Re-learning Astrology

Re-learning Astrology

by Ashutosh Agnihtri

Time and again, I receive new students who sadly claim that they've tried studying astrology for years but never seem to make head or tail of it. This article reveals that it's not so much the complexity of astrology nor the lack of having a mentor that holds them back, but more, how they learn it.

Most students of astrology do not have the privilege of starting with apprenticeship. They had to plod along with the different styles of different authors, and subjected themselves to what the authors wanted them to read that would support their own arguments. That was precisely how I started, but I was not happy with how I learnt things. So I enrolled myself with astrological academies and institutes around the world. Then having acquired every single diploma and certificate I could get, I found that a lot of my questions and curiosity were still unanswered. It was about the same thing as when I did my personal studies through books. Even so, I developed a confidence in astrology that gave me great confidence with my astrological skills. I felt that what I learnt, and how I learnt it, no one could learn it better than the way I did. Of course, this is how most students would feel with whatever it is they're learning.

Things changed for me when I met the person I would have the destiny to call master. It wasn't easy for me to accept just anyone to be my master, even if they were my better. I would only bow to a master whose knowledge, skill, and experience should be light years ahead of my own. What made me accept my master was his own story with astrology. He was highly educated, socially respected, a spiritual leader to many, impeccable with his delivery and documentation, and practically peerless in our region with his astrology. In the beginning, he was amused with my astrology skills, which then was very tropical, and respected my psychology background and how I blended it with my astrology. I thought my ilk and I were at the zenith of astrological application. But then, he presented his eastern metaphysical concepts and questions, and I realized that I was in the face of a doyen of metaphysical and astrological wisdom. Apparently, his own astrological sojourn paralleled my own as he revealed that his decades of western astrology brought him no closer to the questions he was asking for decades. So there was this man who fascinated me with the most balanced view of astrology, metaphysics, and life I had ever come across. Not just that, he was an extremely objective and scientific experimenter. No one could convince him of anything that he couldn't experiment with himself. That was the final touch for me.

What started off as a freeform discussion turned out into a decade long apprenticeship that turned my metaphysical knowledge of the cosmos; all using astrology as the trunk of my tree of knowledge, making it my main hub of reference. Today, I realize that the greatest import I received from my revered teacher, was not so much the astrology but particularly the way I learnt things with and from him.

Today, many students come to class carrying along with them, knowledge of what they have studied. As I normally warn my beginning students: it is crucial that you leave your biases behind, your beliefs, and your disbeliefs. Start off as a scholar, commit to the processes, expect no specific outcome. What is crucial at the outset, is the dedication to the process. And the more objective that process of learning is, the more the student should be able to get the best of what the current system would have to offer. It is only after getting the best that the new system has to offer that you would be in a better position to make a good comparison or integration between the old and the new. But not before absolute devotion to and mastery of the new.

When starting to learn something new, many students start by validating their previous astrological knowledge. I urge my students not to do that. There are generally two main phases to the study: firstly, learning and committing to the process that makes the path of analysis consistent and scientific, and secondly, recording co-relations of the prediction with real-world events.

One of the main reasons why most people don't have much of an opinion for astrology is because astrology is not known for its objectivity and everyone thinks that there is some magic or gift that the student of astrology would need to have as a pre-qualifier to ever become a "good" astrologer. The following are properties of being objective and scientific that every student of astrology must strive for:

there must be laid out standards of operation that suggest objective procedures capable of producing replicable results
there should be sound documentation capable of retracing the path of analysis that produced the results. It must be able to subject itself to a post-mortem analysis.

Anything outside of the above will push astrology into individualistic subjectivity. That's when others can challenge the workings of astrology down to personal intuition or psychism, and that it wasn't true astrology at work.

It is crucial that for the sake of personal integrity, the student of astrology should consider serious scholastic aptitude in studying astrology. Work out the science portion religiously, and leave the art portion to bloom on its own. The latter part is a natural process that requires no work on the part of the earnest student.

Specific to jyotisha students, the following can be of greatest benefit to your learning process that will eventually round-off all your knowledge in the most optimum manner possible. Be patient with the following:

Forget everything you've learnt about natural benefics and malefics, and the yogas and dosas. Pick them up again until you've acquired sufficient skill in these basic modules.
Stick to the rasi alone and leave behind for a while, the use of amsas, vargas, and sensitive points such as gulika and mandi. There is little or nothing that the "deeper" techniques can reveal that is not already "readable" from the rasi and Bhava.
Polish your skills with the various manipulations of the following alone: signs, planets, and houses. Do this continually as part of a learning game, and juggle them around in all possible combinations. Do it until it becomes second nature to your scanning eyes. Begin with keywords with everything that you're analyzing.
Learn to read events not by houses, but by issues. Doing it the latter way provides for the greatest view possible, covering all possible angles, crucial to the issue at hand. For instance, when a subject asks simply about his finances with a terse "Tell me about my personal finances.", it requires answers from many angles in his personal chart rather than just to read the whole of his personal finances from his 2nd house alone, which many practitioners do. I have always described this as bad astrology. The good student should realize that there are many factors that account for the individual's total financial states at different times in life.

For too long, astrology students had always misconceived that more advanced techniques give them the skill to make "advanced predictions". There is no such thing as an advanced prediction. A prediction is a prediction. It's just another horoscopic potential foretold into a specific time frame. The only thing the student gets out of advanced techniques is more complex calculations that give them the idea that they should be getting better predictive results. I have proven that diligence with fundamentals can take the most average student a long way into mastery.

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Dr Agnihotri has been using astrology for 37 years and has taught astrology for free every week till today, since 1986. He is now adviser to the Institute of Astrological Science, Malaysia at http://astrologyuniversitymalaysia.com. He invites all friends of astrology to email him at rizabeg@gmail.com.