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Deepak and Astrology? 

It is not my fault. I didn't go looking for astrology. It found me. I was on the last year of my doctorate in psychology and, like everyone else that was highly 'educated', I thought astrology was some kind of superstitious fortune telling scam run by gypsies with bad teeth and dirty hands. Then one fine summer day in 1970 I was visiting friends at a hippie house in Boulder, Colorado and this guy with long hair called Billy came over and said, “I bet you are about 1943 Capricorn”.  Now what got me was not the fact that he was right, but the fact that a 1943 Capricorn was different than a 1944 or a 1942. I thought there were just 12 signs and that was it. 

I told him he was right and he asked what day and then he pulled out this dog-eared blue paperback and started reading. He was very abstract and very esoteric, but what he said had more than a grain of truth to it. I had already taken courses in psychological testing and graduate courses in group therapy and I thought I knew myself. Hah!     This was something more. More deep. More comprehensive. More significant. More understandable. More resonant with my soul.

Finally my curiosity could stand it no more and I asked (demanded) Billy to let me see that book. One look and I was shocked. It was a whole page after page of nothing but numbers and cryptic glyphs and no words or proper nouns at all. 'What the hell', I wondered and Billy patiently explained the whole thing to me. It was a Rosicrucian ephemeris he said and it told where the planets were for any given day. Over the next several weeks he showed me how to make a chart for any given birthdate and he loaned me all the books for calculation and interpretation and my scientific nature set out to test this strange 'superstitious' phenomena that had literally been put in front of my face. Six things in my life had made me immediately curious and this was one of them.

First I started getting the birthdates of all my family and friends and people I thought I knew pretty well. My mother was a Leo. No wonder she was constantly fishing for compliments about how good she looked. My sister was a Sagittarius. She was an airline stewardess and constantly traveling, traveling. One good friend was a Pisces and he was constantly helping people. Another friend was a Capricorn and he was the business manager of the college newspaper. Pretty soon, the summer was over and it was time to go back to university and finish the last year of my doctorate.
The last year of the program was mostly learning how to give IQ tests, both the Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet. I had already spent a year studying the projectives, the Bender-Gestalt, the Draw-A-Person/House/Tree, and the famous Rorshach Inkblot Test. Later on in post-graduate settings, I would learn the classic MMPI and 16PF.

I finished my coursework for my doctorate in 1972, got certified as a school psychologist, and started working in the field in Colorado. How I learned astrology was to compare the results of psychological testing with the interpretation of the birthchart. When doing a psychological evaluation I would have the social history from the social worker, academic records, teacher interview, parent interview, clinical interview, observation in the classroom, and psychological test results. Not only were the astrological interpretations always insightful, they helped me to organize and make sense out of the scattered, discordant and contradictory results of different psychological tests. It turned out that astrology was far superior to psychology and psychology was the backward, limited 'superstitious' system. What a joke.

One fine summer day in 1976 I noticed an article on the front page of the local newspaper, '19 Nobel Prize Winners Claim Astrology is Superstitious'. It went on to say that astrology was unreal and anybody who believed in it was gullible or insecure weak personalities looking for guidance in the world. Wow, this was the first and still the only time in modern scientific history that such a large body of prestigious scientists had come together and publicly declared something was unreal. Turned out this same article was on the front page of almost every newspaper all over the country. Turned out the campaign was organized by some group called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal. (CSICOP). No one knew where they came from, but they had enough budget to fly around the country in first class.

There was something strange about this public claim in the name of science. The first thing is that not one of these 'scientists' had done any kind of scientific experiment, study, or even review in the field. This is a blatant violation of scientific ethics. The true scientist limits his claims to the evidence he has himself produced in such a way that it can be repeated and replicated by another. Any extrapolation beyond the facts is theory or philosophy. 

Example:
     One day two scientists are riding in a train together. One looks out the window   and says it is raining. The other scientist looks out the same window and says, 'It  sure is...on this side'.

The second thing strange about this was that most of these guys were astronomers, with a few physicists, science writers, and even a professional stage magician called Randi mixed in. Not one of these guys was a psychologist. They were out of their field. A physicist is not professionally qualified to make a professional opinion about sociology and an astronomer is not professionally qualified to make a professional opinion about psychology. To scientifically investigate the claims of astrology made to the public would require a scientist with a psychological background using psychological methods.

It was time to do my thesis and finish my doctorate and get that final degree. This article decided what I was going to do it on. I was going to go up against the entire scientific establishment and cultural prejudice and test for myself if astrology was really real. Maybe I could be wrong or deluded somehow. The only evidence I had was clinical opinion. In clinical practice it seemed to explain things somehow.

I submitted my proposal to the Department of Psychology at the University of Northern Colorado in 1977. It is to their credit that they accepted the proposal. Most departments would not have accepted research into a controversial area that was presumed to be superstitious and unworthy of professional attention. Maybe it was because I was the whiz kid in the department and considered to be pretty smart. Maybe it was because I was argumentative (college debate team), verbally fluent, well read, and was going to put up a protest if someone said no. Maybe it was because of the openness of the times. Maybe it was because I was likeable. Maybe it was because it was a good proposal. Who knows? They let me do it.

The title of the dissertation was 'Astrological Discrimination Between Authentic and Spurious Birthdates' and it used a double blind experimental method with control group. It was the first time in scientific history it had been done on this subject. The subjects didn't know the answers and I wouldn't know the answers. First, I collected personal histories from fellow graduate students and had them give me two birthdates, one true (authentic) and one false (spurious). Only my research advisor was given the true birthdates. Then I took these case histories (more than 10 pages each) with me to a professional conference of astrologers in Arizona and asked for volunteers to read all these case histories and tell me which ones were the true birthdates. The statistical probability of getting it right was 50/50. Once I collected the results, I showed them to my research advisor, Dr. Richard Bear, and we together calculated the outcome using both chi square and t-test. They got it right 2/3 times, which, with a very small sample, was statistically significant at .05 level. It was not an accident. I had scientifically proven that astrology was real. It did not prove astrology was true. The first step was to prove if it was real. It would take a lot more work to prove how much of it was true.

Now it was time to do the literature search for the thesis. I could have made it easy on myself and just done the literature search in the field of psychology to see if anything had been done. Nothing had been done. There was not one scientific piece of research in psychology using the experimental method on the subject of astrology. There was nothing to report. I could have put it on one page and been done with it, but, no no, I had to do it the hard way. It took me 6 months of reading and research 12 hours a day to get it all done and I just tapped the surface of it. What I did was ask myself, 'If astrology is real, would there be any evidence of that in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and history?' In science, it is called an operating hypothesis.

It was incredible. Not only the evidence was there in every field I looked into, it was clear. In biology were the studies of biological clocks and oysters opening their shells when the moon passed overhead (Dr. F.A. Brown). There were other studies of migratory and navigational behaviors of birds and animals. There were studies in exobiometeorology from NASA and other studies in 'jumping genes'. In chemistry, there were the studies by Dr. Piccardi. In geology, there were studies of the full moon passing overhead triggering earthquakes and there was the theory of 'catastrophism'. In history, astrology had occupied a major space in every civilization of mankind. In religion, there were the 3 Magi (astrologers) of Christianity and the Vedas of Hinduism and the astrological prediction told to Buddha's father that the young prince would either be a great king or a great sadhu. Astrology was a significant part of civilization up until the newly founded French Academy of Sciences eliminated the spiritual/superstitious component of the ancient sciences in 1666. They took the spiritual component out of alchemy and called it chemistry. They took the spiritual component out of astrology and called it astronomy. Kepler warned them not to throw the baby out with the dishwater, but they did not heed.

The thesis was complete, all several hundred pages of it, and I handed it in to the committee. My advisor was Dr. Darrell Anderson, a clinical psychologist head of the department. All the faculty members on my committee were senior members of the department. Dr. Carol Lutey had done the first factor analysis of the Stanford-Binet. Dr. Richard Bear was the Associate Dean of Education. Dr. Liz Rave was a hardworking warhorse with twenty years experience in the field and a no-nonsense attitude. They reviewed my raw data and the experimental design and crossed my t's and dotted my i's and pretty much left the whole thing intact.

The one thing they changed was my conclusion and recommendation. Most scientific studies recommended that further research be done. My recommendation was that no further research be done because of taboo reaction and the professional damage it would do to the researcher. They didn't believe such a thing existed in science. They were not sociologists or anthropologists. They didn't know about the sociology of knowledge and how some subjects are accepted as real and others are forbidden and taboo. Everything I had read in the last six months had convinced me I had just put my intellectual head in the lion's mouth by daring to deal with this subject. The first geologist to propose the 'drifting continents hypothesis' had been ridiculed. It is now confirmed. The first biologist to propose the 'jumping gene theory' had been scorned. It is now confirmed. The first psychologist to prove that Freudian psychotherapy was useless and gave no results was physically attacked. It is now confirmed. The first medical doctor to recommend physicians wash their hands after examining a patient and before examining another one was condemned. It is now standard practice. The scientist who proposed the Gaia Effect was mercilessly flayed by an editorial in the prestigious Nature journal. CSICOP was still active, well funded by someone, and busy busy attacking any researcher in any of the 'forbidden' fields. The committee wouldn't accept my recommendation. They made me take it out.

The thesis was accepted and approved. Then the magic day came in 1978 when it was time to walk out on stage in the monkey costume and accept the scroll that named me Doctor of Psychology. My first thought when I received it in my hand was, 'This is it? This is all you have to teach?' There were no higher degrees to reach for.

Then I did what I was supposed to do as a scientist. I kept the raw data of the experiment for 10 years in case anyone wanted to check the results. I also mailed a copy of the research to an expert in the field for review. Since there was no expert in this field, I mailed it to one of the most famous, respected, and well published psychologists alive, Professor Hans J. Eysenck. He had written over 65 books and published hundreds of articles. The average academic psychologist will publish maybe 3 articles in a lifetime. There were two schools of factor analysis in theories of personality and he was the head author of one. The other school belonged to Dr. Cattle and his collaborator, Dr. Ralph Mason Dreger. Cattell had invented the 16PF Personality Inventory and Eysenck had invented the Eysenck Personality Inventory. Eysenck was the first psychologist to test if Freudian psychotherapy really was effective or not. It wasn't and he caused an uproar. Eysenck was famous for strict scientific procedure and experimental design. His ethics were beyond question.
One year later, my dire prediction came true. On the front page of the Greeley Tribune and on page 3 of the Denver Post was an article about the deteriorating quality of the University and as evidence of this was that someone had done a doctoral dissertation called Astrololgical Discrimination Between Authentic and Spurious Birthdates. I called the reporter on the Denver Post who had written that article and he admitted he never read the dissertation. The University immediately took all the dissertations off the open stacks and put them down in the basement. Just a few months later, my dissertation had somehow been lost and could not be found.

Well, maybe the library 'lost' it, but it is listed in Psychological Abstracts. Hah ha.

I didn't realize they would put the title of the dissertation on the front page of the transcripts. Somehow I wasn't getting the offers for employment from public schools I usually got. Now I had done all this extra work to get a doctorate and I wasn't getting job offers. I began to suspect I had shot myself in the foot with both barrels. I even requested the graduate school to delete the word 'astrological' from my dissertation because of taboo reaction but they didn't know what the hell I was talking about and refused. Finally, I got a position as Associate Professor of Gifted Education at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. I don't think the guy who hired me noticed the title of my dissertation. We were from different professions and it wasn't important to him. A department of psychology would have looked at the dissertation first thing. The subject of a doctor's dissertation is the area which defines his expertise and specialty.

I was determined to do everything a professional psychologist should do to be recognized and given credibility. I started the incredibly long, arduous process to be licensed (two years post-doctorate supervised experience, passing the 33^rd percentile on the written examination from hell, and oral examination before four senior anal retentives on the Board of Examiners) and I applied for membership in the state psychological society.

My application for membership in the Louisiana Psychological Association was taking a long time. I was fully qualified and I was wondering why it was taking so long. Finally I heard through the pipeline that people were objecting to my dissertation on astrology and there was a big argument going on. Finally, a well respected grandfather psychologist, Dr. Ralph Mason Dreger, stood up and said I had all the qualifications and there was no reason why membership could be denied. I was accepted. Six years later, I was elected President of the Louisiana Psychological Association. So hah!
Meanwhile, Professor Eysenck had come out with a new book called Astrology: Science or Superstition. Mostly it was a review of Dr. Gauquelin's massive statistical correlational studies on planetary positions and personality. He had found that athletes had a strong Mars, scientists had a strong Saturn, and politicians had a strong Jupiter. It had even been reported in the media as the Mars Effect. Immediately his work came under ridicule from CSICOP and when Gauquelin submitted his work for scientific review, it was rejected. Eysenck reviewed all of this and concluded that Gauquelin's work was valid and that the behavior of CSICOP was in violation of scientific ethics.
To use astrology in my psychological practice was in violation of professional standards of practice. I decided to play the game according to the rules and put my entire astrological library literally in the closet to avoid any further controversy. It was a mistake and cost me dearly. I became a workaholic and ignored my own personal life and my marriage. Six years later my marriage had deteriorated and there was a horrible divorce. If I had paid more attention to our astrological charts, I would have known better what was going on and maybe could have done something to fix it.
Unfortunately, any psychologist who uses astrology to study psychology will be crucified. It is too close to home. It is too close to the true self. And this knowledge is classified and taboo. It has always been restricted to the few. In ancient Egypt, it was part of the preparation to become pharaoh. In ancient Rome, it was outlawed and forbidden to the public even though the emperors had their own court astrologers ready at hand. As recently as 1985 I saw astrologers arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana for daring to participate in a 'psychic fair' at a shopping mall in the 'land of the free'. I put on suit-and-tie professional garb as a Licensed Psychologist and went to testify before the City Council on their behalf. They were found guilty anyway. The joke was that one of the City Council members was one of my patients who respected me very much. It didn't help. He didn't dare vote any differently than the others. He was scared. He would have been ostracized.

Although I didn't look at my astrology books again for almost ten years, I continued researching the scientific aspects of it in the physical sciences trying to find out the physical mechanisms of how it might work, how those little lights up there far away in the sky could have such an effect. The best I could come up with is that at birth, the first breath was accompanied by an ionization process whereby the DNA rearranged itself on the strands of the helix according to the positions of the stars. The old argument in psychology between influences of heredity and environment could not be resolved because there was a 3^rd factor – astrology. This idea could have been tested if I had had an electron microscope to see if genes jumped on the helix at time of birth, but I didn't have an electron microscope.

Years passed, divorce happened, trauma happened. All my investment in psychology turned out to be personally useless. I had grown in the frontal lobe only, but not as a person. I started exploring other more effective forms of therapy. I went back into hypnosis and started going to the workshops of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. Then I started private sessions with Dr. Fred Orr and learned/received hypnosis sessions 1x a week for two and a half years. Then I discovered NLP and invested every spare moment learning this system for another two years. I totally shifted from diagnostic testing into NLP and hypnotherapy. I was able to do miracles with people and it was a joy. I had given myself a post-hypnotic suggestion that whatever pain and suffering I could relieve in people, I would feel just as much myself. When pain is relieved, then there is joy. Whatever joy people would feel after a session, I would feel just as much myself. It was a win-win situation.

I sold everything in 1991 and went to India on a spiritual journey to find out what more was possible with my life.  I ended up at the Osho Commune in Pune, India and, after a year of doing active meditations and working as an ashram hypnotherapist,  I was asked to write the monthly horoscope for Osho Times. There were thousands of people from all over the world, mostly Europeans and Japanese and Brazilians, and we were all on the spiritual search to know ourselves. I got very well known because everyone was reading the horoscope and my picture was there. People started asking me for astrology sessions. I knew astrology, but I had never given sessions in it before. I was very unsure at first and kept asking people each step of the way, 'Is this true for you?' They kept saying it was. They were amazed and I was amazed. 

The NLP background I had was enormously helpful to the astrology session. The ideas of  parts and positive intention and reframing helped me communicate to people in such a way that they could relax with themselves and feel o.k. Most people beat themselves up for not being exactly the way their society tries to force them to be. Not one society on Earth, including the Osho Commune, supported individuals to be true to themselves. Without astrology, there is no way to know there is any such thing as one's true self. Every society has its own characteristics and conditioning and because all these thousands of people were from everywhere, we all became acutely aware of each other's national characteristics.

Every nationality had its own reputation. The ashram was mostly German, and then Italian, and then Japanese. Oddly enough, most of the spiritual seekers were from countries who lost WWII. The Germans were thought to be the organizers, but not very juicy to be with. The Italians were the drama queens who were juicy to be with but not very organized. The Brazilians were the magnetically sexual ones. The Japanese never showed their feelings and were always polite and reserved. The English were always in their heads. The Russians were always broke and slept 16  to a room. There were strangely very few Americans in the ashram. Our reputation was that we were superficial. At the time, I wondered what that meant.

 My sociologist/anthropologist part was having an expansion of awareness in a beautiful way. With the astrological map I could see a person's inborn true nature, and then with knowledge of the person's family/culture, I could see how the person's true self would twist and turn to find its way through all the external restraints and expectations. A Neptune personality born in Germany would be a misfit, but if they were born in India or Bali, they would have an easier time. A Saturn personality would fit just fine in Germany, but would have a hard time in the manana cultures of Mexico and India. There were not many Americans in the Commune, but all half dozen of us had strong Jupiters (we're the best). A Uranus woman born in California would have a good time, but in Asia she would be miserable. Astrology turned out to be the ultimate map to one's individuality and true self before conditioning.

In the summer of 1997, I put my Royal Enfield 350cc on the train up to the Himalayas to fulfill my dream, to drive my motorbike through the mountains from Dharamsala to Manali to Ladakh to Kashmir back to Dharamsala again. It was a 2000 km journey through ancient and sacred lands and over some of the highest mountain passes in the world. In the incredibly beautiful Manali Valley, I ran by accident into Swami Samdarshi's ashram with maybe 60 Western Osho sannyasins doing meditation and retreat. I had given hundreds of sessions by then and I was famous and they invited me in. People were asking for astrology sessions and I was giving and then one day someone came and said Samdarshi would like a session. 'Oh shit, I thought, how do you give a session to an enlightened spiritual master?' 

So I climbed up the hill to his house with the Tibetan prayer flags around it and opened up my portable computer and gave him a session. In front of 13 of his closest disciples I gave him a session. That night at tea time, when we would ask him questions after meditation, someone who wasn't there said they heard he had had session with Deepak, how was it?  He slowly looked around the room and raised his hand in the air and said, ''Absolutely Correct!' Wow, everyone in that room turned around to look at me sitting in the back and all of a sudden I have 100 eyes looking at me. I must have been embarrassed for maybe two seconds, longest in my life. Us Jupiter Rising people are born with big big egos and self-confidence. Needless to say, I gave everyone in that ashram a session before I climbed on my motorbike and headed into the unknown over the 5 mountain passes into Ladakh.

I learned something important about astrology from Samdarshi. The books will tell you the orbs of the planets should be 6 or 8 degrees, maybe up to 12 for the luminaries (Sun, Moon, Ascendent). The orb is the distance one planet has to be to another for the two to have effect on each other. Transits should be just 1 or 2 degrees apart. What I discovered with Samdarshi is that very conscious people have wider orbs than the books say. It is like the expansion of consciousness includes the expansion of sensitivity to planetary effects further and further away. When sensitivity has been increased to include all the planets at the same time, then All-Is-One. Also with transits. Ordinary people are insensitive to the energies going on, so when the transit gets there, then they realize there is something to be done. By then the transit has moved on, and so they are always behind the energy playing catch-up.

The conscious person feels the transit coming from further away and takes action so that when the transit arrives, the work is done and the job is complete. They are in synchrony and harmony with themselves and the energies of the universe.

Some people think that enlightened masters have transcended beyond astrological influences. First thing is, most people wouldn't know enlightenment if it bit them on the butt. Second thing is, according to Khrishnamurti, meditation and enlightenment do not change the personality and do not cure the problems of the personality. Third thing is, no one goes beyond the effects of the stars, no one, not enlightened people, Santa Claus, or anything else in body and spirit. Enlightened people do not escape their chart, they fulfill their chart. I have done the transits for half a dozen enlightened masters and everything that happens is right on schedule. What is different is the response they choose to give. Ordinary psychology is about stimulus-response. Transcendental psychology is about response-stimulus. Choose your response and let the chips fall where they may.

In the summer of 1998, my beautiful Dutch friend, Tom, loaned me his big, loud, black, shiny Harley Davidson 1500cc Fat Boy to drive through Europe. I put the computer in the saddle bag and packed a sleeping bag and tent and camping gear and drove this incredible thing through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain giving sessions at meditation centers wherever I went. The best time was giving sessions in my tent by the river in Basel with the computer running off of the battery. Or maybe it was when I was woken up in the middle of the night by wild pigs when I was sleeping out in the Black Forest of Germany. Or maybe it was when I met RA, the source of Human Design, in Ibiza, Spain. After four months of nomadic adventures, I dropped the Harley in Holland and then went to Mexico looking for more.

I ran a Mystic Rose group and gave individual astrology readings to rich people. It had to be rich people because the poor people couldn't afford it. That is the way it was in Mexico. You were either rich or poor and not very much in-between. It was also the most crime ridden place I had ever been in my life. One day this rich lady came for session in her bullet proof limo with a guard for the car, a guard downstairs at the entrance, and another guard outside the door of the flat. She was complaining that they had stolen her last bullet proof limo and she had had to replace it with this one and how expensive they are. I never did have much sympathy for troubles of the rich.

It was nice traveling with the computer. It made the nomadic life possible. Otherwise, I would have had to pack such a stack of books (ephemeris for 50 years, table of houses, atlas of time changes in the world, atlas of longitude and latitude for cities in the world) that it would have dug deeply into my baggage allowance. To do a chart by hand would have taken me up to 2 hours. To do a chart on the computer took me 2 minutes. It was a blessing that had turned into a necessity. After two months in Mexico, the hard drive crashed and I lost everything. I lost the birthdates of several thousand sannyasins, which was probably the largest databank of spiritual seekers in the world. I didn't have the money to replace it all and I was stuck.

I ended up back in the USA for the second time in eight years. I had some savings and used them to buy a new computer and an old custom van with 140,000 miles on it and a folding bed in the back. This was the way to travel. I had my 'home' and books with me and I was flexible enough to travel and stop almost anywhere. I preferred the nature and sleeping outside. Even when I was offered a roof over my head, if the weather was nice and the wind was blowing, I would go outside and sleep in the van.

I left Seattle in a dark, cold rain and drove down the coast of Oregon and slept under the giant Redwoods of northern California and along the coast of Highway 1 and then from LA to Sedona, Arizona. I stayed there for 5 months looking for work and trying to establish myself. I was 55 years old and imagined I should be secure and stable. All my licenses as psychologist and school psychologist were expired and out of date. It would take a year of paperwork and continuing education to get them active again. The joke was that I had been doing nothing but 'continuing education' throughout the world in the last eight years, but none of it was 'accredited' by an institution and none of it would count. Besides that, the application forms for a job would take days to fill out and, because of Affirmative Action, the jobs were not really open after all. Besides that, there were requirements for criminal background check, random blood testing for drugs, and there were a lot of questions where I had been for the last eight years. Jeez, this country is really turning paranoid, I thought, and I gave it up.