Birth as Exposure

Part 6 of 8 in our series on Osho's 1971 talks on astrology.

If we live surrounded by fields of energy, when do they leave their deepest mark on us? Osho's answer was the moment of birth, and he explained it with an image from photography.

The film and the shutter

In scientific language, Osho said, we could call birth an exposure. When you press a camera's shutter, its window opens for an instant and closes again. Whatever is in front of the lens in that instant is printed on the film. The film is exposed. Nothing more will be printed on it, and it will carry that image for as long as it lasts.

In the same way, he said, a human being is exposed twice. The first exposure is conception, when life begins in the mother's womb. The second is birth, when the child comes out into the world. Both are printed on a mind that is utterly open and sensitive. In that moment the child takes the whole universe inside, and the sympathies of a lifetime are formed.

Born into the night

Osho gave an example to show what this means. Imagine a child born in the middle of the night. The first impression on that mind is darkness. The sun is absent and so is its energy. Plants have closed their leaves. Birds have folded their wings and hidden in their nests. The whole earth is asleep. Nothing is awake. This, he said, is the first impact on that child.

He stressed that he offered this only as an example, because the matter is much wider. But he added a thought from Buddha and Mahavira. They would say that a birth with the waking sun is a birth of energy, while a birth in darkness, after the sun has set, is a birth of sleep. Most souls, in their view, are still asleep, and choosing the day is hard for a sleeping soul.

The chick and the balloon

Why should a first impression matter so much? Osho turned to the study of imprinting, made famous by the scientist Konrad Lorenz.

A newly hatched chick runs after the hen, and we say it is following its mother. Scientists say it is not about the mother at all. It is about exposure. Osho described experiments in which the hen was removed at the moment of hatching and a rubber balloon was put in her place. The first thing the chick saw was the balloon. From then on, it followed the balloon wherever it drifted, rested against it when tired, and tried to touch it with its beak, while it ignored its real mother.

The chick follows the hen not because she is its mother, Osho said, but because she is the first thing it meets. "That first-moment exposure is very important." A single first impression shapes a whole life.

The whole sky in one moment

If a balloon or a hen can shape a creature's mind forever, Osho asked, what about everything else present at that moment? Astrology says that the whole universe enters at the moment of exposure, and the sympathies and antipathies of an entire life are formed.

When astrologers say the stars "surround" the earth at birth, he explained, they mean that certain planets and stars are sending their influence to the earth at that moment. Each planet, he said, is different in nature and sends a different kind of influence. At the moment of birth, all the planets and stars around the horizon reach deep into the child's mind, and its weaknesses, strengths and capacities are shaped for good.

A lesson from Hiroshima

Osho reminded his listeners how little was known about radiation before Hiroshima. People expected an atom bomb to kill many people, but they did not foresee that it would also affect the children of those who survived, for generations to come. The people, animals, birds and fish that lived through it were changed in ways that would take generations to understand.

Yet an atom bomb, Osho said, is a tiny power next to the sun. The sun's energy is like countless bombs bursting together, and it has warmed the earth for billions of years. Beyond the sun are greater suns, all the stars of the sky, and from each of them some influence of its own reaches us.

Since artificial satellites first went beyond the earth, he added, they have sent back so much information about the energies flowing through space that we have neither the words nor the science to understand it all.

The ruins of a great palace

Osho returned to an idea from his first talk: astrology is not a young science still growing, but the remains of a great science that was lost.

He compared it to a ruin. The walls of a house being built and the walls of a palace that has fallen can look much the same. A thousand years later, it may be hard to tell which is which. Astrology, he said, is like those fallen walls. It was once a whole palace, a complete science. From what remains, we cannot easily imagine how great it was.

Truths are found and lost many times, Osho said. Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer of the third century before Christ, taught that the sun, not the earth, is the centre. Later Ptolemy put the earth back at the centre, and it took many centuries before Copernicus and Kepler found again what Aristarchus had known. Only then did people go back to his writings and marvel.

Osho also enjoyed Oscar Wilde's quip about Columbus: America had often been discovered before, but it had always been hushed up.

The astrologer on the street

This, Osho said, is why he approached astrology from so many directions. If he spoke about it directly, people would think he was defending the astrologer on the street corner, who tells your fortune for a few coins.

He was clear about this. In the name of astrology, he said, ninety-nine out of a hundred are fraud. The hundredth, the one who truly understands, is hard to recognise, because he will never be dogmatic. He knows that astrology is so vast that one can step into it only with great hesitation.

What Osho wanted was to show his listeners the whole palace from many sides, so that they could enter it with confidence. Yet, he observed, most people only want to know whether their daughter will marry this year.

In Part 7: The Three Layers of Astrology, Osho separates what in our lives is fixed, what can be changed, and what is mere chance.

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.