Astrological Predictions and Star Signs

Welcome to Astrological Predictions and Star Signs.

There is a mountain spring. It falls steeply, cutting through rocks and rolling over cliffs to form beautiful waterfalls. Tumbling ever downwards, its white waters gather momentum. Even as it flattens out and becomes a wide and undulating river its current is still very powerful. It is known as the Kikori River.

This river is subject to a strange phenomenon. This phenomenon occurs at the river’s mouth, its estuary, where it joins the Gulf of Papua. Strong as its current is, twice daily a high wave, stretching from bank to bank, makes its way up from the sea and proceeds up river. It is actually overcoming the mighty current. How can this be?

Unbelievable as it might seem, the incoming tide is so powerful here that it can even overcome the enormous flow of the mighty Kikori River. So how does it work? Why? The answer is the ‘pull of the moon.’

Now, there are a lot of people who claim that the stars and planets have no effect upon our lives. They debunk the idea. Astrology is definitely bunkum. How can the stars influence us? Yet these same people will step into the shade on a hot day, or remark how cold it is in winter. Our nearest star, the Sun, has an enormous influence upon our lives- indeed all life upon Planet Earth. You could say that, without the Sun, life as we know it would not exist. No, with a little forethought, even the most sceptical among us know that this nearest star, our Sun, does have a very real and tangible influence on us.

Additionally, we know that the Moon affects the tides. We know that all sorts of things happen when the tide is incoming, or, conversely, on the ebb. We even know that the phases of the Moon affect the amount of water flow. But are you aware that, on a certain phase of the Moon, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef sheds a billion tiny eggs coral in order to reproduce itself? Did you know that shell-fish, worms, mayflies and a host of other creatures’ activities are virtually controlled by the Moon’s soft light?

But of course, it could be argued that when people are referring to whether or not stars and planets influence our lives they are talking about distant stars, and distant planets.

Well, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that if the sun and the moon, because of their close proximity to us, affect our world so greatly, then planets and stars further away would do so, but with far less noticeable effect. That is, their power to affect this earth of ours would be there. But it would be greatly diminished.

But let’s continue with the sun’s influence on our lives.

Way back in 1963 I bought a large book entitled: The Earth Sciences. Cost me a packet at the time. It was written by Professor Arthur Strahler, Professor of Geomorphology of Columbia University, USA. Here is one small excerpt from that book.

“Virtually all processes operating at or near the earth’s surface, and the

maintenance of all forms of life, depend upon the quantities of solar energy received at various positions on the earth’s surface, and upon the daily and yearly variations of those quantities.”

Question: What’s he talking about here? Could it be astrological predictions? Star signs? Is there anything in this Astrology thing?

Here is what Lyall Watson, author of Supernature, a book which sold over one million copies when it came out in 1973, said:

“Our sensitivity to the sun extends from light rays into the longer wavelengths of radio. We see the sun, we feel its warmth, and we respond to changes it produces in the earth’s magnetic field. These changes affect radio reception in a pattern that scientist John Nelson has shown can be predicted by the position of the planets. The amount of change is small, but its effect is most marked on biochemical processes such as nerve activity. Even by drilling two holes in the trunk of a tree, one can measure the variations in electrical potential that follow movements of bodies in our solar system, so it is no surprise to find that the complex human organism is affected by the planets.”

“Michael Gaugquelin, of the Psycho-physiological Laboratory at Strasbourg, was the first to quantify this effect. His twenty years of painstaking research are summarised in his excellent book, The Cosmic Clocks.

In 1950 Gauquelin became interested in planetary rhythms and looked for possible correlation’s on earth. As our planet spins on its axis, the sun and the moon appear to move overhead, rising and setting in solar and lunar days whose length depends on our latitude and the time of the year.

Other planets travel across our horizon in the same way, producing Venusian and Martian days that are equally predictable. In Europe all local authorities record the exact moment of birth in official registers, so Gauquelin was able to collect this information and match it with the positions of planets computed from astronomical tables. He selected 576 members of the French Academy of Medicine and found, to his astonishment, that an unusually large number of them were born when Mars and Saturn had just risen, or had reached their highest point in the sky.

To check these findings, he took another sample of 508 famous physicists and got the same result. He deduced that there is a strong statistical correlation between a child’s moment of birth and his future success as a doctor.

Ten million to one

Taken together, the two tests produce odds of ten million to one against this happening just by chance. For the first time in history a scientist had produced evidence that the planets can actually influence, or indicate an influence, on our lives. This gives science a point of vital contact with the age-old beliefs in astrology.

Sunspots and the Ionosphere

Question: Why do Australian farmers worry about the ‘top soil’ on their farms being blown away?

Enfolding the earth is a thin layer known as the biosphere. Above this,

rising to a height of some eight or nine miles at the equator, but only a mile or so at the poles we have the atmosphere) But above this again, ranging from a few miles to up to 150 miles high we have something called the Ionsophere

I spent roughly twenty-five years in radio-telecommunications. This gave me an insight into the effect ‘sun-spot’ activity has on radio frequencies- especially that frequency gammut known as the H.F band. The sun has a ‘sun spot cycle’ that ranges over an eleven year period. During maximum sun spot activity, up go the working frequencies. In minimum sunsport activity years, the frequencies used are lower. The Ionosphere’s layers are affected by the extra or lesser radiation from the sun.

Trees grow faster when Sunspots are at maximum. Annual tree rings are wider.

Sunspot influence on human activity

Question: Do you think sunspot activity on the surface of the sun affects human beings?

Here’s what Lyall Watson has to say about this:

“The black death that drove Issaac Newton from his college and into a momentous discovery, swept England in 1665. Astronomical records of the time show that this was a year of intense sunspot activity. These records also revealed that the terrible plague of 1348 was also accompanied by a very active sun. A Russian professor of history has been collecting correlations of this kind for forty years, many of those years spent in Siberia for daring to suggest that major social changes might be due more to sunspots than to dialectical materialism. This scientist worked out that, “The great plagues, the diphtheria epidemics, the cholera outbreaks in Europe, the Russian typhus, and the smallpox epidemics of Chicago all occurred at the peak of the sun’s ‘eleven year sunspot cycle.’

In Japan

A professor Takata of Toho University, Japan, has been able to show that changes in blood serum occur mainly when major sunspots are interfering with the earth’s magnetic field. Major soviet research also supports the idea that our blood is directly affected by the sun. Over 120,000 tests were made of people in a Black Sea resort to measure the number of lymphocytes in their blood. These small cells make up between 20 and 25 percent of a man’s white blood cells, but in the years of great sunspot activity this number decreases. The number of people suffering from diseases caused by ‘lymphocyte deficiency’ actually doubled during the tremendous solar explosion of February 1956.

The Three Kings and the Star over Bethlehem

Half a million years ago our cave-man ancestors gazed out at the night sky, wondering about all those pinpricks of light in the sky. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star- how I wonder what you are?”

World’s earliest science

Earliest Science: a mixture of Astronomy and Astrology. The earliest gazers out at the night sky noticed that certain groups or clusters of stars formed patterns. We can see the ‘dipper’ the ‘southern cross.’ In the Northern Hemisphere the sky was (probably arbitrarily) divided up into twelve zones. If we stretch our imaginations a bit we can make forms and shapes out of certain clusters of stars. Twelve of these became known as the ‘Signs of the Zodiac.’

My Oxford Concise says this about the Zodiac.

“A belt of heavens limited by lines about 80 degrees from the elliptic on each side, including all apparent positions of the sun and planets, as known to the ancients.”

The ancients. We know that Astrology dates back to at least 2870 BC. But there are indication that it goes back another 30,000 years before that. So we’ve had an awful lot of time to study those stars.

The History of this oldest of sciences in brief.

In Supernature, Lyall Watson says this about ‘popular’ astrology, as distinct from ‘real’ astrology.

“For a start, we can discard the popular newspaper version of astrology altogether. Glib, all embracing predictions, in which everyone who is born under Pisces will have a good day for making new plans, while another twelve of the world’s population will be busy meeting attractive strangers, have nothing to do with astrology. They are held in well-deserved contempt by both serious astrologer and their critics. Perhaps the best approach to real astrology is to examine the tools of the trade and see how they are used. The most basic instrument is the horoscope, which literally means a “view of the hour” and consists of a detailed and formal ‘map of the heavens’ as they were at the exact place and at the precise time that the person was born. Every horoscope is different; if it is well drawn, with proper attention to detail. It can be a as distinctive as a fingerprint

There are five steps in the construction of a horoscope.

1. Establish the date, time, and place of birth.

2. Calculate the appropriate sidereal time. (We operate for convenience on a 24 hours day, but the real day length, the period of the rotation of the earth relative to the universe, is four minutes shorter. Sidereal time is obtained from standard tables based at Greenwich in England, and corrections must be made for the time zone, longitude and latitude of the birthplace)

3. Find the ‘Rising Sign.’ (Long explanation- Use whiteboard)

4. Find the ‘Mid-heaven Sign’ (Use whiteboard)

5. Plot the positions of the sun, moon, and planets on the birth chart. This map includes all the planets, even those below the horizon at the moment of birth. All details are then taken from a book which is updated every year.

Question: Why would we include even the planets below the horizon? because the world appears solid, but even though it is solid we know that some rays penetrate and pass through such solidity)

Science’s view of Astrology

“Science has no argument with the mathematics of Astrology. The arguments arise over the ‘interpretation’ of the horoscope.

Admiral Shattock

Page 81 of his book, Power Thinking.

“Present day astrology, as popularly presented in most of our daily newspapers is mumbo-jumbo of the crudest sort. But Astrology per se is, or should be, an exact science. Unfortunately we do not, at present, know enough about the various energies entering our world and affecting everything in it. When these energies have been identified, their varying effects of physical, emotional, and mental matter studied and understood, then Astrology will step out of the realm of fancy and become a serious interpreter of known factual occurrences.”

Gary Zukav in the Seat of the Soul, says:

“We are coming to the end of a ‘phase of a phase’ of evolution that was written long before we existed.   When the learning and evolution of our species was designed, it was designed to complement cycles, great cycles that work within the Universe, within our galaxy and within others.    The cycles move within physical form at certain speeds, serving certain purposes and balances of energies.

“The cycle we are now ending, and, therefore, beginning, is of a moment in which three cycles come to conclusion and begin again.    These cycles act one inside the other.    Just as the moon orbits the earth which orbits the sun and there are orbits within orbits, so, too, there are cycles within cycles.     We are coming to the close of a grand cycle astrologically, a two thousand year cycle, and an even grander cycle, where a 25,000 year cycle is linking with a conclusion of a 125,000 year cycle.   That is why these things, within the momentum of our evolution, are happening now.    This is when they were meant to be.     We are coming of age spiritually.”

More Personal Note

On a more personal note. Here is what writer Yildiz Sethi has to say about why we are born into a particular part of the world at a particular time, in a particular set of circumstances. We are talking about the Laws of Karma and Astrology here.

“At the end of each life the soul reconnects with the Oneness and looks at the collective past karmas (actions) of the soul. It is each soul that judges itself, not an outside force or God that judges us. The soul assesses its own progress and decides what experiences it didn’t understand fully last time, or which ones would further aid the development on the journey to enlightenment. At this point, spiritual contracts, or understandings between souls take place.

“Between lives, the soul will wait in the Oneness until the time is ripe for its new incarnation. Once the planets around the earth are in the correct position to deliver the experiences it has contracted to have, the new soul manifests in the parents has they make love.

“The position of the planets at birth forms the new soul’s astrology chart from which the personality and events of the life can be predicted and analysed. The drama of this unique life will unfold from this point onwards. The new soul will see everything with new eyes. Maya (illusion) is effective in allowing the soul to forget its spiritual contracts and its spiritual connection with the Oneness. The illusion is complete. However, once an awakening has started to take place, it may continue to evolve in future incarnations until enlightenment is achieved.”

The Divine Dichotomy. You have free will: it is also already pre-ordained)

A final word from Lyall Watson.

“There are some mystical things about Astrology. But there is nothing supernatural about the way it works. Man is affected by his environment according to clearly defined physical forces, and his life, like all others, becomes organised by natural and universal laws. To believe otherwise is tantamount to assuming that the Encyclopaedia Britanica was thrown together by an explosion in a printing works.”

I hope you enjoyed Astrological Predictions and Astrology - Anything in it?

Keep smiling.

Tom.