Working with Time: Recognising and Using Opportunity

© 2014 Suzanne Rough. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   05/29/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8041-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8042-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908778

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part One Primary Directions and Secondary Progressions

Chapter 1   Primary Directions

Chapter 2   Secondary Directions

Part One Appendix

Part Two Transits

Chapter 1   Transits: Overview

Chapter 2   Category 1 and 2 Transits

Chapter 3   Category Three Transits:

Chapter 4   Building the Picture

Part Three Practical Tips on Working with Time

For my clients of the past three decades who brought the ideas to life.

Preface

For a student astrologer, learning the art of prediction is a good discipline because it tests the understanding of energy principles, how they express themselves, and how the different principles interact. However, prediction has no real place in Western astrology.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy to impress with a few accurate predictions. Those who visit astrologers think they want to know what is going to happen, but they do not, not really, not Westerners brought up on the idea of free will. We are confused and disempowered by predeterminism.

We would rather know about the kind of situations that are going to present themselves so that we can make conscious decisions about how to engage with them. Keeping the focus upon the circumstances, not the probable outcomes, creates opportunities for intelligent choice. This serves Western consciousness better.

This book first came into being as a teaching manual after two decades of client work during which I used to good effect, apparently, a small number of time-working techniques to help my clients identify and prepare themselves for their opportunities.

I have made some revisions for the purposes of this edition, removing case histories and observations. While they have a place in a teacher-student communication, they are not appropriate for a mass-market book.

Suzanne Rough

April 2014

Introduction

Time scales

The competent astrologer is a juggler. We juggle to blend influences, and we juggle signs and houses, planets with other planets, and planets and aspects. We juggle with different time frames and alternative time scales.

Human time is created by the human brain. It is a product of the personality in incarnation. As a basic point of reference, it uses the relationship between the sun (Endnote 1) and our planet, Earth.

The rotation of Earth upon its axis gives us our day; the movement of Earth along the ecliptic gives us our months; and a complete revolution gives us our year. This is as true for an astrologer as it is for the astronomer and for those who simply keep an eye on the time to manage their lives, even if astrologers do start their year at the spring equinox and not the first day of January.

Astrologers, however, have other time frames that use a different scale, although they express the relationship between the Sun and the Earth

It is a long-established tradition in practical astrology to make one day in the ephemeris equal to one year of human life.

There is in existence a video of Robert Hand being sworn in as the president of the American Astrological Association. One would have to go a very long way to find a more competent astrologer than Robert Hand. Hand claims to have worked with every surviving astrological tradition and has written some first-rate books. Though when it comes to answering his own question of why, in time-dynamic astrology, a day should equal a year, he sidesteps the issue entirely and says, rather disarmingly, that he simply does not know why it works, but it does.

It is highly unlikely that Hand is unaware, although one wonders why he did not want to give an uncomplicated explanation. It involves just one word: correspondence. It is the same principle expressing itself on a different level. In the course of both the year and the day, Earth moves through all twelve signs of the zodiac. It takes Earth twelve months to move through each of the signs and just twenty-four hours for it to make a complete revolution on its axis, taking in each of the signs as it turns. According to esoteric thinking, this makes the day the lower correspondence of the year.

In this short course dedicated to working with time, we will be looking at the following:

• primary directions (scale: day for a year)

• secondary directions (scale: day for a year and two hours equal one month [the lunar equivalent])

• transits (scale: real time)

There are other time-working techniques, but these are the ones that we are selecting as being most useful for identifying opportunity without getting involved in a level of detail that lures one close to the rocks of predeterminism.

Energy combinations that produce events are predetermined; the forms with which they clothe themselves are not.

Predeterminism, fate, and opportunity

The natal chart is a diagram of the celestial relationships in force at the moment that a child’s independent life begins. Contained within that energy pattern is our path, which will disclose itself in time. Unless premature demise is a factor, that path will take the child into adulthood, from adulthood into old age, and then on to the doorway out of incarnation.

We spin our own paths from our psyches just as a spider spins thread from within its own body. To work with time in astrology is to pull out and put into a frame that part of his or her path that an individual will be covering at a given age, i.e., after a certain number of revolutions of Earth around the sun. Because the planets orbit at predictable speeds, it is possible to identify their mutual relations at any point in the future, as well as their relations to their positions in the birth chart. These predetermined relationships are the basis of prediction.

A person can be blown along his path as the wind blows a fallen leaf, in and out of the events and situations that will cause both pleasure and pain. Alternatively, he can move along it purposefully, recognising that the people, situations, and events he encounters are all externalising aspects of his own psyche, in a process