The Future Pulls

Part 4 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

Astrology says the future grows out of the past. Whatever will happen tomorrow, Osho said, must already exist today in some subtle form.

Lincoln's dream

He told the well-known story of Abraham Lincoln. A few days before his death, Lincoln dreamed that he had been killed and that his body lay in the White House, with mourners gathered around it. He told the dream to his wife, and they laughed it off. Days later Lincoln was assassinated, and the scene of his dream came true.

Osho asked: if what was to happen had not already happened in some sense, how could anyone glimpse it in a dream? A dream can show only what is present somewhere. We open a small window and see it. But it must be there, outside the window.

From this he drew one of the central ideas of his talks: the future is the future only because of our ignorance. If we had full knowledge, there would be no such thing as the future. It is already present somewhere.

What is happening has already happened

Osho linked this with a teaching of Mahavira: what is happening has, in a sense, already happened. If you have set out on a journey, in a sense you have already arrived. If you are growing old, in a sense you are already old.

A bud that is blooming, Osho said, will bloom. The flower is in the future, but its blooming has already happened somewhere.

Pushed from behind, pulled from ahead

Most of us look at life from the past. We say the bud is becoming a flower, as if the past were pushing it forward. But there is another way to see it. Someone can push you from behind, or someone can pull you from in front.

In the astrological view, both are happening. The whole past pushes the bud to open, and the whole future calls it to open. If there were no future, the past could push as hard as it liked and nothing would move, just as no push can move you through a wall. The future must give room. "The past works; the future gives place."

To look only from the past is half a science, Osho said. The future is calling all the time. We do not see it because our sight does not reach that far.

Krishnamurti's chart

Osho gave a modern example. Had Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater looked at J. Krishnamurti's birth chart, he said, they might never have worked so hard to raise him up as a world teacher. In Osho's reading, the chart showed that any organization Krishnamurti joined, he would dissolve.

And that is what happened. The Theosophical movement that raised him suffered a great blow because of him. Annie Besant built the Order of the Star in the East around him, and one day Krishnamurti dissolved it and walked away. This was not wilfulness on his part, Osho said. It was written in the stars under which he was born.

The future is not wholly uncertain, Osho said. Our knowledge is uncertain. Astrology is the process of seeing into the future.

Many ways of seeing

Osho stressed that reading planets is only one dimension of astrology. There are also the lines of the hand, the forehead and the feet, though these, he said, are near the surface.

Deeper are the chakras, the energy centres described in yoga. Each has its own sensitivity and its own speed of movement, and these can be felt and examined. Osho said he had worked with the chakras of hundreds of people, and was surprised to find that in most only one or two had ever moved. The third had usually never begun. If all seven were active in someone, he said, that person could be told this was their last life. Mahavira, he said, looked at a seeker's chakras in the same way, to judge how much could be done with them and how many lives the work might take.

The time track

To know the future, Osho said, we must first know the past, because the future is the child of the past. He pointed to L. Ron Hubbard's idea of the time track: that everything a person has lived through, in this life and in earlier lives, is still preserved within them.

Beneath our everyday memory, which works like an account book, lies a deeper memory holding the essence of all our experiences. Hubbard called its impressions engrams. Mahavira, Osho said, called the opening of this deep memory jati-smaran, the remembering of past births.

The program in the seed

Osho then asked a simple question about a mango seed. It takes no advice from experts and attends no university, yet it grows into a mango tree, never a neem. It must carry inside it a complete program: how to sprout, what leaves and branches to grow, how tall to become, what fruit to bear.

Scientists now accept, he said, that a human seed likewise carries the colour of the eyes, the height of the body, the tendency to health or illness and the level of intelligence. If we could read the human seed, we could foretell a great deal about a life. The birth chart, in Osho's view, has always been an attempt to read that seed.

He also spoke of nature's care for individuality. No two thumbprints are ever the same, not even those of identical twins. If nature gives such uniqueness to the thumb, it seems unlikely it would fail to give each person a unique soul and life.

Science moves slowly, he said, and rightly so. It does not take a step until the facts are proved. Prophets and seers leap ahead and speak of what science will confirm much later. Science seeks the cause; astrology seeks the effect.

Learning to cooperate with the inevitable

What use is such knowledge? Osho answered with Mulla Nasruddin. Nasruddin was always unhappy. When his orchard gave a perfect crop of apples, he grumbled that there were no rotten ones left to feed the animals.

Then one day he was suddenly happy, and the whole village wanted to know why. Nasruddin said he had learned to cooperate with the inevitable. He had fought for years. Now he accepted that what must happen will happen.

This, Osho said, was one purpose of astrology: no wasted struggle against what is sure to come, and no wasted longing for what will not. Astrology was a way to bring a person into tathata, suchness, total acceptance.

Nothing is apart

Osho closed his first talk by returning to his central theme. The universe is a living body. Nothing in it is separate, and even the farthest is joined to the nearest.

Influence also flows both ways, he said. Even a stone on the road sends its rays toward you as you pass, and you send yours toward it. If storms on the sun can spread disease on earth, then when a Buddha is born and a stream of peace and meditation flows across the earth, it becomes harder for storms to rise on the sun. "Life is joined! Here no one is small or big."

In Part 5: We Are Pieces of the Sun, we turn to Osho's second talk, where he begins with our oldest relationship of all: the one between the sun, the earth and ourselves.

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.