Man’s flair for personifying the inanimate is as old as man himself. But when and what is it that we personify? Certainly not everything under the sun – that for sure won’t make sense. Rather, it is those things which, metaphorically as they may, can be thought to demonstrate one or more human-like attributes that staggeringly often become subjects of personification.
And if anything, one can point at umpteen spheres of life and human activity where this has served man well. The foremost purpose it serves is to ease our understanding of dry and complex phenomena – for how else can man comprehend something better than by relating it to himself? Take human evolution for instance – many of the principles underlying natural selection go from abstruse to commonsensical once evolution itself is conceived of as a living creature looking to guarantee its continual existence. It is the personified fables of gods and demons that ingrain morality into our minds long before our inner moral compass attains any maturity of consequence. And no doubt, personifying planets in astrology has helped generations of enthusiasts in grasping and gauging how planets behave and impact our lives.
That said, I have never been an exponent of personifying planets, at least not for the common folk. And for very good reason. But before we get on to it, let me be clear that this in no way implies that I advocate personifying planets ‘in restraint’. The ordinary human, in any of his instinctual tendencies, does a pretty bad job at exercising the right amount of restraint at the right time.
Humans are masters of pattern creation. The fact that this aided the survival of prehistoric man amply explains why and how. Provide man with just a handful of dots and his brain supplies the missing ones to put together the pattern that suits him most. It is for no other reason that little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing. We also rarely know how little we know. And no matter how much we know, imagination and emotion often take it as their birthright to embellish the truth. The corollary is that we unwittingly end up cooking vivid stories and narratives in our heads. But what’s the issue with these vivid narratives if they don’t incur harm? The problem, summarily, is that they very much do.
The starkest consequence of someone vividly personifying planets and deeply invested into astrology at the same time is the loss of self-agency. They commonly hear voices in their heads such as, “Oh, I think Shani wants me to choose A over B because that’s what he would have preferred himself”, or, “May be I failed because my Atma karaka doesn’t like it”. Judgement and prudence go for a toss and one becomes a mere passive reactor to the commands of his own imagination. An almost inescapable implication of this is blame projection: “the planets want me to suffer, what can I possibly do?” Thoughts like this often spiral into obsessions, overthinking gets confirmed into habit, frustration cripples daily functioning, and what began as a sublime endeavour to guide life turns into a vicious circle of self-sabotage.
The alternative? Take a more practical approach, refuse to go overboard with your imagination before its late, and think of planets as forces of nature that play by their unique and typical rules. Even better, think of planets as modules of your very own subconscious mind, as I’ve discussed in previous blog. These, in my view, are the closest we get to a true approximation of astrological reality.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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