It’s about the scrimmage between fate, freewill, omens and inner peace.

Last August I visited my friend of forty years at her home a six hour drive from my place in Montreal. The first thing I said when I walked into her house was “I love this painting, can you put it in your will for me.” 

She laughed and we bantered a bit about what we might bequeath each other. We were both 58, both healthy by most standards, and both looking forward to many more years together — in fact, we’d plotted her trip to see me in Montreal the weekend of October 2nd , six weeks later, as our next rendezvous. 

She died of a heart attack only three weeks after our visit. And the first things that came to me on hearing the news, other than a tsunami of shock-loss, were all the signs that this WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. 

The chat about the painting and our wills. 

The bit of money she owed me for a couple of years and paid me back only months before her unexpected death. 

Her insistence that I meet her other best friend (the local girl) on this trip and we all hang out, as if me getting to know her other bestie had to happen now, even in the middle of a pandemic.

Her uncharacteristic angst that a friendship between her daughters and mine might not flourish because my daughter was high on shrooms on a cliff over the lake one day, and her kids might disapprove. I still remember saying “Audrey don’t worry, we have a lot of years and many trips ahead to get them all together again.” 

That our next get together was scheduled for October 2nd, the date of my mothers sudden unexpected death.

These anomalies seemed innocuous at the time. In hindsight, they were omens. And this is where that scrimmage starts, the one between fate, freewill, omens and inner peace.
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Ten years ago an overnight enlightenment blast transformed everything instantly — it was like all of my life I had been nearly blind, and suddenly I could see. What I saw, and still see, is the unreality of reality, and more particularly, of the self. 

And yet, in the months after this awakening, a perceptual shift in which the thinking mind was pin-drop quiet and joy effervesced non-stop, the first action impulse that rose up was to answer the question: What is this form for? 

Awake, or asleep, or even drowsy, the fact is that we operate in a simulation-like reality that at the highest level of gamesmanship asks the character to define a purpose. Some newly awakened folk go straight to “teacher” and hit the satsang circuit, often prematurely, before the full integration happens. 

Others find themselves cast adrift in a void of zen sickness, finding a loss of self leading to a paralysis of agency. (no me here to do anything, life is life-ing me etc).

My path was two fold.

The impulse post awakening was to purpose myself to the task of writing a blog (and later writing online everywhere from Huffington Post, to elephant journal to Good Men Project Magazine. And second  to eventually to play the role of astrologer as a full time gig with my Lunatic Astrology site.

The confession today is that only by diving into the natal charts of two thousand people or more, have I had to wrestle with the dragon of a question: Is there free will, or is life fated. Does personal agency really exist? Are portents of a future meant as preparation or for prevention?

Here is what I have chosen to believe: 

Our life is like an infinite lane highway with occasional exits. The exits are the chance to get off the life road. There is more than one “time to go” and we don’t chose it, not at least from the level of the personality. 

The infinite lanes more or less operate like a multiverse, or many worlds theory. We shift lanes slightly or massively (the one next door, or the one way the fuck over there) and when we do this, our life circumstances change slightly or dramatically. I have done lane changes where even features of physical reality are not the same, and for those in the know, this is called reality shifting and it out pictures too in what is called The Mandela Effect. Lane changes are not about conscious choices, they are sourced from a far deeper algorithm.

There are cycles of experience that are baked into our existence from the moment of birth. The astrological chart, a snapshot of the sky at birth, is a map and a clock of our entire life story. A good astrologer tells you what will happen, and it’s not that hard, honestly. A great astrologer will tell you why. 

I strive now, with every client, to read the chart as a sky story and to delve deeply into character and motivation along with plot points. Like any story it has before and afters — and in a decent astrology reading, the reader should say, “so tell me what what happened when” because the what happened before will inform the flavour of what will happen next. 

Yet, even with the best sky reading acumen, what cannot be told is who chooses. Who is driving the plot line? Who wrote this script that the stars, and planets and asteroids, are unfolding? 

I remember years ago dating a guy heavily into A Course in Miracles. He used to insist realty was a dream, and I agreed. But my take was simple: Why not make it a happy dream? 

Astrology, or any predictive tool, can help create a less turbulent and enjoyable dream, if only by forecasting the turbulence itself and equipping the client with the needed navigational guidance.

As for who chooses, that’s a question I will dedicate the rest of my days to answering. A free book channeled by me in 2019, The Coming Age of Miracles, suggests divine will is the only will. But then we are divine and so that will is ours — when I suppose we claim it. 

In the meantime, in service of the more happy dream, I created a course to teach the basics of seeing those inevitable event cycles (both lucky and difficult) in order to flow with the the best of them and to avoid swimming upstream. If you are curious, just sign up for my LIVE 4 week Diving Timing Masterclass that starts May 8th to May 29th.

May the sky tell you true stories,

Lori Ann