Jyotish and Western Astrology have common ancestry. There seems to have been some interplay in the last two or three hundred years BCE and the horoscopic side of Jyotish is heavily derived from a translation of a Hellenisitic text, now known as
The Yavanajataka Of Sphujidhvaja
Both Hellenisitic and Medieval Western Astrology were heavily forecasting oriented, like Jyotish but unlike it's Indian cousing, Western Astrology was not a continuous tradition. There were two main breaks in it, the most recent being from the end of the Seventeenth Century to the end of the Nineteenth Century. In it's present incarnation it owes much to a delberate decision by Alan Leo to concentrate on character analysis (for reasons I won't go into here). Thus as Mystic Zyl points out, it is now mostly used for personality assessments, counselling and synergy (compatiblity assessment) and less emphasis is placed on the forecasting of external events than was the case in its traditional format and is still the case in Jyotish.
I have to stress that this is a comment relating to the balance of astrological practice , I'm not suggesting that there's no personality assessment in Jyotish or that there's no forecasting in modern Western approaches (though the object of forecasting is often not so much external events but psychological states)
Mystic Zyl said:
But I believe it is all what you have been trained in and are comfortable with. I also like chinese, too. I think they all are good. I like western because I have studied it for 37 years and it just a comfortable energy for me.
Yes I think that is a very important point. Changing your system of approach is extremely challenging and there's a cultural dimension too - trying out an approach that has little point of contact with what you are used to can be very daunting. And if you are currently practising Astrology in a way that is productive for you, then there's no real reason to change.
For the minority of us who started out in the Modern Western approach but found it unfulfilling, Jyotish used to hold an attraction as an alternative. Over the last twenth years there's also been more research into and partial reconstruction of the earliest systems of Western Astrology.
So from a personal point of view, my answer is Traditional Western Astrology, but then I'm now reasonably comfortable with it and I'm very interested in it's origins, so I'm willing to step outside my comfort zone to explore more. If I were Indian, then I think I would be heavily into Jyotish and I don't think I'd consider changing.
