Listen to this

excerpted from the book Astrology Is Real





One of my beloved tasks as an astrologer of the soul is to help readers learn to distinguish between the wasteful, demoralizing use of the imagination and the uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination.

A good way for me to earn the right to discourse on this subject is to keep learning more about how to distinguish between my own wasteful, demoralizing use of the imagination and my uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination. I was not adept at this early in my adult life. My skill has improved, but is still far less than expert.

Here’s the foundation of my meditations: Our imagination is the most important asset we possess. It’s our power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that we want to bring into being. It’s like the magic wand we use to shape our future.

We are all prophets. Our imaginations tirelessly churn out images of what we will be doing later. The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of ourselves eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of building our dream home.

Our imagination is a treasure when it generates scenarios aligned with our deep desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating the life we want. We call on it to formulate images of the conditions we’d like to inhabit and the objects we hope to wield.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We may use it conjure up fearful or distasteful premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values.

That’s in part the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and influential people.

Chaotic, disturbing, and even sickening fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those disheartening fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end ruminations.

Every time we entertain at length a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we blast ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren’t healthy for us and that we don’t need.

Whenever we surrender to the allure of false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imaginations are practicing putrid magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that Buddhists dub the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly exudes pictures in the manner of an agitated critter. The teacher Jeff Brown adds a crucial nuance. He says our “monkey hearts” are forever churning up forlorn, fractious, frightful feelings that are at the roots of the monkey mind’s disquiet.

Is there an antidote? Maybe. If we stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind’s and monkey heart’s slapdash chatter, we may become gracefully attuned to the life that’s right in front of us.





Whether our imagination is in service to our righteous desires or in thrall to our compulsive commotion, there is one constant: Its prophecies play a prominent role in shaping what happens to us. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to us as actual events that confirm our expectations.

The well-documented placebo effect in drug research, for which there is plentiful evidence, has broader implications. So much (not all!) of what unfolds in our lives, for good and for ill, is shaped by what we believe will happen.

Does that mean our mental and emotional projections help create the future? Let’s consider that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we presume will happen does tend to materialize?

Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible and practical approach is to expect blessings.

That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my Divinations for you, my readers. If I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.