What does it mean to be you, is it your body, your memories, beliefs or something else? When we speak about the soul we are usually speaking about the personality which includes our memories and beliefs rather than our bodies.  By personality we mean that complex mix that makes up your personal identity and gives each of us a unique perspective on life.

Our soul we may claim is different from our personality, but what if our soul doesn’t believe in compassion or love.  What if these things that are important to our personality or personal identity were absent from the soul – it would be an unthinkable thought to have a soul minus the ethics and love we have developed as part of our personal identity.  We each of us through out life become more experienced and usually more compassionate as we make our own mistakes – a soul that did not encompass our personal identity, our learning would be a lesser thing.

Life is worth living because the unique entity that is you from birth to death is a unique and evolving you that develops wisdom and compassion through experience making your life a life worth living for it is a life with the opportunity to develop a better you in complex ways.

Soldiers never die defending freedom but corporate interest, greed and lust.  It is the biggest myth that religion causes war it can be used to motivate people into believing that what they are doing is just, that they are defending friends and family but all wars are caused by greed.  They are employed to defend corporate interest and greed, you and I are of no importance.

Yet we have an instinct to protect our own family, friends and communities this is the Moon and this instinctive desire stems from love but it is twisted and corrupted by propaganda until it creates the barbarity of war.  One of the lessons the soul has in aspect to the moon is to question what we are told threatens our communities.  Probably the biggest threaten to communities globally is corporate greed, yet this is not likely to be what you are told it is likely that the other the foreigner, the disabled, the Muslim, the Jew or the Hindu is your threat.  It is only in questioning what we are told that we may start to protect our communities.  Until then the poor ordinary people will continue to kill each other for corporate wealth, and corporations will continue to dominate the planet for as long as we are fighting and killing each other we are not fighting the corporations!

Take the American civil war was that about slavery, were black people in Northern states treated any better than in southern states other than being called free did they actually have any freedom or rights the answer is NO! Civil war wasn’t about freeing slaves because black people had no freedoms in the Northern states.  It was about power; industrial corporations against industrial farming Corporations and the winner was corporations! What about the war of independence, British corporations against American corporations and the winner was corporations! WWI & WWII all about which country’s corporations were going to get their hands on other countries’ wealth and resources.

Our families and communities are important they are where our soul lies yet we are perpetually allowing them to be destroyed by the propaganda of war that stops us uniting globally against global corporations and which leaves us vulnerable to be being picked off one by one.

If somebody says, ‘I know God lives’ and they believe it they are telling the truth or in other words not lying but that does not make it true that ‘God lives’ it also does not make it necessarily false.  When you go to court you swear to give the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. People can and do give the whole truth and nothing but the truth, yet it may be false not because the are lying but because what they believe is false. That means not only do we have to assess when we are being lied to but even when we are not being lied to we still have to assess whether something is true.

Thus we spend vast amounts of time trying to assess truth and true, we can say that an important aspect for the soul is the continuing process in which it tries to determine true and truth.  How does it do this?  An important aspect to truth may be whether a person contradicts themselves or the facts, for trying to discover if something is true we also check whether it contradicts facts and whether it is the most likely or most rational explanation.  This is mercury in action we listen and we compare what is said with what we already know, discover the areas where we may need to find out more facts before we can make a decision. We do it all the time in life we are constantly deciding whether something is true or if somebody is lying and at times we may get the decision wrong and we learn lessons from that which make effect future decisions.

Thus we can say that a major part of the soul’s journey through life is the decisions on what is truth and true.

Last month my cousin died, but what upset me most at funeral was seeing ‘Wee John’, because he represents a stage of my childhood and memories. I looked at him and remembered us all crawling through the woods on our stomachs behind the Colonel’s house  to steal the bamboo shoots from his garden.  With this came the realisation that I could never do this again with my cousin. Our emotions are a worm hole through time that connect us to the past, I’m no longer a child but I am connected to that soul stage by my emotions.

Not only am I connected to those emotions some of them are carried forward to the present, what it means to be mean includes that childhood, the people and the emotions.  I no longer crawl through the woods on my stomach but it is still part of who I am, I no longer change my son’s diaper/nappy but it is still part of who I am.  Venus is our emotional worm hole through time and space, we span time and space emotionally from birth to death, there we are at different stages feeling incredible things, you are not simple existing now you are a wormhole through space and time that contains memories and emotions, your soul is the whole of that worm hole, past, present & future emotions.  In that worm hole there are people no longer alive, friends we have not seen for years and friends we have yet to make as well as family yet to be born.

Plato in the ‘Phaedo’ has Socrates arguing that the soul has an essential characteristic of being alive that there is no such thing as a dead soul in existence, even in sleep although consciousness is missing the mind is alive and full of drives and desires expressed in dreams.

We all have drives and desires and they can have opposing outcomes, lets take two UK political parties SNP and UKIP.  Both are nationalist parties, nationalism is derived from the drive to go beyond our ego and have something of higher importance in our lives. For the SNP this may be expressed as another Scotland is possible, we can build a better country, we can be a beacon of light to the world, we can do something about poverty, we can show the world Weapons of mass destruction are unnecessary. For the UKIP this may be expressed as Britain used to be great, the migrants are what is destroying our greatness, Europe is destroying our greatness, get rid of migrants and Europe and Britain can be great again.

I have a bias in this I’m Scottish but although both want the same thing pride in their country there is a problem, as a Scot I’m ashamed of Scotland’s part in this ‘greatness’ of the British Empire, so for me only one of these options is a possibility. That is not to say that UKIP is lving in past and SNP the future, there are important parts of Scotland’s past that I want. Scotland had a clan system which although I do not want as a feudal system I want that sense of family and community that the word clan has come to mean in Scotland.  Clan has a special meaning in Scotland and that is gathering together irrespective of blood as one people, one family.

Mars represents our drives, and this includes nationalism but how we fulfil this drive can take us in many directions at different times in our lives but whatever we are doing at anytime if we think about it we will see the same basic drives expressed in different ways throughout life by a soul that is alive and questioning!

Hope is a dangerous thing, without any hope we often have nothing to lose.  Humans with nothing to lose are impervious to any argument, law and justice is based on the fact that we have something to lose and that makes us willing to trade a part of our freedom to keep them.  A while back I read a comment from a black student who said riots were bad because people can vote. If candidates x,y & z are all offering B and you need A then voting offers no hope, it cannot provide you with the possibilities necessary for hope. Rioting in this situation is the most rational option, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain, this is why riots tend to spread like wildfire because they express the last desperate hope of the hopeless.

From rioting to revolution is the step from hopelessness to euphoria, from powerlessness to powerful. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses but so is revolution, rioting and protesting because they are all about moving from hopelessness to euphoria.  Euphoria makes all things possible it motivates us all into believing the once impossible is now not only possible but within our grasp.  Thus some degree of euphoria is necessary for change.  The opposite is also true that some degree of hope is necessary to prevent change, it is just the proportions of both that are different. Change is often prevented by offering some small hope such as the lottery, yes the system is unfair and punishes you but if by a billion to one chance your number comes up the benefits are massive. Change happens when we are offered the hope that the majority can make a difference and make the world a better place for everybody.

However there is one flaw, Kierkegaard’s argument that in a world where everybody is ‘Christian’ nobody can be Christian applies. Kierkegaard was talking about ‘Christian’ democracy. Christian democracy was based on ‘loving the sinner but hating the sin’ whether that sin was poverty or homosexuality you were confined to the poor house or prison.  These themes still run through modern democracy where showing ‘love’ means food banks, sanctions, fines and imprisonment. In a world where Christian love is defined in this way nobody can be Christian. In a world where everybody is democratic there can be no democracy is also true, democracy becomes like Christianity twisted to reflect its opposite totalitarianism.

Yet those caught up in the euphoria may not see when the ideal has been twisted into its opposite, they may be so wrapped up in the euphoria that they are easily persuaded to remove the opposition to their ideal in order to create a better world, idealists commit genocide. Not only can our ideals be easily twisted into their opposite but we can be easily convinced that the world would be a better place if only there were no Jewish people, Muslim people, gypsies or any other group.

Jupiter is the planet not just of hope and euphoria but of beliefs & God but no matter how euphoric we may feel we must be able to see clearly the God we are worshipping.

Martin Luther King like J.F. Kennedy and George Washington had affairs they all committed adultery. Gandhi slept with naked young girls although nothing sexual happened.  Heroes are like ideals and often do represent an ideal, we mythologise them and in the process we confuse the ideal for the person and no person is ideal, that is why it often shocks us when the person is revealed behind the ideal.  The ideal we may say is part of what Jupiter represents, the human behind it we may call Saturn. That is humans have natural boundaries called character faults and flaws, the great thing about this is that when we see other faults and flaws we have the potential for empathy.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise but to be human is to have desires, successful living organisms have a drive for resources and reproduction or food, drink and sex.  This part of our nature is predetermined by the simple fact of being a living organism.  We desire certain things but what we do about that desire is a matter of free will. I desire all the chocolate cake but I will ultimately choose whether to have none, some or all and the choice I make may depend on past experiences. I may not eat all the cake because the consequences of actions like these in the past have given me an upset stomach or I may decide the pleasure of eating the whole cake is worth the upset stomach. Saturn and the soul is the relationship I have to this process as a conscious being I weigh up all the consequences the pleasure in eating against the pain of an upset stomach and perhaps decide to eat half the cake instead.

What is amazing is that I can choose, I can eat all the chocolate cake and do the same the next day but perhaps in a year’s time I may decide that there has to be more to life than chocolate cake and decide I don’t want any more chocolate cake ever.  This too will be a consequence of my eating chocolate cake.  We all have desires and whether or not we choose to act upon those desires may give us different consequences from which we can decide many different courses of future actions.

The soul, mind or consciousness gives us the ability to find personal meaning in tragedy, part of what it means to be human is the ability to find our own meaning in the life we live. Atheist, Buddhist, Pagan, Christian, Muslim or Jewish we find our own meaning in life that may include, God, divinity, Nirvana, or simply what it means for us to be a good person but the largest part of that meaning will be unique to us alone, it will be the meaning and personal insights we attach to tragedies we have experienced, trauma & loss.

Having consciousness means we have the capability when we experience trauma or tragedy to extract meaning from it, to use our experiences to understand how others may be feeling.  From parents that lose a child to survivors of genocide, humans are capable of finding meaning and hope in the darkest hours.  We are capable of finding the deepest meaning to life in the midst of our darkest despair and this aspect of the soul is ruled by Neptune.

We find meaning in how we deal with tragedy, what we learn about ourselves and others. We develop strength through facing our deepest fears and it is often whilst facing our deepest fears that our hopes and desires are at their strongest pulling us on to overcome and fulfil our potential.

What is a soul, we define it as the mind or consciousness, ability to think, imagine, to have emotions, desires and to be irrational.  What is irrationality, it is our ability to ignore the evidence as it is presented and to trust our gut instincts no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is.  Abolitionists would have been considered irrational at the time, the economic consensus of the time saw slavery as a necessity, in fact even today the argument is an irrational one – it appeals only to the emotions we feel it is wrong to treat another human in this way, just as we feel it is wrong for adults to have sex with children or for people to be cruel to animals.  We would think somebody disturbed if they wanted a rational debate on the pros and cons of paedophilia, animal cruelty or slavery.

Yet irrationality is often seen as a weakness used in derogatory terms often to describe women, why? Women in all societies as mothers have often needed to develop a stronger awareness of emotions, how certain actions are likely to affect others emotionally as well as physically.  As mothers women often understand that emotions are often more important than other physical factors that for a baby being loved and nurtured is more important than the best cot or pram.  This is not to say that women are more empathic than men, but to say historically they have been placed in situations where their main roles were ones that required them to develop empathy whilst men traditionally occupied roles such as a soldier where empathy for the enemy was necessarily discouraged.

Irrationality or our gut instinct says something is wrong, whatever good evidence we are being given something is missing  here I may not know what it is yet but it doesn’t feel right. This irrationality, emotions and desires are ruled by Pluto and it is what makes us human, sometimes these very things can make us selfish, manipulative and greedy but they are also what make us capable of changing the world and making it a better place to live in.

For those unfamiliar with Terry Pratchett’s ‘Disc World’ a witch’s hat is what makes her a witch and as such is powerful magic like the white coat doctors wear.  Clothes make an identity and that identity such as police, paramedics, doctors or judges is powerful. For most of human history we have used clothes to define status such as royalty, serf, magistrate or soldier.  However in the modern world  clothes don’t just represent social status or occupation, we can walk into shops and buy a whole personal identity, first shop dress as an anarchist, second shop buy a religious / spiritual outlook and off we can go to MacDonald’s with our whole new persona irrespective of whether it reflects who we are or is merely a shallow fashion accessory we can exchange for Goth in a few months if we become bored. Venus goes retrograde to conjunct the Sun and at this time we may choose to look at whether we have created and forged a personality that reflects our values or whether we have simply bought a series of personas to fit the prevailing fashions of the time.

Have we been narrating our own story in our true voice or the voice that is currently on trend and in fashion, have we found a way of expressing what our ideals and beliefs are or do we buy them off the peg at GAP, to be changed each season, for the current trend.  If it is your voice it is unlikely that it changes with the season, always agrees with the majority or in crowd or is particularly bothered about what others think.  The best witches are the ones who are powerful with or without their witch’s hat because they were born a witch and shall die a witch.  Their narration is a magical one because it has a theme throughout the story.