Episode Details

Behavior

What does that even mean, to behave?

We can start with the premise of what behavior means etymologically. In English, to behave comes from Old English “behaven”: be and have together, to hold, to surround, to contain, to have oneself in a certain way, the way we carry and conduct ourselves in front of others and in front of life. In French we would say comporter, which is to bring together, to gather who we are and how we act into one gesture. So behavior is how we hold ourselves and how we carry ourselves, the way we bring our parts together in one line of action, the way we draw a definition and move in a direction.

I have been really integrating the idea of what behavior is because I speak about Aristotle showing us the telos of humanity as a pursuit of happiness, and that is already going to decipher and describe the behavior of a collective. When you go to Von Mises in Human Action, he says that this is purposeful behavior. If you go to Carl Jung, we are going to see that behavior is about integrating our unconscious with our conscious.

So where do I stand now?

Studying markets, I always read the behavior of demand and supply; when I look and observe other people’s reactions or responses, including my own, I am looking at behavior and integrity, principles: these are words that have a lot of weight.

If we go to principle, it means beginning: Principium in Latin, the foundation. Integrity means that synthesis is allowed to include other parts. I always say that principles, for me, are a horizontal line where we stand, and integrity as individuals is a vertical line that does have a price, where the individual will arrive to a place and say: I will not bend beyond this height. Integrity is very subjective; we can judge other people for their own lack of integrity, and we can see ourselves where we bend.

Now, I am speaking about all this because Saturn is finally going direct on the 27th of November. That is Thanksgiving here in the United States. After a few months, since July 13, it went retrograde from Aries back to Pisces on September 1st, and now it is going to go direct at 25 degrees of Pisces. It will reach Aries again in February to then approach the final great conjunction with the planet Neptune, who is the ruler of Pisces. Saturn has been in Pisces for the last three years. Try to remember everything that has been going on in your life since March 2023.

For me, it was my second Saturn return. They say that when you have done the work, your second Saturn return gives you a lot of goodies. I think I have had a lot of goodies in the last few years: realizations, motivations, achievements, if you want to call it that.

By the way, Mark asked me yesterday in our monthly session what I would say now about the second Saturn return, having effectively been through it, and I told him this: by the time Saturn came back in 2023, I already knew that my most painful turning had been my Chiron return at fifty, when I shattered into a million pieces because I had lived without boundaries and felt completely empty. So I prepared; years before Saturn entered Pisces I chose therapy, I chose to work on boundaries, I chose to start writing my first book as a reflection of that coming of age, and now the second book as a spine of thirty three vertebrae is holding the structure quite gently, because with Saturn in the first house in Pisces I can be any f*****g form, and the only way to give it form is to know myself and take care of myself first. This cycle has been about standing my ground, doing the homework instead of escaping, reparenting myself, feeling both parents at my back while I rebuild my nervous system from the core and stop shrinking to make space for others. My mom died as I was coming out of this second Saturn return, and somehow that sealed the work; I am standing in my own personality now, breathing fully, supporting my own needs without guilt.