The Universe Is One Body

Part 2 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

After tracing astrology back to its ancient roots, Osho turned to the sciences of his own time. Since about 1950, he said, astrology had begun to reappear in the world, and some new branches of science were making astrology easier to understand.

Cosmic chemistry

The first was what Osho called cosmic chemistry. He linked it with the Italian chemist Giorgio Piccardi, one of the most valuable scientists of the century. Through long years of laboratory experiments, Piccardi studied how events on the sun seemed to affect ordinary chemical reactions on earth.

From this work Osho drew a conclusion: the universe is an organic unity. "The whole world is one body."\ \ A body means that its parts are not separate pieces. They are joined in a living way, so that touching one part moves the whole.

In the same way, Osho said, nothing in the universe stands apart. However far away a star may be, when it changes, it changes the beat of our heart. However distant the sun may be, when it becomes more active, the streams of our blood change.

The sun in our blood

Osho told the story of Maki Takata, a Japanese physician who spent around twenty years studying human blood.

Takata had observed a basic difference between men and women. A woman's blood changes with her monthly cycle and during pregnancy, while a man's blood was thought to stay much the same. Then came a period of intense activity on the sun. To his surprise, Takata found that men's blood was changing too, in step with the sun.

Nothing like this had been recorded before. For Osho, the meaning was clear. If the sun can reach into our blood, it can reach into anything.

The seed and the sun

Osho also spoke of the American biologist Frank A. Brown Jr., who studied the rhythms of living things. One of Brown's findings was that a potato or any seed lying under the soil still grows in relation to the sun. It is the sun that wakes it, calls its sprout and lifts it upward, even in the dark.

Osho added that space itself is not the empty void people once imagined. It is full of streams of radiation and energy.

What "horoscope" means

Osho then turned to the word at the heart of astrology. "Horoscope" comes from the Greek horoskopos, which means "watcher of the hour". It refers to watching what is rising on the horizon at the moment of birth.

Just as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, he said, stars and planets rise and set all through the day and night. When a child is born at six in the morning, the sun is being born on the horizon at that same moment. Some stars are rising, some are setting, some are high overhead. Each birth happens within a particular arrangement of the whole sky.

The common objection

Osho took the usual objection seriously. What can the moon and stars have to do with a child born in some village? And at any given moment, thousands of children are born under the same sky. One becomes the leader of a nation, another dies within two days. One is brilliant, another is not. Surely, the critics say, the stars cannot matter.

For three hundred years, Osho said, these arguments seemed so clear that people concluded there was no link at all between the stars and a person's birth.

But the work of researchers such as Brown, Piccardi and Takata, he said, had led scientists to a new position. They could not yet say that each individual child is affected. But they could now say with confidence that life itself is affected. And as research becomes finer, Osho predicted, it will show that the individual is affected too.

A science that was lost, not one still growing

Here Osho reversed a common assumption. People think astrology is a young science that started and never grew up. In his view, the opposite is true. Astrology was once a fully developed science of some civilization. That civilization was lost, and only broken fragments of its knowledge reached us. Civilizations come and go, he said, and when they go, the foundations of their knowledge are forgotten.

\ In Part 3: The Moon, Water and the Hidden Senses, Osho looks at the moon's pull on the waters within us and at the inner senses of fish and birds.

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.