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"This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centres of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe -- perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy -- and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves."
"Astrology is an art, rather than a science or a system of religious beliefs. But what, then, is art? The artist mediates between different dimensions of life. The images, sounds, words and forms which the artist utilises are languages which can communicate the meaningful patterns of levels of reality which would otherwise be incomprehensible or incommunicable to the rational mind. When we are affected by art, it is because the work speaks to us on many levels: intellectual, intuitive, emotional, visceral."
"People who dismiss astrology do so out of either ignorance or rationalism. Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream or person requires intuition and divination, not science."
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A Bit of a Bio:
Astro Inquiry is published in Washington State -- beaming out from Vashon Island. When I was 14 years-old, I made the dogged effort to write to as many astrologers in California as I could, seeing which, if any would take me on as a student. I lucked out with my teachers Ivy Goldstein Jacobson and Margaret Latvala, and studied with them through my high school years. A year later I became a member of Llewellyn George’s Educational Astrology organization in Los Angeles. I helped write, edit and publish the group’s quarterly newsletters... continues
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Death is the New Black
Death opens us to The Now. But to reside in the now means passing through a little bit of death — every — single — moment.
Beyond Saturn’s boundary of rings, are the planetary stand-ins for the enlightenment drive and the mystical impulse: Uranus and Neptune (through envisioning and longing), pull our attention towards the future or the universal. But Pluto, Death’s ambassador, pushes our awareness deep into what I call the non-present. The awareness of no time, no place — a metamorphic marriage of now-ness with nothingness. Freud knew about this particular place and understood the longing that each of us has for it. He called that longing the death-wish.
Really? A wish? Sure. Death: It’s so quiet and peaceful over there.
You can identify this longing within yourself every time you visit a news site online and secretly hope to read about some new disaster or catastrophe that might signal that The End has finally arrived. Now. Who doesn’t want the grinding game to cease, to abandon the sandbox so everyone gets to go ‘home’? It’s not a desire to be ashamed of.
But you know how it goes. Our survival instinct is always trying to distance us from the death-wish — that’s its job, as a regulator of any species — to separate death from life, a divisive process that ultimately forces us to live ‘half-lives’. Small existences. A half-life is a numbed-out experience of reality. A frightened one.
Pluto is the corrector for this condition and assures that each moment is stillborn — it arrived but disappeared at the same moment. Is a tiny declaration for the death-wish. A kind of cessation that offers so much presence, so much is-ness, that you simply lose your head and just ‘are.’ There’s nothing to plan for, nothing to remember. One simply is a ‘nameless’ presence. So death allows us to live fully. But only in the present. A present where death and life are so tightly intertwined there’s no separation between the two.
With presence, there’s nothing for us to attach ourselves to. Nothing to box up and store away, or build a concept upon — there is just the experience of ‘is.’ This Plutonian mystery pulses in tandem with our heartbeat and declares:
• The Truth About Mercury Retrograde
• Planetary Ennui: The Nostalgia for Samsara
• How To Make Facebook Your Slave and Preserve Your Creative Drive
• The Power, Beauty, and Wonder of the Horoscope’s 12th House
• Imbeciles at the Gate: How The Internet Destroys Astrology
• How To Escape From the Torture of Self-Help Hell
• Depression and the Solar Consciousness
• Secrets of the Heart: Love is an Action Not A Feeling
• Create Your Own Archetype & Call It You: An Escape from Evolutionary Astrology
• Redefining the Oxymoron of Sex and Marriage
• Pluto in Capricorn: Death is the New Black
• How To Write About Astrology (Especially How Not To)
• Astrology, Ants, Hives, Essence, and Types: A Gurdjieffian View
• Final Notes About the Life-and-Culture-Changing Uranus-Pluto Square