Almost everybody now and again has concerns about the future. It seems a very human trait to ignore what is familiar and always there, like waitresses in my last posting, and to be concerned about what might happen some time in the future.
People spend fortunes using complex tools to try to foresee the cycles of the stock market for example. When it was discovered that the ups and downs of parts of the European grain markets corresponded almost exactly to the sunspot cycle of just over eleven years, there was an immediate response, and lots of money available to study cycles in nature. Very well off people in the know can take advantage of cycles that are unknown to the ordinary person. The multi-millionaire W Clement Stone, used cycle research to his great advantage, and financed such research.
For ordinary folk like you and me, without vast fortunes to invest in forecasting events, the obvious choices are the ancient ones of psychic readings, astrology, numerology, palmistry, biorhythms and various oracles still in existence, like the one Napoleon used.
As a student of metaphysics I have looked at and studied several of these, and perhaps my opinions and experiences may help, but not create, some ways of regarding these materials in as far as they produce maps of future events.
A good psychic reader can give many people an accurate glimpse into the darkness of the future. But what usually happens is that the psychic can see pretty clearly the reactive element in the personality of the client. It’s obvious to a sensitive person when they meet someone who life runs on reflexes and old programs. With such a person it is easy to predict not the next week but the next few years. They are living their lives like a tram, going down a totally predictable path. It’s a shame to take their money.
Other clients are those with left brain dominance who are unable to see the guiding energies around them that right brain dominants name as guides or angels or the like. Very off-putting to those unable to sense such energies. So they cannot communicate with the energies that could guide them in problem situations and can use only their intellect, cleverness instead of wisdom.
The good psychic, with clean filters, can pick up what that client’s guides have been trying to tell them and will then come up with often astonishingly appropriate responses, IF the left brainer can be persuaded to do anything as stupid as going to a psychic who may not even have a PhD.
A particularly interesting form of reading the future is palmistry. Someone well trained after discovering their own innate talents can produce remarkable readings from anybody. Basically, one palm and its pattern of lines and crosses is a blueprint of what you came into the world with, and the other palm indicates what you are doing with it. A very skilled reader can even do something that Western astrology and numerology cannot. He or she can predict the year of the death of the body whose hand is being read.
A very famous Indian swami whom I met, suddenly developed a serious heart condition. His doctors, one of whom I know, thought that he was dead. To their surprise he suddenly sat up and asked them why they weren’t attending the current program. His devotees all thought that he was on the way out and were miserable about it. He was not, because he had in fact been sent back from the gates of death, as it were, by his own deceased guru to finish a job.
When a very accomplished palmist/acupuncturist from Chicago visited the ashram in Ganeshpuri the swami asked the palmist to read his palm and tell him when he was going to die. This was for the benefit of the devotees who were thereby assured that their guru wasn’t going to drop dead in front of them within the week. This particular palmist used an inking technique to get a perfect imprint of the palms that he could study carefully and at leisure, and keep in a professional collection for reference.
By one of those coincidences that the Celestine Prophecies made common knowledge, I just happened to hear about that particular practitioner in Chicago and went to him for some acupuncture. He talked about how people didn’t have any idea of what it was, and said that he had only ever seen one article in the public media that explained it correctly from his viewpoint. When he showed it to me I laughed out loud. It was an article I had written some months before in the Contemporary Times. Then we got to talking seriously and found that he and I at that time both shared the same guru. He gave me Xeroxed copies of the palm prints. That’s how I found out about the ‘Tell me when I’m going to die” story.
But such practitioners are rare indeed, I certainly did not have the effortless access to the subconscious to be able to read a palm. And often, those gifted practitioners do not remain at the same level of proficiency as mundane affairs interfere with their psychic gifts. We all know about people like mediums whose public EXPECT them to perform. Sometimes the temptation to cheat rather than admit that they can’t it on that particular day is too great. Then the skeptics of the world point out that it’s all fraudulent.
Joel Goldsmith, the amazing preacher and healer, used to wait for the message before he spoke. On more than one occasion, in front of a large audience waiting for his sermon, he said, “Nothing is coming through today. I’ll see you next week.” Such integrity is difficult for mere smear humans to evince.
OK, Retournons à nos moutons, as the French say. Let’s get back to the sheep. I strayed off the path a little, but readers of this blog doubtless found something interesting in my meandering.
Before computers were available to do the pretty intricate calculations necessary I used to prepare natal charts by hand for astrology clients. So I found out a lot about the ins and outs of astrological forecasting, Western fashion. The client chart is usually circular with the planets, the horizon and other astrologically important data on it. The chart is divided into houses, and the astrologer would look at my chart and say, “He’s got four planets in Capricorn in the second house.” Then knowing the ‘meanings’ that astrology gives the planets, and the ‘meanings’ that astrology gives to the second house, he would be able to say something about me. The Capricorn is the sign of the zodiac that those planets were in, according to the protocol of astrology.
If those planets made specific angles with other planets then the astrologer could say something more. Planets around ninety degrees to one other, using the arc of the circle would indicate stress occurring between the factors that the planets signified. An angle of one hundred and twenty, or sixty would show an ease occurring between the factors.
And so it would go on. Specific degrees round the circle were more important than others. If one of your planets was very close to one of these angles it made a difference to the reading. Nodes of the Moon would help those who knew how to compare previous and past lives. Everything below the horizon would imply an introverted personality. If the majority of planets were above the horizon the personality would likely be more extraverted. Planets in the left or right side of the circle indicated a reaping or a sowing incarnation. Thousands of data are in a natal chart for an accomplished astrologer.
My problem with astrology began with the system of dividing the chart into houses. The English system gives each house exactly thirty degrees. Twelve equal houses and the circle is complete. This was called the Equal House system. Many astrologers when I was working on charts used a house division system invented centuries ago by a mathematically competent monk named Placidus. In this system you might find more than one sign of the zodiac or portions of a sign, in a House. The Houses are not all thirty degrees in width. The reason that so many of the old books used the Placidus system, was that he was the first to publish tables to help with the calculations.
I’m not knocking Placidus. His spherical trigonometry was fine, and not everyone in the twenty first century can solve triangles on a sphere that are made of three curved sides and can have an angle sum of greater than 180 degrees. His tables made life quite a bit easier for the calculator.
But when I got deeper into the work I found that Carl Jung used the Koch House system to guide him in his client analysis. He found it worked better for psychological purposes than Placidus. When I began to correlate the meanings of the Tarot trumps with the planets and zodiac in the chart I found that Porphyry and Koch Houses gave results that correlated with the client much better than old Placidus. Porphyry incidentally was the disciple of one of the greatest of third century mystics, Plotinus.
Incidentally, the Tarot system is amazing. By replacing the planets and zodiac signs with the Tarot cards that correlate to them you can instantly see which parts of the client’s personality are at war with one another, and which are cooperating. If two planets are square to each other, i.e. about ninety degrees apart then the two cards that correspond to them tell you which parts of their personality need to be reconciled. And the meanings of the cards give reams of tested information. For professional counselors the method is a gold mine of useful and easily picked up information for those who know the Kabbalah based Tarots.
But the number of different House systems disturbed me, being a left brain dominant. I sometimes did a single chart using eight of the different House systems currently in use. The differences in the chart were significant to me at any rate. In some charts my four planets in Capricorn were split between houses, and that affects the interpretation.
Now I know that clients of Freud had Freudian dreams, and clients of Jung had Jungian dreams. I knew that a client of Jung had once complained at the start of his treatment,
“But I never dream.” “You will” replied Jung grimly, and he did. So maybe the people who used Placidus automatically acquired the clients for whom Placidus was best. Such psychic sorting out is common in the metaphysical worlds, particularly among Tarot readers, with dozens of different decks out there. But for someone like me, to whom reading a chart was a severe intellectual labor, it was not good to have all those house systems.
I have right brained friends who can pick up a chart they’ve never seen before and right off the top of their heads read the character and near future of the client. So I know it’s possible for others, those who pick up ALL the stuff on a chart like I pick up all the stuff in a photograph, thousands of bits of information, put together in a fraction of a second into a family portrait or a landscape.
And that wasn’t all. There is the necessity of an accurate date and place of birth. Not everyone is holding a stop watch and anxious to see exactly the moment when the baby draws its first breath. And when I did charts for clients in Illinois I had a data base of the hospitals, because some of them, not all, used Central Standard Time all year. Even an accurate time from one of these hospitals might be an hour off, and a lot of things can change in an hour on a chart. Planets can slip across a cusp into another house, angles that were significant may change. And then there are some wranglers and debaters who think that the baby is a person at the moment of conception. Only two fanatical astrology buffs are likely to know that data for the child, and remember that a Japanese baby is counted as nine months old on the day of birth.
There was too much to go wrong for this intellectual in the reading of the chart. The intuitive chart reader might not even notice these problem, because he or she automatically drew from the collective unconscious the necessary corrections. It would not bother such an intuitive that the baby was born on board ship at the exact moment when it crossed the International Date Line. The bow of the ship might be in Wednesday and the stern in Tuesday. That would bother me.
So though I acknowledge without constraint that amazing right brained astrologers like Maritha Pottenger, or the very intellectual Robert Hand, or intuitive Liz Greene can deal with such matters easily, and that galactic minds like Dane Rudhyar could deal in centuries with ease, I couldn’t, and needed another system that gave good or even excellent results, depended on the same or similar archetypes as astrology and was more straightforward for a four planets in Capricorn person. I found it in Pythagorean numerology, about which I will tell you in a future posting.
All the astrologers I’ve mentioned have written excellent books about the multifaceted subject of astrology. Maritha has her Masters in clinical psychology and many other qualifications. Maritha’s mother is the famous astrologer Zipporah Dobyns , another clinical psychologist whose name I have mentioned with reference to her charts of Jesus. Her system of reading charts is called the Zip code. Robert Hand is dedicated to showing the connections between science and astrology. Liz Green has a doctorate in psychology and is a qualified Jungian analyst. These are not lightweight people.
And for those who are put off by what may possibly be a scholarly approach to the subject simply by the caliber of the people, I can recommend The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astrology, and the inspirational The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest. Just Google and Amazon and you’ll have plenty of information about any or all of them.
