I have been studying and practicing astrology for about fifty years. Although I was a professional astrologer in the 1960s, I did not make my entire livelihood from astrology until the summer of 1972.  That is when I hung out my shingle, so to speak. That was also the year that my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child. That sure put a practical hitch in my gitalong. I had to pull something together and fast.

A number of you have commented or messaged me, asking for comment on the state of modern astrology and why astrologers are, as a group, so damn poor. That is like asking me to stick my hand in a hornet nest, but I figure I am still too young to resist and too old to be afraid of repercussions. Just keep in mind that, like perhaps many of you, I have devoted my life to astrology and given it my all every step of the way. And it greaves me that astrology today is not light years ahead of where it was when I started out.

This is a longish one, but it might be very useful for those of you who are curious just what the Dharma Chart is all about. It has been a long journey since I first became interested in things like astrology back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I don’t know if history has always had such an exponential curve, but I do know that so much happened so fast in the 1960s that I cannot possibly tell someone who was not there (in words) how it was.

For me this kind of direct-to-Earth flare usually changes the rules of the game for me, deftly subverts any current sense of direction I might have, causing me to wake up to find myself heading off on another bearing. So far, this seems exactly what is happening now. The direction I have been on recently is fading out (I lose the trail) and another begins to open up, but I can't see it well enough yet to own, much less make use of it. It takes time for the smoke to clear and for me to get my feet back on the ground after change. Strong change is especially like that. If I am true to myself, then I have to drop what I was doing (since it has lost its direction) and pick up on what is new, what change has brought.

I see that these recent solar flares and their earthbound solar plasma made headlines on CNN, although scientists are only concerned with the exoteric or outer ramifications of the influx. What about their effect on our psyche and inner life? That is too esoteric for science, and for that matter astrologers as well. Until recently, intense solar activity has been, astrologically speaking, totally esoteric. Astrologers have mostly ignored it. 

If you resonate to this solar flare information I have been posting, if it makes sense to you and you feel like internalizing it a bit, there is one major step you can take, if you can realize it. Understanding it is not hard, experiencing it consciously is a little harder, and realizing it can be difficult. It is worth the effort, so I will describe it to you.

To begin, I would like to share a few experiences and thoughts concerning the structure in space beyond our solar system and how it might be of value personally (or astrologically if you are an astrologer) for learning more about who we are and what on Earth we might be here for.

As a writer I believe that the hardest thing for me to author would be a dictionary. Can you imagine coming up with words to describe that many words? Yet in a way, we each do this internally and here is the problem with that. We use many words that we never even look up, but have just understood by osmosis from the context in which we hear them used around us. And the dangerous part of this is that with some words we end up not with the gist of the word, but perhaps the gist of the gist of the word, or worse just something we imagined it means. We really never sat down and thought it out. For me, the word "Compassion" is one of these. 

"That He Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying"

A quote from Bob Dylan's song "It's Alright, Ma (I'm only Bleeding)." I can't speak to what Dylan meant by this line, but it sticks in the mind and illustrates a phenomenon pointed out to me very early-on by my first dharma teacher, that life is more of a parabola rather than just linear as most assume. In other words, life begins, reaches a high point (which extends for a time) and then goes into a gradually decline.

This is just a pet peeve that I have, so bear with me. I have raised my hand many times to question why Buddhism is classified as a religion when it does not really fit into the standard definition of the term. Using the Oxford English Dictionary, acknowledged as one of the best, the first definition for religion is: