Astrology and Esotericism

Understanding astrology as a symbolic model of the reality

How To Get Successful Astrological Readings

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Although I practice astrology myself I sometimes find the need for a external advice or guidance. I know my chart by heart and still I can find useful and fresh chart interpretations from another professional astrologer, or even from a friend who’s practicing astrology.

Recently I had one of those insightful readings from a professional astrologer and I realized most of the people searching for astrological advice don’t get the full package when having astrological readings. Maybe it’s time for me to share some thoughts on this matter. Oh, and if you’re in the “I don’t give even two recession cents on this astrology nonsense” league, I recommend you to start by understanding astrology. And if it’s still doesn’t ring any bell to you, that’s highly ok, feel free to skip this post.

Important: this post will not teach you how to chose your astrologer, instead it will focus on how to work with it. We will assume that you already have / know / work with an established astrologer.

Why Would You Have An Astrological Reading

Let’s start with the reasons. Why you would need astrological advice? As a rule of thumb, you will turn to alternative answers when everything else fails. The vast majority of people are asking for astrological advice only when their life path is a complete mess. They chose astrology as a final resort and this is why the answers they receive are largely negative. When you spend all your time wasting your resources on a wrong path, the simple fact that you have to acknowledge that – and an astrological reading will shed a powerful light on this – will upset you.

It would be so much simpler to just include this way of getting answers for your questions in your current bag of life tools. Astrology is just a symbolic way of seeing reality and it should be treated like this. Is just a way of understanding the world in an alternative way, that’s all. And using it at the same level with your other, more earthy approaches, would just give you a balanced view of your life. You don’t have to believe it first hand, but it would be so interesting and challenging to take it into account.

So, try to integrate it as a secondary tool for all your decision making processes. I always try to raise a chart of some important moments in my life or at least to know where exaclty the planets are at that specific moment. I get a lot of information about the poential of that moment, and several times I even switched decisions based on some unfriendly astrological contexts. And it turned out I was right. Also, in some cases I ignored the astrological warnings and I had to face the consequences.

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The Master Plan

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Ever had the impression that there is a master plan? Something bigger than you, a web of ideas, situations and people that are linked together in a larger structure? I did. I actually had this sensation a lot during the last few years. And in the last few months, I started to feel it even more.

I often see things or get caught in situations that feel familiar to me. It’s like I’ve been experienced that before, or like I saw that thing some time ago. It’s not a deja-vu, though. A deja-vu will be something that will repeat identically to me. Those sensations are not repeating identically, there is a subtle change every time I see those things. I don’t know how to call it, things are almost identical, but there is some change involved.

I used to be scared when I started to have these impressions. First I was surprised, and then a little bit scared. Every repetition around you seems to be perceived like articulated language, and you start to look for significance. It’s ok to do this with people who are trying to talk with you, but when the Universe is starting to repeat sentences made from people and situations you feel a little fear.

That fear made the sensations disappear for a while. Or maybe the things were there, only I pretend they weren’t. Maybe that. Whatever the reasons, there was a big gap in how I perceived those recurring situations in my life.

I used to have a lot of insights during my teenage years, and then a big gap until 3-4 years ago. I used to see connexions and links in almost every little incident in my life when I was a teenager. Everything seemed to me like a big logical structure. Every detail had its role. And then, after I started to be more involved in the social game, like having a job, a standard set of relations and more, that vision disappeared. Everything was made of a discrete structure, with no more links than the present moment.

But as I said, those perceptions started to reappear 3-4 years ago. And with a lot more power. I started to observe coincidences and synchronicity. First I saw it in my life, and then I started to observe patterns in other’s life too. Apparently unrelated situations or persons lead to a certain type of outcome.

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Practical Astrology: The Moon In Signs

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As some of you may know, I use astrology for personal development. Among some other stuff, of course. And by that I mean I use it constantly as a symbolic model of reality. The position of the planets on the sky is having some kind of influence on our lives and I learned how to understand that. Today I’ll share a little experiment which lasted for more than a month. It’s about the Moon and its position on the sky during a complete cycle from New Moon to Full Moon. If you still think astrology is only a horoscope in the morning paper, with no value whatsoever, I recommend you to read more about understanding astrology. And if you still think this is just new age garbage, feel free to skip this post, it’s ok.

I guess you already know the Moon is having a complete cycle in around 28 days around the Earth. During this cycle the Moon is staying between 2 and 3 days in each astrological sign. The nature of the sign in which Moon is at some moment is affecting that part of our being which is ruled by Moon. There are many interpretations of what Moon “is” in our lives. For the sake of simplicity I chose to understand Moon as the ruler of our emotions. It has a number of other interpretations but staying only at the emotional level will just be enough for this experiement. Just remember that the Moon represent the things that can hurt us and the things which we need healing from. The Moon is the unconscious pulse of our emotional field. From joy to sorrow, from compassion to anger, everything that is in your emotional filed has something to do with the Moon and its position on the sky.

The Experiment

During a complete cycle of the Moon I monitored my emotions. I also monitored the position of the Moon on the sky and noted my impressions and reflections of what the Moon in the sky could be. I did this in a kind of geeky way by using, of course, an iPhone. There are two apps on the iPhone that I used during this, none of them directly related to astrology, but more on that later on after the experiment description.  For now, let’s just focus on what I felt during a complete cycle of the Moon on the zodiac, from Aries to Pisces.

Moon in Aries

My emotions were extremely intense, like powered with high energy. On the whole, I felt an intense drive to action. Anything I started was out of enthusiasm, was powered by my own choices, not by external circumstances. I also felt an interesting silence on the emotional level, not too much noise, everything seemed extremely pure. It seemed that Moon in Aries favors clean emotions focused on achieving immediate results. Moon in Aries is also accident prone, during this interval I had a small driving accident (no consequences, but the burst of energy was almost physical around me).

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Is Water A Super Computer?

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This is a movie I saw two weeks ago. It’s about one hour and 20 minutes long and it talks about unusual things about water. I got the link from one of my astrology groups where I’m subscribed, so I expected something beyond scientific. But most of the time in this movie, it’s the scientists that are speaking. And they’re speaking about stuff that we don’t know yet about water, even if we did walk on the moon or discover the atomic bomb (yes, they are talking about “heavy water” too, several times).

I’ll let you see the movie for now, and if you think like commenting upon it afterwards, you’re welcome. But if you don’t want to see it, I’ll outline what surprised me the most, and try to comment a little about it. So, without further ado, these are the key points in the movie:

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Understanding Astrology

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Like any other discipline outside the normal, established scientific approach, astrology is often mistaken as a form of delusion or just a funny topic in a new agey conversation with your new neighbors. There is a lot of confusion regarding this topic, and, when it’s not pushed into the entertainment area as a daily horoscope in a magazine, it is discarded as a trustworthy and sound discipline. My personal experience with astrology is quite the opposite. For me, astrology proved over time to be one reliable model of reality. It also helped me identify and solve some of my inner problems I had during years. Using astrology was a tremendous leap in knowing and understanding people around me, it gave me a better understanding of events, situations and relations.

But I often found it difficult to share my astrological opinions with other people. The vast majority rejects astrology and, despite the credit they are showing to it when in difficult situations, most of the time they are not taking it very seriously. Well, that’s everybody’s choice and I’m not going to twist anybody’s arm in this regard. Everybody is free to believe or to not believe whatever one’s want. But for those of you who are curious about the nature and the advantages of astrology I will describe my experiences with it in this post. I will try to find a simple way to show how astrology can be understood and then I will outline a few areas in which an astrological analysis can bring benefits.

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Personal Development Techniques

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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.