Astrology and Spirituality
The very first post on this site is a post about the Catholic church's hypocritical rejection of astrology. I've also written elsewhere that I think a lot of what is in the Christian Bible is not really rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ but is more about other people projecting onto him what they wished to see.
I'm not a huge fan of religion but I've thought a lot about what constructive purpose it can or does play in society when it's, you know, going well and not some awful debacle. I think what it TRIES to do (and probably mostly fails at) is deal with a person's inner reality.
Whatever your earliest, formative life experiences are, we all have biases and blind spots, like those cats raised by scientists to only see either horizontal or vertical lines but not both. I write elsewhere about my hypothesis that women get raised to have a private sphere life and men get raised to have a public sphere life and my opinion that this is a large part of the "gender as social construct" thing that gets in the way of forward progress for equal rights for both "default" genders, which is usually framed as women's rights but that fact implicitly overlooks the things men miss out on in life.
Yes, I am aware of trans issues, etc. I write ELSEWHERE about LGBTQ issues. We just don't yet have good linguistical constructs for EASILY being FULLY inclusive in that regard.
I have read that when women cross-dress, they are merely social climbing. They seek male money and power. But when men cross-dress, they are seeking to be in touch with the divine.
Which perhaps explains a few things. Women get expected to do so-called emotional labor "out of the goodness of their hearts" and people seem to MISS that all that "free" stuff moms do is really part of a deeply embedded social contract to exchange their labor for material comfort. It's their JOB to care for their husband and children and to some extent other people, it's just a job that doesn't come with a paycheck PER SE.
And we turn a blind eye to that. People get offended at the idea that mom is trading her labor for money and this willful denial of reality causes a lot of problems.
We think "love" is supposed to be free and unconditional and it's crazy talk. My own children had to point out to me that the "uncondtional" motherly love that so many people crave in life, presumably for not having REALLY gotten it in childhood, is HIGHLY conditional.
It is given on the condition that you be her CHILD (whether biologically or by adoption).
Maya Angelou spoke of people having "a PLACE" inside themselves and that she raised her son with this understanding and it made him more challenging for his step-fathers to deal with because he had a deep sense of self respect which did not cave to pressure when he was in trouble.
I think her idea there was about people having a private self and private experiences that other people CANNOT know and you need to honor that fact -- that you don't have perfect knowledge of another person, even if you live with them and know them well. And her framing of it struck me as a kind of spiritual thing (and I apologize to people more familiar with her views who likely think I'm butchering something).
For her, this was an essential part -- or so I gather -- of the need to treat people with dignity and to accept interpersonal friction with as much aplomb as possible. My view: That source of friction may be rooted in them knowing something critical about an issue to which you are NOT privy and maybe they don't even know how to share it or that they need to share it.
My first blog was a parenting blog and I persist in trying to figure out how to blog about parenting. My impression is I did well with raising my kids in part because I saw them as having knowledge about their little bodies and their lives that I did not have, even though I was a full-time parent.
Somewhat like what I once heard Maya Angelou say in an interview about her son having this PLACE inside himself and it making him a challenge for his step-fathers, I felt my kids had to be treated with dignity and respect and not like "Mom KNOWS BEST and you need to DO AS YOU ARE TOLD."
I would like to think that I always had this enlightened, respectful approach to parenting. Maybe I kind of did but it was firmed up tremendously when my oldest was about two years old and I did the stereotypical thing of make him eat his lunch because I was in a hurry to get somewhere and thirty minutes later he threw up all over me in a highly memorable fashion.
After that I was much, much stricter about being respectful of my children's boundaries. Like maybe they know something about their little body that I don't know and they are just too young to articulate it. Their knowledge of themselves should not be simply disregarded due to them being so young they can't TELL me verbally and me imagining that I know best even though I clearly do not have complete knowledge of the situation.
I blog to try to help other parents cope more effectively in the face of tough things but also I think helping parents do right by their kids in the early years is the best way to make a better future. I think it's the easiest and most effective means to create a better world.
But even assuming I REALLY have superior answers for thorny parenting issues and even assuming I could get traction, which so far I haven't, helping parents do a better job doesn't fix everything. There will always be people who had something unfortunate happen to them in early childhood and who are trying to figure out how to find a constructive path forward.
So what do you do about that reality? And how does society deal effectively with that?
And I think that's kind of one of the things religion tries to do -- or at least Christianity. I think the framing of "our Father who art in heaven" is about some idealized parent who can fix your life when things went wrong with your REAL parents here on Earth.
It's this NEBULOUS idea, like our NEBULOUS idea that "women do things out of the goodness of their hearts because they CARE" which overlooks the reality that all that caring is WORK and it's WORK for which women expect to get PAID in some sense. Marrying well is the "gold standard" expectation for how a woman can achieve the material comforts of The Good Life in a man's world.
Religion -- or at least CHRISTIANITY -- seems to involve a lot of magical thinking. You pray and your prayers are answered "magically" and there isn't a lot of thought put into HOW that happens.
It seems to be seen as just a freebie. And I've actually thought about "Well, if that WORKS, where does it COME FROM?"
So, like, if you are desperately in need of money and you FIND money on the ground, COOL! But someone had to drop it, right?
So if your prayers really can MAKE that money come into your life, is someone ELSE being shafted because YOU found the money you needed? Did an angel pluck it out of their pocket and leave it on the ground for you to find?
If so, is that ethical? Assuming prayer REALLY WORKS to draw things to you that you need, how do you pray ethically and not just use it as a magical means to rob people and feel good about it?
Christianity talks a lot about "I was lost and then I was found" and forgiveness and redemption. And I think what it tries to address is the needs of people with unfortunate childhoods who weren't raised right, who were abused, who grew up with bad mental models and I think it does it badly.
What I have found is that the knowledge I have from sorting my own personal problems and from raising two special-needs sons is useful knowledge that can be helpful to other people who didn't get a good start in life. But it's REALLY tough to try to help them.
Like a drowning man desperate for help, such people tend to cling to me and do so in a manner that threatens to destroy ME.
So I think religion is kind of society trying to find some means to tell unfortunate people where they can go for help and NOT become a nightmare problem for some poor well-meaning FOOL who would like to help them but doesn't know how OR does know how BUT even if you know how it's a big problem if you do it "out of the goodness of your heart" and not as their paid therapist or something.
Historically, pastors were counselors and often still are. Both of my therapists were men of the cloth.
So your pastor is supposed to be someone who actually CARES about you and isn't just in it for the money but it's a professional role and that comes with expectations that limit how much people expect from the relationship. And I don't have those protections.
People just think I will move in with them even if they live thousands of miles away. People think I'm supposed to give ENDLESSLY and that I'm not allowed to set boundaries and say "No, I've given you as much as you are going to personally get from me."
So I consciously CHOSE to not try to become some kind of "mystic" and I continue to try to figure out "Well, if religion isn't the answer to people fixing their lives who didn't get the best start in life or who had a tragedy at some point, what is?" and I think the answer is, in part, ART (in the broadest sense of the word -- paintings, music, movies, fiction, etc).
Here is a clip of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece which goes on for eight minutes and below is a shorter version of the same performance art piece. I don't know much about the lady, but this piece intrigues me. It's peformance art for the sake of evoking emotion, which is central to a lot of artistic or creative work, but it's much more explicit than most kinds of art that this is about a feeling or experience and it is unusual in being more obvious that you cannot know what is going on inside the people experiencing it.
You can't really know what that felt like to them from simply watching the piece. And I think that kind of evokes my impression of what Maya Angelou said about her son having "a PLACE" inside himself.
The subjective experience of the PARTICIPANTS who actually approached her and cut pieces off her clothes is likely a powerful experience. Watching it, at least for me, is not some big powerful thing, though the IDEA fascinates me.
I really like the piece in part because for me it captures the essential meaning of art. Art is like a substitute for a Vulcan Mind Meld. It is the artist being "naked" in public and trying to find some means to bridge the gap between their inner world and yours so as to share something that is very personal, so personal that in some contexts it's considered "religious" in nature.
Religion is about a public setting for talking about that very, very private "PLACE" inside each one of us. But I dislike a lot of the stuff that goes along with it, like expecting some OUTSIDE FORCE to magically take responsibility for your welfare and this idea that fixing deep problems will somehow magically be "free" and not cost anything.
Sometimes, people are able to speak effectively about things that "aren't normally discussed in polite society," like in this clip from the movie Dances with Wolves.
For me, astrology was useful in sorting my baggage from my childhood and it is part of a set of spiritual beliefs that help guide me without all the pitfalls of what I personally dislike about religion. In brief, this is what I have read about spiritual things associated with astrology:
I believe in karma -- that what goes around comes around -- but I also believe in something some texts call "dharma" though my understanding of what was meant differs from what a quick google of that word brings up.
Western texts I read in my youth basically simplified karma as "your bad deeds come back to bite you" and dharma as being similar to what Christians might call grace. A way out of negative patterns. A means to escape your personal hell via good character or good fortune rather than some kind of "cheating fate" even though you don't deserve it.
And I blog because writing is my art and it's my attempt to find some socially acceptable means to be naked in public as a means to try to share something meaningful "my mind to your mind" while establishing some kind of professional expectations and boundaries -- including an expectation that I should get paid for my work and not be treated like some mommy substitute who should love random strangers "like my own child" while getting nothing in return.
I'm not a huge fan of religion but I've thought a lot about what constructive purpose it can or does play in society when it's, you know, going well and not some awful debacle. I think what it TRIES to do (and probably mostly fails at) is deal with a person's inner reality.
Whatever your earliest, formative life experiences are, we all have biases and blind spots, like those cats raised by scientists to only see either horizontal or vertical lines but not both. I write elsewhere about my hypothesis that women get raised to have a private sphere life and men get raised to have a public sphere life and my opinion that this is a large part of the "gender as social construct" thing that gets in the way of forward progress for equal rights for both "default" genders, which is usually framed as women's rights but that fact implicitly overlooks the things men miss out on in life.
Yes, I am aware of trans issues, etc. I write ELSEWHERE about LGBTQ issues. We just don't yet have good linguistical constructs for EASILY being FULLY inclusive in that regard.
I have read that when women cross-dress, they are merely social climbing. They seek male money and power. But when men cross-dress, they are seeking to be in touch with the divine.
Which perhaps explains a few things. Women get expected to do so-called emotional labor "out of the goodness of their hearts" and people seem to MISS that all that "free" stuff moms do is really part of a deeply embedded social contract to exchange their labor for material comfort. It's their JOB to care for their husband and children and to some extent other people, it's just a job that doesn't come with a paycheck PER SE.
And we turn a blind eye to that. People get offended at the idea that mom is trading her labor for money and this willful denial of reality causes a lot of problems.
We think "love" is supposed to be free and unconditional and it's crazy talk. My own children had to point out to me that the "uncondtional" motherly love that so many people crave in life, presumably for not having REALLY gotten it in childhood, is HIGHLY conditional.
It is given on the condition that you be her CHILD (whether biologically or by adoption).
Maya Angelou spoke of people having "a PLACE" inside themselves and that she raised her son with this understanding and it made him more challenging for his step-fathers to deal with because he had a deep sense of self respect which did not cave to pressure when he was in trouble.
I think her idea there was about people having a private self and private experiences that other people CANNOT know and you need to honor that fact -- that you don't have perfect knowledge of another person, even if you live with them and know them well. And her framing of it struck me as a kind of spiritual thing (and I apologize to people more familiar with her views who likely think I'm butchering something).
For her, this was an essential part -- or so I gather -- of the need to treat people with dignity and to accept interpersonal friction with as much aplomb as possible. My view: That source of friction may be rooted in them knowing something critical about an issue to which you are NOT privy and maybe they don't even know how to share it or that they need to share it.
My first blog was a parenting blog and I persist in trying to figure out how to blog about parenting. My impression is I did well with raising my kids in part because I saw them as having knowledge about their little bodies and their lives that I did not have, even though I was a full-time parent.
Somewhat like what I once heard Maya Angelou say in an interview about her son having this PLACE inside himself and it making him a challenge for his step-fathers, I felt my kids had to be treated with dignity and respect and not like "Mom KNOWS BEST and you need to DO AS YOU ARE TOLD."
I would like to think that I always had this enlightened, respectful approach to parenting. Maybe I kind of did but it was firmed up tremendously when my oldest was about two years old and I did the stereotypical thing of make him eat his lunch because I was in a hurry to get somewhere and thirty minutes later he threw up all over me in a highly memorable fashion.
After that I was much, much stricter about being respectful of my children's boundaries. Like maybe they know something about their little body that I don't know and they are just too young to articulate it. Their knowledge of themselves should not be simply disregarded due to them being so young they can't TELL me verbally and me imagining that I know best even though I clearly do not have complete knowledge of the situation.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.There are studies that show things along the lines of "every dollar spent on improving life in early childhood saves five dollars down the line on things like incarcerating screwed up adults." Having had bad things happen to me in early childhood which substantially interfered with me getting the life I wanted as an adult, I made sure to protect my kids from similar trauma.
I blog to try to help other parents cope more effectively in the face of tough things but also I think helping parents do right by their kids in the early years is the best way to make a better future. I think it's the easiest and most effective means to create a better world.
But even assuming I REALLY have superior answers for thorny parenting issues and even assuming I could get traction, which so far I haven't, helping parents do a better job doesn't fix everything. There will always be people who had something unfortunate happen to them in early childhood and who are trying to figure out how to find a constructive path forward.
So what do you do about that reality? And how does society deal effectively with that?
And I think that's kind of one of the things religion tries to do -- or at least Christianity. I think the framing of "our Father who art in heaven" is about some idealized parent who can fix your life when things went wrong with your REAL parents here on Earth.
It's this NEBULOUS idea, like our NEBULOUS idea that "women do things out of the goodness of their hearts because they CARE" which overlooks the reality that all that caring is WORK and it's WORK for which women expect to get PAID in some sense. Marrying well is the "gold standard" expectation for how a woman can achieve the material comforts of The Good Life in a man's world.
Religion -- or at least CHRISTIANITY -- seems to involve a lot of magical thinking. You pray and your prayers are answered "magically" and there isn't a lot of thought put into HOW that happens.
It seems to be seen as just a freebie. And I've actually thought about "Well, if that WORKS, where does it COME FROM?"
So, like, if you are desperately in need of money and you FIND money on the ground, COOL! But someone had to drop it, right?
So if your prayers really can MAKE that money come into your life, is someone ELSE being shafted because YOU found the money you needed? Did an angel pluck it out of their pocket and leave it on the ground for you to find?
If so, is that ethical? Assuming prayer REALLY WORKS to draw things to you that you need, how do you pray ethically and not just use it as a magical means to rob people and feel good about it?
There's no such thing as a free lunch.I think the Christian mythos of God in heaven and Satan being his former right-hand man who decided "I would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven." is really some kind of metaphor for the heirarchical society that birthed this religion. Perhaps people dreamed such things, failed to see those images as symbols rooted in human psychology and, instead, concluded that God and Satan were REAL and yadda.
Christianity talks a lot about "I was lost and then I was found" and forgiveness and redemption. And I think what it tries to address is the needs of people with unfortunate childhoods who weren't raised right, who were abused, who grew up with bad mental models and I think it does it badly.
What I have found is that the knowledge I have from sorting my own personal problems and from raising two special-needs sons is useful knowledge that can be helpful to other people who didn't get a good start in life. But it's REALLY tough to try to help them.
Like a drowning man desperate for help, such people tend to cling to me and do so in a manner that threatens to destroy ME.
So I think religion is kind of society trying to find some means to tell unfortunate people where they can go for help and NOT become a nightmare problem for some poor well-meaning FOOL who would like to help them but doesn't know how OR does know how BUT even if you know how it's a big problem if you do it "out of the goodness of your heart" and not as their paid therapist or something.
Historically, pastors were counselors and often still are. Both of my therapists were men of the cloth.
So your pastor is supposed to be someone who actually CARES about you and isn't just in it for the money but it's a professional role and that comes with expectations that limit how much people expect from the relationship. And I don't have those protections.
People just think I will move in with them even if they live thousands of miles away. People think I'm supposed to give ENDLESSLY and that I'm not allowed to set boundaries and say "No, I've given you as much as you are going to personally get from me."
So I consciously CHOSE to not try to become some kind of "mystic" and I continue to try to figure out "Well, if religion isn't the answer to people fixing their lives who didn't get the best start in life or who had a tragedy at some point, what is?" and I think the answer is, in part, ART (in the broadest sense of the word -- paintings, music, movies, fiction, etc).
Here is a clip of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece which goes on for eight minutes and below is a shorter version of the same performance art piece. I don't know much about the lady, but this piece intrigues me. It's peformance art for the sake of evoking emotion, which is central to a lot of artistic or creative work, but it's much more explicit than most kinds of art that this is about a feeling or experience and it is unusual in being more obvious that you cannot know what is going on inside the people experiencing it.
You can't really know what that felt like to them from simply watching the piece. And I think that kind of evokes my impression of what Maya Angelou said about her son having "a PLACE" inside himself.
The subjective experience of the PARTICIPANTS who actually approached her and cut pieces off her clothes is likely a powerful experience. Watching it, at least for me, is not some big powerful thing, though the IDEA fascinates me.
I really like the piece in part because for me it captures the essential meaning of art. Art is like a substitute for a Vulcan Mind Meld. It is the artist being "naked" in public and trying to find some means to bridge the gap between their inner world and yours so as to share something that is very personal, so personal that in some contexts it's considered "religious" in nature.
Religion is about a public setting for talking about that very, very private "PLACE" inside each one of us. But I dislike a lot of the stuff that goes along with it, like expecting some OUTSIDE FORCE to magically take responsibility for your welfare and this idea that fixing deep problems will somehow magically be "free" and not cost anything.
Sometimes, people are able to speak effectively about things that "aren't normally discussed in polite society," like in this clip from the movie Dances with Wolves.
"It is not polite to speak of the dead, but you are new so I will tell you."
For me, astrology was useful in sorting my baggage from my childhood and it is part of a set of spiritual beliefs that help guide me without all the pitfalls of what I personally dislike about religion. In brief, this is what I have read about spiritual things associated with astrology:
- Your time and place of birth are chosen to fit with your soul state and reasons for incarnating.
- You are what might be called "a co-creator with God" in that what YOU wish to accomplish is factored into the equation, though it's not just some narcissistic thing driven ENTIRELY by what you want.
- It is part of a system of belief involving reincarnation and karma, so if you GET AWAY with behaving very badly in THIS LIFE, just wait. It will come back to bite you in your next life.
I believe in karma -- that what goes around comes around -- but I also believe in something some texts call "dharma" though my understanding of what was meant differs from what a quick google of that word brings up.
Western texts I read in my youth basically simplified karma as "your bad deeds come back to bite you" and dharma as being similar to what Christians might call grace. A way out of negative patterns. A means to escape your personal hell via good character or good fortune rather than some kind of "cheating fate" even though you don't deserve it.
And I blog because writing is my art and it's my attempt to find some socially acceptable means to be naked in public as a means to try to share something meaningful "my mind to your mind" while establishing some kind of professional expectations and boundaries -- including an expectation that I should get paid for my work and not be treated like some mommy substitute who should love random strangers "like my own child" while getting nothing in return.
