Situation
5 traditions are shelved here, each stating the question in its own words.
A tradition originating with the teaching of the Buddha in northern India and preserved in several textual collections. The discourses gathered here come from the Pali canon, recorded as talks given to particular people in particular circumstances.
"They abused me, they hit me! They beat me, they robbed me!" For those who bear such a grudge, hatred is never laid to rest.
"They abused me, they hit me! They beat me, they robbed me!" For those who bear no such grudge, hatred is laid to rest.
For never is hatred laid to rest by hate, it's laid to rest by love: this is an ancient teaching.
When others do not understand, let us, who do understand this, restrain ourselves in this regard; for that is how conflicts are laid to rest.
Reflection that does not appeal to a religious or philosophical authority. The pieces here were written for this collection and make no claim to be anything other than one way of putting a question.
There is an account open in your name, and you are the only one making entries in it.
That is the strange part. The person who wronged you has, in all likelihood, stopped thinking about it. They have a version of the story in which they were tired, or provoked, or right. You have the ledger, and you update it, and every update costs you an evening.
None of which makes the wrong less real. Some things genuinely were unfair, and saying so out loud matters. The question is narrower than justice: what is the account for? If it is evidence, it is already gathered. If it is a warning about who to trust, you have learned that, and you can act on it without rereading the file.
Closing an account is not the same as saying the debt was never owed. It is deciding who goes on paying the interest.
A practice of reading meaning from the positions of the sun, moon and planets, attested in Babylonian, Hellenistic, Indian and Chinese forms and continuous in the West since antiquity. Western astrology divides the year into twelve signs and reads the movement of the planets as a description of timing, season and disposition.
An opposition is not a wound. It is a sightline.
Two planets a hundred and eighty degrees apart can only see each other, and the tradition reads that geometry as a subject a person keeps meeting through other people. What sits across the chart from you tends to arrive wearing someone else's face. The argument is real, the other person is real, and the axis is still an axis.
Mars is the planet of the flare — the heat that gets you out of a chair and into the argument. It is not treated as a fault to be corrected. Mars is how anything gets defended, and a chart without it would be a chart of someone who never stood up. But Mars unaimed simply burns whatever is nearest, and the classical remedy is not to cool it. It is to give it a direction.
The Aries–Libra axis is the one that runs between having a self and having a relationship, and nobody resolves it permanently. It comes round again. What changes, across enough passes, is how quickly you recognise it when it does.
A tradition rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, carried through two millennia of churches, commentaries, liturgies and practices. Its texts are read as scripture by their communities.
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don't even the tax collectors do the same? If you only greet your friends, what more do you do than others? Don't even the tax collectors do the same? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."
A school of Greek and Roman philosophy taught from the third century BCE onward, concerned with judgement, action and the distinction between what a person controls and what they do not. Its surviving handbooks were written as practical training rather than theory.
When any person does ill by you, or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts or speaks from an impression that it is right for him to do so. Now it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but only what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from false appearances, he is the person hurt, since he, too, is the person deceived. For if anyone takes a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, but only the man is deceived. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear with a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, "It seemed so to him."