Nude Eh?

In both senses – ’tis a New Day (we’ve been reprogrammed), and we’re Nude, eh? (as in, vulnerable, without artifice).  What’s changed most dramatically is the relationship between our personality and our culture.  Not just in terms of what’s expected of us and how we respond to that, but deep in the roots.  Which is to say, we should all expect the Unexpected, and when we meet it, observe carefully, and to the extent that we can, meet it with Curiosity.

Now, not only has our conscious and unconscious relationship with our culture changed, but We have changed.  Which is to say, our vibrations have moved up a notch.  Paul’s letter to the Corinthians talks about seeing through a glass darkly, since not now, but then shall we fully understand.  Well, our Being is the same way.  Our physical manifestation (form, action, life circumstances) echoes our vibration through a funhouse mirror.  But each time our vibration moves up a notch, the mirror gets a little clearer.  Carefully recognize that this up-notch is not about understanding.  It’s about creation.  This is Aries we’re talking about, and understanding is the last thing Aries does – Aries is about impulse, in all senses of the word – a pulse inward, a devolution or descent of Spirit, as well as impulsive action; as my Funk & Wagnalls calls it, a sudden impelling force that produces motion.

This isn’t about being energized or ennervated – you could be either.  Reprogramming can be exhausting, and it can be invigorating.  Or both.  We Hufolk are creatures with a load of inertia.  Maybe you’ve heard it phrased as Karma.  When inertia meets an impelling force, our angular momentum changes.  Last week you were on Life Path A.  This week you’re on Life Path Q.  It will serve us well to trust our impulses.  It will serve us well to meet the Unexpected with Curiosity.  It will serve us well to celebrate the New and Different.

Just as an example, this is what got put on my plate today.

Dizzy Weekend

Saturn goes direct at eleven minutes after 11am PST on May 30 at 28 Virgo (“A baldheaded man who has seized Power“).

Neptune goes retrograde at ten minutes to noon PST on May 31 at 29 Aquarius (“A Butterfly emerging from a chysalis“).

In the interim, things’ll continue to be pretty dizzy, cuz Magic is Afoot.  Our biggest payoff comes from being curious about any Confusion we encounter.

Birdcage

We keep mentioning your “birdcage,” and you might have missed our introduction to our use of the term, so we’ll review quickly.  It’s not an insult.

Our Reality is held together by a set of Limiting Beliefs.  The Universe is Limitless, but Our Reality – what we Expect to see and occur – is a very small subset of that Infinitude.  Our Limiting Beliefs are assembled from a variety of sources – our “past lives,” our parents and other programmers when we were new to the Planet, our educations, who we listen to and believe, etc etc.  We could include our “natal planets” in that list, and in some cases they’re important – for instance, the sign position of our natal Venus can say a lot about what kinds of things we’re likely to believe or disbelieve – but our natal planets just show tendencies.  The important thing here is that we each have a set of Limiting Beliefs that define our Reality.

Our Limiting Beliefs are partly conscious, but mostly unconscious.  They’re partly personal, but also partly cultural, and partly planetary.  And our Limiting Beliefs are partially intellectualized, but mostly held in place by rivets that are essentially emotional.  We could even postulate that the Intellectual and Emotional Worlds are internal – they comprise the structure of our Birdcage, while the Material and Spiritual Worlds are external – our Birdcage is a lens through which we define our version of them.  When we speak of As Above So Below or As Within So Without or talk of Reality as a Mirror, we’re speaking of this Birdcage, very directly.  So this Birdcage we all have is not at all as simple as the metaphor implies.  Nevertheless, a great deal of Power lies in the simplicity of the metaphor.

The fundamental purpose of our Birdcage is to keep us Safe.  The Universe is totally and completely and absolutely Overwhelming.  If you’ve ever seen the cartoons about someone’s head exploding, or seen or experienced the equivalent in “Real Life,” you know exactly what I mean.  Our Birdcage, like a Customs Agent, allows certain Realities in, demands a duty or fee to let other Realities in, and denies entry completely to yet other Realities.  As in, I’d do anything for Love, but I won’t do that! Our Birdcage has a lot in common with our Ego, but the Ego-word is used in so many different ways that it’s not good for much beyond trying to shame somebody.  I don’t equate our Birdcages to our Egos, but their fundamental purposes are similar.

Our Birdcage is a “Rube Goldberg” structure.  No high-price architecture involved, purely form follow function with a minimum of fuss – but most of the function is waaaay obsolete, so it’s hardly minimalist.  Random Baroque, or Brugelesque, would be more like it.  So it’s put together with old car hoods and bailing wire and disused sidewalks and duct tape and cardboard and gum.  It’s a shantytown, a slum.  It has a few nice rooms, even a few windows, but most of it is a maze of semi-lit closets and hallways that we visit as rarely as possible, for fear that we’ll see the roof leaking unwanted stuff.  But to us it’s Home.  We’re very attached to it.  It’s like Dolly Pardon’s Coat of Many Colors.  Most of the time we’re unaware that our Birdcage is any different from anyone else’s, but when we notice, we feel hurt when someone insults it.

Now, the problem with Safety is that we’re constantly outgrowing it.  For much of our up-growing, we’re naive to Risk and eager to explore New Worlds, so it feels like we’re outgrowing Boredom, rather than outgrowing Safety.  That’s partly because it’s other people’s Safety we’re growing beyond, partly because we don’t research the Risks before we leap.  So to grow, we need to add a New Wing to our Birdcage every time, hence the duct tape and gum.  That’s why it looks so helter-skelter.  And that’s why, if we really sit down and talk about it, nobody else’s Birdcage make any sense to us.  Like the guy in the cartoon standing knee-deep in Gulf Oil carrying Down With Government signs and shouting Why Isn’t the Gummint Fixing This!?!

That’s why it’s so hard to respect other people – it’s lonely in our Cage, and we have a deep longing to connect, but it’s really hard to find mutually compatible portals where our Cage lines up with another’s Cage, where our Customs Agents won’t check our bags, if you please.  And then, when we do find a connection, and try to share the other Wings in our Cage that we’re particularly delighted with, the Other Person won’t be able to share it, because their Wings don’t match up with ours.  Same with their desire to share their Wings, and our Customs Agents.

Adding a Wing to our Birdcage, which we gotta do every time we want to grow, is like adding a Wing to a Space Station.  We can’t just knock down a wall, or we’d let all the Safety out.  We have to build the equivalent of an airlock, a Safelock, or time things just right while the Dragon, or Sylvester, is sleeping.  So it’s always a dance on a sharp edge, between Safety and Growth.  We all have different natal proclivities, where we lean toward one side or the other, in one area of life or another.

We’ve talked quite a bit about the Fourth Harmonic, Dominion, and how to tame a Fourth Harmonic (learn to see it as a serendipitous journey toward situational Wisdom, rather than a destination with preset Correct and Incorrect categories).  The Fourth is one of the most challenging Harmonics we get, but we haven’t introduced the Eighth Harmonic yet.  The Eighth is the Fourth’s smaller cousin.  It symbolizes Alignment and Balance.  Those are two of the most troublesome aspects of the Fourth Harmonic, so practicing them under the easier Eighth Harmonic, where they’re much simpler, could be a real Teacher for us.

The Full Moon chart that visits us today (4pm PST) and ushers in Uranus crossing the Aries Point (7pm PST), is a very busy chart, but it features two strong Eighth Harmonic relationships that give us opportunities to practice – Mercury-Saturn and Ketu-Neptune (Ketu is the Moon’s South Node, also called the Dragon’s Tail).  Mercury-Saturn is about the relationship between mind (Mercury) and Ego (Saturn).  One element of that is of course self-criticism and self-justification.  Bringing those into Alignment and Balance would involve neutrality – not Self-Love per se, because Love happens in the Heart, not in the mind or the Ego.  But the I’m Okay You’re Okay place, where we’re free to be ourself, and we’re Safe to let others be themselves, but we’re quick to Set Boundaries or Make Amends as soon as harm begins to enter the picture.

Ketu represents all of the skills we’ve accumulated in all of our past lives, all tangled up with all of the emotional baggage we have left from all of our past lives – it’s a biggie, eh?  Neptune, meanwhile, represents Grace.  So it’s a very different realm than Mercury-Saturn, largely emotional and somatic, but the exercise is kinda the same – finding neutrality.  The place where we recognize and enjoy our talents (including especially the talents we didn’t know we had, and the ones we’ve never nurtured), and we’re aware of our emotional load while neither denying it nor letting it have its way with us.  That would be some Alignment and Balance, eh?  To pull it off we’d probably be tapping furiously, but that’s cool.

Now, both Saturn and Neptune are standing still right now, through the weekend, so they’re both very strong.  So we don’t want to create big hurdles for ourself and make Big Expectations about what we might achieve with these exercises.  Being conscious of self-judgment and self-justification, and being able to say, “Oh, there’s the mind dancing with the Ego again!” a half dozen times a day is probably a realistic goal.  The mind and the Ego could easily be dancing around Safety and Risk – Oh, I shoudna! and Oh I shoulda! As Joan Armatrading puts it, This time it’s too late/ But I’ll know next time/ To mix some Water with the Wine.

And the Ketu-Neptune thing – we’re probably doing well to conceive of the possibility of bringing neutrality to our emotions and allowing hidden talents to arise unbidden to create what we’d consider to be Miracles.  This’ll be more like Daydreaming than Presence, leaning toward something like Lucid Daydreaming.  We’d want to be careful not to cast these as Hero stories – that’s the Saturn Ego butting in.  Neptune’s a behind-the-scenes kinda operator.  Maybe dwelling more on pleasure we might get from pulling off some well-admired skill, rather than adulation.

Uranus in Pisces and Aries

We’re a tad bit late, since Uranus has been in Pisces since 2003 and moves into Aries inna few days (May 27), but it’ll be good to review Uranus in Pisces, since it’ll give us a much better idea of how Uranus in Aries will change things.  We actually only get a taste of Uranus in Aries this year, cuz Uranus goes retro on July 5 and backpedals into Pisces in mid-August.  (Lots going on in mid-August.)  It’s March 2011 before Uranus settles firmly into Aries.  Nevertheless, Uranus deputizes Jupiter in the first degree of Aries on June 8, so it’s gonna be a Big taste, as Amplifier Jupiter carries on the Uranus-in-Aries work even while Uranus is on holiday.  So it’ll be a long transition.

The Big Deal for the coming week, of course, is the simultaneous Saturn and Neptune Stations that occur next weekend, Quincunx to one another.  So the whole Uranus transition is more of a foreground-background thing, but it’s gonna add a great deal of color to the Saturn-Neptune broadcast.  We’ll probably say much more about Saturn-Neptune as the week wears on, but to put it in a nutshell, your Species will be experiencing Great Curiosity (Quincunx) about the relationship between Humans (Saturn) and Nature (Neptune) this week.  Lotsa fun implications there, eh?  Curiosity, recall, is the Great Healer, because it cracks open the fortress of our Limiting Beliefs, and could even allow a few Big Miracles to slip through.

Fun aside, back to the topic at hand…

The easy interpretation of the Pisces-Aries Cusp is that Pisces is the Last Sign and Aries is the First Sign, so their Cusp is about Finishing Business and Starting Over Afresh – and that’s a totally valid interpretation, probably the most important one.  We can extrapolate that out a bit – Pisces is mutable Water (Emotion in transition, or moving Emotion, or Energy in Motion) and Aries is cardinal Fire (Spirit being creative, the New).  So that may add Emotional Release or at least Risk of Loss (as structures transmogrify – Energy in Motion) to Finishing Business, and adding the possibility of Divine Inspiration or a touch of Grace to Starting Over Afresh.

If you find parts of this post confusing, that’s good – Confusion is what happens when a wing of your Birdcage is ready to expand, and the rivets that hold the old structure together begin to loosen.  Stop a minute to assess your reaction to Confusion (impatience? anger? fear?), be loving and gentle with it (and/or tap on it), then read on.

The whole Energy in Motion interpretation of E-motion is intriguing.  Traditionally, we can describe two different but related processes that freeze Energy into Matter (Pisces is about melting Matter back into Energy).  One is ritual, repetition, hypnosis, trance – transformation as trance formation.  Telling the same lie enough times, etc.  See how long it takes you to deprogram your unconscious differentiation between weekdays (sposta work) and weekends (sposta have fun), for instance – took me about three years, and after a coupla decades ghosts still linger.

The other Energy-freezing process is Emotion.  When you lose it psychologically, or take hallucinogenics to simulate that, your World deforms.  The patterns and relationships change.  Things change in the Reaches, as Ursula Leguin puts it.  The dance between Expectation and Detachment is about Emotion.  When you consciously try to detach from something, or try to re-engineer your expectations to create Abundance, you discover unconscious Emotions – the boundaries you set as a child or in a past life to protect yourself from harm and fear.  Pisces is about restructuring these.

One way to begin to deconstruct the Unconscious is to divide it into three components – your personal Unconscious (Uranus) or your own karma (as inertia, not retribution), your cultural Unconscious (Neptune) or programming you got at home and in school (such as nationalism, or your work ethic), and what Jung called the Universal Unconscious (Pluto), or the force of history.  This week, with Uranus and Neptune plus Saturn (clarity, differentiation) lit up strongly, gives us a unique opportunity to look into this space, and use our Intention to tweak any relationships we’d like to change.

The process of becoming conscious is not a process of Discovery, it’s a process of Differentiation.  Once we differentiate Cumulus from Cirrus and Nimbus (with or without the names – it would work just as well if the names were BigPuffy and HighWispy and LowDark, or Fred and Ginger and Frank), we can bring the mind into our sense of when and how Rain will be gracing us.  That’s just an example – the mind is certainly not the only way to become conscious of future weather.  We could just feel it with our skin, for instance, and differentiate the skinfeel of humidity in the air around us from the skinfeel of being sweaty from exertion.

So this week is uniquely suited to unwinding karmic associations, changing cultural expectations, and general consciousness-raising.  Don’t get bogged down by Separation (Saturn) – remember WeBeAllOne (Neptune).  The 100 Monkeys story, where once enough Monkeys on one island begin to eat sandwiches, Monkeys on other islands pick up the new ritual in the Collective Monkey Consciousness Field, and start eating sandwiches too.  Once I asked an online group “How long will we have to do the Ghost Dance before Humans change?” and the illuminating answer I got was “As long as it takes.”  My unconscious question had been, “How long will I have to do the Ghost Dance before I succumb to cynicism” – the answer differentiated my cynicism into consciousness and changed me.

It would be a good week to open to the possibility of Miracle, that things could change overnight.  By dwelling on the Sanctity of Life in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Responsibility to Respect It among the Important Humans in big offices in Houston and London and Washington, for instance.  Or on Enough for Everyone, including the Critters.  In one of Ursula’s stories, when someone dreamed that the World had changed, then the next morning the World had indeed changed, and no one remembered that it had ever been different from the way it was now, except the one who had dreamed the change.  Put the Power of Ritual together with the 100 Monkeys notion of the Field, then put on a coupla John Lennon songs.

Since Uranus represents our Soul Chord, the Jupiter-Uranus Initiation on the Aries Point is Big, signifying an entirely new chapter in our individual and collective lives.  These next two days are a major preview of that – think of the next two days as shopping days.  Magic is afoot, so you can try on several new personality-suits and life-circumstance-suits and Planet-Change-suits and collaboration-suits to see which ones complement your skin tones and accentuate your positives and make you feel Sunny.  Enjoy the Possibilities!

Crying Over Spilled Fish

Jupiter’s opposing Saturn in a few hours (11pm PST May 22).  This energy has been with us all century, and is just reaching the Second Harmonic.  It’s the Store Fulla Gems Energy, so taking some time to be present with it here while it’s fruiting would be very useful.  The Second Harmonic is about Intuition and Self-Trust – that is, the temptation in an Opposition (the Second Harmonic is a polarity) is to get stuck in the mind, since the mind is the uncontested Champion of Two Dimensions.  When we step out of the helicopter, though, the real question is always which coin is it, not is it heads or tails – and that’s what our Intuition and Self-Trust inform us about.  As Jule puts it,

Don’t matter which side it lands on if it’s someone else’s dime.

Jupiter (expansion) and Saturn (contraction) are always apparently opposing energies anyway, unless you’re into Both/And.  Expansion and Contraction sound like they’re mutually incompatible, till we remember that contradiction is always a property of the mind, never of the Universe.  It’s a good koan for today – what is the sound of expanding contraction?  There’s a whole generation of very smart Cosmologists stuck on this koan, unable to make sense of a Universe that they demand must be one or the other in order to fit their binomial mathematics.  Of course you could expand in one dimension and contract in another, but you don’t even gotta do that.  Just play with synonyms.

For instance, you could grow (Expand) good boundaries (Contract).  You could define (C) your wannas (E) more clearly, and prioritize (C) your goals (E).  You could practice a random walk following your Heart – your Heart is the seat of your Values, and your Values tell you very clearly when and where and how to expand and contract, even simultaneously, if you can carefully distinguish (C) your Values (Heart) from your Ideals (mind).  Not only that, but your Values have the added feature that projection is futile, because everybody’s got different Values, so you can painlessly just give up (E) your Control Issues (C).

Which is precisely what Jupiter’s telling us to do, being as it is at the end of Pisces.  Pisces is the Last Sign, it’s all about giving up – not in the sense of defeat, but in the sense of letting go, or giving over.  Surrender, in the best sense of the word.  Pisces is a Water Sign, and Water Signs are about Emotions.  So Jupiter’s telling us to let go of any Emotional Attachments we’re holding.  That is, let go of anything we’re thinking about, anything we want, anything we’re feeling.  It’s like the Love Thing – let it go, and if it was Right, it’ll come back, and when it does it’ll be closer to the Real Thing.

Any promises you been making to yerself or others?  Let ’em go (renegotiate if you need to, but tomorrow, not today – you want to avoid the risk of getting stuck in someone else’s duality).  Any resolutions you been trying to make?  Let ’em go.  They’ll just backfire anyway.  Anything you’re promising or resolving is almost certainly an intellectual attempt to override your own Integrity, and with Uranus lit up too, that’ll never work.  If it was really You, you wouldn’t need to promise or resolve, you’d just do it.  Give yerself a break for the next half-day – or even for the next two weeks, till the Jupiter-Uranus Initiation.

Saturn, meanwhile, is Stationary, which is to say, Strong.  Not that Jupiter isn’t Strong too, being at the end of Pisces and about to turn the page into a new chapter where Uranus initiates it.  A strong Saturn tells us to focus on our Number One Priority.  I know, we’re scared to give up the fallbacks, in case #1 doesn’t work, but that’s not what it’s about.  Saturn is about dedicating ourself to #1.  That’s Self-Trust.  They useta say on Wall Street, it’s not whatcha earn, it’s whatcha learn.  So yes, it’s entirely possible that your #1 Priority is doomed to failure – but if that’s the case, it will be a failure that greatly increases your future successes, and that’s not a failure you want to avoid.  But chances are, if you give it the Attention you’re used to giving to yer fallbacks, your #1 will succeed famously.

And if Jupiter’s fishing up the dregs of Pisces, that means Saturn is dancing in the last drippings of Virgo.  Pisces is about letting go of Emotions, but Virgo is about letting go of Reality.  Sounds extreme, but yer Reality is a perfect, if funhouse, mirror image of your Identity and yer Unconscious Limiting Beliefs, and Virgo’s job is to dissemble your Identity.  At the end of Pisces, the task is to open you up to whole new Possibilities , as the next sign Aries represents the descent of Spirit into Matter.  At the end of Virgo, the task is to open you up to whole new Experiences of Other, as the next sign Libra represents liberation from fear-based patterns of thinking.

Saturn’s Station is Direct – it’s about to start moving forward again after deliberating about things since mid-January.  It moves into Libra on July 22, just as the Sun moves into Leo – we been rebuilding our personalities, and they’ll come shining forth in August with a whole new appeal.  Any projects that’ve been held up are about to rush toward progress in June, and we’ll be amazed at the kinds and quantities of collaboration we find come August.

In a sense, there’s a handoff here.  Saturn (Ego) has been retrograde (introverting) since mid-January, which means it was retrograde when the Chiron-Neptune Initiation occurred in mid-February.  Now, next weekend, Saturn’s going direct – all of the Chiron-Neptune changes (essentially, allowing Miracles) have been ruminating around inside our Unconscous, and now they’re about to Bloom into our Awareness.  Now we start taking some responsibility for the Miracles – passing rudimentary financial regulation in the US Senate, and banning naked shorting in Germany, are previews.

Meanwhile, Neptune (Forces Larger than Us) goes retrograde – God’s energy retreats into the background.  We been carried along by currents seemingly beyond our control lately, and now the tide is turning.  Now we get to have more of an impact on what’s going on – as long as we stay in our Self-Trust and Integrity and stay open to Unexpected Possibilities.

I’m constantly amazed at how clear and straightforward Jim Rickards’s insights are.  He doesn’t try to make it other than it is, he just tells it like it is and suggests how we might get into the current and stop paddling in circles.  Here’s his take on the turmoil in Europe and the related repercussions.  What a refreshing contrast to the strident propaganda in MELTUP.

Up Yer Melt

I could only stand to watch the first five minutes of the “viral” MELTUP video everyone’s cheering about – couldn’t stand Peter Schiff’s AM-radio yelling, especially in combination with the narrator’s sardonic monotone.  It reminded me of one of those neocognitive fakeo questionnaires that the DNC sends out –

Official Survey – To Be Opened Only By Addressee

Do you believe Bears will eat People if they’re hungry enough?

Do you think it’s good for Bears to eat People?

What if the Bears ate your family?

So then, how much will you donate to the DNC?

Shades of Watermelon Sugar.  Cognitive is one of the more subtle ways that our parents shamed us into abandoning ourselves in order to make their life easier, or in order to meet their own control issues.  You can lead someone down a “logical” path to any conclusion you want.  All you need to do is start with “facts,” and loosely connect them to some conclusion you want them to reach.  We do it all the time.

Problem is, logic is a house of cards with no foundation.  Everything depends on premises – foregone conclusions – not “facts,” and anyone trying to manipulate you with logic will never state their premises, because they might differ from yours, which would spoil their whole manipulation.  If you’re stuck in your “left brain” enough to fall for their game, don’t examine the premises, and end up betraying your own values, you’ve just created a bundle of self-hate.  It’s a more subtle way to gain power over people than by wagging your finger and calling them names.  Now all the bosses gotta do to control you is trigger your self-hate, which they can do with as little as a tone of voice.

There are no “facts,” only Beliefs.  Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure, as they say.  Even if all of the “facts” that MELTUP presents are “true,” or believable, their premise is that government must shrink, to zero would probably be best, and regulation must go away.  That way the Greedheads that created the Crash in the first place, can continue to rip you off.  Exactly how Hoobert Heever turned the market crash of 1929 into a Depression so deep only War could bring the US out of it.

The Developed World is indeed destroying its currencies, and that will indeed lead to more economic difficulty.  You’ll never get the US and Europe to voluntarily lower their “standard of living” enough to allow the other five billion to move up from bare feet to bicycles without killing the Planet that laid the Golden Egg.  So we’d start with the “fact” that the Planet can’t sustain the current rate of population growth, the “fact” that the People won’t tolerate extreme inequalities indefinitely, the “fact” that the US makes almost half of the World’s weapons, and the “fact” that the antiregulation movement, if they get control of the US government again (more than they already have as a Superminority), will destroy civil society ten times more quickly than government overspending ever will.

The Logical result of Reaganism and TeaPartyism and MELTUPism is not gated communities but Walled Communities, like Europe had in the Middle Ages.  The Greedheads inside will have all the weapons, and the rest of us will be the Barbarians at the Wall (who eventually won, by the way).  The Greedheads won’t pay taxes to keep prisons open, but neither will they tolerate scofflaws (except of course financial crimes), so there will have to be mass executions.  The TeaParty will follow the traditions set by the Brownshirts and the KKK.  In that World, which side would you take – assuming you were able to choose?

So our Cognitive story would give us several options for continued survival on the Planet…

Population reduction via famine (a high probability if the MELTUP folks take power; and a real possibility if they don’t).

Population reduction via war (a high probability if any group in power decides that their most lucrative endeavors involve weapons).

Population reduction via disease (a decent probability because of Climate Change, the profit dynamics of Big Pharma, and an increased possibility from synthetic viruses with Craig Venter’s trademark on them).

Population reduction via agreement (not as comical as it sounds at first).

Equalization of economic status via agreement (not even I am enough of an optimist to give that a high probability, though I can certainly grant it the status of possible – we’re in an Age of Miracles after all).

Equalization of economic status via painful adjustments (probable).

It’s probably time to choose your favorite and begin visualizing.

Or, you can recognize that we’re in the throes of Saturn-Neptune (Omigod, am I All One, or does The Other have my interests at heart?) and Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus (How do I make a safe space for myself to be me – do I embrace Other, or set boundaries against Other?) energies, relax, and watch the fireworks as everybody else freaks out.  The keywords we want to keep in mind are Balance, Integrity, and Curiosity.

We’re in the final few days of the old Jupiter-Uranus Cycle, which began in February 1997 at 6 degrees of Aquarius, “A masked figure performs ritualistic acts in a Mystery Play.”  This is the energy that’s leaving.  The energy that’s arriving is “A Woman rising from the Sea, embraced by a Seal” – the birth of the New, with the Good Seakeeping Seal of Approval.  Here for your enjoyment is Rachel Maddow’s story about masked figures performing ritualistic acts in a Mystery Play – which, recall, is the old energy, with an expiry date of June 7.  Ifya wanna actually visualize up something actually New, which opportunity is available here, it behooves to work hard to release the old.

The Good News

Well, the Good News is that none of the European countries is invading any of the others.  Considering the history of Europe, that is Good News indeed, and not to be dismissed lightly.  Sorta like the Worldwide anti-war demonstrations before Dubya’s War – ifya look for it, and don’t believe the Corporate Media, you can see the Transformations.  As one reader-poet  says,

Inevitable Transformative Disruption serves Inevitable Transformative Integrity…..it’s inevitable , it’s transformative, it’s disruptive….this whole getting of our Integrity.  And those are all Good Things.  I like these individual words—seems that they can be put together in all their possible combinations and still lead to The One Thing that seems to really be lacking in USA Adulthood these here days…. Integrity.  But one way or another (resistance is futile)…it’s—–coming to the human species near you.

Or as Leonard Cohen puts it,

But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Which is necessary, since it’s the USofA that’s most likely to be invading other countries these days.  Not that “Democracy” is a panacea – we still gotta deal with “Human Nature.”

So the Big Deal for the next several weeks, in addition to what we’ve been talking about, is Saturn opposite Jupiter-Uranus.

The Jupiter-Saturn opposition is an expansion-contraction extroversion-introversion balancing act that’s a blooming of the Jupiter-Saturn Initiation of May 2000 at 23 Taurus, “A jewelry shop filled with valuable gems.”

The Saturn-Uranus opposition is Old News – it’s been going on since November 2008, and this is (was – it was exact at the end of April) the fourth recurrence, so we’re quite familiar with the energy.  It’s a blooming of the Saturn-Uranus Initiation of February 1988 (part of the Harmonic Convergence) at 30 Sagittarius, “The Pope, blessing the Faithful.”  The Harmonic Convergence was complicated, so it isn’t nearly as simple as that, but we don’t need to go into that here.

An opposition is the Second Harmonic – as Angie says in The Tarot Handbook, “This archetype serves as a reminder that we are not to sacrifice our stength for our softness or our softness for our strength.”  Which is an excellent reminder that’s it Both/And – it’s sooo easy to forget that the Second Harmonic is about Balance, and get lost in taking positions and making arguments and justifying judgments, and all those helicopter trips that the mindbone loves to take.  So it’s both Expansion and Contraction – a new wing built while Sylvester sleeps, both Extroversion and Introversion – new communication and new consciousness.  More like buy the dips than panic and sell.

The New News part of this is the Jupiter-Uranus initiation, June 8, at 1 Aries, or the beginning point of the Zodiac, which corresponds to the first day of Spring.  So our Inevitable Transformative Disruptegrity is about New Beginnings, Gems channeled from On High.  If you get lost in the Disruption or the intellectual ambiguity in the first week of June, tap out the fear or annoyance or confusion, and find the crystalline whisper of your Intuition, which will be showing you exactly where and how and what you need to be and do to position yourself for surfing the New Wave.

And by the way, while the budding Uranus-Pluto Fourth Harmonic could easily have put us to sleep around the New Moon, the Jupiter-Uranus is more likely to produce a manic phase.  When Uranus is lit up, don’t expect to sleep a normal schedule.  If you aren’t sleeping, get up and do something fun or creative or productive.  The last thing you want to do is worry about not getting enough sleep – under Uranus we can be more rested from two hours of appropriate sleep (ie, when we feel like it) than from twelve hours of trying to sleep.

None of which should allow us to neglect the Saturn-Neptune energy that’ll immerse us till June 1.  Saturn and Neptune aren’t making a normal Harmonic relationship to one another, they’re just standing still (ie, at their strongest) at the same time on May 30-31.  The angle they do make to one another is a Quincunx, the angle of Curiosity – which is a boon, because Curiosity is one of our greatest gifts.  It’s another flowering of another part of the Harmonic Convergence – the Saturn-Neptune Initiation of March 1989 at 12 Capricorn, “An illustrated lecture on Natural Science reveals little-known aspects of life.”  So the Gems Channeled from On High that facilitate Beginnings so New that they Surprise Us, are Secrets about Life – Bruce Lipton comes to mind, as well as James Oschman.

So we need to review the Harmonic Convergence after all, eh?  We’ll do that in detail later, but in a nutshell the essence of the Harmonic Convergence was the Uranus-Neptune Initiation of February 1993 at 20 Capricorn, “A hidden choir singing during a religious service” – Angelic Gemmy Secrets about Life, Channeled from On High, that facilitate Beginnings so New that they Surprise Us.  The 1987-88 dates usually associated with the Harmonic Convergence applied to the preliminary Saturn-Uranus and Saturn-Neptune Initiations, which occurred opposite Jupiter and Chiron.  But the Uranus-Neptune Cycle is a 170-year Cycle, so it’s huge that its Initiation occurred in our lifetimes.

By comparison, the Jupiter-Uranus Cycle is 20 years long, Jupiter-Saturn 21 years, Saturn-Neptune 37 years, and Saturn-Uranus 44 years.  The Uranus-Pluto Cycle lasts 150 years.

Bottom Line?  Keep yer eye out the next few weeks for Angelic Gems Channeled from On High about Secrets of Life that facilitate Beginnings so New that they Surprise us.  They’ll inform us about how to navigate the Changes ahead.

Disruption Intensity

Astrologers use something called “orb” to measure the intensity of an astrological energy.  “Orb” is easiest to understand during a conjunction or Initiation, when a quicker planet passes a slower one.  The energy will be a lot more intense when the planets are one degree apart (“1 degree of orb”), than when the planets are three degrees apart (“3 degrees of orb”) or ten degrees apart (“10 degrees of orb”).  Different degrees of orb are used in different circumstances.

In the case of the Fourth-Harmonic Uranus-Pluto relationship, “orb” is the distance between the current position of the planets, and the exact Fourth Harmonic.  The Fourth Harmonic is a 90-degree angle (one fourth of the way round the Zodiacal circle), so the two planets would be within “one degree of orb” when they were between 89 and 91 degrees apart, within “three degrees of orb” when they were between 87 and 93 degrees apart.  The Harmonic would be “exact” or “complete” when they’re exactly 90 degrees apart.  We consider 89 degrees to be quite different from 91 degrees, but we’ll go into that difference later.

The reason I bring this up, is that, as we approach 2012, we can measure the intensity of the budding Uranus-Pluto Fourth-Harmonic (which I’ll shorthand as “UP4”) by measuring the orb.  Note that 2012 is about more than Uranus-Pluto – other folks have written extensively about the alignment of Pluto and/or the Northern Winter Solstice with the Galactic Center, the “end” of the Mayan Calendar, the Great Attractor, and any number of other phenomena.  UP4 is complete on June 24, 2012.  Also, Harmonics usually re-occur several times, since the planets don’t dance across the Heavens in straight lines (they stutter).  Again, we won’t go into detail here, but we consider the first completion to be the primary one.  UP4 goes on dancing through 2015.

So, when you’re drawing up a chart for general purposes, such as a natal chart or a New Moon chart, you usually use 8 degrees of orb for a Fourth Harmonic.  In the Ascension New Moon chart, the UP4 orb was around six degrees, so we include it in the indications for the Lunar Month, especially when it’s “approaching” – that is, the faster planet (Uranus) hasn’t yet made the exact Harmonic.  When I’m looking at what we’re actually likely to detect in our bodies – which of course depends on our sensitivity, and we’ll all be differently sensitive to different energies – I usually use one degree of orb.  UP4 gets to one degree of orb in the Northern Summer of 2011.  In August of this year, UP4 is within 3 degrees of orb (close enough for Jazz) – and remember, there’s a whole buncha other stuff going on in August (which we’ll discuss soon).

So we can project the intensity of the Transformative Disruptions we’re likely to be experiencing, as we move into 2012.  Of course, if this event triggers Hot Spots in your own natal chart, your own experience will have it’s own dynamics.

UP4 first came within 8 degrees of orb in June-August 2007, and again in  May-October 2008 (at the nadir of the Wall Street implosion).  In 2009, UP4 was within 8 degrees during April-November, getting down to 5 degrees in July and August.  UP4 crossed within 8 degrees for good in March of this year.  It gets down to 3 degrees (ie, very Warm) in August, before moving back to 8 degrees for the Northern Winter.  It’s within 3 degrees of orb from May to October of 2011, and within 1 degree (ie, Hot) from June to September of 2011.  For the 2011-2012 Northern Winter, it gets back only to 6 degrees.  In 2012, UP4 is within 3 degrees from April on, and stays within 1 degree from May to October.

The energy of a Harmonic intensifies as it approaches, then – if you’re conscious that it’s occurring – fades rapidly.  If you’re not conscious that it’s occurring, then it fades slowly.  That’s because you attribute the Changes to other Causes, and make adjustments in your birdcage to try to intercept those Causes, and this carries our reaction and resistance to the Harmonic beyond where it naturally occurs.  The Patriot Act is a prime example.  We’re all still living in birdcages that were constructed when we were kids, making decisions to abort what we believed were the Causes of our discomfort – to which we could have easily adjusted without creating Limiting Beliefs, had we known they were “just” Harmonics.  As someone once said, “We’ve learned that this too shall pass, but astrology knows when it will pass.”

Transformative Disruption

So we were looking at how to convert our response to Fourth-Harmonic energies from Victim to Dominion.  Let’s start with the Biggie, Uranus-Pluto, since it’s a prominent part of the Ascension New Moon and therefore a prominent part of the coming four weeks.

Uranus, representing the Soul Chord, symbolizes Integrity and Disruption – Disruption of any elements of our lives which are not in Integrity with our Soul’s Mission in the Lifetime, as manifested in this particular phase of the Lifetime.  That is, Integrity/Disruption will manifest differently in different phases of our Life, just as our Mission evolves over time – as does our readiness to choose to accept it.

And Pluto represents the Inevitable, and Transformation.  Pluto is associated with Deaths and Rebirths at all levels, Transformations of all sorts.  The Transformations are not totally under our control, because Pluto represents the Long Wave of History – it has a directionality, like a River.  So we can steer, but we’ll wear ourselves out trying to paddle upstream.

So we can see Uranus-Pluto as Inevitable Disruption (unless we’re in full Integrity already), or Transformative Disruption, or Disruptive Transformation, Change that’s good in the long run but which probably necessitates some adjustment in the short run.  After all, even if we’re in full Integrity now, the Larger Field is shifting (Transforming Disruptively), so we’re very likely to have to make some adjustments to stay in Integrity with the Larger Field, and actually, our Soul’s Mission is highly likely to be shifting as well.

How does that line go, about seeing through a glass, darkly?  The mind runs in 2D, and the Universe runs in nD, where n is very large, maybe infinite.  So sure, we can pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness about Relativity and Quantum Theory, and make some cool toys by engineering the knowledge, but the folks who decided, Okay, now I’m an adult, I can stop learning now. are in for many more big shocks.

By the way, How to Train Your Dragon is a version of the Avatar story that features an anti-hero rather than a hero.  We’re entering the Age of Aquarius – the Big Heroes lived in the Age of Aries (2000 BC to 0 BC, give or take), so the whole hero concept is quite retrograde.  The anti-hero of How to Train Your Dragon is a cultural idiot run by large doses of naivete, curiosity, and maybe a hint of compassion – much more like Aquarius, though his prescience-without-detail is still a bit like Aries.

So, how do we avoid being the Victim of Inevitable Disruption, and move into a position of Dominion over the Disruptive Transformation?  We’ll need to do this on two levels – in our own life per se, and in our relationship to the World at large.  Dominion means Healthy Control – lotsa folks see Control as an epithet you hurl at an antagonist in order to try to assert Control over them by triggering their self-hate.  But we all want to have a reasonable degree of Healthy Control over our lives, so we aren’t always in a panic of overwhelm.  The symbol of the Fourth Harmonic is the Emperor – think of your best folklore image of the Wise and Benevolent Ruler who allows folks the freedom to exercise their own Judgment, but intervenes quickly and effectively when someone’s Judgment is harmful to others.

If you take a few moments and ask yourself, Where am I out of Integrity right now? you’ll probably find an answer or two, if you’re very careful to first list and disregard the answers to Where does (Mom)(Dad)(Spouse)(Boss)(they) think I’m out of Integrity? We aren’t talking about Guilt or Shame or Self-Deprecation, we’re talking about What would it take to make me feel more Whole and In Control more often? Kinda like those polls about Do you think the Country’s headed in the right direction? only applied to your own life.  Uranian Integrity is not at all an intellectual thing, it’s multidimensional.  So no shame in being outa Integrity – if we were all in perfect Integrity with our Soul we’d be dead, eh?  Or narcissists.

If you was very brave, you could even pray God, please lovingly and gently show me the ways in which I am out of Integrity – Uranus is opposing Saturn (Ego) after all.  But if I was gonna do that I’d massage that prayer a whole lot, maybe starting with something closer to God, please help me lovingly and gently transition into greater Integrity.  And of course, the reason we step out of Integrity is to learn and develop wisdom, so we might want to add a trailer about not missing any important homework.  I see Ego as our friend, our agent in charge of survival, and here in the Age of Sustenance, er, Sustainability, that’s perhaps even more important than usual.

Then there’s our relationship to the World at large.  If you haven’t noticed that the World at large appears to be significantly out of Integrity and experiencing a great deal of Disruptive Transformation, well, you’re more enlightened than me.  At least the last two Chiron-Neptune Initiations (1879, 1945) have been followed by major economic Disruption, and the current one is obviously no different.  Of course, the invitation offered by Chiron-Neptune is to open to Miracle, and it’s only our own birdcages that limit us in that regard.  The way I read this change, 1945-2007 were about the exploration of Consumerism and Abundance, while most of the rest of the current century are about the exploration of Sustainability – and Sustenance.

Here’s a highly recommended interview with Jim Rickards that describes very concisely how the Lizards have taken over – makes How to Train Your Dragon especially relevant – and how the Winner-Take-All folks are screwing the rest of us.  Worth listening to several times.  And of course, if you’ve forgotten, astrologically and otherwise, Dragon is a symbol for Karma – and using the inertia embedded in our Karma to create Dominion is a parallel to converting the Fourth Harmonic from Victim to Dominion.  Here’s a very relevant followup interview with John Hathaway.  The “home page” that Eric refers to is http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/King_World_News.html.  The “Juniors” that Eric and John refer to are Junior Gold Miners.  If anyone has any interest in learning more about those, lemme know.

The folks who went back to the Land in the 1960s were fifty years ahead of us, so we’ve got some catching up to do, but being able to grow our own Food and preserve it so we can eat all year, and obtain our own Water and Power, probably has more upside and a bit less downside than Gold.  The extra fifty years has produced a great deal of innovation to make off-the-grid Water and Power more practical – though the Atlantean danger of over-reliance on technology is ever-present.  Many of the new technologies are based on Quantum properties of “unusual” metals and processes – like the Neodymium magnets and superconducting circuits that reduce weight and increase efficiency in wind generators.  Those may eventually trickle down to the Common Person, Popular-Mechanics style.

The Gulf Between

My friend Alice Miller proposes this wonderful process…

Dear Ones

Spirit just handed me an idea to be shared with you, and It asks that you pass this on to others.

With Pluto transiting Capricorn, the time has come for the creative consciousness to prove its power, for us to become conscious co-creators of our reality.

We are all asked to apply this power to help heal  Earth’s wound, under the Gulf of Mexico, and clear the water on behalf of all its inhabitants.

It is asked that, at least once each day, until the issue is resolved, we pause and do this:

If you can visualize, see the ocean clear, clean and sparkling.  Add frolicking sea creatures, celebrating the healing, if you like.

Alternatively or additionally, affirm this:  By the power vested in me, I declare the wounded sea-floor healed, and the ocean returned to its natural clarity!

(It cannot possibly hurt, won’t take much time, and could be the force that will solve the problem.  Join me, won’t you.)

You are a blessing and you are blessed,
Alice Miller
Minister of Astrology
www.lifeprintastrology.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ask_the_Astrologer

But I would add this,

If you can visualize, see all Humans collaborating to help keep the ocean clear, clean and sparkling.  Add frolicking sea creatures, celebrating the healing, if you like.

Alternatively or additionally, affirm this:  By the power vested in me, I declare the wounded and destructive Humans healed, lovingly and gently, and returned to a balanced place in the Natural Order!

Because if the destruction of the Gulf goes away without anyone having to take responsibility for the consequences, just as the destruction of the World Economy has so far gone without any meaningful change in the way the Corporations exploit the Planet and the People, then harm would be done, because it will take yet larger disasters before Humans awake from their Consumerism-induced stupor.

And because Mother Gaia and “Nature” have their own way of correcting imbalances, and despite their belief that Humans are “above” it all, Humans are actually totally integrated into Nature.  Nature’s process includes Bloom and Collapse – an increase in the food supply for any given Critter causes the population of that Critter to Bloom or expand, that increased population then depletes the food supply, and the population of that Critter then Collapses.  Whether it’s Locusts or Humans.

Each of us needs to look into our own Heart to see the Meaning that our Heart assigns to the Gulf Spill.  If your Heart sees the Meaning as another message from Mother Gaia that Ayn Rand was dead wrong and Humans are incapable of regulating themselves, then the appropriate visualization/affirmation is that Humans start learning self-regulation.  If your Heart sees the Meaning as Critters Are Suffering (including the many Human Victims of the spill), then a visualization/affirmation (or prayer or intention) that Suffering cease, is more appropriate.  Of course it’s Both/And.  If it ain’t Both/And for you, it’s a great time to tap on the edges of your Ideology, because that birdcage needs a new wing!

And if you really want to stretch, stretch beyond your current Lifetime, and visualize/affirm/pray/intend/tap on easy transitions from one Lifetime to the next, for all of us Critters.  The New Moon occurred on Ascension Thursday, and it was Christ who demonstrated to us that other kinds of transitions are possible.  Transitions do not need to involve Suffering, and that’s a primary lesson that Pluto in Capricorn will be teaching us, if we can open our cages to the lessons.  To Mother Gaia, the Spill is but a pustule.