
Ask HN: Help me learn astrology in 2020 - jelliclesfarm
One of my to-do in 2020 resolutions is to learn more about astrology and explore it and see if it is a predictive science.<p>1. I am learning Vedic or Indian Astrology which uses the sidereal and not tropical charts.<p>2. I have a software that does calculations<p>3. I have books. So. Many. Books.<p>I want to be able to study it as a discipline and subject. I am not interested in proving whether it’s ‘science’ or an ‘pseudo science’. Maybe it’s is ..maybe it’s art..maybe it’s a game.<p>The goal is to read the texts and follow the rules of analysis and predict. And then I want to record it, find patterns based on interpretations and see how it turns out. There has to be a pattern and it can’t be entirely random even if the predictions don’t pan out.<p>How do I go about this?
======
carapace
Ah, metaphysics.

I studied metaphysics in a practical way extensively in the late 90's. I was
technically homeless but I lived by magic for about four and a half years. It
was pretty intense. Anyway...

I speak with authority in this matter:

Astrology is a form of _divination_. All forms of divination work, depending
on the operator. All forms of: Astrology, Numerology, Tarot, Dowsing by
pendulum or rods, Palmistry, Reading of tea leaves or entrails (yuch!) or
cracks in heated turtle shells or thrown reeds or coins, I Ching, omens and
signs, etc., _all_ of them, work by the same method. It's the internal potency
of the operator that leads to correct knowledge (from "esoteric" sources.)
Your own connection to source guides the interpretation. The format of the
divination system is a conduit to bring semantics into concrete syntax.

If you simply want reliable truthful information the "applied kinesiology"
technique of Dr. Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. [1] is the single simplest
and purest methodology. It's so mind-blowing that even I can barely credit it.
But I have never found it to fail. It's so spooky that I often "forget" to use
it, and just bumble along as best i can. YMMV

However, if you want to study astrology, you can just make up your own system.
It will be more powerful than adopting someone else's system. _Unless_ you
feel _drawn_ to a certain school or format, in which case that's important
information for your personal path and you should likely study that. Spread
all your books out, pick one at random, open it to a random page, and read the
first passage your eye alight upon. (Bibliomancy, another form of divination,
one of my favorites. I have a shelf with the Gita, Bible, Beezlebub's Tales to
His Grandson, and others and still practice bibliomancy with them from time to
time.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliomancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliomancy)
)

[1] Although he didn't invent it, his presentation and discussion of it are
the only thing I'm talking about here:
[https://veritaspub.com/](https://veritaspub.com/) If you go look at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_kinesiology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_kinesiology)
there's a lot lot there that could be unpacked, but that's NOT what I'm
talking about. I mean specifically the "Levels of Consciousness"
interpretation of Hawkins.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Thank you. But can we codify it in a mathematical language that can be a
visual map? I chose Vedic astrology because to a certain extent the astronomy
and math part of it is pretty well documented and authored.

How to extract the predictive pattern recognition aspects of it so the
‘intuition’ part of it can be understood?

~~~
carapace
Cheers!

> But can we codify it in a mathematical language that can be a visual map?

Short answer is yes (but not in the same way as physics.) But there's no "one
true" map (somewhat like how there's no "one true" programming language.)

> I chose Vedic astrology because to a certain extent the astronomy and math
> part of it is pretty well documented and authored.

Yes, but it's all made up. And all in association with a world that's long
gone (or at least changed massively since then.) It's no better or worse than
e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Astrology isn't about the actual planets.

Have you looked at Sacred Geometry? (It's just geometry, but studied with a
sacred mindset.)
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sacred+Geometry&t=ffab&atb=v60-1&i...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sacred+Geometry&t=ffab&atb=v60-1&iax=images&ia=images)

It sounds to me like you might be wanting to "mind map" psychological
archetypes onto a sort of Sacred Geometry? (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map)
)

> How to extract the predictive pattern recognition aspects of it so the
> ‘intuition’ part of it can be understood?

There's aren't any "predictive pattern recognition aspects" in the thing
itself. As scientists point out, rightly, divination is logically barren. The
intuition is something the operator does, the system of astrology (or
whatever) is just the markings on the dial.

You can't understand intuition (if you could it would just be "thinking") only
experience it. Understanding and intuition are like sight and hearing: two
different but complimentary ways to sense/model the Universe.

Does this help?

Really, if you just want to study astrology like an anthropologist would then
just read the books you have. If you want to use astrology to model the world
you should instead use physics. If you want to use astrology to model the
inner world then read e.g. "Golden Bough" and Jung's archetype work and his
_Liber Novus_ (aka The Red Book), and maybe "The Varieties of Religious
Experience" and "The Perennial Philosophy". And then just make up your own
system. It will work just as well for prediction.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_%28Jung%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_%28Jung%29)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy)

(It's a shame this got flagged, eh?)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Perhaps intuition is just fast thinking? To be able to connect bits and pieces
of seemingly disparate information cogently?

I love flipping the pages of The Red Book. I am charmed by Jung’s calligraphy
and art. Even if I don’t understand enough High German. The entire book is a
work of art.

~~~
carapace
> Perhaps intuition is just fast thinking? To be able to connect bits and
> pieces of seemingly disparate information cogently?

That's intelligence. Intuition is more akin to a sense. It can be practiced
and improved like a skill.

I've never actually seen the Red Book. I did an image search though and I see
what you mean.

I probably should have asked you this before blathering at you, but what are
you going for here? What's your motivation to study astrology? If you don't
mind me asking.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
(Edited multiple times to add more thoughts)

In Jung’s Man and his Symbols, he says that the unconsciousness is a new
phenomenon...and man had relied heavily on his unconsciousness..that is now
repressed. It reveals itself in dreams. And so it lingers...like a secretary
taking notes and organizing them. Sometimes it comes back garbled as our
dreams and not always decipherable.

Writing dream journals is a good habit.

I also want to write down not just dreams but also moods during eclipses and
lunar cycles and match it to astrological transit charts.

What if there is a pattern..on an individual level and for the general
collective and the for the larger society. If there are 300 or 500k such
journals...would it be possible to figure out patterns and trends.

Can we do this by matching Facebook status updates or twitter or fit bit data
etc? We already have so much data. How difficult would it be to match birth
dates/horoscopes to available data.

A social media app for tracking moods, life events and zodiac should be
interesting.

I hesitated to use social media to describe it but did it anyways for lack of
a better term. I don’t mean to suggest that this can be a ‘product’ for
generating revenue. Somethings should be beyond exploitation for money.

What if we can have a window of insight into our own unconsciousness? And if
there is no true free will, then we are still processing information that we
are exposed to and making life decisions based on what we perceive
subconsciously.

On the other hand, an acceptance of astrology and code of behaviour can steer
a society into predictable patterns of behaviour leading to less conflict.

Think of it like a language. If in a country everyone speaks the same
language, the changes for miscommunication would be much lower than in a
country where there are multiple languages of communication.

This language can be linguistic or mathematical or anything else. Why can’t it
be astronomical or astrological?

~~~
carapace
But we _do_ have that language, it's science. Specifically physics. The laws
of physics are precisely the shareable, universal language.

As for a common language of the subjective world, what I call the "semantic
layer" of reality as distinct from the physical "real" world, I don't think
you can find one, mostly because if you did you would be the Messiah. :-)
There are lots of such "languages", and new ones are popping up all the time.

> I want to understand why and how predictions work with astrology.

Well again, _divination_ works by the operator not the system or tea leaves or
whatever. The basic formula is "As above, so below." You can use any system,
as long as you practice with sincerity and persistence you'll get better at
intuition, which isn't _quite_ like prediction: you get a nudge to go one way
rather than another, but you don't know why, maybe you find out later and
maybe you don't... It's experiential rather than analytical. (In other words,
part of the job of the Tarot cards or Numerology or Astrology system is to
_distract_ your analytical mind.)

Gurdjieff claims that there _is_ influence of the planets on humans, and that
astrology used to be based on that but all concrete knowledge of it has now
been lost. Certainly modern forms of astrology are, shall we say,
astronomically naive, and do not (indeed cannot) work according to their own
theory because they don't actually take account of the true state of celestial
objects.

The most effective and impressive astrologer I ever met had her horoscope
software _misconfigured!_ It didn't affect her efficacy.

It sounds like you are interested in the old, lost 'science', eh?

I've wondered too if "big data" would reveal correlations between human
behaviour and the state of the solar system, and I think the high-frequency
traders would be the first to find out. They have the data, the compute power,
the motivation, and a willingness to overlook the "woo-woo" factor if doing so
leads to profit.

It will sound strange, but in some ways I pity the NSA. They are the only one
with _all_ the data and they must be privy to some strange _strange_ things.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
If a human being can practice divination, then surely an AI can too, yes?

I don’t understand why you say it’s physics..and not mathematics.

Let me give you an example from my low tech job/life. I have a farm and I want
to automate it. I have been at it for five years now. To replace humans with
machines, you need data. You need data sets to train the intelligence behind
the machine. That data is expressed as numbers and in the language of
mathematics.

Example: when I want to mow my cover crop field in spring, I simply do if I
get a feel for it. I know it’s not going to rain..I know it’s before they have
flowered, I know how the soil ‘feels’ before I can disc it. I just know. I
pick up a handful of soil and then at the sky, in a split second I can make a
decision.

But for a machine to make that decision, mathematically..it needs weather
data, soil moisture data, leaf analysis, vision system data..put it all
together to say ‘yes, I will prep the field today’. The language is
mathematics.

In a way, I forecasted and predicted intuitively from previous years springs
to determine when I can prep the field. I could be wrong. A farm machine AI
however ..with math can make a decision based on narrow parameters but will
almost never be wrong because it only has to be right within those narrow
parameters.

Why can’t this be done with Astrology?

How can planets have an impact on humans..lets rephrase that..how can planets
not have an impact on humans? The sun does. The moon does. That’s because we
know heat and light are forms of energy. We acknowledge gravitational force
and tidal waves and electro magnetic forces. Does this mean that there is
nothing else? Perhaps there are forces we haven’t even met yet and don’t know
how it works.

How can we ever figure it out if we dismiss it off hand because it feels
‘woo’. Nature isn’t ‘woo’. Nature doesn’t care how we label it.

We can only see if we want to look. We can’t look if we are afraid of being
judged/mocked/downvoted/flagged. Know what I mean?

~~~
carapace
> If a human being can practice divination, then surely an AI can too, yes?

Very interesting question that. Would an AI be a person? Or just a sculpture
of a mind?

Divination is essentially a communion between the self and the Self (God,
Source, Universe, I don't want to presume upon your beliefs) so if we
succeeded in making a person somehow, then yes, I believe it would have a
relationship with God beyond that of its constituent matter.

If not, if we can only mimic our own minds without kindling the spark of life,
then no, it would just be an elaborate dowsing rod, eh?

I think it might be possible to make a tulpa and associate it with a
mechanical form (physical or virtual) and there are corners on the internet
where people experiment with that. The resulting entity would be somewhat like
a golem. FWIW, I would advise against all that kind of thing.

> I don’t understand why you say it’s physics..and not mathematics.

Just that physics is the part of mathematics that maps to real world
phenomenon.

> Example: when I want to mow my cover crop field in spring, I simply do if I
> get a feel for it. I know it’s not going to rain..I know it’s before they
> have flowered, I know how the soil ‘feels’ before I can disc it. I just
> know. I pick up a handful of soil and then at the sky, in a split second I
> can make a decision.

That is the kind of thing where intelligence and intuition blend. If you keep
going you'll reach the place where you could be sitting deep in a cave and
still know.

FWIW, Tom Brown hints at this in some of his books on tracking.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brown_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brown_Jr).

> But for a machine to make that decision, mathematically..it needs weather
> data, soil moisture data, leaf analysis, vision system data..put it all
> together to say ‘yes, I will prep the field today’. The language is
> mathematics.

> In a way, I forecasted and predicted intuitively from previous years springs
> to determine when I can prep the field. I could be wrong. A farm machine AI
> however ..with math can make a decision based on narrow parameters but will
> almost never be wrong because it only has to be right within those narrow
> parameters.

I'm not convinced that machine could be built, I think the variables
(including astrological influences) are too involved. On the other hand, your
physical body including your brain could be considered to be that machine
already. And that seems to bring up again the question of whether or not you
could make an artificial person with enough fidelity to the real thing to
develop intuition/divination, eh?

I think it would be much easier to make a machine that allowed the plants and
soil itself to communicate the optimal times for events.

Do you have a copy of "The Secret Life of Plants"?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants)

> Why can’t this be done with Astrology?

If you mean letting astronomical data be part of the inputs to your Bayesian
AI then by all means I think that might help. But modern astrology is pretty
much barren for the kind of thing you're talking about.

> How can planets have an impact on humans..lets rephrase that..how can
> planets not have an impact on humans? The sun does. The moon does. That’s
> because we know heat and light are forms of energy. We acknowledge
> gravitational force and tidal waves and electro magnetic forces. Does this
> mean that there is nothing else? Perhaps there are forces we haven’t even
> met yet and don’t know how it works.

I believe there are such "subtle forces" and that our periodic chart of the
elements is like a single octave of a much larger plenum of
matter/energy/frequency. I'm following Gurdjieff here more-or-less. But I know
almost nothing about them. There's no modern source of reliable information on
such things.

The problem is that we can only make machines out of the matter we can touch.
You can't make an instrument that responds to these "subtle energies". Unless
of course that's exactly what these various divination machines (Tarot,
Astrology, Numerology, Dowsing, etc.) are somehow doing. (But personally I
don't think they are.) And again, your physical body inducing your brain is
already an instrument that responds to these "subtle energies" (if they
exist.)

In the context of farm automation I would try making simple machines that let
the farm life communicate to them to activate various programs, based on some
of the stuff in "The Secret Life of Plants".

Cheers! Happy New Year.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Many thanks for engaging! It is much appreciated. I will update here on HN
perhaps ..if I make any breakthrough. Happy New Year. Cheers!

------
mitasu-hachi
Astrology is about trying to find what your target/subject wants and creating
predictions around them. You should keep predictions vague, never "predict"
specifics.

It's basically the Mediumship-esque parlor trick, the difference being that
you're observing stars and planets instead of communing with the dead, you
have to probe and search to see what they really want. Ask leading questions,
make educated assumptions, refine over time as you learn about them.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That's what it is now, but Medieval and earlier, and in the same era Islamic
and Indian astrology were well respected fields of study and scholars studied
it seriously. Granted they had some very wrong headed ideas on many things,
not just stellar influences -- every disease was a judgement of god, doctors
checking horoscopes to decide treatment, treatments that were sometimes worse
than the condition, etc. Though in those times Islamic and Indian treatments
were far more based in fact than those in Europe -- who mainly wouldn't
consider them as they were non-christian. :)

Would be interesting to try and find a real pattern in any of it (by which I
specifically _don 't_ mean the type you mention, or the 3 sentences of dross
once found in daily newspapers)...

[https://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/bodies/astrology/astrologyho...](https://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/bodies/astrology/astrologyhome.html)

~~~
mytailorisrich
Astrology hasn't fundamentally changed. Our understanding of the world has.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Which is not the point of OP's question.

~~~
mytailorisrich
Well, you brought it up...

Anyway, I believe it is related to OP's question (and so are my other
comments). If (s)he wants to see if astrology is a 'predictive science', make
predictions, and analyse them to find and interpret any patterns (s)he has to
give serious thoughts about what sort of predictions can be made and how
(which I think is key since 'predictions' really are whatever the astrologer
'interprets'...), how to analyse the results and what significance any
patterns might have.

As such (s)he cannot simply brush anything deemed 'inconvenient' under the
carpet.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
But astrology has changed dramatically though, which I was trying to avoid
getting into an argument about. I haven't studied or read up on it, but have
read a lot of history, particularly of Medieval times and earlier. For
hundreds of years it was inseparable from astronomy. Astronomers making
predictions, astrologers identifying events in the year or night sky,
diligently recording eclipses and comets. The terms were interchangeable. For
centuries they were the same thing, thus there probably is valid science
potentially in some of those writings, much as chemist and alchemist were at
one time the same thing. Alchemists figured out many chemical reactions, or
purified real drugs long before we separated them out into chemistry and
mystical hogwash. Just as religion were once connected with scholarship and
education (and astrology) too.

So I _suspect_ if there is any grain of predictive basis it would be
astronomical or meteorological in nature rather than the vanishingly unlikely
finding a life partner third week of next month or next Tuesday being
particularly lucky.

 _shrug_

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Forget about whether you’d find a partner because of your sun sign..what about
predicting eclipses or comets or drought or famine or war. That’s astrology
too, yes?

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Well in old enough texts they might all be considered and described so. From
our perspective,

eclipses or comets -- astronomy, drought or famine -- meteorology or
climatology, war -- fun one that could come into several, e.g. a climate
change or drought could trigger a war with neighbours, perhaps to try and
migrate. War is only one of those I think does fall under modern view of
astrology as, like earthquakes, they can't be reliably predicted until
inevitable. Comets like Halley's or solar eclipses can be predicted, with
decent precision.

------
onecommentman
Don’t listen to the haters ranting against astrology. They are computer
science types for the most part and are jealous, seeing that computer science
itself sits somewhere between astrology and numerology, without the popularity
of the former or the formality of the latter.

------
nwrk
Contact someone experienced who will be willing to give you guidance.

If you are in positive spirit to adventure / travel you can find many
traditional communities (off-path) and you can truly learn a lot.

The books approach can be difficult to swallow as the learning outcome is
limited by your own interpretation.

Seeing is believing!

Have fun

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Unfortunately I am not able to commit fully due to time constraints but want
to set aside at least 5 hours/week.

