Yesterday public television in Seattle celebrated their decade-long relationship with the just-deceased self-help writer Wayne Dyer, and to honor the author the station was replaying one of his final talks.

The theme of his presentation alludes me; it was something about Five Steps to Something or Other, the secrets of which were contained in his new book, which was touted tastefully throughout his talk.

I decided to give the show a try, despite the fact that I’ve a strong aversion to listening to other people talk or write about ‘how’ life should be lived or experienced.

Prior to the advent of the Internet, this phenomenon of people giving advice about living was always buzzing in the background of life, but not in the omnipresent way it does now.

The Net has mutated what used to be a semi-contained industry (the self-help, how-to world) into a bacchanalia of yapping gurus and guides — billions of bromides pinging back and forth across blogs, YouTube and social media every hour.

The world, as the Net depicts it, is divided into distinct camps: Those with electronic devices doing nothing. And those doing nothing but writing or talking about doing stuff and then selling that information on an electronic device to people that aren’t doing anything.

Read this entire post here.

You won’t find a more uplifting description of Saturn’s placement in Sagittarius (where the planet will transit until December of 2017) than astrologer Marcia Moore‘s:

This position of Saturn “gives the capacity to concretize ideas and to bring abstract concepts down to earth. In this respect, Saturn is like a crystal which concentrates the light of the Sagittarian mind into a flame that can start a fire. Sagittarius, in turn, warms the austere formality of Saturn with the genial glow.”

Rational optimism like this is a welcome shift after Saturn’s final pass through Scorpio which often felt like a cathartic slog: A Roto-Rooter attached directly to the collective’s unconscious.

Astrologer Michael Lutin aptly associated Saturn’s transit through the last degrees of Scorpio with “death anxiety.” He listed several markers that were particularly difficult to resolve during the last couple of months. I’d imagine that you can relate to:

“The feeling of helplessness while awaiting a decision, diagnosis, judgment, revelation, miracle, change, or new direction.”

He also mentioned: “The anger brought by having to accept enforced change.”

And probably most painful and confusing, a kind of sadomasochistic “…holding on to improper attachments.”

I think we’re all welcoming the new Saturn through Sagittarius transit. So let’s talk about it.

Saturn’s New Abode

But first:

Imagine listening to only the trombone section playing a Haydn concerto. How weird. Something similar happens when astrologers attempt to define lone planetary transits, detached from the whole. Like I’m doing here, with Saturn’s transit through Sagittarius.

You can’t really pull out a single planet from the pantheon and then describe the possibilities inherent the transit. All of the planets participate in the solar system’s symphony simultaneously. So, keep this in mind whenever you read about significant planetary shifts in astrology. Only a facet is examined, a facet that is removed from the totality of the cosmic field. It is incomplete.

That said, of all the planets Saturn is the easiest to form a distinct impression of when you consider the planet’s placement in any of the twelve signs.

Meaning, wherever Saturn moves in the Zodiac, the reality principle under which we all abide, shifts. So you sense it palpably. It’s like changing the lenses in your glasses. The effect is immediate. Various qualities of the sign Saturn transits are made distinct and specific, and, Saturn being Saturn, we’re pulled in — like Brer Rabbit with the Tar-Baby — until we decipher the code.

So, if Saturn in Scorpio is tied to “death anxiety,” will Saturn in Sagittarius involve life anxiety?

Not exactly. But kind of.

Sagittarius, of all the signs, is related to the flame of optimism, a faith in the ultimate good that resides within or beneath every experience in life. It sounds corny, but think of where you’d be in life if you didn’t have faith? (Not belief, mind you — but faith. Think about the two words and faith’s meaning will become emphatic; Saturnine).

So this is the promise of Saturn in Sagittarius: The realistic benefits of exercising faith. This might show up in your life (at least initially, on the heels of the Scorpio transit) as a super-effort to remember why life is worth living. Read more

The revelations related to the vicious hack of the Ashley Madison website (the cheating spouses’ watering hole you’ve read about everyday for the past week) have — once again — shocked puritanical America. In the way puritanical America is always shocked whenever it discovers that people are having sex outside the confines of the missionary position (and sanctity of marriage).

Recently, several of the Scarlet-Lettered individuals — publicly exposed victims of the hack —  have committed suicide. I’m very sad about the suicides (I’ve experienced that shock first hand to understand the impact). These extreme reactions point to a gigantic schism within the culture’s attitudes about sex. Judeo-Christian prohibitions that inextricably link sex and shame, forever and ever, until the end of time.

To sustain porn star-like passion within a monogamous relationship is sorta oxymoronic. It’s not impossible (there is now Viagra and Addyi — female Viagra), but the misconceptions people project onto monogamy — the levels of romantic passion they expect to be constant, over time, aren’t germane to the natural arc of a relationship.

Those sustainability dreams are borrowed from the realms of fairy tales and online porn. Symbolic idylls meant to instruct or entertain. But people being people, we literalize what shouldn’t be made literal.

This delusion hasn’t been helped by New Age, Oprah-esque goofiness: If you dream it — goddamnit you’re entitled to it.  Think hard enough about a new car and you’ll either win the lottery or the death of your spouse will free up his life insurance policy so you can buy one.

The Ashley Madison hack is throwing the epidemic of romo-sexual magical thinking into high relief.

Astrologically the events surrounding the Madison hack mirror the slow-building Saturn/Neptune square…

• 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
• 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

 
Gone are the days of celebrities helping us reconnect to the necessity for some kind of connection to our bodies (and minds). (Remember Cher‘s workout video?… OK, nevermind.)

Cartoonist Katy Davis (AKA Gobblynne) has created this whimsical (but incredibly wise) animal-filled animation that just might bring you back to the meditation practice you abandoned years ago (or last week). Read more

When you’re a writer Facebook becomes a peculiar problem.

Famous writer Zadie Smith, in her list of 10 rules for writers, says that working on a computer without wi-fi is essential. I guess she was tempted, while writing, to make too many visits to The New York Review of Books and start grazing.

In this post, I’m using the word peculiar to evoke its deeper etymology. Peculiar’s Late Middle English usage was to indicate: “Belonging to one person.” But even more peculiar (and further back in time) is the word’s Latin origin and usage, which is related to cattle and how those cattle belonged to you, were your property.

The Latin etymological tree goes like this:

pecu (cattle) > peculium (property) > peculiaris (of private property) > peculiar (particular, special).

So this is good to note, because you need to guard your stock when you’re working on your own creative stuff; to keep your words in your own writing stockade — rather than let them roam too much within the Facebook dream field. Grazing.

Secrets, Tips and Suggestions

Over the years, as a writer and incessant Facebooker, I’ve found that I can use Facebook to my own advantage, and so can you:

• 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
• 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

In the declaration below, Allen Ginsberg explains why it is vital to write.

I’ll simply add this: Similar to the how the ego is targeted as a pariah within the psyche’s field of awareness, the mind also is often devalued and maligned as a function that sidetracks us — prevents focused attention.

Ginsberg reminds us that the mind is a mirror. And when we remember this I think we’re aligned in the right way with our apparatus.
 

“Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper?

So writing could be seen as “writing your mind”, observing your own mind, or observe what’s vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others’, revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what’s palpable, visible, and whatever little you’ve learned. Read more