Ya Ali Madad!
I was wondering if astrology is forbidden in Ismailism....I have heard it was but was not sure why. I was also wondering why it would be as it is a study not just a random prediction but based on the study of the stars. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and
Ya Ali Madad!
Astrology
The following chapter from the "Autobiography of a Yogi' discusses the efficacy of astrology. This is a dialogue between Paramhansa Yogananda and his master Swami Sri Yukteshwar. I found it quite illuminating and interesting.
https://www.ananda.org/autobiography/#chap16
Chapter 16
Outwitting the Stars
"Mukunda, why don't you get an astrological armlet?"
"Should I, Master? I don't believe in astrology."
"It is never a question of belief; the only scientific attitude one can take on any subject is whether it is true. The law of gravitation worked as efficiently before Newton as after him. The cosmos would be fairly chaotic if its laws could not operate without the sanction of human belief.
"Charlatans have brought the stellar science to its present state of disrepute. Astrology is too vast, both mathematically1 and philosophically, to be rightly grasped except by men of profound understanding. If ignoramuses misread the heavens, and see there a scrawl instead of a script, that is to be expected in this imperfect world. One should not dismiss the wisdom with the 'wise.'
"All parts of creation are linked together and interchange their influences. The balanced rhythm of the universe is rooted in reciprocity," my guru continued. "Man, in his human aspect, has to combat two sets of forces—first, the tumults within his being, caused by the admixture of earth, water, fire, air, and ethereal elements; second, the outer disintegrating powers of nature. So long as man struggles with his mortality, he is affected by the myriad mutations of heaven and earth.
"Astrology is the study of man's response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity, but offer a lawful channel for the outward operation of cause-effect equilibriums which each man has set into motion in the past.
"A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma. His horoscope is a challenging portrait, revealing his unalterable past and its probable future results. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by men of intuitive wisdom: these are few.
"The message boldly blazoned across the heavens at the moment of birth is not meant to emphasize fate—the result of past good and evil—but to arouse man's will to escape from his universal thralldom. What he has done, he can undo. None other than himself was the instigator of the causes of whatever effects are now prevalent in his life. He can overcome any limitation, because he created it by his own actions in the first place, and because he has spiritual resources which are not subject to planetary pressure.
"Superstitious awe of astrology makes one an automaton, slavishly dependent on mechanical guidance. The wise man defeats his planets—which is to say, his past—by transferring his allegiance from the creation to the Creator. The more he realizes his unity with Spirit, the less he can be dominated by matter. The soul is ever-free; it is deathless because birthless. It cannot be regimented by stars.
"Man is a soul, and has a body. When he properly places his sense of identity, he leaves behind all compulsive patterns. So long as he remains confused in his ordinary state of spiritual amnesia, he will know the subtle fetters of environmental law.
"God is harmony; the devotee who attunes himself will never perform any action amiss. His activities will be correctly and naturally timed to accord with astrological law. After deep prayer and meditation he is in touch with his divine consciousness; there is no greater power than that inward protection."
"Then, dear Master, why do you want me to wear an astrological bangle?" I ventured this question after a long silence, during which I had tried to assimilate Sri Yukteswar's noble exposition.
"It is only when a traveler has reached his goal that he is justified in discarding his maps. During the journey, he takes advantage of any convenient short cut. The ancient rishis discovered many ways to curtail the period of man's exile in delusion. There are certain mechanical features in the law of karma which can be skillfully adjusted by the fingers of wisdom.
"All human ills arise from some transgression of universal law. The scriptures point out that man must satisfy the laws of nature, while not discrediting the divine omnipotence. He should say: 'Lord, I trust in Thee, and know Thou canst help me, but I too will do my best to undo any wrong I have done.' By a number of means—by prayer, by will power, by yoga meditation, by consultation with saints, by use of astrological bangles—the adverse effects of past wrongs can be minimized or nullified.
"Just as a house can be fitted with a copper rod to absorb the shock of lightning, so the bodily temple can be benefited by various protective measures. Ages ago our yogis discovered that pure metals emit an astral light which is powerfully counteractive to negative pulls of the planets. Subtle electrical and magnetic radiations are constantly circulating in the universe; when a man's body is being aided, he does not know it; when it is being disintegrated, he is still in ignorance. Can he do anything about it?
"This problem received attention from our rishis; they found helpful not only a combination of metals, but also of plants and—most effective of all—faultless jewels of not less than two carats. The preventive uses of astrology have seldom been seriously studied outside of India. One little-known fact is that the proper jewels, metals, or plant preparations are valueless unless the required weight is secured, and unless these remedial agents are worn next to the skin."
"Sir, of course I shall take your advice and get a bangle. I am intrigued at the thought of outwitting a planet!"
"For general purposes I counsel the use of an armlet made of gold, silver, and copper. But for a specific purpose I want you to get one of silver and lead." Sri Yukteswar added careful directions.
"Guruji, what 'specific purpose' do you mean?"
"The stars are about to take an unfriendly interest in you, Mukunda. Fear not; you shall be protected. In about a month your liver will cause you much trouble. The illness is scheduled to last for six months, but your use of an astrological armlet will shorten the period to twenty-four days."
I sought out a jeweler the next day, and was soon wearing the bangle. My health was excellent; Master's prediction slipped from my mind. He left Serampore to visit Benares. Thirty days after our conversation, I felt a sudden pain in the region of my liver. The following weeks were a nightmare of excruciating pain. Reluctant to disturb my guru, I thought I would bravely endure my trial alone.
But twenty-three days of torture weakened my resolution; I entrained for Benares. There Sri Yukteswar greeted me with unusual warmth, but gave me no opportunity to tell him my woes in private. Many devotees visited Master that day, just for a darshan. 2 Ill and neglected, I sat in a corner. It was not until after the evening meal that all guests had departed. My guru summoned me to the octagonal balcony of the house.
"You must have come about your liver disorder." Sri Yukteswar's gaze was averted; he walked to and fro, occasionally intercepting the moonlight. "Let me see; you have been ailing for twenty-four days, haven't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Please do the stomach exercise I have taught you."
"If you knew the extent of my suffering, Master, you would not ask me to exercise." Nevertheless I made a feeble attempt to obey him.
"You say you have pain; I say you have none. How can such contradictions exist?" My guru looked at me inquiringly.
I was dazed and then overcome with joyful relief. No longer could I feel the continuous torment that had kept me nearly sleepless for weeks; at Sri Yukteswar's words the agony vanished as though it had never been.
I started to kneel at his feet in gratitude, but he quickly prevented me.
"Don't be childish. Get up and enjoy the beauty of the moon over the Ganges." But Master's eyes were twinkling happily as I stood in silence beside him. I understood by his attitude that he wanted me to feel that not he, but God, had been the Healer.
I wear even now the heavy silver and lead bangle, a memento of that day—long-past, ever-cherished—when I found anew that I was living with a personage indeed superhuman. On later occasions, when I brought my friends to Sri Yukteswar for healing, he invariably recommended jewels or the bangle, extolling their use as an act of astrological wisdom.
I had been prejudiced against astrology from my childhood, partly because I observed that many people are sequaciously attached to it, and partly because of a prediction made by our family astrologer: "You will marry three times, being twice a widower." I brooded over the matter, feeling like a goat awaiting sacrifice before the temple of triple matrimony.
"You may as well be resigned to your fate," my brother Ananta had remarked. "Your written horoscope has correctly stated that you would fly from home toward the Himalayas during your early years, but would be forcibly returned. The forecast of your marriages is also bound to be true."
A clear intuition came to me one night that the prophecy was wholly false. I set fire to the horoscope scroll, placing the ashes in a paper bag on which I wrote: "Seeds of past karma cannot germinate if they are roasted in the divine fires of wisdom." I put the bag in a conspicuous spot; Ananta immediately read my defiant comment.
"You cannot destroy truth as easily as you have burnt this paper scroll." My brother laughed scornfully.
It is a fact that on three occasions before I reached manhood, my family tried to arrange my betrothal. Each time I refused to fall in with the plans,3 knowing that my love for God was more overwhelming than any astrological persuasion from the past.
"The deeper the self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux." These words of Master's often returned inspiringly to my mind.
Occasionally I told astrologers to select my worst periods, according to planetary indications, and I would still accomplish whatever task I set myself. It is true that my success at such times has been accompanied by extraordinary difficulties. But my conviction has always been justified: faith in the divine protection, and the right use of man's God-given will, are forces formidable beyond any the "inverted bowl" can muster.
The starry inscription at one's birth, I came to understand, is not that man is a puppet of his past. Its message is rather a prod to pride; the very heavens seek to arouse man's determination to be free from every limitation. God created each man as a soul, dowered with individuality, hence essential to the universal structure, whether in the temporary role of pillar or parasite. His freedom is final and immediate, if he so wills; it depends not on outer but inner victories.
Sri Yukteswar discovered the mathematical application of a 24,000-year equinoctial cycle to our present age.4 The cycle is divided into an Ascending Arc and a Descending Arc, each of 12,000 years. Within each Arc fall four Yugas or Ages, called Kali, Dwapara, Treta, and Satya, corresponding to the Greek ideas of Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Golden Ages.
My guru determined by various calculations that the last Kali Yuga or Iron Age, of the Ascending Arc, started about A.D. 500. The Iron Age, 1200 years in duration, is a span of materialism; it ended about A.D. 1700. That year ushered in Dwapara Yuga, a 2400-year period of electrical and atomic-energy developments, the age of telegraph, radio, airplanes, and other space-annihilators.
The 3600-year period of Treta Yuga will start in A.D. 4100; its age will be marked by common knowledge of telepathic communications and other time-annihilators. During the 4800 years of Satya Yuga, final age in an ascending arc, the intelligence of a man will be completely developed; he will work in harmony with the divine plan.
A descending arc of 12,000 years, starting with a descending Golden Age of 4800 years, then begins5 for the world; man gradually sinks into ignorance. These cycles are the eternal rounds of maya, the contrasts and relativities of the phenomenal universe.6 Man, one by one, escapes from creation's prison of duality as he awakens to consciousness of his inseverable divine unity with the Creator.
Master enlarged my understanding not only of astrology but of the world's scriptures. Placing the holy texts on the spotless table of his mind, he was able to dissect them with the scalpel of intuitive reasoning, and to separate errors and interpolations of scholars from the truths as originally expressed by the prophets.
"Fix one's vision on the end of the nose." This inaccurate interpretation of a Bhagavad Gita stanza,7 widely accepted by Eastern pundits and Western translators, used to arouse Master's droll criticism.
"The path of a yogi is singular enough as it is," he remarked. "Why counsel him that he must also make himself cross-eyed? The true meaning of nasikagram is 'origin of the nose, not 'end of the nose.' The nose begins at the point between the two eyebrows, the seat of spiritual vision."8
Because of one Sankhya9 aphorism, "Iswar-ashidha,"—"A Lord of Creation cannot be deduced" or "God is not proved,"10 —many scholars call the whole philosophy atheistical.
"The verse is not nihilistic," Sri Yukteswar explained. "It merely signifies that to the unenlightened man, dependent on his senses for all final judgments, proof of God must remain unknown and therefore non-existent. True Sankhya followers, with unshakable insight born of meditation, understand that the Lord is both existent and knowable."
Master expounded the Christian Bible with a beautiful clarity. It was from my Hindu guru, unknown to the roll call of Christian membership, that I learned to perceive the deathless essence of the Bible, and to understand the truth in Christ's assertion—surely the most thrillingly intransigent ever uttered: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."11
The great masters of India mold their lives by the same godly ideals which animated Jesus; these men are his proclaimed kin: "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."12 "If ye continue in my word," Christ pointed out, "then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."13 Freemen all, lords of themselves, the Yogi-Christs of India are part of the immortal fraternity: those who have attained a liberating knowledge of the One Father.
"The Adam and Eve story is incomprehensible to me!" I observed with considerable heat one day in my early struggles with the allegory. "Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent unborn generations?"
Master was more amused by my vehemence than my ignorance. "Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation," he explained. "Its 'tree of life' is the human body. The spinal cord is like an upturned tree, with man's hair as its roots, and afferent and efferent nerves as branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In these, man may rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the 'apple' at the center of the bodily garden.14
"The 'serpent' represents the coiled-up spinal energy which stimulates the sex nerves. 'Adam' is reason, and 'Eve' is feeling. When the emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs.15
"God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to create children in a similar 'immaculate' or divine manner.16 Because His manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals, instinct-bound and lacking the potentialities of full reason, God made the first human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. 17 In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity which underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.
"The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced by an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were too crude to express full divinity; the human being was uniquely given a tremendous mental capacity—the 'thousand-petaled lotus' of the brain—as well as acutely awakened occult centers in the spine.
"God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, but not to put their concentration on touch sensations.18 These were banned in order to avoid the development of the sex organs, which would enmesh humanity in the inferior animal method of propagation. The warning not to revive subconsciously-present bestial memories was not heeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man.
"Knowledge of 'good and evil' refers to the cosmic dualistic compulsion. Falling under the sway of maya through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve—and Adam—consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency. 19 The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his 'parents' or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden."
As Sri Yukteswar ended his discourse, I glanced with new respect at the pages of Genesis.
"Dear Master,' I said, "for the first time I feel a proper filial obligation toward Adam and Eve!"
1 From astronomical references in ancient Hindu scriptures, scholars have been able to correctly ascertain the dates of the authors. The scientific knowledge of the rishis was very great; in the Kaushitaki Brahmana we find precise astronomical passages which show that in 3100 B.C. the Hindus were far advanced in astronomy, which had a practical value in determining the auspicious times for astrological ceremonies. In an article in East-West, February, 1934, the following summary is given of the Jyotish or body of Vedic astronomical treatises: "It contains the scientific lore which kept India at the forefront of all ancient nations and made her the mecca of seekers after knowledge. The very ancient Brahmagupta, one of the Jyotish works, is an astronomical treatise dealing with such matters as the heliocentric motion of the planetary bodies in our solar system, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the earth's spherical form, the reflected light of the moon, the earth's daily axial revolution, the presence of fixed stars in the Milky Way, the law of gravitation, and other scientific facts which did not dawn in the Western world until the time of Copernicus and Newton."
It is now well-known that the so-called "Arabic numerals," without whose symbols advanced mathematics is difficult, came to Europe in the 9th century, via the Arabs, from India, where that system of notation had been anciently formulated. Further light on India's vast scientific heritage will be found in Dr. P. C. Ray's History of Hindu Chemistry, and in Dr. B. N. Seal's Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus.
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2 The blessing which flows from the mere sight of a saint.
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3 One of the girls whom my family selected as a possible bride for me, afterwards married my cousin, Prabhas Chandra Ghose.
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4 A series of thirteen articles on the historical verification of Sri Yukteswar's Yuga theory appeared in the magazine East-West (Los Angeles) from September, 1932, to September, 1933.
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5 In the year A.D. 12,500.
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6 The Hindu scriptures place the present world-age as occurring within the Kali Yuga of a much longer universal cycle than the simple 24,000-year equinoctial cycle with which Sri Yukteswar was concerned. The universal cycle of the scriptures is 4,300,560,000 years in extent, and measures out a Day of Creation or the length of life assigned to our planetary system in its present form. This vast figure given by the rishis is based on a relationship between the length of the solar year and a multiple of Pi (3.1416, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle).
The life span for a whole universe, according to the ancient seers, is 314,159,000,000,000 solar years, or "One Age of Brahma."
Scientists estimate the present age of the earth to be about two billion years, basing their conclusions on a study of lead pockets left as a result of radioactivity in rocks. The Hindu scriptures declare that an earth such as ours is dissolved for one of two reasons: the inhabitants as a whole become either completely good or completely evil. The world-mind thus generates a power which releases the captive atoms held together as an earth.
Dire pronouncements are occasionally published regarding an imminent "end of the world." The latest prediction of doom was given by Rev. Chas. G. Long of Pasadena, who publicly set the "Day of Judgment" for Sept. 21, 1945. United Press reporters asked my opinion; I explained that world cycles follow an orderly progression according to a divine plan. No earthly dissolution is in sight; two billion years of ascending and descending equinoctial cycles are yet in store for our planet in its present form. The figures given by the rishis for the various world ages deserve careful study in the West; the magazine Time (Dec. 17, 1945, p. 6) called them "reassuring statistics."
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7 Chapter VI:13.
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8 "The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness."-Luke 11:34-35.
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9 One of the six systems of Hindu philosophy. Sankhya teaches final emancipation through knowledge of twenty-five principles, starting with prakriti or nature and ending with purusha or soul.
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10 Sankhya Aphorisms, I:92.
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11 Matthew 24:35.
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12 Matthew 12:50.
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13 John 8:31-32. St. John testified: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name (even to them who are established in the Christ Consciousness)."-John 1:12.
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14 "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."-Genesis 3:2-3.
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15 "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. The woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."-Gen. 3:12-13.
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16 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."-Gen. 1:27-28.
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17 "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."-Gen. 2:7.
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18 "Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtil than any beast of the field" (any other sense of the body).-Gen. 3:1.
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19 "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed."-Gen. 2:8. "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."-Gen. 3:23. The divine man first made by God had his consciousness centered in the omnipotent single eye in the forehead (eastward). The all-creative powers of his will, focused at that spot, were lost to man when he began to "till the ground" of his physical nature.
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https://www.ananda.org/autobiography/#chap16
Chapter 16
Outwitting the Stars
"Mukunda, why don't you get an astrological armlet?"
"Should I, Master? I don't believe in astrology."
"It is never a question of belief; the only scientific attitude one can take on any subject is whether it is true. The law of gravitation worked as efficiently before Newton as after him. The cosmos would be fairly chaotic if its laws could not operate without the sanction of human belief.
"Charlatans have brought the stellar science to its present state of disrepute. Astrology is too vast, both mathematically1 and philosophically, to be rightly grasped except by men of profound understanding. If ignoramuses misread the heavens, and see there a scrawl instead of a script, that is to be expected in this imperfect world. One should not dismiss the wisdom with the 'wise.'
"All parts of creation are linked together and interchange their influences. The balanced rhythm of the universe is rooted in reciprocity," my guru continued. "Man, in his human aspect, has to combat two sets of forces—first, the tumults within his being, caused by the admixture of earth, water, fire, air, and ethereal elements; second, the outer disintegrating powers of nature. So long as man struggles with his mortality, he is affected by the myriad mutations of heaven and earth.
"Astrology is the study of man's response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity, but offer a lawful channel for the outward operation of cause-effect equilibriums which each man has set into motion in the past.
"A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma. His horoscope is a challenging portrait, revealing his unalterable past and its probable future results. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by men of intuitive wisdom: these are few.
"The message boldly blazoned across the heavens at the moment of birth is not meant to emphasize fate—the result of past good and evil—but to arouse man's will to escape from his universal thralldom. What he has done, he can undo. None other than himself was the instigator of the causes of whatever effects are now prevalent in his life. He can overcome any limitation, because he created it by his own actions in the first place, and because he has spiritual resources which are not subject to planetary pressure.
"Superstitious awe of astrology makes one an automaton, slavishly dependent on mechanical guidance. The wise man defeats his planets—which is to say, his past—by transferring his allegiance from the creation to the Creator. The more he realizes his unity with Spirit, the less he can be dominated by matter. The soul is ever-free; it is deathless because birthless. It cannot be regimented by stars.
"Man is a soul, and has a body. When he properly places his sense of identity, he leaves behind all compulsive patterns. So long as he remains confused in his ordinary state of spiritual amnesia, he will know the subtle fetters of environmental law.
"God is harmony; the devotee who attunes himself will never perform any action amiss. His activities will be correctly and naturally timed to accord with astrological law. After deep prayer and meditation he is in touch with his divine consciousness; there is no greater power than that inward protection."
"Then, dear Master, why do you want me to wear an astrological bangle?" I ventured this question after a long silence, during which I had tried to assimilate Sri Yukteswar's noble exposition.
"It is only when a traveler has reached his goal that he is justified in discarding his maps. During the journey, he takes advantage of any convenient short cut. The ancient rishis discovered many ways to curtail the period of man's exile in delusion. There are certain mechanical features in the law of karma which can be skillfully adjusted by the fingers of wisdom.
"All human ills arise from some transgression of universal law. The scriptures point out that man must satisfy the laws of nature, while not discrediting the divine omnipotence. He should say: 'Lord, I trust in Thee, and know Thou canst help me, but I too will do my best to undo any wrong I have done.' By a number of means—by prayer, by will power, by yoga meditation, by consultation with saints, by use of astrological bangles—the adverse effects of past wrongs can be minimized or nullified.
"Just as a house can be fitted with a copper rod to absorb the shock of lightning, so the bodily temple can be benefited by various protective measures. Ages ago our yogis discovered that pure metals emit an astral light which is powerfully counteractive to negative pulls of the planets. Subtle electrical and magnetic radiations are constantly circulating in the universe; when a man's body is being aided, he does not know it; when it is being disintegrated, he is still in ignorance. Can he do anything about it?
"This problem received attention from our rishis; they found helpful not only a combination of metals, but also of plants and—most effective of all—faultless jewels of not less than two carats. The preventive uses of astrology have seldom been seriously studied outside of India. One little-known fact is that the proper jewels, metals, or plant preparations are valueless unless the required weight is secured, and unless these remedial agents are worn next to the skin."
"Sir, of course I shall take your advice and get a bangle. I am intrigued at the thought of outwitting a planet!"
"For general purposes I counsel the use of an armlet made of gold, silver, and copper. But for a specific purpose I want you to get one of silver and lead." Sri Yukteswar added careful directions.
"Guruji, what 'specific purpose' do you mean?"
"The stars are about to take an unfriendly interest in you, Mukunda. Fear not; you shall be protected. In about a month your liver will cause you much trouble. The illness is scheduled to last for six months, but your use of an astrological armlet will shorten the period to twenty-four days."
I sought out a jeweler the next day, and was soon wearing the bangle. My health was excellent; Master's prediction slipped from my mind. He left Serampore to visit Benares. Thirty days after our conversation, I felt a sudden pain in the region of my liver. The following weeks were a nightmare of excruciating pain. Reluctant to disturb my guru, I thought I would bravely endure my trial alone.
But twenty-three days of torture weakened my resolution; I entrained for Benares. There Sri Yukteswar greeted me with unusual warmth, but gave me no opportunity to tell him my woes in private. Many devotees visited Master that day, just for a darshan. 2 Ill and neglected, I sat in a corner. It was not until after the evening meal that all guests had departed. My guru summoned me to the octagonal balcony of the house.
"You must have come about your liver disorder." Sri Yukteswar's gaze was averted; he walked to and fro, occasionally intercepting the moonlight. "Let me see; you have been ailing for twenty-four days, haven't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Please do the stomach exercise I have taught you."
"If you knew the extent of my suffering, Master, you would not ask me to exercise." Nevertheless I made a feeble attempt to obey him.
"You say you have pain; I say you have none. How can such contradictions exist?" My guru looked at me inquiringly.
I was dazed and then overcome with joyful relief. No longer could I feel the continuous torment that had kept me nearly sleepless for weeks; at Sri Yukteswar's words the agony vanished as though it had never been.
I started to kneel at his feet in gratitude, but he quickly prevented me.
"Don't be childish. Get up and enjoy the beauty of the moon over the Ganges." But Master's eyes were twinkling happily as I stood in silence beside him. I understood by his attitude that he wanted me to feel that not he, but God, had been the Healer.
I wear even now the heavy silver and lead bangle, a memento of that day—long-past, ever-cherished—when I found anew that I was living with a personage indeed superhuman. On later occasions, when I brought my friends to Sri Yukteswar for healing, he invariably recommended jewels or the bangle, extolling their use as an act of astrological wisdom.
I had been prejudiced against astrology from my childhood, partly because I observed that many people are sequaciously attached to it, and partly because of a prediction made by our family astrologer: "You will marry three times, being twice a widower." I brooded over the matter, feeling like a goat awaiting sacrifice before the temple of triple matrimony.
"You may as well be resigned to your fate," my brother Ananta had remarked. "Your written horoscope has correctly stated that you would fly from home toward the Himalayas during your early years, but would be forcibly returned. The forecast of your marriages is also bound to be true."
A clear intuition came to me one night that the prophecy was wholly false. I set fire to the horoscope scroll, placing the ashes in a paper bag on which I wrote: "Seeds of past karma cannot germinate if they are roasted in the divine fires of wisdom." I put the bag in a conspicuous spot; Ananta immediately read my defiant comment.
"You cannot destroy truth as easily as you have burnt this paper scroll." My brother laughed scornfully.
It is a fact that on three occasions before I reached manhood, my family tried to arrange my betrothal. Each time I refused to fall in with the plans,3 knowing that my love for God was more overwhelming than any astrological persuasion from the past.
"The deeper the self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux." These words of Master's often returned inspiringly to my mind.
Occasionally I told astrologers to select my worst periods, according to planetary indications, and I would still accomplish whatever task I set myself. It is true that my success at such times has been accompanied by extraordinary difficulties. But my conviction has always been justified: faith in the divine protection, and the right use of man's God-given will, are forces formidable beyond any the "inverted bowl" can muster.
The starry inscription at one's birth, I came to understand, is not that man is a puppet of his past. Its message is rather a prod to pride; the very heavens seek to arouse man's determination to be free from every limitation. God created each man as a soul, dowered with individuality, hence essential to the universal structure, whether in the temporary role of pillar or parasite. His freedom is final and immediate, if he so wills; it depends not on outer but inner victories.
Sri Yukteswar discovered the mathematical application of a 24,000-year equinoctial cycle to our present age.4 The cycle is divided into an Ascending Arc and a Descending Arc, each of 12,000 years. Within each Arc fall four Yugas or Ages, called Kali, Dwapara, Treta, and Satya, corresponding to the Greek ideas of Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Golden Ages.
My guru determined by various calculations that the last Kali Yuga or Iron Age, of the Ascending Arc, started about A.D. 500. The Iron Age, 1200 years in duration, is a span of materialism; it ended about A.D. 1700. That year ushered in Dwapara Yuga, a 2400-year period of electrical and atomic-energy developments, the age of telegraph, radio, airplanes, and other space-annihilators.
The 3600-year period of Treta Yuga will start in A.D. 4100; its age will be marked by common knowledge of telepathic communications and other time-annihilators. During the 4800 years of Satya Yuga, final age in an ascending arc, the intelligence of a man will be completely developed; he will work in harmony with the divine plan.
A descending arc of 12,000 years, starting with a descending Golden Age of 4800 years, then begins5 for the world; man gradually sinks into ignorance. These cycles are the eternal rounds of maya, the contrasts and relativities of the phenomenal universe.6 Man, one by one, escapes from creation's prison of duality as he awakens to consciousness of his inseverable divine unity with the Creator.
Master enlarged my understanding not only of astrology but of the world's scriptures. Placing the holy texts on the spotless table of his mind, he was able to dissect them with the scalpel of intuitive reasoning, and to separate errors and interpolations of scholars from the truths as originally expressed by the prophets.
"Fix one's vision on the end of the nose." This inaccurate interpretation of a Bhagavad Gita stanza,7 widely accepted by Eastern pundits and Western translators, used to arouse Master's droll criticism.
"The path of a yogi is singular enough as it is," he remarked. "Why counsel him that he must also make himself cross-eyed? The true meaning of nasikagram is 'origin of the nose, not 'end of the nose.' The nose begins at the point between the two eyebrows, the seat of spiritual vision."8
Because of one Sankhya9 aphorism, "Iswar-ashidha,"—"A Lord of Creation cannot be deduced" or "God is not proved,"10 —many scholars call the whole philosophy atheistical.
"The verse is not nihilistic," Sri Yukteswar explained. "It merely signifies that to the unenlightened man, dependent on his senses for all final judgments, proof of God must remain unknown and therefore non-existent. True Sankhya followers, with unshakable insight born of meditation, understand that the Lord is both existent and knowable."
Master expounded the Christian Bible with a beautiful clarity. It was from my Hindu guru, unknown to the roll call of Christian membership, that I learned to perceive the deathless essence of the Bible, and to understand the truth in Christ's assertion—surely the most thrillingly intransigent ever uttered: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."11
The great masters of India mold their lives by the same godly ideals which animated Jesus; these men are his proclaimed kin: "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."12 "If ye continue in my word," Christ pointed out, "then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."13 Freemen all, lords of themselves, the Yogi-Christs of India are part of the immortal fraternity: those who have attained a liberating knowledge of the One Father.
"The Adam and Eve story is incomprehensible to me!" I observed with considerable heat one day in my early struggles with the allegory. "Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent unborn generations?"
Master was more amused by my vehemence than my ignorance. "Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation," he explained. "Its 'tree of life' is the human body. The spinal cord is like an upturned tree, with man's hair as its roots, and afferent and efferent nerves as branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In these, man may rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the 'apple' at the center of the bodily garden.14
"The 'serpent' represents the coiled-up spinal energy which stimulates the sex nerves. 'Adam' is reason, and 'Eve' is feeling. When the emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs.15
"God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to create children in a similar 'immaculate' or divine manner.16 Because His manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals, instinct-bound and lacking the potentialities of full reason, God made the first human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. 17 In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity which underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.
"The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced by an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were too crude to express full divinity; the human being was uniquely given a tremendous mental capacity—the 'thousand-petaled lotus' of the brain—as well as acutely awakened occult centers in the spine.
"God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, but not to put their concentration on touch sensations.18 These were banned in order to avoid the development of the sex organs, which would enmesh humanity in the inferior animal method of propagation. The warning not to revive subconsciously-present bestial memories was not heeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man.
"Knowledge of 'good and evil' refers to the cosmic dualistic compulsion. Falling under the sway of maya through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve—and Adam—consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency. 19 The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his 'parents' or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden."
As Sri Yukteswar ended his discourse, I glanced with new respect at the pages of Genesis.
"Dear Master,' I said, "for the first time I feel a proper filial obligation toward Adam and Eve!"
1 From astronomical references in ancient Hindu scriptures, scholars have been able to correctly ascertain the dates of the authors. The scientific knowledge of the rishis was very great; in the Kaushitaki Brahmana we find precise astronomical passages which show that in 3100 B.C. the Hindus were far advanced in astronomy, which had a practical value in determining the auspicious times for astrological ceremonies. In an article in East-West, February, 1934, the following summary is given of the Jyotish or body of Vedic astronomical treatises: "It contains the scientific lore which kept India at the forefront of all ancient nations and made her the mecca of seekers after knowledge. The very ancient Brahmagupta, one of the Jyotish works, is an astronomical treatise dealing with such matters as the heliocentric motion of the planetary bodies in our solar system, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the earth's spherical form, the reflected light of the moon, the earth's daily axial revolution, the presence of fixed stars in the Milky Way, the law of gravitation, and other scientific facts which did not dawn in the Western world until the time of Copernicus and Newton."
It is now well-known that the so-called "Arabic numerals," without whose symbols advanced mathematics is difficult, came to Europe in the 9th century, via the Arabs, from India, where that system of notation had been anciently formulated. Further light on India's vast scientific heritage will be found in Dr. P. C. Ray's History of Hindu Chemistry, and in Dr. B. N. Seal's Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus.
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2 The blessing which flows from the mere sight of a saint.
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3 One of the girls whom my family selected as a possible bride for me, afterwards married my cousin, Prabhas Chandra Ghose.
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4 A series of thirteen articles on the historical verification of Sri Yukteswar's Yuga theory appeared in the magazine East-West (Los Angeles) from September, 1932, to September, 1933.
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5 In the year A.D. 12,500.
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6 The Hindu scriptures place the present world-age as occurring within the Kali Yuga of a much longer universal cycle than the simple 24,000-year equinoctial cycle with which Sri Yukteswar was concerned. The universal cycle of the scriptures is 4,300,560,000 years in extent, and measures out a Day of Creation or the length of life assigned to our planetary system in its present form. This vast figure given by the rishis is based on a relationship between the length of the solar year and a multiple of Pi (3.1416, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle).
The life span for a whole universe, according to the ancient seers, is 314,159,000,000,000 solar years, or "One Age of Brahma."
Scientists estimate the present age of the earth to be about two billion years, basing their conclusions on a study of lead pockets left as a result of radioactivity in rocks. The Hindu scriptures declare that an earth such as ours is dissolved for one of two reasons: the inhabitants as a whole become either completely good or completely evil. The world-mind thus generates a power which releases the captive atoms held together as an earth.
Dire pronouncements are occasionally published regarding an imminent "end of the world." The latest prediction of doom was given by Rev. Chas. G. Long of Pasadena, who publicly set the "Day of Judgment" for Sept. 21, 1945. United Press reporters asked my opinion; I explained that world cycles follow an orderly progression according to a divine plan. No earthly dissolution is in sight; two billion years of ascending and descending equinoctial cycles are yet in store for our planet in its present form. The figures given by the rishis for the various world ages deserve careful study in the West; the magazine Time (Dec. 17, 1945, p. 6) called them "reassuring statistics."
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7 Chapter VI:13.
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8 "The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness."-Luke 11:34-35.
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9 One of the six systems of Hindu philosophy. Sankhya teaches final emancipation through knowledge of twenty-five principles, starting with prakriti or nature and ending with purusha or soul.
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10 Sankhya Aphorisms, I:92.
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11 Matthew 24:35.
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12 Matthew 12:50.
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13 John 8:31-32. St. John testified: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name (even to them who are established in the Christ Consciousness)."-John 1:12.
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14 "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."-Genesis 3:2-3.
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15 "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. The woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."-Gen. 3:12-13.
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16 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."-Gen. 1:27-28.
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17 "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."-Gen. 2:7.
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18 "Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtil than any beast of the field" (any other sense of the body).-Gen. 3:1.
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19 "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed."-Gen. 2:8. "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."-Gen. 3:23. The divine man first made by God had his consciousness centered in the omnipotent single eye in the forehead (eastward). The all-creative powers of his will, focused at that spot, were lost to man when he began to "till the ground" of his physical nature.
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Last edited by kmaherali on Sat Aug 22, 2020 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Autobiography of a yogi.
Kmaherali,
We should start a separate thread on this book.
Very interesting book - though there are places where Mukunda is off track..but a very good book for someone pursuing Sufism/Spirituality to read.
Shams
We should start a separate thread on this book.
Very interesting book - though there are places where Mukunda is off track..but a very good book for someone pursuing Sufism/Spirituality to read.
Shams
Re: Autobiography of a yogi.
Shams,ShamsB wrote:Kmaherali,
We should start a separate thread on this book.
Very interesting book - though there are places where Mukunda is off track..but a very good book for someone pursuing Sufism/Spirituality to read.
Shams
Yes I agree with you. It is an excellent book for anyone on the Path. I would be very interested to know about the 'off track' aspects of his book. I believe he has truthfully narrated all his experiences.
I came across the following news item today that relates to the subject.
Couples find love without astrology
Misty Harris
CanWest News Service
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A new study of 20 million husbands and wives has concluded that a pickup ploy linked with the Age of Aquarius is all wet.
According to a University of Manchester report released this week, asking a potential partner "What's your sign?" offers no more insight into the relationship's likelihood of success than consulting a Magic 8-Ball. The investigation, which draws from 2001 census data in England and Wales, is thought to be the largest-scale test of astrology ever undertaken.
"If there is even the smallest tendency for Virgos to fancy Capricorns, or for Libras to like Leos, then we should see it in the (marriage) statistics," says study author David Voas, senior research fellow at the university's Centre for Census and Survey Research.
Assuming even one set of lovebirds in 1,000 is influenced by the stars, Voas says, favoured combinations of signs would appear an extra 10,000 times in a sample of 10 million couples. But he says the spousal pairings were instead "just what we'd predict on the basis of chance."
Since there's disagreement among astrologers about which signs are most compatible, only the lowest common denominator was tested: that is, whether any combination of sun signs -- Taurus, Aries, Aquarius, etc. -- could be found more or less than would be expected by probability.
Herald astrologer Georgia Nicols says she's in "total agreement" with the study to the extent that couples are more than the sum of their sun signs. "It's not wrong that the sun signs like to hang with each other, but we're way more complicated than that," says Nicols.
Not every star-gazer, however, is as enthusiastic about the findings. Critics say the study ignores such astrological factors as a person's moon sign and rising sign in judging partnerships.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
excellent info, but question remains, is astrology accepted scinece in our religion or not.
This is what according to nehgulbalagha hazrat ali said
O' people! beware of learning the science of stars except that which guidance is sought o n the land or sea, because it leads to divining and an astrologer is a diviner, while the diviner is like the sorcerer, the sorcerer is like the unbeliever and the unbeliever would be in Hell. Get forward in the name of Allah.
Quran" None(either) in the havens or in the earth knoweth the unseen save Allah" (27:65)
This is what according to nehgulbalagha hazrat ali said
O' people! beware of learning the science of stars except that which guidance is sought o n the land or sea, because it leads to divining and an astrologer is a diviner, while the diviner is like the sorcerer, the sorcerer is like the unbeliever and the unbeliever would be in Hell. Get forward in the name of Allah.
Quran" None(either) in the havens or in the earth knoweth the unseen save Allah" (27:65)
Astrology is an exact science but one needs to distinguish between adepts and charlatans. The latter have tended to abuse the science for personal gains. Swami Sri Yuketeshwar was an adept astrologer as well and he correctly predicted the predicament alluded in the article. But he also states that one can overcome the influence of time under a true guide and therefore as our tariqah is primarily a relationship between the Murshid and a murid, these influences can be overcome.azamour wrote:excellent info, but question remains, is astrology accepted scinece in our religion or not.
This is what according to nehgulbalagha hazrat ali said
O' people! beware of learning the science of stars except that which guidance is sought o n the land or sea, because it leads to divining and an astrologer is a diviner, while the diviner is like the sorcerer, the sorcerer is like the unbeliever and the unbeliever would be in Hell. Get forward in the name of Allah.
Quran" None(either) in the havens or in the earth knoweth the unseen save Allah" (27:65)
There is an excerpt of an article which discusses briefly astrology and Islam at:
Current Issues --> ASTROLOGY.
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zubair_mahamood
- Posts: 238
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Yes Astrology is an exact science and Islam prohibited use of astrology.
Astrology exists! Check Quranic verses referring to the birth of both Prophet Musa and Prophet Isa. Astrologers of time were able to calculate, predict and give information to respective Rulers of time Pharaoh (Egypt) and to Jewish Priests. Rulers felt that the birth of Musa and Isa is dangerous for them… they felt that the people would turn their worship to Allah the Almighty alone. Consequently they would lose their authority over the people therefore they tried to kill new born babies to change their fortune.
I was watching Mahabharat story… before birth of Lord Krishna his Mama King Kan’s astrologers predicted that his sister Devki’s eight son will be responsible for Kan’s death so he imprisoned Devki and tried to change his Fortune. (http://rajshri.com/mahabharat/index.asp?Page=1, 10th episode)
It’s prohibited in Islam! while explaining this to me Local Imam of Mosque told a story. A Man (X) has pets horse, cow, dog and cat. X was able to understand language of animals, he found out that the dog can tell future so whatever dog was predicting was coming true. X was taking advantage of dog’s astrology. One day cat didn’t get enough food to eat so dog said don’t worry tomorrow cow will die and we will have enough food to eat, after listening to this next day morning X took the cow and sold it in market. X made money and as predicted by the dog cow died. Cat was angry at X as it didn’t get enough food to eat then dog said don’t worry tomorrow Horse will died and we will have enough food to eat… On Hearing this X again did the same he sold horse next day morning and made money as per prediction at the end of day horse died. X was delighted, Cat was again angry as it didn’t get enough food to eat and dog was happy. Cat got angry on dog then dog replied don’t worry tomorrow our master will die and after his death ceremony we will have enough food to eat. X heard it and was….
Then Imam said in General Human can’t accept reality and try to do things that favour there personal interest… some knowledge must be hidden for our existence to be pleasant. Astrology is true science but we sometimes can’t accept reality, what must be X’s situation who took advantage of dog’s prediction, what advantage he can take now, X would have died many times before his actual death. Death is truth! A person born must die, astrology was used in past to escape from truth and people today use it for personal interest without thinking it’s unethical. “True momin will accept death happily as he doesn’t love life or doesn’t fear death or anything that comes his way as he accepts whatever comes to him is from Allah”, this is one of a reason why Islam prohibits use of Astrology but they are other side of astrology which can be accept and are not prohibited.
Astrology exists! Check Quranic verses referring to the birth of both Prophet Musa and Prophet Isa. Astrologers of time were able to calculate, predict and give information to respective Rulers of time Pharaoh (Egypt) and to Jewish Priests. Rulers felt that the birth of Musa and Isa is dangerous for them… they felt that the people would turn their worship to Allah the Almighty alone. Consequently they would lose their authority over the people therefore they tried to kill new born babies to change their fortune.
I was watching Mahabharat story… before birth of Lord Krishna his Mama King Kan’s astrologers predicted that his sister Devki’s eight son will be responsible for Kan’s death so he imprisoned Devki and tried to change his Fortune. (http://rajshri.com/mahabharat/index.asp?Page=1, 10th episode)
It’s prohibited in Islam! while explaining this to me Local Imam of Mosque told a story. A Man (X) has pets horse, cow, dog and cat. X was able to understand language of animals, he found out that the dog can tell future so whatever dog was predicting was coming true. X was taking advantage of dog’s astrology. One day cat didn’t get enough food to eat so dog said don’t worry tomorrow cow will die and we will have enough food to eat, after listening to this next day morning X took the cow and sold it in market. X made money and as predicted by the dog cow died. Cat was angry at X as it didn’t get enough food to eat then dog said don’t worry tomorrow Horse will died and we will have enough food to eat… On Hearing this X again did the same he sold horse next day morning and made money as per prediction at the end of day horse died. X was delighted, Cat was again angry as it didn’t get enough food to eat and dog was happy. Cat got angry on dog then dog replied don’t worry tomorrow our master will die and after his death ceremony we will have enough food to eat. X heard it and was….
Then Imam said in General Human can’t accept reality and try to do things that favour there personal interest… some knowledge must be hidden for our existence to be pleasant. Astrology is true science but we sometimes can’t accept reality, what must be X’s situation who took advantage of dog’s prediction, what advantage he can take now, X would have died many times before his actual death. Death is truth! A person born must die, astrology was used in past to escape from truth and people today use it for personal interest without thinking it’s unethical. “True momin will accept death happily as he doesn’t love life or doesn’t fear death or anything that comes his way as he accepts whatever comes to him is from Allah”, this is one of a reason why Islam prohibits use of Astrology but they are other side of astrology which can be accept and are not prohibited.
23 Things You Didn't Know About Astrology
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/styl ... ailsignout
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/styl ... ailsignout
Watch how the astrologer predicted a major change in America...
Watch "Finally the truth of who will win the Presidentia…" on YouTube
Published on Oct 19, 2016
Book a Reading with Joni Today! ► http://www.galacticcenter.org/vedic-a...
Want to learn Vedic Astrology from Joni? Join my online University of Vedic Astrology to become a certified Master of Vedic Astrology! ►
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvTt1R1 ... e=youtu.be
Watch "Finally the truth of who will win the Presidentia…" on YouTube
Published on Oct 19, 2016
Book a Reading with Joni Today! ► http://www.galacticcenter.org/vedic-a...
Want to learn Vedic Astrology from Joni? Join my online University of Vedic Astrology to become a certified Master of Vedic Astrology! ►
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvTt1R1 ... e=youtu.be
Stars seize Iranian imagination
People in the southern Iranian town of Saadat Shahr make sure not to miss Friday prayers.
How else will they get the imam's comprehensive update on which stars, nebulae and meteor showers will burn brightest in the following week's night sky?
Saadat Shahr, 625km south of Tehran, has gone stargazing-crazy, reflecting a national passion that has seen new members flocking to astronomy clubs across the Islamic Republic to devour information about what lies above.
Women in Saadat Shahr have even sold their jewellery to help science teacher Asghar Kabiri realise his dream of building an observatory.
"School janitors and teachers all paid a small share of their salaries to help build the observatory. Now it has become the pride of the town," Kabiri told Reuters by telephone.
"Astronomy is a divine science and is encouraged in Islam. So in a small, traditional community like Saadat Shahr, people contribute to our activities just as they would chip in to build a mosque," he added.
Quranic proof
The Quran often cites natural and celestial phenomena as proofs for the existence of God.
The imam in Saadat Shahr has tuned into the local obsession and uses the weekly prayers to talk about what's coming up in the skies during the days ahead.
As proof of God's existence, the
Quran cites celestial phenomena
"The townspeople even allow their daughters to stay out at night if they know they are going stargazing," Kabiri said.
More...
https://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/ ... 14940.html
People in the southern Iranian town of Saadat Shahr make sure not to miss Friday prayers.
How else will they get the imam's comprehensive update on which stars, nebulae and meteor showers will burn brightest in the following week's night sky?
Saadat Shahr, 625km south of Tehran, has gone stargazing-crazy, reflecting a national passion that has seen new members flocking to astronomy clubs across the Islamic Republic to devour information about what lies above.
Women in Saadat Shahr have even sold their jewellery to help science teacher Asghar Kabiri realise his dream of building an observatory.
"School janitors and teachers all paid a small share of their salaries to help build the observatory. Now it has become the pride of the town," Kabiri told Reuters by telephone.
"Astronomy is a divine science and is encouraged in Islam. So in a small, traditional community like Saadat Shahr, people contribute to our activities just as they would chip in to build a mosque," he added.
Quranic proof
The Quran often cites natural and celestial phenomena as proofs for the existence of God.
The imam in Saadat Shahr has tuned into the local obsession and uses the weekly prayers to talk about what's coming up in the skies during the days ahead.
As proof of God's existence, the
Quran cites celestial phenomena
"The townspeople even allow their daughters to stay out at night if they know they are going stargazing," Kabiri said.
More...
https://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/ ... 14940.html
The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again!
Belief in astrology and the occult is surging.
We’re living in the middle of a religious revival; it’s just that the movements that are rising are not what we normally call “religion.” The first rising movement is astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.
This surge in belief is primarily among the young. According to a National Science Foundation survey, 44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say that astrology is somewhat or very “scientific.” Unsurprisingly, online horoscope sites are booming. Stella Bugbee, editor of The Cut, told The Atlantic that in 2017 the typical horoscope got 150 percent more traffic than it had the year before.
Another surging spiritual movement is witchcraft. In 1990, only 8,000 Americans self-identified as Wiccans. Ten years later there were 134,000, and today, along with other neo-pagans, there are over a million. As Tara Isabella Burton put it in an excellent, deeply researched essay in The American Interest, “Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.”
The third great rising spiritual force is mindfulness, which seems to be everywhere. The fourth is wokeness, what some have called the Great Awokening. Burton’s essay is really about how astrology and witchcraft have become important spiritual vocabularies within parts of the social justice movement.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/opin ... y_20190611
Belief in astrology and the occult is surging.
We’re living in the middle of a religious revival; it’s just that the movements that are rising are not what we normally call “religion.” The first rising movement is astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.
This surge in belief is primarily among the young. According to a National Science Foundation survey, 44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say that astrology is somewhat or very “scientific.” Unsurprisingly, online horoscope sites are booming. Stella Bugbee, editor of The Cut, told The Atlantic that in 2017 the typical horoscope got 150 percent more traffic than it had the year before.
Another surging spiritual movement is witchcraft. In 1990, only 8,000 Americans self-identified as Wiccans. Ten years later there were 134,000, and today, along with other neo-pagans, there are over a million. As Tara Isabella Burton put it in an excellent, deeply researched essay in The American Interest, “Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.”
The third great rising spiritual force is mindfulness, which seems to be everywhere. The fourth is wokeness, what some have called the Great Awokening. Burton’s essay is really about how astrology and witchcraft have become important spiritual vocabularies within parts of the social justice movement.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/opin ... y_20190611
Why Astrology Matters
Seeing meaning in the stars is a vital part of the scientific story.
A few years ago, I went to an astrologer as research for a radio show exploring strange beliefs. Vishal knew only my name, and date and place of birth, and didn’t tell me anything terribly profound until I asked him about the car I had just bought. He tapped something into his laptop. I waited.
“I see two cars in your future,” he said.
I laughed. “Does that mean I’ve bought a dud?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
A fortnight later, a mechanic phoned while working on my new car. He informed me I had indeed bought a dud, and suggested I return the car, get my money back, and buy another one.
I bought a second car. Two cars. It’s just a coincidence, isn’t it?
The basic premise of astrology is the stars and the planets exert an influence over events on Earth. The stars’ and planets’ exact influence depends on their motions and relative positions, such as when they appear close together in the sky. If we had all the data about how the sky looked when you were born, say, we could use it to say something about your future, your personality, and maybe your best course of action over the next few weeks, months, or years.
To the informed scientific mind—a relatively new phenomenon—astrology can’t possibly work. That’s because these heavenly bodies are nothing more than agglomerations of rock, dust, or gas. There are distant influences from the stars and planets, but they’re called the gravitational and electromagnetic forces. The gravitational force creates an attraction between masses. Electromagnetic forces transmit light, heat, magnetic attraction, and repulsion. There is a pull on Earth due to these bodies’ masses, and we see the light (and, in the sun’s case, feel the heat) they emit. That’s it. They certainly have nothing to say about the purchase of motor vehicles by science writers with a Ph.D. in quantum physics but no ability to spot a dodgy used car. Why would they?
Newton bought a book on astrology but couldn’t make sense of it. So he began to study Euclid.
Some might walk away at this point, seeing no value in discussing astrology. However, astrology is a vital part of our human, and scientific, story. We have been making astrological connections—mapping the heavens and trying to discern their influence on the Earth—for much longer than we have been doing science. And with very positive results: Astrology had a huge influence on the development of science, sometimes directly. In 1663, Isaac Newton bought a book on astrology at the Sturbridge Summer Fair. It was an act of curiosity, but Newton found that he couldn’t make sense of it because he didn’t know enough geometry. And so he began to study Euclid. This is how Newton got hooked on mathematics.
Most of the influence has been more subtle. Astronomy, for example, arose as an attempt to do better astrology. The 16th-century astrologer and mathematician Jerome Cardano even taught the public to read the skies for themselves, publishing a primer on astronomy within his 1538 astrological guide. “One who wishes to attain knowledge of the stars must begin with knowledge of the planets,” Cardano explains. And so he lays out the movements of the known planets, and instructs the reader on how to find each of them in the sky. He was, according to the Princeton scholar Anthony Grafton, “a 16th-century counterpart to Patrick Moore or Carl Sagan.”
Cardano is the first astrologer mentioned in A Scheme of Heaven, a fascinating new book by Alexander Boxer, a data scientist with a Ph.D. in physics. In the book, Boxer explores the difficult relationship between science and astrology. He honors the latter as “the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise.” It involved gathering thousands of years of observations of heavenly motion, and the concomitant earthly events—whether they be births, deaths, kingdoms lost, or riches gained—into enormous datasets. Throughout its history, Boxer writes, astrology has aimed high, looking to produce “nothing short of a systematic account linking the nature of the heavens to our own human nature.” Like ancient AI, it was the job of astrologers to identify patterns in the gathered data and extract meaning from the correlations they found. Who can blame them if they sometimes saw patterns and meaning where there were none?
It’s not even as if they were blind to this possibility. An underappreciated fact about astrology is that many of its practitioners never fully believed in it. Cardano, for one, wrote a great deal about the inaccuracies of the astrological art (as well as the possibility that it was all a great delusion). And he was far from alone. The great astronomer Tycho Brahe produced astrological interpretations of supernovae and comets and horoscopes for his patrons, but also wrote criticisms of astrology. The same is true of Johannes Kepler. All of these great minds saw the failed predictions, the problematic ambiguities, and the claims based on insufficient data.
Brooks_BREAKER
ZODIAC ANCESTORS: Data analyst Alexander Boxer calculates there’s been 30,180,228 “Z-codes” or “distinct astrological moments” from 10,000 B.C. to 2020. To illustrate the rarity of these moments, he created these charts. The chart on the left lists famous people born in 1979, shows their Z-code, and links them to their nearest Zodiac ancestor. The other links every day in 1979 to its nearest Zodiac ancestor. Does the fun data give astrology some credibility? It does not.Alexander Boxer
But while many astrologers were conflicted about the claims they were making for astrology, few had the economic resources to ditch it entirely. Boxer details a conversation between the poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca and his astrologer friend Maino Maineri. At the time they are both working for the Visconti family who ruled Milan, but Petrarca relentlessly ribs Maineri about the inadequacies of his astrological service. You can’t even use the stars to predict next week’s weather, he says, how can you possibly advise our boss about business and military strategies? Maineri’s reply is almost heartbreaking: “My opinion about this is no different from yours, my friend, but this is how one must live here.”
Petrarca would appreciate the modern experimental confirmations of his suspicions, such as the one published in Nature in 1985. Called “A double-blind test of astrology,” it compared astrologically inferred personality against personality assessments made by psychologists. The astrologers were given a natal chart and three psychological assessments, one of which came from the person whose natal chart was under scrutiny. Astrologers correctly matched the natal chart with the psychological assessment only 34 percent of the time. In statistical terms, they did no better than pure random chance.
Boxer has expanded the available data again by examining four datasets in two experiments. One test involved comparing the timings of road traffic fatalities against astrological suggestions regarding the best moment to travel. The second stacked Renaissance investment advice against data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In neither case was there any indication that astrologers, for all their thousands of years of data mining, have stumbled across useful patterns.
An underappreciated fact about astrology is many of its practitioners never fully believed in it.
Boxer has tried his best to help astrology out by mining the most complex datasets he could find. One frequent criticism, for instance, is that two individuals can have wildly different life experiences despite being born with identical, or near-identical, astrological identities. But perhaps, Boxer says, the astrological identity is just not well-enough defined.
Boxer’s contribution here is the “Zodiac code,” a string of seven alphanumeric characters, based on the eight contributors to an individual’s horoscope drawn up by second-century Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens. The Zodiac Code, or Z-code, is a shorthand description of the positions of the heavenly bodies at the time of a person’s birth. There are 44,789,760 different Z-codes, Boxer says. It sounds like a lot, but each Z-Code can be shared by upward of 30,000 people on Earth. It is hard, then, to claim that astrology can offer predictions or advice that are unique to the individual. But, Boxer suggests, perhaps its power lies in making certain moments unique, or at least rare.
To test this, Boxer created a data-dump of historical Z-codes. From 10,000 B.C. to today, Boxer calculates, there has been a total of 30,180, 228 “distinct astrological moments.” It is surprising how rarely they repeat. For instance, the last time someone with the actor Heath Ledger’s Z-code appeared on Earth was in the year 1362 (they were born on March 31). Boxer’s own Z-code last appeared on May 20, 2669 B.C., when Imhoptep was building Egypt’s first pyramid. An unfortunate who was thrown to the lions, as documented in Vettius Valens’ second-century A.D. Anthologies, has shared a Z-code with no one since: The next person with that code will be born on March 30, 3328.
Is it enough to give astrology some credibility? No. A horoscope can only serve as “a cosmic reminder” of how unique each moment is. “It’s awe-inspiring and humbling to consider that the configuration of the heavens on our birthday, or any given day, will almost certainly never repeat in our lifetime,” Boxer says. “Even the sum of human history has played out against a backdrop of just a small fraction of astrological possibilities.” But the bottom line is that there is no discovered pattern that backs up the suggestion that these possibilities have affected human lives in any way. The data gives astrology nothing.
In the end, Boxer, like me, doesn’t think there is any reason to believe in astrology—but we are both Tauruses, so what can you expect?
In fact, throughout history, philosophers and scientists have always charted the world with the available data of the time—and they have always got things wrong.
“Men will from time to time revert to darkness out of boredom with light,” said the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz in an essay he wrote at the beginning of the 18th century. “Ours is such a time,” he went on, “with great opportunities to learn the right things being spurned, and a wealth of the most lucid truths being disregarded in favor of obscure trivialities.” Leibniz was a champion of sober thought, a mathematician clever enough to invent calculus at the same time as Isaac Newton. His essay was called “Against Barbaric Physics” and railed against a resurgence in magical thinking. Physics stripped of all mysticism is “too clear and simple for these people,” Leibniz complained. “How can any reasonable person today subscribe to a belief in fantastic qualities that is tantamount to a betrayal of all natural principles?”
Sapolsky_TH-F1
ALSO IN ASTRONOMY
Where Nature Hides the Darkest Mystery of All
By Matthew Francis
No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside, and no probe will bring us information about the inside. We can send radio messages or...READ MORE
It might sound like Leibniz is talking about a resurgent interest in astrology, but he’s not. He’s talking about forces—in particular, Newton’s argument that forces can act at a distance. The idea that the planets are “gravitating and striving toward each other,” and that “matter is supposedly able to perceive and covet even things which are remote” is “fanciful,” Leibniz says.
Leibniz thought as little of Newton’s gravitational force as he did of astrology, which he dismissed as “pure nonsense.” That said, he was a great believer in the power of Biblical prophecy. “The prophets of the Old Testament have amazingly foreseen the detail of the new,” he once wrote to Sophia, Electress of Hanover. He firmly believed that the Jesuits embodied the locusts who rise out of the Abyss in the Book of Revelation. “This is something that should not be doubted unless one is a disciple of the Antichrist,” Leibniz says.
We find it easy to forgive Leibniz his biblical follies because of his valuable contributions to mathematics and science. We do the same for Newton, whose follies were arguably greater. And we should extend the same courtesy toward ancient astrologers.
I’m not ashamed to say that I have a soft spot for astrology. Historically, astrology is the grit that seeded the pearl; its data-gathering, map-making, and pattern-seeking laid the cognitive foundations for modern science. Rather than rudely dismiss it as an embarrassing product of ignorant times, we should acknowledge its contribution.
And astrology remains useful today. It provides a useful illustration of the vexatious fallibility of human intellectual achievement—including, and perhaps particularly, the sometimes illusory certainties of science. It’s certainly something to keep in mind as we make our modern maps of particles, forces, and strange cosmological energies. Who knows? Perhaps future generations will lump 21st-century interpretations of data together with those of the astrologers—a laudable but clumsy attempt to find meaning in the meaningless—and wonder why we learned nothing from the failings of the earliest attempts to understand the universe.
Michael Brooks holds a Ph.D. in physics, and is the author of The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook.
http://nautil.us/issue/81/maps/why-astr ... b00bf1f6eb
Seeing meaning in the stars is a vital part of the scientific story.
A few years ago, I went to an astrologer as research for a radio show exploring strange beliefs. Vishal knew only my name, and date and place of birth, and didn’t tell me anything terribly profound until I asked him about the car I had just bought. He tapped something into his laptop. I waited.
“I see two cars in your future,” he said.
I laughed. “Does that mean I’ve bought a dud?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
A fortnight later, a mechanic phoned while working on my new car. He informed me I had indeed bought a dud, and suggested I return the car, get my money back, and buy another one.
I bought a second car. Two cars. It’s just a coincidence, isn’t it?
The basic premise of astrology is the stars and the planets exert an influence over events on Earth. The stars’ and planets’ exact influence depends on their motions and relative positions, such as when they appear close together in the sky. If we had all the data about how the sky looked when you were born, say, we could use it to say something about your future, your personality, and maybe your best course of action over the next few weeks, months, or years.
To the informed scientific mind—a relatively new phenomenon—astrology can’t possibly work. That’s because these heavenly bodies are nothing more than agglomerations of rock, dust, or gas. There are distant influences from the stars and planets, but they’re called the gravitational and electromagnetic forces. The gravitational force creates an attraction between masses. Electromagnetic forces transmit light, heat, magnetic attraction, and repulsion. There is a pull on Earth due to these bodies’ masses, and we see the light (and, in the sun’s case, feel the heat) they emit. That’s it. They certainly have nothing to say about the purchase of motor vehicles by science writers with a Ph.D. in quantum physics but no ability to spot a dodgy used car. Why would they?
Newton bought a book on astrology but couldn’t make sense of it. So he began to study Euclid.
Some might walk away at this point, seeing no value in discussing astrology. However, astrology is a vital part of our human, and scientific, story. We have been making astrological connections—mapping the heavens and trying to discern their influence on the Earth—for much longer than we have been doing science. And with very positive results: Astrology had a huge influence on the development of science, sometimes directly. In 1663, Isaac Newton bought a book on astrology at the Sturbridge Summer Fair. It was an act of curiosity, but Newton found that he couldn’t make sense of it because he didn’t know enough geometry. And so he began to study Euclid. This is how Newton got hooked on mathematics.
Most of the influence has been more subtle. Astronomy, for example, arose as an attempt to do better astrology. The 16th-century astrologer and mathematician Jerome Cardano even taught the public to read the skies for themselves, publishing a primer on astronomy within his 1538 astrological guide. “One who wishes to attain knowledge of the stars must begin with knowledge of the planets,” Cardano explains. And so he lays out the movements of the known planets, and instructs the reader on how to find each of them in the sky. He was, according to the Princeton scholar Anthony Grafton, “a 16th-century counterpart to Patrick Moore or Carl Sagan.”
Cardano is the first astrologer mentioned in A Scheme of Heaven, a fascinating new book by Alexander Boxer, a data scientist with a Ph.D. in physics. In the book, Boxer explores the difficult relationship between science and astrology. He honors the latter as “the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise.” It involved gathering thousands of years of observations of heavenly motion, and the concomitant earthly events—whether they be births, deaths, kingdoms lost, or riches gained—into enormous datasets. Throughout its history, Boxer writes, astrology has aimed high, looking to produce “nothing short of a systematic account linking the nature of the heavens to our own human nature.” Like ancient AI, it was the job of astrologers to identify patterns in the gathered data and extract meaning from the correlations they found. Who can blame them if they sometimes saw patterns and meaning where there were none?
It’s not even as if they were blind to this possibility. An underappreciated fact about astrology is that many of its practitioners never fully believed in it. Cardano, for one, wrote a great deal about the inaccuracies of the astrological art (as well as the possibility that it was all a great delusion). And he was far from alone. The great astronomer Tycho Brahe produced astrological interpretations of supernovae and comets and horoscopes for his patrons, but also wrote criticisms of astrology. The same is true of Johannes Kepler. All of these great minds saw the failed predictions, the problematic ambiguities, and the claims based on insufficient data.
Brooks_BREAKER
ZODIAC ANCESTORS: Data analyst Alexander Boxer calculates there’s been 30,180,228 “Z-codes” or “distinct astrological moments” from 10,000 B.C. to 2020. To illustrate the rarity of these moments, he created these charts. The chart on the left lists famous people born in 1979, shows their Z-code, and links them to their nearest Zodiac ancestor. The other links every day in 1979 to its nearest Zodiac ancestor. Does the fun data give astrology some credibility? It does not.Alexander Boxer
But while many astrologers were conflicted about the claims they were making for astrology, few had the economic resources to ditch it entirely. Boxer details a conversation between the poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca and his astrologer friend Maino Maineri. At the time they are both working for the Visconti family who ruled Milan, but Petrarca relentlessly ribs Maineri about the inadequacies of his astrological service. You can’t even use the stars to predict next week’s weather, he says, how can you possibly advise our boss about business and military strategies? Maineri’s reply is almost heartbreaking: “My opinion about this is no different from yours, my friend, but this is how one must live here.”
Petrarca would appreciate the modern experimental confirmations of his suspicions, such as the one published in Nature in 1985. Called “A double-blind test of astrology,” it compared astrologically inferred personality against personality assessments made by psychologists. The astrologers were given a natal chart and three psychological assessments, one of which came from the person whose natal chart was under scrutiny. Astrologers correctly matched the natal chart with the psychological assessment only 34 percent of the time. In statistical terms, they did no better than pure random chance.
Boxer has expanded the available data again by examining four datasets in two experiments. One test involved comparing the timings of road traffic fatalities against astrological suggestions regarding the best moment to travel. The second stacked Renaissance investment advice against data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In neither case was there any indication that astrologers, for all their thousands of years of data mining, have stumbled across useful patterns.
An underappreciated fact about astrology is many of its practitioners never fully believed in it.
Boxer has tried his best to help astrology out by mining the most complex datasets he could find. One frequent criticism, for instance, is that two individuals can have wildly different life experiences despite being born with identical, or near-identical, astrological identities. But perhaps, Boxer says, the astrological identity is just not well-enough defined.
Boxer’s contribution here is the “Zodiac code,” a string of seven alphanumeric characters, based on the eight contributors to an individual’s horoscope drawn up by second-century Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens. The Zodiac Code, or Z-code, is a shorthand description of the positions of the heavenly bodies at the time of a person’s birth. There are 44,789,760 different Z-codes, Boxer says. It sounds like a lot, but each Z-Code can be shared by upward of 30,000 people on Earth. It is hard, then, to claim that astrology can offer predictions or advice that are unique to the individual. But, Boxer suggests, perhaps its power lies in making certain moments unique, or at least rare.
To test this, Boxer created a data-dump of historical Z-codes. From 10,000 B.C. to today, Boxer calculates, there has been a total of 30,180, 228 “distinct astrological moments.” It is surprising how rarely they repeat. For instance, the last time someone with the actor Heath Ledger’s Z-code appeared on Earth was in the year 1362 (they were born on March 31). Boxer’s own Z-code last appeared on May 20, 2669 B.C., when Imhoptep was building Egypt’s first pyramid. An unfortunate who was thrown to the lions, as documented in Vettius Valens’ second-century A.D. Anthologies, has shared a Z-code with no one since: The next person with that code will be born on March 30, 3328.
Is it enough to give astrology some credibility? No. A horoscope can only serve as “a cosmic reminder” of how unique each moment is. “It’s awe-inspiring and humbling to consider that the configuration of the heavens on our birthday, or any given day, will almost certainly never repeat in our lifetime,” Boxer says. “Even the sum of human history has played out against a backdrop of just a small fraction of astrological possibilities.” But the bottom line is that there is no discovered pattern that backs up the suggestion that these possibilities have affected human lives in any way. The data gives astrology nothing.
In the end, Boxer, like me, doesn’t think there is any reason to believe in astrology—but we are both Tauruses, so what can you expect?
In fact, throughout history, philosophers and scientists have always charted the world with the available data of the time—and they have always got things wrong.
“Men will from time to time revert to darkness out of boredom with light,” said the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz in an essay he wrote at the beginning of the 18th century. “Ours is such a time,” he went on, “with great opportunities to learn the right things being spurned, and a wealth of the most lucid truths being disregarded in favor of obscure trivialities.” Leibniz was a champion of sober thought, a mathematician clever enough to invent calculus at the same time as Isaac Newton. His essay was called “Against Barbaric Physics” and railed against a resurgence in magical thinking. Physics stripped of all mysticism is “too clear and simple for these people,” Leibniz complained. “How can any reasonable person today subscribe to a belief in fantastic qualities that is tantamount to a betrayal of all natural principles?”
Sapolsky_TH-F1
ALSO IN ASTRONOMY
Where Nature Hides the Darkest Mystery of All
By Matthew Francis
No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside, and no probe will bring us information about the inside. We can send radio messages or...READ MORE
It might sound like Leibniz is talking about a resurgent interest in astrology, but he’s not. He’s talking about forces—in particular, Newton’s argument that forces can act at a distance. The idea that the planets are “gravitating and striving toward each other,” and that “matter is supposedly able to perceive and covet even things which are remote” is “fanciful,” Leibniz says.
Leibniz thought as little of Newton’s gravitational force as he did of astrology, which he dismissed as “pure nonsense.” That said, he was a great believer in the power of Biblical prophecy. “The prophets of the Old Testament have amazingly foreseen the detail of the new,” he once wrote to Sophia, Electress of Hanover. He firmly believed that the Jesuits embodied the locusts who rise out of the Abyss in the Book of Revelation. “This is something that should not be doubted unless one is a disciple of the Antichrist,” Leibniz says.
We find it easy to forgive Leibniz his biblical follies because of his valuable contributions to mathematics and science. We do the same for Newton, whose follies were arguably greater. And we should extend the same courtesy toward ancient astrologers.
I’m not ashamed to say that I have a soft spot for astrology. Historically, astrology is the grit that seeded the pearl; its data-gathering, map-making, and pattern-seeking laid the cognitive foundations for modern science. Rather than rudely dismiss it as an embarrassing product of ignorant times, we should acknowledge its contribution.
And astrology remains useful today. It provides a useful illustration of the vexatious fallibility of human intellectual achievement—including, and perhaps particularly, the sometimes illusory certainties of science. It’s certainly something to keep in mind as we make our modern maps of particles, forces, and strange cosmological energies. Who knows? Perhaps future generations will lump 21st-century interpretations of data together with those of the astrologers—a laudable but clumsy attempt to find meaning in the meaningless—and wonder why we learned nothing from the failings of the earliest attempts to understand the universe.
Michael Brooks holds a Ph.D. in physics, and is the author of The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook.
http://nautil.us/issue/81/maps/why-astr ... b00bf1f6eb
The anecdote below is about the encounter of the 47th Imam Aga Ali Shah with an astrologer given in Mumtaz Tajdin's 225 anecdotes:
http://ismaili.net/source/books/225anecdotes.pdf
(19) Once Imam Aga Ali Shah visited Maria Hatina, the village of the Gir in Kathiawar. There the Ismailis were mostly infirm farmers, who at once gathered to behold the Imam in the Alishah Bagh. With the orders of the Imam, three to four persons unloaded the hunted deer and cleaned and few other cooked rice. Every follower was rejoiced and mirthful to see the Imam. The Imam was asking their problems and giving them guidance. Meanwhile, the food was ready, which contained deer mutton and the jirasar, a kind of rice. It was a nice table. They all ate with the Imam.
The Imam asked the Mukhi, “How are you?” He was awe-struck and yearned that there was a two years’ drought in their village. The Imam looked with utter surprise and said, “What did you say, two years’ drought?” The Mukhi wept and said, “We are died. We have scanty of corn. The cattle struggle hopefully devoid of water and forage.” The Imam took serious notice of their miserable and intolerable condition and asked, “Is here any astrologer?” The Mukhi said that there were one to two astrologers in the village. The Imam said, “No, no. I mean an expert astrologer.” In the meantime, one young man said, “Mawla! One champion astrologer of the Junagadh has come in our village, who is the guest of the court of Maria Hatina.” The Imam told him to call him at once.
Pandit Chandra Shekhar Shashtari was an eminent astrologer of Junagadh. Few young men brought him before the Imam, who said, “Sir, I am in hurry to go to Junagadh.”
The Imam asked that when he was to go Junagadh, to which he said on the following day. The Imam said, “Okay, okay. You see why there is no raining for last two years. Is there any chance of rain in this year or not? You check it, when it will fall?”
The astrologer took out his books and made calculation and came to the conclusion that there was no chance of rain in the current year. The Imam said, “What? No rain in this year? You recheck your calculation. I think you have committed an error.”
The astrologer said, “My calculation never becomes fake. I have studied for 14 years in the school of Shri Sombat. For your satisfaction, I am recalculating it.” He calculated, then made his face serious and said, “Sir, there is absolutely no chance of rain in this year.” The Imam closed his eyes and remained silent. The jamat also became mum, muttering Ya Mawla, Ya Mawla.
After a moment, the Imam opened his eyes and told, “Look, astrologer, it will be rained and that too now.” The jamat delighted and recited salawat. The Imam told him, “It will be difficult for you to reach Junagadh on tomorrow as there will be flood everywhere.
Take my carriage of four horses and reach Junagadh at evening.” The Imam also gave him some cash for his fees. The astrologer started his journey for Junagadh in the Imam’s carriage. In the meantime, the people felt cool airy atmosphere. The clouds began to thicken and the gusty wind blew. There was almost darkness. The astrologer reached Junagadh, while on the other side; the Imam was with the jamat in the Alishah Bagh and said, “The astrologer reached Junagadh.” No sooner did the Imam complete his sentence than the rain started. It certainly rained cats and dogs. Imam Aga Ali Shah stayed there for eight days and joined in the auspicious celebration.
http://ismaili.net/source/books/225anecdotes.pdf
(19) Once Imam Aga Ali Shah visited Maria Hatina, the village of the Gir in Kathiawar. There the Ismailis were mostly infirm farmers, who at once gathered to behold the Imam in the Alishah Bagh. With the orders of the Imam, three to four persons unloaded the hunted deer and cleaned and few other cooked rice. Every follower was rejoiced and mirthful to see the Imam. The Imam was asking their problems and giving them guidance. Meanwhile, the food was ready, which contained deer mutton and the jirasar, a kind of rice. It was a nice table. They all ate with the Imam.
The Imam asked the Mukhi, “How are you?” He was awe-struck and yearned that there was a two years’ drought in their village. The Imam looked with utter surprise and said, “What did you say, two years’ drought?” The Mukhi wept and said, “We are died. We have scanty of corn. The cattle struggle hopefully devoid of water and forage.” The Imam took serious notice of their miserable and intolerable condition and asked, “Is here any astrologer?” The Mukhi said that there were one to two astrologers in the village. The Imam said, “No, no. I mean an expert astrologer.” In the meantime, one young man said, “Mawla! One champion astrologer of the Junagadh has come in our village, who is the guest of the court of Maria Hatina.” The Imam told him to call him at once.
Pandit Chandra Shekhar Shashtari was an eminent astrologer of Junagadh. Few young men brought him before the Imam, who said, “Sir, I am in hurry to go to Junagadh.”
The Imam asked that when he was to go Junagadh, to which he said on the following day. The Imam said, “Okay, okay. You see why there is no raining for last two years. Is there any chance of rain in this year or not? You check it, when it will fall?”
The astrologer took out his books and made calculation and came to the conclusion that there was no chance of rain in the current year. The Imam said, “What? No rain in this year? You recheck your calculation. I think you have committed an error.”
The astrologer said, “My calculation never becomes fake. I have studied for 14 years in the school of Shri Sombat. For your satisfaction, I am recalculating it.” He calculated, then made his face serious and said, “Sir, there is absolutely no chance of rain in this year.” The Imam closed his eyes and remained silent. The jamat also became mum, muttering Ya Mawla, Ya Mawla.
After a moment, the Imam opened his eyes and told, “Look, astrologer, it will be rained and that too now.” The jamat delighted and recited salawat. The Imam told him, “It will be difficult for you to reach Junagadh on tomorrow as there will be flood everywhere.
Take my carriage of four horses and reach Junagadh at evening.” The Imam also gave him some cash for his fees. The astrologer started his journey for Junagadh in the Imam’s carriage. In the meantime, the people felt cool airy atmosphere. The clouds began to thicken and the gusty wind blew. There was almost darkness. The astrologer reached Junagadh, while on the other side; the Imam was with the jamat in the Alishah Bagh and said, “The astrologer reached Junagadh.” No sooner did the Imam complete his sentence than the rain started. It certainly rained cats and dogs. Imam Aga Ali Shah stayed there for eight days and joined in the auspicious celebration.
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swamidada_2
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swamidada_2
- Posts: 297
- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
Natasha Symonds
You may not believe how the length of your pinky finger (little finger) can describe your personality and what type of person you are. Compare and measure pinky finger with ring finger. There are 3 levels. If length of pinky is little higher than next to it finger, you are in class A. If length of pinky is equal to next, you are in class B. If length of pinky is lower than next to it, you are in class C.
According to renowned palmists everywhere, the length of your pinky can actually show you the type of person you are and the personality traits you have.
There are three main types of people, Type A, Type B, and Type C. Take a close look at your pinky, choose the type you are, and read on to find out more about your personality based on the length of your little finger!
Pinky shape A
– You have an incredible heart and are always ready to help those in need.
– You hate lies, dishonesty, and insincerity because it goes against everything you believe.
– You keep your feelings well and do not open strangers so easily.
– You are sometimes stronger and more open-minded than you really are. However, when you approach someone and trust them, you become much more open and expressive.
– Your eyes are very expressive and you wear your heart on the sleeve.
– You do not like stupid people and sometimes you can be strange and arrogant.
– You are a very hard worker and will always finish every task put upon you, even the ones that are boring and unfulfilling.
Pinky shape B
– You remain calm and collected in the midst of chaos and disorder.
– You do not easily approach new people. You are a little shy and reserved at first.
– Your soul is very subtle, although you don’t always show this.
– You are a devoted and faithful partner in your romantic relationships. You always give your loved one 100% of your love and devotion and think about them constantly.
– When you focus on something, you are always busy keeping it to the end.
– You are well-known for your ability to keep secrets. You’ll even be foolish if you know the truth to protect someone else’s feelings.
– You are very afraid of being hurt. You can pretend that you do not need anyone, but you still dream of finding your soulmate.
Pinky shape C
– You never hold grudges against those who have wronged you.
– You are often described as an easy-going person and get along well with everyone.
– You remain respectful of the opinions of others, even if you do not agree with them.
– You do not like any surprises. You feel very uncomfortable when you do not know what will happen.
– You try to keep your worries and problems as close to you as possible. This can disrupt your partner’s relationship because they often do not know what’s bothering you.
– You are a straight-shooter and like to tell it like it is. You don’t sugar-coat your words and prefer the company of those who do the same. You want to be around those you consider honest and authentic.
– You want to be with those who think you are honest and genuine.
– You have an ego that can be dominant and you can get angry quickly when you argue. However, you are also the first one to apologize after the discussion is over.
You may not believe how the length of your pinky finger (little finger) can describe your personality and what type of person you are. Compare and measure pinky finger with ring finger. There are 3 levels. If length of pinky is little higher than next to it finger, you are in class A. If length of pinky is equal to next, you are in class B. If length of pinky is lower than next to it, you are in class C.
According to renowned palmists everywhere, the length of your pinky can actually show you the type of person you are and the personality traits you have.
There are three main types of people, Type A, Type B, and Type C. Take a close look at your pinky, choose the type you are, and read on to find out more about your personality based on the length of your little finger!
Pinky shape A
– You have an incredible heart and are always ready to help those in need.
– You hate lies, dishonesty, and insincerity because it goes against everything you believe.
– You keep your feelings well and do not open strangers so easily.
– You are sometimes stronger and more open-minded than you really are. However, when you approach someone and trust them, you become much more open and expressive.
– Your eyes are very expressive and you wear your heart on the sleeve.
– You do not like stupid people and sometimes you can be strange and arrogant.
– You are a very hard worker and will always finish every task put upon you, even the ones that are boring and unfulfilling.
Pinky shape B
– You remain calm and collected in the midst of chaos and disorder.
– You do not easily approach new people. You are a little shy and reserved at first.
– Your soul is very subtle, although you don’t always show this.
– You are a devoted and faithful partner in your romantic relationships. You always give your loved one 100% of your love and devotion and think about them constantly.
– When you focus on something, you are always busy keeping it to the end.
– You are well-known for your ability to keep secrets. You’ll even be foolish if you know the truth to protect someone else’s feelings.
– You are very afraid of being hurt. You can pretend that you do not need anyone, but you still dream of finding your soulmate.
Pinky shape C
– You never hold grudges against those who have wronged you.
– You are often described as an easy-going person and get along well with everyone.
– You remain respectful of the opinions of others, even if you do not agree with them.
– You do not like any surprises. You feel very uncomfortable when you do not know what will happen.
– You try to keep your worries and problems as close to you as possible. This can disrupt your partner’s relationship because they often do not know what’s bothering you.
– You are a straight-shooter and like to tell it like it is. You don’t sugar-coat your words and prefer the company of those who do the same. You want to be around those you consider honest and authentic.
– You want to be with those who think you are honest and genuine.
– You have an ego that can be dominant and you can get angry quickly when you argue. However, you are also the first one to apologize after the discussion is over.
Amulets, Magic, and Talismans
Magical designs are to be found on virtually every medium of material culture,including metalwork, objects carved of wood, cloth, and jewelry. Their presence highlights beliefs and practices prevalent to different degrees throughout the Islamic world, expounded by the authors of a variety of treatises devoted to magic. While the roots of many of the designs and symbols are to be found in early medieval Islam, the nature of these practices means that the same symbols continue to be used in much the same way on “magical” objects today. The chapter will begin with a brief discussion of what the term “magic” refers to within the context of Islam, then will consider aspects of the magical literature where theories of magic and its uses are put forward, before proceeding to discuss the elements of what can be termed a “magical vocabulary” and to examine traces of the magical theories preserved in medieval and some later artifacts.
What is Magic?
Magic and its traditional place in Muslim societies has most succinctly been described by Michael Dolls as “a more forceful method of supplication or a super charged prayer” (Dols 2004: 87). There is of course good and bad magic practiced by different kinds of magicians. Licit magicians are regarded as being able to constrain the spirits by supplicating God, while illicit magicians enslave the demonic spirits and are able to enact evil deeds. Over time there has been wide ranging debate over what is or what is not allowable in Islam. The tenth century Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, known as Ikhwan al Safa, discussed below, for example, included a polemical treatise against those who dismiss magic and oppose the “science of talismans” – that is, the use of materials, particularly metals and plants, that possess certain useful properties hidden from human understanding but evident in their effect on other creatures. To justify their advocacy of astral magic and talismans, the anonymous authors provide a history of attitudes towards magic (Ikhwan al Safa&; 2011). Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was also concerned with magical practices and believed that human beings had the ability to influence the“world of elements” through supernatural means: “These are sciences showing how human souls may become prepared to exercise an influence upon the world of the elements, either without any aid or with the aid of celestial matters”(Asatrian 2003: 94). In the case of such practices today, there is a wide discrepancy across the Islamic world on its acceptability, much of which depends on which strand of Islam is being followed.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/11255688/Amule ... view-paper
Magical designs are to be found on virtually every medium of material culture,including metalwork, objects carved of wood, cloth, and jewelry. Their presence highlights beliefs and practices prevalent to different degrees throughout the Islamic world, expounded by the authors of a variety of treatises devoted to magic. While the roots of many of the designs and symbols are to be found in early medieval Islam, the nature of these practices means that the same symbols continue to be used in much the same way on “magical” objects today. The chapter will begin with a brief discussion of what the term “magic” refers to within the context of Islam, then will consider aspects of the magical literature where theories of magic and its uses are put forward, before proceeding to discuss the elements of what can be termed a “magical vocabulary” and to examine traces of the magical theories preserved in medieval and some later artifacts.
What is Magic?
Magic and its traditional place in Muslim societies has most succinctly been described by Michael Dolls as “a more forceful method of supplication or a super charged prayer” (Dols 2004: 87). There is of course good and bad magic practiced by different kinds of magicians. Licit magicians are regarded as being able to constrain the spirits by supplicating God, while illicit magicians enslave the demonic spirits and are able to enact evil deeds. Over time there has been wide ranging debate over what is or what is not allowable in Islam. The tenth century Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, known as Ikhwan al Safa, discussed below, for example, included a polemical treatise against those who dismiss magic and oppose the “science of talismans” – that is, the use of materials, particularly metals and plants, that possess certain useful properties hidden from human understanding but evident in their effect on other creatures. To justify their advocacy of astral magic and talismans, the anonymous authors provide a history of attitudes towards magic (Ikhwan al Safa&; 2011). Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was also concerned with magical practices and believed that human beings had the ability to influence the“world of elements” through supernatural means: “These are sciences showing how human souls may become prepared to exercise an influence upon the world of the elements, either without any aid or with the aid of celestial matters”(Asatrian 2003: 94). In the case of such practices today, there is a wide discrepancy across the Islamic world on its acceptability, much of which depends on which strand of Islam is being followed.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/11255688/Amule ... view-paper
Very much so based on the above post which you have obviously not read. She says:swamidada wrote:Is Magic related to Astrology?
“These are sciences showing how human souls may become prepared to exercise an influence upon the world of the elements, either without any aid or with the aid of celestial matters”(Asatrian 2003: 94).
Celestial matters means matters pertaining to the movements and positions of the celestial bodies.
If you read the whole article, there are diagrams and illustrations depicting the relationship between what is described in the various objects and the heavenly bodies.
It is not human soul but it is progressive human brain which can make difference. Human has no power to influence celestial matters or celestial bodies. It was only few years back when this idea popped up; that there is a relationship in between Magic and Astrology.kmaherali wrote:“These are sciences showing how human souls may become prepared to exercise an influence upon the world of the elements, either without any aid or with the aid of celestial matters”(Asatrian 2003: 94).swamidada wrote:Is Magic related to Astrology?
The statement that I quoted says nothing about humans influencing the celestial bodies. It says about the ability of human souls to influence the world of elements either with or without the aid of celestial bodies.swamidada wrote:It is not human soul but it is progressive human brain which can make difference. Human has no power to influence celestial matters or celestial bodies. It was only few years back when this idea popped up; that there is a relationship in between Magic and Astrology.
Buj Niranjan Part Six states:
ek aalam suno meraa meetaa
dhartee bhee taa arash jo keetaa(retee laee rasaj jo keetaa)......1
Listen to a story, my friend, about a spiritually elevated person who elevated even the sand around him.
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/23011
However elevated souls can influence the celestial bodies. There is a Prophetic tradition of him splitting the moon into two:
We were along with God's Messenger at Mina, that moon was split up into two. One of its parts was behind the mountain and the other one was on this side of the mountain. God's Messenger said to us: Bear witness to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_of_the_moon
Mowlana Rumi has also confirmed this in his Dicourses of Rumi.
How did the Miracle of the Splitting of the Moon occur?
https://questionsonislam.com/article/mi ... ing-moon-0
Also according to Ginanic tradition, Pir Shams brought down the sun.
Anant Akhado:
Aashaajee Shaah Shamsh kero deen peechhaanno
chaudas tene paayaa jee
suraj mangaavee jyot dekhaaddee
Nar sohee avtaar........................Haree anant..378
Oh Lord Know the religion preached by Pir Shamsh
he achieved control over the four directions
He was able to order the sun to come down to the earth
and demonstrate it's light
He was indeed the Manifestation (of Light)
Haree You are eternal...
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/13080
Beside Astrology and Magic, now you induced third factor in discussion i.e Miracle.kmaherali wrote:However elevated souls can influence the celestial bodies. There is a Prophetic tradition of him splitting the moon into two:swamidada wrote:It is not human soul but it is progressive human brain which can make difference. Human has no power to influence celestial matters or celestial bodies. It was only few years back when this idea popped up; that there is a relationship in between Magic and Astrology.
We were along with God's Messenger at Mina, that moon was split up into two. One of its parts was behind the mountain and the other one was on this side of the mountain. God's Messenger said to us: Bear witness to this
The splitting of moon is a miracle and it has no sound scientific footings. But sorry to write without offending any one, the Prophet split the moon but did not give sound instructions for sighting of lunar moon, and every year at Eidein the Muslims are split like splitting of moon.
We are discussing the influence of elevated souls upon the celestial bodies. Whether they can be explained scientifically or not is irrelevant. No all occurrences can be scientifically explained, that does not mean that they do not occur.swamidada wrote: The splitting of moon is a miracle and it has no sound scientific footings.
Last edited by kmaherali on Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Compare my translation of couplet with yours.kmaherali wrote:Buj Niranjan Part Six states:swamidada wrote:It is not human soul but it is progressive human brain which can make difference. Human has no power to influence celestial matters or celestial bodies. It was only few years back when this idea popped up; that there is a relationship in between Magic and Astrology.
ek aalam suno meraa meetaa
dhartee bhee taa arash jo keetaa(retee laee rasaj jo keetaa)......1
Listen to a story, my friend, about a spiritually elevated person who elevated even the sand around him.
According to me 'Aalim' means knowledgeable person. It means Aalim can uplift a particle to heavens. In Urdu it means zarah ko aasman par punhchana. Means in the companionship of Aalim (ustaad, teacher) his nazar e karam lift you to heaven.
Let me quote here a real discussion between youth and a well known missionary ( I do not want to name) in Garden JK, where Missionary Saheb quoted that anecdote during waez.kmaherali wrote:Also according to Ginanic tradition, Pir Shams brought down the sun.swamidada wrote:It is not human soul but it is progressive human brain which can make difference. Human has no power to influence celestial matters or celestial bodies. It was only few years back when this idea popped up; that there is a relationship in between Magic and Astrology.
Anant Akhado:
Aashaajee Shaah Shamsh kero deen peechhaanno
chaudas tene paayaa jee
suraj mangaavee jyot dekhaaddee
Nar sohee avtaar........................Haree anant..378
Oh Lord Know the religion preached by Pir Shamsh
he achieved control over the four directions
He was able to order the sun to come down to the earth
and demonstrate it's light
He was indeed the Manifestation (of Light)
Haree You are eternal...
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/13080
Modern youth are smarter than previous generations. Youth argued scientifically, if sun tilt half degree up or down what will happen to planet earth. Question was valid. Missionary first gave some unreasonable answers, then said you people suppose not to ask such questions in dharma and finally said," Oh this anecdote has inner and esoteric meaning (as you usually do), you won't understand".
kmaherali wrote:We are discussing the influence of elevated souls upon the celestial bodies. Whether they can be explained scientifically or not is irrelevant. No all occurrences can be scientifically explained, that does not mean that they do not occur.swamidada wrote: The splitting of moon is a miracle and it has no sound scientific footings.
Mostly The Prophets and The Imams, already elevated souls usually show such kind of miracles. Haven't read in any history or in any article that any human being has split the moon or the sun.
Did al Hallaj influenced hid surroundings. He was martyred. Even his spiritual guide Junaid Baghdadi left him.kmaherali wrote:Nevertheless he is a human being who can influence his surroundings. That is the point I have been making.swamidada wrote: According to me 'Aalim' means knowledgeable person. It means Aalim can uplift a particle to heavens.
As I said earlier not all phenomena can be explained scientifically, that does not mean that they do not occur. There are matters that are beyond rational or scientific explanations. One has to take approaches such as Ibadat to understand such matters.swamidada wrote: Modern youth are smarter than previous generations. Youth argued scientifically, if sun tilt half degree up or down what will happen to planet earth. Question was valid. Missionary first gave some unreasonable answers, then said you people suppose not to ask such questions in dharma and finally said," Oh this anecdote has inner and esoteric meaning (as you usually do), you won't understand".
MHI's message:
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."(CONVOCATION ADDRESS ON THE OCCASION OF THE 10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY - 1994-11-19)
In my opinion ideas based on miraculous phenomena are part of unorthodox ideas alluded to in the above quote.
Miracles are possible for any elevated soul.swamidada wrote: Mostly The Prophets and The Imams, already elevated souls usually show such kind of miracles. Haven't read in any history or in any article that any human being has split the moon or the sun.
There is a hadith which states:
“Allah, the Almighty said, ‘Whoever has mutual animosity with a friend (wali) of Mine, I declare war upon him. My servant does not draw near to Me with anything more beloved to Me than the religious duties that I have imposed upon him; and My servant continues to draw near to Me with supererogatory works so that I would love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes, and his leg with which he walks. Were he to ask of Me, I would surely give him; and were he to ask Me for refuge, I would surely grant it to him.”
Hence whatever is possible for God is possible for him