Each Sri Lankan new year strains my tolerance for auspicious times. It’s an idiotic practice. Symbolising the madness infecting the island and its culture of the last 40 years.
If doing something at an auspicious time is a powerful factor in the outcome of anything, we Sri Lankans should be the most successful people on Earth. The facts of the last two years indicate otherwise.
In the usual fashion we will point to other causes. Bad astrologers is oddly not one of them. It’s a reaction highlighting another symptom of the underlying problem – unwillingness to admit difficult facts. The biggest of them all – the fact that significant success in anything is difficult.
It’s easy to put flowers before statues after stealing billions than life a vaguely ethical life. Similarly it’s simpler to start doing something idiotic at an auspicious time than putting in the effort to work out the intent and consequences of your actions.
There are many well planned endeavours which are started (with much ceremony) at auspicious times. Any success these have tend to bolster the idea that auspicious times work. On the flip side, astrological miscalculations are a convenient cover for sloppy planning and sloppier execution.
Our cultural norms are rooted in lost rice-centric agricultural civilisation. Its sense of time and patterns about the world are defined by familiar cycles of monsoons. Such predictable rhythms are long gone. Yet our un-Buddhist attachment to its habits is slow to change. Slower to change are the rituals of long-abandoned beliefs. So we make the same old mistakes and expect things to get better. Just as we think a ritual at an auspicious time will change our fortunes.
Cerno 