Full SuperMoon in Aries, Libra Solar Festival 2016, Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast
Welcome to the September 16, 2016 Full Moon in Aries, Libra Solar Festival edition of the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast.
This weekend, the Harvest Moon occurs in Aries, the sign of the individualist, and coincides with the Libra Solar Festival, celebrating life lived in relationship, along with community values. The challenge for each of us at this sacred time of year, when seasons shift, is to balance the needs of the individual and of the community.
Here in Florida fall is the planting season, not the season of harvest, although Jane and I discovered you can plant during the summer rainy season and begin to harvest vegetables and kitchen herbs right now!
Fall arrived in South Florida with a bang, ushered in by Hurricane Matthew, which cruised past us last week, 30 miles offshore.
The near-miss did not damage our baby garden in any way, but many people in Haiti, the Bahamas, and even the Carolinas have been devastated by the first Category 4 hurricane to hit Florida in years.
This was the second hurricane to hit Florida this year, of course. Hermine hit the West Coast of Florida a little over a month ago.
Since Matthew brushed by, the weather pattern has changed. It’s cooler and much less humid this week.
Despite beautiful fall weather in New York, with highs in the 60s and lows in the 50s this week, the snowbirds have started arriving here already. The Jewish New Year this month seems to have triggered the influx. Our favorite deli had a waiting line of fifty people at lunch today so we are adjusting our habits accordingly.
We are adjusting to the idea that autumn is prime planting and growing season here. Seeds are going in the ground, and what we planted a month ago has grown so much we’re amazed.
Despite the shorter days, and the fact that the sun is lower in the sky, the plant world is totally activated during this rainy season. We are eating lettuce, arugula and beans from our garden already, and have plentiful kitchen herbs like Cuban oregano, basil, and more.
We are benefiting in many ways from our new garden. We love tending our plant allies, and as we uncover issues with mealy bugs or whitefly or aphids, we gain a better understanding of the soil deficiencies and other conditions that weaken the plants and attract pests as a result.
Working with the plants helps us connect with the life in the soil, and with the elements in the soil that combine to nourish the garden over time. The soil is so sandy here that soil amendments can be sucked down below the surface layer so easily, especially during rains, so we have opted to grow many kitchen herbs, and vegetables in raised beds, filled with organic soil, organic fertilizer and of course the generous helping of peat and mulch that this climate requires.
We relax amid our plant allies and enjoy visiting them both day and night. Now we feel we are “embedded” in our new homestead, and we are beginning to experience the way this eco-system we inhabit transforms itself over time.
Dozens of recent studies have shown that horticultural therapy helps alleviate clinical depression, leads to improved scores in sciences among children, improves psycho-social functioning in prisoners, promotes health among older adults, and reduces stress among cardiac patients, improving their lives and enhancing rehabilitation.
On a subtle energy level, we have created a crystal grid around the house and garden and energized the area with Reiki and with mantras for healing and abundance. We have also energized our swimming pool with Reiki and with Aura Soma, a set of colorful liquids infused with herbs, gemstones and other energizing elements that activate and cleanse the etheric body and astral body and elevate consciousness, enhancing communication with Higher Mind, Guides and Teachers.
We always clear the perimeters of our home wherever we live, including the gardens in an attempt to create a holistic environment that has a spiritual highly charged eco-system with a clearly defined boundary. We don’t wear street shoes in the house and make every attempt to have a clear and clean house energetically.
Now we inhabit a sacred space, a space optimized for healing work, meditation, Reiki and all spiritual work. So now we feel at home! Contact us if you’d like help with creating your own crystal grid, or if we can help you formulate a plan to energize your own indoor or outdoor space with an altar or with Reiki energy. We can do this in person in Palm Beach County or via distance Reiki and other subtle energy healing modalities.
Cosmic Weather Forecast
The Full Moon in Aries occurs on Sunday October 16, 2016 at 12:23 a.m. EDT, at 23º Aries, opposed by the Sun at 23º Libra. That’s Saturday night at 9:23 p.m. Pacific Time.
This is a Supermoon because the moon will be at the point in its orbit closest to Earth, and will appear huge and bright in the night sky.
This is the Hunter’s Moon, the time of year in North America when indigenous people would venture forth to kill deer fattened on the bounty of summer growth and fall harvest, to create a food stockpile for the oncoming winter season.
So we could see this month’s Super Full Hunter’s Moon as a good sign – hunters certainly would benefit from its strong luminescence.
On a subtle energy level, stellar configurations indicate volatile emotions, chaotic changes, and unexpected turbulence in schedules and relationships.
The Moon shines bright, conjunct Uranus in Aries, which is once again square Pluto (and Mars) in Capricorn, a continuation of the long pattern of extremely disruptive outer planet aspects in Cardinal signs that began with the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008 and culminated in the Grand Cardinal Cross of 2010 and has persisted through a series of similar configurations we have experienced since that time.
So we are once again confronted with a conflict between the oligarchy and the people, between banksters and populists, between progressives and reactionaries, between those invested in the status quo and those demanding complete transformation of what they perceive to be a rigged social, political and economic system that is slowly destroying the planet’s ability to sustain human life – not to mention the myriad species of plants and animals that are being exterminated year after year, on land, in the air and in the seas.
This desire for positive change, which is a Uranian impulse, is blocked (squared) by the Plutonic obstacles that we encounter in our lives.
With Pluto in Capricorn, the sign of large institutions, we feel these Plutonic forces in action wherever we encounter concentrated forms of power hidden from view that shape the contours of our society.
These shadowy Plutonic forces can be seen in action wherever a small group of people are allowed to leverage vast power which is generally hidden from public view and subject to very little social accountability.
Bankers who shape our government and our economy to maximize their personal wealth are seen as a Plutonic force. Shielded from prosecution for their crimes that have cost over $10 trillion in taxpayer bailouts, these plutocrats socialize losses and privatize profits over the entire business cycle, for better or worse.
Technology behemoths inter-breed with government security agencies to strip-mine people’s privacy and use the data they gather to generate marketing dollars and to operate a 21st century Panopticon that spies on our phones and our emails and compiles video footage of public spaces in major cities worldwide.
Trans-national corporations that ignore the environmental consequences of their actions often have the power to help draft the laws and regulations that might inhibit them from their most predatory actions. They are perceived as Plutonic powers.
Government leaders who put the pursuit of power above their responsibility to the people are also Plutonic in nature. They say one thing in public and something entirely different in private, and are insulated from accountability when society suffers from their egocentric actions.
These various flavors of plutocrats have vast systems of surveillance and control at their disposal, the ability to project armed force around the globe, the ability to create financial bubbles and financial crashes at their computer screens, and armies of servitors zealous to implement their will in all areas of the social sphere.
Never in human history have so few been so rich, so empowered, so dangerous and so seemingly beyond all control.
Nevertheless, Uranus in Aries conflicts with these Plutonic forces, and surfaces as rebellion against “the system”, the status quo, the entire social hierarchy that we inhabit.
We see this rebellion manifesting in populist political movements around the world, where masses of people confront the power elites that are rendering life ever more conflicted, precarious and unhappy for the vast majority of citizens.
The forces of revolutionary change are Uranian in nature, and the forces of reactionary plutocracy are Plutonian in nature. And eventually, in such conflicts, over the long run, the Uranus impulse will prevail.
Here in America, for example, the desire for large-scale institutional change and dramatic transformation of the entire world-view underpinning status quo political parties led to the primary insurrections of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reports that roughly ¾ of American voters say the country is headed in the wrong direction. No matter who wins the election this year, the plutocrats can expect increasing blowback from the 99% over the next few years, and it appears that only a small segment of society would support the plutocrats or the status quo in a showdown.
This is understandable since the full effects of the Grand Cardinal Cross and the series of Uranus-Pluto squares surrounding it will manifest after the aspects have run their course. The most intense of these aspects are certainly over now, but we will see the most intense period of social change the planet has ever seen over the next six-ten years.
As individuals we can expect some degree of emotional turmoil this Supermoon. That’s typical of the Uranus-Pluto square, as we feel a burning need to transform large structures in our lives and to optimize and re-sort our close relationships. We just want to break free, but there’s so much in our way!
This Supermoon, the Moon conjunct Aries is square Mars conjunct Pluto in Capricorn, which amps up the conflicted energy a few notches.
Mars and Pluto in Capricorn signifies a lust for power and dominance exercised in secret, heightened sex drives, and the fortitude and determination to initiate, implement and complete difficult and challenging tasks.
Moon conjunct Uranus in Aries surfaces the long-repressed subconscious desires we all have lurking beneath the surface of our personalities. Sudden outbursts of emotion appear seemingly out of nowhere, exploding the structures of our relationships and the routine of our lives.
So with this combination of planetary influences it is not surprising that the second US Presidential debate, held a few days ago, revolved around an unexpected, explosive scandal dubbed “Pussygate”.
The mainstream media struggled to formulate the proper etiquette for discussing the video of Donald Trump’s “locker-room” comments about how a “star” like himself is entitled to take sexual advantage of women.
This revelation has triggered a civil war in the Republican party, with Trump and his defenders attacking the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senator John McCain, and a host of other Republican luminaries who found Trump’s overt sexism to be suddenly unsupportable.
The highly televised clash of ideas about immigration, national security, and how best to pull America out of its deeply held funk was suddenly derailed.
The subtext of the campaign has always been about the clash between Donald Trump the privileged hyper-masculine conservative and reactionary male versus Hillary Clinton the liberated, progressive, liberal female.
Despite the fact that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders created mass populist movements to confront the power of entrenched wealth and privilege in this country, sexual politics is the central campaign issue this Supermoon. Reforming the financial system and restoring a more equitable distribution of wealth in our society is no longer front and center in the news coverage of this campaign.
Because of the fallout from the fossil fuel driven Industrial Revolution, the entire biosphere is in danger of shifting to a new equilibrium which would render vast areas of the planet uninhabitable for humans in a few decades. Yet environmental issues are not a significant part of this Presidential campaign, and neither candidate has made environmental issues a priority.
Instead we see a referendum in America on the question of whether or not male celebrities, athletes, and wealth holders should be entitled to grab women by the genitals, brag openly about seducing the wives of business associates, speak of women in degrading terms in public, and generally objectify women they encounter in every area of their lives.
As of today, Thursday, October 13, Donald Trump denies ever groping numerous women who have accused him of sexual predation, and says he was just bragging about grabbing women by the pussy and hitting on married women on the Pussygate video but never did it.
But that’s last week’s news.
This BBC story from Thursday October 13 summarizes new accusations of sexual harassment surfacing in The New York Times, People magazine and elsewhere. Trump says he will sue The New York Times.
To the dispassionate observer of Cosmic Weather patterns, this escalating war over male sexual predation indicates that at the psychological level, the conflict between male and female deserves to be added to the list of today’s burning political issues, along with institutionalized racism, environmental catastrophe, and income inequality.
Sexual politics will be at the forefront of our collective consciousness for the next several years, no matter who is elected President as a result of the way this election campaign has evolved.
Because no matter which candidate wins, nearly half of the American public will say that the new President is illegitimate. This is the first election in America where one candidate wants to put the other one in jail. And the war between the sexes will continue to play out in the political arena.
It is perhaps tempting to dismiss the Pussygate scandal as an aberration which is in no way indicative of a widespread war between the sexes. After all it is hardly news that powerful, wealthy, entitled males push the envelope when it comes to acceptable sexual relations.
Can you say “Bill Cosby”? Or “Roger Ailes”?
Or ask El Goog (Google backwards) about “Berlusconi sex scandals” and you’ll get about 49,000 results in ½ second. Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, a bilious, right wing populist, hyper-masculine media mogul and billionaire, was convicted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute. Later the conviction was overturned as an Italian court said this “did not constitute a crime.” He is notorious for throwing bunga bunga sex parties. He would lure women to these parties by telling them he would get them jobs as weather girls on his TV network. Then. . . Ask El Goog.
Then there’s Arnold Schwarznegger. Playwright John Steppling writes in an article in Counterpunch that: “If Trump resembles [former Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi (and he does now more than ever), he also resembles former governor [of California Arnold Schwarznegger], and a host of other rich and powerful men in the public spotlight. For this kind of casual abusive misogyny is part of the performance for a certain class of men. Why else have money they will tell you? Great restaurants? Meh. Nice cars? That’s probably second place. Or travel? Nope. It’s access to beautiful younger women. The trophy wife sidebar phenomenon. The frat boy rape culture that is the default setting for privileged young white males.”
“I’ve seen it over the years, and I remember that former governor [Schwarznegger] in fact, back when he spent his days in gyms,” Steppling continues. “And it should be noted, I’ve seen an inverse phenomenon with professional athletes who actually often have to have bodyguards remove the groupie contingent from the hotel when they are trying to get to their rooms. And pop musicians. For this is the culture of total sexual objectification. Sex is currency. I remember that sense of entitlement.”
But it’s not about a few, rich, entitled men who routinely grope women, brag about their inappropriate sexual exploits, think workplace sexual harassment is an executive job perk, and maybe have swinger parties where women are treated as mere sex objects.
The media war over Trump’s history of sexual harassment of women is a reflection of a deep split in America’s politics, and a reflection of a deeper culture of misogyny that seems to be the default setting for the 21st century American male.
Last night on ABC News a new poll showed what would happen in America if only men or only women could vote for the President.
If only men could vote, Donald Trump would win 350 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 180, a landslide unlike any ever seen.
If only women could vote, Hillary Clinton would win 450 electoral votes, and Trump would receive only 80, an even more lopsided result.
These results indicate that there is a widespread sympathy among men for Trumpish behavior toward women, and a widespread aversion to the same behavior among women.
A HuffPost/UGov poll taken a week after the release of the Pussygate tape showed a majority of debate watchers thought Trump’s apology was insufficient, but a majority of men thought the apology was sufficient and/or unnecessary.
So is there something weird about women’s response, or about men’s?
It’s clear that the vast majority of American women haven’t been exposed to Trump, Cosby, Schwarznegger or Berlusconi, so what fuels their repulsion toward this type of behavior?
Maybe because such behavior toward women is extremely widespread in America.
For example, The Department of Defense estimates that in 2010 alone there were more than 19,000 violent sex crimes in the US military. This YouTube video explains that a female US soldier in the combat zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.
Ask El Goog about “top sex scandals in sports”. I dare you to go there. You’ll see about 3,270,000 results. Enough said. Of course a fair number of those will remind you of the sex scandals involving Catholic priests. Sports heroes and superstar coaches will abuse males and females with nearly equal abandon apparently.
There is a sexual sickness abroad in the land.
If you wonder how Donald Trump’s view of women evolved, and if you wonder how such widespread misogyny comes to dominate an entire culture, then take a look at this short, brilliant MTV video entitled American Male.
Perhaps hypermasculine athleticism and militarism and misogyny go hand in hand. Read the book Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit. Theweleit explores the images of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warriors of World War II Germany.
After all, we’ve been at war continuously for over 15 years, the longest continuous period of warfare in American history Military experts expect this war to continue for another two or three generations to continue. So it’s fair to say we live in a militaristic society. And it’s understandable that the militarization of America has affected the way men and women relate to one another.
For the German fascist warrior, masculine identity was a flight from the feminine, driven by a fear of ego dissolution experienced during affectionate sex, and warfare is the fulfillment of the repressed longing for a transpersonal experience. Buddy bonding is intense in life and death situations, and is seen unconsciously as the only legitimate way a real man is allowed to transcend the constraints of the ego self.
Athletic competition in such a society is the perfect training ground for the male warrior, and inculcates the necessary psycho-sexual mechanisms to perpetuate the bizarre mindset that glories in displays of dominance (like Trump, Schwarznegger and Berlusconi), and in inflicting pain on others.
In fascist societies men love all-male activities like sport that keep women at a distance, and see proletarian women, that is women of a lower class than themselves, as their worst enemies, as whores, and as legitimate targets for sexual violence.
This is an unpleasant set of realities for all of us to ponder deeply this Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival.
Yet there may be nothing more important in life than establishing right relations with those we love, especially those with whom we have sexual relations, and especially those of the opposite sex no matter what our sexual orientation.
Libra is the sign symbolized by a goddess holding a balance in her hand, and in the Tarot is pictured as Trump VIII, called Justice or Balance.
We would all do well this Full Moon weekend to meditate deeply upon the nature of sexual conflict and upon the necessity for us all to work towards creating a better balance in our relationships.
If you are interested in understanding the spiritual laws of love, you might want to read our free online e-book Back to the Garden: Cultivating Love in Our Lives.You’ll find a lot to meditate upon there I guarantee.
Meditation Moment
"Most men and women are so careless when they enter a relationship or a marriage! They imagine that everything will be easy, light and pleasant, since their partner is there, of course, merely to satisfy their needs. But gradually they begin to feel stuck, and then come the arguments and confrontations, until they understand that in order to restore the situation, they must each strive to forget themselves a little and think of the other.
What they mistook for recreation is in fact a school where they begin what for every human being is the most important apprenticeship: the expansion of consciousness.
Perhaps you are wondering what this expansion of consciousness means. It means leaving one’s small, limited self in order to enter the vast community of humanity and, for many, this apprenticeship inevitably begins with the experience called ‘falling in love’.”
Photo & Illustration Credits: October Gardens at Satya Center photo by Jane Sherry, Sky Reflected in Pool photo by Jane Sherry, Full Moon Reflected in Pool Photo by Jane Sherry, "The Lovers" tempera mixed media all by Jane Sherry, "Death Joins the Weird Sisters at the Dance" oil stick drawing by Jane Sherry, Libra clip art
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He has been an editor, publisher, investigative journalist, and restaurant reviewer, and has covered local, state and national politics, national security issues, the Federal Reserve and global central banking, the banking industry, personal finance, new media and information technology, and privacy issues in the digital age.
Curtis Lang's work has appeared in WORTH magazine, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, The Nation, Ad Age, New Media, NetGuide, ULTRA, <