Suppose a man has pain in his knee. He sits down and does japa. He has a hawan performed. He is told to put something in running water on a Tuesday. Weeks pass and the knee still hurts.
Nobody should be surprised by this. The world runs on rules. A knee is a joint, and a joint that has worn down or swollen is treated by a doctor who can see what has happened inside it. No amount of chanting will put cartilage back. If you have pain, go and get it treated.
And yet people keep doing this. Not because they are foolish, but because somewhere along the way we took the word remedy and made it mean something it never meant.
What We Mean When We Say, Destiny
Destiny is not a thing. It is not a sealed envelope handed to you at birth. It is a name we give to a situation, and the situation is this: here, nothing more can be done.
That is all the word means. The moment you reach a point where your choice no longer moves anything, you have reached destiny. Before that point, you are still choosing.
People argue about whether destiny exists. The better question is where it begins, because it does not begin in the same place for every person or in every part of the same life.
Neither One Ever Comes Alone
Pure destiny does not exist, and neither does pure free will.
Look at free will first. A man decides to work harder. He can decide that, nobody stops him. But how hard can he actually work? That depends on his body, his mind, how much he can hold, how long he can sit. He did not choose any of that. So even his free choice is standing inside a boundary he never drew. Effort is always effort within capacity, and capacity was given, not chosen.
That is the destiny sitting inside free will.
And the other way round. Even where almost nothing can be changed, something small still can. A night is never completely dark. There is always a little light somewhere, enough to take one step. The same is true of the hardest period in a chart. The size of the step is small, but it is yours.
Destiny Does Not Sit on a Whole Life at Once
This is the part most people get wrong, and it is the part that decides whether a remedy is worth doing at all.
Destiny does not settle over a person like a blanket. It settles area by area. The same man, in the same year, can have one part of his life completely shut and another part wide open. His money may be fixed for the next three years while his health is entirely in his own hands. Or the reverse.
So the question is never whether a man has free will. The question is where he still has it.
A Remedy is Not a Shortcut, It is an Action
Go back to the knee.
The medicine does something to the body. It follows a rule. The right medicine, in the right amount, for the right condition, and the body responds. Change any one of those and it does not work.
A remedy does the same thing to the mind.
A man in pain is not only in pain. He is frightened, he is tired, he has stopped sleeping properly, he has half decided that nothing will help. Japa works on that. It settles the mind. And a settled mind takes the medicine on time, keeps the exercise going, does not give up in the third week, does not run from one doctor to another. The treatment works better because the man is in better condition to receive it.
Notice what has happened here. Nothing supernatural was needed. The remedy did not reach into the knee. It reached the man, and the man did the rest.
This is why I say we have misunderstood the word. Remedy means upaay, a means, something you do. It was never meant to be a substitute for doing.
No remedy gets anyone a job. No remedy produces a wife. No remedy gives a child. No remedy cures a disease. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Three Things Have to Meet
If a remedy is an action with a rule, then like every action it can be done correctly or incorrectly.
Think of firing at a target. You need a round in the weapon. You need to aim. And you need to press the trigger at the right moment. Any one of the three missing and the shot does not land. Nobody calls this a mystery.
A remedy has its own three.
The first is the shraddha of the person doing it. Not belief in the sense of arguing for something, but the quality of attention he brings. A man repeating words while his mind is elsewhere has fired without aiming.
The second is the strength of the person who gave it. This is the part I have to say carefully, because it is the single most abused idea in this whole subject. It is the line every seller of remedies hides behind. When the remedy fails, he says your faith was weak, and when it works, he says his power did it. So let me say plainly that it can be used dishonestly, and that you should be suspicious of anyone who leans on it. I still hold that it matters.
The third is the state of the life itself. There is a time when a thing can be moved and a time when it cannot. The same remedy, done by the same person with the same sincerity, lands in one year and does nothing in another. That is the trigger being pressed at the wrong moment.
Why Remedies Fail
Put those three together and the failures stop being mysterious.
A remedy fails when it is given for a problem that is not a remedy’s problem at all, which is most of the time. It fails when the man is doing it mechanically. It fails when the period of life has closed over that matter and no amount of pressing will open it. And it fails when it was given by someone who had nothing to give.
What it does not do is fail randomly. I have written separately about this in Why Astrology Remedies Do Not Work, and the argument there is the same as the argument here.
The ordinary explanation, that your faith was not strong enough, is the explanation people reach for when they do not want to examine the other three.
So Can a Remedy Change the Dasha
Now the question this article began with.
A dasha is a period. It brings what it brings. If you are running a period that has decided a certain matter, a remedy will not reach in and rewrite it. That part is closed. That is what the word destiny was invented to describe.
But a dasha never decides everything at once either. It closes some things and leaves others open, and it is almost never obvious from the outside which is which. In the part that is still open, what you do decides the result, and there a remedy can do real work, because there the man himself is still the deciding factor.
So the honest answer is neither of the two answers you usually hear. Not everything will change, and not nothing will change. What is already decided stays decided. What is still moving can be moved.
The whole difficulty is telling the two apart.
What a Chart is Actually For
This is where I part company with most of what is written on the subject.
A chart is not a list of remedies. It never was. Its real use is that it shows you where your freedom is still left and where it has run out.
That sounds like a smaller thing than people expect. It is not. A man who knows that a particular matter is closed for the next two years stops throwing money and years at it, and puts both into the area that is open. A man who does not know spends those two years pushing against a door that is not going to move, and then calls it his fate.
The saving is not in the japa. The saving is in knowing where to stand.
And this is the one thing you genuinely cannot work out for yourself. You can read about dashas, and I have written about how a period actually produces its results and why the same mahadasha gives two people different lives. But looking at your own life, you cannot see which part of it is closed right now. Everyone believes the thing they want most is the thing still open.
Do I Give Remedies
Yes, sometimes. Not always. The chart decides, not the client and not me.
When I can see that a matter is still open, and that the man himself is the weak link rather than the situation, then a remedy has something to work on and I will give one. When the matter is closed, I will not give one, because taking money for a remedy that cannot do anything is the same as selling a medicine for a disease the patient does not have.
A consultation that ends without a remedy is not a failed consultation. Often it is the more useful of the two, because the man walks out knowing where not to spend the next two years.
If what you are carrying is not one bad year but the same shape returning again and again, with different people and in different decades, that is a different kind of question and it is read differently. I keep a separate sitting for it, the Karmic and Spiritual Reading, which is meant to give understanding rather than dates.
And if the knee hurts, please go to the doctor first.
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