How to Learn Astrology, Part 3
Welcome back to the third part of a series on how to learn astrology the old-fashioned, tedious, and, on occasion, mind-numbingly boring way. In this part, we’ll cover some practices to begin turning your newfound knowledge into wisdom. If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, make sure to do that first before going on (you can find them here).
Astrology, as I’ve opined before, is best approached with some kind of spiritual mindset. As a spiritual and not a religious discipline, astrology itself is entirely blind as to what religion or spirituality you practice. There are Christian astrologers, Muslim astrologers, Hindu astrologers, Hellenic Polytheist astrologers, and Druid astrologers, just to name a few. All of these religions and spiritual paths are compatible with astrology, and all of them reward an astrological interpretation of their scriptures, myths, and philosophies with a wealth of insights. Astrology itself can also be a fulfilling spiritual path, of course. Still, whether as a complementary framework or on its own, as a spiritual discipline, it stands to reason that some tools developed for spiritual advancement can benefit the practical study of astrology. In this post we’ll examine two of them.
The first of our tools is discursive meditation, a traditional Western meditation technique which trains the mind to understand the meaning of an idea by thinking in an orderly manner about it. To discourse is to talk, and discursive meditation often takes the form of a dialogue with yourself on a predetermined topic. It requires no special equipment other than a chair, a quiet place to sit, a clock, a notebook and pen, and fifteen to twenty minutes a day. It has many benefits, some of which are not obvious, and the drawbacks are generally merely those which result from thinking carefully about a topic. If discursive meditation interests you, read the following instructions and try incorporating it into your daily routine for at least several weeks.
Sit with your feet flat on the floor and your palms flat on your thighs. Your back should be straight and relaxed, as if you were being pulled very slightly upwards by a string extending from the crown of your head. Tilt your head very slightly downwards. You may choose to meditate with eyes open, in which case they should be in soft focus and looking at nothing in particular, or shut. Your clock should be somewhere in your field of vision, so that you can glance at it without moving your head; if you prefer meditating with your eyes closed, set an unobtrusive timer which won’t disturb you if it keeps going off for thirty seconds or so. For the first week of your practice, sit completely still in this posture for five minutes every day.
Unless you have prior experience with some form of meditation, this is likely to be very uncomfortable. You’ll notice right away that you have all sorts of aches and pains and mysterious tensions which demand that you move your body to address them. Ignore this impulse. Instead, pay attention to the affected area and imagine it relaxing. With practice, you’ll find that the tension dissolves physically as well as in your consciousness.
When your five minutes are up, immediately write down your thoughts in your notebook. Do this in reverse chronological order; if the last thought which went through your mind before the timer went off was that I’m full of it and that paying attention to aches and pains doesn’t make them go away in the least, write that down first. Then, ask yourself what happened immediately before that, and before that, until you’ve traced the chain of your thoughts all the way back to the beginning of your meditation session. Why did you think I’m full of it? Because you were paying attention to your scalp, which was stubbornly itching. Why did you pay attention to your scalp? Because you remembered that you didn’t have time to shower last night, and your hair needs washing. (If you have any new insights during the process, write those down too.) This should take you about five minutes for a total of ten minutes of practice every day.
Next week, you’ll add breathing to your practice. The foundational breath used in discursive meditation is usually called the Fourfold Breath, or square breathing, and it’s done in this way. Take a smooth, even breath while internally counting to four; without closing your airway, hold this breath while counting to four again; exhale smoothly and steadily for another cycle of four; and keep your lungs empty, again with an open airway, for the final count of four. Focus on your breathing as you do so. Add this to your daily meditation practice: relax for five minutes, spend five minutes breathing, then write your thoughts down afterwards.
When you notice your attention wandering during these preliminary exercises, gently refocus it on your body or your breathing, according to whichever you’re doing at the time. If you are using a timer, don’t jump to shut it off when it rings; instead, perform one or two more square breaths and then move deliberately to end your meditation. In square breathing, I find it pleasing to my sense of rhythm to count the phases as well as the numbers. Thus, breathing in becomes “one, two, three, four,” holding the inhaled breath becomes “two, two, three, four,” and so on. (Incidentally, this is how 4/4 time is counted in music.) It is very important to keep the airway open while holding your inhaled or exhaled breath. A simple way to do this is to actually continue to breathe in a very small stream of air during the second phase , and to continue to exhale a small amount of air after you think you’ve emptied your lungs during the fourth. When you are confident in doing this, switch to only imagining that you continue to breathe in or out during the appropriate phases. You may eventually omit this visualization entirely.
In the third week, you’ll finally add a topic. Discursive meditation works best on short themes: a single sentence, phrase, or word is excellent. Choose one of your keywords for one astrological element. For the sake of demonstration, let’s choose Venus, and we’ll say the single meaning I assign to Venus is ‘peace.’
Prepare to meditate as usual. Spend the first ten minutes relaxing and doing square breathing; eventually, you’ll be able to relax more quickly, but you should always aim to do five minutes or so of square breathing before meditation. When about ten minutes have passed, let your breath return to normal and turn your mind to your subject. In this case, it’s the planet Venus and the meaning ‘peace.’ Explore the meanings of Venus and of peace in your thoughts, and what it means for them to be related to each other. Ask yourself questions related to your subject. Follow chains of associations that your mind turns up. At the end, take a few more square breaths, then write down your thoughts in reverse order, beginning with the last thought you had about your theme and ending at the first.
When your mind wanders, as it inevitably will, trace your chain of thoughts back until you arrive at your topic. You’ve had two weeks of practice doing this already in writing. Now, when you realize that you’re thinking about your grocery list and not Venus, simply ask yourself why you were thinking about your grocery list, and so on. At first you may spend about one minute in an entire meditation session thinking about your topic, and the rest of it getting distracted and redirecting your thoughts back to the subject. This is normal, and valuable mental training.
Spend at least two or three sessions on each subject you choose. There is no upper limit; you can continue to explore a theme until your mind runs out of material. After a week, increase your meditation time to ten minutes. When you feel ready, you may increase the time you spend meditating further. Keep in mind that, depending on the level of detail you like to use in your meditation journal (as your notebook will soon become), you may have to also increase the time allotted for writing afterwards. Meditate on each of the meanings you assigned to the basic astrological elements, and when you run out of those, choose any material that you like. If you can’t find any, your astrological textbook is a good source of themes.
You do not need to fully complete this process before going on. At three sessions per subject, meditating on all forty-six keywords you chose will take you upwards of four months, not to mention the time spent learning to meditate, if it’s not already part of your spiritual practice. It is enough to solidly establish meditation as part of your routine and to have a few sessions of meditation on a single concept under your belt before adding more elements of daily practice.
For the second tool in our toolbox, we’ll turn to the work of the 13th-century Catholic missionary Ramon Llull. Llull wanted to prove the basic doctrines of his faith logically, and he set about devising a way to do it: the ars combinatoria, or combinatorial art. On its most basic level, the Art, as he called it, is composed of two concepts: a set of principles and a set of questions. The principles are composed of what Llull considered the basic attributes of God, such as goodness, greatness, and so on. The questions are a corresponding set of questions such as whether, who, and what. (Anyone who remembers the basic journalistic questions from English class will find this familiar.) Each of these questions are applied to each of the principles; whether goodness, whose goodness, and so forth.
Let’s put this into practice. The full list of nine principles are: goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, and glory. To each of these principles, we’ll assign one letter of the alphabet, so that A represents goodness, B greatness, and so on. Imagine each of these letters, uppercase, evenly spaced around a circle in your mind’s eye. Move around the circle through the alphabet, and at each letter, recall the associated principle. After you get to I, pause, and then recall the same things in reverse, so that you end at A and goodness. After a round of this, you should have a solid visualization of the circle of letters.
To be clear, visualization doesn’t mean seeing a colorful picture behind your closed eyelids; it refers to the active faculty of the imagination, which we all can develop. If you think you can’t visualize, take any image–a standing stone in a Druid circle, perhaps–and imagine how it would appear to you if you could visualize it. Take a moment and try it now. The perception which just crossed your mind–whether that was a memory, a sound, an emotional association, or a sense of spatial position just outside your conscious awareness–is your visualization of a standing stone in a Druid circle. The more you practice visualization, the better you’ll become at it.
Once you’ve established your visualization of the first circle, add a second inside the first, composed of the lowercase letters a through i. The series of questions are: whether (is it?), what (what is it?), from, why, how much, which, when, where, how, and with what. Assign each of these interrogatives to the second circle of letters in turn, placing both of the last under i. Once you have a solid visualization of these two circles, imagine the second, inner circle rotating, like a wheel, counterclockwise, while the first, outer wheel remains still. You don’t have to imagine literal motion for this; it’s enough to keep the letter A in your perception, select the letter b from the second wheel, and recall to mind what the combination Ab represents. As it happens, that stands for the principle of goodness and the question of what, or to restate it more clearly, what is its goodness?
The obvious question is: what is what’s goodness? What we need is a subject, something we can perform the combinatorial art on. Llull, a devout Catholic, was interested in exploring the nature of God and the universe; as astrologers, we’re interested in a slightly less expansive set of subjects, chiefly in the planets, signs, and house. Let’s begin with one of the planets, and following on our previous example, we’ll choose Venus. To represent this, add the astrological glyph of the planet Venus to your visualization, placing it at the center. Now that we have a subject, the question naturally becomes: what is the goodness of Venus?
Consider this question for a little while. Make the attempt to answer it yourself, based on what you know of Venus from your studies so far. Once you’ve made a serious attempt, turn the second wheel again, until you’ve asked yourself all the combinations of questions from Aa to Ii, remembering that the lowercase letter i represents two questions. You may wish to go back to answer the first combination of whether Venus is good (as it turns out, yes: she’s a benefic). As you gain facility with the art, you may wish to skip combinations with obvious answers and go directly to more interesting ones, or to move freely backwards and forwards within the wheels. However you go about it, at the end of your exploration, you will have learned a great deal about your subject: and, by the way, each of these principle-question-subject combinations makes an excellent theme for a session of discursive meditation.
Those eagle-eyed of my readers may have made the intuitive leap from Llull’s combinatorial art to another art of wheels within wheels. They would be correct: astrology is combinatorial. The terrestrial houses form the fixed outer wheel; the zodiacal signs form the second, which rotates within the former; and the planets inhabit the innermost wheel. Worlds of interpretation open up when a chart is studied in this way. Since this is a series for the beginning astrologer, however, we’ll have to leave our discussion there for now.
As previously mentioned, there’s no need to master either of these techniques before continuing your studies. Both discursive meditation and the combinatorial art can be lifelong pursuits on their own. However, if you take up one or both of these practices, you’ll very likely start seeing results after a shorter time. The applications of these systems can extend far beyond the study of astrology; they can also be used in the simple ways I’ve outlined here and still produce noteworthy results. Give them a try and see if they work for you. Next time, we’ll get back to astrology proper and establish the daily practice of reading a chart.