We Are Pieces of the Sun

Part 5 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

Osho began his second talk with the sun. To understand astrology, he said, we must first understand our relationship with it.

Mother, daughter, granddaughter

The whole solar family, Mars, Jupiter, the moon and the earth, came from the sun. Then life arose on the earth, from plants all the way to human beings. So man is a part of the earth, and the earth is a part of the sun. "We are pieces of the sun." Its atoms live in every drop of our blood and every piece of our bones. So if the sun affects us, Osho said, there is nothing surprising in it.

Empathy

To explain how this works, Osho used the word "empathy". Things born from one source carry an inner fellow-feeling. They echo each other.

He pointed again to identical twins. He described experiments in which twins were kept in separate rooms and asked, at the same moment, to write down the first thought or draw the first picture that came to mind. Again and again, in his telling, their thoughts and pictures matched, as if they were linked through some unknown path.

The same kind of constant, hidden conversation, Osho said, goes on between the sun and the earth, and between the earth and us. It is subtle and inward, but it never stops.

What the trees remember

Osho then told of the work of Andrew Ellicott Douglass, the founder of tree-ring science. Every year a tree adds one ring to its trunk, so the rings tell its age. They also record the weather: a warm, wet year leaves a wide ring, and a cold, dry year a narrow one. From very old wood we can read the weather of years long past.

Osho made the point with a vivid example. If the Buddha said it rained heavily one year, the very tree under which he sat would carry the record. The Buddha could misremember. The tree would not.

As Douglass studied the rings, Osho said, he found something he had never expected: a rhythm of about eleven years that matched the cycle of activity on the sun. From this grew the idea of a "climate of the earth", a single rhythm across the whole planet beneath all the local differences of weather. We do not notice it, but the trees do.

If trees are so sensitive to the sun, Osho asked, could human beings be untouched? A tree records these events in its body because it has no mind. A human being has a mind, and it is the mind that records them. That is why we cannot read a person as easily as we read a tree. Astrology, he said, is the search for exactly this: whatever happens in the universe also happens within the human mind.

Sailing with the wind

Osho drew a lesson about human life from this rhythm. A child born while the sun is rising, he said, is like a person setting out in a sailboat with the wind behind them. They only need to open the sail. A child born while the sun is declining is like someone who must row east while the wind blows west. They must struggle at the oars, and the sail is of no use.

In the same way, he said, there are years when illness is less common on earth and years when it is more common, following the sun's rise and fall.

Even the earth feels these rhythms. Our finest clocks are set by the earth's turning on its axis, and for a long time it was thought that the earth never varied by even a second. Now, Osho said, we know that the earth's turning is not perfectly steady. As the earth moves through changing cosmic influences, its rhythm shifts slightly.

It takes immense force to move the earth by even a fraction. And when such forces pass by the earth, Osho said, they pass by us too. When the earth trembles, the trees tremble, and so do we.

The limits of our senses

Why don't we feel any of this? Osho's answer is that we are protected by our limits.

Our body can live only within a narrow band of temperature. Our ears hear only within a certain range: below it a sound is too faint, and above it, though we rarely think of this, a sound is too vast to be heard at all. Huge sounds from events in space pass around us all the time, Osho said. If we could hear them, we would be deafened.

It is the same with all our senses. A dog smells far more than we do. A horse can sense a lion long before a man knows anything. If we smelled every scent around us, Osho said, we would go mad. "Man is closed in a capsule."

Think of a radio, he said. The broadcasts of every station in the world are passing through your room right now. You hear them only when you turn on the radio, but they are there whether you hear them or not.

The same is true of everything around us. We may not hear or smell or see it, but it touches every nerve and every heartbeat. Our knowing is not needed for a thing to exist and to act on us. Astrology, Osho said, simply says that we live inside fields of energy, and that they affect us all the time.

In Part 6: Birth as Exposure, Osho explains how and when these fields leave their deepest mark on us: in the first moments of life.

This article explains, in our own words, ideas from Osho's talk "Jyotish Arthat Adhyatma" (Astrology Means Spirituality), 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.