In this podcast I begin with a salute to Scorpio eclipses, pen a stingy Scorpio prayer, bow to the dharma of collapsing governments, explain why Millenials and Gen-Xers are indifferent to religion, but “on fire” with astrology, take a peek at the “therapist of the future” and explain how tomorrow’s counselors and priests will cut to the root of neurosis: “cosmic claustrophobia.” Finally, I explain how astrology mends together the split halves of the Sagittarius archetype, replacing the rigidity of religious dogma with a lifetimes-long, psycho-spiritual art project.
__________________
GREETINGS fellow dream animals! Welcome. This podcast is 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 spacious and digestible there will be four dharma bells breaks followed by 30 seconds of silence. At the end of the podcast, you’re invited to join me for a few minutes of devotional chanting.
If you’d like to learn more about my Astrodharma readings and online Mentorships, please visit my website: astrodharma.org.
Given the way so many souls are pivoting into new lives right now, rocked by the tremendously guided death and rebirth cycles of this Scorpio eclipse season, I thought we’d begin with a Scorpio prayer; a salute to the Monstrous Benevolence slamming us every day with the realization that we’re on a journey not of our own making. Someone is taking perfect care of us.
Monstrous Benevolence: A Scorpio Prayer
Monstrous Benevolence,
Thank you for loving us into this holy instant in a world full of beautiful problems where we can’t trust anyone but You, absolutely.
For bathing our eyes in this puree of gratitude and grief, that we might awaken as the Merciful Witness of both.
For silencing this dizzy discotheque of “getting somewhere” so we can weave daring amounts of spaciousness into our days and notice- with tears in our eyes and a lump in our throat- what days really are: a string of grateful goodbyes.
Thank you for tightening the screw of your otherworldly anvil: squeezing us between the “suffering of having” and the “suffering of not-having” until we’re forced to take refuge in the fullness of Being and remember what “I love you,” really means:
“In your presence I am released from the cold, clammy hand of time, free to let the merciful light shine through.”
Diabolical saver of souls! Magnify our self-absorption- the ego in our aimlessness, the pride in our despair- until we stop searching for “our purpose” and get busy listening others into Being as they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, one shock away from being homeless, starving for that death-reckoned gaze who knows: the frailty of ego adds sweetness to the beauty of our eternal soul.
“Everything must burn,” said Thomas Merton, to the monks in his care. “Life is a burning house, and soon that body you are holding will be bones, that face that so moves you, a grinning skull.”
——-Dharma Bell Break #1
The Dharma of Collapsing Governments
Why did we choose to incarnate at this time? Because the behavior of collapsing governments is dripping with spiritual symbolism. Because we wanted a crash course in the corrupt and unsustainable ways in which ego governs consciousness.
In their final days, all failed regimes do the same thing: they unite their beleaguered, restive citizenry against an external enemy or they foment fighting between various factions within.
In this way, the enforcers of the regime’s failed policies are not held accountable. Hidden in “the fog of war”, the bloodlines wait, poised to seize power once again, when one of their expertly infiltrated camps is declared victor.
In the same way, the most famous of all “failing regimes” (mind-on-a-countdown) preserves power by crushing free speech (the subtle energy language of meditation, prayer and self-inquiry) and prodding us to fight- not for the authority of our eternal Being- but for a flicker of egoic honor, reputation and gain.
Notice. The absurdity of striving to become a “happy orphaned ego” can and must be violently beaten down, pushed to the curb by a utopian rationalism that defines unhappiness as a worldly problem with a worldly solution. This is ego infiltrating and watering-down our revolutionary, mystic impulse.
Forget about the sublimity of the soul. Happiness and well-being can be had, says Mr. Mind, by re-electing the old order (formulating a new, more satisfying story of self). Why do the work of returning to our true positions as “Awareness having a personality” when you can enjoy the immediate status of planet-saver, soul-saver, knower-of-absolute-truth or some other ego-hardened vision of “woke”.
Alas. “The Deathless Being Party” is, once again, co-oped and crushed by the market-tested propaganda of a safety-promising politician.
But we’re not safe; we’re eternal.
But fear not. The Merciful Witness can, even now, be returned to its rightful throne. How? Listen to the Millennials.
__________Dharma Bell Break #2
Listen to the Millennials
Millennials may be indifferent to religion and the notion of a faraway God, but they are positively “on fire” with the felt sensing of soul. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dramatic uptick of interest in astrology.
As the economy contracts and conventional mental health becomes pricey and inaccessible, new, archetypally savvy modalities (condensed into pithy, single-session formats) are rising up to take their place.
This punchy, existential kind of counsel– accurate as it is — has its downside. Long-term change requires sustained introspection and accountability over time. This is the power of standard therapy.
On the other hand, the paradigmatic jolt of encountering Creation’s archetypal fingerprint upon us– has its own long-term impact. We don’t just get personal insight and direction; we get a visceral experience of being embedded in a intelligently designed, soul-evolving universe.
Why the renaissance of astrology? Because, for the average Millennial (26-40 years old), soul-brand is all the “god” they need.
It’s not hard to see where this is going. The therapist of the future will succeed because they couple counseling skill with archetypal insight; ego-management with capacity to align with soul.
Imagine handing out a business card whose tagline was,”Healthy habits of mind within an orphaned paradigm.” Creepy, no? Constrained by the paperwork and pigeonholing protocols of health insurance companies devoted to the god of scientific materialism, many of today’s therapists feel like compassionate prostitutes.
Clearly, the two halves of the Sagittarian archetype (counselor and priest) long to be stitched back together. As the one-two punch of the Saturn/Pluto conjunction (2020) & the Uranus/Saturn square (2021-2022) continue to destabilize the world economy, how long before the shrinking economic benefits offered by bankrupt corporate health plans finally free therapists to take the risk of soulful self-employment?
Answer: it’s already happening. How do I know? Because most of my clients are the therapeutically strategic, beginning the transition now.
Accelerated Generational Change
To understand how quickly attitudes toward psychology and spirituality are changing, check out the duration of the three generational categories: Boomers, GenX and Millennials. Notice how the zeitgeist of each generation shifts in progressively shorter periods of time: 20 years for Boomers, 15 years for Gen X’ers and to 5 years for Millennials.
Boomers: 1944-1964 (56-76 years old) Duration: 20 years
Gen X: 1965-1980 (41-55 years old) Duration 15 years
Millennials: 1981-1986 (26-40 years old) Duration 5 years
Consciousness, it seems, is accelerating. But what are we rushing towards?
Simple:
Less God-fearing, more Soul-nearing.
___________Dharma Bell Break #3
Less God-Fearing, More Soul-Nearing
In a healthy psyche, the impersonal, lawful aspect of god (masculine) and the personal, nurturing aspect of god (feminine) are equally attended to. Indeed, “being present” demands that we stand strong in the tension between these two apparently antithetical realms.
What happens when mind becomes too remotely witnessing or too personally enmeshed? On a religious level: Rigid dogmatism or flaccid relativism. On a therapeutic level: soul-less clinicality or a kind of dharmicly directionless empathy.
Tomorrow’s counselor/priests will not be obligated to affirm the illusion of otherness, but they will be karmically compelled to have compassion for the “cosmic claustrophobia” that it produces. At last, they will be free to facilitate the archetypal self-inquiry needed to wake up as witness of ego and live responsibly within its dream.
Will astrology be one of the soul-seeing modalities favored by future therapists? Here’s five reasons why the answer may be “yes.”
Five Reasons to add astrology to your therapeutic tool box
1) Millennial/GenX souls sense the cosmic roots of personality and are uncomfortable with overly materialistic, matrix-tethered definitions of mental health.
Helping people integrate into society without, at the same time, helping them honor their soul’s unique style of awakening gives tacit support to the scientific materialism that’s sterilizing the planet. Flesh-saving without soul-saving dishonors the feminine face of god.
Defund the therapy police!
2) Millennial/GenX souls want fast therapy
Unsure of how much time they have left on the planet, climate-conscious Millennials want compressed, intuitively verifiable and immediately actionable insights about how to better manage their psyche, choose a fulfilling career and build healthy intimate relationships– exactly the areas where astrology shines.
3) Millennial/GenX souls are entrepreneurial and skeptical of any therapy that makes them dependent on an outside authority figure.
If a therapeutic process cannot, at some point, be self-administered, Millennial/GenX souls will quickly lose interest. The profound, yet digitally accessible, insights of archetypal astrology fit the bill perfectly.
4) Millennial/GenX souls define mental health as a capacity to honor the equality of all souls, the sacredness of nature and the innocence of the body’s animal impulses. Self-saving minus earth-saving = insanity.
Astrology reestablishes an oracular connection to the cycles of nature. Personality traits are regarded as the outward face of divinely-ordained styles of awakening. In this way, astrology re-sacrilizes the earth and what it means to be human. It’s a intuitively-verifiable, dogma-free way of restoring individual and collective sanity, accessible to all beings regardless of economic or educational rank, race, religion or sexual preference.
5) Millennial/GenX souls understand the stakes: despair about the planet’s dystopian direction or a profound re-embodiment of eternally evolving consciousness.
In the face of so many insurmountable world-threatening problems, Millennial/GenX souls view most career and community service roles as a pointless, “drop in the bucket.” Only a lifetimes-long, psycho-spiritual art project has the power to inspire them to fully invest in this desperate dream of separation.
This is the heart and soul of astrology.
Ideologies and Empires come and go, but Astrology remains. Why? Because the guiding symbols embedded into the psyche and structure of the world are forever untouched by the of antics of ego and the fashion of belief.
_________Dharma bell #4
Hunter Reynolds- November 2022
Ready for more?
-Subscribe to The Astrodharma Podcast
–Learn about the Styles of Awakening online training
–Schedule an astrology reading with Hunter
–Subscribe to Styles of Awakening newsletter (monthly)
–Receive these articles by email as they are posted
Like this article? Please share it with friends!
Get free newsletter & e-book
