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Good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Progressive Channel. Today we will talk about how Astrology, the Vedic Astrology,

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good as it may be as a tool, it's just a tool, an esoteric tool, a magical tool if you want to ask or go in that direction with me.

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It's a magical tool which can help you activate certain areas of life which is what I focus on rather than readings we just give a predictive analysis of what events might happen based on the planetary movement.

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Chart reading is you have to remember this and go carefully with this. In any form of Astrology, Western or Vedic that you choose to engage with you need to understand that that was just a snapshot of the heavens in the zodiac at the time of your birth.

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Nothing more. Remember this, very important to remember this. Since then a lot has moved in your chart in terms of planetary arrangements, in terms of what is called as Mahadasha or major periods as per Vedic Astrology.

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A lot has moved in the system, a lot has moved on the planet, a lot has moved on the planetary energies and we are in the shift since quite a lot of time now, since 1987.

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So we have to remember that the snapshot is not just the governing principle of who you are or you cannot shift any of that.

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Now I'll come at this from a different angle today here. So just follow this logic. This is also again as per the Vedic texts, more like Upanishads rather than the Vedas themselves.

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See the Vedas just speak of absolute energies but the Upanishads speak more in terms of the self, the self, what is the soul or the self? They call it more like the self. They don't give it an individuated form of consciousness like a soul, like a thing, like something is there.

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You are actually, if you want to call it that, a no thing. It's not a thing. It's not a substance. Okay. So I'll give it to you in this perspective.

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One of the things we have to examine one piece at a time otherwise it gets really jumbled. The soul or the perceiver or the receiver of all experience, whatever you are experiencing in life, the perceiver is not the perceived.

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Whatever you are perceiving or whatever you are seeing, not the physical eyes, we are talking about the observational eyes inside you. Whatever you are perceiving is not you.

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For example, if you are looking at your hand, you are looking at your hand. The hand is not you. It is the hand.

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If you are examining your emotion or if you are feeling down or depressed or anything like that, that is not you. If you are seeing the world outside, that is not you.

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For the simple understanding that the ancients came across was whatever the perceiver is perceiving, it cannot be that because it is the point of perception.

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The point of perception is separate from what is being perceived itself. Doesn't matter if it's your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, whatever you think your life is, whatever you think your body is, whatever you think your job is or the money is,

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or all the beliefs that you have been indoctrinated into. Remember, it's just programming an indoctrination and all the fear based ideas that we have been fed with a very healthy diet over centuries.

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It's just what it is. You are perceiving all of this stuff. You can perceive your own fears, you can perceive your guilt, you can perceive your doubts, you can perceive your own personality, you can perceive all these things.

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But that is not you. You are the one who is the point of perception. Your soul is the point of perception. It is the perceiver. The perceiver is not to perceive. You can perceive everything. That's a pure point of awareness, your soul.

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The pure point of awareness does not have any other aspect to it other than it perceiving everything else. See what I mean? You are perceiving everything. You will continue to perceive everything.

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It doesn't matter if you are in your dream state while sleeping or when you get up and you start engaging in a conscious way from the time you wake up in the morning. You start perceiving all these things.

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But that isn't you. You are just perceiving it. You are perceiving the energies of everything around and you are translating that perception as an experience in an embodied way. You are an embodied soul. You are in a physical body right now listening to this podcast somewhere.

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So that point of perception will continue to remain until you leave the body right for everyone. This is common for everyone.

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But you have to disengage from the fact that you are not in what is being perceived. You are perceiving it. You are definitely not the one who is part of it.

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You can identify with it. You can identify with I am this or I am that. I am a Hindu or I am a Christian or I am a Buddhist or I am a monk or I am an engineer or I am a doctor. I am this I am that.

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You can go on endlessly about I am a fill in the blanks whatever you want to put there. I am a dash whatever you want to put in the fill in the blanks. You can keep doing this exercise endlessly.

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Now we talked about the soul as the perceiver. That's one of the attributes of the soul energy itself that the ancients give us through the Upanishads. They say the self is the absolute point of perceiver.

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It is the point of perceiver. It is the receiver of all experience that has ever happened not just in this lifetime but all lifetimes put together. Not just this planet but maybe other planets that you have been on. Everything is the point of perception. It is the receiver of experience.

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All your experiences doesn't matter how you qualify them as good or bad or hard or easy. It has been just a point of perception that somebody is receiving this whole experience that I am experiencing in this body.

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That is the summary of experiences. That is what is gained in life. The real gain is the experience of your life itself. It is gained through the perception of experiences.

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You might be in joy, you might be in sadness, you might be in grief, you might be angry, you might be feeling very high or on something. But it is just a point of perception received as an experience. That's what the soul is.

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The second point which we talked of briefly was identification. They talk about identification. This is another quality of the soul. For example, if you are feeling angry, you say I am angry today or I am angry at this situation or I am angry at such and such a person.

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You are identifying with that feeling. You are identifying with that particular emotion. This is another quality that the ancients say, the Upanishads is the capacity of the soul to identify with something.

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You identify strongly with your body or your face or your good looks or your bad looks or your clothes or your culture or the knowledge you have or whatever it is that you want to eat, some good food, a good piece of music, some art and crafts, any number of things that you want to do that you are experiencing, you can identify with it.

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It means the soul can feel as if it is merged with the other. If you want to go down the astrological route, this is that seventh aspect we talked of. Every planet or point has the seventh aspect. It looks at its opposite aspect, the opposite side.

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The diagonally opposite side of every house is the opposite of it. This is where the identification comes into play. You can identify this as another quality of the soul. If you keep staring at a flower, you can identify very strongly with that flower.

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What happens with identification? What is learned? Why are we identifying with so many things? Let it be the body, let it be the desire for this and this. Desire is actually a quality of identification. You are identifying with one thing or the other.

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So the process of identification is another quality of the soul. Just like pure awareness, the point of all reception of all experience is one quality of the soul. Another quality is to go out there seemingly. It doesn't need to go out anywhere. This whole thing is an illusion.

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It is trying to embrace everything within identification. This is another way that the soul learns by identifying as something. Let's say a person strongly identifies as being a doctor this lifetime.

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Being a doctor and going and helping patients and curing patients of all illnesses is all that he or she knows this lifetime. Just taking an example here. The person strongly identifies who are you, Mr. So and So or Mrs. So and So or Mrs. So and So.

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I am a doctor and this is what I do. This is what I am about. This is my life. This is my soul's purpose. The person can feel a strong identification with whatever they are doing. This is another quality of the soul.

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It can identify. It may continue in its last breath as an identified personality, outer personality which thinks it's a doctor. Well, in the absolute sense it is not.

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But it played out that particular role in that lifetime as identified, strongly identified. Now they can be as you can imagine, they can be strong or weak identification. Some people have a weaker identification with the role, but they are strongly identified in something else.

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It's still identification. They say I'm not too attached to my job, but I'm attached to my children, for example. I care a lot about their children, about my children, their education, what they are doing, how they grow up as individuals, personalities, etc.

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That's another form of identification. So I want you to just take away and reflect on these two things. These are told in the Upanishads and the texts as two qualities of the soul.

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If you are to tell what are the qualities of the soul, first is it is the point of all reception of all experience. All your life experiences, doesn't matter how you qualify them, they land inside the soul as a life experience.

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This particular life now, you're just experiencing them. You're just experiencing them as an experience. I do this and this happened or I did such and such or I felt such and such. It may be a whole range of emotions.

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It may be a whole range of observations which is derived out of life experience. Why I'm stressing on experience is because many people are starting to think that life is can be engaged with through the virtual media like social media, like where you are listening to this podcast,

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or it can be engaged with through the medium of just emotions which is kind of being programmed right now, very fear based programming. Oh, there's doom and gloom. Oh, there is such and such.

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No, that is just a very narrow lens of perception. Nothing else, nothing more. So you need to disengage from this kind of perceptivity and think that life is actually your experience of it. How you choose to make your experiences pretty individual.

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Suppose you decided to keep your phone in your house, walk out of the house and just enjoy a tree, just enjoy the birds flying, or just enjoy the sky, or just enjoy the sun, looking at the sun.

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Or any number of things, children playing on the grass. This is how you chose, your will power is absolute. So you chose to actually disengage with everything and take your experience to where it feels good to you.

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Remember, this is the point of reception of all experience. You are consciously taking your soul to engage with something because the soul here has actually come out to play in the form of identification with something.

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Something you identify with something, it immediately goes out. It's a natural inclination of the soul to go out there and identify with stuff on a daily basis.

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Sometimes you're just doing it as a routine. I get up, I make breakfast, I make lunch, dinner, eat, go to bed and do everything else in between. Whatever I feel like doing it that day.

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It may be a repetition of the same thing for 10, 15, 20, 25, 75 years, or it may be that I'm not engaging with anything, but I just feel like chilling and watching Netflix.

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All of this are still your choices. The choices the soul makes, that is the conscious you. That's where you have the power and the control of your own life, of your own life experience on a daily basis.

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Another thing is what you want to identify with. Even that can be a conscious selection. It's all about conscious selection, folks.

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So conscious selection in these two ways. Understand that you can perceive everything as neutral. You take, you know that everything is being perceived and you are the perceiver of things.

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Your own thoughts, feelings, emotions, your own actions, your own drives, everything can be perceived.

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Even the ascendant, if you want to go down the Vedic Astrology route, is just a point of perception. Whether you take Mars as Aries or Mars as Scorpio or Jupiter as Pisces or Jupiter as Sagittarius, it is just a point of perception.

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It is not everything. There are many planets, including outer planets. It is not everything. It is just a point of perception. You can choose to stand in a particular place and relatively examine whatever is going around you.

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That's the point of perception. It can even tie into quantum physics and theory of relativity. It depends upon where you stand. What is being perceived depends upon where you have positioned yourself.

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That's one point. Secondly, what you are identifying with. You can shift that as well. You can consciously, once you perceive, you can shift your point of perception to identify with something that you want to do today.

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If you choose to identify saying that I want to do this and this today, I do not want to engage with that or identify with this person or this activity or this hobby.

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I want to do something else today. I want to try out something else. That's your freedom. That's where the real freedom lies for every individual every day.

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Not going into too much esoterics there, but this is the essence. Two essences I wanted to share with you today. One is you are just a point of perception or receiver.

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Everything that you are perceiving, if you can separate yourself for a second from your mind, from your emotions, you are perceiving everything. You are just pure awareness. That's one of your qualities.

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Second, you can identify with anything. You can feel as if seemingly you are going out and looking at that stuff. If you are creating a piece of painting, you can become so identified with it and you can get absorbed in it seemingly.

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This is the power of the soul. It can identify and get absorbed with anything. It can be a person. It can be an abstract art. It can be taking care of gardens and flowers. It can be anything at all. Any activity, any place, any person, anything.

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Take this away and reflect on this today. Take care and I will see you in the next one. Meanwhile, be safe and happy.