The Sky Speaks — Karma, Consciousness and Astrology

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday, everyone. Little bonus episode for you today. We're going to talk about karma, consciousness, and astrology. I think some of you know I've mentioned it on the channel several times in the past few months that I've been taking a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy. One of my favorite teachers in the Buddhist tradition is Thich Nhat Hanh. I'm sure many of you know who he was, a great monk in Vietnamese, a Buddhist monk who comes mostly out of the Mahayana tradition, but Zen and fascinating and super compassionate, sweet Buddhist teacher and practitioner.

So as I've been studying him, I have listened to hours and hours of his talks and have refreshed on a few of his books that I had read in the past. In addition to several other Buddhist podcasts I've been listening to, I thought to frame a talk on how I am understanding Buddhist philosophy alongside of the spiritual value of astrology. So I thought that you guys might like this today. It's also a chance for me to keep generating pre-draft writing on my new book. I've been doing that a lot lately, with my content, getting into flow with meditative, reflective writing on astrology.

So anyway, I wrote something today. I hope you'll like it. Before we get into it, as always, don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the channel grow immensely. When you do that, you can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, which is nightlightastrology.com.

Don't forget, today is also the last day of our sale for the Kickstarter campaign. If there were any rewards that you wanted to pick up, you can find the link pinned to the top of the comment section or in the description of this video. That includes all of the major sales on our classes, all of our training programs. If you want to come study and learn astrology with us, practice professionally, those class passes don't expire. They're good for this year, 2026, 27, 28, whenever you want to use them.

So great sale that ends today. It's the last day to take advantage of that. Head over there if you want to study with us or deepen your relationship to astrology in the year ahead. Hope to see some of you guys in classes soon.

Alright, so in the Buddhist tradition, Thich Nhat Hanh uses a number of phrases that are unique to his lineage as a teacher that nicely convey many complex Buddhist concepts, philosophical concepts. One of them that he uses is the word "interbeing." This is a word that he uses that, I think, is a little easier to understand than something like contingent, you know, co-arising or dependent origination, all sorts of philosophical phrases that are used to describe one of the core tenets of Buddhist philosophy.

Anyway, I'm going to talk a little bit about interbeing today. And if you are not familiar with Thich Nhat Hanh, I highly recommend checking out his work and just getting a feel for him as a teacher. He was absolutely fantastic, and especially the way he speaks, you can really hear in him someone who has just been steeped in mindfulness and meditation, and he has a very peaceful, loving vibration anyway.

So as I've been reading a lot of his work and other Buddhist podcasts, I've been thinking about the spiritual value of astrology in relation to Buddhist philosophy. So this is for you today, for your consideration. I've been thinking lately about astrology as a language, not a system, not a belief, not just a tool for prediction, but a language that we learn to speak about experience itself.

Astrology, the Logos of the stars, originally was thought of as a heavenly language, a heavenly form of writing. It was thought of as a way of naming patterns, a way of noticing how things arrive together in a kind of woven symmetry. In the Buddhist tradition, Thich Nhat Hanh used the word interbeing to describe something very simple but very difficult to remember, which is that nothing exists on its own. Nothing stands apart. Nothing appears without contingency or conditions.

Now astrology, in my humble opinion, when you sit long enough with it, when it accompanies your life as a kind of language, starts speaking the same truth. In the language of astrology, no planet ever speaks alone. The planets arise in pairings that make sense of one another. No sign makes sense without its opposite. All signs are understood in terms of complementary oppositions. No part of the chart exists without the whole contributing to its unique compartmentalized meaning. Meaning is always relational in astrology.

Now we tend to think in our daily consumption of astrology as astrology is something that's going to tell us what's going to happen. But in my experience, if we listen more carefully over a long period of time, astrology is actually showing us something subtler. It's showing us how the mind organizes experience through our perception of time.

In traditional astrology, there's a distinction between spirit and fortune. That would also be the spirit-matter distinction. There's a distinction between intention or choice and outcome, between what we mean and what actually occurs. But these aren't divisions in reality according to Buddhist philosophy. They're distinctions that our human mind creates. Essence and form, inner life and outer circumstance, thought and event. We make distinctions between them. We try to cut clear divisions between them, but in Buddhist philosophy, they arise together always.

What we call spirit and what we call fortune or matter and form or spirit and matter are two sides of the same movement. It's how consciousness meets conditionality. When we study a birth chart, especially over a long period of time our own charts or charts of clients, something becomes very clear, and that is that the things we desire and the things we fear come together. They're never separate. The outcome that we hope for and the outcome we want to avoid are shaped by the same attachment.

Distinctions like benefic and malefic planets, good houses and difficult houses, supportive aspects and challenging ones. None of these things exists on their own. They come about together. Thich Nhat Hanh has this example where he holds a piece of paper while he's teaching and he says, "Above, below, you cannot separate them. They're a part of each other, even though they're different." The entire language of astrology pairs things together, not to torment us, but to show us how experience actually works.

Ease can bind us just as tightly as difficulty. Struggle can soften us in ways that comfort never will. And so what looks like opposition is always mutual dependence, and things that are arising together, they exist together. I think that this matters because human beings, being a human, involves investment in outcomes, because we care. We want things, we avoid things, we're afraid of things, we desire things. There's no need to pretend like life is otherwise for us in our experience.

But astrology, when it is practiced carefully and considerately over a long period of time, doesn't just reinforce that investment. It also gives us a specific modality through which to see it clearly, to notice how grasping forms, to notice how our fears contract us, to notice how hope pulls the mind into some future scenario.

In this way, astrology becomes a study of karma, not just as the investment that we have into what will occur or what will happen, but as a study of pattern, as a study of co-arising contingent conditions that always come together. Karma, when it starts to be understood in this way, studying astrology over a long period of time and observing things honestly, karma is no longer about punishment. It's not about reward. It's repetition of pattern, often born of just not being aware of pattern.

When awareness enters patterns, something begins to shift or change or loosen. Good karma from this perspective, and if you study astrology long enough, you'll start to see what good karma actually is, just my humble opinion of course, but I really do believe this: good karma is not just getting what you want. Good karma is what reduces suffering. Good karma is what brings clarity. It's what leads to less grasping or fear, desire or fear, desire or aversion, attachment or aversion, and it's what creates more peace.

Astrology becomes meaningful when it helps us to see which movements of mind and awareness lead us toward freedom from suffering, and which quietly reinforce the struggle, the enslavement. This is why astrology pairs so naturally with spiritual traditions that value silence, or let's call it prayer. It could be mantra, it could be kirtan, it could be meditation, it could be listening, it could be contemplation, it could be quiet time. But let's call it contemplative arts.

Astrology pairs with an interior life that isn't always trying to fix or optimize things. Thich Nhat Hanh famously said, people often are either chasing being number one, being successful, or they come to realize how exhausting that pursuit is, how unsustainable it is, and how lacking in peace and happiness it is to chase success. And so instead, they prioritize peace. And the choices that we make that are conducive to peace are very different than the choices we make that are bound to the desire for success, or the choices we make that are bound to an aversion or desire to avoid things we fear.

Either way. And this is again why astrology, in time, paired with any kind of contemplative art or an interior life, is conducive to good karma. It is conducive to a life that becomes about peace and not so much striving or grasping that is actually really exhausting. Because when we sit quietly with our own chart or with any chart that we're studying, without rushing toward reassurance or desire or attachment or dread, it stops being a map of fixed identity and starts becoming a mirror of ecological contingencies, not a mirror of identity, but a mirror of relationship.

One of the things that's quite famous in Buddhism, and famously misunderstood as I'm finding out myself, is that there's no self. But what Thich Nhat Hanh makes very clear is not so much that there's no self as much as there's no independent self. There's no self that isn't relational, contingent, dependent, ecological. And when we come to see ourselves that way, we come to see the chart that way, or vice versa. We come to see the chart that way, we come to see ourselves that way.

There is a kind of gestalt that happens when we stop seeing the chart as a fixed map of a fixed identity. The study of karma naturally leads us to changing how we see a chart and how we see an individual being, and what it means to be individual, which is never really entirely individual, but contingent and relational. We can start to sense that nothing in a chart is out of place when we see things this way, that cycles of time and planets and karma rise and fall the same way the breath does.

Beginnings already contain endings. Endings are never final. As the Buddhists say, there is no birth and death really, because it's constantly happening, just change. So in this way, when astrology becomes part of a contemplative spiritual lifestyle, it echoes this old teaching. It has different valences in different religious traditions, so don't mistake me to be trying to indoctrinate you into Buddhism right now. There's no true birth and there's no true death, only change, only movement, only conditions rearranging themselves endlessly.

And when astrology leads us to that recognition, it helps us to release our fears. It helps us to soften and relinquish attachments. It helps us to meet life exactly as it is. Then it's no longer separate from contemplative practice. It becomes another way of seeing experience in the light of truth and awareness, which releases clinging.

I'll leave it there. These are just thoughts and an opportunity for me to share something genuine. I love breaking down the astrology Monday through Fridays. It's nice on Sundays to head to church, where I like to hang out thinking about why this is in my life. What is it for? How am I using it? How can I honor this as a spiritual practice? I consider these just roaming explorations, a part of my own ongoing conversation with something I love. So I hope that it's useful for you, too.

I want to give you an opportunity right now, in case it's useful. Once a month, we hold silent Sunday meetings. You can find them on the events page of the website, which is nightlightastrology.com. Go to the events page. Click on Silent Sundays, you'll find a link to join us for a free hour-long session of meditation. We do 30 minutes of silence, and then we have a time for some sharing and reflection. That happens once a month. You'll find those meetings listed there, and again, you can just join us for free.

But in case you don't know or have yet to experience the value of sitting quietly, I'm going to leave us here now with five minutes of quiet time together, and you can just sit with me if you want. I'm going to be quiet for five minutes while the recording is going. I suggest not staring at me. Find something else, or just close your eyes, or just sit quietly. I'm going to close my eyes so I don't get distracted by looking at the screen, and I'm going to sit here for five minutes.

And there's nothing to do with this time. There's no doctrine, there's no dogma. There's no reason. There doesn't need to be. There's nothing to follow, nothing to resolve. There's nothing you have to do with your breath. There's nothing at all that I want to imprint upon this, other than an opportunity to sit quietly and just listen. So I'm going to do that now for five minutes, and I'll be back, and then I'll close things up, and maybe that'll also whet your appetite for joining our silent Sunday meetings.

I'm...
I... That felt good. So I hope if you joined me for that, that even five minutes you can see how nice it is to, you know, just sit and take a moment. Sometimes it's like giving your system a chance to digest life experience and lots of things. And other times, I find that, you know, there's a tangible sense of just remembering things like who I am and where I am.

Anyway, if you like that kind of thing, consider joining us for our Silent Sundays once a month. Great opportunity to bring meditation into your life, and even one Sunday a month doing so can have some profound benefits, truly. And it's my hope that this channel in 2026 will serve as more and more of a bridge for people who are trying to bring more peace and self-care into your life, alongside of your interest in astrology.

So I'll leave it there for today. I hope you're all having a good one, and we'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.