Astrologers are not unlike their more psychic cousins, the psychometrists who use

various objects to get in touch with different types of interpretive information. However,

instead of handling some personal object belonging to the person in question, we

astrologers tend to use all the available astronomical facts as a touchstone or pointers

to whatever meaning or interpretation we are searching for.

A number of you have written asking me about the various tarot-card-like astrology images I use and where they came from. I don’t mind telling you how these came to be, but as you will see it has a personal element to it, so take note. Some years ago, I went through a period of loss. I won’t go into detail, but it kind of stopped me cold and popped me out of whatever day-to-day distractions I was into. It was quite a long period, years. There was nothing at that time that really could cheer me up.

Ever wonder about the place where you have lived most of your life? Places do have qualities and are we too a product of those qualities? Is the state of Michigan where I live also a state of mind? I didn't used to think too much about this, but I got my eyes opened a bit back in the 1980s, plus back in the 1970s I developed an astrological mapping/relocation technique called "Local Space," which is now used by astrologers all over the world. Here are three things that I have learned about Michigan (where I live in a small town called Big Rapids) that I consider interesting.

Most of us have a home town where we came from. Ann Arbor Michigan is my home town; I grew up there. In the 1960s Ann Arbor was very different from the overly-caffeinated and sophisticated city it is today. For one, it did not used to take me 20 minutes to drive across town, but that is beside the point. Back then Ann Arbor appeared much less sure of itself (or was it just me growing up?). It seemed to be overly self-conscious and playing second fiddle (weak sister) to other college towns like Cambridge, Madison, and Berkeley. Ann Arbor had not yet found its place in mainstream America and what it lacked in bravado, it made up for in introspection and a quiet humility. What I did not fully grasp back then is that Ann Arbor is fecund, a fertile place, indeed a womb. It is pure feminine

Well, I tried to load a short video taken by my wife Margaret of the Earthwork-Women's

set at the Harvest Gathering where I have been for the last week, but it failed. The video

was poor, the sound was poor, but the spirit of the Earthwork woman is not. The woman

artists in the Earthwork music collective offer a special set each year for listeners, where

each of them sings a song. In this case, my daughter Anne is singing Dylan's "I Shall Be

Released.' Thought you might like to hear a little taste of their solidarity.

The Annual Harvest Gathering is over; I am back home where my dog has been waiting

for me all this time. I have way too many mosquito, spider, and bug bites than I would

like and it feels so good to have my own shower and bathroom back, not to mention

sleep. I have not slept much in days.

We have two wonderful violinists or “fiddlers” here, Bob Bernard and Kailin Yong. Bob Bernard is known throughout northern Michigan for his love of fine waltzes and great skill at playing them, and that is what these two violinists are here to do, make an album of American Waltzes, a duet between two great musicians.

I have always been intrigued by Tibetan Buddhist comments on what they call the

"Three Times," the past, present, and future. Two of these which I have often presented

in blogs are:

Don't Prolong the Past

Don't Invite the Future

I get that, but it is the third one I have been considering for a while, which is.

Don't Alter the Present

I am a believer in the expanding universe theory, at least the universe of my family. It keeps getting larger. No need to send out for friends. My growing family is a party all on its own, just waiting to happen. And every once in a great while everyone shows up and hangs out. We did that yesterday, all four of my kids, their partners, their kids, a few close friends, and a surprise guest. I will get to the surprise guest in a moment.

Not all stories are as touching for me as yesterday's blog. My life is not "that"

interesting, so here is a more mundane story from the depths of last winter; at least that

is when it all started.

We live in a cold spot in Michigan or so the weather maps tell me. I don't like to think

about this fact, especially around February and March. Worse, I was browsing through

CNN (or some site recently) and I clicked on an article that said "The Ten Worst Cities

to Live in the United States." Of course, I just had to see that.

On my journey as baby-holder this last weekend, we drove a lot of miles. And this event

happened. I had pulled into the passing lane on an expressway getting ready to pass a

slow-moving semi-trailer. There was still a little gap between my car and the semi, but I

was gaining on it.

A faster-moving driver suddenly pulled up behind and tailgated me. When, instead of

immediately moving over directly behind the semi, I proceeded with my attempt to pass

the semi, the tailgated car roared into the right line next to me, surged ahead, and

dangerously swung in front of me in space that was hardly enough and tore past the

semi. I didn't look, but if I did I would not be surprised to see the driver giving me the

finger. I guess this is called road rage. But it underscored how much aggression and

anger there is around us much of the time.

What happens when you mispronounce a name and end up left in a cow pasture with a five-foot pile of luggage watching your plane fly away? And then you manage to lose two of your children to a runaway cab driver. Here is the story.

A quick check of the weather forecast shows that we are going to hit 70-degrees today, with a lot of wind, and maybe a 20% chance of rain. That is pretty warm for mid-November. And we are only a couple of days away from the start of hunting season here in Michigan. As it turns out, the town I live in (Big Rapids, Michigan) sits on the edge of almost a million acres of national forest, the great Manistee National Forest. We are on the very verge, so to speak. Normally that is all for the good, but right now it means that our town will suddenly be the vortex of a hurricane of hunters who descend each year like locusts. All dressed in red and orange, the grocery stores will be filled with them in the act of provisioning. Beards are big, so are boots and hats. The local Big Boy and other restaurants will be filled. More women hunt all the time, but mostly it’s a boy’s game, two weeks of bachelor parties, and too many drunks on the road.

I made my living doing sit-down astrology readings with clients for many years. I still do readings, but mostly for friends and acquaintances these days. I am just too busy running a company to have the time anymore, but I still like to do them. One thing that comes up in many readings is what do we do when something really devastating happens to us in our lives, like losing our job, our life savings, our partner, or what-have-you? These kind of events happen all too often, and to almost everyone at some time in our lives – a really big setback. It has happened to me, for sure – big time.

It is easy for me to smile here on Facebook or to the friends and neighbors I bump

into, but much harder to always be at my kindest in a 24x7, one-to-one relationship

like marriage.

And please keep in mind that the word "yoga" means union, and the most common

form of yoga is marriage. Most of us (particularly me) are not masters of yoga. And

marriage reminds me of that each and every day. In my experience, there is no

closer mirror of the mind than intimate relationships. Perhaps this is why most

monks don't marry. They already have found their mirror. The rest of us find our

mirror, sooner or later, in relationships, ready or not. It seems we are drawn to this

by love. Amazing!

In the previous section I point out that at around thirty years of age we begin to emerge from time. At that point time as we know it stops for all practical purposes and our soul is mentally frozen in our prime of youth like an insect in amber. It never decays. But the body does decay and after its prime, it embarks on a long trajectory downhill that personally ends with death. In other words, at thirty years of age the spirit up and leaves the body, or begins to, and this transformation has not gone unnoticed by certain religious groups. “Born Again” is what I am talking about here. A Christian concept? Hardly, but some Christians have been aware enough to claim it, although it is available to us all.

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.