Two kinds of astrology

There are two kinds of astrology.

The first kind is the general cook book style, one size fits all, typified by the astrological analysis done by a computer on-line, or with some computer chart programs. Its a Linda Goodman Sun Sign type of analysis.

Its a Linear this causes that system of astrology, and can be had by looking at textbooks of astrology and copying out stuff like what it means when Libra is in the 3rd house, and calling that an astrological analysis.

This first kind of astrology is what we all do when we first decide to be "into astrology". All of us do it.

Many people never get beyond it because to get beyond it one has to recognize that we are not really dealing with a linear causal effect system.

To get beyond this first stage we must understand that we are dealing with a Complex Non-Linear Chaotic system. No one thing causes on other thing.

But, to get beyond this first stage, takes one into a kind of astrology where one must simply have to see the chart. And it takes us into a realm of complexity that most people are not willing to go toward since it violates their own models of how the world works and makes things very confusing.

Most humans like the linear causal world where there are simple explanations for everything. 40 years in professional counseling, and 45 years in astrology has certainly taught me that.

Both kinds of astrology are valid. But the second one is way more accurate than the one size fits all first one.

I think cookbook astrology... is great at the beginning.. to create a foundation of how things work. As you move forward you can start with the demolitions ..& the reconstructions are an ongoing process, IMO. and are all part of the fun.

In response to how people don't move from the basics of astrology because it violates their perception of how the world works because it requires a non-linear approach. I disagree. I think most people just get the basics, don't dig any deeper... because well, that is our Culture nowadays. Especially for the younger folks, they have a much harder time breaking away from that because they have been raised in this technological/materialistic culture. The average attention span for just about anyone today is scary. -- Even for people who grew up without all the technology, with storybooks and games of hopscotch!

As you note we all start with cookbook explanations.

But some people go on to develop a more intuitive way of looking at charts.

I have met a psychic who also studied astrology (& she didn't charge for her readings, so I trust her). When she looked at people's charts she could tell them things that I, who only had the technical astrology skills, wouldn't have picked out as important. It was as if the chart was the first thing she focussed on but then other knowledge came from somewhere else. By the way she could also tell people things about their future using psychometry (insights from handling people's personal items) without an astrological chart anywhere in sight.

Another idea that I have heard of is the rule of 3 - if something is confirmed 3 times in a chart then it is important. When using this 'rule' the many, many different ways that a planet in a sign or a planet in a house could be interpreted could be narrowed down.

Perhaps also after looking at hundreds of charts a person would be able to pick out pertinent points, or perhaps it is better to say unusual points, much more quickly and to see this theme reinforced in other areas of the chart much more quickly, without really stopping to analyse how they know that. This is like learning a language - at the beginning you have to think about how the verbs are conjugated but later on you can see the subtleties of tone.

But I also agree with the idea of demolitions and reconstructions. Sort of like how we were taught Chemistry in school. We were taught that atoms and elements had a basic structure, and we were then tested on that, to get us through our first set of exams, but then the people who went on to study it further (which I didn't) were told that everything they had learnt for the first exam was just an oversimplified version, and the truth was actually completely different.

Pluto themes are relevant when when going deeper.

Just my musings.

Juno - being psychic definitely helps in astrological analysis. I intuitively know where to look or what to focus on - although I may start the analysis in a textbook fashion, it doesn't long before I get into a "zone" and just know what to look at, ignoring many other facets or not finding them as important than some other element that suddenly gets my attention. When doing a full analysis for a client, once I get going the words just fly out on their own. I'll attempt to go back and re-read what I read and often times it is like it was written by someone else and I can't even follow my own train of thought.
You are right that often once I catch on to a theme in the chart, it will be confirmed in several different areas of the chart via different planets and aspects. I do often start with just an overview, looking at the chart as a whole without focusing on any particular element or planet.

Several similar indications are necessary to obtain a high probablity of accuracy; for example in the 22 mundane disaster charts I have been researching, there are ALWAYS at least 4 negative factors of significance pointing in the same direction, and usually there are more than 4 such factors; a constellation of seperate but similar indications, are always needed to make a potential trend likely...

Hi Zarathu, very interesting topic, thank you for discussing it, I guess most of us do start with the Linda Goodman astrology, it's easy, it's fun and it serves social interactions, but it also depends on what age you have started, what kind of information was available to you and how much that information satisfied your eagerness for knowledge, once you decide to go further in studying astrology and begin uncovering its symbols; one begins to understand himself more and decides that it was his way for a superior understanding of the universe. Here the motivations of the person drives him to choose the second kind of astrology or the third, the third is looking at it as a language spoken by the superior being (GOD) to humans, the language of the superior wisdom.

Hello Zarathu,

How might cook book astrologers apply the model of chaos? Do they need to study the new science of chaos where charts are strange attractors as are all the planets in it when looking at the whole chart, as well as the cook books or just be aware of the theory?

Sorry if this is a dumb question .

thanks for your reply Z, I'll give it some thought

Hi Zarathu, please correct me if I'm wrong, you are saying that one should study the chaos science to be able to interpret a chart, does that include all branches of astrology, or are we speaking about psychological astrology? and if you mean all branches, does the chaos science gets you accurate results in predictive astrology?

Madammaha said:

Hi Zarathu, please correct me if I'm wrong, you are saying that one should study the chaos science to be able to interpret a chart, does that include all branches of astrology, or are we speaking about psychological astrology? and if you mean all branches, does the chaos science gets you accurate results in predictive astrology?

Click to expand...

No... I am saying that complexity theory is astrology, and that if you were to study complexity and chaos theory, you would see astrology looking back at you.

Whereas if you study reductionist linear non dynamic systems, which is what science is all about, you will never find astrology there, and science will never find that astrology is really a science on their terms. Science is all about limiting the variable to one and showing causal effect with just one on one causal effect. Astrology is a measurement of a non-linear open-ended dynamic system of the universe which has an infinite number of variables. So actually this is beyond Chaos Theory, and into what is called Complexity Theory.

"Chaos" by James Gleick...is used as the text in a class on "Chaos and Reductionism" at Stanford University. If you don't like reading, you can watch a session of the class at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo

"...chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being."

" Believers in chaos -- .... -- speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constitutent parts: quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole." [Notice anything similar in this statement to the talk on this forum?]

The reductionist is the computer printout, cookbook astrologer: Mars in the Third House = "whatever". But living organisms are chaotic, constantly evolving as their (un)conscious intelligence responds to ever-changing conditions, injecting disruptive free will into the equation, making choices based on feelings. Astrologers who understand this seek to understand the organism as a complex but integral whole.

I suggest reading a specific text that relates to astrology.

(Somewhat Famous Astrologer) Bernadette Brady has written an enlightening volume called Astrology: A Place In Chaos ISBN # 1902405218

She also has several YOU Tube videos, and some other tracts which I would be happy to email anyone who PM's me an email address.

Hi all,
Here's a link to a video of Brady talking about complexity and astrology... Directly related I believe it what Zarathu is talking about.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XgiZZFEWndc

Gong back to the original two posts, I tend to think both Zarathu and ashriia are right. I don't think their points in the first two posts are mutually exclusive. This phenomenon Zarathu is pointing at with this thread is something I see,and struggle with, in my life as an educator. I don't know if all educators see it, but there is a kind of Faustian bargain that happens when we teach. For entirely pragmatic reasons - simply in efforts not to lose the students from the offset - we introduce whatever we're teaching in simplified ways. But that perpetuates a bad tendency most of us already "naturally" lean towards. We want some kind of clear, parsimonious, obvious answer that just is. What does 2+2 equal? 4. And that kind of clear answer that we can harken back to as authoritative gives us the kind of framework we want to work with. If somebody comes around and says "Sometimes 2+2 does not equal 4" we don't want to sit and ruminate on that kind of ambiguous mystery. We want to be able to say " No. The universe is a certain way. 2+2=4 and that's that. I know because I learned it in school, in big bold letters our textbook said "2+2=4." And we hold this (my point) not just for math but for all sort of things we learn, be it from school, from our parents, our religious institutions, etc. we want 2+2=4 type statements in our ethics, our economy, our notions of love, our politics, and our astrology.
My whole job is to keep introducing ambiguity and uncertainty to students. I have the privilege of working in a place where we are maintaining intellectual standards. Instead of giving students the simplified, textbook version of Immanuel Kant's philosophy of ethics, for example, we make them read Kant's original books, and struggle with all the many possibilities and interpretations therein. But of course, students default to reading it for simple answers, even when they're not there.
It's something we want and something we reinforce in the way we pass down knowledge, not just in our schools but in our cultures. The two (wanting it naturally and learning it through culture) go hand and hand, mutually and reciprocally creating each other.
But I can't be hard on us for it. We have to be compassionate about our bad tendencies. We want 2+2=4 for a range of complex reasons, I think, including - as Zarathu has been pointing out a lot recently - a shift to a more science-centric, linear and even mechanical understanding of the universe that really took a hold of the West around 300 years ago. Today, it's the sort of knowledge we feel safe in. Thou when I say "we" I mostly mean the great masses of people. Even within our science-heavy world there is a great deal of ambiguity, and scientists know it. The Chaos Theory Zarathu is talking about comes to us from 20th century science. And I think a lot of scientists are open to the ambiguity and stare it down. It's the wide masses of us that feel safer with parsimonious, simplified intellectual systems. We want to look at the universe and see an order that makes sense to our limited minds even if it comes at the cost of failing to recognize the staggering, overwhelming complexity that is the truth of the universe, beyond perhaps our capacity to genuinely grasp.

but the world is cause and effect, because all things do have consequences.

But then most people's exposure to astrology is via the newspaper columns or magazines/TV, so it figures they don't view astrology for what it is. Any traits per Leos, or Aries are loose generalisations, as they are for any subset of humanity.

It's the pop culturalisation so to speak of astrology that causes a lot of misconceptions around it.

ukdesifem said:

but the world is cause and effect, because all things do have consequences.

But then most people's exposure to astrology is via the newspaper columns or magazines/TV, so it figures they don't view astrology for what it is. Any traits per Leos, or Aries are loose generalizations, as they are for any subset of humanity.

It's the pop culturalisation so to speak of astrology that causes a lot of misconceptions around it.

Click to expand...

No.... Recent research is beginning to suggest that the wrold is not cause and effect. Its multiple cause with effect. Research into weather, and many many systems including medicine, biology and every is beginning to show that reality is actually complexity and chaos not direct cause and effect.

This began with French Mathematician Henry Poincare's 1899 proof that the the solution for predicting the famous Newton Three Body Problem was impossible when three or more bodies were involved. While central to the development of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the late 1920's it was largely ignored.

It was again discovered in 1961 by Edward Lorenz at MIT when he was working on rudimentary weather programs. Since then Chaos and complexity theory have made great enough strides that an understand of the world as one cause causing one effect, has increasingly been shown to be in the minority of real circumstances.

Astrology is clearly not simple cause and effect, unless your astrology is limited to the newspapers and Sun Signs.

Yes, but astrology merely tells a person what the scope of their life is. A person still has the means to choose what s/he wants out of his or her life and isn't fated by the planets. This may not be cause and effect, but then it's another misconception of astrology that it implies or indicates fatalism or determinism.

I haven't read much on chaos theory, but I have to say that that philosophy seems antithetical to what astrology is. Astrology is admitting patterns within the universe that cannot be directly related to our experiences; that everything is related in some way, that the motion of the heavenly bodies are in concert with the motions of people and life, that the size of the universe in comparison to us prevents us from seeing the patterns fully. Chaos is a lack of patterning from my understanding... which to me is what occurs when you your frame of reference is incomplete. Unless, we are saying that there is value in admitting the "chaos" of incompleteness?

cause and effect is a basic law of the universe. The cause of us using English on this forum goes back ultimately to Anglo-Saxon England 1500 years ago. the cause of people today using smartphones relies on the invention of the telephone and then mobile communications.

Chaos theory just says that cause and effects are not linear and simple but complex, and that connections are not simple or clear cut. It's like the old saying of if a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa a hurricane hits the USA or Mexico. Connecting the causes and effects in this case is not simple, but it could be possible, who knows?

I don't see how it is chaos - chaos implies variables outside your ability to control and random outcomes. Your chart is set and doesn't change, and progresses and transits within specific parameters, not random ones. While your choices are not predetermined, the beginning point certainly is, and one's choices can be as fixed as any starting point. While there is some variability with regards to outside influences, I hardly consider the entire process chaotic. With a person aware of their chart, the chaos is very minimal, IMO.

mdinaz said:

I don't see how it is chaos - chaos implies variables outside your ability to control and random outcomes. Your chart is set and doesn't change, and progresses and transits within specific parameters, not random ones. While your choices are not predetermined, the beginning point certainly is, and one's choices can be as fixed as any starting point. While there is some variability with regards to outside influences, I hardly consider the entire process chaotic. With a person aware of their chart, the chaos is very minimal, IMO.

Click to expand...

Chaos is the phrase used for a specialized kind of scientific method called chaos theory. It has nothing to do with the literary definition of the word "Chaos". Its a term representing a non-linear dynamic system with an indeterminate number of variables. Specifically it refers to something called deterministic chaos which is used to describe a system that appears random but one in which patterns are rebuilt. You are thinking of an entropic chaotic system where all order is lost and none emerges.

Specifically astrology is actually what might be described as a phase membrane which exists between the states of stasis(no change) and chaos(all change). In this phase, spontaneous order emerges which increases the complexity of the system. Complexity Science works with open systems such as the environment, communities or in our case, whatever it is that astrology represents, where all the variables cannot be known or controlled.

Specifically, in this context, astrology might be described as a system at the edge of chaos(again remember we are not talking about a literary definition here; we are using the scientific definition. This is the place between stasis and total change where the new order emerges. This is a technical name and does not mean that which moves into disorder, but rather it is a place which can be visited by increasing the relationships or information feeding into the system. It is essentially the place of origin and may be the moment of birth in a birth chart.

IMO, traditional astrology has attempted to stay within the bounds of a linear closed system which is a reductionist approach by specifying a limited number of variables and keeping it as a closed system. However, this is not possible even if it feels as if the variables are controlled.