Weathering the Long Emergency
Welcome to the Thursday July 14, 2011 edition of the Satya Center newsletter and Cosmic Weather Forecast. This week we celebrate the Cancer Solar Festival and the Capricorn Full Moon.
Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry.
We all need a break from the Long Emergency. We are in a marathon run, not a sprint. There are no fast fixes to humanity's problems, only long-range solutions will be viable. So let us take the time this Full Moon to be gentle with ourselves and our loved ones.
Let the keynote of this Full Moon Festival be loving kindness. Let us take a moment out from the various emergencies we face and simply connect with loved ones. This is a great time of year to refresh ourselves by spending time in nature, so visit the beach, the mountains or the woods, and allow yourself to be inspired by the sublime beauty of this Creation.
Remember that we are in the midst of a collective spiritual initiation designed to elevate us to a totally new level of consciousness. If things are a little tough right now, that indicates that the transformation is deep and thoroughgoing, and that, ultimately is a good thing.
Thursday July 15, the Full Moon occurs at 23° Capricorn at 11:40 PM PDT, or, if you're on the East Coast, this Full Moon occurs on Friday July 15 at 2:40 AM EDT. The Sun will be at 23° Cancer.
Thursday night, Venus will be in Cancer opposing the Full Moon in Capricorn. More importantly, Venus will be forming a Grand Cardinal Cross with Saturn, Uranus and Pluto this week, squaring Uranus in Aries on July 7, opposing Pluto in Capricorn on July 8 and squaring Saturn in Libra on July 13.
The energy of the Grand Cardinal Cross continues to dominate the Cosmic Weather patterns this month. We'll have another round of the historic Jupiter/Uranus-Pluto-Saturn T-Square which includes a Jupiter-Saturn opposition, Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, and the Saturn-Pluto square, featuring Jupiter and Uranus in Aries, Saturn in Libra, and Pluto in Capricorn.
Pluto’s entry into Capricorn, on January 25, 2008, put the planet of sub-molecular transformation in the sign associated with big business, big government and big finance, and coincided with the beginning of the present economic crisis, which was predicted on this web site in February 2008 in an article I wrote entitled "The Coming Collapse of Globalization". Pluto will remain in Capricorn until March 23, 2023.
Astrologers who attempt to predict future trends and events associate the planet Pluto with the energy of purifying disruption and total renovation of outmoded or diseased elements. Thus since Pluto entered Capricorn a total restructuring of our large financial, corporate and governmental systems has been the top item on the Cosmic Agenda.
A series of Uranus-Saturn oppositions and Saturn-Pluto squares since Pluto entered Capricorn have co-incided with further systemic financial and political crises around the world.
The Saturn-Pluto cycle is considered a prominent indicator of world-changing events by mundane astrologers. Saturn and Pluto were square one another during World War I, in opposition during the Great Depression, in square at the start of World War II, and in opposition during 2001, at the outset of the so-called "War on Terror", which is really a global resource war as much as anything else, a response to the dwindling supply of hydrocarbons on the planet.
The first instance of Saturn opposing Uranus became exact on the day of the US presidential election in 2008. The opposition of these two slow-moving giant outer planets takes place five times between 2009 and 2012.
The planet Uranus is associated with revolutionary transformations, social upheaval, and lightning-fast changes from one state of being into another.
A Uranus-Saturn opposition indicates a vast struggle between elements that wish to preserve the status quo and elements attempting to birth new social relations, new social institutions, new social contracts and new cultural paradigms.
This type of dynamic is readily visible in today's world as we watch world leaders struggle to manage the global financial crisis. It is clear that global elites will go to any lengths to maintain the current financial system, which rewards them so well, and that these elites are so far having little real success in restoring normalcy to financial markets, currencies, or stock markets.
In February 2008 I said, "I believe we are witnessing the slow motion collapse of the current financial system, known as 'globalization', which is shorthand for a whole range of political, economic and social policies, including laissez-faire Utopian capitalism and its trickle-down economics, Reaganomics, free trade and the leveling down of global wages, human rights and environmental protection, financial deregulation and corporate oligarchy.
"For over a decade social reformers have waged an intermittent but high-profile mass movement protesting the current system, and anti-globalization protests have become a common occurrence from Washington to Europe to Japan.
"But now it looks like this mass campaign will not be necessary to topple the neo-liberal economic ideology that has had the world in its fevered grip for the last twenty-five years – the system is toppling of its own weight in a slow-motion collapse that will make the chaos that accompanied the unraveling of the Soviet Empire look like a Boy Scout jamboree."
Fast-forward to mid-year 2010. The Grand Cardinal Cross reappeared during the summer of 2010, as the BP oil spill transfixed the world community.
Despite a drumbeat of "happy news" in the mainstream American media, it was clear that this is no ordinary downturn in the business cycle, as the pundits and politicians and bankers proclaimed.
And as of July 2011, there is no recovery in America except on Wall Street, where stocks have recovered most of the ground they lost since the market bottom in March 2009.
Alan Abelson, the editor of Barron's magazine, reports that "while there are roughly 14 million people out of work by the usual count of unemployment, there are, uncomfortably, some 25 million by the U-6 measure." The U-6 measure includes both unemployed and underemployed.
There's a lot of pain out there! And there's still no recovery in sight.
According to a new analysis of the July jobs report by economist Gary Burtless from the Brookings Institution, "To bring the adult employment rate back to its pre-recession level, we would need to add about 11 million new jobs. At the pace of job growth we have seen since the start of the year, that task may take decades."
Meanwhile, Europe's economic union appears set for major problems. Billionaire financial guru Warren Buffett proclaimed this week that Greece would be almost certain to default on its debt, and banking insiders warned that France and German banks are holding hundreds of billions of dollars of Italian debt that looks increasingly likely to default.
Oh yeah, here in America Congress and President Obama have about a week to raise the debt ceiling or raise the spectre of a US debt default, which would have totally unknown consequences for financial markets. Of course, no one thinks the consequences will be helpful to anyone.
Unfortunately, with the Grand Cardinal Cross in play, political cold war is a more likely outcome than a diplomatic solution. However it is quite likely that trillions of dollars will be cut from Social Security, Medicare and other social programs in America, because President Obama, nominally a Democrat, has already signaled his willingness to gut the legacy of the Democratic New Deal, which could quickly turn America into the world's largest Third World economy.
Or maybe not. Maybe the United States is already the world's largest Third World Nation.
"If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark," social science Professor Richard Wilkinson told the TED Global 2011 Conference this week, according to a story in the UK Guardian. "The TED Conference brings together some of the world's smartest scientists, biggest thinkers, and most innovative do-ers to share their 'ideas worth spreading', the Guardian reports.
"Because if it's social mobility you're after, the USA (followed closely by the UK) is the worst place to live on Earth, according to Richard Wilkinson. . .His research has shown that the more unequal a country - ie, the greater the gap between rich and poor - the less people trust each other, the more heart disease they suffer, the greater number of murders there are, and the higher level of mental illness they suffer.
Status anxiety, according to Wilkinson, isn't some sort of existential malaise: it affects all people in all walks of life and entire nation states. If you really want to tackle diabetes or teenage pregnancy, or infant mortality, or depression, he argues, then you need to restrain City bonuses and raise taxes."
Of course capping compensation of Wall Street and City of London traders and raising taxes on the super-rich is not only not on the agenda of any major British or American politicians, merely mentioning the idea is enough to get one branded as an outlier, someone who has lapsed into a form of economic heresy that renders their opinions unfit for mass consumption.
However the economic crisis is not going away, and the impulse to give the super-rich .1% that own nearly half of all the wealth in the US and Britain a little taxation haircut will not be going away either, despite the best efforts of the mass media to portray populist impulses as inconsequential leftovers from the bad old days prior to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's War Against Social Democracy and The New Deal.
This is a turning point in history. The current global crisis is written in the stars, where we can clearly see a combination of extremely rare planetary configurations that only occur once in hundreds of years -- or even less frequently than that.
The negative aspects that have been recurring over the last few years are building up to another climax this summer, in the rare configuration we've noted, called the Grand Cardinal Cross.
The deployment of the stars this summer suggests that the events that began in 2007 are also set to reach yet another climax. The financial crisis that began in New York has now spread across the globe.
We can only hope that the intrusion of Venus, planet of abundance, prosperity, love and diplomacy, into the Grand Cardinal Cross configuration, at this week's Full Moon, will help America's reality-challenged political parties to make nice and come to an agreement that will avoid the worst consequences of the Cold Civil War now gripping the country's political landscape.
Needless to say, with Venus in the mix, there will be substantial energy available for reassessing, reconfiguring and reforming power relationships, loving partnerships, and political and business alliances during this extremely tense Full Moon week.
The Sabian symbols for this week's Full Moon emphasize the need for co-operation and individual courage in the face of a tsunami of fear.
The symbol for the Sun at 23° Cancer is "The Meeting of a Literary Society". Here we are encountering the need to rise above the astral plane of emotional reactions and utilize the power of the intellect to understand the sweeping changes transforming all life on Planet Earth.
It is the task of any society's authors and writers to both reflect and shape the consensus worldview. By doing the hard work of analysis and by keeping our emotions in check, we can begin to assess the scope of the social system's collapse, and we can begin to plot a course toward a new society that will be equitable, just, democratic and environmentally sustainable.
The symbol for the Moon at 23° Capricorn is "A soldier receiving two awards for bravery in combat." We are all veterans of the Grand Cardinal Cross now. We've experienced global financial meltdown, the secession of the wealthiest 1% of Earthlings into their own self-contained privatized bubbles of privilege, the environmental catastrophes of the BP Oil Spill, the epic floods in America, Pakistan and elsewhere, the Fukushima meltdown, and the increased belligerence of nation-states intent upon seizing profits and natural resources for themselves at any cost, everywhere in the world.
And like the soldier receiving awards for bravery, we are pretty burned out.
We live in a time of planetary transformation. Courage, persistence, patience, discernment, and loving wisdom are called for if we are to extricate ourselves from the web of problems we encounter now as the Industrial Civilization we built the last few hundred years from cheap hydrocarbon energy begins to collapse around us.
We all need a break from the Long Emergency. We are in a marathon run, not a sprint. There are no fast fixes to humanity's problems, only long-range solutions will be viable. So let us take the time this Full Moon to be gentle with ourselves and our loved ones.
Let the keynote of this Full Moon Festival be loving kindness. Let us take a moment out from the various emergencies we face and simply connect with loved ones. This is a great time of year to refresh ourselves by spending time in nature, so visit the beach, the mountains or the woods, and allow yourself to be inspired by the sublime beauty of this Creation.
Remember that we are in the midst of a collective spiritual initiation designed to elevate us to a totally new level of consciousness. If things are a little tough right now, that indicates that the transformation is deep and thoroughgoing, and that, ultimately is a good thing.
There is no going back. There is no retreat. There is nowhere to go back to. There is no way to sustain the status quo.
The only way open is forward into unexplored regions of consciousness, new and unknown social relations, and a new and unknown global environment, facing new and unknown challenges to come.
The only way we will thrive in this utterly new world that we are rapidly entering is by creative and constructive use of the energies of the planet Venus and the sign of Libra.
It is through loving kindness, compassion, an open heart and a finely tuned awareness of right human relations that we will find our path through the rubble of the Old Order and reach the doorway of the New Age.
Nothing less than a superhuman commitment to peace, diplomacy, selfless service, magic and wild joy will see us through to the other side of this epochal transformation of human civilization.
Let us share this adventure with good spirits, and help one another along the way. As in all adventures, the goal is not the most important part of the trip, it is how we navigate the path to the goal that defines our experience and shapes the goal as we approach it from afar.
There is plenty of good news. The good news is that millions of people around the world are waking up to the reality that the current political, economic and social systems are bankrupt and obsolete. A thousand new ideas for political, economic, social and environmental reform are blossoming, and they are grounded in the grass roots, where real social change always begins.
A host of unsung, and for the most part, less than famous heroes and heroines are doing the good work of analyzing our current mess, and fashioning solutions based upon discernment, creativity, and spiritual guidance. This is exactly the task set by this month's Full Moon Festival, as revealed in the Sabian symbol for the Sun, "The meeting of a literary society".
For example, David Korten, Chairman of the Board of YES! magazine, offers a superb analysis of the power of stories to structure and transform social relations in his new article The Story of a New Economy.
"The fabricated story that there is no alternative to the existing Wall Street system is being challenged by the New Economy story that it is possible to create a world of strong communities and living economies," Korten explains. "People across the United States and the world are organizing to make the new story a reality in the places where they live."
"The New Economy story that we humans are capable of creating a vibrant, peaceful, cooperative world bursting with life resonates deep within the soul of all but the deeply psychologically damaged," Korten continues. "Once that connection is made between a possible human future and the soul’s deepest yearning, the lies of Wall Street advertisers and propagandists are exposed and trance is broken. We are liberated to take responsibility for our future and get on with living the world of our shared human dream into being."
"New Economy messages are spreading through countless conversations to challenge the false claims of the fabricated stories of the old economy culture that:
- It is our inherent human nature to be individualistic, materialistic, greedy, competitive, and violent.
- We live on an open frontier of endless resources that are free for the taking to grow the economy.
- Money is wealth, money defines the value of life, making money is our highest human calling, and everything related to money is best left to the market.
- Government is the problem and unregulated markets are the solution.
"As pointed out in previous blogs, the truth is that:
- The human brain is wired to support creativity, cooperation, and life in community. That is our nature. The prevalence of materialism, greed, competition, and violence common in modern society is a symptom of severe cultural and institutional dysfunction.
- We humans inhabit a wondrous but finite living planet with a self-organizing biosphere to which we must adapt our lives and economies.
- Life, not money, is the true measure of value; money’s only legitimate use is in life’s service. An obsession with making money is a sign of psychological and social dysfunction.
- Markets are essential to the function of a healthy democratic society. Their proper function, however, depends on proper rules implemented by democratic governments under the watchful eye of a strong and dynamic civil society.
"Story power is the ultimate power. Authentic stories liberate the human consciousness, build immunity to cultural manipulation, and give us the courage and insight to create a world of peace and prosperity for all."
Jane and I hope that you will receive the Grace and Guidance you need to refresh yourselves this Full Moon Festival, and we wish each and every one of you an increase in Love and Light! May you each be empowered by the telling of a New Story to replace all the Old Stories that shackle us to our bad habits, past traumas, and mistaken maps of the world.
Meditation Moment
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
From the Essential Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks
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Much Love and Light this Full Moon Week From Your Editors Curtis and Jane
Here's a picture of us on the way up Mt. Shasta, about 9500 feet elevation.
We are continuously amazed by the sublime vistas and amazing beauty we find in the incredibly diverse landscape in California.