The earlier article in this line asked whether a remedy was aimed at the right planet. That question is a real one and it settles a large number of cases. But it is not the first question, and it is not the last one either.
Before it comes a question about the chart. After it comes a question about two people, the one who gave the remedy and the one who is doing it. And underneath all of them sits a question that almost nobody asks, which is what a remedy is supposed to change in the first place.
What follows is my own view, built from the charts I have worked with and from what I have watched happen to people over the years. It is not offered as a rule that settles the matter.
Before the Remedy, a Different Question
When a chart is opened with a remedy in mind, the first thing to look for is not which planet needs help. It is whether remedies are going to do anything for this person at all.
That is a real question and the chart answers it. For some people the chart is open to this kind of intervention and for others it is not, or not yet. Skipping that check and moving straight to prescribing is like a doctor writing out a treatment without first asking whether the patient can take it.
And if the chart does say yes, the next thing it says is which kind. A gemstone, a japa, a vrat, a paath, a daan. These are not interchangeable. They work on different levels of a person, and a chart that calls for one of them may do nothing with another.
Most of the remedies that disappointed people were never put through either of these two checks. The complaint was heard, a planet was named, and something was handed over.
The One Who Gives It
Now the part that I think matters more than any other, and which is almost never discussed in public.
A remedy is not a self acting object. It passes through the hands of the person who gives it, and the state of that person decides a great deal about what arrives at the other end. In my own view, in very nearly every case where a remedy went nowhere, this is where it went nowhere.
I do not mean credentials, and I do not mean years in the field. I mean something closer to what a doctor has. A doctor has learning, which comes from study, and he has practice, which comes from standing in front of thousands of patients until the learning becomes something he can use. In this subject the second half is sadhana, and it is not optional.
There are people who predict quite accurately without it, working purely from the sutras, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is a ceiling to that, and it arrives sooner than those people expect.
Here is the part that surprises students. A person whose sadhana is moving in the right direction does not usually catch the wrong planet, because by then he has begun to work from intuition, and the intuition takes him to the right place.
That sentence is easy to misuse, so let me close the door on it immediately. Intuition is not a licence to skip the chart. A remedy cannot be handed out on a feeling. The astrologer still has to read the chart properly and locate the problem inside it, the ordinary way, with the ordinary work. Sadhana does not replace that. It sits on top of it, and it shows itself in the quality of what the man sees when he looks.
An astrologer who tells you he does not need to study the chart because he simply knows is telling you something about himself, and it is not what he thinks he is telling you.
The One Who Receives It
Now the other side, and this is where I expect some disagreement.
Think of a wound that has to be dressed. The person giving the medicine needs his practice to be sound. But the medicine also has to actually be applied to the wound, by the person who has it, every day, the way he was told.
A great deal of the time that simply does not happen.
Somebody is told to sit and do a japa every day. He finds the same japa playing on the internet and listens to it instead. He has not done what was asked. He has listened to somebody else do it. Those are different acts and only one of them was prescribed.
Somebody else does it on the days he feels like it, leaves it on the days he does not, picks it up again a month later and then wonders why nothing moved.
So my position is this. Whatever maturity the giver of the remedy is required to have, something of the same is required from the one doing it. Not devotion in the abstract. Trust in the person who gave it, enough to actually do the thing as it was given.
And I want to separate this very clearly from a sentence that gets used as an excuse. Being told afterwards that your faith was insufficient is not a diagnosis. Nobody can measure it, which is exactly why it is such a convenient thing to say when something has failed.
What I am describing can be checked, and you can check it yourself without asking anyone. Were you told to sit and recite it daily? Did you sit and recite it daily? There is no judgement hidden in that question and no mystery in it either. You already know the answer.
When a Person Does It Himself
A lot of people never involve an astrologer at all. They hear a mantra somewhere, read about a vrat, and begin.
Two things apply there.
First, the method has to be right. A practice has a form, and the form is not decoration. Done loosely, or half remembered, or picked up from a source that itself did not know, it is not the same practice.
Second, and this is the important one, in that situation the person is himself the sadhak. There is no intermediary. The japa or the vrat works on him in proportion to his own shraddha, and nothing else is carrying it.
That has a consequence worth sitting with. As a person goes further along this road, he is accumulating sadhana of his own, and what he does later works on the strength of what he has already built. The practice is not only acting on the problem. It is acting on him, and he is becoming the reason it works.
There is a caution attached, and I am going to state it plainly even though it will sound alarming, because a warning that is softened until it is comfortable is not a warning.
Starting something on your own, without knowing its method and without knowing whether it suits your chart, is not a harmless act. It does not always land where the person assumed it would, and occasionally it works against him.
This is not a reason to be frightened of practice, and it is certainly not a reason to abandon something that has been quietly helping you for years. It is a reason to stop before beginning something new on your own and ask somebody who knows. That is all the caution asks for.
The Question of Time
There is one more thing and it is the one most likely to be misread, so I will say what it does not mean before I say what it does.
In my experience, a remedy that is capable of working does not reach a person before the time for it has come. When the weight of what is being carried is heavy, there is usually a stretch of wandering first, and during that stretch things are tried and they do not hold.
Now, what that does not mean.
It does not mean sit still and wait for the right year. Food placed in front of a man does not travel into his mouth without his own effort. The time arriving is one thing. Being in a position to use it when it arrives is another, and only effort puts a person in that position.
I would go further, and here I am stating a conviction rather than something I can demonstrate to you. Making no effort is itself an act. It is a karma like any other, and what it tends to do is keep the existing result running without interruption. The man who does nothing is not standing outside the process waiting for it to change. He is feeding it.
And there is a plainer reason to act. Only a person who is already making an effort is in any condition to trust the one who helps him. Trust is not a feeling that descends on an idle man. It is built by people who are already doing something, which is why effort has to come first in the order even when it is not what produces the result.
Why You Cannot Tell in Advance
If what decides the outcome is partly the state of the person giving the remedy, the obvious question is how a seeker is supposed to identify such a person.
The honest answer is that he cannot, not with certainty, and not before the fact. Nothing visible from outside settles it. There is no mark, no title and no number of years that proves it.
You come to know by experience, and experience means having gone through it.
Which leads somewhere people do not expect. If finding the right person is not something that can be arranged by searching harder, then meeting such a person is itself part of what a chart carries. I have seen this often enough to say it out loud. A particular period opens in somebody’s life, and within that period he happens to meet the person through whom the thing finally moves. He did not search better that year. The year was different.
This is not an argument for giving up the search. It is an argument against blaming yourself for the years when the search did not produce anything.
What a Remedy is Supposed to Change
All of which brings me to the thing I actually wanted to say.
Most people judge a remedy by whether the outer situation moved. The marriage happened or it did not. The money came or it did not. That is how it is sold and that is how it is measured, and I think the measure is wrong.
In my understanding, a remedy is meant to change the state of consciousness of the person doing it. Everything else follows from that or does not follow at all. A man whose inner state has not shifted by a hair, but whose situation improved for a season, has not been given a remedy. He has been given a reprieve, and the shape will come back.
And this has an implication which some will find strange. If a person’s state can be changed by being shown something, by being made to see his own life from a place he had not stood in before, then that too is a remedy. Nothing has been worn, nothing has been recited, nothing has been given away. But the thing a remedy is supposed to do has been done.
That is why I do not treat seeing a chart and treating a chart as two separate departments. The purpose of both is the same.
And it is why the first question is never which remedy to try next. It is what is actually being carried, how it reached you, and what it is still asking for. Those answers are in one place. Everything else, including the remedy, comes after them and depends on them.
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