Overmental Astrology?

Overmental Astrology?

[The forecast for Friday has already been posted.

[The following is my reply to someone who posted an assemblage of statements on astrology by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Both admitted that astrology has some validity but they warned that one ought not to take it as fatalism. They also said that yoga can change the way an individual experiences his horoscope.]

Anyone who has read my daily astrological forecasts knows that I do not predict that someone will break his neck. That is an absurd parody of real astrology. The real astrologers from whom I have learned were all deeply spiritual souls who understood things from a deeply spiritual viewpoint. They were also scientists who did not make ridiculous assumptions based on superstition but who tested, and continued to re-test, everything they said in their books. One of the best of them, Marc Edmund Jones, was also a superb philosopher, spiritual teacher, and expositor of the Bible, an ordained Presbyterian pastor with a doctor of philosophy degree from Columbia University.

Much of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother said about astrology was designed to warn devotees against Indian astrology, which is much too fatalistic. So-called Vedic astrologers will give you exact predictions of when you will die and so on. Western astrologers do not do that, or I have never known of one who did. We are a little more sophisticated than that.

It is interesting that just two weeks ago when I was testing an advanced astrological hypothesis I was able to find conclusive evidence for it in the horoscope of Sri Aurobindo. I used the dates that the Mother first visited him in 1914, Her coming to stay at the Ashram in 1920, and the marvelous events of November 1926. I was able to see these three reflected perfectly in the heavens by the particular advanced method I was studying. So the idea that advanced yogis are no longer linked with the solar system is just not true. Why would they opt out of the solar system? There is nothing evil in it! No astrological aspect is evil. Some are more difficult than others, that is all. Sri Aurobindo's attainment in 1926 was not fated or predicted by "the stars." That would be absurd. But the placements of the planets at the time of that attainment reflected what was going on perfectly, simply because, as the Mother says, astrology can be "a kind of notation on the material plane of the relations between universal and individual life." For someone who was not a yogi, born at the same time as Sri Aurobindo, these planetary placements would have meant something different---not a Day of Siddhi but something remarkable in the context of his or her more limited life. Because Sri Aurobindo was the most advanced yogi the world has ever seen, he was able to make something happen which had never happened before. The planets did not do it, but it happened at a time when the planets were aligned in accord with the essence of that remarkable event.

Astrology is a field of discovery, not a closed and fixed system. There can be an overmental as well as a merely mental astrology, and the best astrologers are either close to the Overmind or perhaps sometimes working within it. (Of course these are quite rare beings.) I doubt that any of them are Supramental astrologers, although I envision that possibility.

Astrology is not about planets influencing people. It is about the invisible and divinely ordained links between the motions of the solar system and individual human lives. There are multiple ways of studying and using it. I find that every critic of astrology I have ever read or encountered has a much too simplistic or primitive idea of what it really is. He does not know what those who have studied it for years to develop a proficiency in it have learned. Advanced astrology is truly amazing, enlightening, uplifting, thrilling, and a real proof that G*d is not separate from his universe or his people. I love it, and because it is true I know that it is part of the Truth-Consciousness. I mean, of course, advanced, real and evolving astrology, not the reflection of it in popular superstitions.

Hugh Higgins
Cosmic Piper