EWS #40: On Astrology, on what astrology is not (2)
Aug 24, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome everyone to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste. Before we begin, I'd like to say a few words of thanks to all of you who have contacted me, written to me, and have praised this series. You may continue to write to me whenever you feel you have a question to be answered, and we will review them and address them. Narada, N-A-R-A-D-A 12 at gmail.com. Today we are continuing with Sraddhalu on Astrology.
Sraddhalu (0:01:41):
In our previous discussion on Astrology, we had made a kind of a broad survey of the whole symbolism on which astrology is based. And we saw the framework of the horoscope and the role of the planets, the zodiac, the houses and how they represent the relationship between the individual consciousness on one side, the universe representing God or the absolute on the other side, and then the play of nature represented by the nine planets and the complexity, we got a glimpse of the complexity involved in the whole representation. I wanted to, rather than going in depth on the nature of astrology, what will be more useful will be to look at some examples of what astrology is not and then maybe in the next session we'll look at how it can be actually applied in what way it will be useful or what is its utility in the context of the yoga particularly. So as examples of what astrology is not, because there's a lot of misunderstanding, the first idea people have is because astrology is mathematical, the whole of your fate is as if frozen in a mathematical timeline because astrology gives you these cycles of planets beginning on this date to that date such and such planet rules and then within that sub-cycles, within that sub-sub-cycles and things will happen when this date changes and so on. So typically a person goes to an astrologer and ask questions like when will this problem be solved and the astrologer gives a date or says after this is your good period now is your bad period and so the idea people have is somehow if they wait long enough for that date then suddenly things will become okay and the problem will be solved. Implied is the idea that your fate is fixed and even this problem was the occurrence of a fate predictable from the chart and its resolution is predictable and in fact this is a complete erroneous understanding even from an astrological point of view
Narad (0:04:12):
So the predestiny, is false?
Sraddhalu (0:04:16):
Absolutely, in fact the astrologer himself is only fulfilling the role that you have assigned to him, as let's say a counselor who is going to give you based on his understanding of what's going to happen next. So the game is like this. In astrology first of all the moment you approach him, his solution will be astrological. If the same fellow went to a financial analyst, his solution would be stock market is down wait for six months, it might rise. So he will give you a financial resolution. Somebody who is a medical person will say, looks like your mental faculties are low, here take some pills, it will boost your mental faculties. So the fact that you approached an astrologer means that you are going to get a response which will be in his world view. The next problem with astrologer is he is going to be assessing in a way that fulfills his self-importance and because it's also his business very often, ensuring that you come back to him. If he does something which does not make you come back then he has lost a client potentially, isn't it? So the game goes like this. I'm going to play out a typical scenario of astrologer. Let's say you go to an astrologer. Already on your face he can see that you're in distress, you wouldn't be approaching him otherwise. If you knew the solution to your problems you'd have solved it. You're approaching him because it's like a last resort, you don't know what to do and so he looks at you, oh very difficult period, he looks at the chart, okay, so very difficult period in your life and obviously the fellow is very impressed, the astrologer made out that I am going through a bad patch. But all you needed was the fact that you have come to an astrologer. Then he said, oh right now you have Dasha is the term used in Sanskrit, the phase of a particular planet. Or you have Rahu Dasha or Saturn's Dasha. Now Saturn, Rahu, typically these are the ones which are the malefic or in common language they are understood as malefic planets. So you have the phase of Saturn or you have the phase of Rahu, you are in trouble. So the guy says when will it end? Further, the skilled astrologer, well they are all, they pick up this psychological skill of assessing whether what they are saying is fitting your expectation. So typically the problem will be three types and often everybody has all three problems and it's only a question of which is more important. Let's say financial which is the most common, health and romance. What else is there for which you'd go to an astrologer? These are the three things which throw at you uncertainties. Everything else you know what to do so they play on this money problem, health problem, marital problem or romantic problems and then they look at typically the planets associated with these things what gives you money or the houses which give money or health and so on and they'll feed you things which for you are interesting the problem is everything they tell you has to do with your future and so you have no way of validating whether what they're saying is true whether it's genuine or whether it's just some rule of thumb is applied you could go to a stock market analyst and there are the good ones and the bad ones you can never know the difference because each will give you his justification.
[Narad] Maybe one day we have to talk about palm readers also.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, that's the whole interesting field and maybe after this series on astrology. Mother was a palmist, I mean she knew palmistry very well by the way.
So here's the problem, you have no way of validating until the period passes. So he says well in six months you'll be fine. So you wait for six months and at the end of six months if things have got better you say I see that fellow said it and your belief in the astrologer and astrology grows. If it doesn't happen either you don't go back to that one you go to someone else until it happens and then you say oh this guy is the better astrologer and so often it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's another trick that is often played not always intentionally some of them are very sincere but they say well based on this numerology or chart the answer to your question is three. When will I get my money? Well three. Three days, three months or three years. Now you see what happens three days the fellow waits, it doesn't happen, okay now it must be three months, you wait if it doesn't happen three years, well eventually something has to happen and that's the game that's played.
Narad (0:09:14)
But you use the word trick.
Sraddhalu (0:09:16)
Yes, because unfortunately and many astrologers know that they are playing a game. They have the knowledge and I have seen astrologers, good ones and bad ones and really gone in depth with them to see how far it actually works and the bad ones are just doing rule of thumb. They have passed an exam which gives them a certificate that just knows they have the rules of thumb and that's it that's not enough to do an analysis. In a chart typically consider nine planets influencing whatever question you have raised. You have nine different influences pulling or pushing and modifying. How do you assess? It needs a very high level of intelligence or a deep intuition and if the astrologer is successful in most cases it is intuition and the rule of thumb is only an indicator. So I'll give you an example now I had a friend who was in business and in the real estate and that's one of the most uncertain, tricky, cyclic businesses and he was himself an astrologer because that's how he maintained his sense of fixity and then he would consult astrologers and then one day he tells me that he's passed away now, one day he tells me I've found the perfect astrologer, this man is so good he can tell you things down to the hour and I said okay, with having studied astrology deep enough I knew it doesn't work like that, of course you can describe influences to the hour but that's not how things happen. They are just influences. So you can describe for example looking at your website the weather forecast for the next few days but the forecast changes from now you watch it six hours later the forecast has changed because the data is changing all the time. Well so I go, when I was next in Delhi, he brings this friend of his and I asked him what do you do and he explained to me. He took a chart, out of the chart derived a second chart, into that chart went into further complexities and then compared that with the original chart and at some point it was such a quagmire, in Hindi we will say jalebi, such a mix of so many different things that he himself was lost and it was a way by which he got his mind so confused that the intuition would kick in and catch something. So and then he would say something and if you asked him why, he would hesitate, he would think and then look for the justification and feed it to you. So well I saw that and then we were in the car driving and my friend turned to the astrologer and said, okay he wanted to show off the astrologer's skill, he said to astrologer okay look at him and tell me what is his ascending sign. Now the ascending sign is the sign which is on the east at the moment when you're born that sign of the zodiac has a strong influence on your overall physical appearance. So there are only two signs for example which are associated with a tall build so looking at me any astrologer worth his name would say it's either this or that, it's so basic and the moment my friend asked him the question I said, okay let me test whether this guy is really using astrology. I thought it was more intuition or mind reading so in my mind I pictured six and dangled it in front of his head and so if he is a genuine astrologer it's there as a suggestion, if he is intuitive mind reading he'll catch the suggestion and catch it as his own. If it is a real astrologer, he'll say this doesn't make sense and he'll cut through to what's real, so I'm dangling the six and then he says six and the sixth sign is not for a tall person. So my friend was so shocked. He said how can you make such a basic mistake? Okay try again. Now look, if I ask you a second time after having made a mistake, at least you would think the second time, okay. So this guy again stops, gets into his state of confusion for the intuition to kick in and I again dangled 6. I didn't change the number and again he says 6. Now you can see the level of intelligence was so poor that he was not aware even he has made a mistake once and he is repeating the same mistake. He is not even conscious. You can see what a low grade of mental development it is. It's not intuitive mind. No, it's more like an instinctive, a mix of intuition with some skill of psychology. And so that was enough. Then my friend was so disappointed. He said, I don't know what has gone wrong with you. And then I had to tell him, please don't worry. It was my fault. I held the idea of six and he caught it.
But then I explained to him that this man is not really doing astrology, he is picking things. So when he meets a client, he is picking things, things from the client's thought, emotion, aura, his expectations, his fears, that is got by this fellow and feeds it back to you. And the chart is for him only a reference, a starting point which gives suggestions or or as in his case, it's such a complexity that it completely numbs his thinking mind and allows something deeper to kick in. Now a modicum of intuition is there in all of us, but astrologers, particularly this type who are more mind readers, have it more fine-tuned to the person before them. And so like I said, they look at you, they know you're in distress and then they are trying to sense and they catch things, they don't necessarily know how they do it and that was the only value he had and of course my friend very quickly lost interest in that. So this is an example, I want to give a few more examples like this of how people are fooled by what seems to be astrology but is not. Another type of astrology, a variation of this which is also mind reading skill is where they tell you your past in great detail with great accuracy which is so surprising that you begin to say wow if this span can be so accurate in my past what he says for the future must be true also so that's the skill there so this comes into two categories they are called in India we have texts called Nadi Grantha. So, Nadi is what will you word you will use? Line of or a flow of energy but the text itself is often said to be many hundreds or thousands of years old in which supposedly all possible horoscopes are described or in variation they will say your horoscope will be described written by some Rishi many thousand years ago and when you go to that guy he pulls out your horoscope and tells you everything about you including your name where you live, your relationships and things like that. But not past lives. Sometimes they tell you past lives. It is could be. But that's the catch. How do you verify it? They can make up anything and you'll never know. So the commonest game in this and this is a game really I'm sorry to say it's a massive deception.
But there are two kinds of these Nadi Granthas. They are called the dead ones and the live ones and I'll explain the difference. So the dead one is one where the text is frozen. It was written many thousand or hundred years ago. The guy reads out but he needs to first check is this yours. So when you go to him, he will say look I have got thousands of these, which one is yours? So I'm going to go through an index and he pulls out this bundle and he says I'll ask you a few questions to check whether we have your chart and he'll start by asking some questions like you were born in a hospital, your name has six letters, of course the problem is you're talking to a guy who is writing in Sanskrit or Hindi or Tamil and letters there will be syllables. So in English you have to translate from the English script. So he will say but will tell me what is your name? So you tell the name and then he says, okay, so many letters. So that's the wrong one and he goes to the next sheet and he keeps flipping. The moment you say no he flips the sheet the moment you say yes he asks the next question and through a yes-no process he is zooming in on specifics about you. You have two children, you have one child okay before that they'll ask you're married or not married etc. Then it gets more complex because today people are often divorced and they're divorced a second time and so these guys are not used to that so they often mess up there on those details. Anyway, so having gone through for about 10 minutes of asking questions like this, he has got a pretty clear picture of you including your name, even your parents name or which town or city you are from. The rest they are filling in from the chart which you have given them already and from there you can get a pretty good sense of your interests, likes, dislikes. Now meanwhile, there is another third guy who is sitting with you, who supposedly has also come for the same reading. And before you get your chance to read, while you are in the waiting room, this guy is chatting with you and he digs out information from you, feeds it back to them. So it's a big scam. I have been to a place in Tamil Nadu, it is called Vaitheeswaran Koil, I am going to take names. It's a temple where they claim to have these palm leaves, anyone can go there, they will actually pick out a leaf that says Narada and give you a reading of you were born in the United States and etc. etc. Catch is this. All this material they have dug out from you, they are feeding back to you and then they ask you questions like your Guru's name is beginning with Ss, Sha, Ka, Pa. You say yes or no.
Sraddhalu (0:19:49):
Now they will zoom in to the next. Your Guru's name is Sa or Sha and you say no, they go to the Ka or Pa. So they have got a list of like five or six common gurus. So I happened to be there with somebody who had come from the United States who wanted a reading. So I tagged along to see what happens and of course his guru Sri Aurobindo. So that guy doesn't know Sri Aurobindo. He's never heard of him. So he says, Sa, Sha and the guy and he gets an answer, yes. So finally he says, okay we have your sheet. He goes inside, brings a palm leaf bundle. Now meanwhile all this is supposedly written in Tamil. I can read Tamil. So I am looking over his shoulder and looking at the text to figure out what is he reading. He was not reading what was written there. And most of what was written was junk. The palm leaves were fresh, they were new. And so what they had done was they had created these bundles of palm leaves with stuff scrawled on it and it was a big drama to flip sheets until they claimed to have got your thing and then he gets this bundle which is supposedly your reading all brand new leaves, maybe a decade or two old. And now he starts reading, except he is not reading because, I am watching what he is reading and he feeds back to you all the stuff he has asked you questions and finally he says, and your Guru's name is Sai Baba. So everything was accurate and the Guru's name was totally wrong and my friend was so disappointed and the guy was shocked that, who is your Guru? So it's a scam, it's a huge scam. It plays on some elements of astrology with which you can guess a person's overall interest in.
[Narad] But they must be so astute at reading people.
[Sraddhalu] Absolutely, that's their skill. And they have gamed you from the beginning, from the point of entry.
[Audience]There is a serial called Mentalist, where this guy is so observant, that by observation he can get, I mean what is the person involved in to.
[Sraddhalu] It's a skill of psychology of person reading. Sometimes they refer to it as face reading, but still that's not it. There is more to it, I'll come to that. So this is one kind which is called the dead Nadi. Some of these are actually genuine books. I have seen printed books of Bhrigu Samhita, which is another famous one. So the dead version of Bhrigu Samhita is a full-fledged book, which has all typical charts. So let's say a chart where the sun is in this house, then the chart where the Sun is in the next house and so on with all possible combinations, you can imagine how big the whole text must be. You can't have detailed readings for all, so you have broad readings. So the fact that for example, you are likely to live in a place which is close to or has the character of the sign which is in that house which represents your residence. Okay, so if the sign is a watery sign you're likely to be living near water. If it's a earth sign you're likely to be living in a soil field. Or if it's a air sign you're probably near a mountain or on a mountain. So the things like that you can pick out from the chart and feed that back. So you live in a place which is close to water. You will probably say yes. Isn't it? Yes. How does one know that? Because the sign is watery. But that's the interesting part. There are correspondences. If you had to choose a house, would you be happier being in a place which is close to water or in a place where there is no water? You personally? Because it is water.
Sraddhalu (0:23:44):
Why? Something in your nature is drawn to water. Where is that coming from? And that is seen in the chart. In the imprint of the influences at the time of birth, these are tendencies in your nature, which have been, so to say, stamped. You could change it but as long as you're following your inborn inherited nature you will tend towards these types of things. So Sri Aurobindo explains that the chart is much more accurate in describing your character rather than events. As a result of your character certain types of events are likely to happen and the timings or the dashas of the planetary influential phases often indicate when certain aspects are amplified or dulled. And with that one can get a broad, rough sense of tendencies in your life. So they are playing on that if they are good astrologers, but otherwise they are pure scamsters. So now we come to the second kind of the Nadi which is the living Nadi (jiva nadi). This is more interesting because here you actually have the text appear. It's not pre-written. The text appears in response to your presence. So I'll give you an example of that. I went to a place in Orissa. A friend of mine had told me this. One, very famous one, Achyutananda Malika is the name. Achyutananda was a very famous tantric some 500 years ago, very powerful, extraordinary, he's like a household name in Orissa. He did extraordinary miracles and even the way he died was amazing. He had literally, they say, discovered the secret of immortality and youth and healing any illness and when he found that secret his son said, "I'm sorry I cannot allow you to share this with the world you will be messing around with God's scheme of things which needs illness and death to keep the cycle of life going so I have to kill you because that's how I'm going to protect the world". So the father says, "yes, you are my son you have a right to kill me and only one condition, first let me call my assistant". And his assistant happens to be a being of the subtle world Yakshini, female being, Yakshini, Yaksha and Yakshini are low-level vital beings, not very crude but reasonably they can be helpful different natural bodies like water bodies and things like that. So he has a Yakshini as assistant, he summons his Yakshini and says okay now you he gives instructions and tells his son now you can chop off my head. So his son chops off his head, the Yakshini picks the head puts it back and he's back to life and he says, "now that you have killed me, your role is finished and my role in the world is finished, so I'm leaving" and he says "Yakshini, let's go" and poof he vanishes. Well, that's the story officially. So there's a text apparently written by him or a set of metal leaves which are created by him. It's called Achyutananda Malika which is in the hand of a priest of a temple. So a friend of mine who was in Orissa said to me this is fantastic you must come and see it. I said 'okay, why not?', I had a day free, 'let's go'. So I go with my camera and recorder, I want to record this and the guy says, 'well you've come on a Wednesday, sorry Wednesday I don't do readings, that is Achyutanand's day, but I'll answer your questions'. So I asked him how he got it. Fascinating story! I don't know if you would like to hear that. Okay, so he says he started with saying I was a priest in this temple and he's still a priest there and he says, ‘like all priests I didn't believe in God’.
<Narad laughs>
Sraddhalu (0:27:45):
Interesting..And he is doing his ritual worships daily and then he says one day I thought I would like to have darshan of the Devi, the Goddess and so I started doing certain practices. I asked him what did you do? He said, oh meditation, pranayama, something or other. And then he goes on with his story and asks him, well did you get your darshan? He says, yes of course I had my darshan. I was giving this as an example of a priest who as easily said, I didn't believe in God, as saying, 'yes, I had darshan of the Devi', and for him it was like, okay, it's the most normal thing. And she appeared to him in dream one day, and showed him the image of a place and said you must go there and as if visually he was shown instructions of how to get this bundle so he thought about it and said, 'well, why should I do this, it's just a dream', and he ignored it and the dream came two or three times. So finally, he goes looking for that place and it was a location near Konark where there was an ashram called Kalki ashram and he was shown that he must enter a well. So he goes looking for the well and the head of that ashram comes and recognizes him and says, 'oh yes, you are the person, I am supposed to take you there'. So interesting, I went to that place to verify and that head who had passed away, someone else from the ashram was there, who claimed he had seen the whole event. So there is a lot of objective verification for this. This man was put on a special program of diet and fasting to prepare him for what was to happen and he was extremely weak from his fasting, he was not allowed to eat for so many days and then the head of that ashram holds him by the hand and takes him into this well and there are steps, you go around, you are in the water, so he takes him into the water and then he pushes him into the water. And for people who are watching outside, they said the fellow vanished for a long time. This man says, 'when I was pushed into the water, I found myself pulled into a tunnel. It was dark, so I kept on walking. And there were roots of trees poking, because it was all sandy on the side'. And then he said, 'I came to a room, and it was full of these bundles of palm leaves. And there was this one which had been shown to me in the dream. So I picked it up and I came out'. So I said, okay, hang on. You went in all the way, you picked up the bundle and how did you get back? He said, 'no, I don't know. I just picked up the bundle and I found myself thrown out of the water'. So something very odd in the description. And the people there confirmed that they saw this man gone for a long time and then he would jump out of the water with this bundle in his hand. And so the head of the ashram said, well that's all I had to do with you, you can go now. This guy comes home with his bundle, he doesn't know what to do with it, so he leaves it lying in his temple for a long time. Then he said a sadhu came from Maharashtra, who said to him, 'you have a bundle lying, let me show you how to use it', and then he teaches him how to use it.
So this was the story, quite fascinating and like I said, I validated certain elements of it, I took photos of those places, I took the photo of the bundle and then I said to him, 'well how does it work'? He said, 'okay, let me show you'. So just a moment back he said, 'I'm not doing a reading' but now he's going to show me how it works, I said great, he pulls out the two bundles. One is copper plates, the other is what looks like tin plates. And he shows me the copper ones, he says it can show any text from a dozen languages and the tin one he uses for European languages. So for my purpose he brought the tin one. He showed me metal plates, separated them and showed that they were all blank. He put them together, put it in a plate which was part of the device. Then he takes a piece of like a chalk and he holds it to his head and then he takes a little stone which is like a Shivling, puts it on his navel plugs it like a plug. Then he goes like that and flip, he opens the whole set of bundles and I can see text etched in it in English. Now when I was going there I knew the process was that you have to have three questions and then he answers the three questions. So I had put in my mind three questions. The third question was specifically when will India and Pakistan reunite? Now the first two, I don't remember but they had to do with something generic of that kind where I could validate the accuracy of this. The third one was specific to India and Pakistan reuniting. So he looks at this and then he starts doing a reading, except that he said because it's a Wednesday, 'I'm not going to give answers, I'm just going to tell you what your questions were'. So he takes out this sheet of metal etched in English and he starts reading and he doesn't know English supposedly, he of course follows a smattering but and then he starts reading with heavy Oriya accent, 'dancing in your mind is this question....', I couldn't follow half the words but 'dancing in your mind' and he's going on reading and I can only see two lines, so it's like he's reading one paragraph. Okay, so I had my tape recorder and camera. I didn't have a video camera in those days, but I took photos. And then I asked him, how does it work? So he came to the third question, India and Pakistan. So I said, how does it work? What happens? He said, you know, the question which is in your mind is picked up and then it is transferred and then it appears here. I said but you were reading out more than what was written there. He says 'yes, I am seeing more than what is written'. So there were three interesting miracles, if you can use that word. The first was the text appeared etched on metal as if freshly etched with a sharp tool. It was not like a scroll of pencil, it was etched into the metal.
[Narad] And it was previously blank and you photographed that.
[Sraddhalu] Yes. Well, so there is a catch there, which I'll come to later. But I'm assuming it was a valid blank and the text appears, but it's quite deeply etched. And the words India and Pakistan are so clear. I wanted to bring that. I forgot to bring it. You can see, you can read it. And I'm wondering, it's not a question anyone else would ask, isn't it? It's not a typical question someone asks, mostly people will ask questions about their money, the wedding of some etc. So how could those two words appear so clearly? So he is then he explained that you do this and that is how the thing goes in and so first miracle was text appearing etched, second miracle was that he was speaking in a language which he did not know and he is obviously not reading English, he is reading the words which are being shown to him. So that's the third miracle that whatever my question is, is being articulated in some script probably in Oriya which he can read but which has the language linguistic pronunciation of English. So I thought it was quite a fascinating experience but except I couldn't get a reading so I cannot validate its accuracy for the future.
Many years later, I had gone with a TV crew to record this and this time he again showed and we had the video cameras recording and when he opened the same palm leaves, the same metal leaves, I saw the leaf with exact same text 'India and Pakistan' was there. Now it's either a coincidence that because I am there the same text appears or it could be that it's a scam and there were already some leaves with etched writing but why would those two words appear, three words and there were a few more words around that. Very unlike, very strange and I pointed out to him and he was a little flustered when I pointed out that it's the same text which he had shown me many years ago. So, the category of Nadis which are called living Nadis is where text appears, not always etched in, but often to the person it is visually seen and they read out to you, but it may not be the actual physical etching. I have heard descriptions from others who have seen on palm leaves, the similar thing, text written in ink, black ink and as the person read out the text, the writing would vanish. So this is a category of reading where your question and something of the answer is being somehow written out or shown to the inner sight of the person who then basically feeds it back to you. Who does that? Not the person. In this case the credit was given to Achyutananda. But is it so? I don't know.
Sraddhalu (0:37:06):
So I come now to a third category which is a variant of this actually which will explain how this works. In the tantric occultist lines of, well text or literature they have descriptions of categories of beings, most of them are low-grade vital beings and then there are also higher beings, most of them are vital, typically though, only those ones would be interested in messing around with human affairs normally. So the lower ones particularly, there's a category called Karna Pishachini. Karna is ear, Pishachini is demoness. So it's a demoness which sits in your ear and whispers to you and they have a whole ritual to enter in relation or call those beings and make a pact with them and the result is that this female, well, demoness, now has a pact with the human being where in return for favors that she needs, she gives you this service, let's say, where she sits in your ear and whispers to you. And what she is doing, being in the vital plane, she senses what is in your mind and whispers into his ear and the guy speaks out as if he is read from your mind except he knows nothing he is not reading mind, he has no ability except this pact and the pact is quite terrible, in the sense that what she demands in return is so horrible, you will probably, if you knew it you would not want it probably.
So I met a person who was, who didn't have this but, well I met a few, I'll give you examples. So there was a guy in Bangalore who was an astrologer and again it was a friend who said, 'oh, you must meet him, this guy's father was wonderful, I had met his father and the father had demonstrated this to my friend. He said you write any three questions on a piece of paper, fold the paper and the father told you What was it the question and then based on your chart give you an answer'. So it was pure mind reading, but he had something of this Karna pishachini type power or being which gives him that access and the person we went to meet was the son. So I asked the son, 'don't you do this'? He says, 'no, my father never taught me'. Now think about it, if it was a worthwhile power, wouldn't he have given it to his son? Obviously, and this is the point which you will see in that literature, the being of a very low order demand things of very low order and sometimes they demand animal sacrifice, blood sacrifice, all kinds of other things. They interfere in your life, they demand you to do something, not do something. Do you think the being is happily giving a service of reading other people's minds and not bothering you the rest of the time? They'll continue to harass you 24 hours if it serves their pleasure or their perverse pleasure and so people don't realize what they get into when they make these pacts. They become slaves of the beings more than the other way and the result is such a miserable existence, some of them then say I want to get free of this but you can't, it's tough. So the father never taught his son, he had done with it and it ended with him. It's the reason why many of these low grade things are dropping out thankfully and they remain only with a few black magicians which are very filthy vibes generally because they are aligned with these beings and their energies fill them eventually.
[Narad] Maybe this is not exactly apropos but is there any evidence of serial killers being motivated by these beings?
[Sraddhalu] I believe there is, I don't know if there is evidence but Mother refers to this, she says that people who do these kinds of serial crimes generally are possessed by beings and when they are given capital punishment, you will find immediately after somebody else replicates the crime. I have seen this repeatedly in newspapers, news reports, and Mother say, it is because the being now jumps to someone else. So the right thing to do in such a case is not to give them capital punishment, keep them locked up, it keeps the being trapped in the body. But what happens in this case and I think I don't know if it is Sri Aurobindo or the Mother explains this that when they associate with these beings through the association the being actually begins to enter you, possess you and fills your vibes. Instead of you relating to the Divine you have aligned yourself with these very low level, low grade beings they give you some power in return for it, they own you. So I give you a few examples. So this fellow in Bangalore that I met, he didn't have it, but he was one of those rule of thumb astrologers. And he would not even bother to look at your chart. The moment you ask the question, he will say, well now the Sun has set, so the answer is no.
Sraddhalu (0:42:23):
That's not astrology, but that's what he was. But I give you another example of these types. This is a friend of mine in Delhi who was into this sort of thing for a long time. So many of these stories I had heard from him and he was going to all kinds of people and then one day he told me, 'I found the man, he can tell you everything, he gave me all accurate descriptions'. So I had explained to him, 'look, these are Karmapisachini types, they are mind reading', no use, but anyway he dragged me along, so I said okay. When I went I invoked Mother's presence as a protection. So I went to that fellow's room he had a big bowl where you throw in a hundred rupees the vibes were so filthy, but anyway I stayed in my protection and the guy barely looks at me and starts mumbling, 'you at the age of 18 you try to enter the Indian Army you failed in the Indian entrance exam, then you went try to enter the Air Force and then you went da da da da da'. Every single statement was wrong. Perfectly accurately wrong. And my friend knew enough of my background to say, 'I don't know what happened, he was hundred percent wrong, with me he was hundred percent right'. And I said, 'well because he could not see through, you see, because I had invoked Mother's protection and that's it'. It was like a screen and this is so effective to, you know it completely blocks their sight. But what is interesting is the being still fed him trash and the fellow doesn't know one thing from, the he doesn't know what is true what is false, he is just repeating what is being whispered in his ear and there is another example I want to give, a positive example. This was a friend of mine whose family came from Karnataka and their entire family in some very unusual circumstances suddenly shifted to Pondicherry and then he joined our school, his brother was in my class and they had no contact anymore with the relatives in Karnataka and these were you know 50 years ago, you didn't have easy communication. So someone there was concerned whether they were safe. So he went to one of these types. So in the old days every village had someone shaman type, you know, who had access to things of the subtle worlds. So he goes to this guy and the guy tries to see and says, 'it's very strange, normally I can see where a person is but here I can see as if they are enveloped in some kind of a white protective light and I am unable to penetrate through it'. Interesting, just the fact that they were in the ashram under Mother's protection, it was the time when Mother was physically present also and he couldn't see through but he said all he could say was, 'it is a heavenly region, it is like a heavenly space but I can't look into it, I am blocked'. So that's what happened in this case also. But, so this I have given as an example of people who are basically mind reading but they don't read, it's some spirit which does it. And it's the similar principle of a seance.
Sraddhalu (0:45:33):
In seance, which was very popular in about a hundred years ago in Europe, everybody was doing it and they were even trying to understand the science of it. So what would happen typically a dozen people would be sitting in the room, it would go dark and then a form would appear and it might be a grandmother who's passed away and now she appears with the full appearance and she talks to you and tells you things which only you knew, including things which you had forgotten by the way and then she vanishes and then some other form appears relating to someone else and talks to them and so on so the trick they play of course is, there's only one being, it takes the image from your mind and kind of puts it on its face. The rest of the body is the same. it's only the face changing and it reads what's in your mind and feeds it back to you and so everybody is impressed. So many spirits came, maybe a dozen spirits came and they were all busy talking about none of them have taken birth obviously. You can invoke Napoleon, he is there, he has not taken birth, he is still waiting to have communication through seances, which is odd if you think about it. And often the spirit itself, to be able to materialize needs material substance dense enough to materialize, which is taken from the medium. The medium then goes into often a cataleptic type trance or close to catalepsis. So Mother narrates this incident when she had, somebody who she knew had gone to a seance, he was a scientist and the being which was materialized was walking by and he suddenly reached out and pulled at the dress of the being and tore off the dress. The being shrank back and the dress was torn, the being vanished and instantly as he did this, the medium screamed and had a shock and when she was revived, it shocked her because it was her body ectoplasmic substance which was being used by the being. So the shock of the being being hurt, of the dress being torn was on her body. But this material which she tore off then stayed materialized. And Mother said, he showed it to her and it was like plastic substance and in the days before plastic was invented. It had similar kind of feel. But this is to show you, I am broadening the whole issue, there is a whole class of phenomenon which passes for astrology or materialization or communication with the dead, which is all done by beings which are basically taking stuff from your mind and feeding back to you and impressing you, by the fact that they are 100% accurate on your past and therefore to you it looks like they must be accurate for the future.
So I give you one last example of this, maybe another. So this happened in Pondicherry. There is a guy in Pondicherry who is doing stuff like that and I don't remember how it was but somehow I was made to go to him. And so I had a very specific issue. It was something that happened in relation to a person I knew, there was a medical negligence accident and I wanted to know if was this intended or was it an accident? And I said, well, okay this type of person should be able to see that or sense that because it's already in the past. And he gave me a very accurate description of keywords - Injection, kidney, something, something, keywords were all right. And then he did a whole reading. I came away very impressed and then I said to myself, what happened? Everything he said to me was 100% accurate as far as past is concerned and there was nothing which I didn't already know as regards future. He had caught a few elements of my plans for travel or some other activity vaguely and that's about it. The only thing he said to me, 'that lady like this, like this hair, she will give you a lot of trouble'. I said, 'what like this hair'? And he was as if trying to catch some name and he couldn't, but he was seeing a picture so he could describe an image. And it so happened a couple of months down, there was a person who gave me a lot of trouble and later I realized it fitted that description. But what is interesting is, if in my mind the name had been clear, he would have caught it, but there was a picture he caught and fed it back to me and he was similar. And with him I could have a frank chat. I said, where do you get this power? He said, you know, these are beings which do it. And he said he had also dabbled in materializations and he had done that for a while. And he said it's no big deal there's just a being which brings to you what you want. So he says like keeping a servant, you pay your servant and you say bring me soap from the shop and he goes and buys the soap and gives it to you.
What has he done? You paid the money, he got it for you and this the difference is that here is a subtle being you have to pay it what it demands and then it gets you what you ask for. What's the big deal? So you know these are incidents where I got the sense of this whole game. But so much of what passes for astrology is just this. And I'll give you one last example, which is what they call face reader. This is a classmate of mine in Pondicherry, and he was very excited. He said, 'you must come, you must come. This guy, he's so good in astrology. And all he does is he looks at some shells and makes your horoscope'. So I am putting it in the context of astrology. Because, so I saw what he was doing, he was doing readings for others and then it came to my turn. I really didn't have any question but I was just watching what he was doing. He takes these seashells, scatters them on the table and then he starts doing a reading. Except when he is doing a reading, he is not looking at the seashells, he is looking at your face. And he would say something and watch you and then tilt his head and again say something and then watch you, tilt his head and again say something. So it was clear he was either picking what was in my mind or he was listening and feeding back and waiting for a response in my consciousness to catch the next idea to feed back. So several times I interrupted him, 'how do you say this? what's it got to do with astrology?'. 'You know', he said, 'this is Jupiter, that is Saturn', I couldn't distinguish. So the trick was he distracts you by saying, 'I'm using this shell'. It has nothing to do with the chart, it has nothing to do with the shells. There are other variations in India where they do a thumb print. They ask you to put your thumb print and reading the thumb print they tell you things or another variation where they measure your shadow length and tell you, all that is just a diversion, that's why I use the word scam, it diverts your attention to a cause when in fact it's just mind reading feeding it back to you. So this is a whole class of phenomenon associated with astrology, which is not astrology but which has very high accuracy as long as it creates in people the idea that fate is fixed and so things will happen but by exposing yourself to things like that and accepting the idea that you wait six months for the problem to solve you have only delayed the resolution of the problem and yes sometimes the problem does fade out but not always. Sometimes it just changes because you waited too long. And I would warn people not to get stuck, not to get caught into these kinds of scams. I have gone into it in great depth to tell you what astrology is not, and do not get caught by these things. Once you understand how it works, you will stay away from these things. So in the next session we will discuss what astrology can measure, can describe and what is its utility or not.
Narad (0:53:37):
Good. Right now it seems that we should never go to an astrologer.
Sraddhalu (0:53:41):
Well, none of these types at least. <laughter>