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LIGHT ON RELATIONSHIPS
The Synastry of Indian Astrology
By Hart de Fouw, Robert Edwin Svoboda Samuel Weiser, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 Hart de Fouw and Robert Edwin Svoboda
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57863-148-3
CHAPTER 1
BHAVA AND RASA
The first stop on our tour of Jyotisha's techniques for evaluating relationships is at the conceptual border that separates skillful divination from educated guessing. Several new and beautiful Sanskrit words will board our vehicle at this stop. Even if you have no facility for languages, your appreciation for and enjoyment of Jyotisha will greatly benefit if you will take the time to make the acquaintance of a few of these words.
SUKHA
Sukha, which most translators render as "happiness," literally means "good space." More than the exclusively emotional state that many of us think of when we think of "happiness," sukha is a state in which all the many "spaces" of a life are "good." These include (but are not limited to) the physical space of the body, the fiscal space of the bank account, the psychological space of the mind, the living spaces in one's home and community, the communal spaces that compose a society, and the moral space of the soul. A couple in relationship shares many spaces, each of which contributes to the overall condition of their mutual sukha.
Sukha appears in a life only when internal satisfaction blends with external plenty. A person who is emotionally optimistic, but living the life of a beggar without suitable amenities, may be "happy," but possesses no more sukha than the rich man whose heart has shriveled. Sukha is a relationship that develops when you are able to convert the circumstances in which you find yourself into satisfying experiences. Sukha may be associated with and may promote shanti (peace), but it does not, in and of itself, guarantee peace, for sukha may require quite an effort to establish and maintain. A person may spend so much time and effort juggling the realities of life that there is no time to be peaceful, despite the satisfaction that sukha may provide.
Sukha is one of those useful generalizations that support classical India's multivalent mode of thinking. A jyotishi who says, "Your fourth house being afflicted, you have had no sukha of mother," utters a general statement whose potential specific interpretations are many. The facts of the parent and child's life together may have been at fault (perhaps the mother died early, or gave the child up for adoption, or had a truly wretched life), or the shortcomings may have derived from their personal acts (the child may have abused his mother, or been beaten by her). While both may have been generally healthy, peaceable, and well adjusted, they may simply have been a poor match for one another. The child may have been unhappy with the mother, or vice versa, or their relations, though cordial, may have been dry and unsatisfying. Astute clients will intuit that their personal situation is likely to reflect any of these scenarios, to different degrees. Because this perception of sukha is complex and textured, you may obtain a tolerably accurate representation of your relationship with your mother. Understanding some of the complexity of the underlying flavor of this relationship, however, will provide you with a background against which you can interpret the specific incidents that have made up your lifelong interaction.
A good jyotishi will know in which areas of life sukha is likely, and in which of our relationships sukha may tend to elude us. Many of us spend our lives searching blindly for sukha, when just a small investment of time and energy studyingjyotisha's maps can show us reliable paths that can lead us thence. When we unroll them, we find these maps to sukha are written in the language of bhava and rasa.
BHAVA AND RASA
A bhava is a state or condition. Depending on context, a bhava may be a state of existence, a state of mind, or a state of karma. Your natal horoscope is a snapshot of your bhava, the overall state of your karma, at the moment of your birth. An horary chart is an outline of your karmic state at the moment you query a jyotishi about some aspect of your life. Jyotisha distinguishes three de grees of intensity for "fated" karmas, intensities that may apply to one, many, or all areas of a person's life. Dridha (fixed) karmas give fixed pleasurable or painful results, because they are so difficult to change that they are practically immutable. Dridha-adridha (fixed/unfixed) karmas, good or bad, can be changed with considerable effort through the concentrated application of creative will. They give fixed or unfixed results, according to the amount of effort employed toward the goal of change. Bhavas that display adridha (unfixed) karmas produce results that can easily be altered by the concentrated application of creative will.
Karma is such a complex business that astrologers divide horoscopes into twelve smaller bhavas (astrological houses, in this context), each of which defines the state of karma of one portion of your life: children, career, home, education, relationship, and so on. Taken together, these twelve horoscope bhavas house the totality of your external existence—your objective experiences, the things that "actually happen to you" in the world—as they are experienced by the internal states of your being, your subjective perceptions of those events. When a skillful jyotishi reads your horoscope, he or she first teases the bhavas apart, to analyze them, then carefully recombines them into a narrative that describes for you both the skills that you bring to certain areas of your life and the outcomes you can expect through the operation of those skills.
Frequently, we find that careful application of good skills will produce good results. We also all know of cases, however, where consistent hard work produces little or no practical result during a lifetime. And we have all heard of those who found the heavens showering blessings on them simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Vincent van Gogh provides us a good example of how dramatically skills and outcomes can be mismatched in one life. Recognized now as one of the fathers of Modern Art (a testimony to his skills), he was an abject professional failure during his lifetime (the outcome that he personally experienced when he used those skills). He focused on his art to the exclusion of all the other bhavas of his existence, so much so that, when the weight of his internal experience of his external rejection became unbearable, he took his own life. Someone else in a similar situation, someone better able to withstand external rejection, might have taken a more philosophical view of his plight and settled down resignedly to a quiet life of composing canvases in Arles.
The difference between van Gogh's subjective perceptions of the events of his life and the subjective perceptions of this hypothetical other represents differences in their rasas. Our rasas (juices, essence) are what we experience as a result of our bhavas. Individual bhavas produce individual rasas, and the overall bhava of life produces an overall rasa that is the "expression in juice" of that life's unique flavor. Rasa, in Sanskrit, means "juice," in all senses of that word. Water, lymph, blood plasma, semen, other tissue juices, fruit and vegetable juices, meat soup, metals in general and the metal mercury in particular, and taste (both in the mouth and in the mind) are all rasas, all "fluid realities." The flavors of the juices that make up our bodies and minds combine to create our personal emotional rasas, the subjective perceptions that are the juices that water our souls.
While an existence bereft of emotions is dry and tasteless (in Sanskrit, rasahina), bitter emotions (like those of profound grief, extreme fear, and intense possessive jealousy) make for a bitter, mislived life. Unpalatable rasas can kill, as they killed van Gogh. Even romantic love, the ideal to which so many of us aspire, can, when unbalanced or misguided, destroy all hope of the happiness it promises. Love is wonderful, but merely being in love may not inspire a couple to develop a consensus over mundane issues, like who will pay the rent and who will wash the windows. Many people today are so afraid of the potential peril of their emotions that they label emotion "unnatural, untruthful," and try hard to eliminate it from their lives. Emotion is, in fact, so natural and so expressive of the truth of what lies within us, however, that very few people ever completely escape its coils. Why should we seek emotional emptiness when, with a little emotional intelligence, we can discover healthy ways to know and manage our emotions? Our relationships with others can improve dramatically when we learn to think as much of their rasas as of our own. Emotionally intelligent individuals know that their own lives become richly satisfying when the lives of those with whom they interact are richly satisfying as well.
Although bhava and rasa are causally related, they are not identical, just as the tree differs from the seed that gives it birth. Differing bhavas can sometimes produce very similar rasas, as was the case during the Impressionist period of painting, when men and women with vastly different life milieus (suggesting widely varied horoscopic patterns) succeeded in creating a body of work that is substantially uniform in rasa. On the other hand, similar bhavas can sometimes produce very different rasas. An Indian and an American with the same horoscopes will, for example, respond to their grabas (the "planets" of Jyotish) in different ways, due to differences in their upbringings and social environments. Moreover, their genetics will differ, as will the palms of their hands. Two people with identical bhavas are still two different people, who will probably respond differently, even to life events that are comparable.
The rasas you create from your bhavas is often determined by the choices that your current and evolving internal physical, mental, and emotional grooves encourage you to select. These grooves, which in turn, generally—but not exclusively—are determined by your pre-existing karmas, which can be read from the twelve bhavas of your horoscope. The more you escape from these pre-existing grooves, using your will or initiative karma to actively transform your bhava raw material into enjoyable rasas, the less these grooves will be readable in your natal horoscope. Delicious rasas make for a delectable life, a life of sukha. Rasas arise from a dynamic interaction between fate and free will, between the karmas we have brought with us into this life and the ones we are performing now. Jyotishis attempt, in their analyses, to evaluate how easily toothsome rasas can develop in your existence, how "fated" they will seem to be. Jyotisha also estimates how easy it will be for you to use your initiative karma, your "free will," to transform potentially disruptive situations into satisfying experiences.
A truly satisfying life is rasatmaka, filled to the brim with pure, refreshing emotions that permeate the very core of your being. The richest lives, those filled with greatest sukha, are those lived by the handful of spiritual giants among us. These emotional geniuses learn to reunite the fragmented bhavas of their lives into one coherent, focused bhava they "cook" into one singular, sublimely tasty, spiritual rasa. One such man of God, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, made his life rasatmaka by coddling all his bhava-moods into one maha bhava ("super bhava"), a samadbi (spiritual trance) in which he went mad with uncontrollable love and joy. From his maha bhava samadhi, Ramakrishna distilled parama rasa ("supreme rasa"), the transcendental flavor of God-consciousness that became, for him, a daily diet. In this, he followed his namesake, India's divine cowherd, Krishna, that paragon of rasatmaka-ness who is chock-full of blissful emotion.
As with ordinary people, so with saints: comparable rasa-states can arise from disparate circumstances. Sri Ramakrishna and St. Francis of Assisi lived in distinct times and countries and followed dissimilar paths. Because they dedicated themselves to unifying their very different bhavas, however, they were each able to distill from their experiences similar states of parama rasa. Any sort of spiritual bhava can produce results when followed sincerely, though only those unified bhavas that can be guaranteed to create unselfish states will ultimately relate to divinity. Adolf Hitler's unified, but egotistic monomaniacal, bhava unification, for example, does not qualify. Some of the bhavas that India's saints and sages have perfected over the millennia in their quest for relationship with God include:
• Shanta, the serene affection of a loving wife for her husband;
• Dasya, the humble devotedness of an obedient servant for his master;
• Sakhya, the friendly camaraderie of two near-equals;
• Vatsalya, the maternal ardor of a mother for her child;
• Madhurya, the intensely fervent craving that a passionate woman feels for her lover;
• Virodha, the intense hatred of God and everything for which God stands.
Every couple reflects, at any particular moment of its relationship life, some bhava. If they preferentially indulge in one bhava to the exclusion of others, it will eventually become a habit. Healthy bhavas create grooves that facilitate the production of ever healthier rasa, and ever deeper sukha; unhealthy bhavas do the opposite. Healthy or not, two people who form a relationship habit tend to return to it, for it comes to form the chief source of that relationship's rasa. Even a couple whose relationship seems essentially "dysfunctional" to observers may be experiencing substantial subjective enjoyment through their interaction. They may, in fact, so condition themselves to bickering that they refuse to consider new ways of relating, for fear of sacrificing what juice they have learned to suck from the situation.
Some years ago, one of us went on a joint vacation with a married couple who squabbled incessantly from sunrise to sunset about what seemed like trifles. They debated what to have for breakfast and where to have it, which way to face the chairs on the beach, the cost of the vacation versus the value received, the age and condition of his bathing suit, what she said to a waiter, on and on, ad nauseam. Some of these tempestuous arguments displayed an intensity that made their companions so distinctly uncomfortable that they resolved never to commit casually to a future vacation with any other couple. Astonishingly, however, on the way home, the couple turned to their fellow travelers and said enthusiastically "That was fun! Let's do it again soon!" Twenty years later this couple still seems inseparable; quite naturally so, for who else would so enthusiastically accept such a quarrelsome sentence for life?
Despite such examples of couples who find ways to extract a workable outcome from poor relating skills, belligerence is rarely an effective relationship bhava. Rasa gets poisoned by the venom of selfishness, and purified by the nectar of benevolence. Each of our thoughts and actions transmutes bhava into rasa within us, the rasa becoming sweeter as the motives become purer. Healthy rasa begins to ooze into our lives when our bhavas, our normal states of being, get "well cooked."
Ramakrishna found ecstasy in his relationship with his goddess. Any of us can taste the flavor of that ecstasy, even if on a smaller scale, in our own relationships, if we are willing to refine our one-pointedness. Life is like a lasagna: raw materials that may be only modestly savory on their own can develop a superb flavor when they are combined in the right order and baked in an appropriate vessel at a reasonable temperature for a judicious length of time. Most of us require rasa-cookery classes to optimize our rasa-experiences, however, for uneven bhavas produce lumpy rasas. Only good luck (previous good karma) can guarantee that a pleasingly sweet rasa will arise between two people who have not consciously learned how to generate healthy rasa within themselves.
The many arts and sciences handed down from ancient India seek, through their varied disciplines, to generate this sort of ecstasy-flecked rasa, the sort of healthy rasa without which no life is well lived, alone or in relationship. The Dasharupa, a classical work on dramaturgy written by Dhananjaya, avers that "there is no subject that cannot succeed in conveying Sentiment (rasa) among mankind." The Dasharupa describes five types of svada (enjoyment) that arise from nine rasas, the last of which is the "peaceable rasa." Dhananjaya maintains that the peaceable rasa is the ground on which all the other rasas play. Peace of mind is, to him, an experience of the "permanent state" (sthayin bhava) that produces tranquillity, eliminates cravings for the pleasures of the senses, and promotes repose in the knowledge of the absolute reality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LIGHT ON RELATIONSHIPS by Hart de Fouw, Robert Edwin Svoboda. Copyright © 2000 Hart de Fouw and Robert Edwin Svoboda. Excerpted by permission of Samuel Weiser, Inc..
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