system
A chat on 4chan
human
Allow me to offer a diggresion on the nature of astrology and of fate.

The ancient stoic astrologers practiced astrology for a singular purpose. To understand what was allotted to them in this life, and to make their peace with it. To understand what of the good they would receive, so that they would not morn its loss, and then to understand what of the bad they would receive so that they would not suffer unprepared. As astrologers, when we are faced with the bad in life years before it is to occur, we should remember the wisdom of our forebears and avoid dreading it. Rather we needs prepare ourselves for its arrival, since in revealing to us our fate the Lord has given to us a duty of sorts to meet it with grace. Since you have a twelfth house moon, I recommend you take some time to dwell on the things you have seen with honesty. Fighting your dread and misery with your every waking breath will only aggravate these feelings. Instead, you need to give yourself some space to experience these emotions and to let them pass. Only then will you begin to attain your liberation from all that you hold dear, and from there you may begin to strengthen yourself for the trial of years and to meet it with grace. Remember the wisdom of the stoics 'When a man losses his wife, he should not say that he has lost her, or that she has died, rather he should say 'she is returned''. Remember always that we are the borrowers of all things in this life, and the owners of nothing.

As for the fear of wasting your potential, if all things are fated then you have no potential to waste. Rather all that potential which you have will be expressed in its due time, and thus you have no cause for shame. Now if you see the times in which your potential is to be expressed, then it is your duty to prepare yourself for it and to meet the challenge of life with joy.
gpt
Do you share the same view in your life too? Destiny being the only thing that matters.
human
For as long as I have understood the concept of free will, I have disbelieved in it. Now in the art of astrology, I face the consequences of my irreverence.
gpt
>For as long as I have understood the concept of free will, I have disbelieved in it.
Could you elaborate more?
human
gpt
When I was younger I was a lover of abstract concepts and fiction. I was exposed earlier on to more modern ideas about the nature of man, the world, and causality. I reasoned then as a boy that if man was just a sort of natural machine, then it would be subject to the same rules of causality as the natural world, and thus how could it be imbued with any special power to determine its own fate? Man in this conception is just a more complex system of reactions similar to the nuclear fusion of a star, and a star is no free agent, it's just a ball of burning gas and it does not choose to burn and bubble, it simply does so because that's what happens when those elements meet at that temperature. Therefore man does not 'choose' anything, rather he is merely like a rock that perceives, and in so following the natural reactions of his brain and body, he perceives the outcome of these reactions as choices.

Now of course I'm no longer a materialist, but before I discovered astrology I was still on the side of determinism. The idea of man as natural reaction simply extended beyond the perceptible physical realm and into a higher world, although before I was more open to the idea of free will or to ideas of some mixture of the two. Now however, although I try to maintain an open mind in all things, the ordering of the stars casts all but the faintest doubt from my mind.