The Astrological Signs Haunt Us

Recently, I was listening to Tim Ferris talk with the artist Dustin Yellin on his podcast. I am not a typical member of Tim’s audience, but I admire his curiosity and open-mindedness. He draws out the best in people when he interviews them, and his podcast is worth checking out for that, even if you aren’t into self-help.

One of the reasons I like listening to his podcasts is that he has a knack for getting people to channel astrological signs. His interview with Elizabeth Gilbert is the best unpacking of the sign Cancer I’ve ever heard. This may be on purpose, at least on her part. She mentions being a Cancer, but Tim helps her articulate this part of herself, and they spend an hour or two, essentially talking about how to live a healthy life under the influence of Cancer.

His interview with Dustin Yellin is such a good exploration of the mutable signs, I actually stopped halfway through so that I could take notes for this blog post.

There is a river, he said, that runs between the madness of openness and narrow pickiness, and you can swim from one side of the river to the other. This is a perfect description of the relationship between Virgo and Pisces, the relationship between sign polarities as a rule.

At another point, Tim got Dustin talking about what I recognized as Gemini. You come to a state where you have to get the whole universe in your head, now, he said. You have to be curious. You have to talk to everybody.

We don’t have astrological signs. They have us.

One of the aspects of astrology that doesn’t get talked about enough is the way that the signs and planets in astrology are like spirits with their own personalities, spirits that can possess people like demons or ride them like gods. We talk about archetypes, but that is too abstract and not nearly dramatic enough to describe the truth of what happens.

When a person is keyed into, say, Gemini, they talk fast. They ask questions. They are jittery. They are full of information and facts. They need to know everything. Immediately. Their mind is going a million miles a minute. They want to know what you think. About everything. Right now. Do you have any idea how many rocks there are?

A moment later, they might get keyed into Pisces. They talk more slowly. They talk about consciousness, man, and develop that drawl people that people who have done a lot of drugs have. Their sentences get longer, and they start telling stories, and they are just feeling so many things all the time, but especially this oneness with all life. I mean, have you ever really thought about whale song, just floated in the salt sea and let yourself dissolve into the music? They are absolutely certain that everyone is related to everyone else, and we’re just all pretending not to be.

Dustin does this in the interview, switching from sign to sign, like he’s playing shufflemancy with the zodiac.

We say that a person is “an Aries” if they have the sun in Aries, but I think it would be more accurate to say that their chart says they have the tendency “to Aries” or that “Aries speaks through them” or that they are “possessed by Aries.”

An astrologer is like a medium.

The most valuable skill I learned from my mentor Paul Richard is how to hear the signs and planets speaking through a person. Learning to hear the signs speaking is a skill you can learn, and it’s an invaluable one for you and for your clients. It is an important step to mindfulness to recognize what signs your’e channeling and when and why.

This is why, if you are a student of astrology, you need to put down the books and start listening to people. You may not be in a place to work with actual clients, but even just sitting down with an astrologer and watching commercials and learning to pick out which sign the mad men are selling will give you a much deeper understanding of the art.

This post was originally published on adapembroke.com in October 2020.