The Promises & Pitfalls of Astrology Prediction
“People think about the future two or three times as much as the past. They also report that their thoughts about the past are often because of its implications for the future”.
- The Science of Prospection by Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs
We are the new prospectors, but we do not carry shovels or search for gold. We are mining for the gems within, using maps of the heavens to guide us.
This search is not a digging into our past for the sake of it, but to more clearly understand our current state and future direction.
We look back only for signs on how to move forward.
Psychoanalysts were always more interested in uncovering the past, while cognitive psychology focused on memory and perception; the past and present.
As it turns out, we dwell on the future far more than the past according to recent reports.
“It is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behaviour, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities”.
— Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney, The New York Times
The problem with interpreting what hasn’t happened yet
Despite the many advantages of having an awareness of oneself and one’s place in the universe, there are drawbacks with astrology when it comes to predicting the future. It’s not astrology’s fault, really. The fault lies with astrologers. The problem is that we are human — we have a point of view.
How can so many astrologers, using some many different techniques which seem to contradict, all be right?
No, we’re not all right, all the time. And, in fact, if you must know, we are wrong quite a bit. Not because we don’t evaluate charts correctly, but because we interpret subjectively. We have a bias which we seek to back up within the myriad of astrological techniques.
True objective is impossible in astrology. However, astrology does offer us, at least, more objectivity than a conversation on the level of the problem. It lifts the us out of the situation, as we look to the stars for guidance.
If, however, you are predicting with such certainty, or seem to be - and what you are predicting is challenging - the person is left feeling the inevitability of your prediction, even if you prescribe remedies to overcome it.
When most astrologers got the 2016 US presidential elections wrong, I had a sense that astrology had turned a corner.
These mistakes are of benefit. It humbles the astrology community and that can only be a good thing. Because if you think you know it all, you can do more harm than good in reading a person’s life — because a reading should be an attempt to understand how the person is experiencing what you are studying. If you use textbook analysis of a person’s life, and do not consult the person you are reading for, you are missing one very important ingredient; the person!
As an astrologer, my aim is to be as objective as possible; to lift myself out of the mire of my day-to-day life in meditation, to see the perfection of existence, mapped out in the alignment of the planets; to help navigate the best way forward.
But the following should be implicit in an interpretation: with too many variables at play — not least of all your will, no matter how free you believe that to be — it is not possible to be 100% accurate all the time. So, although we do not know when a prediction is accurate or not, my aim is to help you make a well-informed decision based on probabilities.
When I do readings, I want to engage with the client, to find out about how they experience their birth chart. And each new client is a new adventure, not some jumble of planetary alignments I have heard time and time again. That does not mean I believe an astrology reading should be a conversation like you would have with a confidant or counselor. It is informational, which means the astrologer has certain things to impart that you’ve probably paid him or her for.
Let’s face it, you can get some good advice from pretty much anyone. Astrology is different because the astrologer can see patterns non-astrologers cannot.
I believe some vagueness in interpreting a client’s future is useful because, well, I’ve never had a 100% accurate reading myself. The more precise the astrologer attempts to be, the more chance he or she will get lost in the myriad of calculations available. And if you have one reading that gives you the impression your life is heading a certain, very specific, direction; not quite the direction another astrologer has relayed to you, you will likely feel conflicted.
And if you don’t find disagreement within astrologers’ interpretations of your chart, you may find astrologers parroting what other astrologers have garnered from ancient texts — further solidifying an interpretation that may have been taken out of context or poorly judged to begin with.
If a technique doesn’t work, an astrologer may drop it and pick up another to justify an argument they’ve already convinced themselves of.
Worse still, an astrologer may develop an ideology around interpretations and soon they’re passing off advice superstitiously. Astrology can be a type of religion for some. They may lose all context in favor of supporting an ancient view.
The astrologer may not ever check with the individual and their experience of such an alignment.
Because, here’s the thing, no two people on the planet experience the same alignment in the same way, even if they have identical charts. And that’s not just because we can dig a little deeper to find individual differences in the charts — that is obvious — but that we forget that the person is just that; an individual person and not their chart.
YOU ARE NOT YOUR CHART
Time and again I’ve witnessed a resignation when convinced of certain alignments in my own chart, only to realize that when it came to pass it was not as stated by any book, or any astrologer. At the interpretive stage, you may also lose all sense of yourself, in favor of an interpretation that was written hundreds, and sometimes, thousands of years ago.
Context. Hello!
I’ve had many great astrology readings over the years, from some great astrologers. Some have been quite good in assessing a situation or predicting an outcome. But none accurately predicted anything in my life. Why? Because even if they had been accurate on paper, they brought their own interpretations to bare on the situation and expressed their personal point of view.
When I eventually experienced what they predicted it was something completely different for me, as I have my own experience that no one else can completely understand.
But it’s not they we shouldn’t try to as astrologers. We must take the time to ask how the client feels about what is predicted. By doing so, we change some of our language to fit the reading.
As Above. So, So.
So, what’s to be done about this ‘problem’?
We must accept that astrology represents a truth on a higher level; a truth that incorporates lower truths which seem paradoxical, while astrologers have their subjective truths and often contradict one another.
No one can know you like you know yourself. Even future AI, with its promises of algorithms that can give you insights you were unaware of, will have its limitations. Algorithms may be used in astrology in the future and let you know what will likely happen, but this is not as important as the most important element: how you experience it.
And while not being 100% accurate in prediction may sound like a bum note for an astrologer, it’s actually a good thing — if we relay some of the uncertainty to a client, as it gives the person a sense of things not being set in stone. And because clients usually seek astrological advice when in difficulty, this is most certainly good news.
You cannot know the thing from the interpretation of the thing, just as you cannot know a flower because someone told you the name, color and size of the flower. Knowing the timeline for when the flower blossoms is helpful in planning your life, but it cannot capture that moment, until it happens and you experience it.
Here we need to differentiate between what Eckhart Tolle refers to in his book, The Power of Now, as ‘clock time’ and ‘psychological time’; the difference being that clock time allows us to plan our lives, but we do not let our mind’s get lost in an imagined future. Instead, we can fully embody the present, while planning for the future.
Astrology certainly helps us to plan more effectively. However, if you’ve had an interpretation of your chart that has conveyed something that is likely to blossom in the future, it is important to remind yourself that even if the prediction is correct on paper, it does not give you the essence of the thing. And you will not know if this is true for you until you experience it, anyway.
The only thing you can do to experience the flower, your life, it just that: experience the flower, the blossoming of your life.
Reference
Eckhart Tolle (1999) The Power of Now, 1 edn., USA: New World Library.
