MOST PEOPLE think astrology is a way of languaging the infinite shades and textures of personality. Astrology subdivides — and thereby makes more “real” — the illusion of separation.
Astrodharma takes a different approach. There are only two shades of personality: the self-liberating hues, spontaneously dissolving themselves into love, and the dense, hard-edged hues, crying out for love. Furthermore, even this binary collapses in the realization that all personalities, luminous or opaque, are simply colors of illusion — the ego’s evidence of separation.
Perhaps this difference-flattening worldview seems a bit joyless, impersonal. How juicy a dance can you have with another being whilst beholding their personal style as mere “evidence of separation?” Great question. But let’s turn it around: How intimate can you feel with a personality whose “proud owner” is averse to the fragrance of pure awareness?
Surely, ego squirms, there must be a happy middle path between abiding as the witness and passionately inhabiting one’s body/mind? Consider this possibility: You are not a person. You are a convulsing birth canal. Your entire physiology was designed to push the sky of pure awareness out through your eyes and allow personality to follow easily and naturally behind it, like the gush of a placenta.
Hmm… Are you willing to live a life where selfhood is incidental to the vastness of presence — where different moments midwife different “kids?” Perhaps this lucid, in-the-moment approach to somebody-ness sounds refreshing — a kind mystical improv. I concur. At some point, however, mind will not like who this birth reveals. The children of vastness have a way of frustrating our parental agendas. What then? Will we disown them? What happens when employer, mate, or friend push back? When flashes of “What’s gotten into you?” start showing up in their eyes?
During these times it may help to remember: continuity of self is not like continuity of government. Liberation from the habits of ego requires regular, automation-killing introspection — a process akin to healthy revolution. Singapore, one of the shiniest, safest and well-organized city-states, has one of the highest suicide rates. When we fail to “see ourselves seeing” and flop out a predigested shtick, we are not just being lazy, we are suffering from a creepy, Singaporean kind of automation. Imagine if the statistics for suicided presence were published daily. Would we not fall to the floor weeping? Truthfully, the report is in and we already are.
So how about it? Are you willing to insert an ego-burning interval of silence between the question that is the world and the answer that is your being? Will you abide the labor pains and keep pushing — allowing your newborns to show up Buddha-fully innocent, ancient and strange?
Need a way to check yourself? Read through the Astro-Authenticity Quiz below. Answer a consistent “yes” to each of these twelve astrologically inspired self-inquiry questions and surely you have achieved something delicious and humanly rare: a “certificate of live birth!”
Astro-Authenticity Quiz
(See archetypal correlations at end of list.)
1. When giving is unappreciated, can you persevere, trusting that your seeds of compassion will sprout at another time and place?
2. Can you commingle with the dark passages of self-in-other whilst preserving an unshakable faith in their initiatory brilliance?
3. Can you sustain your connection to personal love in the midst of mercenary haggling, organizing and business dealings?
4. Are you mystic enough to see the innocent heart of the matrix, injecting a conscientious luminosity into its pedestrian roles?
5. Can you grandly inhabit your personality costume instead of succumbing to a false, impersonal transcendence?
6. Are you willing to let life bump your egoic phonograph needle so you can jump free of boring identity ruts?
7. Can you benevolently confront others and remember in the midst of interpersonal friction, this is what love looks like?
8. Do you have the courage to feel the pain of your own and others’ inner abortionist as ego twists us into safe, scripted roles?
9. Can you spontaneously inspire, adapting your communication of ultimate truth to the individual consciousness in front of you?
10. Do you care enough about humanity to risk your personal reputation for a chance at shocking the group trance awake?
11. Are you sovereign enough to stand tall with compassion when your innocent offspring is found offensive and disagreeable?
12. Do you have enough groundedness to convert inner darkness and disorientation into embodied presence?
1. Pisces 2. Scorpio 3. Capricorn 4. Virgo 5. Leo 6. Gemini 7. Libra 8. Cancer 9. Sagittarius 10. Aquarius 11. Aries 12. Taurus
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