Management of Measurement Constructs

Awareness of LEVEL and Fulfillment of Astrological Potentials

The handyman who helps keep my house together has a definite aesthetic sense: he clearly enjoys setting things right, keeping things clean and in order, improving efficiency, aligning stones harmoniously in the garden, sculpting large desert bushes, laying tiles, building walls. While he may sing in his little church choir, he didn’t take his aesthetic into University study for a degree in music; he isn’t conducting the Community chorus; he’s not composing music or writing books on landscaping. But he is doing a wonderful job that interests, supports, and fulfills him.

There are those ranging fields across the plains of the Dakotas and elsewhere in the upper Mid-West. Occasionally there is a little house or barn complex, then miles later it seems, another. But, oh my!, it is desolate. All life is concentrated into those fields. Families exist because of each other; even gene pools are affected. –How much of the potentials in those horoscopes is being realized, used, developed? “So-and-so left the farm fifteen years ago and went to the big city and I hear he’s doin’ OK!” But that’s the exception within the swath of normalcy, of conventionality that inexorably works to blanket so many of us, our potentials, and our dreams at whatever Level we adjust to. This is a very real pressure throughout society: to keep things similar, the same, not to allow ranks to be broken.

These are considerations of Level, a vitally important modifier in the fulfillment of astrological potentials. There are basically five considerations to keep in mind: leadership, vision, education, opportunity, and reward.

Leadership Leadership in our development comes first from the parents. One of the oldest bromides in our culture is “Like father, like son.” Homes used to have photo galleries of relatives to show the constancy of appearance, of professional development, etc. Children were more often than not named after one of the parents, one of the grandparents, etc.

In our socialization process, we emulate to one degree or another the parent of the same gender. We model our relationship behaviors with the opposite gender through observation of the dynamics between our parents. [Please see The Astrology of Intimacy, Sexuality, and Relationship]

What if that model –which, in turn was inculcated in the parents by their parents before, reinforced by the culture around them—works predominantly to maintain the status quo, to keep things secure, as they are. What if survival tips the scale away from advancement. –What if the parental values and behaviors dominate the individual needs and behavioral potentials of the son or daughter?

Parental leadership must recognize children’s potentials, must bring them into view as much as they can.

Vision Imagine the world before television; before movies! We could not see past our front door or experience others beyond the local grocery store.

Now we can see more than anyone else has ever seen before: we can see ourselves as anything we want.

Vision becomes catalyst. Leadership must help guide that vision into practical bounds.

Education Education leads us into life knowledge and experience. Education explains and adjusts vision. Parental leadership is gradually transferred into educative mentoring, and a continuity of development and bloom is begun.

Our self-worth is confirmed through the education we receive.

If leadership and education clash, vision is distorted. Escape without preparation occurs (precipitous marriage to leave the home; education thrown to the winds). The train races onto wrong tracks. Level development is curtailed, truncated.

Opportunity Opportunity just might be another word for challenge. With leadership supporting early vision, leading us into education, we are faced with challenges, opportunities to show our stuff, to find out dramatically just who we are with all we have developed!

How many people actually end up where the first professional footsteps can lead? –Very few [and that’s what the Saturn-return phenomenon is quite a bit about!]: the testing of where we need to go.

We try this and that. We eventually refine our potentials at the Level we have internalized through our development, and we make a choice. We transform all this as authoritatively as we can into a paying occupation: gardener, concert singer, doctor, athlete, accountant, cook … [And here is where vocational profiling comes forward as one of astrology’s most important disciplines.]

Opportunity has guided us; challenge has confirmed us. We are fitted in to the scheme of things at our Level.

Reward Reward reinforces who we are by recognizing what we do for a living. Fulfillment of our needs confirms we are quite possibly, highly probably on the right track. We feel successful.

Leadership [“What encouragement I received!”]; Vision [“I used to dream about doing this!”]; Education [“Boy-oh-boy, I was well prepared!”]; Opportunity [“I finally found the niche when I engineered that offer from ….”]; and Reward [“It’s really paid off; I’m very proud of what I’ve done.”]

Astrologers must be keenly aware of Level, learning to assess it from the first instant of client meeting, through all sorts of cultural signals we know very well.

Level is the visible, audible tone of personality.

[Please, review “Analytical Techniques,” Archives, February 20, 2001. It is so very important … to bring your astrology literally and figuratively to life.]