Your self-image is the cause of everything that happens to you. If you truly believe that you are noble, you will live a noble life. If you think like a beggar, you will live accordingly. Nothing is so important to you as the concept you hold of yourself.

All that you experience --- the touch of your Beloved's hand, the sight of sunrise, your feeling as you look into the mirror, the sound of a distant bird on a clear Autumn day --- everything, all of it, is colored by your basic idea, your semi-conscious world view, your centrally-dwelling concept of yourself. This concept, though you may ignore it, is the lens through which all else comes.

Ideally, this concept has grown from your honest self-appraisal looking accurately at your one and only lone, original soul, the original essence at the center and core and beginning of your self. Ideally, your self-concept is the courageous and truthful recognition of what you really are, learned from a lifetime of utterly honest encounters with the Universe, coupled with an uncompromising integrity which forever looks, with absolute gentleness and modesty, only to that which is best for every answer.

But often, this ideal is not the actual reality of things. No one teaches us to be alone like God is alone, no one comes up to us and says,

We should all learn our self-image by ourselves, experimenting alone, helpfully guided by wise elders who teach us a little and generally allow us to learn for ourselves. But unfortunately, most people are afraid to be self-reliant, afraid to take a chance on their own good luck, instead preferring to learn their self-image from the eternal ignorance of their families, their society, their peers. They forget to think for themselves, and they wind up living in absurd, old, inappropriate, outdated identities and patterns that are hopelessly unhappy.

And thus is created the general human condition, where you probably find yourself now. The most important thing that you have --- your self-created concept of yourself --- has been almost entirely neglected, while someone else's common definition of you has come into your mind and governed you all these years. Thus do you live without discovery and joy, for the very foundation of your mind is not your own. In this mediocre state, you tend to simply go on and on, at a loss to discover something new.

But all that can be changed. You can discover a concept of yourself that is true, appropriate, and strong, one that makes you come alive when you first hear it, that causes you to remember how wonderful you felt all those times when you had hope in your heart---when you fell in love, traveled to new lands, conquered a great problem, escaped death, or just realized how great it is to be alive. You can start all over again, and this time you can take charge of your destiny yourself.

I have been reading star-charts for over thirty years, and it never changes --- so many people expect to find permanent final answers, asking to be told who they are, what they should do, when they are going to get lucky. But all I can do is read what the chart says exactly, to point out the essence and core of themselves, the real self with its definite goals and interests --- and then remind them that all of the millions of stars in the heavens above are a poem, a song, a psychodramatic mystery all saying the same thing --- that every star is an ever-living fire, wild and alive in the void, poised in a mystery endless and divine --- and every man and woman are exactly the same as every star. Each star has a right to exist and to create what it deems best, and so do you.

Your concept of yourself --- all along, it was the springboard to your life, the launching-point for every successful journey. Give birth to your own original idea, and you will live an original --- and probably happy --- life. Or go along with society's definition of yourself, and you will probably exist only in a quiet despair, standing alongside millions of others who learned their self-image from the same exact source.

Thus does it always come down to the same simple thing --- your destiny is in your own hands, and it will lead exactly and only where your concept of yourself must eventually go. And thus, it might be a very good idea to look at this concept in depth.

Sincerely,

Robert Tkoch, Astrologer since 1970