Astrology & Esotericism

Personal development is a process. Is not a single task that you do once, and then forget about it. It’s a continuous hunt for your next crossroad, your next challenge that you need to take, the next obstacle that you have to overcome. It’s personal, so you do have an original approach. You use only tools and techniques that are working for you. You experience what’s the best and then refine it. Use it and refine it.

Here’s my personal list of my most used techniques for personal development. As things will evolve I will come back with more and more informations for each specific technique.

In chronological, Last In First Out, order:

1. GTD = Getting Things Done.

   Getting Things Done is a methodlogy created by David Alled. It is one of the latest techniques that I tried, liked and implemented it. At the first level, GTD is focused toward business people, managers and busy persons. But it can be used for anybody that just wants to clarify its life and enjoy it more. GTD has several concepts:

   • You are an information processing machine. You process stuff. So, you must establish a consistent way to deal with it. The process of GTD is to analyse stuff and do the following: is it actionable? if YES, you move to the next step, if NO, you just chose from one of the three options: toss it (no loner needed, garbage), put it in a Someday/Maybe list (you want to action on this sometime), or file it (in a reference system, to be used lately).
   • If you answered YES at the first question, is it actionable, you have to decide “what’s the next action”: if there are more, you create a project, if the action is less than 2 minutes, you are doing it now, if the action does not involves you directly, you delegate it, and if it can’t be done right now, you just defer it for later, in your calendar.
   • You repeat this every day, and, most important, every week. The actual repetition, or implementation of the process, is the most juicy part of GTD. And most difficult.
   • Another key concept is “mind like water”, meaning one’s capacity to react to some stimulus with the exact quantity of energy needed, and then regain the initial, quiet status, much like a water surface after launching a rock in it. You achieve that by constantly learning how to “empty your RAM”, which is another key concept.

   I am using GTD for about three months now and the benefits are extremely visible. I benefited the most by the “empty your RAM” exercise, and the daily/weekly review.

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One of my readers commented the other day – in a somehow bitter and ironic way – the fact that my blog is starting to get delusional.

And that is because I started to introduce informations and posts about astrology. This is an interesting viewpoint. And in fact, is one of the things that I expected to come, sooner or later, in my blog. As I already told you, I am not blogging about the usual stuff. I do make unusual connections, and I do hunt as many crossroads that I can, because, well, that’s my nature. If somebody find this ridiculous, that’s it, I really don’t take it personally. But chances are that somebody will find this interesting too. Or at least provoking.

After many years, I found out that the only way to actually understand stuff is by experience it. It’s so easy to take out from a giant library of comments stuff like: astrology is an strange thing, it’s a toy for delusional people. Most of the folks are making their comments this way. Well, I don’t. If something comes to my focus, and I decide it is interesting, I start to experience it.

Because if you are not experienced anything that comes into your focus, you are just talking other guys ideas. Let’s say there is a topic that intrigues you, like astral projections, or psychic experiences, generally speaking. If you don’t take the time to experience them you will find your self propagating other peoples ideas on that topic. Take the time to experience it. It can frighten you, it can make you feel great, or it can leave you completely indifferent. But you had your personal experience, and you can talk from a real viewpoint, not from a borrowed one.

I did exactly that with astrology. For many years I had the same perception: it’s a nonsense thing. But I just started to be more and more intrigued about strange things that happened to me, like meeting over and over again the same kind of people, or having more and more the same kind of reactions to stuff. And this was not easily explained, or totally explained, by psychology or common sense. I did tried to explain things by psychology and common sense, and, to some degree, it went ell. But there was more, and then I started to be interested about astrology.

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Admit it: you are intrigued. You’re not using it, nor give any credit to it at all, and still some strange voices are telling you from time to time to take astrology seriously. You don’t take it, to be honest, and this is more than OK. After all, everything in our lives it’s a matter of choice. But that doesn’t necessarily means that astrology is useless. My own experience with astrology proved even the opposite, as a matter of fact.

Yes, good idea, let’s talk about the facts. I used astrology in its lowest form and level of perception, in the form of daily horoscopes, when I worked in the FM radio stations as a fulltime DJ. I had to fill my program with some informations, and horoscopes were – and still are – one of the most used. And abused, I will say, because there is nothing more wrong about the astrology than the daily horoscopes.

But I found out that the hard way, years later. When I engaged a more conscious way of living my life, I decided to try it out for real. It must be something beyond daily horoscopes and stupid predictions, I said at some point. So I started to study by myself. I read several books and subscribed to several popular astrology websites. I learned to use astrology software and use it on a daily basis. I studied the planet movements, the transgressions, the planetary hours and the cycles of days, weeks, months and astrological signs. Things has started to progress nicely. Not only I began to realise that my image about astrology was completely wrong, but I also learned to use it in a systematic way. I even followed the official course from an astrology school in Romania, called Fidelia.

To make a long story short, after two years of constantly experiencing it I becomed an intermediate to advanced astrologer. Now I master enough of that science for actually getting something out of it. And the term “science” is a little bit exagerated, I admit. Astrology is not a science in “normal” way. It involves a lot of emotional and spiritual participation, things that traditional science has avoided constantly. But I was not interested in its legitimity – I can make my own decision about things and not wait for other to tell me if this thing is legit or not – what I was really interested in, was its use. How can I use astrology for personal development?

And, first of wll, why use it?

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