We’re proud of what we’ve created here at the FCEA in the four years since we first conceived it back in March 2019. We’re also delighted by the expressions of support, enthusiasm, and appreciation we often hear from our students and Community Members. New businesses are famously shaky and many of them quickly fail. Not us! All in all, we’re doing OK and that’s thanks to all of you.
Naturally we hear grumbles from time to time. Keep them coming! We’re good, but we know we can get better and that’s our aim. Your feedback is helpful, even if we can’t always make everything fit everyone’s individual needs.
Sometimes “grumbles” isn’t the right word either – we also get lots of minor corrections and they’re always welcome. For one example, just this week a perspicacious student noticed that I’d made a typo in my handout about the discovery date of Eris. I had it down as January 25, 2005 when it was actually January 5 – obviously that mistake was not the end of the world, but it’s good to make things right! We fixed it right away. Someone else once pointed out an error in a birth time for one of our teaching charts – I can’t even remember which one, but we fixed that too. There have been a few more instances of little goofs on that kind of scale – not earth-shaking, but still important – and we wouldn’t have known about them without your help and sharp eyes, so thanks!
With the FCEA curriculum materials we can quickly fix things, but in my life as an author, I’ve had a futile ambition all along – it’s that someday I would publish a book without any typos at all. Still, even with a dozen eyes, including my own, combing through the pages, that’s never happened. And once a book is in print, it’s graven in stone unless and until there’s a new edition. We can at least include a note about those kinds of errata in Moodle. We’ve done that – the bad charts for Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Skymates II come to mind.
In pursuit of ways that we can possibly improve, a few of our tutors have let me know about some frustrations they’re hearing from students. Four of these issues have come up with some consistency and I want to touch on them here. Two of them are biggies and two are fair to call “small potatoes.” I should say right away that none of them are completely fixable, at least in the present circumstances of the school. Mostly here I simply want to say “we hear you” and to take the opportunity to explain our position. One aim we’ll always have here in the FCEA is to be as transparent with everyone as we possibly can be.
FACE TIME
By far, the issue that comes up most often is the desire for more “live” interaction with the tutors and with myself. I have a lot to say about that, starting with a simple agreement: almost everyone agrees that more live interaction would be great!
Let me first speak about the tutors, then I’ll speak about myself.
Our tutors are paid by the hour – not enough, not what they’re worth, but they are paid!.And there’s a lot of them and that gets expensive. Those hours mount up. The FCEA has no outside source of funding – even the loan Jeff Parrett gave us to start the school is being paid back with interest. You probably see where this is going. Financially, the school is usually “in the black,” but not by much. To afford more tutor hours, we’d have to raise our tuition rates. No one – including us – wants to do that.
Speaking for myself, I really do enjoy the many Zoom Q&A sessions we do. I like teaching. Beyond those, this (northern) autumn, we’ll finally reach FCEA 306 – that’s a course where I’ll be teaching “live” via Zoom in a small-class context. I look forward to that! Let me also add that at the 300-level, students are advanced enough to begin working together with a tutor and their peers in live Zoom classes every week. Even better for many of you, we just started our 101Z and 102Z labs. They’re led by tutors on Zoom and students get live interaction every week there too.
One of my personal goals in framing the FCEA was for me to be able to do more teaching at a “master class” level. I felt that doing that would be a better use of my time than teaching the basics over and over again – hence the reason behind all the videos and handouts I’ve made for our curriculum, not to mention all my books. Those are where I teach the basics – although our Q&A sessions are actually often that too. And even there, we’re building our indexed reference library, which is also gradually becoming another resource in our basic curriculum. But a real motivator for me is to be able to teach at a higher level. As the first wave of FCEA students reaches the 306 level in a few months, we’ll finally arrive at that point.
There’s one more thing that’s sort of tangentially related – we’ll soon be implementing a platform called Circle (www.Circle.so). I honestly don’t know much about it yet, but we’re hoping it will facilitate an easier and more lively kind of social interaction among us.
Speaking of face-to-face interaction, let me add that it was a joy to finally meet some of you in person at the big ISAR conference in Denver last August and also at the NORWAC conference in Seattle just a few weeks ago. My upcoming event this August at Omega Institute in New York is promising to be a big one – last I heard, 107 people have signed up! I know many FCEA students are among them. (If you’re interested in possibly attending, here’s the link: https://www.eomega.org/search?query=Steven+Forrest).
Then there’s Astro-Bash (https://www.astro-bash.com) starting on September 28th. Ralph MacIntrye, a former student in my old Apprenticeship Programs who happens to live in the same desert town as me, has put together a broad group of evolutionary astrologers as speakers. Our Dean, Catie, will be among them. I’ll do a keynote. Getting to Borrego Springs is not the easiest thing in the world, but for me it’s home sweet home. Maybe some of you can come too.
I’m writing about these in-person events because they’re part of how I want to address the whole question of more live teaching and “face time.” By the way, as I write these words, I’m aware of how unfair much of this must sound to our students who live in other countries. I’m sorry about that, but at least these events do provide another option for face-to-face work, at least for some of you. We still hope to create an actual FCEA conference at some point, but frankly we’re all just too busy running things day-to-day to even think much about it at this point.
Let me briefly belabor another obvious issue for a moment – like the rest of you, I have to make a living and there are only so many hours in the day. Most of how I support myself comes from work outside our school. That does put some constraints on my time. That’s of course true as well for our tutors, teachers, and staff.
THE CLONE WARS
There’s a second issue that’s come up from time to time. Let’s call it “the Clone Wars.” So, is the purpose of the FCEA to crank out dozens and dozens of robotic Steven Forrest clones? In response, I’d start by softening that language a bit, but basically let me admit that, yes, in a sense, that’s exactly what we’re doing. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
There’s something terribly unsettling about that kind of language! Cloning? What about respect for your own individualities? What about that core principle of any healthy kind of astrology, which is respect for human diversity?
Here’s our reasoning. Astrology is a wide world. I’ve often felt sorry for enthusiastic beginners attending their first astrology conference. If they listen to ten lectures, they’ll probably hear ten different takes on astrology. Many involve perspectives that would be very difficult to reconcile with each other, both practically and philosophically. There are helpful, impressive astrologers practicing in the Vedic traditions, along with many fine Hellenists, Uranians, and Cosmobiologists. There are good psychological astrologers – and in the FCEA we’re pretty close to them, but we’re not the same. Even in the mainstream forms of modern astrological practice, you have a dozen systems of house division to choose among. Should we use the Vertex? What about the Part of Fortune? What about planetary midpoints? What about harmonics? Black Moon Lilith anyone?
Again, I pity beginners as they try to pick their way through this whole smorgasbord of astrological possibilities. They often feel that to become good astrologers they need to understand it all. But no one can understand it all! There’s just too much. And on top of it, no client anywhere would have the patience, time, or attention span to listen to a session that applied all of those techniques at once.
My personal North Star has always been aimed at meeting the needs of those clients. Over the years, sitting with many, many thousands of them, I’ve honed my arsenal of techniques down to the few that have consistently seemed to work the best, at least for me and my clients. I’ve also only pursued techniques that answer the kinds of questions that I personally find most compelling – basically the ones around how our psychological processes relate to the growth of our souls. I find it more exciting to wrestle with those particular angels and devils than to try to pick the stock whose value is about to rise or the candidate who’s most likely to win the election.
The distillation of all that I have learned – and unlearned, and forgotten, and discarded – is the Steven Forrest Method. And that efficient, accurate, stripped-down package is what we teach in the FCEA. That’s what we’re “cloning.” The point is not that we reject all the other traditions and techniques – the point is that we want to chart the most efficient course from A to Z for our students, where A is a blank slate and Z is the ability to sit down confidently with an astrologically naive client and actually know what words to say. So we teach one method – again, call it “cloning me” if you want – and if you want to explore other methods, go for it! Just please do it outside the framework of our school.
Learning this FCEA methodology is, as you know, a serious commitment. Even stripped down like this, it still takes three or four years of hard work to get on top of it enough to reach a professional level of competence. It’s sort of like going to medical school. The bottom line is that in the FCEA, our aim is to get everyone to “Z” as efficiently as possible, so we limit our attention to specific practices, while we discourage anyone from muddying the waters for the other students by wondering about what this chart would say in Porphyry houses or in Whole Sign House format. That’s not because those systems are wrong, but rather because they’re confusing to anyone who’s trying to keep their eyes on the prize as we’ve defined it.
Once you’ve learned the Steven Forrest Method, you can take it anywhere you want. In fact, even now as active students in our school, if you want to check out other approaches or other teachers, go for it – just please support the other students by staying focused on our core curriculum.
There are a couple more areas where a few concerns have been expressed. They’re both comparatively minor, but I’d like to clear the air about them as best I can.
INCONSISTENCIES ABOUT ASPECT ORBS
I’ll own it! In the videos and handouts that comprise the FCEA curriculum, sometimes you see me suggesting an orb of 2.5 degrees for a certain aspect, then elsewhere I might suggest 5 degrees. I’m all over the map about orbs and I admit it’s probably confusing.
Some of that is simply my own inconsistency – and that’s further exacerbated by the fact that, for example, The Inner Sky and The Changing Sky both date back to the 1980s, while much school material is practically current by comparison. So you’re looking at over three decades of my own learning curve. As an evolutionary astrologer, I am proud to say that I am not “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow!”
There’s a deeper issue. Universally, astrologers of all schools use wider aspectual orbs for the Sun than they do for Neptune. But what if that Neptune is in Pisces or on the Ascendant? Then maybe we stretch the orbs a bit further because the planet is a little stronger in that particular chart. What if a planet is in its own sign? What if it rules the Ascendant? What if two planets in a wide hard aspect to each other are also in mutual reception? That softens their tension. Do we still get any benefit from thinking of them as “in opposition?”
It goes further – what if we have a planet in the first degree of Aries and one in the last degree of Gemini? Geometrically, that’s a tight square – but the basic harmony of Aries and Gemini makes itself felt too. Clearly that square isn’t quite the same as one between Aries and Cancer. Now widen the angle between them a bit – at what point do you stop thinking of it as a square? It’s hard to be rigid about any of this, but clearly in practice that Aries/Gemini square would break down sooner than an Aries/Cancer one.
The point is that, beyond the exact geometrical angle between the planets, orbs are influenced by many factors. For that reason, only a (hilariously) inexperienced astrologer would formally pronounce that “the proper orb for sextiles is five degrees – not four, and not not six.”
The inconsistencies you’ll encounter about aspect orbs through the FCEA curriculum materials fall somewhere between a happy mistake and a bit of a “time capsule” study of my own evolution as an astrologer over the years. Personally, I’m actually glad they are there – that’s because if I were consistent about them you might start to think that they were consistent themselves. They’re not!
REPEATING CHARTS
The further into your FCEA studies you go, the more charts you will see. Catie and I are really happy with the diverse spectrum of “case studies” the school presents. We’ve got mostly famous people, a few made-up charts, and the occasional client example – that, plus tons of “mystery charts,” which are mostly famous people supplied with false names.
Basically, the more charts you look at, the smarter you get. That’s why, as an FCEA student, you’re subjected to such a flood of them. The only limit we’ve set is that we’ve mostly steered away from very contemporary examples, mostly because “the verdict isn’t in on them yet.” I’m profoundly grateful, for example, that when I was writing The Inner Sky in the early 1980s, I used John Lennon for my example. Imagine the mess I’d have been in today if I had used Bill Cosby – or that bon vivant and then-rising star of commercial New York real estate, Donald Trump. When it comes to analyzing a life, it’s often helpful to have the whole story.
One or two students have grumbled about seeing a particular chart used more than once. Why not switch to someone new? I believe the issue was around the chart of Muhammed Ali, although I believe Lily Tomlin comes up more than once in the curriculum as well, and there are others – Amy Tan and Jane Goodall, for example. They mostly occur at the 100-level where students are first building their confidence and we think a longer look at a single chart is probably most beneficial to them.
Our reasoning here is actually very simple, at least with Muhammed Ali. To understand anyone in the context of transits, progressions, and solar arcs – or for that matter, in a synastry framework, it is essential to understand the core birthchart. As you know, analyzing a birthchart is a big undertaking. It requires time. For that reason, Catie and I just decided that it made sense to introduce Muhammed Ali’s natal chart in the FCEA 100 courses, and then to build efficiently on that foundation when we got to the FCEA 202 Practicum and it was time to look at his transits. Why redo 101 material with a new person when we were ready to work with transits and progressions and everyone already had a strong foundation with Muhammed Ali?
In general, don’t worry – in our school, you won’t often see the same chart used more than once!
Those are the four areas I wanted to address in this newsletter. Once again, we always welcome constructive criticism and helpful suggestions, so please keep them coming. We won’t be able to make you happy every time, but we’ll do our best.
Even better, do let us know when you’re simply feeling good about the school. Running it is a lot of hard work and positive feedback is what keeps us going, so thanks for that too!
