NAKED ASTROLOGY 1.2
Astrology invites us into a participatory relationship with time and space.
NAKED ASTROLOGY is a new open-ended video series for paid subscribers to WOODRUFF. It’s a refreshing reappraisal of astrology—unrestrained and fun. Join the ALM (astrological liberation movement). Check out the introductory video here.
DOES THE ANIMATED GIF of a gold atom featured above remind you of anything?
Like perhaps our solar system? I know, right? Macro without, micro within, macro within, micro without.
Who decides where to draw or outline the demarcations of the dimensions? Your imagination? Or maybe NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The Indian word maya, usually associated with the world of illusion, translates in English as ‘measurement.’ Mic drop. Do you see where they were going with that?
Maya also includes, most emphatically, as William Blake pointed out, the endless buzz-kill of scientism.
Astrology invites us into a friendly relationship with time and space. Usually, we associate time and space as frigid scientific or philosophical concepts. Actually, both dimensions are akin to living energies.
Consider your relationship to time. Doesn’t it feel like something that is ‘out there’ stalking you? Something that you try to manage or micro-manage your way through?
Time’s participation in our sentience is very much happening—touching and transforming everyone and everything. Who escapes from their relationship to time?
The dead? Hmmm, I dunno—maybe.
When Ramana Marashi was on his death bed, surrounded by his devotees entreating him not to leave, he said to everyone in the room: “But where would I go?”
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” —William Blake
What about space?
Space is a phenomenon that invites time to occupy its ‘field’ and display time’s endless variety of expressions. Do a simple experiment.
After you stop reading this paragraph, pause and survey the room you’re sitting in. Notice how awareness is prejudiced towards materiality and its sundry objects. Notice and ‘see’ instead the space that allows the objects to demarcate themselves from one another and exist seemingly independently. OK, try it now.
OK, so here’s another exercise. This one related to time.
After concluding this paragraph do the same thing. Pause. Survey the space in front of you, but this time notice time’s influence on each of the objects that you noticed 30 seconds ago. Already time has burnished each of those objects and reconfigured their atoms and molecules into a brand new arrangement. By the time you’re done reading this sentence you and those objects will have transformed yet again. And again. OK, try it now.
What if you developed a friendly attitude towards time and found a way to open yourself to time, where time meets you halfway and assists you in facilitating whatever it is you’re attempting to experience, comprehend or accomplish within time’s body?
Every single thing we dedicate our attention to instantly evokes time. Even just a thought that pops into your mind, as soon as it appears, time is moving it from ‘here’ to ‘there’ within space.
So, be it a thought, an emotion—or writing a book, making a baby, or weeding a garden—you can’t avoid your relationship with time and space. We are each time and space’s byproducts. Our original father and mother. Father Time. Mother Space.
I like how the Dalai Lama approaches the mystery of time and space.
“What existed before the big bang? Where did the big bang come from? What caused it? Why has our planet evolved to support life? What is the relationship between the cosmos and the beings that have evolved within it?
Scientists may dismiss these questions as nonsensical, or they may acknowledge their importance but deny that they belong to the domain of scientific inquiry.
However, both these approaches will have the consequence of acknowledging definite limits to our scientific knowledge of the origin of our cosmos.
I am not subject to the professional or ideological constraints of a radically materialistic worldview.”
And neither are astrologers.
If these ideas pique you, then you’ll like the NAKED ASTROLOGY video series, a new symposium I’ll begin posting for my paid subscribers this weekend.
Join us today.
Love,
Provocative as always. Looking forward to your video series! 👍
Love this! the tyranny of the measurement of time is also an illusion. We pretend it's real because we name it and measure it . . . and, as you so rightly point out - NOTHING EVER DIES. I'm thinking of Toni Morrison's Beloved and also Viet Thanh Nguyen's book Nothing Ever Dies. Some of us are quite comfortable with having them around as our companions or teachers.