00:00  Opening and Welcome

Hello everyone, my name is Fiona Marques and it is my pleasure to welcome you to The Vedic Astrology podcast.

I am a Vedic astrologer. I’m a graduate of The Asheville Vedic Astrology Apprenticeship program.

I’m the host of the AstroliJam. A monthly get together of Astrologers geeking-out over a pre-researched chart. And I am a tutor on Vedic-astrology at teachable.com

00:38  Topic Areas of the Vedic Astrology Podcast

There are 5 topic areas to the Vedic Astrology Podcast:

1.       What is Vedic Astrology?

2.       How does astrology work?

3.       The knowledge and techniques of  Vedic Astrology

4.       Interviews with astrologers

5.       Case of studies 

I hope that you will join me for these episodes in the future.

01:33  Invitation to Participate

The Vedic Astrology Podcast is a new initiative.  It's a great time for you to participate so as you listen to these episodes, if it brings up ideas for you things that you'd love to hear more about or things you'd like to contribute, please let me know.  I look forward to a growing community of contributions

01:52  Introduction

I'm going to begin by asking for forgiveness. This is an enormous topic. No one has ever sat me down and explained this to me.  I wished that someone had! Which is why I can’t start this podcast without attempting to do that service of exploring – How does Astrology work?

02:23 My Starting Position

I come to astrology late in life. It's not something that interested me throughout other parts of my life. As a teenager read the occasional horoscope in a magazine and it never resonated with me.

As a trainer, I’ve studied lots of other personality models and I use them extensively in my work (like the Myers Briggs Personality Type Model MBTI). But astrology was never something that I studied in in that context.

And so I come to astrology with no preconceived idea that it would work or that it should work.

I have that naturally sceptical, inquiring mind.  I come from western education.  My majors were in chemistry and double mathematics. So it’s clear, I really enjoy investigation and scientific explanation.

And that’s how I’m going to approach today’s podcast: How does Astrology Work, the scientific context of Astrology.

03:14  Cause and Effect

One of the very first places for us to start in answering this question how does astrology work, is to look at the very fundamentals of cause and effect. 

Does astrology work by cause and effect? Do the planets that are in the birth chart cause a person's life to be a certain way?  Is it that planets are causing events to unfold?

Ancient Humans

And we can see why one may be tempted to think that with astrology because especially if you've had the chance to tune into Episode 1 of the  Vedic Astrology Podcast, you know how we explored the importance of the Sun and the Moon to ancient humans; how much the earth's relationship with the Sun means; the Moon's relationship with the earth; how much those have effects here in the environment that we see every day as we were eking out a way to survive; as early humans are finding their way to thrive on this amazing planet.

The Sun has such a direct influence on the seasons around us, on the way that the plants are growing, and therefore, the way that the other animals are behaving. The availability of food is also influenced by the sun.

It would be natural to think that if the Sun is having a direct effect on us (and equally the Moon - as we spoke about in Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, it's easy to observe how the Moon interacts with the tides and has a strong connection with bodies of water on the planet that has a direct relationship to how we harvest fish).

These heavenly bodies provide useful information that helps us to survive.

And what do we notice that the Sun and the Moon are going around the ecliptic, where all the other fast-moving heavenly bodies are also moving on this same ecliptic, therefore it's quite natural for us to imagine “if the Sun that is on this superhighway and has a strong effect on the planet, the Moon is also and there having a strong effect on the planet, are these other heavenly bodies moving in the same superhighway also having direct effects powerful causation effects?”

05:13  Instrumentation

And for all we know, that could be true. Perhaps the planets are transmitting sound or light or electromagnetic frequency or something else that we do not yet have the equipment to measure.

That is how scientific discovery works. Every time we refine our instrumentation we're able to pick up more and more subtle information 

So you can imagine that before the invention of the microscope or the electron microscope, the thought that all matter was made of atoms and that inside those atoms there would be more space than stuff: That these atoms would be filled with vast areas of space in relation to the amount of stuff (that is the protons and the neutrons).

If you'd said that to people before the invention of the electron microscope, people may not have been able to conceptualize that because we just didn't have an instrument that could demonstrate that (that could show us that level of subtle insight). 

And this goes for all of the developments that you and I are able to exploit today.  We have been lucky enough to live in a time where technology has progressed so much. You think of all of these different advancement that have occurred in your lifetime.

This is a bit of a tangent but I remember growing up watching The Jetsons cartoon and they would have these video calls and I just thought that was amazing mind-blowing! And now, after a year of Covid, how many hours have we all spent on zoom video calls?

To get back to the topic, it is possible astrology is based on cause and effect and we just have not yet invented instruments that would pick up.

Maybe it's a light vibration - Jyotish is the study of light.

Maybe it's a sound vibration - we've just had a probe go past Venus and pick up a sound being produced by the planet[i].

Maybe it's an electromagnetic signal - we’ve recently had some insight into birds migrating by earth’s magnetic field and the birds’ eyes having a special chemical that can respond to the magnetic field. Quoting here from the BBC “Clues to how bird migrate using Earth’s magnetic field[ii]”

Prof Hore (from Oxford University) said the mechanism they have been investigating involves magnetically-sensitive chemical reactions initiated by light inside the bird's eyes - in their retinas, to be precise.

"It looks possible - and I would put it no stronger than that at the moment - that these highly-specialised chemical reactions could give the bird information about the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and in that way constitute a magnetic compass," he explained.

And from Quanta Magazine – an article entitled “Social Mitochondria, whispering between cells, influence health[iii]” discusses whether mitochondria are communicating using electromagnetic signals

Maybe it's a gravitational thing – we certainly we're held here in our goldilocks position, not too close and not too far from the Sun, by those big, gravitational planets Jupiter and Saturn so far from the Sun.  Jupiter and Saturn are in a gravitational tug of war with the Sun, keeping us placed here in the goldilocks zone.

So there are interactions that are happening between us and other planets and the Sun.

Perhaps there will be instruments invented (instruments not necessarily in space, but measure how our body responds and communicates at subtle chemical, electromagnetic and more levels).

Perhaps there is actually a cause and effect reason why astrology works. If that is the case we're just not there yet. 

09:16  The Three Bodies Doctrine

But what if it is the case that the scientific method is not the appropriate tool to use here. 

Taking you back to your high school science, you probably remember this process of having a hypothesis, designing an experiment that would test that hypothesis, then running the experiment, gathering data and seeing whether that data confirms the theory or lies outside the theory - in which case you need to come up with a new theory.

We've developed this rigorous scientific method and what a wonderful thing it has been in giving such a strong discipline to science, to discovery. And we've talked about how it's advanced us so much in the amounts of technology and application that has happened in our lifetime 

But the scientific method is restricted to phenomena where there is a cause and effect. That's what it's best for - where something really causes something else. That's when we can observe and we can use data to validate or to confirm the hypothesis.

But are there phenomena that beyond cause and effect?

Three Bodies Doctrine

In the body of Vedic knowledge which we touched on in Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast we spoke about how beautiful it is that Vedic Astrology in its name has been attached to this style of astrology because it ties Vedic Astrology to the body of Vedic knowledge.  In Vedic knowledge there is the 3 Bodies Doctrine. The physical body, the astral body, the causal body.  Each at a different level of subtleness.  We're quite familiar with the physical body. But there are more subtle levels of our existence as well. In the astral body and the causal body and then even beyond that.

And how do we study things that are beyond the physical plane of existence or beyond cause and effect

11:00  Non-sequential Cause and Effect

I was reading a fascinating article recently in Quanta Magazine called “Quantum mischief rewrites the laws of cause and effect[iv]”.

And begins by outlining for us Alice and Bob …

who are the stars of many thought experiments. And let's imagine that they are cooking dinner when a mishap occurs. Alice accidentally drops a plate and the sound startles Bob, who burns himself on the stove and cries out. In another version of events, Bob burns himself on the stove and cries out and that causes Alice to drop a plate. 

Over the last decade, quantum physicists have been exploring the implications of a strange realization … in principle, both versions of the story can happen at once. That is, A causes B and B causes A.  And they are simultaneously true. 

This is kind of mind-blowing for those of us who've grown up thinking that there is only cause and effect! And this article is opening us up to the idea that maybe, there's another way of experiencing or understanding the experience of life.

The article goes on to say …

In labs in Austria, China and Australia and elsewhere, physicists observed indefinite causal order by putting a particle of light, called a photon, in a superposition of two states …

Now what's really neat about sharing this article referring back to Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, is that photon particle of light.  Because, remember, although we call it Vedic Astrology, it's called Jyotish in Sanskrit or in India. And that name refers to the study of light. So I think it's neat that this example that I’m sharing with you, happens to involve a photon a particle of light.

Meanwhile,

… the physicists then subject one branch of this superposition to process A followed by process B and the other branch to B followed by A.  This procedure is known as the quantum switch. A’s outcome influences what happens to B and vice versa.  The photon experiences both causal orders simultaneously.

Finally, the article says …

Physicists have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a sequence of causes and effects doesn't capture the fundamental nature of things.  They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we are ever to figure out the origin of gravity, space and time. 

I think this is so powerful just to introduce to us the idea that it might be okay for us to let go of thinking that everything is cause and effect.  And in fact this article is saying that, perhaps to understand things like gravity space and time, we're going to have to let go of that.

And what is things like gravity space and time if not astrology!

We take for granted that science is the study of cause and effect.  It's brought great rigor to the discipline.  But can we see for example from that article that perhaps it's also limiting us.

And bringing it back to Astrology – maybe Astrology is it's not really about cause and effect?

We don't have any tools to prove that yet (maybe we never will). But is it possible to open our mind to that possibility and this will allow us to study phenomena that are occurring on subtler levels of existence whether we're talking about gravity space time and I wonder whether we can apply it to astrology as well? 

14:45  Unexplained Phenomena

Are there any other phenomena that we experience every day that are maybe beyond cause and effect? Let's run a few potential examples through our minds as thought experiment …

Music

What about music?

Music is something that transmits meaning and sentiment across cultures. We have responses to the music and so does someone else that we've never met. Music changes a person’s mood, people study better, they exercise better, sleep better.

Why does music work? How does music work in that way? And is it something that falls into the mysterious beyond cause and effect category?

Love

And what about love?

Romantic love is a human experience. Many of us grow up hoping to fall in love. It’s that common that it's something that we all expect will happen in our lifetime. But can science explain that? Can science explain cause the cause and effect of love?

Can we put people in an MRI and see the cause and effect of love? Can we measure pheromones? Can we do a blood tests? Look at the hormones?

Is there anything that is cause and effect related that we can say that person will fall in love with that person? Or that person won't fall in love with that person?

And yet here's this very common phenomena that many of us are experiencing!

Thought

Another common experience is thinking. You think, I think.  We're all creating new thoughts in our minds.  And we if got in an MRI what would it show? It certainly may show that areas of the brain, that the same areas are being stimulated, but the way that I think - about an elephant made of pineapples – something that has never been thought before - and you think this same zany thought too - do your neurons cause that, or could I arrange your neurons to think that? Are they unique to each of us? Are the neurons the same if we’re looking the MRI?

Consciousness – Self Awareness

A related example of something that we also can't explain through science that is perhaps beyond cause and effect is consciousness. My self-awareness, your self-awareness, my awareness that you are self-aware. Maybe the defining feature of being an adult human being! Is there something that causes the effect of consciousness? Science is divided on this topic. Or even whether we are conscious or if that is an illusion.

Magnetism

Finally, another every day object that we exploit and use that we can’t explain how it works is the magnet.

I’m reading from an article here on ‘livescience.com’ called ‘How do magnets work[v]?’

Physicists have some understanding of how magnets function. But the underlying phenomena to explain magnetism continues to elude scientific explanation. Exactly how do magnets work?

There's a large scale theory from classical physics and a small scale theory from quantum mechanics.

According to the classical theory, magnetic fields are clouds of energy around magnetic particles that pull in or push away other magnetic objects.  In the quantum mechanics view, electrons emit undetectable, virtual particles that tell other objects to move away or come closer.

Although these two theories help scientists understand how magnets behave in almost every circumstance, two important aspects of magnetism remain unexplained: why magnets always have a north and south pole, and why particles emit magnetic fields in the first place. 

So isn't this astounding! Magnets you and I played with as children and use in everyday devices, in MRI machines, in a whole gamut of technology including this microphone, scientist can’t actually explain how they work. We are able to harness the effect and exploit them.

The article goes on to say …

We just observe that when you make a charged particle move, it creates a magnetic field and two poles. We don't really know why. It's just a feature of the universe, and the mathematical explanations are just attempts 

at explaining it.

So here we have something that we don't know how it works but we do know that it does work and we use it every day 

So, here we have many things that we interact with all the time that we can't answer the question - How does it work? 

And is Astrology one of these phenomena?  We can observe it, but we can't prove why it works.

19:51  Summary One

To summarise so far, we have explored the question “How does astrology work?” in terms of is it causal - maybe it is, if so we need more technology. (And that's been the case in the past, that technology has helped us to understand things).  So it could possibly be causal but we don't have any way of measuring whatever it is that's causing it.

We're also being encouraged to question sequential cause and effect. The scientific method is great for studying cause and effect, but what is great for studying things outside the realm of cause and effect 

And we’ve examined some phenomena that we experience that are not explainable through the cause and effect model

So that gives us some background in answering the question “How does astrology work?”  And I look forward to all of your thoughts? How you explain astrology to your friends? And if you are someone who's being exposed to astrology for the first time through this podcast, what do you think about astrology being a phenomena that's beyond cause and effect? Do you think that there are phenomena that are beyond cause and effect? 

20:53  Scientific objections to Astrology

Alright, so now let's pivot here and here and talk about scientific objects that come up when we when we ask the question “How does astrology work?”

Generally, there are 2 big objections to astrology.  The first one is a discrepancy between the locations of the planet and the actual constellations - so we're going to talk about that.

And then the second big objection is the perception that astrology is a pseudoscience: That is - that it is not falsifiable.

Let's examine these two objections as part of answering the question “How does astrology work?”

21:48  Precession of the Equinoxes

The number one big objection to astrology is that now if you look up in the sky when we say in astrology the sun's in Aries, if you were able to look past that the Sun, the constellation in the background would not actually be Aries.

As we talked about in Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, everything is moving.  We are a rock hurtling around a hydrogen explosion in the vacuum of space in a gravitational battle to get away from the Sun and to be attracted to the Sun all at the same time.

Everything is moving.  The Moon is moving around the Earth, we're moving around the Sun, all the other planets are moving around the Sun.  We're in a galaxy that's moving around its centre.  Everything's in motion.

And over time, things move enough that even things that are very far away we can see that they move over thousands of years.

And another thing that's moving is even the Earth itself spinning on its axis. It is wobbling slightly and this means that, from our perspective, when we look out at the zodiac constellations they've moved. 

This is often called the precession of the equinoxes.

Now astrology has two ways of handling this. One is sidereal and the other is tropical.  

So if your astrologer uses the sidereal zodiac, they're actually recognizing that this precession of the equinoxes is taking place. They've calculated it in this very ancient system used a lot in Vedic Astrology (many Vedic astrologers use sidereal). And what sidereal zodiac or ayanamsha is doing is lining up the zodiac signs as they were.  And it's already factored in the wobble of the earth and it keeps the signs lined up with where the constellations where when the system of the zodiac was encoded thousands of years ago.

The other way of dealing with the precession of the equinoxes, from an astrology point of view, is using tropical astrology because tropical astrology is not tied to the zodiac constellations.

And we went through this in Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, for this very reason to make sure that, as astrologers we're comfortable with where things are in the sky.

As you remember with tropical astrology, the zodiac signs are just names for the segments of the ecliptic.

That ecliptic has not changed.  We are still going around at approximately 364 and a quarter days for each orbit.  And the equinoxes are still where they were because they are Earth related in tropical ayanamsha.  So the zodiac constellations were only ever used as markers or names. They were never literal.  Which means that, when you pick your star signs in a magazine, you're looking at tropical and those are relating to the segments of the ecliptic not to the actual constellations in the background - which, because of our earth's wobble appear to have moved.

So, it not that case that astrology doesn't work or can't work because the planets no longer line up with the constellations.  Either, you want to be using sidereal where the planets do line up with those background stars or you want to remind yourself what the ecliptic is all about and that the constellation names are markers for the segments on the ecliptic. 

So, it turns out that precession of the equinoxes is not a problem for either sidereal or tropical astrology.

25:10  Pseudoscience

And what about the second big objection to astrology - that it's a pseudoscience?

And you will see that a lot if you google it - there's plenty of hits for that phrase.

And this comes down to the idea, that in order to make the scientific method more rigorous, not only do we follow what we spoke about (the hypothesis, the designing an experiment, gathering data, allowing that data to show that our hypothesis is the most likely correct). The idea was we need to add into the scientific model is – “is it the hypothesis falsifiable in the first place?”

Because the scientific method relies on that it's something that is falsifiable - otherwise what's the point of an experiment because if you can't prove that it's false then experimenting and getting data isn't going to help you out.

Let's dig down into this because it takes a little bit to unpack it …

Karl Popper

For example, let's go with the science of psychology.  Like all sciences, it's observing phenomena, people suffering and looking at understanding how could that possibly be the case and therefore how can we be helpful? And we create theories. But in psychology, and in other sciences, it's easy to come up with theories and hard to disprove them!

It was Karl Popper who came up with the idea of adding falsifiability.  He was contrasting Einstein's Theories of Relativity versus the primordial ingredients of what has become psychology.

So here we have a quote from Karl Popper from the ‘Farnham Street Blog’ entitled “Karl Popper on The Line between Science and Pseudoscience[vi]”

… that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child.

Each of these two cases can be explained with equal ease in Freudian and in Adlerian terms. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation. According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove to himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child). 

I could not think of any human behaviour which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory.  It was precisely this fact–that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed– which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories.  It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.

So what he's really saying there is that the way the scientific method was originally (which is design your experiment, go gather data and if the data matches your hypothesis then likely your hypothesis is true) - but he's saying that here for example in psychology these two distinctly different theories - you can design the experiment, you can get the data and they will reinforce both theories even though the theories are not related to each other and they're conflicting or different theories. 

So this is why he suggested that, if it's going to be science, we need to be able get some data that would not support the theory.  And so, the idea of adding falsifiability into the scientific method came about.

But in psychology (and it turns out in other scientific fields) it’s actually more difficult than you would imagine.

I’m going to read some extracts now from an article from the National Institutes of Health on the U.S National Library of Medicine and it's called What Would Karl Popper Say? 

Are Current Psychological Theories of ADHD Falsifiable?[vii] 

I'm going to read the abstract of the article …

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common and highly heritable neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder. 

Here, we critically review four major psychological theories of ADHD – the Executive Dysfunction, the State Regulation, the Delay Aversion and the Dynamic Developmental – on their abilities to explain all the symptoms of ADHD, their testability and their openness to falsification. 

We conclude that theoreticians should focus, to a greater extent than currently practiced, on developing refutable theories of ADHD.

If you think about ADHD these days it's a well-known condition. A general lay person has an awareness of it. And it would be a common reason why people would seek psychological or psychiatric service (especially for their children). And yet even at the top of that field, the four main theories under review by this study can't fit into that falsifiable requirement of scientific method.

It's challenging.

And in a different article on the ‘Frontiers in Psychology – Quantitative Psychology and Measurement’ website called Replication, Falsification and the Crisis of Confidence in Social Psychology[viii]. It states that …

… replication attempts (of physics experiments) are rarely carried out. … to the extent that they are carried out, it can be well-nigh impossible to say conclusively what they mean, whether they are “successful” (i.e., showing similar, or apparently similar, results to the original experiment) or “unsuccessful” (i.e., showing different, or apparently different, results to the original experiment).

if even replications in physics are sometimes not conclusive, as H. M Collins (of Cardiff University) has convincingly shown, then what hope is there for replications in psychology?

Even in something that we think of as being as predictable as physics - when we go and replicate studies, sometimes we find data that doesn't back up the theory or comes up with completely different data than the theory suggested. 

So you can imagine if that's a problem in physics, it's definitely a problem in psychology and obviously a problem in astrology as well.  Which is why Astrology get called a pseudoscience.

And a finally article I want to quote for this part of the podcast is from a psychologist from the London School of Economics – Satoshi Kanzawa.  He reminds us that there really is no such thing as scientific proof in his Psychology Today Article – Common Misconceptions about Science I: Scientific Proof – why there is no such thing as a scientific proof[ix]

In the article he states … 

Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science.  Mathematics and logic are both closed, self-contained systems of propositions, whereas science is empirical and deals with nature as it exists.

Proofs have two features that do not exist in science: They are final, and they are binary.  In contrast, all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final.  There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science.  The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives.

And this reminds me of an Australian example.  For hundreds of years, Europeans had observed a bird called a swan. And swans in Europe were always white. It’s easy to imagine that there is something quintessential to being a swan that involves it being white. But then when Europeans discover Australia – they find black swans. Hundreds of years of observation, data collection, replicable over and over that swans were white, is just wiped out in an instant by a new piece of empirical data.

The real world, where all of our science is, is based on observation. There are not any watertight proofs. There's just most likely explanations for the data that we've observed.

34:50  What is provable

So where does this all leave us?

Let's just put it front and centre to say that there are definitely things about psychology that are measurable and you might want to say in inverted commas provable.

And it's all on that intervention end of psychology.  We can study the interventions and say for example that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was used in this study of this many participants and it had this many results that improved these people's experience by this so much percent.

So there's definitely things about psychology that are scientifically studyable, countable and measurable.

But even if you look at Cognitive Behavioural Therapy on the NHS fact sheet, it says right up the front …

CBT is based on the concept that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are interconnected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a vicious cycle.

So even medically or psychologically we're saying that these are theories.

And Astrology is obviously like this as well

If you see an astrologer they're going to raise your awareness about patterns in your life and they're going to give you homework. If you come and see a former life coach like me it's going to be literal homework. Maybe if you see a different Vedic astrologer they are going to suggest you do mantras or making a regular practice where you perhaps fast on a particular day of the week or perhaps you make a donation, you sacrifice some of your time some or some of your money some of your belongings, you make a donation to an organization or a charity.

But what are those things really? - Mantra, Fasting, Making a donation …

Similar to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, they are circuit breakers. They're going to change your behaviour. They're going to remind you to stay aware that this is a pattern that you want to change. And every time it happens you're going to think this is a pattern that you want to change and do a new particular action (mantra, fasting etc.).

So we're not arguing about whether psychology is measurable or whether it has a measurable impact of improvement 

We're happy that it is. We're happy that astrology can as well.

So we're not talking about whether it does work or does not work. We're just talking about - How does it work?

And if the theories of psychology (and even in some cases physics) are not falsifiable, can we be open to realizing that, there are in fact things that we take for granted (for example going to see a psychologist about ADHD - we think that that is a scientifically backed - that theory is inverted commas proved) but in fact, at many levels of psychology, and in other sciences, we perhaps haven't had that falsifiability, replication standard of rigor and investigation that we might expect from the scientific method.

And if we're going to be okay with that, can we be okay with Astrology?

37:48  Conclusion

Let's sum up the journey we’ve been on in this podcast. Where does this leave us now in answering the question “How does astrology work?”

We've had a look at cause and effect - maybe there is a cause and effect - if so we need instrumentation that we haven't invented yet.

But we’ve also touched on how physicist are beginning to acknowledge that cause and effect might not describe reality well and may be limiting our perception and ability to solve problems (and some very exciting developments there around space time and gravity coming from simultaneous cause and effect)

We've also looked at other phenomena that we experience all the time that either we don't have an explanation for or are maybe happening beyond cause and effect. We've talked about music, love, thinking, self-awareness and magnets. It turns out we can’t explain how magnets work.

And Astrology may be one of these phenomena too.

I also looked at the two major objections that people have to “How astrology works” which are about the misalignment between the planets and the constellations and we've also looked at the pseudoscience label that astrology has because it can't be falsified.

But we've actually examined that in psychology and even in physics there are theories that either can't be falsified or struggled to be replicated.

To sum it all up, we don't know how astrology works. It could be a mechanism that we can't observe yet. It could be one of the many phenomena that we harness the power of that we don't know how they work (even something as beneficial as CBT is well researched in its effectiveness but remains a based on a theory that is not proven).

This reminds me of an experience had when I moved to a country town at the age of around 12. The town was filled with hydrangeas. I don't know if you've ever seen hydrangeas, but they're these big bushes and at particular times of the year they just burst forth in flowering leaf clusters of pink or blue. And I would ask about what are these spectacular bushes and flowers and be told that if you put rusty nails in the soil under the hydrangea it flowers blue. Wow, that's amazing!  And obviously people did it and it worked. And everyone assumed that it must be the iron in the rusty nails that caused the plant to go blue. But it turns out that it's got nothing to do with iron at all. The rusty nails, in the right conditions, can be acidic enough to make the soil a little bit more acidic which will release the aluminium that is bound in the soil. When the soil is alkaline, it holds on to the aluminium.

So it's got to do with aluminium not the iron. If the rusty nails are doing anything, they're just tipping the balance to be more acidic and that releases what was already there bound up in the alkaline soil.

And, who know, maybe it is also like this with Astrology. Maybe we think it's got something to do with planets and signs or maybe it like the rusty nails - it's something that works but it might not be the cause.

41:05  The Tree of Knowledge

Finally, when I was doing the research for this podcast about magnets I came across a blog post by maths teacher and author Tim James.  The blog post was called “Is Magnetism Impossible to Explain?[x]” to finish his blog and he said that sometimes he imagines human knowledge as a tree …

… and at the moment science is built on a few main boughs of this imaginary tree and we haven't yet unified them into a single trunk. But when we have done so, the trunk will extend down as far as we can go maybe even connecting to other universes or different laws. And magnetism is one branch of this tree of knowledge - we can observe its effects and we want a deeper explanation

but we just haven't united that tree yet.

And I love this because going back to Episode 1 of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, Vedic knowledge / Vedic science works the other way. It works from the trunk out to the branches. It has the unified field. It has the unified answers to those questions. And it sees how everything is connected.

Whereas, in science, as this teacher has experienced, we come from the twigs and the leaves and we're working our way in towards the branches and we're trying to find where the trunk is and we haven't done that yet.

So I think this leaves us with the wonder that all of us have in the natural world. It reminds us of how many things we still don't understand. And this is a great gift - it’s AWEsome. It inspires awe in us. 

And maybe that is the role of astrology to connect us to the awesomeness of how big this universe is.

And think about how those other non-cause and effect things are like that as well - love connects us it's awesome - music is awe-inspiring - consciousness is the ultimate awe - and maybe magic magnetism is as well.

Astrology is in good company with these aware inspiring phenomena that we are tapping into, we're harnessing some of it, but we just might not understand all of it yet.

42:25  Farewell

I hope that you've enjoyed this journey through answering the question “How does Astrology Work?” I think it's something that we're going to come back to over and over again.

I'm hoping this was useful insightful, thought-provoking and whatever you would like to share about the way you understand How Astrology Works, I'd love to hear about.

I'm looking forward to already the next time that we get together for the Vedic Astrology podcast and until then, stay well

44:58  End

© fionamarques.com 2021

Quoted Articles

[i] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/Parker-Discovers-Natural-Radio-Emission-in-Venus-Atmosphere
[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57582451
[iii] https://www.quantamagazine.org/social-mitochondria-whispering-between-cells-influence-health-20210706/
[iv] https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-20210311/
[v] https://www.livescience.com/32633-how-do-magnets-work.html
[vi] https://fs.blog/2016/01/karl-popper-on-science-pseudoscience/
[vii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2654902/
[viii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00621/full#B14
[ix] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof
[x] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J6Om8rsRnJIJ:https://www.timjamesscience.com/blog/previous/4+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pt