A Word On Astrology

It's been suggested to me that my love of astrology seems incongruent to other aspects of my personality. Not so!

Allow me to explain.

The universe is an elegant network of repeating patterns. Sometimes these patterns can be viewed by us in a concrete manner, like the way the bodies of our solar system move around the sun. Sometimes the patterns occur on a scale so small that they're not immediately obvious, like the behavior of our tiniest microscopic particles. And sometimes the patterns appear on a scale so grand that they escape our recognition entirely, their individual components appearing random and meaningless.

The patterns we recognize are subsequently labeled and -- sometimes -- we're able to identify the rules that explain their behaviors and influences. If we're lucky, we learn how to use what we understand about these patterns and their rules to improve our lives.

Man has always intuitively suspected that these patterns (at least within the scope of those he's recognized in any given age) are all interconnected at some level. For lack of any better way to explain it, man has mostly articulated this interconnection as God. Albert Einstein was the first to try to explain it through science. It was his work, incidentally, that has brought science to even imagine a "theory of everything." As an aside, it often makes me smile to think that religion, which so hates science that some idiot zealots have created the Creation Museum to defy it, may someday view science as its champion.

So back to astrology. Astrology is not religion. Astrology is simply the recognition of identified patterns and a set of theories and observations about their influence. Nothing less, nothing more. Patterns and cycles... these things make sense to me. I like to think that if science ever finds the Rosetta Stone of universal patterns it may all start coming together for us like Neo in the Matrix -- God (or not), astrology (or not), genetics, the key to human nature itself.

Until then, we're resembling the story about the blind men trying to describe an elephant. Item A makes sense to me, item B makes sense to you, item C makes sense to Henry, etc. We're all just trying to piece it together as best we can.