“Is It My Fault?”

I get this question pretty often.

Someone had in her partnership chart (navamsha) the symbols for a heart attack, but her partner didn’t have them in his direct rasi chart. Her partner had a heart attack when the combination in her chart was activated.

Was it her fault?

I remember when the Great Maharishi Mahesh Yogi passed on. A follower had death signifiers for her guru in her chart that were activated by dasha at that time.

Was it her fault?

I think the answers are no.

Either nothing is one’s fault or everything is one’s fault for everything is in any given person’s chart. Same thing. Pick a side, but if you’re giving a reading, I think the best approach is to say no, it’s not your fault, and it’s not, in the usual sense of the word.

Vasistha’s Yoga talks often of all events in this world being related only as when a crow alights on a tree and at that moment a coconut falls off. The “ignorant” (for lack of a better word) think there is a relationship between the two, but there is not.

The one infinite consciousness alone is thought-form or experience: there is no cause and effect relationship, these (’cause’ and ‘effect’) are only words, not facts. The infinite consciousness is forever in infinite consciousness.

This is a quote from Saraswati Herself in Vasistha’s Yoga.

(How does this jibe with “karma“? Well, as I understand it, even your past actions are just right.)

A friend asks, indeed, all that there is is the present moment, so how can there be cause and effect?

Symbols in the chart are at this level best understood as signposts. That the woman had a partner who would have a heart attack was in her chart at birth, but that was not her doing any more than her own creation itself was her doing. (Or was it?)

Make sense?

What about issues with seemingly more free will like choice of college?

I think they follow along the same lines. We can forcefully mess up our dharma by bad volitional karma or improve upon it, but our dharma is still there.

This is interesting to me, because if the planets were signposts only, why does supplication and appeasement of them by upaya work so well?

In the beautiful Colorado mountains, if we supplicate the trailhead sign it seemingly changes nothing on the trail or the mountain within it. Why do upayas(gems, mantras, yantras, etc.) work?

The grahas (planets) obviously are still very much involved, and they are inside of us (as above so below), but in terms of fault, responsibility, no, I don’t think there is personal responsibility in the personhood egosense (jIva) of things.

If the client is ready for it, and this is rare, you can present some thoughts from the Bhagavad Gita and other sacred books that there is a relationship behind all things and we are the relationship itself not individuals within.

The well known New Age phrase/bumper sticker “Life is the dance and I am the dancer.” was turned on its head to me by a speaker the other month who said, more truthfully I think, “I am the dance and life [Shiva I’d say] is the dancer.”

nimitta maatram bhava savyasaacin

Be only the instrument, O Arjuna. (Bhagavad Giitaa, 11.33)

So basically relax. No, it isn’t your fault, and yet you are the world.

sarvabhuutastham aatmaaanam sarvabhuutaani caatmaniiksate

He sees the Self in all beings, and all beings in the Self. (6.29)

It is a paradox, either very complex, or very simple.