In all my years of practicing our mysterious craft, I have never once met anyone who possessed these two qualities at the same time – they didn’t believe in astrology and they knew a damned thing about it. Seeing this pair of conditions operating in the same person would be like finding a blind Uber driver or an astronaut with a big fear of heights. They’re unicorns. They don’t exist. 

Once we give astrology a chance to prove itself, its efficacy simply can’t be denied. 

Just this week I did a reading for a woman who teaches breastfeeding. Her chart shows a Cancer Midheaven. Chance? I just got a sad message about an old friend who died before her time. Saturn had just touched her Ascendant. Chance? As any astrologer knows from experience, the list goes on and on. All you need is an open mind. Give astrology the opportunity and it proves itself to you – or to anyone. In the right hands, it never fails. 

Many intelligent, thoughtful human beings disbelieve in astrology. I wouldn’t shame them for that. They come by their disbelief innocently. Some of it is just what they were trained to parrot from an early age, at least if they wanted to make A’s in 6th grade science class. Some of it is that strange shibboleth that we call “common sense.” After all, the premise that the planets “control us” does seem implausible – they’re millions of miles away, so how could they possibly affect anyone? Why would they? And so forth. 

On the face of it, astrology truly doesn’t seem to make any sense. Neither do quantum mechanics nor the theory of relativity, yet both of them are apparently true too. The irony is that what actually doesn’t make sense is “common sense” itself. Many quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein without him ever having said them. Here’s one that he actually “sort of” said – “Common sense is everything you were taught to believe before you were eighteen years old.” I checked – a statement along those lines appeared without quotation marks in a May 1948 issue of Harper’s Magazine, so it was a writer’s recollection of Einstein’s words in an interview. The point is that Einstein was right – and let’s just add that most of us were “taught to believe” that astrology was bogus “before we were eighteen years old.”

While I’m quoting people, here comes a line from Napoleon. “History is a lie agreed upon.” Let’s generalize Napoleon’s observation and see if we can corral the term, “common sense” a bit more precisely. Try this: common sense itself is a lie agreed upon. Each age and each culture has such a construction and each one teaches its children to believe it. We don’t live in reality; we live in a description of reality which we carry around between our ears and which stands between us and the actualities of the world, and it’s something we inherit from those who have gone before us. 

Seventy years ago I learned that boys don’t cry and girls do. That was part of the description of the world in which I grew up. Try beating that gender-drum nowadays. You’ll win a free membership in the flat earth society.

The point is that there’s reality, and then there’s consensual reality. The two often have a tenuous relationship. In our present version of consensual reality – the current cultural “lie agreed upon” – randomness rules the universe. There’s no underlying purpose in anything. Materialism reigns supreme – and materialism is not just about the love of money. Ultimately materialism is the belief that we are these material objects that we call our bodies. And when they die, you die. 

Humans have not always thought that way! Many do not think that way even today. 

Existentialism reigns too – and that’s the notion that there is no fundamental, transcendent meaning or purpose to life at all. Any meaning we find in it is our own creation rather than a spiritual discovery of something that is actually there, built into life itself. As master-existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” 

Dark words! Not everyone is so bitter – still, a sense of randomness and pointlessness underlies much of “common sense” as we encounter it in the world today. An evening spent channel-surfing among sitcoms will quickly prove it. Laugh or cry, but there’s no getting around it: ask any “normal, commonsensical” person in the modern world” – shit happens. 

If history teaches us anything it is that each century and each society has its own version of consensual reality – and each one of them looks “obviously wrong” from the point of view of the rest of them. Meanwhile, those who adhere to the party line about whatever passes for reality at a given time in a given culture are deemed to be sane and grounded. Those who question it are viewed as flaky.

WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ASTROLOGY?

Are astrologers flaky? Obviously, the answer depends on who you ask, but even though we are chipping away at the anti-astrology prejudice, the notion that we are all a little soft in the head is of course still pervasive in the mainstream of society.

Yet astrology works. And the implications of that simple fact are earth-shaking. They go way beyond the scope of some “new discovery” that we can simply file away as a footnote – something like adding a new heavy element to the periodic table or discovering evidence of an ancient temple buried in a jungle somewhere. The implications of astrology actually working do for “reality” what Albert Einstein did for 19th century physics. They shatter the dominant paradigm, along with its assumption of randomness as a fundamental law of nature. They leave our present version of consensual reality looking like a shipwreck on a cold, forlorn beach in Greenland. 

Think about it. Maybe in June 2024, with Neptune passing through the last degree of Pisces, you met someone who deceived you. Maybe when you were born, Venus was in the last degree of Pisces too, so Neptune (in the sky) was hitting Venus (in your chart). In that case at least, the fortune-teller was right – someone tricked you, right on schedule. 

So did Neptune “cause” that person to come into your life? Some astrologers still talk like that, but they sound like those 19th century physicists. When that romantic trainwreck happened, Neptune was almost three billion miles away. Talk about a perfect alibi! Neptune didn’t “cause” that meeting in the same physical way that “every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.” It wasn’t “science,” at least as we currently understand it. Neptune hitting your Venus correlated meaningfully with that event. It’s about synchronicity rather than causality.  

And the simple fact of synchronicity knocks the legs out from under consensual reality as it exists today. That’s because – and I am being totally literal here – synchronicity makes the universe meaningful. You can read the world like a book. It speaks to you. Your intimate life is connected to the sky – and of course, it works backwards too: the sky is connected to your intimate life. 

Oneness. Everything is connected. A Higher Intelligence governs everything that happens in the Universe.

Am I sounding flaky yet?

Even the dumbest kind of astrology does the same trick – and offers the same gift. Somebody might say, “Of course I’m loony sometimes – I’m a Sagittarian!” Or “of course I’m picky and critical – I’m a Virgo!” That kind of astrology is hardly helpful, inspiring, or even reliably accurate – but it too assumes that there is a meaningful connection between your mind and the sky. Even the shallowest, silliest forms of astrology connect us meaningfully and personally to the cosmos.

Delving a little deeper, here’s a fact no one can escape: you’ve had your chart since the day you were born. So, back to our example:  Your Venus has been sitting there, right at the end of Pisces, ever since then. According to “common sense,” at least as it’s currently dished out, we meet people “by chance.” Some of us get lucky, others don’t. And yet back when you were born, any astrologer could have looked at your chart and seen that Neptune would be crossing your Venus in June 2024 – and told you to watch out for “Neptunian” people coming into your life around then.

So was that fateful meeting predictable or did it happen by random chance? 

We’ve actually already answered that question – if the astrologer predicted it years in advance, how could that meeting possibly be understood as “random and unpredictable?” Hey, it was predicted! Anyone who can’t follow the logic there isn’t going to be invited to join the gifted and talented program. 

Going a mile deeper, you learned something from that bad relationship – well, maybe. Astrologers could help you tip those scales in the right direction. Sit with evolutionary astrologers and they can help you see the purpose in any event. Sit with them in advance and they have the power to not only “see that Neptunian person coming from a mile away” – but also to help prepare you with the right questions and the right cautions. Those astrologers can help you learn what you need to learn, in other words. Even better, maybe they can help you learn it the easy way rather than the hard way. They can help you sort out the “good Neptunians” from the toxic ones.

All of that might sound like an infomercial for evolutionary astrology and in some ways it is, but that’s not really my point. The point is that, for you, there is at least the potential of a meaningful breakthrough in wisdom built into that Neptune transit. 

• And since it all could have been spelled out two minutes after you were born, the idea that luck and randomness had anything to do with it is logically indefensible. 

When Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance,” he was simply incorrect. If Sartre were right, astrology would not work. And it does. See what I meant by the fact that astrology works leaving our present version of consensual reality looking like a shipwreck on a cold, forlorn beach in Greenland?

Astrology is holy work, and not only because we are helping individuals make the most of their lives. That alone would be enough. But we are doing so much more. With every consultation we do, we offer one more soul a bit more freedom from the soulless illusions of this digitally-addled age. At some point down the road, one of those people whose lives we are touching will become the famous “hundredth monkey.” The cultural scales will tip. Astrology – and the larger philosophical framework it represents – will triumph. Why? Because it’s true, and because generally truth outlasts lies.

On that happy day, once again human children will learn at their parents’ knees that they were born into a meaningful universe, and born here for a reason. Even better, they’ll learn that astrology and everything it represents isn’t a “religion.” They don’t have to accept that belief on faith, in other words. These truths are robust. They can stand any scrutiny anyone wants to throw at them. 

If anyone doubts it, all they need is to have an honest conversation with that sacred map of the sky as it appeared at the instant of their birth. It can win any argument, whether it happens in a science classroom, a place of worship, or in your own head. 

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