The Moon, Water and the Hidden Senses

Part 3 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

Why should anyone take seriously the idea that the moon and planets touch human life? Osho's answer in this part of his first talk begins with something everyone already accepts: the moon moves the sea.

The moon and the waters within

We all know that the tides rise and fall with the moon. But we forget, Osho said, that our own bodies are mostly water, and that this water is salty like the sea. If the moon moves the oceans, why would it not move the waters inside us?

He pointed to language as a clue. In English, a mad person is called a "lunatic", from the Latin word for the moon. In Hindi too there is an old word for a mad person, chaandmaara, meaning moon-struck. People in very different places noticed long ago that the moon does something to the human mind.

Osho then pressed the point further. If the moon affects those who are mad, it cannot be that it leaves everyone else untouched. The brain and body of every person are built the same way. The difference can only be one of degree. And since every mad person was once sane, the moon must first have been working on the sane.

Planets and professions

Next Osho described research into the birth charts of people in different professions. The French researcher Michel Gauquelin collected the birth data of thousands of eminent people, including doctors, scientists and military leaders.

The result, as Osho told it, surprised even a sceptic. People of the same profession tended to be born under the same planetary pattern. Famous generals and military commanders were often born when Mars was rising or high in the sky. Those devoted to peace were not.

Osho argued that one or two such cases could be chance, but not thousands. He pointed out that the poet and the mathematician, the warrior and the man of peace, are so different in their very nature that we should expect a difference in the moment of their birth. Was the gap between a lover of peace like Bertrand Russell and a celebrant of struggle like Nietzsche only a matter of ideas? Or did the hour of their birth also play a part?

The soul chooses its moment

Osho added his own interpretation. Ordinary astrologers say that a person has certain abilities because they were born under certain stars. Osho turned this around.

A person, he said, chooses to be born under those stars. What they could become, the inner possibility of their being, the whole shape of their past lives and the consciousness they have gathered, can only be born in that particular arrangement of the sky. Every new life insists on its own hour. It wants to be conceived in its own moment and born in its own moment.

Water, the sensitive medium

Osho then returned to water. Life itself, he noted, is born from water. The ancient Greek philosophers said so, many mythologies of India, China and elsewhere say so, and modern scientists who study evolution agree that life began in water.

Those who study water deeply, he said, find it to be the most mysterious and most sensitive of all substances. In Osho's view, water is the medium through which the influences of the stars reach us. Whatever touches us from the cosmos moves through the water in our bodies first. And once our water is affected, we cannot escape being affected.

He noted that a child in the womb floats in fluid much as a creature floats in the sea. In his telling, even the mother's influence reaches the growing child through this fluid. Throughout life, water does in our bodies what it does in the oceans.

The fish and the tide

To show how living beings sense the cosmos, Osho described certain fish that come to the shore to lay their eggs only as the tide is going out. Riding the waves in, they lay their eggs in the sand, and ride the waves back. About two weeks later, when the high water returns to that spot, the young have hatched, and the waves carry them out to sea.

If these fish laid their eggs on a rising tide, the eggs would be washed away. Their timing has to be exact, and it is. How do they know? Osho said that those who studied them could find no answer except the moon.

He described experiments in which such fish were kept away from the sea, in dark rooms where they could see neither the sky nor the waves. Even there, when the moon reached the right position, they released their eggs. The moon was speaking to them without any outward sign.

Birds that know before the snow

Osho also spoke of migrating birds. Every year, great flocks leave the cold regions weeks before the snow begins to fall, to make journeys of thousands of miles. The first snowfall comes on a different date each year, yet each kind of bird leaves at its own fixed interval before it.

He told of a small village bird in Japan which, people say, leaves a village a day before an earthquake strikes, so that villagers take its departure as a warning.

How do these creatures know what humans struggle to predict? Osho said that scientists had begun to speak of an inner sense in living beings that responds to cosmic influences. Perhaps humans have it too. But Osho said man has lost much of it through his own cleverness. What he had, he has lost. What he did not have, he has made.

These inner senses, he said, carry one message: life on earth is not isolated. It is joined with the whole universe, and whatever happens in the sky has its effects here.

Not superstition, but cause and effect

Osho returned to the sun to close this theme. He said that physicians had noticed that disease rises and falls with the spots on the sun, and that the eleven-year rhythm of the sun's storms echoes in the rhythms of war, epidemic and revolution on earth.

People call astrology a superstition, he said, but anything begins to look like superstition when we cannot explain its causes. At heart, astrology is scientific. "Astrology says just this: whatever happens in this world has causes." We may not know them yet. But the future grows from the past, just as today grew from yesterday.

In Part 4: The Future Pulls, Osho goes one step further: the future not only grows from the past, it also calls us toward it.

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.