Management of Measurement Constructs
Inviting Inspiration into Analysis
Who hasn’t been told at one time or another during our development –or maybe a million times!— that we are closed minded!?
This is a way of saying we’re not open to a new idea, a new opinion, new information. Indeed, it is a (defensive) condition that can block growth, that can make us stale within our comfortable, reliable, routined, perfunctory reactions to things. It’s usually not as bad as all that; we just are routined to do things a certain way, thinking a certain way every time, all the time, and we don’t have our windows open.
But, our best way of growing, of interacting with the environment, is to make ourselves discriminatingly open-minded to a fault. For us astrologers, new ideas must come into our thoughts all the time to individualize what we know about astrology to the realities of our clients. Every astrological measurement is different for every client to one degree or another.
For example, Carol Burnett’s peregrine Mercury is different from Howard Cosell’s peregrine Mercury. While the measurement alerts us to extraordinarily effusive mind-power and communication strength, it takes different forms for each of these two individuals. How might they best use the extreme facility with mind and communication? How does the rest of the horoscope channel such abilities?
When we think about it, the inspiration for Cosell, a sportscaster (and lawyer and university teacher), could be to create a distinctive professional selling proposition on the basis of being “encyclopedic,” to channel his mind to gathering and retaining facts. For Burnett, a dramatic performer, the thrust could be through widely diversified comedic skit portrayals. –For performer Jonathan Winters, also with a peregrine Mercury, to imitations and sound effects!
We need ideas at all times. We must learn to think creatively, freshly, confidently. But what happens in our tremendously routined lifestyles is that we do things the same way over and over again. We hit our head on the ceiling of development potentials. We don’t push on further. –It is so important to arouse the mind, alert perception, and make aware creative dimensions in all situations.
How to get an idea.
Take a small object like a rectangular tissue box, a deodorant bottle, a modernized salt or pepper shaker, a deck of cards, a spool of thread or ball of yarn, etc. Put the object in an unusual position on your desk or tabletop (on its edge, upside down, or flat). Isolate it in your vision and start to talk: “What we have here is a ….a … new ultra-modern Japanese express train with minimum wind resistance. It can go from Tokyo to Hiroto in 47 minutes, when normally the trip is three hours! Look at the wind contrails issuing out of its side!”
Or, “What we have here is a kind of rock dropped into Siberia, presumably from an asteroid orbiting Earth. The rock form is actually a Rosetta Stone of mineral interactions. We can learn about ore dynamics easily, and, additionally, this form appears especially aerodynamic; it’s being reproduced for classroom study at MIT, where collective analysis should produce some surprises.”
Our spoken thoughts appear to be fancy imagination, but the process is more, much more dynamic: this process exercises our potential grasp of the uniquely possible.
—And where did that fascinating phrase just come from: “it exercises our potential grasp of the uniquely possible”? I am exercised to allow that kind of thought to come out of me; I expect inspirational words, imaginative adjustments.
The major, major point of this study is not WHAT is being said, but that something is being said at all!!!!
–Another FLASH enters my mind, just at this moment: You take, say, the Four of Diamonds out of a deck of cards and place it on a table, leaning against something hidden behind it; it appears to be standing freely. Now, we simply open our minds and start talking: “This is a specially formulated hologram of information, built to substantial size, patterned for highest-impact communication to future visitors to Mars. The iconographic monolith will be constructed on Mars to teach the future who we were in the past. Our life and culture systems will be codified into the four computer-controlled four-sided freeforms, beginning with the four compass points of our natural orientation on our Earth, our four Elements, our four Great Religions, etc. and going on with enormous sophistyication.”
What we say does not have to make sense, at first. That will come as the talent is freed. The point now is to exercise our muscles of receptivity, our receptivity to ideas and the delivery of those ideas.
In my teaching Seminars, I ask for a transparency of a horoscope. I look at it for 20-25 seconds (timed by someone), project it onto the screen, and then, I start talking.
My mind will have recorded what I have seen, without much conscious guidance, working with trusted instincts within a disciplined, internalized process that expedites synthesis. I will begin to talk in a way that is constantly and consciously checked for reasonability, with each successive thought related to the one before. Within four or five sentences, a wonder is usually created, synthesizing the horoscope under study.
The muscles of receptivity and communication must be exercised. They must be challenged in order for them to grow. We have to ask our sensorium for inspiration; we must get dull routines out of the way to allow inspiration to occur … through us.
And of course, what grows with this receptivity and communication spontaneity is confidence: we believe we can understand, and, amazingly, we do! –It’s much like dormant embers in the fireplace: stir them, and they leap into flame again.
Practice and confidence invite inspiration. The exercise establishes our potential grasp of the uniquely possible.
With this fortified analytical ability, conversation with your client becomes a potential dynamite-exchange of insight, creativity, and practical applications of astrologically stimulated deductions. We learn to concentrate with freshness. Our awareness allows new things, fresh creative connections, to happen.
Try it yourself. Stoke your fires. Give the process about five to seven days of attention in five-minute exercises here and there. You will be amazed with yourself, I promise!