12th House

The Tibetan Book of the Dead caught my fascination when I was watching “Quantum Activist.” In the movie, Amit Goswami, theoretical nuclear physicist, says he heard a voice in his head say that he should prove the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And his response was, pretty much, what the fuck? What does this have to do with physics?

The Tibetan Book of the Dead and quantum physics share the view that individual perspective shapes reality. It’s a bit of a paradox because, ultimately, all is one. There isn’t good. There isn’t bad. There is experience. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, if you can totally accept unity – yourself as Ultimate Reality without personalizing experience you’re free from the cycle of incarnation. Most people self-guilt, need a God figure to judge them, or seek other forms of separating and judging themselves. The Christian idea of heaven is viewed as a temporary state, and, therefore, not the most desirable change possible.

There is another reason why the book caught my fascination in that documentary. Dr. Goswami talks about a myth or story – I don’t really remember the exacts – but a lover waiting at the edge of hell for their beloved. The lover would rather stay behind than move on to paradise without their beloved. The story’s point being that ultimately there is no singular ascension. We all ascend together or not at all.

In a psychic state, I watched someone I love identify with the demons around him and descend further into hell. I don’t like that as a possibility. I don’t want to say that’s possible or true. That’s what I experienced. So it seems to me, we are all dead already. We can choose to identify with the horrors around us, explain their presence, justify our own discontent, tolerate the abuse, or we can transcend to the Ultimate Reality. The difference between material life and immaterial life is that the material engagement gives us a chance to sort out our reflection, our ideas, our karma. There’s work to be done here. The dead don’t get to make slip covers, invent gadgets, re-experience themselves and whatnot.

Life is a power position. Demons, evils, injustices cannot live without our efforts to keep them alive. And even with all that power to sort out heaven and hell, life is still in the business of dying – collapsing into the one Ultimate Reality.

So what are the tools we have to die with? People make so much of love. Even, sadly, Dr. Goswami talks about the power of the heart chakra as key to ascension. But we have seven chakras for a reason. Not everything around us is loving. We are here to use all seven chakras. They’re designed for a reason. We’re here to fight for our own Ultimate Reality. And not everything and everyone can be set straight by love alone.

That was my painful love lesson. Even God can’t step in between a person and their own self-judgment. Free will isn’t a joke. That’s the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Maybe one day, society will be able to know it as fact.  

It took three men to discover Neptune. Or so I learned from my in depth research skimming a Wikipedia article. I like knowing that Neptune had to be triangulated by consciousness. “Three symbolises the trinity of life, substance, and intelligence, of force, matter, and consciousness. The ancients considered three the first real number. Monad, one, is mother. Dyad, two, is father. And three the first manifest. Neptune was discovered by three. First, Alexis Bouvard proposed that Uranus’s orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. Second, Urbain Le Verrier developed a mathematical prediction for its orbit. Third, Johann Galle first observed Neptune on September 23, 1846^[1]

Neptune, astrological ruler of mysticism and addiction, is the eighth planet in our solar system and the one farthest from the Sun. Neptune’s composition is like Uranus, astrological ruler of sudden events and rebellions; they both have cores of rock and ice. Neptune’s atmosphere is similar to Saturn’s, lord of karma, and Jupiter’s, the great benefactor, but icier.  Uranus is largely featureless. Neptune’s atmosphere has active and visible weather patterns. Uranus helped discover Neptune. There’s a wealth of information for the astrologically inclined to muse over. The symbols of the discovery, the similarities of the planets, let a pattern-spotting mind see a larger pattern at work.

Being “born” on September 23 makes Neptune a Libra.  That’s the really mystical thing about astrology – you make it by naming it. So I googled Neptune’s birthday astrology on How Stuff Works. I like that Neptune’s health regime naturally includes time for prayer or meditation.

It takes 165 years for Neptune to make its orbit. That means it’s the first time Neptune has returned to the sign it was born and rules: Pisces. Neptune will enter Pisces the first week of February and stay there until 2025. And Neptune’s old friend Uranus, ruler of sudden and unexpected events, is fired up in Aries.

I can’t even begin to predict what kind of generational change this will lead to. The animal totem I get is a frog. A frog blends water (emotions) and air (thoughts). A frog’s borders seem permeable, much like Neptune’s perpetual nebulousness. Neptune is a mystical fog that could quite easily be a fog of obsession if the seeker surrenders reason to sensation entirely.  It is the path of mystical experience, a feeling of universal oneness that once had can become an addiction of its own. A balanced Neptune triangulates – it uses senses from both worlds to reason, like a frog moving between land and water at home with both. For humans, this would be a shift in consciousness. A more conscious and reasoned acceptance of the function emotions serve in our lives as opposed to thoughtless and destructive emotionalism. All nature is both spiritual and material – not dualistically – as in spiritual on Sunday or spiritual with certain thoughts – but mystically, as in feeling as part of being and being a part of everything.  

With Uranus, fired up in Aries, it’s hard to tell where the impetuous for recognizing our already integrated spiritual and material nature. Understand, our nature is always and has always been both spiritual and material here. It’s just we’ve been doing a lousy job at balancing that. I imagine there are lots of bursts of personal consciousness going on right now. The energies will balance out. The choice is only if people want to do it the easy way or the hard way. Drama can play out internally or externally. I do a lot of internal work. But if there were explosions in the street, I would see that as external drama of the group, who need to work it out in the physical to manifest change. There’re all types around here. It’s a matter of style. But the energies will balance out.

Plus, we have the second in a rare Venus transit this spring and Saturn moving into Scorpio in the fall. Exciting times.

Personally, I think of my animal totem. I had a dream last fall of a rainbow frog eating half dead bugs out of a spider web. I thought, “a frog shouldn’t do that – eat half-dead bugs out of a web like that – it’s not healthy!” but I sat and watched it eat the web clean. Then it jumped right at me and startled me awake. Late this summer, a frog jumped on me in the creek and I thought “stupid frog” because as often as I’ve walked the creek I never had a frog do that before. Today, New Year’s Day, I saw a hawk flying with prey. I am not sure what the prey was, but my first thought was that it was a frog.

I had an astrological consult that predicted my “psychic stuff” would really pick up when Neptune got into Pisces. That’s made me afraid because I’ve been through a lot of “psychic stuff” in the past few years. I don’t want to get lost in Neptune’s fog again. Seeing today a hawk carrying what I saw as a frog was the Universe telling me to not let my eagle-eye for details take away my spiritual rewards. Or so that’s what I feel is my challenge. And since Neptune is a transpersonal planet – its movements so slow that they effect a generation – I know it’s not a challenge I face alone.

It’s very hard to take relationships personally when you’re a mystic. Personal love is like a rabbit leading Alice down the hole. The rabbit really has nothing much to do with the story. But without the rabbit the journey would never begin. I’ve recently returned from a trip down the rabbit hole. And I’m realizing I will never fully return from that trip. I’d have to shrink down to size. I realize I can’t fit into the old framework, which is irritating. And I am done trying to shrink myself. It hurts.

I’ve been feeling really intolerant. Today, I googled “love and tolerance.” There’s already a blog post explaining it” “Tolerance is Resistance to Love.”

I don’t want people’s judgments anymore. Whether they think I am a good girl or a bad one. I’m in love with everything. And love is the most intolerant emotion of all. I’m not sure what that means for my lifestyle yet. But it’s apparent that my life has to change to fit me. I’ve already transformed.

I’d like to have empathic intuitive psychic abilities recognized as a condition in the workplace. I’ve been labled as a “purist” and “seemingly negative” on a job performance review for the last time. I have to take measures to defend my emotional space. I can be in a meeting at work and feel vibes from a colleague about how he was abused by his Dad as a child. It’s not social to pick up on everyone’s repressed memories or “secret” emotional turmoil. Its hard to keep track of things happening on multiple layers, to keep my distance, to engage with the task, not the feelings. I don’t judge people for their feelings. I feel people’s feelings and its easy to get flooded and blamed for labeled as “having an attitude” for knowing things.

I have to be myself because I exist. I have a right to earn a living, the right to not be made fun of for being spooky, the right to be the way I was made. I’m not my own maker. Thank God I don’t live in a society that hangs witches in the townsquare like the old days. I really need to get over being afraid of myself. Public executions suck, they’re generally not around, so now should be like party time for empowered people, right?

I expect to be questioned and tested over my skills and needs. It hurts to be blamed for trying to change people when I talk to them about things they’re uncomfortable feeling. It has happened to me so many times, I’m kind of tired of trying to engage and being called “spooky” in one way or another. Its hard to find people who can laugh at emotions instead of defending or guarding them as if emotions are the same as people. Its hard not to get mythologized by my own experiences and stay grounded as a human being. I’m just another animal.

It really hit me that so many ongoing blocks in my life exist because I’m not making enough space for my own sensitivities. And my sensitivies are increasing all the time. I realized I can feel houses. I was talking to a friend on the phone and I could feel her kitchen table giving her house indigestion. How am I supposed to sell that as a skill? I can’t handle crowds, dating, news, or politics, but I can feel people’s houses remotely. WTF?

Neptune gets a lot of bad press in astrology because of its tendency to blur borders. Neptune keywords are addiction, disillusionment, and mysticism. Now…mysticism is the vibe you want with Neptune. A relationship with challenging Neptune aspects doesn’t require you to lose yourself in an illusion you have about someone else. However, once you get on the crazy train of a Neptunian relationship, it becomes hard to keep your borders as the Neptunian aspects will always fight to blur them.

So, how do you manage Neptune in relationships? I’m asking myself this question since I just got out of one soul-challenging Neptunian relationship and another popped right up when Uranus moved direct in my 7th house Aries. All the synchronicities were staggering and it felt like time collapsing. I pulled up his chart and saw the karmic story pop out at me. It freaked me out a little bit – like the Universe was dropping a lesson plan on my lap. I saw the energy in our connection is about him becoming a father as his North Node in Capricorn is being activated by transits and he’s being pulled that way without me. I just add gravity to the pull when my charts put next to his. He already has a son, and now comes the great cosmic push to domesticate him. We have so many lovely aspects in our synastry. So many synchronicities in our lives. I have a daughter of my own. He has his son. We can help each other. We’re both creative. Just two steps away from the perfect domesticity created our way. If only we were closer, but that’s what he needs – his chart says so. Nice, eh?

But I’ve been here before. This time I see it coming. The new guy lives several hundred miles away. We’ve chatted online. And I get the sense that his photos don’t show who he is because I also feel him energetically. So I googled him and found his mug shot online. Yes, mug shot. And I laughed out loud for about 10 minutes thinking here is my new Mr. Neptune, appropriately arrested for a DUI several months ago, several states away.
I’m not judging him. It’s just so Neptunian. And in truth, I know he’s nothing like the last guy. He isn’t. The pain of being open hearted is in staying that way. I can’t let the past shut me down. Here’s a new situation, but its alarming because the Neptune signature is all over the place – the long distance, the sense of disillusionment already (his Neptune squares my Venus. My natal Venus is square Neptune, so I suspect I have a better sense of what the challenges are all about.)

Whenever there is a heavy aspect in a Neptunian relationship, it’s important to realize that there is a third player involved – the great collective, the dissolution of borders into Universal oneness. Now there is so much romance built up around “oneness” being a couple that it’s easy to put the need for Universal oneness on to the relationship. That’s what I focused on last time. And it left no room in the relationship for me.
So this time I intend to tell him what his karmic path is. To tell him there is a great cosmic push to domesticate him. To tell him to run as far and as fast in the other direction if that isn’t something he’s ready to face. And to understand, that the great push to domesticate him doesn’t come from me. There’s always going to be a third in this relationship – Neptune. I won’t take blame (or credit) for cosmic design. It comes from the Universe, who wants him to know he’s safe and loved here simply because he exists. I need him to understand that as *his* karmic path. Because once I have my karma goggles on, I don’t care what someone says, whines about, opines about – I see it and its priority number one. I watched the last guy go to the abyss and throw his soul away. I don’t want to watch that again.

Perhaps if from the start strong borders are established, there is a chance to enjoy the relationship and the mysticism. But mysticism isn’t a relationship. Mysticism is an experience of boundlessness, not an experience of another. Certainly, relationships inspire mystical experience, but every relationship requires work and compromise.

So, until and unless Mr. Neptune comes to town, he’s just a guy out of state. And if he is in town, I’m going to review our charts with him so he can see – before we get on the Neptunian crazy train – where it’s going and how to use other elements of the chart to aim for the North Node.

So, we’ll see. Maybe he’ll run away. But either way, I am a mystic now, with or without that relationship.

I’ve got natal Kassandra (asteriod 114) in Virgo 12th house getting pinged by transiting Mars. If  Cassandra of Greek myth were alive today, she’d have a job performance review that includes words like “perfectionist, purist, seemingly negative, sullen.” I heard those words today. This time it hit me: those words have been on every performance review I’ve had since I started working at age 14. From the Persians who owned the bakery in the mall who “didn’t like my attitude” to colleagues in corporate America.

The words stick to me regardless of the context. Those are words about my character, not my job performance. I’m 37 years old. When do I get credit for doing an objective job? When do people in the workplace stop using subjective, judgemental language about my character? How is that constructive feedback on what is otherwise noted to be stellar job performance?

I’ve never been called lazy, that’s for damned sure. I’m not working harder any more. I stop here.

I told the reviewer, what can I do with feedback like that? I don’t work at Friday’s and need to wear flare. I’m not a waitress for a reason. Fuck all. Good work is good work. Sorry if being around a person with standards makes you judge yourself. But put the “seeming” shit in context. The negative, sullen feelings are your own. And on what basis to you ascribe a “perfectionist” or “purist” quality to my work? Aren’t we all trying to do a good job here? Did anyone accuse me of making unreasonable demands or responding with anger? Or is this all just a matter of “feeling” a “pure” quality around me?

OK. I only said the first line. Or maybe the first three. I’ll write it out beter in my appraisal comments once my Mars cools off. But – these cycles – sometimes they just pop right out at me – this collapsing of time – everyone has eyes to see it. Everyone. That’s the joke. There was a sudden look of terror in the reviewer’s eyes as I responded. I was supposed to be fearful of what people think of me. Instead, I asked an intelligent question. “A look of terror?,” I thought to myself. “This is comedy. Why isn’t anyone laughing at the jokes yet?”

Its a dark moon. Winter solstice. I hope this season I’ve cleared the last of Cassandra from my 12th house closet.

I love The Onion. My favorite bit in the week in review is when 10-year old boys hold a press conference to clarify the acceptable course of action to take if witnessing someone being raped. “The nation’s little boys emphasized that seeing anyone commit any form of rape is more than enough reason to directly contact the police.”

The bit about the food chain shake up is pretty funny too. Ah, The Onion makes me cry.

Brief Reprieve From Mariah Carey’s Christmas Song Comes To Resounding End

An excerpt from “Sisterhood is Easier in the Winter: Short Skirts Magically Turn Women Into Bitches”

This “myth of male weakness” outsources men’s sexual self-control to women. For decades now, junk science has foisted the “caveman mystique” onto us, insisting that testosterone, Y chromosomes, and evolution trump the willpower and empathy of even the most well-intentioned dude. We’re hardwired to be promiscuous, hardwired to stare at nubile young women, and hardwired to cheat if given half a chance. Ignoring the reality that women have their own libidos (and their own demonstrable propensity to stray), the male myth advises women to accept men for the perpetual adolescents we are. So women need to control those whom the myth promises are within their power to influence: other women. Women learn to slut-shame and ostracize the miniskirt-wearers whom they see as sexual rivals; men get let off the proverbial hook.

I don’t understand all the focus on pair bonding. Certainly in the last few years, my ideas about romance and love changed. But now, I don’t get the importance of having a significant other (emphasis on the singular). I mean, I get it. But I don’t. Why is the “couple” status as such an important aspect of our identity? Have we, socially, collectively, replaced our tribal identity with our romantic identity? Its seems like bad economics to me. Humans are social. Groups, societies, that’s how we evolve. But pair bonds? It takes a village to raise a child and all that. Community support matters. And I think the importance of relating to one another – regardless of sex/$ – gets lost under the weight of fantastical romantic ideas.

Gay/straight/bi whatever –  it seems to me so archaic to define yourself by sexual experiences. But, more than that, it seems archaic to define sexuality as an economic or indicator or romance as a way of making a tribe of two. And that’s what couples seem to very often slip into. An economic powerhouse. The building blocks of the economy. A solidified “we” outside the larger society. First comes love, then comes the single family home and two cars.

I’m not feeling cynical about it. Just feeling kind of alien because so much energy in our society is spent trying to help a person find “the one.” I think it’s absurd. Love is a feeling and, as such, it is everywhere at any time. And sex – sex is a team sport. Sex is a way to get groups to cooperate and feel good about each other. Sex doesn’t have to be one-on-one. It’s an activity.

These days, my sexual fantasies revolve around men having sex with each other. Pornceptual is my favorite tumblr stream. “Gay” men are never what I was taught was a turn-on – they’re unnatural, eh? – but there it is. I like seeing men as being able to take care of each other. It’s nice to feel like I am not responsible for meeting their sexual needs. It’s nice to think of sex as a fun activity that isn’t aimed at a particular goal or product. It’s nice to have group support in case someone gets tired or stuck. It’s nice to feel like, as a group, we can make our way through this – whatever this is.

Anyway, its not like that fantasy or current preference is WHAT I AM. I haven’t had sex or pair bonding in years. But that’s what I like to imagine. And that’s how I feel now.

I wish I had a chicken-themed photo for this blog post. Perhaps I’ll add one later. For now, the above photo is a picture of lamb hearts. Notice a stone under one? I call it “Saturn in Libra.”

I was having a fascinating discussion about the difference between generations (as defined by Pluto transits) on Mystic Medusa’s blog and remembered one of my favorite blog posts ever. We were discussing the Pluto in Scorpio generation’s revolt against processed food and subsequent affinity for fresh produce and home cooked meals. And I thought of this post I read in 2007, its called “How the World Bank Almost Killed Me.” Its written by a lovely woman who got frustrated translating a World Bank document. Excerpt below:

The African farmer doesn’t either have the means to fight against the massive importation of chicken from European countries. As European cereal producers benefit from direct aids, imported chicken are cheaper than local chicken (0,50 €/kg against 1,8 to 2,4 €/kg).

In Cameroon, local producers could cover 90% of the national needs. Today, they provide only 37% of the poultry consumed in this country due to fierce price competition.

On top of that, we’re not even talking of a nice fat imported chicken…In fact, Africa receives frozen chicken parts. The good parts (wings, legs, drumsticks and breast) are sold to European consumers. The rest is left for the African consumer: ends of wings, feet, rumps. One can also wonder about the quality of these products as the cold chain is often interrupted before being presented to the consumer. The meat might have been thawed then frozen again several times.

If we change the way we eat and buy food, we will change the world. Some problems are really that simple to solve.