A friend recently asked me how the stones or whatever remedies work? I partially answered this question in a previous blog post, but I wanted to give a more direct answer to this question.
I have been studying astrology for only a few years. I’ve always had a skeptical rational mind. Most of my life I rejected things like astrology. I was quite attached to the idea of free will and the thought that my life was entirely my own: either I’d make it or break it by my own will and my own effort.
But then of course I came to India and started studying the philosophy and the vedic culture. Through my yoga practice I began to recognize more and more how little control I actually had over the events in my life. I suppose to put in yogaly, the more I identified with the witness, the less I identified as the doer of my actions. But of course one has to wonder who (or what is the doer)? Who (or what) is the enjoyer of the actions if I am a mere witness?
Then I started looking into astrology. There’s no need to explain how I found it to be very accurate and very easy to learn if you have the sort of mind that appeals to hard logic (I finally discovered the use of those symbolic logic classes I took in college).
In astrology we are mostly looking at the kinds of energies represented by the planets and the houses and the signs and the Nakshatras and such. These are the same archetypical energies that Ayurveda and yoga and sankya and Tantra use to understand the world. The principles are all the same.
After all these years studying and practicing these disciplines I can attest that it’s a sound way of understanding the health of body, the workings of the mind, and the relationships between everything (the elements, mind body and spirit, past present and future, people between each other, man and nature…… ect ect).
The stones, because of the purity of their elements, presumably represent the sattwic nature of the various planetary forces. We can use much more than stones to mitigate these forces. In many ways, the stones I recommend are meant to help purify the already satwik properties related to personality, mind and luck. Stones are subtle and simple. If we want to start working on improving negative indications in chart, then a person has to be willing to commit to more active remedies.
To use a rather extreme example, say a chart indicates that a person my do something wrong and go to prison for a few years (not that you have anything like this). By logic, one way to perhaps influence this out come might be to bring doughnuts to the police station every Tuesday. This would have a very strong effect on making you more law abiding. But of course, no one is going to do this and the police would likely think it so strange that they might indeed find some reason to put you in jail, so, we feed the fish every Tuesday and perhaps donate some time or money to something like a halfway house. As the shamans would say: “we have to appease that energy that wants to do us harm.”
These sorts of remedies all depend on the client and what they want from life, what they’re willing to do to get it, and of course, what resources they have at their disposal.
This link is to an article I wrote and presented to the university about the role of science in regards to preventative treatment:
And here’s a slightly different perspective on how astrology (and such things) work: