The question of astrology comes up afresh too often these days to let us forget it. If it were wholly true, this predictive reference to the planets, it could easily be tested and established in the company of all the respected sciences. If it were wholly false, it could just as easily be tested and discarded once and for all. But because the correct appraisal lies at some undetermined point between these two extremes, the question can only receive a tantalizing and confused answer. Those who reject astrology totally prove thereby that either they have never or insufficiently investigated it. Those who accept it totally are in grave danger of denying to man his gift of limited free will in mind and action as well as of losing their way in a silly fatalism. Since it is man himself who has made the larger part of the destiny which he must undergo, it is he who can unmake it. Thus there is no room for extreme fatalism. Nevertheless, because his individual will is governed by a higher will, some part of his destiny remains so strong that it is beyond his capacity to change it. The Overself must surely be granted the simple power to know, before each reincarnation on earth, the potentialities for virtue and sin, for spiritual rise and fall, that lie innate within its progeny, the ego. But this no more commits man to a hopeless fatalism than does the knowledge that he will eat a couple of meals tomorrow. Let him ask his own reason and past experience whether these shining points of light in the sky are more baleful influences on his life than his own weaknesses, shortcomings, egoism, and lack of self-control. What can they do to him worse than what he can do to himself?
-- Notebooks Category 9: From Birth to Rebirth > Chapter 3 : Laws and Patterns of Experience > # 432
