Celebrating the Aries Full Moon & Libra Solar Festival
Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry. Welcome to the Tuesday October 4, 2011 edition of the Satya Center newsletter and Cosmic Weather Forecast.
This month we celebrate the Libra Solar Festival and the Aries Full Moon, also known as the Hunter's Moon, because in the Northern Hemisphere this month is a month of falling leaves, when game will be more visible and vulnerable.
It's fall! Archangel Michael comes armed with subtle fire and a sword of iron, to redirect Universal Life Force Energy on planet Earth upward, lending support to all spiritual practices, and offering the promise of accelerated spiritual growth in the season to come.
See our article entitled Autumn Equinox 2011: The Archangel Michael Meditation, for a complete guided meditation designed to invoke the protection of Archangel Michael during these difficult transitional times, and to purify and cleanse us of all unwanted and negative energetic attachments we have incurred through our interactions with those around us.
Cosmic Weather Forecast for the Libra Month of October
Let us take this opportunity to accelerate our progress along the Ascension path appropriate to this seasonal cycle. The Fall season is synonymous with the sign of Libra, and is all about releasing attachments to lower chakra activities more appropriate to the summer season, refining and raising our internal energies to the higher chakras, and cleansing our bodies, minds and auras of all unwanted and negative energetic attachments resulting from imbalanced relationships of all kinds.
The sign and month of Libra is always about relationships, and this month's Full Moon is all about spiritual community. We are all going to be presented with golden opportunities to participate in spiritual community, and this participation will provide strength, wisdom and joy to us during this difficult time of transition.
This is an ideal Full Moon for meditation and group work of all kinds. This month's Cosmic Weather Forecast indicates harmonious and auspicious conditions on the inner planes. This Full Moon, Ascended Master Guides and Teachers are making themselves readily available to provide Lightworkers, meditators and seekers with the extra energy, deep insight, and clarified understanding we all need during these troubled times.
The Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival occurs on Tuesday, October 11th in North America at 10:06pm Eastern time and at 7:06pm Pacific time, and falls at 19° Aries/Libra.
The effects of the Pluto-Saturn square that is the signature aspect of the global financial crisis continue this Full Moon, with Saturn and the Sun conjunct in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn, and all three planets square the Moon in Aries.
These aspects are somewhat gloomy, and although they are not as explosive as similar past and future aspects we are experiencing in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown, we must all make an effort to rise above the fear, anger, sadness, and depression that such a lengthy series of difficulties always presents. The main emphasis this month is on oppressive but necessary duties that must be honored.
On a positive note, the Aries Full Moon, Mars in Leo and the North Node in Sagittarius form a grand trine in Fire. The fiery energy of this well-placed Moon indicates an uprising of will forces deep within our unconscious, which feeds into the extremely strong and creative Mars in Leo, indicating that we are now focused internally upon the North Node in Sagittarius, the "destiny point" in the chart, which, in this case, falls in the aspirational, philosophical, and adventurous sign of Sagittarius.
This Grand Fire Trine provides immense support for us to come into alignment with our Mission in life, our Higher Purpose, and to achieve clarity concerning our own inner Truth. The energies of this Full Moon can help us to understand the changes that are necessary for us to advance spiritually and materially, and also support the activation of the will forces necessary for us to pursue our own path of Spirit.
The support offered by the Cosmic Energies released during this Full Moon Grand Fire Trine is being directed by our spiritual Guides and Teachers to assist us in achieving our loftiest spiritual and material goals, so this Full Moon is a time to ask for guidance, give thanks, and offer help to those in need in our own communities. The more we give, the more we shall receive from Spirit in return.
By connecting with inner spiritual guidance and with our spiritual community during this Aries Full Moon cycle, we strengthen our own ability to creatively address the most pressing issues we face in our families, our workplaces and in the broader world at large.
The Sabian Symbol for this month's Full Moon at 19° Aries is "The magic carpet of Oriental imagery: the use of creative imagination."
Thus, this month it is through our spiritual relationships that we are fulfilled, and this sense of connection to Spirit, to our Guides and Teachers and to our spiritual community provides the safe, secure space in which we can envision a better, brighter future on an individual and a collective basis. This Full Moon our spiritual community, both incarnate and disincarnate, bolsters our self-assurance in a time of troubles, when it appears that we can no longer depend upon existing social structures to provide for our financial well-being, our personal security, our health and the health of our communities.
Global News Roundup: "Occupy Wall Street" Protests Rock US
For many people that I have talked to lately, a common issue is fear of the future and a feeling of being "alone against the world". That's not surprising because in their response to the global economic crisis our political and financial leaders have demonstrated their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
In fact, as readers of this newsletter are well aware, the financial elites on Wall Street and our political leaders in Washington collaborated in a 30 year plan to deregulate banks and investment firms which resulted in the creation of a string of financial crises featuring massive equity, commodity and debt bubbles, world-class episodes of financial fraud and abuse such as the S&L crisis and Enron, the creation of $60 trillion dollars worth of opaque and mysterious financial products called "derivatives" which cannot even be priced by experts in today's markets, the re-distribution of wealth in America so that the top 1% own the vast bulk of all equities, cash and assets, and the impoverishment of the American middle class during the de-industrialization and financialization of the US economy.
This deregulatory neo-liberal political and economic regime collapsed in 2007-2008 resulting in a $15 trillion taxpayer bailout, the loss of over $10 trillion in financial assets, and the collapse of the American housing market, repository of the vast majority of middle class savings.
No financiers were put in jail. No indictments have been issued for players at major banks or Wall Street investment firms, no high-profile Congressional hearings have been scheduled, and other than New York state, no state attorney general is conducting serious investigations of the Wall Street meltdown. No substantive reforms and regulations designed to prevent a recurrence of the debacle have been put in place. Political and financial leaders in America and around the world have been united in their resolve to socialize the losses in the financial system, privatize all profits to the benefit of the big bankers and Wall Street firms who caused the collapse, and force austerity on the 99% of the population who do not have tens of millions of dollars worth of financial assets.
Austerity for the masses and taxpayer bailouts for the upper classes is the global prescription for recovery. Deregulation remains the default setting in the world's political capitals, and the neo-liberal economic prescriptions that generated this global meltdown remain the gold standard of economic theory among the world's elites.
The result is a series of rolling crises that affect first one part of the world, then another, with no end in sight. The financial plague has gone global, affecting economies and markets in Asia and Europe as well as America.
All eyes are on Europe this month, where knowledgeable market watchers are anticipating a total financial meltdown and the breakup of the Euro zone.
“I’m very concerned of things getting out of control,” Professor Nouriel Roubini, Chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC. explained in an October 2 interview at Bloomberg’s Dubai office. “You need a huge bazooka of at least 2 trillion euros, but you can’t wait three months. You have to do it in the next few weeks.”
Roubini is justly famous for his predictions of the dire consequences of the 2007-2008 Wall Street Meltdown, which we brought you in our February 2008 newsletter, The Coming Collapse of Globalization.
Roubini sees little hope for the Euro project. “Even if you have a debt reduction, that’s not going to restore growth unless you have a change in real exchange rates through a depreciation and you go back to national currencies,” Roubini continues.
“The problem isn’t that Greece is insolvent, but that the fact of having two big elephants in the room – Italy and Spain,” Roubini said. “They’re too big to fail but also too big to save. Even if they are illiquid, but solvent given austerity reform, they’ve already lost market credibility.”
Roubini believes that a resolution of the current European crisis would require the following: easing of European Central Bank policies and rates, lowering the value of the euro, recapitalization of European banks, and an “orderly process to allow the exit of Greece from the euro zone,”
There is a risk of a “self-fulfilling run” on their government debt, Roubini said.
“What is the likelihood of all of these things occurring in a coherent, consistent and realistic way to avoid the mess?” Roubini asked. “I think it’s a low probability because of the political constraints.”
Roubini calculates that the consequences of European leaders' failure to adequately address their economic and political problems will likely be "worse" than the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which precipitated the onset of the "Great Recession" and the current global financial crisis.
The response of global elites to the financial meltdown seems to be "austerity for thee and bailouts for me." No new taxes on the super-rich. No new jobs and fewer government services for everyone else.
The elites of the world seem to have seceded from the human race. They no longer believe they belong to the human community. They want to secure their fortunes, their over-sized gated homes and their privileges at the expense of the other 99% of humanity. In their ego-mania these elites pursue a short-sighted Darwinian, rational materialist, winner-take-all philosophy of life that is as crippling to the souls of the winners as it is to the material well-being of the losers in the never-ending race for more and more.
The ongoing slow-motion global economic collapse has created a huge amount of stress. For many of us, it is no longer possible to trust our political leaders to do the right thing. It is no longer possible to believe that if we play by the rules of the financial game we will be able to achieve our life-goals -- to support ourselves and our families.
For many people, President Obama's performance has proved disillusioning and disappointing. The anti-torture, anti-unnecessary-war, rule-of-law, environmentalist, green-jobs creating, candidate of 2008 has veered so far to the right that he actually threatens to out-do former President George W. Bush in expanding the global war on terror and ratifying the use of torture as an everyday tool of American foreign policy. Instead of the green jobs program candidate Obama promised, President Obama favors building a new generation of nuclear reactors and creation of a new environmentally disastrous pipeline from Canada's tar oil fields into the US. Candidate Obama promised to put people first. Now President Obama wants to gut Social Security and Medicare to pay for his multi-trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street and foreign banking interests. If George W. had behaved this way, the country would have been in open revolt by now.
Obama's performance looks good only in comparison to the intransigent and reactionary American Congress.
Despite America's love affair with Obama, it is clear that a surge of public disapproval with financial and political elites is rising across the country.
A recent poll shows over 50% of Americans disapprove of Obama's performance, while 82.3% disapprove of the performance of Congress. These are lower numbers than George W. Bush posted at a similar point in his ill-starred Presidency, and the lowest approval ratings for Congress ever recorded.
No one will be surprised to hear that the only group posting lower approval ratings than America's politicians is America's financial elite. In a recent poll 97% of respondents said they do not trust bankers.
This disapproval is manifesting in a series of protests against elite financiers and their political enablers that is beginning to sweep the country.
This is appropriate considering that the Sabian symbol for the Sun at 19° Libra is "A gang of robbers in hiding: protest against disharmonic social privilege."
The American protests began at Liberty Square, a park in Lower Manhattan's financial district, on September 17, 2011, organized by a group called "Occupy Wall Street" in response to a call to confront the power of organized financial capital in a Canadian magazine called AdBusters. More than 700 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested Saturday October 1, as they attempted to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.
The protesters say that "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."
Protests have spread to Boston, Chicago, and dozens of other cities across the country. In downtown New York, the protesters hold workshops, informal concerts and community debates every day where discussions are held in a free-form open-ended manner.
People are donating money from all over the world. Car pools of reinforcements are arriving from Wisconsin, California and Florida. One woman who traveled a long way to join the protesters is Becky Wartell, 24, a massage therapist from Maine. "I am a small business owner!" she told a reporter from the UK Guardian. "What everybody's here protesting is that fact that 1% of the population controls so much wealth. We are the rest of society. We are the 99%," she said.
"One thing many of the protesters do know is their facts and figures," explains Guardian reporter Paul Harris. "For every hippy talking about world peace or traveler wanting to heal the world, another will mention the exact tax rates that rich Americans pay, or that 20% of the US population now control 84% of the wealth. Or that the richest 400 families have the same net worth as the bottom 50% of the entire nation."
"Brought together by outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, participants hope the New York protests can plant the seeds of a permanent national movement," reports Colum Lynch in an article in The Washington Post. "The site www. occupytogether.org serves as a clearinghouse for information on the movement and includes a list of events around the country."
"The primary theme is that corporate capitalists, backed by corrupt politicians, have tipped the balance of the economic system too far in favor of the powerful, thus condemning the regular guy to a sea of debt and little opportunity. As one sign put it: 'The loan shark ate my world.'"
“'The American dream is dead or dying,' said Max Richmond, 26, a New York City-based carpenter from Millerton, N.Y. 'Four or five weeks ago, I was just another apathetic, defeatist member of my generation. Being here, I’m not. We were all just waiting for something like this to happen.'"
"The movement has struck a chord in some liberal New York circles, attracting celebrities such as actress Susan Sarandon and former New York governor David Paterson," The Washington Post reports. "It also got a seal of approval from one of the world’s most successful capitalists, billionaire George Soros, who said the demonstrators had every reason to be angry at the U.S. financial system for jeopardizing their future."
“'I can sympathize with their grievances,' Soros told reporters at U.N. headquarters Monday, faulting U.S. banks for driving small businesses out of existence by boosting credit charges to unsupportable levels. Soros, who has profited during the financial crisis, suggested that the banks’ selfish conduct has provided grist for powerful anti-establishment movements, from the tea party to Occupy Wall Street."
So now America's political and financial elites are faced with twin protest movements -- the Tea Party on the right and the anti-Wall Street movement on the left.
Yet it appears that America's elites retain their confidence and expect to continue to determine the shape of our future -- for their own benefit, of course. And thus it is extremely likely that the 2012 Presidential election campaign will be an affair fraught with negative emotions, conflict, and attempts to find scapegoats to blame for the current crisis. Get ready for some really ugly realities and rhetoric to appear in prime-time as America's richest 1% attempt once again to trick Americans into voting against their own best interests for a charismatic politician who claims to have simple answers to our complex problems.
It appears that we cannot expect America's elites to provide us with leadership and guidance from our existing and obsolete social, economic and political system to a new, sustainable, equitable and more democratic future. It is up to each of us to attune ourselves to the energy of the Solar Age that exists beyond our addiction to material consumption. It is by envisioning a better future, and by taking small steps to manifest that future in our own lives that we magnetize ourselves to the energy of that future society that exists beyond the global warming crisis, the oil-based Industrial Revolution, and existing financial and political relations.
By taking time to envision creative solutions to our problems we will create an energetic vessel within us which can then be filled by our Guides and Teachers with the vision, the energy, the will forces and the power that we can use to create a new human civilization worthy of that name.
For as you align your energy signature with the energies of the more balanced future human civilization, you automatically attract those energies and the attention of the Beings of Light who guide humanity's footsteps into that new realm of being.
As you know, the Law of Resonance and Attraction states that you will attract to you energies that resonate in harmony with the vibrational frequencies you exhibit in your physical body, your emotional or astral body, your mind, and your mental or causal energy bodies.
We are at a world-historical turning point. Be the change you seek in the world, and the change you seek to make in the world will seek you out, providing golden opportunities for you to continue to be the change you most want to see and be!
Libra Festivals Around the World
This month of October provides us all with a marvelous opportunity to honor the varied ways that different cultures and religious traditions mark the autumnal turning point in our yearly seasonal cycles.
In October, in the wake of the autumnal equinox and the Harvest Moon, the Sun presents itself against the starry backdrop of the constellation Libra, often represented by a woman wielding the sword of free will and discrimination, and holding the Divine Scales of Balance. Initiates around the world celebrate The Libra Festivals of Michaelmas, Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, and Navratri, sacred to the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religions.
Many seasonal festivals fall during the month when the Sun is in Libra, and these festivals work to create and restore an individual and collective sense of balance during a difficult transitional period of the year, when days shorten, and in the northern hemisphere temperature falls, crops wither, and the extroverted summer energy of plants in the fields begins to turn inward in anticipation of the onset of winter.
Mother Earth comes to the end of the cycle of spring and summer exhalation that extends the breath of life across the surface of our blue-green planet, and she begins the long inhalation characteristic of fall and winter. The planet’s surface becomes barren, but the interior of the Earth, more receptive now to the light streaming from cosmic sources, is quickening with new life.
At this time of year, the spiritual component in human nature surfaces after a long summer slumber when activities in the physical world captured the energy and attention of the entire community.
The Libra Festivals all include elements of giveaway, emphasizing the importance of charity and community balance during the time of the harvest, and elements of purification, designed to elevate the energy of the individual and the community. Once the harvest has been gathered, the community can redirect Universal Life Force Energy from the lower chakra activities of sex, mating, and food production into the higher chakra activities designed to liberate the individual from over-dependence on physical stimuli of all kinds. The time in the yearly cycle has come for gatherings designed to foster a sense of community and insure good governance of shared resources for the collective well-being.
Read our article about The Libra Festivals and you'll be surprised by the abundant and obvious parallels between the major festivals of Hindu Navratri, Muslim Ramadan, Jewish Rosh Hashanah and Christian Michaelmas.
You may want to explore the beauty and the power of these spiritual festivals for yourself by experiencing the rituals and the spiritual practices exemplified by these different traditions. Or you may want to simply turn inward. It's a good time to purify and to come to the aid of the needy around you by making love offerings of goods, money, clothes or other essential items. In these ways, you will surely connect with the most elevated energy signatures residing at the very Source of Spirit, and you will certainly attract the attention of Angelic Beings of Light, Ascended Master Teachers, and Spiritual Guides who will be overjoyed to introduce you to ever-more elevated energies and realms of being.
May you receive the grace and guidance you need to accomplish your loftiest spiritual and material goals this October Full Moon!
Love and Light,
Curtis and Jane
Meditation Moment: Martin Luther King on American Revolution
At a critical moment in the midst of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King delivered his "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam".
King said, "In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military 'advisors' in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken--by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.
"With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.'
"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
"America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."
This challenge is as valid today as it was then. Let us take up that challenge and walk in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King.