Photo by luca romano on Unsplash
Sometimes it’s pretty hard to keep faith in the world.
This weekend, there was a far-right protest of over 100,000 in London. On the same week, we had the shooting of Charlie Kirk in the US too. It’s safe to say we’re in choppy waters right now.
Yet the point in faith is not to hold it only when things are good.
I admit that my belief in the universe has ebbed and flowed. More recently, I’ve gone more inwards, choosing not to think about ‘what it all means’.
I think there is wisdom in this. Many people I see get very caught up in analysing current events. But trying to rationalise the world is like trying to explain time and matter. Our brains cannot comprehend things that are so beyond our reckoning. Sometimes we need to just stop thinking so deeply about things. There’s a life to be lived, after all.
Yet I’ve also found some comfort in connecting with the beyond too. It’s not always about understanding everything, sometimes it’s about understanding enough.
The world seems to move through periods of intensity. Some periods are calmer, some are stormier.
Right now, we seem to be in quite a stormy moment. This is our reality, and probably will be for a while. Sometimes we have to know how to hold tight. The boat navigating through the torment may have to brace through the night to get to the light of day. I think that’s the period we are in right now.
On a personal level, I’ve ended up getting into reading about some of the ancient historic south Asian texts. It’s helpful to see how the world has evolved before us. It puts things in context, and helps us see how periods of hardship and prosperity ebb and flow.
I ended up for one reason or another into looking into a Vedic astrology chart. Understanding what these actually mean can be quite complicated, so I never really could read it in the past. Ironically using the ultra-modern technology of chatGPT I’ve been able to read something that is based upon technology built thousands of years ago.
Apparently I’ve been going through what will probably be the roughest period of my life. It started in later 2022. I was tested in what was doing in my life, as well as what I wanted. These years had a real risk according to the charts of challenging working conditions and burnout.
Broadly, this feels pretty accurate. My last few years have felt very choppy, and lots of things have changed. I did indeed go through a burnout over the last year. I think it was the world’s way of saying things needed to shift in my li.
The good news is that this three year cycle is coming to an end. From November, I’ll enter into a new cycle. Things should start to settle, and life will improve. By 2028, I’ll have several years which will feel like a golden period.
I’ve learnt to be a little cautious around these readings. There was a point a few years ago that I got so caught up in them that I was tracking it month by month. I slowly realised that such micro-reading ends up being quite unhelpful. I lost an ability to live more serendipitously, and I ended up believing that everything had to have some deep meaning. Plus, these astrology charts can get it wrong.
But I have experienced when it has gotten it right too. I remember meeting a man in India in early 2023. He was an astrologist, based in Jaipur and apparently a particularly renowned one. Within a few minutes of meeting me, he told me very directly that I had a high level of intelligence, and that I would write books. In the conversation he said that I should be working in a top institution such as Oxford. Funnily enough, at the time I was working at an Institute in Brussels which was part of the University of Cambridge. There were a bunch of other things he said. A lot of it made plenty of sense, even if some of it didn’t.
When we look for signs in the universe, they are often there. If we completely ignore them, we are doomed to be limited by the capacity of our brains. But if we look too hard for meaning everywhere, we can end up getting surrendering any sense of self-agency. We don’t need the stars to tell us what bread we’re going to buy today.
It’s important that we continue to lead our own lives in the best way we can. Some of us have the fortune to not be caught in the crossfire of world events, whilst others will have their lives cut short due to the evil of others.
In moments of despair, the universe is there to guide us. But we must remember that it is ultimately us who holds our own destiny.