I suppose all of us have visited an astrologer at least once in our lives, or have been taken forcibly by parents or folks around who claim to be close to us. Maybe, some of us have begun the interaction with a skeptical smirk, but as the conversation moved on, somewhere the person in front did make an impression, provided she/he was good at the trade.
The astrologer went on to mention a few incidents from your past without exactly citing specifics, but stating them in general terms like,” you had a problem with someone close when you were 19” without specifically pinpointing whether it was with a close friend, parent, partner etc. OR “At age 12, you achieved a major success in your life” without mentioning whether it was at school, in a public exam, on stage or in a sport etc….
These statements from the astrologer then took you back to the time when some similar incidents did take place in your life. That was the time when you began to wonder, “If this person can tell me stuff from my past (& she/he is seeing me the first time), maybe she/he can predict some stuff that’s in store for me” & gradually, the smirk from your face gave way to a ‘Oh My God, tell me what’s coming in my appraisal next week’ look.
How is a good astrologer able to know your past & predict your future? That’s where your belief in Science kind of gets a little shaky……
However, in the next few paragraphs, I am going to try & dispel the myth about astrology & kind of prove that it is a logical, pattern-recognition, analytical field of study.
Astrology is nothing but a Relational Database Management System(RDBMS).
This may seem to be an outrageous statement. Let us try & make sense of this.
What is a Database Management System?
A collection of programs that enables you to store, modify, and extract information from a database.
What is a Relational Database Management System?
A Relational Database Management System is a type of database management system (DBMS) that stores data in the form of related tables. Relational databases are powerful because they require few assumptions about how data is related or how it will be extracted from the database.
i.e. in short it is governed by a set of rules that basically say, ‘if this field >,=,< than some other field(s) or some preset values, then the result is as per table X, Y, Z…. or cell A,B,C.. or column L,M,N….. etc. OR if cells P,Q,R follow a particular pattern, then the predicted results would be S,T,U etc…..
So it is nothing but a tool that can recognize patterns and predict the answers to different “what ifs?”
Now, what does Astrology rely on? Your date and time of birth, right? The planetary placements at the time of your birth determine the way in which your life will unfold is the underlying principle on which Astrology stands.
Astrology is a field of study that wasn’t written or postulated by a single person in a single lifetime. It is something that has evolved over centuries and many have contributed to its development.
How Astrology as we know it today, evolved?
A record of hundreds of thousands of lives was kept to see what kind of milestones each of these people under observation had in their lives?, when in their lives?, of what magnitude? etc. A database was thus created with millions, if not billions, of entries. Then a systematic sorting exercise was done to aggregate the milestones in the lives of people born under similar planetary placements. It was observed that the milestones in the lives of people born under similar planetary placements, were broadly similar. A more in-depth analysis & sorting exercise led to stronger correlations emerging. Thus, in the database, strong patterns emerged on the basis of which one could say, “If a person were born under XYZ planetary placements, then her/his life may follow a set of milestones as listed in the database. The next logical step was to predict one’s future milestones based on those of the recorded lives in the database.
The various people involved in compiling these records kept adding to the records over centuries. The smarter recorders saw patterns (relations) in what they were compiling and postulated some rules based on the trends they observed and these rules form the basis of Astrology. These rules determine the way in which information is to be extracted from the database, something that a Relational Database Management System does. Many such patterns were observed and the field of Astrology evolved to what it is today.
A similar analysis must have led to the compendium on Palmistry, wherein the lines on millions of palms were correlated with the milestones in the lives of owners of the palms.
The same explanation would hold good for Face reading too.
The next time you visit an astrologer, maybe you can greet him the way you do your CTO back in office, LOL!!!
