The Art of Picking Your Moment

down the rabbit hole of muhurta

Readers who’ve been here for a while know from pieces like this and this about the deep dive I’ve been on with Jyotisa, India’s living divination tradition¹.

Jyotisa is astrology, but perhaps not astrology as you know it: it has about as much in common with newspaper horoscopes as a Hello Kitty sticker does with a Bengal tiger.

hello.

Like the tiger, in its native land Jyotisa commands the respect of hundreds of millions.

It should, seeing as it has teeth.

If you grew up a rational, atheistic materialist like I did, encountering a system that can so accurately describe the shape and color of one’s life, that can predict the timing of its chapters and reveal the flavors of karma each of us is set to experience—such an encounter can have the force of revelation. The rationalist in you thinks “how can this be true?” and then, later, “if this is true, then what else (that I used to arrogantly dismiss as nonsense) is true, too?”

I’m here to say the rabbit hole is deep, friends. And the water’s fine.

What I mean is that the whole cosmology from which Jyotish emerges is rich and resonant. The Vedas, Purānas and Tantras; the rites and ritual observances, the rather large pantheon of deities and their intricate tissue of myth—all this is as real as you’re willing for it to be. The age-old technologies of invocation, offering, prayer, mantra, the whole ritual kit ‘n kaboodle—they work, if you put your heart into them.

There’s an unlimited supply of wisdom and meaning to be found in this realm. More than enough nectar for anyone to digest in a lifetime or a hundred.

If you know, you know.

If you don’t, I can’t really convince you. Experience is the only teacher that counts in this regard.

So enough, then: no more apologetics from me for believing things people may think are crazy, for being a spiritual polyamorist (“religion?” “please sir, can I have some more?”) or a practicing diviner² prone to reading anything and everything in this fractal, holographic universe of ours.

With all that out of the way, let’s get on with the topic of hand: a branch of Jyotish called muhurta.

One more bit of context: classically Jyotisa has six “limbs,” starting with astronomical observation and calculation. (Until very recently in human history, astronomy and astrology were inseparable. Johannes Kepler was (fun fact!) a noted astrologer³.)

The most well-known among these limbs is jataka, natal astrology, the interpretation of birth charts.

Another of the limbs is praśna (literally “question”). This is the art of casting a chart to answer a question, like '“Will I find my ring, and if so where?” or “is it a good idea to go to Bangladesh next Spring?”

Yet another limb is nimitta, the art of reading omens. An example: a client came to one of my teachers asking if she was pregnant with their second child. At just that moment, there was a loud baby’s cry from outside the window as a couple pushing a stroller walked by. The jyotishi immediately told the querent “yes,” even without looking at her chart. Sure enough, the prediction panned out and she gave birth to a healthy babe in due course.

A fourth and critical limb is what’s known as muhurta, literally “moment.” As you’ve doubtless gathered from this piece’s title, there’s an art to choosing the moment to commence a thing. This only stands to reason, since anything we birth or begin has its own natal chart. In a sense, then, muhurta is the process of reverse-engineering the natal chart—something we don’t have the luxury of doing when it comes to childbirth (unless we’re a surgeon scheduling a C-section) but which we can absolutely do when it comes to starting a business or picking a wedding date.

Now, speaking of weddings, marriages are probably the most famous application of muhurta. Anyone passingly familiar with Hindu culture knows that a jyotishi is almost always enlisted to select an auspicious date, even if (in this modern era of love marriages as opposed to arranged ones) he wasn’t consulted on compatibility matters. Furthermore, astrological considerations are the reason there’s a wedding season in India: this year’s season started this past week, with the holiday known as Makar Sankranti, when the Sun enters sidereal Capricorn and embarks on the northerly part (uttarāyana) of its annual trajectory.

The point is, when something comes into being, it’s deeply imprinted⁴ by the pattern of the universe in the moment of its birth, in ways that will unfold over its entire lifespan, for better or for worse. So it behooves us to pick that moment with care.

In practice, that’s not so easy.

We start by blocking out inauspicious times, which are numerous. After X’ing out all the client’s no-go times, we do our own “black-outs.” We give eclipses a wide berth, for example, and stay away from nighttime, dawn and dusk. New moons are basically out, as are days when the Sun enters a new sign, and so forth. Certain lunar days and certain angles between the sun and moon are inauspicious and best avoided. All that’s just the general stuff. Next we go down another level and start taking the client’s natal chart into consideration. At this point a whole host of filters come into play, grouped broadly into technical categories such as “candra balam,” “tārā balam,” and “lagna balam.” (The strength of the moon, the lunar naksatra, and the rising sign, respectively).

Then there are even more specific considerations depending on what kind of event we’re finding the moment for—weddings being the most finicky of all.

So what’s left after all this filtering, after the balls have been juggled and the sixteen sided Rubics cube solved? In practice, often not all that much. It becomes about choosing the best available option for the situation, not necessarily a perfect or ideal one. The realities of embodied life are not always kind to our hopes and aspirations, in other words, and some compromise is usually necessary.

This is where we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Even a not-quite-ideal muhurta is leagues better than one chosen at random or for the sake of convenience alone. For in consciously, skillfully choosing when and how to enter the flow of time, we stack life’s deck in our favor.

Muhurta is truly a potent way of aligning ourselves with the cosmos and making the most of the hand we’ve been dealt.

I’ll end by pointing out that, like most parts of the Vedic universe, this stuff is open-source and universal. Anyone can benefit from engaging with this body of knowledge, which is about the texture of time and space; there’s no need to be an astrologer or a card-carrying Hindu or anything else. Nor is belief a necessary ingredient here (although if you have a heart brimming with devotion as well as clear intent, that’s sure to be a boon).

So, next time you’re wondering when would be a good time to start XYZ, try dropping your neighborhood jyotishi a line.

If I’m the main jyotishi in your rolodex, just give me a minute; I’ll be available for custom muhurta work as of April 2025.

1. Far from being a monolithic entity, Jyotisa is composed of many strands and schools, from pre-Aryan through to Vedic, Greek, and Perso-Islamic influences. Its roots are untraceably deep—many thousands of years old—and they’re still very much putting out new shoots.

2. The Bible isn’t big on divination, so it says, but how else did the magi know to head to Jerusalem for the birth of a great king, if not by reading heavenly omens? I’d argue we lack context for the biblical prohibition against divination, which doubtless made sense at the time. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and it’s high time we recover the babe that went out with the bathwater all those centuries ago.

3. A fact that the dependably rationalist-biased Wikipedia does its best to sanitize.

4. That phrase “imprinted by“ suggests a causal arrow that may not obtain: it’s not so much that a new life is imprinted by the universe at birth, but that the two are synchronous, co-constitutive.