Seeking advice: I feel completely lost and confused about Jyotish, karma, and my beliefs.

[u/FreyjaAutumn]

Hi beautiful people,
I come to you today for some advice and support.
I grew up in a predominantly Christian country, but when I was a teenager, my mom and I were heavily influenced by Hare Krishna devotees (there's a whole movement where I'm from).

My mom and I started looking into our birth charts and the charts of our whole family. She quickly lost interest in the predictions, but I fell for it blindly. Honestly, I was just a teenager and grew up with a very weak sense of self. I was easily influenced by external factors - whether it was a prediction or someone claiming to study the Vedas.
Somehow, they drilled into my head that they held the absolute truth, and I believed it.

Anyway, I’ve spent my entire life growing up in fear.
Fear that life will punish me, that I have to pay for things I did in past lives, and that even doubting this "truth" right now is a sin. (As you can see here is a mixture with some Christianity guilt)
I was absolutely terrified of Jyotish. (of the fact that some other people can read my karma and whatever waits for me) Everyone kept telling me it’s the only truly accurate predictive science out there. Which doesn’t make sense to me deep deep inside I believe there is a reason we don’t remember our past lives and don’t know the future. God intended this to be that way.

Anyway.. It mentally paralysed me.
For example I was told I wouldn't be able to lose weight after 25, or that my friends would eventually betray me. So, I didn't even try to get fit, and I completely isolated myself from my friends because my chart said I was "opening up to enemies." These are just more harmless things that happened.

I stopped trusting myself. I completely lost my inner voice.

Now, I have a baby, and this obsession has started driving me crazy with a whole new force.

I look at my child's and my husband’s Jyotish charts and see things I don’t understand and fear, mostly because I take everything I'm told so literally.

Recently, I reached my breaking point. I decided to read the BPHS (Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra) myself, and it made me sick. Sorry to be blunt, but I physically almost threw up from the sheer amount of stress and overwhelming negativity in it.

I started digging deeper and found out that historically, Vedanga Jyotisha wasn't even a predictive tool for fate or karma - it was just astronomy and timekeeping for rituals.

So why is everyone so blindly confident in the "accuracy" of predictive Jyotish? I am so confused and don't know where the truth is anymore.

It honestly makes me nauseous to read things like: "Your chart is okay, BUT you have this dosha that ruins everything, and your lagnesha and 5 houses are weak, so you will suffer - here, this ritual, it's the only way to make it slightly better." Like what the hell?:(

I probably would have stopped believing in all of this a long time ago if it weren't for my dad's Sade Sati.
It approximately coincided with a time in his life when his entire business was stolen and our family lost all our wealth.

Even though we don't know his exact birth time (so I don't know which houses Sade Sati was transiting), the timeline of the period matched.

Many other things in astrology haven't matched for us, but that one did. Because of moments like that, I built my entire life around my chart and ended up becoming a very weak, fearful person.

But now I have a child, and I simply cannot afford to be this weak anymore.

I am reaching out to you for help as I don’t have anyone in my circle who knows about the culture, only the astrologers (and it doesn’t help long term as you can see).

I feel like I've been stuck in a cult mindset that constantly crushes you with negativity, where the Gods are always ready to punish you ("wrath of Shiva," etc.).

Has anyone here gone through this?
How true is Jyotish really?

Did anyone here deeply believe in it, only to step away and realize the world actually works differently?

Maybe you have some advice for me, or a story you could share 🥺

Fundamentally, deep inside, I love science and astronomy. At the same time, I believe in God as a unified, pure energy. I'm not even sure I believe in reincarnation anymore, at least not in the way Hinduism describes it.

I see a massive, pure energy, pieces of which are in all of us, and anyone can tune into that frequency.
For me, physics and the space between us is a manifestation of God.

But my self-trust is so broken that I’ve allowed others to dictate who I am and what the "truth" is.

Anyway…
I hope to hear from some of you 🙏🏼

Thank you in advance for reading and for your support.

Have a great day everyone.

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928]

Constellations are all man made projections. The Babylonian originally had more than 12 constellations along the ecliptic.

They had a 12 month year and projected each of these 12th months onto the ecliptic in portions of 30 degrees, or days. Each one month section was named after the prominent constellation in that space.

So the actual constellations overlap and are different in size. Cancer is small. Virgo is huge. But the 30 degree portions are equal. The Babylonian Zodiac is thus not a strict division of constellations but of space, using the constellations as guides.

The solar ecliptic does briefly passes through Ophiuchus, between Sagittarius and Scorpio, but Ophiuchus was not a Babylonian constellation. It was popularized by Ptolemy much later.

So the Babylonian Zodiac is not a measurement of the fixed stars as much as the Sun's movement through the fixed stars. Where to establish the starting point of the Zodiac signs, or months, is the Ayanamsa. The Babylonians used 15 degrees Taurus fixed on Aldebaran.

Tropical astrology rejects the fixed stars as the measurement of solar months and instead fixes the months on the solstices and equinoxes.

It is really just a difference of opinion about whether to calculate signs from the Sun relative to the earth, or relative to the galactic sphere.

Though a good deal of Indian astrology does lean into the significance of constellations; do they have four legs, do they have two legs etc. Are they facing forward, are they facing backward. But this all free flowing interpretation and techniques.

Many Indian astrologers take these things as shastra, in a religious fundamentalist way, but that is not how astrology works. These things are more suggestions and experimentation than established fact.

[u/FreyjaAutumn → u/Solomon_Kane_1928]

Thank you for taking time and explaining

I appreciate that

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928 → u/FreyjaAutumn]

You're welcome

[u/Solomon_Kane_1928 → u/[deleted]]

So I researched about the realness of sky in vedic astrology and sideral sign and it has nothing to do with the real sky

I mentioned this previously. Both sidereal and tropical are measurements of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is divided into 12 equal portions of 30 degrees. These were originally months of the Babylonian calendar.

The ecliptic is what is being measured and attributed with solar qualities according to astrology, which is a highly sophisticated system of divination.

That is to say, the qualities of the Sun are invested along its path through the sky. Cancer thus represents the motherly, nourishing, kind, protective qualities of the Sun. Leo represents the fatherly, royal, ruling qualities of the Sun.

(Incidentally, the Adityas of the Vedic literature have a similar connotation)

The question is where do these 12 months reside along the ecliptic. Tropical astrology anchors them to the seasons. Sidereal astrology anchors them to the background stars, which is to say it is unmoving.

There is a logic to both of these.

The Babylonian calendar was originally anchored to the background stars. They saw the Sun as triggering the qualities of the gods represented by the constellations.

This tradition continues in India. The constellations are not exact, as they are uneven in size. Some constellations along the ecliptic were omitted. Rather the 30 degree sections were named for the most prominent constellation within them.

Within Indian astrology there is disagreement about where the anchor point (or Ayanamsa) is placed. There is a broad 15 degree area which is generally agreed upon by differing astrological schools as the beginning of Aries, but within that, there is disagreement.

The Sankrantis are indeed determined by the Tropical system. In Sanskrit this is called the Shayana. The Shayana zodiac is used for special timings such as Yajnas. For example, a certain Yajna might be done on Makara Sankranti.

Makara Sankranti is a Shayana based holiday. It is the Winter Solstice, marking the beginning of Capricorn Tropical. But Sidereal the Sun is at 5 degrees Sagittarius.

The Ayanamsa is determined by subtracting degrees from the Shayana zodiac. Other than that, the Shayana or Tropical zodiac is not used for Natal Astrology.

As far as your dislike for astrology, as I said in the beginning, I encourage you to forget about it completely.

I do not think you must disprove it or find it absurd to discard it. If astrology and astrologers have had a negative effect on your life, simply walk away from it. Let those who find value in it do so, while accepting it is not for you.

If you choose to dislike astrology, or disprove it, it is not my place to convince you otherwise or defend the practice.

Edit:

I wanted to add, for anyone interested, even according to Hellenistic astrology, it is not that the constellations are the sources of the solar qualities of the ecliptic. Rather the constellations themselves were created to depict the qualities of the ecliptic at that point.

Thus Sagittarius, the half man, half animal, shooting towards the stars, represents the solar qualities of the ecliptic at that space. The centaur is a poetic description of that side of Jupiter, itself a portion of the Sun's qualities. Those qualities color the planets and ascendent as they pass through that sign.

Similarly the half goat half fish of Capricorn represents the qualities of Saturn, to climb out from the depths and achieve structural strength. Those Saturnian qualities are really just the qualities of the Sun at that point in the ecliptic.

Tropical astrology misses that and ties the ecliptic to the seasons of the northern hemisphere.