Free Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra Page B

future, and to show his absolute mastery of timeand fortune, prepared a chart to answer the very questions you came to ask.
    How this art came to pass carries us into the epoch of myths. When the god Brahma created the world, he had seven wish-born sons, who sprang into existence from his mind. The world was conceived in wisdom, and these primal rishis, or seers, were sent to guide newborn humanity. One day the wisest of these early humans gathered together at a great religious festival. They soon fell into dispute over which of the three gods—Brahma, Vishnu, or Shiva—should be worshipped as the greatest. To settle the argument, Bhrigu was sent to ask the gods themselves.
    First he arrived at the dwelling place of Brahma, his father. But when he asked his question, Brahma waved him away impatiently, saying, “I’m busy creating the world. I have no time for you.”
    Next Bhrigu went to the abode of Shiva, who was even more dismissive and arrogant. “I’m busy destroying creation as quickly as it is being made,” he said. “I have no time for you.”
    At the third dwelling place, when he called on Vishnu, Bhrigu found the god sleeping on his side with his consort, Lakshmi, at his feet. Impulsively Bhrigu kicked Vishnu in the chest to wake him up. It was a hard kick that left an imprint still to be seen on images of the god. Vishnu sat up, rubbing his chest.
    “Are you hurt, my dear Bhrigu, from kicking me?” Vishnu asked. “I am strong enough to sustain any wound, but you are not.”
    This show of compassion rather than arrogance immediately made Bhrigu decide that Vishnu, the god who sustains the cosmos, was more powerful than the gods who create and destroy it. But before he could leave, Lakshmi confronted him, indignant that anyone should injure her husband. On the spot she cursed Bhrigu such that he would forget his immortal knowledge. Not to be trifled with, Bhrigu cursed her back.
    “You, Lakshmi, are the goddess of prosperity, but from this day forward you will never be able to stay with any man.” Which is why no human can count on good fortune his entire life.
    This myth comes with a tale that applies to the ability of astrologers to foretell the future. When he returned home, Bhrigu despaired of losing his knowledge. So his devoted son Shukra devised a secret plan. When his father went into deep samadhi, the state of meditation that reaches pure awareness, Shukra would whisper the name of one of his friends in Bhrigu’s ear. At that moment Bhrigu would see and reveal that friend’s entire span of births and deaths, which were secretly written down by Shukra. One after another the son received the charts of all his friends, and they went on to acquire deep knowledge, becoming the first astrologers in the line of Bhrigu. Their power to foretell the life of someone born far in the future had a divine source. (To most Indians the son Shukra is far better known than the father. His name refers to a brilliant light and became the Indian name of the planet Venus.)
    My father’s family needed to call upon that power to see if Tilak’s memories of his past lifetime were correct. They traveled to the sthan, or seat, of Bhrigu in Hoshiarpur, in the far northeast corner of Punjab, where the charts were stored. There the readers confirmed that the boy was right: His chart gave the same village that he had seen and the same names of family members. The chart held some darker aspects, too. Tilak, it predicted, would wander between being a man and a woman. He would marry but never have children, and then he would die prematurely, in his fifties.
    All of this happened when my father was only eight or nine, so he had only the vaguest memory of the trip to the Bhrigu readers. But when I was young I thought that Tilak was the strangest of my uncles. He had an effeminate body, with wide hips and a swinging gait; beneath his shirt one definitely saw breasts. Then it happened that he got married but had no children, and