Without a big introduction, here is your answer: the planets aren’t ruling your life, they are mirroring it. Similarly, how we humans evolve is also a mirror of nature. And this might really hurt if you have an inflated ego: the world isn’t revolving around us. We are simply a part of it and therefore follow the same energetic pattern as everything around us.

A quote by Hippocrates is worth mentioning here:

“There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose… the great principle extends to the extremest part, and from the extremest part it returns to the great principle, to the one nature, being and not-being.”¹

Now onto the other part of the question. Do we have control over our lives?
My understanding is that we do and we don’t. As a part of nature, we are meant to follow the universal flow and we observe and experience things that we have no control over. This is something we try to understand through astrology, as well as through studies like ecology, evolutionary biology, mathematics etc. We are all studying the same flow and patterns but using different lenses and focusing on different areas. They are all valid and part of the same whole. But each of these studies recognises that there is a pattern given to us that we don’t get to choose. We have to move within it.

We don’t control how the planets move. We are not in control of how they interact with each other or with our birth chart. But it is my observation that we do have a choice in how we manifest the energy that is upon us, from a selection of options. For example, a Mars opposition Venus transit may show up as problems within a sexual relationship, or it can be channeled into someone expressing their primal patterns through art.²

So the way I would put it is this: we don’t have complete freedom to control our lives, but we do have a selection of choice.

This also allows me to answer another question: is manifestation real? The short answer is yes. When you truly desire something, once the energetic support is there for your creation, you will manifest it. The energetic support is the universal flow, and it is also the reason why we do not manifest what we want right away. The universe waits until there are favourable conditions for the desire to take form. For example, if you are trying to manifest love, beauty, or money but Venus is not activated in your chart or is under tension, you might feel like nothing is moving forward. That is why when we are intentionally manifesting, we have to release the desire into the hands of the universe so that it can return to us when the conditions are right. But then comes a deeper question. Is your intention to manifest something truly yours, or was it placed in your heart by the collective unconscious to create something aligned with the universal flow? The answer to this may make us question whether any of our desires ever truly belong to us at all.
Intentional manifestation is real, but whether the manifestation will last or unfold the way you imagined it — that’s a different discussion.
Perhaps I will elaborate on that in another post.

In summary, we are not in control of the flow of our lives, but it is fair to call ourselves the co-creators of our reality. The planets are not the cause of any events. They are mirrors, just like everything else around us.
Perhaps the real journey is learning how to read those mirrors with honesty, and to choose our response with intention. After all, that is the best we can do.

Reference:

1. Carl Gustav Jung, Jung on Astrology, edited by Safron Rossi and Keiron Le Grice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), e-book edition. ↩︎
2. Robert Hand, Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living (West Chester, PA: Whitford Press, 1976), 236. ↩︎

Image credit:
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash