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I liked it too, Kirk. The trines and sextiles to the Ascendant and the planets which joy in those houses. Very interesting, and dare I say "rational" :wink: Made a lot of sense to me since I have Sun in 9th ruling 5th.

However
Scientists and astrologers, and everyone else on Earth, often suffer from the same affliction: too much Saturn, too many boundaries.
:-| Too much Saturn? You can never have too much Saturn, imo. My favourite planet :D

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A bias against science by astrologers may be just as counterproductive as a bias against astrology by scientists. I think there is much common ground to be discovered. While I think it is necessary for astrology to occasionally retreat into the less objective world of myth and enchantment, it is also necessary to occasionally find ways to rationally objectify the myths and enchantments.

As I mentioned earlier, I?ve developed my own thinking in this subject more along the psychological lines of projection and identification as a process, instead of enchantment, but I?m trying to adapt here. I am generally in agreement with what Kirk said:
I think of the logical and rational mind as a tool which we need, but the tool at times is dissolved, dislocated, released, in order for something larger to come through.
Sometimes, however, it goes the other way. Enchantment itself can become limiting and it is rationality that brings awareness of something larger. The following is based on a true story.

When an American marine biologist first came to the archipelago on Canada?s west coast, she came to study the enchanting songs of the orcas. After some time living in this enchanting world she notices that the baby wild salmon are being decimated by sea lice. After some investigation by netting fish and counting sea lice, she traces the sea lice problem to the new commercial fish farms. The sea lice are spreading to the wild salmon and the population is plummeting. She knows that while everything flows down from the mountains, the salmon are the only thing taking life and fertility back up the mountains, for the eagles, bears, Douglas firs, and other abundant life on shore. Motivated by her disenchantment and the vision that flows from her rationality, she directs her research towards saving the enchanted archipelago with a renewed purpose.

If the marine biologist had been content just to live in the enchanted world she found, she might have been oblivious to the subtle failures in the ecosystem that would eventually lead to its collapse.

As Deb said earlier, enchantment is not a permanent state. I would go so far as to suggest that enchantment is transitional and ephemeral. I believe enchantment and disenchantment are both necessary for growth and development and associate enchantment with the normal developmental processes of transits and progressions. The types of things that enchant are more a question of signs, which I equate with values. Different people have different values and are enchanted by different things.

KennethM

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Hello Kenneth,
?A bias against science by astrologers may be just as counterproductive as a bias against astrology by scientists.?
I agree.
?Sometimes, however, it goes the other way. Enchantment itself can become limiting and it is rationality that brings awareness of something larger.?
Looking at this story from a slightly different perspective, it appears to me what limited the experience of enchantment was the narrowing of focus down to the operational practical functioning details of reality, the scrutinizing of the smaller details of this enchanting world which gave rise to disenchantment and her motivation to do something about it.

A transition from a human ?being? in the larger moment of enchantment who, through focusing in on the smaller details identified the threat within it and was therefore motivated into doing something about it ? and in her 'doing' is endeavouring to sustain, preserve, conserve, save the larger enchantment.

Will she ever experience that same enchantment she felt as when she first experienced that world? Perhaps not. But I?d suggest it?s this initial experience of enchantment ? to preserve or save it - which acts as the motivation for what follows.

And new enchantments open up as new worlds, new discoveries within that world, occur along the way. The transition from the larger realm of ?being? to within the practical limitations of ?doing? ? the doing prompted by the experience of being.

I?d suggest expansion (enchantment), contraction (disenchantment), expansion (enchantment).

That it is the contractions, the disenchantments, or the actions, or the 'doing' which are negotiated in the hope of arriving at a place of being (enchantment) ... yet if caught up in the constant act of 'doing', enchantment easily passes by, unnoticed.

Enchantment being one of those things you either feel or you don't, but to experience it usually requires a pause in action - including the act of rationalizing/analysing/negotiating - for appreciation.

Warm wishes,
TS.

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When I was young, what enchanted me was the type of thing that enchanted the Upanishads: smoke, a firefly, ... but what was the meaning of it all? Now I can be enchanted and have meaning at the same time.

I find Einstein's famous equation ( e = mc^2 as programmers write it ) enchanting. But in actual fact it is just a variation of the general equation for a straight line in the system of cartesian coordinates which we all learn in 1st grade (or Year 11? 12? if you're in the UK), namely y = ax + b. In Einstein, we have b = 0, and a = c^2.

In plain words, Einstein's equation says the energy within some matter is proportional to its mass. That's not difficult to grasp: no mass, no energy to get from it; the more mass there is, the more energy can be liberated. It's a simple proportionality. But what makes it enchanting is this: the scaling factor is light. Specifically, (the speed of) light times (the speed of) light. Or Light! That's the same light that's in smoke, that makes a firefly glow, ...

Does it work? Sure, there's 2 nuked cities to show so. Is it true? I don't know of any experimental verification of this mathematically derived equation to compare with say the empirical verification of anti-matter, which was first derived mathematically by Dirac and latter verified as true. Curiously, Tesla disagreed with Einstein over where the energy in matter actually came from: for Tesla it was the space between the atoms. Which is to say, take care which gods you worship.