Jyotish-shastra

Because we are hoarders of perspectives. We don't like limits – word counts, rules, lanes, traffic lights. Like moths chasing light in the hope of finding the sky, we chase divergence, treating every new perspective like a juicy new possibility to unlock the big secret of life.

Our immediate instinct to most things new and different is curiosity, not fear. This is not to say that the very next instinct is also as welcoming. Quite the opposite actually, but the intention tends to be to first absorb, understand, and then classify.

This invariably results in any new thing, idea, or person first getting integrated, and then discriminated – for better or for worse.

Concepts of Indian origin tend to be cohesively divergent, making it difficult for non-natives to understand due to a lack of familiar precedent.

Concepts of Indian origin tend to be cohesively divergent, making it difficult for non-natives to understand due to a lack of familiar precedent.

Say, is it like a bike with two wheels or a car with four wheels?
Neither! It is an auto-rickshaw with three wheels.

Lacking in familiar parallels, most Vedic practices get approximated for the ease of adoption. Yoga becomes Fitness, Meditation-Mindfulness, Ayurveda-Veganism, and Jyotish-Astrology.

Jyotish originated over 4000 years ago as a way to measure time by studying celestial light. Unlike a single invention, it has evolved over several thousand centuries, codified by various civilisations that inhabited the Indic region since the Vedic ages.

At the heart of it, Jyotish recognises each of us as individuals on our own unique paths. We each have our own set of karmic debt and equity that either grows into a bigger debt, gets settled, or grows into a bigger equity depending on the choices we make along the way.

Jyotish has stood the test of space and time – wars, natural calamities, colonisation, and industrialisation – maturing into a sophisticated system of mathematical probabilities that dares to understand the dynamic between cosmos and consciousness by combining spirituality, science, and psychology.

It is this karmic legacy that pre-determines certain facts about us, like our birth parents, who ascertain our race, sex, genetics, height, facial features, IQ and such other life-defining attributes, leaving the rest to be determined by us, therefore making us a co-creator of our own destiny.

In Jyotish, we are not treated as powerless victims at the mercy of an almighty judge but as co-authors. Nothing in Vedic tradition is random and everything is cyclical – past determines the present, and present determines the future, which in turn changes the past.

Jyotish in itself deals with astronomically complex datasets and the mathematics that goes into creating the schematic birthcharts for each of us is mind bending. The good news is that most of these calculations have been automated by sophisticated Jyotish softwares, however the reading and understanding of our birthcharts still requires skill, human ingenuity, and understanding of Jyotish fundamentals.

While a complex topic, if one gets a hang of a few foundational principles, it becomes easy to start reading and understanding our birthcharts ourselves. Having taken the journey myself these past years, I can confidently conclude that no one is better positioned to read your birthchart than you, because no one knows you as intimately and precisely as you know yourself.

So, if this is something that intrigues you, we invite you to try Yuti.ai. We have designed it to spark exploration instead of prescribing solutions. It helps you explore your birthchart, and learn to read it yourself rather than rely on an expert to do it for you. This is not to say experts don’t have a role to play. They very much do, in fact you can book a session with them anytime to understand the logic or validate your deductions. You can even choose to ask them for prescriptive answers but I would urge you to take their answers as starting points of your own exploration.

Happy exploring!