Using Jyotish to Ease Out of Samskaras or “Stop Being a Tool”

When Westerners broach the spiritual practices of the East without much access to the cultural
foundation/understandings that built them, difficulties can set in.
One difficulty is language. All languages are both freeing and limiting, but some languages are
prisons more than they are passports. Language is a primarily left-brained, linear production
that confines intuitive, felt, holistic reality within its grasp. There is a Zen saying about language,
“the finger that points at the Moon is not the Moon,” but in some languages, words don’t tend to
even point at the Moon. Or the Moon they point at is a barren, windswept rock visited by men in
gigantic white suits who somehow made it through the Van Allen radiation belt, (but I digress.)
The point is that the Moon is a Being, a location, an experience, a place, an energy, a
consciousness, a key holder of various aspects of the human experience saturated with implicit,
intuitive felt realities that cannot easily be captured in words.
Now the Moon is a universal symbol because it exists everywhere in the world at some level,
and while, at some level, many implicit realities exist everywhere in the world, some only exist in
a particular locale and many do not exist everywhere in the world to the degree that the
language of a particular culture carries words that point to the fullness of that particular aspect
of reality.
Thus, when people begin to translate spiritual concepts and precepts from the languages of the
East, and particularly Sanskrit – a language (whose name means “well-constructed”) deliberately
constructed to “point at the Moon” as much as possible, and, in fact, to be able to produce the
Moon in some instances – to English, a language designed for precision, for specificity and for
splitting, much more than for unity and inclusiveness, enormous gaps in understanding begin to
appear. English has more words than any other language because of this property of specificity.
The other feature of English, and of specificity, is that words name things. In Sanskrit, words
mostly name properties or activities of things. Many things can share similar properties and/or
activities, and thus a singular word can evoke a constellation of objects, experiences or
processes which opens the doorway to an intuitive, holistic understanding.
The other problem with English is how easily it lends itself to reification. Reification is a process
of concretization whereby the immaterial is treated as material. Immaterial things – like love,
hope and cruelty, become things. Reification is a dangerous practice because it makes
processes with multiple attributes evolving through time that have different connotations in
individual nervous systems, into artifacts and abstractions worth fighting over and dying for. And
in the garden of abstraction there is no end to the flower beds of conflict and confusion.
The second difficulty is in trying to align divergent maps of the essential components of a human
being, and divergent ideas of what the purpose of human life actually is. From the Western(or
perhaps American) view, a human being is something entitled to enjoy pleasure and it should
find its way to enjoyment using the minimum moral compass necessary to sustain enjoyment, or
whatever moral compass it settles on with its “free will”. Then it should mostly do whatever is
necessary to continue to sustain enjoyment with little regard for death which is an unpleasant
eventuality that should a) be avoided by any means necessary, and b) has no life of its own.
From the Indian point of view, a human being is an aggregate of elements, some gross and
some subtle, that mistakenly identifies itself as being that aggregate of elements. The point of
life is to disidentify with that aggregate of elements in order to obtain freedom from endless
cyclical rounds of birth and death, periods of death lasting for much longer than periods of life,
and being, potentially, much more grueling. Enjoyment, while it can be had, should be had
moderately, because enjoyments tend to produce further identification with cyclic existence and
most have a hidden price tag in the form of karma, or future reactions to previous actions, that
will have to be endured in some future life when the original memory of how the consequence
came about is likely to be wiped out, leaving people wondering, why me Lord?
From the Indian perspective, maximizing pleasure in life is shortsighted and dangerous –
although minimizing enjoyment can be equally shortsighted and dangerous. Why? Because of
the Law of Karma, which states that Nature tends to respond in equal measure to human
gestures. Thus, enjoyment taken at the expense of other beings will eventually give them a “turn
behind the wheel” so to speak. And excessive sacrifice of enjoyment will eventually give
Enjoyment itself a turn behind the wheel, at which point one may be living in an incarnation
where one has forgotten the purpose of human existence because excessive enjoyment has
inclined one to think life is a wonderful treat to be, well, enjoyed, thus ensuring future rounds of
cyclic existence as one creates new karmas for oneself basking in the comfort of old blessings.
Cyclic existence is all well and good when things are going well, but boy does Time Crawl in
difficult circumstances. The New Age seems to posit a linear view of life-to-life progression, but
from the Indian perspective, which is far more cyclical, there is no linear progression. The
causal body, one’s storehouse of previously performed karmas, is immensely vast, and perhaps
not even “individual”, such that however well things go in one particular incarnation is no
guarantee of continued progression in the next. The next could belong to some hideous batch of
karmas that renders existence bleak and futile. From owning every Apple gadget ever made,
one could go to China to make every Apple gadget ever made in a prison-like factory. So many
people have committed suicide doing this work that the factories now have nets around them.
This is one reason yogis often attempt to prolong life in a particular body, understanding that
should they depart with their meditations unperfected, they may return in a body unfit for
sadhana or in a time, place or circumstance where it is highly unlikely to regain memory or
access to what one was previously doing. This is also why Indian culture has traditionally put a
premium on Self-Realization over other pursuits.
Another significant difference between East and West is the notion of freedom. There may be
nothing more tightly confined than a human being that believes its own deluded reality is already
free. America is the “land of the free”, where people mistake desire fulfillment and ego
expression as “freedom.” In the East, it is understood that all identification with limited existence
is bondage, whether painful or pleasurable and that what one identifies with, unless it has been
consciously chosen with some discrimination, is a matter of previous experience and therefore,
has no intrinsic merit or reality beyond personal evocation – which can run very deep. Because,
in addition to desire, there are simply habits of mind, repetitive perceptual grooves that take the
information gleaned by the five senses from the external world and make it mean whatever that
mind is most practiced at making things mean.
One of India’s tools for going beyond limiting identifications is Jyotisha or Vedic
Astrology, which describes both one’s karmas – the external reality one is pinned into, and one’s
samskaras, the deep mental impressions one is likely to identify with and “act out.” People
frequently go to jyotishis to learn primarily about their karmas. On the highest level, there is no
free will, but there is iccha shakti, the energy of will, which can, with awareness and a resource
or two, be creatively used to modify internal reality even if little can be done about external
reality.
Internal reality is that of samskaras, or mental impressions, which are the primary driver for the
creation of new karmas. (I am using the word samskara because it is the word most commonly
used in the West to talk about mental impressions. But in actual fact, there are a few words for
mental impressions that describe different aspects of that phenomenon. Ironically, samskara is,
like Samskrta, a word that points to deliberate construction. It implies a deliberately constructed
mental impression, as in Nama Samskara, or the naming ceremony of a baby, in which a name
is given in a ritualized fashion at an appropriate moment to encourage the infant to develop in a
healthy direction. Which also goes to show the power and possibility inherent in deliberate
construction of the mind) The mental impressions that are simply there by happenstance and
circumstance are more appropriately referred to as vasanas and vrittis; vasanas are all the
impressions in the mind, vrittis are the ones moving in the mind at any given moment. People
will tend to identify with their pre-existent self and to continue to move in the direction of their
sense of preference and aversion, which often consists of repeating painful, useless habits and
avoiding health promoting behaviors. By this I don’t mean preference in the sense of conscious
liking necessarily, because at a deeper level, any habit is a “preference.” Mood states are
“preferences”. Interpretations of reality are “preferences”.
Swami Rudrananda said, “We are all victims until our thirties, and most of us manage to
continue to be victims for the rest of our lives.” We are victims of our own previous conditioning
which limits reality to our container of mental impressions and persuades us that that container
has intrinsic value and validity.
To creatively rework this container of mental impressions, one must first have some idea of what
it contains. That is where jyotish comes in. While an understanding of one’s external Fate can
be useful, it can also be useless and, in the Age of Kali Yuga, it can often be just plain wrong,
since very few jyotishis have completed the necessary training and sadhanas to be excellent
predictors. But even a half-baked jyotishi may be able to say something useful about the state of
one’s mental impressions. Once the territory is known, a willing human being can, with some
assistance, begin the process of deliberate self-reconstruction through any of the great
modalities, old and new, that exist to modify identifications.
The ultimate point, from an Indian view, is to go beyond samskara altogether, but it is easier to
reach outer space in a rocket than it is on the back of a three legged donkey. Depending on
one’s pre-existent samskaras, reconstruction may be necessary before launch can be achieved.
Because certain perceptions, emotional stances and accompanying behaviors do not promote
the ability to disidentify.
So what do I mean by, “Stop Being a Tool”? Unless and until, humans acquire some selfawareness and self-restraint, they are tools of the game of Maya. Maya is an Indian concept
that is frequently applied to the external world, but actually really applies to the internal world,
because the external world only exists to the degree that and in the mode of how, we perceive it
to exist. Maya is often translated as that which creates illusions, which creates another illusion
for the Western brain, which is inclined to feel that mundane reality is very concretized and
therefore very “real”. Maya is composed of two Sanskrit syllables which can be translated many
different ways. Ma, in essence, represents all of manifest existence and it can also mean,
simply “not.” Ya means restraint. If you flip these two syllables around, you get Yama, the Lord
of Death whose very name means restraint. So, in one sense, Maya simply means the
unrestrained mind, which creates “illusions” for each one of us.
The biggest “trick” of Maya is that people believe in their own desires, perceptions, and
aversions as necessary, essential and often immutable self attributes. As Swami Rama says,
“People think of the joy of getting things, but they never think of the greater joy of not getting
them, which eventually leads to not wanting them, which is freedom.”
Until then, people are a “tool” of the reality they perceive, reaping and sowing karma in an
existence that, while it is real, is mutable, impermanent and limited. The Greater Reality is
Satchitananda – Being-Consciousness-Bliss. The Greater Reality can only be realized with the
help of Relative Reality, which should be respected and cared for and maybe enjoyed, within
sensible limits. And certain habits and attitudes and behaviors in Relative Reality promote an
internal and external environment that is conducive to the cultivation of a greater, more
encompassing peace and awareness both for self and other. These habits, attitudes and
behaviors form some of the bedrock of Indian spiritual tradition.
For instance, take the yamas and niyamas, the first two stages of Patanjali’s Eight Stage Raja
Yoga. While mostly in the West, people have skipped over yama and niyama and gone straight
to asana without understanding its deeper purpose, yama and niyama are somewhat known
concepts, if not the household phrase “downward dog” has become. Yama and niyama
prescribe modes of conduct that promote peace and awareness. The conduct they prescribe,
when sincerely attempted, allows people to recognize their mind at work, because any effort at
behavior modification will reveal the inconsistent and grasping nature of mind. When applied
over time, not only do they prevent people from generating more bad karma for self and other,
they allow us to free ourselves from the grasp of Maya. We may never practice them perfectly,
but the effort will increase the capacity to disidentify.
From the perspective of Ultimate Reality, nothing is sad. From the perspective of Relative
Reality, nothing is sadder and stupider than useless suffering for self and other in a mistaken
attempt to achieve contentment through grasping at things in the external world.
That said, for many beings, some of the painful wounds of suffering need to be closed as part of
transmuting the three-legged donkey into a rocket ship. Neither the overly nor the underly
blessed tend to have an easy time leaving Earth. The overly blessed never think of it, and the
underly blessed are too preoccupied with the perplexing issue of how a Loving God allows such
hideous suffering. The underly blessed have work to do with loving the small self and work to do
with forgetting their suffering, to make that donkey launch, otherwise, the very thing many other
people could do with being more mindful of, the suffering of self and other beings, will be the
preoccupation that ruins spiritual development for those who have been seriously afflicted in this
lifetime.
The problem lies in the fact that, due to the nature of self-identification, people who need to love
themselves more usually feel like they need to crack down on themselves, and people who
need to be a little sterner with themselves, usually feel like they need to be permissive. That’s
where jyotish comes in, to save us from our tendency to endlessly, unknowingly self-replicate
and create suffering in the process.