The philosopher Baruch Spinoza saw nature to be synonymous with God. He saw all living creatures as a part of this whole. The thing that tied everything together was affectivity; the capacity to affect and be affected.
He saw everything to be relative to something else in a web-like structure. Consciousness sits in the middle of cause and effect, attempting to better perceive this ‘web’.
If the web of cause and effect can be somewhat perceived, something very special can happen. We can become the cause and will the effect.
If we notice that the sun makes plants grow, we can plant seeds in the right spot. If bears notice that salmon swim upstream at a certain time of year they can position themselves to capitalize on this event and fill up their bellies.
But animals don’t focus themselves into an idea of a future that suits them on a highly individual level. They go with nature’s flow. They are nature, as we are, but with them there is no confusion. There is also no freedom to create a unique future to answer an inner calling.
Camus said, ‘with rebellion, awareness is born.” Human awareness is free of time’s constraints. Reflective thought allows us to get outside of time’s bondage and then return to it with better ideas of navigation. The only way to navigate time is to embrace its forward push. There is no backwards time navigation and no time machines. To navigate time well is to embrace the forward push within your own chemistry.
The web of cause and effect becomes very personal. It is now quite evident to strive to clearly see what causes your effects. Maybe the problem that you continue to face is less about circumstance and more about a mindset, and maybe not. Seeing it clearly reveals true strategies to get back to ‘forward’.
And what about the effects that are not negative? Are you paying attention to those? This would include effects such as delight, peacefulness, enjoyment. Maybe you think that a certain tv show gives you delight but in examining the true cause it becomes clear that the delight lies in getting a taste of a certain kind of life. Maybe it’s a life of more adventure and maybe it’s a life of better simplicity. To go on enjoying the show without ever examining its true cause of delight might keep you from taking a certain action towards something wonderful for your flourishing.
The point is that the cause and effect pattern of the wide world we live in is like an elaborate web. Scientists see much further into the web than the bear awaiting salmon. They have found ways to determine the solid causes and effects of invisible forces. They can calculate measurements that serve as learning tools for future human minds to discover even more, as they build on this knowledge. The web emerges, in plain sight for those that learn these things.
But the web is not just for scientists, it is also for artists, psychologists, engineers, teachers, farmers, chefs, parents and athletes. Anyone can use the knowledge of this ever-growing web to their advantage. Anyone can become the cause that they want to become, in search of desired effects.
The web is vast and worldly, but also quite intimate and immediately present should one decide to become aware of it. If we can learn what the toroscope teaches us about the ego then we can witness a very personal web that is in the constant act of being spun. The Moon, our egos, are in a continuous state of change. Constantly “arising with a tinge of the past on the fringe of the future” as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described. He said we inherit the past, thus we are bound to it, but we are free to create. Each moment truly is the potential to a new dawn. You can wake up to the web you are spinning, or you can stay asleep to your momentum and spin in a mechanical spidery way.
In the zodiac, Saturn represents ’cause’. These causes make up all of science and describe the laws of our natural world.
Saturn upside down is Jupiter. The toroscopes alerts us to the reality of inward and outward connections. If Saturn is the flipside of Jupiter, they are in a sense the same thing. If Saturn is the cause then Jupiter is also a kind of cause, just consisting of fire stuff instead of earth, or willing instead of law.
What kind of cause is this? It’s a cause that stands outside of time, in fire’s eternity.
The cause is quite simply your potential to be the cause, and create an effect. Embracing this ‘reality’ within is called confidence. It is as natural to embrace this cause as it is to embrace the cause of rain falling from the sky, in fact it is more natural.
Toroidal Zodiac 