“When you know that you are something beyond your body, mind, emotions, sensations, that there is a lot more to you which is deeper than these things, your point of view about life will change.
If all your life you’ve looked for somebody to love you, and then find that your nature is love, what will happen to that search? You spent all of your life trying to get love, and then realize that you are love; you are no longer the bee looking for nectar; you are the flower itself. Suddenly your prospective is totally shifted; now there will be something else to do with your life other than searching for love.
To work on gaining knowledge about ourselves, we use every possible means: emotional methods, energetic methods, psychological methods. We need to sharpen our capacity to learn, our ability to investigate, to see, to understand, and to know. We need to learn how to learn. Then we can go on finding out who we are, what’s really there, what life is about, what is really good, what we are supposed to go after.”

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Emerson looks upon the universe as a witness, not as a lover. He waits for things to display themselves before him so that he can “yield to the law of their being.” Without being in the least a scientist, he is often impressively disinterested and curious about phenomena. He complained that “Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.”

Emerson is at his best not when he is announcing the Oversoul to the people or flattering his audience, but when he is idiosyncratic, spare and strange; in those moods of almost sleepy reflection and passive wonder one feels that he is entirely open to his unconscious, that he can get it to speak through him in the same way, to use his own image, as the tree puts itself forth through its leaves and branches. “The secret of the world is the tie between person and event . . . . The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.”

— Alfred Kazin The Atlantic

“A man meets his life most poignantly in moments of painful contraction and expansion. At those moments he senses the difference between being present and being taken. If he keeps himself open to the question, he will move in what he believes is a fruitful direction.

Many roads will beckon: art, studies, perhaps drugs — other pursuits. He may not find the answer to his fundamental question but he senses that a reality is escaping him; perhaps that something within himself can change existence. Maybe he has a fleeting feeling while listening to a passage of music, or is struck by a word, by nature. Perhaps some flash appears in the midst of love, of sorrow, or joy — a moment of ah…! Something is here, strange, wondrous.

And at that moment, a door opens. He may or may not go further. The chances are that the pull of gravity will close the door. He will be shut away from his ever-present possibility. Back to the office and workplace, to vacations, to family, to having a good time/bad time, getting and spending. The door may never open again — or will it?”

Today’s New Moon makes for a stellium — a sort of cosmic bloc that takes place within one small section of the sky. The locale? Pisces. The theme? Well, with Pisces you always get two completely different scenarios to choose from: Inspired dreaming, otherworldly inspiration and unshakeable faith — on one side. But that’s just one facet of the the fishes’ tale. The dark twin fish connotes Shakespearean tragedies like manipulative martyrdom, deluded flights and fuzzy self-deception.

Regardless the approach, and which of those orientations manifest within the psyche, our present dream cycle is winding to a close. Today’s New Moon highlights the buildup prior to the real new year that begins with the Spring Equinox. Any Piscean pileup will impart a sense of closure, or perhaps, as we’re experiencing life on the world stage, a feeling that the thread that suspends Damocles’ sword is beginning to fray, preparing to snap. The damage to be revealed two weeks from now during the Aries Full Moon.

This particular planetary mashup (the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus — half of the solar system’s denizens in Pisces) heightens our susceptibility to psychological disassociation and splitting, due to the line in the sky drawn by the vector of the Moon’s nodes, and how Pluto, Saturn and Mars — sometimes a brutish planetary trio — are corralled into their own hemisphere of the zodiac.

This division of the circle can be difficult to maneuver. Treacherous actually — always the case when normal, healthy functions within the psyche are sequestered into the shadow realm. You’ll need to decipher the symbols for yourself. And you can do this by trying to picture the enclosed trio via the lens of dream. Let’s say you have three ruffians locked away in a closet. What do you discover once you’ve rallied your courage to open the door? Or you could see this in a less alarming light, and imagine, say, a solider, a lawmaker and a plutocrat being forced to collaborate on a well-lit stage. What sort of play would unfold? What would their relationship set in motion, what is the dream trying to convey by conjuring these three symbols?

Well, in the first instance — related to the thugs — it’s all about the brute force of the instincts and the particular demands the instincts make upon the environment. Mars being the sexual side of our nature, can be rapacious. Saturn being the social side of the self-preservation urge, often appears disallowing and stifling. And Pluto, well Pluto is always about the raw, primordial power of survival. The “get the fuck out of my way I’m going to eat that” sort of subsistence. Survival that must destroy in order to thrive. And this isn’t as unsavory as it sounds. If the cells in your body weren’t constantly being destroyed so new cells could run the course of their function, you’d become a toxic monster. And this is a perfect image to conjure when considering the body politic at this time. Read more

To stall is to procrastinate. That’s the usual connotation of the word stall. And procrastination implies a conscious kind of non-action on the part of the procrastinator. But there is another definition taken from the world of aviation. A mechanical stall is a malfunction in the flight of an aircraft in which there is a sudden loss of lift that results in a downward plunge. “The plane went into a stall and I couldn’t control it.”

Can you relate?

With both Saturn (the prime mover) and Mars (the feisty shaker) in retrograde motion, our direction, our sense of time, our desire (Mars) for a forward momentum (Saturn) — all of our leaning toward and lunging for is, well, suspended — left dangling. So when someone asks you, “What are you up to?” You can say, in all honesty, “Just hanging around.” Or if you’re a more melodramatic type: “Man, I’m going down.”

So, while you’re falling why not pick a card — any card.

Of all the various versions of the Tarot’s Hanged Man (Pamela Colman Smith’s glowing, haloed figure or Aleister Crowley‘s eerie ankh-hung Spiderman) I like the simplicity of Robert Place‘s rendering — taken from his Alchemical Tarot deck — the best. I also think Place’s Hanged Man is more true to the initial stages of frustration that one experiences when she first notices that her airplane has gone into a stall.

Place animates his Hanged Man with a thrashing motion of the body and an angry, perplexed countenance. The man is definitely rebelling against his predicament. And all that he has acquired within the normal, forward motion of time, is falling from his hands. Read more