WE ARE BORN INTO THE WORLD IN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT APPEAR difficult, and we must acclimatize ourselves to the third dimension and the ways in which we can perform within it. We inherit a particular genetic stream, equate ourselves with our surroundings of family, friends and schooling, and slowly get into a lifestyle that does not necessarily relate to who we really are, but is who everyone else (and our surroundings) tells us to be.

The great journey of life is an ongoing collection of experiences that are unique to each one of us as an individual. We cannot play someone else’s life and expect to have the same experiences they do. The “Rules of Life” are imposed by those who reach limits in their own sensibilities beyond which they are reluctant to move. The “Morals of Life” are imposed over time by those who reflect on how they think that “their” God or peer group perceives them.

In reality, there are no limits in life except the ones we impose on ourselves, or allow to have imposed on us. In certain situations, we have to bend to the imposed authority of parents, teachers and others however, there comes a time when we must shake off anything that is not truthful to our own nature and stand in our own and complete integrity, as a unique individual and an authority of our own life.

In this article, we are going to look into the Design of Shirley MacLaine, actress, seeker, Free Spirit, as someone who has devoted her life to a personal exploration of all that is offered in life, and who has made the remarkable discovery of herself.

The Incarnation of the Unexpected.
Shirley Maclaine was born on April 24, 1934 in Richmond, Virginia, USA, into the personal Incarnation of the “Unexpected.” Anyone born into this Incarnation brings with them the unexpectedness of radical change both in their own lives and into the lives of anyone who relates with them; they can literally aim their life in any direction, in any way, at any time. As to what transpires, that is another matter!

With her 3/5 Profile (Conscious Sun and Earth in a 3rd line, Unconscious Sun and Earth in a 5th line) she comes bursting into a fast-track lifetime of hard knocks, which either allows her intelligence to grow fast, if she doesn’t succumb to the weight of the pronounced challenges life offers. Many who are born with this Profile find themselves at risk of losing their sense of humor by age 30, finding life to be almost impossible to navigate unless they are given much encouragement and support to acknowledge their particular and unpredictable way.

The Emotional Projector
In design terms, Shirley Macaine is an emotional projector. In her design chart she has three definitions, the 31-7, the channel called "the Alpha," espousing the nature of the leader who guides through progressive logic. This channel connects between the Self center, the yellow diamond center, and the Throat Center, the Brown Square Center. She also has two channels connecting between the root center: the Brown Square Center at the bottom of the chart, and the Emotional Solar Plexus Center, the Brown Triangle Center at the right side of the chart. The channel that is colored in red, the 19-49, is the channel of synthesis that makes her a highly sensitized being. The fact that the channel is colored in red indicates that it is unconscious in Shirley's makeup. The general indication for anyone who has a fully unconscious channel like this is that everybody else is aware of it except the person who has it! Anyone with an unconscious channel exhibits the characteristic relating to their defined channel, in Shirley’s case, a high level of sensitivity regarding the interconnectedness of life, but does not always know they're doing so, at least, not without much personal introspection.

A highly conscious being like Shirley Maclaine may have always have been aware that on an emotional level she could attune to the potential interconnections in almost any situation. She would feel compelled to join in with just about any activity that goes on around her, quite often intrinsically feeling more about situations than anyone else involved in them. It would quite often be her sense of trust that would guide situations to turn out for the benefit of others involved in those situations.

The other channel connecting between the root center and the emotional center, is 41-30, the channel called recognition, delineating an intense focus on experiencing a particular stream of emotion. Typically people who have this channel defined cannot be interrupted once they have plotted their course and aimed themselves towards a particular experience, whether the experiences is going to be beneficial for them or not. It is "all or nothing," and they become resigned to the experience and committed, whether they are going to like it or not. This drive for experiencing, which can even appear destructive at times, is quite hard for other people to understand or appreciate. It is not reasonable or logical but aims purposefully and directly towards fulfillment of personal experience.

“I would never be young again. You don't know enough about yourself to live life properly. My juices didn't really begin flowing until I turned 40.”

The Mid-life Turnaround
Life expectancy has increased quite dramatically in the last few hundred years. It used to be that we could expect to live to the age of 50 but in these times it is more likely, at least in the Western world, to live between 80 and 100 years. In earlier times, it has been expected for a man to be taking on all the responsibilities of the world and likewise for a woman to be taking on all the responsibilities of her family by the age of 30. Such responsibilities could be linked to what is known as the Saturn return, when at sometime around our 29th birthday, the planet Saturn cycles back to the place in the sky where it was found to be at our birth.

As we are now moving into the Aquarian age, our lives are more closely linked with the planet Uranus. Uranus is typically seen as the planet of radical, bizarre and dramatic change, it is also seen as the planet of the awakening. The planet Uranus has an orbit which takes 84 years to go around the sun, and there comes a moment in time when it arrives at the place in the sky opposite to where it was at our birth, and typically this happens at sometime between our 38th and 44th birthdays. In humorous terms we like to talk of this time as our mid-life crisis. Typically at around the age of 40 we realize that whatever it is we have been doing to date is no longer relevant in our lives. We are shifted, sometimes dramatically, to embrace a whole new reality. This can be documented in our design charts by seeing a movement from the South node phase in our lives to the North node phase.

Looking at Shirley's Design chart, in her South node phase, unconsciously she has the 4th gate in the first line, relating to mind that is capable of justifying mental solutions to any problem. Consciously, she has the 7th gate in the fourth line, relating to the leader who can very easily step aside from having to take personal responsibility. At around the age of 40, when Shirley made a shift from her South node phase to her North node phase, she moved into a very different experience of herself. The unconscious North node is in the 49th gate and in the first line, that relates to an emotional recognition of those people around her who are important to her personally. Consciously, she has the 13th gate in the fourth line, relating to a potential of consciousness that expands into many and diverse levels of vibrational recognition. Very often I have found this gate and line in the designs of great healers and communicators. The 13th gate is the case of the listener who is able to guide and direct their life and the lives of others by an attunement to the vibrational frequencies being played out around them. Often these frequencies relate to the spoken word, but these frequencies can also be less obvious. People who have the 13th gate with the fourth line have the means to penetrate into generally unheard dimensions, even sometimes penetrating into past life situations.

When Shirley relates that "her juices didn't really begin flowing until she turned 40," she is describing something of the relief she felt at moving through her mid-life turnaround.

“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”

Coming to Terms with Fear
Fear can exist on many levels. It can relate to our physical survival, it can relate to our worry of having a mental grasp on things, it can relate from a concern as to whether we have any control over our life or not, it can relate from an insecurity stemming from our sense of identity, purpose and in many other dimensions in our lives. The more we give in to our fears, the more chaotic our life becomes and the less we are able to align ourselves with our inner resolve. For us to find strength in our lives, we have an urgent need to face our fears squarely, acknowledge them, accept them and transcend them.

In almost any design chart, there are centers that are colored in white. These white centers, what we call undefined or open centers, are where we get to play in life through our interactions with all sorts of people who have those particular centers defined (colored in) in their charts. I emphasize the word play, because in any of these white centers, the energies relating to these centers come and go in all the multifaceted ways that other people in our lives bring. So long as we appreciate that the energies in our undefined (white) centers are constantly changing, then our life remains a play and we have the means to become enormously wise in the nature of these centers; the moment we become attached to a particular form of expression in one of these undefined centers, then we take on a handicap and become prone to all the fears, diseases and neuroses implicit in that part of our being.

Her undefined Heart (willpower) Center, can give her the wisdom to know what things in life are really worth pursuing and who has the willpower and responsibility to achieve them, often inspiring and launching others in their search, but can never afford her a consistent "control" over whatever it seems she wants for herself.

Her undefined Sacral (Life Force) Center can make her feel short on energy sometimes, when others can keep on going and going, but at the same time can give her a great and objective view on how to garner and use life's energy to the greatest advantage, quietly steering others towards growth, new horizons and resourcefulness. Her undefined Spleen (physical well-being) Center, gives her access, through her interactions with others, to the dimensions of fears in our physical health and well-being that relate to future events, sudden changes in our lives and even the whole perspective of life and death itself. When she is clear within herself that she is only reflecting the concerns and fears of others, she can then remember the consistency of her own Design that is rooted in her feeling nature. For Shirley, relating to her world through her own feeling clarity is her great gift guides her toward the journey in life that is exactly right for her.

In Conclusion
We are all confronted by what might appear to be the same kinds of events in our lives that are lived out by everyone and that we would like to experience gracefully and move through easily. Even though the events may look similar to us all, living through them is always an individual experience that requires us to be clear in our own intrinsic nature in order to interact appropriately to achieve our own fulfillment in life.

As an Emotional Projector in active search of her own truth, Shirley McClaine will have found herself constantly realigning herself in her life according to her own feelings. Feelings are constantly rising and falling, at one moment experiencing a thing in one way, and at another moment experiencing the same thing in a completely different way. When she recognizes her own feelings to be her own moving nature, she is free of all the concerns, fears and neuroses that may have been imposed on her in her life by people around her and her environment. It is a wonderful thing to discover one's own true nature. Bravo, Shirley! You are an inspiration to us all!

Next month: Voices of Light : Jimmy Carter, Nobel Laureate of Peace.

© 2002 Chetan Parkyn

© Chetan Parkyn, 2002