On 7/2/2006 I posted A Matter of Time. in which I described how Deepak Chopra went to see a Vedic astrologer in India who picked out his horoscope written centuries before and stunned him with the accuracy of its current information.

Well, a great many of the kind of people who would read this blog from choice are among those who consider that the year 2012 is a kind of watershed in the history of Earth and those currently living on it. The Hopis and the Mayans and several other sets of people have ancient prophecies in which this date is, to put it bluntly, the end of time.

We know that time is a mental construct of human beings and is relative to all sorts of other things. But along the time line that most people accept, in which one year follows another in a linear fashion, and parallel universes don’t interfere, along that time line the Vedic astrology of India is supreme.

For the benefit of those looking with interest, if not apprehension at the date some 5 years from now I’ll touch on a couple of items from Vedic astrology.

Many people were first introduced to Hindu philosophy, spirituality and yoga by reading the Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda.

Organizations associated with his teachings and his remarkable life are still going strong in America today. One of Yogananda’s followers is today the spiritual teacher Donald Walters. He was thoroughly acquainted with the amazing powers of Yogananda, and the astonishing things that seem to go on in India where the Western materialism still hasn’t crushed spirit.

But, like Deepak Chopra, he was skeptical when a spiritual teacher suggested that he visit a Vedic astrologer in the Punjabi town of Barnala. The astrologer, he was told, owned a copy of a book written a few thousand years ago by an enlightened being named Bhrigu. This book, he was told, contained the horoscope of everybody in the world today. Rather a lot for a rational, though spiritual Westerner to swallow. Deepak was an Indian, and he didn’t believe it himself.

So Walters journeyed to meet Pandit Bhagat Ram, called the keeper of the Book of Bhrigu. The book, as I mentioned in the previous post, was a mass of palm leaves kept between boards and wrapped in cloth for protection.

The Pandit welcomed Walters, whom he had never met, and disappeared into a inner room and returned with the appropriate leaves. It described in detail Walter’s previous life in Persia and said that in this incarnation his name was Kriyananda and he was a teacher, lecturing in spirituality in a foreign country. Kriyananda is a very rare Indian name, and just ‘ happened’ to be the name that Walters was given at his initiation into Kriya Yoga by Yogananda. And yes, he was a teacher of spiritual matters in a foreign country.

Walters passed the leaves to his erudite friends and they agreed that what was reported was what the Sanskrit of the ancient book said.

Now, Deepak Chopra didn’t go back to his astrologer as far as I know, though he did learn the day of his death, which an astrologer would only give you if you asked. But Walters did go back. He was so astonished by the performance that he just had to know if the pandit was a fraud who had learned about him from elsewhere.

He was doing what skeptics do when confronted with an inescapable supernormal fact. They go into mind trips to explain what they don’t understand in terms of what they do understand.

So back he went. The pandit brought out a second reading in which Bhrigu said that he wouldn’t go over Walter’s past lives again because that had been done in the previous reading. This palm leaf said that Walter’s name was James, which was his baptisimal name, and that he had been born in ‘Rumanake’ which was pretty close to Rumania where Walters was actually born, and that he was currently living in a country called Amerika, if you transliterate the Sanskrit. He also told Walters several things about his family that he didn’t know, and that Walters verified on returning to the States.

With permission, Walters took the leaf to Delhi where several Sanskrit scholars independently verified the translation given to him. And the technicians of the Indian National Archives verified that the page had been copied over a century ago, the last time the book had been re-copied. The pandit wasn't a fraud. Neither was Bhrigu.

Now the Book of Bhrigu was first written a few thousand years ago. In case you didn’t pick up on it at once, that’s thousands of years before George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers existed. But the Sanskrit says that Walters lives in Amerika in this incarnation.

Linda Johnsen, whose books on Hinduism and India are absolute gems of their kind, went to India to study tantric yoga, among other matters, and she, with a built in attitude about Western astrology, made a disparaging remark about astrology to her tantric yoga master. He was astonished. “How can you understand tantra unless you know astrology?” was his comment.

He told her about his own enlightened guru who went to test the keeper of the Book of Bhrigu, the same pandit that Walters met. The guru disguised himself as a business man and visited the pandit who ran out of the manuscript room with the leaf in his hand and prostrated himself before the disguised guru. “Either you are an enlightened master, or all my work here is meaningless.” he cried.

So there you have it. With Vedic astrology, which is event oriented, it was possible for astrologers thousands of years ago, with the benefit of the superior Hindu mathematics, to calculate the lives of beings who wouldn’t incarnate for centuries. It does give a little more power to the calculations of the Mayans, whose mathematics and architecture was centuries ahead of the Western world when the Spanish priests burned their books.

For those of you currently interested in what the West regards as astrology I can recommend Linda Johnsen’s book A Thousand Suns, as a very readable and interesting introduction to Vedic astrology.

She gives a pretty stunning set of predictions about G.W.Bush, based on his Vedic natal chart. So even the ones who watch the current political scene with interest could benefit. And it is available on many of the sites that sell used books.

If you were a student of a Vedic astrologer he would ask you to check the planetary configurations when you woke up and then predict what questions your clients would ask you today, and what would the answers be. An astrologer in India is expected to give detailed answers to practical problems, not psychological interpretations of the mythology of your current archetypes.

So, use this posting to contemplate what time means to someone who has already written down detailed descriptions of your last several incarnations, knows the names of your family members and how many children you have, and who you will be next time, if there is a continuation of the current processes after 2012. Now, what does time mean to you? Where do free will and destiny fit into this matrix?

Oh, that reminds me. Google the word Matrix on the web. That is the name of a very experienced provider of astrological software for both Western and Vedic astrology.

Decades ago they taught me how to write my first astrology program in the ancient computer language called Basic. That was in the days when TV's were used as monitors and tape players were the hard drive.

They will send you their catalog which is a treat to see, and amazingly informative.