The DK Foundation

Recognizing opportunity is an approach to life. It is born out of an understanding that opportunity appears when and how it can, and this is determined by what has gone before.

‘In order to know the future it is necessary to know the present in all its details, as well as to know the past.’ G.I. Gurdjieff said. ‘Today is what it is because yesterday was what it was.’

‘The present is but the past unfolded.’ said the great esoteric astrologer Sephariel, even more succinctly.

This is why opportunity has to appear to us in an assortment of different forms, including those that the personality perceives as rank misfortune, because this may be the only way that it can gain admission into our range of consciousness.

Generally speaking, we do not like opportunity to appear in this guise. This is aberrant, things gone wrong, because opportunity is a positive word and positive idea and we expect opportunity to express itself through positive experiences. And many times they will, especially when there is room and a person is receptive to the new. But at other times, when there is no other way of gaining admission, something will have to be cleared out of out lives in order to make room for the new. This clearing out is not separate from opportunity; it is a precondition of opportunity.

The Foundation is not teaching Stoicism; we are not denying the reality of the personality. Until it understands why something should have had to happen, and usually this involves more time, the personality will feel threatened and thwarted. This does not matter; of itself, this does not sabotage opportunity. What matters is when this reaction makes us go into judgment because in a state of judgment we will freeze around the negative experience and we will not be receptive to the continuing unfoldment of that situation. This is sabotage.

Over time this sabotaging tendency produces bitterness and loss of trust and we all know people who have allowed this to happen. We know what the quality of our own lives is like when we allow negativity to take root.

This is why recognizing opportunity requires an approach to life: it requires a suspension of judgment that is ongoing, an open-mindedness that is receptive to the idea that there is some benefit in any situation, no matter how unwelcome. That, in turn, requires a willingness to concede that our expectations, plans, strategies may not have been adequate. In all probability, we will not have taken into account or even been aware of all the relevant details and considerations because the personality has only narrow vision. Until it becomes aligned with the soul, which has a knowingness outside time, this is one of its limitations.

To acknowledge this limitation of the personality is not the same thing as saying have no faith in setting goals and making plans; neither does it necessitate a self-mortifying sense of our worm-like inadequacy, (a popular affectation amongst the spiritually minded!). If anything, it requires a good sense of humour. In the Findhorn Community in Scotland they have coined a very useful expression: if you want to give God a laugh, tell him your plans! Opportunity likes a proactive mind that is open to suggestion but it cannot work with a proud and non-adaptive mind.

Our very lifetimes are opportunities; every experience brought by time is an opportunity but there are times in the lives of all us when opportunity assumes a more concentrated form.

Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are the most recognizable agents of opportunity to an astrologer.

Jupiter opens out; Saturn focuses the mind and encourages us to recognize what we need to change through conscious effort; and Uranus is the custodian of progress. Uranus understands the plan for the life and sends in the situations that are needed to keep the show on the right road.

Uranus knows all the details about the present and the past.

But the personality, even the spiritually prepared personality, does not entirely trust Uranus because that planet is no great respecter of its desire for comfort and continuity. The personality does not always notice that Uranus, when it acts, brings with it a courage and honesty that makes us able to cope with what it insists upon. And Uranus will always prevail, forcing upon us, if need be, our gift from a higher level.

For this is what opportunity is, a gift from the concerned soul to the personality in its charge. Opportunity is life expressing itself in time and form. And it is consciousness that enables us to recognize it. We have to know that nothing can stand still and that we must be always alert to ways of moving on.