Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

I would like to follow up on some comments on the astrological Dharma Chart and Karma Charts, along with their differences.

First, these are two different charts calculated for the same exact birth moment and the same planets, but each from a different perspective or view. So, what you have here are not different entities (you are the entity), but rather different views of the same entity and the same moment in time. We are talking astrology here.

The one chart, let's call it your "Karma Chart," is the standard traditional astrology chart used for centuries and probably millennia. And there is nothing new here that I have added. This karma chart has always been a chart of the personality (how we appear, with ascendant and houses, etc.), you know, the particular Earth-centered circumstances in which each of us find ourselves embedded in and looking out through the lens of our particular personality, which some poets have referred to as that "terrible crystal." The personality eventually grows old and dies. That kind of thing.

The second chart is not really new, but it is still new or "news" to astrologers. In fact, it is about 400 years old, originating when Copernicus first pointed it out to all the astronomer/astrologers back around 1514 A.D. Copernicus pointed out that it was the Earth that goes round the Sun, and not, as we had mistakenly thought up to then, that the Sun goes round the Earth.

And although this may sound like a simple mechanistic and mechanical observation, it has much deeper roots in the mind than that and longer legs, as well. Of course, those we know today as astronomers immediately adopted the Sun-centered view, which they added to the traditional geo-centered view and went on to become the astronomers of today, putting men on the Moon, and all of that. They used both charts in their work, and continue to do so.

Yet, for reasons not clear to me, those whom today we call astrologers did not accept the Sun-centered chart that Copernicus pointed out was, in fact, the way things were, as in: the truth. Instead, they continued to use (and still do today) the standard geocentric birth chart they had used since time immemorial. Why astrologers chose to ignore the helio chart, I have no idea, but would love to understand. However, astrologers have paid a dear price for their ignorance and continue to pay it forward, even today.

And that price is that astrologers failed to become empowered by the truth of a sun-centered solar-system view and continued to behave as if everything revolved around us here on Earth, including the Sun. This kind of self-centered view is obscured to the degree that we ignore the truth that not everything revolves around us.

Because we are still wrapped up in materialistic (19th and 20th Century) science, it has been convenient (and even now traditional) to ignore any spiritual ramifications of our views, and to carefully compartmentalize our spiritual leanings as distinct from the mechanistic truth of science, as if scientists do not have a heart, a soul, and a spirit. Save that for Sundays and church or don't go there at all.

So we end up with folks like me "crying in the wilderness" and echoing what Copernicus and scientists ever since have known as the truth, that we are also children of the Sun, not only children of Earth.

I believe anyone reading this can grasp what I am explaining here, but let me point out what apparently cannot be grasped, so that you might grasp it.

The mechanistic transference of view from that of looking at life through our Earth-eyes to that of also (in addition, mind you) looking at life from the point of view of the Sun as center is not without spiritual, emotional, and psychological ramifications. The transition to a Sun-centered perspective does not mean that we give up our Earth-centered perspective and somehow are "planet-less." Not at all.

It is more like we transfer our consciousness to the Sun-center and from that vantage point continue to look out through our Earth-centered personality at our life. But there is a difference.

This transference of consciousness is a profound empowerment that changes forever our, well, view, of course, the seat of our consciousness. And that seat is also the heart of what is called the Dharma, the path or way to full awakening for each of us.

In other words, the Dharma Chart (our sun-centered) chart is a map of our spiritual path or dharma, the dharma being also the path and way through the obscurations and thickets of our personal (Earth-centered) life.

And while this transference of consciousness for me began as the intellectual exercise of looking at two kinds of astrology charts, one Earth-centered and the other Sun-Centered, unknown to me at the time, the ripple effects or implications of that act, when fully resounding through my life, was what I am making an effort here to point out to you, that my consciousness transferred outside (my personality) to within to a new and more deeply seated (and natural) vantage point, my spiritual being (whatever we could agree to call it).

I am making that transition here and NOW, rather than at the time when my physical body passes on. This is the transmigration that the Buddhists point out happens in the bardo. We are in the bardo now and it can happen now, as well.