I woke up thinking, holy merde, I hope I haven’t gone too far in the one direction of exploring the energy of each day via these Sabian Symbols. Not to say they are limiting in any way—au contraire—they are opening a new world of thought to me on one hand and also providing a program to which I can stick, so that I can come to this blague every day with inspiration for something to say. But I awoke worried that I wasn’t exploring the other direction I hoped to: that of the blague cosmique, the cosmic joke element of life that is fairly obvious, in my life anyway. I have a list I’m keeping of stories characterized by strange phenomenon, synchrinicity: outrageous coincidence, seeming divine intervention and also what I sheepishly must admit is my own psychic ability, which comes and goes, and yet, on the whole, grows stronger from year to year. That element of my psyche has always “been there”—I believe it was inherited through my Celtic bloodline—and this extra sense has steadily intensified, crystalized, the more I’ve exercised it via my metaphysical work with clients. When I read people’s astrological charts, for instance, information flows two ways: There is the literal patterning of planets in signs in houses, and how they connect to one another, and what that all means, in an individual’s astrological chart, portrayed, as it is, by the wheel of their zodiac; and then there is what I call “off the page” information whereby “stuff comes through”, the circle of the wheel of the zodiac becoming something of a scrying device, a wonder wall, a magic mirror (I was obsessed by “Romper Room” as a kid), a crystal ball of sorts. Clients of ours know what I mean by all of this.

And lo and behold today’s Sabian Symbol, for 7° Aries is: A Man Successfully Expressing Himself In Two Realms At Once. For starters, seven is a number near and dear to my heart as it is the Libra number, one of Light, Order and Music, seven rainbow rays of in a lightbeam, seven notes to “The Scales”, and many more Apollonian connections. And ways in which any of us lead double lives not withstanding, when I think of two realms I immediately think of the material and on material realms. Yesterday, we explored A Square, With One Of Its Sides Brightly Illumined wherein we are drawn toward that illuminated side, where we might break on through to the proverbial other side. (I neglected to mention that the square, or the cross, symbolizes matter and the material realm.) Today we look at life from both sides now: We have broken through to discover that the other realm or dimension might be immaterial but it is in now way unreal. It is always there, whether or not we are engineered or inclined to perceive it.  And—why not?—it might be empowering to imagine that this dynamic is especially available to us on this particular day. I’ll be curious to peruse a list of people born on this day to see if they personify the dynamic of expressing in “two realms” at once in any way.

There is precious little written online about these symbols. But I stumbled upon an interpretation of 7° Aries being labelled “Integrity Light”, all the Aries degrees being “Integrity something”; tomorrow’s, according to this site is “Integrity Regeneration”, regeneration being the keynote of Scorpio which follows Libra, the sign of (cardinal-air) Light. So, hooray, I’ve just stumbled onto some validation that these symbol degrees may indeed be following the zodiac’s pattern of twelve, times thirty (days in a month) circles within circles, equaling the 360° cycle of the calendar year. It goes to show: sometimes (read: always) leading with our intuitive sense can result in concrete proof in the pudding. Anyway, in this description I found, today’s symbol is characterized as “the one who keeps his lamp alight whatever the price”. We have moved into the light (cue the lady’s voice from the film Poltergeist) and now we are holding that lamplight aloft, or indeed we are the light, shining in two directions at once. I think of the children in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, entering that realm for the first time—Lucy (meaning light) first encounters a lampost, which marks the point between the so-called real and imagined worlds.

Whether we are speaking of the world of our imagination, or some spiritual, energetic realm that we can “psychically” visit if not fully inhabit, we are on about the same thing. Back in the late 1980s, right before I had an extraordinary “event” happened to me whereby I was triggered into an altered state—I will try to write more fully about this for you at a later date, though Stella and I have told this story a number of times, live on stage—I had a dream. The dream centered on this giant black book from which I was privileged to read; the book was titled, in giant silver letters: I Magi Nation. Now of course it spells imagination; but it also points to the notion that perhaps I was a Magi and that I wasn’t alone, but part of a larger body, community, nation of them. Within days after this dream the weird event occurred—it may’ve been triggered by a stranger slipping something into my drink—I will never know—but it resulted in my being endowed for a night with super human thought and strength that involved my “seeing the math in my head in blueprint form” for successfully dive-rolling out of a car going 40 miles an hour, landing on my feet and then sprinting faster than a gazelle as well as my “seeing the math” to launch myself into the air and scale an eight-foot fence without touching it; “seeing the math” as well to “find the sweet-spot” in a chain-link gate, embedded in cement, where I could hit it with my vintage Columbia bicycle so that the fence/gate would be knocked over, out of its cement foundation, allowing me to ride my bike over that fence without so much as taking my feet off the pedals—I remember that was important to me—to stay balanced on my bike without putting a foot down. This and more all actually happened on the eve of the Harmonic Convergence, August 16, 1987. I won’t bore you with the rest of this story now; but the upshot was that I learned the hard way, and in a manner I did not invite, that I was capable of perceiving (an) other realm(s) that had heretofore been closed to me. It was violent and forced upon me, and at the time I did not see any good in this having happened. In time, though, I came to understand that, whether welcomed or not, this event provided a breakthrough.

Needless to say, I strongly relate to today’s symbol, but just because I readily imagine my particular two realms to be that of a solid world and that of an impressionistic one, doesn’t mean the duality begins and ends there. I do find it funny that my particular first “psychic break” with “reality” had “physics” overtones. As one who hated math and science growing up, I suppose the joke was on me that my being endowed with extrasensory powers for one evening back in 1987, manifested as a superhuman strength powered by sudden flashes of mathematical, physicist genius. What springs to mind as the two realms in which you express yourself might be drastically different from mine. And, yes, there are simpler, terrestrial dualities that might be portrayed by phrases like “leading a double life” or “juggling two worlds at once” or even “bringing home the bacon and frying it upon in the pan”, which are also suggested by this symbol.

Still, I am inclined to see the Sabian symbol of A Man Successfully Expressing Himself In Two Realms At Once as being pinioned to the material/non-material world dichotomy. I think that we are, all of of us, expressing ourselves in these two realms simultaneously, but I don’t believe that we are all doing it successfully. Even those of us who might be conscious of doing it at all might fall short. I consider myself a auto-didactical metaphysician—metaphysics can be defined as “the science of the immaterial”. Indeed, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5 167-8). Increasingly, I am made aware of this and, hopefully, becoming more succesful at said expression. And, having looked at life from both sides, now, what I’ve gleaned from my understanding of the unseen world has only inspired me to live more simply, healthfully and sanely, in the seen one. I am conscious of the fact that the expressions of our thoughts and actions don’t just manifest in the here and now, they make an impression on the “other side” as well—call it the spiritual realm, or that of infinite or eternal or, plainly, the energetic—where elements of our being, thoughts and actions are duly noted. Perhaps there is an Akashic record, I don’t know. But when I consider that possibility I immediately flash to my dream of I Magi Nation and the very real experiencing of realms of power and possibility that I encountered in the days that followed, which seemed to defy my own natural laws not to mention those of physics.

A footnote: When we embarked a decade later on writing Sextrology, our publishers assumed we would write a popular, splashy, sex-sells sort of book. We, however, sensed it was an opportunity to write a book that one really couldn’t judge by its title, let alone its cover. Delving into the immaterial but very real world of archetypes and energies as it does, Sextrology itself is a successful expression in two realms. It is at once a real and funny, bawdy and poppy, academic and logical book that makes a strong argument for the validity of astrology; and yet it is also suffused with that “off the page” element, a sense of esoteric understanding, a knowingness and a mystery that speaks to readers on a more transcendent level. And, without getting too specific, I will say that we’ve had some indication that the book has indeed been well received in realms beyond Horatio’s ken.

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