The Most Important Thing 2

Yay!  Kristin Metcalfe has directed us to https://serennu.com/astrology/ephemeris.php as a place to get lists of asteroids and dwarf planets sorted by Degree, so we can find Heavenly Bodies that we don’t normally use, which will fill out an Almost-Big-Configuration!  Hooray!  Thanks a million, Kristin!  For example, our 7 May 2020 Full Moon 19 Virgo Vacancy in the Potential-Grand-Sextile, is occupied by an asteroid (Asclepius) named after the Greek God of Healing.  Goddess knows we can use that!

Meanwhile, let’s take the most intense Challenge (T-Square) in today’s 10 May (9:09 pm PDT) Priorities astroevent (Station of Saturn in 2 Aquarius – Yay Again!  I discovered how to use this color without having to post-process the whole post), and see what happens if we consider it an Almost-Complete-Configuration.

I’ll start with our traditional interpretation process, where the planet at the focus of the Challenge (in this case asteroid Sappho [Self-Love] at 30 Virgo) is Worried by a False Dichotomy (Opposition or Duality, False because the Universe isn’t Dual; here the Nodal Axis [our Life Path], with a Big Party on the South Node – dwarf planets Ixion, Pholus, and Quaoar [Climate Change and how our Unique Genius will handle it]).  The Challenge is basically then, How are we going to Love Ourselves Unconditionally when we know that our Culture and most of our Species is on a Suicidal trajectory and people just Glaze Over when we point out that the Sky is Falling? 

But of course we have to Take Responsibility for our own Unique Genius, “Save Ourself,” let our Tribe find us, and Let Go of the folks that the Sky will Fall upon.  They have their own Free Will, whether they Recognize it or not.  They who Fart in Church sit in their own Pew.  We can have Empathy and Compassion for them, but do we really want to Follow them to their Self-Genocide.  You can Martyr yourself in front of their bulldozers if you want, but that’ll just Bloody things up.

I know, we Fear that they will Destroy our Planet and leave us without a decent Home, but the Planet we Live on is a Mirror for our own Inner Peace or Lack thereof.  The notion that our Planet is Only Physical, and therefore unable to Manifest Differently to each Observer, is a 3D Trance that we need to be willing to shed.  Life is an Interaction between the Consciousness Constellated around our Identity (ie, “Me”) and the Rest of the Universe (from our Viewpoint, “the Unconscious”).  In Energy terms, it’s a complex Diffraction Pattern (Hologram) Created when these two complex Energy Waves cross one another.

So then, can we find a planet that Opposes the symbol for Self-Love and Completes the Grand Cross, which would then be Balanced?  Yes we can.  It’s the symbol for The Lord of the Wind (Trans-Neptunian Object Manwë, aka 385446, aka 2003QW [Tolkien’s Lord of Wind, Air, and Birds] at 29 Pisces).  Wind is Uranian, the Higher Manifestation of Mentality.

In its Discovery chart (25 August 2003 in Chile), 150km-wide Manwë is Conjoined by a Retrograde Mars [Action Behind the Scenes] and Opposed by asteroid Arachne [Grandmother Spider, who Weaves the Web of Life that we Live in] and Worried (T-Squared) by dwarf planet Chaos [Unlimited Potential] on one side and Ixion-Quaoar [Survival of our Unique Genius] on the other, making a Grand Cross.  Which is to say that the Actions of our Unique Genius (Ixion) will Open Doors that will never again be Closed (Chaos) – if we Allow our Genius out of its Cage.

The Mars-Manwë T-Square in the Manwë Discovery chart is also Self-Resolving (a Diamond Star) that will Resolve the Issues that it Opens.  The Path which the Resolution follows will Lead through (the feet of the Manwë Finger of the Goddess, namely) Rebirth (dwarf planet Haumea) and Trust (asteroid Eurydike).  That is, we need to be Willing to Abandon Ourself (Eurydike) to the Dark Unknown in the Rabbit Hole of Ego Death (Haumea) in order to Coax our Genius out of Their Closet.

So to give this symbol for the Lord of the Wind (Manwë) a one-breath phrase or keyword to use should we encounter it again, we might use Stepping Off into the Unknown, also a reminder that this Lord Lives on a Mountaintop.

So then, How are we going to Love Ourselves Unconditionally when we know that our Culture and most of our Species is on a Suicidal trajectory and people just Glaze Over when we point out that the Sky is Falling?  We’re going to Trust that our Hidden, probably Forbidden, Unique Genius will plot an Effective Course for us, if we Give ourselves Permission to Break the Rules that imprison Her, or Him, or Them.

Thus Emboldened, let’s Risk going a step further.  There’s one planet five Signs away (a Quincunx) from the Focus of the Challenge (the Sappho T-Square).  If there was a second planet also five Signs away in the other direction (making a Finger of the Goddess), we’d have a Self-Resolving Challenge (a Diamond Star)!  Why not make it Easy on ourself?

Well, turns out there is a planet there, an asteroid.  The symbol for the Goddess of the Soul Completes this Major Configuration (asteroid Psyche at 1 Taurus).  We’ve met this lady before, though it’s been a while.

So now, Where will we Look to see How Unconditional Love Heals our Culture and our Species from its Suicidal trajectory so we don’t have to Run Around shouting that the Sky is Falling?  We’re going to Trust that as the Goddess of the Soul (asteroid Psyche) Merges with Our Own Soul as it Descends into Matter (Uranus in Taurus), our Forbidden Unique Genius (Ixion) will Break Free from its Hiding and Find its True Effortless Role in Creating a Safe Place for Us and Others on Earth.

This Merger (Uranus Initiating / Conjunct Psyche) occurs on 26 May at 3pm PDT (in 9 Taurus, “A fully decorated Christmas Tree“) and Begins a New 5-year Cycle where we may Learn to Celebrate Ego Death as a Rainbow of Light Penetrating the Darkness of our Unfulfilled Desires.  Each time we Lovingly Embrace an Ego Death we get closer to EnLightenment.

This is more Indirect than I prefer to go, but it verifies that the process works.  Next time I will probably go directly to Filling a Vacancy in a Self-Resolving Challenge rather than Filling a Grand Cross Vacancy, if there’s already one five-Sign connection.

Over the course of writing these blogs we’ve tried to make a Big Deal out of our Reaction to Confusion, hoping to Learn and Teach us to Embrace Confusion Directly as an Emotion, without trying to Fix it or Change it or Trying to Figure It Out.  When we succeed in Eliminating Confusion we Eliminate personal Growth, and it we have a Goal of EnLightenment or Ascension or any other form of Growth, we Sabotage ourself.

And separately, over the course of writing these blogs we’ve tried to make a Big Deal out of how we deal with Curiosity.  Many or most of us have been trained to Believe that Curiosity should Inspire us toward Knowledge, that Curiosity automatically seeks Understanding, that it’s a Question seeking an Answer.  We’ve tried to Shift that to Curiosity in the Infantile sense of Wonder or Awe.  More “Wow, isn’t that Amazing!” than “I need to Figure Out how that works.”  More “I Wonder at that!” than “I Wonder How That Works.”

Curiosity is the primary keyword assigned to the five-Sign Angle (Quincunx), in both Ego astrology and Growth astrology.  But in Growth astrology we want you to replace the Question Mark that follows Curiosity in Ego astrology, with a period.  With PIAVA, if we don’t Change the Subject after our Prayer, Thinking rapidly removes the Opportunity for Change by reinstating our old Limiting Belief System, fencing out what we’ve PIAVAed.  It’s Thinking that considers Curiosity to be a Question and does the dirtywork of reinstating our old Limiting Belief System and blocking what we could have Learned.

The other Major Angles connect Signs that are Related…

• Three-Sign Angles (Squares) connect planets in the same Quality – Creative (Cardinal), Stabilizing (Fixed), Changing (Mutable).
• Four-Sign Angles (Trines) connect planets in the same Element – Spirit (Fire), Matter (Earth), Emotion (Water), Mind (Air).
• Two-Sign Angles (Sextiles) connect planets in the same Polarity – Dynamic (Masculine) or Magnetic (Feminine).

But Five-Sign Angles (Quincunxes) Connect planets in Different Elements and Different Qualities.  Categories and Judgments are useful, but they are also Arbitrary, and Inhibit us from Recognizing the Unity and Infinite Variety of Reality.  They are products of Thought and its need to reduce everything to Duality.

The Five-Sign Quincunx Angle offers us Opportunities to Look at the World a little Differently, subtly slipping out of our Habit of Naming and Constraining and Limiting everything we Encounter.  When we Ask a Biomancer to Teach us how to Listen to Plants, the first thing they tell us is to Let Go of any Names we’ve associated with the Plant.  Try it – unless you’re having Senior Moments (which have their advantages), that’s not easy to do.  But when we consider Curiosity to be a Question seeking an Answer, we blithely Discard that Opportunity to Learn and Grow in Consciousness.

Is your Life absolutely Perfect the way it is?  Then don’t Change your Habits of dealing with Confusion and Curiosity as Invitations to Research.  Otherwise, PIAVA to Disrupt them, post-haste.

The current Priority astroevent (Saturn Station at 2 Aquarius) happens close to a Sign Cusp.  We usually use three Degrees of Sensitivity (“Orb” in astrologuese).  That means that we may have Major Angles between planets in Different Qualities or Elements.  For instance,

• The Self-Love symbol (Sappho) at the End of the Ego-Death Sign (30 Virgo)

makes a Major Angle (Trine) to

• The Top-Priority symbol (Stationary Saturn) Early in the Group Relationships Sign (2 Aquarius).

There’s less than three Degrees Difference between them, but they Connect Changing Matter (Mutable Earth) to Stabilized Thought (Fixed Air) – Different Qualities and Different Elements.  Another Opportunity to see the World through Different Eyes and Potentially Crack Open our Ossified Perspective on “Reality.”

Since Four-Sign Angles (Trines) are considered Benefic precisely because they Connect Signs in the same Element, there’s even a legitimate Question whether Cuspal Trines are Trines at all.  All six Angles that the Self-Love symbol (Sappho) makes include Cross-Cuspal Angles.

Here, by the way, is the chart for the Saturn Station – a Flying Squirrel with one ear missing…

It’s a bit crude, but you’ll have to bear with me.  It’s been more than 50 years since my Cartography degree – I looked for my tools but couldn’t find them, so I had to draw it by hand.  My Canon printer turned ink-cartridge up, and thanks to the Spumonivirus the same brand wasn’t available, so I had to buy an HP printer.  Of course it wouldn’t talk to the ancient HP laptop that makes my charts.  So we’ll have to make do for a while.

Wants, Mission, Compromise 6

The Neptune Station (18 June 4:30 pm PDT) chart is less complicated – and less straightforward – than the others…

The first thing we have to notice is the Grand Trine and Kites (Fabulous Blessings – blue lines), because all three of our Big Three charts this extended weekend have included this feature, even though they’re in different Degrees…

• Saturday’s Makemake Station (Manifestation) chart featured two Grand Trines, both Kites, one in Earth and one in Fire!
  • The Kite on the Fire Grand Trine focused on Makemake itself, lending Spiritual Cred to what we’re Manifesting
  • The Kite on the Earth Grand Trine focused on OR10 in Pisces, reinforcing the notion that we have to Clear our Held Emotions in order to find enough Authenticity to Manifest What We Really Want

• Sunday’s Eris-Juno Initiation (the Coming into Consciousness of What Was Previously Denied) held a Fire Grand Trine and Double Kite (ie, Almost-Grand-Sextile), with the foci of the Kites on Rebirth Haumea and Unlimited Potential Chaos

• Today’s Neptune Station chart’s Grand Trine is in Water, again with a Double Kite, focused on Self-Confidence Chariklo and a Conjunction which we’ll discuss more, that should Shift our approach to Ego Death

That omits Air, or Mentality, which on some levels is appropriate, as one of Western Culture’s most serious Self-Sabotage is overfocus on Mentality.  On the other hand, three of the Kites focus on planets in Air Signs.

And veteran readers will already be wondering where the Vacancy is, in today’s Neptune-Station chart Almost-Grand-Sextile. 

A Sextile occurs when two planets are two Signs apart, and it signifies Grace, but “the Native” (that’s what astrologers call the person whose natal chart we’re discussing – in this case since we’re speaking of what’s going on the Sky just now, all of us are “the Native”) has to take the first step to get the Grace flowing.  Co-Creativity, in other words.

A Grand Sextile consists of six planets equally spaced around the Zodiacal Loop, all two Signs apart; it symbolizes Great Symbiotic Grace – but again, us Natives have to Initiate the Projects that we want to Fly.  An Almost-Grand-Sextile is five of these six, leaving a “Vacancy” in the Grand-Sextile. 

As with any Vacancy, it’s up to us to supply the Missing Energy to complete the Configuration and enable the Energy to Flow.  For an Almost-Grand-Sextile, we have two assignments – supply the Initiatory Energy for each of the five Sextiles, and also supply the Missing Energy that will complete the Grand Sextile and remove impediments to Flow.

The Vacancy here is 17 Virgo, “A Volcanic Eruption” – Intense!  Not how we’re used to thinking about Neptune, but then Tsunamis are Neptunian too.  In other words, the Neptune chart is advising that we Don’t Hold Anything Back, even if (or especially if) we have to Express it more violently than we would prefer.

That’s a pretty strong hint that we should talk about the “Shift in our approach to Ego Death” that we mentioned earlier.  This is a Conjunction between asteroids Nemesis (Ego Death) and Lachesis (Conscious Manipulation of Timelines) – Conscious Manipulation of our Timelines around Ego Death in other words. We may be accelerating some, delaying others, and/or Changing the ground rules of the whole ball game.

This Opposes another Conjunction, between Jupiter (Expansion) and asteroid Hopi (Respect for All Things), suggesting that we may be removing Judgment, including Self-Judgment, from our processing of Ego Death.  That would compliment the Conjunction between Sappho (Self-Love) and Uranus (Soul) in the Makemake-Station chart.  That chart is still in effect, as we have to remember to see the weekend’s three events as one, since they’re so close in Linear Time.

So, if an Explosion Destroys Your Ego, Go with it, to see where it leads.  You’ll be Delighted, though wear your shoes and take a broom, as there may be some broken glass to cross first.

Lots left to look at, including the Nemesis-Lachesis Cycle, the Hopi-Jupiter Cycle, and the Sappho-Uranus Cycle, to see what they’re about and what sort of Changes they have in store for us.  We’ll save all that for later today.

Blessing Full Moon Eclipse

Two planets are “Sextile” to one another when they’re within a few Degrees of being two Signs apart, or one sixth of the way ’round the Zodiac from one another.  The Angle from one planet to another determines how their Energies are Relating to one another.  One sixth of the way ’round the Loop is a 60-Degree Angle, and it’s a very positive Angle.  

The Sixth Harmonic (ie, one sixth of the Circle) is about Partnership, Collaboration with Others, and particularly with a Special Other.  Well-functioning Partnership makes Life a lot Easier – with two cats in the yard and all.

The Trine (Third Harmonic, 120 Degrees or four Signs apart, a third of the Loop) represents “Dumb-Luck” Grace – things flow so Effortlessly that we don’t even know that there could be Resistance.  Personalizing a Trine – thinking the Ease is a result of our own special heroism – creates insufferable Arrogance.  

The Sextile is more subtle.  It only Opens the door to Grace after we’ve taken the “first step.”  If we don’t take the first step, nothing happens.  Kind of the way Partnership works – one of us has to take the first step.  There’s generally no Arrogance involved, more like Surprise and Gratitude instead.

We use the term “Grand” when any set of Angles fills the Circle – three Trines back-to-back is called a “Grand Trine,” six Sextiles end-to-end a “Grand Sextile.”  Generally, the “Grand” Configurations are Blessings.  Even the Grand Cross, which is four Squares (each 90 Degrees, one fourth of the Loop), is a Benefic, even though it’s made up of four Angles which by themselves would be Challenging.  It’s Benefic because, like the other “Grands,” it’s Balanced.

Many folks consider the Grand Sextile – a six-pointed Star – to be the greatest Configuration of all.  A Grand Sextile contains two Grand Trines, so there’s plenty of Dumb-Luck Grace.  But there’s also all that Collaboration flowing from six Sextiles all working together, once we set it all in motion.

The long-lived Ixion Golden Rectangle we’ve been touting for months is made of two Trines and two Sextiles, so while it doesn’t include a Grand Trine, it does fill the Circle and is relatively Balanced, so it’s also fairly “Grand,” it’s a very beneficial Configuration.  Well, the 10 February (4:30 pm PST) Full Moon Eclipse, at 23 Leo-Aquarius, turns that Golden Rectangle into a Grand Sextile.  Break out the Champagne!  It’s short-lived, since it’s the fast-moving Moon that forms the Configuration, but we get a solid half-day out of it, from around 11am till 11pm PST on 10 February.

Grand Sextiles occur in either the Dynamic Signs or the Magnetic Signs, this one in the Dynamics.  So Action is implied as our strategy most likely to be successful.  That means Brave and Brash.  The six points on the Star represent the six Energies that will Dance hand in hand on 10 February…

• Trusting Intuition, Trusting Self (Moon in Leo)
• Big Rebirth – take the Risk to meet new People and Be a new Person (Jupiter-Haumea in Libra)
• Forbidden Creativity – take the Risk to loose the chains and really Be Your Scariest Self (Saturn-Ixion in Sagittarius)
• Party it Up and Celebrate Community (Sun in Aquarius)
• Be Unabashedly Yourself, no holding back or thinking about Consequences (Uranus-Eris in Aries)
• Whenever you Feel a Should coming on, Cancel-Neutralize-Upgrade it before it can get past the Sh-h- (Atropos-Chaos in Gemini)

Any Full Moon Eclipse is Stronger than the average Full Moon.  This one is a “Penumbral” Eclipse, which means you have to look very closely to notice the slight darkening of one side of the Moon.  While a Full Moon does its work by Illuminating what was hidden, an Eclipse does its work by making absent what was there all along but not differentiated.  If all you see is a Forest, then they log half the Trees, suddenly you see, through their absence, that there were Trees there too, not just a Forest.

So a Penumbral Eclipse does double duty.  The Full Moon is almost as bright as usual, illuminating what we need to see to make our next jump in Growth of Consciousness.  It’s also Eclipsed – we may have to squint to notice, but the Eclipse Energy is there – so what’s been hiding in plain sight suddenly becomes obvious by its absence – and that is our next jump in Consciousness.  

We don’t Grow in Consciousness through Discovery; we Grow through Differentiation, through Noticing what we hadn’t Noticed before.  That’s what Meditation is all about.  You might Notice that you’ve been Shoulding on yourself without Realizing it till now, for instance.  Or you may find that your Limits are Illuminated in such a way that you Realize that they’re your Limiting Beliefs, not the “Laws of Nature” you thought they were.

There’s a lot more to this Full Moon and Eclipse; we’ll take that up in the next couple of posts.

Kundalini Rising II

The Elves of Lily Hill Farm don’t mince words (Penny Kelly, p.191)…

“Humans are at the top of nature’s heap.  Ye humans need everything that’s in the heap under ye to support yer form of life.  But nothing in the heap needs that human at the top.  Ye humans are the most expendable of all – yet ye all think yer indispensable!  

“Picture the security of the human race right now as one lonely person riding a unicycle across a tightrope that is tied between two poles anchored in soup bowls floating on an ocean,  Yer position is tenuous – at best.”

But there be Hope (Genia Haddon, Body Metaphors, pp.108-9)…

“Neither participational consciousness [the original Matriarchy] nor differentiating objectivity [the Patriarchy] characterizes this third model.  It [the Age of the Yang Feminine – the Age of Lilith] encourages a ‘both-and’ way of looking at things.  Although uncommon in the Patriarchal Age, this sort of consciousness is sometimes experiened in mystical states or with the aid of psychedelic drugs.  

“A pair of opposites that are mutually exclusive as seen by patriarchal, differentiating consciousness are no longer contradictory when comprehended by mentation that simultaneously holds awareness of various levels or orders of wholes.  In other words, this is a style of consciousness that is attentive to varying contexts and can shift from one to another, or even hold several in awareness simultaneously [Castaneda’s ‘Cognitive Dissonance’].

“In such a system, we should expect to experience life as multivalent rather than focused, contextually transformative rather than goal oriented.  Within the gestative system [Matriarchy], movement was contained and cyclic.  The metaphor for progress was natural, vegetative proliferation and succession of seasons.  Phases succeeded one another in a repeating pattern, like a circle, or like the snake biting its tail.  

“In the phallic system, movement is goal oriented and linear, like a arrow.  Progress is pictured as ascent achieved through competition and mastery.  In the exertive [Yang Feminine] system, movement is to be rooted in context and emerging out of it, like a spiral or helix … [in which] interleaved ascending and descending coils suggest the contexting of ‘opposites’ within a larger whole that retains their distinctions, yet transcends their opposition [the ‘Coin’].”

“In an Age reflecting the nature of the exertive womb [Yang Feminine] rather than the phallus, property ownership and exploitation would simply cease to be meaningful concepts, based as they are on patriarchal principles of separating out and power over.  It is beyond my capacity to picture concretely such a world based on exertive-world principles of egalitarian networks, contextual transformation, and holistic transcendence.  

“To appreciate how alien exertive-womb principles still are, try to imagine what sort of pattern would replace ‘ownership’ of animal pets by ‘masters’ in an age in which the dominant motif is no longer hierarchical. … These are the watchwords: context, egalitarian, transformation, multiple wholes, self-transcendence, non-uniform multiplicity, both-and simultaneity without loss of distinctions, network.”

Here’s an example of Both/And/And-that-too, from Robert Moss’s Dreaming True pp290-1…

“The philosopher of Science Thomas Kuhn observed that we get a paradigm shift when the accumulation of ‘anomalies’ forces the abandonment of old scientific paradigms and the adoption of new ones.  Dream journalists can contribute mightily to the emergence and understanding of new paradigms in science” by, for instance…

• “Case studies of interactive dreaming that will provide mutually confirming evidence that consciousness is never confined to the brain.
• “Documented and witnessed reports of dream precognition, telepathy, and other psi phenomena that will establish that these are entirely natural events and that our everyday experience is not the only engagement with time and space that is possible.
• “Serial dreams in which we return to locales where we seem to be leading a continuous life as our present selves, but with some different elements in the scene.  For example: we may be married to a different person, living in a different town, following a different line of work.  Serial dreams of this type may provide strong experiential evidence for the ‘parallel universes’ hypothesis.
• “Serial dreams in which we enter the situation or perspective of people living in other times or dimensions who are clearly not our familiar selves.  These experiences may be suggestive of our connectedness, in our multidimensional identity, with a vast family of consciousness in many time periods and frequency domains.”

The Eclipse Grand Cross is tight, spanning only three Degrees, 17-19 of the Mutable Signs (Pisces, Virgo, Sagittarius, Gemini).

In general, Angles between planets that are less than three Degrees apart can be considered to have a strong impact on the Present Moment.  Angles between planets that are less than eight Degrees apart will have less effect on the Present Moment, but will have profound impact on any project or Entity or Identity that is born at the time.  

“Orb” is the astrological term for the inexactitude of interplanetary Angles, but we prefer “Sensitivity” because how responsive we are to the Angles depends on how Sensitive we are to Energy.  The average Muggle might be hard-pressed to detect one Degree of Orb, while a Sensitive person could feel the impact of eight or ten Degrees even in the Present Moment.  We’ll all be much more Sensitive to any current-moment Angle that mirrors an Angle in our Natal chart.

Because we use many more planets, asteroids, dwarfs, and Centaurs than traditional astrology, for birth charts we try to keep our Attention directed toward Angles that are less than five Degrees apart.  Because we expect most of our readers to be Sensitive to Energy, we often use five degrees for Present-Moment charts as well.

Exceptions arise when Angles adjoin one another.  For instance, the Total Solar Eclipse occurs at 19 Degrees of Pisces, two Degrees from Chiron at 21 Degrees, and three Degrees from the South Node at 22 Degrees.  But Ceres sits at 16 Degrees, three Degrees on the other side of the Eclipse.  So we have a choice: we can interpret Eclipse-Chiron-South Node and Eclipse-Ceres as two distinct relevant Energies, or we can read Ceres-Eclipse-Chiron-South Node as one Stellium and one Energy.  To be thorough, we should do both, that is, read all three.

So now we’ve stretched from 17-19 Degrees to 16-22 Degrees, sevan Degrees of Separation.  Still well within traditional astrology’s span for a birth chart.  Lilith is also at 22 Degrees, so this allows our Grand Trine and Kite, since Pallas, like Saturn, is at 17 Degrees.  Haumea is very Conjunct Lilith, but at 24 Degrees.  We can’t ignore Haumea’s promise to Rebirth Lilith, but this brings us to 17-24 Degrees, and 16-24 if we  include Ceres, which is hard to exclude when the Ceres-Saturn Square is only half a Degree from being Exact.  While this seems like way too much slop for Present-Moment consideration, we can’t ignore the interconnections.

So far we have involved planets in Pisces (Ceres-Eclipse-Chiron-South Node), Aquarius (Pallas), Sagittarius (Saturn), Libra (Lilith-Haumea), Virgo (Jupiter-North Node), and Gemini (Chaos).  Uranus-Eris at 19-23 of Aries makes our Kite into five-sixth of a Grand Sextile, and the asteroid Klotho at 17 Leo completes it.

Klotho is one of the “Fates” – Klotho cuts the fabric from which Lifetimes are woven, Lachesis measures out the length of a Lifetime, and Atropos cuts the chord when that length is reached.  Their mother Moirai completes the foursome.  

It’s important to remember that Fate and Free Will, as a Duality, cannot be properties of the Universe at Large, as the Universe at Large is Multifarious.  Duality does happen to be a signal property of the Observing Human mind, however, so we interpret Fate as a philosophical issue, not an Existential issue.  It is striking, though, how often astrology seems to Teach us about what’s going on, as if our Co-Creations have long been mapped out by the Stars, as if the best outcome we could hope for from a Lifetime would be an Oscar.

We’re fond of saying that if we use Senses and Skills beyond the intellect, or if we desire to peer into the Unconscious, there is no Contradiction, only Paradox.  In most cases that’s giving the mind more credit than it deserves, but it’s certainly a valid Perspective.  So we could profitably view the Question of Fate and Free Will as a Paradox.  In fact, we can even look at it through Genia’s Yang-Feminine Perspective as a case of “both-and simultaneity without loss of distinctions”!  

How handy.  We’re being Rebirthed into the Yang-Feminine Age as we speak!  

We don’t usually think of Klotho as a heavy hitter, but completing a Grand Sextile gets our Attention, particularly with Haumea Rebirthing Lilith.  The combination means that…

This is a particularly germinal time for building foundations for our Role in the New “Fresh Violets in an Ancient Pottery Bowl” Culture that we’re Co-Creating.

Big revisions to our Cultural Zeitgeist were promised by the 2009 Neptune-Chiron Initiation, “Fresh Violets in an Ancient Pottery Bowl,” which we consider to be the astrological correlate of the Derivative Crisis that the Lizards quite successfully spun as a Mortgage-Deadbeat Crisis.  Genia’s comments are validation for what we’ve been talking about in this regard.

In a significant way, we’re “cutting the cloth” this month for our New economic and ecologic Persona.  We’ve suggested that major Commitments are better delayed till after June’s Eris-Uranus Initiation, since we can expect to meet whole new elements of ourselves then, but if we Trust our Knowing, there is a lot of preparatory work we can be doing that doesn’t involve firm Commitment.  And while New Moons are generally considered to impact the following two to four weeks, Eclipses are usually given a longer span of influence, often nine months.  So if we pinned on the Pattern this month, and wielded our pinking shears in July, we’d be in good stead.

Kelley Hunter usually reads the more traditional astrological symbols, while I stray into all manner of questionable nooks and crannies, so it’s particularly validating when the two of us walk down the same lane.  Her readings have been more mundane than mine of late, so we haven’t been linking to her newsletter.  On the other hand, she literally “wrote the books” on Lilith, and few folks are more in touch with the evolving Age of Lilith than she.  Her reading for this Eclipse mirrors ours, but of course as always adding much of note…

http://heliastar.com/cosmic-news/the-new-note-eclipse/

So we regard this Eclipse chart as a legitimate Grand Sextile, in addition to the Kite, Grand Trine, and Grand Cross – very Powerful.  The nature of a Sextile is Grace, as long as we provide the initial impetus to kickstart the process.  A Grand Sextile is about processes that feed on themselves and become virtuous cycles, like Genia’s interleaving helixes.  We may even be able to kickstart one of the Sextiles and watch it activate the other five!  Let’s talk about that in another installment.

I don’t want to leave this train of thought without bringing Pluto into the picture.  Pluto, at 18 Capricorn, Sextiles the Eclipse, and this Sextile forms the base of a Finger of God pointing directly at Klotho.  So it’s a good thing we included Klotho.  It doesn’t pay to ignore Pluto, or Eclipses.

Pluto represents that which Cannot Be Ignored.  I think of Pluto as a Powerful River, not in Space but in Time.  Paddling our canoe upstream is not an option; we’ll simply get pulled backwards into the rapids, if not the falls.  We need to ride this River downstream.  We can, however, steer toward one bank or the other, camp on an island, and since we can see where we’re going, pull out to portage around the falls.

The Klotho Finger of God tells us to Pay Attention Now to the way we’re designing the New Life that we’re Rebirthing for the Age of Lilith, to make sure that our New Life flows with the current and not against it.  The Eclipse-Ceres Conjunction reinforces this Directive, Asking us to Attend to Sustainability here.  

And to the other side of the Sustainability Coin, Sustenance – which means Letting Go of what’s no longer necessary – especially our Limiting Beliefs, which will be illuminated brightly for us with the Eclipse (which provides Illumination by showing us what it’s like without what we take for granted) on the South Node (which harbors our Held Emotions).  Penny Kelly spends about 90% of her book describing how difficult it was to Let Go of all the Resistance she had to Receiving Insight from The Elves of Lily Hill Farm.

The keystone in this Drama is the Initiation of Moirai, mother of the Fates, by Pluto on 10 March, at 18 Capricorn, “The Union Jack flag flies from a British warship.”  Rudhyar’s interpretation, “Protection provided by institutions in charge of maintaining order,” reeks of the Patriarchy, as Rudhyar’s roots were deep in European traditions.  

Our interpretation springs instead from the 1/1/2000 Initiation of Chiron by Pluto, “A flag turning into an Eagle, turning into a Chanticleer heralding the Dawn.”  The flag represents the old Loyalist status quo Ego, the Eagle the wide, inclusive Perspective of the Yang Feminine, and the Dawn of course the EnLightenment that follows.

So now we’re tossed back into the “Paradox” of Fate and Free Will with a renewed sense of Importance.  It would probably be quite accurate to say that astrology shows us our Fate if we proceed Unconsciously.  If we interpret the Squares to the Eclipse negatively, we’d Expect that because the Eclipse will cause us to freeze like a Deer in the headlights because there are too many Choices (Chaos), we’ll find our Future to be severely Limiting (Saturn).  

And I imagine that this will be an apt description of the Future confronting many of the Muggles that still suffer under the Illusion that their employer and their government have their interest at Heart, as the propaganda machine continues to work overtime to keep them convinced.  Ask your doctor if Climate Change Denial is good for you, it should say.  Ask your doctor if Globalization is good for you.  Ask your doctor if Glyphosate-saturated, mineral-deficient food-like substances are good for you.  If Death occurs, tell your doctor immediately and discontinue use.

I’m sure it’s an apt description for the poor blokes who’ve just been trying to survive the Drought and Turmoil in the Middle East, and for the Greeks being trampled by the results, after being wrung out by the Vulture Capitalists and Multinational Patriarchs running the EU.  We may not be able to divert the Pluto River, but we do have the option to Respond Consciously to the currents, to recognize that The Most Important Thing (Saturn) confronting us is Making Choices to steer our Unlimited Future (Chaos) in directions that promote our Deepest Desires and further our Mission in the Lifetime (Jupiter-North Node).

We still have quite a bit of material left in this Eclipse chart that keeps on Giving – to be continued!

Portal 13-14.6 – Scorpio and Virgo

Sagittarius and Scorpio.  Believe it or not, the Sagittarian Wisps are actually Crystals, of Natrolite, sitting on a more recognizable Crystal, Scorpionic Apophyllite.  Nevertheless, things are still not what they seem to be.  The recognizable Crystal is actually a Mica, Apophyllite, even though it looks nothing like a Mica.  And the Wisps are actually a Zeolite, even though they look nothing like any we’d recognize.  A Zeolite is a complex Mineral with pockets.  You wouldn’t think there’d be room in those Wisps for a pocket, let along a complex Mineral.  If you get the right Zeolite, you can dump it into a toxic mess, and the Zeolite will pocket the toxins and bring them out!  I know, She is truly amazing, especially when we forget She’s a Living Entity with many orders of magnitude more cleverness than we’ll ever dream of mustering!

Apophyllite (Potassium Calcium Fluoride Mica) is about Opening our Third Eye, appropriate for Getting to the Bottom of Things.  Green Apophyllite brings Compassion into our Intuition.  As we like to say, Apophyllite was used for Divining by the twelve Apophylls.  Natrolite (Sodium Aluminum Zeolite) is about Opening the Crown Chakra, appropriate for Letting Go of what Limits us.  Like much of the loveliest Apophyllite, this one comes from near Pune, India, a center for many different flavors of Spiritual pursuit.

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Friday the 13th falls on a Saturday this month, as Pogo used to say.  Whatever you’re Grieving, Trust that it was not planning to be part of the next phase of this Gaia-Pi Adventure.  We’re in the process now of Co-Creating what we need for the next phase.

June 13-14…

• Makemake (Manifestation) is Stationary Direct (Strong)
• Saturn backs into Scorpio (Did we leave any Emotional Stones unturned?)
• The Moon Occults Mercury (Beginner’s Mind) at 5 Gemini (“A revolutionary magazine asking for action”)

Mercury and the Balsamic Moon rise ahead of the Sun, so they should make a lovely couple just before Sunrise, whether you’re in the right spot (east central Asia) to see the Moon cover Mercury or not.  The Balsamic Moon is about Letting Go, echoing our other themes.

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Saturn points us to The Most Important Thing, and informs us that all of the other priorities will be just fine playing quietly by themselves while we put all of our Attention on The Most Important Thing.  Scorpio is about Getting to the Bottom of Things, so when…

The Most Important Thing Is Getting to the Bottom of Things,

we can – appropriately – be pretty obsessive.  Another useful key phrase about Scorpio, left over from the Recovery Movement in the 1980s (when Pluto was in Scorpio) is The Way Out Is Through.  Saturn has been in Sagittarius since Christmas 2014, and in Sagittarius The Way Out Is Letting Go.  So we’ve Lightened Up quite a bit since Christmas.  But there are still some bits of Egg clinging to the pan, so we need to go back and scrub a little more.

Till last Christmas, Saturn had been in Scorpio since October 2012 – in other words, The Most Important Thing has been Getting to the Bottom of Things since Time ended and Pi took over.  For the last two and a half years The Most Important Thing has been locating anything and everything that has stood between us and taking Full Responsibility for Everything in our Lives.  Though Pi gave us that first nine months of Grand Trines to ease our Rebirth into the New Era, of course that would feel like being poked with spears and knives by everyone and everything around us, as we were educated about where we weren’t taking Responsibility.

Soooo, what did we not quite finish up?  Responsibility means being able and willing to Respond.  It looks to improve the Future, not assign causality and Blame for anything from the Past.  Anyplace in your Life where you’re still feeling like a Victim, or where you want to Blame someone else for anything?  Those are the bits of Egg we need to work with; keep your eye out for them between now and mid-September, especially toward the end of July, as Saturn turns Direct on August 1.  After mid-September, we’re in the Let-It-Go Stage “for good” – well, for two and a half years anyway.

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The Station of Makemake in 29 Virgo (“A seeker after occult knowledge is reading an ancient scroll which illumines her mind”) suggests that…

We should be on the lookout for What We Need to Survive in this New Era.  We first experimented with meeting our new Next-Phase Tribe (Makemake in Libra) from mid-October 2013 to mid-March 2014.  Then last September we renewed this quest.  In mid-July we get serious about it.  In between – March-August of 2014 and mid-May through mid-July of this year, we review our own Blocks to receiving our new Community.  Virgo is about breaking down the Ego so we’re ready to meet Other without prejudice – without Judgment.  Ego is a force for good; it’s primary Mission is to keep us alive. The only problem with Ego is that it’s “sticky.”

Sure, Narcissism can feel like a pain if we’re stuck with having to deal with someone else’s Narcissism, but that’s just about our own unwillingness or inability to set working Boundaries.  Our own Narcissism?  Not to worry; it’s its own best frenemy. 

A caution for Virgo, though.  Since Ego-Recycling and Virgo are so poorly understood in Ego-dominated Western culture, Virgo ends up being seen as nit-picky and critical, and Virgo grows up with a programmed self-hate from introjecting this criticality.  So anyone with strong Virgo will likely worry about their own Narcissism.  But Virgo is the Opposite of Narcissistic.  What’s the Coin?  Self-Love.  Self-Transformation (Virgo) is about Self-Love, for sure.  Transformation isn’t about hating what’s being Transformed, it’s about Transcending what’s being Transformed.

A functioning Ego is flexible enough to Celebrate our own unique Skills fully – without having to compete them with the unique Skills of Others, and to Recognize when and where it would serve our Community better to delegate to the superior unique Skills of Another.  A “normal” Ego, more concerned with how many strokes we get, gets stuck on the last hurt or triumph, and loses track of the Present Moment.

This is what Virgo is about.  Pisces is about making a break from a Community that we’ve outgrown, with all of the Grief and unfulfilled Wishes and lack of Recognition and unexpressed Angers and Fear of Abandonment that’s involved in Letting Go of a Community without the assurance that we’ll be accepted into a new one.  Neptune and Chiron are working us through all that Drama and Trauma.  Virgo is about making a break from a sticky Ego that we’ve outgrown, with all of the Grief and unfulfilled Wishes and lack of Recognition and unexpressed Angers and Fear of Abandonment that’s involved in Letting Go of an Identity without the assurance that a new one will function any better than the old one.  Or, in a word, Ego Death.  Makemake is helping us through this wicket, and it’s an excellent Guide to have, as its focus is always on Co-Creating the new tools we’ll need to Survive in a new Era.

So as we go back into Getting to the Bottom of Things, we’re also back in Ego Death.  With Saturn, we’re just re-entering our last review period (ie, just tiptoeing back into Scorpio and hoping she doesn’t wake up).  With Makemake, we’ve already finished our review (ie, already backtracked into Virgo, and now we’re turning to exit for the final time), so we’re in better shape there.  Between now and mid-July we’ll be making the adjustments that will “fix” the Responsibility shortcomings that we’ve already encountered.

So while there may be a few Surprises awaiting us on the Emotional front, on the Ego front we’ve probably seen that last of them.  Is it any easier to step aside and Witness an Emotion that threatens to overwhelm us, than it is to step aside and Witness an Identity that’s sabotaging us?  You bet.  It’s when the Emotion and the Identity are intertwined, that the greatest difficulties arise.  And as we encounter the last few Emotions that Separate us from Joy and Light, we should already have some degree of Ego Detachment.

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Cuspal Saturn and Stationary Makemake are Sextile to one another, sharing the quality of Magnetism.

Sextiles connect two Signs that have either Magnetism or Dynamism in common, so on this basic level they aren’t competing with one another.  It’s the Sixth Harmonic, so the basic Energy is about Partnership – Win-Win. 

It’s a Waxing Sextile, several years into the Saturn-Makemake Cycle that began in September 2009 at 26 Virgo, “A boy with a censer serves the priest near the altar.”  In terms of current events, we could trip into a number of directions on that one, about boy-priest relationships or about “making things smell better.”

In our tradition of focusing on what’s being Healed, we’ll do just that, and propose that the current 33-year Saturn-Makemake Cycle is about Healing the lost art of Apprenticeship.  In pre-Industrial society, as children we “played” at learning the “work” our elders were doing, automatically learning Survival Skills in the process.  Since that link was broken by the various forms of Industrial Slavery (schools that removed children from parents so they could be propagandized into one paradigm, work that separated the workplace from the family so compassion could be removed from working conditions, etc), child-adult relationships have been strained and forced into unfamiliar forms.

A Saturn-Makemake Cycle would be about Building the Structures that Support Survival in the next Paradigm.  So we could see the current Cycle as Restructuring Apprenticeship to reintegrate Spirituality and Survival (“Work”) and Everyday Life.  Industrial and Religious Culture rigidly divided these into separate days of the week.  Remember that what we’re going here (2000-2020) in the Jupiter-Saturn Cycles is, on the Cultural level, deciding what parts of the Industrial Age we want to take with us into the Digital Age.  The Sextile represents Grace after we take the first step.  The Cultural level is assembled from accumulation of Personal levels.  So an appropriate question to ask ourselves might be…

Are there concrete steps I can take right now, to integrate my Spiritual Life with my Everyday Life and What I Do to Survive?  Have I already taken any steps like this?  Can I start to build them into Patterns that can become the infrastructure of Life in the Next Phase?

Square Planets Up Your Nodes

Manganvesuvianite – the Manganese-rich form of Vesuvianite, named for the Volcano that decimated Roman Pompeii.  Vesuvianite symbolizes the Mother Goddess, Creator of All That Is, and her Power to Heal “Miraculously.”  It appears as a Miracle to the Limited mind; it’s everyday to the Goddess.  The Manganese clears away Confusion so we can see the Growth that’s hiding behind it and Embrace it.

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A reader asks…

“Can you talk more about those of us who have a planet squaring the nodes?”

Which is an excellent question.  It’s a similar situation for folks with planets Conjunct either Node. 

A “Square” is two planets that are separated by one fourth of the Zodiac; they’re near the same Degree but three Signs apart.  A T-Square is two Squares connected end-to-end, or two planets Opposing one another with a third planet halfway between them.  Both mean Mastery through Challenge, the T-Square’s Challenge being more Challenging than a single Square’s Challenge.

First though, let me address another reader comment…

“That discussion of squares/Tsquares got me – depressed – no, actually, I recognized that feeling as despair when I read it.  Your writings have taught me to recognize that feeling –  despair.  And unconscious despair.  I never knew what that darkness was.  It’s been interesting to note where, when, how often it comes.  That’s helped clear a fair amount of it to an extent…just recognizing it for what it is.  That post brought it on.  Condemnation.  I always thought squares were Mastery Through Challenge.  So there is no ‘never.’  Mastery comes.  Not just ‘getting it’ but MASTERY!!  I feel like they should be called Infinitely Perpetual Challenge then.  Give it up.  You ain’t getting anywhere.”

Well, Infinitely Perpetual Challenge isn’t far off – till you Change your Objective.  Let’s take any of us that have Squares to Mars or Venus for an example – that’s timely, with Mars Initiating Venus and Wabi-Sabi Stationary.  We don’t even need a Square between Mars and Venus, just some other planet Squaring Mars or Venus.  Those movie scenes and ads about Perfect Romance and Perfect Bodies and Perfect Faces are irresistible to us.  Pant, Pant.  And that’s the whole idea – it ain’t Real, it’s a Trance.  I’ll wager that every Relationship you’ve ever been in had some positive feature.  If you cut out each one of those boons and pasted it on your Ken or Barbie doll, you’ll witness your Mastery first-hand.  You just haven’t put them together all at once.

That’s actually a great way to move toward What You Want – list the pieces or characteristics of your Desire, check to see which ones you’ve already Manifested, and then work on the others.  When you get most of them checked off, list all the combinations – A+B, A+C, B+C, etc. and start working on those – you can Plan and Execute, or PIAVFA, or both.  Then if you need to, work on the triplets – A+B+C, A+B+D, B+C+D, etc. – and the quadruplets.  Sound too complex?  Hmmm.  Maybe it’s your Desire that’s too complex.  Maybe you need to Prioritize a little.

Let’s try a thought experiment.  Think about your unfulfilled Desire.  Now pick its two most important characteristics.  Just for the sake of illustration we’ll call them Passion and Security.  Sound contradictory? 

That may be part of your Frustration.  Contradiction exists only in the mind, not in Reality.  In Reality it’s Both/And; in Real Life it’s called Paradox, not Contradiction.  If we’re striving for two Paradoxical qualities that we Believe are Contradictory, we will be doomed to Infinitely Perpetual Challenge.  It’s very difficult to Manifest what we don’t Believe – this is part of the Powerful “Placebo” effect.  So the first thing we may need to PIAFA is that we Believe our Desire is Possible.

Back to Passion and Security.  Ever feel Passion toward your Desire?  If not, Imagine it (Feelize or Visualize or …).  Shake It Off, take a drink of Water, and then think about the times you’ve felt Security around your Desire.  You may not have met any of your other requirements, but you felt Security.  If you haven’t Experienced Security around your Desire, not even for a few minutes, then Imagine what it’ll feel like when you do.  (If it’s a Relationship Desire, think Friendship.)  Then Let It Go, Dance a bit, another drink of Water, then recall or Imagine Manifesting both Security and Passion around your Desire.  Add Belief if you need to.

Feel good?  Or are their Yesbuts squeaking in the background – or shrieking in the foreground?  Yesbuts can feel Frustrating, but they’re just information about what else your Desire needs.  A frequently Unconscious Yesbut is whether or not you Deserve to Manifest Your Heart’s Desire. 

Virtually all of us went to the same Obedience School, where we were given a biscuit if we got the right answer, and if we’re very lucky only fingerwagged when we got the wrong answer.  Lots of folks would consider it Sociopathic if you Believed that you just Deserved things without having to Earn them.  Well, you do Deserve to Manifest your Heart’s Desire, right or wrong.  If your Heart’s Desire is punishable by Life or the Chair, so be it, you’ll just have to face the music.  But that’s not about Deserving; it’s about what your Culture permits and how well you finesse it.

Okay, you’ve Shaken It Off and Let It Go again and danced around the Fire, and now you’re sitting there feeling what it’s like to Believe in and Deserve to Manifest Safety and Passion around your Desire. 

I know, they’re still Yesbutting you, but Imagine that Belief, Deserving, Security, and Excitement are all you Want, that they’re Enough.

Ahhhhh! – Wonderful, isn’t it!

No?  Well, that’s it then. 

Desire is indeed an Infinitely Perpetual Challenge.  The basic problem is that Desire is misspelled.  It’s really spelled M-o-t-i-v-a-t-i-o-n.  Now there has to be a Balance between Motivation and Satisfaction, or else we’ll never feel good about Life.  So what to do?  Well, we certainly don’t need to give up our Desire, that would be the equivalent of Death.  We might need to dial it back a little, and approach it one piece or characteristic at a time, or set intermediate and achievable Goals that we can Celebrate along the way, so we can enjoy the Journey and not just the possibly hallucinatory Destination.

But the real key to Enjoying a Square or T-Square is shifting our Objective from Desire to Learning.  We’re always Learning, so we can Celebrate some quantity of Learning (even if we don’t understand yet what it is) from every Experience.  So a Square or a T-Square is about Learning about our Desire.  Once we make that shift we’re free to Play.  Learning is usually Surprising – otherwise we’d already be Learned.  So we’re open to Surprise as well as Success.  We really can afford to Play with it, because when Learning is our Objective, the bigger and faster our failures, the more we Learn.

That is MASTERY.  You’ve actually experienced it in your Life, around lesser Frustrations, like Spelling or Story Problems or DiffyQ or Asking for a raise or maintaining your Health.

And in fact, with a Square or T-Square, you are a Master, because you’ve always been Motivated to Explore the Edges of your Infinitely Perpetual Challenging Desire.  Take Music as an example.  If you’re Mozart, you were a Master at Birth.  If you’re Salieri, you’ve been working your butt off all your Life, and he gets all the contracts.  But suppose you’re Vivaldi, and you’re trying to figure out whether you want a minor or major key for your concerto about Spring.  Mozart could tell you in a flash.  But Salieri would be able to tell you why you need a minor key. 

If you were depending on Mozart you’d need to ask him again for each Season.  The answer you got from Salieri would allow you to figure it out on your own.  So who’s the real Master – Mozart or Salieri?

This is Real, it’s not a rationalization or a PR trick.  You may need to start your process by Believing that it’s possible to shift your Objective from your Desire to Learning about your Desire.

Conjunctions and Oppositions are similarly Heuristic.  Oppositions Challenge us to escape Duality by recognizing that while the Heads and the Tails distract us from what’s really happening, focusing on the Coin will trigger our Intuition.  Conjunctions Challenge us to Accept that just because our Perspective on the World isn’t popular, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  In fact, the more unusual our Perspective, the more Powerful.  You may end up writing things that won’t be understood for 200 years, or that only six people on the Planet will grok, but the Value in that is immeasurable. 

Squares and T-Squares are members of the Fourth Harmonic, which is basically Mastery or Dominion; the Emperor.  But it’s the Fifth Harmonic that’s about Learning, so we must be wrong, eh?  No, we Master each Harmonic by adopting the Perspective of a higher Dimension.  The First Harmonic, Conjunction, is about Self.  The Infinitely Perpetual Challenge about Self is Other, which is introduced by the Second Harmonic, Opposition. 

The Challenge of Self “versus” Other is resolved by Love, the Third Harmonic or Trine.  The Infinitely Perpetual Challenge about Love lies in resolving Codependence, via Healthy Control or Dominion, the Fourth Harmonic – Squares.  We resolve the Frustration of the Fourth Harmonic by using the Fifth, Learning, the Quintile.  We resolve the Paradox of Inequality between the Student and the Teacher by moving to mutually respectful Partnership, the Sixth Harmonic or Sextile.  And so on.

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Squares to the Nodes

Okay, finally we get to the original question.  But I think you’ll agree that the detour was useful. 

We’ve been equating the North Node to Desire and Mission, and now we’re talking about Squares as if they represented Desire.  These are two different flavors of Desire.  A North-Node Desire is hardwired in.  Moving in the direction of a North-Node Desire produces the sense that we’re on the right track, even as Satisfaction avoids us.  North-Node Desires evolve without much Frustration; we don’t recall how different our current North-Node Desires are from our picture of it five or ten years ago.  The basic sense is one of Progress.  A T-Square Desire on the other hand is an unachievable chimera that we set up to Motivate ourselves.  It’s a picture of Perfection.  It probably hasn’t changed substantially since we were five or ten years old.  The basic sense is one of Frustration.

So, if we put them both together, Progress with Frustration, gradual evolution with our Perfect Pictures, the whole process can be very Confusing.  And we may not remember that Confusion is the first stage of Growth.  That’s probably the key we need to resolve a T-Square to the Nodes – remembering that Confusion is the first stage of Growth.

Note that since the Nodes by definition Oppose one another, a Square to the Nodes is always a T-Square.

There are a couple of productive processes for dealing with Confusion.  We can acknowledge it with Gratitude.  “Omigosh, there’s Confusion!  Thank Goddess I’m Growing out of that dilemma!  That’s Exciting!”  And Curiosity.  Unlike the programming we got in school, real Learning is always Surprising.  If we had any idea how a real Life dilemma would be resolved, it wouldn’t be a dilemma.  So acknowledging Confusion as the first step of Growth almost automatically inspires Curiosity.  And Curiosity, like Love, is Goddessly, as both eschew Judgment.  We don’t want to strive for Curiosity about how our T-Square will be resolved – because we’d get stuck to our Perfect Pictures again.  Curiosity about what we’ll Learn next about our Desire fits perfectly, however.

We come to the difference between Desire and Fantasy.  Suppose for instance that we crave Acknowledgement.  If as ankle-biters we weren’t Valued for who we really were, we’ll spend our Lives craving Acknowledgement.  We have a picture of how that might happen.  We might be “Discovered,” for instance.  That’s a very nice alternative to Earning Acknowledgement.  Once who we really are is Discovered, everything else will fall into place, and it will all be easy.  That’s how we know it’s a Fantasy – everything else becomes easy.  Fantasy is a Manifestation-killer. 

When we detect Fantasy we need to substitute Curiosity.  We don’t know what it will look like when we’re Acknowledged – we’ve never been there.  We know the Perfect Picture we daydream about, but our Desire is behind that Picture, not in it.  When that Picture arises and we recognize it (how can we not? – we’ve been daydreaming it all our Life!), we need to pull the cord next to it so it rolls up like an old-fashioned window-shade.  Behind it there’s a Wilderness, and it’s Delightful and Dangerous and Exciting and very Compelling.  You can’t Imagine what’s in there!  But doesn’t it inspire Curiosity!

So let’s take some examples.  Suppose Saturn, which represents The Most Important Thing, Squares our Nodes.  It’s never this simple, because many other influences are afoot – such as the Sign of our Saturn, and other Angles to it from other planets.  But we could have a Lifetime Frustration about knowing what’s The Most Important Thing.  Is it Learning new Skills or collecting boons by using the Skills we have?  Is it Love, or is it Power?  So we need to find a reliable way to move from Confusion to Curiosity around The Most Important Thing.

In Psychic School one of the first tricks you Learn is “What if you did know?”  When Duality wants you to do Either/Or and you aren’t in touch with your Intuition enough to understand how Both/And might work in this circumstance, you can Ask yourself, “What if I did know?”  Chances are you will have already rejected at least one answer to the question, and that answer will probably pop back into Consciousness.  There’s a danger here.  This is an exercise for developing your Intuition, it’s not your Intuition. 

The answer you get is an excellent trial balloon, and a great first guess about what’s The Most Important Thing.  It’s worth trying.  But it may only work for a few steps.  West might be the correct direction for the first three strides, but you need to be alert for when Confusion arises again, and Ask again.  The next four might be North – or West again.  If you decide that one direction is Most Important forever, you’re likely to end up in a swamp.  After you practice this for a while it will become your Intuition, and you’ll develop the habit of recognizing Confusion and shifting immediately to Curiosity.  Eventually you won’t even notice the intervening steps, you’ll just Intuitively know what comes next.

But it’s still a Square; you can never sit on your laurels.  It will always be evolving, and you’ll always be Learning more about how to define The Most Important Thing, on more and more subtle levels, till you finally realize that there’s no one you can compare notes with, because no one else knows as much as you know about it – you are the Master.  It Squares your Nodes, so knowing it is The Most Important Thing in your Life.  When you Celebrate your Certainty about knowing the Most Important Thing, you’re about to step into the muck.  Celebrate Learning more about how to discern The Most Important Thing instead.

Now, think back over your Life.  How many times have you repeated this dance, and how many different ways have you Learned for dealing with it?  Include all the ways you’ve forgotten that you Learned (what if you did remember?).  In truth you’re the Master of this Process.  There’s no one better than you to teach it to others, because you’ve Explored all the blind alleys and discovered all the thoroughfares.  And more important, you know how to find the mainlines that haven’t been discovered yet. 

The primary characteristic of any Square is a shortage of Self-Acknowledgement.

That’s another process for resolving a Square in any given moment – moving to Gratitude – make a list of what is working for you.

Or Jupiter – what if Jupiter Squared our Nodes?  Jupiter is about Fortune, Expansion, Amplification.  When Jupiter dances with your Nodes, your Mission is always foremost in your Attention.  That’s fabulous, as no one will ever be able to accuse you of not immer strebend.  But it’s never Enough, is it.  Jupiter’s the Great Benefic, but Never Enough is a bummer.  So Self-Acknowledgement of your Enoughness has to become your mantra.  You’ve beaten it practically to death, but Enoughness is your Mastery.  Now you need to Master Not-Quite-Enoughness.  Your Challenge is to Learn to feel good about Performing at 90%.  When you get pretty good at that you can try 80%.  You’ll be More Than Enough at 50% – you can spend the other 50% having Fun.  You’re already doing this, aren’t you.  That’s MASTERY! 

We just can’t Acknowledge that we’re actually Manifesting the Power to Serve Effectively when we’re the Victim of our own Unconscious Motivation.  Dominion requires the Ability to Respond to “threats” to our Healthy Control.  As long as the Power to Serve Effectively is our Goal instead of Learning to Use the Power to Serve Effectively, Frustration follows, because Life is a moving target and “those people” – who really are less competent and less dedicated than you because they don’t have Jupiter Squaring their Nodes – are your Teachers, Unconsciously of course.  You’re underemployed, but you won’t be able to leverage yourself into a position where you also have the Authority and Responsibility to Serve Effectively – and the rewards, until you Learn to Honor yourself. 

There’s still time to remember all of the little and big Successes along this course, and Celebrate each one.  They’ll feel burdensome until you reframe them from Frustration about Failure, to Excitement about Learning.  Buy three big sheets of gold-colored cardboard and a “Sharpie” permanent marker.  Take an hour each week, choose one of your historical Frustrations, fully Embrace your Grief about how your hard work was unseen and unacknowledged and even actively thwarted, and then Ask “What did I Learn from this?”  If what you Learned feels negative, Ask “What was the positive function of that?”  “What was one positive thing that came out of it?

When you feel good about that Learning, cut a trophy honoring yourself for that  Success out of the gold cardboard, and give it a title and an approximate date.  As you process each historical Frustration there will be too many trophies (it’s Jupiter after all!) to keep on your mantle or altar all at once, so keep the extras in a box.  Each morning choose one trophy to put back in the box, and replace it with a new one chosen “randomly” from the box.  Spend a minute remembering the Frustration you felt as you climbed that mountain, and find the Relief you felt when you Learned that Lesson.

What about Venus?  Venus stands for our Values, so you’re probably often at odds about which Value of yours to follow.  Having multiple Values is fantastic – no danger of becoming a Zealot, eh?  But boy, those Zealots sure look Satisfied, don’t they?  Compared to my Confusion, that looks like a Blessing!  What if being Multifarious was the Blessing?  It’s a Square, it’s always a moving target.  I think of a Spiral, where we revisit the same issue over and over again but with slightly different circumstances.  A friend and reader uses the metaphor of “an elevator which stops at identical floors, but different things happen depending on where your head/vibes/frequency is.”

But the constant about is this is Constant Learning.  Your Values are Universal, but for every moment a different Hierarchy of Values applies.  If you’re anything like the rest of us, you’ve been programmed to apply the Values that were handed down by your family heritage in every moment.  You’ll be Learning how to stop and reconsider every moment, so you can apply the Values that work best in the circumstances.  You’ll know when you got it right because there will be a short burst of North-Node Satisfaction, the sense that you’re on the right track.  Till the Square’s Never-Quite-Right Energy butts in again.  No worries, it’s just Confusion, the first stage of Growth.  Isn’t that Curious!  I wonder which Values apply here – Growth or Certainty?

The Centaur Nessus Squaring the Nodes?  Confusion over Action, how to meet one’s needs with finesse rather than force, and how to replace that Confusion with Curiosity and Self-Acknowledgement.  Passive Pacifism isn’t worth much.  A Pacifist who knows how to Embrace and Master their own need to Dominate is a Teacher of Value.

The dwarf planet Ceres would tie us in knots over what’s Sustainable, and beg us to replace our Preaching and Self-Abuse about it with frequent PIAVFAs about how to make it stick. 

The poster child of dwarf planets, Pluto?  Sorry, your Life Path is intense, and you won’t bargain your way out of it.  You’ve probably already been in and out of Addiction, as there’s no faster way to understand Control.  Your Hero’s Journey is the Heroin’s Journey, figuratively or literally.  So what if no one listens to you – you see the Future, and they don’t.  Let them stumble; it’s their Learning Experience.  Your Certainty is a hindrance, though.  See if you can reprogram your Trance to seek Curiosity instead – you’re the Master of Trance-Re-Formation after all, even if you haven’t Recognized it yet.

If it’s the Centaur Hylonome Squaring your Nodes, Grief is your constant companion.  She’s just over your left shoulder.  Don’t push her away any more; Embrace Her.  Once you let Her swallow you like Inanna was swallowed by the Sun, over and over again, you’ll emerge Surprisingly quickly, each time having gained deep Insight.  Be Curious about where Grief will lead you next, as it’s a deep service to Humanity and to the Planet.

Inanna’s symbol is the Grand Octile – the Eighth Harmonic is where we go to resolve the puzzles presented by Magic.  This Ouija Board Uranus-Pluto Cycle is about Magic, and you know what comes next.  You are a Visitor from the distance Future, come to try to steer us away from impending disaster.  Embrace that Perspective without succumbing to Certainty or rejecting your constant Grief about being Unrecognized.  Grief is your greatest Tool.

Ah, Lilith.  It feels Confusing only because you’re ahead of your Time.  The World is moving toward Yindependence – Universal Respect for Self-Sovereignty – and you’re the advance guard.  Let yourself be Curious about how you can best help move the Planet forward.  The Hero’s Journey is well documented; it’s up to you to document the Heroine’s Journey for us as well.  Starhawk’s Truth or Dare is a good starting place for you.

Then there’s Uranus!  Yes, there are deep mists between you and your Soul, and many false profits.  You can’t dispel Confusion with Certainty, it must be Embraced.  It’s all Metaphor, Both/And.  What will happen if you Surrender to Confusion? 

Anyone else wanting to come forward?

Procrasti Nation and Walking in Beauty

There aren’t many Stones or Minerals that combine the two Heart colors, pink and green.  Zoisite (Calcium Aluminum SoroSilicate) makes two of them – Anyolite (green Zoisite with Ruby) and Thulite (green and pink Zoisite).  This is a lovely chunk of “massive” (Crystalline but not a discrete Crystal) Thulite.  The third Heart Stone is Unakite, a combination of pink Feldspar and green Epidote.  These pink-and-green Rocks symbolize Relationship, combining the two flavors of Heart Energy.  I particularly like this one because in the center it has a band of the third form of Zoisite – the brown form that it makes when Zoisite forms discrete Crystals.  Brown is a Third-Chakra color, so the Stone signifies Relationship without Codependence.

 Φ   Φ   Φ   Φ   Φ

Sitting around feeling guilty because you know you should be doing it, but you don’t feel like it at the moment?  Welcome to Yintegrity. 

This is what it’s about.  What would you be doing right now if you could do anything you wanted?  I know, it’s hard, but Yintegrity is just one Energy of many, and we need to stay in Balance.  Right now, being in Balance means being in Yintegrity, bigtime.  Not a time to be shoulding on yourself.  You’ll feel more like doing that other stuff next week.

Or not.  Maybe that other stuff is what you’re being asked to leave behind, because it’s no longer in Alignment with your Soul’s Path for you.  That’s a hard one if you have a big investment in that other stuff – for instance, maybe it pays the bills, or you vowed till Death do you part, or you promised Mom.  Uranus will do Scorched Earth if you back it up against the wall.  But it doesn’t need to be that way.  You can PIAVA a gentle and loving transition, or you can even PIAVA Both/And.  Maybe there are ways that that other stuff can change so it’s more fun and fits your temperament better.  There’s no need whatsoever to be closed to Miracles.

In fact, Mr. Miracle-Chiron Initiates Mr. Action-Mars at half-past noon PST (http://www.jbuss.com/tt/pst12.htm) on January 31, about 8 hours before Ms. Yintegrity-Uranus Initiates Mr. Karma-South Node.  The Chiron-Mars Initiation occurs at 16 Pisces, “In the quiet of their study a creative individual experiences a flow of inspiration“!  That’s pretty cool.  Why are we drudging about now when something exciting like that awaits us?  We should be celebrating!  What about Uranus-South Node?  14 Aries, “A serpent coiling near a man and a woman.”  That’s pretty germinal.  No wonder we’re in the dumps – you know the “Chinese curse,” May you be born in interesting times.  Well, interesting times ‘r us, so we may as well party!

By the way, to use the Sabian Symbols, or otherwise refer to Zodiacal Degrees, you always round up.  13:17 is 14 Degrees.  Why?  Because there is no “zeroth” Degree – 0:35 is in the first Degree of the Sign.  Aries 14 includes 13:01 through 14:00.  That means the Aries Point, 0:00 of Aries, is actually 30 Pisces, as Aries 1 (or 1 Aries) begins at 0:00:01 of Aries.  It’s better to read both Symbols, though, than to spit hairs – Both/And. 

Cusps are always transitions, and a good case can be made that Pisces 30 is actually the strongest point of Aries.  For instance, if a planet is 3 Degrees shy of a House Cusp, I regard it as being not just in that “next” House, but being “on the Cusp” of that next House, which in many ways is a place of great emphasis.  So if a House ran from, say, 16 Pisces to 14 Aries, I’d count planets as being in that House when they were between 13 Pisces and 11 Aries, and I’d count planets between 14 and 17 Pisces as being highlights of that House.  But when it’s important, Both/And is always better.

The reason I do this is because when two planets are Approaching one another, the Energy is much stronger than when they are Separating from one another.  So I expect Mars-Chiron Energy to be much stronger prior to noon on January 31, than it will be after 1pm.  I extend that logic to House Cusps, and to a lesser extent to Sign Cusps.  I consider a planet at 29 Degrees of Leo to be in Leo, but to be on the Cusp of Virgo.  Depending on other things (such as Conjunctions), I’d talk about the planet as having Leonine qualities, but I’d talk about the Energy as Initiating Virgo.

Sometimes the terms Approaching and Separating are used, respectively, to mean the Waning and Waxing phases of a Cycle instead.  I find that to be confusing and inaccurate, but the bottom line is that you need to be careful to be sure you understand what the speaker means when they use these terms.  Same with the terms “Sinister” (from the left) and “Dexter” (from the right) – even decades later there are some books that I still can’t decipher because they use those terms without clear explanation.

Of course the Chiron-Mars Initiation creates a Quincunx-Unx Bridge across the Nodal Axis-plus-Uranus Opposition and the Uranus-Pluto-Nodes T-Square, so it’s a Big Deal.

An Unx, recall, is our new name for a Twelfth-Harmonic or 30-degree Angle between two planets.  They used to be called SemiSextiles, but that’s much too clumsy.  The Twelfth Harmonic is about Pattern-Breaking, so when the South Node is lit up as it is today, it’s much too important to be considered as half of a Sixth Harmonic Sextile.  In general of course, there’s no better way to get your face rubbed in your Patterns than to get into Relationship (Sixth Harmonic)!  But that’s not necessarily what the South Node is about.

Chiron-Mars is also Square to Ms. Boundaries-Pallas…

There are some Boundaries that need to be Transformed here.  Often an experience of Guilt is generated in real time by Other People’s Expectations; it may not just be your own Programming.  Ask yourself, “Who’s bugging me here?” and take the first answer, then imagine holding a wardrobe Mirror up between you and them, facing them.  If after a minute or so your Feelings change, ask them (psychically) to use a different Communication channel.  Then you can just not answer the phone, and they’ll have to assume you’re otherwise engaged.  If your feelings don’t change you can try a second-most-likely person, but if your first few Mirrors don’t yield results, you want to PIAVA to take Responsibility for your Programming.

We aren’t against negative Feelings; we just don’t see any reason to Sustain them for longer than a few moments.  Why not get down to their root causes and shift the Energy.  Life’s too short to waste on bummers, except to make sure we’re comfortable with ALL Feelings, because it’s all one channel, so if we’re blocking out Guilt for Fear or Anger, we’re also blocking out Excitement and Ecstasy.  That’ll make it very difficult to Follow Our Joy.

Pallas also forms a Trine-Sextile Bridge across the Nodal Axis and the Pluto-Uranus T-Square, so Grace is available.

Mars-Chiron is also Decile to Ms Denial-Eris, and with the Chariklo-Hylonome Conjunction forms a Quintile-Decile Bridge across the Eris-Haumea Opposition.  The Conjunction of Ms. Charm-Chariklo and Ms. Grief-Hylonome is about…

Beauty has it’s own Karma.  By that I mean alpha males and alpha females miss out on a great deal of Life Experience by virtue of their natural attractiveness to others.  When someone is “spoiled” by their parents or other Power figures in their Life, or even stronger or smarter than the average Bear, or skilled in any admired characteristic, it’s a similar phenomenon.  So Beauty and Privilege are coming to some Grief here, and facing this Shift, where we’re sort of being “cut down to size” or brought closer to the norm, facilitates Miracles.  Resisting the Shift feeds Discouragement.  All Losses must be Grieved, and this is no exception; Embracing the Grief will move it through much faster.

And the Opposition between Ms. Revelation-Eris and Ms. Rebirth-Haumea…

There’s a major Rebirth awaiting on the other side of the Grief, but it involves facing up to some Denial.  If it feels like you’re being treated unfairly, then this is what you’re up against.  Rather than indulging your Anger or Offendedness at the unfairness, open to the Grief instead.  And rather than intellectualizing the Anger or Offendedness, PIAVA to Lovingly and Gently take full Responsibility for what you’ve been Denying.  You probably wouldn’t feel Offended without an underlying Feeling of Inferiority or Defensiveness.  There are clues there, but be very kind to yourself.

We and the Universe are always in Balance.  Whatever elements of our Life appear to be Out of Balance, these elements must be Balanced in the Unconscious.  It’s not fun to feel Inferior, so we shove it into the Underwhere whenever we can.  That’s compensated by a bit of a chip on our shoulder, so we’re Offended where no Offense is intended.  Once you explore it once or twice and develop the habit of looking through the Funhouse Mirror at yourself, these Imbalances are easy to resolve.

Just check the Angle of your jaw and spine.  If your nose is in the air a bit or your shoulders back, PIAVA what sort of Inferiority you’re hiding from yourself.  If your chin is pointing down or your shoulders forward, PIAVA what sort of natural or hard-earned Superiority you’re discounting.  Don’t forget to Change the Subject and Pay Attention (https://astrobuss.wordpress.com/category/manifestation/piava/).  Miracles await.

You may have noticed that these techniques can apply equally to either situation – we could easily have pointed our Funhouse Mirror at ourself to resolve our Guilt about what we thought was procrastination, and we could easily have pointed our wardrobe Mirror at our protagonist to resolve our Offendedness over what we felt was unfair.  It’s Both/And – both techniques are valid, useful, and instructive in most situations.  The only “rule” is Safety First.  If we push ourself onto unsafe ground, we can easily create trauma that impedes our journey into Expanded Consciousness and can even reverse it. 

So you might want to do the wardrobe Mirror (facing them) first, but without Blame.  Even when Mirroring someone relieves your discomfort handily, it doesn’t mean that the dynamic is really them pressuring you.  This isn’t Newtonian physics, it’s quantum.  You don’t know who or when or why or how you got Entangled with them.  You could make up Stories, but they’d be one of many that applied.  The notion that your Ego is Separate from theirs is an illusion, part of the Trance that makes up the Veil.  They’re just an actor acting out another part of you, and vice versa.  You’ll probably feel safer though after doing the wardrobe Mirror as if they were your protagonist, so your Funhouse Mirror (facing yourself) will be less biased toward the Defensive.  We can hardly Open to Denial when we’re Defensive.

More Tricolors

We’ll be a little more technical in our bold-italic sections here than we usually are, but bear with us, because this material is bottom line, even if it’s more astrological.  If you run into Confusion because of the geometry or the fractions, just skip that part that’s Confusing, and move on to the next paragraph.  Confusion is the first stage of Growth, but you don’t need to resolve Confusion intellectually.  You don’t need geometry or fractions to understand this, it’s really about Human Nature and Opportunity.

* * * * *

More very welcome questions about the Tricolors…

“It is difficult for me to grasp a subtle distinction between the Major and Minor Tricolors, hence I am submitting three questions to you:

1) Could you please explain how the 4th harmonic, symbolizing dominion and healthy control, is interrelated with the 3rd, 5th and 12th harmonics contained in the Major Tricolor?

“2) As for the Minor Tricolor, I do not understand, according to your definition ‘…teaches us to share Dominion with our partners’, how it works with the principle of Pattern Breaking (12th harmonic), that the Major and Minor Tricolors involve.

“3) Is it relevant to say that the 5th harmonic is related to ‘Learning’?

“Again, thank you so much for your help on these matters.”

Questions are always welcome – thank you!  And namaste!

* * * * *

The correlation between the Major Arcana in Tarot, and the major Angles in astrology, is very strong.  I’m sure there are as many different schools of Tarot as there are different schools of astrology, but I’ve learned from Angeles Arrien’s excellent The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols.

* * * * *

The Fourth Harmonic

The most Challenging Angle in astrology is the Square – two planets 90 degrees, or three Signs, apart.  The Challenge arises because you have two planets trying to cooperate while they’re in different “Elements” – Fire, Earth, Air, Water. 

Cuspal Squares follow a different Pattern, but that’s a topic for another day.

We’re working in these years, by way of example, with the Uranus-Pluto Square, from Uranus in Aries (Fire) to Pluto in Capricorn (Earth).  So Uranus, which is scarily Spontaneous already, is very excited about flinging itself into all manner of Exoteric Arian Adventures, while Pluto very much wants Capricornian Practicality and Moderation.  That’s a Challenge, eh?  Put any two different Elements – like Fire and Water – in the same sandwich, and you get similar results. 

You get all the way around the Zodiac by putting four Squares end to end.  So the Square is the astrological representative of the Fourth Harmonic.  In the Major Arcana, that’s the Emperor, symbolizing Dominion, or Healthy Control.  We’ve noticed over the years that a Square symbolizes not just Challenge, but Mastery.  Our Squares reveal our greatest Skills, because they show the places where we never feel like we’ve “got it right” – it’s never satisfying enough that we get complacent and feel complete.  So we keep trying different approaches, on ever more subtle levels, and collecting the resulting Experience and Wisdom. 

So, immer strebend (as Goethe put it), we become, as we get older and more experienced, the true Expert on those issues, though we’ll have to work on ourself quite a bit to recognize this, since it doesn’t feel that way.  We’ll always feel like a failure, because our Fourth-Harmonic standards are unreachable.  As the Emperor we’re always dealing with tradeoffs, nothing is ever “black and white” or “cut and dried.”  If it is, we’re deluded.  We’re lucky when the odds in a situation are “60-40” and not six of one and a half dozen of the other.

So we refer to the Square and the Fourth Harmonic as Mastery through Challenge.  The more you recognize that you’re in the game to gather Experience and Wisdom rather than to “get it right,” the better you’ll feel about your Squares.  You might even Consciously make a Choice you know is “wrong,” just to gather experience around that Choice (which would actually just be bringing your true motivation up into Consciousness!).  Squares are primarily Motivating.  Always something else to do to try to make things a little better, or patch up past missteps.

The Square – the noisy, messy, never-fully-resolved issue that demands Attention – is the core of the Tricolor. 

* * * * *

The Quincunx

The Magical portion of a Tricolor is the Quincunx.  A Quincunx symbolizes Curiosity.  Curiosity, Wonder, Awe – those are most Sacred places to reside.  There is no Judgment while we’re in Curiosity, so it’s Unconditional, like Love.  A Quincunx is formed by two planets five Signs apart, or five twelfths of the way ’round the Circle from one another.  So it combines the Fifth Harmonic with the Twelfth Harmonic.

Yes, as your third question avers, the totem for the Fifth Harmonic is the Hierophant, master of Teaching and Learning.   So we have the potential for an Open mind.  The Hanged Person stands for the Twelfth Harmonic.  The Hanged Person is hanging by their heels, not their neck (or fingernails), so the Twelfth Harmonic is about seeing the World through a perspective that’s different from the one we usually use.  That allows the Hanged Person to be the Pattern-Breaker, because they can see newly how they can Change things to better meet their Values and Goals.  Like Chiron, and Einstein’s advice that we can’t solve a problem by using the same thinking that created the problem.

So you can see how the Quincunx and Curiosity get linked intellectually – Learning how to Break Patterns, recognizing that Curiosity is the first requirement for that.  Curiosity means relaxing – nay, disarming – our usual Resistance to Change.  It’s like sneaking up behind the Ego’s usual attachment to the relative security of the status quo and Opening the back door to a fresh breeze.  Experientially, the link between the Quincunx and Curiosity is patently obvious, as we all know what we’re perpetually Curious about, long before we know where our Quincunxes are.

What a combination!  The Square’s indefatigable thirst for unachievable perfection, and Curiosity’s Openness to the New!  It’s no wonder that when we combine 1/4 and 5/12 we’re left with 1/3 – the Square is three Signs (3/12 or 1/4), the Quincunx five Signs (5/12), and there are twelve (12/12 or One) all together, so we have four Signs (4/12 or 1/3) left over.  To close the Circle, we need a Trine.

* * * * *

The Third Harmonic and the Major Tricolor

Four Signs is one third of the Zodiac, or a Trine.  The positive side of a Trine is automatic Grace.  The negative side of the Trine is Arrogance, as until we learn that everyone has different Skills, we’re tempted to think we must be pretty clever to be able to do this (whatever it is) so well without even breaking a sweat, while everyone else must be pretty dumb because they have such a hard time with it.  So we call a Trine “dumb-luck” Grace.  Trines make everything easy.  The only thing we have to do (and unfortunately it’s optional), is remember the flip side of Grace, which is Gratitude.

The Third Harmonic in the Major Arcana is the Empress, symbolizing Love with Wisdom.  She doesn’t encounter the hard 50-50 Choices that the Emperor has to make, so she’s free to dispense Compassion.  Yet there are consequences, so she must use her Compassion with Wisdom.  The Third Harmonic is harmonious because it links Signs of the same Element.

Again, cuspal Trines would operate differently.

So a naked Trine, without any complementary Tension (Square, Conjunction, or even Opposition), can give us a great deal of grief, if we mistake the Grace for Competence.  Just think of the “stuck-up” people you knew in high school, and you’ve got an excellent picture of an unacknowledged Trine.  Some of them ran into real difficulty once they got out into the World and were asked to be less one-dimensional, and had to start dealing with their Squares.  Or, out in the larger World, had to compete or cooperate with people who had genuine Competence.  To excel we need native talent and hard work, and while Trines are an excellent foundation for it, they ill prepare us for that Both/And necessity.

But tie the far ends of a Square and Quincunx together with a Trine, and you combine the Square’s indefatigable thirst for unachievable perfection, Curiosity’s Openness to the New, and Effortless Grace.  A Grand Cross (four Squares end-to-end) can make us super-Competent because we’re always forced to multitask to put out the constant series of brushfires surrounding us.  A Grand Trine (three Trines end to end) can provide so much Grace we seem invincible.  The combination of a Grand Cross and a Grand Trine is one of most powerful Configurations of planets, because it combines this-World Competence with lots of help from beyond the Veil.

But what an opportunity a Tricolor creates!  While the Grand Cross and Grand Trine are scattered all over a chart, the Tricolor is sharply focused on one Square, one contrast between Elements.  Like the 2012-2015 Uranus-Pluto contrast between Truth and Security (Fire and Earth), or the current Mars-Pluto contrast between Mind and Matter (Air and Earth), or the Venus-Lilith contrast (in the current Fez) between Consistency and Desire (Earth and Fire).

* * * * *

The Sixth Harmonic and the Minor Tricolor

The most powerful Configurations are those which fill the Zodiac – that is, their Angles add to 360 degrees.  The Grand Cross is 4×90, the Grand Trine 3×120, the Major Tricolor 90+150+120.  In a Minor Tricolor, a Sextile substitutes for the Trine, so we don’t get to a Full Circle.  However, we do have Challenge combined end-to-end with Curiosity and Grace.  But we have Sixth-Harmonic Grace rather than Third-Harmonic Grace.  That’s Grace through Work and Partnership rather than Grace through “Dumb Luck.”  That’s probably actually better for our Spiritual development, though since it will involve more Effort, probably not as automatic or monumental for accomplishments.

The Sixth Harmonic is The Lovers Archetype.  That brings with it all the Joys and Labors of getting along with another Entity.  Even if that Entity is your Soulmate, there probably won’t be more than a heady glance and a smile until one or the other of you is willing to expend a little effort to open the door.  Hence the understanding that a Sextile usually requires some initial Effort to get the Grace rolling.  And if the other person really is your Soulmate, you’ve got a lot of Work to do, because no one gets along with their Soulmate without doing their Self-Love Work.   Triggering your Self-Love Work is what Soulmates do for a living.

The Sixth Harmonic connects Signs that are not in the same Element, but in the same “gender.”  We don’t use the terms masculine and feminine to distinguish Signs, because those terms are too polluted with cultural bias.  Angeles Arrien uses the terms “Dynamic” and “Magnetic” instead, and we often just call them “Yang” and “Yin.”  The Elements Fire and Air are Dynamic or Active, and the Elements Earth and Air are Magnetic, or Receptive.  So a Sextile connects two Yin Signs or two Yang Signs.  There is mutual understanding, but it requires a handshake or a hug to acknowledge it.

So the Minor Tricolor can actually result in greater Self-development, while the Major Tricolor is more likely to work its magic in the outer World.  With the Minor Tricolor you’ll need to go back and rework that nettlesome Square over and over again, to smooth the Partnership path.  You’ll need to take Responsibility for your own muddle.  Thank goodness we’re Graced with the Curiosity, or the Challenge would be too great.  We should actually look for Minor Tricolors between the charts of Lovers and others in Relationship; it may be where the real value of this Configuration lies.

In the current Fez, it’s the Partnership between our Willingness to actively Support ourSelf in the outer World (Mars) and our Inner Female’s need for Suzerainty (Lilith) – or you could say, our Willingness to actively Support our Inner Female’s Suzerainty – that resolves both the Mars-Pluto (“Go for it!”) and the Venus-Lilith (“What would Momma say?!?”) Challenges.

* * * * *

Now, did I actually answer the questions?

1) Could you please explain how the 4th harmonic, symbolizing dominion and healthy control, is interrelated with the 3rd, 5th and 12th harmonics contained in the Major Tricolor?

The geometry is given to us by the chart – the Square (4th Harmonic), Quincunx (5th and 12th), and Trine (3rd), are presented to us by the Angles between the planets at the moment under consideration.  So it’s up to us as astrologers to combine the ideas of Dominion, Learning and Teaching, Pattern-Breaking, Challenge, Unacknowledged Mastery, Curiosity, Grace, and Potential Arrogance, into some view of the person or situation that provides Insight.  Of course we’ll need to also fold in the Signs and Elements involved, and temper it all by what the rest of the chart says.  Horribly complicated, yes, but that’s the nature of astrology.

That’s why I focus on reading first the Square then the Quincunx as the path to unlocking the Grace.  So for the current Pluto-Mars-Venus Major Tricolor, we can condense that into “We can resolve dilemmas about how vigorously to Act, by consulting our Values.” 

That is, We can resolve (Pluto and Trine) dilemmas (Square) about how vigorously (Mars) to Act, by consulting (Quincunx) our Values (Venus).

Wrapping in the Elements, we might say “When conflict arises between what we Think we need to Do and what is Practical, ask yourself what will create Stability.”

That is, When conflict (Square) arises between what we Think (Air) we need (Pluto) to Do (Mars) and what is Practical (Capricorn), ask yourself (Quincunx) what will create Stability (Venus in Taurus).  We could extend that to, When conflict (Square) arises between what we Think (Air) we need (Pluto) to Do (Mars) to get along (in Libra) and what is Practical (Capricorn), ask yourself (Quincunx) what will create Stability (Venus in Taurus).

Is this helpful?  Astrology is more like an “essay question” than a “multiple-choice” question.

In The Tricolor and the Fez we suggested a couple of alternate ways of looking at the Energy – our comments about the “swelled head” and “dead cats” and being “in the flow.”  But since so few people are at peace with their Squares, I’m betting that the Square-to-Quincunx-to-Trine reading will be the most useful for most people most of the time.

“2) As for the Minor Tricolor, I do not understand, according to your definition ‘…teaches us to share Dominion with our partners’, how it works with the principle of Pattern Breaking (12th harmonic), that the Major and Minor Tricolors involve.

True Partnership entails a degree of Equality that we don’t usually exercise in most of our day-to-day transactions with other Entities.  So I’m guessing that in most Minor-Tricolor situations, once we shift from Problem to Curiosity, the Initiatory Action that the Sextile will require, is that we shift out of Command mode and into Negotiate mode.  We can more or less Command a sales clerk to give us a loaf for a coin, but commanding a Partner to do something is more problematic.  “How do you feel about…” or “Would you be willing to…” or “Can we talk about…” will probably be a lot more effective than “A loaf of sourdough,” even if we were British and added a “please” at the end.

That’s why I emphasized “sharing Dominion” – hypothesizing that most of the time for most of us, sharing Dominion will be a Pattern-Breaker.  We would go from a Challenge to our sense of Healthy Control, into Curiosity about how to resolve it, into an Action that would trigger Grace, one that would most likely involve interaction with a Partner (Sixth Harmonic). 

Does that clarify the Minor Tricolor at all for you?

“3) Is it relevant to say that the 5th harmonic is related to ‘Learning’?

Absolutely.  The Fifth Harmonic is about Learning, and it’s flip side, Teaching.  We don’t really Learn something until we have to Teach it.  That’s when we discover what we’ve been assuming, that may not actually be True or relevant. 

My discussions of the Fourth Harmonic make it sound like I’m talking about Learning there too, but it’s different.  The Fourth Harmonic is about feeling that we’re on the Edge of being out of Control (as any Emperor always is).  I just suggest that we shift our focus from what we haven’t perfected, to what we’re Learning, as a way to defuse our frustration and recognize our accumulated Skills – our experiential Wisdom. 

 

It’s like the difference between the Third and Ninth Houses – the Fifth Harmonic and Third House are about Knowledge, while the Fourth Harmonic and the Ninth House are about Wisdom.  I’m always intrigued by the way Ursula Le Guin divided Knowledge among the faculty at the School on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea.

 

How’d we do?  Are we making any sense?

Awakening the Harmony Within

Living and Creating vs. Surviving – An Interview with Eugenia Oganova

I’m studying Awakening the Harmony Within: How to Create with Spirit, Eugenia Oganova’s new book – and studying is the right word, not reading.  What I’m reading isn’t unfamiliar, but it keeps stopping me – not because of “exercises” like some textbookish guides include, but because she keeps bringing me face to face with my Limiting Beliefs, in ways that are new to me.

Chironic opportunities for me to reframe!  It’s not like I’m instantly transformed; it’s more that I’m caught in an “Oh!” that silences my usual self-talk and spaces me out – and then the next day I’ll notice that something is different, some subtle loss is gently asking to be grieved (all losses must be grieved, even the loss of a Limiting Belief!), and the World will be subtly new.  Feeling like I don’t quite recognize a place, even though I visit it at least daily – a sure sign of Ego Death.

The glorious thing is that I’ve been given the opportunity to ask Eugenia questions!  And I’m eager to take advantage of it!

I don’t get farther than page 2 before I get stopped:

“At some point every person arrives to understanding that they are in survival and that they do not want to be in that state anymore.”

To me it seems like Eugenia speaks here about the contradiction between the Yang-integrity (you do what you said you were going to do) and the Yin-integrity (you do what you dang well feel like doing, moment to moment). When I look for Limiting Beliefs, I see that I don’t actually Believe that it’s possible to stay in Yin-integrity – to do moment to moment exactly what I feel like doing – and Live Well too.  That of course is the Uranus-Pluto Challenge that’s with us until 2015.

Eugenia:

“Well, Jim, you are talking more about the ‘electric’/structural (the Yang) and the ‘magnetic’/fluid (the Yin) difficulty.  In truth the difficulty of Survival affects both sides!  Survival is the fight for our existence which we mistake for Living.  The main difference between Survival states and Living states is the connection with the Soul-Self.  That link to the core of who we are is present when we are Living.

“You can be ‘electric’ (Yang) and fully committed to your daily responsibilities, but you CHOOSE these responsibilities based on your Higher Self.  In Survival we get trapped in our daily routine because these ‘responsibilities’ are not coming from our true core Self, but from the Lower Self and the Ego – i.e. we are driven by the social expectations.  This only amplifies stress, competition and aging!

“Same goes for the ‘magnetic’ (Yin) state – when you are Living, you are in Joy and Peace – that supports relaxation, flow and cellular regeneration.  When you are Surviving, you are in Not-Enoughness – that supports depression, anxiety and worry.”

Astrobuss:

Right on!  I’m embarrassed that I didn’t already think about it that way!

True to the promise of the book, Eugenia provides methodology.  For instance, on page 13, this paragraph feels very important and I know it to be true, but it literally stuns me for some reason.

“Whatever it is we focus on and feel – we create.  This is a very important distinction though, not just ‘whatever you mentally focus on,’ but ‘whatever you focus on and feel.’  If you have an issue with something, a fear, you must work with it, i.e., you will have to think about it and find the beliefs that generated it in order to transmute it – and that is okay.  But when we focus on something feelingly and remain with that focus, we create it.  Witnessing feelings with our minds, parallel to experiencing them feelingly, is beneficial to our development.  Experiencing feelings without any mental Witness is detrimental to our spiritual growth, because we become limited by the perceptory range of that feeling.”

Eugenia, can you say more about this?

Eugenia:

Jim, people find this component of creation to be the most challenging – they often focus on what they are thinking, forgetting that it is the thought linked with a feeling that together produce new realities, not the thought alone!

The pathway of creation is:

Belief  =>  Thought  =>  Feeling  =>  Reality

This means that if we do not like what we had materially created in our lives, we must change the Belief which was the perpetrator.  Ideally we can just KNOW what Belief was in the way.  But of course we don’t.  Self-analyzing can find Limiting Beliefs, but won’t change them!  Witnessing the feelings, though, will definitely show us our Limiting Beliefs.

There are two possible detours here:

1. We over-think it, forgetting the feelings, and even though we might have figured out what the erroneous belief is, we can’t change it, because these very feelings we had ignored are sabotaging our efforts;
2. We over-feel it, forgetting to Witness with our Minds what we are feeling, and so we drown in that feeling instead of changing anything.

In the #1 (over-analyzing) there is not enough ‘juice’ to change the Belief. In the #2 (over-feeling) there is not enough consciousness to change the Belief!  And since the Feeling is the last step before manifestation of Belief, when we over-feel, we essentially create the very thing we were afraid of, and NOT what we wanted.

Astrobuss:

That sounds so clear and exactly nails the point!  How do I know when I am over-doing it in either direction?

Eugenia:

How do we know if we are over-feeling?  If the mental Witness is missing, we are over-feeling.  Witness is an ability to impartially label the feelings – i.e. you can tell that you are feeling anxiety, then, by further exploring the feeling, find out what is the internal story (not the external circumstance), and do so without any judgment.

How do we know we are over-analyzing?  If we are not able to feel even the small dose of the emotional experience attached to the thought, then we are over-thinking for sure.

Astrobuss:

Many many thanks, Eugenia!  I hope you have time for us to do this again soon – I’m still in the first few chapters!

I’m finding this book to be a perfect companion to the Grand Sextile, part of the Blessing!  You can order a copy of Awakening the Harmony Within at http://eugeniaoganova.com/awakening the harmony.htm or at Amazon, which also has a Kindle edition.

Blessings Are Afoot!

Starting September 11, and continuing through September 26, we’re Blessed with another complete Grand Sextile, as these six players all dance together harmoniously…

• 1. Saturn-North Node, well on their way to Conjunction, meaning the influence is very strong.  The implication of Saturn-North Node is that if there’s any sense in which we’re Resisting the urge to Follow Our Greatest Joy, we need to stop with the Resistance, not just because it’s futile, but because it’s a severe self-sabotage that will make our Future much more difficult.

If we really can’t abandon our Resistance because it would in one way or another “kill us,” then at the very least we need to PIAVA a loving and gentle transition from here (Resistance) to there (Joy), in ways that harm no one, especially ourself.  If you still have Resistance to that, add another condition.  For example, if you’re afraid you’ll have to give up income in order to Follow Your Joy, you could PIAVA a loving and gentle transition to Joy in ways that harm on one especially me, and in ways that actually increase my Well-Being more than I can imagine, through means I’ve never thought of!

If you haven’t looked up PIAVA yet, it means to Pray, Intend, Ask, Visualize, or Affirm.  There’s another important step involved, but that’s the essence.  It’s worth looking up; use the link in the previous paragraph.

Remember that a Sextile represents Creative Grace – that is, in order to take advantage of the Blessings that are available, we have to supply the initial Kick-Start.  Such as a PIAVA.  Wouldn’t hurt to PIAVA even if we aren’t in Resistance!  Or initiate an Action to begin Following Our Joy.  Or better yet, both.  Gosh, even if we’re in Life-or-Death Resistance, we could PIAVA that we initiate an Action that would be a step toward a loving and gentle transition to Joy, in ways that would harm no one and have zero downside risk.

• 2. Pluto: the Master of Transformation, aka Trance Formation, or Changing the Trance that we operate under.  If we’re PIAVAing transition, that’s a lot like Transformation; there’s a good chance we’ll be amazed at how rapidly Changes unfold, which makes it all the more important that we add as many conditions as necessary to our PIAVAs – loving, gentle, harmless to all, risk-free, etc, etc, everything we can think of to defuse our Fear of Change.  Because Change is going to come down fast and hard.

Pluto represents the Universal Trance.  It can’t be stopped, but it can be steered.  It’s made up of all of our Deep Desires, all mixed together in a huge cauldron, with an Eye of Newt.  Pluto isn’t us, but we’re part of Pluto.  We don’t want to contribute Fear or Anger, we want to contribute Joy and Excitement.  You can think of Pluto as a kind of Force of History (and of Herstory), because when Pluto shifts, everyone shifts.  We barely notice that it used to be different.  And Pluto is shifting.  Shifting how?

First, Pluto is Squaring Uranus, meaning that we are literally, till 2015, in the midst of Mastering the process of Following Our Joy.  We’ve been calling that Yintegrity; same diff.  Syria’s an example; the folks who would get great Joy from throwing missiles at Syria are now far outnumbered by the folks who understand how much of a bummer it would create.  Not that the Joybombers aren’t just more hip than the rest of us about reincarnation, and after all who among us doesn’t need to confront our Fear of Suffering, to release our Karma.  But there are better ways, loving and gentle ways, to get that done.

And second, Pluto is Opposing…

• 3. Lilith, who represents pre-Intellectual Instinct, dedication to Community, Collaboration, Cooperation, Equality, Respect for Diversity, and unconditional rejection of the old MCP program.  If you missed the 20th Century, MCP stands for “Male Chauvinist Pig,” or the obsolete notions of hierarchy, competition, bullying, exploitation, male superiority, slavery, colonialism, and deceit.

The Pluto-Lilith Opposition (Grand Sextiles involve three Oppositions) means that we’re at a turning point in the Universal Trance around Lilith issues.  Specifically, this is the blooming of the current Lilith-Pluto Cycle, which is about “Within the depths of the Earth, new elements are being formed,“ which Rudhyar reads as “The alchemical fire which both purifies and transforms the very substance of one’s inner life.“  These are very deep Changes.

Is there someone, or some institution, in your Life that projects hierarchy, bullying, competition, exploitation, or male superiority?  As your Sextile Kick-Start, why not PIAVA stepping out of their sphere of influence for a few minutes in a loving and gentle, risk-free way that increases their respect for you as their Equal, and educates them about the ways in which the World Has Changed.

I know, these PIAVAs sound like we’re expecting Miracles, don’t they.  Loving and gentle and risk-free and respect-generating and educational.  Loving, gentle, harmless, risk-free, wealth-generating, active.  Loving, gentle, risk-free, equality-generating, educational.  I mean, what Miracle-maker are we going to hire to design these multidimensional omniscient, omnipotent scenarios for us?   Well, our luck is remarkable – it’s a Grand Sextile after all!

• 4. Chiron, the Miracle Man (or rather, Centaur) himself!  Do you remember your first Spiritual Insight?  When, after years of suffering under the Ego’s notion of what happened to you, you first understood how that experience was such an important part of your growth into Consciousness?  It may have developed gradually, but do you remember how Liberating that Insight was?  Your Life was no longer ruled by Anger or Grief.  Like the day I understood why my father said those things!  That’s Chironic reframing.

Like Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that formulated the problem – you have to find a new way to approach it.  When you do, it isn’t a problem any more.  While Darwin’s approach to evolution involved a lot of Ego Death, evolution is Chironic.  Folks who live near the Coast will suffer as Sea Levels rise – till somebody’s born with gills, mutated from all that RoundUp, or from Fukushima.  Intractable problems just dissolve before your eyes when they encounter Chiron’s reframing.

So, you want to take advantage of all the Grace embedded in this Grand Sextile?  Then what are you most in Despair about?  That’s what can be Healed here!  The worst kind of Despair is Unconscious Despair – when you don’t even know you’re in Despair, because you simply don’t believe something is possible!  Follow Your Joy AND Enjoy More Abundance Than You’ve Ever Imagined?  Dreamer!  What Galaxy do you think you’re in?  Exactly!

It’s not possible to brute-force or think out a Chironic shift, because a Chironic shift requires an Epiphany, a complete change of Perspective.  Thoughts follow only from Assumptions, most of which are Unconscious, and Chiron changes the critical Assumptions.  The only way we can Kick-Start a Chironic reframing, is to PIAVA one.  Great Spirit, may I please move toward Following My Joy AND Enjoy more Abundance than I’ve ever imagined, AND make the transition lovingly and gently and rapidly and completely, without any down-side risk!

• 5. Ceres, which Opposes Chiron.  Ceres is about Sustainability and Sustenance.  Ceres asks us to make sure that what we do (and feel and think, and who we are) is Sustainable.  Are we spending more than we earn?  Are we depleting the Soil?  Are we moving away from a rising Sea Level?  Are we prepared to survive 1,000-year Storms?  And Ceres asks us to give up what is unnecessary.  Do we need to burn that much gas?  Is it really such a good idea to continue to insult people like that?  What is that Sugar really doing to us?  Maybe we could Miraculously PIAVA someone really compatible, so we can cut our rent in half – it is a Grand Sextile after all, and Power is Afoot!

The blooming Ceres-Chiron Cycle is “Heavy car traffic on a narrow isthmus linking two Seaside resorts” – what pops to mind are two of our subpersonalities, one that knows what we really Want and knows exactly how it feels to have it, and the other who knows how to survive in the “real” World with all its compromises and half-truths.  Just look at all that intellectual and emotional traffic between those two, as they argue constantly about what we have to do, what we should do, what we want to do, what we need, what we have permission to receive, what we’ll have to give up, whether it’ll even work, what Mom said about it, what Dad said about it, how will we pay the rent, what about the Stress and its toll on our body – is that Sustainable?  Not to mention how the feel about all that.

We know that traffic pretty well, eh?

This would be a great time to sit those two down and help them negotiate Win-Win.  Not in terms of what we need to do, we have to manifest a Chironic earthquake before we can do that, so we’re working on a landscape where you can get there from here.  But in terms of helping them intellectually, emotionally, and Spiritually, to fully understand one another’s goals, so they can start working together collaboratively to manifest both.  To serve you rather than sabotage you.  Chances are one of them wants Safety in some form, and the other wants Excitement in some form.  Once you disengage from both and take the role of impartial counselor or facilitator for both of them, the whole drama gets a lot easier.

That’s what Sextiles are all about, ease.  Once you take a Creative first step of course.  Which brings us to…

• 6. The South Node.  Karma, yes, but a whole lot more.  There’s always Emotional Holding here, some door we’re afraid to open, or some person (and everyone that reminds us of them) we’re still mad at eighteen lifetimes later, or the like.  Much of which is Unconscious.  But as Seth said so clearly, it’s written all over our Personal History!  Just look back at your Life, reframe the Blame, accept that it was you who Created all that mess, even though it was a you that you hadn’t met yet (let alone learned to Love!) and still don’t understand, and get to work integrating those strangers into your self-concept.

Whoa, tall order, eh?  Well, there are Miracles available that can instantly Transform us and allow us to Follow Our Joy in Sustainable ways, so what better time than now?  Besides, all we have to do is PIAVA it, because all that MCP Doingness and thinking it out and doing it alone and protecting the Ego – all that stuff is so last-century!  Just let Lilith have it!  While we’re at it, we can PIAVA rapidly and completely and effortlessly and painlessly.  I mean why not?  Take the Gift while it’s available!  All the Universe requires is your buy-in to Kick-Start the process.

But the important thing is what’s buried underneath that Emotional Holding.  You know how they say “You can’t take it with you”?  Well, that’s bullshit.  We never leave anything behind.  But we do lock it in a trunk, and seal it with Emotional Holding.  Remember when we used to fearlessly and relentlessly negotiate Peace Treaties between tribes?  No, of course you don’t, because all those skills are locked away in the trunk beneath the Grief you felt about that one failure that cost you your children.  You can still hear them scream.  Remember what a talented musician you used to be?  You could make an angry Lion into a Kitten with your flute, and did many times, saving many lives!  You don’t remember?  Is that because of the Shame you felt when your pants fell down in the middle of a performance, and you vowed never to put yourself in a position to feel that kind of Shame again?

Actually, it’s no accident that the South Node Opposes the North Node – they mirror one another.  What prevents anyone from Following Their Joy?  Emotional Holding.  That subpersonality who argues that it’s not Safe to Follow Your Joy?  Guess where his and her origins lie.  Why does it feel like it’s not possible to Follow Our Joy?  Because in order to do it we need the Skills that we locked in those trunks, and we threw away the keys, didn’t we.  Well, PIAVA a new set of keys, and do it now, while it’s easy.  We got two weeks left.  Alls you needs to do, is to make the first move.