The Lovers - The vow of "love" is the "fruit" of obedience and poverty. You have been offered two paths - it is time for your choice. Resist the temptation to change - stick to your resolutions and make firm decisions. "Is this situation what you really want?" Control your emotions, seek spiritual values and select your path with care. Seek the union of your material self-conscious (feeling) and your spiritual sub-conscious (reason). Discern the differences between the two, separate the true from the false. Union of the two suggests a rewarding relationship of SELF - the potential of a good marriage. To free yourself from the "illusion" of "me living - you shadow" requires that you extend the love you have for yourself to others, then you will arrive at the realization of "me living - you living". Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Find your inner lover, your inner "soul mate" and you will find yourself and your "earth mate".

Your true destiny is to represent the highest aspect of "Self" - to seek and find a balance of intelligence and sensation. Analyzing what you see and hear on the outside to come up with the truth is virtually impossible -it is your "inner" instruction which fills in the gaps. Do not resist those to whom you are attracted...seek that which represents balance, beauty, responsibility, unity and harmony. Love spreads - it fills all who are encompassed within its boundaries. You have analytical ability and a keen perception - you will come to an honest, fair decision.

Your choice is between your two separate desires. Your desire for materialism and your desire for spiritual development. Materialism is the outer path which is laid out for you. Spiritual development is the "inner" path which leads you to a confrontation with your hidden desires in order to break free of worldly influences and strike out on your own. Allow your true personality to emerge, with its own ideas and purposes - able to make important decisions based on your own assessment of desires and responsibilities. This will result in freedom from inhibitions, guilt, conditioning and bondage. LOVE can exist only in the absence of restrictions. You can seek, you can ask, you can knock at the door - but you can not open the door by force. You are required to wait patiently for it to be opened. Through prayer and meditation you open yourself to "grace" and you receive it. This knowledge does not happen automatically, it is revealed when the door is open. Dare to ask, have the will to seek, remain silent and listen long enough to know when the door has been opened to you.

Your relationships mirror your own inner sense of worth. How you feel about yourself can be seen in how your partner relates to you. Your sexual drive leads you away from isolation and pushes you to form vital relationships with other people and finally - opens the door to love. Wholeness is love, which is the non-judgmental acceptance and embrace of the material and the spiritual. It is through love that you achieve unity with someone else - you come to know a greater meaning and deeper significance to life as you give up the part of your "ego" which controls and isolates you from people and from life itself. The male is ruled by reasoning, the female is ruled by desire - a balance between the two brings out the divine spark and unites you with your conscious Self. Balance unites reason with passion and gives conscious energy form, direction and meaning. The love of a specific person is necessary in your life now, for it will lead you to a new understanding of life. Allow yourself to engage in emotional intimacy.

An important emotional growth step to the desire for and acceptance of an extension of yourself. The birth of duality in the heart as the self discovers the other. Emersion out of the self, immersion in the other. It teaches you emotional partnering, how to share the basic components of human activity with one other person in particular. You voluntarily alter your course of needs and wants to accommodate those of another. Without passion and sexual drives to spur you, you might never make this "compromise," but it is the first major lesson to the ego of the necessity to go beyond the separate, physical self.

Here are the choices, the trials, the decisions created by desire. This emotional partnering may in some cases not be with another person, in which case that other something (possibly a place, a thing or even a personal talent of yours) must be thought of as a surrogate for what would otherwise be a lover or mate. As long as the lessons to be learned at this stage are in fact being addressed and learned, this presents no problem, but if there is no partnering and no surrogate and no lessons being learned, watch out! The Romance Legends, such as the Arthurian tales where love predominates over the state, show the evolution of society from the Emperor(4) and Hierophant(5), i.e., from the belief systems which are handed to us by our elders, into the thrusts of desire of the Lovers which sends us on our individual quest. Hence, it takes the birth of duality in love to make us assert our individuality.

Questions to Answer: What significant relationship are you involved in? How does this relationship mirror your own sense of self-worth? What choice or decision do you need to make? What responsibility will you have to take based on your decision? What needs to be combined, synthesized or brought together?