Astrology provides us with an analogy in the same way as the river, to which both Abraham and Arthur refer. Astrology is old. It goes back to caveman days when as earthly incarnates we looked to the sky for answers to our biggest questions. So developed a relationship between what we saw in the sky and how we felt and what we did about it.

As the Earth turns once every 24 hours on its axis everything in the sky apparently rises on our eastern horizon and sets on the opposite western horizon, most obviously the sun. The beginning and ending of things have an extra fillip or jolt of energy (think about this in relation to all experience). So as the sun, for example rises we might feel a degree of renewal, energy after sleep or if there is something coming up that we do not want to face, a degree of dread or trepidation. In the same way, at the end of the day we might feel relief that the pressure of the solar imperative has come to an end and the time of letting down has begun. Or we might feel nervous at the onset of darkness.

I remember when I first arrived in San Francisco in 1983 noticing the ads. outside bars for something called Happy Hour – an entirely new term for me, but it immediately endeared me to this apparently wonderful nation that instinctively understood the slight discomfort I felt each evening as the day ended.

Using astrology to understand this, and remembering that astrology is simply a collection of empirical data so old that its origins are literally lost in time, we can look at the Ascendant and first house of the birth chart to see a description of our own personal power, and then look at the Descendant and seventh house for a description of how we relate to the other person, that is any other person as well as outside events on a personal level. Here we see individuality reaching out to refer to another as the Earth tips and potentially dark things emerge at sunset. We tend to cling to each other for comfort in times of danger or crisis.

For lovers, the sunset is sometimes a romantic notion. For older folk with a little dementia there is a condition called Sundowner’s Syndrome or just Sundowners: ‘the occurrence of sadness, agitation, fear, and other mood and behaviour changes that occur in dementia patients just before dark.’

What underpins both states, romance and dementia is this sort of reaching out for comfort and closeness as a primal need rises to the surface. Most people think nothing of it, although many come home from work and pour themselves a drink, perhaps to help relieve the tension of the day but also perhaps to help relax into a part of the day that has a thread of the unknown woven into it from long ago creating a ripple. A rill.

So, every day the sun rises (appears to) and sets, and in every birth chart there is a particular sign on the Ascendant and Descendant coupled with the placement of Aries and Libra somewhere in the chart which relate to the Ascendant and Descendant, .

Astrology has now become a more sophisticated version of earlier rudimentary star-gazing because it factors in the rising and setting of everything in the sky and also the culmination – that is the highest point to which anything rises – and the lowest point of anti-culmination.

See then how we arrive at the idea of ‘as above, so below’ or ‘as without, so within’. This is the essence of astrology which is the language of vibration.