Transformation Sparks Hope

I recently was a speaker at a conference held at the Menla Mountain Retreat Center in the Catskills, near Woodstock, NY, about two hours from New York City. It was founded by Robert Thurman and his wife Nena, and is associated with Tibet House NY. The idea of the conference was to contrast and explore the differences and similarities of various techniques of eastern and western Astrology.

Eastern Astrology was represented by the Tibetan Buddhist astrologer Jhampa Kalsang, from San Diego, who showed how his native Astrology emanates from the people of Tibet and their region. He prepares almanacs for each year in succession and told that the many valleys of Tibet often use different calendar systems, have their own almanacs, and even consider certain days positive or negative according to their own unique customs. He was terrific and very down-to-earth in his views and totally in the present time. Tibetan Astrology encapsulates a kind of folk wisdom that is uniquely Buddhist and is based partly on Indian principles, using the sidereal (star) zodiac, using the twelve animals in monthly sequence, and partly on Chinese principles of the yin/yang polarities, the trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching and its lunar calendar and festivals.

The Astrology of India is derived from the wise books of the Vedas and is commonly called Jyotish, represented by Komilla Sutton, of India, London and San Francisco. Every planet is 23 degrees behind its western equivalent, so many planets change to earlier signs, which shifts my Sagittarius Ascendant back to Scorpio and my Aries moon to Pisces, both of which are profound shifts. However Jyotish is very methodical, with many laws and rules governing its practices and something that is profoundly different from western Astrology in that one’s astrological circumstances determine prayers, colors and gemstones to wear, kinds of food to eat, and the deities one should worship. There is in eastern astrologies a deeper direct contact between the individual and the gods and goddesses and their surrogate temples, statues and rituals.

Jhampa Kalsang stated it nicely when he told us that in the east they “negotiate” with the planets through their various intermediaries and when a particular planet offends or threatens, there are specific ways to atone for them and for the purpose of mediating their influences. I quite like that idea and immediately realized how that would change things in our lives.

Western Astrology is more “psychological” in the current time as the primary focus is on self development, attaining greater awareness and reorganizing the inner life to adjust itself more readily to the turbulent conditions in our outside world of economics and politics. In this context the eastern views are quite practical and pragmatic in their intention. Things are quite real and the psychological issues are played down. Of course there is a quality of eastern Astrology that is more highly “fated” than Western Astrology is, in that certain planetary influences are expected to wreak their influences whatever we do, and the only realistic approach is to lessen their strength by taking positions that modify or ameliorate their influences, which makes a lot of sense.

My views were primarily about my Life Time Astrology which is more eastern than many of the current techniques in that there are a series of principles that it embodies that are essential elements of Tibetan Buddhism, like impermanence (the reality of continuous and inexorable change that is characteristic of a dynamic life) and the principle of afflictive emotions, which states that when we are drawn into highly emotional situations when our worst traits (like jealousy, selfishness, and ignorane) are triggered by others, that is shows us where to look in ourselves to discover the traces of these ideas that we must root out and learn not to overreact to.

The weekend was very powerful in the unique ideas and concepts presented and we showed how all of them worked in practice by using the “magic hat”, out of which we drew participants’ horoscopes and looked at them from both viewpoints. While using different techniques and zodiacs, there were remarkably similar prognoses for many of the subjects. In all the weekend was powerful and we all learned a lot. We are assuming that this will be a yearly event at Menla and thanked everyone there for their kind enabling and hospitality. It is a truly beautiful valley high in the mountains, with rushing streams and magical beauty.

For more information see: www.menla.org and http://www.atmann.net/schedule.htm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 8:21 am and is filed under Astrology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.