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Generally we try to keep 0's and 1's for out-and-out trolling rather than just nastiness in the heat of discussion.
More seriously, reiki has at least got the placebo effect going for it.
Astrology has more of the attributes of religion or mythology really: any value it has is pretty indirect.
At that time I was teaching big seminars and everytime there were 2-4 people asking me what I think of astrology. I would have loved to say (love the word afew used) piffle! But somehow I felt it was a bad idea. So I started learning astrology to have the prove that it is piffle. Well, I am still learning and am still fascinated by it. However, I would never use astrology to predict the future or make investments with it. :-)
What did learning astrology give me?
It teached me to think in visual, symbolic, 3D, network-thinking. Something that opened up a new world to me.
It helped me to look at my self. I was always fascinated by the question who am I? But found it difficult to think about that. Astrology helped to take on puzzle piece at a time, like for example looking at the combination of Mars in the chart. Then look it up and as is what they say true about me. If I did feel it was not true, I would ask but then how am I different from that. And so piece by piece I become more aware of my strengths and weaknesses.
And I also found after a one year course of psycholocical tests at the University, that a astrology is able to give just as good a profile of a person as do some of the tests. Now you can interpret that however you want to. :-)
Okay, this just the short version.
I never had much use for the tools, but I always found the ideas about mind levels useful. keep to the Fen Causeway
You remember who you took the course with?
some of the best things are like that, i've found... 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Although I have never studied astrology, I am aware that most serious practioners are almost as scathing about these newspaper soothsayers as astronomers are. However, those of us who've had individual full charts done have a different view about what level of insight is available.
As I briefly mentioned last night, I had one done when I was 22. Back then I was a blokey bloke; jeans, scruffy T-shirt wearing beer drinking heavy rock slob (don't anyone dare say little has changed). And this guy told me to my face that I was transgendered. Okay, he fenced it around and approached it on the sly and was relieved when I acknowledged the truth behind his revelation but the fact is that I gave him no clue in my demeanour. He saw it in the chart.
So, far as I'm concerned, there's something in it even if I don't know what it is. It ain't all chaff. keep to the Fen Causeway
See yer in Dublin soon-ish ? keep to the Fen Causeway
And maybe another aspect that is sometimes ignored. I think most people will agree that the moon affects the oceans, creating ebb and tides - why shouldn't it affect human beings - now with the other planets it might be a little more subtle. I don't know what is true, but just because it can not yet be measured I am not willing to dimiss it - nor am I willing to take it as a full truth. However, I think it is important to stay open, there are still many things we do not know how they work, but they work. And I find that exciting.
It's certainly not gravity. The weight difference caused by the moon passing overhead - which it doesn't, usually - is a gram or two.
It's not light, because otherwise cloudy nights would be the same as new moon nights.
So saying 'But it must!' doesn't really say anything useful about what might be going on.
However water goes down the Antipodean plughole in the opposite direction to here in Europe. That is caused by the Earth's rotation - just as cyclones and anticyclones rotate in opposite directions. In this case the macro matches the micro - but not with the gravitational pull of the moon.
If you really wanted to look for a potential factor it would be cosmic particles. They are passing right through us all day and all night, passing through the latticework of atoms like tennis balls thrown through scaffolding. They do, very occasionally, hit the structure.
We know roughly how often they hit Earth (and thus us), but we don't know exactly where they come from. There are lots of sources. All active stellar bodies emit them. But trackng any particular cosmic particle back to its source is impossible AFAIK. You can't be me, I'm taken
The trouble with linking cosmic particles to astrology is the fact that we are indeed bombarded with them at all times, and that makes a nonsense of the importance attached by astrology to the exact time and place of birth.
It was obvious for some weeks before he was born that my son was a considerably more laid-back baby than his older sister. That there is some sort of cosmic significance to the moment of birth-by that point in development not much more than a (traumatic) change in environment-doesn't make logical sense. How could cosmic particles or forces acting across vast distances be stopped dead by a few centimetres of flesh and amniotic fluid?
Birth time isn't calculably related to the moment of conception with any great accuracy-there's sufficient variation in gestation period that only about 5% of babies are born on their due date. On a cosmic scale, even within the scale of an individual life, there's a four-week period within which the moment of birth is as near arbitrary as makes no difference.
Unless we postulate that the time of birth is influenced by the guiding stars. But my own birth was induced early when my mother developed pre-eclampsia. It altered my star sign, but a generation or so earlier we would probably both have died. For cosmic forces to account for relatively new medical technology implies a level of predestination rather incompatible with any notion of free will.
Tides -> oceans -> gravity-> people's moods seems to be based on Argument by Similarity - the idea that just because two things look similar, they must be connected in some deep way.
But how does being made of water change anything? The tides go up and down. They don't have moods or personalities. They're completely predictable and mechanical.
So where do changes in mood and behaviour come from?
The only connection is a poetic one - moods ebb and flow, the sea ebbs and flows (even though tides are mechanical), so therefore, an obvious link.
But isn't this just taking a metaphor literally?
Being made of water doesn't really make anyone moody, surely?
Do unemotional people have less water in their bodies than moody people?
great question!
here's an 'indirect' answer:
people with a lot of water in their charts are definitely moodier/more emotionally governed, in my and many others' experience. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
As a heuristic tool to start an investigation it can be quite fruitful. She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
brilliant and much better way of saying what i meant about objective reality's being a conversation point. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Oh, and just pay attention to traffic on a full moon day! :-) you know all those lunatics loose in cars.
And only around 30% of women have a cycle within two days of the 28 day (not 29.5 day) average.
And the Earth days themselves are slowing down, they had fewer hours a billion year ago.
The Moon is already tide-locked with one side watching the Earth. Eventually if the system could go on long enough (it won't, the sun will blast it all earlier), the Earth would also become tide-locked with the moon, with a day that last weeks and the Moon further from the Earth than it is now.
And anyway, it's only western women who have a 28 days cycle, found this looking for a ref. on wikipedia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1340049&dopt=A bstractPlus Pierre
City life and brick and mortar dwellings have made us unaware of a very basic aspect of the moon cycle : a full moon means lights. Which may have had very practical effects in the way of life of your basic hunter-gatherer tribesman, especially pre-fire.
The fact that women's cycles are very variable means the adaptation could have been a weak one ; and that synchronisation within the tribe may have helped to adjust the cycles to the moon's cycles. And maybe the synchronicity happened only because once a yearly cycle was too long for reproductive success, another rythm was needed - and the one given by the moon was fairly convenient for biological purposes. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
(Aren't metaphors fun?)
He used to take his anual holiday two days at a time over the full moons to avoid the worst excesses, he reckoned that if he worked then, one of these months he'd end up on the other side of the bars because the inmates were just to difficult to deal with during that time. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
that can be a huge dose of some of the chemicals we produce and carry around in our systems.. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Not in that sense, anyway.
(I'm not sure levity is either, but the jury is still out on that one.)
Equally, the fact that there is, as yet, no western scientific theory that might encompass astrology doesn't undermine that, to those who have studied it, the ability to discern useful understanding of individual's personalities is real and discernable. I don't see fit to dismiss something simply because I don't understand how it can work (transistors must be a bugger for people of that persuasion) or because of the lack of credibility of its major proponents. keep to the Fen Causeway
With all of these things you have to be sure there's a What before you start asking about the How. Acupuncture built up a fairly solid body of evidence for itself over a long time, and eventually the medical profession grudgingly started to take it seriously.
With something like moon lore, there are two problems. The first is that if you look at crime records, hospital admission records and other hard data there doesn't seem to be any real effect. This could be because studies have asked the wrong questions, but the current state of what's known isn't encouraging.
But assuming there's a real effect - my problem with a statement like 'It words on the tides, so of course it works on humans' is that it's a pseudo-how.
It's fine for people who want to believe it, but if you accept it it closes down further curiosity.
Once you believe you know what's happening, you lose interest in anything that might challenge that - and might also deepen your understanding beyond the usual received explanations.
The scientific community,[11] where it has commented, claims that astrology has repeatedly failed to demonstrate its effectiveness in numerous controlled studies. Effect size studies in astrology conclude that the mean accuracy of astrological predictions is no greater than what is expected by chance, and astrology's perceived performance has disappeared on critical inspection.[48] When tested against personality tests, astrologers have shown a consistent lack of agreement with these tests. One such double-blind study in which astrologers attempted to match birth charts with results of a personality test, which was published in the reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature, concluded that astrologers' could not solve clients' personal problems by reading individuals' natal charts and that astrologers had no special ability to interpret personality from astrological readings.[49] Another study that used a personality test and a questionnaire contended that some astrologers failed to predict objective facts about people or agree with each other's interpretations.[50] When testing for cognitive, behavioral, physical and other variables, one study of astrological "time twins" showed that human characteristics are not molded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of birth.[48][51] Skeptics of astrology also suggest that the perceived accuracy of astrological interpretations and descriptions of one's personality can be accounted for by the fact that people tend to exaggerate positive 'hits' and overlook whatever does not fit, especially when vague language is used.[48] They also argue that statistical research is often wrongly seen as evidence for astrology due to uncontrolled artifacts.[52] In another control experiment conducted by ABC's 20/20 team and documented by John Stossel in his best-selling book Myths, Lies & Downright Stupidity, an astrologer was asked to do a chart on Ed Kemper, a serial killer and necrophile. The astrologer compiled a twenty-five-page report, of which identical copies were made and given to a class of college students. The students were each told that it was their own personal horoscope. "A few were 'amazed' that the astrologer could know so much about them. Some said they had been skeptical of astrology, but [that] detailed horoscope had made them total believers." [53] Needless to say, the students were embarrassed, some angry at the revelation that they've been tricked. [citation needed] A similar experiment was conducted by professional debunker and scientific skeptic James Randi, in which he gave a class of students identical horoscopes, telling each however that it's their own unique personal one prepared by a professional astrologer based on when and where they were born. He gave the students some time to read their horoscope, then asked them to rank the accuracy of the horoscope; the majority of students ranked it 5/5.[citation needed] . He then asked each student to hand his/her horoscopes to the person behind them. Most students were disappointed to see that they've been had, as they found the horoscopes to be quite telling. They believed the horoscope was true because it contained a plethora of vague and general descriptions that flattered the students, descriptions with many misses but "hits" which impressed the students so much that they overshadowed their doubts with the misses. [54] James Randi describes these kinds of descriptions as cold reading, a technique with which you tell people more things about themselves than they actually do by making countless vague descriptions that could apply to almost anyone. A team of famous clinical psychologists also reached the same conclusion after conducting their own set of experiments on astrology, as well as other well-known pseudosciences [55] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
The scientific community,[11] where it has commented, claims that astrology has repeatedly failed to demonstrate its effectiveness in numerous controlled studies. Effect size studies in astrology conclude that the mean accuracy of astrological predictions is no greater than what is expected by chance, and astrology's perceived performance has disappeared on critical inspection.[48] When tested against personality tests, astrologers have shown a consistent lack of agreement with these tests. One such double-blind study in which astrologers attempted to match birth charts with results of a personality test, which was published in the reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature, concluded that astrologers' could not solve clients' personal problems by reading individuals' natal charts and that astrologers had no special ability to interpret personality from astrological readings.[49] Another study that used a personality test and a questionnaire contended that some astrologers failed to predict objective facts about people or agree with each other's interpretations.[50] When testing for cognitive, behavioral, physical and other variables, one study of astrological "time twins" showed that human characteristics are not molded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of birth.[48][51] Skeptics of astrology also suggest that the perceived accuracy of astrological interpretations and descriptions of one's personality can be accounted for by the fact that people tend to exaggerate positive 'hits' and overlook whatever does not fit, especially when vague language is used.[48] They also argue that statistical research is often wrongly seen as evidence for astrology due to uncontrolled artifacts.[52]
In another control experiment conducted by ABC's 20/20 team and documented by John Stossel in his best-selling book Myths, Lies & Downright Stupidity, an astrologer was asked to do a chart on Ed Kemper, a serial killer and necrophile. The astrologer compiled a twenty-five-page report, of which identical copies were made and given to a class of college students. The students were each told that it was their own personal horoscope. "A few were 'amazed' that the astrologer could know so much about them. Some said they had been skeptical of astrology, but [that] detailed horoscope had made them total believers." [53] Needless to say, the students were embarrassed, some angry at the revelation that they've been tricked. [citation needed]
A similar experiment was conducted by professional debunker and scientific skeptic James Randi, in which he gave a class of students identical horoscopes, telling each however that it's their own unique personal one prepared by a professional astrologer based on when and where they were born. He gave the students some time to read their horoscope, then asked them to rank the accuracy of the horoscope; the majority of students ranked it 5/5.[citation needed] . He then asked each student to hand his/her horoscopes to the person behind them. Most students were disappointed to see that they've been had, as they found the horoscopes to be quite telling. They believed the horoscope was true because it contained a plethora of vague and general descriptions that flattered the students, descriptions with many misses but "hits" which impressed the students so much that they overshadowed their doubts with the misses. [54] James Randi describes these kinds of descriptions as cold reading, a technique with which you tell people more things about themselves than they actually do by making countless vague descriptions that could apply to almost anyone. A team of famous clinical psychologists also reached the same conclusion after conducting their own set of experiments on astrology, as well as other well-known pseudosciences [55]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
I'm a Sadge, Solveig's a Virgo, but I don't recall a conversation QUITE like that..... "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
(I am dredging up some basic statistics from 25 years ago so could be entirely wrong) Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
The difficulty for astrology is that it has been seriously debased by the "12 sizes fits all" Sun sign daily forecasts in the newspapers.
Thanks for bringing these up. Most astrologers I've read (one thing you do when you start to look more deeply into this is find as many websites as you can and compare what everyone does) seem to consider these as just entertainment, another income source from a newspaper, etc. In other words, not a lot of them seem to take daily newspaper forecasts seriously either. There are too many influences each day, and it's really only by luck that that astrologer can hit on the influence that happens to get you that day, if any of them do.
There are a couple of daily forecasts I've seen that haven't been bad, but they were either tailored to my specific chart, or were an undivided list of daily influences (e.g., Mars trines Jupiter today; check your chart to see where that might affect you) that weren't really "predictions."
(Which is another image that's made astrology unbelievable in the eyes of many. Vedic aside, Western astrology doesn't predict. It gives you the influences and it's up to you to work with those. Unfortunately, so many people have bought into the prediction idea that when nothing comes to pass, they chalk it up to fraud.)
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