chinese astrology and the internal

Summary:

The most basic model of Chinese Astrology, or BaZi, is the four Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches.

You can find what yours are here. It might be fun to follow along.

Here are mine:

A basic way to read this is, you take the second line of text from each box on the the “Stem” row, and combine it with the animal in the “Branch” row below it.1

So, for me, it’d be:

Hour: Yin Fire Ox

Day: Yin Wood Goat

Month: Yang Metal Rat

Year: Yang Fire Rat

If you’re unfamiliar with BaZi, this probably means nothing to you. No worries. I’ll give you the crashiest crash course right now.

Each column, or “pillar”, is a way of describing a certain archetype at work in us.

If you don’t like the word archetype, you can think of it as a:

So, I have four main patterns. The Yin Fire Ox, the Yin Wood Goat, and so on.

Now, what do these mean? What is a Yin Fire Ox? I’ll offer two ways to find out.

Budget: ask chatGPT

Premium: read this book

Now, do you have your archetype descriptions? Do you relate to them? Depending on your age, you may not relate to the hour pillar, as that one becomes stronger later in life.

If you don’t relate… I’m sorry for using your time.

But if you do, try this prompt (substituting my pillars for yours):

Hour: Yin Fire Ox

Day: Yin Wood Goat

Month: Yang Metal Rat

Year: Yang Fire Rat

Can you anthropomorphize these BaZi pillars as employees applying for a job at a company? Don't assign them roles or hierarchy yet. I want to decide that later.

Of course your mileage may vary with ChatGPT, but I feel like it's a good way to get started. I came up with my own descriptions before using ChatGPT, and found that the AI descriptions matched mine quite well.

So here's my archetypes now described as employees:

Yang Fire Rat: Delinquent but entertaining and creative. Trouble staying on task, but sometimes makes up for it with occasional breakthroughs. Tendency towards bullshitting in meetings to coverup lack of actual knowledge. Unstable mental health, tending towards bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD, dopamine disorders. Abuses stimulants and sleep deprivation. Grimes energy.

Yang Metal Rat: Loves tracking, to-do lists, getting things done, processes and systems. Company.

Yin Wood Goat: Sensitive, friendly, gentle, but low-key determined and ambitious. Patrick Collison energy.

Yin Fire Ox: Stable, dependable, consistent. Pleasantly grinds out eight hours of work on whatever needs to be done. Slow but diligent. Great stamina. Solid mental health.

Then, given their personalities, I assign them roles.

Yang Fire Rat: Independent researcher. Delinquent but entertaining and creative. Trouble staying on task, but can sometimes make up for it with occasional breakthroughs. Tendency towards bullshit in meetings to coverup lack of actual knowledge. Unstable mental health, tending towards bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD, dopamine disorders. Abuses stimulants and sleep deprivation. Grimes energy.

Yang Metal Rat: Project manager. Loves tracking, to-do lists, getting things done, processes and systems.

Yin Wood Goat: CEO. Sensitive, friendly, gentle, but low-key determined and ambitious. Patrick Collison vibes.

Yin Fire Ox: Engineer. Stable, dependable, consistent. Pleasantly grinds out eight hours of work on whatever needs to be done. Slow, but diligent. Great stamina. Solid mental health.

Now what's the point of this? Well, recently whenever I need to work on something that takes organization, consistent at work, planning, careful, thought, etc. or what I need to make a big decision. I called these different parts into a meeting and let them negotiate a plan. And when things get disordered, I call another meeting. I realize I've been doing this unconsciously at my last job for a few years when I had to research and write about all kinds of complex topics that were largely new to me.

Yang Fire Rat would get overwhelmed chasing a billion threads and amassing a disorganized heap of notes. Yang Metal Rat would get mad and impose some structure and deadlines. Yang Fire Rat would feel lost and hopeless and start ditching work. Yin Wood Goat would re-focus and re-motivate him by reminding him of the big picture. Meanwhile, Yin Fire Ox would step in clean up the mess, carefully organizing everything into something coherent and useful, trying to take pleasure in slow and careful work.

Seeing it consciously as a company helped me realize that I have too much fire rat and not enough ox (which is normal, as the hour pillar (my ox) gets stronger later in life). That doesn’t mean the fire rat is bad, but it just needs to be balanced with the rest of the team.

It should go without saying to take all this with a big grain of salt. I don’t have a successful career or the qualifications to be talking about this. This post is pure Yang Fire Rat wanting to share with someone.

1

Of course BaZi is much, much deeper than this reductive way of looking at the chart.