It was a pleasant Sunday morning in October, I was watching the morning news on my favourite channel in the TV. During the break, the flashing displayed “Jyotisham Oka Moodha nammakam” (Telugu) meaning ‘Astrology is blind belief.’
My thoughts started racing. How is that there is a different perspective to Astrology. I realised, for everything individuals/groups can always have different opinions and rightly there are already, different political beliefs, religions beliefs, medical beliefs, economic beliefs and so on. Calling a belief as blind seemed to be slightly unwarranted.
Being an Astrologer myself I strongly believe that Astrology is a science. For everyone to understand let us define what are the attributes of a science.
Science is that where the outcome is predictable for a given set of conditions. It is repetitive i.e. Any number of times we repeat, the result is the same under given set of conditions. What is blind faith? It is believing in something, which some others may not believe. The spark in my mind flashed. Yeah, here it is, I believe in God and some others do not. God cannot be experimented repeatedly to prove the same result as in science. Then in this scientific world can we say God does not exist and it is all blind belief? This is a question to all readers. It is a different fact that we have some God men who flourish in the name of God while the very existence of God is questioned by some others.
In the same tone let us discuss about medicine. If medicine is science, and it is so , it works for a disease. No person suffering from a disease when administered with specific medicine should get fully cured because science is repetitive and absolute. Now that medicines exist generally for all known diseases, people should not be dying. But they do. Do we call that the medicine is not a science. Let us examine the weather report. The weatherman predicts thunderstorm and heavy rain at a specific place. Instances are there when the day ended up with some heavy winds and nothing as predicted . Then do we say weather prediction is not science?
Have we not noticed that the most brilliant students who attend the same lectures in same school perform differently in examination and end up in unexpected careers. Do we say that the school teaching is different to different students?
The underlying fact is that there are absolute fundamental sciences like Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry and also the applied sciences. Again both these sciences are the subsets of human thought. Human thought can perceive subtle vibrations of the universal energy and also gets impacted by these subtle vibrations individually, hence resulting in different variable outputs. All applied sciences are the mix of fundamental sciences coupled with human mind there by delivering different outputs. In other words there is a fixed scientific concept in all the objects, activities and existence coupled with a variable dynamic component, generated by universe, which would dictate the final outcome in innumerable options. It is this variable component, which is given different names like God, luck, intellect, fate etc, when we do not understand the subtle way how the environment has worked on the outcome.
The variable component of the science which dynamically changes the outcome predicted through standard scientific models is the cause for the variations. To elaborate further, when persons die without any reason, we attribute unknown terms to this, when we finally understand that it is from a specific virus or bacteria we say it is science. But the fact is that the event has happened and earlier we named it as blind belief a strange name, whatever your say, but later the same got replaced by the name of the bacteria/virus.
Hence as long as we cannot scientifically explain how a thing is happening we say it is blind faith and when we can explain it is called science. In either case, the actual happening has not changed but when we are able to explain , we could attribute a name, reason, justification and called it science.
Now do we say that Astrology is a science or blind faith?
(Continued in next article)
ASTRO VEDIC JYOTISH