I hide by being everywhere. Come find me! Come find me!
Welcome to the Astrodharma Podcast. My name is Hunter Reynolds and I invite you to join me as we sip the tea of self-inquiry, sit proud in our infinity and bask in the soul-seeing light of meditative astrology.
This episode contains six dharma bell breaks and ends with three minutes of devotional chanting.
If you’d like to learn more about my readings and online Mentorships, please visit my website: astrodharma.org.
We begin this month with what appears to be a reasonable question.
Are these times darker and more vexing than others?
The question, however, implies that time can be something other than vexing. Mmm… Suddenly the question feels manipulative: a carefully crafted play of words designed to keep us locked inside a preconception and keep “the light-wanting mind” firmly in the driver’s seat.
The world is teeming with this kind of innocently manipulative earnestness; genuine attempts to know the truth couched in miserably secure paradigms. This is ego fending off the chaos of not-knowing and there is no shame in it. In fact, world views collapsed prematurely backslide us into even more rigid thinking.
Questions, you see, are like bodies; they are designed to expire. They are the containers in which consciousness evolves and each time we outgrow a “body,” a more soul-soaring one is born. This is what self-inquiry is all about.
Are these times darker and more vexing than others?
What if the children of time are inescapably heartbroken and the ones who manage to savor this come-and-go-sey-woezy world do so by peering out at it from a realm that is, in fact, ageless, innocent and untouched?
What if all times are equally dark to the mind-seers and equally light to the soul-seers? What if the operational definition of suffering is “grasping for something more than heartbroken happiness?”
Are these times darker and more vexing than others?
There is only one answer that makes any sense at all: Who wants to know?
What if the ephemeral nature of things is what makes them beautiful and until we meditatively survey the play of form as a soul-spiraling dreamscape, all beauty-savoring stops?
What if the fantasy of a happiness untinged by heartbreak is the original pornography?
What if the divider of life into dark and light is the primordial party pooper, the Grinch who stole Christmas, the constipated clinician unnerved by the messiness of hurtable human love?
And if, as the Buddhists say, transcendent bliss is born from meeting heartbreak with compassion, these so-called “dark times” (and the dark one’s who deliver them) are “small potatoes” compared to the lockdown we impose on our devotionally parched heart.
Suppose, for a moment, that all of this is true and that everyone has, for moments, been broken open enough to walk the world as “eternity-with-eyes?” Why then, is our commitment to abiding as the Merciful Witness so spotty and lackadaisical? It’s simple.
In order to come to a “full stop” we must first feel our mortality. We must be still enough to feel time eating us alive and watch mind’s nervous, addictive attempts to secure its status in the shifting sands of time.
In this phase of meditation, the juvenile restlessness and mediocrity of mind can overwhelm us. This passes quickly, however, when we realize we are standing at the cusp of another world. The Himalayas of heartbreak are beckoning, and compassion cultivated here, will change our life forever. During this tenuous interval, when distraction and deliverance vibrate as equal possibilities, a prayer can sometimes help:
Dark Night Prayer
For the sake of all beings numb to the divine hand slipped into the sock puppet of their flesh, I pray- not for my own awakening- but for the soul-mirroring presence that might inspire others to pass swiftly through the gate of their “dark night” and celebrate the ageless innocence animating all.
Are these times darker and more vexing than others?
Can you feel how desperately ego wants you to say,”yes, yes?” Why? Because it would harden the “knower” and “save” it from being dissolved into the Merciful Witness. Sorry, Charlie. It’s just another day in the Samsaric park: hairdo’s and happenings continue to bob and dance all around as mind seeks happiness by manipulating the contents of awareness, while soul sips sweetness from awareness, itself.
1) Dharma Bell Break
Thankfully, we’re not alone. The Shepherding Presence is near and dharmic pointers have been pre-positioned everywhere. Even now, the shape of our solar system whispers,
Will you abide as the radiant center of this mental merry-go-round? Or will you ride dizzy at its circumference?
The stakes are high. “Radiant” and “dizzy,” after all, populate our eyes with entirely different kinds of people. And the beings we choose to see don’t stay put in our eyes: they walk our into the eyes of the one’s we love. Blindness to divine presence, it turns out, is infinitely more contagious than Covid.
Astrology sees personality as drifting archetypal smoke: a divinely flavored incense with heady, inductive powers that bless every biome and accentuate the temple-like nature of earth.
Mr. Mind, on the other hand, sees personality as a dense knot of me-stories– some likable, some not. Why do we have such strong positionality about the imaginary “others?” Because it makes our passing cloud of me-stories feel solid, separate and real: immune, for a moment, from the microbial manslaughter drawing closer with every breath.
So, sports fans, which will it be: Holy smoke or storied bloke?
The question is both playful and deadly serious.
“Playful,” because eternal awareness is, in the end, fully vaxed against this dream of separation. Our deepest essence smiles, untouched.
“Deadly serious,” because, in the short term, ego’s fear of dissolving back into timeless presence drives us into compulsive, identity-hardening role play. We “ghost” our soul, seduce others to do the same and live haunted by a nameless shame.
The purpose of Astrology? To help us quit falling for the “trait bait” and strengthen our soul-seeing skills. To replace the smelly play of personality with divinely ordained “styles of awakening.” To ease us out of the land of imaginary others, into The Friend.
In this sense, astrology is a kind of extroverted mysticism.
It locates the God of the sky in the play of personhood; it melts our heart by exposing the divine intent of every archetypal facet of personality, even as it equips us with the shrewdness needed to catch orphaned ego twisting the soul’s innocent impulse into empty, automated role play.
Should we take the time to be baptized into this world of “felt archetype,” the blessings come quick. Steeped in this field-sensing language, we wake up one day and realize, with a start:
God has given me the perceptual skills needed to balance soul-seeing with ego-seeing– and savor the divine play hosting both!
What kind of world do “the baptized” behold?
Angels with amnesia.
What is “evil?”
Knowing overlaying innocence.
2) Dharma Bell Break
For most of us, the road to “fullness of Being” is rocky and painful- especially in the throes of reactivated trauma. Unmet loneliness, pain and fear do not give way to the Merciful Witness overnight. Fortunately, ageless innocence comes into view not just through inner encounter, but by celebrating the divine beauty in others.
This is the soul, healing from the outside, in.
This is where the rainbow-like lens of astrology shines. No archetypal system is more soul-specific and capable of showing us our unforgiven parts, projected on the screen of others. The more we pull back the projection and “own” our reactivity the more we’re driven too confess:
It’s nothing short of masochism to abandon our true position as awareness, itself, having a personality.
What’s happening is uniquely astrological. We are learning to move as timeless Pisces presence having an Aries point of view. This straddling of Aries and Pisces, alpha and omega, individuation and the One Being, is the endgame of astrology. Some call it “enlightenment.” I call it, “full spectrum vision.”
An intriguing phrase, no? But what, exactly, does it mean?
Let’s begin with what it’s not: “believed-in mental commentary:”
Here’s the full, mind-shattering quote from Carl Jung:
The purpose of believed-in mental commentary about others is to keep ego undissolved and blind to the truth that observer and observed are one.
Here, Jung is asking us to encounter the world as a dreamscape by coming alive to the language of archetype and metaphor. Why? So we can quit being yanked around by the spectacle of personhood and master our latent soul-seeing skills. Can you think of a better definition of “full spectrum vision?
Collin Wood concurs,
Coming into this world has meaning only with a view to leading that which is metaphoric back to true being. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?
Indeed. And given that we are such social creatures, doesn’t it make sense that the bulk of our code-cracking happens interpersonally? Personality traits were not designed to be liked or disliked! They’re like news reporters, impartially documenting the way souls sleep and wake to their immaculate, unborn nature.
Okay, but which archetypal sun glasses should one don? Well, one thing’s for sure: whichever symbolic lens we choose it should be kinesthetically verifiable, time-tested, coherent and accessible to the western mind– four areas where modern, meditative astrology absolutely excels.
Joseph Campbell takes the importance of archetypal literacy even further, calling it perceptual “Apocalypse:”
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon. Our divided, schizophrenic worldview, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious – that is what is coming to an end.
Think about it. To the extent that we lack a revelatory lens that permits us to see the innocently evolving soul inside a full spectrum of egos, are we not perceptually crippled? Minus a set of powerful soul-seeing skills, does not the mechanistic madness of mankind require us to harden, numb and distract?
Only a cruel God would plop us down on a mapless terrain lacking any homeward beckoning signs and symbols. Why do we act so insensitively toward the planet and each other? Thomas Paine knew:
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
3) Dharma Bell Break
The Meditator’s Objection
Still, many meditators shun astrology. “Why would I cloud my eyes with archetypal stories when naked seeing introduces me to such bare bones beauty and equanimity?” A great question- best answered by Bernardo Kastrup:
Some say the purpose of Advaita is to eliminate all myths through which we interpret sensation. But you can overshoot. You can deny life and stop engaging with it. Something true is generating illusion and it is essential to interpret that illusion and derive meaning from it. To pretend that one can live life without myth is, itself, a myth!
Absolutely. John Welwood continues,
“Advaita-speak” can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative truth, emptiness to devalue form, and oneness to belittle individuality. By suggesting that only absolute love or being-to-being union is real, these teachers equate the person-to-person element necessary for a transformative love bond with mere ego or illusion.
No thanks. I prefer the embodied god of astrology: a paradox-loving mystic-maker who keeps pushing us to straddle spirit and matter. Hello genuine non-duality!
I mean, think about it. Isn’t the failure to meet people where they’re at (lost, to some degree, in a trance of archetypal possession) a form of spiritual narcissism? Developing the power to intuit others unique styles of waking (and sleeping) is, on the other hand, a Bodhisattva move. We are resisting the allure of premature spiritual escape and, out of compassion, returning to the automated play of egos in order to infiltrate them with lucidity and presence.
Still, let’s not be naive. Mainstream astrology is conceptual quicksand: a collection of superficial “trait bait” that hardens every ego, enflaming its hopes and fears. Only when personality traits are seen and felt as the Supreme Being in various stages of Self-remembering are the insights of astrology truly helpful.
That’s the beauty of courses like The Styles of Awakening Training: they pull self-inquiry out of the philosophical clouds and re-aim it at our own archetypally bias and blind spots. In this way, we move more quickly through the three stages of awakening:
1) Seeing personality
2) Seeing positive intention
3) Seeing the Divine at play.
Bottom line: If we learn to perceive archetypes at play in people and do not learn to pause to appreciate the larger Being in which they rise and fall, we are simply gathering more and more sophisticated evidence of separation.
Am I saying that students of archetype must cultivate deeper and deeper levels of humility, self-reckoning and perceptual purity? Absolutely. It’s called modern meditative astrology.
Until then, as Mooji puts it,
When we relate to personality, we are bowing down to conceptual shape.
4) Dharma Bell Break
Buddhists call astrology’s archetypal use of mind to transcend the mind, “skillful means.” Why are these conceptual stepping stones on the way to timeless union so important? Because we don’t wake up “from” ego; we wake up “inside” it. We must learn to articulate (if only to ourselves) our automated habits of mind playing out, on the spot. Only then can we claim a small sliver of free will.
Skillful self-inquiry requires an accurate, ego-busting language and as Robert Shaw so eloquently put it:
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.
Amen. And what is the first thing that the serious student of astrology sees? This:
Most human interaction is “Identity Bargaining:”
You tell me I’m right about my unconscious archetypal me-story and I’ll tell you you’re right about yours. Deal?
At this point in one’s mythological mapping, the world can get a bit darker before it reanimates as divine presence. Sure, we’ve always sensed that ego was a feverish identity-grab, but now we have heartbreakingly specific insight into how and why each mind grasps at its karmically inherited me-stories. With the help of astrology, our own and others egoic automation becomes impossible to ignore, pushing us to dive deeper into meditation and self-inquiry.
The deeper we get into archetypal seeing, the more we flicker: one moment our heart is burdened by the intractableness of God’s sleep; the next moment we’re lost in Rumi-like appreciation of the divine play.
Nobody describes this transition from the “seer of separate somebody’s” to the “embracer of the One Being” better than Thomas Merton:
A life in which we love “god in men” is necessarily an active life. But the contemplative loves “men in God.” When we love “God in men,” we seek to discover him over and over in one individual after another. When we love “men in God,” we do not seek them. We find them without seeking them in Him whom we have found. The first kind of love is active and restless. It belongs more to time and space than the other, which already participates in the changeless peace of eternity.
Or, in Mooji’s words,
There are no dialogues in the universe, only monologues. The human mind cannot cope with this knowledge.
And, finally, here’s Adyashanti,
What you really are is totally in love with seeing itself everywhere.
Here we arrive at the awakened endgame of all Astrodharmic study: The beholding of human interplay as “awareness in love with itself.”
5) Dharma Bell Break
”Are you a wise lover?
Perhaps the best way to ground and summarize this discussion on Astrodharma is to say that its purpose is to turn us into “wise lovers.”
How? By noticing:
When hearts grow cold and differences of opinion seem irreconcilable, the issue that seems to divide is rarely the real culprit.
At the core of every mortal conflict is a spiritual devastation that no human resolution or agreement can cure.
Why? Because the “answer” we’re looking for is the sublimity of the One who’s asking, and no partner- no matter how empathic or insightful- can restore our lost connection to soul.
Only humble self-reckoning can do that. Only meditation’s fountain of fullness has the power to carry couples through crisis intact.
Said another way: compatibility is important, but insufficient.
It takes shared steady practice to bring ego to its knees so the Merciful Witness in one partner can meet the Merciful Witness in the other.
This is the operational definition of “wise loving” and the endgame of all astrological study.
6) Dharma Bell Break
Let us close with a prayer entitled,
Church That Never Crumbles
Wine of the world! You who turns buzz cuts into walled gardens, and “Doing the dishes” into the ultimate New Zealand bunker,
Help us say yes,
To this ferocious tide, the sloshing of souls back and forth across the veil, quieting the noise of “because,” so we can hear what wants to be said through us: those gentle offerings: the open-ended question, the intimacy of “not sure,” that “simple immense thing” that dissolves both beings into a field of meditative relating: the church that never crumbles, in a world that never stops shaking.
Unwounded by this wonder, we are half-conquered: an ape on cocaine with mystic refrain, data-dumping lips, spitting chips, desperate for a drop of You.
Refusing to swim in Your light, we tattoo ourselves with trauma, stride with the pride of the uneldered, unsheltered and get terribly busy pasting smiles on the face of orphaned ego on a countdown.
Merciful Witness, thank you for birthing us into this time of tumult and transformation when faces turn to stone or grow a mystical backbone, pushing us to answer, finally and forever, the question that’s haunted us for lifetimes:
Am I designed for crude survival or am I wired for mystery, dangerous to the machine, 10 percent solid, 90% dream?
7) Dharma Bell Break
I hide by being everywhere. Come find me! Come find me!
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