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Karma isn’t Punishment: What Vedic Astrology says about Karma, Free Will, and the Patterns We Repeat · Bending The Light: Vedic Wisdom for a Brighter World

• 0:02
  Vish Chatterji: Welcome to Bending the Light. I'm Vish Chatterji. car engineer turned karma mechanic. Are you ready to explore karma, dharma, mantra, ritual, and yoga philosophy to help navigate life, but all grounded in our modern world reality, along with a dose of healthy skepticism, I mean, after all, I am a trained engineer. Join me as we navigate the timeless wisdom of my ancestors, the ancient sages of India, from yoga to meditation to Ayurveda and Vedic philosophy, and Jyotish, the science of light, to help make sense of yourself, your life, your karma, and the world around you.
• 0:41
  Come with me on this journey to learn the power of bending the light. Welcome, everyone, to Bending the Light, our fourth full-length episode. I want to take a moment and thank all of you for tuning in, for supporting this show, a new endeavor for me, and I'm proud to report that there are almost a little over 5000 of you listening, which is very exciting, given that I've only got three full-length episodes out there. So please keep on listening, share with your friends, help this podcast grow. I'm having so much fun doing it! I'm having so much fun sharing this knowledge, and
• 1:20
  definitely, definitely, if you could please write a review, and I'm going to explain to you today why reviews are important for you to leave from a karmic perspective. As you all know, I am a Vedic astrologer, and sometimes we wonder what is you know what is Vedic astrology versus Western astrology are they the same thing? And they're vastly different sciences, vastly different systems. And as this show goes on in the future, I'll get a lot more detailed into Vedic astrology so you can understand it and leverage it in your own life. But from my understanding, Western astrology kind of helps
• 2:01
  you understand yourself. It's really about your psychological patterns. You know who are you as a psychological being, and the zodiac that it follows is seasonal, so it adjusts with the season. So Western astrology kind of gives you a little bit of a snapshot of where you are right now in your particular life. But Jyotish, the the name for Vedic astrology, Jyotish. Jyotish means a combination of two words: Jyotir, which means light, and Isha, which means God or divinity or divine consciousness or your soul. So Jyotish, rather than merely translating astrology, Jyotish is the understanding
• 2:41
  of the light of your soul, or the light of God, or the light of divinity, the light of consciousness, you could say. And the aim of Jyotish, the aim of Vedic astrology, is really: what are you here in this lifetime to work through? What is it that your soul is trying to do? What are the challenges that your soul is facing, and so rather than a psychologically focused system such as Western astrology, Jyotish is actually focused on karma. And so, before you can even get into you know what sign am I, what is my rising sign, what is my sun sign, what planet do I have where, you really have
• 3:21
  to understand the nature of karma, and that is just a huge word. I mean, we've all in Western culture heard about karma, right? And there's so many sayings like you hear the word "what is it? What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. Oh, she had it coming to her. Karma got her right. Came back to bite him. Sometimes, oh yeah, the universe is keeping score. You made your bed, now lie in it. You know, payback. And even you know, as a scientist, as as an engineer, Newton's third law of motion in physics is the law of physical. You know, physics: for every action, there is an equal
• 4:02
  and opposite reaction, and that is basically the law of karma. For every action taken, there is some equal reaction that comes in its place in terms of cosmic law, and so whatever we do in this lifetime has some kind of karmic consequence. And one of the things I teach my students is in the in the Vedic tradition, you know, when you die, you let's say you come to the pearly gates of heaven, right? And in Judeo-Christian tradition, at the pearly gates of heaven, there is a judge. There is a judge.
• 4:36
  Literally, there is some judgment that takes place, and you might have you know a judgment of how good or how bad a soul you are, but in Vedic astrology we don't really have a judge up there. We have an accountant, literally a celestial accountant. In fact, he even has a name. His name is Chitra Gupta, and he is a celestial accountant. And his role is to basically add up all the good and. Points of everything you've ever done, all your choices in your life, and then determine based on the balance sheet of good versus bad where you go next. And it was really well exemplified in a Netflix TV
• 5:12
  show I watched years ago called The Good Place, and it starred Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and Ted Danson played literally the accountant in heaven, and so Kristen Bell, you know, led not a very good life. She did a lot of bad things. She wouldn't help the old lady cross the street, and she wouldn't return her shopping cart when she was done shopping the grocery store. And she ends up getting, I guess, I think she gets run over by shopping cart, and she ends up in supposedly the good place, and when she arrives, she faces Ted Danson, and he literally goes through a counting of all these green
• 5:49
  and red marks of good things and not good things that she's done, and based on that, she gets determined where she goes. And that was probably the best Western TV show I've seen that, like, really is built off this idea of what the karmic system is, and so a Vedic astrologer is trying to understand really what is your karma, and you know in Western culture we have this negative connotation. We say you know karma is like punishment. You know oh I'm getting this bad thing happening to me because it's my karma, or I wish bad karma upon that person. But karma is actually not good or bad. It's just
• 6:26
  like I said, accounting. It's very simple. There's credits and there's debits. It's not like saying credit is good, debit is bad, or vice versa. So karma is not a negative thing. It's just a simple accounting reaction. It's the response of an action; it is a consequence of an action. So the idea is that whatever you do in life, there is some consequence, right? And here I'll give you the review analogy. I buy a lot of products online. So if I let's say want to buy a new widget, I'll go online and I'll research all the different widgets that are available, and I will read those reviews. And
• 7:08
  if I see something with three star reviews, I may not buy it. And if I see something with a bunch of five star reviews, I say, "Wow, that's really good five star reviews. I'm going to go ahead and buy it, and then I get it. Now, what if I keep on buying things based on reviews, but I myself never ever contribute a review. That is one of those things to think about from a karmic point of view. I'm leveraging the system. I'm using the system. I'm using what other people took the time, took the energy, took the effort to leave a review for a product. I'm sort of relying on their review, but then
• 7:45
  I'm not actually putting anything in the system. Not I'm not contributing. In fact, I'm freeloading, right? So if I'm a person that relies on reviews to purchase things, if I don't also leave reviews to help other people make their decisions, I'm freeloading off the system. There is a karmic sort of a negative balance, right? There's a negative balance there. Same thing with this. I'm asking for all of you, you know, 1000s of you that are listening to my podcast. I will benefit from reviews, right? I'm I'm taking my time. I'm taking my energy. I'm doing this podcast. I'm doing some research,
• 8:17
  preparing, showing up, trying to talk about these interesting subjects. You're enjoying what you hear, and if you're not leaving reviews, then it doesn't it doesn't sort of pay me back for the effort and work I'm paying. So please, please think about leaving a review. That's a simple request, but also think about everything in your life in this more complex way.
• 8:38
  One of the examples I used in Astrology Decoded was this idea of going to a restaurant for a meal. So if I go to a restaurant and I enjoy a really nice meal, we have so many amazing restaurants in LA, and there's this creativity of the chef. There's this beautiful plating. They've laid out the silverware. It's clean. The glass is clean. They bring out this incredible meal that's so creative and so tasty, and I enjoy it. And if I enjoy that meal and then I leave the restaurant without paying the bill, what is the karmic consequence? And an astrologer or a karmic accountant thinks about things in
• 9:15
  this way. Well, there was a farmer that grew the vegetables. There was, you know, maybe raising the food. There was a delivery system, vendors, diesel fuel, trucks that brought all the supplies to the restaurant. There's you know sous chefs, prep cooks, cooks that are cutting, chopping, preparing the food. There's you know a chef that's sort of laying it out beautifully on the table. There's a waitstaff that's bringing that food to your table, there's a dishwasher that has to clean the dishes to make them all sparkling. There's rent being paid to a landlord for that particular facility. If
• 9:48
  you think of all those consequences or all of those factors, when you pay your bill, you are compensating for all of those service providers there. But let's say you decide to leave without paying the bill. At that point, something is owed. All that work went in, all the supplies went in, and you didn't pay your due. Now there are a few ways to now pay back that debt. You can use your credit card, swipe the card, pay a little fee to the credit card company for their service. Again, a karmic balancing there 2.9% for many credit cards. You could write a check, right? You could pay cash. You could
• 10:29
  end up being forced to wash dishes, or you could have a knock on the door from the police saying you literally stole from the restaurant and now you're going to get booked and charged with potentially a crime. When we think about balancing karma, there's always a difficult way and a pleasant way. Getting caught by the police and getting booked in jail is the most unpleasant way to pay back that meal. Credit card cash may be the more pleasant way. Washing dishes somewhat unpleasant, right? So in life, whatever karma you have, there are ways to pay it back in not such a difficult way or in a
• 11:06
  difficult way. So, what a Vedic astrologer does try to understand what is the karma that this person has to face in this lifetime, and by looking at the planets, and the planets are literally considered agents of karma in Vedic astrology, different planets deliver karma in different ways. Mars is quite aggressive, so it delivers more aggressive karma. Mars is connected to blood and weapons and knives; it can deliver that kind of karma. Saturn is restrictive and painful and challenging and slows things down, so it delivers that kind of karma. Jupiter is graceful, happy, and benevolent
• 11:42
  and expansive, so it delivers that kind of karma. And so, when we look at a birth chart in Vedic astrology, we can see what are the latent karmas of all these different planets, and based on different times of life that the person goes through, depending on the planetary period they're in, the astrologer can say, "Look, this is a planet that's about to deliver its particular karma to you, and where does that karma come from? We believe in the Vedic system that it comes from all these lifetimes you've had in the past. So every choice, every decision, every action you've taken has sort of been
• 12:14
  recorded in this cosmic spreadsheet, so to speak. And out of all the karma, a certain amount of that spreadsheet, a certain number of karmic things are addressed in one particular lifetime, and in that lifetime, the moment you're born, the a map of the stars, a map of the heavens, your Vedic astrology horoscope basically is a syllabus or lesson plan of karma that you will face. So the astrologer can say, "Wow, you're coming to a Jupiter period. You're about to get a big bonus at work. Great karma, right?
• 12:46
  That's really pleasant, and you're probably not going to try to avoid that or change that. But the astrologer could also look and say, 'Wow, you're coming to Saturn period. You're going to have a real restriction, and trying to ask for that promotion is probably going to get denied, or wow, it looks like you're going to go through some karma and get a little bit sick for this period of time. And so, when something negative happens, it's because some debt is owed. You left the restaurant without paying the bill. So the question becomes: Is there a way to pay back that karma in a more pleasant
• 13:18
  way? Insteading to instead of having to get sick, can I deliver or pay back my bill in an easier way, like a check or credit card? Right. So, in a way, a Vedic astrologer is almost like a karma manager. In a way, I think of myself as a karma mechanic, right? A karma accountant or karma manager. And what I'm doing is assessing. Okay, here's the karma that's going on. Here's what's to come, and here's how you can avoid it. So when a Vedic astrologer looks at a birth chart, they can distinguish between fixed karma that is really almost impossible to modify without God's grace or a guru's
• 13:55
  help, or karma that you can modify with a lot of effort and a lot of focus, effort, discipline, repetition, or karma that, with a little bit of effort, will actually modify. So you know, in Sanskrit, there's a saying, and this is in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, verse 2.16: "Heyam dukam anagatam, avoid the suffering that is yet to come. So we're not here on Earth to suffer. We're not here to just endure suffering. Some suffering is there. Some difficulty challenges there cannot be modified. Find a way to gracefully get through it. But in the birth chart, when we identify suffering that can be
• 14:36
  avoided and can be modified, then definitely take action. Do something. Change the situation, get out of the situation, transcend the situation, modify the situation, take action. So part of what I find I'm doing a lot of is in terms of karma managing is deciding what is when somebody shares with me something they're going through, is it modifiable, and if so, how much effort is required, and if there's some ability to modify. Hey, let's do it. Now, if somebody comes to me and says, "Look, I'm already deep in a problem. I'm already having this challenge. It's not going away, or I have this
• 15:08
  pattern that keeps recurring, and over and over, the same pattern every time I get in a relationship, the same thing keeps happening. Then you know it's a deep karma that has not been balanced. And so, what we do is through the chart we can look at remedies, in fact cures for that particular karma. And in a birth chart, there's some karma that's fixed. No matter what, you're going to face it. There's no way out. There's some karma that is slight. It's small. It can be easily modified. And then there's some karma that's sort of in between. It can be modified, but it needs a lot of work and
• 15:42
  a lot of effort, right? So suppose in one lifetime you used to go around punching people, punch, punch, beat people up, right? This lifetime you're going to face some trauma. One of those times you punch somebody and you broke their jaw. You're likely to have some problem with your jaw this time around, right? You probably either get an accident and jaw gets injured, or somebody punches you. You get injured, but through karmic remedies, let's say you decide to pray to some of the more strong deities that are sort of muscular and aggressive. So, so Mars or Martian deities. In the Vedic
• 16:18
  tradition, we would propitiate those Martian deities make donations to those kind of temples, or even let's say look at Martian causes such as you know Mars is a soldier, so you start donating to a wounded warriors organization, or you start volunteering with soldiers.
• 16:35
  What'll happen is instead of your job being damaged, you might end up with a slight toothache for a few days, and it goes away, or you end up with a little bit of a you know bang your bang into a door, and it injures you a little bit, but it doesn't actually destroy your jaw. So that's the thing we start to do with karma: is we find ways to balance that. And so this is where the astrologer can be very creative and say, okay, what is the karma here? What is the planet delivering it? And how do we sort of propitiate or you know calm the energy of that planet through a remedy that's connected
• 17:06
  to that planet's energy, right? So don't think as karma as blame. Like we should never say somebody deserved their suffering, right? It's just an accounting sheet. They did something not good. They have to pay that back. So for instance, let's say you in a relationship in the past never ever listened to your partner. You just tuned out all the time. Well, this time around, you may get a partner that talks a lot, and you don't listen to them. Means you haven't solved the karma. You haven't learned to listen. So, before getting out of that relationship, you first have to figure out how do you
• 17:44
  listen better, and once you get good at listening, maybe that karma of a very talkative person goes away in your life. They start talking less, or you meet partners that talk less, or I mean, usually once you've solved that karmic imbalance, you're not treated with that lesson anymore. So think of this lifetime as a lesson plan, a grand lesson plan of many things that you have to learn. And as long as you're not learning them, you keep being faced with the same challenges, the same difficulties, the same challenges, the same problems, the same patterns. Once you figure it out and you've
• 18:17
  learned the lesson, then the pattern goes away. You don't have to face it anymore, right? Now, what gets difficult is that some people say, "Wow, I I suffered this severe, severe trauma. How can that be karmic? That's just not fair. Why did a good person like me suffer like that? Or why did that great person I know suffer so badly? And you know, I think it is really beyond our human understanding to understand the sum total of how karma works. It is it is such a complex subject, but in a more trivial sense, like small trauma with a little t, not trauma with a big t. Usually, what happens is we
• 18:59
  face some kind of trauma with a little t, and we're like, "Why did this happen to me? I'm so upset about this. I hate that this is happening. Why is this happening? But at some point, when we get far enough from that trauma, we start to metabolize that experience, and by metabolize, kind of like food, we experience a toxic event. It is all toxic, and we can't even talk about it. It is so painful and so difficult. You cannot talk or share about it. That is, you know, the deepest trauma that happens. Right? People shut down. They can't face it. But at some point, through maybe therapy work,
• 19:39
  different therapeutic tools, talking about somebody, journaling, maybe prayer, maybe doing meditation practices. Little by little, we start to understand that experience, and we start to realize that there's some nutrition in that experience, and there's a bunch of junk in that experience. And when we can pull out the nutrition, and. Use it to make us stronger and more resilient, and when we can flush away the toxic part of the experience, that is what I call you've metabolized it, right? So think of things that you faced in life that are difficult. At some point, you were able to extract the
• 20:15
  nutritive value. Say, "Wow, I had a really tough dad. He was always so hard on me. He made me feel so little. But you know what? I got out of it this really hard work ethic, and I'm willing to throw away all the stuff I thought negative about him. And I can just see him with compassion and love now, and realize that he helped me into the person I am today.
• 20:37
  At that point, by metabolizing that experience, by extracting the nutrition you have learned from that particular lesson plan, right? So in a way, your challenges in life are a clue into your karma. If you have a challenge, it is typically a clue to some wound in your heart and some karmic pattern that needs solving, which we're always working on, right? So, what I do with my clients oftentimes, I try to help them understand that. Hey, this, you know, I will look at a chart and say, hey, I noticed in 1993 in June you had some violent incident happen in your life. What is that? Because I can
• 21:18
  see Mars is active at that particular time in that person's birth chart, and say, "Oh my God, how do you know that? I never shared that with my therapist. That's something that has been deep inside me that I never was willing to talk about. But you just brought it up. How do you know this? And because I was able to identify the event and the timing, I've now gained some trust and credibility. And so they may share with me something they never shared with anybody else, and as they share it, they start to see how that event made them stronger, and they're able to flush away the toxicity part of
• 21:51
  it, extract the nutrition, and move forward. And I now know that when Mars shows up again in their life, it won't be the same difficult challenge because they've metabolized, they move beyond it, so in a way, karma is a way we understand. In fact, trauma is a way we understand karma. Karma is a way we, you know, transcend trauma. You could say, and you know, there's sometimes karma of individuals. There's karma within families. A lot of learned wisdom teachers, the Indian traditions say, if you want to understand your karma, go spend a week with your family, right? Go spend some
• 22:24
  time with your birth family, and you will see your karma right in front of your face. And if you get to a point where you have good, happy relationships with all members of your family, you've processed and moved beyond that karma, right? So, I this modern world of cutting off communication with somebody who's toxic in your family, you know, maybe you you set a good boundary and you set that you know distance from them. But did you metabolize the karma? Did you actually work through the issue first? And so that becomes very important. So even if you're not on talking terms with
• 22:52
  someone, finding a way to find compassion for them, finding way to forgive them, is ultimately the way that you process the karma for yourself. And what we understand in Vedic astrology is everything that's happening around you is a result of your karma. It is part of you. It is part of your your life. The other theory around karma is that sometimes when we do something, we have to experience it from the other point of view. So, as part of our cosmic soul lesson plan, if we're the person who is, you know, constantly doing something. We have to see from the other side. So, as an example, let's
• 23:28
  say I constantly yell at people all around me. Every time I said I yell at people, I will have to at some point learn what it's like to be yelled at, so that when I'm yelled at continuously, I learn. Oh, that's not good. I won't yell at people anymore, and then I won't be yelled at either. So that's an example that you you play the different roles. For instance, if you create you know something really negative in your family, right? You create this horrific situation in your family. You yourself will have to face it from a family member's point of view at some point, that's the way the thing
• 24:02
  looks. Now, all of this is, you know, can sometimes be a bit overwhelming, right? I hope I'm not offending anyone with this, you know, basic understanding of karmic theory.
• 24:14
  The core line here is karma has to be balanced somehow, and everything that happens in your life, like it or not, is a result of something you have done in the past, and so Vedic astrology asks us to take responsibility for our past choices and face with resilience and grace what we have to face because of those choices. Now, how do we reduce this? So Vedic astrology sees spiritual practice as one of the most powerful ways to shift karma. If you pray to God, if you follow a teacher, spiritual guide, if you do meditation practices, chanting, singing, you start to clean out and refine. Some of
• 25:00
  that karma, but that doesn't mean that just because you're meditating, all of a sudden life gets easy. Yes, if you meditate, people have found that life gets easier. You get more resilience, right? But what happens when we meditate? So when we go into a meditation state, first of all, we have to quiet our body. We have to sit still. We have to start focusing on some object of meditation, and as we focus on that object of meditation, we start to transcend the mind. We have a physical body, we have a mental body, emotional body. We start to transcend that body and mind in meditation, and we
• 25:38
  enter a realm of our being known as the karana shariir in Sanskrit, the causal level of your being, and when you transcend the mental body and you end up in this causal body, which is kind of where your soul resides, you enter a part of your being that is beyond where karma is stored. In meditation, you enter a part of your being where karma is stored, and when you enter that causal realm, you have no idea you're there. This is called sometimes in Sanskrit. People say, "Look, I'm. I don't know where I was. It's turiya state. So I'm. I'm sitting in my chair. I'm aware of the chair. I'm aware
• 26:15
  of my body. I'm concentrating on, let's say, my breath. I'm noticing my breath. My mind wanders some random thought, another random thought. Did I say the right thing today in my podcast? Then I come back to my breath. Then at some point I transcend, and at the moment that I'm in that beyond phase of meditation, where I'm not aware of my body, I'm not aware of where I'm sitting, I'm not aware of my breath, I've transcended. In that moment, I'm actually in a realm where karma is getting scrubbed, right? So meditation in a proper formal meditation, if you learn from a proper teacher, you will
• 26:51
  keep entering this area that is in the beyond. Let's call it for now. And I like to think about it as hardware, software, and the programmer, so you know I use a program on my computer. It's a software. I have a like right now. I have a document up with some notes so that I make sure I'm saying the right things. That software is a is a word processing software that's residing on my Mac computer, which is the hardware. So the computer is like the body. The software is like the mind. It's got some kind of conditioning, patterning, and programming, which is like my word processing
• 27:24
  document, word processing software. When I transcend, it's like I became the programmer. When I'm stuck in the mind, I can only use the word processing software the way it was programmed. The moment I transcend hardware and software, I enter the realm of the programmer. I can change that software to be whatever I want. And so, when we enter the causal realm, when we enter the karana Sharia in yoga tradition, when we do meditation, we enter that that area, that realm. Then we reach a place where we're literally able to reprogram ourselves, reprogram our mind and our karma, which is why people
• 28:00
  that meditate regularly find so many changes in their emotional state, right? Because they're entering the realm of the programmer, and as an astrologer, we see that we are you're cleansing karma. So one of the best remedies in vague astrology is to actually meditate every day. Now, does that mean that when you start a spiritual practice, life gets easier? Sometimes people notice, and and you know I'm a yoga teacher. I teach yoga. I wrote my first book on yoga, the business casual yogi.
• 28:28
  And as you might remember, if you've read the book, there's these eight different limbs of yoga. There's yama, niyama, asana, pranayam, pratyahara, dharna, dhyana, samadhi. The first are personal guidelines. Second is societal guidelines. The third is bodily posture, the thing you do on the mat. The fourth is breathing techniques. Then the next four actually steps of meditation: withdrawing from the senses, getting quiet, focusing on one pointed attention on something, entering a state of meditation, and then the eighth limb is transcending. Samadhi, it's called. So, out of the eight
• 29:07
  limbs of yoga, the eight things of the yoga system. Obviously, everybody just does the one on the mat in Western culture. But if you do all eight limbs, you'll find that four of the limbs are preparatory steps, and four of the limbs are actually meditative steps. And on the last limb, you transcend. So, yoga itself is actually a karmic modification system. If you practice yoga in a serious way, the yoga was intended to be practiced by the ancient Indian rishis, the ancient yogis of India, what they taught, you will improve your karma. But what I find surprisingly, and you may know this,
• 29:39
  when you start doing yoga, life actually gets a little harder. What's going on? So what happens is when we begin a serious spiritual practice, we start to accelerate the lesson plan. We actually accelerate the curriculum. It's almost like you burn through things a little bit quicker than than normal, right? And so you go through and refine and refine. Your soul starts to evolve, but the evolution process is like more studies. So think about you know somebody who's in second grade, somebody who's in middle school, somebody's in high school, and somebody who's doing a PhD program.
• 30:13
  Right, the second grader faces a lot easier tests. The PhD faces a lot more, a lot more difficult tests. Right, and they have to defend their thesis. So it's the more advanced your soul moves, the more capacity you have to learn those more refined lessons. We cannot expect a high schooler to study at the level of a PhD, but the moment you enroll in school and you move through the system, each grade level, each year gets harder and harder, just like spiritual practice. So I find that people who are very advanced souls actually face a lot more complex karmic refinement. And I remember
• 30:49
  reading how one very wise spiritual teacher once said that I need more difficulty and challenge in my life so that I can refine my soul better, right? This is why spiritual practitioners of all traditions take on penance. You know, it's like why would you torture yourself? Well, through the pain, through the difficulty, through the challenge, you are actually you know accelerating that karmic refinement. And for you know beings who are on a spiritual journey who want to reach enlightenment, the hardships are ways that they purify karma in order to get to enlightenment quicker. So
• 31:28
  the astrology chart basically reflects all these karmic. What is the karmic terrain? What are the karmic tendencies here? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? And sometimes you get good karma come your way. Sometimes you get difficult karma. Right? You did a good deed in a past life. Good deeds come your way. You did bad deeds, bad difficulties come your way. So, but this lifetime you have free will and you have agency to make choices. You can do more good deeds. So, for instance, if I see somebody with some problems with Venus, and Venus is a planet of relationships
• 31:57
  and money. So, if somebody's having relationship problems, money problems, and I'll say, "Well, you need to fix Venus. So one thing that Venus also rules is art. So I'll tell people, if you donate to the arts, you will honor Venus's energy. Venus will sort of accept that rebalancing that you're giving to the arts and improve your overall wealth karma or relationship karma. And you'll notice people who are very wealthy-they donate to the arts. They're called patrons of the arts. Somewhere in their consciousness, they understand that if they do good for the world through art, some good will come
• 32:33
  to them. And true enough, as as seen in Vedic astrology, if you donate to the arts, if you donate to the music causes, like you know, we we were donating to the L.A.
• 32:42
  Opera, right? That's a Venetian kind of a activity. In return, our Venus should improve in our chart. That should help me with relationship karma, wealth karma, financial good financial karma, those kind of things. So remedies in Vedic astrology are not necessarily magic. It's not some magical thing that we're doing. It's some conscious way that we're rebalancing the energies that are out of balance. So either the chart shows the imbalance, or a lot of times you know what your imbalance is. You say, "Hey, I'm having, you know, every time Mercury goes retrograde, my computer is crashing.
• 33:17
  Well, you know, you got some Mercury problems, right? And Mercury is a planet that loves speaking and communication, so even though it seems unrelated, by doing more speaking and communication, it seems unrelated. But energetically, you're helping Mercury, which then it delivers less technology glitches to you along the way. So that's the way we look at it. Now, sometimes we are born into difficult karma, right? So you have your individual karma based on your circumstances. Then you're born into a family, and the family has its own collective karma that it goes through. Sometimes
• 33:52
  you're born in a family with full generational trauma, and so part of your karma is to help solve that generational karma. Sometimes you're born into a lineage, and your ancestors, and I mentioned this in the last short drop of light about ancestral karma. There's some ancestor that had some serious problems, and you're now responsible for that. And you have to do something, right? I had a grandfather who had an extremely, extremely imbalanced temper. He got so angry he almost beat somebody to death, lost his job, and by losing his job, lost the family land and family holdings, and now
• 34:25
  I'm born in that lineage, and I have a temper problem. And if I don't fix it, then I continue that pattern and lineage. But if I solve that karma in my living being, I've solved it for that grandfather two generations ago, and I've solved it for the lineage of the family. So sometimes we carry some things in our in our own birth chart in our own being is actually coming from nothing we did but something an ancestor might have done, and we carry that responsibility to do work on behalf of our ancestry. Right? I mentioned in that drop of light, you know, Grandma couldn't express
• 34:55
  herself. You now have to express yourself in order to solve that particular karmic imbalance. So this is not necessarily a courtroom. This is not a judgment thing. Like I said, it's accounting, but it's also a curriculum. It's like the lessons of life. What are you here to learn in this lifetime? And then we are also born into certain cultures, certain societies to deal with karma. Right? We might be born into a very repressed society. If we were somebody who repressed people, perhaps we have to face repression ourselves and born into a repressed family. Sometimes we're born in a time of
• 35:30
  history. Right, all of us in the U.S. right now are going through a very particular collective karma as a nation, and that is something we all have to face together. And it's part of our collective karma, so we have individual karma, family karma, societal karma, cultural karma, as well as you know overall big picture historical patterns and karmas that we're born into. Right, people that were born into World War One or World War Two-that's a very specific karma they were born into. All the people who perpetuated evil in the world in in different wars-what happens to them? Where do they get
• 36:01
  born? We start to wonder, right? So I want you to really think a lot more critically. I think that's the key thing that an astrologer wants wants to do, and astrologer wants their clients to do, is to really think critically. What are the consequences of my action if I decide to buy a product and not leave a review, what kind of karma am I perpetuating? If I go to a restaurant that I really enjoy the meal and I don't leave some kind of review for them, what kind of karma am I perpetuating? What imbalances there? Am I freeloading off the system? If I, you know, yell at someone when I could have
• 36:40
  just explained calmly to them what was going on.
• 36:42
  If I shamed somebody or made them feel bad, if I swore at somebody, what kind of karma am I creating? My astrology teacher once told me, he said, "Vish, every time you swear, that's another lifetime you have to come back to solve. And I thought, "Oh my goodness! All the times I swore in my life, that's a lot of extra pain, right? So, why do they? You know, the Christian traditionalists say, "Don't don't swear, right? Don't don't use bad words. I'll wash your mouth out with sopo. There's a karmic reason there. This idea of an eye for an eye, right? It's not a not a great thing, but there
• 37:13
  is some that is almost an explanation of karma, right? Anything you do, you harm someone. The harm will come to you eventually. So, in our life, we have to think: What can we do to reduce the overall karmic burden? What can we do to reduce the consequences of our actions? What can we do? So when we think about how we're contributing to keeping our planet healthy, how we're contributing to you know taking care of animals, maybe I'll do an episode on how taking care of animals helps your karma. Dogs, cats, pets-all those things. You know, how are we treating our family members? How are we
• 37:47
  treating our friends? How are we treating our employees and our work colleagues? Are we being kind and compassionate? Are we being aggressive and nasty? They all have a consequence. So, I, since studying astrology, I've really gone through life in a much more conscientious way to think, you know, what karma am I perpetuating? If I, if a person comes to me for a reading, and I make them have fear, and I say, "Oh my gosh, this is going to happen unless you do this. What karma have I created for myself by instilling fear in that person, right? And that's why it's very dangerous for
• 38:19
  astrologers to to be fear mongers. If you if you give people hope and you give them agency and you give them a chance to fix their challenges in their chart, then you're developing much better karma. It's funny because there's always been a debate of how much to charge for an astrology reading. If it's a spiritual service, shouldn't it be free? I hear this all the time. You know, why does this charge what he does for a reading, it should be free. It's a spiritual thing, but you know, think about the karmic consequence. If I undercharge for my services, then I just got a good credit on my
• 38:52
  balance sheet, and you just got a bad credit because you took something and you didn't adequately compensate for it. Do I want to create this situation where all of my customers, all of my clients are in a debit, collecting all these credits, there's a karmic consequence on both ends for that, right? So, if you are a solo practitioner, if you're a business owner, you have to charge a fair price. If you overcharge, there's a karmic consequence. But if you undercharge, there's also a karmic consequence because now that person is indebted to you, and you're unfairly, you know, holding all these
• 39:26
  credits, right? So part of what I do, even in my pricing strategy, say, look, for all the studies I've done, for the uniqueness of my skills, for what I'm able to do for somebody in their life, for the financial shift that they have in their lives, what is a fair price to charge, where they're paying adequately for the service, so they don't owe me anything, and I don't owe them anything after the session is over. So that's part of you know that kind of thinking that goes into pricing strategy as a Vedic astrology oriented person. So I want you to think to yourself, what are. You here to
• 40:00
  learn in this lifetime? What are some patterns that seem to be occurring over and over? And what is it that you need to shift in your life to change that pattern? What area of life do you not have good flow in? What might be contributing to that? And what can you do about it? What what good can you do in the world to help unblock that particular area of blockage in your life, that's the way to think about it.
• 40:25
  So now that I've given you some background on karma, next episode I will start to get more detailed into what is Vedic astrology. Because now that you understand karma, you have the right foundation and platform to understand how the planets of Vedic astrology work and how they show up in the birth chart. So I look forward to seeing you again. I am moving to a twice a month full length episodes and twice a month drops of light. So you'll get something new from me every week. So please keep tuned in. Please share this podcast with your friends. Let people learn about this. Please leave me a
• 41:06
  review to balance out the karma, and I look forward to talking to you again in a week's time.