The Oracle Speaks — My Book is Out!

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

Happy Sunday, everyone. Little bonus episode for you guys. Today I am going to tell you all about my new book. It is finally out. It's called The Oracle Speaks: A Mantic Memoir. I am so excited. It's been several years in the making, two and a half years from start to finish, and I couldn't be more excited about it. I think you'll—the people who like this channel, I think will really like this book. I'm going to tell you about it today. That's our agenda.

Before we get into it, as always, please if you're not yet subscribed, take a second to do that. Give us a thumbs up. It really helps us. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on our website, as always. That's nightlightastrology.com. Reminder: we have an everyday free meditation. You can join us. Go into the Events page, click on Community Quiet. Also, I want to just show you where you can find my book. I'll kind of show you this at the end as well. But I feel like I should probably start off by showing you where you can pick it up, because if anything today is interesting about the book and you want to get a copy, head over to the website, click on the Shop tab, go to My Books, you'll see The Oracle Speaks: A Mantic Memoir.

Please buy it from us, not Amazon or Barnes and Noble, because we do a lot better when you order direct from the press that we work with. It's the same price either way, but we get more of the profits as opposed to the big retailers. So that helps us. Anyway. You can learn a little bit about it there. We've also republished my first book, second edition. That book I wrote in 2010; it's about the ayahuasca journey I went on, and a lot about my upbringing in the Christian faith. I am a creative nonfiction storyteller, so let me tell you what that means, and then I'll give you a little background about the creation of this book. I want to read you the preface to the book and one of the pieces of praise that I received that meant a lot to me.

So I did a master's degree and then a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction. If you don't know what creative nonfiction is, it's like the genre of fictional storytelling—dialogue, scene, character development. It's the craft of fiction, but applied to real stories from real lives, as opposed to ones that are fiction. So a great example of creative nonfiction in the film industry would be the movies that come out that retell true stories but dramatize them and make them fit for the screen, as opposed to a documentary, which would be more just sort of linear biography. A creative memoir in the way that I studied, I studied something called braided memoir, and the way of telling the story of a life. You could write four or five memoirs about the same life but capture different—just like the archetypal jewel, right? That you turn and catch different glances of light off of.

You could tell the story of a life from a lot of different angles and choose a lot of different anecdotes from a life and creatively render them and put them together to tell a totally different side of the story. I love that about storytelling. I love that when I'm sitting with my clients, the number one reason I love astrology is because I love listening to people's stories and being able to see the jewels of the archetypes in the creative rendering of a life. That's why I do this. And if you like my channel, then you know that, because half of the way I talk about astrology is through story. I share a lot of personal stories from my life—of parenting or something the dogs did or whatever—because I find that it's our humanity that is the best mirror for the astrology.

So on that level, I have always been a storyteller, in some ways more than I'm even an astrologer, although obviously that's my profession. But I started as an English teacher and as a creative writer, and it's been 16 years since my first book was published. It took me a really long time to get to a space in my career as an astrologer where I had something to say about astrology that I also felt was creatively satisfying. I'm not the kind—I mean, I will at some point write technical, philosophical stuff, because that's interesting to me as well. But what I really wanted this book to do was to creatively capture what it is like for astrology to just weave its way into your life. And I wanted to tell that not in terms of "then this happened, then this happened, and then I found astrology," but more like watching the weave of the oracular cosmos that we live in, talking to you and being a part of your life in the strange way that one story fits into another in themes and patterns that are astrological before you even know what astrology is.

That's what this book is. It's an attempt to catch what it's like to be unaware of astrology as it is very clearly weaving its way into your life until it becomes conscious. Like, oh, astrology. This was such a great creative labor of love, because to show that path is largely to write a book about astrology that has nothing explicitly to do with astrology. And to do that meant picking a lot of stories whose juxtaposition—the laying of one story next to another, laid next to another, woven through time and space—show you the weave of a human life and the way that the daimon, the Oracle, is gradually bringing you along, and for some of us, gradually bringing us into a deep love affair with astrology. So that's what this book is about. It's a creative way of writing about astrology, and I am so excited to share it with you guys.

If you pick up a copy, do me a favor: take a picture of yourself with it in a fun location and tag me on Instagram. That would mean a ton to me. I've seen authors do that before and always thought it was really cool. I would love to do that with my book. If you get a copy, what I'd like to do is I want to read one praise that I received from a colleague that's in the "In Praise Of" section, because it really captures the experience that I was hoping a reader would have reading the book. And then I'm going to read you the preface of the book. This is from the praise for The Oracle Speaks section, from Ari Moshe Wolf, who you guys know is a brother, a colleague, a friend. I asked him to read the book, and if he felt up for it, give a blurb, and he wrote this.

He said, "This is one of the best non-astrology astrology books I've ever read. The Oracle Speaks takes the form of a personal memoir of a boy, teenager, and young man finding his way in life while, in essence, telling the universal story of the harmony and rhythm that animates and weaves through all of our lives. It's deeply personal, disarmingly authentic, and universal all at the same time. Each chapter actually met me in my own unfolding story, as if the book itself became the Oracle, companioning me in the prayers and questions of my own heart, eliciting a reverent sense of the rightness beyond my understanding of my life right now. That is the unique medicine and teaching of this book. And if you're open to it—perhaps even if you are not—it will weave into your own life journey in the same way." When I read that, I cried, because that's what I wanted a reader to experience.

I called this book a Mantic Memoir. The Oracle Speaks: A Mantic Memoir because I wanted the reading of this book—as it was designed, as it was intended—to be something that could speak. You know, when you pull Tao cards, there's a story going on in those cards, right? And there are people, and it's not you, but somehow it becomes your story. And I wanted this book to be that, almost like every chapter was the pull of a card or a reading of some kind, and that someone so dear to me had that experience. That was very, very meaningful. Stephen Forrest wrote the foreword to the text, and I will let you guys read that on your own. I am too embarrassed by his praise to read it aloud. He was very, very gracious with me, and I am incredibly thankful for someone like him, who is an elder. Both his mastery—technically and philosophically in the field of evolutionary astrology—speaks for itself, but his example as a soul, as a person who clearly cares about his clients, who cares about spiritual growth, who cares about healing, and who walks that path himself throughout a life devoted to astrology, meant so much to me that he would take the time to read my book, to endorse it, to write the foreword for it. So I'll let you guys read that on your own if you pick it up. But check it out, because what he had to say about astrology in the foreword itself was, I thought, brilliant.

Anyway. Here's the preface to the book, written by me:

In ancient astrology and philosophy, it was believed that each soul is born with a story to live and a daimon, a guiding intelligence that accompanies the soul throughout its life. The daimon was not imagined as a distant spirit or external guardian, but as a subtle presence woven into one's character, destiny, and circumstances. It was the spiritual thread running through the story. The earliest language of horoscopic astrology was saturated with references to this guiding intelligence. The astrologer's role was therefore not merely predictive or technical. It was interpretive. The astrologer served as a kind of diviner for the daimon, helping people hear and recognize the deeper patterns shaping their lives.

In this sense, astrologers have always been oracular storytellers. Through symbols, charts, cycles, and transits, the astrologer helps someone recognize the sacred story they are living: the shape of it, its themes, its lessons, and its seasons. In many ancient philosophical traditions, as the soul was said to transmigrate from lifetime to lifetime, it could easily fall asleep, forgetting its own nature. The astrologer's storytelling was therefore meant to awaken it. This book is, in part, the story of such an awakening. It's about the strange, subtle, often invisible ways that spirit shapes a life. It's about how we come to recognize its presence, sometimes in the immediacy of experience, but more often in hindsight, when we see that its footprints have been walking alongside us all along.

On the surface, this is also a book about how I became an astrologer. Astrology happens to be the medium through which I learned to hear the voice of spirit more clearly. It is a language the ancients described as heavenly, a symbolic grammar for recognizing meaning in time. But the goal is not mastery of technique for its own sake, nor prediction for prediction's sake. It's about learning to listen. Astrology provides a way of noticing the patterns through which guidance speaks, through timing, relationship, and experience. In this view, the cosmos is not a dead mechanism, but an animate, an oracular presence. When we learn to pay attention to the shape of our own stories, we begin to sense its intelligence moving through them.

Many who come to this book are already part of the Nightlight community: listeners of the podcast, students in our programs, or participants in the broader stream of work that my wife and I have cultivated over the years through Sky House Yoga. If that is you, I hope this book offers a sense of the current that you've stepped into. It tells the story behind the teachings, the spiritual and evolutionary path that shaped the way I practice astrology and the reasons I approach it as a sacred art form. If you're studying astrology with me, I believe it's helpful to know something of the story that shaped your teacher—not as a badge of authority and not as a formal claim to lineage, but simply as context. Every practice emerges from lived experience. This book creatively traces the twists and turns that led me to this work and the inner transformation that gave it meaning.

And if you have found this book from outside that circle, I hope it serves a broader purpose beyond astrology. This is a book about the living cosmos and the presence of guidance within every life. My story is particular, but it's not unique. If you look closely at your own path, you may recognize similar patterns: moments of rupture and redirection, strange convergences, and lessons arriving in their own time. Everyone is living a story. Everyone is being shaped by something larger than chance. I believe these things to be true. Perhaps you will hear echoes of your own life in these pages. I also imagine this book as something I can pass to my children and someday, perhaps to theirs—a way of saying, this is the story that shaped me. This is why astrology became part of our family's vocabulary. This is part of the stream that we stood in.

Ultimately, this book is an invitation. If astrology is a sacred language, then it's meant to help us listen more deeply to the presence of meaning, to the voice of divinity, to the story we are being asked to live. May this story help you hear your own.

I'm so excited, guys. I hope that you will check it out. I hope that you will enjoy it. It means so much to me. For the people who like this channel and find this channel to be a place of guidance, I want this to be something that is a blessing to you and your life. This book was written with the spiritual intention of being healing and fun and entertaining and a mirror—a kind of mirror that helps us recognize the same beautiful weave of fate and divinity moving through our own lives, that helps us, really at some point or another, astrology becomes part of its language. But it's much bigger than just that. So it's a non-astrology astrology book. I love how Ari put that.

Anyway, that is it for today. Again, you can find the book on the website, nightlightastrology.com. Go to Shop, My Books. You'll see it right there. You can check out my other book from 2010. It's been a long time since I wrote that, but that second book is Fishers of Men, which is almost exclusively about the path of sobriety through working with ayahuasca. A lot of creative storytelling in that book too. I mean, that's my jam. But I think I would recommend starting with this one if you're a fan of the channel, and then maybe working your way back to the other one later.

Anyway, if you do get it again, please, we would love it if you take a picture, send it to us—and I'm saying "us" because my social media manager is helping me with all this—at Nightlight Astrology on Instagram, and then we'll repost it and share it and help get the word out. Hey, I hope you're having a great Sunday. And here is to creativity being a huge part of how we do astrology. Why not? We have a lot of technical manuals, we have a lot of philosophy, we have endless workshops. What really motivated me about this was: how can we be more and more creative in the way that we talk about astrology? That was the kind of vision behind this. By the way, it was Uranus squaring my natal Venus, my ascendant ruler, when this started. So when this project came about, that was the transit that was taking place. Kind of a fun detail.

Anyway. Hope you guys are having a great day. We'll see you again soon. Bye.