Climbing the Right Mountain

When you love and fear what you are meant to do.

Mar 16, 2024

I’ve been trying to figure out my “purpose in life” for two decades. On the one hand, I think we are probably always living out our purpose, so it’s kind of a pointless question. On the other hand, if your character has a lot of drive to work, it does matter that you are aiming that drive in the right direction—i.e. climbing the right mountain. The wrong mountain will be depleting, boring, and frustrating, whereas the right mountain will be a source of continual growth, and the kind of challenge that enlivens you. But it also involves conquering your fear. Because a mountain that challenges you is also one that scares you.1

I am a person with an immense amount of drive, but I could never find the right mountain to apply myself to. And so I just climbed inner mountains. I put all my drive into my own healing, because I couldn’t find any external thing that felt right to apply that drive to.

This pattern has slowly been changing over the last year. I started writing this newsletter. I realized spirituality is actually a huge part of my thing, and that I don’t want to keep that a secret. I don’t want to live in fear of what people will think.

And in the last month I got another huge piece of it. It involves astrology.

Astrology!?

I want you to understand the level of fear that I have around publicly declaring a committed interest in astrology—something I’ve been dabbling in (again, mostly in secret) for most of my adult life, and that I’ve gotten immense benefit from.

The intense derision I’ve heard people express toward astrology echoes in my mind, and I just want to hide. Hiding has been my safety for so long.

But I have reached the limits of its usefulness. I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to be who I am and be seen for who I am, because a life of hiding is lonely and limited. And there are experiences I can only have by coming out of hiding. There are people I can only meet if I am honest about who I am.

I constantly see myself with double vision. There’s my own knowledge of myself and how I hold astrology—what I’ve learned from it, how I use it, what it means to me—and then there is this caustic stare of contempt. It’s just the Barnum effect. It’s ridiculous. How could you believe in such a thing? What’s wrong with you? You lack critical thinking skills. You just want life to be certain and it’s not. Religion is the opiate of the masses and astrology gives everyone a personal religion! People who believe in astrology are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories!! You’re just not smart!!!

I’ve been circling around astrology for 20 years. Understanding my chart has been immensely helpful in untangling my psychological patterns. The astrologers I respect are some of the wisest and most psychologically and spiritually insightful people I’ve found on Earth. They understand human nature and the spiritual journey with a precision that I’ve never found anywhere else. Astrology, once you get beyond the pop-horoscope surface level, is an immense and fascinating world of people who are exactly as nerdy about spiritual growth as I am. I love it.

But I am also quite aware of the stigma that is associated with astrology. I can still hear Carl Sagan’s voice in my head telling me how profoundly wrong it is. And other people’s voices too—people I’ve known who could tolerate my woo up to a point, but astrology was just a bridge too far.

I understand why people think astrology is BS.

Astrology doesn’t make any sense. At least, not physically—not according to any physics we understand.

What astrology implies about the nature of reality (a perennial topic of fascination for me), is wild. I know a lot of people use it without thinking about what it implies, but I can't not think about it. I’m the kind of person who, when I was 15, tracked down a book on how the internet was constructed because I needed to know how on Earth I could connect to people across the world with a computer in my school’s library. I needed to understand how it worked on a ground-truth level. I couldn’t just use it and trust that magic bits and bytes were going through wires somehow. I needed it to make sense.

Astrology is the study of correlations. It’s not saying that the planets themselves have an influence on us—it’s saying that if we read their positions and interpret them according to a set of arcane-but-evolving rules and meanings, we can derive insights about anything from our life struggles (natal astrology), the best time to get married (electional astrology), to where your missing phone might be found (horary astrology).

We read the positions of the planets the way we read the hands on a clock to see what time it is. But the clock didn’t cause time to pass. The planets and their positions are just a map. Astrology is not causative, it’s reflective.

But why on Earth would there be a map to my psyche and my major life challenges in the positions of the planets in the solar system as seen from Earth? And why would there be a map of everything that connects the point of time in which a thing is “born” — which includes people, events, countries, and even questions (in the practice of horary astrology)—to its inherent qualities and its ongoing development?

What the actual fuck does that mean about the nature of reality?

Even if our reality is a simulation, I don’t know how you could program such a thing into existence. It would mean everything is connected to everything else in ways we can’t even begin to fathom—and that includes both objective reality and our subjective reality and our consciousness.

How can a skeptic accept astrology?

If you are a person who really needs to understand how or why things work, I think you have to come to one of two conclusions:

It’s just a lot of poetry and psychological insights that people interact with in ways that they find personally meaningful, and it’s not all that different from reading any kind of book on philosophy. You’ll pick out what is meaningful and resonant to you and you’ll conveniently ignore the rest. It’s just a mirror of our own psyche that we project on and create meaning from, like anything else in existence. But it does not actually describe physically true things. And the fact that horary works in bizarrely accurate ways, and every astrologer has their own story of the profound accuracy they found in their chart, is just like, a lot of coincidences and projection and magical thinking.
Reality is radically mysterious in ways we do not comprehend. Objective and subjective reality are not actually two different things—they just seem like it from our perspective. They are actually two sides of the same coin in ways we can’t fully fathom. Whatever we think is going on here—it’s actually something way more bizarre.

I sat nicely on the fence with #1 for a long time. I just operated with a kind of suspension of disbelief when I looked at my chart, and didn’t worry about it, because it was just so useful. And (as a quadruple-Virgo), I don’t ignore the utility of anything. If it’s useful, I use it—even if I can’t explain how it could possibly work.

But the time for fence-sitting is over. It worked for me for a long time as a kind of compromise with my inner skeptic—the internalized voice of my Dad and others. But what has become clear to me is that I cannot be whole, authentic, and powerful if I’m living my life according to the dictates of other peoples’ beliefs and judgements.

I have to think for myself, be myself, live my truth, and accept the consequences. That is part of growing up and owning our own power. (This is Saturn—the path of maturity and mastery).

Owning my truth is the only way I can really occupy a space in the public sphere. It’s not really in me to have a fake persona. So it’s either the real truth or I hide.

And I’m really, really tired of hiding. I’m tired of the isolation it brings. Because you can’t find your people—and your people can’t even recognize you—if you refuse to be yourself. That feeling of a community where I belong, a group that values me as I actually am, a place where my contributions matter—that’s somewhere past the bridge too far.

And that’s why I could never find it before. I couldn’t find my mountain because I had edited it out of my internal list of possibilities.

Everything I truly want is past that bridge too far.

So I crossed it. Which for me meant signing up for a yearlong astrology course. (Two of them, actually. Go big or go home!)

Because like, fuck it, I’m 43. Life does end. And there comes a point where you’re more afraid of dying without having ever lived the life you actually want, than you are of being seen as a delusional witchy weirdo.

I am not entirely sure where this will take me. Astrology takes a lot of time and study and practice to master, because it is a different language—a symbolic language. But I’m obsessed, and I love it.

I have always occupied a world beyond what the physical sciences can describe to me. That’s why I gravitated to astrology in the first place—because it explains things that I experience in a way that nothing else does. No self-help book has ever really given me the answers astrology does.

For example, this exact thing of feeling like I occupy a dreamworld is explained by Neptune conjunct my ascendent. My ridiculously codependent and high conflict relationships are explained by my Pluto-Venus-Moon T-square. Over and over, I have gotten insights that helped me find healing, clarity, and self-acceptance.

Even my interest in astrology—my mountain—is there in my chart, in the form of Saturn (mastery & discipline) in Virgo (precision & practicality) in the 9th house (spirituality & philosophy).

I cannot be nourished by the physical world alone.

I deeply need to explore and find meaning in the dreamworld, and translate that meaning into something that is accessible and practical. It's just part of my nature. Being deeply practical and curious is also part of my nature, so I also love science. They coexist for me, and I understand they don't coexist for everyone. But I am only here to live my own life, and it's OK if it doesn't make sense to everyone.

This last year for me has been about understanding that my survival does not depend on being everyone's cup of tea. This isn't the 1500’s, and I'm not going to be burned at the stake. It's safe to be who I am and honor my own truth. And there is no way I can truly be happy and fulfilled in my life if I don't embrace my full self and walk my own path without apology or compromise.

There are thousands of different symbolic systems and ways of making meaning out of the dreamworld. There are dozens of different approaches just within astrology. And the question of, "How can they all be true—how can any of them be true?" is irrelevant, because the dreamworld does not operate according to the laws of physics. It has its own logic and its own laws and its own truth. And that truth is often mysterious and paradoxical. But that mystery and paradox and dreamlike quality is my native land. It’s my home.

My inner being exists in some kind of borderland between this world and the next. But instead of feeling like an exile from my home and a stranger in this strange land, I want to embrace the position of being a bridge. I want to learn how to navigate this dreamy world of archetypes and symbols, and make it useful to other people, the way it’s been useful to me.

So, I’m going to climb this mountain. I don’t know if the mountain is just astrology, or if learning the language of astrology is a step on a larger mountain. I’ll find out when I get there. For now, I’m just happy to have found it, and to be slowly working through my fears of being my real self, in public.