Moon and Your Psychology

In writing about my first visit to USA in November 1993, Dr. Frawley wrote, "Important Western astrologers came to visit Mr. Rao. Ingrid Naiman, one of the most prominent Western astrologers particularly in the field of medical astrology received a reading from Mr. Rao and said that the predictive accuracy of Hindu system as related by Rao had no real counterpart in Western tropical astrology. Reading her chart he was able to tell amazing details of her life, including the characters and features of her parents".

In the same report Dr. Frawely aslo said, "Yet Rao’s readings were not mere feasts of prediction, he turned out in details the psychological sophistication of Hindu Astrology which Western astrologers and their psychology based interpretation tend to ignore saying the Hindu astrology is of predictive value only. Rao showed how his prediction of events in a person’s life is third stage astrology, as the action is the outcome of an intention and a particular mentality derived through time the circumstances of a person’s life, which a good astrologer should be able to read in the chart before making conclusions about a person’s psychology. In his day long class he showed in detail the psychology operating in the charts of the Nehru family, as he has written in his book on the Nehru Dynasty."

What amazed me in USA and in my other contacts with foreigners who have come to me for consultations is that they insist on being given a psychological reading without first wanting to know about some events of their lives, stage by stage, to help an astrologer see how a person’s life has been shaped from early childhood. Then to see what impact some events in their lives have had on their psyche. More than my reading of the horoscope of Ingrid Naiman it was her fine conversational ability which pleased me so much. In reading her horoscope I started with her childhood and told her that I saw a very well-placed father with technical background and a mother with proficiency and distinction in fine arts. Totally surprised, she told me that her father was a scientist and her mother an opera singer. Since she did not want me to discuss her horoscope in any article or book, I will only mention some other readings of mine which she liked. One was that she had a spell of a job in a foreign country. It was India she said. And during that period she had an extraordinary motor car which must have been the envy of many. It stunned her completely.

When I met Ingrid again in July 1994 she spent two evenings discussing many things, good and bad about the American life, which was sensational in many ways. If she ever wrote about it, she told me, she would be "bumped off".

If Ingrid is such a fine intellectual it is because of her early unbringing under a scientist father and artist mother which, she told me, could never be seen through Western astrology.

If such influences cannot be seen by an astrologer how could he ever claim that he could do psychological reading and then, to cap it, counselling? No American could give me till this day any satisfactory answer. I had another interesting experience when I did on phone the reading of a well-established psychiatrist that he had second wife who was beautiful and perhaps an actress. He was surprised. Finally when I told him that he could run into serious difficulties because of some unethical practice, he was shocked. It was precisely a difficult eighteen month period. That was counselling and given to a well-established and successful psychiatrist, who could not have known what was awaiting him in future.

A question to which I would need a very clear and specific answer from my American friends. is what do they mean by counselling? My own ideas are based on my seeing Indians trained in UK or USA and their techniques are very well known to me. I had the rare advantage of working in my undergraduate days with a woman psychiatrist from Germany when a professor of mine asked me to help her. I rarely felt satisfied with her results. In retrospect I can say that, because at home I saw my own mother do very good counselling after reading the charts of the persons who came to her, and dividing the remedial measures into very clear categories, as given here.

1. Cases where the fears had no foundation because the horoscope revealed no need for any worry.

2. Cases where the fears could be overcome by using common sense and by taking precautions in time.

3. Cases where a little patient waiting would help.

4. Cases where confrontation had better be avoided.

5. Cases where the inevitable should be accepted.

In difficult cases where the inevitability appeared to be imminent or even fatal, she advised remedial spiritual remedies and even used some yantras which she had learnt from classical Brahmins of Andhra Pradesh in her childhood. She never taught them to me because she was instructed by her Brahmin guru not to teach them to anyone. But I saw those very simple measures work very well.

6. Cases where nothing would work at all.

My Mother’s Technique

I have not met any astrologer who made so wide a use of the Moon in a horoscope and the Janma-nakshatra or the birth star.

I have had to learn many dashas other than Vimshottari based on the Janma-nakshatra and experiment with divisional horoscopes (harmonic charts) and Jaimini’s sixteen dashas to search light amidst gloom.

To do it, it takes me many hours of work and not the one hour's guillitone, which people in USA give to their clients. An experienced Hindu astrologer should know that in some cases five minutes will do for counselling and very specific guidance while in other cases it may take many days.

The starting point of this is the examination of the Moon, but that is the starting point only. The psycho-analytical frame in Hindu astrology is very elaborate and exceedingly well defined. It will take a very large book to explain it. But one must understand why the Moon is the pivotal point in the psychology of a man.