“Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.” –Colin Wilson

A fellow Cancerian, Colin Wilson‘s seminal book The Outsider aggravated a place in my soul that eventually became my salvo against the confines of consensus reality.

Meaning, his close examination of individuals who lived as poets or artists or occultists or just peculiar mutations within our species — the unclassifiables — got under my skin when I was a teenager and helped forge my path forward as an adult — with courage and enthusiasm — to explore astrology, art, poetry, metaphysics and the teachings of Gurdjieff.

Years later he recounted: “As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.”

His claim that the “mark of greatness is always intuition, not logic” supported my own instincts and goaded, in a way, my disinterest in hard science, with its over-emphasis on materialism and chilly all-or-nothing proclamations about reality. Which, if you study enough science, you soon discover are made defunct decades later by a new brood of giant-headed blowhards declaring the latest explanations for everything.

Wilson always wrote from a wild mixture of wonder, awe, strict discipline (his output was beyond prolific) and the impulse to explore every possible facet of any given subject, especially if it involved the otherworldly. The weirder, the better. Even lurid subjects like crime, murder and perversion benefited from his unflinching eye and inquiry, driving my Moon and Saturn in Scorpio into rapt attention that bordered on obsession.

There will be lots of homages to read online today, better and more comprehensively written than mine. Find them and then begin your own journey into Wilson’s wondrous worlds. Start with The Outsider. A rite of passage for every human being.

But I wanted to post my shock and sadness and sense of loss upon hearing the news this morning that Colin had died. I don’t like the feeling of being on the planet without him around — as corny as that sounds; but it’s a testament to how thoroughly his essence intertwined with and impacted my path.

It’s like I’ve lost a soul brother.

This post comes via a suggestion from astrologer Sherrye Weinstein, and I’d like to thank her off the top for it.

I’d posted a request for article ideas over on Facebook today and Sherrye suggested an inquiry into the peculiar — and rather long — transits of Venus in Capricorn and Mars in Libra. Venus will move through the sign Capricorn until early March 2014; and Mars will transit Libra, beginning tomorrow, until the end of July 2014. That is a long Mars transit, and in a sign that, conventionally, Mars is muddled in. Not to mention Venus’s FAIL in Capricorn.

Without launching into a diatribe against the too-tight limitations traditional astrology applies to interpretation (with its rulerships, laws, dignities, falls and train wrecks), I want to focus more on the fascinating possibilities that exist for each of us while the planet of love traverses the sign of structure and limitation — Capricorn (where Mars is exalted and runs free — bastard!).

As you’ll see, I’m not negating our heritage from traditional astrology, but I’m amplifying the various paradoxes in a way that fit a modern logos, one imbued with the merits of psychological understanding. Having said that, it’s interesting to remember that Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler is exalted in Libra, a Venusian sign — and that offers a cogent clue here. We’ve a bit of a cluster fuck with these transits, and it’s fun to untangle the various limbs and gender parts, to find the goose that lays the golden egg (I think I mixed metaphors, yes?) Read more

The above photograph, titled eXtreme Deep Field is considered the most zoomed-in photograph ever created by humankind.

Essentially, you are looking billions of years backwards in time because what this photograph displays is a myriad of galaxies, some as old as 13.2 billion years; galaxies that were created shortly after the universe came into existence.

Michael Zhang notes:

What scientists and physicists never broach, when discussing the notion of ‘singularity’ (the Big Bang and all it connotes) is of course what came before the Big Bang.

So what I like to do is contemplate the Big Bang and then hold alongside the theory of singularity the question of origin.

And then something peculiar happens. My mind stretches out to the endlessness of space, eliminating any sense of location, which, then, shortly thereafter does away with the concept of time.

If I do not have markers, locations, to designate any movement from A to B then, well, I don’t have any ‘time’. Because I’m not located in a particular place, neither are any of the galaxies, they might as well all be inside my head, which is the wild and poetic concept that the mystic Rudolph Steiner offered as a teaching.

Steiner suggested that human beings are a direct reflection of the cosmos and that our consciousness is imbued with the entirety of the universe.

In The Sun Mystery lectures he wrote: “Throughout a human lifetime, what happens in the head remains an image of the entire cosmos. The very fact that we have a head means that each of us carries an image of the entire cosmos around with us…”

If you want to amplify your mind being blown a wee bit more you can see the giant, hi-res version here.

So when I meditate on the amazing eXtreme Deep Field photograph that’s what I contemplate. How about you?