I started looking at astrology with the assumption that it was complete nonsense. For that to be true, however, it would have to contain only casual correspondences that could be part of the expected range of coincidence. That was not the case. Although there is a degree of ambiguity in a thorough analysis of an astrological chart, because there are several layers of influence which determine each others prominence (like colors that look much brighter when they are adjacent to each other than when they are by themselves), once you are familiar with how to weigh the conflicts, it becomes possible to read a fairly clear and meaningful narrative. It's even clearer when you look at the charts of families. If someone wanted to do a real proof-of-astrology statistical project, I would look to correlations among members of the same immediate family. I have never seen a family whose charts were not powerfully intertwined in extremely sophisticated ways.
The problem with proving astrology is the same problem with proving consciousness - it just doesn't work like that. Subjectivity is not a mechanism of objects, it is the opposite of that. Experiences develop through time like a movie or a play. Stories with characters and themes, repeating archetypes. You don't ask 'how did Batman get into Christian Bale if he was in a comic strip before'.
Astrology may have nothing to do with stars. Planetology is more accurate, or really, archetypal planetology, because what we are looking at is not the hands of a clock with turn gears that we are helplessly strapped to, but themes and influences which have their season. We get hungry at lunch time because of many different factors, subjective and objective, momentary and long term - not because the hands of a clock have magical powers to cause lunch time. The fact remains however, that we can use a clock to tell us what time most people are likely to eat lunch, and then decide for ourselves if the want to go along with that or have lunch at another time.
The bottom line is that all of our clocks and calendars are models or maps. Astrology is just a more precise map, and as a result, time is not collapsed into a one dimensional continuum of before and after, but a complex and literate aesthetic of multiple qualities of times which translate differently from different perspectives (since we emerge at birth our of this context).
If you consider that the relations of the orbiting planets have been around much longer than life on Earth, it doesn't seem so absurd to imagine that these rhythms could be of particular familiarity to everything that has come out of the Earth. On their own scale, the planets are solar neighbors, separated by only a vacuum. Like seasonal fruit and vintage wine, time and place play a key role in the quality of what can be produced. Can a pineapple be grown in the Arctic? It is the same, in a more subtle way, with human identity. Individuals are a mere crest of a wave on the surface of a vast ocean of potential themes. The angles of the planets in relation to each other are only the exterior view of a process of storytelling which we have reduced, in this digital age, to mere duration...which itself is part of a large cycle of epistemology.
It's ok if people don't want to believe in astrology. It's like handedness or gender preference. Not everyone has to know or care about it. It's maybe better that way. For most people, astrology is only going to confuse them and make them look outside themselves to answer questions which might be better left to their own inner wisdom. If you are going to mess with astrology, make sure it's something that really interests you and not just a way to make you feel special. Do a hundred charts of people you know. Then you won't be bothered by people who insist that astrology is idiotic. Of course it seems idiotic. Consciousness would seem idiotic if we weren't experiencing it ourselves first hand.
CraigStatistics: Posted by multisenserealism — 18 Sep 2012, 05:34
]]>