Welcome to the November 2019 Cosmic Weather Forecast, celebrating this Tuesday's Taurus Full Moon and Scorpio Solar Festival. Warm greetings from your co-editors, Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry.
Sexy. Spooky. Spiritual. Scary. It's Scorpio season once again! Plus we have a magical Taurus Full Moon trine powerful, mysterious Pluto in Capricorn. Prepare for startling revelations of closely held secrets of the global elite, reject propagandistic astral glamours, compost decaying karmic patterns of behavior, and elevate your consciousness by piercing the veil of egotism with the Eagle Eye of the Scorpionic Adept!
This Full Moon in Taurus 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.
Here in South Florida, Jane and I are delighted that for the first time in about seven months, it felt cool at night, and was only 79° during the day on Saturday. Of course that was partly because of the cloudy skies and unseasonable rain. Christmas tree lights on all the palm trees in sight don't make it feel like the holiday season when it's still hot and so humid the air is thick and steamy.
However we have a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving month. Jane's Boca garden is full of marigolds, ground orchids, and heliconia, with a few frangipani blooms. We are enjoying our new Qi Gong practice, which has been very good for our health. And most of all, we are blessed with a thriving website and many new subscribers to our newsletters. We are grateful to all of you for being part of our Satya Center community.
For any who may have missed the recent Crystal Store newsletter, be sure to use the coupon code XTRA5 at checkout and receive a 25% discount until the end of the month, on everything but our deeply discounted Vogel wands.
Thursday, November 28 we celebrate Thanksgiving day here in America, a time for celebration of seasonal recipes, fall foods, and the warmth and joy we share as the weather turns colder in the Northern Hemisphere.
Jane loves cooking as much as gardening, and loves to share fall recipes from her cooking gardens, created over the years in upstate New York, California and now here in South Florida.
Jane presents a luscious Fall Chopped Salad with Walnut Miso Sherry Vinaigrette, featuring jicama. "Jicama is an overlooked star of the salad universe. Jicama has a reputation as a great dieter’s food and has a real satisfying crunch. Not only is it a low calorie vegetable but it’s one which really satisfies hunger cravings."
Here's a super simple classic fall dish -- Jane's Squash Soup Recipe. "Now that the weather is cooler, warm yourself with a winter squash soup," Jane urges. "Make an easy nutritious Squash Soup. This recipe is good with either summer or winter squash, with Vegetarian, Vegan and Sattvic variations."
Jane's recipe for a bountiful Thanksgiving Vegetarian Feast will delight the whole family. Enjoy Indian Spiced Chick Peas on Quinoa with Holy Basil, Brussels Sprouts in Ghee with Maple Syrup and Toasted Walnuts, Creamed Red Swiss Chard, Jicama, Fennel and Apple Salad. This Thanksgiving recipe includes a spice medley that will thrill your palate. Black Mustard Seed, Cumin Seed, Asofoetida, Ajowain, Anise Seed, Curry Powder, Star Anise Seed, Cinnamon Stick, and whole Nutmeg combine to create a delicious homemade Curry mix!
"Sometimes I just love to cook!" Jane says. "I find it relaxes me and helps me connect to the moment, especially if I am eating and cooking local fresh food from my cooking garden and the farmer's market! This was not a meal made with Thanksgiving in mind, but after eating it, we decided it was a meal for which to give thanks."
"We honor all those hard working people from around the world who made these foods available to us. And our Mother Earth for her Bounty, may we receive the Grace and Intelligence to live in Harmony with one another and our only home, Planet Earth," says Jane.
As we prepare for the Thanksgiving season, let's all focus on the importance of gratitude as a spiritual practice, as a community-building exercise, as a fond family ritual, and as a way to boost our health and well being.
"Having an attitude of gratitude changes the molecular structure of the brain, keeps gray matter functioning, and makes us healthier and happier," according to a study by UCLA’s Mindfulness Awareness Research Center. "When you feel happiness, the central nervous system is affected. You are more peaceful, less reactive and less resistant. Now that’s a really cool way of taking care of your well-being."
Scientists at UC Berkeley used a brain scanner to measure participants' responses when they were each given some money and asked to pay it forward if they felt gratitude for their gift. This was designed to eliminate other potential motivations like obligation, guilt or desire for approval by peers. Then those who received that pay it forward gift were given questionnaires to determine their feelings about the gift and their willingness to give to charity after receiving the gift.
FMRI Coronal Scan of Nathanial Bradford: Nathanial Luceus [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
"We found that across the participants, when people felt more grateful, their brain activity was distinct from brain activity related to guilt and the desire to help a cause," the research scientists report. "More specifically, we found that when people who are generally more grateful gave more money to a cause, they showed greater neural sensitivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with learning and decision making. This suggests that people who are more grateful are also more attentive to how they express gratitude."
". . .Simply expressing gratitude may have lasting effects on the brain," scientists theorized. "While not conclusive, this finding suggests that practicing gratitude may help train the brain to be more sensitive to the experience of gratitude down the line, and this could contribute to improved mental health over time."
So let's all join together in thanksgiving this year, celebrate the joys of healthy charitable giving, and remember to offer a helping hand, a kind word, and healing energy to everyone we come in contact with this holiday season and in all the days to come. What goes around comes around, and we can only benefit from our generosity!
For those who would like to honor the original Americans, the indigenous people whose Thanksgiving gifts enabled the Puritan settlers of New England to survive the harsh winter months they encountered on their arrival in the New World, we suggest you join us in offering up a Thanksgiving Prayer from the Mohawk Nation.
It's a beautiful prayer that begins like this: "Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one."
For those who would like to refresh their memories about the history of colonial America and the historical roots of Thanksgiving celebrations, take a moment to read our article entitled Thanksgiving: History of Community & Conflict.
Cosmic Weather Forecast: The Taurus-Scorpio Axis, The Full Moon in Taurus and the Scorpio Solar Festival
The Full Moon at 19°52' Taurus occurs at 8:34 AM Eastern time on Tuesday November 12, as we celebrate the Scorpio Solar Festival.
The Taurus-Scorpio axis involves two signs notorious for their sensuality, flammable tempers and attachment to material wealth and power, yet both signs are also known in esoteric circles as signs of the initiate, and when guided by Higher Mind, these individuals exhibit a fixed determination to reach their material and spiritual goals that is potent indeed. At their best, after much struggle, Scorpio becomes a spiritual warrior, and Taurus the blissful, peaceful avatar of love.
“Desire in Taurus becomes spiritual aspiration in Scorpio. The darkness of the experience in Scorpio becomes illumination in Taurus,” wrote Alice Bailey in her book Esoteric Astrology, composed of channeled messages she received from the Tibetan Master DK.
Taurus, ruled by Venus, can become addicted to sensual pleasures and fixated on amassing material wealth and power. But Taurean lack of moderation and greed are found in those wounded bulls who have yet to discover their own inner spiritual guidance, or who suffer from a sense of being somehow incomplete. They seek to compensate for unconscious feelings of inadequacy and of being unloved.
Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia. Image Public Domain.
When Taureans are well on their way on a spiritual path, in touch with their intuitive guidance, their inner sense of self-love provides them a sense of peace that passeth understanding, and they are both loving to others and receptive to loving energies from those around them. A Taurean who has learned life's lessons and is in contact with Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose can be the exemplar of self-contained, peaceful, blissful existence. Such a bull has no need to acquire anything, no need to achieve anything, no need to prove anything, no need for anything external to provide validation, love or emotional satisfaction.
Taurus is ruled by the Earth as well as Venus. A spiritually awakened Taurean is in contact with the Divine within all earthly creation.
"Everything is a manifestation of the Divine," explains Bulgarian spiritual master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, in his insightful book, The Splendour of Tiphareth. "flowers, birds, trees, mountains, lakes and stars, and even human beings. . .When the world above created the world below, it left its seal and signature on all things, so that man may find his way back to it."
Contemplation of the sacred geometric forms in nature, sensitivity to the subtle energy present in earth, air, sunlight, and water, and intimate interaction with plants and animals connect the awakened Taurean to the devas, elementals, and nature spirits, and to the higher realms of being where Angelic presences and Ascended Masters dwell.
Scorpio, like Taurus, is a feminine fixed sign, rule by Pluto, so depth, mystery and hidden uncontrollable forces are like mother's milk to Scorpionic personalities. Scorpions may appear mysterious to others, but they have an uncanny ability to see through the masks others wear, and their X-Ray vision is so apparent to everyone that it can make some people quite uncomfortable in their presence. Scorpions are masters of non-verbal communication. At their best they can fuse minds and hearts with others in a soul deep communion.
Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia. [Public domain]
Scorpio, like Taurus, is known for larger than life sexual appetites and presents a dominant personality that has a tendency to overwhelm or overshadow others.
Truly, both Taurus and Scorpio demonstrate tremendous love for physical incarnation, and reverence for the body and the body's inherent wisdom. Taurus and Scorpio often emanate a palpable sense of self-love, which, in the Age of Pisces, was mistaken for selfishness, but which can simply indicate a healthy emotional state and an aversion to the self-sacrifice and body-shaming so characteristic of the outgoing age of the fish.
Scorpio is extremely self-sufficient, like the awakened Taurean, and Scorpions are also capable of performing extreme austerities, and suffering without complaint. Scorpio is born to walk the path of the spiritual warrior.
Scorpio is represented by the scorpion, the snake and the eagle. When the egoistic personality controls the individuality, beware the sting of the scorpion and the stealthy stalking ability of the sly snake. The egoistic Scorpionic personality will inevitably seek conflict, being a natural born warrior, and will eventually come face to face with events that will trigger self-transformation, as part of an inevitable spiritual awakening.
Scorpio's destiny is to make the journey of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, to plunge deep into the underworld, confront the monsters unleashed by rampant egoism, and then fearlessly undergo the initiation of death of the ego and spiritual transformation, finally returning to the light with gifts from Pluto's realm.
The quintessential esoteric account of Scorpio's spiritual journey refers to Hercules' eighth labor, to battle the Lernaean Hydra, a fearsome beast with nine heads representing the nine faces of carnal desire: sex, comfort, money, fear, hatred, desire for power, pride, divisiveness and cruelty. Those Scorpionic spiritual warriors who can overcome these manifestations of the egoistic personality will achieve the ultimate victory.
Upon Scorpio's return to the realms of the living, when Higher Mind, Higher Self and Higher Purpose have been engaged and the Scorpion has embarked on the spiritual path, prepare to stand back in awe as the eagle soars high above metaphysical mountaintops, in contact with subtle energies and beings of Light populating vast landscapes in higher worlds.
In the outer world this Full Moon week, the influence of Mercury mid-retrograde in Scorpio amplifies the Scorpionic energies peaking at this week's Scorpio Solar Festival, for good or ill.
Washington is experiencing peak spookiness and peak fear, divisiveness and Scorpionic mystery during this full moon season.
Democrats are holding impeachment hearings with anonymous whistleblowers and other witnesses in closed door sessions in secure rooms deep below Congressional offices while preparing articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives. Democrats expect to bring impeachment to a vote before Christmas.
Republican Attorney General William Barr is secretly preparing a new report on the Russiagate controversy and on the Ukraine allegations, which is expected to include criminal indictments of individuals involved in investigations of alleged Trump-Russia collusion to tamper with the 2016 election, many of whom were spooks and FBI agents.
[Public domain]
". . .This new report looks to be . . . like an atom bomb, designed to incinerate Washington by putting the whole Justice Department behind a conspiracy theory that rewrites history and declares open warfare on political opponents," according to a report in The Daily Kos.
"Barr appears to have taken the results of an inspector general report that was expected to end weeks ago, rolled it together with the investigation-into-the-investigation that he launched under the nominal control of prosecutor John Durham, and capped it all with the 'findings' of a world tour that included attempts to get the Australian government, the Italian government, and the U.K. government to participate in attacks on U.S. intelligence agencies," according to The Daily Kos.
"Barr did not shift to a criminal investigation because he doesn’t intend to arrest someone," argues The Daily Kos. "There are going to be claims of serious wrongdoing. They are going to be aimed at not just creating a distraction to derail the impeachment hearings, but to provide 'evidence' that Trump’s requests for investigations by Ukraine were justified. The question is going to be whether they are merely awful and damaging to the nation, or absolutely incinerate the rule of law."
If the investigation of the investigators who were investigating spooky Russian interference in the 2016 elections involving clandestine meetings with Donald Trump's campaign staff appears Byzantine, confusing and more like the convoluted and opaque machinations of the Cold War Kremlin than Washington business as usual to you, you're not alone.
Mercury by Hans Thoma [Public Domain]
Stay tuned, the plot is destined to thicken as winged messenger Mercury, retrograde in conspiratorial Scorpio, traverses the underground global labyrinth of secret tape recordings, hidden paper trails and clandestine meetings destined to be brought to light in a Plutonic eruption of vitriolic charges and counter-charges threatening to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the White House, Congress, the courts, and America's vast underworld of semi-autonomous intelligence agencies during the next few weeks.
That's only for appetizers. We can expect a parade of spooks, inquisitors, investigators, and trolls to amplify the charges and counter-charges being leveled by both parties during this Scorpionic Thanksgiving season, up to and through Christmas, with potential peak spookiness and peak soft conflict triggering maximum national antagonism sometime in January, to coincide with the Capricorn Stellium activation January 12, 2020.
It is quite likely that all parties, Democrats and Republicans, will be badly damaged by the revelations to come. Trust and confidence in America's already tarnished political institutions will be damaged further, perhaps irrevocably and fatally.
That will kick off what promises to be the most acrimonious and polarized 2020 Presidential campaign since the days of Richard Nixon. So buckle up, the ride gets bumpy from here on out.
As if that was not enough in the way of unexpected, unprecedented Scorpionic excavation of hidden Plutonic secrets and lies, the mainstream media is now revealing something that readers of this newsletter have known for quite some time.
We know now that the consensus expectations of climate change, ratified by most scientists and global political elites, and codified in the Paris Climate Accords, vastly understate the scale and danger of global climate change, and the rapidity of the onset of civilization destabilizing climate disruptions soon to come.
"For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong," reports Gene Linden in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
"This summer, for instance, a heat wave in Europe penetrated the Arctic, pushing temperatures into the 80s across much of the Far North and, according to the Belgian climate scientist Xavier Fettweis, melting some 40 billion tons of Greenland’s ice sheet," Linden explains.
"Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities," warns Linden.
"In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, said in its first report that climate change would arrive at a stately pace, that the methane-laden Arctic permafrost was not in danger of thawing, and that the Antarctic ice sheets were stable," Linden continues.
"Relying on the climate change panel’s assessment, economists estimated that the economic hit would be small, providing further ammunition against an aggressive approach to reducing emissions and to building resilience to climate change," says Linden.
Antarctica. An orthographic projection of NASA's Blue Marble data set (1 km resolution global satellite composite). "MODIS observations of polar sea ice were combined with
observations of Antarctica made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s AVHRR sensor—the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer." [Public Domain]
"As we now know, all of those predictions turned out to be completely wrong," Linden concludes.
So how bad are things likely to get?
A United Nations study, entitled The Emissions Gap Report 2017, concludes we are not heading for warming of 1.5 degrees centigrade, the level deemed optimal for sustaining our global civilization, not 2 degrees centigrade, but more likely 5.4 degrees centigrade.
Scientists have trouble even finding comparable temperature changes in the Earth's geologic record.
"To see the most recent climatic lookalike [to 5-6 degrees centigrade of global warming], we have to turn the geological clock back between 144m and 65m years, to the Cretaceous, which ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an even closer fit at the end of the Permian, 251m years ago, when global temperatures rose by – yes – six degrees, and 95% of species were wiped out," according to an analysis on the website globalwarming.berrens.nl.
In a five degree warmer world, forests burn, rivers vanish and flammable methane is released from ice and seabeds in quantities sufficient to accelerate further global warming to unlivable levels, while triggering massive explosions cause by lightning during Superstorms.
Hydrogen sulfide content of oceans rises precipitously and global seas and waterways can no longer support oxygen breathing aquatic lifeforms.
Civilization collapses. Agriculture is wiped out. Wars for land in potentially survivable Siberian and Arctic regions could become lethal nuclear conflicts. Individual families and tiny groups trying to survive this apocalypse by hunting and gathering food would need 10-100 times the land required by similar groups growing food for themselves. Isolated survivalism would be impracticable at best.
So we are in a certifiable climate emergency. We can only hope that people in America and around the world wake up and make a commitment to an unprecedented national and