Your birth chart provides you with a map of your character and the experiences that have shaped your development up to the moment of your human birth.

It provides an astrological account of your life and Hermetic astrology allows you to translate the astro-text into self-information.

But your chart – like you – operates in an environmental setting that provides events, conditions and situations.

The chart maps character traits that are given a special mode of expression by the events and conditions you encounter after your birth.

This formation of a special mode of expression is called conditioning and all your behavior has been conditioned by experience.

The conditioning process, involving pleasure and pain, trains your thoughts, feelings and impulses to respond to circumstance in a situation-specific way.

Your birth chart and you

Your birth chart reveals your potential to develop habit systems in response to human-life experiences, but the actual formation of the habit takes place after your birth.

The chart pictures your character and the life experience it weaves is determined by your experiences after birth.

So, your conditioning by environment is in accordance with the character pictured in your birth chart.

The expression of your thoughts, feelings and impulses is specified by events and conditions that are uniquely human.

The harmony or discord that’s been built into a character factor by previous experience determines if the events and conditions you attract are fortunate and beneficial or unfortunate and detrimental.

Your parents and home environment

As a child the influence of your parents, home environment and culture were all-powerful.

They shaped and conditioned your character.

You express traits, qualities, attributes and behaviors, but the shaping process began when the behaviors mapped in your birth chart were exposed to your parents and other environmental cues.

Your parents taught you how to behave.

They had a profound impact on your mental and emotional development, but what you felt and thought was natural to you – see your birth chart.

As a child your home and family life provided a set of circumstances that sustains the development of your character.

First experiences set a trend

First experiences are very important.

They cause already established character factors to develop specific desires and direct these desires towards events involving specific life-matters, activities and interests.

They set a trend and once established can last a life time.

A first experience sets a trend and your inaugural feeling response – felt at the time – not only returns when the same or a similar experience recurs, it keeps on returning.

Through a process involving regular repetition both your feeling response and the event become a habit and a predictor of future conduct.

A regularly repeated thought or feeling represents a well developed character trait and your character today expresses an array of personal experiences that cause you to feel and behave the way you do.

Your conditioning by experience

The events and conditions you experienced as a child triggered feeling responses that represent your conditioning by experience.

Learned behaviors like fear and anger, lies and deceit, optimism and hope, happiness and satisfaction, success and failure and competence and incompetence are conditioning factors built into your character.

Your behavior in a particular environmental setting is just your character doing its thing and only you know how you feel in a particular place or situation.

Your conditioning by experience simply reveals the events and conditions that caused you to become who you are and you need to know your conditioning by experience.

Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge