“In order to develop from any of the three ordinary types into higher orders of being it is necessary to crystallize and temper essence into a permanent and unifeid “I.” This is done mainly by instigating a struggle between essence and personality. Both essence and personality are necessary for this work: essence must have personality or it will not wish to develop. Personality provides the material to study, the obstacles to overcome, the temptations to resist, the delusions to invalidate, and in the process of struggling with and testing itself against personality, essence gains in strength and maturity. This battle is what Islam calls the holy war (jihad) and in this war the more evenly matched the opposing sides, the greater the intensity of combat and the more thorough the destruction and renewal entailed.”

— Kathleen Riordan Speeth

Recently I clicked into a podcast with the author Mitch Horowitz that forced me to put away my painting (I usually multitask) and sit down to catch each illuminating insight from Horowitz’s encyclopedic memory.

I was fascinated to learn of the various magical, mystical, and spiritual movements that have influenced American history, from Plymouth Rock to the Twin Towers. A complete chronology of which Mitch details in his award-winning book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation.

Mitch currently works as the vice-president and editor-in-chief at Tarcher/Penguin. And he is completing his second book, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, a history and defense of the positive-thinking movement, which will be available at the top of 2014 from Crown. You can find Mitch online at mitchhorowitz.com.

We spoke yesterday about astrology, conspiracy theories, the post-election political landscape, his own horoscope and of course tomorrow’s Mayan-inspired End Days prophecy.

Frederick Woodruff: How do you link the world of astrology to the political history of the United States? We all know about Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, Joan Quigley, but what else can you share about the cosmic art and its influence on US politics and policy?

Mitch Horowitz: I actually write about this in my new book One Simple Idea. Seen from one perspective, Ronald Reagan’s personal interest in astrology was fairly casual, and limited to reading the daily horoscope page. But in actuality both Ronald and Nancy Reagan were deeply attached to the social and spiritual mores of Southern California, where they spent almost three decades of their adult lives. They were proud of those ties, and I think rightly so.

In my new work, I go into the deeper aspects of Reagan’s connections to that world. In a sense, he was indirectly a product of the positive-thinking movement, whose phraseology runs throughout his speeches. His first employer was a mind-power mystic and one of the shapers of chiropractic in America, B.J. Palmer, who gave Reagan his break into broadcasting.

One of Reagan’s Hollywood friends was an author named Eden Gray, who Tarot fans will recognize as a seminal, early author of Tarot guidebooks. Reagan spoke openly of his friendship with psychic Jeane Dixon, his belief in UFOs, his longtime interest in astrology and other mystical thought systems, and, most significantly, of the work of LA-based occult scholar Manly P. Hall, whose influence can be detected in Reagan’s earliest speeches. Read more

New Moons are the best time to learn astrology. Not by reading or studying the subject but by taking advantage of the opportunity that a New Moon affords us to feel our way forward in our quest.

Today’s New Moon is in Sagittarius. If you’ve ever wanted to grasp the fundamental principle embodied by this symbol now is the time to do it. You don’t need a fancy approach, just your eyes and your heart.

Look at the symbol of the centaur archer, everything you need to know about what the sign typifies is there, in its picture. Make the associations: Half-human, half-animal, a bow and an arrow. And more importantly an arrowhead and an aim.

What does this amalgam evoke? What is conveyed on the essential level? Meaning, if we strip things down to their pure being-ness, what is there as a movement within the soul, the essence of which is captured in the symbol? The answer imparts direct knowledge of what the Sagittarian ‘instinct’ is about. And that information will stay with you long after any passage from a book.

So, this is how you learn astrology. Books are good, teachers are important but you need a ritual that is beyond the sphere of acquired knowledge. A ritual that involves each of your centers, the intellectual, the emotional (your heart) and your moving center (your body). Applied this way, astrology becomes a kind of spiritual discipline or practice. An active way of receiving.

Forget all the stuff about archetypes or Linda Goodman or your Sagittarius mother-in-law. Those are each several steps removed (or worse, degraded by their immersion in carnival culture) from the simple is-ness of the symbol. Learn to identify the essential level of the instinct within your own experience as it’s made into an image, i.e., the picture of the centaur. Again, forget all the keywords or hackneyed associations. LOOK AT THE PICTURE. See.

We live within and are tethered to the wheel of Time; meaning we ‘move and have our being’ within the entire Zodiacal circle — a symbol of Time. As astrologers it’s good that we familiarize ourselves with the Zodiac’s truth, each unique component (sign) — not only because we are born ‘into’ the wheel, but because we also contribute to it via our process of expression (within Time) that is in and of itself a particular configuration of Time’s body, also known as the birth chart or horoscope. (Yes, reread that paragraph because you don’t want to miss the point.) Read more

My friend Anne Hoff alerted me to this dispatch early this morning.

I haven’t been able to find any corroborating website, but thought I’d share with you nonetheless (Note: Austin Coppock tells me he first read it on the Facebook.)

It’s from astrologer Jonathan Tenney on this year’s Mercury retrograde election predictions and it’s the best post-election commentary I’ve read yet.

Bonus points for: Conflating ‘dementors’ and Caroline Casey (that had me busting out laughing) and evoking Jung‘s principle of ‘enantiodromia‘ to finesse his point.

It is titled Mercury Pivots and it’s a beautiful thing:

It’s been 48 hours since the election and I’m still in a state of shock. Seems like something unusual happened, although I’m not sure I can exactly put a name to it. Feels a little bit like some kind of time-warp. Two days ago the dementors of doom (ala Carolyn Casey [sic]) were riding high…It looked like Karl Rove commanding the 1/2 billion dollars dedicated to the lie and buy strategy of corporcratic control was closing in for the kill. It was, by most accounts going to be at least nail-bitingly close. Then there was Mercury Rx which we all remember so well from the 2000 elections and the anticipation of all sorts of possible delays…vote stealing, and subterfuge. Read more

There’s a famous book called the Art of War. A wise Chinese general named Sun Tzu wrote the book thousands of years ago and it’s considered one the greatest classics of military literature. I love the title because it’s a condensed miniature koan, a magical moniker that calls forth a paradoxical truth related to desire.

As G.I. Gurdjieff taught, whenever you want something the force of your wanting sets off a second force that is directly related to your desire — a force that arises to deny your getting what you want. This is a simple law. Like gravity. It’s nothing personal and it is beyond your ability to manipulate. There is a name to this oppositional side of the equation. Gurdjieff called it the law of denying. These two laws, the law of affirming and the law of denying work like this:

I’ve decided to start a new diet on Monday. On Sunday evening, under the law of affirming, I pull together all my resolve and will power. And then come Monday morning, under the law of denying, I’m gorging on bagels and cream cheese at the coffee shop. What happened?

This diet dilemma was a faulty arrangement to begin with because my intent did not consider the ‘art of war’ which has a secret directive to it that is easy to overlook.

I’ll talk about that now.

Seeing the Invisible

Because our brains are steeped in duality (the Moon/Mercury part of our nature — or the left brain/right brain dichotomy) we miss the one force that would transform the clash between positive and negative. Reconciliation (or neutralization) is the third force or law and Gurdjieff talked about it this way, he said:

“The presence of a third force is necessary, for it is only with the help of a third force that the first two can produce what may be called a phenomenon…” But the problem for human beings, he explained, is that we are “third force blind.”

What is the third force? Well, that’s complicated. I would describe it like this: The third force contains two important components:

The first involves the actual realization that we live life trapped within our tunnel vision of polarity. Good and bad, male and female, liberal and conservative. Blah blah blah. We take this to be reality. But it is missing the perception of the third force.

The second component is that the third force isn’t ‘interested’ in winning or losing, getting or not getting, dieting or not dieting — its essence is that of reconciliation or neutralization. When the paradox of duality is quelled something is then able to actually manifest or appear within the flow of time.

Here is a prayer Gurdjieff gave in relation to the three forces. See what you can make of it and then let me know what you think. It goes like this:

Holy-Affirming,
Holy-Denying,
Holy-Reconciling,
Transubstantiate in me,
For my Being.

A hint is in the word transubstantiate. And also in the word Being, which means presence which means living beyond the confines of one’s personal history with its litany of personal desires which are based on unconscious drives that desire things that have no relevance to the creative expression of your life, as it appears in the moment, right here, right now.

Which is to say that reality is only interested in bringing forth what is fresh, new and pristine — never been seen before. The ego is only interested in ideas and desires that have their origin in unresolved ideas and frustrated desires from the past.

You could say that the third force isn’t interested in the ego’s particular desires or self image. Third force is involved with how presence shows up in real time: In reality. Which of course evokes the planet Saturn.

Read more

The phone rang six times today. Everyone wanted to know the outcome of the election. Each caller explained how he couldn’t take one more minute of torment. I couldn’t blame him. Since when has a civic event ignited such fear, loathing and dread? Christ, I thought democracy was supposed to be sort of cool; and this feels more like a sickness of soul.

I’d decided last week to consciously minimize my obsessive tracking of the polls, the blogs, the posts and the predictions. I’d noted that my fervor was turning into a sort of masochistic dog treat. Like when a dog starts chewing on a bone so hard his gums begin to bleed and he thinks he’s getting more juice from the bone when really it’s just…

A lot of nothing.

And we want so badly for something right now. To appease, put in order, make the craziness subside. Ah, so maybe this election will finally ‘do it.’ Right?

I don’t think so

Ours is a hybrid condition presently. Not unique in history, but unique to us right here and now. In astrology it is the trans-personal planets — Uranus, Neptune and Pluto that mirror, like a full moon on the surface of a still lake at midnight, our generational and cultural shifts. This is the gift, you could say, of the outer planets and what they symbolize. Dane Rudhyar called them “ambassadors from another galaxy”, and I think this is an apt term. Read more