What Is Astrology For?

There’s a fork in the road when you get six months in to learning astrology like me:

Either you fall in the hole and have to astrologize everything that is happening and everything that will happen (please no), or you begin to trust without checking that it says “go live your life.”

“What is it for, then?” you might ask.

It is for helping you when you don’t know what to do.

Before reaching the “live your life” point, I do think it’s useful to do a ton of astrologizing, so you reach the “my God, life is a time fractal that is always showing all of itself to me, and my life is irreparably changed” point.

Astrology is just like any other properly contained spiritual practice in this trajectory, but it is among the most potentially effective AND most potentially ineffective I’ve tried. Big user’s manual.

Part of the problem — perhaps still not very different from other practices in this regard — is that it gives you plenty to do to let you think you’re doing it without doing any spiritual practice at all. In fact, much of the tradition explicitly doesn’t regard itself that way.

But it’s too simple to take from this that this is just one of those “everything is a spiritual practice if you have the proper orientation” situations. The word “shamanic” comes to mind. Learning to speak sky is as uniquely powerful as learning to speak bird or tree.