A huge, eternal laugh is built into the Universe. We can see it in the funny and strange animals, such as the giraffe, hippo, and sloth. The giraffe has such an amazingly long neck. It defies gravity and makes us wonder how it survives with such a heavy upper body. Can you imagine having a stiff neck if you are a giraffe? Yet it is precisely, and ironically, this long neck that has allowed this animal to thrive because it can eat vegetation other animals can’t reach. Its smile-inspiring neck looks like a liability and ends up being its main asset.

The hippo is funny too, unless you get next to one on a bad day. Then the cute and cuddly-looking giant water pig can get nasty and murderous very quickly. It is large and lumbering but can swiftly overcome a man or other large animal and run up to 19 miles an hour on its stubby legs. So the peaceful hippo, grazing on water veggies, ironically turns into the animal that kills more people than any other animal in Africa, including lions and tigers.

The sloth, too, is a humorous looking creature. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of its long, curved claws, but it can’t move fast enough to do much damage with them. It moves in such exaggeratedly slow motion, most people have to smile when they see this. Yet, ironically, sloths have been around for a long time, since pre-history, when the giant ground sloths slowly crept through the Pliocene and Pleistocene jungles of South America. Their low-stress lifestyle may make people laugh at them, but it is working out for them because they are not extinct yet.

The fact that they are so slow has helped the six existing sloth species on the planet to survive today. They do very well exactly because their movements aren’t fast. Sloths have a very low-energy lifestyle because they eat leaves that are very low in nutrition. They stay out of the “rat race” of swift and desperate food procurement on the prowl. They also move slowly so they won’t be identified as prey. So while we are laughing at the sloth and its almost insanely hesitant movements, it has a proven survival strategy that makes us look like the butt of the joke.
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These are just three of the many examples of the sense of humor of the Universe, which is on display all around us. From plants that get people to do things for them to the crazy dances of the New Guinea Bird of Paradise to playful kittens, puppies and otters, the world is full of joy, play, irony, humor, and laughter.

We can make very sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imagination when we bang our toe on the table leg, burn our hand in the fire, or bruise ourselves after falling down the stairs. We will feel pain and it is not all in our imagination. It hurts, and rightly so, because our nerves are sending signals to our brains. We can see the black and blue bruising. It is tender to the touch, especially when we forget about it and bang ourselves again.

On the other hand, imagination is the process of making something up that never happened. The fall did happen. We did get hurt. We might even have broken a bone. We are not making this up. No one is sharing this imagining with us either. We are the only ones feeling our specific pain. We are the ones who need to get that broken bone reset.

But what I would say is that the world we experience, may be and can be, a shared misperception. For example, the earth looked flat to people before global navigation began and proved this flatness not to be true. Yes, it looked flat but that was due to our ignorance and to our limited visual perception.

Another shared perception that is not true is that we are seeing the stars just as they are now. In reality, it has taken so many millions of light years for some stars to be visible to us, they have already died and all that is left is their glow in the night sky. One more example of shared false perceptions is that the sun “sinks” in the west and “rises” in the east. Of course, we know now that the earth’s rotation causes this visual phenomenon and no active sinking and rising is going on.
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Imagination is making things up that don’t exist and never have. The universe and you exist. You are not making it up. But how you perceive the universe and all of physical reality can be highly flawed, faulty, and based on ignorance. A whole culture and planet can share these misperceptions and take them to be the truth, when they are false.

To become a “proficient” astrologer, you don’t need to be spiritually advanced. But that is just proficiency. It means you are good and can do your job ably. You can study the charts and all their permutations and interpretations, memorize the signs and their ascendants, and have all kinds of book knowledge.
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But to be an inspired and excellent astrologer, you must be spiritually advanced. Astrology is only one component of a complex system. It includes past lives (where Saturn was on your natal chart in this lifetime), your aura, your energy fields, and so much more. Therefore, to be a truly gifted astrologer, you need to have a psychic gift that turns it into an art, even more than a science.