What is Evolutionary Astrology?

Each of us - every soul - arrives on the stage of life not as a blank slate but as a composite of our prior lifetimes' experiences. We can see it in a baby's eyes - joy, contentment, fear, anger, trauma, hope. Each soul arrives on the planet for a reason, and the reasons can be as numerous and diverse as there are people on earth. Each of us has a quest that is unique to us and is reflected in the birth chart - the blueprint for the evolution of the soul.

Evolution is simply the metamorphosis of one's consciousness and soul through a series of lifetimes and all the emotional, intellectual, psychological and physical experiences of those lifetimes. It is a very "human" journey within the context of a larger perspective, a larger plan. Within the Soul (Pluto) there are two antithetical desires, one to separate from that which created us and one to return. The reason for evolution is seen in our desires and the actualization and elimination of those desires, until there is only one desire left - to return to the Source that created us in the first place. This was the essence of the Buddha's enlightenment as he sat under the Boddi tree reflecting on the nature of sorrow, pain and suffering.... it is desire. Swami Paramahansa Yogananda stated the same thing a different way: "Mankind is engaged in an eternal quest for that "something else" he hopes will bring him happiness, complete and unending. For those individual Souls who have sought and found God, the search is over, He is that something else."

Evolutionary Astrology, which was realized and developed by Jeffrey Wolf Green, is rooted in the philosophical principles of Natural Law and brings to the Astrological world for the first time in its 8000-year-old history a way to measure the journey of the Soul from life to life. Through reading a birth chart using the paradigm of Evolutionary Astrology, the Soul's journey prior to this life is revealed in complete detail, including, but not limited to, the person's deepest security/insecurity issues, their inherent resources, their family structure, their inner relationship to themself, as well as their relationship to others, natural abilities and capacities, habits, fears, longings, and desires.

All of us have deep security issues which we are drawn to in each life. Remaining secure necessarily means repeating what we are most familiar with, whether it is pleasurable or painful, and therefore why we find ourselves creating the same kinds of circumstances, situations and people in our lives over and over again. At some point, we get tired of repeating the same patterns and look for a "way out," a new direction, new experiences.

The planet Pluto represents the deepest desires and security issues of our Soul, with its polarity point revealing the metamorphosis of those desires and security issues. Through the paradigm of Evolutionary Astrology we can identify the dual desires in the soul as reflected in our prior life experiences as well as the intention and new direction that the soul desires to take: the next step forward in our evolutionary journey. Swami Sri Yukteswar, the teacher of Paramahansa Yogananda stated it this way: "A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his or her individual karma. The individual's horoscope is a challenging portrait revealing the unalterable past and its probable future results." In other words, we must understand where we have been in order to know where we are going; we don't read the last chapter in a book before the first chapter.