July 2017 Full Moon in Capricorn, Cancer Solar Festival Cosmic Weather Forecast
Welcome to the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast for July 2017! Warm greetings from your co-Editors, Jane Sherry and Curtis Lang.
Here in South Florida, tourist season is long over. The water in our swimming pool is about 91 degrees in the afternoon, but still feels cool when you jump in!
Our garden continues to surprise us. We did not know that Heliconia, with its amazing rooster comb orange and red and yellow flowers, acts almost like an invasive plant here in the semi-tropics. Heliconia just keeps walking around, colonizing new areas of the garden, even appearing in the middle of giant Galangal ginger plants and thick stands of button gingers, which are so large they're sporting six to eight inch long lipstick shaped red tips with flowers called inflorescences!
We planted several varieties of marigolds, and they have self-hybridized as they spread across the garden, becoming the de facto ground cover wherever there's room for the marigolds to grow. We are about to plant more of the original varieties as well, encouraging this trend, replacing bare mulch with marigolds!
Jane and I are preparing to add more soil, fertilizer, compost, iron, calcium, and mulch to our vegetable beds, herb garden and flower beds due to the incredibly poor sandy soils here. We miss access to the humus rich soils of the northeast. In the near term we are planting Asian Greens for harvest in about a month to a month and a half. We'll plant more varieties of vegetables in the traditional Florida planting season of August, after the total soil upgrade and vitalization is complete.
Cosmic Weather Forecast: Full Moon in Capricorn, Cancer Solar Festival
July's full moon occurs at 12:07 AM EDT on Sunday July 9th, 2017, at 17°09′ Capricorn, and is opposed by Sun at at 17°09′ Cancer.
The cosmic weather patterns have been turbulent for the last few months. That turbulence intensifies in the month of July as the energy of the 2008-2012 world-altering Grand Cardinal Crossreappears. In this newsletter we will review the events of the last decade, since the appearance of the Grand Cardinal Cross, and we will take a peek at the decade that lies ahead.
This month a Cardinal T-square dominates the Full Moon sky, echoing the challenging and transformative energy we all have felt during the series of difficult Uranus-Pluto squares we have experienced since 2012.
The energy this month is more raw and combustible than ever because the Sun in Cancer conjuncts Mars, and they are opposed to Moon conjunct Pluto in Capricorn, engaging two Mars-ruled planets in a head-on collision. Sun, Mars, Moon and Pluto are all square Uranus in Aries and also square Jupiter in Libra, creating what astrologers call a "wide" Grand Cardinal Cross -- or at the very least a highly combustible T-square.
If you are like Jane and myself, with numerous planets in Cardinal signs, you will recall that the Grand Cardinal Cross years have been full of medical dramas, aging and dying parents and elders, and an assortment of the many flavors of pain and suffering known on planet Earth.
So if this applies to you, and if you have chronic health issues or family members who are aging or infirm, or if you have recently experienced a recurrence of chronic issues or concerns then you can expect flare-ups of these issues to peak this month. The current cosmic climate is also ideal for discovering paths to healing for yourself and your loved ones, because although this energy is quite intense, it is in no way as overwhelming as the tsunami of challenges that swept over us from 2009-2014.
The Cancer Full Moon puts the Cosmic focus on relationships and families, governed by Cancer as Great Mother. The incendiary nature of this Full Moon T-square/weak Cardinal Cross indicates the potential for simmering relationship issues to boil over in unexpected ways. It's important to remain calm in the face of perceived provocation, and to keep firmly focused on the big picture, rather than being triggered by passing emotional squalls or slights.
The Sabian Symbol for the Full Moon at 18° Cancer is A Hen Scratching the Ground to Find Food for Her Progeny. This Full Moon we could be preoccupied with financial issues relating to the long-term stability of our close family. This would be an excellent time to review our assets and liabilities and our progress toward long term goals with an eye to reducing expenses, increasing income and creating realistic budgets that will empower us over the years to come. With the cosmic climate triggering inner stresses and tensions, it's a good time to consider the creation of a rainy day fund and other measures designed as buffers in case of unexpected expenses or fluctuations in income. All the angst unleashed this month may provide a strong motivation for us to make such contingency plans a reality.
The July T-square in the sky provides us all with an important opportunity as well as with numerous challenges. With Sun/Mars in Cancer square with Jupiter in Libra, there is definitely a fiery stream of energy feeding the strong Jupiter influence in the ethers. For those who can connect with their inner child this Full Moon, work can become play, play can become creative joy, and creative projects can take on a life of their own, expanding our horizons in unexpected ways. Remain open to better than expected outcomes in the areas of your life where you tend to channel your creativity.
The Sabian Symbol for the Sun at 18° Capricorn is The Union Jack Flag Flies From a British Warship. This symbol emphasizes the importance of existing social structures and power centers, which create the "rules of the game" enabling everyday commerce and social stability. It is only through the exercise of raw power that Britain, at the height of its Empire, could underwrite the military and economic stability that enabled the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution to spread across the globe.
That's the upside of this aspect. The danger here is that the Imperial power may engage in wars of choice that destabilize the existing social structure rather than reinforcing it.
Donald Trump, like it or not, is the human face of the currently existing Imperial hegemon, the United States. Trump is provoking the North Koreans, stoking the Sunni-Shia religious civil war in the Middle East by taking Saudi Arabia's side in their ill-conceived confrontation with Qatar, and continues to support policies in Syria designed to antagonize Russia and Iran, rather than focusing on the destruction of ISIS, which could be accomplished much more easily with a policy of partnership between the Americans, Syrians, Russians and Iranians, who all want to eliminate ISIS.
This highly combustible July cosmic weather pattern makes all this saber-rattling extremely dangerous. As we will see in next month's newsletter, outer planet configurations and a powerful eclipse appearing right over the United States indicate intensification of global risks. Because the August eclipse triggers powerful aspects with Donald Trump's horoscope those risks are magnified in all areas where the current Imperial hegemon is militarily active.
The risks to the existing global social order, which rests upon the Pax Americana created some fifty odd years ago after World War II, are mounting. Trump is making good on his promises to retreat from a global position of leadership on climate change, to downgrade relations with America's European allies, to take steps towards starting a global trade war, and to institute draconian immigration policies that will empower overtly racist, regressive factions around the world.
The long term consequences of America's movement toward isolationism will be felt globally, and could have profound consequences for the stability of the existing global social order. This is to be expected during a decade still dominated by the Grand Cardinal Cross and its permutations, including outer planet squares and T-squares in cardinal signs.
Longtime readers of this newsletter know that the intricate dance of the slowest moving outer planets tends to relate to transformations of our entire civilization. The recurrence of the energy of the Grand Cardinal Cross this summer highlights the large social consequences of our collective activities in all areas of life.
Once again this summer we are confronted with symptoms of a global Triple Crisis: financial, environmental and political systems are being stressed to the breaking point.
The onset of the Grand Cardinal Cross years coincided with the Great Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-9, from which the global economy has yet to fully recover.
Greece has become a Third World country, Italian banks are in crisis, Deutsche Bank looks like a potential problem-child, and the entire Eurozone is reeling from terror incidents, Brexit, immigration crises and economic stagnation.
China is said to have created a debt bubble larger than any ever seen in world history. Worried investors have identified bubbles in global stock and bond markets, created by the policies designed to rescue the global financial system from the 2008 meltdown.
Americans generally see their economy as stagnant. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, only 30% of Americans believe the economy is improving, and that is said to be a big improvement in consumer sentiment. Donald Trump says he'll make America great again, but so far he has done a lot more Tweeting than legislating.
The global economic system, which transcends national politics, has been transformed over the last thirty years, and already resembles a war of all against all. In the current economic system, nation is pitted against nation, race against race, class against class, religion against religion, corporation against corporation.
Wall Street celebrates this "winner-take-all" economy, which is expected to automatically generate solutions to our environmental and political problems through the magical actions of an "invisible hand". This is the same invisible hand that has redistributed wealth upwards at an unprecedented rate in America and across the globe over the last forty years.
The end result of that economic experiment has been the creation of a new class of super-rich billionaires around the world.
"According to 2016 calculations made by the aid organization Oxfam, just eight men control a fortune worth $426 billion, with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, textile magnate Amancio Ortega (who owns clothing retailer Zara) and investor Warren Buffet at the top of the list," reports a July 5 article in Der Spiegel. "Together, those eight men possess more wealth than the poorest half of the global population. The few profit handsomely while the vast majority lose a little: It is this state of affairs that galvanizes critics far beyond the leftist political spectrum."
True the neoliberal economic philosophy of Reagan and Thatcher oversaw the expansion of the American middle class lifestyle to significant numbers of Asians previously mired in poverty, and the enrichment of the upper middle classes in Western countries, but these gains all came at the expense of the Western middle class. 
Poor citizens around the world are being reduced to the status of economic serfs, political pawns with no real voice in their political system.
"Every 10 seconds, a child dies of starvation somewhere in the world, despite there being enough food on the planet to feed between 10 and 12 billion people -- and the global population is just 7.5 billion," Der Spiegel explains. "Almost 800 million people in the world live in extreme poverty, despite there being more money in the world than ever before."
"Political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans," according to an article in The New Yorker entitled Is America an Oligarchy?. The answer appears to be yes, our democracy has transformed itself into a country ruled by the few, the rich and the well-connected. "Indeed," the article continues, "the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy."
“In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes," Gilens and Paige conclude. "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
So with our democracy so feeble, and elites so dominant, it's no surprise that Americans are losing faith in democracy and in the democratic institutions that support elective governance. Americans have no faith in politicans who lead them, and no faith in their fellow Americans. This is both cause and symptom of the economic war of all against all that has been unleashed by Anglo-Saxon globalist and neoliberal economic policies initiated by Reagan and Thatcher over the last 35 years or so.
In a 2015 poll by the Pew Research Institute, 74% of Americans said that politicians put their own personal interests ahead of the country's. More amazing, 63% of those polled had little or no faith in the wisdom of the American people to find political solutions to the nation's problems.
In addition to highlighting the bankruptcy of current economic orthodoxy, and the dawning death of democracy in America, the energy of the Grand Cardinal Cross is alerting us to the fact that the Age of Cheap Abundant Hydrocarbons is coming to a close.
Even if new technologies can produce more oil and gas more cheaply than we think, the impact of the burning of these polluting fuels will lead to runaway global warming, the flooding of the world's coastal cities, increasing global warming, the loss of untold acres of farmland, a global food crisis and a forced panic migration of hundreds of millions of people.
This June and July the United Nations estimates that 20 million people are on the verge of starvation worldwide, primarily in Africa.
According to the United Nations, "An unprecedented 65.6 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18."
"There are also 10 million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement," the UN adds.
Environmental scientists estimatethat there could be 150 million climate change refugees on planet Earth by the year 2050, which is only 33 years from now.
It is an open question whether alternative sources of energy can be developed and deployed quickly enough to prevent these nightmare scenarios from manifesting, especially because of the failure of political will in every important country on Earth.
The failure of political elites to forge workable strategies for a co-operative global effort to transition to a new Age of Clean Energy is yet another symptom of the crisis of human civilization revealed by the Grand Cardinal Cross years.
The demonization of immigrants worldwide is a symptom of this political failure on a global scale. The rise of anti-immigrant political parties throughout the rich countries of the world signals the beginning of the end of basic human solidarity in the face of impending environmental catastrophe.
If humanity is unable to find common ground in the face of rapid climate change and sea level rise, a new Dark Age will replace our humanist and Enlightenment values with a brutal social order characterized by steep social pyramids in which a war of all against all determines who will survive and who will be cast aside.
This new Dark Age -- a 21st century technocratic surveillance society ushering in a social hierarchy of masters and slaves -- is antithetical to the Enlightenment values of democracy, and appears at just the historical moment when traditional democracy seems unable to create workable consensus solutions to environmental, social, and political problems and conflicts.
So the Grand Cardinal Cross years challenge us to recognize the Triple Crisis of environmental catastrophe, political regression and economic polarization that threatens to create a never-ending series of resource wars, religious conflicts, civil wars and nation vs. nation power grabs that could paralyze humanity's ability to manifest the desired transformations needed to reduce levels of suffering during this difficult transition from the Age of Cheap Abundant Hydrocarbons to the new Age of Clean Energy.
The task is so mind-boggling in its complexity and its scope that it is virtually impossible for the individual to encompass the enormity of these inter-locking problems and to accept responsibility for taking urgent action to address the Triple Crisis.
That's probably just where we all need to be right about now, believe it or not. Now we see the problems, and that is an improvement.
The world-shaking repercussions of the Grand Cardinal Cross years will extend through the mid 2020s, according to the most knowledgeable astrologers.
In the last decade we have been presented with ample evidence that the underpinnings of our global society are collapsing around us.
We now have a good view of the Triple Crisis that faces us.
We now also understand that in the face of such epochal social transformation, and presented with the imminent danger of vast die-offs from environmental degradation, climate change, starvation, and warfare, there is a temptation to close the heart to all those outside the magic circle of our family, our friends, our co-religionists, our race, our nation, our kind.
There is a temptation to redirect energy towards the root chakra, and away from the compassion and awareness centers located in higher chakras. This could be the primary danger faced by humanity today.
For when we put our own survival above all else, and when we enter fight-or-flight mode in our daily life, when we engage in the war of all against all in an increasingly chaotic world with little institutional support from traditional social structures, we unwittingly enlist our energies on behalf of those regressive forces that would turn back the clock on humanity's spiritual evolution.
Spiritual scientist Dr. Rudolf Steiner warned that in the 20th century and beyond, there would be a cosmic struggle between the heavenly hosts commanded by Michael the Archangel and the forces of demonic presences such as Ahriman, the asuras and Lucifer.
Most of us have heard of Lucifer.
Many of us have heard of Ahriman, whom Steiner referred to as the power that ossifies humanity and brings us to the superstition of rational materialism.
But who has heard of the asuras?
"Asuras are spirits of the very greatest egoism who remained behind during Saturn evolution," explains Dr. Steiner. Their goal, according to Steiner is to degrade humanity even further than the rational materialism espoused by Ahriman, which turns us into mere calculating machines. The asuras prompt humanity to unleash their inner animal. ". . .men will also live like animals, will sink into animal impulses, animal passions," Steiner warns.
After many years of spiritual practice and over a decade of work as a Reiki Master and energy worker, who has known many gifted spiritual teachers and healers, it is clear to us that the average human being has most of their energy concentrated in the lower three chakras -- the belly, sex center, and the root chakra.
The ego, centered in the third chakra, sexual relations, centered in the second chakra, and animal survival instincts, centered in the root chakra, are thus active in most human beings.
It is the task of Michael the Archangel and of spiritual people everywhere to raise the energy of humanity, so that the heart, throat and higher chakras are activated.
It is only through activation of these higher chakras that trans-personal experiences like compassion for all living beings can flower. It is only through activation of these higher chakras that we can begin to have personal direct experience of spiritual worlds.
This is the direction of humanity's ultimate spiritual evolution. It is the task of Archangel Michael, and of spiritual people everywhere, to energetically overpower the forces of rational materialism, fear, greed, jealousy, factional hatred and religious, sexual and racial bigotry that threaten humanity today.
Let us all ask for grace and guidance this Cancer Full Moon Festival so that we may center our energy in our heart chakras, open our minds to Divine Wisdom and envision positive outcomes for ourselves and for humanity around the world.
For this is the primary task at this point in human history. We must stay strong, centered and grounded while working to uplift struggling humanity in the face of a tsunami of regressive energy. 
If we can do this, over the next decade, we will be given visions of pathways to a brighter future. This Full Moon we call upon Archangel Michael and his hosts to visit us and strengthen us in preparation for what is to come.
Heart-Centered Healing Meditation
In gratitude to Divine Source, in gratitude to Archangel Michael and his hosts, in gratitude to our Guides and Teachers, let us join together in meditation this Full Moon weekend. Let us all make it our intent to send our love and light to all humanity, each in our own way, at times of our own choosing.
Here is a visualization you can do to stimulate the feeling of compassion and to send healing energy to suffering humanity. Let us make it our intent that this energy we share in this meditation will help to raise the consciousness of struggling humanity in some small way, and to begin to elevate the human energy signature, activating and energizing above all the heart chakra, because for most of humanity the ascension path leads from the lower three chakras to an open, loving heart, which is the gateway to the higher chakras and the entrance to the trans-personal realm, where we become aware and conscious of Spirit.
Attune yourself to Source. Connect your aura, mind and body to Source by visualizing a golden tube passing up through your chakras into the sky above and beyond, all the way to Source itself and extending down deep into the center of the Earth. Allow the flow of Universal Life Force energy to flow from Source into your auric field, your mind, your heart, your body. Feel Universal Life Force energy flowing from your hands. 
Visualize the Source of Universal Life Force energy as a great ball of fire, a Celestial Sun, hovering above your head. Now, see the Universal Life Force 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 warm, 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 warmth streaming down through your chest and stomach, filling your heart with warmth, light and love, warming and healing every organ along the way.
You feel the warmth and see the energy streaming into your hips, and down into your legs, pouring all the way into your feet, until you feel the warm 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 Universal Life Force 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 warm, healing energy.
Now visualize your best friend. Feel the limitless Universal Life Force 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 warm, healing energy.
Now visualize your family and friends, gathered in a group around you. Feel the limitless Universal Life Force energy which has filled your being begin to overflow your heart and stream forth from your hands.
Visualize a golden stream of Universal Life Force 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 warm, 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 Universal Life Force 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 warm, healing energy.