Does Astrology work? Should we bother about it?

Yes. For the simple reason that you are a human living in a world of conditions that impact you, your loved ones, and the society.

A human desires, make plans, carries ambitions. He makes meaning and strives to fulfill the things that are desired. It matters to him a lot whether or not the desires come out to be true. If the desires are fulfilled, that gives way to arising of one or more of these many feelings: satisfaction, pride, happiness, exaltation, or some other. If desires are unfulfilled then that leads to eruption of the other set of feelings: sadness, remorse, guilt, anger, rage, and others. Fulfilment of desires lead to moods change and also formation of other desires. These desires expressed as moods and perceptions make a personality for others to react to - either in your favour or against. The whole world works by individuals making personal and collective desires and then entangling themselves in the actualization of them.

Desires get shaped into needs, wants, and motivation

Gautama Buddha said that a human being is bound within the habit of making desires.

The Buddha further distinguishes desires into two categories – cravings/aversions that bothers one too much or simple desires that don’t bother. He further says that rare are the people who are able to extinguish these desires that bother so much. I’m a meditator myself and have travelled some distance in life in not rolling into these desires and yet there are some things that just press my buttons. If someone molests my daughter tomorrow, I will probably go and chop off his head. If I do that thing then my life will turn in a direction never thought of before. And that will give birth to a new set of desires for me and my family - how to defend myself in a court of law, how to arrange monies, and how to have peace of mind.

Be the captain of your ship

I know from contemplation and life experiences that being in control of one's life is only possible when certain life events (death, disease, dire events) don’t happen in a way and that some other life events do happen in a certain way (my employer/clients reward me as promised, government doesn’t seize my bank accounts, my wife continues to love me, etc).

There are desires that are easy to recognize and then there are the ones which leave us shocked in the absence of their fulfillment. We are left stunned, lost, beaten, confused, powerless - if not longer than for a brief time. Not to speak of career aspirations, life goals, animosity, responsibility, hate, revenge which come under heavy desires – the ones that sit on our head and consume us duly. Then there are subtle desires: what pizza I will eat, what coffee flavour, Paris or Switzerland for a vacation. These are desires that bother us subtly and yet influence us in everyday affairs.

Quality of life needs carefully conceived actions, not reactions

Things bother us, and what we do then makes our future.

We live in a conditional world. In a world bound by conditions with everybody interconnected, everything happening to me becomes a factor that either works in my favour of fulfilling my desires or against of their fulfillment. In us, the humans, is also available the instinct to get to know whether or not our desires are riping as we expect. Because of this instinct, we get to keep updates, change investment plans, relocate places of stay, shift careers, replace life partners, et al.

Science has made huge developments and we have tools of predictions that we follow – weather forecasts, election forecasts, investments planners for the long term. And yet we have not been able to find that formula to obtain life forecasts for most of Life’s domains. We know that some die, that some are fired from jobs, some get divorced, some lose investments. But we don’t know if our children die that soon, that we can be the ones to get defunct from our jobs this month, if we get divorced, and if the stock market plummets our investments. It would be wonderful to have some tool that can guide us.

I want to tell you that astrology is that tool.

(For a more technical answer, refer to my Quora post on "Is Astrology true? Should we believe it or not")