stages of learning

I don't remember if I've posted this before. Following is a recipe for gaining spiritual understanding that I mapped to the zodiac years ago. I don't formally use this, and wouldn't expect anyone else to, but maybe the ideas could useful.

The steps contained in the top half of the zodiac, that is, 1 - 2 and 10 -12, tend to be more active while sleeping. Steps 4 - 8 are usually more active while awake, and steps 3 and 9 are metaphorically at the boundary between waking and sleeping.

Counter-clockwise starting with taurus:

1. inspiration
2. imagination
3. insight
4. exploration
5. formulation
6. application
7. reaction
8. evaluation
9. conclusion
10. generalization
11. integration
12. understanding

My observation has been that a person who makes a fetish out of any one of these types of thinking can make a lot of progress with it, but eventually gets balled up there because of steps they're not taking in the other areas. This system here is more balanced, but of course its still limited by the structure of the zodiac.

I also cooked up a 'stages of love' that was more emotional than mental, but I've forgotten it.

Interesting tool for development. Some signs don't seem to match up to those attributes to me, but I suppose its how you apply them.

You could even focus on one per month, going through the zodiac cycle in real time.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil Toad

Interesting tool for development. Some signs don't seem to match up to those attributes to me, but I suppose its how you apply them.

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Thanks. I think the reason they don't appear to match is we're not working from quite the same version of the zodiac. As I guess you know, in western astrology the signs are earth, air, water, fire, starting with taurus. I don't understand that order, since in order from passive to active, the elements would be earth, water, air, fire. In the zodiac I'm more familiar with, which presumably is of some more obscure Vedic origin and was picked up or bastardized by Theosophists, elements correspond to levels of manifestation, not to each of the 12 signs. The horizontal line through cancer and capricorn corresponds to fire, the next line down, through leo and sagittarius, corresponds to air, virgo and scorpio is water, and earth is at libra. The 'water' line would correspond to the astral plane, the most solid plane above the physical one.

My cycle of 12 steps corresponds to this other zodiac that describes the path from unmanifest to manifest and back again. At one time I tried to understand the correspondence between the western astrological zodiac and this one, but I couldn't work it out. Perhaps the earth, air, water, fire order is even somewhat arbitrary and historical, and now the astrological gods conform to those meanings by convention, not by an underlying necessity. I'm just speculating though.

If I were to try to formally use the 'stages of learning' zodiac, I probably wouldn't schedule it according to the calendar, I'd probably just follow the cycle around for a subject of thought, which would take anywhere from a few hours to years depending on the subject.

If people are interested how the physical plane / astral plane dichotomy maps into the zodiac I mentioned, there is an article called 'the zodiac' by H. W. Percival at wordfoundation.com, or a person can read about it in the 'thinking and destiny' book pdf on the same site. Books by Max Heindel, Rudolph Steiner, Alice Bailey, or almost any other Blavatsky influenced writer will describe something similar, but Percival's description is clearest.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my first quasi-shared dream experience concerned the four elements, with a counterpoint to my criticism of them appearing in my sister's dream.