One Foot on Kailash, One Foot on the Cremation Ground

I’m a grass roots guy, my followers and supporters are just everyday people who’s thinking veers towards the profound.

I’m not interested in marketing my work. I’m interested in doing the work. These days, instagram astrology is full of slick memes, quick replies, and trying to prove themselves with a million predictions so that everntually they can put garlands on their one in a million. Everyone’s looking for the next technique, the next module, the next certificate. The hunger for external validation is endless.

I’m not above it. Validation helps orient us. It helps us serve. Like Shiva laying out his body for Kali to cool her feet—there’s a kind of holy submission in allowing ourselves to be used for something greater than us.

If your world is hell—if, as they say, “other people are hell”—then it’s on us to learn how to make it heaven. What’s our purpose? To serve. Without attachment to results, as Krishna says in the Gita. But even that is a dance of energy.

Travel has taught me a lot about this. Especially travel in India. The first immersion breaks people open. They come back changed, strange to their families, a weird spiritual person in suburban middle-class America. Who needs it?

The hero’s quest needs constant refinement. How many times must Ulysses return before he learns to assimilate all the knowledge and experience he has gathered while being away with his home culture, his birth place. Many of times he danced with what his home calls profane and taboo. He made his way by figuring out what people want, and giving it to them — the business guru’s are not wrong. That’s what opens doors, hearts, minds; the path, the Way.

Sure, there are devils in this world. Just look at Shiva & Kali on the cremation grounds— it’s not a vision of heaven. It’s chaos on destruction and we are called to dance with it like Ulysses; not a god, just a man, like the Aghore who is neither attracted or repulsed by anything. The one who laughs at pain suffering,”and blesses those who curse him.

And we all have these pieces in us: the punk, the outcast, the metalhead, the gangster—Rahu & Ketu intensity & deathly ambivalence; crashing against Mars & Saturn moving us forward and holding us back. But we also have the saint inside of us. The side of you reading this. The one climbing mount Kailash, gasping in the thin air, pressing on like a Sherpa carrying the weight and getting none of the glory. Alone on the mountain.

We should visit both places—the Kailash and cremation ground of our own hearts. We’ll be dragged into hell even if we resist, and pulled toward heaven even if we don’t ask for it. BY karma or by grace.

Maybe yoga is standing in both. Maybe the reason the Kailash climb is so hard is that we try to carry up what should have been burned below. The climb itself can be a kind of hell.

I always found it strange that Ulysses could blend into every foreign land but not his own. Sometimes the project of moksha—of liberation—doesn’t align with dharma.

The Aghori accepts uninhibited freedom, he doesn’t care at all about external validation; he realizes he wants to suffer so he laughs, he eats sin and the curses and scorn that is thrown at him, and he throws back blessings; he is fulfilled by the hate people hold inside themselves. He makes himself the target.

Nobody has any power over the one who is not bothered by anything, the one who wants nothing cannot be controlled. The one who laughs at consequence suffers no such consequence.

Yes, we may always be living out some dharma, with some greater meaning we cannot see, but as an astrologer many people come to me who want to find their higher purpose. If you are asking: what is my dharma? You will it inside and sharpen on the external.

So, what’s in your heart? Let that out. But also find where it meets the world. That “other-than-ourselves”—that’s Mother. That’s where our real nourishment comes from. It’s not just other people or cultures or gods—it’s whatever is opposite us. The past. The future. That path we call dharma itself. Whatever is on your mind is also across from you with the light of your minds eye turned to it.

What is your relationship to with that other? With the past, the purpose, the light, and the minds eye itself?

Am I really doing something meaningful with this life or am I just confused? If it’s not meaningful, we suffer. If it is, we are supported—in ways the world can’t always measure.

Can we survive following our heart?
Will the world support it?

In energy theory, there are two kinds of energy:

1. True energy—generated within us when we live in integrity, when we know what we’re doing matters, even if it’s hard.

2. Speculative energy—external hits from sugar, social media, praise, performance. Inflated but hollow.

They aren’t always easy to separate. and it can be hard to distinguish; they are not as mutually exclusive as saying so suggests. We hope the friction between the to will eventually catch fire and help us rise.

Constantly refining one and the other hopring they will work together.

Is it a sacrifice? Is it freedom? I don’t know.

Maybe there’s no other choice but to do what we do. Nothing lost, nothing gained. All that’s left to do is the work that’s been given to us.

— Sincerely, Saturn-Moon-Ketu