“There’s something I’m really good at, but I’ve forgot what it is,” announced my 7 year-old to his 2 new friends at the campsite we were staying at. He made this announcement standing on a wall in his pyjamas, having insisted they were in fact regular daytime clothes. When he was 2 he would wander around in his Mum’s high heels with a dustbin over his head going “Where’s Finn?” (his name).

He’s an unconscious eccentric and clown. Unlike the rest of his family, he is not very Aquarian/Uranian – not in the sense of hard aspects, at any rate. But he does have Uranus sextile Sun, and trine Moon and Mars. So being individual and different will come naturally to him, and others will enjoy it (Venus in Aquarius trine Jupiter). Whereas his Mum and Dad have either Sun or Asc in Aquarius opposite Pluto. So being weird has been more of a struggle for us, we’ve had to struggle more with others wanting us to be the same as them.

I’m now off camping again for a few days on my own, back at the same campsite on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. If you want good campsites, google ‘campsites “no caravans”’. This one is on an organic farm, very cheap, you don’t even tell the owner you are there till you are going, and he lays on good facilities. He probably has Sun in 4th House Aquarius – organic (Aquarius) farmer (Sun in the 4th). It’s called South Penquite Farm, near St Breward.

Another one I’ve been to is called Pool Bridge, near Porlock in Devon. It’s a thin strip of land at the bottom of a wooded valley, with a river. Cost is only £5 per night. The owner stays on site in a yurt and wanders around in a cowboy hat in the morning, collecting the money. He is both slightly eccentric and civilised, a nice combination. Probably another Aquarian. He was in heaven when he overheard me playing Tales from Winnie the Pooh in the car.

See you in a few days.

The Winds of Change

Using astrology, you can in a sense see your whole life mapped out before you. You know that when you are 34, Pluto will square your Sun, and then conjoin your Moon when you are 42 and so on (using myself as an example!) Of course you don’t know specifically what these transits will mean, or you’d be pre-empting and forestalling necessary changes to yourself. And the universe has a way of not letting us see these things, obvious as they may be with hindsight.

So it’s as if these future changes are already present, as if they have already happened, and they are sitting there waiting for us. It’s a fascinating thought. Look at it this way: if the future hadn’t in some sense already happened, how could we predict it, how could we be so certain about it? Because as astrologers we CAN be certain about the timing, and to some extent the nature, of future changes.

So time is not what it seems. The past, present and future exist equally. They are all composed of real events which our minds place in a certain order that facilitates life as we know it and the process of learning and growth. As I wrote the other day, it is well-known neurologically just how profoundly interpreted and artificially constructed by our brains is the experience that comes in through the senses. Time, space, ‘thingness’, subject and object – all these basic ‘facts’ of our experience are neurological bodge jobs that work.

So it’s no wonder that the human mind can’t help thinking in terms of fate and destiny. Because somewhere we know that time is artificial and that the future is already written. Of course, we then want to literalise and concretise it, but it doesn’t work like that. The future is writ, but we also have the ability to make choices, and that’s a paradox that can’t be understood without a shift in consciousness.

So there is a sense in which the future, which already exists and has substance, draws us towards it. As astrologers, we can feel this. We can currently see the planets Uranus and Pluto gradually moving towards an exact square. So far, they have come within 8 degrees of the square, and will not be exact until 2012. But they are close enough to be operative. And we also see Pluto just beginning his time in Capricorn.

So we know that the economic shock waves that have been passing through the world lately are not temporary. They could be temporary under another astrological signature, and the stock markets are behaving as though the worst is over, but we know the ‘worst’ has yet to come.

It’s as if the Uranus-Pluto square of 2012 is pulling us towards it, and I do not think that is simply a metaphor. There is a new world somewhere out there in the near-future, and we are unavoidably being pulled towards it, and through the storms along the way. This is something we can also feel and sense, and it’s as if the astrology helps us trust and give weight to what we are sensing anyway.

The change will be political as well as economic, for Capricorn is a sign of government. And, as is well-known, the Uranus-Pluto square will be impacting the Sun – leadership – of many of the major powers.

In the UK, the Labour Party has been taking an electoral hammering over the last few weeks, firstly in the local council elections, and then 3 days ago in a by-election for Parliament, in a normally ‘safe’ seat for Labour. There is nothing Labour can do. They have been in government for 11 years, and technically they could continue for many years. But seeing Uranus-Pluto on the horizon, we know that sweeping political change is on its way, and Labour is now the old guard. Everyone is blaming Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, but it is not personal: we are seeing the first winds of a much bigger change.

It is the same in the USA. With an astrological perspective, it has been fairly clear all along that it is Barack Obama who will win the Presidential election, because he represents the new, whereas Hillary and McCain represent the old. I think it’s that simple. Obama is not there yet, and there are still defining battles to be fought, but all the same he is the future towards which America is being pulled, for better AND for worse, by the exact Uranus-Pluto square of 2012.

China is also beginning to show herself strongly on the world stage, while hoovering up the world’s resources in the process. This beginning is just a sign of what is to come. The rise of China is arguably the biggest single factor in the coming changes.

So all these winds are starting to blow. Yes, the credit crunch could just prove to be a blip, Obama might just be a flash in the pan and McCain will win, and China might over-reach herself and go into recession. But the astrology is saying no, these are the first winds of change, and in 4 years time we will be entering a very different world. Uranus square Pluto is very powerful, and it is already reaching out to us from the future, drawing us towards that new world.

Mercury Trine Neptune

Mercury and Neptune are currently trine to each other, and stationing. For the next week or so it will be very easy and natural to communicate (Mercury) with the dream/spirit world (Neptune), particularly if you have planets/Angles at 21-24 degrees of the Air/Fire signs.

A few days ago I dreamed I looked in the mirror and saw a beautiful young man. His name was Language. Days later, that dream is still strongly with me.

Last night I dreamed that the North Node was the point of genius in the chart.

Mercury is also exactly trine to stationing Chiron, and to the North Node. Chiron educated the young heroes like Achilles. So it is a time to dream and to attempt what you may have previously felt to be impossible.

Human-Animal Hybrids, Chiron in Aquarius and the Madness of Worldlings

3 days ago the UK Parliament voted to allow the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for research purposes. In the US, a Federal law is being proposed to ban such practices.

I last wrote about this subject just over a year ago, when the Bill was first proposed. I remain divided on it. I have a visceral response, running alongside a mistrust of the scientific establishment, that says no. But I can also see that a lot of good can come out of it. These embryos will have to be destroyed after 14 days, early enough in my opinion for nothing significant in the way of consciousness to be present. But I can’t prove that, and I may be wrong. So I am cautiously in favour of this research.

At the same time Parliament has passed a number of other related matters: allowing the creation of so-called ‘saviour siblings’, removing the need for a father with IVF treatment, and voting down a proposal to reduce the time limit for abortions from 24 weeks.

What needs paying attention to in all this is the astrology. Chiron is currently stationing in Aquarius, and it is conjunct the North Node and stationing Neptune, also both in Aquarius. This is powerful stuff. Aquarius is associated with Science. Science tends to treat nature one-sidedly as an object of investigation, and ignores nature as subject with which we imaginatively identify. To this extent Science is inhuman. Chiron’s presence in Aquarius is pointing this out, he is saying be careful what you do while I am in this sign, for I am a centaur, I am nature, and I was wounded by the unthinking and heroic Hercules; likewise, you too can do irreparable damage in your heroic but unconsidered quest to manipulate and conquer nature.

With Chiron's conjunction to Neptune, there is the suggestion of the mad (Neptune) scientist, and the crossing of natural boundaries.

With Chiron’s conjunction to the Node, we are talking about long-term karmic lessons for humanity, and often the only way lessons can be learnt is for mistakes to be made. There was a Chiron-Node conjunction in Aquarius at the time of the first oil strike in 1859, and the parallels are obvious. There was also a Chiron-Node conjunction at the time of the first controlled nuclear reaction in 1942. With these precedents we can be pretty sure that Science is going to make some ghastly mistakes around the creation of human life. And probably do some wonderful things as well, like reducing the number of people born with crippling diseases.

As a bio-ethicist pointed out on TV the other night, what you are often dealing with in these situations is competing ‘Goods’. It is good, for example, that a baby has a father, and it is also good that lesbian couples can have children through IVF. People get very passionate about just one side or the other, and understandably so. But I don’t think that is reasonable or helpful, because there ARE 2 sides, and there are usually no easy answers.

There is one issue which for me does have an easy answer, and that is the need to reduce the time limit on abortion from 24 weeks. The pro- and anti-abortion arguments often seem to me to be riddled with wrong-headedness, because they easily ignore the central issue, which is that an unborn baby after a certain (hard to determine) point is a sentient human.

The scientific argument, which carries the day politically, is that abortion is OK if the baby could not survive outside the womb, and as medical treatment improves, so does the time limit go down. This argument is inhuman, it is Science at its worst. It is saying that if Science would not be able to save you once you are born, then you are not human, so we can kill you.

The pro-lifers have a certain amount going for them, but we are often dealing with ideology rather than experience. Does a newly fertilised egg, or even a few week old embryo, have consciousness in any substantial sense? It is hard to know, and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about it. Once you get dogmatic/ideological, you may still be right, but you’re right for the wrong reasons.

I think the ‘pro-choice’ camp also gets wrong-headed, because though choice is an important issue, it is a secondary one. The primary issue is that we are dealing with a sentient human consciousness and the responsibility towards that, in my opinion, needs to come first.

So abortion is complex, and can’t be boiled down to the slogans of pro-life versus pro-choice. It seems to me to be obvious that there is a sentient human being way before, even months before the 24 week time limit that we have in the UK. That said, determining a time limit remains a very difficult problem.

While I am on my soap box, I have had on my mind the Buddha’s saying from 2500 years ago that ‘All Worldlings are Mad’. The saying certainly makes its point. But Indian Buddhism was a monkish religion, and so there are overtones of the superiority of the renunciative lifestyle compared to us mere, ‘mad’ mortals.

All the same, the scientific argument for abortion concerning the viability of the baby outside the womb reminded me of this saying. How could any sane person think like this? Not just one person, but a large collective of people? Similarly, how could a large collective of people take as a moral good the idea of endless economic growth for its own sake, when resources are limited? And when economic activity has the purpose of meeting material needs, why are you promoting it for its own sake? Why does one race of people consider itself superior to another? And so on.

You can see that the Buddha was right, that what he said 2500 years ago applied then and now. Wisdom is about not having these insane attitudes. Wisdom is not about complicated theories, it’s about seeing what’s in front of your nose (which is something the education system can paradoxically knock out of you, it makes you both clever and stupid.) But it can be remarkably difficult to see what is in front of your nose when everyone around you can’t. What society has told you since you were young seems like self-evident truth, and we get a lot of psychological security from thinking like everyone else.

So I think this is the main reason that ‘all worldlings are mad’: that we take our opinions from those around us, and this incidentally means that crazy ideas can take root and become authoritative and respectable. Of course, no-one would ever admit to taking their ideas from those around them. And in my experience this applies just as much to educated people as it does to uneducated people, and to liberal thinkers as much as it does to conservative thinkers. The alleged connection between CO2 and global warming is a perfect example of this. It is a provisional and arguable truth that has been turned by collective thinking into an absolute truth that no 'reasonable' person would reject.

You start to get some wisdom when you have the inclination, and the psychological security, to look independently at what’s in front of you. ‘Ignorance’ comes from the word ‘ignore’, it is a wilful, albeit unconscious, act. Ignorance is thinking that you know when you don’t. Wisdom begins with realising that you don’t know, as Socrates said. OK, I’ll get off my soap box now.

Predicting Death

Lynn has a post about the ethics of predicting death. She begins: “Most professionals agree that predicting death in the chart of a client or a client's loved one is unethical.”

It’s an interesting issue, and there is a lively discussion of it over at Lynn’s site. I suppose it partly depends on what you mean by ‘predict’, because we usually have in mind a psychic peering into the future and seeing an event. And this is possible, some people do see actual events. Like Jung having a vision of rivers of blood a year or two before World War I, when no-one was foreseeing a major war. Or just having a sense of a place you are going to live one day, and then it happens to you.

But I don’t view astrological prediction in this way: it is about dealing with possibilities and sometimes, when you take circumstances into account, near certainties.

And I don’t personally view death as a special case (hello Pluto! – he sometimes turns up and stands behind me when I write.) Death is a straightforward and natural part of life. If you feel your client can handle the subject of their own or a loved one’s possible death – only if – then it is a very helpful area to go to, it is very deep.

I think a big confusion that creeps into the ethics of predicting the possibility of death is our cultural attitude to it. A lot of people are terrified of death, they don’t want to discuss it, and I’m sure the Christian background we have, and its possibility of eternal damnation, has something to do with it. I mean, how do you cope psychologically with the idea of eternal torment? You can’t, no-one can cope with that. And we also have nihilistic materialism, where death is the extinguishing of an ultimately meaningless sojourn on earth. Who can cope with that idea? I for one can’t.

A couple of friends have in their time tried to commit suicide, and what was interesting was the reaction of their friends afterwards: in one case, her friends cut her in the street, they didn’t want to know her anymore. In the other case, her friends, who regarded themselves as ‘spiritual’, wrote her damning letters, insisted she was mentally ill and tried to have her sectioned, and one of them formally ended her friendship with her. I find all this much more shocking than the attempts to commit suicide.

People often can’t handle death. Of course it is a huge and often difficult issue, but we also have all this cultural baggage. This, I think, is why some astrologers can be so absolute and damning of other astrologers who are prepared to predict it.

As I said, Death is a straightforward and natural part of life. This doesn’t mean we know what lies the other side. I don’t think it would be helpful to know, and I don’t think we can know. I mean, we don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon, so how can we possibly know what’s going to happen after we die? What we do know is that we shift out of body-based experience. If you’ve read any Oliver Sacks (‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’), you’ll know just how deeply neurologically created is our experience of the world, divided as it is into 3 dimensions, time, separate 'things' and ‘in here‘ and ‘out there.’ It is a construct that enables us to cope. I think this was Kant’s point also. If you lose your body, you lose all that. But those are the only terms on which we can understand anything. So even if a ghost came along and tried to tell us what death is like, we wouldn’t be able to understand.

That said, I think that in life if you don’t approach things too literally and rigidly, if you see all your understandings as provisional and in the moment, if you see life and other people as flowing and changing, then you start to move away from the 3-D box inhabited by things that our brain builds for us, and towards the completely open dimension that death stands for.

In this sense, death is a very positive and open experience, and it’s only terrifying if you’re clinging to the security of the 3-D box.

It’s also a matter of trust, which with Neptune stationing at the moment, is very topical. Trust in the basic process of life is something that we can lose, but we can’t do without it if we want to grow and unfold. Hanging on to things and to people and to money shows mistrust in life. If you have trust in life, you know that you are like a tree that is continually growing and putting out new branches, that you have a beginning, a middle and an end, all of which are deeply appropriate. Yes, you might get struck by lightning or lose a branch now and then, and you suffer, but there is still a basic flow and unfoldment that is benign and can be, needs to be, trusted in. You can always trust there is a helpful next stage to your life, and the more you trust in this, the more your experience confirms this. So why should it be any different with death? It is simply about moving onto the next stage. And if life has taught you anything, it is that at a deep level you can trust it, even though you may have been dragged through some pretty rough times.

So that is why I don’t see a problem with looking at the possibility of death with clients. Of course you have to be careful, and with a lot of people you wouldn’t dream of it. No transits on their own suggest death. No transits on their own suggest anything concrete. As with all prediction, there has to be a reason to suppose that death might occur, like age or ill-health. Or you might advise someone to be careful on the road under a Mars-Uranus transit if you knew they were a careless driver.

A few years ago I did a reading for a woman in her 80s who’d nearly died the year before and was clearly not well. It was also clear from her chart and from talking to her that she had an unlived sensitive/psychic side that it was now time to explore, and it was a bit like she hadn’t died because there was still this thing left to do. I was able to point to another time, a couple of years down the line, when it was possible she could die, and she was very happy with that, because she had come to terms with dying, and it showed her how long she might have to get on with what she had to do.

Another time a friend was caring for a fairly young person who had terminal cancer. The specialists told her she had another year to live. I looked at the chart and said I reckon she has only a few months. I was right, and it confirmed the intuition that the patient herself had.

I have a prediction going currently with a friend’s elderly mother, who she is caring for. She says it helps her feel that caring for her mother, who doesn’t really want to be around any more, is not a life sentence!

Another friend I deliberately held off with recently. A close relative of her’s had a recurrence of cancer. The astrological prognosis (Pluto about to oppose natal Sun), given the circumstances, was not good. I didn’t discount the possibility of death (which eventually occurred), but it didn’t feel at all appropriate to discuss it.

So I think that discussion of death can be an important part of an astrologer’s work. Of course you have to be sensitive, but that applies to whatever you’re discussing. That said, I think there are 2 areas that lead to confusion: our unhealthy cultural attitude to death; and misunderstanding of the nature of astrological prediction, which people are often too ready to take as certainty, as fixed fate, however carefully you explain it to them. Or it will turn into certainty in their mind subsequently!

UFOs and Conspiracies

The British Government has just started releasing batches of previously classified UFO files after a number of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The files document reported sightings of UFOs by members of the public and the RAF. With Pluto about to make its final visit to Sagittarius, the timing is appropriate. Eight files have been released, part of almost 200 to be released over the next 4 years.

Here are some drawings made by members of the public. (From the BBC news website.)
They include this diagram, whose author believed alien craft used decoy methods to avoid detection, carrying not humans but "fallen angels".

This drawing of a UFO was made from a description given by a 78-year-old man, who claims he was taken on board an alien craft at Basingstoke Canal in Aldershot during 1983.

This reproduction of a UFO was made by a Metropolitan Police officer after three officers saw an object at Stanmore in Harrow in 1984.

A 1979 government briefing for the House of Lords dismissed the idea of political collusion with aliens:

d. There has been no approach to Governments, and no direct knowledge of UFOs by Governments. Lord Clancarty has an answer: there is a great inter-governmental conspiracy of silence, initiated by the CIA.

15. The idea of the inter-Governmental conspiracy of silence is at once the most astonishing and the most flattering claim of all. On so few things can the Governments of the world agree unanimously, but they have all supposedly agreed to conceal the evidence of UFOs from their peoples. Let me assure this House that her Majesty’s Government has never been approached by people from outer space.

Personally, I have no reason to doubt that these experiences were real. And I'm sure they weren't all just mistaking aircraft for UFOs. Beyond that, I don't know.

It's an excellent subject for conspiracy theorists. I like the point about how hard it is to get governments to agree on anything, so what chance a world-wide conspiracy of silence? Of course there are things we don't get told. But I'm continually disappointed by conspiracy theories, because I'd love it if some of them were true. What I keep finding is that the people who promote these theories make very shoddy use of any available evidence or theories that don't agree with their own theory, and 'facts' are presented which turn out to be anything but. These people clearly have a strong psychological need to believe their theories, quite possibly rooted in a sense of powerlessness.

If anyone knows of a conspiracy theory where the case is well-argued, and both sides presented, please let me know! With Pluto entering Capricorn, a time in which we can expect more government control and secrets, we may be about to enter a Golden Age of conspiracy theories!

LIBRA: THE NEXT 2 YEARS

This is the twelfth and final sign in the series, which has taken me about 3 months to get to! For some reason I’ve been putting off writing about Libra. For the other signs in this series, go to Topics on the right of the page, and find 'Sun Signs 2008-10'.

Using solar astrology, Pluto is this year entering your 4th House, while Uranus and Neptune are gradually coming to the end of your 5th and 6th Houses respectively.

So the 3 outer planets between them occupy the second quadrant of the chart, which is a place of self-expression. As a Libran your main focus tends to be on others – for better or for worse – and you instinctively define yourself through your relationships and attitude to others. The outer planets are emphasising the need for you to develop what YOU have to say behind your other-oriented self – the type of home environment you like, your creativity and your skills. You know what it’s like with Librans – getting them to say what THEY want can be near impossible.

And this is where Pluto hitting the bottom of the chart is taking you to – into who YOU are. Pluto is currently the strongest influence, for not only is he entering a new House, he is also crossing an Angle, the IC. The IC is less glamorous than the Asc and MC and is easy to forget about, hidden at the bottom of the chart. But he is your roots. It is just like a tree: what you see is the effusion of branches and leaves above ground, not what is standing there underneath, Atlas-like, making the whole show possible.

So Pluto is asking you, at least to some extent, to turn inwards and pay attention to your deeper sources. As a Libran you like to be civilised, you like to do things with subtlety and grace and consideration for others, and this is your strength. But it is easy for you also to be too identified with your graces and forget that you too aren’t always very conscious, you too have a reptilian brain and ancestral reasons for much of your behaviour. Without this awareness you will become gracefully hypocritical and superficial.

25 years ago I had a chat with my local MP at a fair, and he was telling me about his vegetarianism. What struck me at the time wasn’t what he was saying, but the extent to which he WASN’T THERE. He was trying to impress me with his idealism, but all I could sense was someone who was hard and withered and not at home. He wasn’t a Libran, but it makes the point.


Bernard Weatherill...The Man Who Never Was

Someone who is a Libran is David Cameron, the leader of the Tory Party in the UK, and probably the next Prime Minister. Something that exhausts me to think about is the extent to which these politicians have to pretend to care passionately about every issue that arises. I think it is both Libra’s strength that they can be so involved ‘out there’, but also their weakness. With David Cameron I am impressed with his ability and freshness, but his concerns are so obviously politically crafted that I don’t get much of a sense of the man behind them. Acting ability is also useful in a politician, and Cameron has Moon conjunct Jupiter in Leo.

The man who sets the lie to it all is Boris Johnson, the Tory clown who has recently become London Mayor. He can’t do false sincerity, so he cracks jokes and blusters instead. Asked at a Press Conference about drugs, he turned to his adviser and said, “What’s my policy on drugs?”


The new Lord Mayor of London

Anyway, I’m not here to write on politics. What I’m talking about with Pluto is not just about Librans acknowledging their reptilian brains, I’m talking more importantly about finding a greater degree of reality in your judgement. The judgement that comes through many years of considering both sides is your special strength, but you won’t get there if you either won’t look at your own feet of clay, or you think it wrong and unfair to acknowledge the faults of others.

Listen to this Librans: what drives me bananas about you is not just your unwillingness to look at other’s real motives, but the righteousness with which you defend those people. And you get righteous because you feel it is wrong to talk or even think critically about other people. And this makes you stupid.

I have a Libran friend who spent years getting shafted and manipulated by women he regarded as good, sound people simply because they were young and pretty. The penny has finally dropped, but it has taken him 30 years. Having Moon in Pisces as well didn’t help.

So in some ways Pluto crossing your IC is asking you to look at your feet of clay, examine your past and family background. This may occur through events, such as deaths or births or betrayals within the family. But he is also asking you to deepen your sense of what is real, so that it is the whole of you that is out there engaging with people and weighing up your experience. And to do this you need to listen closely to yourself, listen to what your feelings and instincts are saying, even if it seems unpalatable. Your feelings and instincts are what sustain you, they are the roots beneath the brilliant foliage.

Meanwhile Neptune has been passing through your 5th House of play and children and creativity. Neptune is the Imagination, so he likes the 5th House. The Imagination is the product of both mind and emotion, there is both understanding and feeling, but not separate. Rational analysis and sympathetic engagement fuse to become insight. Through the Imagination we become more whole. With Pluto entering a House of deep personal feeling, you will be able to bring more emotion and sympathy to your rational understanding, and this will enhance your ability to be insightful and creative and original.

Uranus has been passing through your 6th House of work and skills and health and everyday life. Wherever Uranus is, this is where we are being nudged to think outside the box, to see the fissures in the self-serving bodge job that often passes for society's idea of reality. Being successive Houses, there is a progression here from the increased emotional depth that Pluto is catalysing, through the heightened powers of insight that Neptune is giving you, and then bringing this into work and everyday life via Uranus in the 6th. The 6th is an Earth House, and it is about manifesting the inner transformation in the most real place of all, everyday life. But it is also Uranus, so there needs to be a positive disruption as well, a willingness to be seen as ‘different’.

Finally, bringing it all together, we have Saturn in your solar 12th House. The emphasis of the outer planets is on transformation, despite what I said about the 6th. Saturn is about making things real and concrete, and learning from that. But it is in the 12th House, the least concrete House of all! We could say here that as a Libran, a Cardinal sign, you have a need to be in control. Which is OK. ‘Control’ has become a bogey word, it’s what men do to women etc., and it makes you a ‘freak’. We need control, it’s over-control that is the problem, where there is no room for the unconscious and its promptings. Saturn in the 12th raises this sort of issue, and it’s a difficult transit to work. As a Libran, it’s about your favourite word, ‘balance’. Balancing responsibility, fitting in with society, achieving, paying the bills (Saturn), with trust in the natural process of unfoldment of your life - the sense that things that are uncomfortable sometimes need to be so for a while, and also that things that seem completely unearned and ‘undeserved’ can just come your way, and just open yourself to them.

CATHOLIC TRIVIA

Cherie, wife of Tony Blair, is not a good Catholic. She has just published her memoirs, in which she reveals that her 4th child Leo was conceived because she didn’t have any contraceptives with her. What a thing to tell the world about! The story is that Cherie and Prime Minister Tony were staying at Balmoral, the Queen’s Scottish residence. As you’d expect with an upper-class stately pile, it was cold and draughty in the bedroom, and one thing led to another. The reason she didn’t have her contraceptives was that the year before when they were staying at Balmoral, Cherie came into the bedroom to find that the staff had unpacked her suitcase for her!

She’s never been fond of Gordon Brown, and accuses him in her memoirs of rattling the keys of No 10 over her husband. Brown has Moon-Pluto in Leo, Cherie has Moon and Pluto in Leo straddling Brown’s conjunction. And they were engaged in a power struggle (Pluto) over who occupied the throne (Leo).

Tony Blair’s father was adopted. His biological parents were both actors. That explains a lot. Blair has a 10th House Moon, a good place for an actor, because it helps you to connect emotionally (Moon) with the public (10th House). A number of people have commented on what a good actor Blair is. The trouble is, I don’t think he knows he is doing it.

Father Funes, a respected scientist and director of the Vatican Observatory, has published an article in the Vatican newspaper called ‘Aliens are my Brothers’. In the article he says that just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. So far so good. But then comes the killer bit: he speculates that some aliens could even be free from original sin. Who needs comedians when you get priests like this? Presumably he means a world with no sex, gays, unconverted Jews or pleasure. Just eunuchs with wings. Heaven!

When Will Hillary Go? Your Opinion Please.

It’s a good sort of guessing game – when will Hillary go? I invite all my readers to give a date, backed up by astrological argument, as to when Hillary Clinton will concede to Barack Obama in the Democratic nomination contest. I’m going for 4th June.

Hillary was born 26 Oct 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, time uncertain.

I think the real battle has been over for quite some time now. It began under the prolonged opposition from Mars to Pluto that lasted, on and off, from September through to the end of March. It started in earnest on super-Tuesday in early February, when a large number of US States held their Primaries. At this time Mars was stationing between the tips of the horns of the bull – what an omen for a great contest!

Arguing astrologically, I’d say the real battle finished when Mars stopped opposing Pluto on 29 March, because that had been the presiding signature of the contest.

What we are dealing with in Hillary is an enormous amount of staying power which is proving also to be extremely stubborn in the face of defeat. ‘Testicular fortitude’ is the term being used by her supporters. Her funding has dried up, Obama now has the lead amongst super-delegates, and the arithmetic for her to win just isn’t there – and hasn’t been for some time now.

This stubbornness and staying power is described by her Scorpio-Leo configuration. She has Sun in Scorpio, and Mercury-Venus in Scorpio square to a Mars-Pluto-Saturn conjunction in Leo. Very fixed and determined, very good at surviving (Scorpio) and very ambitious (Leo).

The main transit occurring for her (in the absence of a birth time) is Neptune opposing her natal Saturn at 21 Leo and squaring her Mercury at 21 Scorpio. This is not a great natal aspect for charisma, but it is good for emphasising how experienced you are (Saturn), which has been the line she has taken against Obama.

Neptune is now stationing opposite her Saturn, dissolving (Neptune) her stubborn resistance (Saturn) to conceding the leadership (Saturn/Leo). Neptune will be gaining power over the next 2 weeks as he slows right down and then goes retrograde. I reckon this will do for Hillary. Her Saturn will finally yield to Neptune’s power. Neptune is also about illusion and waking from illusion. Neptune being so active for her right now suggests to me that she is not just being calculating or determined, but that she is also refusing to face reality.

Being as fixed as she is, it is more likely she will go towards the end of Neptune stationing, or even as he turns retrograde. So she will fight not just today’s primary in West Virginia, but Kentucky and Oregon in a week’s time, and then the final primaries in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota on the 1st and 3rd of June. Not that the outcome will make much difference. Neptune will just start to move again during these final 2 primaries, ushering in a new phase.

In her natal chart, Hillary has stationing Uranus. So she is sensitive to this planet stationing, and this can help time events. Uranus will be just starting to station in early June. And on 4th June, the Moon will conjoin, and so trigger, her natal Uranus. This is suitably the day after the final primary. So the astrology and the events tie in together to give this date.

Hillary's Downfall

Here is a tasteless video on Hillary Clinton's downfall, courtesy of comedian James Andomian at youtube.

OK, it's a bit harsh, but it's a comment on the fact that she won't bow out when it is time to. She is a Scorpio, so you can't expect it. She is determined to survive in this race, even at the cost of her personal fortune. But there are wider issues, and the writing is now clearly on the wall.

The Different Species of Human

I’m toying with the idea that what we call humanity is in fact a number of different species that share the same type of body. In many ways I find it makes more sense to think like this. We do not all share a common humanity. What we think of as human - the ability to reflect on and to know ourselves, to understand others disinterestedly and to empathise/sympathise – is by no means a universal or even necessarily latent characteristic of people.

With some people, you feel they do have this ability, but it is latent, or got messed up somewhere along the way, and you want to help them get there. With others, you can feel no, they are happy in their own way being e.g. materialistic, that is what they believe in, the world makes sense to them in those terms, they are not particularly messed up, they just are what they are. They are a different species, and it wouldn’t be fair to judge them negatively for being what they are. It’s like dwarves and elves and orcs. Personally, I find this can help me understand some people better if I'm not having to assume they are in some fundamental sense like me. No, we really are different species, like me and horses. And there's nothing wrong with being a horse.

In Buddhism you find the concept of the 6 realms of existence, which are inhabited by different types of being. These realms both exist objectively on other planes to our own, as well as describing the psychological realm to which different species of people belong. What characterises the truly human being is the ability to experience and understand all of the realms and not to be over-identified with any of them.

So you get gods, people say with loads of trines in their charts, who are talented and beautiful, life goes easily for them, but there is little discomfort, at least not enough to get them to reflect on themselves, to see that happiness and ease is not a given. So that when things do go wrong for these people, they really do suffer, because they are not used to it.

And you get jealous gods, those who want to seize from outside of themselves what they think will make them happy, and are ruthlessly competitive and self-centred in the process.The worlds of business and politics are full of this species. A Mars-Neptune square might describe this type – driven and competitive (Mars), but deluded (Neptune) into thinking that happiness lies purely outside of themselves. The USA, the most successfully competitive country of all, has a Mars-Neptune square, as well as a Sun-Saturn square, which has a similar kind of message.

Then there is the animal realm, characterised by the satisfaction of natural desires such as food, sex and sleep. Satisfying these desires can be very pleasurable, and there is nothing wrong with that, and some species of people are happy to live like this.

The hungry ghost realm is the passive reflex of the jealous god realm. Like the jealous gods, these people feel empty inside, but they are Pisces about it: they try to satisfy themselves by sucking energy and attention from other people, or from drugs and alcohol. It is a sad realm.

Then there is the equally sad realm of the hell beings, the opposite of the god realm. Instead of the unalloyed bliss of the gods, they experience unalloyed suffering and madness and despair. It is like a chart full of squares and oppositions and no easy aspects.

What all these realms have in common is that the beings in them are completely identified with their psychological states and they do not see that existence contains other possibilities. Human consciousness is present when, though you may have a tendency towards a particular realm, you see it is not the be-all-and-end-all, that you can change realms. I don’t think you can predict this from a chart, because self-awareness is an act of volition that is always possible (albeit very hard if the suffering or pleasure is very intense). The chart does not tell us the choices people are going to make. But perhaps we could say that a chart with a good balance of hard and soft aspects gives us a breadth of experience that lays a good foundation for reflective awareness.

So these 6 realms are one particular system, quite a good one in many ways. But it is a system and therefore needs to be treated lightly and provisionally, or it will get in the way of direct experience.

I’ve written quite a lot in the past about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but I’m going to drag them out again to illustrate the distinction between human and non-human, to put it rather bluntly. ‘Non-human’ carries a weight of judgement that I don’t intend, it’s just descriptive.

Gordon Brown is well-known for his jealous god tendency, his lust for power that dogged Blair’s premiership, and that has no awareness in it, no consideration on his part as to whether he is suitable for the job (which in many ways he isn’t). But Gordon Brown is not just this. He also has a genuine passion for helping those in need. So he is a human being, at least sometimes, but one with a big power thing to sort out.

Tony Blair seems to me to be more seamless, I feel he belongs to a different species to me. He believes completely in who and what he is, which I think is one sign of an absence of self-awareness. Though he may agonise about whether or not God wants him to do certain things, I don’t think this reflects a genuine awareness of his real motives. I feel much more inclined than with Brown to put his desire to change the world down to personal ambition. If I were to use the Buddhist classification, I’d probably stick him in the jealous god realm.

It’s amazing, given the number of different species that occupy the human body, that we manage to muddle along collectively to the extent that we do. An alien invasion, that would unify us!

In the Buddhist 6 Realms system, the destiny of all consciousness is eventually to become human and then Enlightened. That is where I part company. Enlightenment to me easily becomes an abstraction that takes you away from the integrity and even perfection of your current experience. And as for the destiny of consciousness – that’s a big one! Consciousness is so vast and mysterious and multiform that it seems presumptuous to me to say that it is all going in a similar, albeit uniquely individual, direction. And this also presumes that it is going anywhere, or needs to go anywhere, in the first place!

The Astrology of Peak Oil

Peak Oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. (Wiki)

I’ve always thought that however much we are exhorted to use less petrol etc, it’s not going to happen while it remains affordable, and it will remain affordable until demand starts to significantly outstrip supply. i.e. Peak Oil.

I’m cynical about the extent to which the burning of oil is held to be responsible for global warming, because the issue has been politicised to such a degree. Even if we are the main cause of global warming, nothing is going to stop us using up the oil until it starts to run out. For all the attempts to get global agreements, we have still continued collectively to increase our use of oil.

I have no hopes of the politicians being effective, and the current biofuel fiasco proves the point. On one level biofuel is a nice idea, but any intelligent person can see it will lead to food shortages. Because the issue was politicised, intelligence went out the window. It wasn’t the individual politicians who were stupid, it was the stupidity that so often arises when you have a collective taking action.

The main problem with the use of oil in my opinion is that it is a limited resource, and our civilisation has come to depend heavily on it. This is why Peak Oil is such a significant point, because it will force significant change to where we get our energy from and even maybe a realisation that we need to use less energy. Until that point is reached, we will just be playing with alternative energy technologies.

The big question is when will peak oil be reached? Nobody knows, and there are plenty of theories about when. What we do know is that most of the countries that produce significant quantities of oil, e.g. Iran, USA, UK and possibly Russia, have already peaked. This is very telling.

The issue is complicated by the possibility of using non-conventional sources of oil, such as oil sands, where extraction is harder, but which becomes more economically feasible as the price of oil increases.


Click to Enlarge

The chart for the first Oil Strike is set for 28 Aug 1859 at 4pm in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Neptune is the symbol for Oil, and we find Neptune at 26 Pisces in the 2nd House of wealth and resources, which sounds about right. Pluto is conjunct the IC, revealing Oil to be a source of power. And the Node is in Aquarius conjunct Chiron, showing the potential for damage (Chiron) inherent in its use, particularly when combined with the scientific mind (Aquarius). Interestingly, the chart for the first man-made nuclear chain reaction also has a Chiron-Node conjunction.

In July this year, there will again be a Chiron-Node conjunction, and what is really remarkable is that it will be at 19.16 Aquarius, just a few minutes of a degree off the almost exact conjunction in the First Oil Strike chart. It's almost as if there is some sort of reckoning coming up, the need for a collective understanding that oil is not to be relied on in the way we have relied on it.

What I am particularly interested in is the Progressed Pluto of the Oil Strike chart. In the chart of a nation, a change in direction of Progressed Pluto can mark the rise and fall of that nation’s fortunes, of its power (Pluto).

This works well, for example, in the case of the rise and fall of the British Empire in the UK 1801 Chart. It works in the case of China, whose Prog Pluto changed direction in the late nineties as she began her rise to becoming a world economic power.

The US Prog Pluto will not change direction for another 70 years, which sounds about right to me. People have for years been quick to announce that the US is effectively bankrupt and owned by Japan, or owned by China, and that the end is nigh. But actually its economy is still several times the size of its nearest rival. We are likely to see the size of that difference narrowing in future decades, particularly because of China, and maybe the EU if it pulls together more. But I think it will still be a long time before the US is challenged as the main power in the world. 2076, that’s the year to look out for!

In the case of the chart for Oil, Progressed Pluto changed direction in 2004. There you have it. It is still stationing, and will not start to move again until 2014. We may not know when Peak Oil is going to be reached, but the astrology seems to be saying that actually we have pretty much reached it already (as some people do claim). However, we will only fully know this in hindsight, as Prog Pluto begins to move again from 2014 onwards - the same year that transiting Pluto conjoins the ASC of the Oil Chart.

Pluto squared natal Neptune at 26 Pisces in 2006, a further indication that Peak Oil may have been reached in recent years.

The price of oil has risen dramatically in recent months. There are all sorts of reasons for this. But if the astrology is right, one underlying reason would be the sense that there is a growing and permanent supply problem. It is perfect that Pluto should be entering Capricorn as this happens, because it reflects the deep structural change that will be necessary to solve the problem.

Neptune Stations - just Trust!

Neptune is standing still at the moment, and will be for some weeks, so his influence is stronger than usual. It is a time to trust in your intuition, trust in the unfolding of events in your life. Neptune is currently conjunct the North Node, so if you do trust, you may also meet people who will help you on your way.

Here is an autobiographical story by Philip Levine, based on the theme of finding the solitary orphan who, according to Jung, is 'hidden in the innermost soul of man.' It turns out, coincidentally, that Neptune was also stationing the day of this event in 1989.

[The pictures were added by me!]
"There have been times when I have felt that alone, wondering how I would survive in this universe, feeling a solitary place deep inside, unknown and unrecognized by those around me, and probably unwelcome.

I remember one such time, on a strange journey to Maui in 1989. My life was in chaos, my marriage of 17 years was ending, and one day I suddenly felt I was being urged to go to Maui, a place I’d never been or really even thought about. This meant a trip of 6000 miles at a time when I could not afford it. Why?

No matter how much I reasoned, the urge was insistent. Just go. So I made the trip, and on my first night on the Hawaiian island, as I was setting up my tent at dusk in a remote area, I spotted a dark young man watching me from behind a tree. He was the only other person there. He finally walked toward me, and when I said hello as he approached, he ignored me and walked right past, into the woods.

Initially I had felt scared being in a strange and alien environment with no plan or purpose. A traumatic childhood camping experience made camping feel very unsafe. But now I faced an apparent new threat. Who was this young man, and why was he acting so strangely, and worse…what did he want with me? I wondered where he had gone, and then I noticed him watching me from behind another tree.

I panicked, and once my tent was set up, I raced back to my car and drove off leaving him and the tent. The feeling was one of overwhelming aloneness, with nowhere to turn and no one to help me.

I felt like an orphan.

I sat on a cliff overlooking the sun going down. I had never been anywhere like this, and I’m sure there were many romantic couples enjoying the sunset on Maui that night. But I was so scared and alone. Where could I go? What could I do? I could feel that young man waiting back by my tent in the darkness. I was prepared to spend my ten days on Maui inside that car. I had not felt such fear since I was a child. I cried and pleaded, "Why am I here? I don’t even know why I’ve come here, and what am I going to do?"

But there was an answer, perhaps from the same inner place that first led me to un-dertake such a puzzling journey, and I unexpectedly found myself saying "I don’t know why I’ve come 6000 miles to be here all alone, and this man may be waiting at my camp-site to murder me. If I have come this far without even knowing why, in order to be killed, then let me do it well."

I felt a powerful calmness inside me, replacing the panic, and I drove back to the darkened empty parking lot. As I hiked to my tent, I thought I would probably not sleep that night, but in fact I went right to sleep and did not wake till morning.

It is in hanging out in such empty and rocky places of the soul that the orphan can be found. Sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one, faced with the inevitability of their leaving and all the jumbled feelings of fear, anger, grief, sadness and confusion, if we pause and listen, accepting what is, we may be surprised to find ourselves in a deeper place within. Perhaps this is the mythical and spiritual underworld.

Quiet, solitary, and fragile, the voice of the orphan soul within each of us can be heard. Sometimes it sounds like silence. Something had responded to my plea, calmed my panic, and filled me with the willingness to accept my fate. Was that me or someone else in me?"

Copyright Philip Levine 2006

Jupiter sextile Uranus

Click to Enlarge

5,000 evacuated as volcano blast meets thunderstorm in the Chilean sky (Times online).

Sublime: impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.