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Every one of us has forgotten that we're an immortal being
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That's what happens when we come here. I call it I am amnesia
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We forget who I am. Yoga is particularly concerned with renewing our understanding of who we really are
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And the first thing we learn is aham brahmasmi. I am an immortal being
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I cannot die. So the first learning in yoga is you can't die
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You start from there. Therefore you excuse yourself from time. Now that doesn't mean time is gone
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It only means you no longer think of yourself as a byproduct of time or a byproduct of prakriti
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the world of matter. So instead you see yourself on a being as a being on a long journey inside of a place
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that is always changing. So your question is about that changeability. It's about kala
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It's about how does time affect the journey. And this is where jyotish comes in
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Now imagine that this is not us. It's our body. We already know it has different departments
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We know it has a stomach and a heart and a spleen and a liver
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So what if those are departments of our being? Make sense? I can talk to my spleen with doing one thing and to my liver with another
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That's what medicine's all about. So what if our karma is something that we made in past that we've forgotten
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So I call it amnesia. We've forgotten who I am. We don't remember what we did in a previous life
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So jyotish is the UPS. You may not have that where you are
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Here it's called universal parcel system. I call it the universal parcel system because every one of us ordered something from the
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life catalog in a previous life. And that is on its way to us and the truck may just be outside your door to deliver a
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package of karma that you created previously. So jyotish on one level is all about the delivery schedule of our karma
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Now scale that up and right now where I live, we had snow last night
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We had about two inches of snow. This morning it's gone because we're on the edge of Kali Yuga or winter
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Kali Yuga and Satya Yuga and Treta Yuga and Dwapara Yuga, the Yugas are just the seasons
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of the larger cosmos having a change of seasonal experience. So the word that we need in English is entropy
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In autumn, all the leaves fall off the trees where we live here because we have noticeable seasons
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So autumn signals winter is coming. Winter is not the time to go sunbathing
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Winter is more difficult. In winter you have to do this and do this and do this
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So Kali Yuga is the cosmic winter. Wow. It's the first time I hear this kind of explanation. Amazing
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So therefore, it's not bothering everyone the same, but it means there's a general entropy
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that means things fall apart easier in Kali Yuga. But they blossom wonderfully in Satya Yuga
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And so the Yuga cycles as they decline and as it's the entropy of time
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Of course, Kali Yuga is 432,000 years long. And then we double that to get to the next Yuga and add 432 again to get to the next one
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So this means that one of the things that comes to us as we become yogis is a long view
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of time. What the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and modern science have in
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common is they still only believe in one lifetime. So you could divide the world into two camps, only one lifetime, very frightened or cynical
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And many, many, many, many, many, many, many lifetimes. So the way I like to say it is there's born again Christians, and then there's born again
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and again and again and again and again Hindus. So astrology is the weather report
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And it goes on one scale, depending upon the planet you're on and then where on the planet
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you are. And then the social history of the place and whether it's in an upswing or a downswing
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in its particular identity. So think of it another way. Countries have birth charts
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So a country comes into being at a certain time. So in a way, the moment it came into being is its birth chart and tell some of its karma
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Then the people living inside the country are inside the karma of the country
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They don't all agree, but they're being dragged along. If there's a war, they get dragged along
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They didn't want the war, but they're still in the war. So it's a kind of winter for them
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So it's a language, all of this, of talking about time in a way that our civilizations
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have never even considered talking about it. That's one of the things that makes the Vedic yogic culture so interesting, is they have
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a very long view of time. And here's the most interesting thing
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The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great historical texts, have astronomical
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information that proves they happened 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago
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So there's actual proof in the texts because the texts describe what the stars were at
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a particular moment, and that tells you exactly what time in history it was
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And that is one of the characteristics that's only true in the Vedas
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The Bible doesn't have it, the Koran doesn't have it, Torah doesn't have it, none of the
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ancient texts have it, no other civilization has it. And that's because no one else has a language as perfect as Sanskrit
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So perfection in passing on knowledge, mathematics and astronomy, are all part of the knowledge
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that India had for 12,000, 15,000, actually many more years. But provably the Ramayana was written 12,000 years ago, or it happened 12,000 years ago
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According to astrological events? No. Well, according to astronomical events. Astronomy, sorry, astronomical, yes
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Yeah, because astrological could be subjective. Astronomical means in the Ramayana there's a description of the sky, and with computers
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we can backdate to 12,000 years ago. It's science, it's not conjecture, it's not faith, it's not religion, it's science
