I don't know why, but I don't like the name "vegan," even worse if I am becoming one.

The reason why is that probably, as a sometimes vegetarian, for years vegan marked

the line between yummy and not-so-yummy. There is a little story here, so I might as

well tell it. It is early in the morning and it is cold outside. There is snow on the ground

that had to be plowed. If the sun shines today I will try to walk outside. If there are gray

skies, probably I will hunker down, chicken that I am. That says it all.

I have been on and off vegetarian for years, sometimes decades at a time. I will spare

you the details… for now.

The solar influx from flares and CME events can be likened to the flood plain of a river after inundation, in this case by flooding our known and familiar internal landscape with change. When the Sun quiets down and the solar tides begin to recede, you might imagine things would begin to look normal again. Not so. If you have ever seen a river or stream flood, when it recedes, things are not as they were before. The flood tides remove things from one place and makes new deposits in another. Often the course of the streambed itself is altered and there is an entirely new channel. So it is with solar tides and their receding.

I want to continue this discussion of sacred space, consecrated objects, and blessed people. The word "sacred" comes from the Latin "sacer," which means to be set something apart from the ordinary as holy, as in to consecrate, venerate, dedicate, or associate a place or time as special or sacred.

Many countries, mostly ancient societies like China and India, have sacred places or sites. That is what pilgrimages are all about. I have been on pilgrimage to Tibet, China, Nepal, and India in West Bengal and Sikkim, etc., but have heard very little about making pilgrimages here in North America except to places like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Elvis's home, etc. Why is that?

My topic is a dear one to all astrologers: aspects between planetary pairs. When you consider we have eight planets plus The Lights (Sun and Moon) and each body has an aspect with every other body, we soon have a lot of aspects to consider when looking at an astrological chart. Perhaps that is why over the centuries astrologers have tried to reduce the number of factors they have to consider to just the exact aspects, and each astrologer has their own idea of aspect orbs, so we won’t go there in this brief presentation. Like most of you I grew up with aspect orbs and aspect grids, painstaking filling out the grids and marking the aspects I felt were in close enough orb for me to consider them. And of course when computers came along all of this was done somewhere inside the computer and all I got was the finished aspect list. Those aspects that were not within the orbs I set were ignored and I was happy about that for the sake of making my job preparing for a reading with a client easier.

My family loves Autumn. I acknowledge it too, but for me there is also something desperate about the fall season, all the bright days pointing away from summer and toward the solstice in December; that is the moment I start to look for spring, much to my wife’s shaking of her head. I was born a summer baby, on the hottest day in summer my mom said. I guess I am a spring and summer soul. Some like it hot. I am a bit melancholy or perhaps it is just the passing of our dog Kota that lingers. Kota passed away quietly Sunday afternoon, a prince to the end. My wife tells me he was sitting out in the yard where she had carefully helped him stand up to pee. When he flopped back down, Margaret tells me he raised his nose up to the sky, sniffed the air, and then lay down again and his poor heart gave out. We were with him in the last moments. It was a peaceful death.

We all have directions embedded in our mind, which we try to follow. They are not the

directions north, east, south, or west, but rather some itch inside us that wants to be

scratched. When other interests fade away, these itches still are present. They last.

For me such an itch happens with photography, which is more than just a hobby for me.

Since I (without meaning to) mixed photography with mind training many years ago, the

two practices, photography and mind training, are almost hopelessly mixed with one

another. It is the mind training that brings clarity to the photography, but as mentioned

the two are intermingled. They are mixed so that one is the other and vice versa.

Many years ago in the 1980s I had a dream. In that dream I presented my dharma teacher Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche a drawn image or portrait of himself. It was one of those dreams that is magical, somehow more real than waking life. For that reason I felt it was important that this dream be made real and acted out in real life. After the dream I began actively to consider how this could happen. I tried on many ideas.

I want to share with you one of my life's turning points, creatively speaking. The early 1970s found me in a very exciting period in my life. For one, I was emerging from the 1960s, had finally found someone who wanted to marry me (and vice versa), was discovering fatherhood, and was committed to making my living as an astrologer, come hell or high water. Equally important, after a lifetime of looking out at the world, I was also learning to look inward at the mind itself. And the mind, as I was then finding, is a vast storehouse of treasures, perhaps the last great frontier that remains to be explored, at least by we Westerners. The Tibetan Buddhists had planted their flag in the mind centuries before. In the early 1970s I was unearthing some of the hidden treasures of astrology and sharing them with the world.

There is no doubt I love flowers and green plants, just look at what I photograph. Here is

a flower I photographed last night. In some of the Buddhist texts this is known as the

Kamala flower, which is used (along with the Lotus flower) to adorn various deity

statues and drawings. This one is also called the Night-blooming Cereus in popular

speak, and it only blooms one night a year and can be about a foot long. There is no

other flower in the world that I am happier to see than this one. And aside from its

beauty, it has the single most beautiful fragrance I have ever known, so piercing that it

literally goes into your brain, deeply. It is like spiritual smelling salts, one whiff and you

are all tuned in. Well, this big sprawling plant lives in our bedroom and the single bloom

for this year bloomed all night. When the sun comes up this morning, it will be done,

hanging there like a tired sock.

While I am on flowers, I might as well tell you about the time that Margaret and I went

into the green plant business and ended up managing greenhouses in Florida with

19,000 Square feet of glass. Well, that happened. I will try to make this brief, but it will

stretch out a bit.

Here is a story from back in the days when I was running AMG, the All-Music Guide, All-Movie Guide, All-Game Guide, etc. For those who don’t know AMG, it is the largest music review and biography database in the world (http://allmusic.com/), while the All-Movie Guide is one of the two largest film web sites in the world, and so on. Anyway, I founded and created AMG, was its president, and at the time of this story we had about 150 full-time staff and over 500 free-lance writers. Aside from a massive web site, we also produced a series of printed music guides. To make this happen meant that we had to divide up all of the great musicians and composers in the world among our music editors and the hundreds of free-lance writers we worked with, having each music writer doing this or that band or musician.

Of course I was a proud father at the birth of each of my children, all four of them. What father is not? Pride is often made out to be a terrible thing, but a fathers pride is not arrogant or flippant. It is sincere and humbling. And as strong as that pride was, I want to tell you of another experience of pride that was literally overwhelming, beyond my imagination or even wish, and a total surprise in the middle of a life. It had to do with my second born daughter, Michael Anne. Today she likes and goes by “Michael Anne,” but back then she was “Anne” or more familiarly just “Annie.” This is the story of how Annie made me proud. Michael Anne was born November 14, 1974 at home, attended by a woman doctor who also was willing to midwife if asked. After a night of labor, Anne was born in our house by the river just as the sun came up, and rays of light shot through the windows and onto the bed. Anne is a Scorpio, with Scorpio rising, and Moon in Aries, a very hot combination. From the first moment when that tiny baby’s eyes met mine, I knew this being coming into the world was very strong. I found myself immediately having to make room for her in my mind.

I want to tell you a little something about a very close friend of mine. To look at him, you might see just a little black dog. If you did, you would be far away from the truth, for this dog has probably seen more of the world than most of us reading this now. He has traveled the length and breadth of the country. He has hitchhiked, walked, hiked, driven in cars, and hopped freight trains going who-knows-where. He has busked in cities from the east to the west coast and played music at coffee shops, bars, colleges, and (of course) most often just out on the street.

A few words about out-of-the-body experiences, aside from whatever we might have imagined from movies, books, and so forth. I can start out by saying that we are more or less out of the body these days and it has nothing to do with the recent eclipses or even the lunar cycle. And I don’t want to give you a lecture either. Suffice it to say that our consciousness moves in and out of the body all the time. If we wander too far out of the body we can fall ill or simply be carried away in some hair-brained scheme or another. We lose touch with reality. This is why the traditional Buddha reaches down with his right hand in the earth-touching gesture or mudra: grounding himself. Keep it real. On the other hand, if we wander too far ‘into’ the body we can get bogged down (even depressed) and unable to see where we are going in life. For many of us it is a case of feast or famine. Our consciousness circulates in and out of the body.

It is important for me to understand that practicing sitting meditation is just that: ‘practice’ and not the final result of that practice. For many years I assumed (falsely) that sitting practice was its own result and that assumption really cost me time and discouragement. Practice of any kind is “practice,” just as practicing scales and fingering on the guitar is practice and not the same as playing music. The distinction somehow escaped me.

I wish someone had pointed this out to me years ago. Although the word “practice” was right in front of me all the time and I even called the sitting meditation I was doing at the time “my practice,” somehow the common meaning of that word never registered. It was just a label that everyone I knew used. We all did our dharma “practice.” So what is practice, practicing for what?

Dharma practice (or meditation practice) and its goal is a perfect case of Catch-22, a circular argument, each part of which depends on all the others. It is the old razor and shave analogy. It is the shave we are after, not the razor, although the quality of the shave can depend on the razor, and so on. The shave here refers to the awareness and mindfulness that results from meditation practice and the shaver is the meditation practice itself, the technique or means. Meditation practice (the technique itself) is not the result of that practice, but the means to obtain the result. This is true of any kind of practice.

I am 72 years old today. This is somewhat of a pivotal time for me because I am actively

deconstructing a couple of large mandalas that have been very much a part of me for

many years. So on this birthday I will write something about mandalas in general,

because they have been so important in my life.

We form a mandala every time we are inspired to start anything new from our heart. We

create a miniature universe (a world within our world) in which our own essence-activity

is at the center. And that heart-felt activity serves to transform us, creating a sacred

flower in space and time, a mandala.

The elaborate Tibetan sand mandalas start at the very center and gradually emerge to

embrace the entire universe. Conversely, when then are deconstructed, sand mandalas

are swept from the outer edge in toward the center, and the pile of colored sand is then

dispersed, often in a river or stream, which carries away the blessed particles.

Tibetan Buddhist monks and laypersons, along with Zen Buddhist, have developed methods of training the mind that are over 1,000 years old and have proved very effective. These amount to a life-long practice. Marriage for many of us is also a life-long practice just as difficult and complete as many dharma practices. This article is about using these tried and true dharma practices within a marriage to solve problems and to help keep it together.

The outer signs of marriage include the legal document for the state and usually some form of ceremony, but those are just the external signs of marriage. As many religions point out, marriage is a sacrament, meaning that it is sacred, and whatever makes it sacred is what causes two people to marry. In other words (and IMO), what is more important is an inner event that happens before the marriage ceremony takes place.

I am not saying that in this modern world that every marriage is triggered by a deep internal event, because the divorce rate would suggest otherwise. It is my belief that many divorces could be avoided with just a little remedial mind-training. In these articles I am only concerned with marriages that come from some kind of deep (and spiritual) discovery, shared by two individuals, like the act of falling in love.

As an astrologer since the 1960s, for many years I made my living doing readings and counseling clients. It is not surprising that I became skilled at those things I was most asked to read a chart about, and at the tip of the top of that list is marriage and relationships, followed close by vocational questions, and then on down the line. By default, relationship problems became something I am familiar with, not to mention that having been married almost 44 years I was bound to learn something.

Since I have been touching on marriage these last couple of blogs, I would be remiss not to acknowledge some of the problems that marriage can bring, because they are certainly there. I mentioned previously the concept that relationship partners can mirror each other perfectly, down to the last detail, and we don't always want to see ourselves in the mirror.

There is a parallel between the what is called "Recognition" in Tibetan Buddhist practice and "Kenso" in Zen Buddhism with the realization that leads to marriage when we finally meet our loved one, the one we marry. Understanding these similarities is not only interesting, it provides valuable insights into how to revitalize and restore marriage when it encounters problems.

Marriage is nothing to trifle with. It is some serious stuff. As the ministers often recite during the marriage ceremony, marriage "is not something to be entered into lightly, but rather reverently, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God." And I say "Amen" to that.

I like to point out that marriage is the most common form of yoga, which makes those of us who are married yoga practitioners, and I am not kidding. The word "Yoga" simply means to yoke or join together, unite, which is exactly what marriage does. So I am not joking when I point this out.

I want to talk about non-theism, which is not the same as being an atheist. Atheists declare there is no god, period, end of story. Non-theists, such as Buddhists, say there is no being separate, higher, or 'essentially' different from our own being. Whatever there is out there, it includes us as an equal member. That is a real difference.

Aggression with or without provocation is no stranger to most of us. We can call it anger if we want, although there is said to be anger without aggression, but for the most part anger in our society is a form of aggression. I probably should not broach this subject because it is vast, multi-dimensional, and what we socially consider anger is but the tip of the iceberg. Anger and aggression are endemic to modern society, but largely submerged. Most of us are unaware of or in denial of our anger and aggression.

The Buddhists teach that we must first learn to help ourselves before we can be of use to others. I am reminded of the Gospel quote from Matthew "… first take the speck out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Buddhism is a self-help story, but where do we turn for guidance? Being a non-theist does not mean that there are not higher levels of awareness, beings more advanced than ourselves. There are, but how to contact them?

The key part of the elaborate sand mandalas is not the colored sand that is gathered up and thrown into the water. Dust to dust… or sand to sand. No, the mandala is the act of offering itself, the process of creation and not what is created. The mandala is the concentration, intent, life, prayers, and mantras we pour into the creation of the mandala, not just the resulting sand image which is destroyed. In this case, it is the process of offering itself that is the result. And this holds true for gatherings like these 10-day teaching as well. The offering itself, these precious teachings, unlike the sand, is not destroyed, but is dedicated to the eventual enlightenment of all sentient beings. 

In my life, the best English wordsmith I know of is William Shakespeare, but it is not just his choice and juxtaposition of words that strikes me. It is the clarity of his thought which he was so kind to share with us. The Buddhists offer this same kind of clarity and even more in my experience. Buddhist offer not only the clarity of thought from their tradition that we may taste, but, better yet, they also show us how to improve and clarify our own minds, something the Shakespeare only does indirectly. This fact is precious.

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:

Tibetan Buddhism -- In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

Astrology -- In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

The Dharma --In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

Meditation Suggestions -- In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

Meditation - In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

In this six-part series, I have the rare opportunity to interview author, astrologer, entrepreneur, musician, and spiritual teacher Michael Erlewine and ask him questions about his life and various interests. Troy Wehner (videographer and documentary filmmaker)

I love to tell this story because it contains such an incredible truth, one that few seem to realize. I tend to be a completest. When I started reading Dostoevsky in high school, I didn't stop until I had read all 52 or so novels and what-not. Then I went on to learn Russian on top of that. And I will barely mention here founding the All-Music Guide, and compiling the largest database of music on the planet, literally all recorded music from 10-inch records onward. And there was the All-Movie Guide, one of the two largest film databases, and on it goes. There was the concert music poster database (donated to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan), again the largest, and there was the largest astrological library that I donated to the University of Illinois last year as part of their permanent collection, and so on. So when I dig, I tend to dig deep.

TWO POINTS, ONE WARNING

Before some of you run out and drop acid to enable your meditation practice, think again. I suggest that you look two ideas right in the eye, as scary as that might be for some of us. And this first idea comes with a warning, so please take it in:

The primary thing that psychedelics did for me, that had never happened before, is that they gave me some actual "realization" that was not just another experience, but something that came and that never went away, even though it was only a taste or glimpse.

In that time of insight I understood, experienced, and finally realized the basic fact why our dualistic form of perception makes the Self so invulnerable to penetration, i.e. that what we see out there in the world and take verbatim as "real" is in fact very much a product of the likes, dislikes, bias, and prejudice that we hold "in here," in our own views and as a result of our own karma. In other words, the subject "me" in here and the "them and you" outside of me (and over there) are not a true dichotomy, not really separate at all, but are integrally related, one to another – a working unity. In other words, dualisms are an inconvenient fiction.

I will try to make this my last post on the psychedelics, at least for a while, and you would think these drugs would be polar opposites to the mind training that I work with now. However, believe it or not, mind-altering drugs like LSD have some natural affinity with Tibetan Mind training practices in that they both can reveal the actual nature of the mind (to some degree), something that other kinds of drugs (like marijuana) don't do or do very poorly. Marijuana is mind-altering, yes, but not really psychedelic, at least as I define the term.

LSD is obviously not merely an entertainment drug or, if it is, as our friend Bill Maher might say, it takes place in "Real Time." LSD entertains us completely, including swallowing the Self whole and without a hiccup. The Self is often the chief target (and victim) of psychedelic insights.

Anyway, when it comes to drugs LSD is a whole different story and here I ‘am’ very vulnerable. Let me preface my remarks by pointing out that LSD in my opinion was a generational thing, something that had its place in time and, although I am sure they still make it, I doubt that the experience could be quite the same today as it was in the early 1960s. And before I jump into LSD, let me say a few words about prescription drugs.

I don’t consider myself much of an expert on drug addiction, because I never did drugs all "that" much, prescription or otherwise. I also know that when I talk on subjects like this that some readers are uncomfortable. I apologize for this, but as it happened, drugs played a very important part in the direction and mind make-up of the 1960s, of which I am a child of. I am not about to white-wash that history. 

The Latin phrase "Ignorantia juris non excusat," is also true when it comes to karma. Ignorance of the law of karma does not exempt us from its results. That is why "awareness" is the primary key to Buddhist mind training methods. And that awareness extends to how aware we are of our thoughts.

When it comes to thoughts and thinking, what we are aware of can be almost nothing or almost everything that comes to mind, and that's a lot. For one, we have all these thoughts. Some days I find myself standing at the prow of the mind and batting down thoughts like unwanted mosquitoes that obviously have no future, thoughts that are just not worth thinking about further or, for that matter, ever. 

I am not always positive. I do my best, but every once in a while I wander into negativity and I seldom even see it coming. It seems to just happen and it is a bummer every time.

My teacher, Khenpo Rinpoche, gives the analogy of the pig who wants to get into the garden. The time to stop the pig is when he first sticks his nose through the picket fence. That is when a whack on the nose may keep him out. Once he gets in, it is very difficult to remove him and we tend to just chase him round and round while he tramples on everything. My negativity is like that pig. Once it gets in, it makes a terrible mess.

Most of the time I am pretty upbeat and positive but, as mentioned, every now and again I trip up and find myself on a downward spiral – spiraling down. And the nasty part of it is that I usually don't even know I am being negative until I eventually wake up to that fact, always too late for my taste. 

I am frequently asked where is the best place to start in learning the Tibetan style of mind training. More often than not my answer is to start with a technique called "Tong-Len," and a particular subset of Tong-len that I call "Reaction Tong-Len" or simply Reaction Toning. This practice is not limited to sitting on-the-cushion, but can be done anytime and anywhere, by anyone.

Their Inner and Outer Effects

32 Pages pages

By Michael Erlewine

Published on Sep 10, 2012

An 32-page article on solar flares, CME events, and related solar phenomena as regards how they affect us psychologically, spiritually, and physically.

With Local Space, here is no 'subtle plane,' but a personal landscape painted in bold and clear strokes and tailor made to fit the psyche of each individual. Here is a world where the modern man is learning to move across the face of this earth in an endless dance of adjustment and tuning of his radix -- of his self. Individuals driven in particular directions on a checkerboard world, unable to resist travelling toward a goal that is no particular place on earth so much as it is a direction imprinted within them, the direction of a force or planet, 'There! Where Power hovers,' to use Don Juan's expression.

With Local Space, here is no 'subtle plane,' but a personal landscape painted in bold and clear strokes and tailor made to fit the psyche of each individual. Here is a world where the modern man is learning to move across the face of this earth in an endless dance of adjustment and tuning of his radix -- of his self. Individuals driven in particular directions on a checkerboard world, unable to resist travelling toward a goal that is no particular place on earth so much as it is a direction imprinted within them, the direction of a force or planet, 'There! Where Power hovers,' to use Don Juan's expression.

This is an in-depth discussion of the concepts involved with looking at the various coordinate systems in astrology, ranging from the Earth-Moon-Sun, to the solar system, and onward to the Local System of Stars, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of Galaxies, on to the Supergalaxy. Sound technical, but the accent is on the potential for conscious awareness of these distant systems. Hosted by Michael Erlewine.

With Local Space, here is no 'subtle plane,' but a personal landscape painted in bold and clear strokes and tailor made to fit the psyche of each individual. Here is a world where the modern man is learning to move across the face of this earth in an endless dance of adjustment and tuning of his radix -- of his self. Individuals driven in particular directions on a checkerboard world, unable to resist travelling toward a goal that is no particular place on earth so much as it is a direction imprinted within them, the direction of a force or planet, 'There! Where Power hovers,' to use Don Juan's expression.

The Astrology of Space takes a look at modern astrophysics and deep-space astronomy in relation to how the new objects like black holes, quasars, pulsars can be understood and interpreted in the natal chat. Until recent history we have only studied the pinpoint lights of the fixed stars in the visual spectrum, said to be less than an octave if compared to the audio spectrum. Suddenly both ends of the visual spectrum have opened up, both the low frequency radio and infrared waves and the high frequency ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray waves, allowing us to see the actual shape of the universe itself. Michael Erlewine pioneered this fascinating world for astrologers with his publication of the book Astrophysical Directions in 1976, and continues to do so today.

The Astrology of Space takes a look at modern astrophysics and deep-space astronomy in relation to how the new objects like black holes, quasars, pulsars can be understood and interpreted in the natal chat. Until recent history we have only studied the pinpoint lights of the fixed stars in the visual spectrum, said to be less than an octave if compared to the audio spectrum. Suddenly both ends of the visual spectrum have opened up, both the low frequency radio and infrared waves and the high frequency ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray waves, allowing us to see the actual shape of the universe itself. Michael Erlewine pioneered this fascinating world for astrologers with his publication of the book Astrophysical Directions in 1976, and continues to do so today.

The Astrology of Space takes a look at modern astrophysics and deep-space astronomy in relation to how the new objects like black holes, quasars, pulsars can be understood and interpreted in the natal chat. Until recent history we have only studied the pinpoint lights of the fixed stars in the visual spectrum, said to be less than an octave if compared to the audio spectrum. Suddenly both ends of the visual spectrum have opened up, both the low frequency radio and infrared waves and the high frequency ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray waves, allowing us to see the actual shape of the universe itself. Michael Erlewine pioneered this fascinating world for astrologers with his publication of the book Astrophysical Directions in 1976, and continues to do so today.

A remarkable technique developed by astrologer Michael Erlewine using traditional planetary aspects to interpret a natal chart. This technique can be used for charts with or without a birth time with equal ease. Full-Phase aspects have been suggested by many great astrologers, including Dane Rudhyar. Here is an easy to follow, illustrated, tutorial on how to understand and use Full-Phase aspects in chart interpretation.

A remarkable technique developed by astrologer Michael Erlewine using traditional planetary aspects to interpret a natal chart. This technique can be used for charts with or without a birth time with equal ease. Full-Phase aspects have been suggested by many great astrologers, including Dane Rudhyar. Here is an easy to follow, illustrated, tutorial on how to understand and use Full-Phase aspects in chart interpretation.

This is a new way to look at astrological aspects as developed by astrology pioneer Michael Erlewine. It is a unique and easy way to determine a great deal about the make-up of an individual. Erlewine was the first astrologer to program astrology on microcomputers and make those programs available to astrologers all over the world.

A remarkable technique developed by astrologer Michael Erlewine using traditional planetary aspects to interpret a natal chart. This technique can be used for charts with or without a birth time with equal ease. Full-Phase aspects have been suggested by many great astrologers, including Dane Rudhyar. Here is an easy to follow, illustrated, tutorial on how to understand and use Full-Phase aspects in chart interpretation.

A remarkable technique developed by astrologer Michael Erlewine using traditional planetary aspects to interpret a natal chart. This technique can be used for charts with or without a birth time with equal ease. Full-Phase aspects have been suggested by many great astrologers, including Dane Rudhyar. Here is an easy to follow, illustrated, tutorial on how to understand and use Full-Phase aspects in chart interpretation.

Here in a single book, expert astrologer Michael Erlewine lays out the phenomenon of retrograde motion in a clear and easy-to-understand manner. More than just abstract theory, this is a hands-on way to interpret retrograde planets in your natal chart.

A podcast of the landmark Ann Arbor Blues Festivals in 1969 and 1970 by Michael Erlewine, author of the book by the same name. Erlewine interviewed by audio and video most of artists who played at those festivals.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins introduced the

concept of "inscape" to the English language, a word

he coined to indicate our access to the beautiful and

profound, the way into allowing the mind to rest

naturally. Scholars tell me Hopkins keyed on this

concept from the work of Duns Scotus, another of my

favorite poets. I can't say I agree with most scholars

as to their interpretation of what Hopkins meant by

"inscape." I have my own understanding and will use

that.

Inscape to me is a natural sign (a signal in our busy

life of distractions) that gets our attention and carries

us within to rest in the nature of the mind, however

briefly. That rest is crucial.

The history of thoughts is an old story, one we all

have been following for a long time. Thoughts go on

forever and are more than just their content and

meaning. They share a common nature, and that

nature can be seen and looked at in itself. Our

thoughts often end up in sentences and words. What

makes sentences work is that words have gaps

between them, an ocean of emptiness in which words

float.

The arrangement of letters in single words is fixed,

but the arrangement of words in a sentence is not.

The placement of words, one up against another,

creates meaning. Arranging words carefully alters

meaning and involves the clash and friction of

consonants, and the smooth ease of vowels. This is

why spoken poetry is so powerful. A simple

rearrangement of words on the page changes the

meaning.

How much time we devote to meditation practice is a

conundrum, one that has all kinds of answers

depending on how we approach it or who we ask. It is

not unlike the salesman who asks "How much do you

want to spend?" Of course, just starting out we tend to

have no idea. How can we know what we don't know?

We are just beginners.

No matter how you dice it, practice is practice, and

that goes for dharma practice too. Enthusiasm for

what (in the beginning) amounts to rote practice is

almost an oxymoron. If you aren’t enthusiastic, where

is it to be found?

Well, how do you find joy right now in anything in your

life? What gives you joy? Start there. People typically

use a pebble or a stick for an object to focus on in

basic Shamata meditation, and most often the breath.

In themselves, these are not holy objects. You get

extra points for using an image of the Buddha, but

that is beside the point that there is no "right" object of

meditation. We are welcome to pick an object we love

to work with and concentrate on, especially if it helps,

so make it easy on yourself.

I am sorry to say that it took me many years to get the

following concepts through my thick skull. Not sure

what I was thinking or even if I was thinking, but I kind

of let it go in one ear and out the other. Somehow it

seemed like too great an effort or I felt that it was just

not necessary for me to actually do it as suggested.

Perhaps I don't like following directions. Anyway, that

was a very big mistake on my part. This has to do

with how we begin and end our dharma practice for

each session (any practice), whether sitting on the

cushion or in post-meditation out walking around.

I am sorry to say that it took me many years to get the

following concepts through my thick skull. Not sure

what I was thinking or even if I was thinking, but I kind

of let it go in one ear and out the other. Somehow it

seemed like too great an effort or I felt that it was just

not necessary for me to actually do it as suggested.

Perhaps I don't like following directions. Anyway, that

was a very big mistake on my part. This has to do

with how we begin and end our dharma practice for

each session (any practice), whether sitting on the

cushion or in post-meditation out walking around.

The

point of this series of blogs is to help make the

"intangible" tangible, to become familiar with some of

the more subtle Buddhist concepts. While intellectual

distinctions of this kind may appear on the surface to

be overly conceptual, these particular concepts

translate rather quickly to the sphere of action, where

mistakes on our part have real consequences. As an

example, it can be important to understand the

difference between accumulating good karma and

accumulating merit. They are quite different.

Karma of any kind always has to do with Samsara

(this world of cyclic existence) and never with

enlightenment, while merit pertains to our eventual

liberation from Samsara -- enlightenment. It is said

that the accumulation of karma is certain, like a

shadow following an object, and always leads to a

higher or lower rebirth within cyclic existence. Our

karma, even the best karma, will never liberate us, but

only determines the kind of our next rebirth. Karma is

inextricably bound to this world of cyclic existence. 

For years I have listened to students asking Rinpoche

why are they not progressing faster in their dharma

practice, and the answer almost always is: you need

to accumulate more merit first. Merit, indeed, is

cumulative, but we don't accumulate it like in a merit

storehouse in the sky somewhere.

The word "accumulate" is misleading in that it

suggests stockpiling merit. It would be more accurate

to say that merit is cumulative. Its result adds up, but

its effect is to reduce our obscurations. We could say

that merit helps us to accumulate less obscurations, if

that sentence makes sense. I warned you that the

word "accumulation" was misleading.

Meditation training is still quite new in this country. We

are just getting the word out, so most of the emphasis

is on the actual physical meditation technique itself,

the bare bones, but there is more. Aside from the

basic physical technique, there are what I sometimes

call the "intangibles' – everything else. There is so

much emphasis on learning the basic techniques of

meditation that these intangibles are usually ignored

until later on down the line. The problem with this is

that these so-called "intangibles" are not just

supplementary add-ons -- afterthoughts. Quite the

contrary, they are crucial to the success of actually

learning to meditate properly. That's the rub.

I am seventy-two years of age, but inside this aging body is the consciousness of a 25-year old. For some reason, it seems I stopped aging on the inside on May 12, 1967. I can remember the day and the hour, after which I somehow froze in time at that particular age. I believe we all do this. Let's look at this topic.

Clock time may be static, but real time, the kind you and I live, is dynamic. It not only varies in perceived speed and quality, but it varies individually. We can both look at our watches and share the same clock time, but beyond that, time for me may be condensed and for you expanded, or vice versa. Just as you can’t tell a book by its cover, we can’t know what kind of time folks are having internally, but we can sometimes get a sense of it.

What may not yet constitute facts or “science" to the general population may be considered facts by the relative few whose experience or awareness allows them to be able to resolve them from what can appear as chaos. In other words facts, like everything else, (especially in the soft sciences) are often discovered over time. They emerge.

Another way of saying this is the concept of what constitutes a fact itself changes. What once were not considered facts gradually come to be considered

facts, and vice versa. What once were considered facts may be perceived differently over time and finally seen as not factual at all or as incomplete truths. 

Meditation and the practice of meditation, two different things. I have written here many times how meditation is first about building a habit and only later can it be said that we are “meditating,” much later for most of us. Like the scaffolding on a building, meditation “practice” is just that, practicing meditation, and not meditation itself. The practice or habit-building part of meditation has to eventually be let go of or removed, leaving room for the actual meditation itself. In order to learn to meditate, we must practice the process of meditating.

As I get older, I pay more attention to these unannounced impulses that arise spontaneously in my mind. Suddenly, there they are, a thought or a vision of what is to be.

No, I am not talking about the U.S. constitution or the Monroe Doctrine. And I am not even talking about the doctrine of signatures used by herbalists and doctors all the way back to Galen. I am more referring to how mystics like Jakob Böhme used the term “signatures,” that everything signals or is a sign of its own nature and use. And I also am leaning toward what in the East is called the Great Seal, also called Mahamudra or Dzogchen or Maha-Ati, that the natural world itself is a gesture and perfectly reflects the true nature of the mind.

Every idea since time immemorial, every invention and book idea, not to mention every last thought came from the mind. By itself that should be enough to point out to us that the mind is a treasure trove, if only we know how to mine it. The Buddhists call the mind the “wish-fulfilling gem,” which is totally telling, if we think about it.

And every once in a while, each of us manages to find a good idea or two in the mind. Yet, it seldom occurs to us that the mind is evergreen, and always fertile

If you ask a Tibetan where their mind is, they don’t point to their head, but to their heart, actually to the middle of their chest. Here in the West, we point to our heads.

Of course, the mind can’t be in two places, one for Tibetans and another for westerners, which is a good sign that the mind is not somewhere, but more like anywhere. The mind is not physical and has no one physical home.

The main (and hardest) part of learning meditation is building the habit of mindfulness. That is what it is all about. This typically involves sitting (often on a cushion) in some quiet place and practicing the basic technique of meditating. It does take time. The emphasis is on “practice” and the purpose of practice is to learn (make a habit of) mindfulness. We need mindfulness in order to meditate and we need (at least I do) meditation in order to see clearly and respond skillfully to life.

What I am finding out is that many people have no idea what meditation actually is, although they think they do. There are hundreds of opinions on what meditation is in this country, and most don’t jibe with the authentic types of meditation taught for thousands of years in Asia.

In a word, basic meditation is about mindfulness and it is quite simple. Do you know what it is and understand how it works?

Perhaps we are not supposed to talk about the excellent and wonderful qualities of meditation, because indeed it is a long slog from learning the basic technique and habit of meditation to experiencing the fruits of actual meditation, other than as some quiet time in a day.

For me this took many, many years, but not because it had to, only because I was not doing it right and thought I was. But if you have ever learned to type or play an instrument, it is no different. We have to practice, and practice is not meditating, for the most part.

… in learning meditation, that is. Otherwise, it would take a book or two. Here are just a few of the many things I didn’t get right. This has to be a little bit humorous. Otherwise it is too depressing, but it might be useful if you are just starting out.

In those thirty years of practicing, as regards the results of sitting meditation, apparently the only thing I accumulated was more dharma toys. In the beginning I had no toys. I had no shrine, no statues, no mala (beads), no nothing. I had a little piece of paper with my dharma name and a line drawing of the Buddha on it. That was my shrine and I placed it on a little shelf at eye level while I practiced meditation.

But while I sat there for thirty years, although I didn’t accumulate any real meditation results, I did manage to accumulate an incredible amount of dharma “stuff.”

If we will look closely, we will see that we react (one way or another) to almost everything, constantly. Substitute "react" for the word "suffering," and what the Buddha was pointing out may be easier to understand, the First Noble Truth then reads "The Truth of Reaction or Reacting."

The reason is that the 'self', as Buddhists know it, is nothing more than the sum total of our attachments, positive and negative, at best a kind of general secretary for our life, and not any kind of permanent 'being' or vantage point. The assemblage (montage) of what makes up what we call our "self" changes as our interests change. Like an onion, the self has no permanent core. When we die, the self is gone, but the mind is not. This is an audio-blog about putting the self out to pasture.

A personal history and the story of how I discovered Buddhism and ended up actually practicing it. 

My guess is that in the Buddhist view, addressing the 'self" is just talking at the symptoms, without reaching the core. In other words, true to their philosophy, just as Buddhists don't consider the personal self as having permanent existence, they don't bother to address their criticism to it either. To make a joke, the self to them is a non-entity. Their view is much deeper and I believe better than that, and I have to take a lesson from them and reorganize my own thinking on this topic.

According to the Buddhist view, our personality and "Self" is nothing more than a composite image or montage of attachments, all our personal likes and dislikes. I mean, it's right there in the word "persona" if I would just read the dictionary, often defined as social facade or mask, but masking what? And what is behind the mask?

For me, writing prose about spiritual experience is like carrying water in your hands. In the end you have a waterfall of words and very little sense. Some experience is beyond words, but not necessarily beyond poetry, which sometimes can freeze-frame a moment in clarity. This audio-blog is about words, meaning, and language.

Learning meditation is a little like a cowboy roundup and then the rodeo. You have to tame the mind before you can ride it. And there is a bit of the carrot and the stick involved, only in reverse order, first the stick and then the carrot.

 Learning meditation takes practice and practice (for most of us) is no fun or at least not much fun. So in the beginning it is hard to get folks attention enough for them to actually do the habit-building work of learning to meditate.

The more seriously we take the problem of attachment and the self (the more airtime we give it), the stronger our self-attachment gets in response. There is a definite mirror reflection here, which is kind of humorous, like looking at our self in a mirror.

 So the bottom line is that struggling with our self, by punishing, admonishing, hating, or about any other approach to the self we might take will never work, and this: on principle. We are just feeding the fire.

The Tibetans point out that at both New and Full Moons the subtle inner energies (what are called the winds and the channels or chakras) line up or come together within us more exactly than at other times, and when a New or Full Moon is also an eclipse, that inner lineup is about as perfect as it can get. In fact, the Tibetans set these very special days apart as "days of observation," when perhaps the best thing to do is to allow the mind to rest and observe our own mindstream. That is how we learn.

This is a audio-blog about my doing nothing. That's right, doing nothing or as little as possible. Dr. Dolittle here, busy learning to do less all the time, and that takes work.

Things I ought to do, should do, must do, and of course what I have to do. They haunt me every day, and I'm always looking for a time when I actually feel like doing them. And with me that can be a long time.

The problem with great moments (or insights) is that I tend to naturally want to repeat them, to have them happen again, just as they were, or even better. That wish on my part is like a death sentence, a sure sign they will never come again, at least not like that. And it gets worse. This audio-blog is about micro-karma and how it is recorded in our mindstream.

Core change of this kind, for me, is more like setting or rearranging the sails on a boat, taking a different tack or approach. These inner adjustments, once made, eventually result in our going in an alternate direction. In other words, inner change marks a change in attitude or approach more than a sudden outside event. However, failure to note and adjust our attitude can result in physical consequences, i.e. external events.

Beyond words is the life experience that words can but refer to, point at, and we each will have to go deeper into life to have that experience for ourselves. We can stand as long as we want with our toe in the swimming pool, but sooner or later (and it will happen) we each have to take the plunge.

Eclipse times (and also times of intense solar activity like flares, etc.) are moments when change can be more obvious for us to see and feel the urge of, if we will just time-out a bit and let the mind rest long enough to pick up on it. The highest Tibetan lamas tell us that inner alignment is there at eclipses.

If I look up the meaning of the word "change" in the dictionary, it is defined as the "process of becoming different." We are all kind of familiar with change, or should be by now, with one provision, and that (unfortunately) is that many of us tend to view change as something external that just happens to us. This is a little bit masochistic on our part, seeing ourselves as somehow the victim of change. Passivity.

When we study intense solar change or the possibility of change at eclipse times, we are speaking of 'internal' change, and not so much external change, so we might want to modify the above definition of change to something like: change is "the process of how I become different" and… still remain the same.

The problem is that we are protected from witnessing inner change by our own social conventions, by what is called "sanity" and, for that matter, social sanitation. We do everything we can not to come into contact with our conflicting emotions, and all of the rest of the stuff that may be festering in our psyches. In reality, our internal worlds have no fixed boundaries and can include more than a little chaos and all manner of undigested experience – paradoxes that we have come up against but have failed to assimilate, especially relating to our "self." The "Self" does not like to be embarrassed.

As they say, "disappointment is the salt of life," and the big disappointments in life can be, indeed, earth-shaking, but they sometimes can serve as a wake-up call. However, the steady rain of quiet disappointments has less to recommend itself and potentially is even more dangerous to our mental health.

 With the big disappointments, and I have had a few, the best advice I have given myself is not to add insult to injury. It is bad enough that I have been disappointed, that I took a turn life gave me in a hard way, but it is much worse if then I add to that perceived injury the insult of following it with endless regret and, worst of all, bitterness. Bitterness is a real life killer.

Tibetan Buddhism is energy efficient to an extreme degree, aerodynamically designed to fly even in the worst psychological weather.

When we run out of good things to do, we can start looking at and absorbing all the so-called bad things, one by one. They contain their own demise, and more important, they contain the energy needed to fuel us on to greater awareness. If you read even a little in the Buddhist literature you will come across the Three Poisons or the Five Poisons