Cosmic Prognostic and Temporal Archetypographer

I never wanted to become an astrologer.  Like most rational, educated people, I thought astrology was silly, mushy-minded, and so far beneath my intelligence level that it wasn’t even worth taking seriously, much less studying.  

But like so many things I used to think, I was wrong, and the practice would keep circling around me for years until my stubbornness finally abated and I was won over by the beauty, wisdom, and accuracy of this ancient study.  

My first “serious” encounter with astrology was actually pretty innocent.  It was one simple insight I received during an early Ayahuasca experience.  I was “way out there” somewhere and had the simple insight that people could actually choose, from this far off dimension, when they would want to be born.  And the thought popped into my mind, “Hmm, I can see how that astrology stuff (which I knew nothing about) could work,” given my newfound cosmic perspective.  

But I didn’t really give it a second thought, once I “came down.”

Until several months later.  Because after that early Ayahuasca trip, I discovered that I *really* liked tripping.  But I wasn’t very good at it.  I took way too many doses of way too many psychedelics, way too close together.  And I fought, and argued with the medicines like the headstrong young boy that I was.  And after I lost one too many of those battles, I started to lose my mind.  

At the time, I thought I knew what I was doing.  I had, after all, been studying psychedelics for years before I started tripping, particularly the work of pioneering Medical Doctor, Stanislav Grof, who had led early psychedelic studies dating back to the 1950s at Johns Hopkins Medical School.  So he was someone who was both experienced in woo-woo stuff but also someone who possessed the values of intellectual rigor that I so prized at the time.  

In my somewhat crazed state, I managed to move out to the West Coast, where I started taking Stan’s classes in person.  And when I asked him directly for help to regain my sanity, he responded oddly, “When were you born?”

And so began my beginner’s journey into astrology beyond the newspaper nonsense I had so easily dismissed as a kid.  

Stan came back to me the next day with reports of my “Pluto Transit” that was “very intense” and could last for a number of years (NB: he missed the big Neptune transit that was probably causing most of the insanity).  And as I pressed for more info, Stan informed me that after decades of trying to predict what kinds of trips people had during psychedelic journeys (good, bad, transcendent, aesthetic, hellish, etc), he found that no psychological test was more accurate than the astrological technique of reading people’s planetary “transits.”  For Stan and his crew (including co-teacher Richard Tarnas), astrology became inseparable from the psychedelic experience to the point that they warn off people from tripping during certain times (and strongly encourage them during others).  

I was intrigued, but still skeptical (NB: I remain skeptical).  But hanging in Stan’s circles for a couple of years, I was deeply immersed in a culture that spoke openly (and constantly) about “transit astrology,” the temporary passages of planets through our charts that created the zeitgeists - both short term and long term - that we were living through.  

And it was from these folks that I learned the basics.  

But it was just the basics.  

“Transit astrology” is a fascinating topic, but it is not the only topic in astrology, and in many ways studying transits without reference to houses, signs, and aspects is like building your house starting from the attic.  It is not just incomplete, it is downright misleading to talk about these simple transits without the context they are “grounded” in.  At least that is my opinion.  

Of course with any complicated study, you have to start somewhere, and nothing makes total sense until all the pieces are filled in.  And with astrology it can take years to get all those pieces sorted, which is one of the (many) reasons that so many astrologers sound so foolish.  It is also why “newspaper horoscope” astrology still carries so much sway for people despite it being so vague, mealy-minded, grossly inaccurate, and nearly entirely made up of backwards rationalizations and random hunches.  

But me being me, with that “intellectual rigor” and all, I pressed on to learn more, develop my foundations and perform as much research as I could as to how this stuff actually worked in real life.

Firstly, I started learning the signs, houses, and aspects to build out the sub basement of my astrological house in order to retrofit transit astrology (and eventually progress, relationship, and relocation astrology) on top.  

I started reviewing my own life as objectively as I could to see where major life events corresponded to astrological events.  And of course I self-analyzed to a neurotic extent (something I don’t recommend for any astrologer, due to the inherent lack of objectivity and de facto “conflict of interest.”)

And all the while I kept tripping.  

And indeed, the content of my trips aligned very closely with the transits I was having.  Was this because I was looking for it to be so?  It’s impossible to say no.  Just as it is impossible to do scientific research and replicate experimental validation on experiences that are completely unique.  In fact the scientific method, which relies on repeatability to function, is exactly the *wrong* tool to assess psychedelic or any sort of creative experiences, which are, by definition unique.  

And while there have been some attempts to validate astrology with “science,” science being a subset of astrology, it is like asking the coffee bean to evaluate the mocha frappuccino.  And due to its complexity, irrepeatability and irreducibility, science is exactly the wrong tool to “measure” astrology as well.

But it is astrology, however, which excels at describing “the unique moment - never to be repeated” through the constantly changing interplanetary configurations, which describe both universal constants (archetypes) with temporal interactions (transits).  But that is for another time.  

Later that year, during an extended and fruitful tripping period, I experienced as clearly as ever the archetypes of my current transits.  One after the next in increasing intensity based on the orb my Saturn was making to them.  It was incredible.   I was experiencing the essence of the Planets just as one might experience the essence of a good friend or relative.  

From this moment, I began my journey to stop my purely intellectual “book-learned” interpretations and start asking the planets directly what they were wanting from a given transit.  They started to become mentors, guides, and teachers, not merely abstract “theories” from authors I had never met.  This also helped bypass so much of the subjectivity of astrology readings, which are so often mired in projection and doubt on the part of the astrologer.  

But this is supposed to be a biography right, not a treaty on astrology, so let’s stay focused because my deepest immersion into the study wouldn’t happen for about a year later.  

I mentioned that during this whole time I was still tripping, right?  And that I really liked it, but I still wasn’t very good at it.  

Well, after a particularly fervent run of psychedelics, my psyche finally snapped.  I had lost it, and I had had the trip whence I wasn’t sure I would ever come back.  

That is a story all its own, but it led to decades of questing to regain my sanity and, indeed, my life.

My spiritual studies became not just a matter of curiosity and spiritual unfolding, but a life and death struggle to pry myself back on one hand from the grips of madness, and on the other hand from the grips of those who treat madness by deadening the soul into zombie-like compliance with pills, straitjackets, and worse.

It was a spiritual Scylla and Charybdis that, looking back from safer shores, I traversed with Odyssean skill through the dangerous sea of modern medical secularism and blind Californian spiritualized insanity.

And in the early months of those trials, I stumbled upon Caroline Myss’s work on Archetypes.  Truth?  I found the work formulaic, shallow, and cheap.  

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t useful.  

Playing with her ideas of archetypes, I found for the first time - in a long time - a moment of rest from the sleeplessness and the constant clanging disruptions in my head.  When I let my psyche alight on one of those simple archetypes, I felt clarity, stability, and an anchoring of peace that would eventually guide me back from the depths of Neptune’s wrath and the debilitating madness that would do everything to pull me back into the whirlpool.  

And from there, I looked back to my astrology, the deeper study of Myss’s “pop archetyology,” and in so doing, I found that I could rest on my transits, I could rest on my chart, and finally I could start to accept the larger cosmic order that astrology taught, a cosmic order which allows both for madness and sanity, peace and war, perseverance and surrender. . .a multiplex reality beyond the mere “dualism” of the siddhus’ song that allowed for all things to be, to sing their verse in the cosmic song, and for everything - even those things I loathed or doubted -  to have eternal and vibrant meaning.  And with that meaning came the support of God, the resting places that would anchor my psyche and steer me not just through the madness itself, but into a complete cosmological stepping stone to a new spiritual reality that showed me daily the mystical unity of God’s love for all creation.  

As I began to better articulate my own archetypal profile and then see, day by day, the alignment of that with the present movement of the spheres, the grasping and desperation of my mind, clinging to whatever bits of reality I could grasp for more than a moment, began to abate.  Slowly I learned to trust, to stand firmly on the moving spheres and their consistent, yet ever re-aligning stories.  I could trust life again even if I couldn’t trust my own mind for a while.  I saw, nay, I experienced the purposefulness in every travail, and I grounded myself in the perfect divine timing that guided the transport of those stories through the days and hours of my life.  

I was held.  I was protected.  I was understood.  Not by the minds of men but by the universe’s own song itself.  As I learned to listen and to occasionally sing along, I felt and experienced - now every day - the reality of God’s order unfolding beneath my feet, laying out the next brick of the path at just the foretold moment and in perfect rhythm and logic before me so that I could walk in trust through the mysteries of life, more confident every day in the unerring guidance of God’s divine helpers, the planets and constellations themselves.  

And as I did so, I began to see life’s unpleasantnesses not as chinks in “the plan” but as chinks in my understanding of it.  My acceptance of the logic to the spheres took many years, but as it built, I found that my resistance to principles of “fate” were resistances to the help and support the planets offer, not in the strict enforcement they have over our lives.  

What I also found was that the madnesses, the depresions, and the varoius turmoils were simply us receiving the dark side of each planet when we acticvely fight against its gifts.  Looking back, I saw this clearly as Neptune overwhlmed my Mercury during my nascent madness.  I had been fighting the medicines, fighting the transits, and fighting my own self to keep the rigors of my logical mind in tact in the face of a transit whose very job was to confuse, disorient, and ready my mind for the invitation of higher, subtler truths.  

But I didn't let that happen.  I "clung" as Alan Watts might say, to the reason I felt was "right" and ignored Neptune's implorings to trust my way into his Chaos in order unleash the subtler tones of my rational functions which would open me to more nuanced thining and spiritual alignment.  

Because Madness is simply one side of Neptune's teachings, and it tends to occur whrn we actively fight his other gifts of nuance, contemplation ,and receptivity to the invisible-yet-real mysteries of the world beyond.  And one of my grestest learnings during this period was the radical self responbsibility that we create all of our reality, including the nasty bits.  Sometimes with our thoughts, but sometimes with our choices of how we approach and deal with "what is."  What is is not just the Buddhist nihilistic conceit but the planetary will of the moment to help us.  As Jung said, the gods will be there whether we call them or not, so best we listen to them so we get their gifsts and not their curses.  And in my own willfulness of what I thought was "right" I indeed reaped Neptune's curse and the descent below the sea that he can effect with as much ease as the ascent to unitive enlightenmet.

Many people desire or demand to transcend the limitations of the planets’ “hold’ over us (usually when Uranus is hard aspected), and for a while I was one of them.  Until I saw that the planets were the support network that undergirded all of our lives’ adventures, not brutal task masters, beating us into submission to their will.  Their will is to serve as the structural underpinnings, the chapter and verse, of our lives and to shape, build, and reveal the mysteries of our journey.  Why would anyone want to transcend that?  (And if they do, they can always tune in to their next big Uranus transit and find out).  

So astrology didn't only save my life. In the process it saved my soul. ..it cemented my trust in God, my faith in creation, and made unshakable my patience,  no matter how exceedingly slow His mill wheels do turn in my life.

It gave me the tools to transform my unhinged madness into a grounded and practical spirituality.  Completely ordinary in its everyday-ness, yet completely transcendent in its universality, creativity, and constant stream of wisdom.  

So over time, the planets became my guiding voice, yes a sort of polytheistic religion based on the ancient gods whose names they bear.  It is the most practical religion I have ever studied and the only one I have lived with full faith and conviction for years, earned by decades of daily practice and experience.  

These gods have held me through tests of faith, dark nights of the soul, public triumphs, and private misery.  They have guided my work and study, surprised me (right on schedule!) with new opportunities and outlooks, moved me to great voyages and adventures, and took everything from me in painful undoings that would set up previously unimaginable new lives.  

And in doing so, they have earned my trust, not just my faith, for their never failing deliverance of the promises of their purpose in being here to support this magnificent tiny universe and its inhabitants who bounce around like pinballs under their instruction until they rise to consciousness enough to serve and partner with the planets rather than be simply the effect of then (REWRITE)

So teaching astrology for me is a sort of practiced calling, to help ground the complexities of life in timeless patterns, to help guide souls past their mortal blinders and feel the unerring love of the planets who write the deep structures of our lives that we get to dance upon every day.  There is peace in this, not just for ourselves but for our understanding of others.  For when we read the chart, we learn to see others not as we see them - from our partial perspective and individual planetary configuration - but closer to how God sees them, from *their* configuration.  Equally as valid, equally as purposeful, and equally *necessary* as our own.  And by learning to trust “what is,” rather than what we think should be from our fragmented planetary configuration, we learn to accept and even love all that is, whether it is good for us or not, whether we like it or not, or whether we want it or not.  We are an inch closer to “letting go” of our wills and perceiving the greater will, the greater purpose, the greater splendor of God’s whole creation which before we saw as only threatening to our “selves.”

Astrology is the most elegant tool I have seen for bringing forth the majesty and clarity of God’s wisdom in creation to the imperfect preceptors of our human minds.  

Was the journey worth it?  After 20 years of torment, I am close to saying yes.  And by sharing it with you and by bringing forth your deeper understandings and acceptance and joy of life’s journey, my gratitude for my own trials grows to even greater fulfillment as I answer, yes, it was worth it.  

I made a habit of performing “blind readings” on subjects I knew nothing about and had an old friend who was an MIT trained scientist, Harvard Medical School trained doctor, and eventual resident at Yale University, where he was charged with tasering the “crazy” people, who easily could have been me, and eventually terminating our friendship.  But along the way, even someone as credentialed as this in “muggle land” science, as my Australian girlfriend would put it, became a reluctant, albeit bemused, believer.