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Jyotish Star of the Month |
By Juliana Swanson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Juliana Swanson: Hello and thank you for agreeing to do this interview. You are such an icon, so this is quite special to speak with you!
Juliana: And you have a home there, is that right? Robert: Yes that�s right. Juliana: Where did you grow up? Robert: Well, I was born in Texas. My father worked for an oil company, so there was a good deal of moving around and I grew up in both Texas and Louisiana. Juliana: Is �Svoboda� a Russian name? Robert: It�s Czech. My father�s parents were both Czech. He was born in Texas in 1920, but until he was six he did not speak English at all. He only spoke Czech with his family, and Spanish (really Mexican) with the workers on the farm, and became fluent in both those languages. He only knew two English words before he was six: �uncle� and �aunt.� Though he never learned any other languages, language was important to him because he knew those three tongues, and it was partly through his influence, and through the influence of my mother (who taught English in school) that language became important to me. Juliana: What did your father do in the oil business? Robert: He was an accountant. But his real passion in life was gardening, so wherever we went, he would be busy gardening, and when he retired, that�s all that he did. He would spend all of his spare time out in the garden. He had a half-acre garden. Juliana: How about your Mom? Did she like to garden too? Robert: Gardening wasn�t such an important thing for her. What was more interesting for her was teaching, her profession. She taught different grades, and finished her career teaching high school in New Mexico. She also liked to read, and got me into reading when I was very young. And both of my parents were very much church-going types. They were members of the Baptist Church, wherever they went. Juliana: Do you have siblings? Robert: I have one sibling, a sister who is a chemical engineer living in Houston. Juliana: You grew up in Texas and Louisiana, but I recall reading that you graduated from school in Oklahoma. Is that right? Robert: Yes, I graduated from both high school and college in Oklahoma. And I skipped one grade and finished my undergraduate degree in two years because I felt an urgent desire to do something else. I graduated from high school in 1970 and college in 1972, during an era of turmoil. Juliana: Yes, the Vietnam War era. Robert: By the time I was eligible for the draft, the lottery had been created. Are you familiar with how that worked? Juliana: Yes, I am of the same generation. So did you draw a high draft number? Robert: Yes, it was over 300 and they were only drafting up into 70�s, so I didn�t have to worry about that. I went on to college and minded my own business and then decided that I needed to depart and go somewhere. And meanwhile I had applied to medical school and had been accepted so I was thinking well, okay, I don�t know what better thing to do right now so I might as well go to medical school. But I wanted to do something before I did that. I wanted to go move around and be itinerant for a while and see some of the world, because you know with med school, you are in a laboratory for many years. I didn�t know where to go but I wanted to go someplace exotic. So I went to Africa and didn�t know really anything about Africa or why I was going there or anything. I had a good time. Though I did get sick a few times, I still enjoyed myself. Juliana: Where did you go in Africa? Robert: I crossed over land from the west coast to the east coast, and through a happy concatenation of circumstances was invited to participate in an ethnographic expedition that took me up to northern Kenya to the Pokot tribe. This was only the second time the tribe had been visited by anyone from the outside world, and we arrived there just a week after a total eclipse of the sun. Juliana: What year was this? Robert: June 1973. The tribe wanted to somehow punctuate the situation of eclipse plus outsiders, and the ethnographers wanted to document the process of joining the tribe. They asked one of us to join the tribe, and I volunteered. There I was, having just turned 20, joining an African tribe; it was all so very exotic and interesting that I couldn�t see myself returning to medical school just then. So I wrote a letter to the school, and the dean responded with a nice letter saying that it was good I was traveling before barnacles accumulated on the ship of life, and that I would be welcome as a student the following year. I decided to keep traveling, as I wanted to make sure that no barnacles accumulated; but at that point I was still thinking that I�d hang for another year in the far corners of the world before I�d return. Juliana: And as plans go� Robert: As events transpired I flew back to England and crossed overland to Nepal where we had family friends working for USAID at the time. Once in Nepal I had no intention or desire to return to India because I had unfortunately gotten all my clothes and possessions stolen at a railway station there, which left me with a bad taste in my mouth for that country. Juliana: But you went back.
Juliana: Did you know about Ayurvedic medicine yet? Robert: Yes, I had already heard about Ayurveda from the Peace Corps doctor in Kathmandu, Dr. Larry True; as I thought at the time, �True� is a good name for a doctor. Back then (less now), you had to have a reason to be traveling in India and Nepal, because everyone you met would ask you: �Oh, what are you doing here�? So as it was useful to have a good reason, as soon as I learned of Ayurveda, my reason became, �I am studying Ayurveda,� even though I was not actually studying Ayurveda, because I had no idea about how to go about studying it. After the Kalachakra, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to figure out a way to study Ayurveda, this unusual medical system that I�d never really heard much of before; I thought, �Maybe I�ll learn something new and interesting and different.� I decided to study without any idea as to how exactly I was going to study, but didn't let that uncertainty stand in my way. Since I was going down to Bombay (now known as Mumbai), I decided to see what I could find out down there. Juliana: OK. What were you doing down there? Robert: A friend of mine from high school was traveling in India, and I had made arrangements to meet her there. Once in Bombay, I was wondering what to do next. I took an immediate liking to Bombay, which is still one of my favorite cities. It�s not for everyone certainly. But there I was, familiarizing myself with the place, and evening I was wandering with an American kid of my age whom I had met on the train, also named Robert. The two of us were looking for a place to eat, and we went to a small Chinese restaurant (which no longer exists). The very moment that we walked up to the door, a man and his wife and son emerged. I did no more than ask them politely, �Is this a good restaurant? Should my friend and I eat here�? Immediately the man whipped out some money, handed it to me, and said: �Here! Take this money! Eat something here today, and come and eat dinner with us tomorrow.� And I thought, well, how great is that? Robert and I took the money and enjoyed our dinner, and the next night we enjoyed dinner at their house. We became great friends. Their name was Daftary. I used to house sit for them when they went abroad, and I still visit Mr. Daftary when I visit Bombay; he is now well into his nineties. During dinner Mr. and Mrs. Daftary asked me: �Why are you here�? Juliana: You answered that you wanted to study Ayurveda! Robert: Indeed I did, but I also added that I knew almost nothing about it. They replied that they too didn�t know a whole lot about it, except that Mr. Daftary�s maternal uncle Dr. Mehta had been the chairman of the committee that had translated Ayurveda�s most famous text, the Charaka Samhita, from Sanskrit into English, Hindi, and Gujarati back in the late 40�s. This seemed a good omen to me, and I did go to meet Dr. Mehta, who was a very nice man, and very knowledgeable, but also highly retired, in his eighties. Then the Daftarys suggested, �Why not walk down one flight of stairs? In that flat is a saintly man who is visiting from Hyderabad; he may have some ideas.� I thought, okay, why not follow my nose? I walked downstairs, walked in, and met the saintly man. I told him, �I�m interested in studying Ayurveda.� He replied, �Ayurveda is excellent! You should certainly study it,� and he introduced me to one of his devotees. Whereas the saintly man was a Hindu, this gentleman devotee was a Muslim. Back then, in those circles, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Zoroastrians all interacted easily with one another. This gentleman, Mr. Fazalbhoy, told me, �I'll phone Pandit Shiv Sharma, who is India�s most eminent Ayurvedic doctor. He and I belong to the same Rotary Club. He'll know what to do.� So I went to see Pandit Shiv Sharma, whose office was conveniently nearby. He told me, �You're in luck! One of the Ayurveda colleges in Pune has decided that this coming year they�re going to teach one class of Ayurveda in the medium of English. The course starts in May [it was late January at the time], and you will have to pass all the Sanskrit exams at the end of the first year, but you will have an entire year to learn Sanskrit, and at least they will be teaching you in English, not Marathi (the local language in Pune).� Juliana: You had to learn Sanskrit in a year? Robert: I didn�t have to learn the entire language. I just had to learn enough to pass the exams, which did involve studying poetry and dramatics and grammar as well as classical medical literature. Juliana: Medical terminology too? Was that part of it?
No one in the office was very pleased about that letter, but there was nothing they could do, because they could not say no to Pandit Shiv Sharma. So they had to admit me. And I had to come back to the US because for India if you want a student visa you have to get it in your country of residence. I received my visa just in the nick of time, and reached Pune just before the course began. I spent the next six years there, apart from one two-month trip back to the US to visit my parents. Juliana: How did your parents respond to all this? Robert: On the one hand, they were a bit concerned that I had landed in India, about which they knew nothing, but on the other hand they were glad that I was no longer traipsing about in darkest Africa often unable to be in contact with them. Even so, it was not that easy to keep in contact with them even in India. Keep in mind that this was forty years ago when, if you wanted to phone the US from India, you had to sit in front of the phone and wait sometimes for hours on end for the call to go through; and calls then cost the equivalent of five dollars a minute in today�s dollars. So all conversations were brief. Juliana: Did you write a lot of letters home? Robert: I wrote lots of letters home and received a lot of letters, and let my parents know that the best way to communicate quickly with people in India back then was by telegram. Of course if you needed to contact someone immediately you would still have to phone, but if you were thinking ahead, you could use a telegram, which would take only a day or two to reach its recipient. So there were ways to communicate, just not as instantaneous as the ways that exist now. After my six years there I returned to the US for a year. Juliana: What�s the name of the college you attended? Robert: Tilak Ayurveda Mahavidyalaya. Juliana: So by then you had given up your dreams of studying at a medical school in the West? Robert: Well, I had at the time thought that I would see how my Ayurveda studies went and that maybe I would remain there for two or three years, learning whatever I could, before going back to join medical college in the US. Juliana: Okay. Robert: In May 1974 when I started classes I certainly hadn�t expected that I would stay on for the full six years, and then in September 1975 I met Vimalananda. Juliana: The game changer for you? Robert: Yes. His perspective on life was very attractive to me, and I decided that I wanted to spend all the time that I could around him. This made me decide to continue studying at the Ayurveda College, and in 1980 I graduated from that college as the first non-Indian ever to graduate from an Ayurvedic college in India, and the first non-Indian to be licensed to practice Ayurveda in India. And I might have just continued on there had Vimalananda not insisted that I return to the US after graduation to start teaching about Ayurveda to interested students there. I did so for a year, to prove to myself and to him that I could do it; then I returned to India the next year and spent another 4 years there, during which time he left his body. Thereafter, as of 1986, I started spending much time in the US, writing, lecturing and so on. Juliana: What was your plan when you first went back to teach for a year? Where would you even start with that idea of introducing Ayurveda to the West? Robert: Providence assisted me with that as well. Sometime in early 1979, as I was sitting in in Pune in the house of some friends of mine, looking out the window minding my own business, when I saw a foreigner walking down the road. I found this curious, because no foreigners ever came to this part of town. I wondered what in the world he might be doing, and then he came to the gate and entered the door and I found myself wondering seriously what was going on. This fellow, who introduced himself as Lenny Blank was in fact looking for me; he had heard that I was studying Ayurveda and was interested in knowing more about it himself. He was from the US, and was looking for an Ayurvedic doctor to promote in the US. And I told him, �Well, I have the perfect person for you: Dr. Vasant Lad, who is my most beloved teacher at the college.� Dr. Lad was so helpful that all the students loved him. We had several good teachers there, including Dr. Lad's teacher Vaidya B. P. Nanal, but Dr. Lad was the most popular among the students there. He was certainly my favorite, for starters because he had been the college supervisor assigned to me when I showed up there. Juliana: Why did he become your �college supervisor�?
I replied that I doubted it, but if he did do it, that would be great! A few months later out of the blue Dr. Lad received a phone call one afternoon from Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) in Bombay, who said, �Dr. Lad, your ticket to the US is ready.� So Lenny had come through after all, but now Dr. Lad had to get a passport, and then a US visa, pronto; and back then neither of those items were easy to procure. But all obstacles disappeared, and Dr. Lad went off to the US, and was there for three months. This was the first time he had ever been abroad; and he had never even traveled extensively in India. After three months he was seriously homesick, and came back to India for a while. By this time it was 1980. Since interest in Ayurveda continue to increase in the US, and since I graduated that year, Vimalananda talked to Lenny and suggested that he bring me along to the US, and Lenny agreed. Juliana: What did you have to do? Robert: Lenny organized everything; I just had to show up, lecture, and offer my opinions to a few clients. Then Dr. Lad returned to the US after another year, and for a couple of years Lenny was organizing events for both of us. Eventually we started organizing things on our own. Dr. Lad then moved to the US, where he has been for more than thirty years now, in New Mexico, first in Santa Fe, and then in Albuquerque. Then I started my pattern of spending much of my time in the US, Europe, and other parts of the world, but always spending at least three months of the year in India. I have spent at least three months of each year in India ever since 1986, almost thirty years. And I lived there for ten full years, so I now know the place pretty well. Juliana: I understand that you have homes in a lot of places and that you move around a good bit. Is this true? Robert: That is true; I enjoy moving around. It�s definitely not a lifestyle I would suggest to anybody. Juliana: Well I have a question about that. I have heard that yogis don�t stay in one place too long because they don�t want to accumulate the karma of a place. So, I wonder, is it just a natural consequence of being a yogi, and would you call yourself a yogi? I mean I don�t want to limit you with a title like that but it seems accurate in this instance. Robert: Well, �yogi� is a big word. A yogi is one who practices Yoga, and real Yoga is not what is taught in most Yoga schools today. Yoga involves conjoining your limited awareness with that of the supreme reality. This is not easy; what is easy is to get entangled in the world of phenomena, what�s known in Sanskrit as samsara, which literally means the thing that is always flowing, moving, turning. And it�s easier to get caught in samsara when you�re stationary, located in one location. It�s long been a tradition in India that a sadhu, a wandering yogi, should stay no more than three nights in any one place. Juliana: OK, that�s interesting. I have heard stories about Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji), Ram Dass�s guru, who moved around all the time like that. Robert: Of course this has never been the case for all yogis. Many of them find other ways of evading samsara. But this method of living has proven to be valuable to many people because it does force them to avoid attachment. Juliana: Yes, yes. And for all those of us who tend to move around a lot, it seems that Spirit moves us. Is that your understanding? Robert: Right. And when the Spirit does move one, it�s often because the Spirit has a definite purpose for it. Juliana: Absolutely, one can trust that. Robert: And that�s a principle I have tried to follow as best I can: the principle of attempting to put myself into the best position to align myself with whatever it is I need to do and at whatever place I need to be at whatever moment I need to be there. Juliana: And is the secret to that alignment your inner practice, your meditation practice? Robert: It is. I have certainly made mistakes, most commonly the mistake being not to listen to my intuition when it offers me advice. You may think you are intuitive, you may actually be intuitive, but if you have a preference � and preferences can be very subtle - you may allow that preference to influence what you do or how you plan. Then you will generally find that something goes wrong that didn�t need to go wrong because you were not paying attention to the overall pattern of how things were happening. Juliana: And then is �that thing� that goes wrong a great opportunity for learning, and maybe it is not a mistake after all, but a gift in disguise? Robert: Well yes, I would say that learning something about yourself is easy to do when you have made a mistake, when you have to take a serious and close look at that mistake and the implications of what that mistake might mean in your own personal existence. So, yes I think that experience is the best teacher, as they say. Of course, the second part of that saying is that a fool learns from no other. Vimalananda used to say, experiences are the direct way to learn things, but it is better to learn from other peoples� experiences rather than to insist on having every experience yourself. I have found this to be generally true, that benefit is to be had by paying close attention to not only your own experience and your own intuitive take on the situation, but also what�s going on with people who have gone through the same thing already and have their own experiences from which wisdom can be harvested. Better to learn from the experiences of others instead of having to just what they did and, in effect, reinvent the wheel. Juliana: And that would be the role of a guru as well, right? Robert: That is the role of a guru. And since there�s no guarantee that you will easily find a guru, you may just have to communicate directly with the cosmos and hope the cosmos will hear you and act as your guru. Juliana: Ah-ha. That is quite the precious gem you have shared right there. And speaking of gems, I recently read an interesting comment on Google Books by one of the fans of your Aghora trilogy, who said that your guru Vimalananda�s life as described in the trilogy is a great gift to mankind. You have written that he�s the most spiritual person you know or ever knew, and you said that you have always prospered when you followed his teachings. Is there any one thing you can impart here about him and his message, something that you�d like people to understand? Robert: Two things. Number one: he always tried to do whatever he felt he needed to do whenever he felt he needed to do it. He was not an orthodox person. He was certainly a so-called Hindu, but he didn�t like the word �Hindu�, pointing out that it is a Persian corruption of the Sanskrit word sindhu. And he didn�t believe in sectarianism. He didn�t believe in religion. He believed in eliminating everything that kept you from a perfect understanding, a perfect comprehension of reality as clearly and as comprehensively as you personally could understand it. Juliana: So a direct experience? Robert: A direct experience of reality. Juliana: The Aghori path is Tantra? Robert: Yes that is the path of Tantra, though Vimalananda argued that the difference between Tantra and Aghora is that Tantra has lots of rules, regulations, and what have you, whereas with Aghora, the only rule is eliminate everything undesirable from your awareness, so that you will be able to perceive reality in a very clear, unobstructed way. Juliana: You wrote on your website that you had to come to terms with the fact that so many people have misunderstood Vimalananda through the books you wrote about him. How has he been misunderstood? Robert: Well, people started off misunderstanding him because of Tantra. Thirty years ago in India when I wrote the books, and to a substantial degree still today there, Tantra is not so much regarded as cosmic sex like it is in the West (though that is a part of it), but rather as black magic. Practitioners of Tantra are regarded as magicians, and often as black magicians. Misunderstandings back then often happened because people assumed that Vimalananda could do what he did because he practiced magic; many of them were of the opinion that he had performed a ritual that allowed him to harness the power of disembodied spirits, and that he was using those spirits to do his work. The reality is that he never made spirits work for him, which is a very foolish thing to do. Though during the time I knew him he did in fact occasionally perform practices that we could term �magical� (but never of the black variety), the majority of the unusual things that happened around him however happened simply because he had aligned himself so well with the Universe. Juliana: A lot of people are afraid of the Aghora path.
But all these facts are quite relative. Even if you live in the same house for decades a day will come when you leave it, even if only when dragged out feet first after you die. Jobs change, and individuals will come and go from your life, but despite all these changes your persona will maintain continuity a sense of continuity to allow you to continue to believe that you are in fact who you are. Juliana: So memory creates persona? Robert: Yes, memory allows you to create a persona. You may like your persona or you may not, but that is secondary to the fact that you have a persona, a personal narrative. One of the fundamental things that separates human beings from all other lifeforms (that we know of) is that we believe in stories. Stories are in fact a very important part of who we are, particularly the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, because each of us is at all times trying to create for ourselves a meaningful story. Humans crave to believe that things make sense. Animals don�t care if things make sense or not; they do what feels right for them at any particular moment, and feel uneasy when their characteristic patterns of activity get disturbed. But they never get into an existential funk about anything, because that�s not how they work. They�re not philosophers, they just move along doing what they can do. Humans, though, require a story. Juliana: And what of the narrator of the story? Robert: Your narrative will only have meaning for you if it is consistent and if it is being told by someone that you trust. This is why each human being creates for himself or herself a narrator on the inside, a narrator that continuously comments on what is going on in life. This is what Vimalananda meant when he equated memory with life: you as a human being will select certain memories to identify with personally, usually of actual events that actually transpired in your life. When you identify with memories that are not so pleasant, your self-identity will probably become compromised; when you identify with memories that are pleasing, such memories will often reinforce your self-identification. You can even identify with memories that you may have personally never had; sometimes your inner narrator fabricates memories. Juliana: How is that exactly? Robert: It can happen in several ways; here is one example. Suppose that you decide to perform a sadhana of Krishna that involves envisioning yourself in the persona of a human who existed when Krishna existed. You project yourself into a space and time where you have never been in this lifetime, but where you believe you might have been at some previous stage of existence. If you perform that sadhana long enough, you may get to the point where you can identify yourself with that persona and its memories so strongly that you may begin to remember things that in fact never happened to you, at least in this lifetime. Juliana: I am sure our readers, like me, have a gazillion questions for you about Jyotisha. What is the purpose of it? What did Vimalananda say about it? What do you think about it? Are you practicing astrology? Did you study it when you studied Ayurveda in India? What would you like to share about this? Robert: Right. They used to teach astrology many decades ago in Ayurvedic colleges. But that is a long story. Juliana: Is there a shorter version? Robert: Ayurveda was discouraged by the British for many decades, and it was revived in India as a political gesture, as part of the Independence Movement. Politics has been a part of Ayurveda for a long time, and as it was revived, those who were resuscitating it wanted to make sure that Ayurveda did not appear too reactionary, too conservative, too obsolete, too archaic, too ridiculously associated with the Brahmins of the world. Much of Ayurveda can be seen as being �scientific�; astrology is still not regarded as �scientific� by many people. At the time when the curriculum for India's Ayurvedic colleges was being established astrology was regarded as being unscientific. Pandit Shiv Sharma, who wrote the letter that got me into the Ayurvedic College, was elected to parliament twice, specifically for the purpose of creating a law that would normalize Ayurvedic education, and back then few members of India's parliament were willing to support the inclusion of astrology in that curriculum. Juliana: So if astrology was removed from the study of Ayurveda, how did you and others we know learn it? Robert: There are still a few who study it, but they have to study independently on their own. I was one of those students. Fortunately for me, Vimalananda himself had studied Jyotisha. Of course, he had a number of capabilities that I don�t have, and one of them which I witnessed a few times was the ability to read a horoscope just from a face. He was able to state that such and such a planet is here, that planet is there, and when he did so I found him to be correct. It was he who introduced me to the rudiments of astrology, and he always encouraged me to study Jyotisha; he averred that it is a good way to pass one's time as it offers many useful insights to human beings and their behavior. He did of course warn me that, as with Ayurveda and Tantra and other vidyas, Jyotisha is a very long study. Juliana: And so you did study it, clearly. Robert: Vimalananda was not interested in trying to teach me systematically, so I thought it best to be patient. In my life things tend to come to me when they need to do so, so I decided to wait for the occasion to study Jyotisha to arise. I picked up whatever I could from Vimalananda, which in the end was quite a bit. He passed on in 1983, and just a couple of years later, when I was in Toronto lecturing on Ayurveda, I met Hart de Fouw. Hart was very kind, kind enough to invest quite a bit of his time with me when I had free time, in Toronto and in other locales, offering me Jyotisha pointers. Thanks to Hart I got inspired to begin to read, study, and learn Jyotisha seriously, over several years. Though Hart was teaching then, he was not teaching as extensively as he did later, which was fortunate for me because I got to spend a good deal of time directly learning from him. Then I met his guru Mantriji, from whom I learned yet more. Juliana: Please say something about your philosophy of Jyotish and Ayurveda. Robert: My personal belief about Ayurveda and Jyotish and the other vidyas � a belief that I was taught by Vimalananda, and that I have confirmed via my own experience � is that such bodies of knowledge are not just books filled with rules and suggestions and recipes. I believe instead that these sciences are living realities that exist as part of the fabric of the Universe, realities into which people tap which guide their observations and inspire their imaginations to create the principles, the rules that we learn have come to identify those lores with. It has been my personal experience, and the experience of others as well, that serious students of these subjects who become aware that they form part of the fabric of the Universe and who turn their attention in that direction (for however long it may take), will start getting guided by that reality. Juliana: This is the Jyotir Vidya? Robert: That is indeed the Jyotir Vidya. Juliana: Have you ever heard of something called a �Jyotish Nadi� which can open up a direct link to the Jyotir Vidya? Robert: I haven�t heard that there is a specific nadi in the body in which Jyotisha flows, and I am somewhat dubious that there is a specific nadi. Certainly it is true that your prana has to be flowing in a specific way, and so it may well be that a specific nadi exists; or perhaps it exists only in some people, or not as a single nadi but rather as a pattern of nadis. In any event some major nadi or other will need to open up if you do hope to communicate directly with the Jyotir Vidya, which you can do only via the flow of prana. Prana is the way we communicate between the physical reality and the �other� reality of the archetypal world. Juliana: So what is the purpose of Jyotisha ultimately? Or, why would someone need or want or benefit from a Jyotish consultation? Robert: Well, Jyotisha of course literally means �light.� Jyotisha tries to throw light on karmic patterns, in particular that set of patterns that is conterminous with a human being. Jyotisha tries to throw light on us and our karmic patterns so that we can live life as best as possible for ourselves and everyone around us. Juliana: That�s well said. The idea of harmonious living which you so beautifully describe also reminds me of Jyotisha�s sister science of Yoga. I wanted to go back a moment and touch a little more on this idea that you had earlier mentioned, which is that �real Yoga� is not well understood in the modern world. Can you say more about that? Robert: Vimalananda was very dismissive of modern so-called �Yoga.� He said the purpose of Yoga is to make every home a happy home. It doesn�t necessarily have anything to do with what he used to call �physical jerks,� i.e., the performing of asanas and other activities with the physical your body. What is Yoga for me might not involve any body movements; your Yoga might be something else entirely, related only to some kind of meditation. Whatever it is, it will be something specific to you and the situation that you are in. Vimalananda was saying that if you really want to be living in a healthful way, then the only way to is to make sure that you�re doing your best to try to get everyone in your home living as healthfully as possible. Juliana: And what does health mean in this context? Robert: It is the idea that everything is coming together as best as it can, whatever that means for each person. Juliana: Quite worthwhile advice for all of us! And now, back to astrology, two more questions please: First, do you do astrological consultations for others; and, Second, do you study your own horoscope? Robert: People do ask to consult with me. I do a very few consultations, mostly for those with whom I have already consulted. I look at my own chart occasionally, but not too much. I follow Mantriji�s advice, which is, when you�re studying Jyotisha, don�t look so much at your own chart; rather�look at someone else�s chart; make someone else miserable. Juliana: That is funny, and true! Please say more. Robert: People studying their own charts start to think things like, for instance, �Oh my God, my lagnesha is debilitated in the twelfth and aspected by the malefics. I�m screwed!�
Juliana: Do you consider yourself a Jyotishi? Robert: I don�t like to think of myself as a Jyotishi per se; there's too much theory that I do not know. I can say that I�ve been a student of Jyotisha for thirty years or more now, and I don�t think it�s unfair to say that in many cases the Jyotir Vidya cooperates usefully with me, particularly when really needed. Juliana: Cooperation. That�s an interesting word. Robert: I am not essential to the Jyotir Vidya, who has many people that she can choose to work with; and she is not essential to me, as I have many potential vidyas with whom I can work. But if we respect and appreciate one another, and cooperate with each other, then good things can occur. Vimalananda often commented that the best approach to enjoying a happy and successful life is to try always to align oneself with Nature. He used the word �Nature� to mean the Universe, the external environment, the cosmos, Providence, the sum total of everything outside you. Similarly, the Ayurvedic texts specifically mention that if you behave properly with regard to all the �things� in your environment � people, animals, plants, minerals, ethereal beings, everything that is not you � then those things will behave properly with you. Life is a very mutual thing, and my experience has confirmed for me that it is indeed possible to get your environment to cooperate with you, as I was taught. Juliana: How does one learn to do this? Robert: I don't know; I just followed that intention and somehow learned. This was the way I was taught: Vimalananda very rarely spelled out for me how to go about doing what he wanted me to do. He would simply tell me what to do, and would expect me to go and figure out how to do it, and after much trial and error � plenty of error � I would usually be able to figure out some way to do it. Juliana: Do you have any advice for students of Ayurveda or Jyotisha? Robert: My advice is encapsulated in the two words that I find occasion to speak pretty much every time that I am teach. Those two words are, �Remain calm.� Because the deeper you dive into the ocean of any vidya, the more you will understand just how little you know of it. And the older you get, the more you will realize that you�re just scratching at the surface of that vidya, just like some ridiculous insect gnawing on a piece of bread. One of the depressing things for me about modern life is that so many people nowadays start to consider themselves experts after taking a single weekend class in a subject. How can that be? How can you possibly imagine that you can become an expert at anything in the space of forty-eight hours? It cannot happen; it is mere illusion, an illusion that the Internet fosters, that data is knowledge and that knowledge is wisdom. But data is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom; and though people collect lots of information, and congratulate themselves for doing so, all too often that information adds up to nothing more than greater confusion. You can congratulate yourself as much as you want to, but just because you have taken a few classes doesn�t mean that you have created a healthy relationship with the Jyotir Vidya. In fact you can take classes forever and still know nothing. Instruction means nothing at all; digestion and assimilation of knowledge is the key. If you go too far in the direction of accumulation without digestion, and decide yourself that you have become an expert, eventually you will make an unfortunate mistake and then there will be problems. And when you do make some dramatic error you�ll be stuck, unless you happen to have a guru who is willing to pull your chestnuts out of the fire. And being stuck in that situation will not be pretty. Juliana: Since you don�t call yourself a �Jyotishi� per se, because that�s a big word, what would you call yourself? Robert: I prefer to call myself a student of Jyotisha. And in general, I like to call myself a �bon vivant,� because I�m trying to live life well, which is literally what that phrase means. Juliana: You have a wonderful sense of humor. Was Vimalananda funny, too? Robert: He was hilarious, and I�m lucky each one of my parents also had a great sense of humor. My father especially did, and I inherited it. Vimalananda's philosophy was that you have two choices in life: you can either laugh or you can cry, and laughing requires less effort since it requires fewer muscles, and it makes everyone a lot happier if you laugh instead of crying. Please consider laughing as much as possible.
Juliana: So this is really a conference focused on both Ayurveda and Jyotisha. Robert: Yes, and toward that end each day there will be a puja for the graha of that day. Dr. Claudia and I will talk for two hours each morning about that day's graha, what it indicates, what diseases it relates to, and so on. We will begin on a Friday evening, the day honoring Venus, but Venus will not be visible that evening (as it will be appearing in its Morning Star apparition then), but it will be visible on the morning of the conference's last day, again on Venus� day. The first full day of the conference will be Saturn�s day (Saturday), and this is important as Saturn is the main significator of astrology. Juliana: Why is Saturn the main significator of astrology? Robert: Both Vimalananda and Mantriji have declared that Saturn is the most important graha in Jyotisha. Saturn is the planet of anubhava, direct experience, in particular those life experiences which everyone has to experience and no one really wants to experience: disease, dissatisfaction, old age, the death of loved ones, and finally one's own death. These are experiences that no one can evade, and these are the experiences of life for which Saturn is the traditional significator. In addition, Saturn signifies tradition, and hard work, and making mistakes, and things coming to us from the far past, and learning the tradition of Jyotisha, which comes to us from the far past, means abundant hard work involving (at least initially) multiple mistakes. Juliana: Can you say more about the significance of Venus in the December conference? Robert: Venus will be visible as the Morning Star in December 2015, so we will see it on the morning of the last day. We will enjoy the darshan of Venus at the very end of the conference. Of the many reasons that Venus is an important planet for Jyotisha, perhaps the reason most pertinent to this event, is that in the natural horoscope Venus is lord of the second house of speech and recitation. Of course originally, Ayurveda, Jyotisha, and all the other vidyas were taught orally, via hearing and repeating, not via reading and writing. Also, Venus rules death and resurrection, which in this case we hope will be the death of confusion and the resurrection of clarity about Jyotisha and its place in Ayurveda. I thought it would be nice to bring the conference to an end with the darshan of the beautiful Venus. We are going to pray that there are no clouds. Juliana: In his way, you�ll be getting in tune with the observable sky, capturing the real soma of the �stars�! And on that note, I would like to say goodbye for now, Robert, and thank you for being a true Jyotish Star and for sharing so much wisdom with us here today and always.
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