Astrology & the Math of Life!

Thanks to the collateral benefits of a rare power-free combo of a 16-hr BESCOM transformer malfunction, long unserviced UPS, travel-free uncharged power-banks & my fully discharged iPhone 📱, the conducive environment of minimal electromagnetic interference let me relish the longest deep sleep 😴 experience in recent times, except for a short dream on electrifying ⚡️ spiders 🕷. Not to further delay today’s post, my MacBook Pro 💻 donated a few of its meaty fatty calories to resuscitate its Apple family member! So here you go... 

It’s the 30th day of Souramana Vrishabha maasa & Chandramana Jyeshta maasa Krsna paksha Saptami tithi, with Shatabhisha nakshatra, heralding a jathre in Agali village of Karnataka. 

Well, what the hell is the significance of all these astronomical markers or is it all useless mumbo-jumbo?!!! Decide for yourselves from my response to a query from a former research colleague: “🙏🙏🙏... Sir, to what extent is Jyotish Shastra relevant today? Why do many call it as mythology? Here is my take away: time to move on..."

I replied “🙏 Hare Krsna, Vivekanand. You’ve raised a pertinent point. Allow me a fresh & perhaps unique attempt at resolving this “myth of astrology” conundrum, through a couple of funny stories, coupled with exciting mathematics 🧮 & some sage advice for researchers & their publications!!!

I’m sure most of us would’ve heard in our childhood, the story of “sour grapes” 🍇! As a quick summary & reminder, the fox 🦊 in that story tried to reach out to the grapes 🍇 which were hanging way too high for him to jump up & reach out to. But his ego didn’t allow him to admit his incapability. Hence, he kept saying that those grapes 🍇 are sour so many times that he himself got convinced that they were indeed sour, without ever having tasted them, or at least enquiring with some one else who might have tasted them! There are many takeaways from this not only for young children 👶🏻 but so-called ‘mature’ adults amongst us 🧑 too. 

First of all, drawing conclusions & not allowing for other immense known & unknown possibilities is like sounding a deathknell to our own knowledge on that topic. It’s the most unscientific approach to any study & its communication. This is also very important for those of us presenting our research at conferences or writing ✍️ journal articles, books 📚, book chapters, theses 📖 or even blogs, not to make sweeping conclusions but to provide ample room for the topic to develop further through improved future insights, discoveries & works. While we ought to showcase our highly involved work & its genuine findings with the utmost dignity that it definitely deserves, we & our communications also need to leave the field open by humbly admitting the potential for future research, which could perhaps lead to uncovering even more knowledge or deeper truths on the same topic. Development of science has happened mainly because we allowed current scientists to disprove, debunk previous scientists’ discoveries, many a times rendering them a laughing stock, most worthy of memes in hindsight! While, this openness to questioning the dissertations of previous scientific stalwarts & identifying their limitations or even invalidity is recently happening in the West, at the most for the last couple of centuries, we’ve been freely allowing this room for enhanced knowledge in Bharat 🇮🇳 for thousands of years, in fact since time immemorial, without the new scientists having to fear for their lives like in the West. A Galileo, Copernicus, Rhazes or Jesus didn’t have to be killed here. Einsteins needn’t have to be persecuted here. As demonstrated by numerous historical examples of Indians from diverse backgrounds, every individual had the privilege to graduate from lower truths to higher truths both in outer & inner sciences. Truth & untruth are hence not binary but gradations at various relative levels of understanding & perception of the true scientist, who we discovered early on always remains a student. 

Now, amongst all bodies of technical knowledge that I’ve come across so far, Indian astrology (or jyotish shastra, which is one of the 6 vedangas) is the most complex. The reason is it needs a dedicated study, detailed analysis & long diverse experience of not only the outer sciences of astronomy 🔭 & its strong mathematical basis but also the inner sciences of human life in all its multidimensional aspects of body, mind, intellect & spirit of life energies. As you know, there have been & still are many scientific experts on the outer sciences all around the world over centuries. Similarly, there have been & still are many rishis or seers of the inner sciences, especially in Bharat 🇮🇳, over many millennia. But only a rare few have been motivated enough to try & understand both these sciences & thus link/correlate their understanding of the macrocosm with that of the microcosm. And, that’s jyotish shastra for you. Those who you said call this field as “mythology” are either experts only in the outer sciences, or only in the inner sciences, or mostly in neither of these sciences, leave alone expending their time, energy & intelligence in the profound process of correlating the two, yet wanting to conclude without a sincere attempt to acquire these two distinct bodies of knowledge, like the egoistic fox 🦊 in our childhood story! 

That said, we should also realise that every field has its set of black sheep. Just like we shouldn’t conclude science itself is hocus-pocus just because of our encounter with a few incompetent &/or opportunistic scientists or their works, we cannot also conclude that astrology is a hoax or myth, due to perhaps the larger number of incompetent &/or opportunistic astrologers. 

Here’s the second funny short story that I promised for you at the beginning of this post: Needless to say, never-ending debates between pseudo-astrologers & pseudo-scientists/rationalists have gone on for ages. One classic case is where such a debate on “free will vs destiny” went on for hours on end, of course inconclusively. Finally, the so-called rationalist gave up by telling the so-called astrologer, “well, you’ve the free will to believe in destiny!” Not to be left behind, the astrologer retorted, “in the same vein, you’re destined to believe in free will!”

My experience is that this most complicated & profound subject of jyotish shastra requires phenomenal intellectual strength & commitment of a lifetime of focussed energy possible only for a few brave hearts, whose insight arises neither from a blind faith nor stupid confidence, but through an endless yet effortless striving towards truly multi-disciplinary wisdom & its practical experience on the field. 

From my own mathematical & spiritual background, current perceptions of life as a whole & delightful experiences of a quarter century with friendly astrological consultations for hundreds of my acquaintances or their family & friends, the way I see jyotisha is that it’s a well-equipped toolkit 🧰 to explore a large set of non-unique solutions to complex simultaneous combinations of an initial value problem (IVP) & a boundary value problem (BVP). While the initial conditions (ICs) for this mathematical problem arise from one’s birth chart (jathaka or horoscope), the presently valid boundary conditions (BCs) arise from the current generic transit chart at the location of the individual being analysed. However, the best part of this simultaneously mind-boggling & refreshing exercise is that the governing equations aren’t a time-frozen or even god-given dead set! In fact, the very structure & form as well as the coefficients of the governing equations are all continually evolving with our own current emotions, thoughts, words & deeds, based on the choices & decisions we make out of our free will. So, while we have absolutely no choices anymore about the initial conditions with which we were born or very minimal control over the boundary conditions that are thrown at us by our near & far environments, we’ve absolute control over our breaking news karma continually reconstituting our governing equations (GEs)! Hence, jyotisha is replete with a multitude of possibilities for those who want to take well-informed decisions in life based on their given ICs & BCs to evolve their GEs in the most beautiful way. Yet, the solutions will remain non-unique & that’s the lovely play of life, called Leela! Game on!!!