Welcome to the November 2017 Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast. Warm greetings from your co-editors, Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry.
Sexy. Spooky. Spiritual. Scary. It's the Scorpio season once again!
Jupiter conjuncts the Sun in Scorpio this Full Moon weekend, exaggerating emotional responses, amplifying conflicted feelings, enhancing fears and anxieties, and challenging us to respond to life's thorniest difficulties with grace and courage.
Scorpio is a spiritual warrior, and this Full Moon we will find that inner spiritual guidance can provide a path forward through the minefields of modern 21st century life in all its complexities. Intuitive wisdom informed with love will provide the answers to our most intractable personal and collective problems.
Garden Harvest Goddess/Scarecrow by Jane Sherry
When we tune in to Higher Mind, tune out the spooky vibes emanating from collective conflicts, and fearlessly engage with all that we find most frightening and challenging, we will all discover that spiritual warrior within that will carry us to victory in our struggle to attain our spiritual and material goals.
It's been a long, hot stormy rainy season in South Florida, but relief is here at last! We had a surprise chill-down that lasted several days, and now conditions have stabilized. We are enjoying Florida's normal fall weather -- sunny with temperatures around 80 during the day and mid-60s at night.
Jane's garden is producing a variety of greens, pole beans are rising on the trellis, ground orchids are proliferating and so many tomatoes are popping up that we're not sure there will be room for them.
As we entered this Scorpio time of year, a couple of weeks ago, our beloved cat companion Devi became very ill and we took her to the nearby pet hospital, only to discover that she had a huge tumour, her thoracic cavity full of fluid, and more. We made sure she was not allowed to suffer unduly. Last Friday a local veterinarian came to our house and Devi died in our arms.
Scorpio season is the season we confront the deep mysteries of life, such as sex, death and the true nature of consciousness. We celebrate our ancestors at Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. It is appropriate to take a moment and consider our relationship to our animal allies and the spiritual paths animals pursue in life and beyond.
Devi, a Sagittarian, was a rescue animal, a feral cat who was captured in a plastic bag and sent to a shelter in upstate New York over ten years ago, where we found her and brought her home. She was a biter, freaked out whenever plastic bags crinkled nearby, and wouldn't eat or get near people, until Curtis grabbed her when she was exhausted and gave her Reiki.
She bonded with him immediately and climbed on his lap daily for more Reiki! In return, Devi would offer us cat Reiki from time to time and we always felt her loving energy supporting us in all we did.
Devi would go on walks in the woods with Curtis in upstate New York, like a puppy. Over the years, Devi became Jane's familiar and Curtis' Reiki and walking buddy, and we saw her personality mellow -- she became a loving spiritual companion.
One of her favorite spots was right next to our meditation cushions. She learned that she was not allowed to sit on them. Our spiritual teacher, Shri Anandi Ma, says that cats will sit on meditation cushions to soak up the prana collected there, because soaking up prana is one of the cat's main spiritual missions in life. That is why Ma encourages students to avoid cats altogether.
But Devi was well-trained, perceptive, and bonded with her humans in a way that we have not seen with any other cats we've had in our lives. We had a telepathic connection with her that was profound. She always knew our thoughts, even if we were not consciously communicating with her, and we knew she knew.
Jane and I miss her more than words can convey. Devi's favorite place was in Jane's garden, in New York, California and Florida. Devi loved fragrances of all kinds, and delighted in Jane's array of aromatic herbs. She would hang out with Jane as she worked in the garden for hours at a time. She also adored the various scents Jane used when she was making her Jane's Homemade Apothecary products, especially lavender.
We know that she experienced an accelerated spiritual evolutionary journey in her lifetime. A true Sagittarian, she sought out adventure, thrilled at confrontations and enjoyed hunting above all, but as she aged she became more and more involved in the human world, and we remember her for her huge heart, her loving nature and her total devotion.
Animals have group souls, but they also have individual physical, etheric and astral bodies. The experience of each animal contributes to the collective intelligence and spiritual evolution of the species. Sometimes, sub-categories of a type of animal will share a group soul, more clearly defined than the larger group soul, and sometimes an animal will develop with an individual soul.
We do not know where Devi fell in this spectrum, but we are convinced that Devi moved closer in her life to being ready to reincarnate as a higher being, perhaps a human, perhaps some other self-conscious creature. We know that Devi transformed many of her less desirable character traits over the years, and we shared a journey of spiritual discovery that Jane and I continue to explore. We honor our Reiki cat, Devi, and we wish her well, along with the rest of the felines sharing her group soul.
Full Moon in Taurus Cosmic Weather Forecast
This month's full moon takes place on Saturday November 4 at 1:22 am Eastern time, when the moon reaches 11°58′ Taurus, opposed by the Sun at 11°58′ Scorpio.
Full Moon Over Roxbury Road by Jane Sherry
Halloween and Day of the Dead are the quintessential North American Scorpio holidays, when we celebrate our ancestors and mingle with those astral entities that live beyond the veil. The Scorpionic season is always one that emphasizes, sex, death and the transcendence of the egoistic personality.
There is an alchemical quality to this Scorpio season, which is also the time of year in the Northern hemisphere when people set aside harvested foods in preparation for the winter season to come.
The lactofermentation of sauerkraut takes place at the time of the Scorpio Solar Festival and the Taurus Full Moon, a moment of alchemical transformation, when mysterious forces begin to percolate through the psyche of every human being.
Fermenting Sauerkraut by Jane Sherry
Read our article entitled Lactofermentation, Putrefaction and Scorpionic Transformation where we explain the parallel processes of food alchemy you can perform in your own kitchen using simple, non-electrical tools, and the spiritual transformations recounted in Medieval tales of classical alchemical texts.
If you aspire to the role of household alchemist, try out the fantastic recipe for Sauerkraut and Fermented Vegetables from our dear friend, farmer and nutritionist Betsy Cashen.
Cosmic weather patterns this month favor increased abundance, intense romantic connections, heightened sexual energy and strong support for all spiritual practices designed to connect us to Higher Self, Higher Mind, and Cosmic Consciousness.
Sun in Scorpio is conjunct Jupiter, and the Sun-Moon axis is sextile and trine Neptune in Pisces, creating a sense of serendipitous good fortune, in which Divine Timing seems to inform all we do with love and mindfulness. Even those of us with highly developed rational minds will experience unusually acute and penetrating intuitive insights, highly symbolic and meaningful dreams and strong empathy, enabling us to experience other people's emotions as if they were our own.
Take this opportunity to experience the trans-personal aspects of human existence, and to practice the level of discernment required to keep our own emotions separate from those of others with whom we are connected in one way or another, during this highly Neptunian Full Moon cycle.
The Sun-Jupiter Scorpio conjunction can also surface heightened awareness of our mortality, and increased focus on the many ways the 21st century world delivers unexpected death -- through climate catastrophes, unexpected illnesses (such as those that felled our feline companion Devi), and terrorist acts like the November 1 Manhattan Bike Path Massacre by an ISIS-sympathizer, lone wolf attacker.
If you experience these types of energies, utilize the Scorpionic influences to connect with your Guides and Teachers, Angelic Guardians, Higher Self and Higher Mind. Seek support from those you love and trust and you will be rewarded with penetrating insights into the nature of reality and the nature of your own existence.
Enjoy the positive aspects and celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with love, but beware of extravagant, gaudy displays of wealth. Forego conspicuous consumption. Refuse to be hypnotized by glamorous but toxic celebrity culture, which will be promoted nonstop during this Thanksgiving holiday month.
The Sabian symbol for this Taurus Moon is A young couple window shopping and represents the socialization of desire, a time when young people first become aware of the cultural potency of status symbols and displays of wealth and begin to form life-long desires and habits of consumption that will serve as class markers of upward mobility while inducing social conformity in all areas of life.
The Sabian Symbol for this Scorpio Sun is An Official Embassy Ball, which symbolizes the class consciousness and solidarity that characterize the upper levels of society in all countries around the world. Ritualized displays of wealth and power serve to unite the most privileged members of society, forging bonds that serve to concentrate wealth and power over time.
These are significant symbols for us to reflect upon this Thanksgiving season, since they shed light upon the season's cultural significance at a very deep, Scorpionic level.
Modern day Thanksgiving has little to do with gratitude or humility or any spiritual values of any kind. Thanksgiving has become a celebration of gluttony, conspicuous consumption, the beginning of a month-long orgy of Christmas shopping, and a spectacular collective celebration of the joys of rational materialism.
Each year on Thanksgiving, Jane and I join in a virtual commons of like-minded, passive viewers watching a media spectacle designed to forge emotional links between consumers and corporations sponsoring massive parades and a succession of football games shown on TV night and day all weekend long.
The towering air-filled balloons march through Midtown Manhattan, and file across the TV screen, filling my living room, as we munch on breakfast and sip on hot sugary caffeinated liquids while we participate in a nationwide homage to the omnipresence of the brand icons of Madison Avenue, a celebration of consumer culture and its ability to mesmerize children, of all ages, with pastel kitsch cartoon characters emoting warm and fuzzy sentimentality that jerks the heartstrings while imprinting a series of corporate logos in the brains of viewers everywhere.
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade courtesy Wikimedia
There is a subtext, and that is that the imagination will be subordinated to the marketing message, that on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the entire nation of 360,000,000 will awaken as one, with a druggy food hangover, climb in our SUVs and race to the shopping malls to begin a marathon orgy of compulsive spending and acquisition, which will climax on or about the festival commemorating the birthday of Jesus Christ.
Throughout this schizophrenic “holiday season”, our excessive spending and overconsumption of food, drink and electronic media are implied to be a gargantuan love offering to the Divine and, simultaneously, a concrete expression of the gratitude we all feel to our cultural forbears and an affirmation of the rampant materialism of our consumer culture.
In addition, it is through the holiday shopping rituals that we acquire the sacraments of conspicuous consumption, the newest electronic devices, fashions and other markers of material success -- the fetishes of our materialist culture.
We all know that the acquisition of the newest toys, trinkets, smart TVs and phones is a vital activity for all Americans -- defining our status, our personality, our aesthetic sense, even constituting our deepest social identity.
Virtue is visible in America. In fact, virtue generates its own spectacle. We are what we buy! You can easily spot the winners in our culture by the logos on their clothes, their cars, their computers, phones and handbags. And the winners are considered to be not just smart or lucky, but virtuous. Yes, our culture teaches us that virtue is equivalent to wealth.
G 350 BlueTEC in Goldlackfoliendesign: © 1971markus
America’s current cultural mythology of social Darwinism and free market capitalism holds that competition among individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of others and the commons is the God-given right and the moral duty of all people, because in the Bible God made Adam and Eve stewards of the Earth, and all that lives upon it. A good steward must improve the property, so to speak. So individual profit seeking activities such as exploiting natural resources could even be considered a Biblical mandate.
This economic war of all against all will result in a Divinely ordered society, with the most deserving individuals conspicuous by virtue of their wealth and 10,000 square foot McMansions, and the least deserving individuals marked with the unmistakable stigmata of their moral failure, apparent to all in their lack of material possessions.
This is not originally an American narrative, rather its origins can be sought in the religious and political wars of 17th century England, where competing interpretations of Biblical narratives by Catholic and Protestant Christians triggered bloody wars across all of Europe and throughout the United Kingdom.
Read more about the Puritan roots of contemporary American culture in our article Thanksgiving: Community and Conflict.
As an antidote to rampant materialism, be sure to say a heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving during the holiday season.
We suggest A Thanksgiving Prayer from the Mohawk Nation. After all, we can only guess what the Wampanoags must have thought when they first saw the strange ships of the Pilgrims arriving on their shores. But their custom was to help visitors, and they treated the newcomers with courtesy. It was mainly because of their kindness that the Pilgrims survived at all. Let us give thanks with their own prayer in honor of these indigenous people who selflessly helped the foreigners invading their territory centuries ago.
Full Moon in Taurus -- Abundance, Romance and the Qabalistic Connection
The Full Moon in Taurus is traditionally a lovers’ moon, perfect for romance, which combines the emotional, sexy watery nature of Scorpio with the earthy sensuality of Taurus.
The Moon, associated with romance, is said to be exalted in the sign of Taurus, which means that at this time positive Lunar qualities manifest in their highest and most beneficial forms, and any deleterious effects from negative Lunar qualities tend to be minimized.
In the Western Qabalistic System of Wisdom Teachings recorded in the various forms of Tarot cards published since the Renaissance, the Moon in Taurus is associated with the six of disks, which is called Success.
The Qabalistic Tarot displays Ancient Wisdom Teachings in graphic, symbolic forms that depict the macrocosm and the microcosm simultaneously depicted via a map called the Tree of Life. Each card has two meanings corresponding to aspects of the microcosm (the human being) and the macrocosm (the Universe).
The Tree of Life symbolizes important places in the Universe; a map of the human mind, body and aura; states of consciousness within the human mind; stages along the path of life; archetypes of the collective consciousness; steps along the path to spiritual enlightenment; and energy states of varying frequency from lowest to highest.
On the material level the six of disks is associated with quantifiable, substantial material gain; a lifestyle of sensuous opulence; romantic love; and sexual prowess.
For alchemists and practitioners of the Western Mystery School Traditions of Ceremonial Magic, the six of disks has a very special secret significance.
The six of disks represents the Union of Heaven and Earth, the alchemical union or royal marriage of Universal Male and Cosmic Female energies experienced by a man and a woman in sexual union whose hearts are in tune and resonating to the energy of the Divine.
The six of disks represents the highest form of sexual magic. The partners transcend their egoistic personalities through their fusion in love and in offering up their love to the Divine for the benefit of humanity come in contact with the Source of Universal Life Force Energy, then channel that energy through their bodies and out into their environment.
This is a Western Mystery School variant of ancient Tantric practices which channel sexual energy up the spine through the power of the will by blocking orgasmic release through mental concentration.
In this modern variant of sexual magic, a couple dedicates their loving energy to the nourishment of favorite Deities, Angels, Guides and Teachers in Higher Realms up to and including the Divine Source.
The couple links hearts as they reach the plateau stage of sexual arousal, and sets their intention to send the energy up into their crowns and to radiate out through the crown and heart into Higher Spiritual Realms and into the material world.
This is a true love-offering to the entire Web of Life inhabiting all the planes of existence.
Spiritual beings who inhabit high-frequency realms of subtle energy obtain nourishment from human emotions, which exude a subtle energy that is equivalent to perfume in those realms.
This is why Spiritual Teachers tell students they should never become attached to their negative emotions and thought-forms. Students must learn to minimize those negatives as much as possible so as not to attract subtle energy beings who feed on human negativity.
This is why we seek to cultivate positive emotions and thought-forms, which we offer up to the Divine during our spiritual practices, prayers, rituals, meditations and affirmations, and yes, in our love making.
In this case, as the two lovers unite the energies from their opening hearts during sexual union, they experience a fusion that takes consciousness beyond the boundaries of the egoistic personality, and their combined energy resonates with the extremely elevated energy frequency associated with the Divine Lovers, uniting the earthly and heavenly energy streams.
The energy released into both material and subtle energy realms by the act of love and sexual union, which consciously unites male and female, above and below, ascends into subtle realms where it is received as an offering and a banquet by Benevolent Beings of Light. (See accompanying artwork Healing the Wounded Heart of the World by Jane Sherry.)
The act of love, performed as a conscious act of spiritual practice and a conscious offering to the Divine, can be a powerful magical act that activates the tremendous power of sexuality in the service of the spiritual evolution of humanity as well as one’s own personal spiritual evolution.
Imagine the heart of one of these lovers as a rose within a cross, symbolizing the human body and material existence, and imagine a rosy glow around the rose.
This is the image of the six of disks in the Crowley Tarot deck, and is a beautiful symbolic rendering of the moment of the opening of the compassionate heart and the awakening of loving wisdom.
This Full Moon reflect upon this image and you will sense the perfume of romance and the magic of love in the air.
On the spiritual level, the six of disks corresponds to the heart chakra, the fourth chakra in the human body, and also symbolizes the Sun, which is the source of life-giving light and heat in our Solar System.
The six of disks represents the action of the heart in the material world. We can study what that looks like by studying the lives of Ram and Christ -- and Buddha.
The six of disks is called Success because it represents the Union of the Heavenly and the Earthly realms, the infusion of the Holy Spirit into material reality, and into humanity, and is represented by the six-pointed Star of David.
The six of disks symbolizes the creative impulse of the highest form of Deity manifest in the material world – Christ consciousness in a human body, actively at work in the world to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The six of disks is that harmony of expression which reflects the harmonious impression of thoughts and impulses emanating from the Higher Mind, Higher Self and Higher Purpose. The six of disks represents intuitive action informed by a compassionate heart.
This Full Moon in Taurus weekend we all can aspire to become that spiritual warrior whose courageous actions are always guided by loving wisdom. Courage does not mean freedom from fear, but rather overcoming our fears to act in accordance with spiritual guidance and loving compassion in the face of frightening appearances around us.
Jane and I have been talking to a lot of people lately who are Lightworkers, meditators, spiritual practitioners of various faiths and lineages, and everyone is saying that they are being stretched way outside their comfort zones, have been for too long, and would like to hear that relief is in sight.
Frangipani in the Satya Center Boca Raton Garden, photo by Jane Sherry
Good news is here! On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, Neptune will turn direct at 11 degrees Pisces. During most of 2017, Neptune in Pisces has squared Saturn in Sagittarius creating a fog of misinformation, astral glamour and uncertainty.
As all of us know, this year illusions, astral glamour, self-doubt and misinformation, all governed by Neptune, have challenged the Saturnian structures of our belief systems and perceptions of reality.
Fake news, political propaganda, misleading marketing campaigns, duplicitous celebrities and dueling versions of reality have become our staple news diet this year. It's enough to make anyone nauseated, anxious, and fearful.
The Neptune-Saturn square, which began in 2015 has challenged us to investigate our own beliefs and perceptions to determine if we are staying true to ourselves and our Higher Purpose, or if we are being unduly influenced by emotions run amok, rumours, propaganda, wishful thinking and ideologies that obscure a clear view of reality and undermine our faith in our own perceptions.
Above all, while such aspects persist, we must scrutinize our emotional reactions to people, places and events to determine if we are responding in accord with our Higher Mind, or if we are being misled by selfish desires and wishful thinking. Our own feelings, which arise in the astral plane, can create a self-conceived mind-fog of emotional glamours.
So during times like the last year or two, when clarity is hard to come by and a fog of illusion covers the landscape around us, it is vitally important to rise above the astral realm through meditation and other spiritual practices. At such times, it is only by ascending to the causal realms of clear vision informed by the Higher Mind that we can separate fact from fiction and reality from fantasy.
In short, when dealing with news reports, Presidential tweets, channeled messages, and even our own emotions, we must practice discernment. Western psychotherapy and wisdom teachings of both East and West are in agreement that most of life's problems result from emotional reactions to challenges in our lives. You can see a snake under the bed, your can get gooseflesh, and you can feel fear, but you have the ability to transcend the fear and act in a way that will minimize the danger to yourself and others.
Once we have centered ourselves in Higher Mind, we are in a position to survey our own emotional state, which creates individual astral glamours in the form of ego-driven desires and critical judgements of others based upon our own emotional predilections.
The good news is that Saturn is in the last degrees of Sagittarius and will enter Capricorn on the Winter Solstice this December, when Saturn and Neptune will be in happy sextile, with Earthy Capricorn providing much-needed grounding to spacey Neptune in Pisces.
As we know, the outer planets have been in a civilization-transforming series of extremely volatile aspects ever since 2008, including the Grand Cardinal Cross, the series of Uranus-Pluto squares, and the Mutable Grand Cross of 2016 which evolved into the current Neptune-Saturn square.
Now for the first time in