Charlatanry? Science? Life?

[The forecast for Wednesday has already been posted.]

The struggle to be something one is not is the struggle of life, it seems. I am not at all sure that people ever stop doing it--ever stop trying to be something they are not. And perhaps it is healthy to be doing that. To put it in one word, it is aspiration.

Daily schedules are one way of doing it: trying to keep up with an exercise agenda, for example. If one fails one day, one can try again the next. Does anyone ever really keep at it every day without fail? I take such stories with a grain of salt. Maybe in fact some of the old (or current?) Indian yogis in fact adhered to the extremely Spartan disciplines we hear about--but I would not be surprised if the stories have been exaggerated.

Someone, a very nice lady, offered to pay me a small monthly amount for the forecasts I publish for free. I am calling them Messages now rather than forecasts--it seems to me less pretentious. I feel, not insulted, as she hoped I would not, but a little embarrassed by her offer, for it raises the question, are my efforts really worth a monthly fee? I tend to be very modest about my work in astrology. It is after all a "science" of hypotheses pasted to anecdotal experiences pasted to speculations pasted to attempts de novo. One can only try. To charge someone for it seems rather egoistic. To charge for painting a house seems normal; it is for one's time well-spent. The result, so to speak, is guaranteed. To charge for hypothetical projections into the future seems like pretense if not charlatanry. No result is guaranteed. I would include the predictors of stock market prices in that judgment, although in fact they charge much more than astrologers, and are not embarrassed to charge $500 a year for monthly predictions of the stock market, getting that amount from hundreds or thousands of takers. It is a quite large "industry." I find that shocking. 

It is true, of course, that I spend an enormous amount of time researching and writing the forecasts. I am not sure that makes it right to charge for them. But to accept someone's voluntary donation--I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. Still I feel it puts pressure on me to perform, and perhaps I prefer the feeling that I am offering something gratis so that I do not feel compelled to continue doing it or to spend even more time than I already do perfecting it.

The word "charlatan" is interesting. Are there really any conscious charlatans? Do not most or all of them actually believe in what they profess? One might call the stock-market predictors--"Only $49 a month for these amazing expert projections!"--charlatans, I suppose, but they will point to their past successes (not to their failures) to claim that their approach is based on something "scientific" or semi-reliable. And of course they will offer some limited guarantee, something like a three-month trial (after they have gotten your credit card information). Still they get plenty of takers. Charlatans? Probably that is stretching the word.

When reading about the "guru" G. I. Gurdjieff, I often think, "charlatan," but perhaps I am being unfair. Writing a book "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandchildren" filled with outrageous poppycock seems to indicate that one is honestly proclaiming oneself a charlatan, which means that it is impossible to feel that the victims of the deception are any other than willing victims. Perhaps that is not "real" charlatanry, or perhaps "out-and-out charlatanry" is in fact honest because the victims have been thoroughly warned. Believing in one's own deceptions is a trickery of self-deception not unknown to the peculiar human mind. Proclaiming openly that one is a deceiver and then gathering up the proceeds from the deceived is perhaps one way of making a living, if one could live with oneself while doing it. One might say that it is closely allied to the art of the stage magician. Yet he is basically honest, for all he claims is "What you see is what you get." 

I am too much a scientist, implicitly, to be able to do any such thing. "The truth" is to me more real than money, at some basic level of consciousness. And so to take money for something less than true seems like skating on very thin ice. 

One difference between Gurdjieff and his best-known pupil P. D. Ouspensky is that the latter could not by any stretch of imagination be considered a charlatan. His seriousness emanates from every pore of his consciousness and writing. It was that differeence between them, perhaps, which led to Ouspensky's separation from Gurdjieff even though he continued to promulgate many of G's ideas and methods. I am re-reading Gary Lachman's excellent and readable "In Search of P. D. Ouspensky" and enjoying it immensely. The dialectic between the two men is explored tellingly and without much obnoxious condescension or presupposition about what the whole drama really meant. A good writer on such "occult" topics has to leave the occult occult to respect it properly. Lachman generally succeeds at that.