Here’s the link to the video on this site!

Subject:  Who Are We Becoming…   A Symphony of Symbols.

We are nested within cycles of time.  In addition to the larger patterns, we are also subject to the energy fields of shorter-term cycles, and these all interact to create the conditions of our times.   How will it affect you?  How will you affect our times?   Listen here!

“I went to Anne’s lecture for the IONS group. It was So packed, I had trouble finding parking! And I sat on the floor for part of it (gladly so). Anne is one of our best diplomats — spreading the word — making astrology appealing and palatable to the more general public (although I must say IONS people are definitely more open-minded that the regular general public). Every time I hear Anne talk, I feel validated in my experiences … like I am not crazy, there really is a reason why certain things have been going on. If you read her newsletter, you will find the same will be true for you. Example: my To Do Lists nowadays are empty threats and I often don’t follow through on them (= Saturn’s ways don’t work as well anymore); my “bug antennae” are my best guide for what is to be my next step (Neptune ingress to Pisces).”

WOW!   Thank you, Jeannie!

Here’s what the OED says.  There are 2 entries for “influence”.  Here’s from the first entry and the first two definitions:
Word background:  “13th century, emanation from the stars.  4th Century, Firmicus and Pico di Mirandola: The astrological sense: ‘astral influence.’”
Definition 1. “the action or fact of flowing in, said of the action of water and other fluids, and of immaterial things conceived of as flowing in.”

Definition 2. “a.  the supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an ethereal fluid acting upon the character and destiny of man, and affecting sublunary things generally.  In later times gradually viewed less literally or as an exercise of power or ‘virtue’, or of an occult force, and in late use chiefly a poetical or humorous reflex of earlier notions. 

“b. The exercise of personal power by human beings, figured as something of the same nature as astral influence.” 
One might argue that these notions (a ‘fluid’ emanating from the stars) are hopeless scientifically outmoded–but actually, new physics are restoring the concept of the ‘ethers’, now positing the vacuum to be a rich medium of energy and energy transference, and some subatomic particles (the neutrino, the tachyon are examples) far exceed the speed of light, and in particle/wave form (fluids?) move through matter emanating from all objects in the universe to pervade all others.

So the next time someone asks you if you REALLY believe the stars “influence” people and things on earth, you can tell them “Actually, that’s the literal definition of ‘influence’.  So yes, by defnition, the stars influence us.”     Wow!

Why now?  As I’ve said before, the astrological pattern:  Three slow and powerful planets standing on 3 corners of the “cardinal cross” are literally changing our understanding of time.  These planets are all crossing, back and forth, over the points in the sky where we have soltices and equinoxes.  Solstices and equinoxes literally mark the changes of seasons:  They are how we keep time on earth.   They Mayans may say this period will be “the end of time as we know it”, and the planets now are telling us seasons are changing, the way we think of time is changing.   We can’t go back to “how it was.”   We can only discover the beauties of a new normalcy that hasn’t yet been born.

We’re in labor now.   Think of the course of a pregnancy:  usually the beginning is a lot of fun.  The pregnancy itself is literally an expansion period.  Mom eats more, her body signals her to rest, there is anticipation of great change and the discomfort of growth.  But Mom can’t just keep getting bigger and bigger.  There will come a day when the pregnancy ends, and usually that means some level of discomfort.   Labor, especially natural labor, is a difficult and  painful process.  It comes in waves, and often women fear they are about to die.  Some do.  But life can’t continue without this process.

In a fractal sense, the earth, the solar system, the universe, all go through similar processes.  The earth may buck and heave, people may shout and fight, the old, overgrown, too-large systems begin to break down.   And what is the result?   Something new–the new child, the new vision, a new social arrangement–that requires work and dedication, but which all agree is worth it.   The new life we are preparing to nurture will be worth the travail of birthing it, and worth the work to bring it to maturity.

Should we rail against the excesses of the dying age?   No.  No more than we should rail against the excesses of pregnancy.   That too, was part of the process.   And for the dear soul who worried that the pain of birth is woman’s punishment for Eve’s transgression…  I think not.   If giving birth were as pleasant as an orgasm, this earth would have been overrun with humans to die off in horrible plagues many more times than we’ve experienced so far:  my guess is that total plaguedom would have hit us about every 80 years, which is more trauma than most of us want to inherit.

We are the midwives of the process.   Our job is to watch the waves of change break over us and recede, keep adapting to the changes of the last series of pains, prepare ourselves for the next shocks, until we see the beginning of the new.   We will never “get back to normal”  because “normal” is in the process of change.  Our children and grandchildren will have enough time in the new arrangement to get a sense of “normal”, but our job is to keep riding the waves.

Wow. Let’s analyze this.

First, we are dealing with the soltice/equinox points:  Aries is the first of these points–the degree of the spring equinox.  Solstice points are the Axis Mundi– the axis upon which the world turns–the four corners of the world..  Appropriate to this symbolism, the 9.1 Japanese quakes actually moved the earth several more inches off its typical axis.

But the quake actually struck when Uranus was at 29 degrees and 59 minutes of Pisces.  Why was this such a big deal?    Let us count the ways:

1.  It’s as close to the Axis Mundi as it could possibly be, so that’s plenty.

2. 29 degrees is an “unstable degree” and Uranus is the least “stable” of all planets.

3. Uranus was in Pisces, a water sign ruled by Neptune  AND   Neptune was in Aquarius, the sign ruled by Uranus

4. AND Neptune was at 29 degrees of Aquarius.   So with both of these at 29 degrees of each others’ home signs, one of the planets long associated with instability in a water sign, and the other long associated with the ocean in a sign associated with ‘shaking things up’…  we had a perfect storm.

5. And one more thing–the Moon, the most visible object in the night sky, was very close to it’s first quarter position, long considered the position of ACTION.   It was also approaching one of the Biggest Full Moons of 20 years (because the Moon will be unusually close to the earth this time).

So can we rest now?   I’m sorry, but we can’t.   On March 19, the Full Moon will be at perigee (closest to earth) at 29 Scorpio, the sign of the underground, the underworld, the hidden.   And this powerful Full Moon will exactly conflict with Neptune (exact square), still at 29 Aquarius.   Uranus will still be on the Axis Mundi.   Unstable degrees, a powerful Moon, and a powerful Uranus, sharing MARS rulership (conflict, fire, explosions) with the Moon (both Scorpio and Aries are ruled by Mars, which is in watery Pisces).

There’s a lot more going on in these charts, but this plenty to paint a picture.   Uranus will be at the Axis Mundi until March 28, but will return to this degree later this year, resting at that specific point between 11/11/11 and 1/8/2012.   I particularly cringe at the 11/11/11 date, not because those numbers are astrologically significant, but they are VERY psychologically significant, and may prompt some unusual behavior even without Uranus’s help.

Gee.   I hate to end this post on such a dire note.    Right now the only thing I can think of are a couple of platitudes:  True, but not new.   But it’s still important to remember that these earth changes are course-corrections.   We are in the process of long-needed change, and as stubborn as we humans are, we often neglect to make change until there is no longer choice.   … or to mix our metaphors here, we are in the birth-pangs of a new age.  Birth is sometimes long, difficult, and painful, but the results evoke the most profound love we know on earth: that of a mother for her new-born child.   We are getting ready to welcome the child-form of a new era in human history.

This WAS a shock.  Barbara was only 69.  She was taking medication for high blood pressure, but there was no medical concern about imminent death.   Her kids said her greatest fear was a long period of incapacitation.

At the gathering, I heard more.  She called 911 herself, and after the ambulance came, she was intubated–a breathing tube was inserted down her throat.  She clearly indicated that she wanted it OUT, and it was removed.  She died before reaching the hospital.

Of course, I’m questioning the accuracy of the details, repeated secondhand.   But the point was, Barbara feared incapacitation worse than death.   And quite possibly consciously made a decision to die rather than start a series of medical interventions.   And there’s good reason for that.

Thanks to the false use of the phrase “death panels” and the propoganda against “killing grannie”, old people have even more to fear than if the original health coverage plan had been allowed to pass.  The personal cost of health care for the aging and infirm, and the difficulty these people have in simply getting through the day without help, makes dying a pretty attractive alternative.  At what point does it all become Just Too Hard?  Almost no one has a pension anymore.  And social security is again being attacked.   Most people are in the position of hoping they do NOT live long lives.

It shocks and saddens me to hear friends tell me they’d rather die than face the financial and personal catastrophe of too long a life.   THIS is the country I no longer recognize.

There will be a special show opening party, and I’ll let you know the time and date of that celebration as soon as I know!  Prices will be discounted during the show, and a portion of each sale will support the ongoing activities of the Unitarian Church.

There were actually two stories in one.  One was that the zodiac has been changing, slipping backwards, so that the sign you think you are is suddenly no longer your sign.   Why this is suddenly news —well, we had some slow news days.  This has actually been happening for over 2000 years.

If you want to be literal about constellations and zodiac signs, the sign of Aries would be about a week long and Pisces would be almost two months long.  SIGNS are not the same as CONSTELLATIONS.  Constellations don’t arrange themselves in the sky in equal-size 30-degree chunks.    The zodiac is a circle of symbols.  Circles have no beginning and no end, but in order to talk about them, we have to point somewhere and say “Start Here”.  Western astrology starts by linking the beginning of Aries, the first sign, with the first day of spring: the spring equinox.   India-n astrology usually starts by linking the beginning of Aries with a spot in the sky opposite the star Spica.  The Indian system doesn’t drift because it’s linked with a star, rather than with the earth.  Both measurements have a complex system of rules and procedures for interpretation that are internally consistent and are different from each other.

And what about the “NEW” sign, Ophuichus???  Well, if you run a chart for the year 0001 CE, you’ll see exactly the same thing you see today.    And what is that?

First, imagine a map of the orbit of the sun around the earth.  It will look a lot like the equator, but it’s in the sky (and in a different place).  This is the ECLIPTIC, the linear path of the sun, that stays the same each and every year.  Spread out across the Ecliptic,  you’ll see the 12 constellations that give their names to the Zodiac signs.  These constellations are ALL laid out, SPLAT!, right across the Ecliptic.  The line of the Ecliptic goes right through the MIDDLE of these signs.

And 2010 years ago, exactly like today, one TEENSY corner of another constellation slips over the line.  ONE STAR of the large constellation Ophuichus crosses the Ecliptic.

When you have 12 constellations neatly bisected by the ecliptic and one more, with the toenail of its little toe crossing the Ecliptic, and when this pattern has NOT CHANGED for way over 2000 years, you tell me how this is suddenly news!

Unfortunately, the assassination of a judge and attempted killing of Congresswoman Gifford of Arizona bring this closer to home.  This follows the assassination of a Pakistani Governor by only a few days.

The reason for this involves planets that were active in the series of assassinations in the Mid-1960′s.  This time the rebel planet Uranus, about to enter angry and impulsive Aries, is traveling with Jupiter, the planet that makes things bigger.  These planets are squaring the phoenix planet Pluto, the planet of death-rebirth, or total transformation.  The square is a challenging aspect that forces action.  And Uranus is in an OPENING square to Pluto, which is a crisis of action.

These are long, slow aspects, and I expect to see more ‘revolutionary fervor’ (e.g. political violence) after Uranus enters Aries again in March.  Most of this year will be a collective reaction to these planetary positions.

What’s the point in making predictions like this?   Collective events are a result of individual consciousness.  If we are to contribute to sanity here, each one of us must learn to recognize our own anger and reactivity.  Not only must we act sanely, we must THINK sanely and FEEL sanely.  If a room of angry and upset people contains a few who do NOT lose their cool, who can stay on the scene and stay calm, the nature of the group will change.  Most of us choose to leave the reactive group and hang out with others who can stay cool, and while this is not bad, we only indirectly affect others this way.   IF you are one who can stay calm and centered around others who have lost their cool, your greatest contribution is to mingle with others.   Either way, our  job now is to stay calm, cool, collected, and centered.

That evening I got a phone call and an email.  The friend with chronic health issues was bubbling over with energy.  She said she was in a circumstance that afternoon that was usually unpleasant and challenging, but suddenly she realized she was incredibly happy.  And her energy levels went up, and she kept apologizing for talking a hundred miles an hour, but she had so much energy…    And the email, the husband had noticeably less pain that afternoon.

I don’t know if this does anything long-lasting.  I don’t know if it’s supposed to.  But I’m still playing with it.

More Description:

As I said before, trying to describe the process the teacher was showing me is SO difficult, because it took place entirely on a non-verbal and non-physical level.   But I can’t describe it without referring to physical things–like a blast of water, or pushing it around with fingers.

It’s more like an energy blob of indeterminate shape is placed in a spherical chamber inside my awareness.  As my attention is on the blob, energy pressures in the chamber knead the shape, changing it.  In the process, the blob shape twists and rolls in the chamber, with parts of it seemingly pushed in, others bulging out.  I have no idea what the shape is, or why there needs to be this twisting or rolling, but the Teacher would reach inside my mind and nudge it one way or another as a way to demonstrate what I was to do.

I think it’s OK to use familiar images, like blasts of water, or manipulating the blob with imaginary fingers, but I also get that the visuals connected to the world we know are a film that may interfere with the process.

I’ll let you know as I continue to play with this.   If you want me to do this during a reading, I’ll be happy to.

On Monday, we’ll have an afternoon/evening constellation workshop, with 4 openings left.  The end of this session will include a special constellation for the healing of all participants.  For more information about this please drop me an email at anne (at) stariel.com.

I will also have limited time available for in-person astrological readings while I’m there, so if you’re near San Diego, it would be a good time to connect personally!

I look forward to seeing all my San Diego friends!

At long last, several requests later…..  Now I’m making a  Request for Participants!

One lovely individual has requested a Family Constellation, which is a healing process that is most powerful in a group setting.  I am asking those of good heart and curiosity to come (FREE) to assist this person in her own healing.  There is also space for two other focused (paid) constellations.
Constellation work (which is not about stars, but is about how energy is arranged–’constellated’–among people) is a phenomenal process that combines techniques from shamanism and psycho-spiritual healing.

• We engage the energies of love, responsible for all creation.
• Using love’s energies, we interact with the ancestors and sometimes with people we may never know, to create an opening for healing.
• The process “un-kinks the hose” so the creative and supportive power of love can flow freely, and can be available in one’s everyday life.
• This is a group event, in which everyone gains from the singular process which plays out around one individual.

During the workshop, we will also have one constellation focused on the healing of all individuals present. I invite all participants to attend FREE–in support of your own healing and that of others.  There is also room for two more individuals to be healing focal points, at $250 each.
For more information about the constellation process, sample stories, etc., look under the heading “Family Constellations at www.stariel2.com

Please email me at anne@stariel.com if you would like to participate.  I will need RSVPs –I need a reliable count of participants to make this work for the person who requested this.

Thanks so much to everyone.

But every one of us is being trained by the media to look for the “worst case scenario.”   Oil in the gulf?  Worst case scenario: end of the world.   Financial crisis–worst case scenario?  end of the world.  New diseases–worst case scenario?  end of the world.   Spreading fear may “sell”, but it’s not news at all.  The worst case scenario will always be the end of the world by various dreadful means.  I can understand the thinking that this might motivate people to change things, but negativity is NOT really a motivator.  It’s a demotivator.

My teacher (Hugh Martin) used to stress how much we waste productive energy by playing what he called “The Ain’t-It-Awful Game”.   That’s the game where one person complains about his arthritis, the next, sympathizing, says the awful weather makes it even worse, the next person talks about the friend who got heat-stroke from the weather, the first remembers a friend who died of heat-stroke….   Or the one that starts with the oil in the Gulf, is added to by the terrible politics that enables rich corporations, the next adds stuff about the evil of greedy corporations, etc…    These conversations are depressive, demotivating, add nothing useful to our understanding, and burn inner psychic energy that could be used to accomplish something.

Just imagine what it would be like if the news media were to ask interviewees “What’s the BEST possible outcome for this situation?   How do we get there?”   Just that small shift changes the motivation of listeners.  Just that small shift offers the possibility of shared purpose, of creating a mission that joins people together instead of dividing them.  What’s the best case scenario of creating shared purpose?  What’s the best case scenario for community caring?  If the best case scenario seems utterly unrealistic, why do we tend to believe the worst-case scenario is more realistic?  What’s the best case scenario for sending out this blog asking people to think about the best case scenario?

• “Wow. This aging thing may be the most universal of stories, but it is nonetheless shocking to witness. Transformation before our very eyes, but without our seeing it most of the time.”

Reminds me of the time my much much younger brother, on seeing pics of Mom when I was a kid, saying to her…

“Mom!   You used to be a Beautiful Lady!”

Well!  I guess “facts is facts”.  Oh dear.

What is Fear?  For one, it’s a cute acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real.  Unless you are being attacked by a bear, or are in a similarly immediate life-threatening situation, fear is always imaginary and is never about the present moment.  Even if you have stage 5 cancer, your fear does not refer to the knowable present.  It is about the future.  Fear may be about what others might be doing in the present or what someone might have done wrong in the past, about what might happen, about how you might feel. It’s always about something you do not know to be true.    What you know may bring you sorrow; your physical body may bring you pain, but only what we do not know brings us fear.

Good emotional hygiene can innoculate us against a FearStorm.  What is the personal hygiene to counteract fear?

1. Keep your awareness in the present moment. When fear approaches you, ask if it relates to the present.  Bring your attention back to the present moment.
2. Separate fear from reality. Ask yourself if there are alternatives to the scenario you fear.  Most fears are concatenations of disaster scenarios:  First This awful thing, which will trigger That awful thing, etc.  What if there is This wonderful thing, which will trigger That wonderful thing and etc.? Why does one version of an imaginary future seem more real to you than another?  They are both fantasies.  Neither is real.  Fear is our response to the unknown.  Choose what makes you happy
3. Recognize how you’ve coped with past situations. Whether your fear is personal or is related to grand social issues, remember how you’ve coped with difficulties in the past.  Whatever comes up, you will be able to deal with it when the time comes.  You don’t have to deal with it now.
4. Choose your emotions thoughtfully. Even if the worst of your fears comes true, will staying in a state of fear between this time and that make the situation better?   Taking action may make it better, but taking action is not fear.  If something bad were to happen in XX years, would you rather worry about it for all those years ahead of time or just handle it when it happens?   How many things have you feared that have not happened?  CHOOSE to avoid fear.
5. Reallocate your emotional energy. Fear is a gradient emotion.  When you face a huge rollercoaster you may feel fear, but it takes the form of excitement.  Fear can morph into excited anticipation.  Fear can morph into an urgency to take action.  Fear can morph into the determination to envision the world you want!   (Be sure to read Anita M’s Near Death Experience!–and you might enjoy Ricky Gervais’s movie The Invention of Lying).  Reallocate the energy of fear into the excitement of Joyful Anticipation!

In April and May there will definitely be punctuation dates in the process of changes that are inevitable in any life.   Globally, we still have the collision aspects of Pluto (transformation/power), Saturn (authority, big businesses, rules), and Uranus (freedom, individuation, rebelliousness, revolution).  We’re in this dance for the next few years, but punctuations come this summer.

April 6:  Pluto, the planet that triggers fear and resistance, stations retrograde, greatly magnifying its influence.  It makes this station in a collision aspect (square) to another planet of fear, this time adding the theme of regulation, Saturn; and in a smoother relationship (trine) to Venus–the planet of values, including love and money–and Mercury, representing thought and communication.   Expect to see explosions about regulations of the finance system.  Or personal fears about money and finance  (remember your fear hygiene.  It’s all in your imagination!).

April 14:  This is a new moon at 24 Aries.  Time to take action for new beginnings.  No real crises showing up here.

April 17:  Mercury stations Retrograde.  The station point is 12 Taurus, so if you have planets near that point (or 12 Leo, Aquarius, or Scorpio) expect action in the days surrounding this retrograde point.  Why?  Because a station point is intensely powerful energy.  Even more pointedly, this time Mercury stations collides with (squares) Mars, creating the potential for angry (Mars) words (Mercury), but also for sharp (Mars) thinking (Mercury).  (It’s also sextile Pluto, just to spice up the situation with power plays.)   Your choice here.  Mercury stays retrograde until 5/11.   This is NOT a time to sign new contracts, start new projects, send out your advertising flyers–unless you were born with a retrograde Mercury yourself.

April 26:  Saturn (authority, the old way, big business & banking) is in an exact opposition (think collision) with Uranus (the new, rebellion, high tech, freedom) –again.  As it was on the day of Obama’s election, for one thing.  Which will still be in effect on….

April 28:  Full Moon at 8 Scorpio.  This lunation is in collision with Mercury and Mars and is sextile Pluto, so expect some confrontational energy from the crazies out there.  Practice FearStorm hygiene.

May 11:  Mercury stations direct at 2’40″ Taurus.  Uber power here, as it harmonizes with Pluto.  Expect a very powerful message from a very powerful source.

May 13:  New Moon in Tropical Taurus… The moon “likes” Taurus–a lot.  It is stable there (and stubborn), and this lunation collides with Mars (action?  anger?) but harmonizes (sextile) with the most generous Jupiter and with responsible Saturn (trine).    The start of something solid and reasonable?

May 27:  This Full moon at 6’33″ Sagittarius isn’t particularly notable except that the very next day…

May 28: Uranus (freedom, individualism, rebelliousness, “my way or the highway”) enters tropical Aries (the action principle… and what kind of action?  WHAT *I* WANT).   Tickle this with the full moon energy and remember that this brings ALL three Fearstorm planets (Pluto, Saturn, Uranus) into cardinal (action-oriented) signs, and we’ve upped the ante on acting out from folks who have little or no emotional hygiene.

May 31:  Neptune stations retrograde–the powerful degree here is 28’42″ Aquarius.  And it collides with (opposition) Mars, the planet of action.  Neptune is nothing if not nebulous, so this can bring a period of delusional actions, or simply the inability to act—sometimes the impulse is there but the carry-through gets waterlogged.

Ok, that’s it for now.  Stay healthy, emotionally, physically, and spiritually!

First–the techno.  My god man, just because you CAN do 3-D doesn’t mean every single scene must be floating like a drunken sailor on a heaving sea.  Two people stand there talking so, just to make SURE you don’t forget it’s 3-D, the camera is swaying from side to side, moving up and down, in totally meaningless and random motion.  The ONLY reason for such drunken camerawork is to prove it’s 3-D.  It distracts you from the conversation between the characters (perhaps allowing you to forget how inane it is), and takes away from the story.  Actually, the story IS the special effects.  PHOOEY!

Then there was the continuity problem.  Since I had to keep closing my eyes to ward off nausea, I got to see things a bit differently.  At one point, the bad guy, in his huge “Transformers”-like robo-warrior armor, had his shirt sleeve on fire.  He did a bunch of stuff before beating out the fire.  When I opened my eyes again I saw a slashed and torn (NOT charred) shirt-sleeve with pale white skin under it.  Good grief, man.  This was a fire.  My guess is over 10 seconds of full-on flame.  And nothing is charred?

And those robo-warriors:  built to order for over-testosteroned steroid worshippers.  When these 12-foot machines walked, the bass-reverb over-amped sound could have been footsteps from the empire state building walking.   Stupid.    But when the tree of life fell—something that looked a lot bigger than the empire state building–or the world trade buildings, for that matter—sound, dust, hi-amped reverb be damned.  In relative silence, dodge the branches flying through the air and stand there and watch.  It didn’t throw up debris from the forest floor as the ground shook.  The ground hardly seemed to shake.   When, in real life, a block of stone fell off the face of Yosemite, the sonic boom flattened trees for hundreds of yards.  FLATTENED full growth trees, just the shock wave from the sound.  But our dear Na’vi just stood and watched.  I suppose it’s like movie space stations exploding with fire and sound even tho there’s no oxygen to burn or air of any sort to send sound waves, but the demand suspension of disbelief was too erratic for me to switch gears from too-loud robots to too-quiet forest mammoths falling.

My biggest gripe was the war-movie fervor which drove the military side of this movie.  If the message is that the Na’vi culture was wonderful, it was delivered with a military overkill that was prurient in the extreme.  I personally don’t enjoy long war and battle scenes with over-the-top sci-fi overkill machines.  This isn’t fun cinema for me.  The movie was apparently made for people who think this is fun.  What amazes me is how many people are going all gooey over the innocence and holism of Pandoora and saying how fabulous the movie is because of that.  I guess we have to appeal to the violent and sadistic preferences of movie goers to even get them to see an alternative.  That disgusts me, too.   I don’t like appealing to the worst in people in order to “improve” them.  Wrong-headed thinking.

I loved Jon Stewart last nite, when discussing a new film by a different director who said “I think most film-makers underestimate the intelligence of their audience.”  Stewart quipped “You mean you didn’t use 3-D?”

When Pluto shows up in the road of our life, it stays for a long time.  Slow planets kick up a ruckus in our lives for two reasons.   One is we have little experience with them.   Mars, for example, demonstrates its two-year cycle when our toddlers hit the “terrible twos”.   By the time you’re grown up, you get accustomed to this cyclic energy.   But slow planets, especially really slow ones like Pluto, will aspect each planet in your chart by transit basically once (plus retrograding back).   So you’ve got no prior experience to fall back on.   The other reason slow planets have a bigger impact is that their transits to your chart are SOOO slow they seem to take forever.  When Pluto conjoins your Sun it’s not just a few hours or days or a few weeks—it can be for years. You don’t need an astrologer to tell you something’s up: you can feel it. You can’t just ignore it ‘til it goes away, either.  You’re faced with an inexplicable set of circumstances that won’t let up.

This is “encountering the archetype on the road”.  If we’re astrologers we run to the cookbooks and discover Pluto words like “transformation”, “death and rebirth”, “surrender”, and still we’re caught standing in the middle of the road staring down Pluto.  You want to fight…  but someone once told me,   “If you want to box with God, you’d better have really long arms.”

You don’t need an astrological chart and an ephemeris to know you’re dancing with Pluto.    Here’s a short list of Pluto Symptoms:

IF YOU FEEL LIKE THIS IT MUST BE PLUTO.

1. 1. How DARE they!
2. 2. It’s Not Fair.  It’s Not RIGHT.  I WILL make them stop.
3. 3. Obsessed.  You can’t get this issue out of your mind.
4. 4. They WON’T get away with this.
5. 5. 40 jillion get-even fantasies.
6. 6. 30 jillion get-it-back-to-how-it-used-to-be fantasies.
7. 7. Boiling blood each time you think about it (which is all the time).
8. 8. Freezing blood when you think there’s nothing you can do.
9. 9. How DARE they!   …..

These may be symptoms for a Pluto diagnosis.  But does a diagnosis help us understand Pluto?     Does it help you when someone tells you this is transformation at work?  In order to dance well with Pluto, we need to enter Pluto stories and roll around with the energy for a while.

A Pluto Tale

In this story, Pluto takes the form of a dog, a guardian daemon—or angel.   The story begins with a human being—maybe You, who, like all of us, has managed your life into a nice, pleasing rut.   You’ve dug the rut pretty deep, filled it with soft pillows, electronic toys, everything that makes life predictable and pleasant.  It’s so deep, in fact, that even when you stand on your tiptoes, you can’t see the horizon.

You may be enjoying your rut, but there’s an old saying:

The only difference between a rut and a grave is how deep you dig it.

In this story, the wise guardian dog, Pluto, is patrolling the ground above your rut and thinking, “This rut is WAY too deep.”   Ordinarily Pluto might give you a pass, but right now he sees something coming over the horizon that is just perfect for you and you can’t see it.  This fabulous opportunity won’t just fall in your rut.  Unless you get out and intercept it, the opportunity will just pass you by.

So Pluto tries to tell you about it.  Unfortunately, dogs are limited to barks and growls, and all you know is there’s an obnoxious dog outside your comfy rut, barking loudly, incessantly, and ruining the rhythms of both night and day.  You want to scream. Nothing will shut up this dog.  Life is getting miserable.  You tell your friends “I’ve always loved my rut ‘til now…, and as soon as that danged dog goes away it’ll be fine again.”

Pluto is frustrated too.  He’s on to stage two.  Maybe if he throws in loamy dead leaves you’ll look up and see him signaling.  But now your new sofa is trashed and you’re looking for someone to sue.   (How Dare he!) Pluto pauses to think of something new.

“If I throw enough rocks down there,” he thinks, “you can climb up the rocks and see what’s coming over the horizon.”   But the rocks break your new flat screen TV and expensive aquarium and you’re fighting mad. (How Dare he! It’s not Fair!  It’s Not Right!) In fact, you see you’ve finally got ammunition and throw the rocks out of your rut taking careful aim at Pluto.  (He won’t get away with this! Blood boiling.) Maybe you’ll knock him out, run him off, or (hehehe) KILL him!

All gets quiet for a little while.  Pluto goes off to rethink his strategies.

“Hmmm,” he thinks. “I’ve got a friend with a sewage truck.”

The next thing you know there’s a sewage truck emptying itself into your nice comfortable rut.   There’s no choice now.  You’ve gotta get out.  Everything you own is stinking, including the clothes on your back.  (Blood is freezing.) At this point you’ve got two choices:  stand there looking at that stinking hole trying to figure out how to rescue your stuff (you can’t—it’ll stink forever), or turn around and look for that new opportunity coming over the horizon.

Now that you’re out of your rut, if you think Pluto will tap you on the shoulder and point to your heart’s desire, you’ll be sadly disappointed.  You’ll be so busy obsessing over the stinking cesspool that used to be your rut that you wouldn’t even look if he did.  The hidden beneficence of Pluto remains very hidden, and you’re left staring into the cesspool.  Your task now is to break the obsession with what’s been lost.  Even in the standard Pluto mythology, Persephone couldn’t get out of Hell if she brought anything with her.  That six-months-a-year thing was just a compromise for the pomegranate seeds she ate.

You need to learn to seek joy.  Do you remember anything from childhood that entranced you, made you lose track of time and Self?  This is the time to resample that experience.  At some point when you’re not blotto’d by anger or self-pity, make a list of things you can do that can bring you joy.   You’ll discover that JOY requires a singleness of focus, an all-out Paying-Attention, that quite eclipses the negative obsessions of Pluto.  So your Joy-List must include your commitment to focus attention on the potential joy experience.  You can paint by numbers and get stuck in the rebirthing canal, or you can lose yourself in learning something you never knew.  You can take a walk in nature and see nothing, or you can LIVE every scent, leaf, and changing cloud.

As you cross the gulf from bitter obsession to new life, one tiny stepping stone of joy at a time, you will discover, eventually, that you have arrived in an unimagined new world.  This is the journey into Joy:  the journey into a higher level of consciousness.   This is when I hear people say, “That was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, but in a weird way it was the best thing that ever happened to me.   If it hadn’t been for that, I never would have….” (and here they fill in the blank with their version of profound fulfillment).    You’re not likely to volunteer to do it again, but you’ll appreciate the result.  I promise.  These are the facts of the matter when you dance with Pluto.

WHY?

Pluto energy is bigger than we are.   Its main purpose seems to be to break open our sense of self.  Look at the house placement of Pluto and the house ruled by Scorpio in your chart.   This is where you are likely to feel so identified with something that you believe THIS IS WHO I AM.   Pluto is here to tell you that concept is too small.  You are bigger than that.  You must—and with Pluto it’s non-negotiable—you MUST enlarge your perspective.

When we dance with Pluto, we must recognize that the situation is bigger than we are, that the powers are not under our control, and we must knowingly sacrifice.  Pluto triggers our biggest fear:  the fear that we have no control at all.  When Pluto calls, our ruts must change.  Maybe we dig a ramp and a loft high enough for us to see over the edge.  Maybe we build a ladder and climb out when the dog starts barking.   Maybe we wait ‘til the sewage truck arrives, but we MUST expand our perspective.  The sooner we get the message the less destruction we suffer.  Once we embrace the sacrifice, our lives change in astounding ways.  Often the greatest sacrifice is our illusion of control.

Learning to Dance with Pluto

Even though big Pluto transits are relatively rare in our lives, we do get small opportunities to recognize this energy and learn how to handle it.  Every month, the transiting Moon makes four hard aspects to our natal Pluto.  Every year the Sun and Venus do.   You don’t have to watch the ephemeris.  All you have to do is watch yourself and your reactions to the world around you.  If you can learn how to recognize and respond to Pluto on a monthly basis, you’ll be more skillful when the big Pluto events come along.  This is much easier to learn with small things.   Here are some silly small Pluto stories that have been part of my learning experience:

The Broken Set

Long, long ago, and just because I fell in love with the pattern, I bought some pajamas at Walmart.  They had black leggings for bottoms and a really really cute print top that I found among dozens of different patterns.  When I got home, the top was the right size, but the bottoms, hidden, were at least 4 sizes too big.   I took them back to exchange them.

The Customer Service staff said “Just go and find another pair and we’ll swap.”   I looked, and since there were no others with the same really really cute top that I wanted,  I picked a random set in my size, and returned to Customer Service. I suggested we just exchange the pants of the set that fit for the ones that didn’t.

They said, “We can’t break up a set.”  I said, “But the one I’m returning is already broken.”  (How DARE they!) They said, “That doesn’t matter.  We can’t break a set.” (It’s Not Fair!  It’s Not Right!) I asked to see the manager, in a state of absurd fury.   No help there.  He said,  “We can’t break a set.  We can give you your money back or you can choose another from the rack.”

I argued, got nowhere, got my money back and left, thinking I’d write Sam Walton, the board of directors, the head of marketing (They won’t get away with this!  My blood is boiling.  I’ll make them give the pajamas I wanted in the first place) …  and then it struck me.  My reaction was out of all rational bounds.  I was being Pluto’d.  I wasn’t going to win, and it would cost me more to try—postage, angst, fury, etc., than I’d ever get back.  With great difficulty I let it go (but I didn’t forget!).

A New Puppy

Another time, with a much bigger emotional impact, I was looking for a puppy:  a female Maltese puppy to be exact.  I had just finished nursing a dear friend through his final days, and decided to fulfill a long promise to myself to get a Maltese puppy: small, mellow, and hypoallergenic.   So I went off looking in the classifieds.  After several near-misses, I went to the home of an elderly lady whose husband decided she needed a doggy companion, and she thought otherwise.  Her adorable puppy was tied to the doorknob with about a 2-foot running radius.  The pup was bright, friendly, and affectionate, and the woman and I were ready to make a deal.  I responded to the woman’s complaint about all the attention the pup demanded by saying “I can definitely deal with the attention demands.  I just finished caring for a friend who died of AIDS, so I’m used to being on call at any moment.”  At this, the woman said “I’m not letting this puppy go to ANY home where there has been AIDS.”   (HOW DARE SHE!) I tried telling her that dogs couldn’t catch it, and I didn’t have it, and there was nothing infectious in the house. There was no arguing with her.  (It’s Not Fair.  It’s Not Right.) She wouldn’t relent.  I was boiling mad, trying to think of what anti-discriminatory agencies I could find to force her to give up her horrible prejudice and sell me the puppy.  (She can’t get away with this.  I’ll get even.  I’ll report her.  How DARE she!!) Then I realized my blood was boiling:  the situation was purely Pluto.  I couldn’t change this situation.

Pluto was acting like the dog keeping the sheep from the quicksand.  I couldn’t have that puppy.  I had no idea why, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen.  Since this wasn’t the first block in my puppy search, maybe my ideas about getting a puppy had to change:  I would have to surrender something.  Maybe my new puppy wouldn’t be a Maltese.  Maybe it wouldn’t be female.

I went back to the drawing board with a larger perspective and saw yet another Maltese puppy for sale.  I called, and they only had one left: a male.   I asked its birthday (after all, I’m an astrologer), and it was the same birthday as my beloved sister who died and my autistic brother.   I visited it, and when the six-inch pup saw me he tore across the room, somehow leaped into my lap, and smothered me with puppy kisses as if saying “It’s YOU!  It’s YOU!  It’s YOU at long last, my forever best friend!”   Now, 14 years later, he’s still my best friend.

Meeting Pluto People:  The Tar Baby

In dealing with others who are playing Pluto on you, you have limited choices.  You can’t change the other person.  You can’t make them behave the way you think they should.  Your options are limited to walking away without a fight (quitting a job, leaving a marriage, leaving a home or neighborhood); surrendering to stay in a bad situation—which is sometimes possible but usually not advisable, or you can acknowledge to yourself and others that they have the power and you don’t.   If I had said to the Customer Service staff, “You’re the guys who have to follow the rules, and I can’t change that.  I understand that.  But if there is any way you can figure some wiggle room here I’d sure appreciate it,” the PJ story would have ended differently.   Maybe they would relent, maybe not.  But I would have surrendered my fury.  I know people who actually “won” their Pluto battles by deliberate surrender.  This sacrifice of the ego is what Pluto is looking for.   A Pluto situation may be totally unfair, but when you are stuck in the small picture and fight the situation, it just drags you in deeper.   Do you remember the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby?  [i]

The Tar Baby, abbreviated

Brother Fox and Brother Rabbit had a natural and ongoing feud.  Br’er Fox wanted Br’er Rabbit for dinner, and Br’er Rabbit’s life depended on outsmarting him.   So one day Br’er Fox makes a Tar Baby out of tar and sticky molasses.  He molds the sticky goo into a little person, perfectly sized to block the path Br’er Rabbit habitually uses, places the object in the path, and hides in the bushes.   Br’er Rabbit comes along, jaunty and friendly as usual, and says hello to the Tar Baby who, of course, says nothing.  Br’er Rabbit tries again and again to engage the little figure in a friendly conversation, to no avail.  Then he gets angry, insults the Tar Baby, (How Dare he ignore me!) calling it names, accusing it of rudeness, and finally hauls off and hits it, (He won’t get away with this!) getting his paw stuck in the goo. By the end of the story, by hitting and kicking with all four paws, Br’er Rabbit gets hopelessly caught.  Then Br’er Fox swoops in to take Rabbit home to the stew pot.

“Does the Fox eat the Rabbit?” asks the little boy who hears the story.

“That’s all the further the story goes”, says Uncle Remus.

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” [ii]

Pluto is the Tar Baby that delivers us to the Fox.  This is the place where you’ve lost control and can’t stand it.  You want to fight.  If self-righteous anger takes hold, you will lose.  That’s a promise.  Pluto isn’t about whether you are right or not.  Pluto is about dropping your ego and growing your idea of who you are.

Pluto Arrives

As I was writing this article, Pluto entered my environment in two ways.  Dear friends of mine, soulmates in every way, were facing a serious medical procedure.  The wife’s heart was fibrillating, and she needed to undergo a two-step procedure involving a sonar-scope to make sure there were no clots, followed by electroshock to her heart to get the beat back into a healthy pattern.   It is a dangerous and painful procedure, though not  technically a high risk one, and she’s endured it before, but for some reason this time the fear of death was running strong through both their minds.  The other Pluto appearance came as I was reading John Major Jenkins’ definitive work on 2012, The 2012 Story.[iii] And then these two stories came together.

Pluto always evokes themes of sacrifice.   We can lose something dear to us willingly or unwillingly.  We hear of surrender, but surrender sounds like giving up.  Sacrifice is the deliberate letting go of something for a higher purpose.   If we recognize a this pattern, we can choose to sacrifice our egoic desires as the price of the Plutonic passage.   Interestingly, the World Age mythology of the ancient Maya echoes this theme. To paraphrase Jenkins’ longer and more literally accurate telling of the tale, here is the Mayan mythos on what happens at the end of a world age.

The Mayan Mythology:   As Above…

There are three important archetypes in this story.  One Hunahpu is the conscious leader:  a god-being whose ego is in service to a higher consciousness, with a higher perspective of the greater good than could be attained by ego alone.  One Hunahpu cares about the welfare of all the people, and isn’t confused by issues of greed and power.   Seven Macaw, on the other hand, is the epitome of ego run amok.  With no higher consciousness, no transcendent awareness, Seven Macaw becomes more and more greedy as the age progresses, reaching his greatest power at the end of the age, when he beheads One Hunahpu and declares himself, Seven Macaw, more powerful than the Sun, and owner of all the worlds under heaven.

At this point, the Hero Twins are born—children of the late One Hunahpu.  The Hero Twins are beings of high consciousness, as was their father, and they see Seven Macaw racing to take over everything in the world.  Seven Macaw realizes the Hero Twins have something he wants, or wants to destroy, so the Hero Twins hatch a plan to make Seven Macaw chase them into the cosmic fire, deliberately sacrificing their own egoic selves but guaranteeing the final death of the Seven Macaw who follows them into the flames.  The plan works.  Seven Macaw is destroyed, and because consciousness survives ego-death, the Hero Twins and their father One Hunahpu are resurrected to begin a new world age where transcendent consciousness becomes the mode of the world, subjugating ego to its appropriate functions.[iv] These are classic Plutonian themes: death and rebirth, conscious surrender or sacrifice, and a transcendent result when the egoic sacrifice is made.

Then Jenkins offered this quotation:

Whenever a profound experience of change is about to take place, its harbinger is the motif of death.  This is not particularly mysterious, since it is the limited view and appraisal of oneself that must be outgrown or transformed, and to accomplish transformation the self-image must dissolve. [v]

….So Below

Which brought the story back to my friends, who were in a panic about death.  I couldn’t see a literal death astrologically, and I knew two things about their relationship that were at a tipping point.  One was that this Pisces wife with Virgo rising had defined herself as someone who loves by being the servant, preparing meals, keeping a perfect home, saying Yes every time her Leo Rising husband invited folks to dinner.  Her inability to outgrow this definition of self was literally killing her.  The other problem they had were their two different ideas about how money should be handled.   To help her, he was handling all the money issues, but his over-generosity with others and techno-toy addiction was putting her in a financial panic, further stressing her heart.

As they faced this procedure, both of them were acting out in sheer panic.  He was spending more, she was cleaning up a storm.   It struck me that they could use the necessity for this Plutonic medical procedure to transform the difficulties which were adding so much stress to their lives, and to her very life.

My big, buttinski, Aha! moment came the day before the procedure, so I asked them if I could butt in that very evening and offer some suggestions about what this procedure could mean in the larger picture.  I explained that the “motif of death” quote was the key that unlocked the story for me, since they were obsessed, panicked, and fearful of their utter lack of control over life itself as this appointment loomed large.  I read the quotation and told them the Mayan story, suggesting that they could repeat this story in their own lives, acting as the Hero Twins offering sacrifices.   She would approach the fire of the electro-shock, carrying the ego-sacrifices: her twin-soul would ground her in the physical world as he sat in the hospital waiting room.

I suggested that the Leo Rising husband (I called him the Boy-King) needed to turn over household financial handling to a willing and very capable financial servant, his wife, to whom he would sacrifice his need to spend money by entertaining people at will, and buying techno-toys on whims. He would need to sacrifice his financial control by deferring to her decisions about spending.   I asked him if his concept of self was totally tied to his financial autonomy, or if he was bigger than that.  This would be a sacrifice celebrating his Leonine love for his wife, who would be relieved of heart-straining worry if she could get their financial affairs in order without his toppling them again.  Wise King that he is, he repeated back what he thought he heard to make sure he got it, and then agreed immediately.

Then I asked her if she would be the other half of the hero-twins and take his sacrifice into the fire of the electrical jolt to her heart.  Yes, eagerly.  And then she went on, and on, and on some more about her feelings of financial stress and her fears when she had no control.   I reminded her that this money thing was NOT her issue at all.  This was HIS sacrifice of control and all she needed to do was carry it to the fire.  I asked her if she was willing to sacrifice her self-image as the perfect servant-wife, who cooked any time he invited guests, felt that her identity would be damaged if the house weren’t spotless, and who failed in her own self-image if she said NO to anything.  These ego identities were quite literally killing her.  Her heart couldn’t keep up with the physical stress.

Surprisingly, to me, this was the more difficult sacrifice.   She started to weep and said she didn’t know how she could do it.  I reminded her that the goal was to offer the sacrifice.  She needed to intend to carry these identifications to the fire and ask that the fire burn away these ego selves.  She didn’t need to understand how she could accomplish it—she just needed to offer and intend.  When she said yes, she could do make the offer and intend to sacrifice, I could see the energies around her heart relax.

We talked a bit more, wept a little bit, and I left, confident all would be well.  Indeed, I got a call as soon as the procedure ended, telling me it went better than expected, over-qualified angelic substitute staff were on hand (one dripping with amethysts), only one shock was required, and they were home within the hour.  By that evening she was out and about, glowing with an inner light I hadn’t seen in a long time.

It seems to me that when we are called on to walk through the underworld we need to have a deliberate purpose.  There is a sacrifice to be made, and if we don’t know what we are sacrificing that decision can be made for us.   When we take our ego into the fire, we come out a more conscious being.

We can learn to recognize Pluto when we encounter it in the road.  We can learn what it feels like, and what we can do. We can even learn to trust that the intention is to reach a higher state of being, and yet each encounter comes with the ultimate fear of ego death.  I believe that when we open ourselves to the expanded version of life available to us as we walk through innumerable small and large ego deaths, we are preparing ourselves for The Big One:  Death—and our symbolic resurrection as One Hunahpu, the conscious being. As we face Death, we can say.

“OK, I recognize this feeling.  I’ve done it hundreds of times. I know there is a bigger version of me on the other side, once I let go.”

Thus One Hunahpu is born again.

[ii] This is a very real metaphor of the power system African Americans were living under at in the 19^th Century (and continuing on).  The power structure was such that they developed teaching tales to help children learn how not to get put in the proverbial stew pot.   I’ve discovered that clients who live in autocratic and didactic societies have much less difficulty negotiating Pluto passages than those living in relatively free westernized societies.  They have no illusions of control.  There are things, unfair things, unjust things, that just happen, and if you know what’s good for you, you don’t fight it.   But for most of those reading this, we still have the illusion of control, partly because we usually have some measure of control in our lives.

[iii] John Major Jenkins, The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History, New York: Tarcher/Penguin 2009.

[iv] As I read this chapter of Jenkins’ book, the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend as much money as they liked on the American political process, thereby giving them the legal ability to buy the government of the most powerful country in the world.  I thought: “Seven Macaw has just cut off the head of One Hunahpu.”  There will be two more elections until the changing of the World Age.  I wonder, who are the Hero Twins?

[v] John Weir Perry, “Spiritual Emergence and Renewal,”  Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, ed. by Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof, New York: Tarcher 1989, p. 67, quoted on page 411 of Jenkins, op cit.

If you looked at my Youtube video on January, you’ll recall my saying that the Pluto/Mercury/Saturn stationary exact square, exact Jan 13-15, indicates a BIG power play.  We saw this take place in the Supreme Court decision of Jan 21, giving corporations permission to put as much money as they wish into politics and candidates of their choice.  No point in even worrying about lobbying laws.   They now can just hand the money out directly.

When planets are “stationary”, (from the perspective of earth, they are standing still in the sky instead of rotating as they usually do), they are exquisitely powerful.   In this case, Saturn (rules) stationed in a collision position with Pluto (remember “plutocrats”?  –ultimate power, wealth, manipulation)  which was sitting right next to Mercury:  ideas, communication.    Pluto and Mercury are manipulations of ideas and communications.  Saturn makes the laws.  These planets were so close together, mathematically, that you could hardly see air between them.

We had a 3-truck pileup here, where a manipulation of the idea of “free speech” made it possible for the highest court in the land to hand over governance of our company to the wealthiest corporations in the world.   What a brilliant victory for the wealthiest of the world:  World corporations can buy and sell laws and policies of the most influential nation in the world.

But there’s another part to this story.   The solar eclipse that preceded this pattern was very tied to the chart of our Declaration of Independence.  In fact, it was on the PLUTO (power, wealth, manipulation, “plutocrats”) of that chart.   This will have the eventual result of eclipsing the “plutocrats”, which is exactly what the American Revolution did in the first place.

And if that’s not enough, we are heading toward the very first anniversary of Pluto’s position in our Independence chart.  Soon.  2021.

We have just seen the first shot fired in the next American Revolution.  Which, as was the case the first time, will be against government policies that favor corporations and hurt people.

(Historical note:  The tax on tea, the impetus for the Boston Tea Party, was a tax on any tea not sold by the British East India Tea Company.   You could still buy their very expensive tea without a tax.  But any other tea was taxed to the point that it was just as expensive as the British East India Tea Company’s tea.  Corporate influence, indeed.  And there’s an interesting parallel meme with the current “tea party” movements.)

Anyway, there is a silver lining here.  As we approach a cycle ending in 2012…   (I am reading THE only clear, definitive, non-hyperbolic book on 2012:  The 2012 Story by John Major Jenkins.  I recommend it. Not new age hyperbole, not doomsday scenarios, but the archeological and Mayan mythological underpinnings.)  The first thing about the cycle ending is that, in every cycle, the forces of ego and hubris become strongest just before the ending of the age.  Second,  in their fear of conscience and consciousness, the dark forces chase the forces of light into the great rift, where consciousness (light force) survives but ego (dark force) dies.   So there is an apparent sacrifice (light jumps into the rift) resulting in the real ending of darkness (darkness/ego dies).

How might this play out in the world at this time?   We’ve just seen the gigantic corporate monsters given the biggest power boost in the history of the world.   Not only can just a few of the biggest corporations buy and sell the population of the entire earth, they can now apply this wealth to setting policy and making laws.  They can start buying congress this very instant.

The next congressional election is 2010, when a bunch of senators and representatives will be “for sale.”   The next election after that is 2012.  The window is very small between now and 2012.   If laws are not enacted NOW, there will be no government unbought left to make them.  I repeat:  The 2010 election is likely to be purchased and the 2012 election will be, leaving only a tiny minority to try to stand against corporate dollars.   And don’t think that people of conscience will have a chance.  There are good public servants who may be perfectly willing to take a stand against corporate money.  But if companies decide someone else will serve greed better, corporate money spent on advertising and spreading lies and falsehoods about good people will drown good people out, make them invisible in the electoral process, and bury them at the polls.

What kind of legislation can stop this?   As quickly as possible–BEFORE the 2010 election, we need to enact legislation LIMITING FOREVER the size, assets, and profits of a corporate entity.  If corporations have less they must spend less.  Large corporations must be split into smaller entities…. Instead of Monsanto owning genes and food products, and poisons, and fertilizers, and machines, and paper goods, etc., they must own only one thing.   This will have the side effect of stopping the financial churning where the richest few make money on purchasing and killing great small companies.  This, indeed, would be a game-changer.  This could be the dawn of the new age.

And in the meantime, someone better come up with a new case to bring to the Supreme Court…  one without the ambiguities of the recent case….  and hope that by the time it actually reaches the top court, it will be possible to make a new law.   Dred Scott was revoked.  This can be, too.

On December first, Uranus will station direct.   Uranus is in tropical Pisces and its retrograde motion has been moving it away from an exact 3-way collision with the SaturnPluto square.  (Imagine a 4-way intersection with no signage, and then imagine 3 semis moving full speed into the intersection.   They don’t have to be aligned with mathematical precision to create a pretty powerful show.)   When Uranus stations direct on December 1, it will be moving towards its square with the SaturnPluto series of squares (4 more in the next two years, and the next one is in late January).

What will this feel like?   Uranus is the fear of losing freedom.   It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.  It’s the urge to break free from any and all constraints, and is the signature planet of the highest technologies–and of revolutions.   The energy zeitgeist of this time will be restlessness, impatience, “wired and tired” syndrome, and the pure rebel archetype.  Think of Aquarian (the sun sign ruled by Uranus) Sarah Palin.  Don’t fence that gal in.  She refuses to do what is expected, and reacts to every criticism as an attempt to abrogate her personal freedom.  Not the highest form of Uranian energy, but she definitely fits the pattern.

Now imagine that kind of energy combined with (and beginning to trigger) the SaturnPluto FearStorm.  It’s reasonable to expect that December and January will show us more over-the-top reactiveness from those who are fearful and angry.    But that’s not the only thing we can expect.

This archetypal energy combination is the signature for some of the most far-reaching scientific breakthroughs of all time.   As we speak, the CERN research facility in Switzerland is again setting up their “god-particle” experiment…  attempting to create the bit of anti-matter that some theorists think was the spark for the “Big Bang”.   They’ve failed to perform the experiment several times, due to events like power failures and bread crumbs falling into the device by (they think) a passing bird.  I think it’s likely that they will succeed in the next year, and quite possible in the next two months.   The implications for energy production alone are world-changing.   The implications for humanity’s ability to become god-like in our creative potential is also tied into this experiment.   BIG STUFF!

But we’re not done yet.   December also includes the relatively rare (once in two years) retrograde of the planet Mars.  Mars is the principle of action, of assertion, aggressiveness.   An astrological rule of thumb is that anyone starting a fight during a retrograde Mars is bound to lose.   This includes barfights and legal challenges.  Mars will station retrograde on December 20, and it will be tied up in the PlutoSaturnUranus picture.   Just what we needed:  More fire.  More agitation.     Usually Mars spends 2 months in a single zodiac sign, but because of this pattern, it will be in Tropical Leo until June 2010.  Sidereally (vedic astrology) it will be in Cancer, which is its sign of debilitation.   In the Indian system, retrograde planets are stronger for two main reasons:  they are brighter, and they aspect twice as many houses.  Two negatives can make a positive in Vedic astrology (retrograde is negative and debilitated is negative), but it won’t do it in any normal way.   Mars will be a wild card.  Mars goes direct March 10, and then it will only be “debilitated” in the Vedic system, and will remain so until late May.

The Mars Retrograde is a perfect setup for a successful Re-Doing of the CERN Hadron Collider experiment.  Mars archetypes include speed and collisons.   Unfortunately Mars configured with Uranus can produce accidents, but we’ve got that weird double-negative with Mars going, which can pull the danger out of the fire.

AND one more thing.  On  Dec 26, Mercury goes retrograde.  This happens 3 times a year, for 3 weeks each, so we’re pretty used to it.   This retrograde point doesn’t re-inflame the Saturn/Pluto/Uranus/Mars mess, so the normal mail, technology, lost luggage, traffic jam screw-ups will be in play.  Plan for extra time in your schedule and don’t sign major contracts unless you have a retrograde Mercury in your birth chart.  Mercury is an archetype that includes the mind, manual dexterity, trade, communications, local commerce.   Anything along those lines that can be RE-thought is excellent.   With both Mercury and Mars RE-trograde, RE-Thinking, RE-DOing, Re-Viewing, Re-Searching, Re-Writing will all go more smoothly than usual.   Mercury stations direct about January 15, 2010.

For the next few months, the key is staying clear of the FearStorm virus.  Surrender to what you can’t control, Trust that there’s a bigger picture unfolding, and sit back and enjoy the show from what my friend calls the “Bob Uecker Seats”.   It’s all Maya–a big play unfolding for our amusement and edification.

One was the tragic shooting at Fort Hood…  In my opinion, the cultural and career stresses on Hasan (the shooter) were a recipe for a breakdown.   Just imagine, American born, deciding that serving the military was a reasonable career choice and getting a degree in psychiatry through military funding (an aside here:  it isn’t uncommon for people who have suffered psychological trauma to be attracted to psychiatry in an attempt to heal themselves.  We don’t know Hasan’s psychological background.)   His birth country is now in a war which is loudly proclaimed by extremists as a war against Islam–Hasan’s own religion.  He is placed in a position in which those who have been most traumatized by the horrors of war are bringing their broken spirits–and their horror stories from the front–to a man who has already been the brunt of anti-Islamic prejudice.  Then he is told they’re sending him to the front.   This series of events twists and torture every familial, religious and cultural loyalty the man ever had.  It is a recipe for a schizophrenic break—and, getting back to the astrology, the Saturn Pluto energies:  Fear of events you can’t control, and Fear that things won’t be the way they absolutely SHOULD be, in your opinion, came together in a perfect FearStorm for Hasan.

The second was the announcement that a major state-owned bank in Dubai has declared a moratorium in paying of tens of billions of dollars of debt.  A financial announcement that also triggered a FearStorm across the world’s financial markets.

Look ahead to December in the next post.

THIS IS THE ISSUE OF NOW!  Saturn/Pluto energies are the keys to this discovery.

Yesterday I talked to a friend who hit a classic Saturn/Pluto crisis issue.   Saturn is fear things won’t be the way YOU think they SHOULD be, and Pluto is fear that you have no control at all.  (pssst–a secret:  you Don’t).

As we’ve said before, Pluto’s cycle is so long that no humans have lived through an entire cycle.  Only a few of the very oldest humans, and only in some generations, have even lived through a half-orbit of Pluto.   If you think of Mars’ two-year cycle and the infamous “terrible twos” of children awakening to the energy of their own Mars, and then you think of know-it-all Jupiter’s 12 year cycle and a 12-year old kid’s know-it-all attitude as they complete this first phase, you can begin to get an idea of how important the complete cyclic experience is.   Not one of us will ever have this understanding of Pluto.   It is beyond our control and also truly beyond our comprehension.

And it usually brings upheaval.  Why?  Because Pluto’s aim and goals for us are so far beyond our comprehension that we just don’t “get it” when our wonderful boss gets replaced by an ogre, or our company’s health insurance policy, on which our life seems to depend, is seriously reduced.   We aren’t capable of seeing the long view here.  And with Pluto, the long view WILL be good, as long as we stop trying to control what we can’t control.

The kind of control we can have when Pluto is involved is Self Control.    Recently an acquaintance set off my Pluto buzzer in a trivial, but still intense way.   By attacking my friends, I feared he was changing an amiable and nurturing group into a dangerous place where people would be fearful of expressing themselves.   In a dream, I saw a mother protecting toddlers by placing a mason jar over a scorpion.   When I woke, I went to my cupboard and found a Mason Jar.  ATLAS MASON, it said.   I turned it upside down on my coffee table to contain “his” dangerous energy.   A few days later I realized that my enraged fury was the scorpion that needed to be contained.  So now the upended ATLAS MASON jar is a reminder for me to control my over-reaction.

The irony about Pluto reactions is that they are SO intense, and SO sudden, that even someone as obsessed with Pluto symbolism as I am can be overtaken by the flashfire of reactivity before recognizing the true cause.  It’s totally absurd—here I was, obsessed, angry, unable to think of anything else, unable to sleep — this level of intensity can ONLY be Plutonian…  and it took me days to recognize that my only path was Self Control… and trust.

Now we’re getting to the secret of happiness.  Only one more detour.

Have you ever seen those advertised seminars that tell you how this or that spiritual technique will make you rich, or how getting rich is an indicator of spiritual advancement—and taking this or that seminar will get you there?   (Shades of Calvinism!)  Why do people want to get rich?  Why do people want to “get spiritual” for that matter?   Really–Why!   It’s because they think this will make them happy.   When we are going through an intense Pluto time we want things to be different, because we think if things are different we will be happy.  Have you ever seen a truly happy person?  (To be picky here, maybe the word “happy” isn’t the right word, as it suggests “happenstance” and thus temporary conditions.  Let’s use the word JOY.)  Look at the Dalai Lama.  His presence is surrendered to happiness.

Why are we unhappy?  Because things aren’t the way we think they SHOULD be (Saturn).  The Abraham teachings say that we must be as happy now as we will be when the desired condition manifests.   That, they tell us, will bring the desired condition to us.   But if the point is to reach happiness, it doesn’t matter if the condition ever arrives.  If we are happy now, we are happy now.   If we have joy now, even if the desired condition never arrives we will always be in a state of joy.

I have the deepest respect and admiration for Byron Katie, who has reached a state in which every single moment and every single circumstance coming to her awareness is seen as “perfect” and as a cause for joy.  She can live this despite a rare corneal ulceration in both eyes causing her extreme pain and intermittent periods of blindness.   This is truly a Saturn/Pluto joy.   She has SURRENDERED (Pluto) her idea of how things SHOULD be (Saturn), and in this surrender has found the TRUST that the larger picture is perfect.   In our yin/yang universe, all is in balance at all times.  All is in perfection at all times.  The tragedy of one spot is balanced by the celebration in another.  The answer is not to erase both tragedy and joy to reach a homogeneous condition of stasis.  The rocking motions between yin and yang are part of the ongoing perfect creation of our multiverse.

If you can create the happiness within you that you believe you would have if all your dreams came true, you have created the miracle.  Truly, all your dreams HAVE come true, even if not a single atom of your physical life has changed.

Pluto creates such deep discomfort in us that we are forced into new situations.   It is experiences like this that make people say that suffering brings enlightenment.   In periods of such discomfort, Pluto holds the promise of joy.   After long periods of pain in my life, I finally decided that my next “lessons” would come through Joy.   It’s a decision.   It’s possible.   How?

When you find yourself in a place of pain, look around your inner and outer landscape and use your imagination to find something to do that will give you peace, joy, or happiness in this very moment.  It could be making cookies.  It could be taking a walk in the park and deeply breathing the seasonal air.  It could be listening intently to your favorite music.  It is anything which involves all your awareness and all your senses.  (It is NOT watching TV or eating one more pint of Ben & Jerry’s.)

This is the beginning of the path to total joy.   This is the secret of happiness.   It’s very simple and not always easy, but always joyful.   By following this path, the joy of the universe will open to you…  “the peace that passeth all understanding”.    And who needs anything else?

Astrology and Chaos Theory: Fractal Progressions

by

Anne Beversdorf

With an MC in Sagittarius, an Aquarius ascendant, and a Leo sun, I consistently find myself proselytizing avant-garde or unusual concepts. So, of course, as an astrologer, I’m often in the awkward position of trying to get my skeptical friends to see why astrology is a valid and meaningful discipline. Skeptics say they don’t “believe in” astrology, meaning that they do believe it doesn’t work. It’s tempting to say “If you don’t believe in gravity, does that mean gravity doesn’t work?”, but everyone can SEE the effects of gravity, and one can’t see the relationship of astrology to human life without knowing something about astrology. The challenge is, how can you show an astrological virgin something about astrology in their own life without bombarding them with the meanings of signs, planets, and houses, and how all that symbolism relates to life on earth? And how can you give them a rationale for how this works that compares to something they can accept? I’m beginning to realize that the new sciences, combined with some ordinary common sense, can help us take a giant step in this direction.

Some time ago I read James Gleick’s book, Chaos: Making a New Science. It’s a powerful and mind-expanding book, and I strongly recommend it to astrologers looking for possible scientific underpinnings for our field. [Note:  Bernadette Brady’s recent book Astrology, A Place in Chaos, is really the last word on the subject.] Gleick’s book has been germinating in my subconscious mind for a few years, and recently something sprouted. Gleick speaks a lot about fractals–a new type of math that has been popularized by the “Mandelbrot Set” a collection of highly colored, computer-generated graphics that resemble nothing so much as a psychedelic paisley. The curious thing about these pictures is that, if you take any subsection of a picture and blow it up enough, you get the original picture again. And if you take a subset of that picture and blow it up enough, guess what–you get the original picture again–and so on and so on, ad infinitum. What makes this significant is that this mathematical picture-building seems to apply to the geometry of nature itself. Mandelbrot has named this geometry “fractals”.

Let’s examine this for a minute. Consider trying to measure the coastline of California. It proves impossible unless you identify the SCALE of your measurements.

To determine the measurements of California‘s coast, we could lay a single straight line running from Mexico to Canada: but that doesn’t take into account any of the coastline’s irregularities–all those bumps and bays and peninsulas. You could place an imaginary grid over the coastline and plot and measure distances between places where the coastline hit grid points–but how large or small will be your grid? It reminds me of my little sister’s statement after we walked home from her first day at school. “You say it’s a mile, but it would be a lot longer if you straightened out all the hills!” She was right! And if you measured the California coast by taking your measuring tape, millimeter by millimeter, around all the rocks and pebbles and outcroppings of the coastline, you’d have a distance that would astound us all, and apparently be not at all related to one generally accepted figure of 1264 miles.

But–is there really no relationship? In fractal dimensions there is, indeed a relationship. Rather than look at the Euclidean measurements of length, depth, and thickness, Mandelbrot asked the question in terms of “dimension”. To quote James Gleick:

A twisting coastline, for example, despite its immeasurableness in terms of length, nevertheless has a certain characteristic degree of roughness. Mandelbrot specified ways of calculating the fractional dimension of real objects,… and he allowed his geometry to make a claim about the irregular patterns he had studied in nature. The claim was that the degree of irregularity remains constant over different scales. Surprisingly often, the claim turns out to be true. Over and over again, the world displays a regular irregularity. (Italics added.)

Let’s apply this to the coastline: what happens is that any sub-portion of the coastline actually corresponds in shape to the pattern of the entire coastline. And a sub-portion of that sub-portion, again, corresponds to the same shape. Realize, we’re talking about patterns here–we’re seeing a mathematics of patterns. (In fact, the science of Chaos is the science of patterns in seemingly random events… does this begin to get interesting?)

Let’s look at something else. The financial astrologer, Arch Crawford, points out that the history of cotton prices is the longest complete data of market records available to U.S. market observers. Funny thing about cotton prices…. If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern! So what we are seeing here, again, is regularly repeating patterns.

Okay… how does this relate to astrology: Well, one technique commonly used in astrology is the examination of progressions to look into the timing of a person’s life. A Secondary Progression is a comparison of the pattern of the sub-portion “one day” to the pattern of the sub-portion “one year”. One type of Tertiary Progression compares one lunar cycle to one year. One of the things that blew me away when I first started studying astrology was my teacher’s statement that you could take any recognizable cycle of time in one’s life and make it “equivalent” to one year, therefore using it to “predict” patterns of that person’s future. Try that one on an incredulous friend! But astrologers know that this use of patterns is meaningful. In fact, we can take this quite literally, as you will see in a minute. I’m calling these arbitrarily assigned progression periods “Fractal Progressions”.

Astrology is a language of symbols: a language of meaning. Astrologers apply symbolic meanings to each of the planets used in casting a chart, and take a measure of the patterns between these planets to interpret, symbolically, and sometimes specifically, the type of event likely to occur when this pattern is in place. This is one place where skeptics get tangled up. Since they don’t understand the symbolic language, they can’t understand that “patterns in the sky” have any relationship to their life on earth. They don’t cause events on earth any more than having brown hair causes brown eyes. They simply have a predictable relationship to each other. But in order to give someone an explanation of symbolism, you must use symbols that your listener understands and relates to.

Let’s look at progressions again. Another astrologer once suggested that parents of new babies keep a detailed diary of the first 90 days of the child’s life. This would provide a real-life background for interpreting secondary progressions as the child grows up. This really clicked for me. Although I didn’t have a detailed baby book, I did have anecdotal references for several significant events in my first 45 days. My mother tells the story that, after my birth, she stayed in Houston with her parents for several weeks after my dad moved to Indiana to begin his professorship. Therefore, sometime on my 43rd day of life I boarded a train with my mother to move from Houston to Indiana, changing trains in New Orleans. Late in the 43rd year of my life I quit a successful and lucrative career. Still unemployed after many months, I was conscious only that I was entering a very different phase of my life–what that would be, I couldn’t tell. Looking at this symbolically, it seemed, in my 43-44th year, that I was “on the train” between what I knew and what, in hindsight, I know to be my first home. As an infant, of course, I literally didn’t know where I was going. Did this trip in my infancy cause me to quit my job or drift in unemployment? Of course not. But the events are clearly symbolically related.

A few months after receiving my last income, I decided to use some of my free time and frequent flyer miles to take my first trip to Europe. I asked my mother if she would pick up expenses if I got us two tickets to Spain. (As I write this, I realize our railway tickets in 1949 were also “free”–courtesy of my grandfather’s position with Southern Pacific Railroad.) My mother said an enthusiastic “yes” to the trip, so after checking calendars, I scheduled our flights. Some weeks later it occurred to me that we had not taken a trip alone together SINCE I was 43-44 days old. That the second such trip would occur in my 44th year seemed pretty amazing. Well, I should have remembered that another part of the story might also have a parallel. Apparently, as an infant, I caused my mother some pretty dramatic trouble on the train. After our trip to Spain I was forced to make a wry apology after I jumped all over her for no reason at all: “Sorry, Mom. When we were on that train in 1949, I literally dumped on you. Here we were, on our next trip together, and I managed to dump on you again.”

In astrological language, my Secondary Progressed Chart for July 19, 1993 (last day of earnings) is equivalent to the chart for Sept 27, 1949 at 5:17 pm in New Orleans, where we changed trains and the trouble began. These charts are the same because a secondary progressed chart IS a chart for the exact number of days after birth as your age–in this case 43+ years=43+ days. This chart shows Sun square Uranus, with Mars and Pluto conjoined and square Venus, and Moon square Saturn. My 43-44th year coincided with transiting Pluto at the apex of a T-square with my natal Sun and Ascendant, the Uranus/Neptune conjunction opposing my natal Mars, and transiting Saturn on my ascendant squaring transiting Pluto approaching my MC ( transiting my relocated MC). On July 19, Venus squared Mars and semi-squared the Moon. It’s easy to see the heavy, and similar, patterns at work in both instances. But I didn’t need to know the astrology to feel the impact of the comparison.

“Symbolically parallel event periods….” What a great way to talk about progressions to a non-astrologer. But not everyone has information about their first 90 days. So I decided to check out a pattern of weeks, and a pattern of months. I was 43 weeks old on June 12, 1950. At that time in my life, my parents traveled back to Houston by car every summer, as soon as the school term ended in the spring. I don’t know if June 12 was the day that trip started, but it would have been very close to that date. I don’t know what happened in my life in March 1953, when I was 43 months old. But I was intrigued enough with the possibilities in choosing a periodicity for progressions-via memories to start trying this method of “fractal progressions” with friends, as a way of demonstrating some of the principles on which astrology is based. Here are some of the results:

At a wedding reception I asked a young woman in her early thirties what might have happened between 30-35 days in her life, 30-35 weeks, and 30-35 months. She couldn’t think of anything in particular (it’s probably not unrelated to the fact that her life was going along smoothly at the time of the reception–we tend to remember most vividly the dramatic events!). Then she asked “Why were the years 24-29 so traumatic for me? Those were horrible years. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was totally lost. It was just awful.” I asked her what was going on at 24-29 days, 24-29 weeks, or 24-29 months. As a realization dawned, her eyes lit up. She said “I think it was about the time I was two years old that my grandfather died. He was my primary caregiver and I still remember how awful it was.” She searched the room, found her mother, and asked her when grandfather died. It was during her 24th month of life. I asked her if the period in her 20′s bore any symbolic resemblance to that earlier period. Yes, she said. She kept feeling that something was terribly wrong, something was lost or missing, and she might find it anywhere, but whenever she thought she had, she hadn’t. As a toddler, after her grandfather’s death, she kept running into the arms of bald men, because she identified them with her grandfather, but none of them filled his place. As a result of this conversation, without even identifying her Sun sign, we could talk about the energies associated with Saturn, and different ways this energy can be expressed in life. She could see some of the meanings involved with her five year sense of loss, and her search for a sense of structure and order in her twenties, as part of –and a more mature version of– the same symbolic package as the loss of her grandfather at two.

Another friend has few memories of her early life, so we tried using a different “periodicity”. We decided to look at her life in terms of 2-month periods representing a year. Events up to her first birthday would correspond to the first six years of her life. Using this scale she was able to relate events of her sixth year to her present life. At that time, she entered first grade wearing clothes that caused the kids to tease her about looking “like a boy”. At this time, she is consciously trying to learn ways to express her femininity while still being successful in a career. When we looked at a 4-months equals a year period, she realized she was dealing with issues of femininity strongly again at age 12, when she entered the social world of junior high. A first-house Sun-Pluto conjunction in Leo and a Mars-Venus conjunction in her third, with Mars at 29′ 52″ Virgo and Venus at 00′ 00″ Libra indicates the significance of these issues in her life, and the development of this issue over her life reflect her personal growth, culminating at this time, with a more mature understanding of “femininity”.

As I thought about the relationship between fractals and progressions, I realized that if virtually ANY period could be used as a “fractal progression”, the easiest thing is to simply divide your current age in half–and for fine-tuning, into quarters. I’m 44 now. At 22 I again moved from Texas, where my husband and I had completed our undergraduate work, to my hometown in Indiana, where he would enter graduate school. It was another clear and parallel transition–to home. At 33, I got my first real “professional” job at a “professional” salary. At 11 my second sister was born–the baby I fell in love with and who changed my life. In my mid-40’s new beginnings and transitions were the theme for my life. I asked a friend at a party what happened in her life when she was half her age. Recently widowed, her husband died when she was 46. At 23 her mother died. Another friend, at 53, has been doing whatever “pickup” work she can find in a long period between “real” work. At 26 (half of 54) she was divorced. The period before the divorce was a long, grinding, depressed period. After the divorce, her life improved.

Fractal progressions not only provide non-astrologers with a personally understandable experience of what astrology is all about, it also provides outcomes. It provides a glimpse of “how things turned out”, and therefore “how things might turn out this time”. Astrologers can use this information to supplement interpretations of transits, standard progressions, and solar returns, in much the same way we already use information when we ask a client with a Sun/Saturn square “What happened to you 14 and 21 years ago?”

The point here is not to describe a “simple technique of predicting your future and understanding your past,” although it’s fun to look at the symbolic parallels. I see fractal progressions as a way to demonstrate to skeptical non-astrologers how astrological patterns work. You can briefly describe planetary archetypes involved with the significant memories of a person’s life and guide them into reaching their own understanding of meaning and planetary symbolism. They can clearly see that hating their teacher in first grade, for example, didn’t cause their marital conflicts at 48, but there may be an understandable symbolic relationship.

This approach allows one to step around one of the big misunderstandings about astrology: namely that old bugaboo about planets “causing” events. Just because two events occur at the same time–say, your progressed Saturn transiting your eighth house Moon may occur at the same time as the death of your mother– it doesn’t mean that one event causes the other. They are both part of the same repetitive pattern of occurrences–part of the same fractal pattern.

To a skeptic determined to deny all symbolic relationships, looking at fractal progressions in his or her own life certainly wouldn’t constitute “proof” of anything. On the other hand, we all know people who are genuinely open to different ways of viewing the world and who have no basis for personally understanding how the patterns reflected in the stars relate to their lives. This concept has been useful to me as a way of beginning to relate our field directly to aspects of the new scientific paradigms and explaining it to non-astrologer friends. I encourage readers of this article to experiment with fractal progressions in their own lives and those of friends.

————

Anne Beversdorf is an astrologer living in Austin, Texas. Her practice is directed toward life understanding and spiritual development and she uses techniques from traditional Western astrology, as well Vedic traditions. Anne has worked in the meeting-place between science and metaphysics since her first Science Fair project in 1961. She welcomes conversation, insights, (and clients) and can be reached at email: anne(at)stariel.com. She is especially interested in readers’ experiences using fractal progressions.

According to the Mayan Calendar, we are already in the period of time leading to the close of the Fifth World Age.   And according to the evidence of your senses, we are clearly living in a time of profound global change.   Forgetting for a moment all the apocalyptic hysteria, what might we expect from this shift?   A world age shift doesn’t happen overnight.  Despite having an “end date” in mind (and there is scholarly argument about this exact date), the years preceding that date imply the ending of the old age, and the new date is only the beginning of the new.   What can we realistically expect to change?

First, we need to understand the nature of the “old age”.  According to Mayan cosmology, the existing world age began approximately 3000 BCE.  Interestingly, this coincides closely to our consensus western understanding of “world history”.   Most contemporary historians still look to ancient Sumeria for the beginning of writing.  Interestingly, this was also in the 4^th millennia BCE—the beginning date for the current Mayan world age.  In fact, some fundamentalist Christians claim that the entire world began somewhere within that same era.  In this sense, they’re not too different from historians, who claim that non-written records of the past are unreliable and therefore don’t qualify to be called “history”.  These “undocumented” versions of the past are called “prehistory”.  Of course, this assumes that written records are more accurate than oral histories, which is just another result of intellectual dependence on what can be pinned down to a physical source.

Not coincidentally, the earliest Sumerian records were records of trade—the records of buying, selling, and making (or losing) money.  It seems reasonable to characterize this age of “written history” and “buying and selling” as an age of materialism.   Even our science has been based on what can be seen, measured, and touched, and the extent of materialism has been growing ever more dense during this world age.

Scientific materialism has become the dominant world view witin ithin the last two hundred years.  This paradigm enshrines the materialistic worldview into the sole source of Truth.  Let’s explore our recent history to track this theme.  Until the mid 19^th century, for example, anyone who thought about the world and how it physically worked was called a “philosopher”, not a “scientist”.  Those who thought about the physical world were called “natural philosophers.”   But since natural philosophers were holistic thinkers, meaning their thoughts included the unseen world of thoughts, of forces like “gravity”, the idea of what held the stars in the sky, their thinking soon ran them into collision with the power of the Church in the western world.   The church as an institution can be dated back to the middle of the first millennium CE.  It’s a pretty new part of the existing world age, and historically had a lot to do with buying and selling and making money, as well as gathering worldly power into its own purvue.

The Church and Natural Philosophy collided in a way that concretized the materializing trends of this world age.  How did this happen?  The Church claimed all authority over unseen things.   Natural philosophers were relegated to measuring the HOW of the natural world, but were prohibited from addressing any questions of WHY it worked.   The WHY was only the province of religion.   This division led to a divorce between philosophy (holistic) and “science” (physically measureable world).   Therefore Galileo could LOOK at planets through his telescope, but was prohibited from offering an interpretation of what he saw.  A natural philosopher who continued to philosophize about the whys and the unseen interconnections of the natural world was at risk of torture and death by the Inquisition (which was not dissolved as an arm of the church until late in the 19^th century!).  This was a profound shaping of how the scientific mind works.  The message was loud and clear:   “Think about more than the measurements and you may be tortured to death.”

This led to what Stephen Schwartz (via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) called the “Grand Material Worldview”, or the “The Materialist MegaParadigm”.   A paradigm is the shape within which all thinking must fit in order to be considered “acceptable” thinking.   The current Materialist MegaParadigm posits that

1. The mind is a result of physiological processes.
2. Each consciousness is a discrete entity
3. Organic evolution has no specific goal
4. There is only one time-space continuum, providing for only one reality. (ref. Stephen Schwartz, The Secret Vaults of Time, p. 269.

The resulting of this thinking is the tautology, repeated by many “scientific thinkers” of our time:    “If it’s unseen, it’s not science.  I’ll stake my life on that.”    (This is pure PTSD [post-traumatic-stress-disorder] on the part of rational thinkers, caused by latent memories of the Church’s promise:  “If you offer thoughts about the nonphysical you may be tortured to death.”)

But the fifth world, the world of the material, is coming to a close.  We are leaving behind the divorce between science and Nature.  We are leaving behind the divorce between This and That; Self and Other.  The new paradigm sees the universe as a whole, full of promise and mystery, and guided by what is good for all.

THIS is what is shifting in our shift of ages.   The material world is beginning to reflect our dawning realization that the Materialist MegaParidigm is tattered and broken.  The infrastructure lies in tatters and the megalopoly of buying and selling is disintegrating around us, but the new paradigm hasn’t yet birthed our “new world”.

Wayne Dyer tells us “a change of thought precedes a change in society”.  Obviously, the structures of society have not yet accepted a new paradigm.  Those people whom Ray and Anderson (authors of The Cultural Creatives:  How 50 million people are changing the world) call the “cultural creatives” are already aware of the new paradigm.  Their values and impetus toward change actually pull society in the direction of the new paradigm.  While the bureaucratic structures of society may be resisting this change,just as obviously, the system is breaking.   We are likely to reorganize ourselves around what the cultural creatives would recognize as the dawning paradigm.   New breakthroughs in physics are leading the way to a new way of understanding the world around us—a way in which the previously materialistic and deterministic interpretations are expanded and eventually discarded.   These new breakthroughs show us a new way of envisioning our environment in which thoughts, previously unthinkable, are forming a new organizing principle.   Here are a few of them.

1. The mind is separate from the body.  The brain is the vehicle for the mind in the physical world, but the mind exists independently.  Mind may be the preeminent operating principle in the universe.   (Oddly, this is not a new idea.  The Corpus Hermeticus states that the first creation of God was The (universal) Mind.)
2. Everything is connected.  The entire universe is a single organism, and the fate of any part affects the whole.
3. Organic evolution is shaped by the Mind of the Universe for the goal of the universe’s well-being (e.g. the well being of all, since all parts of the universe share in the wellbeing of the entire cosmos).
4. There are multiple, overlapping time-space continuums, and time is a dimension in which may be able to move as easily as one does in space.  In fact, time itself has many qualities, and is not simply the strictly linear ticking of seconds that we once thought it was.  (Pre-clock cultures already recognize this.)

What will be the results of this kind of paradigm shift?  Clearly there are many more than I could list or you’d wish to read, but just to get your juices flowing here are some results of such a paradigm shift:

1. People will realize that all their actions affect all others.  Actions causing pain to any part of the cosmos will cause pain to the individual taking the action.   Therefore testing cosmetics on animals would be unthinkable.  Not watering your plants (or planting things that don’t naturally grow in your environment) would be unthinkable.  These would be things that cause pain to living beings.  Conversely, caring for and nurturing and giving joy to any living being adds to the joy quotient of the universe, and the person taking the action quite literally would feel this increase in joy.
2. Government organizations would truly focus on the good of the all, because pain in any part of the world would truly and immediately affect the lives of leaders and lawmakers, and the positive results for others would bring joy to the actors.
3. Short-term gain at the cost of long-term suffering would not be possible, since the long-term suffering will cause a ripple of pain in the universe.
4. The health of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, would all be important.  (Space junk may not be a viable way to decommission old satellites.)
5. The exploration of the entire cosmos may be possible through meditational and psychic means.  These means will become acceptable tools for discovery.
6. The holographic link between every part of the cosmos (physicist Nassim Haramein’s new black hole theories) provide evidence for the psychic link between all of us.

These are just a few thoughts about where the new metaparadigm might take us.   As we remove ourselves from a strictly materialistic “truth detector”, we will become open to other ways of knowing, honoring the information gained during meditation, holotropic work, and other altered states of being.  Our understanding of the nature of reality itself would expand from only what can be measured by instruments of our devising, to include valuing the metaphysical and wisdom experiences of those whose contributions to the world increase its well-being for the long term.

If the Mayan ages do shift within the next several years, we can’t expect this new Meta-Paradigm to emerge, full-blown, from the chaos of the dissolving world.  Children being born today will be lucky to see the beginnings of a new social structure based on these concepts.  Still, it seems reasonable and consistent with current patterns of change to anticipate this kind of intellectual and consciousness revolution to become ever more apparent as we cross the divide of anciently-measured world ages.  And as we move into this ever-more-chaotic period of changes, it is useful and comforting to have a sense of where we may land when we reach the other shore.

Dear Anne,

The Panelists:

On the importance of studying shift: Mark Iberg, lecturer on humor and humanity, from multiple perspectives. Mark encourages us into action and asks, “What does shift mean to you?” His website http://www.lcsvs.com/ presents his perspectives on how to keep one’s health strong for any shifting that may take place.

Overview of paradigm shift, from a timeline perspective, both horizontal and vertical: Looking at times past, Roberta Shoemaker-Beal will give an overview of the predictions for paradigm shifts around the dimension of time, from various wisdom teachers who have alerted us to anticipate changes in this decade, especially. She will talk of the work of Edgar Cayce for a long horizontal view of a timeline. The vertical view of time is from the ancient Greeks who wrote of and defined different “kinds of time” such as chronos and chiaros. How do we shift to accommodate to the changing nature of time? Is life things speeding up? Is that a good thing?

The Nature of Time: Katya Walter will speak on the “nature of time, now and anytime,” as a core element in our reality. Her books have defined dimensions of time at the core of our reality, down to the Planck level, where time and space interact in the space~time continuum. Her book and web site, http://doublebubbleuniverse.com/ give extensive information on “the nature of time.”

Focus on time to prepare: Anne Beverdorf, local educator and astrologer will share current predictions defined by those who looks at vast timelines, with the ability to predict the nature of timely events, we can anticipate through astrological studies. The use of time awareness, by studying cycles of time, can be used to plan our lives. Anne will share predictions for upcoming events for May 2009 and other relevant time we need to consider for the future. Her website at http://www.stariel.com/ leads us to more information.

Planning for the future: Jan Blevins will be traveling to Peru this summer to study about a suggested change from the Gregorian to the Mayan calendar, as suggested by Dr. Jose Arguelles. His studies demonstrate that the Mayan calendar is a more accurate time keeping system than the Western European one used by the majority of our population. Read “Open Your Mind to a New Time” on the Internet at http://www.philzone.com/interviews/jose/jose.html for an Arguelles interview on this dynamic and controversial topic.

Consider: What shifts in our foundational paradigms, for time and space, are we ready to shift? Is the ancient pairing of Mother Nature and Father Time offering us an opportunity?

Now, 18 hours of labor later, I’ve finally got them all up—I hope.   There’s one more to write, which I’ll get to, I promise.  But Geez Louise (as my friend Paul used to say)!!!   It was a NIGHTMARE!   I’d upload things, only to find other paragraphs–entire pages, had disappeared.   I’d reload those pages to find another set of pages had somehow repeated themselves.   Repeat.  Then repeat again….  From vanishing pages to self-replicating…   I’m not so sure this IS a good way to publish!    It took me at least 5 times as long to get the pages up as it did to write them!

OK.  Just venting here.   FRUSTRATION CITY!   I keep trying to remind myself that this is All Voluntary.   Hopefully someone will find the articles useful.   PLEASE let me know if you do!

Thanks!

(and how to get where we want to go)

Anne Beversdorf,  May 2009

[Part Three. Bracing for Change: Multiple Strange Attractors in Existing Systems. (No astrology here.) Science and society in the whirlpool…]

Bracing for Change: Multiple Non-Linear Systems in Chaos.

We talked before about the nature of chaos. The irony of chaos is that the MOST chaotic time is the ONLY time when something totally new can arise. Mild chaos only pushes us into adapting old systems, but total chaos creates a breakdown because so many substructures are interacting in such chaotic ways that they actually form brand new, previously unthinkable systems. Right now, in 2009 and probably for the next several years, we are looking at not just one system reaching a chaos-point: We’re looking at almost every system in our society undergoing dramatic change. Having this many systems in chaos doesn’t just double, triple, quadruple the chaos around it—it amplifies it in logarithmic ways. This is intuitively obvious, but there’s a scientific explanation as well.

Each of these systems has its own strange attractor, and as each system is stretched, little-used pathways in its strange attractor become engaged. As each system is developing its underused pathways, each of these systems is now interacting with other systems in brand new ways. If you change something in your life—say your job—you notice a sense of excitement, perhaps apprehension, and you begin to meet new people and make new connections. Sometimes it’s tricky to develop new relationships in an organization where everyone else already has their procedures, routines, and expectations. But what if EVERYONE is brand new, as in a brand new organization. In that case every single person is being asked to stretch and grow, and the excitement of newness is palpable. In that case we could say that each person is using a rare path in their personal strange attractor, and the interactions between people will take a brand new form as these new paths interact.

At this time in our civilization we have multiple systems at chaos points, and while some of these systems are clearly in the process of breaking down, others are in the process of new creations. What’s breaking? The list is long, and just so you don’t get depressed reading it, remember two things: One is that there is another long list that follows of things that are already in the chaos of CREATION (including many of the items on the break-down list), and Two, each of these chaotically breaking systems is interacting with the others in totally new ways, and these new ways of interacting is exactly what is required for totally new systems to develop. OK. Ready now?

Competing Strange Attractors in Existing Systems: Chaotic Breakdown List

· The global economic system is clearly at a chaos point.

· There is growing social unrest, as economic pressures create greater divisions between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Many people, feeling their lives are running out of control, tend to take reactionary, divisive, and sometimes violent political positions in an attempt to gain some kind of psychological control.

· There is a growing tax revolt in this country. It comes in four flavors:

o Unreported tax revolt is called “failure to file”, and the IRS says it’s growing fast. These people, for whatever reason, have decided that their money is theirs, and not filing a tax return will make their legal liability disappear.

o Under-reported income on tax returns also appears to be growing, according to IRS estimates. People, forced to earn “under-the-table” income to make ends meet, simply don’t report the excess. This happens at all income levels.

o The most concerning is the growing anger against taxes, fueled by the huge taxpayer bailouts of corporations. This could lead to an outright tax revolt.

o Property tax revolts. The current economic crisis is making states and municipalities even more dependent on property taxes at a time when landowners are even less able to pay. Cities don’t want title to these homes, but as people default, this will raise the stakes on property tax anger.

· We’re still experiencing a global population explosion with its concomitant increased demands on all resources.

· Demands on energy systems are growing among newly developing large nations (China, India) just as global energy supplies are running out.

· There is a growing concern about the increased number of antibiotic-resistant diseases. The ease of transportation through the global village makes the possibility of a global pandemic ever more likely. Even if such a pandemic isn’t deadly, it will add to the economic crisis, as Mexico’s experience with the recent flu virus demonstrates.

· The medical/healing establishment the west has grown to rely on over the last hundred years is breaking down for various reasons. One of the biggest is the cost/benefit ratio. Another may be related to the fact that, in the United States, the NUMBER ONE cause of death from any source is the medical system itself: incorrect drugs or dosages, or hospital-acquired diseases or medical errors. Those old-timers who refused to go near a doctor or hospital for any reason are now looking less stubborn and maybe smarter than we realized!

· The calcification of the age of “science” is beginning to crumble. When battles with the Catholic Church resulted in the tacit (backed up by the inquisition) agreement that the church handled all the unseen, and science dealt with only the physical world, we got an artificial divorce. New scientific discoveries are proving that there is a very strong scientific connection between the seen and unseen realms, but science has long been stuck in a mode of “if we can’t explain it, it doesn’t exist” which of course is the antithesis of the scientific method of inquiry. The real equation is a leftover imprint of the idea, “if we can’t explain it in physical terms, we can’t call it science or we may be tortured to death.” Either science will lose its credibility or it will begin to grow up and address these questions in modern terms.

· Global climate change. It doesn’t matter what causes it. Almost everyone knows we’ve got “weird weather” now. And those looking closely can see just how close we are to total upheaval due to rising seas, declining gulf stream currents, conditions ripe for super-storms, and unpredictable (and therefore non-producing) farming conditions.

· Related to the global climate change is the largest species die-off we’ve seen since the dinosaurs disappeared.

· There are rumors of water-wars on the horizon, as the distribution of weather patterns puts water where we don’t need it and dries out places that have depended on local water. And increased population demand puts even more pressure on these systems.

· Not surprisingly, the global infrastructure is breaking down at the same time. Highways, water systems, bridges, power delivery systems, electricity grids, sewer lines—not a day goes by without reports of some city being flooded with water (or worse), or having a lengthy electrical blackout.

· And not surprisingly, our faith in all the institutions we’ve relied on for centuries is at an all-time low. All the old structures: government, religion, educational institutions, medical institutions, corporations, banks, the infrastructure—seem to be failing us just when we think we need them most.

But is that true? Do we really need them to be as they’ve always been? Of course not! They must change to meet changing situations.

Figure 7: The Universe: The Four Winds and the Four Elements (tapestry by Anne Beversdorf based on undated medieval illuminated manuscript)

Ready for the good news? Here’s another list:

Competing Strange Attractors in Existing Systems:

Multiple Nonlinear Systems in CREATION

· Right now, we’re seeing dramatic breakthroughs in energy sources. And the information explosion caused by the Internet is making the science behind these techniques available to anyone interested (whereas in the past, these techniques were closely guarded, and often “shelved” secrets.)

o The prematurely debunked fusion experiments of 20 years ago are getting new and positive attention.

o Magnetic and electromagnetic engines are being developed

o Hal Puthoff’s Institute for Advanced Studies has proven the availability of zero point energy (the ability to pull energy from a vacuum) in practice as well as theory.

o Concept cars have been developed using compressed air for fuel; water; and hydrogen.

o Solar, wind, and water energy systems are being combined with breakthroughs in storing and delivering this kind of energy over distances to make sustainable and renewable energy resources available over large areas.

o Fuel cells as energy storage devices can make it possible for individuals to live anywhere they want.

o With freely available energy through renewable and storable resources, no longer will people have to cluster together where energy systems are delivered. You could take your fuel cells into the desert, pump water over long distances, and heat and cool your home without depending on the “grid” of wiring that limits comfortable living to clustered areas.

o New plastic wires have been developed by a California company that have NO energy impedance. At present, over half the energy that goes through our wiring systems is lost because of impedance. This new wiring alone doubles the available energy to homes and businesses.

· New technological breakthroughs in many other areas, including nanocomputing, medicine, genetics, that can aid us in adapting to rapid change.

· New paradigms of health and healing are challenging the supremacy of allopathic medicine’s “medicine as warfare” concepts. Spiritual/mental/emotional states, herbal remedies, essential oils, homeopathy, as well as energy healing, both technologically and spiritually mediated, are beginning to encroach on accepted medical practices, immediately enlarging our resources for personal health and wellness.

· Dramatic new understandings of the universe present us with models for understanding global change initiated at the personal level. Astrophysicist Nassim Haramein, for example, has published peer-reviewed articles that mathematically prove that black holes are present in every bit of matter and, rather than being sink-holes that swallow universes hole, they are quite literally the creative point of EVERYthing. This is because a black hole is density of information to the point that all information in the universe is being sucked into it. And since these are everywhere, including in us, we ourselves have universal knowledge and information available to us, with which we participate in creating the universe. Furthermore, we have new information about the creative power inherent in the dodecahedron (sometimes called the star-tetrahedron). Katya Walters’ theories in her work The Double-Bubble Universe also give us access to new levels of consciousness that work both on the scientific and on the emotional/spiritual level.

· The nature of time itself seems to be morphing. Even the young are commenting on how time itself seems to be speeding up. More and more people are reporting time anomolies, where time no longer seems to be predictably linear. Physicists report that the reason time seems to be going in only one direction is because it is linked with space, and in an expanding universe, space is traveling away from the big bang point. But as the universe begins to contract, the physics of time say time will start running backwards. Interesting to think about, isn’t it. Will we have a “redo”? or perhaps better, a “re-Undo”? On the other hand, physicist also tell us that all time exists simultaneously, and advanced states of meditation or prayer (and sometimes near-death experiences) can throw us into experiences of other places and times. Perhaps a flexibility in understanding and experiencing time will allow us circumstantial “re-dos” as we revisit choice points in the past with a fresh perspective of joy and healing.

· the Maharishi Effect and Heart-Math studies prove that our own internal emotional/spiritual state has direct and measurable influence over the world around us. The Maharishi Effect meditators changed crime rates in major cities and in a case of “mediation by meditation” diffused a near nuclear war in the middle east. Heart-Math researchers along with NASA measurements of the Global Magnetic field have demonstrated that global emotional congruency actually changes the protective magnetosphere of our planet. By finding our joy, our bliss, we actually and literally protect the earth.

· If we can extrapolate from what we know of the Bose-Enstein condensate, it may not take many humans living in joy and bliss to affect a global change. Bear with me here, so I can explain this.

o The Bose Einstein Condensate is actually a NEW state of matter. We are all familiar with matter as solids, liquids, or gases. The BEC is a “Boson Wave” that is none of the above.

o At low temperatures, Bosons can behave very differently than ordinary matter. When a small number reach a “high spin state”, it triggers a “condensation of the probability state,” in which, suddenly, ALL the bosons in the condensate reach high-spin in the same instant. In hydrogen Bosons, only 3% of atoms reaching high-spin will trigger the whole condensate to become high-spin. What’s so great about high-spin? It’s a superconductor! A superconductor puts out more energy than it takes in.

o Some researchers believe that Bosons in a superconductor state are partly in the physical world, and partly in the non-physical world of limitless energy. Usually Bosons require energy-sucking cold conditions to turn into superconductors, but a few researchers have identified conditions not requiring super-zero temperatures.

There seems to be an analogy between the Bose-Einstein condensate state and the widely-reported “hundredth monkey” phenomenon. Rupert Sheldrake refers to this as a morphogenetic field. When enough monkeys (100, in the story) on one island started washing their tubers in the ocean to remove the sand and enjoy them more, monkeys on other islands spontaneously started washing their tubers, too. According to Sheldrake, the concept of washing tubers entered the “field of monkeyness”, where all monkeys could have access to it. The principles seem to be a macro-level example of the Bosons-turned superconductor at the micro-level.

· On a social level, new communications tools have created the foundation for new socially conscious community-activist advertising. Carrotmob is the name given to a marketing technique designed to create environmentally sensitive businesses by rewarding those who do it. In the first instance of its use, a liquor store agreed to spend thousands of dollars reducing packaging waste and recycling everything in sight in exchange for “nine thousand people coming to your store next Saturday.” Through cell phone messaging, internet viral messaging, and Twitter, the marketers asked everyone to spread the word that THIS liquor store was going green, all the way, and to reward and thank them, please show up next Saturday and buy something. The crowd was much larger than the promised 9,000 and the store, the marketing team, and the community were all pleased with the results. The store changed because of the carrot of the mob dangled before them, giving the marketing technique the name “Carrotmob”.

· Paradigm shifts in international leadership models are not only showing up, but are being appreciated and are spreading. First, there’s Bhutan’s model of “Gross National Happiness” as a measure of economic well-being. Their 2008 conference on Gross National Happiness attracted top government policy makers from the US and Western Europe, as they explained the metrics of the 74 measures of well-being that run their economy. As an example, they state that people must have quiet time to reflect on their life in order to be happy, so the well-being of the country is better served if people work fewer hours a week but earn enough to live on. More dollars at the cost of quiet reflective time is not good for the country or its people. They also state the people are happiest when they have natural beauty to gaze upon, so logging industries that threaten their forests are discouraged as being against the well-being of the country, and city landscapes with trees and plants and flowing water are encouraged. A second change, and one with more publicity, is President Obama’s total rejection of the politics of fear and divisiveness in favor of a policy of hope and inclusion. To the frustration of many of his former supporters, his refusal to embrace divisive politics continues even as his political opponents have demonstrated their commitment to their “no to everything” policies.

· The population explosion itself seems to be triggering a unified field of consciousness among humans. Ervin Laszlo’s theories show a fractal development of single entities multiplying to form group consciousness at a certain critical population level. From atoms that coalesce to form molecules, wherein atoms work together for the purpose of the molecule; molecules that coalesce to form cells, where molecules work together for the larger purpose of the cells; cells that form ants, wherein cells work together for the larger purpose of the ant, ants that form colonies wherein all ants choose to act in ways that support the whole group, cells that form humans, where all cells work together for the well-being of the human; to eventually humans to form the human group, wherein all humans work together for the well-being of all. These turning points in group awareness seem to come at about the 10 billion population point. At present, the earth’s population of humans is somewhere around 8 billion. Our population explosion could be leading us inexorably toward a unified field of human consciousness.

· Somewhat related to this is a growing understanding of spirituality as a non-dogmatic, experiential state. In centuries past, one’s religious orientation was directed quite specifically by the organization of one’s religious affiliation. Now more and more people identify themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”, meaning that they believe in direct connection with the spiritual world, but are not willing to cloak this in dogmatic explanations or directives. This is related to an increased awareness that the world and the explanations of our world are a matter of “this AND this” instead of “this OR that.”

· And while we are caught up in the awareness of the monumental changes in front of us, a growing number of individuals are, privately and collectively, actively and deliberately choosing to celebrate life itself. Certainly a massive catastrophe bring about the joy of seeing oneself alive. I was blessed to visit Hawaii just after a category 5 hurricane, Iniki, had devastated the island. While over 90 percent of the roofs on the island had been torn off by the force of the winds, the only fatality was an elderly man who had a heart attack. The attitude of the islanders after the storm was a huge celebration of life. To have experienced such a powerful force of nature that the very leaves were stripped from the trees and still see ones’ friends and neighbors alive and well put into perspective the value of life over the “things” that had been lost. As global changes threaten much of our lifestyle, I believe we are simultaneously seeing a reclaiming of the values of life, and love, and community, and kindness towards our neighbors, both local and global.

Figure 9: God, Creating the Universe (miniature tapestry by Anne Beversdorf, based on French illuminated manuscript from the early 13^th century)

When, as a culture, we start to experience simultaneous total breakdown of known structures and total re-invention our culture, what happens to our ideas? Clearly our ideas change. This is what we sometimes call a “global mind-change”. And what do new ideas create? New ways of being… in fact new ideas create whole new worlds, and new ways of relating to the rediscovered and newly created cosmos.

(continued in Joyful Change: FOUR)

I referred several times to my wonderful brother-in-law who wrote his dissertation on Chiron–but I failed to give you his name:  Krin Gabbard.   He’s written several books that movie and jazz lovers will enjoy.  Krin is an incredible writer–entertaining, unexpected, iconoclastic, intelligent.  His most recent book, “Hotter Than That” is a socio-cultural history of the trumpet and American Jazz.  Krin’s writing can make ANY subject fascinating, but don’t just take my work on it.  Check out the reviews here on www.Amazon.com.   I’ve never seen so many over-the-top-raving reviews.    His previous book is Black Magic which is about how Hollywood has and does portray African Americans in the cinema.  The latest incarnation?–the amazingly wise confidante/protector/nurturer.

OK:  Here are the basic Centaur image types.  BTW, Nessos was the old type, and Pholos may have been the new type–at least according to some greek art.  Pholos was NOT an Ixion centaur.     The podcast is below.

Chiron: Centaur with two human legsOK. Here are the pictures:

Ixion's centaurs: four horse legs (Old centaurs)