Welcome to your consciousness workbook for our ten new planets, written without any jargon, in a way that anyone without any astrological knowledge can enjoy and benefit from. Beautifully illustrated with meditative images for each planet created by astrologer Karen La Puma, this book invites you to embark on the adventure of embracing these new aspects of consciousness in your life!
In the scientific worldview of contemporary Western culture, we tend to think that the stars can't really affect us, and that astrology is something akin to magic or a belief system. This assumes we live in a stable world and the planets are merely bits of rock flying around us in space. The truth is that we live in a dynamic system, and we are influenced by the rhythms of that system. We're on a spinning planet revolving around the Sun, along with all the other planets of our solar system, thanks to the gravitational forces and dynamics of those planets.
Neither magic, nor a belief system, astrology is a social science, recording the psychology and behavior of people over the eons, as referenced to the dynamic system in which we live: and that is the only way we measure and record anything. A year is one cycle around the Sun, a day is one revolution of the Earth.
So, over the eons astrologers noticed that we generally sleep at night and go to work during the day. We go out and party on the full moon and stay home and plant gardens on the new moon. That we struggle to make decisions when Mercury, the planet of ideas, seems to be going backwards in the sky. And when Saturn, the planet of responsibility, returns to his birth position when we're about age 29, we all go through a 'What am I doing with my life?' reality check.
Our personal consciousness develops within the collective consciousness around us, and we see this mapped out in the personal planets in our chart. These are the planets out to Saturn that are visible to the naked eye, and they talk about facets of our personality that are important in living day to day.
The inner planets represent aspects of personality, and the outer planets represent aspects of consciousness. So, as each new outer planet is discovered, it represents a new aspect of consciousness that is becoming available to us. Over the last 200 years, we've discovered three new planets. The discovery of Uranus brought us intuitive consciousness, the discovery of Neptune, spiritual consciousness, and the discovery of Pluto, psycho