Someone on Reality Sandwich recently asked me the question, “Is astrology a fact, or is it mere interpretation?… What makes astrology different than palm reading or gazing into a crystal ball?” The short answers are, “No, astrology is not a fact,” and, “Nothing really. They are very similar practices.”
Over the past few years I’ve been through something like a philosophical identity crisis. For eight years I believed firmly that everything I was doing was part of an objectively verifiable evolutionary path that my soul was taking toward enlightenment. I was drinking ayahuasca regularly in various groups, with full faith that there was a secret science at play. I was receiving deep healing, and that was a “fact.” I started studying astrology for similar reasons. Five years ago, when I was living in New York City, I had my first astrology reading in the cafe at the Whole Foods in Union Square. The woman, who was quite a good astrology reader, gave me information about my soul’s journey (relative to this incarnation) that resonated with me so deeply I became convinced that astrology was “really” real. I saw it like the most outstanding, newly discovered scientific fact.
Like many other people who launch into a serious study of astrology, my intellectual basis for doing so in the beginning was that it was “more real” than, say, what the psychic or palm reader down the street could tell me about myself. It wasn’t that those people didn’t have some real abilities, but astrology felt safer and more spiritually grounded to me because it was based in something more “objectively” real, namely the actual locations of the actual planets up in the sky!
After a few years of hobby study, I eventually became a professional astrologer, deeply convinced that I was learning/practicing an advanced “soul science.” Unbeknownst to me at the time, the gap between what I was actually doing and what I thought I was doing was growing wider and wider. Looking back, I can see how that metaphysical gap had started well before I began practicing astrology.
After my first psychedelic experiences, years previous to finding astrology, I was convinced that there was something “more real” about the psychedelic experience than any of my other life experiences. Psychedelics had exposed me to a set of mystical truths and a new, interconnected way of “seeing” reality. My first instinct, coming back into my regular linear/rational consciousness, was therefore to say, “The mystical reality must be objectively verifiable.” One of my first favorite films that helped me on my quest to “verify” my mystical experience was “What the Bleep Do We Know?” It was a movie about quantum mechanics and consciousness that presented a variety of ideas from a variety of scientists, all of which seemed to “objectively support” the mystical experiences I was having with psychedelics at the time.
Not long after I became topically obsessed with quantum mechanics and fringe neuroscience, I was also enamored by Terence Mckenna. Mckenna’s “Invisible Landscape” was an amazing mathematical dispensation. It seemed to me at the time that Terence Mckenna was using cutting edge science to help verify or make more objectively approachable the mystical state. Similarly I became fascinated by McKenna’s “time wave zero” project, by Jose Argüelles and the Mayan calendar, and by the overall notion that the “real” sciences were as of yet largely unknown.
I eventually found my way to the Amazon and started drinking ayahuasca somewhat regularly. To me, ayahuasca was also an advanced, scientific healing “technology,” and shamans were like the “real scientists.” As my practices continued to add onto each other (yoga, meditation, holistic diets, etc), I was regularly fascinated by the mystical “science” of each and every one of them. To me, for example, yoga was an ancient technology and an ancient “science of the soul.” All herbal or lifestyle/diet decisions could be explained by cutting edge scientific discoveries, and I was most interested in the exciting neuro-scientific side of meditation. It was around this same time that I discovered astrology.
Almost as soon as I started studying astrology, I decided to leave the shamanic group I had been drinking medicine with. One of the reasons I left was that I felt there was a lack of cohesive, grounded, scientific intelligence (so to speak). All different kinds of rites and rituals and magical items and songs were being tossed about in ceremonies like mystical flotsam and jetsam. I started drinking with and soon joined the Santo Daime because it felt better “organized.” There were hymnals and dance formations. Ceremonies were done in the light, out in the real “objective” world. There was a linear goal: use this technology to create the second coming of Christ on earth (Christ consciousness, that is). It was around this time things started to shift for me, and my philosophical identity crisis was well underway.
First and foremost, during the Daime works it was encouraged that we focus on the hymns and stay firmly attentive to the teachings of the songs, allowing my spirit guides to come and help me if I needed anything. However, my experiences of the hymns were almost always being subverted by visitations from the planets instead. Sometimes I would hear a teaching from a hymn, but instead of seeing the teaching in some linear or objective way, I would hear the music of a particular planet resounding through the teaching of whoever had received the hymn. The effect was that the teachings, most of which were Christian and therefore played on my Christian upbringing as well, were becoming less concretely useful to me. In other words, where the hymns may have suggested various prescriptions for living life in a certain way, I was hearing the teaching as a form of planetary music. It was as though each ceremony were my own private astrology workshop.
When I attempted to explain my magical astrology experiences to other church members, I sometimes got the stink eye. I could feel people’s hidden thoughts: don’t bring your astrology into this; do that somewhere else. It was the exact same way I had seen the previous shamanic group I had belonged to: a bunch of mystical flotsam and jetsam. At a certain point my Daime experiences were so regularly about anything but the teachings or traditions or specific structure of the Santo Daime, that it didn’t feel right to attend any longer. I suddenly felt restricted by the tradition, whereas when I first came to the Daime I had seen it as “more concretely” true than my previous “wishy washy” ayahuasca circles. I stepped away from all medicine practices for almost a year ago, feeling utterly confused and skeptical of almost everything I thought I believed about mysticism and spirituality.
At this same time I couldn’t help but notice the astrological signs: Jupiter, the planet of expansion, exaggeration, growth and learning, had entered my first house (the house of self), and was in the sign of Gemini (the rational mind). I figured that the planetary weather was to blame for my flip flopping and confusion. The planets were surely causing the conditions I was experiencing. As a result, and feeling only slightly comforted by the astrology lining up neatly, I did my best to embrace my doubt toward anything and everything mystical, all the while suggesting, ironically and unconsciously, that the causal, planetary/astrological reality was something that included but gave no preference to the mystical state. In a sense I took my own, unconscious logical extremism, along with my ultimately unverifiable love for mysticism, to its natural conclusion: mysticism, you exist, but only in a causal, mechanistic universe that gives no special preference to your point of view.
The way I see it now, this was perhaps just my greatest fear speaking: Adam, you exist, but only in a causal, mechanistic universe that gives no preference to you. Proving mysticism in some “hard factual sense” had become, in other words, a quest to prove the legitimacy of myself, of my own mystical nature, because deep down I doubted the efficacy of any of it. Of course I don’t blame the Santo Daime for any of my process. I can see clearly now how my own rigid motivations for joining the church and leaving my previous ayahuasca group played a large role in my experience as a whole.
Regardless, for the several years that I struggled with my astrology practice at the more structured Santo Daime circles, I studied and taught theories of astrology with the conviction that there was a “soft” determinism at play in the birth chart. I saw the birth chart as the “blue print” of the soul. There were important methods for decoding it “accurately.” I studied a variety of very intense methods for its decoding and taught them to my students. All the while, when I sat down with my private clients, something inexplicably magical was happening. I would often start with the theory of the chart and the explanation that what the client was looking at was a “blue print of the soul,” and then I would start dry reading the chart by using the hard methods I had learned or drawing upon the notes I had written up in advance of the reading. Yet over time, and after watching the magical dart throwing game (astrology posing as a predictive science) fail again and again, I realized that I needed a different approach. I needed to find somewhere between “mystical flotsam and jetsam” and “god’s hard mystical truth.” This was, again, around the time I decided to leave my medicine practice and started doubting anything and everything mystical (Jupiter was also entering Gemini in my first house).
As I probed for a new approach to my chart readings, I started noticing that my best readings were ultimately unique to the moment of the reading. There was far less chart preparation and complete atunement to the symbols, the tone of voice, and the body language of the person at the time of the reading as they spoke of their lives and as I looked into the birth chart. While I was teaching my students that their interpretive “methods” would become second nature the more they practiced them, I was privately learning that all these supposedly “objective” astrology methods used during a reading were but peripheral components of the actual mystical experience of “doing astrology.” I therefore started teaching my students to “spend time looking at, rather than analyzing, astrology charts.” Just as my Daime experiences hadn’t been about the Daime, they had been about something else, my astrology readings weren’t always about the astrological methods or some verifiable “soul science.” My astrology sessions, if I was being totally honest, were moments of inspired, imaginative divination as much as they were “methodological chart readings.” The chart was becoming more like a very intelligent crystal ball, and my clients were getting the best, most soulful readings I had ever done. My students were also doing much better in their counseling practicum sessions, and yet at the same time I was experiencing more doubt than ever. Deep down I was afraid that by my new chart reading methods I was “making things up” or that I was somehow cheating the real science. At the Daime, again, I felt the same way; I couldn’t tune into the tradition or the structure of the ceremonies wholeheartedly, but I was learning more about the planets through my visions than any books could have ever taught me.
Here is another example from the same time. Often times during my readings I would find that the direction I was taking in my interpretation was due to synchronistic circumstances happening in my own birth chart. It’s at this precise point that if I was doing things “objectively,” I would have stopped and recognized the transference pattern, and then returned to the proper “method.” Many astrologers who profess a “psychological approach” to the field would advocate that we do just this: catch, spot, and avoid transference. And at some moments in my sessions, that was exactly the right thing to do. Still, other times, the events happening in my own life and the symbols I was currently fixated on within my own birth chart would come to life in my sessions and the deepest “reading” was found in a sensitive understanding of “myself” implicated within the client’s birth chart. It’s almost too difficult to describe, and yet I am certain that sensitive readers, psychics, mediums, Jungians, etc, have all had this experience. Discerning which way is the “right way” to move in a session cannot be explained in an strictly objective sense because the discernment itself can only happen in the moment or context of the reading itself. It is part and parcel of the “dirty little secret” of how astrology is really operating, which we astrologers are mostly afraid to name and probably couldn’t name even if we tried!
So what happened to finally soften my logical approach and my need to “prove” or “validate” mysticism? In addition to my slow dissociation from the structure of my medicine church group and my changing approach to astrology, increasingly over the past several years, and especially this past year, I was using the IChing to help me solve tough business decisions and/or financial concerns. Over the past few months, after synchronistically studying several important texts that helped me see beyond “astrology or mysticism as scientific fact,” I asked the IChing for advice around a question I had about my astrology school. I first looked at my birth chart and the current transits, but I couldn’t see the answer. The birth chart felt dead to me. The IChing, on the other hand, gave me an immediately resonant teaching for the question at hand. While meditating about this strangeness repeatedly over the past few weeks and after looking back at my practice in the ways I’ve described in this article, it has simply started to make sense to me, like clouds clearing from the sky of my hyper logical intellect: you can’t verify this stuff or think about it like science; that’s not the point.
In my opinion this lesson is one that many of us who love science, who love learning, and who love the mind, must come to over and over again as spiritual students. There is no “out there out there,” to spend our time trying to prove. All “factual science” to the mystic is perhaps something more like art or music: there is reason and symmetry and structure and form, and the mind is capable of great innovations and technologies, but each and every “fact” is also but a signpost pointing toward the ineffable.
What an “apparently objective” medium: the mind. Best we not be fooled by it. After all, its where birth charts and crystal balls and science come from in the first place.
