How Ayahuasca Taught Me Astrology: The Illusion of Essence

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. I am back today, continuing a series that I started a long time ago, which I recently continued. I think it was last week I did another episode in a series on how Ayahuasca taught me astrology.

In these episodes, I've been focusing on the ten-year arc of my work with Ayahuasca shamanism and some of the unique ways that it has shaped me as an astrologer, and the way I do astrology and the way I create content for all of you, five days a week, year-round, I've been doing this for a couple of reasons.

One, as I'm aging and getting farther away from that chapter of my life, I'm trying to make sure that I remember and record some of the most important and vivid or exciting experiences that I had, especially those that shaped me as an astrologer because so much of who I am now as an astrologer really came from those experiences.

They were hugely, deeply inspirational to me. But the other reason that I'm doing this is because I think it is helpful to look at the underlying philosophical and spiritual reasons that we're here studying astrology. And so this series has also been kind of like an opportunity to take some time to reflect on what we're doing and think about, you know, our own spiritual path.

And so I hope that these, these particular episodes, provide some interesting storytelling so you can get to know me as a content creator a little bit more and also take some time to reflect on your own spiritual path and how it's being shaped and how it's grown, and maybe some of the important milestones in your own development that are triggered by this. It's nice to just occasionally remember, my God, I have had some beautiful experiences that have brought me this far that have really, you know, been enlightening or helpful, and there are so many before I get into this series, I always want to issue some qualifiers. I'll do that after I go through a few promotions.

But the main thing I want to say before this is the purpose of this series is not to glorify, you know, Ayahuasca or psychedelics or even my own experiences, as much as it is to just share. This happens to be the path that I took, and these are some of the stories that come from that path, but mostly, I hope that they are useful for you in your own path and your own process, whatever that may be, whether it's similar to my own or looks completely different.

Anyway, before I get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe. We're trying to get to 70,000 subscribers on the channel. We hope we'll get there soon. We have been doing really well. We almost doubled our monthly subscriber total, and we have not. We've gone over double our monthly subscriber average since we started this push. So thank you. If you haven't yet subscribed, we appreciate it. If you do, it will help us grow our business, the channel, and the community.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on my website, nightlight astrology.com. Pretty soon, I'm going to be promoting our new year one course, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic. Our first-year program begins its new cohort in November. So we're going to start advertising that. I think it's like the second week of September when the pre-registration sale will open. The early bird rate will open. Our need-based tuition will open. So keep that in mind if you want to study astrology.

Our first-year program comes up in November. If you are absolutely brand new, the beginner's course is for sale on the website. The pre-registration sale has ended, but you can still pick that up and maybe even prepare yourself for the November 1-year program with that kind of absolute beginners course that we just made. So anyway, that's what's going on at nightlight. I will also be promoting some of our fall webinars, and fall Speaker Series talks are coming up soon.

Okay, so in today's episode, I have titled this the illusion of essence. This story comes from another unique ceremony. See, one of the things that's really hard about remembering Ayahuasca ceremonies is that, you know, I had over 100 of them. I don't know; I remember getting to 100, and then after that, I stopped keeping track. So it's somewhere over 100, and that's all I know for sure.

But anyway, my experiences were primarily with several different lineages from South America, Peru, and Brazil in particular, and the ceremonies really changed my life in my early 20s, helped me overcome a brief period of opiate addiction that I was going through, helped me get sober, helped me help put me on a path with yoga, meditation, and introduced me to astrology, and that's where it gets really interesting, because in the first I'm in three or four years of my professional development as an astrologer, I was regularly participating in ceremonies, and those ceremonies became the medium through which I would reflect, refine and deepen my understanding of archetypes and the astrology that I was doing and studying.

So Ayahuasca has played a really unique role in my growth and development as a person and as an astrologer, and so I'm trying to capture some of the stories that are most vivid from those experiences, that will illustrate important things that I've learned that are at work in the way I produce content. You can get to know me and where I'm coming from, and they can also be opportunities for us to reflect and grow as astrologers.

The spiritual foundations of astrology are 1000s of years old and are rooted in the yogic traditions of India, as well as the mystical traditions of hermeticism, Platonism, the Pythagoreans, the orphics and so many other groups that have existed. Almost every religious group in the ancient world, at some point or another, grafted astrology onto their practices. Buddhists have versions of astrology at work in their tradition, though not necessarily the horoscopic form that we know we see in early Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

It migrates over to the Arabs and Persians who use astrology. And so it just, and then it, you know, it infiltrates Latin Christendom and the Renaissance. And, I mean, it is just has so many different spiritual traditions have utilized astrology. And so astrology. And so what that means is that there's an opportunity for us to explore astrology in relation to a pretty wide variety of spiritual values and practices. And so I don't at all in presenting these stories mean to suggest that there's only one way of thinking about spirituality or only one philosophical conclusion that we should arrive at as astrologers.

It's rather to celebrate the different experiences that work really well alongside astrology and some of those that have shaped me in particular. I also want to remind people that in this series, I am not at all suggesting that you go do psychedelics. Psychedelics are not for everyone. In fact, for some people, if it's not in the right setting, or just some people in general, it's just, it's just not going to be the right thing. It's not going to be the right fit. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. I don't think psychedelics are a cure-all. I don't think they're the answer to all the world's problems.

For some people, psychedelics in the right setting with safety and respect in a holistic and therapeutic approach, so to speak, will be tremendously beneficial. And you know, so anyway, we're not here to, like, glorify psychedelics or Ayahuasca or anything like that, just to share stories, and it's been a positive part of my path, but that's all I can really say. I can't recommend anyone do it or anything like that. So safety first.

And if you are ever going to do something like that, the only thing I can say is to make sure you find someone with their heart in the right place and their feet on the ground, who has traditional experience and training and is in that you're working in a ceremonial, ritualistic setting or container. I think those are the most important things for people who are thinking about it. So, anyhow, let's get into it.

The story I want to tell today that I've titled this talk, this particular talk: The Illusion of Essence. And it's a kind of, I don't know, it might sound like sort of highfalutin philosophy here, but the gist of this is that I had an experience that was pretty profound. And I would say it's sort of like one of the things I love about psychedelic experiences, which, by the way, can be something that you can pick up on through any kind of altered state, prayer, meditation, mindfulness, creative flow states.

But in this space, I would say that the journey of the night took me in an almost kind of Buddhist direction, where this idea of there being no underlying essence behind reality was a very important part of the experience. But there was a twist, and I'm going to share that twist as I tell the story anyway. I want to talk about this, though, because it is one of the things that I believe, one of the lessons that I see running almost parallel to the way that I understand and utilize archetypes in my day-to-day life still today, and it informs the way that I share astrology and teach astrology, work with my clients and so forth.

So anyway, the experience went like this: I'm in a ceremony, and, like, the last episode that I shared with you guys where this was not a particularly, you know, I said that the last ceremony was, like, there was it was not gut-wrenching. I wasn't, like, really sick, you know, like that. This one was a little bit different in that the experience was more of a physical roller coaster.

Okay, so some Ayahuasca ceremonies, and this is why it's really not for everyone, are quite scary, and some will include a lot of vomiting and or purging. And sometimes purging can take the form of laughter, tears, you know, very uplifting things. And other times, it takes the form of, like, really difficult, kind of painful experiences of fear or anguish, or, you know, mental and emotional pain and release, right?

So this wasn't like 100 or 10 out of 10 bad or difficult by any stretch. But. It was a difficult night. It was like right in the mid-range of, like, a difficult Ayahuasca ceremony, not the worst, definitely not the easiest. So, sort of right in the middle, there's a lot of purging. This was the contour of the ceremony when it came to the purging, which, for me, was mostly vomiting.

Sorry, I know that's kind of gross, but it followed a pattern and so, and this was not the entirety of the night like this particular ceremony was actually quite complex, and a lot of things happened, but this was what I would call a substantial passage within psychedelic or ceremonial settings of any kind, whether you're in an altered state or not, there are often passages.

For example, in sweat lodge ceremonies, I was with a Native American, like a practitioner, who led a sweat lodge ceremony in upstate New York one time, and I got to participate. He was a really interesting gentleman, and I don't remember which, like tribal background, he was from, but he led us through and taught us about this traditional ceremony and led, you know, a bunch of, you know, people from all different walks of life through this experience.

It was very safe and sacred, but he described every part of the sweat lodge as a kind of passage you go through, and there are different different things that are going to come up during each passage. And it was really cool. Like, seriously, we, we went through these doors anyway. It was, it was really cool.

Psychedelic experiences are similar in so far as there are often passages you go through, and then the rest of the night may be about totally different stuff, but you'll be like, oh yeah. But there was that one passage, that one like the segment where there was, it was like a whole drama that unfolded the whole story.

So that was like this, and this, in this passage, there was a rhythmic purge that was happening along the same lines, kind of similar to how I told you guys about the story in the last episode, where there was this kind of rhythmic Yes, yes, yes. And that was a very tranquil ceremony. This was more like a barf, barf, sorry. It's so gross. Anyway.

So here's how it happened. I started having memories. Every single memory that I had during this passage of the ceremony was tied to a misstep that I had taken a moment of missing the mark. Did you know that the word sin, in fact, actually means, I think it's the Greek missing the mark. So it's like, it's, it's like, you failed. So these were like Adam fails, right? And they were very vivid, very lucid memories of very specific instances. And I've written down some of them that I can remember. I can't remember all of them, right? Because it's a psychedelic experience, it's hard to capture.

But one of them was a very specific image of being a bad friend to someone. But what's weird was it wasn't just the image of being a bad friend. Then, there was a voice in my head that said, Aha, there is evidence that you are a bad friend. So it was like I was, it was like I was in some kind of cosmic courtroom with the superego judge of my own, you know, my own superego or whatever, like, this is my own psyche, and I'm pulling, you know, evidence, and there's like witnesses coming to the stand in my psyche, in the form of memories that are saying, Look at this moment where you were a bad friend. Aha, this is the proof you're a bad friend. I, uh, no, just barf.

And I thought as I was going along that I was barfing out my sin, my missing of the mark. I thought I was barfing out the bad friend in me. And in a sense, I was, but in a sense, I wasn't. So let's keep going. Then I saw there's, and I'm just named some that I can remember. There was a very specific memory of me in high school. I went through a period of time where several girlfriends in a row cheated on me, and it was very painful. And in each relationship, I recognized I saw myself as weak and pathetic and worthy of being cheated on, right?

And so, in the ceremony, I was seeing these images of myself as kind of weak and pathetic, and that's the reason why you got cheated on. And just like, boom, like the attorney in my head is like, there's the evidence. You know, weak. That's what you are. In essence, you're a weak man and then a bad student. I failed an English class in high school because I didn't really apply myself and was more interested in creative writing than I was in learning grammar, you know, for example. And I had this memory of my teacher when I got a D in the class, and I was talking to him, trying to explain myself, and him basically having zero mercy and being like, you know you're you, you're just sort of not a good student, remember? And so, you know, I remember this as if you're not a good student.

So okay, so I saw these, and then you're a bad student. I grew up trying to be a good Christian, right? That's what is valued in my Christian upbringing. And then there were all these moments in which I clearly failed in my discipleship and in my attempts to imitate the life and teachings of Christ, right? There was this sense of like, Nope, you suck at this. You're not very Christ. Like, if you're starting to detect all sorts of problems with this good that's, that's you should, so you're a bad Christian. And I literally thought as I was going along that every time I was puking, I was puking out these various weaknesses and flaws of character.

This is what I thought was happening. I saw sometimes I had very specific memories of telling jokes, of the jokes like going too far, and of people being kind of cringing, you know, like, ooh, that one went a little too far. Like, that was kind of weird, or there were just these, these thoughts. And I have a Capricorn moon, right? So, I have kind of a dark, cynical, absurdist sense of humor at times. And sometimes it just goes too far, right?

So I was remembering moments like this, and then being like, you have a dark sense of humor, you have a bad kind of an evil sense of humor, you know, being a bad son or a bad brother, images of those things, images of being a bad boyfriend, images of Being a bad writer. You know, I was in graduate school during this particular experience. And, like, I was in graduate school for creative writing, and I felt like I was a bad writer, lacking professionalism.

I was a graduate a teaching assistant, and I was kind of, there were, like, images of how immature and not professional I was, and okay, in each instance, what I saw was the evidence of some misstep, some missing of the mark in my life, and then this voice, you lack professionalism, you're a bad writer, you're a bad boyfriend, you're a bad son or brother. You're someone with a dark sense of humor. It's too dark. You're a bad Christian, you're a bad student, you're a weak man, you're a bad friend. I saw images of myself, you know, struggling with addiction. You're an addict. And I thought as I was going that in each instance, I was purging out some essential quality in me that was not good.

And finally, when I got to the end of the vomiting, sort of the bottom of the bucket, there was nothing left, dry heaves, you know, in the space of dry heaving, I was like, There's nothing left, and I started thinking to myself, Oh, well, I must have gotten it all out. Like, I'm going to be a good person now because I've purged all of these bad things, you know? Instead, I just started to get quiet again. And I think I told you guys about this in the last that we did in the last episode; I mentioned that the mantra of yes just brought me to a place where I was just sitting quietly empty.

There was just nothing there. This brought me to a similar place where I got to the bottom; there were no more images. There were no more bad essential qualities to purge, and I was dry-heaving. And then I got to the bottom of the dry heaving, and I was like, oh, there's nothing left. And then, all of a sudden, this kind of emptiness came over me, and the emptiness was really deep. The feeling of emptiness was connected to the feeling that there was nothing left to vomit. I know that sounds weird, but there was nothing left to like. Throw up, and I started having this beautiful understanding. And the understanding was that, actually, you aren't any of those things.

You're not a bad friend; you're not a weak man; you're not a bad student; you're not a bad Christian; you're not you don't have a bad sense of humor; you're not a bad son or brother, you're not a bad boyfriend, you're not a bad writer. You don't; you're not like some kind of person who lacks professionalism. You're not an addict. You and this negative space, this empty space, was all that was there. And it was really interesting because I was in a space where I was becoming very curious about Buddhism, just intellectually, not from the standpoint of practicing, but like, I was interested in what Buddhists think and what Buddhists believe.

There was a friend in the community that I was in with this tradition in Brazil who was a Buddhist, and he had told me a little bit about one of the philosophical ideas of Buddhism, being that there's not that there's not some underlying essential substance behind everything. And you know, he was like, you could call it nothing, but you know, then it's a something. And so it was like, oh, okay, this is where I'm going right now.

That is the reason that I can't be a bad friend, a weak man, a bad student, a bad Christian. This is because, in each of those claims, there was like, that's who you are in essence. In essence, you're a bad friend, and this was like I had become so empty that I realized that what I was actually purging was the idea that I could be anything in essence. And it was this realization that my soul is more like an empty cup. It is like the negative space of an empty cup, not even the form of the empty cup, but the negative space within it. And that the soul, if we even can call it, is this mediating ground.

It's this negative space. It's this open space that allows for experience to flow through. But me, who I am, my worth is unconstrained, undefined, as Heraclitus said, explored forever to a depth beyond report that the most liberating thing is that you can't ever be something essentially good or bad because your soul is more like this empty, open vessel through which things flow. This was such a profoundly liberating and Healing insight because what I realized is that the vomiting, the vomiting, the vomiting, and then the dry heaving, the dry heaving, the dry heaving, was not so much purging the bad friend that I am, the essentially bad parts of me.

It was purging the very idea that, in essence, we can be anything good or bad, like I'm purging all of these bad essential qualities so that I can get rid of them and try to focus on building or developing or being these essentially good qualities. And what I realized as I was just in this kind of emptiness was that I had dry-heaved my way to the bottom.

And in this emptiness, I realized I can't be anything, essentially good or bad, because that's not what the soul is. The soul is this kind of open ground through which all of these different things flow, and none of them are essential in so far as there's no possible way that my soul, which is this mediating space, can ever be anything but an open channel through which all of these things flow? I was like, Wow.

That was a really, really profound experience for me because it taught me that, in essence, I am not anything good or bad. I just am. And so what I was, again, what I was really getting to the bottom of was the very idea that I could, or should purge out bad, essential parts of me and that if I do enough of that, there will be only good parts of me left, or I, or that like I have to be constantly pruning and weeding out the bad parts and making sure that only the good parts are there. This just emptied all of that out. Stop thinking of yourself as essentially good or essentially bad. Stop observing your life experiences when you. Do something good, saying, See, you're essentially a good person.

Or see, in this moment of misstep, you are essentially a bad person. This just sort of brought me into this space where it was like, isn't the most freeing and liberating thing in the world, that somehow you exist as an eternal being, and yet that eternal being has no essence that can be judged as good or bad, that the ground of being is more like this open space and channel. I mean, you know, for many people, maybe this is like something very simple, but for me, it was super profound. Well, then, I got a little scared. I'll tell you, this is the conclusion of the story. I started getting scared because I thought, wait a second, this is like, I'm such a heady person.

So I apologize because many people would have been like, Hey, that's a nice place, and maybe there would just have been smooth sailing for the rest of the ceremony for people who aren't as nutty as I am. But I was like, All right, this feels really good. I'm an empty, open space. I'm not essentially good or bad. I am an empty, open space. I don't need to have an essence to be like, it was, wow. This is pretty cool.

And then all of a sudden, I started being like, Wait, if I'm an empty, open space that is like, undefined, unqualified, can't be judged, can't be put into a category, you know, what? What am I like? Do I What if I don't exist? What if I'm an illusion? You know, it's sort of getting paranoid about the idea that, if I lack some kind of essence, that can be, um, like, like, positively described, right? Like you're an eternal, beautiful child of God. Or, you know, you're like, you know, this idea of having no essential nature became really scary to me, is what I'm trying to say. And I started getting very paranoid and scared. And then it was the most interesting thing in the world.

So, there was this coin that came into my view, and one side of the coin was just golden, but it was empty. There was just nothing on it, you know, like heads or tails. This would be like tails, I guess, but with no images, nothing, just empty. And then, on the other side, when it flipped, it was the Sun. There was, it was a gold coin, and the Sun was on the other side of it. And then I just heard this voice again, like a voice knowing I didn't know what to call it. It was just an understanding and knowing of a voice, an instruction, and guidance. And it was like, Look, if it helps you, I love this. If it helps you, you can also think of your essence as good, beautiful, true, divine, untouched, perfect, eternal, and timeless.

So that, anytime you start thinking to yourself, Oh, look at my behavior that makes me good, you can simply say I can't be better or worse than the divine beauty of what I already am. And when you have a misstep, you go, Oh, there's the evidence I'm bad. You can say to yourself, This misstep is not evidence of me being essentially anything other than what I am, which is a good, beautiful, true, divine, untouched, perfect, unblemished part of the Divine.

Anytime you tap into these adjectives, it's so that you correct pride or fear right. Like pride, like I'm something more than I am, virtuous, good, or fear, I'm something less than I am. And you can use these adjectives, but then this voice said, but you should also practice that.

You can also just flip the coin anytime you want rather than saying, I'm an untouched, beautiful part of God; I can't be more or less than what I am. You can also just get quiet and empty out because that's also the same thing. Mind blown. Mind blown. These were experiences that I still tap into. How do I tap into them today? And what does this have to do with astrology? Well, today, I can easily do the same thing.

There are times when my inner voices are relentlessly telling me that I'm messing up. This is evidence that you're actually this bad person. And I can just get quiet. I can just go back to that space of emptiness, and I remember it as viscerally as I can remember dry-heaving my way to the bottom of the cup. I. Nope, there's nothing.

Essentially, there is just the open channel of being, or I can flip it, and I can say I can't be anything more or less than this beautiful, perfect, unblemished part of the Divine. And I can flip it either way. So I do that; they're both part of my repertoire. In essence, this also helped me to appreciate the way in which the Christian part of my brain will go into the essentially glorified elements of my being. I am part of God, which is the fundamental substance of reality.

But sometimes another approach is needed where I empty out the idea of there being any underlying essence in anything, and that is, I almost just want to call it like the Yin side of God or something. It's just like there is another approach that we can tap into. We can just empty it out. We don't have to; there doesn't need to be a mantra or an affirmation. We don't have to offer anything positivistic in terms of who or what we are. But it's also an option. It's there for us. I find this to be extremely useful when it comes to a few things in astrology; one, first of all, in day-to-day life, when we see other people's behaviors, we often see people's missteps, and then we take it as an opportunity to say, Aha, I see that behavior. You are that that behavior means that misstep or that. I don't know that that blemish of character that means that you essentially are a jerk. You essentially are a bad person.

It is now a lot easier for me, though not perfectly easy, right? But it's a lot easier for me since having that experience and bringing this kind of practice into my life; it's easier for me to look at people when they have missteps and say, well, that's not who you are. That's something that happened, that's something that it's an experience that you had, and on one level of reality, there may be responsibility or consequences or whatever, but essentially, I know that you are not your good or bad actions. And so there's a grace and compassion that can fill my view of other human beings and reality.

When it comes to the application of archetypes in my everyday life, and I see them playing out in the world around me, it helps me to assume a non-judgmental pattern or a non-judgmental perception. I mean, it's like, yeah, there's a look at all of these things happening, and the archetypes will reflect some of the noble, benefic, beautiful, virtuous things that people do.

The same archetypes will reflect the missteps that human beings have, that I have, but because I've had these spiritual experiences, and I recognize that archetypes themselves, in their relativity, are always calling us back to this space of acceptance and non-judgment, just that, we can empty everything out. When we recognize the multivalent nature of archetypes, they bring us back to the space of emptiness. And the same thing is true.

On the other hand, archetypes, because they sparkle and emanate the light of the Divine, can help us to affirm this is all divine. It doesn't need to be more or less than what it is. So there's an acceptance and an affirming. So whether you affirm through the archetypes or the archetypes help you to empty out and refrain and just be open in either direction. I believe that that is a huge part of how ancient astrologers worked with archetypes.

This is why, for example, that one of the largest schools of ancient astrologers were stoics. I'm not saying everything about stoicism is ideal or that we should all be stoics. I'm just saying that the bottom line of stoics accepting reality in the way that it is is fundamental to what many spiritual traditions have taught and how many spiritual traditions have incorporated the use of astrology.

Astrology helps us recognize the multivalent archetypal nature of experience. And the more you do that, the more you're able to say that reality is flowing through this kind of open vessel, and we are that open vessel as much as everything else is; that's a non-judgmental position, that's an accepting position, that empties out the tendencies of hypocrisy and self-righteousness and condemnation. On the other hand, astrology can help us affirm and acknowledge the divine.

The order of all things in that divine just soness, nothing needs to be more or less than in what it is. So, I find that these lessons that came up during that particular ceremony have always been with me as an astrologer. Sometimes, you just have to shrug your shoulders and go, Wow. You know, I can't possibly comprehend what this is, and so I'm just going to drop into a space of openness and nonjudgment.

And other times, there's this need to step forward and affirm things in just the way that they are and sort of place the Divine Seal of sacredness on them, and astrology is constantly helping us do both. The last thing I'll say is that I also believe that one of the problems we have is that of the two archetypes of the Sun and the Moon, the masculine and the feminine; the Sun is the one always more concerned with essence, right?

So that's why, on that gold side of the coin in my vision, the side of the gold coin with the Sun was the one affirming these basic essential qualities. When we say that there is an archetypal essential triangle in the mind of God, right? This is very Yang. The archetypal realm is Yang insofar as it tends to be dissociated and more static, the fixed, perfect, unmoving, unblemished triangle. And see, notice how we get that when we say that essentially, you are a good, beautiful, true, divine part of the whole, we are saying that because you participate in the archetypal, perfect, unchanging nature of reality, this affirms something about you and grants you an unmovable essence of worth.

Right now, the problem is that if we live too much in the realm of essence, we live and die by that, that philosophical tendency, and so the same tendency that makes us say in nature, I am good, I am beautiful, I am true, I am noble, I am worthy. The actually, the more that we also invite the tendency toward the opposite.

For example, if we don't have within our practice a tendency to just empty out, just empty ourselves of any of those like ontological affirmations, and we don't just empty them out from time to time, what will happen is, when we walk around the world, we'll start comparing people to absolute ideals of virtue or goodness. It just happens because we tend to live that way, with that value at play.

So I'll walk around, and I'll see someone, you know, telling a joke that goes a little too far, and I'll say, see, that's evidence that, essentially, they have a bad sense of humor. And so when you live in an essentialist paradigm, a paradigm that's all about something that is essential, but you're not constantly also working the other muscle and emptying things out, then the tendency will be to be more judgmental and to look at people and their behaviors as evidence of static, essential qualities.

So that's why it becomes really necessary in life to also have this ability to empty things out, and when we do that, we also have the ability to affirm a kind of divine essence. That's the tension between those two practices, in my opinion, which is really what provides us with a degree of ease and, yeah, flexibility.

So anyway, I'm not trying to get too wildly philosophical here, but the simple point is that, like, one of the things I see us suffering from is an over-masculinized spirituality and over Yang kind of spirituality, where we're so obsessed with how divinely good and chosen and beautiful and right we are right that we don't realize that the more and more and more we do that without the opposite tendency to just empty ourselves of any of that kind of certainty or any of that kind of essence, the more likely We are to walk around, and then when someone clearly demonstrates a lack of virtue, we say, Ah, well, that, in essence, means that you're a bad person.

So, we have to be very careful because the Sun's side of the coin will affirm things that are positivistic and eternal. But the more if we get stuck on that, if we get seduced by that, because there's kind of like a fool's gold there, too. There's a Dark Sun as well. And that same philosophical tendency will have us, you know, essentializing other people in negative ways, which is judgmental. This is why, by the way, the Sun and Saturn.

There is a natural archetypal opposition in ancient astrology; we could get into that too, but like, let's say, the opposite tendency for the Yin side of things when you empty out. What's really interesting about that is that if you empty out as a reaction, and you never have access to the positive affirming side, the tendency is going to be toward nihilism, where there's your inability to recognize something of a positivistic essential nature in all things can just as easily lead to the denial or negation of like a person's dignity or of meaning.

So you know, these, like the emptying out of essence and the affirming of essence, need to be in this, like dialog. That was at the heart of what I learned in that ceremony, which started with all of these negative essential judgments that I had of myself. You're a bad person; you're a bad part, you know, boyfriend; you're a bad brother and son and or bad student. And then it was like emptying all of that out and being like, my big problem is that I am so essentialist about everything, and I haven't realized that that puts me into this problematic place.

But then I got so scared, so worried that there was nothing essential to me, that I don't exist, that there was no meaning, that all of a sudden the coin flipped, and it was like, But there's this other side too, and you just need to be aware of both sides as a tension that exists in how we live spiritually. So anyway, I hope that this wasn't too confusing. I hope it was interesting.

Thank you, guys, for listening. It's been really nice for me to try to capture some of these stories and how they've informed my path spiritually and in terms of how I do astrology as well, you will notice in the way that I teach the archetypes that there is a way in which we are constantly trying to empty ourselves of certainty and self-righteousness and hypocrisy and to just level out to being an open vessel. And then you'll also find that, at times, I'm constantly affirming something of a positivistic nature about who we are and what reality is, and that comes from this kind of experience from my Ayahuasca journey. I hope you're having a good day. We'll see you again soon. Bye.