How Ayahuasca Taught Me Astrology: The Sanctuaries of our Suffering

Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology and today I'm going to continue my series on the intersection between ayahuasca and astrology. This is a series that I decided to start doing about a week ago. So if you missed episode one, you could certainly go back and check it out. Although there's no real sequential order to this series. The purpose of this particular set of talks is to explore the different ways in which ayahuasca and altered states of consciousness the psychedelic experience in general, had an impact on the way that I learned astrology. I kind of explained this in talk number one, but I as I was on vacation recently, I was reflecting quite a bit on the way in which I learned astrology and realising that I always I try to tone it down a little bit because I don't want to I don't want to come off sounding like Oh, Ayahuasca taught me astrology, you know, like, I'm some wonder kid who, you know, got the special privilege of being taught in an altered state of consciousness by aliens, something like that. II was actively studying astrology, apart from my ayahuasca ceremonies, but being involved in Ayahuasca ceremonies very regularly, for a decade of my life. And for a number of years during the early formative study period. For me when I was first studying astrology, I was drinking a boatload of ayahuasca and those ceremonies had a huge impact on how I came to understand things that I was reading about, almost like the Ayahuasca experience would say, like, here's a vision or here's an experience that can complement what you're reading and studying to help you understand integrated sort of take it in at a deeper level. And there was many years of studying astrology and regularly drinking Ayahuasca and learning a lot from those experiences that have really shaped the way I practice today and the things that really sort of mattered to me most as a practitioner.

So I'm going to talk about that today, again by telling some stories. Before I do that, if you're new to my channel, always appreciate it if you like and like the videos and subscribe, share your comments in the comment section. I love hearing from you guys. That also helps the channel to grow and click the notification bell for updates. If you are subscribed, you get notifications when I go live. As always, transcripts of my daily talks can be found on the blog of my website, which is nightlight astrology.com, usually within 24 hours. I also am in promotional mode right now my new class ancient astrology for the modern mystic starts on June 5, my year two and horary classes start June 11 and 12th. You can check all of those out at nightlight astrology.com. And I'm going to share my screen briefly with you and take you there so you can check it out. Once you get there, you're going to click on the Courses tab. If you are brand new and have not studied with me before, you're going to want to check out the first year course is a course a one year course in ancient Hellenistic astrology, which is the earliest form of horoscopic astrology close cousin with ancient Indian astrology. It's a 12 month course there are 30 classes we meet on Sundays. We meet on Sundays starting at 11am Central Time, noon Eastern time, I guess that would be 9am Pacific classes about two to three hours long. They're all recorded if you can't make them live. So you can always participate by watching the replay of the video each week. We have interactive group forum discussions all throughout the year with a paid staff of tutors that are there to help you, you can always ask me for help, too. There's also breakout study sessions in between major units, those are not a part of the 30 classes. And then we also have 12 guest lectures that come tonnes of bonus content, lots of support there for you to really dive very deeply into Hellenistic astrology, there's a couple of different payment options, the earlybird payment you save $500 off if you pay for the class up front, there's a 12 monthly payment plan if you need to stretch it out a little bit. And then of course, we have need based tuition. So be sure that if you want to take this class and you're like, you know what it's out of my budget, check out the tuition assistance option that we have, because we never like to price people out. I've been doing this for 12 years and I have always had a donation based option of some kind for my classes because to me this material is you know, it's really sacred and I try to make sure that no one's ever priced out from my courses. So if you want to study Be sure to check that out. If you have any questions whatsoever about the programme as you're scoping it out on the website, it's info at nightlight astrology.com.

So, that being said, see here the one thing that some people know about me and some people don't is that my adventures with Ayahuasca. I wrote about them in a book that was published in 2010, called fishers of men, the gospel of an Ayahuasca VisionQuest. Now, my given name before I received initiation, in the bhakti yoga tradition is Adam Elenbaas. And so you can look me up on Amazon and find my book and check it out, if you want to read kind of, you know, the full story of kind of how my life really changed working with Ayahuasca, especially coming from a Christian background and how Ayahuasca interacted with my Christian faith, and even the faith of my family members, eventually, my dad and my sister, my dad, a minister, would go and try ayahuasca and it really changed the whole trajectory of our family's dynamic. And in my life, of course, in particular. So again, during these early years of drinking Ayahuasca, I was starting to study astrology. And so you know, study the way that I learned to in graduate school where you read books, you know, when you start playing with charts, maybe you start downloading some lectures, or going to an online webinar here or there, whatever, this is the same path that I took the same path that a lot of people take.

So as a result of that, essentially, through that experience, through that process, I started getting a lot of downloads during Ayahuasca ceremonies that were helping me understand what I was reading and studying. That's the gist of it. And along those lines, I think one of the most profound early experiences that I had in, in a ceremony came when I had to, and this is like, pretty personal. So I want to just like kind of, you know, warn everybody. You know, I wrote about this publicly, in my book, it's something I already explored at length in, in my in the memoir that I wrote that was published. So this is, you know, this might seem like TMI, but for me, it's something I've shared openly in talks. And when I went on a book tour, and so forth for like, 12 years, so one of the more painful experiences that I had, opiate addiction was one of them that I dealt with opiate addiction. And Ayahuasca helped me to become clean and sober. But the other thing, one of the other big things that it really helped me to revisit and work through was being molested as a young boy. So that experience was came up a number of times, and ceremonies. And I learned a lot by the way in which I have wasa helped me work into that experience. So I learned a lot about pain and suffering, and the nature of pain and suffering, as well as trauma, I guess you could say, my own experiences with such things. So, you know, I would say, maybe, ever seemed at the beginning, it seemed like maybe every third or fourth ceremony, it would be like something I was visiting, that I would going back into the memory, the memories, I should say, of what had happened when I was little, I was probably four years old when it happened.

So anyway, I kind of talked, I sort of labelled this talk on the sanctuary of our pain, because these experiences really taught me that our pain is is really, really multi dimensional. And it taught me the value of going into and opening the experiences of pain that lived in my past. And this ended up having a really profound connection to my study of astrology. So that's what I want to talk about today. So it kind of, you know, it's talking about pain as a sanctuary pain as a temple. What does that mean? So there's about 10 points that I want to make today. And then three ways in which I want to tie it back to astrology and how I really learned a lot and grew a lot as an astrologer. So the first lesson that came up for me or like insight, I guess you could call it it was not my first time that I revisited the memory of that childhood trauma. It was probably I don't know, three or four times that I had already gone into it. You know, it wasn't the first time so just for a little context, but we you know, so the vision took me back into that space.

And it's funny because every time I had gone into that space, I remember thinking okay, here I am. Everyone says when you drink Ayahuasca you go into the old traumas and you purge them, you know, like you get rid of them. You clear them out of the karma, the karmic data banks or something, you you release them They're, they're stored in you somewhere and you like, get rid of it, you know, and this experience, and every time so every time I was going in, I would have that experience. I'd be like, I was molested as a kid. And now I've got to purge it like, Okay, I've got a barf, you know, like every time that experience would come up in this visionary sequence, like a memory. It was as though I get so eager to heal it, right, that it would move away, it would disappear again. And I kept feeling like, man, it's like this visionary sequence seems like it wants to do something, but you know, it's like, it won't let go, it must be really deep in there.

I started thinking and saying, and I said this to one of the shamans, I said, I think it's like, really deep in there, you know, something like that. And this, this, this woman who was there and she was apprenticing. And she said, Well, maybe it just wants for you to see it again, rather than, like, heal it or fix it or something like that, you know. And it was funny, because she actually made this analogy that I'll never forget. She said, You know, sometimes guys, in particular, like when they're when they have a girlfriend, and the girlfriend tells them, I've got a problem, like, something happened that upset me, or something's bothering me, or something's on my mind, that's got me down, that oftentimes as a boyfriend or a man or a husband or whatever, you're gonna be like, well, let me fix it. What can I do to fix it? Or here's what you should do? Or here's the answer to that problem. She was like, but you know, ayahuasca is very feminine. And sometimes, I think ayahuasca, you know, might want you to just see something, move into it, explore it, open it up, but maybe just go in tonight. And if it comes up again, in ceremony, then just try to let it you know, speak and say its own thing to try not to impress an agenda on it. And I was like, because I was telling her like, I think it's really deep stuck in there. Like it doesn't want to budge. And I was saying all this kind of stuff. So she gave me that advice. So here comes the memory again, in ceremony. And I felt the ayahuasca saying something to me, it was as though it just said, see, see? Look, just look. Do you see, it kept telling me to see, just look.

And it was the most amazing thing because I this is impossible to describe. And I'm going to fail in words, but the in the visual memory of the experience when I just said, okay, okay, I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm just gonna look, I'm just gonna see what am I supposed to see. And then I looked and almost went into the memory, like, it was like a trance state in the memory or something like that. And the experience opened, that's the only way I can describe it. It was like a flower. Opening up. And inside of the experience was like, the whole history that felt like it was the whole history of the universe. I'm not kidding. It felt like, oh, I can't there was sequences of like, going back in time, that led so quickly and so beautifully and so seamlessly, where it was like I was seeing this person who did this thing to me. And then I was seeing what had happened to him. And what had happened to the person who had done it to him and it was like this causal chain of like, grief and you know, abuse and like that, and then it like dove into like nature and it it started showing things devouring each other and and then there were things as they devoured and were getting torn apart that the the the like, remains were being eaten digested going into the ground trees. The earth was blossoming out of this cycle of destruction. I can't even describe it like I must sound like a total crackpot. But it was, you know, but, but it's true. This is actually what happened. So see, look, look more deeply. And all of a sudden it was you know, it was just this multifaceted, ever opening flower that contained like the you know, the entire universe. See, look, and I just thought oh my god, like, it didn't. It's hard to explain because there was so much inside of that pain, that memory that was painful that trauma I guess if I want to call it that, that I literally said Hallelujah. I was sitting in a chair. And I literally said, hallelujah, put my arms up and fell onto my knees.

I grew up in the Christian church where stuff like that, I saw it my whole life hallelujahs people altar calls people fallen on their knees. It felt like it had never really happened to me before. Like, I had never really had a true fall on my knees, throw my hands up, in some sense, like state of rapture, or ecstasy is some spiritual state of ecstasy. And it was because what I thought the experience was wasn't discarded. It wasn't invalid, but it was one small part of the nature of experience itself. And it's like experience was like this nuclear, you know, it was packed so tightly experience that I can't see. I'm like you know, dogs can hear things we can't hear. I don't know bats and dolphins and all sorts of animals that have crazy sonar equipment or wood, they can hear things and see things and feel things that you know, are off the spectrum compared to most of what of what we can feel, or see or sense. And in this moment, it was so overwhelming how much was in an experience. See, look, look look really, really look. Go deep go deeply into the experience. And again, it was not at all like see it wasn't traumatising. It was the whole universe feel good about it. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't like that. There was nothing invalidating about my pain or the horror of the event. But it was it just opened it up. Like it was this nuclear bomb of a of a flower opening with an amazing series of images and history and like ecology and behaviour and, and it was so beautiful and so multifaceted, and so intelligent. And I was so overwhelmed and appreciative because I realised in this moment, that the My pain is very real. And that I am very real.

But that the pain, it's not mine. It's not. I was so caught in this feeling that this is my pain. This is my story. This is my trauma. This is my memory. And this experience, validated that but also just blew it open. It just blew it open. So it could be more than one thing at the same time. It could be the trauma, but it could be so much more. And I was so freaking thankful for that view and understanding that I literally fell on my knees and said hallelujah. Not like a big dramatic thing, either. I mean, I believe at that point, I was muttering and there was lots of other people moaning and crawling around, like, barfing, and buckets and stuff like nobody. You know, it wasn't like, I'm sure that, you know, in the dark, I probably sounded just like a lunatic. And it was not even a really pronounced thing. But it was a real thing to me. And I just, I'll never forget this insight. Pain is real. See, I had been reading a tonne of New Age stuff. I was probably a year or two years, somewhere in there into drinking Ayahuasca but this point, it was not my first time revisiting this memory. I thought something was stuck that it couldn't move that I need to barf it out something like that. And I had read a lot of new age literature and a lot of the New Age literature was like, You are not your pain. You know, you are a transcendental being you are beyond pain, like you have a choice about whether or not to stay attached to pain. And this was so far beyond all that kind of horse crap. Just to be totally like, this was so far beyond that. It was it was not it was not some trope. It was an experience of tremendous multi dimensionality.

And nothing about it invalidated the trauma, but it also it gave me a perspective that made me a more empathetic, compassionate, understanding, curious, off filled human being. It opened the experience and diversified it somehow in my psyche, and it's still got to be and it still is, to this day a painful traumatising event where I was a victim of someone and all of that. The experience told me pain is real. You are real but pain The pain that you experienced is not yours. It is a part of this vastness. This story that is the story of all stories like you can't, there's no way your mind can circumscribe any kind of experience. It's what's painful What to speak of painful experiences, there is no experience that is yours that you can possess. You have experiences you relate to experiences, you are a real being and experiences are real things. But they flow and they keep flowing. And they're they're tied is a mighty one, you know. So, I walked away also a lot more careful about what I read in the New Age bookstore. Letting go of pain does not mean negating its reality child, it means allowing for and opening its reality.

So I had thought, Oh, I'm here to let go of pain. I'm here to purge it and, you know, erase it from the databanks. And what this told me which I would later learn through the apana shots and the Vedic wisdom tradition, is, you know, is is also it's also said there, and that is that karma is a naughty, naughty means without beginning the spin cycle of cosmic history, the there's a reason that the visual that you get in the Indian tradition is that of, you know, universes like mustard seeds pouring out of the, the sweat, like the sweat coming out of the pores of Vishnu, emanating all throughout endless space, and then being sucked back in over and over again, a process without beginning or end.

There's no shuffling your way out of this. That's what it said, like, letting go of pain means letting go of thinking that it's yours. Because once you do, then you also gifted yourself, you know, the burdensome task of feeling responsible for it for the reality of pain itself. As you're doing that as soon as you try to own it. And this, this, letting go of pain, doesn't mean negating its reality. Letting go of pain means opening yourself up to the actual nature of pain, which is holy and sacred, and painful and terrible. Alright, there is a reason in the Christian story that God doesn't come down and, you know, give us unicorn cakes. There's a brutal experience of crucifixion of betrayal of, you know, sort of complicated story. This this god stuff, this reality stuff, this soul stuff. You know, it's holiness is, pain is part of it. And this experience was like, Whoa, look, you know. Letting go of pain doesn't mean purging it from yourself on route to some static state of perfection. It means allowing for the existence of pain and opening yourself to its reality. And I saw an image flash before my eyes of being in that ceremony when I was having these realisations about pain. And ayahuasca said, it's like this. And it showed me a picture of a woman. I still to this day, think, Oh, it was actually it was when my wife but I don't know. But it showed me a woman giving birth. And, you know, it reminded me of is, at this point, I had been really into the artwork of Alex Grey, who's like a psychedelic artist. And it was very much like some of the paintings he has of like pregnant women, women giving birth, but it was a picture of a woman delivering in the contractions and screams like the primal scream of and, you know, pain and and the breathing and the midwifing have, like in existence, like a child like a child coming into being. And I just remember ayahuasca, like that vision, and I was like, see, like this? I was like, holy cow, you know? I mean, that is a big ask. Like for me, I was like, You're You're telling me that this is life that life is like this. It said I lost it. Like yes, experience itself is like this. In fact, Tip number six, God is like this. divinity is like this. It's all of it. Wow.

And then very Christian, I have a lot of Christian imagery in the psyche. So it's fitting that I guess it would come up for me in these ceremonies, but the phrase, it is good. Like in Genesis, like, every day of creation, it is good, it is good, it is good. But this kind of good that Ayahuasca was also exposing me to is not some simple binary good. It's not like good versus bad. It's good as incomplete. It's good as in whole, it's good as in Yes. It's good as in Yes, this too. And it was very clear to me that if you want to experience, God, divinity if you want to experience this as that, that hallelujah, that if you want to be on your metaphorical knees, you know, throughout life, you have to open your heart, in the same way that you just opened yourself to seeing more than just one aspect of what had happened when you were little.

You have to open yourself up to more, and let more flow through. And as more flows through, there is simultaneously more room for opening. This is the most beautiful thing about the heart. And the soul is that it is godlike in nature. God is like an ever expanding origin, a source that is both at the heart of all things and expanding beyond all things simultaneously. And if you want to move into that heart and expand with that heart, you have to open yourself more and more. And as you open yourself, there will always become more room for opening. And the same daring, courageous, heartbreaking, painful, yes, will be birthing you along the way. The only difference is, the more you say yes to it, the easier it gets to say yes. Doesn't mean suffering goes away. It means you don't suffer the suffering in the same way. And also this experience these particular visions in this process of seeing these things, especially the woman in labour, it seemed to say look, if you're having a hard time opening, don't worry, every single experience in reality is designed to help you with it, like without exception. So you're gonna place your faith in anything place your faith and that that you are a heart and soul expanding, that if you go along with it and aid in the expanding with the conscious agency that you have, it greatly helps but even if you don't experience itself will be helping you along the way that is the definition of grace and mercy Can I get an amen?

Number nine, in my little list, the most basic way to open ourselves I learned from Iosco is to retain if you want to open your heart more and remember, I'm not kidding when I say this is a big ask. This is the this is the definition of carrying across to try to open in these ways. It is absolutely understandable to immediately be averse to the whole idea. But the most basic way to open yourself is to retain a spirit of wonder about the nature of any and every experience while also allowing it to be painful or difficult or joyful or whatever else it feels like but stay open. Stay in a spirit of wonder and curiosity. Stay present. Move through your life with a spirit of wonder a spirit of curiosity try to stay present. Move through your life with a tender hearted gentleness tend to experience and keep a really good sense of humour. You know, it's all it's also absurd. So you can laugh about it to some of the greatest experiences that I had an Ayahuasca ceremonies were so overwhelming that rather than hallelujah and on the knees and all All of that Holy Rollers stuff, I just start laughing. You know? Let's call it transcendental opening. We don't want to be opening up, you know, flying off into some, you know, nebulous ungrounded unhealthy states at the next rainbow gathering. I love I have so many friends who have gone to Rainbow gathering. So please know that I'm just I'm just That's my Capricorn sense of humour. Let's call it transcendental opening transcendental opening, this opening that we're talking about, it's actually includes closing, you might be like, Well, what about being closed? This seems to exclude closing, you know? Well, no, it includes that too. We're talking about Transcendental opening, which means allowing for the multi dimensionality of experience, whether that saturnine or Jupiterian whether it's contraction or expansion, whether it's closing or opening it, that's what we mean by opening it's hard to put into words.

Okay, so these were the insights that I had specifically around a ceremony where this childhood trauma was opened up, like detonated kind of had a hallelujah come to Jesus moment and then saw a woman giving birth and had all these insights that I'm sharing with you now, which of course, still took I feel like are still in the process of integrating in a sense these are things that you don't just go okay, now I've got it I'm gonna put it on my Instagram page tomorrow. It's like, no, these are things you have to live into. And if you if you got the get the message hang up the phone kind of situation Ayahuasca is does not suffer fools who come back just trying to collect nice, you know, quippy insights or something, you you got to do the work and the work means really trying to stay gentle hearted, curious present. You know, keep a good sense of humour, like those are, those are practices. There's lots of ways to you know, meditation for me, of course, but you know, they're their practices gotta work it.

So anyway, this led to this, these experiences in particular led to, I summarise them into three astrological takeaways. This all of this dovetailed with remember, I'm studying astrology avidly outside of these ceremonies, these kinds of experiences. Number one, because the planets are multi-valent, because they signify experiences of all kinds. And because the planet can express itself like a jewel being turned in a million different ways, there's so many ways in which Venus can show up. There's so many different dimensions to Mars, that because planets are multi valence, and because they signify experiences of all kinds, astrology supports the opening of the heart, to the multiplicity of divinity, that our experience is divine, it's many, the one is spread throughout, as the many and experiences always inviting us to participate in that holiness. And the planets themselves the language of the planets, from ancient times up to modern times, the planets are multi-valent, and signify something about the nature of experience, both externally and internally.

So what does that tell us? It tells us that astrology itself if you study this language is pointing us to the kind of relationship that we want to have with experience itself. That what we might call a God like nature awakening within us. Having a language to help us open our experiences, especially pain and suffering, is deeply healing and useful. I mean, it's easy to stay curious about curious experiences, or it's easy to stay curious about how did I get so lucky or fortunate? Or what is, you know, to be curious, it's easier to be curious, when you like what's happening, you know, it's a lot harder to stay curious and to open the heart and allow for that multi Vaillant, divine presence to flow through in pain and trauma and healing and suffering. It's just way harder in my experience anyway. So having a language that helps us open experience itself is a deeply healing and beneficial language to have and that's how we ought to use it. Astrology properly used, therefore helps us understand what is coming in our external life or our internal life or both, while helping us stay curious and appreciative. Experience becomes the altar at which we're worshipping. Our pain becomes a sanctuary and it is also our pain. It is also our literal trauma, it can be both we can have we are spiritual, multi dimensional beings who can make room for the linear aspects of our everyday lives while also staying open to the psychedelic complexities of divine have divine archetypes moving around, you know, so it's both.

Anyway. Thank you guys for listening. I hope that you enjoy this series that you get something good out of it that it helps you reflect on why you're doing astrology. What kinds of insights and experiences have led to your own study of astrology. I feel like most people have stories. It's not like well, I just sat down and studied with books. It's like, well, I was studying with books, but then this crazy, these crazy things started happening to me. What are those things? I would love to hear your stories, you know, I don't pretend that like all Ayahuasca is the way that you know the only way that you can learn astrology I'm just happened to be the far outweigh that I was part of my learning adventure. But I love hearing how people come to many of the same insights through all different diverse, you know, experiences in life, so please feel free to share your insights in the comment section. Please like the video if you did like it, subscribe to the channel and click on the notification bell for updates. That helps me a lot if you want the transcript of the talk. It'll be there. Shortly don't forget my new course comes up ancient astrology for the modern mystic starts June 5. You can check it out at nightlight astrology.com Alright, that sort of got for you guys. Hope you're having a great day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.