Celestial Fireworks in the Cosmic Weather Forecast
Welcome to the Wednesday March 27, 2013 Libra Full Moon, Aries Solar Festival, Passover, Holi and Easter edition of the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast.
Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry.
The Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival highlights relationships and the power of Love. And this week’s Full Moon is extremely powerful so be ready for events to rock your world.
The Jewish Feast of Passover, celebrating the Liberation of the Hebrew nation from bondage to the Egyptian Pharaoh, begins this Tuesday March 25 and ends Tuesday April 2 this year.
A highly combustible Full Moon occurs at 06° 52′ Libra on 27 March 2013, 02:28 AM PDT, or 5:28 am EDT. This Full Moon will be a quite a volatile Cosmic event, because Luna in Libra lights up in a confrontational direct opposition to Sun, Uranus, Venus, and Mars in Aries.
The Full Moon this year co-incides with the Hindu Festival of Holi. Holi is a venerable and potent festival of regeneration, resurrection, renewal and new life, celebrating the Victory of Lord Vishnu, Sustainer of the Universe, over the King of Demons, and the Victory of Eternal Light over Darkness.
This Libra Full Moon Festival is the first of the three great springtime Full Moon Spiritual Festivals celebrated by Theosophists, Lightworkers, and spiritual seekers from all religious and spiritual traditions worldwide.
This Libra Full Moon Festival, which normally occurs around the time of the spring equinox, precedes the Festival of Easter. The date for Easter is based on the Christian solar calendar. Easter always falls on the Sunday after the paschal full moon, which occurs on or just after the spring equinox. This year Easter falls on Sunday March 31st.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the weather is cool and spring-like, changeable and blustery. Our rainy season, which normally peaks in March, is not delivering much-needed precipitation this year. Reservoirs are thankfully at a high level because of last year’s heavy rains and snowfall.
Meanwhile, throughout the Eastern and Midwestern US we have just experienced a cold and stormy start to spring. This is the complete opposite of last year, when we had the warmest March ever, with over 3000 record highs in cities from the East Coast through the Rocky Mountains.
Although no direct correlation can easily be drawn between this freakish weather pattern and global climate change, we have seen enough over the last few years to be concerned. Extreme weather events are becoming the new normal.
The Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival of Love and Light
The Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival highlights relationships and the power of Love.
The Sun in Aries accentuates the drive to individuation, and at this time of year, the power of the individual will forces in humanity are vastly strengthened. Aries is a fire sign, the sign of the pioneer, the risk-taker, the way-shower, the ground-breaker, and sometimes of the me-first individualist.
The seasonal cycles we can observe in the natural world mirror the fiery, active nature of the Aries personality. In the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun enters Aries, usually a couple of weeks before this Festival occurs, the Spring Equinox heralds the approach of a time of blossoming flowers, blooming trees and vivifying rains. Conditions are ripe for the planting of seeds, the tending of sprouts and preparations for another year’s agricultural cycle. Humanity feels the quickening of dormant life within the Earth, after winter’s cycle of hibernation and involuted energies. Spirits rise, sexual energies are aroused, and we greet a new astrological year with a sense of renewal and anticipation.
The Solar Festival of Aries coincides with the Full Moon in Libra, the sign of relationships, dynamic equilibrium, diplomacy and tact. Libra is the polar opposite of Aries, and Libra energies are the perfect complement for Aries individualism and impetuosity.
The Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival is the Festival of Resurrection, and at this time we celebrate the Sacrifice, the Suffering, the Death and the Triumphant Rebirth of Jesus Christ, at the time of the Sacred Feast of Easter.
The Resurrection is a Miracle of Love. The Divine Love manifested in the Self-Sacrifice of Jesus Christ created a new energy signature within the etheric body of planet Earth, which corresponded to a new spiritual pathway in the collective consciousness of all human beings. This new pathway provided a template for a new way of life for suffering humanity -- an Ascension path that leads through Love to Forgiveness, the conquest of all human failings, and the Self-Expression of the Divinity which is the true face of human nature in all its glory.
This Divine Love, this monumental Self-Sacrifice, celebrates the healing power of relationships, and the innate ability of humankind to transcend the individual personality, the individual will and the limited and self-limiting perspective of the ego-self.
At the time of the Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival the Hierarchy of Ascended Masters pours forth a potent, healing stream of unconditional love and creates an enhanced energetic field supportive of all Ascension practices.
These energies are available to all Lightworkers, meditators and seekers who choose to access this Love and Light by participating in spiritual practices of their choice during the three day period of the Libra Full Moon Aries Solar Festival.
You can participate in the April Festival of Love and Light by meditating upon the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which takes place on Easter Sunday.
You may want to fashion your own meditation practice for this Full Moon Festival just prior to Easter, or you may want to utilize a Christian practice which is part of your spiritual tradition.
You can also join us in a meditation designed to bring about peace, harmony and goodwill which was designed for this Universal Planetary Spring Full Moon Festival. You'll get all the simple directions for this global group meditation a little further along in this newsletter!
Cosmic Weather Forecast
The Libra Full Moon and Aries Solar Festival is a time to reflect upon the interaction of the individual and the group in which she lives.
Libra is ruled by Venus, and can be symbolized by a dove of peace. Aries is ruled by Mars, symbolized by the ram. The ram is a belligerent beast, strong for its size, and armed with powerful horns used to batter opponents into submission.
This Full Moon is a time for each of us to attempt the difficult and intricate task of balancing our energies and our commitments between our individual needs and desires and the needs and desires of the various communities to which we belong.
When we stop to think about it, we realize that we belong to so many groups, we have so many relationships! Family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, people who serve us in stores, restaurants, and elsewhere in our lives, people with whom we share a religious or spiritual practice, people with whom we share political beliefs, our nation, our race, people who share our sexual orientation and gender, and on and on it goes.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the demands of any group, so difficult to clearly see and feel the way we are inter-connected with the group’s members, and so tempting to put our own needs first, no matter what the end result will be for the group as a whole.
The Full Moon in Libra is all about subordinating the needs of the individual to the well-being of the group, as Jesus Christ did by his death and resurrection, celebrated in the wake of this month’s Full Moon every year. Jesus sacrificed his life to offer humanity an energetic pathway to eternal life.
This particular Full Moon in Libra is opposed by Sun, Uranus, Mars and Venus in Aries, the sign of the aspiring individual, the ardent warrior, the innovator and the explorer.
It’s safe to say that the Cosmic Weather Pattern at the moment is excessively fiery, prone to rash actions, belligerent talk and displays of machismo in all areas of life.
North Korea is threatening to attack the United States with nuclear weapons, once the North Koreans succeed in producing them.
China and Japan are arguing very publicly about who owns some small islands in South Asia, and Japan is quietly moving toward developing a nuclear strike capability while China quietly reduces its purchases of Japanese goods and services, which could hammer the struggling Japanese economy.
The war in Syria is on the verge of spilling over into neighboring states, and could yet involve some combination of NATO forces, US weapons, spooks, drones, troops and/or advisors, support for the two sides by the warring Shiite and Sunni Muslim superpowers Iran and Saudi Arabia, Israel and even the Russians.
To add to the super-combustible Cosmic Weather Pattern, Pluto in Capricorn is in square to all the planets lined up in Aries, and Pluto also squares the Full Moon.
Uranus square Pluto is of course the signature aspect that appeared at the onset of the global financial meltdown of late 2007-08, and this aspect will dominate the heavens through May of 2013 -- and beyond.
The square between Pluto and the Moon indicates that the collective consciousness of humanity, represented by the Moon, is wounded by the power of the Plutocracy, the 1% who rule the rest.
So these square aspects taken together indicate a time in which the rulers of the world are forcing the average people, in the aggregate, who are debtors and taxpayers, to transfer money to the bankers who have destabilized the global financial system, effectively bankrupting one country after another in Europe, and concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
The stock market is hitting new highs. The super-rich are indeed getting much richer, while the rest of us are being subjected to austerity budgets, pension give-backs, Medicare and Social Security “restructuring”, hiring freezes, wage cuts, layoffs and down-sizing.
Here in the United States, the government deficit has shrunk, but austerity politics polices the national conversation on money with an iron fist. The President still wants to go down in history as the man who was able to cut Medicare and Social Security, and reset the rules of the game in America to make the sick and the elderly much more vulnerable to predatory health care corporations and insurance companies.
To that end, Republicans and Democrats allowed self-imposed political gridlock to trigger Draconian cuts in government budgets, as a prelude to what President Obama hopes for in his dreams every night.
“Prominent Democrats -- including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation,” reports prominent Democratic economist Robert Reich in a recent article in The Huffington Post.
“Putting these two programs ‘on the table’ is . . . tantamount to accepting the most insidious and dishonest of all Republican claims: That for too long most Americans have been living beyond their means; that we are rapidly approaching a day of reckoning when we can no longer afford these generous ‘entitlements’; and that prudence and responsibility dictate that we must now begin to live within our means and cut back these projected expenditures, particularly if we are to have any money left to invest in the young and the disadvantaged,” Reich contends.
“The truth is the opposite: That for three decades the means of most Americans have been stagnant even though the overall economy has more than doubled in size; that because almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top, most Americans haven't been able to save enough for retirement or the rising costs of healthcare; and that because of this, Social Security and Medicare are barely adequate as is,” Reich concludes.
Obama’s hoped-for “Grand Bargain” between the two parties involves shifting the balance of power so it favors large corporations, the financial sector, and the ultra-wealthy even more than today’s unraveling social contract allows.
That was the result of health care reform, which actually increases the markets for over-expensive health care delivered through the same highly concentrated oligopoly of cozy health insurance industry “competitors”.
“Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums for many individuals and small businesses could increase sharply next year because of the health-care overhaul law, with the nation's biggest firm projecting that rates could more than double for some consumers buying their own plans,” The Wall Street Journal reports in a March 22 article.
“In a private presentation to brokers late last month, United Health Group Inc., the nation's largest carrier, said premiums for some consumers buying their own plans could go up as much as 116%, and small-business rates as much as 25% to 50%,” according to the Journal article.
Health care providers are set to see huge jumps in profits as a result of Obamacare’s implementation, but our Prez wants to impose years of fiscal austerity, budget-balancing reductions in social services, and higher taxes on average Americans.
Oh yeah, and of course there will be new government subsidies and guarantees for the giant mega-banks on Wall Street who need money from our Prez, and ultimately, from you and me, in order to pay for their big bonuses, at a time when their banks are actually zombie financial institutions totally and constitutionally unable to produce a profit without direct government support.
“On February 20th, Bloomberg News editors headlined, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” and issued the first-ever thorough and current analysis of the taxpayer-subsidy to the Wall Street mega-banks,” reported Washington’s Blog on February 28, 2013. “They found that this subsidy is $83 billion this year, but they made no note of the fact that this amount is only $2 billion less than this year’s sequester cuts are estimated to be, so that all that would need to be done, in order to avoid those cuts, would be to have those mega-banks that we bail out every year forego their subsidy from taxpayers, for just one year. Unfortunately, this would be easier said than done.”
“That $83 billion subsidy this year is, according to Bloomberg’s, also approximately the amount of profits that those banks are ‘earning’ this year. So, if the mega-banks wouldn’t refund it out of what we gave them last year, then they could just refund it by paying to us [from this year’s government subsidy],” Washington’s Blog suggests.
Bad as all this sounds, Americans are still sheltered from the naked greed and political incompetence that shape financial realities in the European Union.
France has recently joined Italy, Spain, and Greece in the club of depressed nations whose economic woes threaten to destabilize the finances of the entire continent.
And with banks teetering on the brink of insolvency in the small island nation of Cyprus, which functions as a particularly attractive offshore banking haven for Russian oligarchs, the European Union has demanded that the government of Cyprus impose losses on some or all of the depositors in that country’s banks.