The Oldest and Most Rejected Science

Part 1 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

When Osho was first asked to speak about astrology, he began with a paradox. "Astrology is perhaps the oldest science, and in one sense also the most rejected." It is old because no period of human history has been found without it. It is rejected because, for centuries, educated people have treated it as superstition.

Where mathematics began

Osho made a bold claim about the roots of astrology. He said that some of its deepest ideas were born in India, and that mathematics itself grew out of the need to calculate the movements of the planets and stars.

As evidence of India's role, he pointed to something we use every day: the numerals from one to nine. These counting digits began in India and slowly spread across the world. For Osho, this was a sign of how far Indian sky-watching had travelled, and how much it shaped human thought.

The sky-watchers of Sumer

From India, Osho said, the first rays of astrology reached the civilization of Sumer, in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerians opened the door of astrology to the Western world.

Their priests watched the sky day and night. According to Osho, they did this because they had understood a deep principle: whatever happens in the human world has its first source, in some way, in the stars. They believed that the diseases and epidemics that arise on earth are connected with the movements of the heavens.

Osho saw the Sumerians as the people who began the real history of humankind. Their idea that heaven and earth move together, he said, is now finding support in modern science.

Chizhevsky: the sun and human unrest

To show what he meant, Osho told the story of Alexander Chizhevsky, a Russian scientist of the twentieth century.

Chizhevsky studied the sun's activity, which rises and falls in a cycle of roughly eleven years. He compared this cycle with human history over many centuries. His finding, as Osho described it, was that times of high solar activity matched times of war, revolution and upheaval on earth. Later he also linked the spread of epidemics with the sun's cycle.

For Osho, the lesson was simple. The sun is not a passive ball of fire hanging in the sky. It is intensely active, its waves change every moment, and even a small change in them makes life on earth tremble. As he put it: "Nothing happens on this earth without first happening on the sun."

When the sun goes dark

Osho gave a picture that anyone can understand. During a solar eclipse, he said, the whole living world responds. Birds stop singing, even before the eclipse begins. Animals in the forest become fearful, as if sensing some great danger. Monkeys come down from the trees and huddle together, looking for safety. And monkeys, which are normally full of chatter and noise, fall so silent during an eclipse that even saints and monks are not so quiet.

A science waiting to return

Osho noted that in his own time, astrology was believed in by very large numbers of ordinary people around the world, while scientists, thinkers and rationalists recoiled at the very mention of it.

He recalled the psychologist C. G. Jung, who said that the doors of the universities had been closed to astrology for three hundred years, but that astrology would one day return to them. The reason, Osho explained, is that the old claims of astrology once had no way of being proved, and now the means to test them are appearing.

Paracelsus: illness as a broken harmony

Next, Osho turned to Paracelsus, the Swiss physician of the sixteenth century. Paracelsus held an unusual belief: a person becomes sick when the harmony between them and the stars of their birth is broken.

Osho said this idea had been neglected because astrology was out of favour, but that it could one day change the whole of medical science.

Paracelsus, he said, would not give medicine to a patient until he had seen that patient's birth chart. By studying birth charts, Paracelsus was able to help patients whom other physicians had failed to cure. His reasoning was this: unless I know under which stars this person was born, I cannot find the thread of their inner music. And unless I know their inner music, how can I make them well?

Pythagoras and the music of the planets

The idea of inner music, Osho explained, goes back much further, to Pythagoras in ancient Greece, about six hundred years before Christ.

Pythagoras taught what came to be called the harmony of the spheres. Each planet and star, as it moves through space, produces its own particular sound. Every heavenly body has its own note, and all these notes together form one great music of the universe.

When a person is born, Osho said, the music of the planets at that moment is printed on the newborn's simple, sensitive mind. That pattern stays with them for life. When a person lives in tune with this original music, they are healthy. When they fall out of tune, they become ill.

What is health?

This led Osho to one of the most striking ideas in the first talk: a new way of defining health.

Ask a doctor what health is, he said, and the answer will usually be "the absence of disease". But this is a negative definition. It describes health only by what it is not. Osho found this strange. "Health is our nature; disease is an attack." We are born with health, and disease comes on top of it. To define health by disease, he said, is like describing the owner of a house by the guest who visits.

Paracelsus wanted a positive definition of health, and he found it in that inner music. Health is our own inner harmony. If a doctor treats only the disease, Osho said, the patient may be freed from one illness only to catch another, because nothing has been done about the deeper music. The real work is to restore that music.

The thread of this series

In this opening, Osho set out the theme that runs through both of his talks. Human life is not sealed off from the cosmos. The sun, the planets and the stars are constantly touching us, in our blood, our health and our history. Astrology, at its root, is the study of that connection.

In Part 2: The Universe Is One Body, we follow Osho into the new sciences of his time and his argument that the whole universe behaves like a single living body.

This article explains, in our own words, ideas from Osho's talk "Jyotish: Advait ka Vigyan" (Astrology: The Science of Non-Duality), given at Woodlands, Bombay, in July 1971. Short quotations are our English renderings of his Hindi words. Osho's works are copyright of Osho International Foundation. This series is an independent study and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Osho International Foundation. For the full text, see Osho's book Astrology.