The Cosmic Weather Forecast this month predicts the onset of world altering long term aspects that could signal the eventual demise of our current hydrocarbon based hypercapitalist global civilization and the beginnings of a 21st Century Renaissance. These aspects indicate that humanity now has the opportunity to usher in a global society marked by a turn from rational materialism, greed and nationalistic competition toward pantheistic environmentalism, global co-operation, and goodwill.
The Winter Solstice occurs on December 21, 2020, and the pernicious Cosmic Weather Patterns that dominated 2020 will begin to dissipate. Jupiter and Saturn will be yoked in a tight conjunction at Zero Degrees Aquarius, heralding a new 20 year and 200 year cycle dominated by the element of Air, and the passing away of a 200 year cycle expressing the qualities of the Earth element.
The entire week of the Winter Solstice is dominated by a triple Jupiter-Saturn Grand Conjunction at Zero Degrees of Aquarius, which takes place December 17-21st.
Early in the evening of the Winter Solstice, Jupiter and Saturn will be so close together from our vantage point on Earth that they will appear as a bright double star in the sky. The last time these two bright planets were as close to one another was March 4, 1226. We look forward to spotting this rare astronomical configuration in the sky on the day of longest night.
Archangel Gabriel presides over the winter season, which begins on the Solstice. Gabriel is the messenger of the Lord, communicating Divine Vision, Divine Grace and Divine Guidance to humanity. Now is the time of year when Gabriel whispers in the ears of all those who celebrate the onset of the winter season by retreating from worldly affairs and immersing themselves in spiritual practices.
We are pleased to offer you instructions for obtaining The Gabriel Initiation, A Vision of the Inner Sunrise, which will be found in Part II of this newsletter, arriving on Monday December 7. Our guide to this powerful meditation practice offers you a simplified version of an Ancient technique that was originally offered only to advanced students of the Western Mystery School traditions.
Performing this meditative practice at the time of the Triple Grand Conjunction in Aquarius would be very powerful indeed!
Johannes Hevelius's chart of Aquarius and surrounding constellations,
from his book Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia.
Early astrologers were unaware of the far outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. For them, Jupiter and Saturn marked the outermost boundaries of the Solar System. During the season when these two planets were in signs opposite that of the Sun, where the night sky was darker, they were visible as extremely bright stars.
Astrologers noticed that approximately every twenty years, these two bright stars would converge on one another, and their conjunction in the sky was said to mark the beginning of a new twenty year cycle in human affairs, the longest of the planetary cycles known to them.
The advent of a new Jupiter-Saturn cycle was said to indicate a thorough transformation of personal and collective lifestyles and views of the world.
Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions occur predominantly in Zodiacal signs of the same element for approximately 200 years. 
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, 1423, tempera on panel, 283 x 300 cm
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The Grand Conjunction in Pisces that occurred 6-7 B.C.E. is thought by many astrologers to account for the miraculous appearance of the Star of Bethlehem heralding the birth of Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of Matthew, one of the more mythological gospels, the Star of Bethlehem guided the Three Magi from Babylon to Bethlehem where they honored the newborn Avatar with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
By some accounts this heralded the advent of the Piscean Age. Zodiacal Ages are determined by the precession of the equinoxes. To an observer on Earth, over time, the equinoxes move westward along the Sun's observed path, called the plane of the ecliptic, relative to the fixed stars.
If we picture the Zodiac as a 360 degree circle, we can see that 12 signs of the Zodiac will each contain 30 degrees. The position of the observed equinox moves one degree of the Zodiac in 72 years. It takes 30 x 72 or 2160 years for the equinox to precess through one entire Zodiac sign and enter the next one.
According to some astrologers, the Piscean Age actually began around 500 BC, a time of incredible intellectual and spiritual awakening across the world. This was the age of Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato and Confucius. Taoism appeared in China alongside the Confucian teachings.
The Eleusinian Mystery Schools had initiated students in Greece for many centuries prior to the dawn of the Age of Pisces. It was around 650 BC that Homer immortalized the drama of the Earth Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who was abducted to Hades and returned to her mother's home for half a year each year after a series of trials and divine interventions, inaugurating the Greeks' concept of the seasonal wheel of life.
One hundred fifty years later, the Mysteries of Persephone and Demeter became increasingly popular along with the death and rebirth initiations common to cults of dying and reborn gods such as Orpheus and Dionysus. These themes of death and resurrection prefigured the dominant Piscean Age religion -- Christianity. 
Dionysian Procession Mosaic depicting a Maenad followed by Dionysus on a lion and Satyrs, 2nd century AD,
in the Archaeological Museum of El Djem, Tunis
The dawning of the Age of Pisces took 500 years, the time between the spiritual ferment of 500 BC and the birth of Christ. Christianity further elaborated the main themes of the Greek Mysteries, creating the quintessentially Piscean ethos of ardent devotion, self-sacrifice, suffering, martyrdom, and ultimate transcendence of a tragically flawed material world and entry into a realm of heavenly bliss.
Astrologers cannot agree on the dates for the Age of Pisces and the dawning of the fabled Age of Aquarius, for numerous arcane reasons. Various astrologers say the Age of Aquarius began around 1470, 1660, 1957, 2000, or even a thousand years from now.
If we assign the Age of Pisces to around 500 BC, then the Age of Aquarius began in around the year 1660, but it will probably be 2160 AD before the defining cultural, intellectual and spiritual themes of the Aquarian Age manifest fully.
Generally, astrologers agree that we are more or less on the cusp of the change of the ages, which coincides with the tumultuous transformations rocking our world for the last century or so.
The Grand Conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn on December 21 at Zero Degrees Aquarius is the defining astrological event of the year. This remarkable event ushers in a lengthy astrological era of cyclic Jupiter and Saturn conjunctions predominately in air signs that will occur approximately every twenty years through 2159.
Many astrologers believe that the Grand Conjunction in Aquarius marks a dramatic acceleration of the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age.
In addition, the Grand Aquarian Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn indicates the end of the preceding 200 year cycle of Jupiter-Saturn Conjunctions in Earth signs.
This is very important because the entire fossil fuel powered Industrial Revolution occurred during the last 200 years, during the Earth sign conjunctions.
Extraction of coal fuel for steam engines and deep drilling for oil empowered global Empires, and led to the World Wars of the Twentieth Century, which were decided in large part by access to fossil fuel energy sources, and to the never-ending American Long War Against Terrorism of the 21st Century, which has focused on oil producing countries of the Middle East and control of emerging fossil fuel pipelines connecting Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
The Hydrocarbon Civilization fueled by fossil fuels over the last 200 years has released so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that Earth's entire ecosystem has been thrown out of balance. Humanity now faces an existential crisis. Scientists predict that if present energy consumption persists or grows, the Earth will heat so much by the year 2100 that the largest cities in the world will be inundated by sea level rise, crops will fail catastrophically inducing mass starvation in poor countries, and much of the world will no longer be habitable.
Humanity must curtail its consumption of fossil fuels immediately. Governments have promised rapid progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions for 30 years that has not happened. Decades ago we were told that by this time solar and wind energy, geo-engineering, improved nuclear fission reactors, and blue sky technologies such as nuclear fusion, carbon capture and geo-engineering would have put human civilization on a new, more sustainable path toward a green energy civilization. The fact is that the world is using more fossil fuel products and emitting more greenhouse gases now than ever before in history.
There is no doubt that, astrology aside, the Hydrocarbon Civilization that emerged during the fossil fuel powered Industrial Age of the last 200 years is going to come to an end in the foreseeable future.
What can we expect to see during the dawning Age of Aquarius, and especially during the next 200 year cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in Air signs? The next 200 years will determine whether human civilization can survive on this planet, and if so, in what forms the new civilization will manifest.
The last 200 years of Earth sign Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions have seen the rise of modern capitalism, as outlined in Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations written shortly before the first Earth sign Jupiter-Saturn conjunction took place in 1802.
The capitalist system has produced extraordinary gains in the living conditions of billions of people, but has rigidified into a kind of financial and corporate technocratic aristocracy, with unparalleled wealth inequality that exceeds that of the slave economy of ancient Egypt.
Religions have atrophied during the last 200 years, the waning years of the Piscean dispensation, and a new secular religion of rational materialism has increasingly captured the minds of human beings in both the East and the West.
This new secular religion of scientific materialism is definitely related to the Earthy nature of the recent 200 year Jupiter-Saturn cycle. In this world view there is nothing beyond material existence. For adherents of this philosophy the Cosmos is essentially mechanistic. Consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity and human beings are ultimately lacking in agency and free will. All the direct experiences of spiritual epiphany and expanded consciousness in recorded history constitute a mass delusion produced by imbalanced brain chemistry or organic diseases of the brain.
Scientific materialism also assumes a linear progression of history, a steady march forward in technological progress which powers humanity's increasing domination of nature and natural processes.
Countries with a US military presence in 2007.
More than 1000 US troops in dark blue
More than 100 US troops in light blue
Use of military facilities in orange
Lokal_Profil, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Culturally, the rational materialism that characterizes the 200 year reign of the Anglo-American Global Imperium has promised ever more beneficial social relations through advancements in technology, the activities of free markets and the spread of democracy around the world.
The march of progress is an article of faith for adherents of the Anglo-American Imperium and scientific materialism. But that faith lacks credibility in 2020, after fifty years in which unimaginable technological advances and continuously improving standards of living have failed to help the majority of the people on the planet, or even to improve the quality of life of the American middle classes.
Here in America, there are no flying cars, 3 day work weeks, domed cities, space colonies, compact fusion reactors, cyborgs, or humanoid robot slaves. We have been promised self-driving cars for a decade, but that remains a fever dream nurtured by Elon Musk's PR blitzkrieg.
Artificial Intelligence offers us a cornucopia of books, movies, TV shows and products supposedly tailored to our individual wants and needs on a variety of digital platforms, but I would have to search through sites by hand to find books I want, TV shows that are somewhat well crafted, or clothes on Amazon that are not fakes from bogus sites.
In America, the shining beacon of progress during the last 200 years, we have an environmental catastrophe, dysfunctional cities with crumbling infrastructure, declining rural populations, structural racism and poverty. We have an economy doomed to shrink during the transition to a non fossil fuel powered civilization. At the top of our social structure we find unimaginably wealthy plutocrats. Society is increasingly run by a technocratic elite with all the social finesse of Marie Antoinette. Our Anglo-American Imperium cannot win any of the multi-trillion dollar forever wars it has initiated in the 21st Century.
We are told that a transition to green technologies, such as wind, solar and geothermal energy will generate a new source of economic growth and millions of new jobs in America. Techno-optimists anticipate the advent of as yet unproven technologies such as nuclear fusion and carbon capture and storage to allow humanity to bend the accelerating upward curve of climate change in the near future.
Nuclear Fusion Reaction
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
But scientists are releasing new studies that question this rosy scenario. It will take massive new fossil fuel inputs to reorient our energy system to build out a new infrastructure supporting new green technologies, increasing global climate change in the short term.
And time for a transition to a new green global civilization is growing short.
An article in Nature in 2019 addressed “the growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes.” The authors concluded that "If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization. No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem."
"The intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best," explains Ian Angus in an update to his invaluable book on climate change, Facing the Anthropocene. "Hence we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping—and hence the risk posed—could still be under our control to some extent. The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action—not just words—must reflect this."
In the long term, nuclear fusion and other Aquarian Age technological breakthroughs could be game changers for humanity, but in the short term it seems inevitable that economic growth must slow to slow the current trajectory of runaway global warming.
America has a moral obligation to reduce the US military budget dramatically. The US military is a bigger polluter than 140 other countries combined. Nations must work together to end the international arms race.
We must force the largest polluting transnational corporations to change their practices to curtail emissions.
Slowing global climate change also means fewer airplane trips; smaller houses; less car travel; eating less meat; converting from industrial agriculture to more sustainable, less polluting farming practices; and retro-fitting existing structures to save energy.
Consuming less to insure the survival of the species is a quintessentially Aquarian task. Our human community must unite to end our endless growth global economy based on unlimited consumption of fossil fuels and unlimited pollution for the sake of ever increasing profits. This will require modifying the Utopian capitalism that reigns in world markets today, and will require dramatic changes in the lifestyles of all those living in rich countries around the globe.
Scientists tell us that on the current path of energy consumption more than a billion people in poor countries will likely die of starvation over the next decades. Even if several billion of the Earth's poorest were to die immediately, the impact on global climate change would be minimal, because these innocents do not cause the problem.
So far neither political party in the United States demonstrates the slightest interest in reigning in billionaires, financiers, transnational corporations, or the military-industrial complex. Both are more focused on demonizing so called "socialist" policies like universal health care and affordable education that would be acceptable to the right wing in European social democracies.
America has by far done the worst job of responding to the global Covid pandemic of any country in the world, judged by the statistics. American democracy has failed to deliver a clear victory to the winner of the popular vote in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2016, and the clear loser of the 2020 election refuses to concede, as he prepares for an accelerated culture war between Republicans and Democrats from now through 2024.
_(cropped).jpg)
President Donald J. Trump is introduced on stage Saturday, March 2, 2019,
at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center
in Oxon Hill, Md. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Public Domain via Wikimedia
Authoritarian governments control China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Poland, Brazil, and many other countries of the world. During the last four years, those authoritarian countries have looked to the American President as a role model for kleptocratic nationalistic authoritarianism, not free and democratic governance.
The stars align this Winter Solstice to provide a simple and powerful message for the Anglo-American Imperium and for the Hydrocarbon Civilization spread across the face of the Earth. It's time to change!
Astrologers are in broad agreement that during the 200 year cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in Air signs we will see change on a scale and at a speed that will make the last 200 years of unprecedented transformation look unbearably slow and limited in scope.
The choices we make as individuals and as a civilization during the next 20 year cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in Aquarius will in large part determine whether the upcoming supercycle changes of the next 200 years will successfully usher in a new scientific and cultural paradigm, a new economic and financial system, a new post-Imperial global political order, and a new environmentally sustainable civilization.
Without changes on that scale and breadth, the collapse of human civilization and the death of billions of people around the world are virtually assured.
The advent this Winter Solstice of a 200 year supercycle in Air signs indicates a turn away from Materialism towards an Idealistic philosophy of life, which considers energy rather than matter to be the determining factor in manifesting our material reality.
Human Energy Field, painting by Alex Gray
We can look for further scientific breakthroughs in understanding the role energy fields play in structuring consciousness and the Universe around us.
If the energy of the Air element is well aspected and if humanity chooses wisely, science will investigate the actions of morphogenetic fields in structuring the forms and life cycles of living beings. These fields correspond to the etheric bodies of living beings studied in much occult literature.
The role of subtle energy in spiritual experience will be the subject of increasing study. Direct experience of states of expanded consciousness triggered by changes in the energetic flow within the human biofield will become the basis for a new wave of spiritual explorations and achievements.
Divisions between religions will be superseded by an understanding of the elements of spiritual experiences common to all traditions, Eastern and Western, monotheistic and polytheistic.
If humanity makes positive choices, the new science and technology that emerges during the forthcoming Air Supercycle will provide new sources of environmentally friendly energy, including wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear fusion, that can replace fossil fuels and power a Green Civilization.
Scientists will study the human aura and the meridian system of the human body, and the role of subtle energy in the healing arts will increase dramatically. The use of acupuncture, herbal remedies, homeopathic medicine, and practices such as Shamanism and past life regression will be subjects of increased study and gain mainstream acceptance. Meditation practices will be as universally accepted as the use of cell phones.
Meditation, painting by Alex Gray
Of course it is also quite possible that an Aquarian, Air sign supercycle could usher in an age of technocratic neo-feudalism featuring a universal surveillance state, top-down management of extremely inequitable social relations by elites, further concentration of wealth and power, and a global society characterized by rigid social structures. Aquarius is, after all, a fixed Air sign.
Aquarius is a sign demonstrating both an unalterable commitment to personal freedom and a diplomatic sensitivity to community relationships. There is a great opportunity in the next 20-200 years for humanity to better balance cultural and political demands for recognition of universal human rights and freedoms with the necessity for greater subordination of certain types of individual freedoms to the greater good of the communities in which we live.
Utopian capitalism, with its emphasis on the unalterable right of individuals to amass great wealth without regard to the effect of their actions on the greater society or the ecosystem in which they live will no longer be seen as a viable philosophical or economic system.
The current undiluted emphasis on the acquisition of personal accumulated wealth will be replaced by a cultural ratification of intellectual, artistic, spiritual and creative activities that benefit both the individual and the greater community.
On a collective, political level, the global tendency will be toward a more socialized and socialistic system, which prioritizes environmental stewardship, social justice and community well being.
Of course such a system could be authoritarian, as in China, or democratic, as in the United States. Humanity's choices will determine the direction this impulse takes in the next 20-200 years.
China's increasing rise as a world power is a given in any scenario, and it may be that a detente between China and America could facilitate the exchange of ideas that would allow both countries to implement over time a hybrid system incorporating the best features of both countries' culture, politics and economic systems.
Aquarian communitarian impulses could lead to a vastly more interconnected global civilization that will emphasize global solutions to worldwide problems, like environmental crises, social injustice, wealth inequality and persistent human rights abuses.
Global Network, courtesy Shutterstock
On the other hand, Aquarian communitarian impulses could manifest as strengthened tribal and sectarian divisions between fiercely committed, doctrinaire and rigid communities set at odds with one another. Conflicts between social classes, religious communities, economic ideologies and cultural traditions could create a world where individuals who identify with a limited form of communal consciousness reject the opportunity for global governance. In that case, global response to the world's problems becomes impossible.
The Grand Conjunction of the Winter Solstice 2020 marks the opening of a door to a future of mind boggling change and requires us to make a bewildering array of civilization shaping decisions. Our decisions will shape global civilization for centuries to come.
In my opinion the most likely outcome over the near time is likely to be neither Utopian or apocalyptic, especially in America.
Militarily, the United States and China will probably engage in a kabuki theater of confrontational scenarios designed to improve the approval ratings of governments in both countries. Economically, both countries will continue to take steps to disengage with one another and to build up alliances.
America is likely to pursue an America First strategy because there are environmental, economic, and geo-political advantages to becoming a 21st Century Fortress America.
Joe Biden hifiving Barack Obama, October 2015
This file is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States,
taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government,
it is in the public domain.
A Biden administration will want to reassert American hegemony in a global world order, but American elites believe that long term advantage lies in paying lip service to global multilateralism while continuing the status quo in many ways and playing a waiting game.
America First was the default setting for US diplomacy prior to the Cold War, because America was a rising power that wanted to protect its markets from outside Great Powers while pursuing territorial expansionism.
"Surveys now show that more than 60 percent of Americans want the United States simply to look after itself," reports Michael Beckley in a recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine. "When pollsters ask Americans what ought to be the priorities of U.S. foreign policy, few cite promoting democracy, trade, and human rights—the core activities of liberal international leadership. Instead, they point to preventing terrorist attacks, protecting U.S. jobs, and reducing illegal immigration. Roughly half of those surveyed say they oppose sending U.S. troops to defend allies under attack, and nearly 80 percent favor the use of tariffs to prevent job losses from trade. Trump’s approach is no aberration; it taps into a current that has always run through American political culture."
Many among America's elites believe that a rapidly aging China will find it impossible to compete militarily with America in the coming years, while increased automation will reduce American dependence on cheap labor and foreign manufacturing.
_(cropped).jpg)
President Donald J. Trump stands before a plaque Tuesday, June 23, 2020, commemorating the 200th mile of new border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border near Yuma, Ariz. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons
As the environmental crisis accelerates over the coming decades, many in positions of power in America believe that a Fortress America strategy will be increasingly attractive. In this scenario, America would refocus its agricultural industry to feed America and seal its borders against a rising tide of global climate refugees. America's military strategists believe that the environmental crisis will destabilize much of South Asia and Africa, creating numerous failed states and causing tremendous geo-political problems for Europe, China, and even Russia in the process.
In such a scenario, the Aquarian traits of social solidarity, technological wizardry and love of individual freedom would result in a fractured world order composed of competing power blocs and a xenophobic America.
In this scenario, the American system of rule by billionaires and technocrats, fueled by the financial wizardry of a Federal Reserve that guarantees the stability of dollar denominated asset regimes would create a 21st Century surveillance state to rival China's digital panopticon, with most citizens' rights surrendered to the priorities of transnational corporations, Wall Street, and the American military industrial complex.
The easy path forward for a Biden administration is to create an extension of the existing status quo as a hybrid of policies from the Obama and Trump eras that will appeal to the majority of American voters who prefer a Fortress America set of policies.
It is likely that this desire to maintain a form of the American status quo will not survive the impact of exogenous events generated during the coming 20-200 year Air sign Jupiter-Saturn supercycle, but what those impacts might be remains to be seen.
After a long testing year of PAN-ic, PAN-demic and political and economic upheaval we are all ready for some ease and grace this holiday season! We send you love and light and Reiki Blessings from Winston Salem during this season of the return of the light.
Meditation Moment: Consciousness Expansion For World Peace
"Evolving is about being able to enlarge the sphere of your
concerns and activities with each day that comes. But what do we
find? Humans are concerned above all with their personal
interests and slightly with those of their family and their
country, all of which leads to so many misunderstandings.
Many people will say there is no greater ideal than to work for
one's country. This is not so, because their country does not
represent the whole. If everyone set to work solely for their
country, it would inevitably lead to conflicts with other
countries.
When you concentrate exclusively on a part of the
whole, you necessarily enter into conflict with other parts of
the whole.
World peace would require people to see things from
the broadest, most universal perspective.
In order to evolve, you have to continually expand your point of
view, open your heart to an increasing number of creatures and
use all your will to make the universal family a reality."
--Omraam Mikhail Aivanhov