Astrology ethics

K

katydid

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

muchacho said:
Sometimes the reading says more about the astrologer than the client. But some people actually do want definite black/white style answers.
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Sure, some do want definite black snd white answers. But are those 'definite' answers 100% accurate all of the time?

I don't think they are. And I believe it can be very damaging to some clients to give them 'definite' answers about unknowable things.

I don't care how good of an Astrologer someone is. There is no way to say with 100% accuracy that a given native 'will NEVER marry.' No one can know with total certainty if that person will marry in the future. The chart can indicate probabilities but not total certainty because each individual has free will.
 
S

Stellium6th

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

katydid said:
Sure, some do want definite black snd white answers. But are those 'definite' answers 100% accurate all of the time?

I don't think they are. And I believe it can be very damaging to some clients to give them 'definite' answers about unknowable things.

I don't care how good of an Astrologer someone is. There is no way to say with 100% accuracy that a given native 'will NEVER marry.' No one can know with total certainty if that person will marry in the future. The chart can indicate probabilities but not total certainty because each individual has free will.
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Then astrology remains as ambiguous, not complete and purposeless
 
K

katydid

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

Stellium6th said:
Then astrology remains as ambiguous, not complete and purposeless
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If you want to give up your FREE WILL, and your power to create changes in your life, then you can believe in a 'complete' form of Astrology. You can allow someone to 'read' your future for you and allow them to tell you what will happen 'to' you.

Do you want someone to look at your 7th and proclaim that you will never find love, never be married and will be alone for the next 5 decades? What purpose is there in that?

Personally, I see that type of Astrology as purposeless. Life is meant to be lived fully and with great purpose. Astrology should be used as a tool to help one develop and progress on their evolutionary journey.

It would be more purposeful to describe the difficulties seen in the 7th and discuss ways of overcoming those issues.
 
Oddity

Oddity

Well-known member
Not all people believe in free will. I don't. I think we can make some choices, but free will is a chimaera.

Astrology is 100%. Astrologers - not so much. Still, you should be right a whole lot more often than you're wrong, and you also need to let your clients know that you can be wrong.
 
S

Stellium6th

Well-known member
Do you know why psychology remains as pseudoscience? Because as much as they have done in history, nothing has been proved so far. It's just an elite pseudoscience. So I agree with you, katy, in the way of knowing who is oneself and not taking anything for granted. But on the other hand, I find it to be too ''hippy'' and nothing solid at all. I Agree with you both, but not entirely with any one. Have to make up my mind.
 
JUPITERASC

JUPITERASC

Well-known member
Osamenor said:
I was asking about the feasibility...
and yes, I suppose you could say ethics...

of me charging for astrology readings at this point in my learning,
not about the ethics of charging for it ever in my life.
Right at the moment, all I'm considering doing is offering this service to my fellow herbalism students
who want help interpreting their charts, but once I start doing that, it's highly likely that I'll hear
"Can you read for my roommate, too?" or some such thing.

The ethical question I'm asking is
what it's really ethical for me to charge

considering that I can't give the full range of services that a seasoned professional could.


Also considering that where I'm starting,
many people have financial limitations,
and there is a spirit of helping each other as a community,
so if I am charging, I need to keep it in line with that.



But doing it all for free doesn't work, either,
because then I'd be expending my time and energy without really seeing a return,
and then there would be some unfulfilled sense of obligation on their part...
so it needs to be balanced.


I think I have my answer already, I just need to work out the how much to charge detail.
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There's also the question of how ethical is it
to NOT simply provide impoverished fellow herbalism students with the www of our astrologers community forum :smile:
those impoverished fellow herbalism students then would at least have some freedom of choice
to either

(a) independently access free readings and learn astrology for themselves on our forum if they so wish

also then
the problem of "doing it all for free with no return" would no longer apply
since multiple members of our forum are daily, from choice, "doing it all for free with no return"
and the impoverished herbalism students may also learn some astrology
and possibly even themselves qualify as astrologers via NCGR certification or similar
and so on ad infinitum

OR ALTERNATIVELY

(b) negotiate an agreement that may possibly involve some form of barter

in order to obtain potentially unaffordable amateur readings from an unqualified astrologer-in-training


incidentally
many members show no trace of the "some unfulfilled sense of obligation"
and instead blithely "grab a free reading to go" as if entitled

 
noraleader

noraleader

Banned
apologies to all for interrupting *this site needs a tip-hat logo*

first, my thanks to jupiterasc for suggesting the unforgiveable, "let's actually educate clients towards independence" the horror! imagine if we were all like this!

it's never really worth saying anything, but fwiw katydid, you know, we all like to believe in the social trust, reality is, some people are simply and emphatically malicious (many colourful adjectives could work here) and have no qualms about damaging people in any extent. i'll forego the particulars. interestingly, increasing autonomy (the unforgiveable) would reduce vectors for such forces.

and another vote for psychology = pseudoscience, read the post on epistemology in my sig, even science is pretty pseudo. poor old james matthews, "don't try to stop our war" heartbreaking, and society oblivious.

some terrible people.
 
M

muchacho

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

katydid said:
Sure, some do want definite black snd white answers. But are those 'definite' answers 100% accurate all of the time?

I don't think they are. And I believe it can be very damaging to some clients to give them 'definite' answers about unknowable things.

I don't care how good of an Astrologer someone is. There is no way to say with 100% accuracy that a given native 'will NEVER marry.' No one can know with total certainty if that person will marry in the future. The chart can indicate probabilities but not total certainty because each individual has free will.
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I agree. But some people don't believe in free will. That's a fact. We can't just ignore that. Those people can't hear you. And so it would be inappropriate to give them a reading that stresses freedom of will. Because it would be far outside of their own framework of reality and therefore worthless to them. It would probably be best to give them no reading at all.
 
passiflora

passiflora

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

katydid said:
One young man was told he would never marry, not have a fulfilling relationship. He was very sad about it. He had Saturn in the 7th square his sun and moon. That prediction only added to his depression. I worked with him for months to help him learn to express himself and to meet people and be more social. He did have a girlfriend eventually. I don't know if he ever married or not. But that is not even the point.

The point is that sometimes 'predictions' get in the way of human development and progress.
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From an ethics perspective you can take this one step further, as you allude above. Sometimes predictions interfere with human progress. Sometimes those predictions interfere with human progress FOR REASONS YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN IN THE CHART.
 
K

katydid

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

muchacho said:
I agree. But some people don't believe in free will. That's a fact. We can't just ignore that. Those people can't hear you. And so it would be inappropriate to give them a reading that stresses freedom of will. Because it would be far outside of their own framework of reality and therefore worthless to them. It would probably be best to give them no reading at all.
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I don't think it would ever be inappropriate to give someone a reading that stresses freedom of will. If it was outside their frame of reference' then I would work hard to open them up to a larger framework, that included the concept of FREE WILL.


Here is Robert Hand's definition of FREE WILL:


Free Will as an Element of Consciousness

But there is another element in consciousness also. We are aware of things being true or false. Based on this, we can make judgments and plan actions based on those judgments. This is free will. While every living thing seems to have the capacity for directed movement, movement that has an intended object (plants reach for the Sun, animals hunt for food), only conscious beings have free will. This is true of human beings, even though we clearly exhibit the primitive, almost machine-like drives that we see present in animals and plants. When we operate from free will, there is something between our awareness and our actions, something that is not determined, something that is not predictable. So we have these three elements in consciousness.
http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0001552.HTM
 
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RaRohini

Well-known member
I have always had the doubt.. what if the astrologer ( as in ..myself) is the one who was supposed to 'break the news' to the client so that his or her life takes a new path? Will i be failing in my duty if i keep mum? This feeling is intense for me as i have Rahu in Scorpio Jyestha in the 8th house dealing with matters of life and death. I have found that my instinct is almost always on track when i read charts of people undergoing transformation or under Saturn or Rahu dashas.
 
K

katydid

Well-known member
Robert Hand has discussed the subject of Free Will, in terms of traditional Astrology in a series of lectures. Here is an interesting excerpt:


Freedom and Consciousness
I would like to call attention to two points that contradict the idea that we have no freedom. We have electional astrology, in which we pick times for taking action. This would not be possible if we had no freedom. Without freedom, we would neither need such an astrology, nor would we be able to use it. The results of our actions would be predetermined. There would be no “electing.”

In magic, the situation is even more pronounced, because in magic the will of the practitioner becomes a genuine cause, even to the extent in some cases of affecting the physical world. But as the higher worlds are ones in which consciousness is more developed than it is in the physical world, so we can gain freedom only to the degree that we become more conscious ourselves. The more we manifest Soul and Nous, and the more we act with integrity (Oneness), the more we become free. This has practical astrological consequences aside from electional astrology.
http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0001767.HTM
 
L

Loda41

Well-known member
I don't think the Astrological community as a whole should be blamed for a small number of people totally lacking common sense.
 
S

Stellium6th

Well-known member
sibylline said:
Yes, I thought the answer was "not much".

Someone posting on an astrology forum claims psychology is a pseudoscience...do you see the irony?
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I didn't claim it. I might swear that I was talking about it's reputation. I have nothing against psychology nor those who decided to study it ^^
 
M

muchacho

Well-known member
Re: Astrology for pay, when to start

katydid said:
I don't think it would ever be inappropriate to give someone a reading that stresses freedom of will. If it was outside their frame of reference' then I would work hard to open them up to a larger framework, that included the concept of FREE WILL.
http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0001552.HTM
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If you have to work hard to open them up, then obviously they're not ready yet. If they would be ready, it would be effortless all the way. That's what I meant with inappropriate. There's no point in wasting words on ears that can't hear.
 
M

muchacho

Well-known member
katydid said:
Robert Hand has discussed the subject of Free Will, in terms of traditional Astrology in a series of lectures. Here is an interesting excerpt:


Freedom and Consciousness
I would like to call attention to two points that contradict the idea that we have no freedom. We have electional astrology, in which we pick times for taking action. This would not be possible if we had no freedom. Without freedom, we would neither need such an astrology, nor would we be able to use it. The results of our actions would be predetermined. There would be no “electing.”

In magic, the situation is even more pronounced, because in magic the will of the practitioner becomes a genuine cause, even to the extent in some cases of affecting the physical world. But as the higher worlds are ones in which consciousness is more developed than it is in the physical world, so we can gain freedom only to the degree that we become more conscious ourselves. The more we manifest Soul and Nous, and the more we act with integrity (Oneness), the more we become free. This has practical astrological consequences aside from electional astrology.
http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0001767.HTM
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What he says about predetermination is incorrect. From the personal point of view you couldn't tell the difference between a world of free will and a world where everything is predetermined.

And it's all consciousness. Consciousness is all there is. The physical world and the non-physical world are one and the same. Which means the non-physical world is not more spiritual than the physical world.
 
sibylline

sibylline

Well-known member
Stellium6th said:
I didn't claim it. I might swear that I was talking about it's reputation. I have nothing against psychology nor those who decided to study it ^^
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The bolded

Stellium6th said:
Do you know why psychology remains as pseudoscience? Because as much as they have done in history, nothing has been proved so far. It's just an elite pseudoscience.
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Seemed to imply that this is your view as well. Thanks for the clarification.
 
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