The Sky Within Sample Report - Based on Your Birth

The Sky Within Sample Report: It is like a conversation with a very close trusted friend.

The Sky Within Sample Report for Donald Sutherland:

 The following The Sky Within Report Within report for Donald Sutherland is for him if he is seeking spiritual reassurance and internal guideposts to universal harmony.

The Sky Within

THE SKY WITHIN 

Using Your Birthchart as a Spiritual Guide

A woman has a baby and is blissful about it. Another one does the same, and spends the rest of her life dreaming about how she might have been a ballerina. The same choice: having a kid. But only one smiling woman.

Nobody has a generic formula for happiness, at least not one that does the trick for everyone. That's where astrology comes in.

The birth chart, stripped to bare bones, is simply a description of the happiest, most fulfilling life that's available to you... personally. It spells out a set of strategies you can use to avoid boring routines, bad choices, and dead ends. It lists your resources. And it talks about how your life looks when you're misusing the resources and distorting the strategies -- shooting yourself in the foot, in other words.

All from a map of the sky?

Hard to believe. But think for a minute...

"How can the planets possibly affect us? They're millions of miles away." Astrology's critics are fond of rolling out that argument. But it doesn't hold water. Go out and gaze at the moon. What's really happening? Incomprehensible energies are plunging across a quarter million miles of void, crashing through your eyeballs and creating electrochemical changes in your brain. We call the process "seeing the moon." Certainly the planets affect us. The question is where do we draw the boundaries around those effects?

Let's go a step further.

Open your eyes on a starry night. What do you see? A vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Now close your eyes so tight they ache. Where are you now? What do you see? Again, a vast, luminous space, full of shadows and light. Consciousness and cosmos are structured around the same laws, follow the same patterns, and even feel pretty much the same to our senses.

"As above, so below." Just as the starry night awes us with its vastness, there's something infinitely deep inside you, a place you go when you close your eyes, a place that's beyond being an Aries or a Gemini or even a specific gender. At the most profound level, a birth chart is a map back to that magical center. It describes a series of earthly experiences which, if you're brave and open enough, will trigger certain states of consciousness in you -- states that operate like powerful spiritual catalysts, vaulting you into higher levels of being.

In the pages that follow, you'll tour your personal birthchart. But don't expect the usual "Scorpios are sexy" stuff. You are a mysterious being in a mysterious cosmos. You're here for just a little while, a blink of God's eye. You face a monumental task: figuring out what's going on! In that spiritual work, astrology is your ally. How will it help?

Certainly not by pigeon-holing you as a certain "type."

Astrology works by reminding you who you are, by warning you about the comforting lies we all tell ourselves, and by illuminating the experiences that trigger your most explosive leaps in awareness.

After that, the rest is up to you.

YOUR TEN TEACHERS

Freud divided the human mind into three compartments: ego, id, and superego. Astrologers do the same thing, except that our model of the mind differs from Freud's in two fundamental ways. First, it's a lot more elaborate. Instead of three compartments, we have ten: Sun, Moon, and the eight planets we see from Earth. As we'll discover, each planet represents more than a "circuit" in your psyche. It also serves as a kind of "Teacher," guiding you into certain consciousness-triggering kinds of experience.

The second difference between astrology and psychology is that astrology's mind-map, unlike Freud's, is rooted in nature itself, just as we are.

The primary celestial teacher is the Sun. What does it teach? Selfhood. Vitality. How to keep the life-force strong in yourself. If the Sun grew dimmer, so would all the planets -- they shine by reflecting solar light. Similarly, if you fail to stoke the furnaces of your own inner Sun, then you'll simply be "out of gas." All your other planetary functions will suffer too.

How do we learn this teacher's lessons?

Start by realizing that when you were born the Sun was in Cancer.

Opening the inner eye, mapping the topography of consciousness, learning to express compassion -- these are Cancer's evolutionary aims.  To assist in that work, Cosmic Intelligence has cranked up the volume on the Crab's ability to feel.  No other sign is so sensitive -- nor so vulnerable.  A certain amount of self-defense is appropriate here; after all, this world isn't exactly the Garden of Eden.  Trouble is, legitimate self-defense can degenerate into shyness or a fear of making changes.  You really do care about the hurts that other beings suffer.  That's good news.  You also have an instinctive ability to soothe those hurts, homing in on the source of the pain.  More good news.  The bad news is that you could choose to remain forever protected within the safe (and invisible!) role of the Healer, the Counselor, or the Wise One.

With the Sun in Cancer, you feed your solar vitality by finding a role in the world in which you address the hurt in the lives of other beings.  You become a nurturer or a healer of some sort.

You also need to make sure that you have enough real intimacy and quiet, private time to "nurture the nurturer" -- yourself, in other words.

Those methods strengthen your sense of identity.  They trigger higher states of awareness in you.  If you don't express your soothing wound-binding instincts, all the glories of the world would leave you feeling like an imposter in your own life.  And without quiet time and naked intimate honesty, you'll quickly burn out on playing the role of everyone's psychotherapist.

Like the crab, you're a vulnerable creature who's evolved a shell.  That's fine and necessary.  But again like the crab, you must eventually shed your shell and grow a larger, more inclusive one, or you'll be awfully cramped.

We can take our analysis of your natal Sun a step further. When you were born, that solar light illuminated the Tenth house. What does that signify?

Start by realizing that Houses represent twelve basic arenas of life. There's a House of Marriage, for example, and a House of Career. Always, we find an element of "fate" in our House structures; the "Hand of God" continually presents us with existential and moral questions connected with our emphasized Houses. How we react and what we learn -- or fail to learn -- is our own business.

One brief technical note: Sometimes the Sun, the Moon, or a planet lies near the end of the House. We then say it's "conjunct the cusp" of the subsequent House, and interpret it as though it were a little further along... in the next House, in other words.

Community -- that's the key to the Tenth House. How do you fit into your local branch of civilization?  What role do you play there?  "He's an anesthesiologist." That's a Tenth House statement. But so is, "She's into the women's movement." Even though she doesn't make a dime being a feminist, it still says something about the hat she wears in the community.

Planetary Teachers in this House do two things for you.  They outline your "cosmic job description." That is, they tip you off about the role you were born to play in your community. Unfortunately, they don't do that very well; there are a billion roles and only ten planets, so the descriptions they provide are of necessity rather vague.  At best, they're rough guidelines.

Tenth House Teachers do better with their second task.  They point out parts of your own character that need to be developed to a radical degree before your mission coalesces before your eyes.  Accept their suggestions, act on them, and you'll leave a lasting stamp of your vision upon the myths and symbols of your community.

With the Sun in the Tenth House, it's as though Spirit has asked you to figure out a way to get paid for being yourself.  Prominent in your "cosmic job description" is the notion that you are to be some sort of role model or exemplar for your community, embodying in yourself a set of principles or skills.  To accomplish that, the part of your character you must develop to a radical degree is... yourself.  And that takes time.  In youth, be wary of the way society will try to seduce you into prematurely accepting some role that doesn't have much to do with your nature or values.  When a Tenth House Sun blooms well, it usually blooms late.

The next step in our journey through your birth chart carries us to the Moon.

As you might expect, Luna resonates with the magical, emotional sides of your psyche. It represents your mood, averaged over a lifetime. As the heart's teacher, it tells you how to feel comfortable, how to meet your deepest needs. While the Sun lets you know what kinds of experiences and relationships help you feel sane, the Moon is concerned with another piece of the puzzle: feeling happy.

When you were born, the Moon was in Virgo.

Virginity isn't the point.  That's just a kind of inexperience, and in the long run no one learns much from avoiding experience.  Virgo means purity.  Perfection.  Getting everything exactly right.  That's a tall order.  Perfection is a harsh master.  It drives the Virgoan part of you, haunting you with a sense of what could be, a sense of the ideal.  It also holds a flawless mirror before you, revealing all the imperfections and shortfalls in your character.  The combination is powerful.  It fills your spirit with hunger and divine discontent, imbueing you with restlessness, as though you'd taken out an insurance policy against complacency.  Be careful, though: Virgo energies can self-destruct, slipping into a crippling hyper-awareness regarding all the flaws and shortfalls inherent in people, oneself, our possessions, our prospects -- everything.  And nothing kills our climb toward perfection faster than that.

With your Moon in Virgo, your instincts are analytical, always searching for weaknesses and flaws.  People can misunderstand that, and imagine you to be "negative" or "hyper-critical."  Those problems are real possibilities for you, but only when you're not taking care of yourself.  When you're healthy, there's a constructive aspect to your perceptions, as though you're constantly straining to improve things.  Ultimately, the only kinds of people with whom you can be comfortable are ones who are willing to see themselves objectively, call a spade a spade, and proceed in reasonable ways to change their characters or circumstances.  You don't have much patience with pretty words that aren't linked to sincere, concrete promises.

To be happy, it helps you a lot to have some kind of hands-on hobby or craft, something that calls for skill, precision, and knowledge.

Going farther, we see that your Moon lies in the Twelfth house of your chart.

Slipping the bonds of ego, letting consciousness expand beyond the narrow framework of personality -- that's the terrain of the Twelfth House.  A planet here stands between you and higher states of consciousness, not as an obstacle but as a bridge.  For that reason, it's helpful to view such a planet as your "Guru" or "Master Teacher."

The very existence of a planet in this part of your chart tells us that in this lifetime you're ready for a quantum leap in awareness.  But to accomplish that, you must practice a very specific "yoga."  What yoga?  That depends on the planets involved.

Before we identify that spiritual discipline, there's one more point -- your planetary "guru" is rather insistent.  If you avoid the methods the Teacher suggests, your poor ego will take some hard knocks.  To the old astrologers, this was the "House of Troubles."  That's a fair description of what's in store for us if we choose to maintain our usual attachments, ignoring the call of the inner worlds.

With the Moon in the Twelfth House, Luna becomes your Master Teacher.  Ever since you were a kid, you've felt an enormous, instinctive pull toward experiencing higher, or at least altered, states of consciousness.  The inner Teacher is working directly on your heart, on your subjective, emotional responses.  Understanding doesn't matter much here; only experiencing, only witnessing, feeling, accepting.  Take care that you provide yourself with time for that quiet, meditative work.  Otherwise something dangerous happens: your emotions begin to erode your self-image.  How?  Two ways.  You may be drawn impulsively and repeatedly into ego-shattering interpersonal dramas.  Or you may find yourself overwhelmed with an urge to experience oblivion -- the shadow of transcendence.  Down that road, we meet alcoholics, not to mention drug-aholics, workaholics, TV-aholics....

There's a third critical piece in your astrological puzzle -- the Ascendant, or rising sign. Along with the Sun and Moon, it completes the "primal triad." What is it? What does it mean? Simple -- the Ascendant is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the instant of your birth. It's where the sun is at dawn, in other words. In exactly the same way, the Ascendant represents how you "dawn" on people -- that is, how you present yourself. It's your "style," or your "mask."

The ascendant means more than that. It symbolizes a way you can help yourself feel centered, at ease, comfortable with who you are. If you get its message, then something wonderful happens: your style hooks you into the world of experience in a way that feeds your spirit exactly the kinds of events and relationships you need. Your soul is charged with more enthusiasm for the life you're living -- and you feel vibrant, confident, and full of animal grace.

When you took your first breath, Libra was lifting over the eastern horizon of St. John,NB, Canada. Let's begin our analysis by considering the meaning and spiritual message of the sign of "The Artist".

Perfect equilibrium.  That's the spirit of the Scales.  When Libra realizes its evolutionary aim, the nervous system is as still as a dark pool on a windless summer evening.  Outwardly, Libran energy often looks as though it's already there: it seems graceful and balanced, even unflappable.  Inwardly, it's another story: the Libran part of you is tuned as tight as the high string on a violin.  Spirit gave you some advice back before you were born: don't pluck it.  And don't let anyone else pluck it either.

Inevitably, with your terrific sensitivity, you'll get rattled from time to time.  What can you do about it?  Watch a ballet, or any other beautiful thing.  The outer harmony will internalize; you'll sigh, releasing tension.  That's the Libran evolutionary strategy in a nutshell: flood your senses with perceptions of beauty.  It will soothe you, lifting you closer to the unbreakable serenity which is the true goal of this sign of the zodiac.

With Libra rising, you radiate grace and friendliness.  Instinctively, people feel at ease around you... which spotlights the central characteristic of your outer self: courtesy.  In this context that word doesn't mean being painfully "proper" all the time; instead it implies the capacity to grease the social wheels, to help people feel accepted and natural.  You have that skill in abundance.

You feel most centered when you're creating harmony -- and that covers a lot of bases.  Encouraging friends to relax and unwind certainly is part of it.  But you can also create harmony between colors, shapes, and sounds.  We call that "art," and expressing yourself artistically is quite self-affirming for you.  Similarly, you can create harmony inside yourself by letting beauty wash over your senses, or by simply sitting quietly in an elegant place.

What have we learned so far? Quite a lot. Astrologers use the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in much the same way people who know just a little astrology use Sun signs. The difference is that while there are only twelve Sun signs, there are 1728 different combinations of all three factors. So when we say that you are a Cancer with the Moon in Virgo and Libra rising, that's a very specific statement.

Here's a way to make those words come even more alive. Traditionally, signs are connected with Bulls and Sea-Goats and Scorpions -- creatures we don't see every day. But we can translate those images into more modern archetypes.

We can say you are "The Healer", or "The Wise One", or "The Invisible One". Those are just different ways of saying you have the Sun in Cancer.

We can say you have the soul of "The Perfectionist", or "The Analyst", or "The Servant"... your Moon lies in Virgo, in other words.

We can add that you wear the mask of "The Artist", or "The Diplomat", or "The Lover". Those images capture the spirit of your Ascendant, which is Libra.

You can combine those archetypes any way you want. And you can go further: Once you have a feel for the three basic signs in your primal triad, you can make up your own images to go with them. Whatever words you choose, those simple statements are your fundamental astrological signature. It's your skeleton. Our next step is to begin adding flesh and hair to that skeleton by considering the planets.

Unsurprisingly, planets can gain prominence in a birth chart through association with the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant. These three are power brokers, and any linkage with them boosts a planet's influence.

Your own birth chart is complicated by the fact that, at your birth, Pluto was aligned with the Sun... or "conjunct" the Sun, to use the proper astrological term. Thus, the energy and spirit of that planet is fused with your solar identity. In a sense, you are an "incarnation" of Pluto."

What can that mean? Start by understanding the significance of the planet.

"Life's a bitch. Then you die." Go to any boutique from coast to coast; you'll find those words on a coffee mug. Meaninglessness. Like most truly frightening ideas, we make a joke of it. That's Plutonian territory: the realm of all that terrifies us so badly we need to hide from it. Death. Disease. Our personal shame. Sexuality, to some extent. Initially, Pluto asks us to face our own wounds, squarely and honestly. Then, if we succeed, it offers us a way to create an unshakable sense of meaning in our lives. How? Methods vary according to the Signs and Houses involved, but always they have one point in common: the high Plutonian path invariably involves accepting some trans-personal purpose in your life.

One more point: Pluto moves so slowly that it remains in a given Sign for many years. As result, its Sign position in your birth chart refers not only to you but also to your generation. The House position, however, is much more personal in its relevance.

Pluto was journeying slowly through the sign Cancer. Thus the shadow material you are called upon to face has to do with the dark side of the Crab archetype: hiding from life. In what part of your life or personal history have you chosen safety over experience, the appearance of love over the steamy reality of shared growth, security over magic? (If you answer is "Nowhere!" then congratulations... you're Enlightened... or not looking hard enough.)

At the moment of your birth, Pluto gleamed in the Tenth House -- the part of the natal chart that helps clarify your "cosmic job description." You were born with a mission, and your sense of meaning in life depends on fulfilling it. What is the mission? We can't say precisely, but we can narrow it down. First, it involves blowing the whistle on lies. Second, it involves countering the force that has historically been called Evil, and healing its effects. Third, it depends totally upon your courage to speak out at the level of moral principle.

While a fairly large number of people have Pluto in that sign and house, the fact that it lies conjunct your Sun gives it special emphasis. By pushing the strengths it suggests toward their limits, you charge your solar vitality, approach your destiny, and set the stage for fulfilling your spiritual purpose.

A planet can gain authority by sharing a House with the Moon. We find that situation in your chart. Jupiter is bathing in moonlight, occupying the Twelfth House along with Luna.

Take all the planets, all the meteors, moons, asteroids, and comets. Roll them up in a big ball of cosmic mush. They still wouldn't equal the mass of the "King of the Gods" -- Jupiter. Exactly that same bigness pervades the planet's astrological spirit. Jupiter is the symbol of buoyancy and generosity, of opportunity and joy. At the deepest level, it represents faith... faith in life, that is, rather than faith in anybody's theological position papers.

Jupiter stands in Libra. This is an important piece of information -- maybe a pivotal one. Being human is tough sometimes. When you need to boost your elemental faith in life, your answer lies in following the Way of Harmony. First, relax. Then let your eyes rest on something lovely -- a painting, a sunset, a sloop reaching across the white-capped bay. Then go find a dear, caring friend, and enjoy the solace of refined companionship.

In your chart, the "King of the Gods" reigns in the Twelfth House -- traditionally the "House of Troubles," but actually the House of higher consciousness. Spiritually you have reached a point in the inner journey in which you need to learn lessons about radical faith. That is to say, in order to enter higher levels of being, you must first be willing to take chances in the world... such as traveling to a Sacred Site, even if you can't afford it. Again and again, Spirit will ask you one simple question: "Do you trust me?"

Your birth chart displays another area of heightened activity: the Ninth House. The reason for that is simple -- there's a lot of planetary activity. With Mercury, Venus and Mars in that area of your life, it is charged with activity, soul lessons, and opportunities for personal development. Before we even consider the planets separately, our first step is to explore this piece of existential real estate in broad terms.

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