I recently had a conversation with Radha - a girl who's all of eighteen years old but has more sense in her head than a lot of people I know several times her age. We were talking about astrology, and whether it really is possible to predict things about people by asking the stars.
We started out by agreeing on the fact that most astrological predictions are vague enough that more than 50% of any predictions you hear will definitely be true for anybody. I mean, if someone tells you that you have a good sense of humour, and that you are a frank and straightforward person, that description fits what 70% of the people in this town think about themselves.
So, how do you know if Astrology really works? Even the best astrologers will accept that they could be wrong 10% of the time. Hence we settled on the entente that Western Astrology has a lot less stuff than Indian Astrology, and makes more general predictions, and is hence not worth talking about. But, being two people who don't believe in Astrology per se but are willing to shed our speculation if only someone could make some real predictions, we started talking about Indian Astrology and the connections with religion, traditions, and astronomy.
I'm not going into that conversation now, but I must submit that there are a lot of things that are very intriguing about Indian Astrology, so one can't simply dismiss it as nonsense. As a kid I was really interested in astrology, palmistry, numerology, the works.... until one stoooopid astrologer told my Mom that I was a "slow" student compared to my brother. I laughed my head off. My brother scored some 86% in his 10th boards, whereas I had 94.2%. And now, I am in IIT, while my bro was advised to stop attending IIT coaching classes after 11th as it would affect his preparation for the boards, and he had no chance of getting into IIT anyway. I'm not bragging. I'm just saying that the astrologer was SO absolutely wrong. Ultimately, I told myself, just because there are correlations between some things in this universe some of the time or even most of the time, that doesn't mean that the two things are related. Did you know that the Brazilian Stock Exchange index shot up every time there was a development in the Monica Lewinsky case?
But I realized later that I've been a bit narrow minded. I used to think how silly it was that people believed (once upon a time) that Solar Eclipses are caused when Rahu swallows the Sun. Later I learnt that Rahu is a point in space where the moon's orbit intersects the line joining the Earth and the Sun. Of course the intellectuals would have told some simplified version to satisfy the common folk. As people of science, we must learnt to sift through the nonsense and find the truth. The more I think about the so-called silly things that our Grandparents tell us, the more I feel that there are genuine reasons behind them. Hence if there were such brilliant people that long ago who studied the heavens and human behaviour in such depth, perhaps they were right... and we are yet to realize it.
Indian Astrology only talks about influences that the positions of the stars and planets have on our lives; they do not predict events. I scoff at the fatalistic people who say that their life is the way it is because that is what is written on their foreheads. But I can most certainly give room to the consideration that the heavens could influence the events on earth. Though one part of my mind tells me that it's only in computer simulations that I take stuff like map coordinates as the seed for initiating random events; this is life, not a computer simulation. Or are we really living in the matrix? Hehe.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
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4 comments:
but what do you have to say about the sense of fatalism that has become deep-rooted in the indian psyche, thanks to superstitious religious practices? agreed most(not all)of these things have a scientific basis, but how do you make the layman understand that and stop him from blaming destiny and celestial movements for his mediocrity?
i've thought about that very same point a lot, and in my personal experience, the way these things work is that the layman in question believes that he/she knows more about religion, spirituality, tradition, etc than the supposed scientific-tempered erudites such as us. hence the layman gets pulled into a complex: he believes in the wisdom of our forefathers and continues to devoutly follow every ritual and believe every belief. us modernists with our new-fangled notions don't have the exposure to all this 'traditional' stuff, which is why we dont understand them. poor chap doesn't know that our forefathers were indeed wise, but every single thing that they said has been diluted down the ages until they have degenrated into superstitions and false beliefs. worse, some of those things (specifically the rituals, which made sense for the good of a temple-centric society) would only be relevant to society as it was hundreds of years ago.
hinduism never told us that we are not in control of our lives. in fact, we are urged to do good in order to attain salvation. astrology can never tell exactly what is going to happen, it can measure only good or bad influences on various spheres of our lives. society is not going to re-learn these things. you will not be able to argue by reason or by shocking revelations with people who already think they know everything and you know nothing. it is fortunate that the trend is for these beliefs to fade, just as it is unfortunate that the ancient knowledge that moulded our society, customs and beliefs to keep it running smoothly and peacefully, is being slowly lost.
hi prashanth,
I dint know our conversation made u think so much.... I ll tell u why the topic of astrology always affected me a lot and wanted me to hope its false.think of it if someone says i can predict your future its indirectly saying no matter what you do,things will happen the way they are destined..... whatever you do is also "denstined" ... you dont really have a choice there either.... this is quite freaking out and makes us feel we are in some matrix like you said... but maybe we can look at it in another way.. if every thing is pre denstined it also means we are not responsible for the good or bad around us... that is it does not call for our brooding over the past or being overanxious about the future.... we can live confortably in the present.. its only the present action that we need to think and not the result or the past or the future.. ( hopefully ved vyas wont ask for his rights its nothing but the teachings of geeta)... in hinduism the teachings are deep but sound ambiguous and can be highly misinterpreted.... we need a great vision or a visionary to say whats right and whats wrong
@Radha
Hey! Glad you found this page... after so long! Anyway, I think you do not need to know whether events are predestined or not to adopt the attitude you suggested. Thats just the line between the people who worry too much about unnecessary things and the sensible people who have the right attitude.
I agree on what you say abt the teachings of Hinduism. But I wonder why this is the case. All good knowledge should be made accessible to everybody. Why crouch it in esoteric poetry? Nostradamus feared persecution. Surely that was not the case here...
Oh, hell. Even as I ask the question, the answer comes to me. Writing was the prerogative of a select few - the intelligentsia - of society. The teachings had to be passed on by spoken word alone. Hence they were put into verse, and in a slightly complicated manner so that people wouldn't change it by themselves and it would be reproduced exactly how many ever thousands of years later.
Hmmmm... why do I not figure out my project and stuff in this way????
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