Cosmic Fireworks and Buddha's Birthday
Welcome to the Thursday April 25, 2013 Scorpio Full Moon, Taurus Solar Festival, Wesak edition of the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast.
Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry.
The global spring spiritual festival of Buddha’s Birthday, Enlightenment and Death is called Wesak, and this Festival occurs this year on Thursday April 25, 2013, the day of the Scorpio Full Moon eclipse and the Taurus Solar Festival.
A Personal Note
On a personal note, Jane and I have spent three of the last eight weeks in Florida, where Jane’s amazing 91 year old Father, Paul Sherry, died of pancreatic cancer a couple of weeks ago.
Paul chose the same month to die as Hugo Chavez and Margaret Thatcher, just after Comet Panstarrs lit up the sky, and just before the Scorpio Full Moon Festival highlights the mysteries of death and transformation. He died just after the Passover Full Moon and just before Easter, an auspicious time to make his transition.
Paul worked at Bloomingdale’s in Boca Raton, Florida full time in the men’s department until December 23, of last year, after 26 years of service there, when he quit at age 91 for health reasons. Paul was an honorable man who did his best to fulfill his dharma in this lifetime, with the style and flare so typical of the Cocktail Generation who conquered the world for America. We love you Paul!
Full Moon in Scorpio Taurus Solar Festival & Buddha’s Birthday
This Full Moon is the Festival of the birth, death and enlightenment of Gautama Buddha.
Astrologically this is an exceptionally potent Full Moon in Scorpio Festival for all of us because there is a partial eclipse, and eclipses are thought to potentize the energies of the Full Moon while also providing a kind of reboot of our nervous system, and our auric bodies as well.
This Full Moon also features Saturn and the Moon in Scorpio opposed by the Sun and Mars in Taurus, not an auspicious combination of stars by anyone’s reading.
This combination of stars speaks of a brush with death, sorrow, confrontation, fear, frustration, anger, unsatisfying retaliation against enemies and deep mysteries that have not been even slightly unraveled yet.
Americans are experiencing all these emotions in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombings.
This month’s Scorpio Full Moon would be a great time for prayers, good energy, mantras and other loving thoughts you might send-off for victims of the Boston bombings, and for all our ancestors.
Our challenge this Full Moon Festival is to overcome fear, take courageous risks to advance the onset of the Forces of Light and Love, patiently endure the frustrations of a time when oppositions create a kind of Cosmic gridlock in the stars, and meditate deeply upon matters of human death and transformation.
This can lead to empowerment.
The Buddha himself was set upon the eight-fold path to Enlightenment when he accidentally gained access to the reality of human mortality and suffering, which his noble parents had sought to protect the young prince from ever seeing first-hand.
This Wesak we can follow him directly by reflecting upon the consequences of human mortality and suffering.
I will call that a blessing.
In the East, Wesak is a yearly Festival commemorating the birth of Gautama Buddha, his spiritual enlightenment, and his transcendent journey beyond the manifested universe.
In the West, the Festival of Wesak is a Global Celebration of the work being done by the Ascended Master Teachers in Spiritual Worlds and by the New Group of World Servers, also known as Lightworkers, in the physical realm on planet Earth.
Over the last one hundred years, the Celebration of Wesak has become a World Festival of Spirituality, of tremendous import to a variety of spiritual seekers, meditators, Lightworkers and others who practice outside the Buddhist community. Wesak is now a major celebration for spiritually minded people in India and America alike.
The 20th century Theosophist, clairvoyant, spiritual teacher and esoteric astrologer Alice Bailey discussed the new global tradition of the Wesak Full Moon Festival in her booklet, “The Wesak Festival: A Technique of Spiritual Contact”.
“As one studies the world situation today, it becomes apparent that the secret of synthesis has been lost. Humanity is divided – one section against another section; the East versus the West; one race against another race; one nation against another nation,” Alice Bailey explains. “Men need to get back to the ancient knowledge that our planet is intended to demonstrate the essential unity of humanity, and that the energy which should manifest is that of integration and coherence. When this is truly realized our present world problems will adjust themselves, and the basic world rhythm will be re-established and stabilized.”
“Unfortunately, as yet, the race as a whole is not group conscious, and therefore average humanity cannot be trusted to work, think and plan for the group,” Bailey continues. “Men are as yet too selfish. In this fact, there is, however, no cause for discouragement, because to those who have a wide world vision it is also become definitely apparent that group consciousness and group responsibility are already something more than simply a lovely vision.”
Cosmic Weather Forecast: Stormy, Volatile, Vast and Fast Changing Patterns
Wesak is always the moment in the yearly seasonal round when we experience the Scorpio-Taurus polarity. Taurus, associated with the planet Venus, is about abundance, beauty, joy and material pleasures at the most basic level. Scorpio is ruled by the planet Mars and is associated with deep mysteries and transformations, death, sexual union, and states of consciousness that transcend the egoistic personality.
The opposition of Scorpio and Taurus highlights the tension between the desire for a graceful, abundant life, and the fearful transformations that we may have to undergo in order to achieve our most precious material and spiritual goals.
The keynote for the 2013 Wesak Full Moon Festival is learning to balance Scorpionic risk and Taurean reward. As a species and as individuals we are being challenged to take a closer look at the risks and rewards associated with our behavior.
We are at a time of tremendous change, tremendous challenge, tremendous risk and tremendous opportunity.
We are all challenged at the material, mental, emotional and physical levels to be prepared to take risks and to be able to exit our comfort zones in an orderly and graceful manner in order to be free and positioned to take advantage of extremely attractive golden opportunities that will soon offer us entirely new pathways to explore in life.
We are challenged to become active explorers, to let go and let loose, but we have to balance what might gain from the exploration against its total cost, including the costs to others and to the planetary eco-system that sustains human life.
At the same time we are conscious of tremendous risks associated with any and all deviations from conventional wisdom in all areas of life.
When we see hundreds of millions around the world suffering, it becomes imperative to act, even when the risk is great, because the rewards for helping in various small ways to alleviate that suffering dwarf that great risk that frightens us. That is why we must be courageous to be explorers of life.
This Wesak Festival occurs with the Full Moon at 5°45’ Scorpio, as we celebrate the Taurus Solar Festival at 5°45’ Taurus.
The Sabian symbol for this degree of Scorpio is -- The Gold Rush Tears Men Away From Their Native Soil.
What motivates people to take great risks in search of great rewards?
The desire for a better, more abundant life produces an inner force so strong that it overcomes the individual’s attachment to home, family, established custom, community and the security and safety we find in living within established boundaries and fulfilling appointed duties and social roles.
The strength of that inner force of desire is often based upon a feeling that the old ways of life no longer have the power to provide a life of abundance, security and safety.
The danger of this influence is that individuals can be overcome with fear and greed, and that under the influence of these negative emotions, it is possible to justify crimes of all kinds against humanity, from environmental depradation to theft, murder and more.
We live in a global society that lives by a simple rule: Winner Take All!
The Winner Take All society provides unprecedented rewards for the 1% who have exceptional talent, exceptional will forces, and/or exceptional wealth and power which can be leveraged to acquire more and more.
On the other hand, the Winner Take All society provides a sliding scale of punishments for all those in the 99%.
If you are upper-middle-class you will be taxed as an oligarch, and you will probably enjoy few of the political privileges of the true oligarchs in the 1%, making it hard for you to avoid onerous taxes, obtain favored inside information for investment purposes, or influence politicians to obtain lucrative contracts or legislation designed to enrich you and your business.
If you are middle class you will be treated as a second-class citizen, whose opinions are completely unimportant, and all the social benefits you have paid taxes to obtain over the years will be slowly removed from the social contract.
Can you depend upon social security or Medicare to provide for your old age? Yet you paid taxes for your whole adult life to support these programs.
Can you depend upon the banks and Wall Street firms to protect your savings and offer you a reasonable return on deposits and investments? I know, you’re laughing as you read this, so please take a moment to review this amusing website entitled Justice Banking, and be sure to click on the "customer appreciation video" by Animal Kingdom, a Brit band.
Can you depend upon the medical system to keep you healthy throughout your life at a reasonable cost?
Can you depend upon government agencies to guarantee oversight of the environment, or provide clean water, clean air, healthy food, and other necessities of life?
Of course not. Only the extremely wealthy can afford these types of social goods.
And if you are one of the working poor, the disabled, the elderly, or one of the millions without work, without hope, without a future, you are criminalized by the society. You are always just one step away from jail. In Ohio, debtors are being thrown into jail. In New York, hundreds of thousands of non-Caucasian people are stopped, frisked, and arrested for possession of tiny amounts of marijuana every year. If you are poor, and especially if you are not white, you are assumed to be a potential criminal. There is no presumption of innocence in a criminal justice system that relies upon profiling and arrest quotas to measure efficient policing. And so it goes.
Yes, we all sense that we are living in a system that creates a constant sense of crisis, along with a constant sense that there are golden opportunities available, but only for a tiny fraction of the population.
We are living in a society that is failing 99% of us, and that threatens to strip us of our rights as citizens if we have not sufficient wealth and power to protect ourselves from the parasite classes at the top of our social pyramid.
The Winner Take All Society uproots individuals from their homes, their families, their communities, their traditional values, and their accustomed ways of living.
As in a gold rush town of the 1840s, where miners cheat, steal and kill to reach their goals, life is cheap in the Winner Take All Society, and sophisticated crime becomes the path to riches.
The Winner Take All Society tends to reinforce negative human tendencies of anger, fear, greed and aggression. We are in danger of being plunged into the next phase of the Winner Take All society, a society that embodies the War of All Against All.
This is a moment of supreme spiritual warfare on planet Earth. There are spiritual forces that desire nothing more than to derail the evolutionary path of humankind which leads ultimately to a society ruled by Loving Wisdom.
These forces wish to starve the souls of human beings by concentrating their Universal Life Force Energy in the lower chakras, and engaging humanity in an unbridled war for resources on a planet in need of environmental healing.
If humanity becomes embroiled in a War of All Against All, in which each human being acts upon the impulses of fear, anger, aggression and greed which are promoted so vigorously by the current popular culture across the globe, humanity’s soul development will be stunted.
In fact, we are in danger of losing our core virtues of compassion, community, and higher consciousness in a world focused upon survival issues, personal aggrandizement, ego-inflation, and rampant narcissism.
This is the objective state of human civilization in the year 2013. We are in danger of entering into a long Dark Age, a neo-feudal society ruled by Imperial warlords, financial aristocrats, Barons of resource extraction, celebrity politicians and Lords of the Internet Cloud, who live above the law and profit by the ongoing theft of money, liberty and blood from the 99% of society.
The Winner Take All Society rests upon an unsustainable philosophical foundation -- The War of All Against All -- and creates a society fractured by unbearable class, race and gender conflicts, increasingly intense competitive economic pressures, and heightening tensions between nations, states, cities, and rural communities for increasingly scarce resources, like oil, gas, water, minerals, and good land, in a world feeling the first blows of global warming, rising sea levels, increased coastal storms and widespread desertification.
Here in America, we have solutions to these problems.
America’s War on Terror is in fact a global war for full-spectrum military dominance of air, earth, sea and space, which will allow America to survive and thrive in a world of environmental challenges, the breakdown of nation-states, and increased military competition among national state actors for increasingly scarce vital resources over the next century.
On an individual level, Americans are stockpiling gold, guns and dried food in elaborate bunkers designed to act as fortresses of last resort during a global social breakdown, protecting the inhabitants from their neighbors and from any environmental or political refugees that may appear on the horizon.
According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, Americans own an estimated 270 million guns, making US citizens the most heavily armed in the world. The US Dept. of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has registered 488,000 machine guns and over 2,000,000 “destructive devices” such as hand grenades owned by Americans.
As the pressures on working people, students, and those with emotional or mental instability increases with each passing year, in our Winner Take All War of All Against All Society, it’s not surprising that in a nation so heavily armed there are spectacular examples of mass violence.
One would expect to see them rising over the last few years, given the global economic crisis that began five years ago, in 2008, and threatens to deepen in the near future.
Recent history bears out this grim expectation.
The mass murder of 26 children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut in December of 2012 startled the nation. The Newtown massacre followed on the heels of the July 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, in which a gunman killed 12 and injured 58 others watching a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
USA Today reports that “A USA TODAY analysis of FBI records has identified 186 mass killings since 2006. That includes 146 mass shootings, which are defined by the FBI as incidents where four or more people are killed. Nearly half of those involved someone killing family members.
The bloody trend is toward more and more extreme gun violence year after year.
Yet the American people and their leaders show no intention of using the legal system to regulate and control the ownership of guns in their highly weaponized society.
Fortress America -- Home of the Planetary War Machine
In 2013 America is an increasingly militarized society in every way. America has stationed military personnel in 130 countries around the world.
America is at war in Afghanistan, supporting one faction of a civil war in Syria, and engaged in low-intensity and/or covert military type operations in many nations around the world.
“According to testimony by [Navy Admiral Eric] Olson before the House Armed Services Committee [in 2011], approximately 85 percent of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen,” reports Nick Turse in Salon.
Very quietly the War on Terror continues to heat up, worldwide.
So it’s not surprising that when two young Chechen-Americans are accused of planting bombs at the Boston Marathon which exploded during the race, killing 3 people and injuring 282, there are calls to curb immigration and a knee-jerk suspicion of all Muslims rises to the surface of the national consciousness yet again.
It is important to note that despite unprecedented security measures at the Boston Marathon this year, two young men who appear to have acted on their own rather than as part of a larger group of political terrorists, were able to do so much damage with some home-made pressure cooker bombs.
America’s multi-trillion dollar expenditures on Homeland Security and the militarization of big-city police departments did nothing to thwart this attack, which flashes a green light to crazies, terrorists and extremists of all varieties and demonstrates that low-tech mass bombings are easy to implement and extremely effective as long as the bombers are willing to die.
In this case, the attack resulted in the lockdown of one of America’s biggest cities for nearly a day, and generated worldwide media coverage.
I believe there is a message for America in these recent bloody mass murders and in the Boston Marathon bombing.
More and more police and military personnel with more and more power over civilian authorities and civilian life still cannot guarantee personal security for citizens in 21st century urban centers.
Only a radical change in human social relations, human consciousness, and human political arrangements and structures can bring us the peace and security we so desperately crave and seek to create through the use of overwhelming state power, controlled violence, ubiquitous surveillance and other systems of control.
The fault lies not simply in the individuals who perpetrate acts of wanton violence but also in the nature of social relations which distort the individual in unwholesome ways to unwholesome ends.
It is time to rethink the current social contract. It is time to reject the Reagan-Thatcher political consensus, the current neo-liberal economic model, and the Utopian laissez-faire capitalism of Ayn Rand, and end the failed social experiment we have been subjected to over the last 30 years. It is time to overturn the neo-Feudal rule of the 1% and transform the Winner Take All War of All Against All Society.
It is time for America to consider ending the War on Terror and sitting down to make peace with Muslim leaders while entering into agreements with them to use standard police powers to eliminate terrorist organizations in return.
In the name of the War on Terror America has spent many trillions of dollars, Americans have given up a wide array of heretofore inviolable civil liberties, and Americans are engaged in a long-term global confrontation with the multi-billion person strong Muslim civilization, that could continue for the next hundred years.
The War on Terror has not gone that well for America, so far. We are now 12 years into this war in Afghanistan, and are looking for an exit strategy. Our original enemy, the Taliban, have reasserted control of much of the southern part of the country near Pakistan, which is not co-incidentally the site of the world’s largest poppy-growing region. The American puppet, I mean Afghani President Karzai, finds his reputation sullied by the fact that his brother is a major operator in the international poppy/heroin industry.
American soldiers complain that they cannot trust the Afghani police forces who are supposed to be a key pillar of the American exit strategy. America will supposedly hand off responsibility for protecting Afghanistan from a resurgence of Taliban rule or the rise of some new warlords to the Afghani police forces. Good luck with that.
America was officially at war with Iraq from 2003-2012, nearly nine years. We supposedly started the war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction controlled by Saddam Hussein, who was said by our President to be associated in some vague way with the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. There were no such weapons.
Opponents of the war argued that the war was for control of Iraq’s massive oil reserves in a time of increasing anxiety about the apparent plateauing of oil and gas production worldwide during a time of unprecedented population explosion, scary climate changes, and massive growth of the fossil-fuel dependent middle classes around the world.
If that was so, and a number of establishment thinkers and ex-politicians have admitted that there is at least some truth to the argument, then this was certainly a key reason that Iraq had been targeted for regime change for years prior to 9/11 by American strategists of a certain political persuasion.
If oil had anything to do with American motives for starting the Iraq war, there has been only one main outcome of that war on oil markets. A great deal of potential Iraqi production has been effectively shut out of markets, because of all the fighting throughout the country, which has not by any means abated since the American “withdrawal”. So oil prices have been kept artificially high as a result.
I suppose that benefits Exxon and the oil barons of Texas who were friends of the Bush family, so who is to say that American oil interests were damaged by the war? As continued low-intensity civil war in Iraq between Sunni Muslims, Shi’ite Muslims and Kurds threatens to break Iraq up into separate Arab and Kurdish countries, the Americans may well find their oil companies can make good deals with the Kurds.
On February 13, 2013, UPI reported that “Exxon Mobil, the world's biggest oil company, is pushing ahead with its controversial drive to develop oil fields in Iraq's independence-minded Kurdish enclave despite fierce opposition from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's central government in Baghdad.”
If America wanted to weaken Iraq by Balkanizing the country, creating ethnic conflicts that would destroy the nation over time, and thus render its resources more readily available, perhaps the Iraq war was successful to some extent, after all.
There are numerous contradictions in current American policy, however, that strike at the heart of the ideological foundations of current policy prescriptions and strategies.
As of today, American officials express public concern that Iraq’s current government is too friendly with Iran. That is to be expected when Shi’ite Muslims are in power in both countries.
The War on Terror has triggered an all-out low-intensity civil war between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims across the entire Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. Americans can only benefit from this civil war, which weakens their Muslim enemy considerably.
American officials blame Al Qaeda for 9/11 and for fomenting the entire global Muslim fundamentalist jihad movement, and Al Qaeda was created by Saudi Prince Osama Bin Laden, a Sunni Muslim.
Yet Americans currently back Muslim extremist opposition groups in Syria which are said by the President of France to be closely linked to Al Qaeda, and the Americans propose that leaders of this confederation be made the new government of Syria once NATO and American surrogates have deposed current President Assad.
Some American leaders are also said to fear that once their own chosen surrogates gain control of Syria, they will become allies with the Sunni Muslim Al Qaeda infiltrated Iraqi forces, and then be poised to attack the Shi’ite Muslims in several countries, perhaps even to retake Iraq.
So if the War on Terror is a success, it certainly could only be because it has created such chaos in the Middle East that the region is devolving into the status of a series of failing and failed nation-states riven by sectarian civil war based upon religious and ethnically based identity politics.
At that point, with the Americans operating as self-appointed policeman for the resource rich region, American control of the flow of the lion’s share of global hydrocarbon resources would be assured for the foreseeable future, giving America a tremendous advantage at a time of potential resource shortages, famines, and catastrophic climate change.