As a kid I showed a lot of academic success and a natural talent for writing. Future looked bright for me. Everything went well until my mother died, in '97, due to domestic violence. After that point, my grades declined and I started withdrawing from people. There was nobody I could talk to. And so began the great 15 years of isolation. In retrospect, that time was the best thing that I could ever imagine happening to me. Had I had a 'normal' life, I would have never known how much more there is to it than just everyday pleasures.
Through my own thinking, I understood why things happen the way they do and uncovered the secret of (mis)understanding between any two people. To me, this realization came bit by bit and by observing myself and others.
It all started with a simple question: "Why did things in my family turn out the way they did?" and I watched people interact with each other. I noticed that nobody is relating to others consciously, we just happen to bump into somebody and whatever happens, happens. It's all an accident and beyond our control, right? It may be laughter or horror. What determines the outcome? Obviously, it is how our character interacts with that other person's character.
As I tried to make sense of character types and traits, the next realization came to me naturally: "Why do people know what star sign they are but can't explain what it means?"
I had very little literature on that topic, what with Internet still being non-existent, but there were periodical magazines with breadcrumbs here and there. Not only did I not have to engineer the entire structure of character, but it turned out there was a vast system already figured out by people, that could potentially explain everything. Every sorrow and every achievement had a place in this system. Then it was all a simple matter of verifying theory in practice.
Could this be it? Had someone told me then, you will understand all the secrets to human condition and post them on a gaming forum, I would have probably tried to back away slowly out of the room.
Edit: PM me if you want to know more on this topic, I decided it is not appropriate to go into greater depth publicly.
Astrology is an interesting topic. I'd really like to understand the how and why of it all.
After careful self-observation, I can sometimes actually feel new moons, full moons, and close comets and meteors. For example, when the fireballs were falling in russia recently, I had a jittery uncomfortable feeling. I posted a thread on a forum asking if I was the only one feeling it. Later the news and videos came out from russia. The reason I was able to recognize the feeling is because I make a point to observe myself during full and new moons, which give interesting subtle feelings if you simply observe.
The whole idea of different "characters" of star constellations is very intriguing. From a naive scientific perspective, I'd take the 12 signs of the zodiac and try to divide the characters up into "basis functions" or "basis vectors". Basically, my guess would be that any "character" could be broken down into 12 fundamental types, and those types could be mixed and matched to create unique characters. Sort of like male and female could be considered a system of two basic types. But the interesting thing with the zodiac is that each of the characters kind of seem to have arbitrary qualities (though I don't know much about astrology so I don't claim to be right).
I think it may potentially have something to do with time. We experience normal linear time which characteristically has entropy increasing and a hidden future and static past. In a different form of time however, which could possibly exist at a cosmic scale, perhaps the world is one of archetypes and forms. This is plato's world of forms which is transcendent to our own.
Anyway, this video is closely related to the movement of the stars and it's affect on human civilizations. Astrology might be noisy at an individual level, but when we step back and look at the subtle influences at a macro level over long periods of time, we can get much more conclusive evidence.