Whenever a strong progressed aspect forms in your birth chart you will be affected in three different ways: You’ll think differently; your observable behavior will be different; and events of some importance will come into your life, often apparently through no actions of your own.
Movement of any kind consumes energy. Physical work immediately consumes calories and there was a time when thinking was considered to consume very little energy because the loss in calories coincident with solving the heaviest kind of mental problems was insignificant.
Whatever energy was consumed was accounted for as necessary to maintaining the normal bodily functions, so the assumption grew that mental work required little energy, instead of being, as is now known, the hardest work in the world.
The physical energy generated by the combustion of oxygen with fuel is measured calories. The energy it takes to raise one kilogram (about two pints) of water from 0 degrees to 1 degree is a calorie. Just to keep alive you require 1,700 calories a day. It takes 170 calories to digest a meal.
Reading one hour, to sustain the muscles while so engaged, consumes 5 calories. A 10-mile walk consumes 600 calories. One hour at a desk, the energy being consumed by the muscles holding the body in position, requires about 21 calories.
Yet if your body is so relaxed as to place no extra work on the muscles but with the brain intensely active, so little energy is consumed that it cannot be detected with the calorimeter.
Because the energy used in mental activity could not be detected or measured it was assumed by many that such effort required little or no such expenditure.
But it was a wrong assumption. The vast amount of energy consumed in directed thinking, the hardest work in the world, is electrical and able to be measured. And you shouldn’t assume that your life in response to progressed aspects is not the result of actual and adequate energies that produce those activities.
The cells of the physical body are of protoplasm, just as I believe the substance of the astral body is thought-organized psychoplasm. And each of these cells has a nucleus of protein, which is comparatively acid.
Surrounding this nucleus is the cytoplasm, which is comparatively alkaline. Separating the acid nucleus and the alkaline cytoplasm of the cell is a semi-permeable membrane. Electrolytes are thus formed of the humors of the body in such a manner as to make of each cell a miniature electric battery.
The semi-permeable membrane separating the nitrogen fraction from the hydrocarbon fraction of the cell, and the membranes surrounding the cell, are adapted to storing and conducting electricity.
These high-frequency energies furnish the electrical, or etheric, energy, which runs your body.
You’re a broadcasting set
The cells of your nervous system are best adapted to the production of short-wave radiations, as well as to carrying electric currents. And the gray matter of the frontal lobes of your brain are the best adapted of the nerve cells in this respect.
Because of their high specialization they’re the ones chiefly employed in objective thinking.
In order for your brain cells to vibrate sufficiently to register objective consciousness they must expend electric energy; and the cells of the gray matter of your brain are the most effective electric batteries of the body.
This discovery of the electrical properties of protein proves that your nervous system is a radio broadcasting set and because the electrical phenomena is reversable, as when the cells recharge in sleep, your nervous system is a delicate receiving set, capable of intercepting short-waves which reach it from other broadcasting sets; and, as I believe, from the planets.
Each cell of physical life, whether a portion of a larger plant, animal or man, or independent of such an organization, is a generator of electrical charges and radiates short wave-length energies.
Through these etheric motions it is kept in contact, I believe, with the four-dimensional thought-cells which constitutes its intelligence.
These four-dimensional thought-cells, associated through short wave-length etheric radiations with the physical cells, enable blood, corpuscles, epithelial cells, and various physical organs intelligently to continue their special kind of work even after they have been removed from the body of an animal.
So long as the electrical equipment is able to perform its function of furnishing short-wave radiations the thought-cells, which have gained their experience for such work in less advanced forms, are able to keep contact with the physical and exercise control of its movements through directing the flow of electrical energies.
But when, for any reason, the battery runs down, the essential conditions of contact between the three-dimensional and the four-dimensional plane are no longer present, the thought-cells cannot exercise control, and the physical is pronounced dead.
Recharge your batteries
All conscious thought, consumes electric energies; and like any electric battery if the circuit is kept closed it tends to run down.
So, not only your brain, but every cell and organ of your body if it is to continue to perform its function it must be given an opportunity to recharge.
For a battery to recharge, it has to have resting periods and all the organs of your body are provided with such periods of rest in order that they may not become completely polarized, or dead.
The nerve cells that operate your breathing, for instance, rest from sixteen to eighteen times per minute. Your heart and its nerves take some seventy to ninety short rests between beats per minute; and the various other glands and organs take brief rests between their periods of rhythmical activity.
Your brain, because its effective use requires a longer period of activity not broken by short periods of loss of consciousness, has developed the power to generate moderately strong electrical currents over a considerable length of time.
Yet for it to recharge it also must have a period of rest commensurate with the work it has done. Commonly, the period of rest – known as sleep – is about eight hours out of each twenty-four.
In electrical terms, to keep your attention directed to some predetermined line of thought, your brain cells must generate, or mobilize an electrical potential higher than the electrical potential generated, or mobilized, by the brain cells receiving stimulation from the desires of dissimilar thought-cells or from incoming nerve currents.
In other words, the thoughts to which the attention of objective consciousness are given, must be able to command and use electrical energies of higher voltage than other thoughts which compete with them for attention can command.
It’s because it must consume so much electrical energy in overcoming these resistances, that directed thinking, a recently acquired biological process, is the hardest work in the world.
Scientists for so long considered that brain work consumed almost no energy because they were trying to measure a low frequency energy, that of heat waves, in connection with brain and nerve activity.
With the discovery that the human body consumes more electrical energy than heat energy, they acquired a new and clear conception of the immense amount of energy consumption required for directed thinking.
And I believe that when you grasp the significance of your nervous system, and the high-frequency electric energies which it carries, as connecting up with the still more difficult-to-detect planetary energies, you will realize that progressed aspects operate with an adequate consumption of energy.
You are justified to consider that the work you accomplish that’s coincident with a progressed aspect is the result of adequate energy expenditure.
Progressed aspects affect your thoughts
If you observe your own behavior when a progressed aspect involving Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn nears its culmination you’ll observe yourself engaging in the type of thinking and behavior associated with these planets.
And to believe that this is brought about through an abstraction, without energy expenditure, is to believe that thinking does not consume energy.
Or to state the matter in a slightly different way: there are ten planets, and whenever there is a strong progressed aspect to one of them, your thinking is always noticeably colored in the direction of the type attributed to this particular planet, and not toward the type attributed to planets not involved in a progressed aspect.
The implication is that in some manner the energies of the planet are able to influence those electrical energies which, when they vibrate your brain cells, give rise to objective thinking; and the thinking relates to the department of life mapped by the houses in your birth chart ruled by the planet.
It seems that the progressed aspect operates as an aerial by which the energies of the planets involved in the aspect are picked up in more than normal volume and added to the factors of your unconscious mind.
These factors are not dependent for their persistence upon association with a physical organism; but they are dependent for certain types of expression, which I call objective thinking and behavior, upon such association.
It’s easy to observe that whenever a planet receives a powerful progressed aspect it colors your physical behavior in the direction attributed to it.
However, some events which come into your life are not necessarily the outcome of your observable behavior. A fire that causes loss, an automobile accident, the death of a relative and the inheritance of wealth may have no observable connection with merit or preventable behavior.
Thought-cell activity attracts events
But research into the birth charts and progressions of thousands of people at the time important events came to pass reveals that they only occur during the time an appropriate major progressed aspect is within one-degree of perfect.
The event is characterized by the planets making the aspect and relates to the department of life ruled by the planets involved in the aspect.
I cannot believe these uniformly observed results are achieved without an adequate expenditure of energy.
Something exerts a pressure upon environment at a distance in such a manner as to attract the event which is characteristic of the special kind and trend of energy expended.
I have come to believe that events and conditions attracted into human lives and the lives of all other creatures are due to the activities of the thought-cells within the astral form.
The astral form of every living thing is composed of such cells, built by the consciousness accompanying experiences.
These stellar-cells, the more active of which are organized into the dynamic structures mapped by the planets in your birth chart, have a certain intelligence of their own, and work from the four-dimensional plane, to attract into your life conditions and events corresponding to the way they feel.
When they receive no additional energy from any source, they only have the amount and kind of activity indicated by your birth chart.
It is only when they receive from some source, such as an aerial formed by a progressed aspect picking it up, an additional energy supply that their activity is greater than normal.
Events of a specific type related to a definite department of life are attracted into your life during the time the appropriate progression is within one-degree of perfect because the thought-cells of your unconscious mind relating to this department are receiving sufficient energy of a kind that enables them to do the work necessary to bring the event to pass.
This article was first published by Elbert Benjamine in the February 1938 edition of American Astrology Magazine. It has been remastered to make it suitable for online reading.
Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge
