Behind the Scenes - How I Use Symbolic Intelligence
Thoughtful Study with Symbolic Intelligence by Astrrid and AI
15th August 2026
Much of my work with astrology and numerology begins with interpretation. We look at a birth chart, calculate a set of numbers, examine a particular cycle, or explore the numerical structure of a name. From this we begin to understand something that may not have previously been obvious. Yet, I have become increasingly interested in what happens after that point. Once we have recognised a pattern, what do we actually do with the information? Can symbolic systems become something we actively work with, rather than simply something we use to describe ourselves or understand what has already happened?
This question has gradually become central to the way I use astrology and numerology within my own life. In many respects, I have turned both myself and the development of my business into something of a living research environment. I use symbolic systems to explore longer-term developmental themes and personal patterns, but also to help with much shorter-term planning and everyday decisions. I use them when thinking about identity, names and brands, when choosing dates, when planning articles and launches, and when trying to understand whether this is a time to push something forward, or is it time to allow it to develop for a little longer. Some of these applications have involved substantial decisions, like changing my own name, or deciding on business start-up date. Others can be surprisingly small - such as the release date for this article. However collectively they have changed not only the way I make decisions, but the way I think about the practical possibilities of symbolic systems themselves.
This is also where my developing ideas around Symbolic Intelligence become particularly important. I am not interested in handing my decisions over to astrology or numerology, and I certainly don't believe that a number, chart or planetary configuration should tell me what I must do. Instead, I use symbolic systems to reveal additional information - patterns, tension, timing, developmental themes, and possibilities that I might otherwise overlook. That information can then sit alongside everything else I know about a situation - experience, commercial judgement, practical constraints, and most of all simple common sense. So in effect, what Symbolic information becomes is another form of intelligence available to the decision, rather than an authority that makes the decision for me.
Symbolic Intelligence, Not Symbolic Obedience
A very simple example occurred when I was preparing one of my articles. I wanted to release it on one of my personal Superdates. However, Mercury was retrograde and, if I had been trying to find an astrologically pristine moment to publish, I could easily have persuaded myself that it would be better to wait. Yet the article was specifically about significant dates occurring within that month. By the time Mercury moved direct, much of its practical usefulness would have disappeared. The sensible decision was therefore to publish it during Mercury retrograde. The result? The sky didn’t fall down.
So I am inclined to think that examples such as this are important because they illustrate the difference between using symbolic information intelligently and becoming governed by it. If astrology or numerology simply creates another collection of rules that one becomes frightened to violate, I am not convinced we have increased intelligence at all. Instead we have simply found another framework to obey. Mercury retrograde may be relevant information, but so are deadlines, audiences, commercial objectives, existing commitments, energy levels, and the purpose of whatever I am trying to accomplish. The interesting work happens when these different kinds of information are brought together and considered in context.
This is why I increasingly think of Symbolic Intelligence as a process of synthesis. Sometimes the symbolism strongly reinforces a direction I am already considering. Or sometimes it introduces a question I had not previously thought to ask. Occasionally it provides enough additional information for me to reconsider a decision altogether. And sometimes I acknowledge what the symbolism is showing me and decide to proceed anyway because other considerations matter more. The objective is not perfect symbolic alignment - it is better-informed participation in the decisions I am already making.
Understanding How I Naturally Operate
Perhaps one of the most useful consequences of working in this way has been developing a much better understanding of my own natural operating style. My astrological chart contains considerable Mercury, Gemini and Aries influence. I have a Gemini Moon and Midheaven, Mercury rules my chart, and my Sun and Venus are closely conjunct in Aries. Mercury itself is in Pisces. Individually, each of these placements can be interpreted in different ways, but collectively they describe something I recognise extremely well. I generate possibilities very easily.
In fact ideas have rarely been my problem. Deciding which ones deserve and then hold my attention can be considerably more difficult as one idea tends to generate several others. Research only then opens new avenues of enquiry. So what can appear to be a relatively simple business problem can reveal multiple possible solutions. A new concept might become an article, a framework, a service, a research project, or something I suddenly want to spend six months investigating. Aries is quite happy to begin something new, Gemini wants to explore the possibilities, Mercury continues making connections, whilst Pisces is perfectly comfortable allowing apparently unrelated ideas to flow into one another.
There are obvious advantages to thinking this way, particularly for the kind of work I am now developing. Yet an abundance of possibilities can create very real difficulties. When many options appear equally interesting, choosing between them requires energy, and it is very easy to spend more time considering possible directions than actually moving in one of them. For years, I tended to assume that the answer was simply greater discipline - choose something, create a rigid plan and then make myself follow it consistently. There is certainly value in structure, but I have gradually realised that productivity does not necessarily require me to work against my natural cognitive architecture. Instead I have found it to be considerably more effective to design around it.
Symbolic systems have become surprisingly useful here because they introduce what I think of as meaningful constraints. Rather than repeatedly trying to optimise every decision from an almost unlimited field of possibilities, I can use astrology and numerology to help narrow the decision-space. A longer-term cycle might suggest that a particular period is better used for development, restructuring or outward expansion. A shorter cycle can help me think about what deserves attention during a particular month. Superdates give me specific points around which certain activities can be organised. A brand or service/product name can be considered not only for how it sounds or communicates commercially, but for whether its symbolic structure appears congruent with what I am trying to create. I find this an enormously powerful tool at my disposal.
Yet none of these things actually removes choice. In fact, I have found that they can make choice easier, as instead of continually asking what I could do from a potentially enormous range of possibilities, I can ask given the larger pattern I am currently working within, what makes most sense now? That apparently small shift has reduced a considerable amount of cognitive friction for me. It gives me enough structure to move without requiring me to close down the very flexibility and curiosity that generates much of my work in the first place.
Learning to Work With My Own Rhythm
This has also changed the way I think about productivity more generally. My natural working rhythm does not seem particularly well suited to producing exactly the same quantity or type of work every day. There are periods when I generate enormous amounts of material and seem to make connections everywhere. Where everything just seems to flow effortlessly. There are other periods when I want to research, think, reorganise ideas, and allow something to develop beneath the surface. Or times when I simply need to switch off, rest, recharge, and turn my attention to more everyday living. Through adapting to my rhythms, these can again then be followed by concentrated periods of execution in which a surprising amount gets completed relatively quickly. Previously, I was much more likely to interpret the quieter periods as a failure of productivity. If I wasn't visibly producing something, I assumed I wasn't doing enough (Virgo Rising certainly contributes to this way of thinking). However I increasingly recognise that synthesis is part of the process itself, and sometimes I need to allow ideas to accumulate before I know what I want to do with them. Stepping away from outward production creates the conditions for the next stage of development. Astrology and numerology do not create this rhythm, but they can provide a useful framework through which I recognise it and become more deliberate about how I work with it.
This is one of the ways in which symbolic systems are beginning to make a very practical difference to my life. Rather than using them to justify doing nothing because the timing isn't perfect, I can use them to think more intelligently about what kind of activity belongs where. The more accurately I recognise the differences, the less energy I seem to waste fighting against myself. Paradoxically, becoming less rigid about how productivity is supposed to look has allowed me to produce considerably more.
Names, Identity and Deliberate Symbolic Change
Perhaps the clearest example of deliberate symbolic intervention within my own life has been my name change (which I will write more about in the coming months.) Most astrological factors are things we observe rather than choose. I cannot decide where Saturn should be moving through the zodiac or redesign my natal chart because I would prefer a different configuration. Nor can I change the core numbers in numerology associated with my date of birth. These describe the underlying energies and developmental architecture we are born with. Yet our name occupies a somewhat different position. Within numerology, it describes how those underlying energies are expressed - how we engage with the world, develop our identity, and give outward form to the potential contained within the birth date. Names are also one of the few elements within our symbolic architecture that we can consciously change. If names carry symbolic structures, then changing a name creates the intriguing possibility that we can deliberately influence how those deeper, unchanging birth energies are expressed through our identity and life. That is what initially drew me to numerology after having specialised in astrology for a period.
My own name change therefore became much more than a search for a numerologically favourable collection of letters. I was thinking about identity, expression, direction, and the person I was becoming after a long period of change. The name needed to work linguistically, aesthetically and practically, but I was also interested in the numerical architecture I was constructing and how its different components interacted with my existing numerological pattern. The process sat somewhere between interpretation and design - understanding what was already there, deciding what I wanted to develop, and then consciously creating something new.
What makes this particularly interesting to me is that the experiment did not finish when I chose the name. I continue to observe what happens as I live and work within it. How does the name feel after six months, or a year? What characteristics become more visible? What changes in the way I present myself or the opportunities I pursue? How much comes from the symbolic structure itself, and how much comes from the psychological process of consciously choosing a new identity? These are not questions I expect to answer through a single calculation, and are instead part of a much longer process of observation, where I increasingly regard my own experience as a useful research environment.
Building “Astrrid” in the Same Way
The development of Astrrid Lovelett/Astrrid.com has naturally become another extension of this process. Numerology has informed my thinking about Astrrid, Astronumology, the Astrrid Numerology System, service names, domains and different elements of the brand. Sometimes I begin with the practical or creative requirement and analyse the symbolism afterwards. Yet more often than not now, symbolic analysis becomes part of the design process itself. For example, I might generate several names that all work commercially and linguistically, and then use their numerical structures as another way of distinguishing between them.
Timing works in much the same way. I use astrology and numerology when considering launches, publications and important stages of business development - but rarely in isolation. A symbolically attractive date that makes little commercial sense is unlikely to be a good business date for me. Equally, if several practically viable dates are available, their astrological and numerological characteristics provide another useful layer of information when choosing between them. Superdates have become particularly useful because they allow me to bring these systems together and identify periods when several different factors appear to support a particular kind of activity.
Some applications are much smaller, but I often find these especially interesting because they demonstrate how naturally symbolic thinking has become integrated into the way I work. When I created a dedicated page on my website for people I might meet at TCCHE — the Conference for Consciousness and Human Evolution — I chose the straightforward address astrrid.com/tcche. As my habits dictate, once I had created it, I calculated the numerology. The resulting expression was 51/6 “The Connector”, which expresses as connection created through communication, sociability, and shared experience. I’m not a large group person and more inclined to introversion, so this is a number with qualities remarkably appropriate for a page specifically intended to create connections between conversations at a conference and the wider body of work I am developing. Would I have abandoned an otherwise useful web address if the number had been less appealing? Probably not. Yet that is precisely the point as the address already worked practically, but the numerical correspondence added another layer of symbolic congruence.
These small examples continually remind me that Symbolic Intelligence does not need to involve dramatic life decisions. Sometimes it is simply about noticing the additional patterns contained within something we are already creating, deciding whether those patterns have anything useful to contribute, and developing a sense that I am increasingly operating in alignment with the rhythms of my own life. Interestingly, I am also finding that I do not always need to seek that alignment consciously. There are many occasions when I choose a date, name or direction for entirely practical or intuitive reasons, only to examine the symbolism afterwards and discover that it fits remarkably well (such as the TCCHE example). Whether we understand this as intuition, pattern recognition, greater self-knowledge, or something more difficult to define, I find the increasing frequency of these correspondences fascinating. It can feel as though the more closely I understand my own patterns, the less effort is required to work with them.
Astrology and Numerology Workspace by Astrrid and AI
From Prediction Towards Participation
The more I use astrology and numerology in this way, the less interested I become in treating them primarily as systems for predicting what is going to happen. Prediction certainly has its place. Timing matters, cycles matter, and there are occasions when recognising that particular conditions are developing can be extremely useful. But I am becoming much more interested in what happens when we use symbolic information to participate more consciously in our own development.
If astrology describes a developmental landscape, how might I navigate that landscape more intelligently? If numerology reveals something about the architecture of a name, how might that information contribute to the way I construct an identity or business? If my own symbolic patterns help me recognise that I naturally move between ideation, synthesis, concentrated execution, and rest, how might I organise my working life so that those tendencies become assets rather than recurring sources of frustration? These questions interest me considerably more than simply asking what the future holds, because they preserve the role of human agency within the symbolic system.
Perhaps this is also why Symbolic Intelligence is becoming a useful umbrella term for the work I am developing. Astrology and numerology provide different kinds of symbolic information, but neither needs to become an authority over the person using it. The intelligence lies in our capacity to recognise patterns, understand their context, compare different forms of information and decide how — or whether — to apply what we discover. Sometimes that means acting in accordance with the symbolism, or it can mean deliberately choosing something else. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is simply notice the pattern and allow that awareness to influence how we understand what is happening.
For me, one of the most significant consequences has therefore been a change in my relationship with choice itself.
Having many possibilities available can feel like freedom, but unlimited possibility can also make movement surprisingly difficult. Symbolic systems provide context and meaningful constraints. They help me recognise that there may be different seasons for different kinds of activity, rather than trying to pursue every possibility simultaneously, and they give me additional structures through which I can decide where to direct my attention.
I still generate far more ideas than I could possibly pursue, and I suspect I always will. The difference is that I increasingly feel less compelled to pursue all of them at once. Some can wait, and some clearly belong to a later stage of development. Whilst others become much more obviously important when viewed within the wider architecture of what I am trying to build.
None of this makes life perfectly predictable, nor would I want it to. What it does seem to do is help me move through complexity with rather less friction. Perhaps that is one of the most useful possibilities I have discovered within Symbolic Intelligence. That it is not another system of rules telling us how we should live, but is instead a way of understanding the patterns within which we are already operating and using that understanding to participate more consciously in what comes next.
~ Astrrid
Continuing the Conversation
The more I work with symbolic systems, the more interested I become in what happens when we move beyond interpretation and begin integrating symbolic information into the way we actually live. For me, this means neither surrendering decisions to astrology and numerology nor searching endlessly for perfect alignment. It means developing a better understanding of the patterns within which I operate and using that knowledge alongside experience, intuition and practical judgement.
Symbolic Intelligence is still an evolving area of my work, and many of the ideas explored here will continue to develop through my research into numerology, astrology, identity, timing and other symbolic systems. Increasingly, I am interested not simply in what these systems can tell us, but in how greater awareness of pattern might help us participate more consciously in shaping what comes next.
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