Why the Universe isn't Gradually Unravelling

I was watching a BBC programme about entropy, the idea that the universe gets more disordered over time. As one scientist put it, in non-technical language it means things are getting worse. And I thought what a strange way of looking at the world.

I learned about entropy at school, but it wasn’t until more recently that I felt able to question accepted scientific theories. They are so battened down by proofs and equations and authority that it doesn’t seem like one can question them. This is probably the biggest fundamentalism of our age, every bit as rigid as the Islamists or Christians can get. And of course, if you are in it, you can’t see it.

The guy who came up with entropy, Ludwig Boltzmann, suffered from depression and eventually killed himself. I wonder if there is a connection. And what kind of culture is it that thinks things can only get worse? The eventual fate of the universe, according to this kind of thinking, is ‘Heat Death’, a vast cold empty nothingness.

My experience is NOT that things unravel over time. Our particular culture is making things worse, but that is particular to us. Just look at life, in its abundance and beauty and complexity. It has been there a long time. We are the babes of creation, the ones who do not know who they are and are making a mess. But our elder brothers and sisters, all the animals and plants – they don’t make things worse, they don’t make things gradually unravel, because they know how to live. They know about balance.

So, here is a big question: my experience is that the world does not unravel over time. But accepted scientific theory says it does. Which should I go with, and do I even have the right to think in this sort of way? And almost as a matter of principle I say we need to go with our experience, because if we can’t do that, then what do we have? It is part of the disempowerment, the brainwashing of our complex culture, that needs people to be productive and to conform, that we have learned not to trust our own experience anymore.

Another example is the Sun going around the Earth. That is something we experience every day, it is a basic part of being human to see this happening. And yet we are told it is not so, that it is the other way round, and we believe that, because we are told it. This, in my view, is degenerate, we have lost our power as humans. Humans that have that power are seen as ‘primitive’.

And the other big question is what kind of culture sees things as inevitably getting worse?

According to Buddhism, everything is Mind. Not mind in a narrow sense, more in the sense of the primordial imagination (in astrology, Neptune) that throws up the world around us. The world is produced by the imagination, life imagines the world into being, and it is real, but not ‘objective’ in the way that science would have us believe. Nor is it a solipsistic fantasy. It is something else, ineffable, that takes a lifetime of contemplating.

So the world is a product of the imagination, and that is what keeps it buoyant and creative, it has that force of life behind it. That is why, left to its own devices, the world does not unravel.

But we have become unmoored from that imaginative link to creation. We think the world is material and separate from us: that is a basic assumption behind the scientific method. So the world around us is no longer being maintained by the forces of our imagination, it has been unmoored, and that is why it is gradually falling apart over time. Hence the theory of entropy.

‘Primitive’ cultures understand this link. That is why, some, for example, participate in the rising of the sun every day, in the belief that if they ceased to do so, the sun would cease to rise. We are a literal-minded culture, and think that people must be primitive indeed to think like this. But welcoming the Sun every day is based on a profound truth, it really does make a difference to the nature of the world.

Anything said or done in a heartfelt way affects the world, contributes to its aliveness, stops it unravelling. This is how prayer and magic work. This is a form of cause and effect that is outside the scientific remit, but it is the most important form of all. Contributing to the world – saving the world, even, as if we could possibly know how – is not just a matter of direct action, though that has its place. It is also about inner work, of heartfelt intention, of prayer. And that connects us to the deeper soul of the world. It is that thing beyond us, that is vastly bigger than us, that makes the difference.

A Critique of the Horse's Mouth

In my last post I quoted at length from Tenzin Palmo, the Englishwoman who spent 12 years in a cave on her own in the Himalayas, meditating within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Her last 3 years were entirely solitary. It’s provided quite a lot of food for thought. On the one hand I have a lot of admiration for what she did, and the insight she gained. Much of what she says corresponds to what you can read in books, but there’s a flavour to it that shows she’s talking from experience, and that’s what I liked, and why I quoted from it.

I spent 18 years as a practising Buddhist myself in a kind of full-time way – that era ended 10 years ago – and I’m still sifting through it. I was never much of a meditator. Since then I’ve lived a much more ordinary kind of life, as well as involving myself in different non-ordinary things such as astrology! This has helped give me perspective, but it’s still work in progress.

There are certain things I love about Buddhism. Its philosophy of emptiness makes complete sense. It is saying that everything is part of an interconnected flux in which there are no separate ‘things’. That includes the sense of ‘I’ – hence the famous ‘no-self’ doctrine.

The sense of ‘I’ is a good place to start. It certainly seems very solid and real, and it locates us experientially at the centre of the universe, to which we reach out and relate. But that sense of ‘I’ is usually based on identifying with what we think and feel – that is what makes us ‘us’. What a lot of people don’t realise is that you don’t have to identify with, and act on, what you are feeling. We have a choice. If you are angry with someone, you don’t have to torment yourself with it, the mind circling endlessly as it tries to justify the feeling of anger. Nor do you have to go into therapy and try and find the root cause of it (though that can have its place.) We can make the decision to stand back and observe the feeling. This is a deeply transformational act.

This principle applies to all sorts of limiting, painful emotions which we all experience every day. And it is a different self that does the observing. This new self is not rigid and protective, for there is nothing to protect anymore. It is spacious. You no longer need take events so personally. You are fully present and aware, fully emotionally responsive to others, fully connected in a way you never were before, because you’re no longer seeing the world through the veil of your own reactions to it. You are, in other words, more aware of the interconnected flux to which in reality we all belong.

OK, fine words, and I sometimes manage a bit of it. But at the same time, I think it describes the fundamental inner act that makes us conscious beings, and that lies at the root of all spiritualities and religions, whatever the cosmologies and dogmas they surround it with.

So ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) can sound like an abstruse philosophical doctrine. But actually it’s immediate and practical. And that is why I like it so much. It has both a metaphysical dimension and a practical dimension, and they both make sense. And it is about a different kind of fullness.

As an astrologer, I respond to symbols, they take me more deeply into an intuitive apprehension of myself, other people and world events. And Buddhism (like any religion worth its salt) has this aspect. Buddhism has figures that are not ‘God’, that are not about obedience, that embody the deeper patternings within the human mind, the ‘archetypes’. These figures have accumulated significance and power over the centuries as generations of practitioners have successively contemplated them. Just like the planets, and the gods behind them, in astrology.

When I write about Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, he often gives me his blessing by turning up in the room behind me. Something of him comes closer to me, he starts to become, in a way, part of me. And it’s the same with the Buddhist archetypal figures when you contemplate them, or when you call upon them to help in a practical situation. One such figure is Vajrasattva, who embodies who you are when all the dross is out of the way, when you remember who you are and why you’re here (the North Node?) He is our 'original face', the fullness that is left when the infatuation with being a ‘somebody’, with ‘achievement’, recedes. I call on him when I need to open up the gap in my experience, when I’m in the grip of some painful emotion that is distorting my equanimity and steady judgement. I only recently began to look at him again, and after reciting his mantra, or sound equivalent, for a while, I began to have these words go through my head: “I am a brilliant human being!” Well we all are underneath it all, and this is what he was pointing me to.

Another figure is Avalokitesvara, in his form with 1000 arms, each holding a different implement. He embodies compassion, and the 1000 arms symbolise the different gifts, the different vocations that we all have that both nourish us and that one way or another impact positively on others. This is something I have come to believe in strongly, that life is about discovering the particular gifts that you have and using them. This is what I find a lot of astrological readings are about: helping people identify, and have courage in, their own gifts. Often people come to me at the point where they know what they want to do, but they are afraid they’ll be no good at it, afraid they’ll look stupid in the eyes of others. But that is a kind of initiatory fire that many of us have to go through, it often seems to be part of the process.

So this is kind of nudging me on to my points of disagreement with Buddhism, at least as it has come down to us. And it starts with the idea of the historical Buddha as a perfect human being. Was there something special about the period 2-2500 years ago when these ‘perfect’ people, like Christ and the Buddha, appeared? Anyone who called themselves perfect, or allowed themselves to be called perfect, would nowadays be rightly laughed out of court. I’ve never met anyone who is anywhere near ‘perfect’, and I’ve been around long enough to have confidence in my experience. There are people with more insight than most, yes, and such people can be pretty helpful. And I reckon it's the same now as it was then.

And yet Buddhism, for an orthodox Buddhist of any school, is rooted in the faith that the historical Buddha, about whom we actually know very little, was inwardly perfect (or ‘Enlightened’). The orthodox Buddhist then bases his or her life around the aspiration to replicate that perfection for themselves. Tenzin Palmo is one of these people, and very upfront about it. And so all the practices, effective and inspiring as they may be, take place in what seems to me to be this inauthentic context, a context that ultimately disempowers people. Because realistically, which of us has ever encountered perfection? It's a nice ideal, but is it something you can realistically feel is possible for you? Or for anyone? It's not part of being human.

Who knows what is the destiny of human consciousness? Who really knows what happens after we die? These are great imponderables and I, for one, am not looking for answers. The important thing is to try to be real while we are here, and the Buddhist tradition at its best (e.g. Dzogchen) has a firm grasp on this. But it is also a religious tradition which has inevitably accumulated all sorts of other dross on the way, 2500 years worth.

There is also the tradition of renunciation as providing the most effective conditions for spiritual progress, if you are up to it. This attitude comes across very clearly with Tenzin Palmo. I’m bothering to criticise her because I think she has some real attainments, and I admire her 12 years in the cave. You also get this in Christianity, where the monks and nuns and celibate priests are the ‘real’ practitioners.

Now I have no problem with people going off and meditating in caves for periods of their lives. For the right people at the right time in their lives, this can be very appropriate. In my experience most people are not talented meditators, including myself. It is a talent like any other, even though a certain amount of meditation seems to help most people. Yet this particular talent has been raised above all others as a sort of royal road to ‘perfection’ (how does one begin to untangle this one?)

If you are going to head off to a cave, or its equivalent, for an extended period, you’d better make sure you’re happy doing without the pleasures and involvements of ordinary life, that the pleasure and sense of meaning that a contemplative life gives you is commensurate. It’s a purely pragmatic decision. For, as any half-educated Buddhist knows, sense pleasures and personal relationships are in no sense harmful in themselves. It is how we deal with them that counts, and they can indeed be transformative. For most of us they are the stuff of life, they give it meaning, they are the charnel ground where we encounter ourselves at our best and at our worst.

But no. The renunciates, however ‘encouraging’ they are about the possibilities of progress in ‘worldly’ life, they still put it down, subtly or unsubtly, as second best. Renunciation for them is not just a pragmatic decision, it is a philosophy. And this is despite basic Buddhist teachings to the contrary, such as the fetter of seeing particular practices as ends in themselves, rather than as a means to an end. Tenzin Palmo has this philosophy (“relationships, let’s face it, can be pretty distracting”.) And it was there in the Buddhist set-up I used to be around, where the teacher encouraged celibacy as a superior path (while not being able to keep to it himself); you’d consequently get these poor people, usually young, wearing it as a badge of honour, when you knew they’d love nothing better than to get their ends away.

There are strengths and pitfalls to both ordinary life and to the contemplative life, and I think it is invidious to start implying one is better than the other: it creates inflation in monks and nuns, and it discourages people living ordinary lives. (In religions you get unwritten rules, and I have encountered a teacher who taught equivalence between ordinary and renunciative life, but in practice gave seniority to the more renunciate.) Broadly speaking, you could say that the strength of a contemplative life is depth of experience, and the pitfall is narrowness and naivety. Tenzin Palmo admitted that in some ways she got very dry during her 12 years in the cave, and immersed herself in music and literature when she came out. She described it as a rupture that needed healing. The pitfall of ordinary life, of course, is that so much is going on that we can forget about what gives a deeper sense of meaning. Its strength is that there is an ongoing challenge from the environment not to react in habitual ways, to look with fresh eyes, and when we succeeed we know it is for real, for it has been tested.

I could go on. There is the obvious issue of authority, around which any organised religion is to a large extent based. Adherents can find it very difficult to see, let alone admit to their compromise with authority, and the payback involved. It is substantially present (though of course not universal) in organised Buddhism just like anywhere else. But it did take me aback with Tenzin Palmo, for as far as I could see she had very much gone her own way, and gone where others would not have gone, in the context of a healthy and heartfelt relationship with her own teacher. So far so good. But her first instinct on deciding how to benefit others from what she had done was to think in terms of founding a nunnery where the young women would intensively study the relevant Buddhist texts in the original Tibetan, prior to heading off and becoming yoginis in their own right. Just like she did. Once it was set up, Tenzin Palmo would leave and resume her solitary meditational lifestyle. This struck me as naïve.

It is clear from her website that she is pretty much creating for women a copy of the monastic training for men that already exists. The women are joining as young as 15 years old, many with hardly any education, and subject to this narrow and intensive full-time training for years. No doubt they will benefit in some ways. But many of them will at the same time be subsumed by this system, they will be overawed by the teachers and their grand titles and the weight of tradition. In other words, authority. This is not what people need, and Tenzin Palmo seems as much as anything to be fighting a political battle to achieve equal status for women, at the expense of the women themselves.

It is clear to me that to this extent she doesn’t understand people’s real needs, the conditions they need to develop, despite the real insight she has gained through meditation, and the genuine goodwill she has towards people. And this is often characteristic of organised religion: there is ‘faith’ in its methods that blinds the teacher to what people actually need. You get this with the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. It’s partly caused by the arrested development of the priests, who as teenagers are shunted off to single-sex seminaries and told that sex is bad. The Pope has apologised on behalf of the Church for the scandal (in which he had been complicit), but seems unable to question the methods that have brought it about in the first place.

In the East, authority has always lain with the monks, who are organised hierarchically. This system is in its own way being replicated in the West, where you get these large Buddhist organisations held together by the authority of the teachers and senior disciples. And what the followers experience as 'faith' is often the hidden surrender of their own independence. Faith is a mixed thing: it is both healthy and necessary, but other more needy emotions also tend to jump on the bandwagon, and this is what makes it to that extent blind and resistant to a critical awareness of the tradition and of the teachers.

It’s a mess, and I accept that for some people finding their way out of this mess is part of their path; and for others who are dysfunctional (you get a high percentage in religious groups) the organisation and hierarchy provide a psychological security that enables them to cope.

(The astrological world is not immune from this. What I found at conferences was that you would get an over-emphasis on hierarchy, a clear division between 'names' and everyone else, that you could even spot in the dining-room. And the 'names' would award each other prizes (yes really!), and they would take it in turns to deliver the Dead Name Memorial Lecture. You could also spot the 'wannabe names'. I found this class-ridden context distasteful and disempowering. Which I why I like the blogosphere, because it is everything the self-styled 'establishment' is not!)

This brings me back to the 1000 armed Avalokitesvara and what I think the real purpose of a religious/spiritual grouping needs to be: it needs to be an informal network that helps people unfold their individual gifts and talents, for that is where their passion lies and their sense of purpose in being alive. The Buddhist practices and philosophy can be a very useful adjunct to this. But if, as in Tenzin Palmo's nunnery, you are a young person and all your time is taken up with philosophical and meditative training, and learning arcane languages and rituals, or working for the good of the organisation, and you are surrounded by people learning and doing more or less the same things, then where is the room for the individual and his/her talents? The words brain and wash come to mind. You end up with people who are sincere and well-meaning, but who lack the confidence to progress in the world, and substitute for this an inflated sense of themselves as ‘spiritual’ beings, unlike the rest of us who are immersed in the ‘mundane’ and doomed to endless rebirth.

And that’s another thing: Buddhism needs to ditch the notion that you find in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that after we die we eventually flee back to a human body because we cannot handle naked reality. There is a certain truth in that, but it gives entirely the wrong emphasis. It is part of a Buddhist mindset that says earthly existence is basically a trap we need to transcend (Tenzin Palmo's view). I do not have a problem being embodied, and my aspiration is to feel entirely happy about being here on this beautiful earth before I die. And I’m here because there are things for me to do, and things to be learned, rather than because I am terrified of ultimate reality, or because I’m not ‘Enlightened’. I think it’s Buddhist scaremongering, just like the Tibetans do with their endless descriptions of hell (Tenzin Palmo agrees with me on that one), in a misguided attempt to get people to engage in spiritual practice. The Roman Catholic Church does the same thing.

Once when Tenzin Palmo was with her teacher, Kamtrul Rimpoche, she asked him a question. He replied well this is what the book says, and this is what I say. I liked that, the ability to function within a tradition without feeling beholden to it. Like any old tradition, Buddhism is like this pile of dross with the odd nugget of gold in it. And it’s only ever going to be a free-spirited minority, who have maybe been burnt by taking the dross too seriously, who will be able to be discerning. Like any religion.

I'm away till Friday, so I will join in the comment scrum at that point!

From the Horse's Mouth

I finished reading Cave in the Snow a few days ago, the story of the Englishwoman Tenzin Palmo, who spent 12 years (1976-88) 13,000 foot up a mountain in the Himalayas, meditating. She had first trained for many years within the Kargyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. She was inspired by its founder, Milarepa, who spent decades in solitary meditation. Part of her mission was to prove that women also could do this.

In the chapter called ‘Yogini’ she reluctantly discusses some of her inner experiences during that time. As she says: “Frankly, I don’t like discussing it. It’s like your sexual experiences. Some people like talking about them, others don’t. Personally I find it terribly intimate.” The author, Vicki Mackenzie, had to press her.

“Of course, when you do prolonged retreats you are going to have experiences of great intensity – times when your body completely melts away, or when you feel the body is flying. You get states of incredible awareness and clarity when everything becomes very vivid.”

There were visions too, but as she says: “The whole point is not to get visions but realisations. And realisations are quite bare. They are not accompanied by lights and music. We’re trying to see things as they really are. A realisation is non-conceptual. It’s not a product of the thinking process or the emotions – unlike visions which come from that level. A realisation is the white transparent light at the centre of the prism, not the rainbow colours around it.”

“There are states of incredible bliss. Bliss is the fuel of retreat. You can’t do any long-term practice seriously unless there is inner joy. Because the joy and enthusiasm is what carries you along. It’s like anything, if you don’t really like it you will have this inner resistance and everything is going to be very slow. That is why the Buddha named Joy as a main factor on the path.

The only problem with bliss is that because it arouses such enormous pleasure, beyond anything on a worldly level, including sexual bliss, people cling to it and really want it and then it becomes another obstacle.

Once when I was with the Togdens [an elite group of yogis, trained from a very young age] there were two monks who were training to be yogis. One day they were standing up outside shaking a blanket and they were so blissed out they could hardly stand up. You could actually feel these waves of bliss hitting you. The Togdens turned to me and said: “You know, when you start, this is what happens. You get completely overwhelmed by bliss and you don’t know what to do. After a while you learn how to control it and bring it down to manageable levels.” And it’s true. When you meet more mature practitioners they’re not completely speechless with all this great bliss, because they’ve learnt how to deal with it. And of course they see into its empty nature. You see, bliss in itself is useless. It’s only useful when it’s used as a state of mind for understanding Emptiness – when that blissful mind is able to look into its own nature. Otherwise it is just another subject of Samsara [mundane, conditioned existence]. You can understand emptiness on one level but to understand it on a very subtle level requires this complement of bliss. The blissful mind is a very subtle mind and that kind of mind looking at Emptiness is a very different thing from the gross mind looking at emptiness. And that is why one cultivates bliss.

You go through bliss. It marks just a stage on the journey. The ultimate goal is to realise the nature of the mind. The nature of the mind is unconditioned, non-dual consciousness. It is Emptiness and bliss. It is the state of Knowing without the Knower. And when it is realised it isn’t very dramatic at all. It’s like waking up for the first time – surfacing out of a dream and then realising you have been dreaming. That is shy the sages talk about all things being an illusion. Our normal way of being is muffled – it’s not vivid. It’s like breathing in stale air. Waking up is not sensational. It’s ordinary. But it’s extremely real.

At first you get just a glimpse of it. That is actually only the beginning of the path. People often think when they get that glimpse it is the whole thing, that they’ve reached the goal. Once you begin to see the nature of the mind then you can begin to meditate. Then after that you have to stabilize it until the nature of the mind becomes more and more familiar. And when that is done you integrate it into everyday life.”

There was the occasion one spring when the thaw of the winter snows had begun and her cave was being systematically flooded. “The walls and the floor were getting wetter and wetter and for some reason I was also not very well. I started to feel very down. Then I thought: “Why are you still looking for happiness in Samsara? And my mind just changed around. It was like: That’s right – Samsara is Dukkha [the fundamental unsatisfactory nature of life.] It’s OK that it’s snowing. It’s OK that I’m sick because that is the nature of Samsara. There’s nothing to worry about. If it goes well that’s nice. If it doesn’t go well that’s also nice. It doesn’t make any difference. Although it sounds very elementary, at the time it was a real breakthrough. Since then I have never really cared about external circumstances. In that way the cave was a great teaching because it was not too perfect.”

She remained deliberately vague about the precise nature of the practices she was doing. “I was doing very old traditional practices ascribed to the Buddha himself. They involve a lot of visualisation and internal yogic practices. Basically, you use the creative imaginative faculty of the mind to transform everything, both internally and externally. The creative imagination in itself is an incredibly powerful force. If you channel it in the right way it can reach very deep levels of mind which can’t be accessed through verbal means or mere analysis. This is because on a very deep level we think in pictures. If you are using pictures which have arisen in an Enlightened mind, somehow that unlocks very deep levels in our own minds.”

In the end, had it all been worth it?

“It’s not what you gain but what you lose. It’s like unpeeling the layers of an onion, that’s what you have to do. My quest was to understand what perfection meant. Now, I realise that on one level we have never moved away from it. It is only our deluded perception which prevents our seeing what we already have. The more you realise, the more you realise there is nothing to realise. The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion. Who is there to attain it anyway?”

Back in the world again, had there been a transformation?

“There is a kind of inner freedom which I don’t think I had when I started – an inner peace and clarity. I think it came from having to be self-sufficient, having nothing or no-one to turn to whatever happened. Also while I was in retreat everything became dreamlike, just as the Buddha described. One could see the illusory nature of everything going on around one – because one was not in the middle of it. And then when you come out you see that people are so caught up in their life – we identify so totally with what we’ve created. We believe in it so completely. That’s why we suffer – because there’s no space for us. Now I notice there is an inner distance towards whatever occurs, whether what’s occurring is outwards or inwards. Sometimes, it feels like being in an empty house with all the doors and windows wide open and the wind just blowing through without anything obstructing it. Sometimes one gets caught up again, but now one knows that one is caught up again.

It’s not a cold emptiness, it’s a warm spaciousness. It means that one is no longer involved in one’s ephemeral emotions. One sees how people cause so much of their own suffering just because they think that without having these strong emotions they’re not real people.

Why does one go into retreat? One goes into a retreat to understand who one really is and what the situation truly is. When one begins to understand oneself then one can truly understand others because we are all interrelated. It is very difficult to understand others while one is still caught up in the turmoil of one’s emotional involvement – because we’re always interpreting others from the standpoint of our own needs. That’s why, when you meet hermits who have really done a lot of retreat, say 25 years, they are not cold and distant. On the contrary. They are absolutely lovely people. You know that their love for you is totally without judgement because it doesn’t rely on who you are or what you are doing, or how you treat them. It’s totally impartial. It’s just love. It’s like the sun – it shines on everyone. Whatever you did they’d still love you because they understand your predicament and in that understanding naturally arises love and compassion. It’s not based on sentiment. It’s not based on emotion. Sentimental love is very unstable, because it’s based on feedback and how good it makes you feel. That is not real love at all.”

Later we read: “There is the thought, and then there is the knowing of the thought. And the difference between being aware of the thought and just thinking is immense…. It’s enormous. Normally we are so identified with our thoughts and emotions, that we are them. We are the happiness, we are the anger, we are the fear. We have to learn to step back and know our thoughts and emotions are just thoughts and emotions. They’re just mental states. They’re not solid, they’re transparent. One has to know that and then not identify with the knower. One has to know that the knower is not somebody. The further back we go, the more open and empty the quality of our consciousness becomes. Instead of finding some solid little eternal entity, which is “I”, we get back to this vast spacious mind which is interconnected with all living beings.

Once we realise that the nature of our existence is beyond thought and emotions, that it is incredibly vast and interconnected with all other beings, then the sense of isolation, separation, fear and hopes fall away. It’s a tremendous relief!

Descartes and Zen

By Zen Buddhist Katagiri Roshi:

I have been reading your Descartes.
Very interesting. 'I think, therefore I am.'
He forgot to mention the other part.
I'm sure he knew, he just forgot:
I think, therefore I'm not.

I am sure that, with natal Sun trine to Neptune, it was indeed an oversight.

The Nature of Reality

According to Buddhist Teaching, the Universe is Mind-created. The universe is in a deep sense a projection of collective consciousness. So when we learn about how the world and other people work, we are also learning about ourselves. You can’t separate inner and outer, self and other. We are incredibly connected to everything and everyone around us. But I would say that, wouldn’t I, with Neptune fast approaching a conjunction with my natal Sun?

Because of this connection between inner and outer, it means that when we think of reality in a particular way, reality has a way of becoming that. And then we think reality was that way all along and we just discovered it. Like if you decide that the Universe works rationally according to certain physical laws that can be discovered by a detached observer, and particularly if loads of you decide to think like this, then Reality actually obliges, and you have a scientific universe which sort of holds together, up to a point.

And I think it’s the same with astrology, and it’s why all the different forms of astrology work, even though they can be contradictory, like western astrology being 23 degrees ahead of Vedic astrology.

All these ways of looking at the Universe are real, they do actually describe what is ‘out there’ (and ‘in here’); but they are also ephemeral products of consciousness, they are like consciousness putting on a new dress and looking at itself in the mirror. So they are not absolute.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the fact that all these different astrologies work makes me suspect that we’re making it all up, that I could get any set of symbols to describe any situation if I tried hard enough. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and most weekends it makes me realise just how strange and subtle Reality is.

And perhaps the biggest reason Reality is so hard to grasp is that we can’t help but divide our experience into inner and outer, self and other. So the whole basis of a ‘me’ trying to describe ‘other’ is false in the first place. So any philosophy, any science, any astrology is going to run into limitations which, if you are honest about them, will point you to this more subtle unitary reality.

This is where religion often goes wrong, because it’s practitioners can’t handle the uncertainty involved, they need solid ‘Truth’ to base their lives on. I say ‘goes wrong’, but actually people often need this level of truth to cope psychologically. I think there can be a natural process whereby eventually, perhaps after decades, they start to feel limited by it.

At times, like under a Neptune transit, the divide between inner and outer, the illusion of yourself as a centre of experience, fades a bit. And then you don’t have to bother any more about trying to work out the nature of Reality, because you are experiencing it.

SATURN-NEPTUNE AND THE SELF

Buddhism has what is known as the ‘no-self’ doctrine which, applied to all phenomena, becomes the doctrine of emptiness (of which there are a number of kinds!) It’s easy for all this to become very heady – which some Buddhists can be very prone to – but the basic idea is that our sense of who we are is not fixed and enduring. As astrologers we’re on familiar territory here, because we regularly observe ourselves and others changing in times of major transits. But we only believe it partially: if we feel criticised, for example, we tend to want to defend ourselves, to protect our sense of who we are, instead of looking at the criticism with equanimity, and taking it on or discarding it as we feel appropriate.

So this is the reason for the ‘no-self’ doctrine: as human beings we treat what is a working construct – the self or ego – as something permanent, something that gives us a sense of security in an uncertain universe.

And this easily translates into the interplay between Saturn and Neptune. We do need a sense of self, a sense of ourselves as a centre of experience, but we need to get it right. Too much Neptune, and you’ve got someone who isn’t very present, who is too dreamy, lacks a strong sense of what they think and feel, and cannot achieve practical results; they find it hard to take responsibility for their lives, and may become parasitic and manipulative. Too much Saturn and you have someone who certainly knows what they think and believe, but their self is rigid, it is like a great wall around them, and it tends to be based mainly on their ability to earn money and recognition and respectability, along with a sense of superiority to others who are less ‘successful’. OK, I admit it, I’ve just had an encounter with someone like this, who has Sun-Saturn-Jupiter conjunct in Capricorn, and it was bruising!

So while we’re here on this planet we need an ego, a sense of self. There may be other realities before or after death where we don’t need a sense of self, but I wouldn’t know about that. If consciousness continues after death, it’s quite possible that Saturn as embodiment disappears, and we are just left with Neptune, in which we do not experience ourselves as being at the centre of things, and there is no protective barrier between ourselves and reality. That is the Buddhist view, along with the idea that we cannot handle it, and we flee back to embodied existence. That is where I part company with e.g. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, because I don’t believe that I was born just because I couldn’t handle Reality. I’m on this earth because it’s a beautiful place to be, and I want to fully appreciate that before I die. Nor do I believe I have a ‘purpose’ being here: that seems to me to be a bit of an abstraction, it takes me away from my experience, which is that I do what I do, and I feel very happy about quite a lot of it.

So whether or not anything continues after death, what I do know is that I’m here, and that I need a strong yet flexible sense of myself. I need Saturn in order to feel I’ve arrived, that I’m real, and that I am building and creating myself; but I also need Neptune to let go of all that, not to take it too seriously (“It’s only money,” as I said last night to someone who had lost some), to allow in new experiences and perspectives, and to remember that others, with equal validity, are also centres of experience.

And it’s not just an intellectual exercise in having the right attitude. In a society based on a one-sided Saturn, I think that generous actions, doing stuff for other people purely because you want to (NOT ‘ought to’ – that’s Saturn) helps get the balance right. Because practically speaking, the best way to understand the no-self doctrine is to be unselfish, but not in a self-sacrificing way.

I think a good image for a balanced Saturn-Neptune, and a balanced self, is a cell membrane. It’s tough, it lasts for years, it contains, yet it is flexible and delicate and porous.