Exegesis V07 Issue 044

Exegesis Volume 07 Issue #044

In This Issue:

From: L:Smerillo
Subject: [e] Re: exegesis Digest V7 #43

Exegesis Digest Mon, 25 Mar 2002

Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 22:18:17 +0100
From: L:Smerillo
Subject: [e] Re: exegesis Digest V7 #43

> >I have found that astrology is more of an artistic outlet for our human
> >capacity for intuition than a discipline for the training of one's reasoning
> >ability.

This then seems to be saying that astrology is a relativist subjective approach to being. The problem with this approach is that it is a ghetto of one ape in a treeless desert. There is no dialogue with the real world, no tension, no loop and feed back of critical thinking, it is mere expression: take it or leave it. The ulitmate form of this expression is a tantrum of boundless egoism and turf protection/expansion (=NE unbridled). The retreat into subjectivism is a way (called passive aggressive) of protecting the individual from social contact, from dialogue and compromise. It is simply a reaction of fear, and the camouflage of boundless expression hides from the invasion of the real world upon the seemingly 'artistic' (ie, individualistic) mirror of intuition which is ever looking only at itself.

> >It appears that you may personally prefer to collect historical data
> >which supports a reasoned argument of one kind or another, and find some
> >degree comfort in the support of authoritative seeming documents, historical

Comfort? Hardly. Seeming? well, yes, it's called dialogue with the past over time and the understanding of where things begin and where then they end, as they do, it is also a information input, a change of perspective, looking out rather than inward. It is a testing of the validity of the intuition. Statements such as 'Margaret Thatcher was the King of Belgium who fought Napoleon' may be intuitive, but are open to challenge if they are to be validly used as paradigms or even statements of perceptive intution. It may be that such a statement is symbolically meanful and true to an inidividual, but whether this is able to be a part of a dialogue with another individual is somewhat of a moot point.

> >facts, or perhaps even the magically authoritative effect of languages
> >themselves, both living and dead...:)

Magic is the stuff of subjectively orientated projection. Language is a mode of expression which needs to be understood in its context. Being bilingual, or having a good knowledge of other languages, can be a mode of understanding the difference between two culturally determined viewpoints. Monolingualism is often only a lazy result of living within one small family of apes (or astrology of the subjective school), on an island.

> >The intellect and the intuition appear to need one another in the manner
> >of symbiotes, and the intellect seems the lesser symbiont. The intuition

Sorry I would see them as equal partners of one entity, and unable to be defined separately the one from the other, in the same way as the individual and 'the other' are unable to be defined separately: the one defines the other. If you like they are two aspects of one entity, and any hierarchy posited between them is a misapplication of the entity's oneness to an aspect of the entity's oneness, which can only be expressed in the process of their unity. To exalt the qualities of one aspect (intuition) over the other is to fall into individualism, which is the breaking of the unity of the entity, which is a triparate entity of individualisation, collectivity and process.

> >seems to be in touch with the intellect's *unknowables*, and the intellect
> >works very hard to word the wordless, image-less, *thoughts* of the
> >rationale-free, (time and space warping), intuition. Astrology may have some

I would view astrology from a much more mundane and humble level: it is a technique, based on a correlation of time space coordinates as expressed in simple mathematical terms which can perhaps give _an_ insight into the possible expression or manifestation of matter in time and at a location. Given that the variables in all parts of this are quite numerous, and some might be yet unknown, the search for a rationale of astrology can not be limited to the merely individualistic and relativist expression, or intuition or interpretation. Part of the problem with astrology lies in its ability to change the cards on the table by the use of the kalleidoscope effect: change one's technique, ill-define one's categories, and the image perceived changes, is perhaps then given to be intuitive.

> >illusive "fact" for Dennis to focus upon; but, for me, astrology's reason for
> >existence lies in its apparently singular ability to suggest some kind of
> >wording for our intuition-born perceptions--our uncanny sensations of
> >"knowing" that which is just outside our intellect's rational grasp or vision.

This would mean I think that one has decided not to dialogue with the real world but to magically inhabit a space of idiolexic monologue. The great propensity of the mind is to fool itself into thinking that it 'knows' what it intuits/perceives. Critical thought, historical perspective, contextualisation, linguistic comparison and intertextuality, verfication by means of definition, experimentation and methodological rigour are a way to exit from the (false)monologue of intuition.

> >Some times I imagine the intellect itself is like a clever ape competing with
> >other apes in a reaching, leaping, grasping, race through the canopy of the
> >intuition's rain forest.

It seems to me that intuition is the ape, not the forest. Somehow I hope that humanity has left the forest long ago, but I do see signs that this has not happened but in patches of irregular pattern.

> >Astrology gives us a symbol like Saturn for our use in understanding
> >enigmatic (and no doubt dubious) observations.

No doubt dubious. What good is a mere symbol if the active process symbolised is merely ignored? Is the symbol then not but a convenient tag-- noli me tangere? I think what you write should read: "Astrological traditon has made of Saturn a symbol..." But can any symbol be a symbol in isolation from the combination of symbols?

> >For example, Saturn gives me a
> >wording or a "reason" for the existence of your email signature's progressive
> >shrinking...its relative change from, "feliciter, Lorenzo Smerillo"...to,
> >"feliciter"
> >...to, "LS"...:) My intuition seems to agree with the astrology's assumption
> >that Saturn is as much involved with authority as it with restrictions of some
> >sort. This because the ape of the human intellect seems destined to express
> >both drives when trying to access, or some tries to employ either of these two
> >qualities or experiences of the human ego.

This is just silly, aside from being simplistic. Try typos, try haste, try just plain commonsense, or variety for the sake of variety, or just nothing. I believe you are attempting to impose your symbolism on that which will not hold it: water off a duck's back, even in the graceful subjectivism of your understated, overflowing boundaries ad hominmen: it just looks so silly!