Management of Measurement Constructs
New Year’s Wishes for the Forum!
Not surprisingly, the practice of making New Year’s resolutions can be traced back to Babylonian times. Today, as we know, we are most concerned with losing weight, stopping smoking, etc.; back then in Babylonia, the common concerns were paying off debts and returning borrowed farm tools and household utensils!
In our astrological work, specifically centered in the Forum here, we can have New Year’s resolutions too: we owe it to ourselves to learn in the best way we can and return what we know to others to be helpful.
With the intent for our astrology to improve even more, for our learning to gain and maintain clarity, good form, and valuable impact, I submit the following:
1. I would like us to resolve that proper notation will become the norm for everyone: the initial letters of Signs and Planets capitalized; the slash ( / ) reserved only for reference to a midpoint picture, i.e., Sun/Moon = the midpoint of the Sun and Moon; that the hyphen serve to show conjunction or other relationship (Mercury-Saturn relationship). When we say what we are learning in uniform style –fulfilling the extant protocol– impact is highly improved.
2. Let us purposefully edit out of our astrological presentations the measurements that are unnecessary or not germane to the issue; let us organize our astrological profiles from the big measurements to the smaller supportive measurements. –Being all-inclusive with measurements accomplishes little –that’s the astrologer showing off without a “bottom line” awareness. Being vividly on target with the key measurements makes the point with significance. Elegant simplicity supports and reveals relevance and accuracy.
3. Let’s make sure to study the enormous reservoir of teaching among the three Essay Departments on this website, accessible through the MENU: some quarter-million words of learning. And to appreciate how much time, study, and experience go into their preparation monthly. –Get answers to questions there; only a few clicks away! [The Archives follow the current essay in each of the three red-asterisked departments.]
4. To continue acknowledgement that we are in a super-fine multi-nation study community, core-solid with rapid, rich knowledge exchange and courteous inter-relationship.
5. Let’s realize that collecting data of “special” charts hoping for specifics, for magic measurements to jump out in revelatory manner, is not astrology; that way of “learning” only delays informed astrology from being: appreciation of the process of synthesis, the animation of symbolisms within the human condition, THAT is what brings astrology literally and figuratively to life. –Take AP=Saturn/Pluto for example [see Counseling Insights, 10/20/05]: it‘s not what the measurement “means” that is significant, but the process of its illumination, how it comes to be relevant in the mode of the description, “talking about skeletons in the closet”.
6. Let’s resolve to show what we can do on the Forum! Let’s not lurk in the background. Let’s step up and show our wares, so to speak. So many people are so eager to get data, but they rarely organize their thoughts within the process revealed by measurements. –When we make a presentation on the Forum, we learn. Otherwise, we just collect. Use your astrology.
Please resolve to relate your astrology to the human condition; to share it with others and feel your light reflected back to you. How far have you come in the last twelve months?
–Happy New Year….