There Are No Planets.

The skeptic hears me say, “There are no separately existing objects,” and immediately thinks he’s uncovered some massive contradiction.

“So,” he says, arms crossed like he’s about to collect a prize for winning a small-town debate, “you’re an astrologer who doesn’t even believe planets are real?”

And honestly, that’s the place where language starts short-circuiting.

No, I’m not claiming Mars is like some fake prop hanging in the sky like part of a theater backdrop. What I’m saying is that, in absolute reality, nothing exists on its own. Not Mars. Not your coffee mug. Not your heartbreak. Not even that polished little LinkedIn persona you’ve worked so hard to maintain. The planets don’t get a special exemption from non-duality just because they’re bright and astronomically measurable.

Usually, the skeptic wants this to be a trap. He wants me pinned between Advaita and astronomy, like I’ve somehow wandered into a contradiction I can’t explain my way out of.

But it’s actually much simpler than that.

At the absolute level, there are no separate things. Fine. But at the relative level, appearance still happens. Patterns still happen. Movement still happens. Relationships still happen. The sun still seems to rise. The tides still shift. Winter still strips the trees down to their bare bones. And a natal chart can still describe the recurring structure of a person’s apparent life, much like a weather map shows pressure systems moving across land.

Do I think the map is the same as the territory? Do I think that a menu is the same as dinner? Of course not. That would be absurd.

Do I think the map becomes useless just because the territory is, at its core, non-separate? Also no. That’s just a different kind of foolishness pretending to be profound.

I don’t practice astrology because I think Saturn is some stern little project manager in the sky assigning hardship and growth lessons. I practice it because, inside the dream of being a person, patterns show up. Reactions show up. Attachments show up. Certain types of suffering recur with a consistency that would be almost impressive if it weren’t so draining.

The chart helps put language to the pattern.

That’s all it does.

It doesn’t manufacture a separate self. It reveals the mechanics of the identity structure you’re already stumbling over.

If I sit with a client and notice a chart full of tension around control, performance, and relentless self-surveillance, I’m not bowing to planets. I’m reading a symbolic language that reflects the ways consciousness has gotten tangled in identification. I’m looking at the costume without confusing it for the actor.

Or better yet, I’m noticing the actor’s habits while still inside the costume.

A skeptic might ask, “But if none of it is ultimately real, then why bother at all?”

For the same reason people bother with therapy, poetry, blood tests, or checking the forecast before biking through the mountains. Relative tools still have relative value. You don’t have to believe a thunderstorm possesses ultimate independent reality to know it’s a bad idea to stand on a ridge holding a golf club.

Non-duality doesn’t erase appearances like emotional tendencies, physical illness, or the pain experienced if hit by a car. It erases the mistaken conclusions we make about appearances.

For example, grief may still arise after a loss, but the added conclusion, “This grief proves I am broken, abandoned, or permanently diminished,” falls away. A chronic illness may still require treatment, limitation, and care, but the mind’s story, “This condition is who I am, and my life is now fundamentally less whole,” is seen as an interpretation, not the truth. Likewise, if someone insults you, the flush of anger or shame may appear immediately, but non-duality cuts through the reflexive conclusion that a solid, threatened self is at the center and has been diminished by the event.

That’s the whole pivot.

In this kind of work, the planets are not billiard balls causing your divorce, and they’re not sacred celestial beings floating around in some jeweled heaven either. They’re part of a symbolic display within manifestation. They belong to the same field of appearance as your body, your life story, your ambitions, your childhood pain, and that strange private narrative you keep repeating about how everything would finally fall into place if just one more thing got fixed.

Astrology, at least the way I practice it, isn’t fortune-telling. It isn’t cosmic puppetry. It’s pattern recognition used in the service of disidentification.

It says: here is the structure you’ve mistaken for 'me.”

Here is the reflex.

Here is the craving.

Here is the fear.

Here is the particular style of suffering.

And here, if you’re willing to be honest, is the place where you might stop calling that whole bundle your identity.

I’m not embarrassed to be a non-dual astrologer. What would embarrass me is using astrology in the conventional horoscope sense, where the ego is treated as ultimately real, identity is treated as fixed, and planets are imagined as cosmic authorities running people’s lives.

The chart is just another part of the dream. So is the skeptic. So is the astrologer.

But while the dream is happening, some dreams are simply more useful than others.

A birth chart, used well, doesn’t reinforce the illusion of separateness; it can reveal it. That’s what makes it valuable.

Not ultimate.

Valuable.

There’s a difference.