Hi Dave,

Sorry about the unquotability of the pdf, I agree that?s annoying & have now changed the security settings to enable quoting.

I?m probably not going to cover many of your points but here are a few thoughts.

The three theories of truth I mentioned a few posts back are just part of western philosophy ? it would be a very long post indeed if I started getting into them any further here.

Now there?s the whole thing about page 16 and discarnate beings. Your point here interests me, because I grew up in a spiritualist household and assumed for a while (until I was 19) that to be discarnate was to be wise. I don?t think that any more, although I don?t think either that to be discarnate is necessarily to be in a bad state. I don?t know where that idea comes from? If you really want to know what I think about discarnate beings, then I?d have to recommend the paper on Theravada Buddhism, Theurgy and Divination which is also on my site. That includes some material on Buddhist cosmology. I think the Buddhist model is pretty good (though I incline to the view that any model will be partial and limited). There?s some material in there which may also link in with your ideas about resonance.

You say re. p.16 that ?The use of the word, "divine" is not supported by the story that precedes it.? but that?s OK because I don?t claim it is. The point of the medium story there is only to draw an *analogy* with one possible account of how astrology works. Also it allows me to slip in a pun at the top of p.17, and puns are important.

So far as I can see, when you say, ?Point 17 is confused. It conflates two distinct things? what you mean is that I am looking at things in a different way to you. You don?t explain why your way is right though.

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your thoughts.

The three theories of truth I mentioned a few posts back are just part of western philosophy ? it would be a very long post indeed if I started getting into them any further here.

I'm a brite kid, but I confess this stuff goes past me. Or maybe it's my admittedly merchant caste: Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap, don't worry where they came from or where they're going to.

Now there?s the whole thing about page 16 and discarnate beings. Your point here interests me, because I grew up in a spiritualist household and assumed for a while (until I was 19) that to be discarnate was to be wise. I don?t think that any more, although I don?t think either that to be discarnate is necessarily to be in a bad state.

When people die they don't get smarter - or dumber, their tastes stay the same, as do their opinions. They loose their ability to deal with the physical world in a physical way. That's about it. It's as if they lived in a trailer house (I think you call them caravans) & one fine day moved to an entirely new town. Some things - the inside of the trailer - stay the same, but other things have changed & the individual must adapt in order to satisfy his new needs.

A healthy discarnate moves easily onto those areas which are appropriate to his new state. In the process he naturally moves away from the land of the living, since he is no longer one of them. A wise & loving one first establishes ongoing links to the living whom he has left behind. This group includes, but is probably not limited to his blood relations & those with whom he has had sex. I have heard of such links, but I have never actually found one, so I presume this is rare.

All other discarnates are, by definition, like five-year-old children wandering the streets. They are, by definition, in need of help, or could use some advice. Discarnates are defined as those who are dead, but are still "earth-bound". So long as they are, they are easily observed by those who are sensitive. Far too many of them are content to simply hang about, like half-awake sheep, which they rather resemble. Those who have the misfortune to be embalmed often hang around their gravesite. My meditation group once spent an evening at an old cemetary in Ventura, CA (last burial early 1940's, burials had largely been discontinued a decade before), where I personally observed hundreds of people still hanging out, every single one of them more than fifty years dead. Other members of the group confirmed this observation.

The other common place to while away the afterlife is in one's last abode. Ruth was like that. We found her as we cleaned up a house for sale. The house had been in my friend's family for some 30 years, Ruth had been gone at least that long. In Santa Fe I lived in an adobe on Baca Street, built in 1951. There was someone there. In the house I live in now, built in 1953, there were two. They were both upstairs, which was built in the mid-1980's, so they are as recent as that. The adult was easily dealt with. The other is a 3-ish year old child. We hear it cry from time to time. She wants her mother (any of her mothers, from any of her many lives will do), but I do not know if she will hear my direction, or, for that matter, has not already refused the support of the various mothers that may have already visited. This is tragic. It could well go on for the better part of a century.

Discarnates who have settled in to some sort of routine, for good or ill, do not need my help, though in the past I have offered it anyway, and it's usually been accepted. The vast majority of them do not know what to do next. They do not know where to go, they do not know who to talk to, since the living, by definition, ignore them. Many of the Christian ones are terrified they will be damned to hell & so will have nothing to do with anyone.

As such, these people of indeterminate state can & often do fall into bad situations. Situations which are not only harmful to them, but can be harmful - even deadly - to the living. To cite a recent case, the late Anna Nicole Smith (well-known over here, at any rate) was most likely killed by her late son. You won't think such a thing is possible, I will merely cite the well-established phenomenon of serial suicide. It is quite possible that others of her household may die prematurely over the next several years. At particular risk is her recent newborn. I feel personally responsible for this, as I know how to stop these things. It is not a hard thing to do, it is easily learned, the process itself takes less than five minutes. I would be glad to volunteer, but it seems the society I live in is too coarse to make use of talents like mine. I don't claim any special talents, I am not a clairvoyant in any sense.

Is this enough about discarnates? In many ways they are similar to the boys trapped in Lord of the Flies.

That includes some material on Buddhist cosmology. I think the Buddhist model is pretty good (though I incline to the view that any model will be partial and limited).

What they put in books is a sketch. You have to figure out how to use the sketch. Back 20 years ago Snow Lion, of New York, published a small book entitled Death, Intermediate State, Rebirth, by one of the Rinpoche gang ("Rinpoche" seems to be the "Smith" of Tibet). The book was mostly incomprehensible, so, perhaps to help himself out, he persuaded the Dali Lama to write the introduction. The Dali Lama, no fool he, wrote a precis of the book in plain English. Which I greatly enjoyed. The section on how one determines his future sex has been a source of ongoing enlightenment & one of the few hints I have seen of critical moments in the "intermediate stage".

So far as I can see, when you say, ?Point 17 is confused. It conflates two distinct things? what you mean is that I am looking at things in a different way to you. You don?t explain why your way is right though.

The relevant portion of 17 is here:

Instead, the signs of astrology are like advisory road
signs which depict ? e.g. ? deer running across the road. The point is not
to tell the driver that deer actually will be running across the road, but
that it will be best if s/he acts as if some kind of wild animal might be
about to do so.24 This, as I understand it, is very similar to the point
which was made by Heraclitus, and repeated by Iamblichus: the obscurity
of oracles is a design feature, the gods ?neither talking nor
concealing?(but) giving indication by signs?.

I am being picky, but there are two things conflated here. Predictions made from numbers & diagrams are different from predictions made by oracles. Oracles are short-term & usually accurate if so, while numbers are best in the long term & can be difficult to interpret accurately.

Tarot cards are an oracle, I presume entrails are as well. In the Pranic Healing classes I took a decade ago, we learned how to sensitize our hands & scan the health aura. One of the class experiments was to register the changes in a person's aura after someone had thought good, and then, bad, things about them. Our hands "saw" the aura expand from good thoughts & contract from bad thoughts. (This cannot be made a double-blind test, by the way.) Which merely confirms the Theosphical claim that thoughts about a particular person go to that person & lodge there, perhaps, but perhaps not, to eventually become conscious to him. Therefore if your boss is thinking about firing you but has not yet come to actually make himself do that, his thoughts have already become part of your aura. Thinking about your life while shuffling a deck of Tarot & then spreading the cards, will immediately unearth the state of your aura, and all the good & bad things therein. Both your own, as well as that of everyone who knows you. The matter then hinges on your ability to read those cards. Few can do so completely.

In the astrological vein, Nadi readers, in India, claim to use very old leaves to predict the future. The jin who actually do the work (jin = genie) employ a sophisticated blend of techniques. On the one hand, they access one's own personal memories to fool us into believing they are truthful, on the other, they make silly, foppish & unrealistic long-term predictions. The late Rick Houck was a victim of such a nadi reader. He was told he would lead a long & healthy life. K.N. Rao, in some book I can no longer find, solved this puzzle. There might be such a thing as an honest & true nadi reader, but I do not know how this would be possible.

So far as the deer in the headlights, Martha Lang-Wescott has had some success with detailed analysis (not prediction) of that sort. In The Architects of Time, she walks with Gary Gilmore in the last moments of his life, noting the minute details & their astrological connotations. In addition to various dials & directions, Martha also uses the Transneptunians as well as upwards of 50 asteroids. It's not for everyone.

The study of metaphysics opens up a new world, different in many ways from the one we think we know.

Dave

Hi Dave,

You said:

Predictions made from numbers & diagrams are different from predictions made by oracles.

This is a potentially interesting point, and I'm certainly up for considering that there may be different types of phenomena to be considered here, and that - further - both may sometimes occur under the name of astrology.

The difficulty I have is that you present this as if all sensible people in the world had a meeting at some point and decided once and for all that things are this way. I'm sorry, but I wasn't notified of the meeting. So what I'd find interesting is if you could say something about why you think things are as you say. What tradition, what texts, what experiences do you have in mind?

Cheers,
Garry

Hello Gary,

This is a potentially interesting point, and I'm certainly up for considering that there may be different types of phenomena to be considered here, and that - further - both may sometimes occur under the name of astrology.

I am of the opinion that everything can be reduced to astrological process, but that we are not necessarily smart enough to do so. While believing this, I also believe that as far as the world as we know it is concerned, astrology is not always the best way of describing it.

The difficulty I have is that you present this as if all sensible people in the world had a meeting at some point and decided once and for all that things are this way.

Well, they did. Blavatsky, Besant, Leadbeater, Hodgson, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky & a bunch of others - the least of them far more talented than I - hammered this out a century ago. For their efforts they were reviled, as is well-known.

That they persisted for more than half a century is an amazing feat of human endurance, given the circumstances. (Isis Unveiled 1875, dissolution of the Order of the Star, July 1929.) But it was apparent early on that they would fail, that their message would not be accepted.

A lot of things came out of this. CC Zain liked what he heard, but wanted his own corner of the world. Steiner seems to have had much the same opinion, but with more talent. Gurdjieff was trained by rivals. Those of lesser talent - Freud, Jung, et al, devised theories that somehow failed to convince Violet Firth, who went on to become Dion Fortune. But for the mass of unthinking folks, Freud was just what they wanted to hear.

The books these men & women wrote, good, bad & otherwise, are now fading away, but many can still be found & studied, if effort is made. What happens if we study the books and then make independent observations?

Back 20 years ago I had read Leadbeater's rather obscure Science of the Sacrements. It postulates the Roman Mass as a white magic ritual. Very well, I thought. Let's try it out. One day Victoria & I (her name will emerge eventually) were passing by St. Patrick's in New York. I suggested we go in. I sat her down & suggested she look for the Angel of the Presence. (You'll just have to read the book.) She was silent a few moments, and then said, It's blinking. Blinking wasn't in Leadbeater's book, which she had not read & I had not discussed with her. She continued, It's so materialistic around here that blinking is the best it can do.

From Leadbeater's book I then made further deductions & observations about the Roman Church, Communion & the Piscean Age in general. Some day I may bore you with them.

In various books Leadbeater postulates certain things that he claimed to have seen or experienced. In one of them he said that a man once astrally projected himself to the moon, and then got temporarily stranded there when the moon moved out of the earth's astral field, which it does monthly, in & out & in again. Oddly enough, Johannes Kepler wrote such a story, Somnium, which he published in 1634. I stock that book for precisely this reason.

In 1990 the movie Ghost was released. The end of the movie has Patrick Swayze "going through the light". I could tell the screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, had done his research, but I knew he had never actually seen anyone "go through the light", as the scene was timidly done. Around 5 am on the morning of July 5, 1984, in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, Victoria & I were privileged to see a recently deceased 40 year old woman named Winnie go through the light. It was spectacular.

Winnie went through the light on her own, but I had unwittingly walked her up to it. This was my first great success & thereafter I tried to impose it on every discarnate who came to my attention. I learned that a ghost will only go there when they're ready, and that most of them are not & will refuse & will return again shortly thereafter.

You will ask how I know a ghost is here or that a ghost is gone. I rely on others to tell me that a room is peaceful, or that it is not peaceful. Since many people live in a single room, their feelings about their abode can be strong. Sometimes I ask them 20 questions, sometimes they simply come to me. Sometimes the ghost is merely in the background, such as Ruth. Sometimes the ghost is obsessing them, as Winnie was obsessing her younger sister, who was a friend & co-worker with Victoria, who was my girlfriend at the time. The sister, whose name I forget, came to Victoria for help as her husband was out of town for the weekend & she didn't want to be alone with her dead sister. Victoria spent one night & then called me in the next night for moral support & the result (the result of my annoyance at being awakened at 5 am) surprised us all.

Once the ghost is gone, the room (or area of the room) which they had haunted, is quiet, in some strange & wonderful sense. It then stays that way & after a day or two the residents realize it is "normal" and are happy. Winnie had died a month or two before & over that time had gradually worked herself into a state of total panic. This disrupted the life of her surviving sister, which probably encouraged her husband to find something else to do over the holiday weekend (i.e., it forced him to separate from his wife). Once Winnie went through the light, she was gone. Her sister was never disturbed again, but, society being what it is, she was scared to death to talk about the experience, once it was over.

And there's nothing new here. One surprise in listening to the slow movement of Beethoven's Ghost trio is that, at one specific note towards the end of the movement, the ghost leaves & this "quiet" is observed. This brings up Ludwig, whom I have obsessed over, in my own way, since I was a child. In his middle period, he, in fact, told stories, only a few of which have ever been puzzled out.

I'm sorry, but I wasn't notified of the meeting. So what I'd find interesting is if you could say something about why you think things are as you say. What tradition, what texts, what experiences do you have in mind?

I might throw the question back at you & ask how you could live to such an age & not at least once had some suspicion? Life presents us with problems, it presents us with situations, which are both disturbing & which need solution. These are problems that cannot be dealt with by ordinary means.

If we are fortunate we have some sort of mind-expanding dogma in the back of our heads (Christianity will do) which will enable us to come to terms with this unpleasantness & restore peace & order. Or we may have read formulas & theories in books & then attempt to apply them. In this we may be assisted by hunch or instinct or intuition or perhaps dimly perceived memories from earlier lives. The only important point is that solutions are arrived at, problems are solved & tranquility restored.

Tranquility is most desired during sleep, at which time we are all naturally hypersensitive. Here is something useful: Never stay in a hotel or motel in which the management does not reside. In recent times such lodgings are often built on waste ground. If the management can't stand to sleep there, you probably won't want to, either.

Dave

As an esoteric astrologer (retired) and longtime student of theosophy and its related branches, I find this discussion both interesting and worthwhile. It seems to me that perigee/apogee and perhelion/aphelion are astronomical relationships with great astrological significance, for precisely the reasons Dave describes. I also note with interest his discussion of discarnate entities and the resonance underlying "astral contagion" of the sort mentioned in connection with Anna Nicole Smith; as a participant in rescue work for many years, my observations closely parallel his. These are fascinating areas of study which inform each other and repay serious attention.

It's a curious thing that although this thread started off being about one article I'd posted, most of the discussion recently seems to be much closer in theme to the other paper I posted at about the same time:

http://www.astrozero.co.uk/articles/theravada.htm

which has quite a lot to do with our relationship to the denizens of other worlds. Btw, as you chaps probably know already, beings who have died but can't move on are known as 'Hungry Ghosts' in Buddhism. There's a tradition of thinking of them before eating, and dedicating your meal to them.

I've no objection to academic discussions, but they should go hand-in-hand with practical problem solving in order to be fully understood.

I understand why feeding a hungry ghost might improve a situation, but what I already know is not what interests me.

Garry, to the best of your judgment, how do you suppose feeding a hungry ghost would improve an obsession / haunting situation? Should you merely think of it before dining, or would calling it out be better, and if so, why? What should you feed it? What should you not feed it? Are there better times of day? Should children feed a ghost? Should the elderly? Is feeding a ghost enough, or should one take other steps, and, if so, what should those steps be? In this regard, how can we distinguish between a deceased hungry human & various other parasitic astral entities. Or should we?

I survived Mercury retrograde on Skyscript. There might be hope for me.

Dave

Hello Garry,

I've been thinking about hungry ghosts all day. If we define ghosts, strictly speaking, as embodiments of the conscious state of post-death humans, then we can divide them into two broad classes: Timid ghosts who are content to remain in the background until they fade out, from purely mechanical reasons, and, those bent on obsessing the living, for one reason or another. We can leave the timid aside.

From my own files, four distinct obsessing ghosts come to mind. None appeared hungry, and all were satisfied with simple techniques. Could they also have been satisfied with mashed potatoes & gravy? Bear with me while I go through them, in historical order:

1. Denise's deceased lover. They met, they fell madly in love, but he was killed a day before the first big date. The sense of loss, even from a mere sexual standpoint, was overwhelming for both parties. A month later Denise came to me & said she saw him everywhere, she could hear him calling to her, she imagined herself under a bus, she thought it would be so easy to join him. She was in her early 20's, as was he. I had no problem with the reality of the relationship, from living to dead, but I did not know then that I could work through her to him. My solution was for her to tell him goodbye, and for her to get on with her life. Which worked. Denise lived. But had I known, I could just as easily turned him into a human incubus, which would have satisfied them both, and for probably a long time, though long-term it would have been risky. Sex with discarnates, sex between discarnates, is tricky & generally not a good idea. But I don't know any way to transfer a sexual hunger to a food-based hunger, especially if that sexual hunger is being satisfied. PS: Incubi, like succubi, are non-human.

2. Winnie I've already mentioned. She wanted attention, she wanted answers, she wanted HELP! She was furious. She knocked plaster off the ceiling onto her favorite chair. Her sister had already tried to buy her off with their parents, both of whom were deceased, but two hours later Winnie was back & worse than before. Food wasn't going to do it. Left to themselves, I fully expect Winnie would have obsessed her sister to death, in less than a year.

3. Donna. Donna was obsessed by Jim, a rock singer who had died 20 years earlier. As Donna was in her 30's, she was too young to have ever known the man. Jim wanted a band to play with & did not know who to ask or where to go. So he found Donna (and probably a number of other sensitive females), induced her to do drugs, play rock music over & over, and write out the names of all her friends. None of which were known to Jim, who then made her repeat the process over & over again. (Discarnates can easily get into ruts like this.) This was destroying Donna's life, which was pretty shaky to begin with. She came to my door one Saturday morning pleading for help. I'm just weird enough, trusting enough, I suppose, that people will tell me stories like that. We went to Ventura's surfside Holiday Inn & over cups of coffee I found Jim a band to play with. He was estatic. The last image I have of him is his face stuck smack in front of mine, long oily black hair, red bandana with white polka dots around his forehead, big, big smile on his face. Saying, THANK-YOU THANK-YOU THANK-YOU, over & over again. Someday I will find a picture of him with that bandana. Food? No.

4. Hazel. Hazel was my lover in London, and after the Home Office forced me to leave in 1981, she fell into a depression & killed herself, in 1985. I was sad, I was upset. Her letters had gotten less & less frequent & I knew she was down, but, of course, I had no clue. She was a female version of Robin Williams. People like that are fragile & damn rare. But she was gone & I put her out of my mind. Ten years passed. Suddenly I get the impression she's not doing well. She was distant, I didn't trust my impressions, so I gave the matter to the meditation group as a class exercise. We found her a cottage in the woods and a "grandmother" to take care of her. She reverted to a six year old child & I think she was happy. She will need more help in the future (this was 12 years ago), but I think grandma will manage. This is the most subtle obsession that I've experienced. Food? No.

A second-hand story. An Hispanic woman, the sister of one of my customers back in Ventura, told me she was parked for the night in San Francisco's Cannery when the door to her camper opened & a certain gentleman got in, climbed in bed with her & demanded sex. She recognized the man - he's been dead & gone for decades - and threw him out. Strictly speaking you could say he came for desert, but she didn't want to give him any.


In your introduction you talk of Theurgy - "God work" as opposed to Theology - "God talk". It seems to me that you then go on to discuss God work as if it was merely God talk. From your description it is clear that Iamblichus saw God work as a necessary corrective to excessive God talk. It's also clear that God work & God talk existed side-by-side as co-equal disciplines up until the "Enlightenment", when practical occult work, such as I've described, was forcibly separated from abstract God talk, and then discarded. Which was a huge loss. People die because they cannot find people like me to help them.

It's also clear that William Lilly - a name that comes up on Skyscript from time to time - could do both & was comfortable doing both. As am I.

As for hungry ghosts, it seems to me that, in astrological terms, you are trying to conflate twelve houses into just one. If we set this in astrological terms, we could say there are twelve different kinds of ghosts, based on the twelve signs, attempting to express themselves in one of twelve different ways, which would be houses. This gives us a base-line of 144 different possibilities, though humans being humans, some will predominate over others.

The example in question - hungry ghosts - would be those ghosts who crave food & who would be perfectly happy eating through someone, once they've been shown & once they got the hang of it. The tendency to develop this characteristic should already be apparent before death. It may be the individual starved to death, it may be they had been eternally malnourished, it might be they were merely greedy gluttons. In any event, they died craving food & will remain earth-bound as long as they do. If, in the larger society, it is a custom that when ghosts show up, you feed them, then many people will die expecting to be fed in the hereafter. This borders on vampirism & presumably continues until the corpses have reached a certain stage of decomposition. In such a culture embalming would be a horribly bad idea.

Diabetic dementia, on the other hand, results in old men craving sex. Typically when they die with this craving (which is far too common) they revert to shy inexperienced little boys & have a twilight life lurking in women's locker rooms as peeping Toms. A great many women will tell you they do not care for such places, and this is the reason why. Ex-military sorts can be jollied out of it, back in to reliving their glory days in the last war, but only if some living person cares enough. For all ghosts, in both categories (active & passive), once a routine is started it often continues for decades with little variation, unless challenged by outside agents.

Some people actually do know what to do when they're dead, and they clear the near-earth plane fairly rapidly. Which is good not only for them, but for the living as well. A ghost is someone who has failed to figure this out on their own. I do not have any idea what the percentages of the two groups may be. I fear the smart ones are in a minority, and, judging from the overall population of the planet, that they are not quite smart enough.

As with any discipline, the study of ghosts has its own rules, its own unique ways. There are different rules for astral entities, thoughtforms, curses & much else. That "science" wants nothing of any of it is mere childish petulance. If it wishes a pre-eminent position in society, it must be held to higher standards.

Dave

Hello Dave,

OK then here?s what I think about all this.

The point of offering one?s food to hungry ghosts isn?t so much to do with the food itself, as with the mental actions involved. Compassion and generosity are Good Things, and if done rightly the intention to offer food will involve both. A hungry ghost is obsessed and closed down, not all that different from a living person who gets depressed. Sometimes a thoughtful act will reach a depressed person, and it doesn?t matter so much whether what?s offered to them is food, a trip to the cinema etc; the main thing is that someone is thinking of them, reaching out to them, so that the sense of isolation is dispelled. The person (or ghost) needs to be more or less ready to break out of their state first, though.

Generally one wouldn?t have a particular hungry ghost in mind with this practice; the idea is that you put the thought out there to all beings in a particular state, and some will resonate with it.

There are plenty of other realms (there?s a total of 31 in Buddhist cosmology, which seems as good as any though I think any division is going to be arbitrary). And it?s possible to direct positive thoughts to all of them. There are specific meditations (loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy) for doing this.

All this overlaps a bit, but is also rather different, from what you are talking about. I don?t have any experience of working with individual entities in that way, though I don?t doubt that it?s possible. It?s potentially dangerous territory though and I?m convinced (& am sure you?d agree) that it?s necessary to have the guidance of people who know what they are doing, and to employ effective measures to protect oneself against harmful psychic influence before getting involved. Of course Dion Fortune?s ?Psychic Self-Defence? is a classic text for this kind of thing.

As a (non-academic) account of the after-death state ? including some of the more gloomy realms, and how to get out of them - I?ve always liked ?Post-Mortem Journal? by Jane Sherwood.

Garry

The situation of hungry ghosts seems exemplified to me in a line from an old Art Garfunkle song ("Shine It On," from his "Watermark" album): "We were looking in a mirror at the time -- I got confused and thought your eyes were mine."

My understanding of hungry ghosts is that on either side of the veil, we are attracted to each other through the principle of resonance: a hungry ghost yearns for experience of some kind -- food, love, drink, substances, excitement, sensations -- and is magnetized to a living being who offers access to those things. Through the shared experience of whatever the attractor is, identities can become blurred and (for all intents and purposes) merged until light dawns, with the assistance of workers on earth and in the subtle realms.

Compassion initiates this work, which is carried out safely on a practical level through understanding and knowledge in the spiritual and technique realms simultaneously. Wholesome detachment is an important component, and my view is that offerings of food, etc. in some cultures signifies an intervening function in the "feedback loop" between incarnate and discarnate beings, such that there is less likelihood of personal attachment and obsession. The down-side is that the ghost doesn't move on; for this to happen, there needs to be cooperation between incarnate beings and discarnate souls working with energies which include, but transcend, the terrestrial plane.

In addition to the books mentioned by Gary and Dave, some excellent works on the subject of discarnate entities and their relationships with souls on earth can be found in "Spirit Releasement Therapy" by William Baldwin, PhD, "Freeing the Captives" by Louise Ireland-Frey, MD, and "30 Years Among the Dead and "Gateway of Understanding" (both by Carl Wickland, MD). The literature in this field is vast and needs to be approached with some caution, since (as in all areas of study) it is uneven in its quality, character and reliability.

Yes, Gary, it is indeed interesting to see how how this thread has evolved! I think that it has done so because modern science participates in/resonates closely with the subject of your article on theravada.

Hello Garry,

The point of offering one?s food to hungry ghosts isn?t so much to do with the food itself, as with the mental actions involved. Compassion and generosity are Good Things, and if done rightly the intention to offer food will involve both. A hungry ghost is obsessed and closed down, not all that different from a living person who gets depressed. Sometimes a thoughtful act will reach a depressed person, and it doesn?t matter so much whether what?s offered to them is food, a trip to the cinema etc; the main thing is that someone is thinking of them, reaching out to them, so that the sense of isolation is dispelled.

That would be the quiet, timid sort who will sit there in a blue funk, year after year. Yes, it would be good if its name were to be called out (verbally, not just mentally) & it would be good - sort of - if it were urged, day after day, to come join the party. Given these two conditions, a blue-funk ghost, and daily urging, I suppose that most would respond eventually.

What you've got then is a pet. Or maybe it has you as a pet. Remember we're still talking about two real people, one living, one dead, both of whom have (or have had) a life & everything that goes with that, both of whom have free will, both of whom are still subject to all the rules of karma.

If such a relationship is formed in a society which has, one way or another, strict rules about this sort of thing, then you might be okay.

In the west, where this would be a novelty to both parties, all manner of things, many of them unfortunate, could then happen.

We see homeless people in the streets & our hearts go out to them & we wish we could take them into our homes & give them "a second chance". We are urged not to do so, as extreme privation has made these people needy & often manipulative. In aquatic lifesaving we are taught not to swim up to a distressed swimmer & offer him our hand, as he will gladly take it & pull us under along with him. Those who wish to help the needy do not blunder in untrained.

If ghosts are fed as a Vedic remedy, under Vedic rules, then no harm should come to the living party. Presumably such an action is started at a certain time, continued at stated intervals, and ended when earthly, not ghostly, conditions have been met.

Without such rules, feeding a ghost can quickly become a form of vampirism, which can become dangerous not only to the person feeding the ghost, but also to everyone in his circle. If we are going to take this up anyway, then it is important that corpses be cremated. Does this hungry ghost come from such a culture?

Not for nothing Catholics insist on Funeral Masses, which, even when poorly performed (as seems the norm anymore) avoid many of these problems & assist the departed in their journey. (I'm looking forward to mine.)

But here is how quick & easy the solution is, for both timid & aggressive ghosts alike:

You are aware of a certain vague unpleasantness, of a lack of comfort over in the corner or down the hall. You play 20 questions with your spouse. Answer from the top of your head, without thinking:

Is it animal, vegetable or mineral? Is it male or female? Is it young or old? Is it happy or sad?

For the timid sort, this is pretty much all you need to puzzle out. For the not-so-timid, you probably already know who they are.

Talking aloud, more or less in its direction, but not quite directly to it, you start to speculate. You would like to help, but you can't, as you're not on the same level. But suppose there was someone who could. Suppose this ghost had a friend. Everyone has friends. Suppose this person had been looking for this friend all their life, but never quite found them. Suppose that friend was here now. [You had previously imagined some "old man" or woman in the corner as your ghost. Now you imagine some other party standing next to him. This should be easy. Continuing.] That friend is here now. He has missed you. He loves you very much. He wants to help. How do I know this person really is your friend? Well, I don't, but you do. Look into his eyes and you will see if this is true or not.

You imagine, or perhaps I should say, observe, the two look at each other. This is the moment of truth. I have never yet seen a ghost fail it.

[Continuing] Your friend will help you. Good luck to you both!

Let the two fade away from your inner eye.

And that's it. And though you may think this was all imaginary, it is not uncommon to feel a wave of relief at this point. This worked with Winnie, with Jim & with Hazel, and with numerous others of the quiet sort. Ruth was slightly different. It works in full consciousness, it also works as part of a focused dream. With Winnie, I then observed a group of friends standing on a low ridge behind them. I directed the two of them to the group, and when Winnie saw who they were, a most amazing thing occurred.

There are rules. The "friend" is invoked several times. For motor-mouth Geminis like me, this is easy. The friend is never, ever named. You may think it is the mother or father, you may think it is an angel or Buddha or Jesus or the Virgin Mary, but you never say the name. If at all possible, you are never to think the name. All names carry emotional baggage, and at this point the ghost is incredibly fragile. Trigger some half-forgotten memory & he will flee & may well never get near you again. The ghost will know who the friend is, and that is all that matters.

From start to finish this takes less than five minutes. Why mess with feeding the things? So far as paying down old debts from the dim forgotten past, this will pay them down far faster than inviting the unseen to your table. There are plenty of physically hungry who need food. Sometimes I think we invent these dodges (feeding ghosts!) to make ourselves feel good as we ignore our earthly obligations. Escapism is as common in the East as it is in the West.

Generally one wouldn?t have a particular hungry ghost in mind with this practice; the idea is that you put the thought out there to all beings in a particular state, and some will resonate with it.

This works with wild birds. I wouldn't try it with humans unless I was prepared for the result. A precise analogy is to give a homeless man a sandwich & then find that he expects you to give him a sandwich every day, which you do, and then find that he brings his friends along as well. Very quickly your simple act of generosity has turned you into a soup kitchen. The world needs more soup kitchens & this is a worth-while thing to do with your life, but you should go into it with your eyes open.

For that matter, the same thing happens with wild birds. A couple of birds will turn into hundreds by the end of summer. All dependent on you, for better or worse.

There are plenty of other realms (there?s a total of 31 in Buddhist cosmology, which seems as good as any though I think any division is going to be arbitrary).

Agreed. But however we divide them, the process results in real things that we can deal with in a real fashion.

And it?s possible to direct positive thoughts to all of them. There are specific meditations (loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy) for doing this.

Agreed. We can go to the hospital & sit by some forlorn bedside & bring cheer to the forgotten. This is good. But it is not a replacement for competent medical care. When we see an accident along the road, we do not stop our car & go to the injured & preach the Word of God to them, or offer them our moral support. We get them an ambulance & a doctor & only after they are finished & in stable condition do we then use them to support our own egos. Ghosts, by definition, are those who need help. Once they have gotten that help, then of course we may talk freely to them, swap old stories, cheer each other up, etc. Except that a happy ghost is no longer a ghost & rapidly moves far, far away, where the living rarely go. Where it's really hard to go. He has been set free, from his own chains. He then naturally rises to a new & more comfortable level. In the hospital analogy, the ill recovers & goes home. If we know where he lives, if we have the transportation, we can go visit. He will be delighted to see us, I can assure you. The previous situation is now reversed. We must now meet him on his terms, rather than he on ours.

It?s potentially dangerous territory though and I?m convinced (& am sure you?d agree) that it?s necessary to have the guidance of people who know what they are doing,

I didn't have it. I stumbled along. So far as dangerous, discarnates can easily put the living in dangerous, life threatening situations without the living having any idea what is going on or what they should do about it. ANY intervention by an outside party is welcome & can bring at least temporary relief, BUT (here's another rule) he must not come with preconceptions of any sort, he must not talk down to the distressed parties, he must not tell him it's all in his head, he must not belittle in any way. He must accept what he is told, he must then find some way to deal with it, on its own terms. As if he was an engineer with a structural problem that needed a solution. It seems to me that social workers would have the necessary training, if they don't let prejudicial preconceptions get in the way.

and to employ effective measures to protect oneself against harmful psychic influence before getting involved. Of course Dion Fortune?s ?Psychic Self-Defence? is a classic text for this kind of thing.

You are confusing things again. Discarnates, no matter how nasty or strung-out, are still humans & will respond to human prompts. Dion Fortune is talking of astral beasties generally & for this one must tread carefully, one must use protection, one must find his own incantations, one must use certain techniques, one must be able to maintain an absolute focus until the matter at hand has been resolved. I might take you on a ghost hunting trip & ask that you be quiet & observe. I would never let you get anywhere close to this sort of astral crap, and, for that matter, I avoid it myself. I only go there when I'm pushed, when I have no choice, and I never go there alone. Scares me to death.

As a (non-academic) account of the after-death state ? including some of the more gloomy realms, and how to get out of them - I?ve always liked ?Post-Mortem Journal? by Jane Sherwood.

Sounds like an interesting book. I wish there were more of them, I wish they were better known. Looking at the blurb on Amazon just now, I would presume the claim that T.E. Lawrence had anything to do with it is false, as such claims nearly always are. Aside from that, we would judge the book on its merits. There are many queer non-human creatures, sentient beings who cannot take human birth, but who have useful information which they wish to impart. One common method is to find a sensitive & then puff itself up & claim to be some famous human, so that the sensitive will think itself fortunate & transcribe what the non-human entity has to say. Analysis of these books is quite fascinating.

In the case of Mr. Lawrence, we would first see if he had any interest in such studies while he was alive. He was a dynamic & forceful man. Such men, when interest in the occult comes to them, rapidly make short work of the study, as they make short work of most everything. So it's certainly possible that a military commander could have a second life as a self-trained occultist. The years after Lawrence's escapades in Arabia saw the very climax of the Theosophical movement. It was a time when many were drawn. His surviving papers would certainly prove this, one way or another. Reading the Wiki entry just now, the possibility that Lawrence had such an interest, while he was alive, is remote. He would not, he could not, have learned about such matters after he died. There are rules. The famous posthumous opinions of John Lennon are another sad case.

I have just glimpsed Astrea's reply. It is quite good, and, from a female point of view, most welcome.

Dave

Hello Garry,

With apologies to Astraea/Dave I would like to get back to the original focus of your article. Is that devolution? Sorry! I will perhaps comment on your Theravada article later as I have a background in that spiritual tradition.

Aside from your article on divinatory astrology I have also been trying to keep up with some of the general literature in this area including your extended interview with Dean, Kelly etc and of course The Moment of Astrology by Geoffrey Cornelius. A divinatory perspective is nothing new to me as I have been a student of the I Ching for over 25 years.

I have never been very comfortable with what I deem astro-exclusivist positions such as those put forward by Dennis Elwell in his book The Cosmic Loom. I will never forget the introduction to that book where he states 'Astrology is not a close relative of hand reading, the Tarot, witchcraft, the I Ching , and the rest of the gypsy band' Despite my philosophical differences though I think Elwell is an excellent astrologer.

While some of your points are not new I think your article is interesting in discussing the usefulness of quantum physics in challenging the Cartesian/Newtonian world view (aka scientism). As you suggest this doesn't necessarily provide evidence for astrology but it does provide a more hospitable environment to discuss it. I was surprised you didn't mention Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn though as both positions seem to typify the division among scientists you describe. I liked the way you showed up the limitations of the quest for scientific objectivity hermetically sealed from the process around it.

There is no denying this method has brought tremendous success but the problem as you indicate is applying that model to all human existence. The debate involves not just science but religion and philosophy of mind. In that sense Dave's reference to para-psychological or psychic phenomena has relevance. The starting point of contemporary science and philosophy is the materialist assumption that these realms do not, indeed cannot exist. Once you accept that the position of Daniel Dennett and denial that consciousness exists follows quite naturally.

However, personally the most interesting implication coming out of the divinatory perpective you describe is that the idea of a pure 'scientific' astrology or one more pristine and therefore authentic are not that relevant to the efficacy or practice of astrology. I have been reading Patrick Curry's book 'Prophecy and Power' lately. He describes the crisis of astrology in the late 17th and 18th century after its halcyon days in the 1640s and 50's. Faced with attacks on religious, political and scientific grounds Curry suggests astrologers attempted two routes to become respectable. One was was the attempt to make astrology more 'scientific' led by people like John Gadbury. The other was what I will typify as the 'back to Ptolemy' movement led by people like Partridge. He condemned practices he suggested were arabic corruptions of the pure, authentic astrology. This sought to present astrology as more rational and based on sound aristotlean philosophy. We now know many of the so called 'corruptions' Partridge condemned were actually authenic hellenistic astrology such as the parts or lots. In both cases these astrologers at least officially condemned the horary and other patently divinatory practices.

It seems to me in the last 30 years or so we have seen a similar kind of process in astrology. On the one hand those seeking to make it more scientific and acceptable. As we have seen for the reasons you state this approach is unlikely to be successful. The move towards traditional astrology seems to represent the other major trend. Here firm ground is sought not in western empirical science but in a tradition dating back millenia. In our era that approach was spearheaded by people like Olivia Barclay who could be described as leading a 'back to Lilly ' movement. These people saw this as a more authentic, less diluted astrology. Such views were stated very clearly and amusingly by the former Barclay student John Frawley in his book 'The Real Astrololgy'.

Unlike the earlier attempt to revive traditional astrology Lilly and horary cannot be presented in purely rational, Ptolemaic causal terms. Indeed Geoffrey Cornelius suggests the divinatory and Ptolemaic approaches are fundamentally different as one is based on an astrology of 'causes' while the latter is based on 'signs'.

I guess the point I am struggling to get to is this. In a divinatory approach if we accept the horoscope is simply signs or symbols presenting to the consciousness of the astrologer surely any approach is equally valid? Committment to a particular approach is central but what approach we adopt is surely less relevant? Whether we are Vedic, Uranian, Huber, CPA, or Traditional ( 17th cent, Medieval or Hellenistic) . If the consciousness of the astrologer is the key issue to make them a receptive receiver of signs it surely only matters that they believe in what they are doing. I think you describe this as the 'Tinkerbell factor'.

I use traditional astrology because I find it less fuzzy, more precise and I love the history of the tradition. However, I have to accept that is purely a personal decision that works for me. The implication of divinatory astrology is that another approach could work equally well, if not even better, for someone else if they conversed more readily with God/the devas. I think the implicit relativism of divinatory astrology will disturb some traditionalists who seek certainty and a purified astrology in the past. As Lilly suggested though the higher the level of consciousness a person brings to the art the better the astrologer they will make. That seems a more important factor than what approach they adopt.

With the lack of empirical science to support us it seems to me the issue for the astrologer is not dissimilar to some faiths in the sense that the practitioner must make a 'leap of faith' in the way Kierkegaard described.
Once we have taken that step the practice of astrology provides innumerable rewards supporting our decision.

Mark