Astrology provides an interesting roadmap that can help you "decode" some of the mysteries of your life, your relationships, other people, your individual pasts, your unfolding future, and your personal destiny. If you look at that list carefully, you'll see a tremendous wealth of material available through this often abused and misunderstood occult discipline.

• If you (or someone knowledgeable) can read it properly, your horoscope ... the map of the sky frozen in time at the moment of your birth that Astrology uses to describe your character ... tells you the "raw materials" you have to work with, the qualities and characteristics of personal energy you are using to express who you are, be who you need to be, and how you can do what you came here to do.
  
  Your horoscope can describe your talents, your strengths, your hang-ups, your challenges, your Karmic gifts, and your Karmic obligations. It can literally tell you who you were meant to be before life, society, and other factors got hold of you and possibly corrupted the picture so that you've had to spend a great deal of time and effort trying to get back on track.
  
  The opportunity to face the conditions of your life armed with that knowledge is indispensable. If, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, Astrology is where you get a jump start on the knowledge you need to have about yourself and the curriculum you need to master to make progress on your soul's unfolding path with the time and energy you spend here.

• If you know Astrology well enough to read your own chart, it's a cinch you can read the chart of another person. This is not only a benefit for learning more about the people in your close relationships, but looking at the charts of historical figures, famous people you admire, or people making news for both great and terrible reasons can offer you an extraordinary new dimension of understanding in human psychology.

• Astrology can help you compare your chart (and therefore your character, needs, and potential) with those of another person or an important event in your life -- such as a marriage, a job, a relocation, an investment, an accident, even a theoretical event -- such as a pending decision ... and help you understand the dynamics of your relationship, what you provide for one another and the difficulties and challenges you face in your association.
  
  Astrology can especially help you examine your relationship between you and your parents, between your parents themselves, between your siblings and your parents, and between you and your partner. (You can learn more about why you had such an easy or difficult time with one of your parents while one of your siblings had just the opposite experience.)

• Astrology will help show upcoming experiences, the themes that will be emphasized in your immediate future, and the progress of major life trends and lessons. It can help you both take advantage of the beneficial energies that arrive and understand (and cope more wisely with) the challenges contained in every life. It can also help you examine your past and gain insight into what "life was asking of you" at certain times ... both happy and painful.

• Astrology will let you take one part of your life and examine in great detail what you have to work with and what you need to have for "best results." You can see what kind of job you are suited for and the best conditions for the work you were build to do. You can see what kind of parent you are to each of your children. (You're different with every one of them.) You can see what kind of partner you're looking for as a spouse. (Which, believe it or not is different from the kind of romantic lover you want.) You can see how you handle money and what your best income potentials are. Astrology can tell you volumes about all this and more.

• If you follow it far enough, you can also learn your Karma through your horoscope -- the gifts you brought to develop, the commitments you accepted, the challenges your are trying to solve, the weaknesses you are working to fortify.

I know of no other human science that can do this so thoroughly, so consistently, so accurately, and with such logic to its information. When you understand the value Astrology can provide in all these areas, you'll view the nonsensical "daily horoscopes" that so corrupt and mock its wisdom with the contempt they so richly deserve.

Rebecca Brents writes on a wide variety of spiritual and occult subjects, including astrology, tarot, metaphysics, and self-improvement. She publishes the extensive online new age Ezine, The Enchanted Sprite on her website: Enchanted Spirit.