Philosophical Astrology
Adi Da Samraj
Astrology is popularly understood to be a means for predicting the future particularly one’s personal destiny. However, the fundamental and traditional import of astrology is essentially philosophical, rather than predictive. Astrology describes the patterns of human existence as being not different or separate from the patterns of the cosmic domain as a whole. Thus, the fundamental communication of astrology is that the pattern of everything human coincides with the pattern of everything altogether.
Astrology proposes, for instance, that there are direct correspondences between the pattern of the human body and the total pattern of the universe. This understanding is not alien even to contemporary science. Indeed, the fundamental endeavor of both astrology and science is the identification and systematic comprehension of patterns. However, science does not yet grasp the fullness of the understanding that is the foundation of astrology, and instead indulges in a reductive materialistic “point of view”. Astrology is an ancient enterprise of human beings, a fundamental philosophy that has been coincident with humankind for thousands of years, even in prehistoric times. As such, astrology is fundamentally descriptive—rather than predictive.
Astrology finds human life to be neither different from nor dissociated from the pattern displayed in (and as) the cosmic domain. Astrology (rightly) understands that human life and the cosmic “play” are one and the same. On the basis of such understanding, one may observe the patterns and the potentials in arising phenomena— and, by doing so, one may, perhaps, learn the likelihood (or pattern-probability) of future events. It is only in this sense—of pattern-based probability-observation—that astrology may be properly said to be predictive. Nevertheless, observing patterns that are perhaps normative relative to future probability is no more (or less) reliable a means of actually “knowing” what is going to happen tomorrow than any other form of divination. One could (as many do) just as well throw a number of arbitrarily chosen objects on the ground and, then, read the resultant pattern of their coincidence intuitively or imaginatively. Patterns can always be seen—and the same (or, otherwise, similar) patterns may even be likely to re-occur in the future. However, the process of astrological prediction, like that of common divination, is more a popular game than it is a form of philosophy or even science. Indeed, the popular enterprises of conventionally predictive astrology and of divination are, essentially, part of the common evidence of social-ego-culture, and of the signs and developments of socialego- culture and of ego-based psycho-physical pattern-presumptions in every context and path associated with the Great Tradition—or all of the problem-based and searchoriented traditions of the “great path of return” and, altogether, of the first six stages of life. It is true that an aspect and an intrinsic implication of the right application of astrology is evidently predictive, in the sense that, by systematically identifying patterns, one may observe the tendency of similar patterns (or mutations of those patterns) to arise not only in all aspects (both personal and universal) of presenttime but, also, in the future. Nevertheless, the findings of right and true astrology are fundamentally and consistently descriptive (or pattern-identifying and patternsystematizing) rather than categorically predictive (or patently “foreknowing”).
When astrology is understood to be founded in the same principles as rational philosophy and right and true Spirituality and esotericism, then one may appreciate its true virtue—instead of presuming it to be intrinsically outside the domain of rationality. In that case, the limitations of astrology, as it is conventionally interpreted, are also intrinsically understood to be the same limitations that are evident in the entire Great Tradition of humankind the limitations of egoity and of the first six stages of life. The practice of astrology can be regenerated and made right by being made coincident with Me and, thereby, being liberated from the limitations of the first six stages of life (including the popular culture of prediction and of divination). Thus conformed to Me, astrology comes to be founded in a right and true and searchless understanding of the Intrinsically egoless, Indivisible, “Differenceless”, Acausal, and Self-Evidently Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality Itself— and, thus and thereby, astrology comes to be a right and true “method” for identifying patterns (based on a right philosophical understanding) and seeing the patterned totality in a rational and systematic manner, in the context of space and time and the human body and human life and the “world” altogether. Such is the right and true understanding of astrology—as it is, and as it has (in its truest sense) always been.
It is the ego-principle that makes astrology subordinate itself to conventionally predictive and divining enterprises. When astrology interprets what are mere patterns as if they are, instead, modes of egoic “self”-identity, the patterns are (on that basis) used for the conventional purposes of ego-description, daily-life predictions, and popular divination. Instead, those who practice astrology should adhere to the greater discipline of humbly, carefully, and systematically identifying patterns in the cosmos and (coincidently) in the human domain—and, then, simply describing (rather than overtly or casually predicting) the immediately actual or otherwise probable demonstration of those patterns in human life, human time, the “world”, and the future.
Such right descriptive and probability-assessing practice of astrology is (at least potentially) a useful and (in any case) profoundly intelligent philosophical—and, potentially, esoteric—activity.