How real is your personality?
Astronomers take a tiny amount of light coming from a star millions of light years distant and analyze it to determine its speed moving towards us or away, its size, temperature and composition. They know at what age it will likely die.
The Great Sages, or Rishis, were scientists using the inner world as their laboratory. Many, many of their utterances are in close accord with advanced physics. How is this possible?
The nature of the Universe is a holographic fractal. “As above, so below” goes the spiritual law.
We may regularly feel hungry when the clock reads close to noon. Is it the clock that makes us hungry? The clock is a representation of the Sun being overhead and a rhythm of hunger and eating has been timed to that.
There are multitudes of rhythms that are present in our bodies and the Earth. The planets are, in part, representative of these rhythms. Do they cause the rhythms any more than the clock causes us to be hungry? Each of the seven “planets” [Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn] represent and reflect the Universal Sacred Seven, like the seven colors making up all color, and the seven tones making all sound.
The ancient Rishis “saw” that the position of these planets at the time of your birth was reflective of your personality. But how “real” is that personality? It certainly seems real to us. We like to think that we “know” who we are, and if we don’t and live in the everyday world that is seen as a problem.
These same Rishis have left the knowledge to us that this personality is an illusion. As the author and poet Robert Bly used to intone, “In 1900 the West discovered the EGO. India said, ‘That’s very good…….’” They tell us that the ego is pure illusion, and that when that illusion disappears, the True Self is apparent. And that True Self is the One of All Creation.
The astrology chart is a complex, moving diagram of the ego that blocks the Light of Truth, that oneness that we are. “Tat tvam asi,” Thou art That. But why should we study the false self imposing as the True Self?
In some great classic movies about WWII, there is often a scene where the enemy’s crashed plane is being searched and the battle plans are found, and this makes victory possible. Learning about your astrology chart is finding the plans of the enemy, the imposter that tells the eagle raised in the barnyard that it is in fact a chicken…
The Buddha taught us the power of becoming the observer and watching our mind, and naming the thoughts and desires as they rise and fall. This is one of the most powerful ways to defuse and dis-empower, if not outright destroy, those desires that obscure the Self.
Astrology is a recognized path to God, or Yoga, in India. it is part of Jnana Yoga, or the path of knowledge. With the knowledge of astrology, we use our minds like smoke in wind tunnel to make visible to usually hidden currents that toss us around like helpless beings struggling for survival.
When one can shift their perspective to that of “The Watcher” instead of the suffering one, the pain may not disappear, but the suffering does. THAT is the sacred power of astrology. And when we are The Watcher we have a navigable boat instead of floundering in the swift current of Life.