How Astrology Explains the Unexplainable
I study chinese astrology, mainly daoist polestar astrology and the tongshu. I haven’t learned ba zi yet.
Before I got my first daoist polestar natal reading around ten years ago, I had already consulted with many people prior. Psychics, healers, etc. I was at a loss to explain the strangeness, struggle and deep pain of my life that had started when I was an infant. Daoist polestar astrology was the first system to clearly explain my situation… but not only that, it literally said the thing that no (white) system or practitioner would ever say cleanly and clearly: that demons are real, and that they are based in genetics and ancestral karma/history/memory.
Fast forward to today, I can without a doubt say that astrology isn’t a cure-all. The past 5 years of my life have been extremely difficult, painful, etc. I can’t see a way to “escape” and that in itself is a terrifying mind of wisdom. I have a path/fate that will not leave much behind in terms of positive legacy, meaning or wealth. There is no win-state for someone like me, or rather, the win-state is personal, nondual and painful.
Astrology can explain why and how our fate shows the up the way it does, and it has very little to do with agency, merit or hard work etc. But your daily choices do influence your fate and karma, so making poor choices with regard to nutrition, mindset, behavior, hygiene and relationships do matter as they strongly affect your immune system, your sense of dignity and self-integrity/self-intimacy as well as what forces in nature you feed.
Humans are nature and nature is humans. The weather/climate is like a mirror. When we as humans engage in in violence, cruelty etc we propagate an environment which amplifies that until all sense of balance and harmony is ruptured and there comes a mass pandemic, contagion of violence, plagues, warfare and madness. This is reciprocal. Nature is reciprocal.
When we do not engage in our part of the reciprocal cycle, whether via nihilism, hedonic excess, greed, aggression, addiction etc, then nature responds accordingly. By engaging in excess, we deplete our basic resources, we deplete our capacity to be human.
My own karma/fate is terrible, but I wouldn’t trade it, because no one else is as prepared as I am to deal with my karma in life or the event of death. In death, we meet nature with and without our lies. We are given a moment of reckoning and then we cease to exist. But the energy continues on in some form. Not a “soul”, but many knock-on effects of qi moving and continuing.
Our beliefs are largely part of the problem. Astrology isn’t about belief at all, at least not the way I learned it or practice it. It is a complex network of stories, symbols, and analogies which describe very large relationship factors which strongly influence our lives, our desires, our appetite, our strengths and weaknesses.
Astrology when used in a nondual animist way can help us to stop comparing our fates to other people’s fates, so that we stop pretending we can be someone other than what we are, where we are, as painful as it may be.
The only power we have is in our present moment with exactly the situation we are in.
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