, one of the oldest devices that humans have ever developed. Then that extends outward into all of the other forms of technology. So, your old-fashioned streak may be happy to hear that the very oldest technology is the one you're being called to develop and master, and this is very much an inner adventure. Remember that. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 You have your own quest for truth. That's the essential difference between these things we call religion and spirituality. What is perhaps most interesting about the way the astrology now describes your life is that the usual way that one might frame topics in a reading -- career, relationships and money -- cannot be described that way. There is something more urgent, a more alchemical level of change. Those are outer expressions informed and driven by deeper experiences of yourself, though in order to fit into the world, that level underneath is usually denied or cut off from expression. What seems to be happening to you is that those levels closer to the core of your existence are where almost all the energy is moving, and it's neither easy to reach in full and make contact with it, nor to express the energy easily and have it emerge as meaningful, tangible or productive. Because of the world's tendency toward harsh, black-and-white values, there are dimensions of inner change that seem more fragile than they are. I suggest you recognize that -- whether the delicate quality is something you feel, or something that is exposed when people begin to make contact with their actual creativity. By that I mean make contact to the point where they have no choice to express themselves in a new way, a way that seems bold and dangerous -- and that would be you. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.  The developments of 2015 will help you exteriorize and express yourself in a gradual, concentrated and focused way, without bursting. Lately we've been experiencing a degree of beyond-all-limits activity in Sagittarius (many centaurs, Pluto-like objects and asteroids). This has been coupled with the constant presence of two deep-space points -- the core of our galaxy and this even more prodigious thing called the Great Attractor, both of which have been under full activation, raising the temperature. I would be surprised if you said your life was a well-contained, neat and tidy place in recent years. While Sagittarius is the sign of single-pointed determination, there have been a lot of those centaurs' arrows flying around. And with many planets passing over the Galactic Core, one after the next since approximately 2006 when Pluto showed up there, your life has been like one long spiritual initiation. Your story would likely lend itself well to some epic novel where the protagonist goes through one life-changing event after the next, always certain that the most recent just had to be the last one. Then comes the next, and the next. Add to that the fact that planets -- potent, meaningful and full-spectrum planets -- are gathering in Pisces, the most sensitive angle of your chart (the one describing your emotional body and your extended skin the space you dwell in). This too has been going on for a while, steadily gathering in intensity for the past five years or so. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 This is a radical change from the usual values of the world -- the carrot and the stick, the end's justify the means, I'll be a doctor because they make a lot of money, I want to be famous for nothing, someone else will take care of me -- all that nonsense that has way too much cultural sanction at the moment. This year it is Vesta that will be your guide to implementing the changes that Pluto is designing for you. You will thrive on the steady pace that this influence sets for you; the foresight; the presence of mind. It will be that same property that guides you through the profound changes in the world, whether you're a witness, one who is affected or a direct participant. Pluto for its part is saying step up to direct participation, but that's not a small matter; you must bring your total presence. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 These have been critical ideas for you the past few years, as you've experimented with (or been dragged into) various leadership roles. Leadership accentuates the relationship of an individual with a group. It is a special relationship. It is a serious issue now, as people are aware that such things as consensus exist, and are insisting on more democratic ways of doing things; that is, until they figure out that it's much easier to be bossed around. Or rather, until predatory ‘leader types' figure out it's easier to boss people around, knowing that they usually fall for it -- it is, after all, more convenient to be told what to do. The theme of leadership continues to be a strong element in your chart this year, though in a distinctly different way. For about the past two years, in various ways and situations, that has involved the more formal style of leadership -- the take-charge kind. I don't think this is really on your agenda, but it's occurred as part of a development process, and as a phase it was necessary to pass through. As you may already be discovering, your role is shifting from formal to informal leadership; from what you might think of as the bureaucratic or authority-based style to the one that's about knowledge; the one that's about your respected place in the tribe. That place always has a touch of honor and a touch of outcast. They are not mutually exclusive, and I think you're familiar with how to navigate this psychic territory. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
 The message of Mars is to do this boldly. Do not hold back your visioning, especially of yourself. Pour it on. Turn it up. When in doubt, turn it up some more. You want to err on the side of expressing yourself rather than your usual tendency, which is toward understatement or subtlety. There are many reasons for this, including exercising your capacity to allow yourself out of your container. But you also need to conduct active tests of your environment to see what actually happens when you crank up the energy. A lot of the hesitation people feel about doing the bold creative expressive thing is based on the theoretical fear of what might happen when they do. What will peole think? How will they respond? Will I offend anyone? I am suggesting you experiment boldly enough to find out what actually happens when you pour on your creative energy. This more than anything will displace your largely hypothetical concerns and provide you with direct experience and feedback from your environment. I'm not saying that everything will be a breeze -- there are always practical challenges in any project. It's just that meeting real challenges is productive, where worrying about what you might encounter is not. The message of Mars is to actively, assertively visualize and describe to yourself what you want to become. What do you see yourself being (which includes doing, but mostly I mean being) in five, 10, 20 years? Adjust that picture until you like it -- and then keep it in mind, revising it as necessary. Purchase Cosmophilia by individual sign, or purchase all 12 signs.
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