Astrology, Values, and The Equation for Wisdom with Nolan Clay Rogers

Join us for Episode 5 of the ThinkBiz.Solutions Podcast featuring our very own Nolan Clay Rogers! Nolan takes us deep into his fascinating background, from growing up in Missouri and his early love for reading to how he developed a unique practice centered around meaning-making. He explains how he uses ancient traditions, including Hellenistic astrology originating from Sumeria, Babylon, and Egypt, to help people recenter themselves as the source of their own warmth, life, and gravity. Unlike modern, psychologized approaches, Nolan embraces the full spectrum of life represented by traditional concepts like the "malefic" planets Mars and Saturn. Learn why the first question in his sessions is always "What do you want most?" and how clarifying your desires and values is the essential starting point for navigating life's challenges.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

What

SPEAKER_00: 0:14

is up, everyone? Today is an incredible day, and I will tell you why. We have Nolan as our guest today, not just a co-host, but also Our actual podcast guest. You make me feel so special, Garrett. So, so special. It's going to be a fantastic time going through and hearing about all the different things that you do, man. We will do our best, my good sir. Now the hot seat's on me and I don't just get to be jovial and loquacious as my normal self. Yeah. Oh, man. Those words just light us off straight away. Oh, I tell you what, though. I woke up this morning and I don't know if you're a rain guy. But it was raining outside, and I was just, I was hyped. I knew it was going to be a good day. I love the rain. Oh, yeah. It was solid. Especially whenever it's just a nice pitter-patter. It's not super torrential. Yes. We just get a good squash weather, as Braveheart would say. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16

Yeah. If I tried my Braveheart impression, I think, I mean, you're mic'd up, so the laughing would be very... evident, you know. Right. Yeah, everyone will know if it's funny or not. Man, okay. Well, let's... What do we do with ourselves? Oh, man. We've only been in this situation one other time. And it was my awkward self at that point. Pish posh, pish posh. Well, so this can kind of bring me to a little bit of kind of what I do is I... founded my business a little bit on trying to solve these types of problems for people of either awkward personalities. Well, that's what we claim. That's the story where Garrett is currently telling himself about the personality, and we can work on that if you would like to. But it's the understanding that everything that I sell, my services, anything else I do for people, I need it for myself. Starting out. So I don't do anything for clients that I haven't needed or I haven't purchased at one time or another. And generally, I tend to purchase it for myself on a quarterly basis. Nice. Because we all need a gut check. And that's been kind of the weird thing, hanging out with the networking group and just improving who I'm around and the business owners that I've come into contact with is understanding that basically what I do is church. Yeah. I had to swallow my crow on that a number of weeks ago. It's just like, oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's always the best starting place. Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to dig into this more. Before we dive straight into all the different things that you're up to today, tell us your story, man. Where did you start off at with all of this? How did you get into the profession that you're in today? Jeepers, Barnes. That started off being a good little born Missouri boy. Oh, I didn't know you were from Missouri. Yep. Been border ruffian between southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas all my life until moving to Oklahoma about five years ago. Very nice. It's drier out here. It's not less hot, but it is slightly drier, so it doesn't melt quite so bad. But, I mean... Growing up, good little non-denominational Protestant boy at Notch Community Church. Yeah. Right next to Silver Dollar City. I mean, I was exposed to everybody and everything. Problem was, by the time I got to churches outside of my home church, well, apparently I was very good at arguing with the Sunday school teachers. They'd bring me out to my parents and say, he's very opinionated. To which my parents would respond, yeah, but was he wrong? And they would... exasperatedly sigh and say, no, he wasn't. He wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong. So, I've always had a fondness for reading pieces of paper and ink of any flavor. And I've been fairly decent at being able to digest and process them from a very young age. So it was always fun to be able to be sitting there in church and you'd be flipping through the Bible and it's like, oh, see these different verses for other things. I'm like, oh, that's halfway across the Bible. I wonder why that's relevant. And so the preacher would be off doing something up on the podium, whatever he was actually talking about. I don't know. And I'd just be flipping back and forth and basically teaching myself how to use Wikipedia from the time I was about seven. Because it's just giant hyperlinked text. And that's how I formed most of my neural connections from an early age is realizing that, huh, so everything's connected to everything else somehow. We just don't know how yet. Cool. So I was constantly selecting for all of those connections. Yeah. I think that's a, that's a skill that is like, you can't, you almost can't buy nowadays. Like it's, it's something that everyone needs to, and it's, it's almost connected to just being Plain old critical thinking. How do we make connections between concepts and actually understand context behind all of the different things, even if it's spread over, in the case that you're talking about, long periods of time? How do things connect across manuscripts? How do they even connect across cultures? Exactly. Very cool. Okay, so what happened next? Well, the what happened next was a combination of things. One was being homeschooled for a couple years just because mom and dad were tired of the elementary school-ness. Gifted and talented programs don't really actually shake out to be that. They're more special privileges for the upper middle class. You smart. You smart. Well done. We'll get to that eventually. I would argue I'm just a very verbose redneck. That's all I am. I'll still blow up Tanner Wright with the best of them. I just like to use big words while I express my joy. That's fair. But it's more just the problem of been in and out of different schools, saw all sorts of denominations of churches growing up, just read profusely. I mean, there's nothing that really stopped me from learning whatever I wanted to learn, really. And then we come in contact with Calvinism in practice, right? in about junior year of high school. That was at the point I realized, huh, I think I'm reading from a different book than everybody else. Because it had never dawned on me as to why everybody else had issues with Christian doctrine and theology and blah, blah, blah. Because I'd always been just learning and studying on my own. It's like, oh, well, this is what this word means. This is the definition. This is the etymology. So obviously this sentence means this. And then when you come into contact with people who have vastly different vastly different interpretations of doctrine, you're like, oh, wait, I get it now. I understand why people have issues with people of different belief sets because the interpretation game is a really, really deadly slope to get on. Hermeneutics. We invented a whole thing, not just for religion or diligent, but there's this whole... sections of hermeneutics dedicated to that but yeah unfortunately they just skip to the hermeneutics yeah and skip over this like but how do we know yeah and why do we know we know things the deeper existential epistemology and ontology yeah yes we're making knowledge claims but how can we back those up And that's something that I come across in my business every day. They're not even to the hermeneutics. They're not even to the problem of, well, what does this sentence mean? A lot of people just don't even have basic understanding of what I took for granted is children's stories. Growing up, every Sunday and every Wednesday night. And I just have to tell people stories every day because we can't get to an understanding of, well, how do we know things? What do we know is true when... People just need better stories. I mean, as a marketer, I, this is something that I think everyone needs is we often will go straight in for, you know, like a sale or, or we will try and just, you know, be super, super direct with, with zero sales. nuance and we forget that one of our core jobs as business owners is to is to be a part of our audience's story and to be able to stay in their mind and help them learn in a way that they can understand. Exactly. Stories, such a big way. And so you use that every single day with what you do. All day, every day. I can't turn whatever part of my brain, heart, hand, interface does this whole thing because it just doesn't stop. I can, what was it? Oh, my baby girl, whenever... My mom, her grandma, was here for a couple weeks or so, just a month or two ago. We were watching Super Mario Bros. because I put it on and she was like, ooh, that looks fun. I was like, okay, fine, I'll put it on for you, baby girl. I've got no problem with Chris Pratt. Let's go. But then I got to actually looking at it and watching it and I'm like, Oh man, this is a great allegory for different things. And I was able, and I was unpacking for my mom as things went on. It's like, oh, so this is, these are all the different stories and different mythologies that are being symbolized by this character. Here's the ancient Roman traditions that this is speaking to. And then, and here's where the storytelling goes off the rails and it's no longer following a cohesive structure that would be satisfying for the audience to end on. And not to mention... Beaches, beaches, beaches, beaches, beaches. Okay, yeah, we're going to stop. Otherwise, we're just going to keep, we're going to go the whole rest of the time. No, that's an incredible journey. And I think one of the things that makes what you do powerful is that you have spent time to understand people. so much literature and you have learned a lot of culture and, and you've taken time, not just to, to, you know, especially in like a, this spiritual world, we are so often to talk at other people as opposed to listen. And especially when it comes to like storytelling is, is a way in which like people, we digest history too. And so in order to be able to do that effectively, you've just taken in a lot of, of really, um, you know, what I would imagine to be fascinating stuff. Well, it's a, there's a, it's six, one half dozen. The other is fascinating and mad is, is what I would say because, um, Like you're talking about is being able to talk at people. I realized really early on whenever I started doing this and actually charging for it, like people have been begging me for forever, I realized really quickly that, okay, I'm going to have a lot of different people come across my doorstep. So how about I just start sessions off by saying, I check my spirituality at the door and I work with whatever you've got going on. What I give you is a process. And over this past year and change, I've been just refining that process to understand really the true meaning behind one of my favorite Terrence McKenna quotes. It's, if it's real, it can take the pressure. And so it made me really understand, it's like, I don't care if you even have stated belief in one thing or another. All I know is that I've tried out a number of practices, said a number of different holy words from holy books, and I know which ones work the best in certain situations. I don't need your belief. I need you to stand here and do this because I would argue that's the actual definition of faith. So a lot to unpack here with really cool stuff. So in, in many ways, your process that you work through with others is meaning making. You help them be able to, to understand the things that, that, they need to in order to be able to process every day-to-day life and then connected to that is some of those deeper deeper aspects of faith as well and and somebody can bring their own faith to a conversation but you that that's not your focus on one specific religion or or something of that nature correct and how i tend to phrase it for people is through What a lot of people come to me for is astrology sessions. They want me to do some math, calculate their charts, see where the stars are in the sky at the time of birth. Sure. The problem is in normal Western parlance is only people talk about the sun sign. Well, that's a problem because one, if you are a horoscope person and you like looking at your daily horoscope, mind you, please calculate it from your ascendant sign, not your sun sign. Why I say this is because your day-to-day life is going to be more affected by what's called the Ascendant. It's literally where the horizon was in the sky at the time of your birth. But what I do in session, like you were talking about, is this understanding of really getting people back in touch with their sun. And this goes across all sorts of religions, being the solar deities or the literal risen sun of Christianity itself. We have this understanding that people aren't doing well because they're not the center of their own universe they are not centered as the source of all warmth life and gravity and so all my sessions really do is just take them through a process to recenter them as the thing that orders their world because all other problems come from outsourcing your agency outsourcing control of what you have in your grasp right this second and that's where people go wrong that's why my first question every session is always what do you want most tell me um If I came into a session, or say that there's an audience member who's never been exposed to astrology or the horoscope, give me like a quick dummies guide. so the dummies guide is it's a little more easy in the visual thing that i've come up with over the past couple weeks but i've turned the seven classical planets of astrology which includes the moon and the sun these were the visible bodies in the sky for thousands of years that our ancestors could see and could track their position right so there were seven of them there was the sun and the moon which basic there was mercury and venus then jupiter and saturn now With those, we then have Mars on the back end of those. I list Mars last because a lot of people have struggles with martial constructs. Mars is named after the Roman god, which is the Greek god Ares. I mean, war, conflict, strife, bladed weapons. But here's the issue is modern astrology, for example. And part of the reason why people go to modern astrologers and it hasn't worked since about the seventies is because they don't recognize that Saturn and Mars are what's called the malefic planets and traditional Hellenistic astrology. Like these are the things that cause Hellenistic meaning Greek, Greek, Alexandrian. So I practice a tradition that goes back from the combinations of Sumeria, Babylon and Egypt that came together in Alexandria. So this is, this is nothing new. No, no. We're looking at something. There is no copyright on any of this stuff. No copyright at all. And it's just astrology, not a sponsor. Not sponsored by. But it's the understanding of we saw these planets in the sky. And we just started writing things down. In Sumeria, about six to eight-ish thousand years ago, clay tablets were just like, huh, the king died today. There was also a solar eclipse. Interesting. We're going to scratch this down on clay tablets. We're also going to complain about copper prices from a bad merchant. Today it's eggs. Today it's eggs. We have had the exact same problems for approximately 10,000 years as a species. Who knew? But... between Sumeria and just noting where the planets are, that's where we get the zodiac signs from. So generally, we would see these certain constellations in the sky during certain seasons, and then we would give them names because that was TV. It was the only thing to watch. It was the only game in town. And then we have the Egyptian tradition, which is more about a time-based concept of measuring things. So hours, days, weeks, we get those from Egypt because we had the flooding of the Nile, which gave us very firm measurements of time a lot of the time. And so then a few thousand years pass. We get to Greek, the general Mediterranean, Phoenician exchange, lots of different things. And all of these things come together along with early Christianity, the Roman Empire, the dregs of dynastic Egypt, and some of the old what's called Chaldean astrologers and wisdom keepers who were, spoiler alert, also the Magi. Because they were the ones that calculated Jesus' birth time. Oh, man. Yeah. I know you spoiled the ending. I know we spoiled the ending, but that's all I do is I'm just drawing from thousands and thousands of years of collected experience and storytelling and I'm showing people how they fit into that story. Yeah. And so it doesn't matter if I'm interpreting the planets as these symbolic archetypes or if I'm interpreting them as gods or archangels, like all of it is just starlight that I'm bringing down to people who we generally can't see the stars anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, in, in some sense, you know, not to, not to be too cheesy here, but you're helping, helping illuminate things for people, you know, through, through the use of, of the light as it were. And it's, and it's less illumination. And I would argue, I'm just kind of like brushing the scales away from your eyes. Okay. Because most of the issue is that people just don't care about themselves. Yeah, sure. That we are so externally oriented towards our jobs, our roles, who we are responsible for, that we, most of my clients, whenever I ask you, what do you desire? What do you want right now? They can't tell me anything. They have no clue. And it's funny you say that because, I mean, every single one of our guests on the podcast so far, in some sense, have talked about self-care as a part of things that have... been impactful in their profession. You know, for Robert Norris, you know, there was mental health that had to be taken account of. And then, you know, when he was able to prioritize that, he was able to focus the plan. For Shannon, you know, it was a huge health crisis for a loved one that really opened up her eyes to what she, you know, didn't enjoy in life and what she did. And then with Karen, you know, she uses people's understanding their stories and caring for them as like the whole premise behind it. So in some sense, she has, you know, that self-care too. And so it's interesting, self-care and putting ourselves as a focus of our own stories is It's a recurring theme for us as we're going through this podcast. We have no other option. This is the only story we get to live out. That's right. The issue is that we just aren't given the good tools to utilize for that. Now, you touched on, we didn't fully flush out, but you mentioned that, you know, There's forms of astrology that don't work anymore, and then there's what you do. Kind of break that down. I'm not sure we got to dig into it. And that's the unfortunate part is there's an entire field of all of this for everything. As just as I can give it to you is the fact of, again, this is a thousands of years old tradition of humans watching the stars and telling stories about them. Arguably, it couldn't even go back. beyond tens of thousands of years based upon even aboriginal storylines in australia tracking the pleiades and telling stories about it and different things so this is people have always watched the stars we have always correlated it with things that are occurring in our lives day to day right now how it's caused how it works we still don't know yet and i'm not going to claim to make any knowledge claims about that i just know that more often than not i look at a person's chart the exact time they were born And I can resituate them in their world and show them what is most effective to focus on. The issue is that a lot of modern astrology, it focuses on everything being super psychologized, right? It's only focused on, well, all of these things are just parts of your mind. And these things are just, you know, anything can be made good. All fluffy sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. When in traditional astrology, well, Mars rules war and bloodshed, and Saturn rules suffering and boundaries, and saying no. Not everything's going to be happy. And I have to sit down and tell people, it's like, hey, so this thing that you've been told to focus on by institutions, society, whatever trash you've been having going on in your head this whole time, that's literally been wasting your time. Because via your astrology, your energy is going to be best served in these different areas of life that nobody's told you to focus on or even try. And that's all I do, is I just make sure that I'm following an ancient tradition of storytelling based upon where the stars are in the sky, what those stars are associated with meaning, and then I apply them to a person's life and their needs and their desires. Because the issue, like I was saying, is modern astrology is super psychologized. It's this... Head trauma we've had since Rene Descartes of, we are just a mind and a body. Well, that's why I have to tell people, I'm not your therapist. Most of my clients already have therapists. I rule the heart. That's my job. The actual spiritus, the thing that breathes life into everything, that opens us up and gives power and energy to things. And that's the storytelling capacity that every generation of humans has always had access to. I love it. I... I know that there's, like you said, there's so much that we could unpack here that we may have to figure out multiple sessions over time to be able to pull you back in. But I'm also, I know, I feel like I mention this every time. A lot of our listeners are, we're all the business folk. And so you have a very unique business. How has things been for you as a solo entrepreneur and running this very unique practice as the way that you make money. It's been an interesting learning curve. One, because you wouldn't think that slinging pieces of paper and ink for a living would be profitable. But more and more of what I've found is that people are craving authentic connection to anything. And that's why my atheist clients, they still love this. They don't have necessarily a spiritual outlook, but they enjoy someone sitting down with them, telling them that their desires matter, their values matter, and figuring out the stories we need to tell ourselves to realign to those things that are the most important to us. That's important. And so it's the understanding of the main pain point that everybody has. are these three things that are when I go and purchase services like this for myself, right? So if I've cried about something, if I've wanted to hit something, or if I've been dragging my feet on it for more than three days, I just need to go and talk to somebody else about it. I cannot trust my own agency at this point to execute on the problem if I'm already in any of those three states of being. And so it's the understanding that the pain point is universal. Everybody experiences these things. That's why I've had people come in regarding family issues. I've had people come in regarding real estate stuff. I've had people just having a bad day. Or their lives are great and they're technically taking vacations out of country multiple times, but they don't actually know who they are. So in some sense, it's not the exact same thing as running a business like... you know, a therapeutic office would run their business. But it's, as far as the structure of, of how you're set up, you, you still, you know, you have an audience that, you know, they set appointments and then you, you help them with the service that you provide. So it's not that different. And it's the other problem too, as to why a lot of people, Prefer talking to me and I constantly get these questions of Nolan, when are you going to start your church? When are you going to do this, that or the other? And I'm realizing that, oh, so that's the function that church and religion served is somebody gets told stories as often as they need that makes them realize there's meaning in life. And more importantly, I am not doing that with an intention for institutional power. I'm not trying to push one agenda or the other. I'm literally just trying to sit down and sell a person on them having the most meaning in their life and them being the core focus of change. Yeah. And I just tell them whatever stories need to be told that are relevant to their situation to recontextualize that meaning and give them that breath of life again. Yeah. You provide perspective in many ways. Well, I know we have all kinds of different directions, but one thing I did want to ask you before we wrap up today is, what's if you had one takeaway that you want everyone to know about astrology or what you do or tarot or anything that you do, what would you want people to know? Let me... Try and verbalize the equation that I came up with to really make this as simple as I can. The sun and the moon equals wisdom. Sol e mon. Sol. Wisdom itself, the right action that we are desiring to take at any given moment in time, is on a far side of the equals sign. Now, what allows us to solve for wisdom are the rest of the planets in astrology. Now, outside of some parentheses, we have Mercury. Mercury is money. It's commerce. He's exchange. He's communication. The problem is everybody tries to start with money as the solution to their problems when, according to good old arithmetic, we multiply after we take care of the parentheses. And so we have to go inside the parentheses. And our two main things in there are the main benefic lights, the good guys here, of Venus, love, beauty. I call her desire. She's our wants. And then we have Jupiter, our values. We've got to first make sure that those are positive integers. If you don't have desires for yourself and you don't have values for yourself outside of the context of responsibilities to someone else or outside of universal goods or virtues that most people tell me when I ask them their values, the equation is always going to turn up negative, if not just a complete goose egg. So we have to start the equation. What do you want and what do you value? Venus, Jupiter. Now, then we get into the malefic planets, Mars and Saturn. Those are the exponents on top of desire and values. So Venus's exponent is Mars. So the cosmic woman is exponentially increased by the cosmic man. Mars is not just violence and conflict and war. He's also force. He's the actual driving life spring of it's the thing that allows the little seed to shoot up. above the ground it's the thing that allows everything to actually move and go forward yeah and motivation exactly yeah it's the capacity to say yes and do things and so with your desires if you don't say yes to them if you don't actively go to war for yourself on those things you want nothing's going to matter yeah and so it's going to go awry one way or the other and so then You have to switch over to Saturn, Saturn's exponent of values. Now, Saturn rules time, rules boundaries. It rules no. And so if people aren't capable of saying no to the things that they don't value, they're going to waste their time, waste other people's time, and they're not going to get what they value. And so all I do in every session, be it tarot, astrology, energy work, or whatever else the clients need me to do for them, even just prayer, I'm just solving this equation for you. And I just have a process I go through to figure out what you know is missing, but you don't have words for. So let me see if I picked up the math correctly. So the values is our drive and our boundaries and kind of that purpose piece. And you add those together and it equals the results. And that's where we can actually start bringing in conversations like money and actually put things into action. Right. Yeah. Most of the time in a first session with clients, we can't even get to solving the money portion or solving the wisdom portion. Yeah. We just have to address the empty... just the emptiness of our desires and our values in our capacity to say yes to the things that we want in our capacity to say no to the things that we do not value. Well, Tell us where people can find you if they want to get in contact with you after today. I am pretty easy to find, nolanclayrogers.com. You can book me at whatever level of assistance you need, or you can just shoot me a text, and we can schedule something in private to see if something will fit for you. Otherwise, I'm generally at Craig's Emporium doing sessions in person on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11 to 5, and then on some Saturdays from 11 to 7. Amazing. I have had such a good time, Nolan. This has been a great session. And man, this podcast has been so good being able to co-host with you. So glad we were able to actually dig into the details of what you do. Thank you. I hope I didn't diarrhea of the mouth too much. Amazing. Amazing. Well, as always, stay sharp. Think biz.