← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 2/164
The aware side
The aware side is the half of the Embodied Energy Chart cast for the moment you were born. The tradition calls it the "Personality". It is read as the part of you that you know from the inside: the qualities you would name if someone asked what you are like, the ones you can watch yourself use and, to some degree, choose.
It is one of two halves. The other, the built-in side, is cast for a moment about three months before birth. The chart is the two laid together.
How it is computed
The aware side is an ordinary set of planetary positions for the birth instant. Thirteen points are read: the Sun, the Earth (always exactly opposite the Sun), the Moon, the North Node and South Node, and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Each one falls in a gate and a line on the gate wheel, and so activates that gate.
Nothing else is different about it. The same calculation, run for the earlier moment, gives the built-in side.
What it decides
The aware side does not outrank the built-in side when it comes to defining centres: a channel completes whichever moment lights its two gates, and a channel lit half by each side counts exactly as much as one lit by either alone. But several parts of the chart are read from the aware side in particular:
- The first number of the profile. A profile such as 2/4 is the line of the aware Sun over the line of the built-in Sun. The first number is read as how you experience yourself.
- The life theme. The aware Sun and Earth are two of its four gates, and the aware Sun's gate decides which of the four quarters of the wheel the life theme sits in, and which of the sixteen faces.
- Two of the four variables. The aware Sun gives motivation and the aware nodes give perspective — the settings that concern how the mind is moved and what it watches for.
How it is read
The tradition describes this side as conscious: themes you can recognise, talk about and sometimes over-identify with. A gate lit only from the aware side is often the one a person says "yes, that's me" to straight away. That is also its trap. Because it is so familiar, it can be taken for the whole person, while the built-in side quietly runs underneath.
A useful way to hold it is as the answer you would give, rather than the full answer. Where the aware and built-in sides light the same gate, the theme is doubly emphasised and usually easy for both you and others to see. Where they diverge, there is often something worth noticing: a quality you know in yourself that others seldom remark on, or the reverse.
None of this is a measure of anyone. It is a frame for asking which of your traits you know from the inside, and which you mostly hear about from other people.
In your chart
Gates lit from the aware side are drawn in warm gold on the chart. A gate lit from both sides is drawn in violet. In the activation table, the aware column lists all thirteen points with their gate and line, and in the ring of sixty-four gates the aware positions are one of the two sets of markers. A channel drawn half gold and half blue was completed by the two sides together.