Jyotisa and Living Enlightenment🔗

Jyotisa can help one to read his destiny. But what is actually destiny?

There are only two types of destinies:

The first one is destiny as defined by a dictionary: destiny lived within the boundaries of the ego, with its own expectations, hopes, desires, successes and failures. It is constantly changing. Because it evolves under mind's law, it is mechanical, accidental and coincidental. This 'destiny' is lived in the dimension of the mind, so it has no existential reality in itself. It is nothing more than a reproduction of one's past in the present, which conditions the future in a mechanical way.

The other destiny is existential and ultimate; it is the flowering of consciousness into enlightenment. Understand: the only thing predestined in the scheme of life is that man is meant to evolve to reach enlightenment. The rest is just incidental; it happens for no other reason than to teach and mold the being towards seeking enlightenment. Living enlightenment is all about making conscious choices, free from the unconscious push and pull of the samskāras.

The further you wander from your center, the more you lose yourself in your periphery, the more you are subjected to incidents and accidents. Whereas, when you live enlightenment, you are centered, you are within your boundaries, you are aware. You become predestined, because your predestination is to reach enlightenment; your destiny is to become more and more aware. Then you become the agent of your fate, and you move beyond grahas' influences. This is how you come to terms with your karmas.

For that to happen, a simple understanding of the forces at work in you can help clarity manifest in your daily routine. In addition to this, you can follow a couple of guidelines to keep your body healthy with the science of Ayurveda and raise your energy level with yoga, the use of gemstones, rudrāksa beads, mantra chanting, and a basic knowledge of your psychological tendencies coupled with the ancient Vedic wisdom expressed by the great enlightened Masters.

All these remedies will bring lucidity about your mental set-up and support for eventually dropping your conditionings, unclutching from your mind and emotions and fostering your intelligence and energy to Live Enlightenment.

Understanding Grahas and Nakṣatras

The grahas are energy centers, energy fields that planets exert in the universe. Each of the nine main grahas in Vedic astrology has a specific energy field that creates specific effects on our planet Earth. For example, the moon has a strong impact on the movements of the sea and on plant growth; it even influences the mind of human beings. In the same way, the major energy centers produce an effect on living beings and influence their potential at birth, their mental set-up and, therefore, the course of their destiny. In Jyotiṣa, grahas are often referred as the agents of the karmas for which the soul took birth. Human personality and life have their counterparts in the structure of the cosmic physiology, represented by the grahas and the naksatras.

There are nine grahas (nine influences or 'planets') in our solar system: the Sun (Surya), the Moon (Candra), Mars (Mangal), Mercury (Budha), Jupiter (Guru), Venus (Śukra), Saturn (Śani) and two nodes called Rāhu (ascending lunar node) and Ketu (descending lunar node). These represent archetypes. Sūrya, for example, represents consciousness; Candra represents the cosmic mind; Budha represents the cosmic intellect, etc.

Most of the calendars of the world have been set by the Sun's and Moon's movements (measuring the day, month and year) and were of great importance for agriculture, because the harvest depended on planting at the correct time of the year. But the Vedic tradition uses a system of 27 naksatras to calculate months. The nakṣatra is the constellation in which the moon sits in the heaven at a particular time. In each month, the full moon sits in a particular constellation, and the Vedic month will have this naksatra's name.

Each naksatra falls under the rule of one graha, sometimes two. Each graha is assigned three naksatras. For example, if the child is born when the moon sits in Pūrvabhadrapada nakṣatra, his birth star will be Pūrvabhadrapada, and his sign will be Pisces (called meena in Sanskrit), ruled by planet Jupiter (guru). Uttarabhadrapada and Revati, the two next nakṣatras, also fall under the lordship of Jupiter and the Pisces sign. All three will therefore have similar characteristics and will influence the child's mind and consciousness at the time of birth, shaping his destiny.