Contemplate's Lineage Acknowledgement

Contemplate does not emerge from one book, one institution, or one individual teacher.

Our work arises from a confluence of family inheritance, formal study, spiritual practice, community life, and the many visible and invisible people who carried these traditions before us.

We offer this acknowledgment not as a claim to spiritual authority, but as an expression of gratitude and responsibility.

Lineage, for us, is not a claim to authority. It is a responsibility.

It asks us to remember where knowledge came from, to distinguish inheritance from invention, to remain honest about the limits of our understanding, and to carry what we have received with care.

Family Transmission

Contemplate’s practice is rooted first in family.

Our work grows from a multigenerational Konkani and Chitrapur Saraswat family in which Jyotiṣa, ritual, devotion, philosophical inquiry, and attention to sacred time were not understood as separate interests. They formed part of the atmosphere of life.

Planetary periods, family patterns, dreams, spiritual practices, health, vocation, travel, relationships, and important beginnings could all be considered within a wider cosmological context. Jyotiṣa was not presented merely as a profession or technique. It was one of the languages through which daily life could be observed, contemplated, and understood.

We bow to our Kula Devi, Shri Laxmi Narayan Mahamaya, of Goa, relocated to Hanumatta, near Ankola, Karnataka, following the Portuguese invasion in the early 16th century. We constantly sense the Kula Devi’s presence in our lives and our work.

We bow to our great grandfathers, Sripad Kalavar and Ganesh Betarbet, and to the generations before them. Through them we were directly connected to the blessings and teachings of Baba Nityananda of Ganeshpuri and Sri Ramana Maharshi. We bow to our great grandmother Ramabai who connected us directly with teachings of Swami Ramadass of Kanhangad, Kerala.

Each of the great-grandparents and grandparents carried knowledge of Jyotiṣa differently. Some transmission arrived through explicit teaching. Some arrived through stories, daily practice, language, discipline, ritual, food, prayer, family responsibility, and ways of meeting difficulty. Some arrived through what was preserved; some through what migration, colonization, and social change made difficult to preserve.

We acknowledge both continuity and interruption.

Lineage is not always an unbroken chain of perfect transmission. Sometimes it survives as a fragment: a mantra remembered, a ritual maintained, a chart kept, a story repeated, a deity approached, or a way of understanding time that continues even after its language has become faint.

Contemplate is part of the work of listening for those fragments and bringing them into conscious relationship again.

V. K. Choudhry

We offer our gratitude to V. K. Choudhry, whose teaching and method, of Systems Approach to Vedic Astrology, significantly shaped the technical and diagnostic framework of Jyotiṣa carried through our family practice.

His work strengthened an approach to chart interpretation that values clarity, precision, disciplined observation, and careful assessment of planetary periods and karmic activation.

This influence can be felt in Contemplate’s emphasis on the chart as a dynamic system rather than a collection of isolated symbols.

We seek to understand:

which karmic potentials are most active
when they are likely to ripen
where support and challenge may emerge
how multiple planetary influences operate together
where action may be useful
where patience, preparation, surrender, or restraint may be wiser

We honor this transmission by continuing to study, test, question, and apply it carefully—without reducing a person’s life to technique.

Swami Shantananda and Advaita Vedānta

We acknowledge with reverence Swami Shantananda, of Chinmaya Mission USA, whose discourses on Advaita Vedānta formed an important contemplative foundation for our work.

This stream of teaching deepened our inquiry into the nature of the self, the difference between awareness and the movements appearing within awareness, and the possibility of recognizing consciousness as more fundamental than the identities through which we ordinarily understand ourselves.

This influence is present throughout Contemplate.

We do not study a chart simply to reinforce a fixed identity. We study the patterns through which identity, desire, attachment, memory, and action arise.

Jyotiṣa may describe the conditions of embodiment, but contemplative inquiry asks a deeper question:

Who is the one witnessing these conditions?

The dialogue between Jyotiṣa and Advaita allows us to honor the reality of karma without mistaking karma for the totality of the self.

The Gurus of Śrī Chitrapur Math

We bow to the guru-paramparā of Śrī Chitrapur Math in Shirali, Karnataka, and to the generations of teachers, sādhakas, families, ritual specialists, scholars, artists, cooks, musicians, and community stewards through whom Saraswat spiritual and cultural life has been sustained.

The Chitrapur Saraswat tradition forms an important ancestral and devotional ground for Contemplate.

Its influence is not limited to formal philosophy. It lives through language, collective worship, family customs, devotional music, community obligations, foodways, festivals, sacred geography, and the understanding that spiritual life must be carried through relationship.

We acknowledge the gurus of the Math not as historical ornaments, but as members of a living stream whose teachings, practices, and community structures have helped preserve a way of life through migration and profound social change.

We also recognize that traditions are carried not only by their formally named leaders, but by the often-unrecorded labor of women, householders, elders, caregivers, temple workers, cooks, singers, and community members whose devotion allowed those traditions to remain alive.

Śivācārya Sthaneshwar Timalsina

We offer gratitude to Śivācārya Sthaneshwar Timalsina, whose teaching contributed to the deeper study of Śaiva and Śākta Tantra that informs Contemplate’s philosophical foundations.

This stream of study helped situate Tantroktaṃ Rātrisūktam and the Śiva Jñāna Bodha not as abstract metaphysics, but as a practical map of consciousness, bondage, recognition, and liberation.

The Śaiva and Śākta traditions remind us that the world is not simply something to escape. Manifestation itself is alive with consciousness. The body, senses, mind, desire, action, time, and material existence are all part of the field in which recognition becomes possible.

This understanding deeply informs Contemplate’s approach to Kālavidyā.

Time is not an empty container.

Time is living movement.

Time is the emergence, transformation, concealment, and revelation of consciousness.

Time is the dance of Kālī.

The Wider Field of Teachers

No complete lineage acknowledgment can name every source.

We therefore bow to the ṛṣis, seers, astrologers, philosophers, poets, ritualists, temple communities, householders, artisans, healers, musicians, farmers, grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, and unnamed practitioners who developed, protected, interpreted, and embodied these systems across generations.

We acknowledge the people who preserved manuscripts, maintained temples, remembered chants, calculated calendars, observed the sky, taught children, performed rituals, cared for land, carried deities during migration, and kept traditions alive under conditions that did not always support their survival.

We acknowledge the Konkan coast and the wider ecologies from which our ancestral traditions emerged: the sea, monsoon, rivers, forests, fields, plants, animals, celestial cycles, and forms of community life through which cosmology was experienced as relationship rather than abstraction.

We also acknowledge the disruptions produced by colonial violence, displacement, persecution, migration, and the modern commodification of spiritual knowledge.

To honor lineage honestly is to hold both what it illuminated and the human institutions through which exclusion or harm could also occur.

Respect does not require the suspension of discernment.

Tradition remains alive through devoted engagement, not unquestioning repetition.