Who Will I Marry? Steps toward Defining Marriage expectations

Q: OMG, I am getting divorced again -- number five!
Finally it is beginning to dawn on me that I have basically married the same type of man five times. As they say, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly while expecting the results to change. Why do I keep marrying this type of man? And why do I feel so tortured by their disrespect, distrust, disloyalty -- to the point of abuse?
Not only that, every single one of these men have left the relationship owing me a good deal of money. In my marriages I am usually the only working person - the only one steadily working anyway. Even if my guys have a job when I marry then, then stop working soon after. It is weird - usually not their fault - layoff, downsize, company goes bust. Five times: I pay for everything. Three of these guys have walked away with thousands of dollars of my wages.
Can I break out of this cycle?

What do I need to know? I don't want to stop falling in love! I am a strong, educated, attractive, desirable woman! I just want to make better love choices and stop losing money. Help!

A: Namaste:

The Jyotisha viewpoint on your question would be the same as always. Why does one attract a certain profile of partner and a certain framework for dialog in the partnership? Because one holds precise expectations that this is the way intimate relationships are supposed to develop in this life.

Subconscious expectations: bleed-through from past-life trauma

Marriage expectations are subconscious for most people. Luckily, in our era, the vocabulary of social and personal psychology is widely used. We can easily talk about subconscious material rising into consciousness. That vocabulary is very helpful when trying to explain the manifestation of past life causes into the present life material reality. The place to start understanding the present life marriage (s ) is deep in the past. Past-life memories, many of which are traumatic, will linger in the subconscious until a person who meets our unseen, unknown expectations enters the stage. Then the trauma rises up again. It is painful but it is also an opportunity to heal old wounds if marriage is properly understood and the privilege to break old cycles of pain is properly utilized.

Making the deal on the astral plane, before birth

Mind you this person was known to us in past lives and indeed we have a specific contract with them that they should enter our life at a very specific time and place in order to push that subconscious belief into consciousness. However the contracts are brokered on the astral plane before birth and unless one is a high lama of Tibet one is quite unlikely to have the time or the insight to remember having made those deals.

So when the person enters it seems like a surprise. In interpersonal karma, often the feeling of sudden recognition and familiarity is hugely comforting and it feels like one was made to be with this partner. The Other is such a perfect answer to meet so many of one's needs at that time of the connecting. And therefore the feeling is deeply healing. If mixed with a projection of divine qualities upon the Other the experience of reconnecting with someone important from a past life can be labeled 'falling in love'.

Love or Worship? The trap of idolatry in marriage

The original word 'luf' in Old English does not mean affection; it means fame or worship. The falling part is the idolatry of mistakenly placing expectations for fulfillment and completeness upon another human being who cannot possibly have thesedivine healing powers. Falling in love is a sort of beautiful, tragic mistake of projecting divine attributes upon a human being. It is sweet but quickly turns bitter.

However if there is also knowledge of the presence of the authentic divinity in one's life then one will be able to accept human flaws in the human partner and move forward with dignity in the partnership, fulfilling the three-party vow of marriage (husband, wife, and God) .

Falling in love to living in love

Falling in love, that intense subconsciously driven attraction (and subsequent bitter revulsion) can certainly mature into 'being in love' so long as the parties expect to get their deepest and most lasting fulfillment from their relationship to the divine, and are committed to supporting each other in material and emotional life during that process of spiritual growth and enlightenment.

Revealing the Subconscious expectations

Falling in love is a very revealing experience. If one is blessed to fall in love of number of times during a single incarnation, the accumulated data can be quite compelling, pointing to a very specific set of expectations which are made manifest again and again. The type of partner to whom one is attracted will have some standard characteristics.

One's own Father and Mother, reprised in marriage

For a woman interested in men, she will if she is paying attention notice that she is attracted to the type of men who resemble her father and possibly step-father, uncles, and other father-figures such as respected religious pastor or guiding professor or guru. In Jyotisha, this male archetype that frames and limits the type of male energy a woman can interact with and absorb during her lifetime is indicated by Surya, the Sun. For a man attracted to women, his archetypal filter is set by his Moon, Chandra.

Women vs. Sun, Men vs. Moon

Modern psychology says that one will be intimately attracted to a person having the gender of the most difficult parent. Most women have more trouble negotiating the energy of their fathers and father figures thus women are predominantly attracted to men. Most men have more trouble negotiating the integration oftheir mother's protective, restraining energy thus most men are attracted to women. However a man who in this lifetime is much more challenged byfather Sun will be attracted to his natural workshop which is a male partner and similarly a woman who is more challenged to make emotional sense and completeness in her relationship to her mother will be attracted to women. And this pattern can vary during a single lifetime too.

But in the broadest general situation, the greatest integration challenge is set between women and men. A woman attracted to men spends a good part of her psychological life trying to understand and integrate what is essentially the foreign and frequently offensivebehavior of men:selfish, hot-headed, and oh so righteous. Whether that is truly righteous in the pure and high sense of divine truth, or self-righteous in the ego sense, depends on the qualities of Surya in the woman's Jyotisha nativity.

For men who are working out their relationships with women, most of their lives are dedicated to trying to understand and integrate passive but protective feminine energy which is essentially foreign to them. They are trying to get a balance with the inward-moving female energies of sheltering, enclosure, embrace, absorption, and intuition. Most men are terrified of losing their direct, outward-moving, creative, productive energy into the vast cool ocean of female emotional cycles. Formen, being too much with women is like getting lost in the forestwhilehunting in pale moonlight. They prefer the blinding bright hot light of individual confidence where they can see exactly what is going on; women more trust in the shadowy, wet cycles of nature; men more trust in their reasoning power and their male leaders. It is an uneasy balance for both males and female as we progress through this life.

Ultimately however all men are trying to be women and all women are trying to be men.

The goal of each person is to become fully integrated within oneself, coming to conscious awareness of a complete inventory of all existence, all things male and all things female, within each personal self. At that magic moment when one is able to count all the millions of things - behaviors, experiences, perceptions - in this world and say in truth I am that, and I am that, and I am that without ever needing to stop and say Oh but I am not THAT horrible thing. At that moment when one has absolute and full acceptance of all the good things and all the bad things, then the barrier between good and bad dissolves, and one is perfectly whole. At that point of complete and seamless integration there is no in and no out, no up and no down, no black and no white, no us and no them, no valuable and no worthless, nothing is judged or placed into a category because it is All One. That is the moment of enlightenment/unburdenment and that is what we are all shooting for, whether we recognize the goal or not.

First, Check Lord Surya

That being said, to which type of male are you as a female attracted? Jyotisha would say, step-one, look at Surya for the "history of male energy" in one's life, beginning with the man one chose as one's father. Yes, one chooses one's parents. They have agreed long before on the astral plane to provide the birth environment which one needs to set up the proper karmic structure. Even if one's parents abandon the child at birth, that is precisely the plan. For adopted children their plan is more sophisticated and complex. For biological children it is simpler but not necessarily any easier. Starting with the bio father there will be one iteration after the next of the male incursion into her female space.

The woman who succeeds spiritually in life will have come to seemale energies like dominance,aggression, selfishness, crudeness,penetration, pushing, andpersistent narcissism as ultimately part of herself, not reprehensible, not separate and notOther. This process of integration with traits that seem immature, offensive,and globally destructive is actually required along the path toward All That Is. However the acceptance must be active and one cannot become a victim or the integration will become fraudulent, slipping into the typical female passive-aggressive "acceptance" which is under a thin veneer of placid neutrality actually a seething mass of resentment and anger, which we ladies proudly pass to our daughters under the name of Guilt.

No guilt allowed. Responsibility only please and it must be authentically neutral responsibility. If the language of "should" or "must" or "have to" or any of (what are called in English grammar) "deontic modals" creeps into the dialog that is a red-flag signal that guilt is operating. One must be constantly on patrol against guilt to prevent getting sucked into a repetitive cycle of disappointment and bondage.

lord of the seventh navamsha = psycho-social placement and behavior of spouse

After looking at the overall expectations for the type and quality of male self-assertive, self-confident, self-righteous energy in one's life that is projected as if upon a movie screen from one's subconscious upon the father-figures, then look at the lord of the seventh navamsha. The navamsha shows one's subconscious expectations of intimate partnership, not only sexual and psychic but every aspect ofthe imagery which governscommunication one-to-one and one-to-many. (E.g., the 10th navamsha shows career which is the expectation of how one will lead in one-to-many settings.) The rashi upon the 7th navamsha is revealing; it defines the scope of behavior one expects from the partner.

In your case the 7th navamsha = Kumbha; one is looking for a partner who is network-oriented, likes social progress movements, but very importantly is objective and scientific in perspective, is aware of the regulation of networks, of the laws by which civilizations move forward and lateral social organizations such as a marketplace or a political party move together as a unit while accommodating a wide variety of interpersonal interpretation and one-to-one connections within the larger universal whole.
A kumbha partner must be a futurist, looking to steer a group into conditions of great opportunity, but not a hierarchical thinker who envisions oneself at the top of a movement giving tyrannical orders. You are very probably looking for someone with a physical science or social science education who works in some collective or collaborative or progressive setting and who is very savvy about economies of all kinds - financial, sociological, cultural, nutritional, religious, biological, astronomical etc -- all of these systems are economies. A person who understands one type of economy or regulated network can often parlay their systems knowledge to understand other mirror-image networks.

The 7th navamsha = the person we are trying to become.

Yes, everyone will in the next life become one's spouse. That is a scary thought if one has been married for awhile! What? I will become my spouse? Eek! But it's true. We are attracted (or matched with by arrangement) tothe persons who have already significantly materialized our own "next step". This person has some critically important jigsaw puzzle pieces about oneself and one's future path. Each intimate relationship, whether sanctified as a marriage via a holy vow or not, is indeed an irreplaceable opportunity to gain information about one's next step on the path toward integration of more pieces of All That Is.

However it is not possible to acquire random puzzle pieces. It is only possible to recognize the puzzle pieces that one needs immediately, right now, as one's new step toward self-realization. Thus, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. What? This impossible man (or woman) is my next step in life? How is that legitimate? It is absolutely legitimate, even when the information arrives in a painful or abusive package. The smart thing to do of course is to "take the best and leave the rest" if the conditions are painful and one feels ready to move on. Before moving on remember to thank the puzzle-piece provider. Then like Lot's wife keeping moving forward. Or else : )

lord of the 7th navamsha = the specific part of YOU = attracting its mirror image

Then knowing the general framework of what skills and knowledge one is needing to acquire via the 7th navamsha, one can get more detail from the function of the lord of the 7th navamsha as this planet functions in the radix D-1 chart. The radix shows what material in one's life has already percolated down from the spiritual plane, into the mental (causal) plane, and down into the astral (emotional) plane. The astrology charts show us a slice of reality which is hovering on the border between astral and material. It is a little bit fluid but in nce of general it can be said that by the time a significator gets into the birth pattern of the D-1 chart, those influences are very likely going to manifest on the social or material level. The D-9 influences by contrast may not manifest directly in a hard-reality way.

The D-9 can be experienced almost entirely as feelings that have no specific manifestation in five-senses reality. For people who are out of contact with their feelings, who don't remember their dreams or who lack empathy in the extreme, (including empathy for self) the information in the D-9 is largely meaningless. These folks are able to register only the data coming in through the five animal senses and certain social ranking sensations like top-of-heap, bottom-of-heap, dominant-subordinate type of animal pack sensations.
Otherwise their access to finer feelings and intelligence is bloof harmony,cked. I am sorry to say that many men are blocked at this level (few women are entirely blocked from their feelings) therefore it may not always be possible to interact psychically or spiritually with all men. But luckily you don't need all men, you as a female only need one or two men at a time, and these men do hold extremely critically important spiritual puzzle-pieces even though it is sadly true that the puzzle pieces may arrive in uncomfortable or invalidating packages.

So let's examine your lord of D-9 yuvati (seventh, the yoke) bhava as it functions in the radix D-1 chart of social-material reality. D-1 shows us materially productive behaviors. In your case the lord of 7th navamsha is Shani. Right there we know that the subconscious expects austerity, withholding, limitation, working-class attitude, scarce resources (not enough time, not enough money, not enough food, not enough love, not enough social legitimacy, not enough respect) in the spouse. On the plus side, one also expects the long-term dignity gains from steady work, one expects the sober mental state gained from a very regular routine (Shani is never crazy. He gets depressed and despairing sometimes, but He is usually quite sane.) One expects a call-it-as-I-see-it type of pragmatic groundedness and salt of the earth practicality which emerges in aphorisms like a penny saved is a penny earned and the Lord helps those what help Themselves.

When the lord of D-9's seventh bhava = Shani

Shani is eminently sensible, the very icon of "common sense" and the nice thing is that such a person is regular and reliable but the difficult part is that such a person will have a very limited, plebian view of the world which is not too spiritual but rather grounded in a strict behavioral morality with a tight and unyielding focus on human law. Such a person is nearly incapable of understanding the joyful permissiveness of Divine Law. They are simple at the life stage of needing to get their human-law intelligence in order, order, order.

Did I mention how rule-conscious, while also universal in viewpoint, the Kumbha person is? Kumbha presumes that there is one set of rules which applies to everyone. Religiously such a person may be atheist or fundamentalist. These are oddly almost the same for kumbha because the Aquarian focus is on tightly regulated, large and complex systems. For the fundamentalist there is a deity at the center of the regulated network system and for the atheist the system has no deity at the center but otherwise they are both focused tightly on the letter of the law not the spirit of the law. (The spirit of the Law = Surya, Shani's opposite enemy.)

Shani = rules

Well now we are getting close to pay dirt. We have to look super-closely at your Shani and the role it plays in your own life configuration, your own personality. Everyone has a Shani position. Shani in the Jyotisha nativity shows where the person runs up against limits that seems fixed by material reality. It seems like Shani creates a barrier that the native cannot, try what they might, crash through. (Until the next Rahu period anyway!) Therefore we know that your intimate marriage-type relationships will bring in many puzzle-pieces that contain information about class systems and hierarchies (Shani) about social institutions such as organized religion and organized crime, institutionalized educational systems, multinational banks, and world government. But on a personal level it is really about the Law: human moral law. Your Shani as you know is not well positioned. For the Karkata native, Shani in Dhanushya falls in bhava-6 which is the house of dissolution of marriage and other contractual agreements.

Shani in Ari Bhava of the D-1

Lord of 8 Shani in bhava-6, Ari bhava, controls the human behavioral functions of police and criminals, physicians (who deal with imbalance) and drugs, servitude and slavery, addictions, lies, usury, exploitation, and a host of other human ills cause by failure to take the other person's concerns into account when one commits an action. The criminal is not in the least concerned with the impact of his crime upon his victim. He is thinking only of himself and getting something which the law says he should not be able to get because he has not earned it, yet his desire and his imbalanced ego entitlement says he should take it anyway. From the fundamental lack of compassion arise all of the evils of bhava-6, all of which are the result of loss-of-agreement, loss-of-contract, loss-of-harmony, loss-of-balance.

Expecting to fail: now learn and earn

Therefore you know this karma of marriage partnership and every other type of contract will be to learn and earn. To learn the skills necessary to negotiate a challenging partnership so that one can get the puzzle pieces without getting enslaved or victimized. This is very tricky indeed but with proper consciousness it can be accomplished. Shani in Dhanushya, the rashi of religion, indicates a ritualistic practice of religion. Shani emphasizes the behavioral aspect of religion which is morality. Therefore much of the purpose of the partners in the present lifetime is to reveal more and more information in digestible form regarding the need for a moral code of behavior that will begin to control the inherent animosity toward contractual obligations which is a carry-over from past lives.

There will no doubt be an abundance of marriage since Shani is with Guru the great expander. However all of the partnerships have a similar purpose. They start out in a past-life-carryover state of inherent suspicion and mistrust (7 = trust, 6 = dissolution of trust). Shani in Dhanushya specializes in as Bepin Behari says "arduous religious observances". Via fasting, strict adherence to a religious scripturally dictated code of conduct, rigorous schedule of attendance at ritual performances of holy vows and other ceremonies, one gradually and I do mean gradually builds up a regulated (Shani) practice of *behavioral* propriety. It is neither possible nor necessary to question the legitimacy of the human moral law.

Law, conflict, law, conflict, law - but from within, not imposed from outside.

In this lifetime the task is to locate the law, study the law, and apply the law to one's own behavior in marriage relationships. Orthodox religion will be a great help. One of the partners, the most important one, should be a priest or other ritual officiant. This person knows the letter of the law in detail. You are supposed to at some point of the marriages-cycle marry a priest who is himself in a great deal of conflict with himself and his society. he may have criminal tendencies, have been involved with police, or have committed crimes under the mantle of his priesthood, so that in some ways he is a fraud. The fraudulent, hypocritical or lying aspect of Shani in 6 particularly in the preaching, sermonizing rashi of Dhanushya is rather inescapable. The resolution of karma comes when the lesson is learned that one's own task is to separate the messenger and the message.

Karmic cycles of dishonesty and disappointment

All spouses will disappoint with this very fixed, very karmic lord Shani of the 7th navamsha. The message of truth for the present incarnation is based in the understanding of the intentional, ritualized control of human behavior to begin to control the animal herd instincts which constantly regenerate conflict: demographic class conflict, ethnic conflict, domestic conflict, all of which end with a master-slave arrangement. The goal is to take an imbalanced karmic expectation that is rooted n the trauma of past lives and work with it slowly and steadily perhaps through a cycle of numerous partners, until one is able to say with confidence that is does not matter to whom one is married or indeed if one is married to a human at all (one may sufficiently be married to a deity) but one's conduct will be regulated by a religious code and one will re-establish one's commitment to behave according to this ethical code regardless of the (potentially despicable and certainly fraudulent) behavior of the partner. It is ultimately not about the partner at all as one will gradually come to see, but about the acquisition of "next step" directions.

The partner knows already what one needs to know now

The partner should be a bit ahead of one on this particular part of the path which is to say that for you the partner should have a good knowledge of religious law (Dhanushya = religion, Shani= law) andvery likely due to this expertise one has found a social position as a priest or preacher. However the behavior of the messenger does NOT have to be lawful. I know, that seems unacceptable. Here you are, working so hard (Shani works hard!) to be lawful, and the partner cannot walk the talk. But in bhava-6, everything is unbalanced. That is just how it is. Unbalanced there. Never trusting, never honest, never equitable, always unfair, and always hostile. it is the house of profound disagreements and suspicious blaming which leads to divorce on a personal level and war on a social level. Plus Shani himself is the very opposite of idealistic Surya. Shani must be absolutely unswervingly materialistic and realistic at all times. Shani does not permit idealism in His realm. Therefore the standards by which one must judge oneself are much more strict than the standards by which one judges the spouse. It is also not particularly important whether one remains in physical social or financial bondage to the messenger.

the karma will be liberated as ignorance transforms into wisdom

Those are concerns of society, to maintain the "pillar of society" marriage for purposes of steady propagation of the species, acquisition of social wealth etc. However on an individual level none of those social concerns are really your worry. If you want to know why you are attracted to the same type of man over and over again and why it seems to "fail" over and over again just look to hard-lesson Shani. As soon as you have made the unshakable determination to live a behaviorally moral life according to a consistent code of conduct, the karma will be liberated as ignorance transforms into wisdom. And BTW while the messenger will have plenty of valuable educational (dhanushya) information about various religious systems and their moral codes, the only important decision that Shani will insist for you to make is to be regular and consistent within some set of rules.

Shani demands the consistency

It is quite arbitrary which set of ethical rules you choose. Shani demands simple consistency. Looking back you might be able to see that each partner has brought you some puzzle pieces about moral codes in the human law, how to make them and how to break them, so that you are now in possession of a considerable inventory of knowledge. Shani does not forecast an ideal marriage at any time. This is a very difficult position. What Shani gives is sobriety, groundedness, responsibility and dignity of hard work.

Also L-8 in 6 creates a Viparita Raja Yoga which means that in general your best opportunities in life occur in small windows when there is a crisis or catastrophe for someone else, you can profit in the moment of the power vacuum. A good example is former USA president Calvin Coolidge, who was an unknown city mayor when his predecessor suddenly died and Coolidge was thrust into the White House competition. In terms of your marriage opportunities it will often be the case that your husband must leave an existing commitment in order to bond with you, which shows right there that he has plenty of his own trouble in keeping his existing marriage vows despite perhaps being very knowledgeable about the letter of the law, traditions of religious commentary upon the laws, etc.

spouse's navamsha

Another step in the process of inquiry into the dialog and psychic dynamics of marriage, what each party subconsciously expects from the other, is to look into the spouse's navamsha and examine his own past-life-carry-over expectations. If you are already married, you can know this for sure. What is he looking for? Can you provide his puzzle pieces? If the marriage vow has already been spoken the answer to that question is that you are already providing what he needs although neither you nor he necessarily can recognize it.

Resist Idealization and Projection

The problem is the confusion of projection: projecting divine ideals upon the spouse (expecting to be in celebrity love all the time is a serious misconception) and the ignorance of confusing one's own history of disappointment and resistance from other males going way back to the father upon this hapless specimen who has - right on schedule - become your present husband! You are giving him what he needs, abundantly so, and he is giving you exactly what you need, what was put into the contract on the astral plane so very long ago before either of you took the present material bodies and started upon the integrative path again. (In the after-death state we do not have permeable aura shields and cannot intimately interact and exchange truth with others, it is just a resting ground and staging area.)

Thanks to puzzle-piece-vendors

If it is possible to stop projecting all the unmet needs of eons and the history of disappointment and collapse of previous relationships upon the present partner, it will become clear that he has precisely the puzzle pieces you need. Now, being a purveyor of puzzle pieces does not make this guy necessarily partner-able, live-able, companion-able. The lord of 7th navamsha is after all Shani in the house of animosity and the nature of these puzzle-piece-vendors in the present life can be highly adversarial, rigidly legalistic, and self-righteously punishing. It is quite possible that one may not be able to sustain a conventional marriage with a person who is by definition a trust-breaker ( 6).

Nevertheless be aware of the gift that he brings, and the sacredness of the vow, and the choice that faces one to live morally no matter whatsoever the behavior of the spouse. His karma is his. Your karma is very close to being completely transformed into wisdom which breaks the cycle of disappointment and blaming forever. Decide what your rules are going to be and stick to them. This is definitely a hard task when rigid Shani is so close to open-minded, educational, philosophical Jupiter.

The way out: rather than project upon the partner, meet those expectations oneself

The lord of the 7th navamsha is Shani, though, and not Guru. Too much open-mindedness and willingness to consider new enlightened options (Guru) will not satisfy Shani's demand for simple consistency to a fairly small set of ethical rules. The cycle of broken marriages will stop when Shani gets what Shani wants, which is regulated behavior and predictable rule-driven consistency.

Be the Change

If one of your rules turns out to be that denigrating language is not allowed in your relationships, then a partner who speaks abusively will have to hit the trail. But Shani will not make you feel like a failure for having stuck to your principles. Shani only wants to recover from the trauma of past lives by making sure that the rules start inside of you, that they are not imposed from the outside and therefore you will never be a victim of moral deceit again.

Wishing you all the best,

Sincerely,

Barbara Pijan Lama, Jyotisha