Jyotisha, the Eyes of the Vedas

The very Vedas are alive.

Manifold, breathing,and human-like, they have limbs, called vedanga, by which we may know Brahma consciousness.

One of the Vedas’ limbs, the eyes, is Jyotisha, what we call astrology, says the Mundaka Upanisad in Ch. 1. 1.

What could this mean?

I invite you to consider: what are our eyes?

For many people, the first idea about the eyes predates ancient Greek literature: “The eyes are the window to the soul.”

Certainly, the soul can be seen in a chart.

The Bible tells us more, “The light of the body is the eye: If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light,” in Matthew, verses 6.22 – 6.23.

So too, the light of the Vedas is Jyotisha.

In fact, the word Jyotisha in direct translation is “jyoti” plus “isha”, “light” plus “divinity”, the divinity of light.

“If thine eye be single,” that is, if your third eye is strong, the divinity of light of Jyotisha will fill you with great spiritual vision.

Through Jyotisha, we can also materially see factual bits and pieces of ourselves just as we look at parts of ourselves (but never the whole) with our actual eyes.

The viewing of our own chart similarly shines light on certain parts of the microcosm which we ourselves are.

Our eyes also help us see outside of ourselves, radially out into and unifying the vast macrocosm.

Our eyes recognize another, identify another, discern another as a whole, telling us movement and other attributes, beyond touch, sound, taste and smell but informing them.

Seeing is space and fire. All sattva. Pure light.

Albert Einstein once said, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

Jyotisha resolves this separateness, this “optical delusion”, for in Jyotisha, any birth chart includes all things.

In the human eye, the higher dimensional world is flattened onto the surface of the curved retina, where light is converted to electrical impulses.

In a similar way, all reality of a moment and place in space-time is flattened onto the two-dimensional chart, macrocosm within microcosm, containing all people, places, things and their relationships within the image, the crystal, of any living being.

Finally, neurologists tell us that what we see is actually happening within us, within the vast and beautiful circuitry of that very thing which we think of as the essential us, our brains.

So too, full reality as seen in the chart actually happens within the rhyme and rhythm, the name and form, of the Vedas themselves, for Jyotisha is the eyes of the Vedas.

Renay Oshop

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