The Beliefs of Ancient Astrologers, Part Three: Spirit vs Matter

Transcript:

0:00
Hi everyone this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. And today I'm doing the third episode of my series on the beliefs of ancient astrologers. So hope you guys have been enjoying the series. Today we're going to take a look in this episode at the spirit matter distinction. And this is something that was common to a lot of schools of philosophy. Many mystics in both the east and the west, were looking at this distinction between spirit and matter. And we're going to talk about this in relation to astrology today. Remember the point of this series very basically, whether you end up adopting these beliefs or not as to just give you a sense of what the most likely faith statements or articles of faith were for ancient astrologers. Why did they do this? Where did they believe astrology came from? What do they believe its purpose was? What kind of reality that they believe that they were living in? What do they think about God, the soul, the universe, divinity in general.

0:55
For me, I approached this research several years ago from the standpoint of the evolution of my own faith journey with bhakti yoga. And I wanted to know, specifically, whether or not the beliefs of ancient astrologers were more or less in line with my own beliefs. And even though I practiced astrology, for a long time, it was something I really hadn't looked into very deeply. I had a lot of assumptions. And so I just set out to figure this out. I mean, it's speculation on a certain level, because we weren't I wasn't there. I don't know what ancient astrologers believed. I don't know how many different schools of thought there were probably many. But one thing that I was confident in is that I could probably discover the most likely underlying shared beliefs and ideas that ancient astrologers had, and that astrologers have had for several thousand years. So kind of almost like just getting down to brass tacks. What is the what are the cornerstone beliefs of astrologers? And broadly speaking, what did they believe astrology is purpose was? So again, whether you adopt these for yourself or not, is up to you, I hope you find it useful. And it's been deeply interesting for me to come across all of this and to do this research.

2:11
So in Episode One, we looked at the idea of an ordered Cosmos as foundational to the practice of astrology, the belief that the cosmos is meaningful, cohesive, ordered, just true and beautiful. And this is something that's common in both the western Hellenistic world which is very broad, and contains many different ethnic and philosophical groups. And also in India, where there is basically the same form of horoscopic astrology taking place and being practised but different and coming, being more informed by the Vedic tradition, the Upanishads, Vedanta sutra, etc. So in the second episode of this series, we looked at the problem of the one in the many, we have the appearance of many diverse forms that are always fluctuating and changing. And also this idea of an underlying unity or essence, that everything is a part of, and we talked about the importance of astrology in helping us to see the one in the many, because the tendency is when we get identified with fluctuation and permanence in change is to lose a stable sense of of centre and to lose track of that unified cosmos that we're a part of. So, in part astrology teaches us everyday how to see ourselves as a part of a meaningful cosmos, and how to see our diverse fluctuating circumstances in terms of these unifying archetypal principles, or symbols in the planets, and to understand that everything is held together by destiny or fate.

3:54
So today, we're going to look at the spirit and matter distinction. And this is just kind of something that's stemming from we're evolving out of these previous two episodes. So far, they're all pretty closely related concepts, but there's some differences too. So anyway, today, spirit versus matter. These are the philosophical schools in the first millennium BCE, especially around the middle of the first millennium BC, that were well known in the Mediterranean sort of Hellenistic world, that we're speaking of the distinction between spirit and matter; two different kinds of energies or two different kinds of realities that are related to one another, but also distinct from one another. So you have the or fix the pythagoreans, the platanus, and many other individual Greek philosophers around the mid first millennium BCE, along with the Vedas and the Upanishads. In India, the Upanishads are like philosophical commentaries or summaries of the Vedas, that somehow some people would describe them and they all move from the more abstract philosophical problem of the one and the many down to the implications of this problem for human beings. So all of these different schools start saying, what does it mean for us that there is a one and that there is many? Why is this important to human life and human experience, psychologically or spiritually? Why do we even care that there's a many, but they're all unified in an a part of this oneness? Why is that even important, right? In the Indian tradition of the Vedas, and especially the Upanishads, you could say from the sixth century BCE onward it said that knowledge of one's true self - sometimes the word that's going to be you've heard before is Atman - is said, is, is seen as a part of the cosmic self, the larger oneness Brahman. So in order to understand that one's individual, identity, or spiritual essence, is a part of this larger cosmic self. So the Atman is a part of the cosmic Brahman, is necessary in order to defeat the illusion of being only your body, or of being only identified with your fleeting material desires, or the coming and going of circumstances that are constantly pushing your mood and your emotions around and robbing you of happiness, only to give it to you again, robbing you of happiness, only to give it to you again, the yoga sutras of Patanjali, which comes around the fourth 400 CE on the other side, in the Common Era, those sutras eventually flower from the same tradition of thought, yoga chitta vritti nirodha, this is one of the famous verses of the yoga sutras that says, yoga means the cessation of the revolutions of the mind or the ceasing of the the turnings of the mind. Insofar as we are identified with the the temporary changing nature, which sometimes is called materiality, that if we get identified with that, then we're identified with constant fluctuation and change, there's no centre there. There's nothing to stand on. It's like, in some ways, the equivalent today is like scrolling through a social media feed for too long, you just go like, Oh, my God, I can't handle one more, one more opinion from anyone else about and they're all diverse and fighting. And so, this world was understood, in part as a reflection of variation and change and impermanence and constancy and flux. And because one's body and one's mind participates in that, then we have a problem, we have a problem because the the true self is thought to be eternal. The true self is thought to be spiritual, which is to say, it does not change, it does not. It does does not display variegation and impermanence. There's something about it that is everlasting, that's unborn and undying. And this indwelling Atman, is also a part of the all pervasive, you know, essential spiritual energy that's in all things, so that all things change, but have coherence and are able to have something enduring behind them because of this larger Brahman.

8:33
So in the ancient world, this is a problem that we see in both the east and the west being addressed like look, if you go and just get lost in your head. And if you go get lost in the changing, ever changing world of fluctuation and change, that's a very painful place to hang out. So the practice of yoga, like the practice of astrology, and so many other spiritual techniques and disciplines in both the east and the west, have, as their goal the the desire to be identified with the true self, the unborn and undying self, that doesn't change. So that while we move through the world of constant fluctuation, we do not get lost in it, or torn apart by it, which, as the Buddha says in the Buddhist tradition, that this impermanence is this is the seed of pain, desire, and aversion. I want this I hate that give me this, oh, no, this happened. That that kind of constant fluctuation is painful when we're identified with it. We're human. So it's inevitable that we're going to walk through this realm of experience, this material realm. We're identified as the spirit soul walking through this different dimension of energy called material energy. Then we find happiness. Now the Buddhist teaching is a little different than that, but this is essentially what ancient astrologers most likely would have adopted about the nature of the material energy versus the spiritual energy. The Orphics believe that release from my material identification is obtained through recollection of one's own godlike nature. Plato similarly compared the journey of the philosopher as one who is moves from ignorance and identification with the realm of opinion, and constantly fluctuating circumstantial energies to recollection or knowledge of the eternal archetypal forms. So for him, it's like a mental contemplative exercise. And he talks about astrology in his work, especially the Timeaus.

10:42
What does what what do the planets represent? In both traditions, they're the wandering stars, they're the gras halls or the grabbers. They are really symbolic reflections of the constant fluctuations of events and circumstances in the material world. Why do we study them so that we can remain seated in, you know, remain seated on the throne of the soul in the heart, and walk through them knowing these do not define me, these do not make me or break me these. These are circumstances all of which I can see God in eternity in, if I train my mind, if I train my heart and my soul, Socrates, the Pythagoreans, the Orphics, and eventually hermetic philosophers, they were all adamant in the West, that for the soul, the eternal spiritual being within to be free from its painful entanglement with the body in the realm of materiality, it had to aspire toward knowledge of eternality, that is spiritual knowledge. Astrology is therefore a spiritual form of knowledge seeking, it's a way of participating in the material world and sanctifying it saying, it's blessed, it's holy, it's sacred, because I have learned, I have trained my eye to see the world of eternal forms within it, I have trained myself to see God in it, I have trained my soul to stay steady in its own nature within it. That doesn't mean that it's bad, it's just recognising that it's like trying to, you know, you're trying to hold on to something that's always slipping through your hands. So you have to train yourself to have right relationship without otherwise you'll go mad in it. And that's exactly what we have in both the east and the west. The idea that over identification with it leads to pain, illusion, suffering and ignorance.

12:30
I remember when I was a kid, I was with a good friend of mine, and we were in a mall somewhere. And back in the day when I guess, I don't know if people still hang out in malls or not, like I don't, I'm so out of it, I haven't been to a mall for so long. But at any rate, we were in a mall, and I was like, let's go get a burger or something like that. And he was like, you know, I'll keep my money and put it towards something that lasts, and you can put your money toward food that will give you like, 15 minutes of pleasure. And I remember him saying that and me like it was such a wise thing for my friend to say, and I was kind of like, suddenly like, what am I suddenly in a zendo? But he was so right. And for whatever reason, just, you know, so many years later, as I reflect back on that friendship, you know, that's a friend of mine who ended up spending a year in India in an ashram. And he just had the making of a Yogi and and from, you know, from an early age that I think we were probably in the seventh grade or something like that. But that's the idea. The idea is that the the material energy, you know, you're going to have different takes on what it is why it exists. But it's problematic if you get overly identified with the rise and fall of the stock market, your appetite, the comings and goings of fleeting things in this world, the coming and going of, you know, opinions and fads and trends. And if you get lost in that, it's a roller coaster ride that never ends and it never really works out in your favour and eventually it exhausts you. So ancient philosophers recognise this ancient mystics recognise this and they said, look, you know that you've there's a, there's got to be an answer to this. Where does astrology fit in? Look at what the Hermeticists were saying about astrology. They were saying that these forms help us to see God in everything, these these planetary forms. In a sense, the purpose of astrology was not likely for many serious spiritual practitioners was not likely something that was used every day to be navel gazing at one's own chart and being obsessed with what was going to happen the next day or the next day to me because they were not interested in making you know, and investing more in material outcomes that by nature should not be the source of our happiness. The source of happiness is within, it's who we are. It's it's something essential about our our actual beingness and that's not to say that there aren't circumstances in the world that that you're not going to find painful or that we can't inevitably walk through the world of that we should somehow be dissociated from it. It's just being in right relationship to it, we have to be able to see everything in terms of this larger Harmonia, this larger oneness and also the sense of divinity, this indwelling sense of spirit, and this greater sense of God or divinity, that the Spirit is also seen in relation to on some level.

15:30
Now, again, all these different schools are going to apply and address these subjects in various ways, but they're mixing and matching around the same problem. So, the Stoics, they were popular from the time of Xeno, third century BC, well into the heyday of the Roman Empire, second to fourth century CE, although they very likely, you know, we're adopting many beliefs from people like the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Orphics, hermetic philosophy that was emerging that had a long previous existence in Egypt. So So I say this because sometimes people because some early astrologers appear to have been stoics, people will jump to the conclusion that astrologers, early astrologers were stoics. And I don't I deeply believe that that's not true. But that doesn't mean that that stoics couldn't have easily adopted astrology, because it fits very nicely into many of their beliefs. One of the reasons I say this is also because the Stoics didn't really believe in a personal soul transmit migrating from lifetime to lifetime. And it would be hard to imagine because of how prevalent that view is in India, and in and in the West, that a school of philosophers who didn't believe in the transmigration of a personal soul from lifetime to lifetime created astrology. Anyway, the stoics were popular from the time of Xeno, third century BCE, well into the heyday of the Roman Empire, that's like second through fourth century CE, they also suggested that there were two opposing substances, matter and reason or like material and logos, both of which comprised God. So the two together somehow comprise the totality of divinity, the human soul was said to be part of the active substance of reason, or of God, this higher eternality and it finds happiness by identifying with eternality and Divinity rather than the passive substance of matter, which is always fluctuating. So it's the exact same thing. And essentially, you see the same teaching, regardless of whether or not there's belief in God or the soul. You see this very similar teachings in Buddhism, Taoism and so forth. For the Stoics this this journey consisted of living in the moment free of desires and fears and acting ethically, or virtuously while pursuing divine reason or the higher. And remember, for them divine reason is that sounds really rational and logical and heady to us. But for them reason was beautiful. And reason was just and reason was true all at once. Human souls were similarly said to be emanations of the primordial active ingredient, the logos, this school of philosophy was one of the more popular schools during the Roman Empire during the flourishing of Hellenistic astrology. But I personally think it's unlikely that astrology was a stoic invention, I mean, much more likely that it was has its precedent in hermeticism, Egyptian mysticism, Pythagoreanism, the Orphics, the platanus, I think it's probably closer to something like that. But you know, who knows, I could be wrong.

18:41
Anyway, so all of these schools in general dealt with the idea that there is spirit and there is matter. And I think if we're going to talk more about reincarnation and karma and the likelihood of the belief in a soul that transmigrates from one lifetime to the next lifetime in the next episode, but for today, I just wanted to really emphasise that there was a belief that there is a distinction between spirit and matter. Now you have different ways of dealing with why that would be there. And I don't want to go into that so much. Because the Buddhists are going to deal with that slightly differently than theists would or and then there's a variety of different approaches in India within the Vedic upanishadic tradition. There's like branches and tributaries coming off the main river of those texts that are going to say things like, you know, ultimately, there is no distinction between God and the soul. That enlightenment means merging and that there's a ultimately they're just one, and that this world is a complete and total illusion. The material energy is actually just illusion. You're going to have other schools that will say no, the material world is real, it's just an impermanent, fluctuating energy, it's divine in its interaction with the soul and is a meaningful part of how spiritual life is cultivated, and that there is an eternal spirit soul. And there's also God and they have relationship with one another, that's divine and perfect, but they're not identical. They don't that the point is not to collapse your individual identity into God or something like that. So there's monism. And then there's just kind of qualified. dualism isn't really the right word, but it's like a qualified way of understanding the relationship between oneness and duality.

20:37
And you see similar debates in western philosophical traditions as well. Sometimes I think, as a student, you know, when I, when I see all of this, and I'm studying all of this, it's tempting to sort of throw up your hands and go, Well, nothing matters, or it's all just historically, culturally conditioned stuff that people made up or blah, blah, blah, I don't personally take that approach myself. For me, I've had to study and carefully reflect upon the different philosophical traditions and find the one that fits for me, and then lock in, in practice, in a tradition that works for me, while also knowing that, you know, I don't want to exist in some kind of antagonistic relationship with different religious or spiritual or philosophical schools that may have come to different conclusions or chosen a different path. I don't think that that means that everything is relative, and anything is true. It's just sort of like saying that I think we can choose a faith path. And we can refine our beliefs as people without having to make other people wrong. I just, I know that our logical brain wants to say, Well, if I'm right, and this other thing that proposes very different or contradictory things to what I believe that they must be wrong, it's like, No, they don't come to the same conclusions. And I'm going to stay in a humble place of being like, this is where I feel called, this is what I'm going to practice. These are where my beliefs take me. And God bless you, God bless other people who are taking different paths.

22:15
I can't, I cannot believe in an all loving divinity, who would not be very graceful for us all doing the best we can with the information we have. But I always tell people when doing a series like this, it's one thing to be academically objective for the sake of trying to understand things. It's another thing to use academic objectivity or relativism as a kind of crutch to avoid having to take deeper risks and, and make deeper commitments with our spiritual life. And some people just aren't going to be called to joining something, right. But refining and clarifying your own beliefs, offers psychic ground to your practice. And even if those beliefs are very broad, in general, with this series, I'm just laying out the most basic things that I think ancient astrologers probably believed. And then obviously, there's lots of variety within them. But even that, you know, to me is, is helpful. It's like, I always use this analogy, it's not mine, but you're digging a well, and you just start digging, lots of little, you know, spade scoops out in the yard, you're not going to get to a well, you have to dig deep in one direction. I think that people sometimes think that if you dig in one direction that makes you intolerant, because somehow it closes you down to variety or possibility or something like that. And to me, ironically, that's a very narrow way of thinking, I don't think that way. I think you can dig very deep in one direction, clarify your beliefs, understand the sacred ground, you stand on and still be open to the fact that other people will have done that same thing differently. So anyway, I want to explain that because I get I get questions about this kind of stuff, people, all of you guys who listen to this channel, I think you're just you're so smart. And I really enjoy the questions that you have and the interactions and so I'm, I'm very glad to be making this series. And I hope that it's interesting for all of you.

24:18
So in our next episode, we are going to talk about reincarnation and karma and what role that might have played in shaping the beliefs and practices of ancient astrologers. So in the meantime, remember, when you're practising astrology, that what it's doing is helping you to see a unified cosmos, it's helping you to see the one in the many. And it's also helping you to retain a sense of your self as an eternal spiritual being within the constant fluctuations of your life. So that's where we've gone so far, and I look forward to more soon. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.