Astrology / Vedic Jyotish  
My two cents on "Eastern &
Western Astrology..." - 3

K.N. Rao, a brilliant Indian teacher, jyotishi, writer and predictor of astounding success indicated a few times in his Jyotish-list messages that even great jyotishis are about 80-82% accurate, generally. A mini study on CompuServe done in mid-nineties through message threads showed that in general average astrologers get things right between 60-75% of times. If we begin to tease out the important from the non-essential predictions, the percentage in the accomplished ones will fall further from 82% down, I am certain.

Even if there are one thousand super-accurate predictors that exist in the marketplace of astrology at this time worldwide, who rarely fail or are wrong, is that a good enough performance record for our ancient disciplines of astrology, given that a few hundred thousand if not a few millions are ardently engaged in discussing and living astrology? One in five being the threshold of statistical significance, we should have infallible performance from 200,000 astrologers per million. How far are we from achieving such numbers, in the eastern or western camp, or any other camp for that matter? If not, should we be spending our energies in claiming and touting the infallibility of astrology as a discipline, let alone as a science, and should we really be brawling on this tiny island of astrology which probably holds only an infinitesimal fraction of the entire population, even if we are counting believers as opposed to practitioners, especially successful practitioners with a high performance record, consistently and documented so!

What is needed, perhaps, is not theories and justifications but DEMONSTRATIONS of what astrology can give, and produce. Failures are as important as successes and egoism or jingoism have no place at this stage of growth or perhaps rediscovery of the ancient craft.

I am neither trying to be provocative nor to challenge any individual's, astrologer or not, view of reality or where our energies should be focused insofar as astrology is concerned, eastern or western. but, let me remind you friends, there are way more than just TWO schools of astrology! And all of these have ardent followers and anecdotes of uncanny predictive success. And I am not even looking at all the different methods of divination, in total! It eerily reminds one of the 'dodo bird verdict' alluded to by Dan Baker in "What Happy People Know". Luborsky, Singer and Luborsky (1975) were trying to figure out which brand of psychotherapy was really the best, but did not find any single one that could be called that. They borrowed the Dodo bird verdict from Alice in Wonderland: "Everyone has won -- so all must have prizes!" Baker comments that if no single therapy is superior, then some other healing factor is obviously at work! We do not know if that applies to the diverse forms of astrology or not, but perhaps we should keep it in mind, given the diverse and dissimilar orientation points used in the various forms of astrology. Perhaps some of the better predictors intuitively know that and do not remain limited in their armamentaria when tackling the tough job of reading the signs and symbols of the human soul through heavenly indicators.

Quite honestly, it is not time yet to get into, "My dad is stronger than your dad!" games and arguments with our playmates, although modern astrology, eastern and western, as it is being rediscovered, is indeed at about that age where such behavior might be just appropriate!

It is all healthy and normal, as long as we do not get stuck, stop growing as individuals, as groups of explorers and as astrologers of any and all cloths as we explore this fascinating and largely unknown territory. But first of all, we must stop in our tracks and really test ourselves honestly to find out where we stand, in terms of progress and performance. Most of us will find that when searching a large and unknown territory, working in groups of individuals with a large variety of skills and expertise is perhaps more efficient!  

– Rohini Ranjan
April 11, 2004

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