In the next few weeks, on 11 November 2025, the planet Jupiter arrives at its annual retrograde motion, which lasts exactly four months, until 10 March 2026.
I’ve always been a student of astrology, since childhood. Some may say it’s a child’s pastime and they may be correct. I won’t say how valid it is as an oracle or symbolic representation of character. It’s not a science. Nevertheless, everyone likes to hear about themselves and wants to know the future, so it provides some entertainment, if nothing else.
This apparent retrograde motion of a planet is an optical illusion of sorts, based upon the relative motion of all of the planets moving around the sun. As we rotate, one planet appears to stop and go backwards for a while, and then stop to go direct or forwards again. It’s pure geometry and math, like a fast moving train being overtaken by an even faster train, which then makes the first train appear to be slowing down, relatively. Nothing unusual about it.
During these so-called retrograde times of a particular planet, its symbolic themes or influence is said to be internalized or focused inward and not on the outer world of events.
With the planet Jupiter going retrograde over the next four months, it symbolizes a time of philosophical or spiritual/religious introspection and reflection. It’s a time to look inward to discover what brings you joy in life and also how to grow, expand and pursue happiness or success. Primarily it provides a time when the re-evaluating of our philosophy of life may arise, where we can look within to find out what makes us really happy and what is our real philosophy of life.
Now, in my case there is the added feature, namely that I was born with Jupiter in retrograde motion at the time of birth. So this next four months will feel more natural to me than perhaps to others who were born when Jupiter was in direct motion. If it occurs for four months every thirteen months, then about a third of all people are born when Jupiter is in retrograde motion. So it’s rare but not unusual.
Already, I can feel the mood of Jupiter slowing down and forcing me to re-evaluate my entire philosophical premise of life. Now is the season for all of us to look within and ask ourselves the questions like what is the meaning of our lives and what is our spiritual perspective, as well as what is blocking our growth.
In Indian astrology, Jupiter is also called Guru. It relates to the priest, spiritual teacher or university professor for example. Guru also means literally heavy. It is, after all, the biggest planet in the solar system. The concept implies heavy with knowledge. That is the nature of guru, which means teacher.
Thus Jupiter’s retrograde time, just now coming, triggers my natural born propensity to seek out such teachers in life, to inquire deeply about spiritual matters and matters of consciousness. However, being retrograde, it pushes the tendency to become disillusioned with the external teacher or guru, and to turn inward to find it within, and not project it so much onto any external authority figure.
And that is heavy on my mind currently. I feel driven to deconstruct all the Vedic philosophy that I learned from my guru at the gurukula or school of the teacher, my yoga monastery ashram training of my twenties. Much of what I took on blind faith can no longer satisfy me or provide that comfortable feeling of knowing, of having all the answers, of being on the right path that I used to have in my youth, thanks to the Veda and the teachings of my guru.
It is a time of crisis of faith, of finding that my faith was placed not only upon flawed and actually corrupt teachers, but also that the teaching that I adopted as gospel might be fairytales, myth or legend.
When the collapse of the foundation of faith and philosophy occurs under our feet, it brings about the dark night of the soul, as the Christian mystics called it. Now this is not my first Jupiter retrograde obviously, since we have them every thirteen months, so already years ago I began to question what I had previously accepted as truth, or who I accepted as truth teller.
Years ago already, I found some books on the science of self-realization as well as the classic Sanskrit text called Bhagavad Gita, which I still love to this day. I accepted the Indian swami who was teaching Gaudiya Vaishnavism based on the Gita as my guru. I recommend reading it.
However, I was trained over that decade in the monastery or gurukula by that Indian teacher's students, because he had already left this world in 1977 when I was a child, so all I had was his writings and teachings, based on classic traditional Vishnu philosophy or sanatnana dharma. And the guru’s students were now my teachers.
They trained me well, or so I thought at first. But then I found out that they were mostly also corrupt and subject to the frailties of human nature, and that they had cheated by re-interpreting the original guru’s instructions. They had become gatekeepers who changed the philosophy to put themselves on high pedistals and accept worship, as if they were as good as god. Yet they were abusers and corrupt criminals, cheaters and posers.
I found out years ago that humans are basically all like this. We all cheat and lie in order to fuel our own ego. These were not the pure hearted men of god that I once believed. These teachers were fakes. That disillusionment is exactly what the life fated by Jupiter retrograde brings. We may all have experienced it in our own way at some point. You grow up and realize that the leaders you thought were pure are just as corrupt as anyone with an ego and material desires, despite looking holy, practicing dicipline and claiming to be renounced or selfless. We see it in politicians and priests, who are often egomaniacs disguised as servants of humanity.
It can shake ones faith in the religion or political party, and even one’s faith in god, or in human nature. It can destroy hope in a better future, in a good life on earth. We realize that perhaps there is no hope, and therefore no truth to the doctrine or gospel that we so faithfully accepted as truth.
It is at times like this when we have to give up requiring or relying on external support, and to find that faith and hope and support within oneself. That is the journey of Jupiter retrograde.
When I abandoned those early teachers who trained me, I still had faith on the original Indian wise old man and guru who wrote the books, and translated the Bhagavad Gita. He seemed authentic, about as authentic as we will get on the planet. So that guru figure is now internalized and the Sanskrit texts are still there for me as reference. My faith in them has remained strong.
Until now.
At this late stage of my life, almost sixty years have passed, forty since my initial adoption of sanatana dharma as the Way. And now the questioning is growing even stronger. Perhaps my brain is developing late in its maturity with the critical faculties of my atheist father, as opposed to my religious mother who influenced me most in my earliest youth.
Now my brain can no longer sit with and accept the screaming cognitive dissonance, the illogical or absurdly mythic concepts that I had blindly accepted all my life. Yet the Vedas still appear to be the truth, filled with such great wisdom and insight for the aspiring transcendentalist or yogi. The longing for truth and unlocking my full potential in consciousness has always driven me.
However, some of the teachings of the Vedic literature appear now to be as absurd as any fairytale. It appears to be totally mythic, magical thinking at its best. Intially we allow ourselves to entertain what is called suspension of disbelief. This is what happens when we watch a theatre performance or a movie. We know that the characters are actors. We know it’s all staged. Yet we allow ourselves to enter into their world and to accomany the actors along the storyline, even feeling the emotions as if it was real.
We obviously don’t believe it, especially when the actions they perform are impossible in real life, yet we allow ourselves to suspend for a while that feeling of disbelief so that we can enter into the story and be swept along by it.
That’s what we do with religious literature, and the Vedas require massive amounts of this suspension of disbelief. After all, you have gods with elephant heads, gods who fly on the backs of eagles and all these kind of absolute impossibilities – from our logical science-based world. Still, today a billion Hindus all around the world are quite happy to worship Ganesh as if he is a god with a human body and an elephant head. The logical mind boggles.
Yet we allow ourselves to accept this a truth because the so-called sacred book says so, and because our parents told us when we were infants and so it stayed permanently as a part of our construct of reality. Even though there is zero proof and zero logic.
The same can be said about any religion really, that claims something to be law or absolute, even when it makes no sense or there is zero proof. Like believing in a person called Jesus who lived and died thousands of years ago and who can save you now just by believing it. Or that there is an eternal hell if you don’t believe it. I mean what an absurdity. I grew out of that fairytale when I was a child of 15 already.
I mean, those early Christians used to think that the world was created about 6ooo years ago. They imprisoned Galileo when he used a telescope to tell them the facts about the solar system. Can you see the stupidity? That was us in Europe a few hundred years ago – total idiots, killing our smartest people because some egomaniac in a robe told us that his myth was more important than observation. It sounds like the kids of today pushing their anti-science myths.
And we all know that those earliest church fathers rewrote and fabricated some of the so-called holy bible, word of god, Jesus myth to favor themselves and their political control over the illiterate masses. It’s all there if you read your history.
Islam is the same, with their murdering prophet and his so-called revelation from an angel of god. What a myth. Yet people kill and die for it. They throw common sense and normal human decency out of the window and will kill or abuse you and call it justified, simply because you find their myth too illogical. This is the madness we live under in this world of fairytales and the men in robes who dictate that we believe them. How do you even take these priests of Semitism seriously?
So, as you can see, reality clashes massively with the myths we call religions. Hinduism is the same. In this way, I have been forced to destroy all these constructs called religion and look within for what appears to be truth.
Yet not all is hopeless. There are schools of thought that rise above the mythic stuff that appeals to children. And they have doctrines and books of wisdom that teach self-realization without the need for fairytales. That are based upon personal experience within our own states of consciousness, not on mythic gods and flawed prophets.
The Buddha had this very same crisis of faith on his journey to enlightenment. He saw that the brahmana Hindu priests of 600 BCE were also corrupt, so he went his own way, and once enlightened he told the masses to give up following the corrupt priests of Vedanta and to look within.
Taoism also does not require any divinity or abstract concept outside of ones current reality.
Yoga also includes the school of thought that is impersonalist, called Adwaita Vedanta, where these magical gods are seen as constructs and not literal.
Abandoning the old faith feels like going out onto the vast ocean in a small rowing boat. For a theist to feel like he is becoming an atheist brings a feeling of huge vulnerability and uncertainty. I still fear even calling myself an atheist, even though I struggle with the ideas of the gods or god that are presented to me via the world’s teachings. I feel like that abandoned god may still strike me or send me to hell or something like that. Those old myths were implanted into my head so early in life that it’s hard to deconstruct them without feeling guilty.
Withdrawing the projection is necessary though. Destroying the magical constructs in the mind is crucial. Yet we should never lose the magic itself. There is magic in the world and there are miracles. They are, however, merely a science that we don’t yet understand. And we may never understand it fully. We may never be able to grasp the bigger picture in its entirety, of who we are and what life really is.
So at this time of Jupiter going retrograde for four months, I am moved to do what I was born to do, namely to look within and find the guru within, the god within, while simultaneously not relying on outer constructs or people, yet also preserving the wisdom that is still available from other wise people and the ancient texts. All the insights I have are based on the ancient sacred texts, and the experiences of the yogis who have already walked this same path which I now traverse.
image: source