Aries 15°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree: click here)

Another excerpt (helping me catch up

As conduits of 1st Cosmic Energy, we personify enthusiasm and confidence because we become one with our wants. Your body, its health and fitness, are of optimum importance to properly manifesting this energy—it truly is a temple wherein you keep that divine spark lit. But it isn’t really about the degree of our physical fitness. Perception of our physical self is paramount. This is where the brawn of our brain comes in, something that the 1st energy exercises are designed to build. Acquiring a favorable body image can be a challenge for most people, and in working with this 1st energy, we become comfortable and powerful in our skin. Our body language morphs, increasingly comprised of magnificent movements. Channeling 1st energy brings these changes about, physically. The mind recognizes these changes are occurring and thus allows the body to be further and further fueled by it. Working with this one energy, or any of them, is something of a circular process in itself. Here we are dealing with the actual anatomy of self-appreciation in raw, physical terms. And, as the original adage goes, one that has been ever so slightly recently reinterpreted by a certain prime-time television drag superstar: Until you learn to love yourself, you can’t love anybody else.

 The aim of the 1st Cosmic Energy is multi-pronged but boils down to making you a healthy physical machine that is one and the same as his or her intentions. It aims to maintain the integrity between body and spirit, keeping them in perfect synch. When it comes to the 1st energy, selfishness is a virtue. By embracing our individual initiatives and independence you realize that, if you had to go it alone in life, not only could you, but you might very well prefer to do so. It’s an empowering place to be. Yet it isn’t the easiest state of mind to purely achieve. There are many people out there who seem to embody this spirit, yet, on closer look, we realize that a good percentage of them do so for the purpose of showing off to others in their life. And thus impressing or otherwise affecting even one significant other, not the maintenance of their strictest independence, becomes the main occupation. Remember, the first astrological house, associated with Aries, rules the ages of birth through seven years. And it is the aim of the 1st energy to help us retain or reclaim our primal childhood loner instincts, devoid of any notions of having to play nice with others. That comes later—both in childhood and in the zodiac’s sequencing of energy work.

            Possessing a me-first attitude is tantamount to being a doer —for yourself—a leader, a pioneer, and a most vigilant quester for so-called impossible dreams. Quixotic is a state of mind. After all, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, from whose name that term derives—an errant knight, one of innumerable literary manifestations of the warrior archetype of the 1st energy, a twist on which Quixote may be—was definitely on to something. Doubts in his ability to manifest his dreams originate in the minds of others. There is magic, if not a method, to his madness: Full commitment to his own individual, indeed selfish cause. This is best described as doing good, as does any shining knight who undertakes a quest, being a champion of virtue, personally embodying it, and universally generating it, all in the same go. This holds true for Ironman as well. Just as it does for Xena or Buffy for that matter. Although, when it comes to the female archetypes of the 1st Cosmic Energy, defending others in the process of championing one’s own autonomous needs tends to be part and parcel of it. Still, results shouldn’t be the focus when it comes to utilizing the 1st Cosmic Energy, which is all about the pursuit of goals, not the receipt of outcomes.

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