Slug-Free Zone

Another great letter from John Perkins…

http://www.johnperkins.org/?page_id=23 .

Thank goodness the Dalai Lama didn’t say we hafta have compassion for the Slugs for there to be Peace in the World!

Convergence

Calleman gives us some perspective on convergence (thanks, Darshana!),

http://www.calleman.com/content/articles/CosmicConvergenceSeptember23-26.htm .

And lo and behold, convergence appears…

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2011/9/24_Gerald_Celente.html

and

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wall-street-elites-enjoy-police-protection-2011-09-27?link=MW_home_latest_news –

and the latter is from Rupert Murdoch’s empire, deep in Wall Street, and not even from his token bad boy!  And then, his token bad boy waxes philosophical…

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-hedge-fund-mixes-ayn-rand-behavioral-psych-2011-09-27

We can only hope that the underlying philosophy shifts because people come to their senses, not because of pepper spray.

If you look closely at the faces of that lovely Rose-Quartz-pink crystal, you’ll notice that the crystal structure is not the usual six-sided structure that Quartz uses, cuz it’s actually Phenakite, or Phenacite.  It’s a nesosilicate, the simplest silicate, where the silicate ions stand alone in the crystal structure, kinda like Ayn wanted us to.  In the other silicates, they’re paired, or chained, or tied up in hoops (with six sides of course), or sheets, or fully linked into a three-dimensional matrix (like Quartz).  The nesosilicates you’ll recognize are Topaz and Garnet.  Like any electrical process, crystals depend on the union of “positive” and “negative” – a positive ion latches on to a negative ion, and that’s how the structure becomes Stable, cuz neither is hung out craving its soulmate.

Of course positive and negative are arbitrary terms, distinct from our moral judgements about what’s good and bad.  Positive and negative do indicate directionality – when a circuit is completed, electricity flows from the positive pole to the negative pole.  Same with magnetic energy, which flows from the “South” Pole to the “North” Pole.  The terms are even chosen that way – the negative cation means “up,” and the positive anion means “down.”  So positive and negative do connote normal.  On the other hand, consider the power of widdershins – walking nine times counterclockwise around a fairy ring can transport you into the fairy realm!  The simple truth is that normal is only half of the story – that’s our connection to moral judgement, and our window to Power.  Any time you see a gap between normal and true, you see an opportunity to use Power.  As Artemisia said in The Findhorn Garden, something like

You humans are afraid of Power, but for us, greater Power allows us to serve God better.

There is Stability in balance, and Power in imbalance.

So, for Phenakite, Silicon is the anion (source); what’s the cation (sink)?  It’s Beryllium.  Beryllium is the fourth-lightest element, and only the second-lightest solid, after Lithium.  At the extremes, there is always instability and Power, and Beryllium is a powerful medicine.  The geological name for Emerald is Beryl – Emerald is a Beryllium Cyclosilicate, where the Silicate ions are bound in Rings.  Beryllium by itself is extremely toxic to humans – it’s powerful.  You need to bind it and make it stable before you use it – in a Silicate, for instance – lest its Power turn round and bite you.  Beginnings and Endings are like that too, including the End of the Callendar.

One More Thing…

…that I fergot to mention.  When we regress to our first occurrence, in the current lifetime, of a Karmic dilemma, we really do regress to the age at which it occurred.  Say, f’rinstance, you were alive inna famine once, when there just wasn’t enough for everybody to eat.  Actually, most of us probably been there, more than once.  So then in the current lifetime, when you was, say, age 4 – maybe in the middle of a Saturn transit – yer parent(s) hit a rough patch and had to scramble to make ends meet.  At age 4 you don’t gotta lotta resources to help out.  Chances are, they made no attempt to relate the information to you in an age-appropriate way, and you just picked up on a house fulla Fear, without knowing anything else.  Well, at age 4 we assume everything is about Us – I mean, isn’t it?  So we musta done something bad, for everybody to be so whacked out and not paying much attention to us.  Maybe we felt like We don’t belong here, like we’re excess baggage, or wrong to be here now.

So today, you may not even lose yer means of support, you could just read about everybody else losing their means of support, whether in Detroit or Athens.  But it triggers yer own Scarcity, the Scarcity that got cemented into yer own psychic reality at age 4.  (Of course it’s Karmic, it all is, age 4 was just the first time you noticed in this lifetime.  Once you fully recover yer age-4 self, you’ll discover that there were similar episodes at 4 months, at 4 months before yer birth, and so on.  And that’s just the 4’s.)  So it’s not just that you regress to when you were Overwhelmed at age 4.  You also regress to the Skill-set you possessed at age 4!  Now that’s big.  You can’t even read or write!  Yer gonna do great on a job application when you don’t remember that you can read and write!

The point is, we gotta be really tender with ourself when we encounter our Karmic Krap.  Somebody has to step in and be the caring adult, to protect our vulnerable 4-year-old and reassure them that it’s not the EndatheWorld.  And that somebody is ourself, our current-moment self.  So the mandatory first step is to recognize that we’re regressed, because till we do that, we aren’t able to make a distinction between our regressed-to-age-4-skills self and our current-moment-more-capable self.  Which brings us to an important exercise.  If it’s true that till October 10 we need to

expect everything to be karmic

then we can just assume we’re regressed alla time!  So we can just start now, without worrying about content or context, and just bring ourself into the Present Moment.

Back in the 1980s, when Pluto was in Scorpio, we learned a trick for that.  We ask ourself, What color is the wallpaper?  Or the paint, since wallpaper isn’t as popular as it was in the 80s and before.  Or the upholstery, if yer mobile.  The wallpaper/paint/upholstery is, like it or not, in the Present Moment.  So let it invite you to join it there.  Start now with that practice.  Count up how many times a day you ask yerself that, and see how many you can do.  See how long you can remember to keep doing it.  A day?  A week?  Three weeks and yer home free.

If you just stay as much as you can in the Present Moment, then you don’t have to analyze what happened at age 4.  You can just tap out any unpleasantness you experience, without intellectualizing anything.  Then you can notice how your alter egos feel, and respond compassionately.  You poor dear, you’re scared.  I know, it’s hard now, but y’know, things are unfolding as they must, and it’s eventually gonna work out okay.  C’mon, let’s go get some ice cream!  Who cares ifya gotta wear it, it’s the EndatheWorld!  I mean, as Jaihn says,

WaveyoHands LikeyaJussdon’tCare!

If we actually move to Gratitude, we’d be celebrating our innocence and vulnerability when we regress, rather than succumbing to Overwhelm.  I mean, we could actually get to Curiosity and Wonder!  Shitodear, our inner 4-year-old couldn’t help but shift from Fear to Excitement, just because they’d have no idea what to expect next!  Bingo, shattered Karma, the enda the World as we know it!

More Zinnwaldite!  Love the stuff!  It’s named after the Zinnwald, literally the Tin Forest, that still somehow remains woodsy, on the border between Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland.  The Tin Man, y’know, was a woodcutter whose axe was enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the West, so he cut himself to pieces.  Can’t think of a better metaphor for Karma.  A tinsmith put him back together outa Tin, but neglected to put in a Heart.  So he joined Dorothy’s journey, in search of a Heart.  West, being where the Light goes to sleep every night, symbolizes death.  Now, there is Tin in the Zinnwald.  But there’s no Tin in Zinnwaldite!  There’s just about everything but Tin in Zinnwaldite!  So there’s no need to intellectualize between now and October 10.

Last Night

Well, there’s plenty of challenges as we enter the Sixth Night of the Callemander, but there’s also plenty of Grace available, alls we gots to do is remember to Ask.  And of course be open to Receive.  Often Grace arrives inna form a bit different than we expected, so too often we end up smothered in 50-dollar bills while we curse the lack of the 100-dollar bill that we Asked for.  Gratitude is to Grace as Tab A is to Slot B.  Now, the Sixth Night is the last one.  There are Seven Days, but only Six Nights.  Night Six starts on Thursday, September 22, just before the Equinox (2am PDT on 9/23).  So everything we encounter between now and October 10 (when Day Seven begins), we need to receive as a Release.

It’s not that we’re cursed to have to re-experience that old shit again, it’s that we’re blessed with the Opportunity to respond differently this time, to respond lovingly and gently, with compassion for our younger self that was less prepared to deal with it when it first hit, and it overwhelmed us.  I mean, that’s what it’s all about, Overwhelm.  We were overwhelmed then, but we can choose not to be now.  Tapping it out is a great place to start.  If tapping doesn’t do it, then Ask for help choosing the right arena to tap.  I was tapping on Fear yesterday, and it was slow to respond.  So I looked down inside, and lo, hiding there, very subtle, just barely noticeable, was a shred of my ancient Abandonment.  Turned away when it saw me looking.  So I tapped on that, and then the Fear responded.

We’re a Victim when we don’t have healthy Control in any situation, and the key to getting out of being a Victim is to Respond.  Differently.  It doesn’t matter exactly how you Respond, as long as you Respond Differently.  A friend used to say, Don’t get even, get odd.  Go for surprise.  Be weird.  Karma is inertia – we’re locked into a habitual, ineffective, response.  So it’s Change that heals.  Sure, our first new response may not move Heaven and Earth, but we’ve broken the chain, and we’re now free to try other new responses, and learn which ones work in which situations.  Even a Karmic response works in some situations; it’s just that when it’s Karmic, we only have one way to respond, and that’ll never work in all situations – chances are it works in relatively few.

Step One is always Awareness.  We need to be able to recognize that we’ve been here before, so we can know to act (and feel and think) Differently, rather than just let the old puppetstrings get pulled.  Consider yourself forewarned!  For the next two and a half weeks,

expect everything to be karmic

and Respond Differently.  Take your time – just stopping for a moment and watching the pull of the strings will usually be Different enough for a start.  Of course, there are places where we have Deerinnaheadlights Karma.  In those situations, Dance.  Move, do anything that’s different.  Find an old shoebox in your closet, and take out the shoes.  Instead, put in yer Spostas and yer Shoulds, especially the ones that are Life-and-Death.  You may as well be dead if yer caught with dirt on yer floor.  You’ll surely starve to death if you don’t go do that job you hate with all yer being.  Ifya sass yer mom, she’ll whap you across the room so fast you won’t even know it hurts till the bruises come out tomorrow.  Tell yer pop he’s fulla shit, and you’ll never eat again.

The World As We Know It is ending.  So it doesn’t matter ifya burn yer bridges.

Well, yaknow that’s probably not quite true.  At the end of Day Seven, we’ll probably just experience a Big Shift – if we feel anything explicit at all.  Besides, the Callemander might be off.  The End may really be 12/21/2012, as others suppose.  Or it may be 7/11/2012, when Uranus exactly Squares Pluto.  We dunno.  Callemander’s scholarship is excellent, but that doesn’t mean he’s right to the day.  The Shift could be Keysian – sometimes you trip out so far that you never get back to know that you’ve left.  Besides, it’s always Both/And.  So what if TheWorldAsWeKnowIt ends – we’ll just shift to a parallel dimension, and it could be one that’s so close to our Familiar that we don’t even notice there’s been a shift.  I mean, you do that every morning when you wake up and think yer in the same bed you were in when you went to sleep.  If we’re actually thinking EndatheWorld, we’re probably thinking linearly, and the Universe is multidimensional.

So it’s not like you gotta tell yer boss to Eat Shit and Die.  Just watch how you respond when she starts berating you.  Do you avert yer eyes?  Drop yer head?  Prop up yer head with yer hand so she doesn’t see yer jaw quivering?  Just do something different this time.  Look up and look through her.  Tilt yer head to the side.  Let her see yer quiver.  Wet yer pants.  Anything to break the Trance, the weirder the better.

Inside and Outside are the same.  It’s just a mirror.  When you change, the World changes.  It is, literally, the end of TheWorldAsWeKnowIt when we betray our Karma.

Ah, Zinnwaldite!  Love the stuff.  Potassium Lithium Iron Aluminum Phyllosilicate (Mica) Fluoride.  Fruitful Potassium, Calming Lithium, Grounding Iron, Levitating Aluminium, with Healing Fluoride in yer rock where it belongs, not yer toothpaste where the purveyors of industrial waste want to put it.  All in a shiny shimmery Mica, like Dragonfly wings.  That shiny shimmery realm is where the Fairies live, in the Dimension next door, where they mostly live happily ever after.  Squint at it, see what comes out.  Course, that’s Dragonfly – Dragon symbolizes our Karma.  The gateway to the happilyeverafter Dimension next door is through our Karma.  The nice thing about Karma is that it aint present-moment.  It’s always just instant replay, celluloid, a paper Tiger.  It can’t hurt us, it can only scare us or confuse us into hurting ourself.  Give it a new Dance this time.

Break on Through to the Other Side

Yer ancestors worked their butts off for millennia to set firm boundaries to keep the Other Side from bleeding through to Over Here.  They’ve done a thorough job, and if you think of things as linear, it’s a dang shame, after such looong hard work, that the Wall is falling.  Fortunately, when we think spherically, we understand that when you go far enough in any direction, you meet yourself coming back.  So the Loss of the Veil is just a swing of the pendulum, albeit a looong pendulum.  Or so history would tell us.  Herstory would be different.  Linear Thinking (I am X and not Y, and don’t you dare try to tell me otherwise!) and Limiting Beliefs (X is great, Y is awful!) keep the Wall in place.  When you accept neither your Shadow nor your Wholeness, the Other Side is peopled by Evil.

The Moon, like any other Heavenly Body, has two Nodes, a North and a South, that Oppose one another.  The North Node symbolizes your Good Karma (X is great!), and the South Node your Bad Karma (Y is awful!).  And of course a Full Moon is also an Opposition.  That’s the Second Harmonic, the High Priestess.  Angie tells us that “this achetype serves as a reminder that we are not to sacrifice our strength for our softness, or our softness for our strength.”  Both/And, in other words.  The Second Harmonic is about Awareness.  The contrast of Opposites always invites us to remember our Wholeness.  Unless X is great and Y is awful, in which case the contrast of Opposites invites us to rage against the Other.  Of course, every time we rage against the Other, the arousal gives us the opportunity to Wake Up.

As you by now well know, when two Oppositions grace a horoscope at right angles to one another, it’s a Grand Cross.  The Grand Cross represents Tension – and Balance.  A Grand Cross in combination with X is great and Y is awful is an invitation to self-destruction, because rage against the Other becomes rage against the Self.  Well, around 3am PDT on Monday, the Full Moon makes a Grand Cross with the Moon’s Nodes.  The Full Moon, rising at dusk and setting at dawn, illuminates the darkness.  So there’s no better time than this Full Moon, Fourth Harmonic to it’s own Nodes, to camp under a Bodhi Tree.  Illumination awaits us.  Or rage.  Or rage as a wake-up call to Illumination.

Coupla other details in the Full Moon chart.

When three planets line up equidistant from one another, each one third of the way round the Zodiac from the next, it’s a Grand Trine.  The Third Harmonic is The Empress, Love with Wisdom, and a surfeit of ease is Grace.  The downside of a Grand Trine is arrogance – attributing our ease to our own prowess, rather than finding our Gratitude for the Gift from the Goddess.  The planets in the Full Moon Grand Trine are Jupiter (expansion), Mercury (awareness), and Pluto (forming a new Trance).  So here’s one key – illumination is a Gift, not an Ego-builder!  So many folks out there wanting us to be sure we know that they’re enlightened.  A sure sign they ain’t.  Be mindful for that trap – as Watts said, it’s a lot harder to transcend your Good Karma than it is to transcend your Bad Karma.  But there are loads of Grace available.

But notice that the Grand Cross and the Grand Trine don’t share any planets.  So they’re independent of one another, so Grace does not facilitate Illumination.  So we could get stuck on the rage, and miss the Grace entirely.  Or get stuck on the Grace, and miss the opportunity to own our rage.  Consider this…

“In a conflict, the first thing you do is find out who your enemy is, then listen to what he says, and then try to figure out why he is doing things.”

Of course our enemy is always a disowned part of ourself.  If you know Fritz Perls, get out a coupla chairs.  If you don’t, it’s time to find out.

The quote is from an interview with Doug Casey.  I’ve been tempted many times to link youall to stories from Casey, because he has such a clear understanding of what’s going on on the Planet, and he doesn’t mince words about it.  But he almost always throws in a few comments that makes him look like the idiot he’s claiming everyone else is.  He somehow misses that opportunity in this interview, so even though it’s long, I highly recommend it.  I’m not suggesting Doug is an example of Illumination, just that he’s a clear seer and  a clear sayer.  Who knows, maybe he’ll notice this weekend how much he disparages his mirror.

When a planet sits at a point one Sixth of the circle from one end of an Opposition and one Third of a circle from the other end, it’s a key to defusing the tension inherent in an Opposition.  When the Opposition is half of a Grand Cross, the charmed Sixth Harmonic-Third Harmonic planet is the key that opens the whole Cross.  A Grand Cross, recall, is four Fourth-Harmonic angles back to back, and the Fourth Harmonic is Mastery through Challenge.  The Sixth-Third planet, should you choose to pay attention to it, is like Aikido – it allows you to use the energy of your tension to master the challenge.  So in the Full Moon chart, a pair of planets sit in this sweet spot between the Moon’s Nodes.

So that planet pair is a key to effortlessly transforming both our Good Karma and our Bad Karma.  Which planets?  Well, whaddaya know – our old friend JUNO!  I-dentity!  And who joins her?  Why, Saturn!  Concentrated Focus on our Identity!  A long time ago, a friend of mine read a book by Wei Wu Wei, I think it was.  And as a result of the book, for a long time my friend went around referring to himself, not as I or me, but as he or him.  That’d be a good practice for the weekend; it could facilitate some third-party awareness of who you’ve been imagining yourself to be.  Here’s a good quote from Wei Wu Wei…

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 per cent

Of everything you think,

And of everything you do,

Is for yourself —

And there isn’t one.

The Big Jade Boulders in Jade Cove on the Big Sur Coast were so numinous to visitors, that they eventually took all of them home, every one of them.  So Jade Cove doesn’t have any Big Jade Boulders anymore.  Talk about an Identity Crisis!  Then again, if you live in San Luis Obispo, Big Sur isn’t sur at all, it’s norte!  So you ain’t the only one with Identity issues.  The term Jade is applied to a number of different rocks, but the “real” Jade (it’s a Common Name, and the rules of Common Naming is that anybody can call anything anything they want) is Nephrite, which is really a form of Actinolite, or Calcium Magnesium Iron Inosilicate.  It’s famous worldwide, throughout history and herstory both, for its grounding and healing properties.  Which it does without a unique and reliable name or a fixed Identity.