Many of you are Tarot enthusiasts and you are aware that the belt around the waist of the Fool represents the illusion of time by symbolizing the Zodiac.

Time is a man-made thing, a symbol to make us comfortable to explain that things seem to occur one after another in an apparent linear sequence. To explain this observed phenomenon we have invented time. Based on our heart beat the quartz clocks everywhere tick away, giving us the impression that time is flying past, and that we have less of it left than we used to have.

Deepak Chopra has done a lot of thinking about time and space and their apparent reality. He received quite a shock when he was persuaded by an enthusiastic friend to have his natal chart read, Southern Indian fashion.

Deepak is a modern Indian. He has pointed out in his books that the spiritual people he met here were all Westerners. The Indian students were eager to get into the modern materialistic world of drinking, partying and dancing. They wanted to leave their ancient customs behind. So Deepak didn’t go to readers or attend seminars on meditation and such, and only the persistence of a friend got him to endure the nonsense of an Indian Jyotish astrological reading, with a special twist.

He was, to say the least, very astonished. And his experience should produce several questions for you to deal with. So I relate it for you.

I have many Indian friends and they all consult Vedic astrologers to find the best times to do anything. Vedic astrology is very event oriented. A Vedic astrologer will advise you on when to built a house, start a business, get married, go on a long journey and so on. It is a very precise art that gives you dates and locations, unlike the more psychologically based work of Western astrologers.

But the reading that Deepak had was from a priest from Southern India. This priest had a large collection of birth charts made up hundreds of years ago, and inscribed on bark pieces called Nadi.

To put it another way, someone sat down hundreds of years before this century and wrote out the complete life chart of people not yet born. These Nadis are found all over India, and it’s only by ‘chance’ that you come across someone who has yours.

The priest happened to have a whole sheaf of Nadis that applied to Deepak so his friend persuaded him to give up being a modern Indian for a while and check it out. An old man translated into Hindi what the priest was reading aloud in Tamil.

Now Nadis can deal with centuries and overlap so Deepak was not surprised when the first two did not seem to relate to him at all. But by the third Nadi the priest was chanting his exact date of birth, the names of his parents, Deepak’s name, his wife’s name, the number and names of his children, the exact date of his father’s death, and the name of his father and mother.

There was an apparent error which transpired to clinch the verity of the reading. The priest said that his mother’s name was Suchinta. He knew that his mother’s name was Pushpa. Since everything else was so spot on Deepak took a break and phoned his mother. She was very surprised and told him that her name had indeed been Suchinta, but an uncle pointed out that it rhymed with the Hindu word for ‘sad’ and suggested that it was changed. She became Pushpa when she was three.

No one in the family had ever mentioned this event so the priest wasn’t reading the mind or memory of Deepak. Now that priest had spent nearly all his life in a temple in Southern India. Neither he nor the old translator knew who Deepak was.

In ordinary astrology the astrologer takes down your birth data and calculates, transcribes and interprets your chart. But not in this kind of astrology. You go to the Nadi reader’s house or temple. He takes your thumb print and goes to see if your stuff is among the ancient Nadis in his collection. Then he pulls out yours and reads from a centuries old document written on polished bark.

The neat thing for metaphysicians is that the Nadi reader doesn’t have to have millions of Nadis. He only needs the ones of those who will one day show up and ask for a reading.

Deepak listened with great attention as the priest went through one of his previous lives in Southern India and showed how things he did then affected his current incarnation. The Nadi reader also did what other astrologers don’t or can’t do. He asked Deepak if he wanted to know the day of his death. Deepak did ask for it. And that little bit of knowledge of course has changed his attitude about many things. Most people don’t want to know.

Some of you may remember in The Way of Wyrd how Wulf offered to tell Brand the day and manner of his death. Brand freaked out. What would you do?

It was pretty clear from the very ancient Nadi that someone centuries ago knew Deepak better than he knew himself. Maybe you have a Nadi somewhere too. But the person who inscribed that piece of polished bark saw the pattern of energy that in this century we call Deepak Chopra. But it is also clear that the essential pattern of energy is not the body or the mind of Deepak Chopra, but what I have to call the essence, the witness of all those lives, and this one.

Somebody, centuries ago looked inside himself and saw a tiny ripple in the ocean of consciousness called Deepak. It must be possible for you to do the same if you can stop identifying with the current body and memories. It’s interesting that a great teacher could be quoted as saying, “I am the Light of the World.” Jyotish is Hindi for light. And one of my conference questions to people who want to contact their inner Self is "Visualize a rose. Where does the light come from that illuminated the rose?"

Where it comes from is the place where all lives originate. Ponder this story and what it means about the fact that you are actually timeless.

Blessings, Douglas Buchanan #90, Volume 7