The intelligence we need to summon in Capricorn is best illustrated in a lesson by the Zen Buddhist master Dae Kwang:
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. If you meet the Patriarch, kill the Patriarch.”
What he means by this dramatic proclamation that nothing — gurus, traditions, books, etc. — should be allowed to usurp the individual’s responsibility for his or her own enlightenment.
Today, this teaching is needed more than ever. Just look around. There are little cults everywhere.
It’s not an entirely new problem for the souls, because the human condition includes an attraction to playing “follow the leader.” Before we know what’s happened, we’ve allowed authority figures to strengthen the bars on our material prison.
This situation can be intensified in Capricorn, because, according to Reverend Bill Darlison in The Gospel and the Zodiac, “This is when ‘institutions freeze into systems,’ when the demands of society and its laws take precedence over individual initiative, and the major organizations of collective endeavor begin their task of regulation and control.
“Capricorn symbolizes organizational man, the company, the state, the team, any area of life in which the individual is a participating member or, worse, a computer-generated number.
As such, “this is the phase of life in which the state assumes control over the individual, and in which an individual ruler can become totally subservient to his office. … It is the sign of the Father, our first authority symbol, who connects us with the past, who embodies all the accumulated wisdom of the race, and who teaches us the great Capricornian virtues of social, responsibility, and self-control.”
This is symbolized in Capricorn’s planetary movement. It “is the sign of the winter solstice, the point of the sun’s maximum southerly declination, when nights are at their longest in the northern hemisphere. The sun, symbolic of individual consciousness, is now at its weakest and the forces of darkness, symbolizing the collective, predominate.
In other words, Capricorn becomes a slippery slope on which the soul can fall deeply into materiality versus spirituality.
Rising Out of Group Think
Granted, “order and stability are essential to the proper management of any aspect of our life,” says Darlison. “This is especially true of the spiritual life, which is intrinsically turbulent, and which needs the support of tradition, and the consolations of company. However, it is our relationship to these structures that the Capricornian phase calls us to examine.
“We need to determine how far our commitment to spiritual authority, church doctrines, charismatic figures, holy books, group membership, and the like has affected our sense of self reliance. How far have we turned over our spiritual life to the regulation of some outside agency or other so that we may be spared the problems associated with thinking for ourselves?
“‘The tragedy of the . . . religious life is that it fosters dependence upon an intermediary,’ says Dane Rudhyar, author and astrologer. The challenge of Capricorn is to develop a sense of spiritual self-determination so that, whether inside or outside of a recognized group, we may relinquish our need to place others between ourselves and the divine.”
Further, “Our religious life must never be entirely focused on any book, no matter how exalted the claims made for its origin. Scriptures may inspire us, and they may educate us; they may point us in the direction we must follow, but they must never be allowed to usurp our sense of self-determination, which relies on the internal light and not the external text.
“Received texts can only be useful to us when they are examined in conjunction with our experience of living. Isolate a text from life, extol it as inerrant revelation, and it becomes a tyrant.”
Reawakening of the Personal
However, while there is tremendous danger in Capricorn, there is also tremendous opportunity.
While on one hand, Capricorn has the propensity to pull us into the material, it also possesses the power to help us extract ourselves and unit with the divine. The secret lies in the reversal of the sun’s direction that occurs on the solstice (the sun being the symbol of individual consciousness).
As Darlison explains: “It is important to realize that the sun’s entry into Capricorn in December marks another reversal of direction. In Cancer, the northerly sun began to move south; in Capricorn it reaches its southerly limit and begins its movement northward. … this reversal ‘relates to the idea of a shift in value, a turning away from the values of the outer world to those within. In one sense it is the reawakening of the personal.’”
The intelligence we need to gain this power from Capricorn is self-determination.
A good example is my own two ex-gurus, as I explain in Sex, Lies and Two Hindu Gurus. Thousands of people believe they need the gurus, who claimed to be divine saints, because they said we needed them to become divinized.
There’s no difference at all in these Hindu gurus and Christian preachers. While Hindus surrender to a guru for divine salvation, Christians surrender to Jesus for divine salvation — in other words, a one-way ticket to heaven (redeemable upon death).
While I was in the cult, I never had a desire to worship the gurus. I wanted to worship God directly. Toward the end, I was so tired of hearing them state like broken records: “the guru is greater than God.” Followers seemed to buy this scam hook, line, and sinker.
I’ve since seen this identical obsession in the followers of other cults on social media. Whenever I’ve dared to say anything negative about any of them, such as Osho, Mooji, Tolle, Amma, etc., their followers would come out of the woodwork to defend them.”
Capricorn teaches us to abandon these false “gods” and turn inward to our own inner divine selves. Self-determination empowers us to make this leap away from the material and into our divine inner wisdom.
Rather than allow people to worship him, the Buddha described himself as merely “a finger pointing at the moon.”
He teaches us this lesson:
It is proper … to doubt … to be uncertain … Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in scripture; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ [Rather] when you yourselves know: ‘These things are bad; [when] undertaken and observed, these things are lead to harm and ill,’ abandon them. [Likewise) when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; [when] undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.”
We’ll conclude the message of Capricorn with more wise guidance from the Buddha:
So, Ananda, you must be your own lamps, be your own refuges . . . Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves.”
