February 2011 Cosmic Weather Forecast
Welcome to the Aquarius Solar Festival and the Leo Full Moon, Friday February 18, 2011 edition of the Satya Center newsletter and Cosmic Weather Forecast. Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry.
This week it's stormy in the East San Francisco Bay area, and seems more like late spring on the East Coast. We've encountered blustery winds, scattered downpours, and an amazing display of layered luminous fast-moving cloud formations, and we've seen a series of huge wide rainbows stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.
Jane is establishing her gardens while the East Coast is encased in a shimmering winter wonderland of ice and snowpack. Jane is working with Aerin Moore, a remarkable landscaper from Berkeley, who runs Magic Gardens, a tremendous resource for horticulture in the Bay Area.
Aerin's landscaping crew have transformed our back yard, which was basically a stripped down McSuburban horror. We've gotten instant gratification, with the addition of five foot tall weeping acacia, numerous seven foot Purple Leaf Purpurea, a trio of tall Fern Pines, six or seven varieties of aloe vera, a cohort of small glistening ground-hugging succulents, and assorted other colorful drought-resistant bushes and shrubs.
Perhaps best of all, Aerin cleared away areas for Jane to plant herbs and veggies, and brought us organic soil, compost and the requisite amendments to bring our ailing soil into balance. The next step for us, as in all of our gardens will be to apply biodynamic preparations, always a joyful magical task.
Now we are starting to feel like we've come home at last!
Cosmic Weather Forecast
This Friday, February 18, 2011, at 36 minutes after midnight Pacific Standard Time, 3:36 am Eastern Standard Time, Mercury, Mars, and Neptune all join the Sun in Aquarius opposite the Full Moon in Leo while Jupiter in Aries trines the Leo Moon, squaring Pluto in Capricorn, making this Lunar Festival an extremely combustible mixture of predominately fire and air elements, challenging our ability to stay centered and grounded.
The people of Egypt and Tunisia first took to the streets when Jupiter entered Aries in late January, square authoritarian Pluto in Capricorn, and now the revolutionary impulses stirred by the planet of expansion, enthusiastic spirituality, and optimism are pouring into a large Aquarian stellium, triggering an almost irresistible impulse to take action in pursuit of progressive change, on a collective and an individual level.
It is impossible to say where these impulses will manifest on the planetary stage this week, or this year, but over the next several months, as Uranus joins Jupiter in Aries, continuing to square Pluto in Capricorn, the forces of entrenched social power devoted to maintaining the status quo will increasingly be confronted by impatient, aggressive and zealous movements devoted to overturning all that is fixed in the social order.
This provocative Cosmic Weather Pattern indicates potential for an increasingly turbulent global atmosphere of toxic emotions, conflicted energies, adversarial thought-forms and widespread full-throated anguish seeking release in an outpouring of spontaneous social combustion.
Ubiquitous access to the Internet, TV and cell phones has exposed the masses of urban peasants who live on $2 a day in the Middle East to ideas of democracy, and highly distributed non-localized communications systems, as yet fairly resistant to attempts at command and control, display images that reflect the lifestyles of the affluent in advanced industrial countries, creating a tremendous disparity between aspirations and reality that is now exploding in the streets of Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen.
This Information Age Revolution is an apt expression of the current Leo Lunar Festival moment. The Sabian Symbol for 30˚ Leo is "An Unsealed Letter: The realization of the individual that all thoughts and all messages are inevitably to be shared with all men."
This is the seed thought for the Zodiacal end point of the regal, individualistic sign of Leo, which must finally come to terms with the spiritual truth that sharing is a fact of life on planet Earth. We are all interconnected at a subtle level, and it is ultimately impossible to hold others in ignorance through secrecy and deployment of powerful systems of repression.
This is also the lesson of the Age of the Internet, a lesson that the autocrats of the Middle East, royal lions of privilege, have yet to learn fully, although they are now being exposed to the truth of this energy signature, visible in the streets all around them.
The tiny elite class of Leonine wealth-holders who wield power in the entrenched authoritarian military oligarchies of the Middle East are being forced to make symbolic gestures of progressive transformation while continuing to tighten systems of social control in every way possible to them. The lesson of this month's Leo Full Moon Festival may take quite a while to unfold in these highly polarized parts of the world.
For these countries, the globalized digital economy continues to operate as a quasi-feudal system in which governments function primarily as enablers of predatory multinational corporations, factotums of the super-rich and enablers of a small class of financial parasites that are dedicated to maintaining a two-class society of Overlords and Peasants.
Nor is this unhappy condition confined to the less developed states of the Middle East, currently experiencing highly televised turmoil. To one degree or another, in comparison to the more optimistic, expansive and innocent days of the mid-Twentieth Century in the industrialized world, when the middle classes felt ever-increasing abundance and leisure to be their birthright, and engines of social mobility operated 24/7 to power the meritocratic escalators that would enable those born without benefit of trust funds to ascend to higher stations of life, the major industrialized and rapidly industrializing nation states in the world now operate as largely static hierarchical cultures -- highly authoritarian social systems defined by extremely well-defined class structures. America, China, England, India and Russia are prime examples of this Neo-Feudalism.
All this history is a prelude to the obvious conclusion that the uprising of oppressed urban peasants in the Middle East against their botoxed jet-set Overlords residing in gated guardhouse communities is a potentially virulent viral meme that could spread like Avian flu across oceans and continents now linked ever so tightly by supply chain webs delivering agricultural products of undefinable provenance, financial instruments of dubious and virtually undecipherable value, and highly sophisticated media products designed to glamorize through the power of digitally mediated virtual worlds delivering unalloyed celebrity-obsessed voyeuristic visions of unobtainable fictional realities.
When infected by memes of optimism, communal solidarity and bootstrapped, highly networked resistance to Neo-Feudal structures of thought and behavior, this global network of self-hypnotic media Maya, originally fabricated to paralyze and control the unruly masses (TV), and to facilitate the operation of military systems of command and control (The Internet), now has the potential to short-circuit the global nervous system.
Spontaneous flows of unregulated creativity and ad-hoc collective thought-forms crystallizing unvoiced anguish and unimagined desire have the potential to galvanize the have-nots, triggering an uncontrollable reflexive paroxysm of revolt against the global structures of Panoptic control which, if left to proliferate without check, could eventually dissolve the self-imposed bondage known as "conventional wisdom" that binds the peasant classes to their feelings of powerlessness, feelings so convenient to those resident in gilded palaces of globalized fiancialization.
In short, the difference between the oppression of the Arab street, the oppression of billions of impoverished Chinese farmers, the oppression of the underfed billions inhabiting the "other India" outside the techno-bunkers of post-modern urban Brahmins, and the oppression of the American middle class by increasingly predatory Wall Street digerati and increasingly confiscatory Washington mandarins is only a matter of degree.
The great fear of those who hold the reins of power, by virtue of meritocratic mandate and mastery of post-modern technology, is that those vast billions of less successful human beings who are still unfortunately necessary to fuel the engines of economic growth and man the armies necessary to elbow aside competing techno-elites in what is conceived as a zero-sum winner-take-all world, will awaken to their commonality.
The New Peasantry of Neo-Feudal neo-liberal Globalization might simply refuse to participate in the Neo-Feudal global charade, as the denizens of the Soviet Empire one day in the late Twentieth Century awakened and tore down the supposedly impenetrable walls that surrounded them, de-programming themselves spontaneously and shedding the supposedly permanent ideological conditioning inhabiting their hearts and minds much as a healthy adult throws off a bad cold.
The lesson of this month's Leo Full Moon is that this fear is well-placed, and the emerging thought-forms of collective co-operation, freedom, and wisdom through love cannot be repressed or contained.
In America, this fear on the part of today's post-modern aristocracy has only hardened the resolve of those who have risen to the commanding heights by virtue of their intrinsic merit, their highly networked social connections and their willingness to sacrifice their own higher impulses to the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth and power.
Only a couple of months after providing the wealthiest Americans with tax breaks totaling around 3/4 of a trillion dollars, President Obama proudly unveiled his 2011 budget, which promises to slash a trillion dollars from "non-defense" related expenditures -- expenditures which not so coincidentally are designed to benefit the lower and middle classes, who voted in overwhelming numbers for the Visionary Politician who promised to restore equity, balance, and progressive values to a country increasingly divided by vast disparities of wealth and educational attainment so that culture wars, ideological struggles and indeed all visible evidence of discontent and bad manners might be permanently banished from public discourse and public view.
Remember Obama's rallying cry? As I recall the heady moment of Mr. Obama's election I cannot help but envision a different scene, a contemporary mind's eye view of free market, neo-liberal, neo-conservative, red-white-and-blue oligarchs intoning to themselves Obama's campaign mantra, "Yes, we can!", while contemplating the extremely convoluted post-modern irony now embedded into the contours of the President's new budget, and by extension, now burdening that short political catch-phrase with deeper meaning, endowing the one short sentence with rich, and enriching, overtones of Orwellian double-speak worthy of Big Brother himself.
Republicans and Democrats alike now agree on only a few things -- and that only when they can be distracted from their laser-like focus on deflecting the righteous anger of their constituents upon the heads of their hated elite competitors for political power.
They agree that the ultimate cost of the bailout of America's financiers could total unimaginable sums -- estimates vary, some as high as $10-14 trillion, but of course the total is impossible to know because official government policy is to conceal the extent of bad mortgages, soured commercial real estate projects, underwater derivatives contracts, and bad bank assets conveniently displaced to "off-balance-sheet" accounting havens impenetrable to the eyes of inquisitive individual investors.
They agree that many states and municipalities are liable to find themselves without money to fund their most basic functions, including police protection, education and fire control, and that it is vital to America's well-being that these spend-thrift entities be forced to don the hair-shirt of austerity, a hair-shirt that will not, alas, extend into the electronically fortified homogenized communities of the rich and famous.
They agree that under no circumstances should vital "defense expenditures" be slashed unduly. I mean we are only spending around a trillion dollars a year in pursuit of global Empire, after all. Over the next several years, these top-priority trillions are designed not just to pursue the unending War on Terror everywhere in the world, but also to underwrite numerous simultaneous wars for dwindling energy resources, to project unsurpassable American power into the depths of the oceans, where tomorrow's supply of very expensive oil will be found, and to establish offensive and defensive weapons of mass destruction throughout the space-junk cluttered strategic high ground of low Earth orbit outer space.
In short, the two major parties agree that a military Empire is good, that global corporations are entitled to earn ever-increasing profits, that financial manipulations conducted by sophisticated software programs that unfortunately sometimes malfunction, creating a few trillion dollars in losses for those uninitiated into the finer points of the derivatives trade, are an unalloyed social benefit, and that those who run America's largest institutions rule by virtue of their self-evident genetic superiority, so the primary job of government is to act as the concierge of the global elite and the disciplinarian of the as-yet under-developed underclasses.
The charade of culture wars that shakes the country from one end of the cable news spectrum to the other serves to mask the underlying consensus of elite opinion, allowing the continued concentration of wealth and power so visible in the United States to continue unabated under both Republican and Democratic administrations with barely a ripple in the good fortunes of those who have a few tens of millions of dollars in discreetly distributed investments dispersed wisely and widely throughout the bounds of the global Empire.
This elite consensus now threatens to undo the social democratic reforms of the Twentieth Century, including Social Security, Medicare, creation of a vast system of affordable higher education available to the vast majority of citizens, and a bias toward creation of an expanding middle class.
This same elite consensus threatens to eviscerate environmental rules and regulations in the name of "free markets" and to create jobs for the embattled middle classes, threatening to replace our living biosphere with a much more profitable technosphere controlled by a few giant oligopolies, in which a handful of companies pretend to compete for customers of their telephone, computer and television networks.
As if this reactionary project of restoring the rugged individualism of nineteenth century America in a 21st century global military Empire were not enough to stop all Aquarian projects of universal brotherhood, religious tolerance, and social conscience in their tracks, an unholy alliance between a very Piscean brand of fervent, militant, and nationalistic religious communitarianism is sweeping the world, and could threaten to return the entire planet to a mind-set that predates the French Revolution and restores the primacy of the priesthood and the power of the pious and purifying agents of a new post-modern Inquisition.
With religious fundamentalism on the rise in the West, the Middle East, and South Asia, all major religions excepting Buddhism are hardening into militaristic inward-oriented communities of exclusion, and linking their identity-based authoritarian structures to an increasingly popular brand of nationalistic adventurism that is an ideal vehicle for the manipulative propaganda of super-patriots and hypocritical political parties who see warfare as a glorious path to spiritual purification, ratified by a jealous God, and as a path to greater access to dwindling global energy resources in a time of peak oil and global environmental change.
In many strategically crucial countries, intolerant and aggressive nationalistic religious orientation creates ideal conditions for global war in a time of resource scarcity and economic insecurity. Israel, Pakistan, Iran, and America are examples of this unsavory trend.
These twin trends of militaristic religious fundamentalism and political Neo-Feudalism can be seen in the escalation of military confrontation between nations and in the increasing intolerance of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu zealots who seek to spread their Truth by the sword, sparing neither heathens, infidels, heretics or apostates in their own communities or in other communities around the world where their writ has yet to extend as fully as their God would undoubtedly prefer, if he could indeed be asked for his opinion on the matters at hand.
In the face of surging fundamentalism and know-nothing reactionary politics, America is threatened with erosion of its traditional reverence for Enlightenment values of religious tolerance, science-based cosmologies, and a relatively classless and meritocratic system of democratic governance, in which the children of rich and poor alike were exposed to the dangers of war, and mingled in shared public institutions and public spaces that now have virtually disappeared in cities and suburbs that increasingly resemble segregated class cantons defined by private security police, gated and walled enclaves and Panoptic surveillance systems designed to enforce the separation of the empowered and the powerless.
And let Lightworkers never forget that America is supposed to be the Beacon on the Hill in the present interregnum between the Piscean age of enforced sacrifice and the Aquarian age of enlightened co-operation.
This is clearly not a pretty picture, but the industrial strength emotions aroused by contemplation of this unfolding global catastrophe cannot be allowed to seize control of the aspirant's nervous system, resulting in an overload of anger, aggression, fear, or depression.
The call of this Leo Full Moon is to connect with the spiritual Lion within, to open the heart to the demands of the suffering billions around the world, to still the questing mind, and to connect with the Source of Love and our beloved Wisdom Teachings in Higher Worlds and in Higher Mind, for only in this way can we be blessed with instruction on how to constructively create an alternative path for humanity to tread during these most frightening and emotionally trying times.
This call will be heard, as I can attest from personal experience. The content of this month's newsletter was so intense that I found myself being concerned that it might trigger some negative emotions in our readers, potentially causing them to tune out, and to move to insulate themselves from current events, to bunker down and withdraw from society during these turbulent times, in pursuit of their own path of Spirit, apart from the disintegrating global Neo-Feudal order.
Meditating last night, on the first night of the 3-night Full Moon window, after writing the bulk of this message, I poured forth a heartfelt cry for inspiration and guidance, and was instructed to pass along a few messages.
First of all, I was directed to ponder the meaning of this weekend's Aquarian Solar Festival. The Sabian Symbol for 30˚ Aquarius is "Deeply rooted in the past of a very ancient culture, a spiritual brotherhood in which many individual minds are merged into the glowing light of a unanimous consciousness is revealed to one who has emerged successfully from the metamorphosis."
As I meditated, I was reminded that I had forgotten that no one can withdraw completely from the human condition, difficult though it may be. In fact, our spiritual fulfillment depends upon working for the betterment of humanity while focusing on our own inner spiritual development simultaneously.
Although the path of the renunciant is always available, even those yogis who retreat to mountains in the Himalayas are energetically connected to humanity and to the Spiritual Hierarchy, which is why they often are Guided to gather together spontaneously in remote locations to perform works of intense austerity and lengthy, arduous periods of meditation and prayer in groups to promote peace and understanding among the fractious peoples of the world.
I was reminded that it is important to work to promote right human relations in our own lives, in our families, among our friends and neighbors, and in the wider social circles to which we all belong, to the best of our ability.
I was reminded that with Saturn currently in Libra, trine to the Aquarian Stellium of this week's Solar Festival, there is a potent planetary energy dedicated to restoring the rule of right human relationships at this time, for Libra is the sign of the Scales, of Balance, and Saturn is the sign of established social structures.
This weekend the portals connecting our material reality with Higher Worlds are being flooded with this Saturn in Libra energy, which is very compatible with the energy of the Aquarian Revelation described above.
My Guides suggested that all Lightworkers who are able and motivated to do so join in a Full Moon Meditation focused upon loving kindness and the establishment of right human relations.
Here is a suggested format for such a meditation, which Jane and I will be performing this weekend.
Loving Kindness Meditation for Right Human Relations
Open your heart, for this is the keystone of all true awakening. When we meditate upon the suffering of our parents, our family, our friends, our loved ones, our co-workers, and on the suffering of the millions in the world who have not the food or shelter or medicine or love they need to survive and thrive in the world, our natural response is to weep with sorrow, to sincerely desire that this suffering should end. The recognition of the universality of human suffering is the beginning of compassion.
Here is a visualization you can do to stimulate the feeling of compassion and to send healing energy to suffering humanity.
Sit by your altar. If you can place some flowers, a crystal, a small offering of fruit or food on the altar, that is excellent. If you can light a candle or a ghee lamp or an electric candle on your altar that is also excellent practice.
If you are a Reiki practitioner, turn on your Reiki energy. Feel Reiki flowing from your hands.
If you are a crystal healer, attune yourself to your favorite crystal. Hold it in your hand or place it upon your altar. Feel the energy flowing between you and your favorite crystal.
Otherwise simply sit quietly, close your eyes and tune into Source. Invoke your favorite Deities, Angels, or Ascended Master Guides and Teachers, the Teachers of your spiritual lineage, and feel the flow of energy.
Tune into the "spiritual brotherhood in which many individual minds are merged into the glowing light of a unanimous consciousness" and know that this weekend's Festival is a Festival of Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood.
Feel the connection with Lightworkers throughout the world who are also meditating this weekend, and with their Guides and Teachers and the Great Beings of Light who oversee their Spiritual Lineages from Higher Worlds.
Visualize the Source of the energy of this weekend's Spiritual Festival as a great ball of fire, a Celestial Sun, hovering above your head. Now, see the energy streaming down from this Divine Source into your own being. Visualize this energy pouring into your crown chakra. Feel the warmth of the Celestial Sun on your head, and feel the warmth spread down across your forehead, your cheeks and into your neck and shoulders, streaming into your arms and down into your hands, until you can feel the energy tingling in your fingertips.
Allow this nurturing energy to fill your entire body, as if your body were an empty vessel of glass. With your mind’s eye you can see the energy filling your body, and you can feel the nourishment streaming down through your chest and stomach, filling your heart with light and love, filling and healing every part of your body along the way.
You feel and see this energy streaming into your hips, and down into your legs, pouring all the way into your feet, until you feel the love and brightness reach all the way into your toes.
Now visualize a person you know – perhaps the person you talked to on the telephone most recently, or whom you saw most recently at work or at home.
Feel the limitless energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands.
Visualize a golden stream of energy passing from your hands and your heart to the place where your reality intersects with this person. See that golden light connecting with that intersection, which is the place where your relationship resides, and fill that intersection between you with loving, healing energy.
Now visualize your best friend. Feel the limitless energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands.
Visualize a golden stream of energy passing from your hands and your heart to your best friend. See that golden light connecting to the place where your reality intersects with this close friend. See that golden light connecting with that intersection, which is the place where your relationship resides, and fill that intersection between you with loving, healing energy.
Now visualize your family and friends, gathered in a group around you. Feel the limitless energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands.
Visualize a golden stream of energy passing from your hands and your heart to the place where your reality intersects with these friends and loved ones. See that golden light connecting with that intersection, which is the place where your relationship resides, and fill that intersection between you with loving, healing energy.
Now visualize an individual with whom you have been having difficulties. Someone who rubs you the wrong way, someone with whom you seem to have difficulty communicating, someone who seems to see the world totally differently from the way you see the world. Perhaps this is someone with whom you have quarrels, or even outright fights.
Imagine that this person is sitting next to you. Now imagine that this person is interacting with your Spiritual teacher. You notice that your teacher can relate to them without conflict. Imagine that this difficult person is relating to their own friends and loved ones. Notice that they have no difficulty relating to these individuals. This is a clue to you that the difficulty in relating does not lie in the other, difficult individual, but rather in your own being. Allow that realization to sink into your mind, and rest with this new knowing.
Feel the limitless energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands.
Now visualize a golden stream of energy passing from your hands and your heart to the place where your reality intersects with this difficult person. See that golden light connecting with that intersection, which is the place where your relationship resides, and fill that intersection between you with loving, healing energy.
Now visualize the entire world, filled with individuals who are all suffering from their own difficulties, their own wounds, their own fears, anger, unfulfilled desires, jealousy, impatience, and alienation. Imagine the three billion people who do not have enough to eat, or a place to live today.
Feel the limitless energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands and go out to those who are suffering.
Visualize energy streaming forth from the Radiant Sun above your head. See this luminous, loving, healing energy stream forth, connecting with all those who suffer – with all of humanity. Allow this energy to pour forth from your heart, your hands and your mind into the world around you, enfolding those who are suffering in a stream of healing light.
Hold this image as long as you feel comfortable and simply feel the energy exchange as it continues.
In this way, you will be healed, and you will be empowered to heal others. Pass this blessing on to others, and in this way, just for today, let humanity’s healing begin. If you are feeling truly blessed by this message of love and light, please send it by email to others who would benefit from such a message.
New Articles at Satya Center
We are pleased to announce a very important new article on the current turbulent condition in today's world, entitled "The Blending of Races and Cultures: Moving Toward a New Race and Universal Religion" by Esoteric Astrologer Phillip Lindsay.
"The blending of races and cultures is all part of the Divine Plan and the world currently finds itself at a critical juncture in this process," Lindsay explains. "If we are to cultivate a world esoteric view, then we must be sensitive to the inner transformation of consciousness that is taking place and not be blinded by the maya of outer appearances."
Phillip addresses many of the iss