Twelve Zodiacal Qualities of Spiritual Living

2. NON-POSSESSIVENESS (TAURUS)

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Where there is possessiveness and clinging to loved ones out of insecurity, fear or pride, there can be no spiritual living. The desire to possess whatever or whoever has brought us pleasure or happiness, ease and the fulfillment of a personal need, is most natural; but the spiritual life is not a life of subservience to nature and its instinctual, bio-psychic wants. It is a life of transcendence. Natural impulses, which are always at root compulsive and mostly unconscious, have to be transcended.

This is the great issue which separates the spiritual life from the type of existence which modern psychology tends to idealize, although such an idealization is valid as a transitional feature. American men and women have to be de-conditioned so that they may forget their varied complexes and the rigidity of feelings and body responses imposed upon them by the Puritan tradition and the pompous hypocrisy of Victorian age morality. In spite of the permissiveness of modern education, the very persons who claim to be ‘free’ are so often bound by subtle, or not so subtle, forms of possessiveness and fear – jealousy being but another form of fear.

The zodiacal sign Taurus is traditionally thought to be a possessive sign, but its possessiveness arises from its concentration upon productivity. In order to produce a rich harvest, limits have to be set to the field in which natural processes have to operate effectively. Ownership is part of the limiting process. There must be a concentration of efforts, a focusing will to keep away all interfering activities. But productivity at a higher level also requires an openness to fecundating external influences – openness to the whole universe.

Possession however, need not mean binding attachment. There is a level at which the Taurean capacity to produce fruits can operate, not in an ‘indefinite’, but rather in a multi-defined or universally operative manner. One can thus transcend the ‘This is mine’ mentality. The demand for an exclusive sense of possession is usually based on fear, which means to the inability to possess oneself. It is rather easy not to be possessive of material goods when one lives in a convent or a group-situation where total sharing of objects being used is the rule. But such situations, valid as they undoubtedly can be at the transitional stage of de-conditioning, often drive possessiveness and fear into deeper and mostly unconscious or un-acknowledges levels. In true spiritual living these illusions are discarded. The individual can stand and act unpossessively in the very midst of possessions. One may experience ‘poverty’ in conditions of affluence. All that matters, or should matter, is that whatever is necessary for the activity at hand should be available. Whether one owns it is irrelevant, provided one can make use of it for the achievement of a purpose which is essentially super-personal – super-personal because the spiritual individual fully accepts being simply the agent for the fulfillment of this purpose.

#astrology #taurus #zodiac #rudhyar #esoteric