A scientist at heart

I’ve always liked the predictable and objective world of hard sciences. Since young age I was into mathematical puzzles and physics phenomena. In school I took extra courses in physics and mathematics, participated in various olympiads, and even placed first in Mathematical Kangaroo competition among 10th graders in Estonia! Following my interest in technological progress and innovation I joined the University of Groningen in The Netherlands to study Artificial Intelligence. While I still enjoyed the mental stimulation and excitement of solving abstract problems (like coding or math problems) to achieve a tangible outcome (e.g. software), I had started to feel like this is not all there is to life.

Interest in psychology

Around 11th grade, after my first big health issue, I got interested in psychology. I mostly wanted to learn how to socialize, something I always wished I could do, and after learning from a random video that one could learn this skill from books I was hooked. I started by listening to the You Are Not So Smart podcast, which covers in detail all the fallacies and biases of our brains. Exploring these fallacies and admitting that I am often deceived by my brain was the first step in seeking deeper truth and becoming open to having my previous beliefs turn out false. This was also a motivator for going to study AI, although I quickly understood that the academic psychology is too cut and dry for me to apply too much of it in my personal life. So I continued consuming pop psychology, most notably the teachings of Jordan Peterson.

The value of the subjective

While I no longer agree with many of Peterson’s teachings, there’s no denying that he has had a transformative impact on my view of life. From the age of 18 to 21 I followed his advice like a gospel, and I grew a lot as a person. Besides personal transformation in taking responsibility and speaking the truth even when it’s inconvenient, I learned from him that the subjective experience of a person is something real and important – this is not something that is understood in the western society at large, it fundamentally opposes the idea of “hard” science and doesn’t fit with our school system (which is basically designed to raise children into cogs of the economic engine). Regardless, I started getting more and more curious about what hides in my subconscious and how to integrate my shadow side as well as get in touch with what I felt I had lost as part of growing up.

Introducing: Psychedelics

Right around the turn of 2020, I had learned from Vsauce, a popular YouTube science channel, that psychedelics scientifically help you rewire your brain and connect to your subconscious self. While this got me curious, I didn’t bother looking deeper as I’m not interested in anything illegal. A few months later I learned however, that while legalizing psychedelics has been a subject for debate for decades now in many countries, The Netherlands is ahead of the curve. While not legal to sell (only in the less potent form of “truffles”), mushroom growing kits are legal to sell there and consumption is essentially legal. Thus, during covid began my slow and careful exploration of this new world of altered states of consciousness.

Long story short, the premise held true and I became free of a lot of superficial psychological limitations, false beliefs and so on. However, I got also a taste of the downside of psychedelics when not used properly and with respect – as I got more careless I eventually had a bad trip and a panic attack, which ended my attempt to become connected with my deeper self through ingestion of badly tasting substances. I could no longer enjoy any psychedelics, and was thrown into a dark night of the soul – term for having lost your old self (hard scientist with fixed beliefs) before having found the new path. By christmas I was struggling with random panic attacks whenever I tried to fall asleep, in fear of losing myself. 2020 had started with feeling lost from not knowing who I am deep down, and ended with feeling like I don’t know who I ever was.

The new beginning

Truthfully, none of us really know who we really are, we just assume some identities and it works sort of okay, and we’re happy with the little we get from this world so we don’t really have an incentive to look deeper. Only during a storm are we forced to face the reality and find some deeper truth to root ourselves in to weather the winds. This is what helped me. I was looking for answers, and this time Jordan Peterson fell short – he sounded good in theory, but I his advice falling short in practice.

Enter Sadhguru. I found him from a documentary interview, where he explained how important stability is before opening up one’s consciousness, and that yoga helps achieve the stability needed. While I was skeptical of someone calling himself a ‘guru’ (as I had only encountered ‘fake gurus’ before), he made a lot of sense and I started trying out his methods to achieve stability, peace, love and so on. The more I tried his stuff the more convinced I got that he knows what he’s talking about. Whether it was his stuff, or the billion other things I tried, the panic attacks faded within a few months.

Back to the Roots

This period of struggle and intense seeking took me on a journey to get back in touch with my longings and inspiration that I had been holding down at least ever since entering school. I started to reflect deeper on what I want from life, who I am, and what makes me happy. Many childhood memories resurfaced, almost like flashbacks in a movie. I started remembering the feeling I got when walking in the rain on a summer day, I remembered how excited I used to get for seeing the sun. And not only remembered, I started experiencing these feelings again to some extent. It really felt like a homecoming.

One of the things that aided me on this journey was astrology. While still a skeptic, I was open-minded enough that when I noticed a pattern of people sharing similar mindset who had the same “star sign” as me, I couldn’t shake it off as a coincidence. The pattern felt meaningful. I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with the stars, I assumed it must be some seasonal effect of being born early summer that makes a person sharp and witty, even if the climates and conditions they’re born in is quite different. On further observation, this assumption did not hold up and even more confusingly, all the planetary placements as described by astrology would explain things about people’s lives that I couldn’t figure out without. This mystical connection between the planets and our daily lives was bewildering, and at the same time incredibly intruiging. I was hooked on a journey to figure out what and why the planets have this impact, how such a thing is possible and what it says about our lives, souls, relationships, free will and more. I found myself thinking about astrology day and night, every free moment from work I was trying to piece this puzzle together, listened to hundreds of hours of The Astrology Podcast and researched every person’s birth time that I could.

Therapy work

The first two years of learning about astrology, I didn’t dare to tell many close people about this new interest of mine. It just didn’t chime with my view of the world and how we should live our lives. I felt it conflicted with the notion of free will and the explanation of planets exuding power over us just didn’t hold water when looked at critically – it can be proven to be false with high degree of certainty (there’s always the remote possibility of some hidden forces we cannot observe, but nobody has given any details about those forces). So it was that I quietly learned more and more about the psychological traits and experiences of myself and people around me without really understanding the deeper truth behind those patterns.

Fate had it that in January of 2023 I had gotten emotionally to the point of desperation after getting rejected by a girl I was head in heels in love with (before having even met her) and I decided to give my friend’s suggestion a go and went to therapy. There I learned many, many deeper things about myself that would’ve maybe taken me years or even decades to figure out without someone personally helping me.

The Love for Symbols

After getting over the biggest psychological hurdles like lack of any boundaries or self-esteem, we started exploring more of my possible ways forward. In one of the sessions I brought a set of items from childhood, among which was a collection of drawn logos and symbols on a couple of A4 papers. I used to love collecting various car logos and draw them down, patrolling the streets for any new car brands and trying to get a whiff of their logos to recreate them on paper, often correcting for mistakes once I was able to the same rare brand second or third time. Another collection was of symbols, such as hieroglyphs and other foreign letters, whatever I could find from books, shoe boxes etc. Interestingly, I hadn’t even learned to write then, nor was I interested in any symbols of language ever since. Although I did love the abstract symbolism of mathematics that I alluded to earlier. To me, there’s just something special about conveying a meaning with a deeply enriched symbol or a few – this is actually how language works, it’s just more fleshed out and not as concentrated as something like astrology. Anyway, my therapist said she really liked the energy in these collections of symbols, suggesting I might’ve tried to get in touch with something from my previous lives. Knowing what I know now, I think she was on the mark with that one. On her recommendation to get back in touch with this energy I knew exactly what it meant – practicing astrology.

Deeper Dive

Just a week after my first therapy session I actually had my first astrology counseling session. I was still uncertain about validity or usefulness of astrology back then, but after the session I was convinced there is something truly meaningful and useful about it. A few months later I randomly learned I can read charts for other people! I was just trying to explain some concepts of astrology to my sister, and to make things easier I took her chart and started explaining what some placements and aspects mean in her chart. That was my first reading, and I was hooked once again. In the spring and summer I started giving readings to everyone and anyone interested, which meant I got to learn a lot about astrology from the real world feedback that previously was limited to my personal experience and perception. Importantly, I learned that astrology does not conflict with any of my other beliefs or perception – free will is certainly real and astrology wouldn’t make sense without it. Planets don’t “act upon” us, they’re like hands on a clock telling the time in just much greater detail and less rigid language than our watches.

Finally a Solution

It’s hard to describe the impact that learning astrology has had on me. I’ve probably spent over a thousand hours reflecting on my own chart to understand both astrology and my own life. What I can say is that before getting deeper into it I was facing a lot of struggles in life without any clarity as to why. I knew it was accurate to say that I was having health issues related to my head, such as headaches and eye problems (mars in 1st), low sex drive (saturn in the 8th), and being very emotional and evasive in my speech when in conflict (mercury in cancer). Knowing it was relieving on one level, yet frustrating on another – Why me? Why am I cursed to suffer these limitations? Why cannot I have headache free life, high libido and be able to tolerate conflict without losing my center? Not much was said about it in the western astrology community, even the first vedic astrology teacher I learned from didn’t really go in depth to how these traits come to be.

But once I started to learn from Ernst Wilhelm, a vedic astrologer who’s devoted his life to researching and recovering ancient techniques in their purest form, my life started to change dramatically. I started to see how my headaches come from my self-criticism (the fundamental meaning of mars in 1st), how I’m afraid to emotionally connect and this is largely why sex has felt scary, and how I’m easily triggered into feelings of abandonment due to certain developmental characteristics of my childhood. The interesting thing is that I knew how to change all of these! I know how to deal with feelings of abandonment once recognized, I know how to be self-accepting when I notice myself being self-critical, and I know how to learn to connect emotionally deeper. Being able to apply the right remedy to the right problem turned like 5 out of 10 of my life’s biggest challenges around in just a few months, even though I had been aware of these issues for years or decades. The difference didn’t come from learning more details about my challenges, or even accepting my limitations, it came from connecting my present problems to my own behaviours that bring them about and being able to change those behaviours. Astrology has been empowering in ways that nothing else has. That’s why I keep learning more about it, and that’s why it’s astrology through which I want to help people life their best lives.

Moving Forward

Today I feel more inspired and optimistic about my future than ever. I am excited to wake up to work on astrology, learn more, practice more, take a walk in the forest and just sit around eating healthy food. I still have my stressful times, especially when it’s busy at work (I currently work full-time as a data scientist) and especially when I can’t focus on astrology because of it. Thus whenever I can I will spend my time working on bringing my practice and knowledge to people. I wish to make astrology a full-time focus of mine, bringing as much value to people who like me wish to see life clearly and life in accordance with the natural laws. In the more distant future I envision making the whole astrological and inner engineering practices more accessible and desirable to people, as well as contribute to bringing more holistic lifestyle to the whole of society.