I have always been a huge fan and follower of Buddhist philosophy and practice, but eventually I came to discover that I do not have a devotional bone in my body. Or soul, to be more accurate, I guess.

While nearly every core Buddhist teaching resonated strongly with me (with the exception of reincarnation, but more of that at another time), very little of the iconography, language, and even literature spoke to me. So I have forsaken the formal side of Buddhism and taken with me what is the most practical and useful: the regular of meditation and training of one’s attention.

These days I am attracted to a very pared-down spirituality, a minimalist mysticism. I eschew all forms of spiritual lingo (in fact, I do not even like the term ‘spiritual’) and prefer deep truths expressed in as simple a language as possible. I am very attracted to modern Advaita and people like Adyashanti and Rupert Spira. Simpler is more sophisticated, as Da Vinci once said. And it gets right to the heart of the matter: presence and clarity.

Since I wrote the Planetary Types: Science of Celestial Influence, I find myself immersed in the skeptical community, relishing the exercise of my own critical thinking. Which you might think is odd, since my first book tries to make a good case for the influence of the planets on man.

However, the success of failure of the book and its ideas rests on empirical tests, and  there are still pending investigations for those interested in assisting with research. Go over to http://planetarytypes.wordpress.com/ and sign up. Planetary Types is actually one the most critical books of astrology, despite being an attempt to sort out the wheat from the chaff on the subject.

I am also prepared to wear the results. There are far too many other fascinating things in the universe to discover to lament and try to bargain over any negative result. Way too many other interesting things to ponder and investigate. Of course, if we get a positive result, then we might have something interesting. We shall see.

I can tell you that I have begun work on my new book, which will deal with scepticism from a spiritual point of view, and with spirituality from a sceptical point of view. To give you an idea of its direction, my completed reading list for research is included below.

Krishnamurti biographies by Jayakar and Lutyens

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon – Peter Washington

The End of Faith – Sam Harris

The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins

On Being Certain – Robert Burton

The Supersense – Bruce Hood

Why We Believe – Michael Shermer

Buddhism is not what you Think – Steve Hagen

The Universe in a single atom – Dalai Lama

The Transparency of Things – Rupert Spira

If you grill any good skeptic worth their salt, they will tell you that true scepticism means being less sure about a good many things. Those who have made their minds up once and forever more rarely learn any deeper secrets of the universe. I have learned to question things much, much more than I used to. And I was pretty rational before.

The surest thing I am sure of is the need to purify my instruments of perception – to train my attention to see things clearly. That is what I am trying to do and hopefully I will be able to judge things with some clarity..

If a subject was, for instance, a Martial type I would look for this planet in key positions. Chance results would produce numbers around 16-20%. Approximately 70% of my selections showed planets in the required positions. The second sample comprised a total of 33 friends and acquaintances of which 31, or 94% contained the appropriate planet in a key position. For my third test I enlisted the aid of the National Council of Geocosmic Research in the US. Of a total of 44 subjects I was able to identify 42 as types, from which I predicted 29, or 70% correctly.

All this was rather encouraging, producing results way, way above those expected by chance alone. But I didn’t really trust my outcome completely. A bona fide scientist could probably pick my testing methods apart, finding statistical errors and biased selection, and all sorts of mistakes due to inexperience. However, with such high numbers, I felt strongly that there was something here that needed further testing, and I tried to enlist the aid of others to verify what I found, with little success. So one of the aims of the book is a recruiting brochure for astrologers or other individuals to help with replicating these tests to put them on a surer footing.

So, if I truly did have some scientific evidence for the influence of the planets, I had to have a go at explaining how that is possible. My type, the Saturnine type,  is not satisfied with easy answers, and has to burrow down to the root of a problem and come up with the truth. So had anyone already come up with a theory to account for planetary influences? The answer is yes, and not just anyone, but a British astronomer, Percy Seymour. Dr Seymour was the principal lecturer at the Plymouth Polytechnic Institute, and devised a plausible mechanism for celestial influences based on the concept of resonance.

Seymour believed that the movements of the planets produce tides in the solar wind that streams out from the sun and bathes the solar system, and also in the magnetic fields and atmosphere of the Earth. The earth’s magnetic lines of force vibrate like telephone cables, and can be tugged or set vibrating by the solar wind, just like the strumming of a guitar. Some of these earthly strings have been tuned by the movements of the planets.

Rodney Collin stated that the endocrine glands are tuned to such frequencies and at birth are set or calibrated, and the most dominant planet at the time of birth determines your most dominant endocrine gland, and therefore, your glandular type.

A lot of the book investigates this vast area of harmonic science and how the principles of music inform and underpin the physics of our world. It’s a fascinating study, and came in very useful as background for this theory of planetary influence. The music of the spheres had become real.  I was also influenced by the work of Hans Cousto, who had written a book called the Cosmic Octave, which set out the harmonic structure and properties of the planets and solar system, and attempted to assign a musical scheme and individual notes to the planets. THis harmonic approach could be summed up by this quote from George Leonard

“At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of the patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Pythagoras told his followers that a stone is frozen music, an intuition fully validated by modern sciences, we now know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequency, its singing. And the same thing is true of all radiation, all forces great and small, all information. Before we make music, music makes us …The way music works is also the way the world of objects and events works …The deep structure of music is the same as the deep structure of everything else.” George Leonard, from “The Silent Pulse”

A few chapters are chockers with examples of the influence of the planets on biology, such as the sensitivity of the animal and human nervous systems to fluctuations in the magnetic field of the earth. There is a solid theoretical foundation here for a science of celestial influence. Now all its needs is further testing to move forward.    

So after all my diligent research I wrote it all up, and tried to shop it around to a few publishers without success. So it went in the draw. I wrote a few other things that also found their way into the draw – an illustrated collection of quotes from spiritual teachers, philosophers and gurus, a small booklet that attempted at sum up my own view of the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, plus a few other odds and ends. Eventually, I managed to get a few articles published in national magazines, some popular glossies and others a little more dubious. My publisher heard about an article I had done on Ouspensky and another on Rodney Collin, and wanted to use them in a biography he was doing on Collin.

I eventually told him about the manuscript I had the planetary types, and since he was already familiar with the Fourth Way, he asked to see it. He emailed back and said he would like to publish it, I said yes please, and so, here we are.

So, what do you do with this? I make no apologies for the science, which might be a bit of a hard slog for some. Be prepared for a little brain exercise. However, once you start asking pointy questions about paranormalities like astrology and framing questions in terms of physics, you have to be thorough. Because science is thorough. Otherwise medicines wouldn’t work and planes would fall out of the sky. I am sure a true physicist would label what I have done as pseudoscience, but I believe it is one of the best attempts I have seen to wed physics with metaphysics, and that is saying a lot, as Saturnine types are traditionally very, very modest and humble.

When people ask me what my book is about, I find myself torn. It’s not a simple answer. Lately I have been giving the short answer, which is that the book is about whether or not the planets influence us, as astrology asserts that they do. But as soon is I give that answer, I realise that it sells the book way short. So I am grateful to have a few minutes to really tell the story of the book, what it contains and how it came to be.

I will just say briefly, what a huge rush it has been to have a book, any book, published. So few books make it further than the slush pile. Less than one percent, I believe. So for a publisher, even a small press publisher like Bardic Press, to see real value in your work is a great tonic for a writer’s ego. And the drive to keep writing and hopefully produce more work of even greater value. How this little book came to be involved a little serendipity, but more of that a little later.

Many years ago, as a result of my search for answers to life, the universe and what I was supposed to be doing in it, I found myself in a spiritual school based on the teachings of Russian mystics George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky. The aim of the school was to help one to wake up, to shake off the fog we live in, to develop awareness of ourselves and others, to basically be better people. One of the tools that was used exclusively in this school was a system of body types developed by one of Ouspensky’s students, Rodney Collin.

Rodney Collin was very interested in synthesising the esoteric knowledge that Gurdjieff developed with modern science. One of the fruits of this synthesis was the connections he made between the ancient planetary archetypes of astrology with a scheme of types based on endocrine gland dominance, developed by a pioneering endocrinologist, Dr Louis Berman. Finally, it seemed, astrology had a biological link between the heavens and man. The endocrine glands produced very clear and definite physiological and psychological characteristics, which were almost identical to the ancient planetary types.

When I first learned how to recognise the types I was continually bowled over by how accurate they were.  Not only were the physical characteristics very clear and obvious, but the psychological profiles that accompanied these body types were deadly accurate. And what’s more, the types scheme contained unique psychological insights that I had not seen anywhere else in my travels, either in esoteric knowledge, or in clinical or even pop psychology.

One of these insights was the idea that there is one central core element to our psyche that manifests both as a chief strength and a chief weakness. It is like the axle to the wheel of our character, around which everything else revolves. If one could discover their chief feature, they would have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of their inner selves. The insight I have gathered from unlocking my own chief feature has been a very powerful tool in the quest to understand myself and my relations with others.

And that is really the main purpose of the book. Though it deals a lot with science and the links between the planets and life on Earth, at its heart, the book is a little guide map to unlocking the undiscovered country of ourselves, to knowing what makes us tick. To help you unravel some of your own mystery.

Now, while I have always had a strong interest in classic spirituality and esoteric knowledge, I have always been equally fascinated by science. Like Rodney Collin, I have always been looking for ways to reconcile science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics. So, after I became convinced of the accuracy and value of these types, which all were named after the planets, I had to investigate whether there was any real, physical connection between these types and their planetary parents, so to speak.

So I researched astrology research itself, to see whether anyone had uncovered any scientific evidence for celestial influence. It soon became very clear that there was none. Almost every feature of astrology — the zodiac signs, the astrological houses, the aspects, its ability to predict events and outline destiny, etc had been tested over and over, but had failed every test. With one exception.

French scientist Michel Gauquelin spent over twenty years studying the relationships between the heavens and man. He had an avid interest in astrology since a young age, but grew critical when his own research revealed the faulty foundations of many astrological principles. Basically, he was looking for evidence but found none. Until he tested the planets.

Gauquelin’s first positive result in his investigations was using birth times of members of the French Academy of Medicine. Doctors who had achieved academic distinction were selected, and the pattern that emerged was that these eminent physicians tended to have been born when either Mars or Saturn had just risen, or had just passed the midheaven, well above the number expected by chance alone.

Gauquelin’s investigations seemed to link planets with certain professions, and he repeated his studies in other countries like the USA, and the results were identical. He also sent his findings to other scientists to verify his statistics. What distinguishes Gauquelin from other researchers into astrology is that he repeated his studies many times over, always with similar results. The most-repeated test was the association of the planet Mars with sports champions, which became known as the Mars Effect, whose positive statistical results still endures today, despite the attempts by the professional Skeptics organizations to demolish it.

The types Gauquelin studied were almost identical to the planetary types developed by Rodney Collin, so I had to satisfy myself that there was some scientific validity here, so I did my own tests. I collected nearly 400 horoscopes of well-known individuals along with photographs of each. My aim was to determine their body types to see where the planets fell. (Part 2 tomorrow)

I could not thing of a better creed for someone who seriously investigates reality and paranormalities. Since I began asking pointy questions about what is, it seems par for the course is to actually embrace uncertainty. Mundane facts, like what color my coffee is, elicit comforting certainties, but larger and deeper questions rarely do.

My posterior is planted firmly on the fence for a lot of subjects, and my feet can dangle either way, depending on the evidence and argument. I am reading B Allan Wallace’s “Mind in the Balance,” and his argument about the independence of consciousness on brain function and its significance for reincarnation has my feet swinging towards the positive side.

I have always felt that Ian Stephenson’s amazing research on the subject was convincing evidence, despite the attempts of the hardcore skeptics to shred it.

It’s okay not to be certain; it’s also okay to change what you believe from time to time.

Discovering just exactly what you can be certain about is an exciting journey in itself.

Above all, the teachings so far have been a reminder that we must be sure that we are looking at things through the right lens. We have to have a filter-less view of reality in order to be sure of what we are seeing.

I do my best, whenever I can, to clear away the muck and grime from my lens, and try to see things as they are.

There seems to be no unequivocal evidence of the existence of UFOs, ghosts, NDEs, telepathy or astrology, although there are staunch supporters of the last three who consider that there is, and debate the finer points of experimental protocols as to the validity of their proof.

The pursuit of finer states of consciousness is one of my passions; the other is the intersection of physics and metaphysics. What happens when belief in higher realities meets the world of facts. Hence the blog. And my book.

Despite the lack of proof positive of paranormalities, I feel there are still nooks and crannies of paranormality to be investigated, but they have to be examined from the middle of the road. My book ‘Planetary Types: the Science of Celestial Influence’ is one attempt to re-examine the basic tenets of astrology from a cautious, objective viewpoint. I believe there is a strong possibility of achieving positive experimental results from testing the physical characteristics of the seven types against natal chart subjects.

But, to be true to my Buddhist quest for clarity and objectivity, if, after several rounds of testing, the results aren’t forthcoming, I will humbly acquiesce. I am no paranormal evangelist, just a curious chap who thinks there just might be a cosmic umbilical that connects us to a higher world. To completely understate the obvious, I think that would be an interesting discovery.

However, the backbone of the Science of Celestial Influence is the scheme of types, whose reality I am convinced of. They are a unique, accurate and utterly ‘organic’ model of human types. If it turns out that the current explanation of their connection to the planets via the endocrine glands does not fit, then the next exciting chapter will be finding out their true biological causes. But in the meantime the there are experimental roads to try out.

I was sitting at my computer early one morning when I heard a god-awfully loud CRACK behind me. A good approximation is the sound of slapping a thong (or flip-flop for my US and UK readers) or sandal very hard on a tile floor. More like a THWACK! This was loud enough to make me jump in my seat and get my heart-rate going a little. Now, I live alone in a small flat with one large main open living area, and the sound was in this lounge/dining/kitchen area. No-one else was in the flat and nothing was out of the ordinary. It sounded a lot like a very loud electrical discharge so I checked all the outlets and appliances but nothing was amiss. The TV was on, but it didn’t skip a beat. Simply put, there was no trace of anything that could explain such a loud retort.

Some explanations that have been offered were large insects or small lizards (I live in Queensland) or mice running across faulty connections. But there was no evidence of a short or anything like that. Another is that moisture inside old TVs can build up a static charge with accumulated dust and deliver a loud crack, and this seems the most likely, but I still can’t believe it would be so loud. I mean, this was really loud.

Suffice to say that most of the explanations so far have been unsatisfactory, not because I want to hold out for a paranormal explanation, but simply because they don’t fit the facts of my experience. Some have even suggested I could have been mistaken about the volume of the sound and its location. Of course, I can only stand by my conviction that everything seemed to me exactly as I describe it.

My niece has had similar experiences with identical lack of obvious sources. Once she heard the same loud crack when entering a completely empty house for the very first time.

I am in logical limbo here. Please rescue me.

In my youth I believed in lots of things: UFOs, ghosts, communication with the dead, and many other paranormalities. I can’t remember why I believed in these phenomena; the universe seemed more dramatic somehow. I think I believed largely because most everybody else seemed to believe in them. It was generally accepted that these phenomena, in one form or another, were real.

Now? These days, it’s not so much that I reject them, it’s more that I have less a need to believe in paranormalia. For a start, I don’t trust my perceptions enough to give me an uncensored, unfiltered view of reality. Numerous are the ways in which we mortals deceive ourselves. “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest. Li la li, li la li li li la li …” I am less interested in believing in something, but seeing what is in front of my eyes, clearly.

I am trying to improve this instrument of cognition, mainly through meditation, mindfulness and being present, without filters, to what is real. For the moment I am happy to simply be, and leave these alternate realities alone.

However, my paranormal agnosticism doesn’t preclude speculating and investigating metaphysical possibilities. My book is a cautious expedition into the unknown, with a guide rope firmly tethered to the real world of facts and physics.

It all depends how much one invests in one’s theories or beliefs. The Dalai Lama has said that if science found Buddhism wrong, Buddhism would have to change. There is a lesson there for all of us.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1906834032/thegospeoftho-20

and I am a very happy and proud first-time author. I haven’t yet held a printed edition in my hand, and dare say that will only add to my giddy pride.

It may appear strange that a self-confessed skeptic is writing a book on a scientific approach to astrology. But the wiggle room that is allowed in circumscepticism makes this the perfect subject for examination. Science says the book is closed on astrology. I say, not quite.

The opening to my media release reads:

“Astrology does not work. This may come as a surprise to the thousands of practising astrologers throughout the world. But traditional astrology has not fared well under the scrutiny of science. Indeed, according to premier astrology researcher Rudolph Smit, astrology has been tested in more than 600 scientific studies.”

Rudolph Smit’s site is the most comprehensive site on the subject, and I thoroughly recommend it for those who are interested in the tendentious relationship between science and astrology.

http://www.rudolfhsmit.nl/hpage.htm

Basically the conclusion Mr Smit, himself a practicing astrologer for many years, arrives at is that:

“Today, for the first time in twenty centuries, we can say with some certainty that no, the heavens do not reflect our destiny.”

“The case against astrology is that it is untrue. It has not contributed to human knowledge, it claims the prestige of science without the methods of science, it has failed hundreds of tests, it does not deliver benefits beyond those produced by non-astrological factors (hidden persuaders), and users do not usefully agree on basics such as which zodiac to use or even on what a given birth chart indicates. No hint of these problems will be found in astrology books, which is why some scientists see astrologers as misguided or even fraudulent. In fact astrologers are mostly nice people who genuinely wish to help others.”

So why does astrology work?

For most people, astrology works if it provides meaning. It does not need to be true, and, according to Smit, attacking it would be like attacking a religious faith. Faith needs no facts: it is all a matter of belief. And many beliefs seem to thrive on contrary facts. Smit says:

“In practical terms a warm and sympathetic astrologer provides low-cost non-threatening therapy that is otherwise hard to come by. You get emotional comfort, spiritual support, and interesting ideas to stimulate self-examination. … In a dehumanised society an astrologer provides personal support at a very low price. Where else can you get this sort of thing these days?”

And further, quoting historian and social critic Theodore Roszak from his book Why Astrology Endures (Briggs, San Francisco 1980): “For a growing number of people, the rich imagery of these old traditions has become a more inspirational way of talking [about ourselves] … than conventional psychiatry. The astrological universe is, after all, the universe of Greco-Roman myth, of Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake. It has poetry and philosophy built into it.”

In short, it has enough ancient mysticism and promise of self-knowledge to attract a wide audience who believe it can supply them with answers. And generally, people cannot be shaken from their cherished beliefs, so I try not to expend too much energy in trying to do so. But that is not the same as trying to make a good case for or against something, and I think “Planetary Types: the Science of Celestial Influence” does that very job.

So, on the subject of whether or not the scientific book is closed on astrology, my media release continues:

“… astrology has been tested in more than 600 scientific studies. All have failed. With one exception.

“Michel Gauquelin tested hundreds of thousands of subjects in numerous experiments to prove that the planets influence character, but his results are disputed by scientists, despite the sheer mass of evidence.

“Author and researcher Tony Cartledge has re-awakened the debate over planetary influence, and is approaching the Gauquelin findings from a new and exciting angle.”

Hard-core skeptics believe they have demolished all Gauquelin’s findings. That may be so, but my book introduces new elements into the mix, that make testing for planetary influence and planetary types much easier, and much less prone to debate. Any results from the testing I propose in the book will leave little doubt as to whether there can be such a thing as a science of celestial influence.