Mark Batterbury
I met Jeffrey Wolf Green in 1993 at the 2nd Pluto school, in North Vancouver. My intention was to deepen my understanding of astrology by learning with a teacher rather than from books, as I was used to the oral tradition. I had already listened to every recording of Jeffrey’s I could find, and his message was clearly deeper and more powerful than anything else I had heard. About half way through the Pluto school, I realized that in Jeffrey I had also found a spiritual teacher. Perhaps the greatest value from my 12 years of living in India and practicing yoga and meditation was that I was able to recognize Jeffrey as a self-realized soul and ask for his guidance in my life.
The first year was all about learning the techniques and archetypes of evolutionary astrology. Then the next eleven years was a journey into a natural spirituality, based on natural laws. His definition of Truth was simple: what is. His methods included observation and correlation, but I soon came to realize that I was nowhere near his level of insight and ability. It was his spiritual understanding that gave life to Evolutionary Astrology. I could study an astrological chart for hours and still not understand it, while Jeffrey simply looked at it once, and saw the evolutionary journey of the soul behind the chart, its past, present and future. Perhaps he saw it by clairvoyance, or intuition, but he saw it because of the advanced state of his consciousness. He would encourage us to “intuit the symbols”, but it took a long time to un-learn my habit of thinking too much, and getting lost in anxiety about my limitations. He guided me in the process of regaining trust in intuition, to shift from a left-brained, analytical mind towards a right brained intuitive awareness. It was hard for me to get past the need to know, and engage with life from the heart where knowledge is not so important.
Wolf was a compassionate, wise, and powerful teacher and he helped my spirit through some very dark places. Always, he allowed for and respected individual differences, and was uniquely gifted in validating those people he helped. While the astrological chart can provide insight into an individual’s unique psyche and journey, there is a spiritual path in Jeffrey’s teachings that has great value on its own, and that has become my main area of focus.
Jeffrey Wolf Green
Wolf did not speak much about his own journey: about the trauma of Vietnam, and the awakening to his future path that was communicated to him by a monk in Thailand. He grew up in a series of orphanages, and a road-rage incident at the age of 18 led to his being given the choice of two years in jail or two years in the army. He chose the marines. After 18 months of combat in Vietnam, he finished his tour of duty at a base in California that was near a monastic retreat center in the Kriya yoga tradition of Swami Yoganada. He began to spend as much time there as he could and learned the techniques of Kriya yoga. As Jeffrey was already highly evolved, this had the intended result of awakening his kundalini energy and activating his chakras. Shortly after his discharge from the military, he was welcomed by a Navaho family that initiated him into their spiritual ways and gave him a retreat cabin in the high desert where he stayed for 6 months. That was where he was adopted into a wolf pack, and became “wolf”. From there his journey took him to Nepal, where he was recognised by an ancient tantric yogini, who invited him to her temple retreat and taught him matriarchal tantra. From there he went to a monastery in Tibet and meditated for six months, experiencing for himself much of what the ancient yogini had taught him. At some point on his journey of awakening Sri Yukteshwar, who was the guru of Yogananda and also an astrologer, visited him in a dream.
At the age of 28, during his first Saturn return, Jeffrey began practising astrology in Seattle. His spiritual journey included kriya yoga practice, the awakening and rising of kundalini energy through the chakras, being initiated into peyote medicine by the Navaho, and the teachings of the ancient yogini in Nepal. He told us he had only read three books on astrology: his insight and knowledge began with the dream where Sri Yukteshwar communicated to him the vision of what came to be known as Evolutionary Astrology.
copyright 2001 by Mark Batterbury
.“Mark was the first student to complete my school of Evolutionary Astrology. Mark’s abilities as an evolutionary astrologer are simply excellent. Beyond this, he has a great natural wisdom which has occurred through the nature of his life experience.”
Jeffrey Wolf Green.