Astrology - my views

7-8 years back I started studying astrology.

First I started with study of Kundali, but I could not learn much that time. What I understood at that time was study of kundali is based on the positions of the planets in sky their effect on our life. Few year later I started studying palmistry, I could learn palmistry much easily. Palm reading is easier for new comers than Kundali (at advanced level both might be equally tough).
I saw hands of more than 200 people in 2-3 years. I could see that different people have different good and bad things in life.

Sometimes my reading was perfect sometimes it was totally absurd. Most of the times when I could not read hand I used to tell the person that I do not understand your hand.

I stopped palm reading almost 2-3 years back after death of my mother. According to my reading I thought she will have life of about 50 years and she died at 48, I did not feel any shock when she died. Rather when my father called me saying mother is serious I went to Lord Shiv's temple to pray for my mother. I had institution that she is no more. After that I thought that palm reading made me unhappy much before actually she died.

I had also read hand of few others and told them some of the bad things that will happen in future like accidents and divorce etc. and when that actually happened I felt bad, I used to think that, by telling them about bad things in future I removed their joy of present.

Some remarks before I write negative side-
1. Like any other science astrology and palmistry is also science. Ancient Indians studied these sciences to good extent and lot of knowledge is available on today's date on methodologies to make astrological predictions.
2. There are people even on today's date who also know the detailed reasoning behind the predictions they are making. It is very much similar to how an engineer reads engineering drawing or architect reads plan drawing.

Negative side of astrology (rather negative side of the way it is used) -
1. First and most important reason why people should stop use of fal jyotish (prediction science) excessively is that
i. People forget the power of present. This is worse effect.
ii. People forget that they are the god/ architect/ designer of their own life.
iii. If you know the future in advance then you can not enjoy present. Then you can not observe life - you can just verify it.
2. Sometimes even though there is no problem with somebody, but astrologer will tell him/her for some big Pooja or will advice them some costly stone. I firmly believe that stones should not be used to solve problems which come because of your karma. Face the problems - do not find easy solutions, when wrong stones are used person using those stones might have to suffer a lot because of it.
3 . Sometimes they tell the predictions just to make the listener happy.
4. Remember you are paying fees to someone who is taking away joy of your life. Do remember that whether the prediction is positive or negative it takes away the joy of your life - simply because you loose the newness of experiences. Your mind becomes prejudiced.
5. It creates a mental block in your mind because of which your attitude shifts from 'can do it' to 'should happen'.

The positive side of astrology -
1. There are scholars who have studied astrology to depth and have found methods to find predictions about weather. I think this can be very useful if we verify the results scientifically. The predictions should be verified with the statistical data and then this can be used as a help for farmers. I know some might think that why not to use satellite etc. methods. my answer is
- astrology is also science. It do not require you to spend any money on the infrastructure. Just use it as guide line - I am not telling that do not use other scientific ways.
2. One more use I think of astrology is for deciding child's name. This is the only science I know which has reasoning for "what's there in name".
3. Though I do not completely agree astrology could also be used for making decision regarding marriage. I have firm belief that those who choose option of love marriage should not at all verify things from astrologer this is wrong. Regarding others who do arrange marriage and the boy and girl do not know about each other, for these people astrology is useful science.

Friends I know that you are going to criticize me a lot. Do write your comments, your views. But before you write any question I have some requests-
1. I have learned astrology methodically, I (almost) do not understand the reasoning. So do not ask me basic questions like - prove that it is a science or prove that predictions made by astrology are correct.
2. You might have experienced sometime that somebody gave your wrong prediction
- true, the reason was the astrologer failed to analyze. Remember when some satellite goes out of control we do not say that science is wrong, rather the scientist who designed it failed to study some parameters.
3. You might tell me that Ashish you are in 21 century and talking like 400BC. I won't mind. I have verified the truth of this science from my own experiences.
4. Why do we require it for weather prediction, marriage decision etc.
- Fine if you don't want it but then why do you either want satellite results (afterall this is also a way of prediction) or partner compatibility tests (they are also statistics based - there are no proven formulae)?