On June 1, 2021, at 9:21 pm-pdt in Santa Monica, California, my dear friends Linnea Miron and Ricky Williams had a little boy. They named him Sol Forrest Miron – and I bet that middle name caught your eye almost as quickly as it caught mine. Actually he’s named after me only in the sense of synchronicity. Linnea’s mom picked out the name from a list of possibilities. I’ve never met her nor at any time did I slip her a twenty dollar bill. But Sol and I do have a connection. I’m grandpa. Sometimes, with babies, you just know there’s karma there, just like with the adults you meet.

While pregnant with Sol, Linnea asked me one of those simple-sounding questions that sends you spiraling into questioning your basic understanding of the universe. Little Sol is a Gemini. Linnea wondered if he was a Gemini because he was born on June 1st, or the other way around? Was he born on June 1st because “he was already a Gemini in his soul” even though he hadn’t gotten around to being born yet?

I love questions like this one. They are so subversive, and what they subvert is my favorite target of them all: the dominant paradigm. Like it or not, we live in perhaps the most materialistic age humanity has ever experienced. That doesn’t only mean that everybody is out looking for money – avarice is definitely part of it, but materialism runs far deeper than that. Ultimately it is the core belief that we are nothing more than these bodies of flesh and bone, living in a push-and-shove, cause-and-effect universe, awaiting our expiration dates. Delete magic. Delete meaning. Delete miracles. 

There’s a rant in there, but I will spare you. I only preach this sermon for one reason – “everybody knows that it is obvious that'' Sol became a Gemini at the moment of his birth, and not a minute before. I mean, give us a break, how could he be a Gemini until he actually had a birthchart? And he didn’t have one before June 1, 2021 at 9:21 pm. End of story, case closed.

“Everybody knows” – those may be the two most dangerous words in the English language. Lurking inside them, like a dragon in a cave, is the voice of the dominant paradigm itself. As soon as “everybody knows” something, there is one point you can take to the bank – nobody is thinking very deeply about it anymore. 

There is another equally plausible way of thinking about Sol’s birth. Long before his first breath, his soul set an intention to be born with a certain chart. Nine months or so earlier, from his vantage point in the invisible realms, he – shall we say – inspired Ricky and Linnea to get particularly graphic about their affection for each other. Then as his appointed birthday approached, he waited in the womb for his moment to spring into physical existence. 

10, 9, 8, 7, 6 . . . you get the picture. 

Saying “his soul set the intention” to be born then has the ring of Western mysticism to it. If your philosophical tastes run more to curry than to filet mignon, we could make it sound more Eastern by saying that “the winds of karma” blew him into birth at that moment. Yet another way to say the same thing is that the changing astrological weather clicked into sync with his karmic necessities, and boom – there was Sol. He saw his opening and he shot for the basket. Personally, I doubt I would enjoy having dinner with anyone who wanted to argue which wording was closer to the way the angels would say it. For one thing, I doubt angels speak much English. It’s too crude a medium. 

Western or Eastern, these perspectives lean in one direction, and they offer a different answer to Linnea’s question than the “obvious” materialistic one. They imply that in some lofty sense Sol was a Gemini before he was born. Being born on June 1 just sort of dotted the “i” here on the material plane.

What about the first possibility – the materialistic one that makes “common sense” according to the current cause-and-effect world mythology? That Sol only became a Gemini at the moment that he was  born with that chart? Let’s not fall into the trap of using essentially “religious” arguments against a legitimate rational possibility. That’s the kind of thinking that brought us the Holy Inquisition. Let’s take a moment to listen to “logic and reason” – let’s just not let ourselves be blinded by them. 

There are some interesting arguments for that more “20th century” perspective – that Sol only became a Gemini when he was born. I explored a few of them in my book, The Night Speaks, where I looked carefully at the work of Percy Seymour from over in the U.K. He wrote a mind-boggling book called Astrology: The Evidence of Science. In it, he makes a compelling argument for a physical mechanism behind how astrology works. It’s a bit too thick with theory for me to dive into it deeply in this newsletter, but in a nutshell, Seymour envisions a triple-tiered system in which the ever-changing electromagnetic field of the solar system impacts the earth’s electromagnetic field – so far, so good: put one magnet near another and their fields shift as they interact. Then he imagines a baby being born – and the mother’s sack of amniotic fluid breaking. With the child in utero, that amniotic fluid had been conducting that electromagnetism to the embryo via the mother’s own energy field. Suddenly the baby is exposed in a new, independent way directly to earth’s electromagnetic field – which in turn reflects the current condition of the solar system in that precise moment rather than mom’s condition. The kid’s brain is then imprinted somehow with that cosmic signature, right there at the instant of birth.

I was impressed with Seymour’s argument. I like the way it graphically reflects the old pagan notion of how the sky is our Father and the earth is our Mother. I love how elegantly it addresses the age-old question of why we use the moment of birth rather than the moment of conception for our charts. But is it far-fetched? I honestly don’t have enough scientific education to say. To my layman’s ears, Percy Seymour’s work doesn’t sound any more far-fetched than quantum mechanics or superstring theory.

Here’s an easier argument for a science-side connection between mind and sky. These words are taken straight from The Night Speaks.

Like a great cathedral, the space between earth's surface and the ionosphere echoes with vibrating energy. The dominant resonant frequency of that sky-cavity happens to be about ten cycles per second.

Close your eyes. Relax. Be alert, but unfocused, not thinking, simply being. In other words, put your brain in neutral. Some call this state “meditation.” Pulsing waves of energy are resonating in your brain. That’s the famous “alpha rhythm,” known for its association with rejuvenation, relaxation, and creativity. 

Its frequency? About ten cycles per second, average.

A familiar figure. The alpha rhythm of the brain and the resonant frequency of the earth-ionosphere cavity are the same. They appear to be “entrained,” to introduce the technical term. Thus, by the same logic that the opera singer shatters the wine glass, the sky constantly feeds energy into the brain.

Why don't our brains shatter? Energy is bled out of the brain in the form of heat, metabolic processes, and thought.

There’s a lot more ground covered in The Night Speaks about the possible science underlying the observed fact that astrology works. I’ve not kept up with current research. Life is short and I have a sense of urgency about other things that are closer to my heart. If you’re interested, here’s a website that’ll get you going – https://www.astrologer.com/studies

So why does astrology work – and why was Sol born when he was born? Humans have been wondering about these questions for almost as long as we’ve been around. We still have no definitive answers. When in doubt, I personally lean toward the more metaphysical explanations – really the essence of astrology, at least the kind that I like to teach and practice, holds that you have the chart you have today for karmic reasons. That means that wheels turning in the pre-birth past led you to take birth as you did this time around. By that standard, Sol was at least in some kind of “proto-Gemini” state before that fateful day one year ago this month – he was born then because the solar system best reflected the preexisting needs of his soul in that exact moment of time and space. 

That view is in contrast to the more “modern” idea that he was more or less randomly “programmed” with a personality and a set of issues because he “happened” to be born on June 1, 2021.

Still, I think of Percy Seymour’s work – or the cathedral of space locked in resonance with your alpha rhythms . . . and I wonder. Might both perspectives hold some truth? They seem like opposites – but so are the ideas that light is a particle and light is wave. Yet we are taught that they are both true as well.

These kinds of paradoxes are woven into the fabric of the cosmos.

Just in case my metaphysical arguments might not seem as strong as the more scientific-sounding ones, let me put in one more idea on the table. I think this one is definitive, as well as practical, provable, and not requiring a scrap of faith.

• Charts can be set up for when a stock is first publicly traded – that’s basically the birth moment of a corporation. In the USA, they’re for the IPO – the initial public offering – which is always 9:30 am in New York City on a Monday. Those charts work like crazy. Astrological stock traders make a lot of money.
• Horary astrologers set up charts for questions – where did I leave my car keys? Those charts help you find your keys.
• Anything that happens has a chart. Set up a chart for your first meeting with someone or when you first discuss a business idea – boom, there’s a birthchart for that event. It responds to transits and progressions, aims you in good directions, warns you of stupid ones.

These three examples all share one point of common ground. In all three cases, there is no physical body to receive any electromagnetic vibrations. There is no physical “receiving station” for the astrological energies, and thus all purely physical explanations fizzle. We are left with synchronicity and all the mysteries it implies. 

Bottom line, next time you see a baby, don’t forget to marvel – and wonder.

Listen to the podcast version

Facebook Comments