“God is everywhere and in all things.”
— quoted by my mother, from my book The Expanded View
My mother said that to me when I was a child, and I have carried the sentence for a lifetime. It came back to me years later, when I first learned what lifts the tide.
At the edge of the ocean the water climbs the sand for six hours, stops, and slides back down again. The Moon does that, from a quarter of a million miles away, and behind the Moon stands the Sun, ninety-three million miles further out, adding approximately half as much again. Both of them are pulling on the water, and on the rock, and on the blood in your arm, at this moment, whether anybody is watching or measuring. This reminds me of my mother’s words, and it turns out to be measurable.
A word that means to take hold
The Sanskrit word for a planet in a Vedic chart is graha. It comes from the root grah, which means to seize, or to take hold of. English translates it as “planet,” and the whole meaning falls out of it, because a graha was named for what it does. It is a thing that takes hold.
Sanskrit, the language the Vedic scriptures are written in, carries more depth in a single word than any language I know, and this is one of its finest examples — because the English word for the same force was built the same way. Gravity comes from the Latin gravis, meaning heavy, the word Isaac Newton reached for in 1687 when he needed a name for what holds the Moon to the Earth. Two traditions, separated by more than a thousand years and half a world, looked up at the same lights and both named them for a grasp.
So what is gravity? Said plainly: every object with mass attracts every other object with mass. Heavier attracts harder. Closer attracts harder. It runs at every moment, in every place, and it runs without end. The Moon is small and very close, so the Moon moves the tide. The Sun is enormous and very far, so it adds the lesser share. There are nine grahas in the Vedic system, and each carries its own domain of life, its own organ of the body, its own metal and day of the week — which is a subject of its own, and I have written it out in full in my article on the nine grahas.
The ground beneath your house
The same gravity that lifts the ocean lifts the land. Twice a day the solid rock under your house rises and falls, on the same schedule as the tide, by approximately the height of a foot ruler. You stay level through it, for a plain reason: the whole neighborhood rises together, so every floor keeps its place against every doorframe. Satellite positioning shows it — a ring of satellites that fixes any point on the ground to within a few millimeters, the same system inside a car’s navigation screen, run at its finest setting.
Jupiter, Saturn, and the ice
If the Moon moves the tide because the Moon is close, then Jupiter and Saturn, hundreds of millions of miles out, ought to be too far away to matter. Distance weakens gravity sharply with every mile. What a weak pull gives up in strength it makes back in time, and a weak tug running for a hundred thousand years finishes its work anyway.
Jupiter and Saturn tug on the shape of the Earth’s orbit — the loop the Earth travels around the Sun, taking a year to complete it. They pull that loop from a near-circle into a longer oval and back again on a cycle of 100,000 years, and they tilt the Earth on its axis as they go. That cycle decides when ice sheets bury the northern continents and when they retreat. Three geologists found the proof of it written in the mud of the deep sea floor, in the shells of creatures that settled there in their millions and recorded the temperature of the water they grew in: James Hays and John Imbrie of Columbia University and Nicholas Shackleton of Cambridge, published in the journal Science in December 1976. The ice came and went on a schedule set by Jupiter and Saturn.
Living things read the sky
The corals of the Great Barrier Reef spawn together on the same nights of the year, set by particular full moons, and they keep that calendar with light-sensing proteins — molecules inside the coral’s cells that answer to moonlight the way the back of your eye answers to daylight. The dung beetle walks a straight line home by the band of the Milky Way, the pale stripe across a dark sky that is the disc of our own galaxy seen edge-on from inside it. Marie Dacke, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, put tiny caps on the beetles to block their view and showed that they lost the line; she published it in Current Biology in 2013.
The coral and the beetle arrive in the world already knowing. Reading the sky is built into them the way breathing is built into us. I find it to be one of the most amazing facts I know.
What arrives from the Sun
On March 13, 1989, a cloud of charged particles thrown off the surface of the Sun — fragments of atoms carrying an electric charge, moving at a million miles an hour — struck the Earth’s magnetic field, the invisible shell our planet’s iron core generates around itself. In under ninety seconds the entire power grid of Quebec collapsed, and six million people sat in the dark for nine hours.
That kind of arrival also writes itself into matter and stays there. Fusa Miyake, a physicist at Nagoya University in Japan, measured Japanese cedar rings one year at a time and found a burst of radiation from the sky recorded in the wood of the years 774 and 775. Radiation is energy arriving with enough force to alter the atoms it meets. The same spike appears in trees on five continents. Twelve centuries later it is still legible in a tree.
Your own minute
Every one of these bodies travels at its own speed. The Moon comes back to the same place among the stars in 27.3 days, Jupiter needs 11.9 years to do it, and Saturn 29.5 years. So the arrangement standing overhead at any one minute occurs a single time. Yet it can be recorded precisely in a chart.
Which brings me to the tradition that has been measuring this the longest. Jyotisha, the Sanskrit name for Vedic astrology, means the science of light. In 499 CE the Indian mathematician Aryabhata opened his book the Aryabhatiya with two numbers for a single yuga — the Sanskrit name for a span of 4,320,000 years. In that time, he wrote, the Earth turns on its axis 1,582,237,500 times and circles the Sun 4,320,000 times. Those two numbers together give the length of a single turn measured against the stars: 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. An atomic clock, which counts time by the vibration of a cesium atom and loses one second in a hundred million years, now gives 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. The gap is one hundredth of a second, across fifteen centuries, from a man working with his eyes and his arithmetic. That same tradition corrects for the slow wobble of the Earth’s axis, so a Vedic chart reports the sky that stood overhead in truth.
From my book The Expanded View:
“We are all microcosmic particles of the macrocosmic all-pervading intelligence that operates throughout the universe — from the perfectly aligned planets to the most minute activities that keep the heart beating, the blood flowing, and each atom and cell performing within the human body.”
I wrote that in 2021. The measurements in this article reached me later, and every one of them pointed the same way. The reach that lifts an ocean and the reach that keeps a heart beating belong to one intelligence, and my mother named it for me in seven words when I was too young to know what she had given me.
That passage is from The Expanded View, my book exploring enlightenment and the way to lasting joy.
A Vedic birth chart is a record of where every one of these bodies stood at a single minute, seen from the one place on Earth where you drew your first breath. My written interpretation covers all twelve houses of that chart — the twelve divisions of the sky that hold the different departments of a life — and runs to seventeen printed pages, delivered to you by email for $27.