Understand Personalities and Planets before Jumping to Predictions

It’s your friend’s birthday and you want to give them something special. You are discussing options with your brother for suggestions. You reject many and accept some to think over. How are you doing this? Because you know your friend well. What contributed to this understanding? It’s a simple thing but the result of complex processes that your mind does in the background without making it obvious.

Your understanding of your friend is a combination of multiple pieces.

Part one is their age, gender, education level, family background, exposure, financial status. Even if 2 friends were similar on these considerations, you may still choose different gifts for them. Because you are distilling their personality further based on Part two that is their unique behavioral quirks, influences (people / philosophies), nature in terms of reactions to various situations, unique experiences, dreams and expectations from life. Your brother is suggesting gift options based on his knowledge of part one. Your acceptance or rejection is happening based on part two. Similarly while reading a chart in Astrology, unless a person’s chart is as comprehensively understood, it will be difficult for an astrologer to make accurate predictions. Humans are evolving all the time and prediction has to take into account not just the events that can be foretold, but also the likely reactions of the person in question. Because subsequent situations are influenced by this.

There is an additional aspect to this argument. A chart covers all facets of a person’s engagements – work, parents, marriage partner, children, friends, sexual inclinations, earnings, kind of work that a person will engage in, kind of people a person will interact with and many more. These are a result of interaction between planets and houses (there are 12 houses in a chart and each represents a wide facet with dominant qualities). If we were to give a human form to each planet and house for our understanding (not too many here, just 21 if you are a student of Vedic Astrology – 12 houses and 9 planets) and understand their personality in the same way as above for your friend, prediction will be a cakewalk. Unless we know every single thing a planet can do, believes in and will or will not do in a specific case, we are far away from any prediction. Same goes for the houses. Then and only then can the synthesis to draw a sketch begin.

The bane of many a budding astrologer is the rush to jump on buying the gift before understanding the friend.

Myths around Astrology, Astrologers and Predictions

Why do we draw up business or sales forecasts? Why do we restructure organizations? Why do we plan inventories? Why do we do weather forecasting? All these are a dossier to prepare us for what lies ahead and to plan accordingly. This came home to me revealingly when I joined the Grad Course in Astrology in 2009.

About astrologers, I had grown up listening and many times saying myself like many others in India that if they were so good why did they not find great riches, achievements and happiness for themselves and their families. My understanding like many others was that it was a mystical field where fates could be changed and anything could be made to happen magically. When I started a formal study of the subject in 2009, one of our professors said a beautiful line that busted this fallacious impression. He said – ‘The purpose of Astrology is not to know what will happen tomorrow, it is to be able to plan what to do tomorrow.’ It’s exactly like in the world of business – If you know where the economies are headed, how they are going to shape the demand for your business and what are the talent gaps, your planning is that much value-added.

Many would say that if future is pre-ordained, what is the point of knowing it before and how do ones' actions stemming from the knowledge of it help? Let me give an example here. You know that summers are inevitable. You also cannot stop going out. So what do you do? You ensure your car AC is serviced. You cannot escape snow in winter either. So you ensure that the car is equipped with appropriate tires.

Similarly in Astrology, if you know that times are likely to be rough, you work hard to ensure that any loss is restricted. If you know the times are likely to be good, you could work still harder to reap maximum benefit possible. Nature and its Sciences are smart - All roads lead to ensure that you keep doing your Karma. They also guide you to understand where to direct your actions. Should you focus on expansion or invest in building IP or restructure?

The most important thing that the subject teaches you is that it’s not about passive reception. It’s about active participation. How you react to events is where Free-Will interrupts to make its impact on destiny. To an argument that this may be pre-ordained as well, the answer is that yes Events may be pre-ordained, Situations already set, Your Reactions influenced but in the end there are Choices and those are entirely Yours. It’s not out there to prove that you are helpless. It’s there to reveal that you are powerful beyond measure.