In this podcast I discuss the interdependence of meditation and prayer, prescribe God-talk as an antidote to Transhumanism, explain how prayer and astrology are both “bridges between longing and belonging” and why our “prayerless funk” is a form of spiritual wife-beating. Next, I dive into why long-term relationships are dying alongside the personal God, ask why anyone would meditatively invest in a “blip with a lip” and propose that souls needs prayer like cement needs rebar. To close, I present six astrological arguments for the existence of a personal god and guide the listener into a short prayer using their newly-chosen name for God. The podcast ends with a question. If Astrology showers us with divinely inherited personality traits, what happens when we pooh pooh the personal dimension of god? Are we not shooting ourselves in the foot?
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Greetings fellow dream animals! Welcome. This podcast is a place where silence grows a tongue, words turn into dharma bells and astrology is understood as a mystical practice more suited to poetry than psychology.
To make the podcast more meditative and digestible, there will be four dharma bell breaks followed by thirty seconds of silence. At the end of the podcast, you’re invited to join me for a few minutes of devotional chanting.
If you would like to learn more about my astrodharma readings and online courses, please visit my website: astrodharma.org
We begin this month with a prayer by a Christian astrologer.
Thou Christ art the Sublime Sun-Being, with us always, ever-seeing. From Thee, oh Lord, we could not hide, for in Thy heart we do abide.
There is no clean line between meditation and prayer. Turning inward, we see how we’ve hardened our ego and ghosted our soul. Our charming role play: a bloody amputation.
Before we can say yes or no to prayer, flickers of remorse and repentance erupt, and with them, a mute cry for help. Meditation turns into prayer- prayer into meditation.
Perhaps we need a new word for meditation; one that honors the power of prayer to break our addiction to selfing: “medi-pray-tion.”
Ah, but is this god-talk of any real consequence?
Slow down. Notice the rush to absolute truth. A more fruitful question:
Can belief in “a presence that cares” be developmentally helpful, regardless of whether it is minutely and absolutely accurate on the cosmic scale?
Absolutely. It’s called being human.
By turning to a cosmic parent, we re-parent ourselves, develop a living relationship with our hurtable humanness and, from there, build a healthy, non-dissociative bridge beyond our me-story into timeless presence.
Prayer implies not just a personal God, but the existence of an eternal soul. What happens to meditation without this?
Think about it. Why wrestle free of dark thoughts and moods if, in the end, the victory amounts to nothing but complete personality “white out?”
If our triumphs over existential angst have no cumulative impact beyond our diapered deathbed, why not numb to our inner demons?
Said another way, Why meditatively invest in a “blip with a lip?”
Can you see how “the prayerless” trivialize the journey of the soul, undermining the entire human project? How easily meditation slips into premature reabsorption!
Have you ever seen a sick, orphaned animal on the side of the road, and kept driving? God’s not like that. On the expressway of prayer, God stops the car, scoops us up and heads for the hospital.
Understood in this way, the sweatiness of prayer and the spaciousness of meditation are one continuous movement: the confessions of ego washing back and forth with the fullness of Being until, finally,
“Alone in our head” becomes God’s feather bed.
Off the cushion, this straddling of the personal and transpersonal takes the shape of “meditative relating.” Tibetan Buddhists call this “licking honey from the razor’s edge.” We enjoy the sweetness of bridging the interpersonal gap even as we savor the One Being.
This is our true vocation: the job we show up for, late or on time, every day of our lives.
Is the experience of “God up there, man down here” a pitiful anthropomorphic fantasy? No. It’s a way of allowing our nervous system to relax and feel so well loved that it melts into genuine, “include and transcend” oneness.
Perhaps today is the day we actually show up for work, confessing:
I’ve been trying so hard to be okay with this prayerless funk; this unnatural effort to numb the needs of orphaned ego. It’s time to stop this spiritual wife-beating, to end the cruelty that this funk has set upon my hurtable human heart.
Embarrassed, hesitant and sick with feelings of fraud, we “pause the transcendence,” bow our heads, and confess:
The rocket of pure awareness needs a launching pad: prayer.
In the throes of god-talk, we face our spiritual insincerity- our clunky, self-conscious attempts at humility. We confess: we’ve become a clever ghost, a dissociated shell of a person, stuffed with memorized Rumi-speak. Who am I? A well-dressed orphan dreaming of union through tidy, self-generated breakthroughs.
A wailing infant, muffled into silence by a pillow called, “the dharma.”
In the nick of time, meditation puts itself out of business. We trade in otherworldliness for a confession booth: a messy, wound-friendly space to step into with The Friend.
If you’re anything like me, there’s a “slap in the face” waiting for you in the dark alley of prayer:
Dear god! My meditation was motivated by the fantasy of “antiseptic transcendence!” I was contributing to the drift towards Transhumanism!
The gateway to god-talk is realism: We are spiritual toddlers and our dependance on human parents was just a running start- a template to aim us at an ethereal Elder- and if we are lucky enough to be touched by the wand of ego-melting prayer it will happen in those moments when we accurately locate ourselves; when we wake up from this restless dream of sovereignty and confess: I am hanging, naked, helpless, on a cross of spirit and matter, and I need help.
Ah, now we can ascend.
Dharma Bell #1/Thirty second Break
Prayer:
Hold us in your timeless glory and let the whole human story take a rest.
Prayer is not a psychological trick. It’s a response to a gnawing, inescapable question festering in our subconscious:
1) Time. You can’t win. And you have to play. Now what?
Like it or not, we’ve spent our whole life- all day, every day- answering this question. The good news: it’s God’s ingenious, evolutionary prod and there couldn’t be a better motivator to pray consciously
2) Time: you can’t win and you have to play. Now what?
Ego imagines a wide array of philosophical responses. Soul knows there’s only two: cynicism or mysticism; grasp at the diminishing returns of time or fly through the portal of the timeless.
3) Time. You can’t win. And you have to play. Now what?
This is our Rumi-seed, pressed into the soil of our psyche, eager to be soaked and sprouted by a life of medi-pray-tion.
The truth is, all brains pray- if only during the “oh shit” moments of crisis and loss. The question, then, is how can we move from “crisis management prayer” to proactive prayers that honor the soul, trivialize the technosapien and light up a guided universe?
Perhaps the best place to begin is to pray to pray well.
Prayer to Pray Well
May our self-conscious, ego-stained prayers- slowly and steadily- be purified, draining our eyes of loneliness, soothing our nervous system and lighting up the Shepherding Presence. May prayer groom us, day by day, year by year, into a soul-seeing elder: gifting the “young of faith” with sublime emanations: the poise of a Tao-saturated soul.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason we park ourselves in front of glowing screens is to escape the humiliating encounters with ego that arise during moments of stillness, meditation and prayer? Perhaps divine entertainment is the only thing that can rival the iPhone’s dazzling light show.
I find it interesting that, as relationship to a personal God goes out of style, so too does marriage. Seems divorce from “the lover upstairs” has desacralized the lover across the table.
It makes sense.
It’s not enough to lock into the beauty of another soul as they are now. Quickly, while the love is still “hot out of the oven”, we must begin praying for an unfading appreciation of our beloved’s ageless innocence in the future, when God’s soul-hammering planetary transits test the mettle of our love.
In the Springtime of love, we lock eyes with something pure and holy. God gives us a running start. Only “the prayerless” dare waste the momentum.
How does the love between greying couples survive? By understanding that personal Leo love comes tethered to Aquarian service to community. The love between true elders isn’t just for them. An invisible network of souls, frightened and wavering in their faith, is looking on, asking: Did their daily practice prepare them to disappear in style, together?
Do the symbols of astrology have more to say about the value of prayer? Absolutely. In the next section, we’ll take a look at the six archetypal polarities that vibrate inside us: each one a synapse eager to be fired by the spark of prayer.
Dharma Bell #2/Thirty Second Break
Shepherding Presence! Safety of souls and overcomer of the gap, thank you for the ageless innocence shining from every eye. Sacred Wounder, straightener of spines and killer of clever, may Your presence be as a descending dove, exposing the one sadness, enflaming our magnetic center, until this lumbering “caravan to midnight” explodes into a mischievous troupe of grave dancers.
Prayer: The Bridge Between Longing and Belonging
Prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. Too cool to set foot on the bridge? Too vast and nondual to believe in an interested entity? Here’s a few astrological reasons to reconsider.
Aries is the symbol of individuation. Pisces, the symbol of reabsorption. This is the Aries-to-Pisces wheel of incarnation playing out in the life of every soul.
To the extent we pace inside the cage of lower octave Aries (personal will and identity) we feel ourselves as orphaned egos on a countdown. The soul, then, has no choice but to chase after the intoxicating, deathless dimension of Pisces. The question is, will we grasp at the material world for chemistry-jarring altered states, or will we ground into the fullness of Being through meditation and prayer, sangha and selfless service?
The twelves signs of astrology are actually six polarities- each with its own unique argument for the validity of a personal God.
Six Arguments for a Personal God
1) Aries/Libra: Listened into Being
The message of astrology is clear: We don’t wake up from ego; we wake up inside it. And we really don’t know what’s going in our Aries head without a Libran soul-mirror: an ego-evoking soul who sheds light on our moods and motivations. Aries/Libra, (self and other) is the matrix in which souls evolve.
Could the same principle apply to man’s relationship to God? We don’t really know what’s going on in our heart of hearts until some caring otherworldly presence listens us into being.
Souls don’t strip naked for just anybody; they need a mighty sense of being safe, seen and cared for. That, and the humble admission that hiding is not an option. Only a personal god could do that. An empathic gaze that cries right there, along with us.
2) Taurus/Scorpio: Prayer as Rebar
The soul needs prayer like cement needs rebar. Prayer makes us resilient, quake proof, like the high-rise buildings in Japan. No one knows when Scorpio’s transformational shake will arrive so we must build Taurus god-talk into our lives while our world is quiet and secure.
Taurus also rules money, what we value; the “savings” we will need to carry us through Scorpio’s visceral death and rebirth cycles. No matter how much money we have, we are impoverished without a soul-steadying practice, unshaken by trauma and loss. Something fad-free and tested over generations, like prayer.
3) Gemini/Sagittarius: Cliff Edge of Thought
Silence wants to grow a Gemini tongue. Why? So overarching Sagittarian truths can flow through us, inspiring others to inquire into their soul’s true direction and purpose. Through curious Gemini self-inquiry: we march, truth by truth, to the cliff edge of thought where, with the help of prayer, we lean forward, communing with God in freefall.
Prayers are the thoughts that take us beyond thought. They de-orphan us and open up a lively otherworldly conversation. This is the endgame of Gemin/Sag. The conversation mind has been restless for this its whole life.
4) Cancer/Capricorn: A Faraway Force
The most basic human longing is to be taken care of. So strong is this Cancer need that, forced to choose, most humans would choose being taken care of over being free.
This makes astrological sense. Cancer nurture is primary. On the wheel of incarnation, Cancer arrives first on the scene, providing a foundation of tender loving guidance from which we later launch into our Capricorn role in society.
The implication is clear. The soul, as it matures over lifetimes, is developmentally handicapped without a personally guiding presence. We are not chicks in an incubator. We need more than impersonal light. Souls, like children, need personal guidance to mature into spiritual adulthood.
Dictators and Tyrants know this. If they can stamp out or curtail people’s connection to Father/Mother God, the citizenry will gradually turn to the Capricorn State to fill the Cancer void: their connection to an otherworldly authority, replaced by the faraway force of government ruling over them with God-like power.
5) Leo/Aquarius: Our Atomic Structure
When we reject the personal dimension of god, in favor of the transpersonal, we are rejecting Leo in favor of Aquarius, hierarchy in favor of equality. As any good leader knows, both styles of governance- the executive decisions of Leo and the consensus decisions of Aquarius- have their time and place.
Notice how fast the hierarchy-hating communities of the 60’s folded. Sorry, without a magnetic center, planets fly out into space.
Leo is ruled by the Sun. Aquarius: the spinning community of planets. It’s no accident that our bodies are housed in baby solar systems; each atom a community of planet-like electrons spinning around a Sun-like center. To embrace Aquarian “equality of Being” and reject the God’s Solar personalness is a rejection of our very atomic structure.
6) Virgo/Pisces: Mystic in the Matrix
What happens when Pisces communion becomes part of our daily Virgo routine? When work becomes meditation and Virgo “fault finder” takes a back seat to Pisces “perfection-seer.” When we become “mystics in the matrix?”
How will we speak? Is there anything to say? What will the energetic signature of our wake be as we walk through a room?
The answer, of course, is “God’s business.” But this level of surrender and noninterference is beyond ego’s ability. The best we can do is pray to be “in the world but not of it” and embody the balance of Virgo and Pisces: mystical realism. To pray, not so much for things, but for compassion and soul-seeing power to love wisely. Immersed in the Immaculate, the details take care of themselves.
Dharma Bell #3/Thirty second break
Okay, let’s say you’re ready to dip your toe into prayer. How to get started? First, we’ll need a name that resonates with our experience of the Divine.
Consider this list of newfangled names for God. Ask yourself: Which is most personally moving? Which is most likely to motivate me to confess and undress? Take note of this name, as you will need it, for the upcoming prayer.
21 Names for God
Great Spirit
Shepherding Presence
Seer of souls, warmer of hearts
Merciful Witness
Sublime Sun Being
Lion of Mercy
King of Happiness
Straightener of Spines
Killer of Clever
Oh Mother Mystery
Safety of souls
Forgiver of Sins
Healer of Hearts
Alpha and Omega
Unborn, Undying, Imperishable
Space between Everything
Storyless Presence
Overcomer of the Gap
Ageless Innocence
Lover who never leaves
What matters most is your immediate visceral reaction. Did one pop out at you?
Let’s go through them again.
Great Spirit
Shepherding Presence
Seer of souls, warmer of hearts
Merciful Witness
Sublime Sun Being
Lion of Mercy
King of Happiness
Straightener of Spines
Killer of Clever
Oh Mother Mystery
Safety of souls
Forgiver of Sins
Healer of Hearts
Alpha and Omega
Unborn, Undying, Imperishable
Space between Everything
Storyless Presence
Overcomer of the Gap
Ageless Innocence
Lover who never leaves
Now that you have your new name, we’ll need to get still enough to tune into our hurtable humanness.
Not easily done on this manically distracted planet.
Perhaps the following prayer will help you get in the mood. Let’s begin.
With hands overlapping at the center of your chest, allow your eyelids to fall and take a few breaths.
Radical Emptiness
Call and Response Prayer
Call:
The world is reeling—
a storm of forgiveness and offense.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Call:
Oh mother mystery,
this sober dying makes no sense.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Call:
Torch of the spirit,
needs fuel to burn a dream so dense.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Call:
Like rain on the ocean,
lifetimes dissolve in consciousness.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Call:
My soul is thirsty,
for a causeless happiness.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Call:
Love is a secret,
that time will not confess.
Response:
That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
Okay, now that we’re immersed in the atmosphere of soul, we can start to look around. Perhaps a subtle wave a broken heartedness is moving through, some holy tears pressing to be felt and released.
Or, perhaps, there’s an air of thanksgiving; a gratitude that, were we to fully feel it, might break us open, like the fear of releasing ourselves into orgasm.
Or perhaps there is simply equanimity.
Or is it numbness, and judgment for feeling nothing? This, too, is a welcome traveler in the guest house of prayer.
Brokenheartness, gratitude, equanimity, numbness- all passing states are welcome here. All eager to be met by the Merciful Witness, God’s presence within.
Now, let’s transition into prayer.
Begin by reciting your new name, silently or aloud, then- with innocence and wonder- let the your heart speak, saying “yes” to whatever wants to be said, through you.
Dharma Bell #4 (Thirty Second Break
Astrology has always been a prod to pray.
As Carl Jung said,
The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.~ C.G. Jung
It’s hard to talk about something we have no words for. In fact, the lack of words may affect whether or not we perceive it at all. That’s why God gave us astrology.
Astrology, the language of felt archetype, cracks the code of personality, illuminates the presence of soul and floods the world with divine personality traits, the crude contours of which we are, even now, embodying. That’s right. We are the personal face of god, waking up to itself and when we pooh pooh the existence of a personal god, we dishonor no one, but ourselves. The personal God of astrology is shining from every face; both awesome and ordinary, immanent and transcendent, personal and transpersonal: a humanly relatable god who whispers, “You, too, are a psyche of cosmic dimensions.”
-Hunter Reynolds
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