In this episode of Sixty Plus Uncensored, host Seb Frey talks with Indra Rinsler, a Vedic astrologer, author, and lifelong spiritual seeker who, at 79, published his first book and continues to split his life between California’s Sierra foothills and months-long stretches in Rishikesh, India. Indra resists easy summary of himself, joking that figuring out who he is would deserve a lifetime achievement award, but over the course of the conversation a clear picture emerges: a man who has spent more than fifty years on what he calls the spiritual path, who makes his living helping people understand the strengths and weaknesses written into their own astrological charts, and who has come to see very little real difference between the life he leads in Northern California and the one he leads halfway around the world.
From New York to the California Foothills
Indra was born in New York and moved to California in 1970, eventually settling in the Grass Valley and Nevada City area in the Sierra foothills, where he still lives today. It was in California, he tells Seb, that he stumbled into the world that would shape the rest of his life: metaphysical bookstores, natural food stores, and a broader counterculture movement that was, in his telling, still being invented in real time. He draws a sharp distinction between that era and today’s instant access to information. Back then, he says, there weren’t yet countless books and resources on any given spiritual or philosophical question; people had to find their own way to answers rather than simply searching for them. He points to the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand’s influential publication, and its associated storefront in Berkeley, as a kind of pre-internet resource hub for an entire generation trying to live differently, alongside emerging publications like Mother Earth News and a nascent recycling movement he volunteered with himself in the early 1970s.
During this period, Indra also lived a distinctly countercultural chapter of his own, buying a home in Orinda, California, a town now known for its affluence and conservatism, and starting a commune there with fourteen people, chickens, geese, roughly two dozen cats, and, for a time, a donkey. He describes Orinda in that era as quietly countercultural in its own understated way, different from the more openly liberal reputation of towns like those in Marin County, but no less a product of its time.
Fifty Years on the Spiritual Path
Indra traces the start of his spiritual path to 1970 or 1971, shortly after arriving in California, when he began reading astrology books out of what he describes as genuine curiosity rather than any single triggering event. He’s been meditating for fifty-five years, and when Seb, candid about his own difficulty maintaining a meditation practice, asks what Indra actually gets out of it, Indra offers a notably expansive definition of the practice. Meditation, in his view, isn’t limited to sitting cross-legged with eyes closed; it can be as simple as sitting quietly with a newspaper after returning from an errand, asking for a few minutes alone before taking on a task, or the deep breath an athlete takes before a free throw or a foul shot. The common thread, he says, is presence: pulling oneself back into the current moment rather than carrying the residue of whatever came before it. He calls these “presence teachers” rather than strictly meditation teachers, and argues that ancient Indian teachings have, in effect, become universalized into countless small moments of everyday life without most people recognizing the connection.
Notably, Indra has deliberately avoided formal schools or structured courses of study throughout his spiritual development, describing them as a kind of institutionalization that he feels limits rather than expands a person’s abilities once they’re too deeply embedded in a single system’s groupthink. Instead, he describes much of his understanding as arriving intuitively, often during ordinary moments like a walk or a conversation, in ways that feel to him like they come from a source outside his own conscious thinking. He compares this to the old experience of struggling with a math problem late at night, giving up, and waking up with the answer already there. His broader belief, as he puts it, is that “solutions are waiting for problems,” much like a mechanic simply waits each day for the next flat tire to roll in.
What Vedic Astrology Actually Is
Much of the conversation is devoted to demystifying Vedic astrology, the astrological tradition of India that Indra has practiced professionally for roughly twelve years, including stretches of giving in-person readings during his long stays in India. He’s careful to note that Vedic and Western astrology aren’t fundamentally different in their basic logic, pointing out, with some humor, that astrologers within each tradition don’t always agree with each other either. The real technical distinction, he explains, lies in how each system calculates a chart. Western astrology uses what’s called tropical time, anchoring the first day of spring to the same zodiac position every year based on the relationship between the sun and the earth. Vedic astrology instead accounts for the slow, 25,800-year cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes, a gradual shift in the sky’s apparent position relative to the sun. Because the two systems lined up around 400 A.D. and have been drifting apart ever since, by Indra’s account a person’s Western sun sign and Vedic sun sign can now differ by roughly one full zodiac sign.
Readers should treat this as Indra’s own account of the distinction between these two astrological traditions, offered from decades of practice within the Vedic system, rather than as scientifically established fact; astrology, Western or Vedic, is not empirically validated by mainstream science, and Indra himself is candid that no single astrological framework or book contains the whole truth.
Indra is notably critical of what he calls “newspaper astrology,” the simplified, mass-market practice of reducing a person’s entire life story to generalizations based solely on their sun sign. He compares this to trying to understand an entire person based only on their foot, conceding that a foot does matter quite a bit if you happen to be having trouble walking, but insisting it’s still only one small part of a much larger picture. He’s similarly skeptical of astrology that disempowers rather than empowers, describing a tendency among some astrologers to hand down fatalistic pronouncements, telling a client that a particular difficult planetary placement means they’re permanently “stuck,” which he considers a misuse of the practice entirely.
Strengths, Weaknesses, and the Space to Grow
Central to how Indra practices astrology is the idea that planets themselves are neither good nor bad; each one carries both a high side, representing skills and abilities, and a low side, representing obsessions and compulsions. His work with clients focuses on identifying both, using the example of a person with what’s called a weak Mercury placement, which he associates with communication difficulties, people who may think a great deal internally but struggle to express it outwardly, sometimes retreating into a silence that, while it can feel meaningful to the person experiencing it, doesn’t actually function as communication with others. Rather than treating this as a fixed, unchangeable trait, Indra frames it the way he’d frame physical fitness: a person can build strength in self-understanding the same way they might build physical strength or stamina, moving gradually from a low side toward a higher, more functional expression of the same underlying energy.
This is also where Indra’s favorite astrological phrase comes in: “the stars incline but don’t compel.” A difficult placement in a chart represents a tendency or a challenge, not an unchangeable life sentence, and in that sense he views the astrology of a life much the way he views ordinary feedback from a boss or a partner: as an opportunity to grow rather than evidence that one is simply stuck.
Readings, Repeat Clients, and Compassion for Others
Though his astrology practice has slowed somewhat compared to what he describes as perhaps his best year, conducted almost entirely online with clients around the world he’s often never met in person, Indra draws a firm distinction between the kind of astrologer who keeps clients coming back indefinitely for repeated readings and his own preferred approach, which leans toward teaching clients to understand their own charts well enough that they need him less over time, an approach he likens to the old saying about teaching someone to fish rather than simply handing them a fish. He tells people that if they revisit a recording of their own reading months or years later, they’ll often hear entirely new things in it, not because the reading has changed, but because they have, a comparison he and Seb both land on independently as being not unlike rediscovering new meaning in a favorite song years after first hearing it.
Indra also pushes back gently on one of astrology’s most commercialized applications: the idea that certain signs are fundamentally compatible or incompatible in romantic relationships. He considers this framing limiting and ultimately disempowering, arguing that with enough openness, people can connect meaningfully across a wide range of astrological combinations, and that writing someone off based on their sign alone is, in his words, fairly ridiculous. Where he does see real value in understanding another person’s chart is in building compassion: once a difficult pattern in someone else’s communication or behavior is understood as a function of their own chart rather than a personal slight, it becomes easier to see the issue as something happening within that person rather than a conflict between the two people involved.
He draws a similarly practical lesson from his own process of building up an astrology practice over the years. Rather than enrolling in formal certification programs, he describes leaning primarily on intuition, a handful of personal teachers along the way, and extensive independent reading, all built into a handout and a set of charts he walks every new client through before a reading even begins. That handout explains the three basic building blocks of a chart as he sees them: planets, which function something like verbs, representing action, such as Jupiter’s expansiveness or the moon’s emotional responsiveness; houses, which function like nouns, representing specific areas of life such as career or relationships; and signs, which function like adjectives, describing the particular quality or flavor of a given planet’s energy. Walking a client through this framework up front, he says, is part of what allows them to keep learning from their own chart long after the session itself has ended.
A Life Divided Between Two Homes
For the past several decades, Indra has spent his winters as what he calls a snowbird, traveling to India and other parts of Asia, a pattern he’s maintained almost every year since 1999, with breaks only for the COVID years and the year he got married and bought a house. His relationship with India began even earlier, with his first visit in 1986, and in recent years has centered on Rishikesh, a town in the Indian foothills along the Ganges River widely known as a center for yoga and spiritual practice, and once visited by the Beatles during their own well-documented period of spiritual exploration in the 1960s.
What stands out most in Indra’s description of his time in India isn’t contrast but continuity. He describes his lifestyle there as, at this point, nearly identical to his life in California: the same general rhythm of reading, writing, studying, and quiet reflection, adjusted only for the practical realities of a different country, such as not driving while there. He credits this partly to the sheer amount of time he’s spent making the trip, twenty-five years and counting, and partly to how much India itself has modernized and become more accessible. He recalls arriving in 1999 to unreliable dial-up internet that took an hour to load a single email, compared to the fast, inexpensive mobile internet he now easily accesses from his hotel room. The two countries, in his telling, have become steadily less different from each other over time, not because India has become more like America, but because global travel, technology, and cultural exchange have narrowed a great many of the old gaps between any two places.
Practical Advice for a First Trip to India
When Seb, intrigued and clearly tempted to add India to his own travel list, asks for practical guidance, Indra offers a grounded, unromanticized take. He acknowledges that India is noisy, crowded, and operates by its own informal rules, memorably summarizing the country’s approach to traffic and public order as having exactly one rule: that there are no rules. He describes watching a city widen a clogged market street not by demolishing anything but by passing a regulation requiring every building along that street to be built six feet narrower, since the municipality, not individual shopkeepers, owned the buildings in question. He considers this kind of unconventional, resourceful problem-solving a defining feature of daily life in India.
On the question of food safety, a concern Seb raises directly after hearing a secondhand warning that “the food will kill you,” Indra offers a more measured view: getting sick from unfamiliar food or water is common when traveling almost anywhere unfamiliar, India included, but he considers this simply part of what he calls “the price of admission” for international travel generally, no more or less likely than getting sick from water in London or elsewhere. He does note genuine cultural differences worth knowing in advance, including the tendency of some restaurants to interpret a request for less spice or less salt as applying only mildly, since omitting seasoning entirely strikes many Indian cooks as removing the point of the dish altogether. His overarching travel philosophy, consistent across his comments about India, Thailand, and elsewhere, is that most places carry some version of the same basic precautions: watch your belongings, learn the local customs quickly, and recognize that people and cultures are, underneath surface differences, far more similar than most travelers assume going in.
Writing, Readings, and What Comes Next
At 79, Indra published his first book, Indrisnet: A Seeker’s Guide to the Human Experience, drawing in part on insights developed during his many years spent in India. He’s also appeared as a guest on roughly 150 podcasts, something he treats as a substitute for maintaining a podcast or travel blog of his own, and continues to offer personal astrological readings to clients around the world through his website. Though he spent a decade earlier in his career working as a book publisher, he hasn’t yet pursued an audiobook version of his own writing, despite, as Seb notes during their conversation, having the kind of naturally easy, listenable voice well suited to one.
The Stars Incline, They Don’t Compel
What runs through nearly everything Indra Rinsler describes, from his approach to astrology to his decades of near-identical winters in Rishikesh, is a resistance to anything that feels fixed, deterministic, or disempowering. A difficult placement in a chart is a tendency to understand and work with, not a verdict. A different country is simply another home, once enough time and openness have been invested in it. A communication problem in a relationship is an opportunity for compassion rather than conflict. Even meditation, in his telling, isn’t a rigid discipline requiring a cushion and a timer, but something woven quietly into the ordinary pauses of daily life, if a person is willing to notice them. For listeners wondering whether there’s still room to grow, travel, or deepen a spiritual practice later in life, Indra’s own life, built steadily and unconventionally since his twenties and still expanding into his eighties, offers a fairly direct answer: the stars may incline a person in one direction or another, but what they do with that inclination remains entirely their own.