from GOD/GODDESS the Astrologer, by Jeffrey Armstrong

Free Will, Action & Ultimate Destination

So far, we have been focused upon the interconnected areas of knowledge which must be understood in order to grasp the process of cause and effect as it delivers reactions to the souls in response to their actions. First of all, there is an individual who is asking the question. That is the atma, or individual soul. Another term for that being is sakshi, which means witness. Each of us is the consciousness, or observer, of all the realities that appear both outside is and within. In the final analysis, no one other than our self can validate what we are experiencing.

The Three Components of Perception
Another way to say the same thing is that there are three components to all perception. The first is that which we are observing, which somehow has a distinct and perceivable existence of its own. The second are the instruments with which we perceive. This could be the sense of our body and any instruments through which we perceive, or it could be internal faculties of the mind and intellect. The third component of perception is ourself as the observer. We have experienced the realms of waking, dreaming and deep sleep but at all times it was we, the atma, witnessing these events.

Paramatma Is the Ultimate Witness
According to the Vedas, there is one addition witness to all these experiences and realities. That consciousness, which is simultaneously present as a witness within all beings and thus aware of all perceptions, is the Supreme atma, or Paramatma. This is God in the capacity of the all-pervading maintainer of life. In other words, just as our individual consciousness pervades our own body and is aware of its sensory experiences, so God's awareness pervades every aspect of matter and is fully aware of all actions and perceptions experienced by each of us. This is happening all at once, simultaneously. It is, of course, inconceivable to us that any intelligence could sustain so many simultaneous and distinct tracks of observation. The Vedas tell us that this is just one manifestation of God's total being--Paramatma. God, as the all-pervading intelligent witness, is situated in our heart as a constant companion. It is we who become distracted by the outer realm of matter and lose track of our potential for relationship with Paramatma.

The Two Realms Within God's Being
This forgetfulness is the reason for Vedic knowledge. In the simplest of terms, imagine that there are two realms within the totality of God's being. One is a realm of eternal existence that is not subject to material transformation. In this realm there is no time or space and none of the five elements [ether, air, fire, water, earth] or three gunas [creation, maintenance, entropy]. Imagine for a moment that we come from an area within the totality of God's being where everything is fully conscious andnot subject to birth, death, old age or disease. All the atmas there are fully aware of their direct relationship with God. For the moment, think of this realm of the front of God. Think of it as our original home, our place of origin.
Next, picture the possibility of a second area within the totality of God's being which is a large mass of unconscious energy. Think of that place as the back of God. That energy is fundamentally different than us in nature because it does not have consciousness. According to the Vedas, we as individual atmas have the freedom to journey into either of these two realms of God's being. Our dilemma is that we are small bits of eternal consciousness and being that can be overwhelmed and covered over by the vast material energy. For the purposes of our discussion, let's call these two distinctions the spiritual world and the material world. We are currently living in the material world, which blocks our view of the spiritual world. Here we only see matter and are surrounded by its dull and unconscious energy. It is the realm of matter in which the five elements, three gunas, Devas, karma, time, space and reincarnation exist.
Souls can live in either the spiritual world or the material world. In order to enter the material world, the atma has to be given a material body for its play here. The density of that matter gives us a kind of amnesia, or forgetfulness, of our original home and true spiritual nature. Under that forgetfulness we act in various ways which generate reaction, or karma. The Devas keep track of those reactions and award them to us in successive births. The continuous process of being and dying and traveling from one place to another in the material universes is called reincarnation. The Sanskrit word for this process is samsara, or the cycle of repeated birth and death. The implication is that once that atma enters matter, it becomes stuck within its realms of experience. In order to leave the material experience behind, the soul must voluntarily choose to return to the spiritua world.
If we back up and see this process in slow motion, picture the unlimited, innumerable, eternal atmas as they choose to venture into the material world from their original home in the spiritual world. You might well ask why they would venture forth into the material energy and subject themselves to such a difficult process. It certainly is a mystery that is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say for now that something in their own eternal nature makes exploring matter one of the options of complete freedom of self-expression. They choose freely and are then captured by the forces of the material Nature.
This is a little like the birth process. Once a being is inside the mother, barring abortion, a series of automatic material processes occur as Nature constructs a body out of the inert principles of matter. Picture the atmas as travelers about to undertake a great journey into another unuiverse. It is as if they are space travelers flying to another galaxy. Before they arrive in their new home, two things will happen: they will be given a spacesuit (a material body) and they will get amnesia to forget where they were previously.

Forgetfulness of Our Original Nature Is called the Gap
In the Vedas, forgetfulness of our original self-nature is called the gap. According to Ayurvedic medicine, that gap of forgetfulness of our true origin is incorporated into the structure of our mind. From that point onward until we are reawakened, we experience our self as a separated individual, disconnected from God and others by the boundary of our material body. By the time we grow out of the fog of birth and childhood, we grow up into what modern pholosophy calls an "existential dilemma." We perceive ourselves as individuals separated fromall other individuals and at war with the laws of Nature that surround us.
In that situation, we use our free will to choose a path of action. We live, eat, think, mate and act as we wish. The trouble is the laws of Nature in the matter that surrounds us are precise and unforgiving in their response to our ignorance. According to Ayurvedic medicine, this is the source of all disease. Because of the gap and our ignorance of natural law, we use our free will to act contrary to the unwritten laws of matter. We then suffer the consequences of our unbalance as disease and suffering.
This brings us to another much-misunderstood Vedic concept, the guru. For a moment, think in terms of light and dark. Picture the spiritual world as a realm of light and the material world as a realm of darkness. You can easily experience this by observing that as soon as the Sun is gone, the world is plunged into darkness. In Sanskrit, the unconscious dark material energy is called the gu (which certainly appears to the atma as a sort of sticky goo). The word ru means who removes. Therefore, a literal definition of guru is that person who removes the darkness of material self-identification and leads the atma back to its original home in the spiritual world. In the Vedas, there is no sectarian or cultish implication in the idea of guru. You could say that anyone who knows the way back out of matter to the eternal spiritual realm is a guru. Whoever removes your darkness is a guru. The prefix gu is also present in the gunas, which are the ropes of matter or goo that binds the atma to the realm of matter.

The Four Ultimate Destinations
In order to better understand the purpose of the Vedas and Vedic astrology, the actions of the Devas and the meaning of free will, it is necessary to understand the soul's ultimate destination. You could say that representatives of any path of enlightenment are travel agents who through their teachings are selling a travel package. At their conclusion, every path of action or thought leads to a destination of some kind.
From where we stand in the midst of our journey, we are always trying to decide where to go next. Wherever you are right now, you cannot stay there. Material nature will not allow it. To be human is to have an acute sense of the fact that we are going to be forced to move on. Similarly, you cannot take anything with you. Even the wealthiest will leave this world naked. Day-to-day life is a series of choices about where to go and what to do next. If you make a wrong choice, danger or death can easily be the result. Every action is based on the belief or assumption that we are moving towards a destination. Therefore, if you can understand the stated or tacit destination of a spiritual teaching, you can understand where the travel agent is proposing to take you.

The First Destination Is Matter
There are far fewer ultimate destinations than there are travel agents. In order to explain the Vedic path and place of Vedic astrology in that vision, I will identify four main destinations. If you examine all the traditions of the world learning carefully, it is certain you will find one of these four destinations as the "bottom line" if where you are going as an adherent of any one. The first conclusion is that we are matter. In this view there is no other realm than the one we are in and we are merely a product of matter. There is no God, nor is there another destination. There is no soul and no self other than the body. When we die, we die. There is no other birth or other destination for the self. There is no purpose in life other than the material experiences we are having. There is no long term karma or cause and effect. Somehow Nature was the matrix of life from from which it has all randomly and with no higher purpose arisen. This is the origin of that saying, "Life is hard and then you die." In order to escape sectarian religion, modern science has more or less embraced this view. At the end of the day, this is the "no future" travel agent.

The Second Destination Is a Return to Emptiness
The second path is very popular these days. It argues that we have come originally from an empty state of being and somehow have fallen into the material condition. This view accepts reincarnation but denies the reality or value of the individual self. The followers of this path seek to extinguish all forms of individuality and end up in a condition known as Nirvana. Nirvana literally means like blowing out a candle. This path does not accept the existence of a God and views the Devas as products of our imagination. The ultimate purpose of this path is to extinguish all individuality and cease both reincarnation and existence. Their slogan is: "Those who speak don't know and those who know don't speak." Right now we experience ourselves as specific individual beings. One of the great decisions before us is whether to believe that individuality continues. This path is certain that in the future state there will be no individual or soul and no God or Supreme Being. This is the "nothing vacation to nowhere by no one."

The Vedas Are Intelligent Transmissions from Beyond Matter
The next two paths are Vedic in origin but are shared by many traditions in various forms. What they share in common is that both of them are beyond the material world. The previous two views are derived from observation within this world. The empty path is a negation of all that is experienced in this world. It essentially says that matter is bad and nothing, which is beyond matter, is good. But the Vedic tradition and various world religions hold the view that in order to get information of what is beyond matter, it is necessary for an intelligent transmission to reach us from the spiritual world beyond the border of matter. In such a case, the information about what is beyond matter descends in the form of a message or messenger sent from the world of spirit to inform us that we have forgotten the true nature of our being and where we are originally from. In the Vedic tradition, there is more specific information about that transcendental realm than is available in any other written tradition in the world. Due to the antiquity of the Vedas (for they are at least ten thousand years old), that Vedic knowledge has been slowly seeping into all world culture for at least that long. Our Western ego likes to claim these as modern concepts.

The Third Destination Is to Merge our Being with God's
The two Vedic views of our ultimate origin and final destination come from beyond the boundary of matter. That means they are not provable in matter in the same way that a material law can be proven. The third destination is a spiritual condition which is totally free of all the qualities and conditions of matter. It is formless and without qualities. In it, all things are made of the same energy that is called in Sanskrit, Brahman. In colloquial terms, Brahman is often called "the white light."
This is the source of the term enlightenment. To return to our source and enter into the Brahman effulgence is the aspiration of all followers of the Vedas. This is the return of the atma back to the realm of light from which it originally journeyed forth. Those who aim to achieve that state are often heard to say, "Aham brahmasmi, I am a being of undivided spiritual nature, one with all that exists." Since even one implies two, this viewpoint is called is called non-dual. Since everything in the material world is dualistic and temporary, its opposite existence is the eternal realm of bliss and light which is the original source of all. The followers of this path say, "This world is an illusion and Brahman alone is our true nature."

The Fourth Destination Is a Personal Relationship with God
The last of the four paths is an extension of the path of Brahman. Some followers of the Vedas teach that in the liberated stage, after all material energies and qualities have been shed and left behind, there remains a core self which remains an individual being even in the final state of liberation. In other words, in this view the desire and potential for individuation and personal relationship that we experience in the material world is continued in the realm of Brahman. In this view there are realms or worlds of spiritual activity beyond all influences of matter. This stream of Vedic thought aims at re-establishing our lost relationship with God and God is understood to be the Supreme Person. This makes it possible to continue to experience love beyond the loss of our material persona in matter. In this view, being a loving person is part of out eternal nature.

Why Discovering Your Ultimate Destination Is Important
When we remove the layers of matter that cover us, what we find is an eternal person whose individuality is not dependent upon matter. In that liberated condition, the atma enjoys a variety of pleasurable relationships with both God and many other liberated atmas.
At first this all seems distant and unrelated to our daily life. You might think that concepts of the nature of God are a distant reality that is not of immediate conncern to how we live in the material world. But day to day and moment to moment we are selecting our next destination. Human life represents the moment in our personal evolution when we have the opportunity to ask very profound questions about the ultimate purpose of life. No matter how beautiful they are, plants and animals do not face such a great choice in who they can become. Their freedom is severely limited by the body they occupy. But we humans can evolve or devolve profoundly in one single life. And because of the mind-body link, we literally become whatever we think and speak.
This means that even our body is being transformed into our thoughts. This is the real basis of yoga and religion. For this reason, the Vedic culture is dedicated to the process of liberating the atma from the ignorance and bondage that arise from material misconceptions of self. In other words, being human is an opportunity to experience the apex of experience in the material world, and it is also an opportunity to extricate ourselves from the material world. In Sanskrit, that process is called mukti or liberation of the atma from matter so it can return to the spiritua world. The followers of the Veda all agree that we come from a realm of spiritual light where there are no material qualities. If you apply this on a personal basis, it would cause the atma to observe its involvement inmatter with suspicion. Obviously, many atmas are lost here in a state of forgetfulness of their true spiritual identity.
So it is that the Vedic culture adopted the slogan to state a larger cultural purpose, "From darkness lead me to light, from ignorance lead me to knowledge, from death lead me to immortality." Thus the life purpose of a Vedic follower is to act in such a way that they can return to the spiritual world after the death of their body. If all karma, or action and reaction, was finished and our desire was to return from whence we came, then that atma would be released from the cycle of birth and death. The Vedic horoscope is like a star-lit electronic scorecard held up at the moment of birth. In its varying patterns of light are encoded the secrets of that particular atma's progress in the elements and the gunas. At a certain point, the souls become eligible or qualified for liberation through their own efforts at attaining their original Divine consciousness. Another possiblity is that through association with a true guru, they may adopt the path of liberation and burn up huge amounts of karma through a life dedicated to divine service.

The Fourth Destination Is Within and Beyond Brahman
That path of service or devotion is the fourth destination. Those who aspire to return to the third path, or Brahman, do so by discriminating between matter and spirit in a very careful process of separating one's self from matter. The term for this is neti neti, or not this, not this. If we are spirits surrounded by matter, then by observation we can separate our true self from the material coverings. The result would be a detachment from matter and a definition of one's identity as "the same as Brahman." In the vernacular of life, when you hear someone say "we are all one" or "it is all one," they are saying, "we are all Brahman which is not individual and has no form and no distinctions." That philosophy originated in the Vedas. The second path uses a similar methodology, except that their ultimate desination is a void or empty state rather than the positive experience of Brahman. That is the principle different between Buddhism, Jainism and Taoism, which usually promote the empty state, and the Vedic path, which accepts either Brahman or a Personal God.
The fourth destination is actually "within and beyond" Brahman. Remember that the question of destination is as much about where we came from as it is where we are going. Our origin is also our destination. Do you believe we originate in matter, in the void, or in Brahman, and ultimately return to those states with no continuation of our identity or individuality? Does our unique individual self survive the process of death? That is the core question of life. It is at the basis of justice, truth, individuality, freedom, and most of all, love. Love is the exchange of voluntary service between two free and consenting individuals for the purpose of their mutual enjoyment. There is no meaning to love without individuality, equality and freedom. If you take any one of these away, there is no love.
This is the ultimate religious question. There is no doubt that as humans we seek love. The evidence is all around us. It is equally obvious that we fail in expressing love on a regular basis. Which is more real: love or hate, desire or detachment? Those who believe that our ultimate state is dull matter, empty void or the homogenous light of spirit do not ultimately believe in the truth of love or individuality. Their inevitable message is that individuality, desire, emotion and love are states of illusion to be removed from our nature in the process of enlightenment.
To put it more simply, any path that denies the final existence of the individual self and the individuality of God--both as persons--is an impersonal path of attainment. At the end of the journey we will either still be an individual or we will not. We will still be free or not. And we will still be able to express love or not. By definition, we cannot have anything that is not already present in God, from whom we have come. Therefore, according to the other section of Vedic thinkers, within Brahman is another reality that has both form and individuality. The place is the core of the spiritual world. It exists as a realm full of unlimited numbers of individual souls who are fully enlightened and eternal. In that place the Being of God is always visible as a Person with whom all the residents of that world have an eternal loving relationship. In this view, the material world is a temporary reflection of the eternal realm. Trees, flowers, persons, natural beauty of all sorts are reflections of that eternal realm onto the pool of unconscious matter. According to the Vedas, this is the ultimate meaning of "as above, so below."

Love Is Our Ultimate Destination
Of course, here in the material world we doubt that this is so. It is too far beyond the range of our perception and proof. Indeed, it cannot be proven at all in the sense that something material is proven. This vision is the subject of meditation for souls who are deeply searching for the meaning of individuality and love in life. This is a deep and intimate secret of the culture of Bharata that is usually reserved for initiates of the secret mysteries. This knowledge has been given to us in the West at this time in history to compensate for the great dangers that have been unleashed by modern science.
You see, if love is not true and not our ultimate destination, then surely hate, darkness, emptiness, detachment and destruction will prevail. It is like the Devas who through Divine light regulate and maintain our life. If the light and love of God did not sustain them, surely we would be plunged into a terrible darkness and chaos. We as individuals must finally decide for ourselves whether the universe and its laws are supported by an eternal love and continued individuality or whether life is an unkind joke at our expense. If love is not real and eternal, if it is not our ultimate destination, then surely we are deluded in pursuing it in our daily life.

We Are Eternal Beings Who Are Always Individuals
On a daily basis we face the certain reality of cause and effect in this material world. That is not optional. We may believe that an irrational and unloving force or a God has cast us randomly into a cruel world. In such a world, justice is a mockery since no one is equal in power or advantage. Maybe this is a "dog-eat-dog world," or possibly it is the world presented by harsh and unloving religions, or perhaps the opporunity of life in this material world is part of a grand and loving Divine plan. In the latter view, God has given us the amazing gift of freedom to come and go between the realms of matter and spirit. What if we are eternal beings who remain individuals in either the spiritual or the material world?
If so, then the gift and responsibility that comes with that freedom manifests as karmic responsibility within the realm of matter. It also gives us the potential to express love to a degree which approaches the magnitudeof love experienced by God the Person. What if in the final state of our being, we may even become intimate lovers of God, in love with God, just as we have always wished to be in love here on Earth. God the Astrologer is a message from the Vedic culture about how to live our lives. In this world we will always receive karma, or reactions to our past actions. When an inevitable reaction arrives, whether it is pleasing or painful, we should understand that it is always just and loving. In the long run, there is no injustice.

Our Role as Guardians Of The Earth
While we live in the material world, knowledge of five-element science and the gunas is crucial to changing the outcome of our daily life. Our health, relationships, business, in fact all areas of our life will be improved by using sacred scientific knowledge. In the next decades and beyond, profound knowledge of how to live in harmony with Nature will be developed by pioneers who are reviving this ancient wisdom. Acknowledgement of our co-operative relationship with the Devas will bring ecology and our role as guardians of the Earth to a new level of perfection.
Ayurevedic medicine, Martial arts, yoga, tantra, Vedic astrology, Feng Shui, Vastu Shastra and a host of other lifestyle sciences will develop around the five-element model. This user-interface to Nature and an understanding of how food, climate and our body type are intertwined is critical to regaining health and balance. Vedic astrology will assist in marriages, business partnerships, education of children, proper timing of projects and a more universal understanding of ourselves as part of Nature. This is the value of the horoscope. It is a tool of self-analysis far deeper than psychology with which to promote further development of a lifestyle of balance and harmony with material nature. It is the record of our use of free will and is God's gift of freedom and love.
Throughout this book, I have referred to "sacred science" as compared to "material science." In the terminology of the Vedas, the word for that sacred science is tantra. Of course you have heard the word and probably think it has something to do with sexuality. A more correct way to think of tantra is its literal meaning, to weave. In the culture of Bharata, the sacred sciences, or tantras, teach all the many ways that the universe is woven together into a web of Divine creative intelligence. Vedic astrology is a tantra. Ayurveda is a tantra. The science of sexuality and the proper weaving of male and female energies are also a tantra. Tantra also means that which expands and the Cosmos itself.

The Male and Female Principle, Mr. & Mrs. God
According to the Vedic vision, the spiritual world is an eternal divine realm that exists forever with no death or decay. That transcendental world, is our original home. It is a place with all the beauties and joys we experience in this temporary world but there they are always fresh and not subject to duality. This world is reflection of that eternal world into or onto the unconscious material energy. This gives rise to two kinds of Divine knowledge. One branch is tantra. Tantra describes the details of how the material universe is created by both a male and female principle, by Mr. & Mrs. God. Just as we are born in matter as either male or female, so before our appearance, God existed in both a male and a female form.
This is one of the great Vedic secrets, that God is always male and female both beyond and within matter. This universe in which we live is the result of the sexual union of Mother and Father God or God and Goddess. All living beings are descended from that original Mother and Father. In our daily life they are visible before us as the Moon and Sun. They are also manifest as all pair opposite things that combine to make life possible. This divine science of tantra includes the five-element knowledge, the gunas, time, karma, the Devas and the details of how God pervades matter. This sacred material knowledge is meant to empower us to enjoy our life in matter while maintaining a co-operative and healthy relationship with all. Sacred scientific knowledge ensures that we will generate good karma. Good karma translates to happiness and ultimately supports liberation.

The Spiritual World, the Realm of Eternal Existence
The second branch of Divine knowledge is direct knowledge of the nature of life in the spiritual world. At one stage of realization that will consist of an experience of the unified principle of Brahman as the all-encompassing spiritual reality of which we are all composed. At the next level of experience, that undifferentiated spiritual light reveals within its core another place of life where everything is conscious. The Vedas contain extensive and detailed information about that realm of eternal existence. According to that knowledge, God as both male and female is perfectly visible in the spiritual world.
Within that spiritual land that is not matter, another form of individuality is experienced that is the alternative lifestyle to our current use of free will within matter. There we are free in a realm of love, light and beauty that is eternal. Here we live with birth, death, old age and disease while seeing before us the potential of a world of beauty that is always just slightly out of reach. It is a reflection onto the mirror of matter. Thus the Vedas tell us "matter is a dictionary of spirit." Of course, we must learn how to read the book. God the Astrologer is only a small introduction to the great Vedic and tantric wisdom and knowledge. This is not only academic or theoretical knowledge; it is enlightening, empowering and critical to our everyday lives. It is knowledge that has descended to us from beyond matter and it is about how God the Astrologer maintains balance and justice in the cosmos.

The Final Choice
Finally, as atmas, we all have the potential to develop a personal and intimate loving relationship with God. If we don't believe that is so, it will elude us. However, if we desire such a loving relationship, then Paramatma within our heart will be our friend and lover in all circumstances. If we wish, in this very life we can desire to be a Deva and be engaged in direct service to God. If we change our mind from material consciousness and volunteer to serve in that way, God's plan for us will also change. Ultimately, either we will serve the Devas unwillingly as the frustrated and bewildered recipients of our karma or we will volunteer to serve God and co-operate with Natural Law. In that case, God will replace our karma with direct service to God and love, while creating as perfect a life in matter as possible.