AN INTENSIVE WORKSHOP EXCERPT
by Jim Lewis

The following is an exerpt from the transcript of a Jim Lewis Astro*Carto*Graphy Intensive Workshop, held September 1993, in San Francisco. CONTINUUM offers a transcript of this workshop, one of Jim's final public presentations. (See our book page.)

People frequently ask me how I got into A*C*G. Well, I have three planets in Gemini and by the time I was 30 years old, I had been to that many countries. I traveled a lot in my twenties, in fact that's just about all that I did during the 1960s. I was on a radio show and they asked me what I missed most about the 60s, and without even thinking, I said my youth. When people are young, they are able to travel around a lot and expose themselves to a lot of good stuff that they haven't been exposed to before.

It's almost as if that youthful age of travel exists so that you can expose yourself to things that your parents never thought of. My parents planned for me a college education, a job in a corporation in a skyscraper in New York, and a house in the suburbs with 2.3 kids and a dog. None of that has come to pass.

They were really wrong. They were absolutely wrong about all of these plans being right for me. So I had to travel around a lot to find out who I was. You'll see that traveling around is actually a way to expose yourself to different parts of yourself that were not consciously cultivated by your environment when you were growing up. This is another way of saying that traveling around is a different way to expose yourself to different natal planetary lines, they're the ones you were born under, and of course that's what A*C*G is all about. So, if you've been raised to be the wrong person, perhaps with your A*C*G map's guidance, you can find out who you really are.

As I was doing all this traveling around, certain things seemed to repeat when I went to certain places. This was not like absolute deja vu, but I noticed that when I was in California, things seemed to be a little looser; that I was looser, happier, more friendly and outgoing. I went to more parties and got invited to more parties.

When I was living in New York City, where I was born, it was sort of a Dostoyevskian or underground experience, where I would stay up all night, read Jean Paul Sartre, and then I'd sleep all day. Staying in during the day was welcomed because it was so crowded outside that being out then would upset me. So it was different, the opposite coasts seemed to be different.

At that time I thought, well, they're different because they're objectively different places. Now, what I actually think was really going on is that I was different in those places. I was a different person in California than I was in New York . . . A*C*G really shows you how you are different in another place, rather than how that place is different.

For information about the transcript of the entire Jim Lewis Intensive Workshop, see our book page.

CREDITS: The background tile came from ABC Giant. The man with the globe in his hand came from a Clip Art Collection on CD-ROM. The party guy came from Iband.