i think belief in astrology is really about expanding the boundary of ones free will. In this bed talk I will
Our free will is bounded by physics, people1, and genetics2.
Some of these boundaries are well defined3 and wars are on to make these less bounded. eg. gender, caste, class, money etc. and some are things that are essential and so war is not the right approach, but they could come up in therapy, eg. parents4.
The default boundary we grow up with is too limiting. in order to go about our business as people we need to do a lot of things that are outside our current free will. to face the world, we need permission or a belief that we can be more and are allowed to be more because of our unique characteristics.
this has individualist as well as collectivist solutions.
the collective ones are about being a member of as many groups as can be. safely. We become members of various groups outside of the immediate family all through our life. We join social media groups, we join things for ethical reasons, we become part of sports teams, wear t shirts about niche things, identify as a nerd etc etc.
The individualistic solutions are the nuclear family, career pride, getting fit, eating clean, learning origami etc. they’re about you and how you are now, and that means you can do more things, behave differently, you have created abilities to expand your boundary.
This might make more sense to me who grew up in India, which is very authoritarian in its epistemic, than to someone who did not. “do you allow your wife to go to work?” someone asked me once, in exactly those words. in my culture, there’s stuff people are allowed to do or not based on their physical and other properties, and what the person **wants** to do is not seen as originating in themselves but the result of prescriptions. There’s food, for eg. that some people in India cannot eat, not allowed, only the म्लेच्छ have free will in this regard, the स्वच्छ and the सात्विक have their free will curtailed at this boundary 5.
And i dont think any of those solutions I mentioned above are all that different from being INTFJP, Libra or Chaotic Neutral. Astrology, Tarot, MBTI etc. all help us create new functions, new capabilities, by expanding our free will map. I think this is true in both “I made this decision because I am intuitive” and “I will listen to my inner child today” ways.
Free will, an aside:
you’re wondering, what on heart do i mean by free will and what in bell is a boundary of will. Let me get into that a little more.
your free will is the person you are, mediated by the tools you have. i say this because if your choices originate within you, they must originate in your personality and be expressed via your skills using the tools available to you6.
We learn to be the people we are based on our environment and most of our environment is other people. This is probably why personality is parent-loaded7, because they contribute both the genetic and, since they create the childhood environment, the early epigenetic.
Our skills & tools are often less parent loaded, they are more the result of later interactions between our environment and our personality. and I think our current environment, money, people,etc. that we can access and use to affect a choice, they are largely temporal loaded and they change a lot from time to time.
Back to Astrology:
all this is exactly the opposite of what science does. science, because of its addiction to the verifiable, presents a universe that is much more tightly bounded than our imaginations. And in the absence of religion/caste/whathaveyou, we often turn to reason, and science, a modern component of reason, becomes our way to be. this is kinda stupid because science is not a way of life. it’s a methodology for answering a very specific type of question leading to a very specific type of answer. and it has no answers for most of the questions we have. Which is why we often turn to other things like belief systems8.
Astrology though, describes you not as a collection of dos and donts (be it scientific ways of sleeping or ethical ways of buying) but a collection of possibilities. These are vague enough to be freeing without being too sparse to offer support when needed.
For pushing our boundaries, we need both permissions, or justifications and explanations. I see Permissions/Justifications as being forward looking. We act almost always out of necessity, inner and outer. what we can do is what is possible in the environment, and when you do something new, we are guided by what we are permitted to do, justified in doing, and then, we explain, guided by where these permissions come from.
which is why, the title.
An Aside about Indian Astrology and The featured Image:
The image is taken from Madhugantagnja. “Tajika Neelakanthi original text with translation and commentary” (1976 ed.). Varanasi: Chaukhamba Amarbharati Prakashan.
What we call astrology today seems to have been a medevial times “personalized predictive analytics” invention. The predicting and learning about the heavens project that scholars were trying to do back in the day goes way back, there are mentions of how to track the movement of stars in several vedas and the oldest indian book we have a copy of is Vedanga Jyotisha which dates back to hundred years BCE. And that book is all about making a sensible calendar, measuring days, equinoxes and stuff that we today call astronomy. How the science became the pseudoscience is still being hotly debated, but it might look a lot like how online advertising began as a branch of mathematics.
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers
- species > biology ↩︎
- chemistry ↩︎
- Margin of a lesion ↩︎
- To be clear, the boundary of parents isn’t a bad thing it is the best way to learn how to be a person and some of us, like me, lucked out and were taught very fun and useful boundaries. This isn’t an antinatalist rant. Those people got issues (about having issues). ↩︎
- Mlechha ↩︎
- if you believe that your choices do not originate from within you, then I’m guessing you already believe in astrology or determinism or something ↩︎
- a phrase demonstrative of my statistics envy https://nextjournal.com/pc-methods/factor-loading ↩︎
- If your belief-boundary is concrete, like “eating for ethical reasons”, has it really pushed your boundary outwards? I don’t know, you would. ↩︎