D60 Shashtiamsha — Four Levels of Karma, Past Life & Moola Dasha

Gemstones and Karma

The class opens with a student's question on the karma theory: if a rajasic remedy is used, is the problem only postponed?

• Yes. Whatever bad karma has to be punished must be experienced. Wearing a gemstone in a terrible dasha, or doing a rajasic or tamasic remedy, pushes the suffering to a later dasha or a later life. The law of karma catches up.
• The loan analogy: you owe someone $1,000 and he wants it in two days. You borrow it from a bank at 10% interest to pay him off. You are free of him, but you now owe more.
• Sattvic remedies are the only ones that incur no further karma. Either you go through the suffering taking the name of God, or you do penance — worship in which you punish yourself, such as fasting. That transfers one kind of punishment into another, and it burns the karma.
• It is not a bargain on your terms. One day of fasting is not the equivalent of a big accident. How much has to be suffered is decided by God. What puja and penance can do is convert the suffering into a different form that is more bearable.

"If you say, I will just wear a nice gemstone that makes my hand look beautiful, and that will stop all my suffering, that is only a delusion. That works in the short term, but in the long term you will have to pay for it."

What the astrologer should do

• Some people are in such a crisis that they cannot think of the next life, or even of ten years from now. Anything that makes things better now is acceptable to them. Unless you are in that position you will not understand it.
• So the astrologer may give sattvic remedies and, where it is needed, rajasic ones too. It is a judgment call.
• But state the facts. If you tell someone to wear a pukhraj on such-and-such finger for his job problems, also tell him that this only postpones the problem, and let him decide.
• If the person is not in dire straits and can afford to go through it, do not even mention the gemstone.

---

Four Levels of Karma

A student asks whether the karma of the people around you affects you. It does. Karma works at four levels:

• This is the decreasing order of importance. The individual karma is by far the largest influence.
• The last two are hard to take into account. The first two are easy.
• The joining of karmas is itself predestined. A country with terrible karma is to be struck by an earthquake; unless it is in your karma to mingle with that karma, you will not even be there. Unless it is in your karma to experience another person's karma, you will not marry that person. If you live in a country and share its suffering or its prosperity, that is in your karma.
• So, ideally, one chart shows everything — what kind of spouse, what suffering the spouse gives, which country the native moves to and what its karma does to him.
• In practice no astrologer is perfect. When the charts of the spouse, children and parents are available, look at them too. A terrible dasha in the wife's chart may bring suffering to the husband that you missed in his chart.

"If you are a perfect astrologer, you don't need ten charts. You just need one chart and you are done. But nobody is a perfect astrologer. That's why looking at more factors will make you more accurate."

---

What D-60 Shows

A student asks for Shashtiamsa to be covered. PVNR first sorts out what each chart shows.

• D-10 tells you the environment you work in — political power, technical work, trading. The physical work itself is from the Rasi chart.
• Read from lagna, with houses and house lords and no arudha, the D-60 shows the karma left over from all previous lives, not one life — the karma still sitting on your head, because of which you were born.

"This is the actual karma which is carried out by your physical existence and environment. This particular body and this particular environment are nothing but a vehicle for carrying the karma, for discharging the karma that I have to discharge."

D-60 decides which way a planet's results go

• Someone runs the dasha of the 8th lord of the Rasi chart. You are tempted to say setback, suffering, ill health. But if the Shashtiamsa shows great blessings from past lives due in that planet's dasha, it is probably none of those. He may be working very hard physically and having a great time, because the work is important.
• A planet in the 8th house only means a lot of hard work. It can be tapasya that ends in finding Shiva, or it can be suffering. The results run from one extreme to the other, and Shashtiamsa is the key in deciding which.
• Navamsa is the abilities and the dharma given in this life. Rasi is the body given to discharge that dharma. D-60 is the purpose: to suffer, to inflict suffering, to give others happiness, to show others the way.

Parasara on D-60

• In the list of what is to be seen in each division (body in D-1, wealth in the Hora, siblings in D-3, career in D-10, upasana in D-20 …), Parasara says one thing about D-60: see everything in it. That is his only statement on how to read D-60 for results.

The 9th house of D-60

• A planet in a trine of the Shashtiamsa, and the 9th above all, gives the results of dharma kept in past lives. Dharmo rakshati rakshitah — the dharma you protected in one life protects you in the next.
• Planets connected with the 9th house of D-60 are great blessings. In their dashas things happen easily. Even if there is a lot of trouble, it disappears like clouds.

---

Vimsopaka Bala — the Weight Given to D-60

• Vimsopaka Bala is a compound strength out of 20. A planet is scored in each divisional chart of a varga group, and the scores are added with fixed weightages.
• The groups: Shadvarga (6 charts), Saptavarga (7), Dasavarga (10), Shodasavarga (16). Dasavarga is the group for normal natal horoscopy; Shodasavarga is for royal horoscopy.
• In the Dasavarga group, Shashtiamsa gets more weightage than Rasi. It gets more than Navamsa. It gets more than Rasi and Navamsa combined. That is the importance Parasara gave to it.
• PVNR does not teach the Vimsopaka calculation in this class. He brings it in only to show the weight of D-60.

---

When D-60 May Be Used

• D-60 lagna changes every 2 minutes of birth time — every half degree of the ascendant.
• A birth time good to ±5 minutes gives two possible Navamsa lagnas. In D-60 an error of 6 minutes moves the lagna by three or four signs. With "between 9:30 and 10:00" every one of the 12 signs is possible, where Navamsa has only three candidates.
• Without high confidence that the time is right to within about a minute, D-60 is statistical noise and you end up talking nonsense.
• The chana bhatura analogy: a baby that has just had its first feeding of rice is given mashed rice, not chana bhatura. Rasi, Navamsa, Vimshottari and Narayana Dasha are the simple food. Shashtiamsa and Moola Dasha are for later.
• PVNR himself uses Shashtiamsa in only about 5–10% of the charts he sees, because he rarely has the time to rectify that closely.
• What is acceptable for a learner: analysis where the facts are already known and you explain them from the Shashtiamsa. Predictions from it should wait.

Testing a D-60 lagna

1. Rectify with Rasi, Navamsa, Vimsamsa, D-24 and the other charts first. D-60 is the last step.
2. If that narrows the time to a 3–4 minute window, you have two candidate D-60 lagnas (say Gemini or Cancer).
3. Run the Moola Dasha for each and check the dashas already lived. In this dasha a death-like event was due — did it happen? In that one, occult learning. In that one, very good results at school.
4. Only if the life so far matches, predict from it.

"If you don't rectify the other charts, if you have a 15-minute window, there are 7 possible signs here. You will not be able to do anything with such a Shashtiamsa."

---

Arudha Lagna of D-60 — the Past Life

• The Arudha Lagna of the D-60 has one specific purpose: it shows what the person did in the immediately previous life.
• Take the AL and read the chart from it as if it were a Rasi chart. Was he an engineer, a doctor, a spiritual person? Did he live abroad? What kind of acts did he do?

Why everything is read from AL

• In the Rasi chart we separate lagna from Arudha Lagna — the true existence of the person from his maya. In the Shashtiamsa, for the past life, there is not enough to make those distinctions.

"Everything is one thing when you are looking at the Shashtiamsa. The Arudha Lagna of the Shashtiamsa is everything for the person in the past life."

What use is it

• Lives need not be linked. A learned brahmin may commit a great sin, be born a dog, learn his lesson and be born a man again.
• But what a person did leaves purva-janma vasanas — tendencies from the previous life. Those instincts are deep-rooted and show up in this life.
• If Jupiter, as 2nd and 5th lord, sits in the 10th from the AL of D-60, the person may have been an astrologer; expect some affinity for astrology now.
• Phobias (Part 8) are the tangible check. Vasanas are a less tangible one.
• For the karma of this life, forget the AL. Take the D-60 lagna and see how results came in the dashas and antardashas already lived.

---

Moola Dasha

• Moola means root. Moola Dasha is the dasha used with the Shashtiamsa. It shows the root cause of what happens in this life on account of what was done in past lives — the karma that has to be experienced.
• Vimshottari Dasha shows how the person feels while he experiences that karma. The karma itself is from Moola Dasha.

Reading a Moola Dasha

For the dasha planet, in the D-60 read from lagna:

1. Which Shashtiamsa is it in — what kind of karma does it carry?
2. For that kind of karma, how is one paid back, or how does one reap the benefit?
3. What is the planet's agenda in the chart — lordship, house, dignity, yogas?

• Conjunct planets exchange results, as in the dashas of the Rasi and other charts. With two planets together, each gives the other's results in its own dasha. With more than two there are further rules, taught in an earlier class.
• What the natal Shashtiamsa shows is valid for the whole life. The dasha of a planet is when its results are at their peak.

The computation is not settled

• The software's Moola Dasha is not fully reliable. The classics give subtle rules — take the quadrants, find the strongest, then the strongest of the next set — and do not spell them out. The Maharshis did not write for dummies.
• Until three years before this class Sanjay Rath started the Moola Dasha from the stronger of lagna and Moon only. PVNR argued from the classics that the Sun must be used too when it is the strongest. Sanjay Rath agreed after testing it.
• In ten charts, one or two may need a couple of dashas changed.

"Even Narayana Dasha is not perfect, but it's almost perfect. Vimshottari Dasha is perfect as far as computations go. But in this dasha, the understanding is a little weak."

• So unless the Moola Dasha has worked in the life so far, there is no point predicting from it.

---

D-60 and Astrology as a Science

• PVNR does not accept that astrology, as practised, is a science. It is an art.
• If astrology or part of it is ever established as a science, the Shashtiamsa will have a central place in it.
• What he has taught is the tip of the iceberg. Much is left to be understood and researched, and the class can do that over the next couple of decades.

"When the dasha calculations are accurate and the Shashtiamsa lagna is accurate, this is the one that can give infallible predictions. All other techniques are fallible."

"Once Shashtiamsa is mastered, astrology stands a chance of being a science. Until then, it's a nice art. Let us practise the art, and also spend some of our energy on the growth of the science."