STUMBLING ACROSS THE SCRIPT

A Different Way of Thinking About Astrology

[This is the opening portion of chapter 2 from my book When the Stars Align.]

I’d invite you to imagine a small village where everyone goes about their daily business, enjoying what they believe is a perfectly ordinary existence, thinking they are all perfectly ordinary people, when there is actually something quite un-ordinary going on.

What none of them realize is that each and every one of them in the village has been hypnotized at some point by a master hypnotist who has given them all elaborate inductions for acting out pre-assigned parts in a play he’s written, while also programming them to forget they’d ever been hypnotized or playing pre-written roles. They’ve even been hypnotized to forget that he exists, so that they wouldn’t even recognize him if they passed by him on the street.

In fact, it’s all part of a grand experiment for the master hypnotist in mass mind control. Of course, not every single thought or movement of the villagers has been pre-determined by the script, just most of the major ones. Consequently, all of them in this village are simply acting out their parts as little more than puppets on a string, mechanically reciting scripted lines to one another. They all genuinely believe that they’re acting out of free will, yet the fact is, none of them are.

But then something unexpected happens one day.

Due to a flaw in the master’s plan, one of the young villager-actors happens to be wandering around in one of the buildings in the village, and stumbles onto a copy of the script the master hypnotist has written for the villagers. The hypnotist carelessly left it in a certain room of that building, and none of the villagers were ever supposed to see it. Leafing through the pages, the villager-actor finds his own role delineated right there before him, with most of his life’s decisions clearly laid out—the kind of work he does, who he marries, his triumphs and tragedies. Also shocking is the experience of thumbing forward a bit in the script and seeing the major actions and lines of dialogs he is personally set to deliver in the days ahead, in exactly the ways he himself had roughly planned.

Now, try to imagine how you would feel in such a situation? It might well trigger an existential crisis of sorts, since you’d be forced to question virtually everything you believed about your life and personality. You’d realize you really weren’t in control of your existence much at all, and that you weren’t much different from a robot, acting out someone else’s programs. From that point on, you’d probably be second-guessing everything you thought or did, and what was or wasn’t scripted by this hidden figure you’ve just learned about.

However, there’s a flip side to this realization, and a more positive one at that. Because now that you know about the script, you’d have a certain element of choice in what you do, some degree of free will. Why? Because, you could decide now whether or not to act on that script—an option not available to the other actors in the troupe, since they’d have no way of knowing which actions and conversations were truly theirs and which weren’t. Through the gift of knowledge, you’d now have a degree of freedom you never experienced before.

Astrology and the “Script” of Our Lives’

One of the reasons I introduce this story is because I think it says something useful about astrology. I’ve written before about my first meeting with an actual astrologer when. Was very young. I felt a real sense of astonishment about what I was hearing, which made me wonder how in the world someone could tell me about my life just from looking at patterns based on celestial bodies millions of miles away. It also made me question whether or not I was really the master of my own fate.

Astrology, I’d like to suggest, is a way of getting a peek at the script of one’s life, from a more objective and detached viewpoint, like what the young villager-actor in my story experienced. And with that peek also comes—ideally, anyway—a certain sense of freedom and free will. Because having seen the astrological script, you could now choose whether or not to act out its storylines. Before seeing the horoscope, you never really had that option. As a teacher I knew once put it, you can’t be free from your karma until you first know what it is!

For instance, you might see that Mars is coming up to form a difficult relationship with your Moon, and decide ahead of time not to respond by getting angry; or you might notice that Jupiter is about to cross over your Venus, and decide to take advantage by signing up for a dating site, going to Vegas, or perhaps even by not acting on your gambling instincts, whether romantic or financial. Generally speaking, you’d now have more choice in your range of responses than you had before.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods and So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway? His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.