The following is a brief excerpt from an interview I did with Adam Sommer - followed by some current reflections.
AS: I love that idea. I’ve thought a lot about how astrology helps us to evolve as human beings, and what comes to mind right now is its ability to contextualize a person’s life experiences. Astrology can help people begin to see past events in their lives as meaningful, even though they often appear to be random and challenging.
MJ: I feel that’s an incredible service. One of the primary things to emerge in my astrology readings is the acknowledgement, and then validation, of what’s already happened to someone. It provides a seemingly objective, archetypal validation of the soul issues and psychic material they’ve come into this life to resolve. This is even more important when I work with older people who have lived a large part of their lives already; the reading is not going to be about a new star on the horizon, or what will happen when they grow up. They’ve already had many life experiences that they may or may not understand.
So, I think you’re right about the sense of meaning the chart can bring. I read a science book recently where the author compared a sensible idea to a stupid idea. The example cited astronomy as the sensible idea and astrology as the stupid idea. It was an otherwise good book, but, yet again, astrology gets ridiculed! It’s ironic to me that in our materialist, rational culture, the things that get ridiculed often carry enormous beauty and meaning. I experience over and over in my therapy sessions with young, intelligent, kind, moral people with successful jobs that they’re struggling to find a sense of their own meaning, of who they are and why they are here. What we’ve lost in all the brilliance of these vast technological advances in our world is our sense of meaningful participation in the larger cosmos.