What is Astrology?
Astrology is a belief system which, like all belief systems, gives us a metaperspective.
This metaperspective uses the zodiac is a frame of reference and helps us understand reality and our place in it. It helps us get to the bottom of who we are, what we are here to do and why the world is the way it is. Astrology is primarily used for two things - psychoanalysis and divination. And it all starts with this.
Natal chart, or birth chart, is a snapshot of the sky in the moment of birth. The natal chart of a person, contains information about the archetypal wiring of their brain that can help us understand their inner needs and the motives that drive their external behavior. The birth chart can also help us predict the future of a person by seeing how their personality (and subsequent behavior) will combine with the currents of the time to form the final outcome - this person's destiny.
At a first glance, individual lives and the universe may seem unrelated. But look closer. You must have noticed by now that there are certain events, thoughts, situations, and people that seem to always happen to you but never to someone else and vice versa. We seem to attract a certain type of energy around us that seems to keep us spinning in circles, making the same mistakes or reliving the same (good and bad) situations.
Why is that?
The ancients thought this was because character is destiny. Because our fate is an extension of our mind. The lives we live are a reflection of the thoughts we think. In the eyes of astrology, life is a grand orchestrated symphony of mutually connected fates in the same way in which all processes in nature are interlocked with one another. By studying this art, we can train our minds to uncover and appreciate the deeper logic, the deeper order, the underlying pattern of the human life experience, and understand ourselves, our loved ones, fate, fortune and the mind of universe. But let's begin at the very beginning.
What is the mind?
When you hear the word "mind" what comes to mind? Most likely for most of you this will be a picture of a human brain or a skull. This is the predominant idea of the times we live in and it is a rather anthropocentric idea. The mind is considered to be exclusively a property of mankind. Consciousness, intelligence, meaning and purpose are considered to be present only in humans. Nature doesn't have intelligence. The cosmos doesn't have intelligence. The universe doesn't have intelligence. They are...essentially .... stupid. Compared to us. But does that really make sense? We came from the cosmos, and we have intelligence but the cosmos doesn't?
Morphic Fields
In 1981, the Cambridge-trained, English biologist Rupert Sheldrake published a book called "A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance." In it, he described the outcomes of a number of experiments he had conducted and put forward a hypothesis that was so scandalous that the editor of Nature magazine, John Maddox (who owed his education to Christ Church), wrote a scathing editorial claiming the book must be burned (you know you are onto some new piece of solid science when you manage to piss off the Church).
What was this book about?
It detailed a number of experiments at Harvard involving rats that were trained to find their way out of a water-maze. They learned to do that and subsequent generations learned faster and faster. The interesting thing is that after the rats had learned to escape more than 10 times quicker at Harvard, when rats were tested in Scotland and in Australia they started more or less where the Harvard rats left off. In Australia, the rats continued to improve after repeated testing, and this effect was not confined to the descendants of trained rats, it was observed in other rats as well.
Sheldrake put forward the hypothesis that species memory was stored externally, not internally. The skills acquired by the first batch of Harvard rats were not stored within the DNA and transferred only to the offspring, but somewhere else. At an external location that any member of the species can access. He called this external location morphic field. Through a process called morphic resonance each member of the species could tune into this field not unlike the way we can read someone's mind or sense their energy. Once you tune into the frequency of the species, you can access whatever is in there, not only what you put there through your own experience, but what others had learnt as well. This, in turn, suggested that the mind is not confined to the physical brain located inside the skull but rather it was out there and the brains we have in our skulls are the organs via which we tune into the different frequency levels (morphic fields).
Jung's Archetypes
Rupert Sheldrake was not the only one to think that way. Psychologist Carl Jung proposed a similar theory. He believed that the human psyche is not just a human psyche but an expression of the collective unconscious, and that this collective unconsciousness was everywhere around us, surround us like atmosphere. Our psyche was embedded in this bigger universal field of psychic energy.
The key component of this collective unconscious were the archetypes. Jung suggested that human psyche itself had a pattern of organization within that influenced and shaped a person's life. This is similar to what I mentioned earlier about the same things happening seemingly over and over again to the certain people and seemingly never to other people. Aside from those events that seem to happen only to us, there are also experiences that more or less everyone has gone through but they have not left the same mark on all of us. For some people breaking up with their first love is a life-shattering event, others fare through it with much less pain. In essence, the life event is the same, but its impact, the way it is perceived by the individual, can be vastly different. Why?
According to Jung, the conclusions we draw from what we see happening in the world at large are unconsciously conditioned by the archetypal setup of our psyche. Some people, he suggested, were wired to view certain experiences as a big deal, others were wired to not care too much. And the final response was dependent on the archetypal patterning of the mind.
Imagine life as a river, a flow of events that happen to us or we make happen to ourselves. This flow is like water falling from the sky. Where exactly it will go once it touches the earth depends on the geographical relief of the earth. According to Jung, this is exactly how the archetypes function in the human psyche The archetypes are these mountain ridges, river beds, valleys and canons that are hardwired in our brains at birth. And they define how we sort out our experiences, how we process them, what conclusions we draw from them.
Transpersonal Psychology
These ideas grew and expanded and are now known as transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology steps on the idea that consciousness is present throughout the entire cosmos and that at its deepest level, the psyche is not individual but rather collective, trans-individual or transpersonal. The leading figure in this field is Stanislaf Grof who was first trained in Freudian psychoanalysis but then branched out to investigate non-ordinary states of consciousness, usually accessed through psychedelics or mythical and religious experiences, that seemed to open up the parts of the psyche that were inaccessible in ordinary everyday states. It has long been known that in conscious states we use only a small part of our brains, he thought that psychedelics offered an opportunity to peek through the veil and into the rest of our psyche. As a result of his work, he created something called "expanded cartography of the human psyche" and concluded that the human psyche is nothing more than an expression and a reflection of the cosmic, all-permeating intelligence.
So ... we have archetypal pathways hardwired in the brain at birth. They are not unique to you, me, her or him. The exact same archetypes can be found in all ancient and even modern cultures from ancient Greece through Mesopotamia and all the way to the Far East. But what does that have to do with the cosmos?
What is Destiny?
Organicism
To answer this question, we will leave the field of psychology and travel to the realm of biology. I'd like to introduce you to the idea of Organicism which posits that the universe is one enormous living organism, and just like other living organisms has a mind and a body. The body of the universe is comprised of the physical forms we see in nature (including space); the mind is what happens in the world, the events, feelings, and situation we experience (the intangible reality). And just the way in which our individual mind is connected to the body (psychological issues find a reflection in health issues and vice versa) the universe's body (nature and the cosmos) must be related to the mind of the universe.
Quantum Physics
In the early 1980s, scientist David Bohm developed a remarkable hypothesis that there exists an implicate (inner) and explicate (external) dimensions of reality; that the universe is both material and psychic and that both of these realities spring from the same sustaining matrix. In other words, that the tangible and the intangible are the two sides, the two expressions of the same thing. His model is based on the ideas of quantum physics.
According to quantum field theory, at the most basic level, matter is actually energy. The hard demarcation line that we think exists between an object and an empty space doesn't really exist. When you look at the world at quantum level, this hard division is only an illusion - reality is undivided. As a result, scientists now believe that there is no such a thing as empty space, or if there is, this is what it looks like - full of action actually. The hard physical forms that we see around what seems to us like an empty space are actually condensed forms of that nothingness around.
So the quantum field is everywhere. In general, it is invisible to us with the exception of the areas where it is condensed. We are in it. Just like Carl Jung suggested that the collective unconscious is "like atmosphere", every where around us. The Greeks professed a similar belief that the cosmos is an independent interconnected whole. The Chinese believed that there is an underlying logic behind the structure of reality. They both thought the universe is in a constant state of flux.
Lastly, we will look at the most interesting (to me) of the scientific theories that underpin astrology.
Systems Theory
It centers on the interrelatedness of three concepts - pattern, structure and the process through which a pattern becomes a structure. Imagine pattern as an algorithm or the conceptualized intention. Structure is that intention already realised or manifest. Process is the process in between, the journey from the original intention to final outcome.
To visualise this model, let's go back to biology and the human body. Every minute some cell in our body dies and is replaced with a new one from scratch. And this process is ongoing throughout our lives and involves all our cells. Yet, throughout the average life span of 70-something years, we maintain a relatively stable physical appearance and an enduring memory. So even though the individual components are new, the overall structure remains the same. The new structure (the cell) is created in line with a surviving design/algorithm. Structure is pattern/algorithm realised. Structure is the embodiment of pattern.
Let's look at this process backwards. We look at a structure and by the look of it, we can deduct the original design behind it. Nature, cosmos, the physical world around is is the structure. What's the algorithm? We don't know yet. But we know it must exist for pretty much everything in nature has a pattern and a structure. Astrology is one of the paths you can take to look for the answer.
The Significance of the Birth Moment
I started this conversation telling you about the birth chart. It reflects the cosmic makeup of the moment of birth. Astrology is entirely based on it and I will circle back to it but add the scientific theories discussed earlier. Quantum physics tells us that everything is really just one thing but differently condensed and structured. Physics also tells us that space and time are essentially the same thing called space-time continuum. Moments (like space) are different. They are charged with different energy (condensed differently). They are qualitatively different "spasms" of the quantum field. A newborn baby is a new spasm of the quantum field. The universe had a spasm and it created you. The structure of your life (called destiny) assumes the form patterned (algorithmically encoded) in that spasm.