Hello! A Collect Call From Cassandra: Will you Accept the Charges?

I’ve been waylaid by an aggressive flu, so plans for the site — some ‘best of lists’ and a music mix of highlights from 2013 — went amiss. Sorry about that.

But I do want to talk a bit about the fervor that’s building as we enter another new year. Many astrologers are declaring that this won’t be just any new year; no — this will be 2014. The year that commences with a New Moon exactly conjunct Pluto. The year that will frame the acutest of the ongoing Uranus Pluto squares. The year when the United States’ birth chart is severely PMS-ed by a grand square involving its Saturn and Pluto of origin (intermixed with the aforementioned Uranus Pluto square).

The Cassandra squawking just won’t stop. Which, to me, in my usual way of thinking about predictions, indicates that reality, being the slippery experience that it always is, won’t deliver the horror show everyone is expecting or perhaps hoping for. (There’s nothing like a full blown disaster to clear the decks and start things afresh).

As I’ve written many times throughout this site, astrology proves a disaster when it comes to predictive accuracy. And mundane astrology, the astrology of groups, nations and world events, has a particularly horrible predictive record.

I much prefer the work and style of astrology that an astrologer like Jessica Murray has mastered, where predictions are forgone in the presence of intelligent, in-depth inquiry into the present and what animates the present, which would be human presence. Because at the end of the End of Days, after we’ve read the last goofy bit of babble about upcoming ‘changes’ and ‘challenges’ and ‘transformations’ (terms that recycle through astro blogging like a virus), we are still left alone with our silly selves, unmoved, untouched because an event as profound as an actual ‘transformation’ involves working with a level of consciousness that is beyond our pea-brain capacities. As Gurdjieff repeated often, “Man can not do.” So until one does, all of the other noise is a distraction.

And yet you and I both know that astrology is so much more.

The anticipated, earth-shattering ‘changes’ that 2014 promises to unleash? Well, honey, that ship has already sailed. We’re neck-deep in the shit now. 2014 has already happened. In fact if I had to concoct a metaphorical image for 2014 it would be the picture of an angelic being handing a straw to a shit-immersed figure so she might breathe easier as the next stratum of crap rises another inch over her forehead.

As I shared with Jessica the other day, in an interview I conducted with her last week (due for publication on this site next Wednesday): The most wonderful and freeing fallout related to the United States’ ongoing economic and spiritual debacle is freedom from the tyranny of the American Dream. That’s a fossil that’s still rattled in an old tin can from our parents’ generation. The group that continues to moan about: “What has happened to my country?”

Younger folks, those of the Generation Y and Zuckerberg ilk, are infused with a different sort of mindset (in some cases a scarier mindset, as it relates to techno-zombie-hood). That ‘generation’ realizes that the idea of tribes and territories and nations is so ‘yesterday.’ And yet, until that other generation dies off (the Pluto set), and until someone finds a way to un-lobotomize the techno-obsessed (the Uranus set), we’re in for this strangely unnerving ride that is set to be classified as: 2014.

Astrology, ultimately, tracks the wondrous and frightening ways that reality unfolds. It gives us a language to talk about time as a continuum that is always fresh and pristine but also infused with the totality of what has gone before and what is yet to come. This is the nature of the cyclic. Which is the nature of astrology.

But you need to amplify this concept and put yourself into the equation too. And that means considering your perceptions like this: Reality unfolds and displays itself before us, through us, in us, and as us — and as such will always surprise us; regardless the transits or the Kali Yuga or the Akashic records or Oprah’s Book of Days.

A cycle does not mean things repeat exactly or can be predicted, it simply means that beauty, in one of its most cogent shapes, shows up as something circular and round. That notion doesn’t need to be invaded and chopped and diced in an effort to second guess Source. It’s a new year, we are back to the same spot again in the Earth-Sun dance. And it is beautiful.

Attempting to classify time into past, present, future is always a big fail because those distinctions do not exist. Obsessing on the future simply reiterates a delusion, and the dissolving of delusion, the wake-up call to the ever-fresh, ‘always-now’ nature of reality, is the real gift of a marker like the start of a new year. It’s not about ‘what’s to come’ but what’s actually here now! Which is always a miraculous thing. It’s really that simple. All you need to do is remember. That’s a start. A start towards doing.

Happy New Year Everyone.

Love,