Transit Lab: Everything transiting everything else (or so it seems)
Mercury’s stationing on the cusp of my 2nd…the new Moon tonight is on my 1st house Uranus, squaring my Cancer/10th South Node, opposing Rx Chiron on the DSC…Mars is transiting the 9th opposes my natal Jupiter in 3rd and squares Pluto in 12th…
Which seems to have resulted in me choosing to take a long-distance trip for reasons I would not have possibly guessed I might (the Mars t-square), but choosing my desired method of transport, no matter what anyone says (Uranus in 1st).
Okay, I’ll just tell you: I’m sailing back to the Midwest for a family funeral in my boat made out of drinking straws.
That wasn’t so hard.
For some reason, I’m just very sure I’m not flying for this trip. Also, piloting my straw boat through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississipi always helps me calm down, stay focused and ground, and that’s needed now.
A couple of days after I received the news, I did an interview with another evolutionary astrologer about a new archetype I’m working with, Arjunsuri (asteroid 20300). She’s producing a podcast regularly, providing a forum for some cool ideas. You can find the podcast here: http://www.denadecastro.com/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html.
I listened to it and was shocked at how clear I am. How together, how with-it. Apparently, I work well under pressure. Can you tell I’d just heard about a death in the family? It never occurred to me to postpone it - how’s that for a good little 10th house South Node?
A woman called me today to wish me well in my work, and to tell me that if I want to, I “can rise above astrology.” She meant the stereotypes and negativity so prevalent in the field. I thanked her and told her I’m doing just that. I guess she found an ad of mine, or my site - I didn’t ask. That’s Mars in Cancer/9th opposing Jupiter in Capricorn/3rd - why, I’m very sure I already do that, thank you was the unconscious impulse.
But isn’t that nice? Someone calling just to wish you well?
When home, I’m going to reconnect with some friends I haven’t kept up with in a long time - oh, I just got that it’s the Mercury Rx - in Scorpio - reconnecting with friends because of a death. And also my sister, who seems to find me inexplicable (though she’s a Pisces/3rd Moon, it’s sextile 1st house Mercury in Capricorn on my North Node - she springs into dedicated action at the drop of a hat, and doesn’t get why I can get in emotional circles sometimes and be, um, somewhat less than productive). And my step-father, who thinks I’m crazy because I choose not to have the kind of job that everyone he ever knew had. And former teachers…and who knows who else who shows up to the memorial service. I think I’m going to tell them I’m an acrobat with the circus, and that I got in with my little belly and not-buff physique because of affirmative action.
When I was a kid, I was asked no fewer than eighteen hundred thousand million times if I was going to grow up to be on the radio, be just like my dad. I had the precociousness, but unfortunately not the prescience or vocabulary, to tell them no (but not that I have retrograde Saturn inconjuncting my 2nd house Sun, and that I probably would not choose to do that).
But, there’s that podcast…that fun podcast…the opportunity-to-get-your-ideas-out podcast…
Given the amount that my mouth moves and emits words and/or ideas in order to alleviate the crowding in my brain, maybe that’s a good way to go? Let me know what you think after you listen to the podcast.
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
October 10, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Astrology: Climate Vs. Weather
Before committing to awakedness this morning, the following unfolded in my mind:
Understanding the planets and signs, and how planets work through signs, is a way to understand our collective unfoldment as life on earth. The solar system in which we find ourselves is a giant clock, and those of us who can learn to tell the time of life on earth open doors to understand how to seize opportunities to assist in the evolution of the human soul and life on earth.
Each individual lives out a personal history of astrological weather, and that is the context for individual readings/consultations. But we as a collective experience the movement of the planets as a backdrop to our collective experience, a kind of climate informing our lives, even as we live with our own regional, personal weather.
An astrologer called Dane Rudhyar wrote that a person is born as an answer to a question, or problem, posed by the universe. If we look at the universe as an evolution of life that unfolds in the posing of questions to be answered, we can use a knowledge of astrology to bring to conscious awareness the questions the universe is asking, and become better able to participate meaningfully and consciously in how life is unfolding here and now in answer to them.
It’s the foundation for a mini-course a friend of mine and I discussed yesterday. She is a real-deal, full-of-love-for-all-beings medium and teacher, and facilitates a group on Meetup.com for psychic mediumship development. She expressed an interest in understanding current astro events as the backdrop of what we’re all experiencing, to, as I understood it, add to her conscious relating to the moment at hand. I became inspired to develop a mini-course to help anyone understand how to read the clock that’s telling the time of life on earth.
This brought up for me a resparking of my love for exploring the possibilities that exist for members of generations to identify and offer their gifts. Each person born bears the imprint of the times in which he or she is born. When my focus is on counseling individuals, I frame this in terms of the time in which a person is born offers the right mix of elements and influences, opportunities and sparks for those opportunities, to explore and advance along his or her individual karmic journey. At the generational level, then, we’re talking for example about all the Pluto-Uranus in Virgo people born in the 1960s sharing a collective Pluto-Uranus-in-Virgo karmic dealio that, while manifesting differently in different individuals for a host of reasons, shares a common thematic, vibrational thread. What we can do with this notion on the collective level is to understand the opportunity for collective contribution of the people born in that generation, based on that thematic, vibrational thread.
Which offers an amazing opportunity to address collective needs, in fact, something I see a lot of people itching to do. For those in the Pluto-Uranus-in-Virgo group, for example, there can manifest a spirit of activism (whether it’s brought out or not, and either for any number of reasons). And yet the most obvious arena for that, national politics, seems to many interested in contributing to real change to offer more barbs of absurdly debilitating compromise than opportunities to effect real change. But if you understand what intentions underlie this generational desire to creat and assist change, other avenues for expression that don’t involve fearing that you’ll be found out to have in your youth experimented with drugs (or men or women - or whatever) will become apparent.
Another side of this kind of thinking that inspires me is understanding the progression of concerns, passions, needs, desires, intentions and fears of each generation as an answer to the concerns, etc., of the previous generation. Use Pluto in each sign to define generations, and understand how each sign in the zodiac is a reaction to the one coming before it. Watch how the issues of Gemini lead to Cancer as a reaction, and Leo as a reaction to Cancer, and then Virgo as reaction to Leo, Libra to Virgo, Scorpio to Libra - and while the Pluto in Sagittarius generation is still rather young, if you build this picture of each generation taking a turn away from the previous generation’s focus in line with the methods and motivations of each sign, you’ll even be able in your mind to fill in some blanks that the Pluto-in-Sagittarius kids of today haven’t yet had a chance to create on a broad, social level.
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
October 4, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Transit Lab: Saturn in Virgo conjunct Arjunsuri
Yesterday I returned from a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, having learned this technique recovered by the Buddha 2500 years ago. The ultimate aim of it is the end of suffering, and it’s possible for every person to do this, given a commitment to patience, ardent work, awareness, perseverance and persistance.
Sound like a list of keywords for Saturn in Virgo, doesn’t it?
This is the kind of thing most of think we could never do, but each of us can choose to do it. I heard about it from a friend who has in common with me a strong mental and communicative energy (Mars-Mercury in Leo in 11th-12th, with a 10th-house Gemini stellium I totally jive with), and a desire for progress that shapes a work ethic that keeps one going going going, that keeps one driven. She told me she’d done one of these courses a while ago, and I was inspired that if she could cause herself to do it, I could cause myself to do it.
Each of the things I knew about it before going in were entries on my well-established and -entrenched list of not-to-dos: sitting still, focusing the awareness on only the breath, following the ethical code central to the technique (read: someone else’s rules), refraining from any communication with other students for the duration of the course, no exercise other than walking, and - here’s the big one - no reading or writing of any kind. I mean, go down the list of attitudes and behaviors I’ve used to define myself, and each needed to be shelved for the duration of the course if I wanted to give myself the chance to suceed with the technique.
But in the face of the opportunity to take better care of myself, and to get to the bottom of a couple of personal issues I wanted to heal, I was willing to do a little Saturn-in-Virgo…which was, I desperately need to tell someone mean, a lot of Saturn-in-Virgo. A lot. I’ve never worked as hard as I did during the course. Never. As a matter of fact, I realized while I was doing it that I can’t remember even a handful of times I chose to challenge myself and work extremely hard in order to achieve something I wanted. When I chose to sideline the rules I’ve developed for myself and submit to someone else’s program (that Mars-Uranus in the 1st bristles at the notion of someone else’s rules, and my Rx Saturn in Gemini/9th and Jupiter in Capricorn/3rd are pretty sure I know what’s good for me and probably that no one else could).
When I studied music, it came easily to me. When I studied philosophy, I couldn’t find the point of most of it and didn’t work very hard, until I found Albert Camus’ brand of life-affirming existentialism and was armed with something eminently useful. When I began writing poetry and satire, it just poured out like you wouldn’t believe (it took a while to bring out my own voice in each, but that was less a matter of hard work than one of doing it enough that other people’s voices played themselves out in me and fell away). When I began with astrology, I dove in and it was, frankly, pretty easy. I seemed primed to incorporate it into the vocabulary I had already been developing about the meaning of life, etc. (building on my work with Camus, in fact). There have been questions and issues along the way in my astrology education that have caused more perplexation than others, but, generally speaking, it was just sitting there and I drank it in in giant gulps.
Okay, so, channeling class was difficult, but in a specific way. I simply had to make sure I didn’t turn down the opportunity every week for four months to confront my fear of doing it; I had to make sure I showed up to do the work and chose to be willing to learn what I needed to learn. And those four months, each weekly installment of which I dreaded like nothing else, were nothing compared with the challenge of sitting still to meditate for ten days and not communicating with anyone.
Do you know many people with Pluto in Libra (those born 1971-1984) who are willing to sit still for 10 days and not communicate with anyone at all? I realized that that in itself was a healing opportunity for me, giving myself the chance to develop a stronger relationship with myself. The soul wound in these people is in relationship, the relating function: the area of fairness, equality and balance - in the area of dealing with others as equals. To learn to sit with one’s self and get grounded in a deep understanding of and relating to that self is Pluto-in-Aries work, or Pluto-in-Libra polarity point work. Doing this is precisely what a Pluto-in-Libra person needs to do when stuck in cycles of Libra misfirings, malfunctionings and junk…which I admit to being prone to be in my more robotic, unaware moments.
The shiny experience worth noting here in terms of Saturn is that the eclipse at 18 Virgo squared from the 12th my own Saturn, Rx in Gemini/9th. I learned something critical about owning up (Virgo) to having compassion (12th house) that I allowed to override (square) an extremely fixed guiding principle I’ve carried (Rx Saturn in Gemini/9th) that no longer serves me. Okay, I’ll just say it: It hasn’t served me for hundreds of years. Even in a past-life regression taking me back to the 1080s, I had this fixed idea! It’s what I’ve known about myself, what I understand as me. I haven’t known any other baseline. So, understandably, I can’t wait to see what will happen next - it’s anybody’s guess.
I work with an archetype I’m introducing to astrology, associated with asteroid 20300, Arjunsuri. This asteroid is in my chart at the first minute of Virgo, so when Saturn entered Virgo, I was in need of some hard work of figuring out to whom to listen. The basic story of Arjunsuri has to do with the process of seeking Truth externally and ultimately learning to listen to your conscience as your guide, allowing the inner voice of knowing to be your final authority. “Finding Conscience on the Path to Truth,” the title of the article I’ve completed describing the archetype, is a good summary of the process.
The meditation course for me, then, had to do with doing some real, some hard Saturn-in-Virgo work, but also with developing a closer relationship with my conscience. One of the conditions students agree to before taking a Vipassana course is to refrain from killing anything, which includes eating meat (as I understand it, if you eat it, you’re participating in a process that began with the killing of the animal). I found myself yesterday on the way home from the course at a restaurant, evaluating the excitingly extensive omelet list. (Omelets with the trimmings are my favorite meal these days, and if I’m going out to eat, I’m going to gravitate toward homey places that serve such things.) Aware that the meditation technique is built on a foundation of vegetarianism, and aware that I’m presently beginning a practice of that technique, I opted not to choose a meat-ridden omelet. I recognized this choice as a Saturn-transiting-Virgoan-Arjunsuri choice: My conscience, with its commitment to giving the technique a real chance in my normal life, overrode my love of meat-riddled omelets. And this asteroid is in my 11th house, indicating how I look to the future and realize goals. My mouth was a little disappointed, but the rest of me felt great in making an informed, healthy choice (Virgo) that supports achieving my goals (11th house).
If you’re interested in learning more about Vipassana meditation, check out: http://www.dhamma.org.
If you’re interested in learning more about asteroid 20300 Arjunsuri, sign up for my mailing list at http://www.tdjacobs.com. It’s the best way to keep up with my activities in introducing this archetype to the astrological community. Within the next few months I’ll be doing a podcast interview about it, and I’ve written an article that will in one form or another be published in the near future, both of which will be announced via my mailing list.
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
September 17, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Shadow Suppression: Lilith, Lucifer and the Dark
It takes a lot of energy to keep out of your consciousness things you don’t want to see. This is the heart of the healing work surrounding wounding associated with Pluto, but it’s also associated with any archetype’s natural expression that we attempt for any reason to suppress.
Pluto’s the obvious example, but we’re talking about every archetype. There are varying levels of social sanction for the different sorts of explosions stemming from an individual’s inability to continue suppression. But all such expressions (explosions following suppression) are seen by society through the lens of Saturn, the glue that we use to hold ourselves in a meaningful sort of structure. They will therefore be seen rather one-dimensionally, as they would if viewed through the lens of any single archetype.
Associated with every archetype are shadow elements we’d rather not see. Mars offers an obvious example in those who use violence outside the structures of the military/police/civic rescue arenas and sports. Uranus offers the terrorist, Venus offers the heart-breaking and deceptive seducer, Sun offers the fascist and the tyrant.
But there are archetypal shadows for which we don’t currently have a vocabulary. Those offered by Lilith, for example, are what come to mind. As a matter of fact, everything about Lilith is made into shadow, leaving people with strong Lilith energy often terrified to again receive the brutal punishment they’ve gotten in the past from embodying the natural energy of this dark goddess.
What’s happened in our history is that we’ve forgotten how to face the dark. Which means that we have come to attempt to deny our true natures. We are light and dark. Each of us covers the whole range of possibilities. If this idea frightens you, take a moment to find out what part of you is conditioned to be afraid. I guarantee you that you have Lilith in you and she wants to find expression, and that there are parts of you that tell yourself that you’re bad for having this part.
Recently I understood that going deeply into Lilith requires me to give up my idea of what love is. I’ve had to confront my assumptions of what it means to support, honor and love others. Specifically, on one level, there are times when not helping someone is helping them more than they know. This is pretty obvious, but on another level entirely, one from which the journey of life is seen as the point of it (and not the pursuit or attainment of happiness, pleasure, ease or goodness), that I try to help you is absurd. No one but you can help you - your journey is in your hands and there’s nothing in reality that I do that actually helps, even if it looks like I do.
This is the level from which we can come to know Lilith. If we assume that destruction is always negative, we miss the point of what she would teach us. Who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad? Is there any such thing? Or is there just creation and destruction and the aftermath of each that forms the bulk of our lives?
So, this is the kind of stuff that makes a deep part of you nervous. Having a relationship with the dark doesn’t destroy existing relationships to moral systems, it only puts those moral systems into context. Perhaps they’re then dropped, but what follows isn’t automatically anarchy, as our conditioned fear of the dark tells us.
Similarly, stepping into Lucifer work doesn’t take us to a higher moral ground, but in truth tends to evaporate the boundaries of specific moral systems. Deeply meaningful Lucifer work takes one to the threshold at which it’s seen that all one can do about developing a relationship to the divine is to choose to do it or not to do it. To either manifest our idea of the divine through our actions or to manifest the opposite.
The path that takes us there is very often informed by the (conditioned) expectation that God is to be found somewhere, if only we were doing the right thing, looking in the right places, or trafficking in the right lingo. The darkness we find in Lucifer work is facing the terrible fact that we can choose to turn away from our idea of God - and there will be no penalty from an external power for doing so. The darkness is in accepting responsibility for ourselves by facing the truth that we have the choice to work for or against what we know is good.
Suppressing Lilith leads to all manner of destructive expression surrounding anger at not having power or being recognized for our true natures, or being forced to deny them. Suppressing Lucifer leads to all manner of destructive action to one’s self and to others, in varying kinds of expression based in anger of feeling abandoned by God and being afraid of aloneness. All these archetypes have in common is that we teach each other to be afraid to look them in the eye, leaving us afraid to look ourselves in the eye. We tell each other that expression of them brings darkness, oblivious to the fact that expression of any archetype can bring darkness.
The truth is that each of us has choice in how to use any energy. This truth is what we as defined as larger groups can’t handle, can’t deal with. That there is choice in each individual terrifies anyone in any sort of conventional seat of authority and power.
And yet, I write again, people will always have access to their true natures. No one will ever truly forget the truth of their nature. And they will in time figure out that the whole human suit game is about choice, and they will in time learn to decondition themselves and exercise free will, which will in fact require looking at these darknesses we carry, getting to know and accept them, and love ourselves for having them. Accepting your self fully, which is creating wholeness in your life and the only true measure of health, means seeing, integrating and loving each part of your complex, multihued nature.
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
September 3, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Where’s Lilith?
Lilith is everywhere.
Everywhere.
In everyone.
Everyone is Lilith.
As everyone is every archetype we could talk about.
Except that the times in which we live now are calling for us to heal our Liliths, so I talk about her a lot.
Hey, you -
Stop believing that your true nature is wrong.
Stop believing that there’s something wrong with you because you have desires and visions that don’t fit the mandates of your environment.
Just go ahead and give that crap up.
(How?
You’ve got to do some of what’s often called “shadow work.” You’ve got to bring up and out parts of yourself you’ve been led to believe are dangerous, ugly, and raw - and integrate them. That rawness, it turns out, is your aliveness.
There are limitless ways to do this, as Lilith is best served in any activity that gets our primal juices flowing. Art and sex are two ready examples, but anything can be done from the place where the fountain gets switched on.
I ordered a cup of tea last night from that place. I noticed that I was pleased when a particular counter person at a particular coffee place was on shift, and when I ordered my tea, I felt the raw desire that I associate with Lilith and I sent it down into the earth. (A way of grounding one’s self in strong energy and not throwing it at those around one.) I knew she felt it because when I turned to leave, one word in her sentence to the next customer came out at about 1500% her normal volume. Her energetic footing was a little shaken when I withdrew all that Lilith-inspired attention.
[NB: The lunar eclipse yesterday squared my true Black Moon Lilith-Neptune conjunction in the 2nd house, at 3 and 4 Sagittarius, respectively - I got to see new things about what Lilith-Neptune stuff I hide or de-emphasize, and as it squared, it wanted action - squares require resolution.]
When we find Lilith in ourselves, we’re prone to remembering the injunctions against our raw intensity our families, clans and societies teach us in our youth, or have beaten into or raped out of us when we stray from their accepted norms. Here’s the beautiful part: Your rawness doesn’t have to be violent. Violence surrounding this raw energy is a corruption of the energy, a forcing of it into a tiny shape that can be swept out of the way…until it explodes. (And if there’s anything in everything that I teach for the rest of my life that is heard, I’d be honored if it’s this: Any energy in us suppressed is subject to explosion. Honoring our true natures, whatever corner we’re thinking or talking about, is vital to happiness, health and survival.)
After, of course, a lot of time feeling resentment and anger from the suppression. The best or worst thing about society, depending on how Saturnian or Uranian you are, is that you don’t have to teach every single person to do this or not to do that; people from their love, and from their fear, will spread the word on their own. Because of this, any of us can choose to support authentic expression in other people.)
Yeah, just go ahead and give that crap up.
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
August 29, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Past Lives & Astrology: The Soul Knows No Time
A friend and I were considering attending a talk recently on karma and past lives. She asked me if I thought if spending a lot of time thinking and talking about past lives might be counterproductive. Does it keep you from the here and now? Can you use it to distract yourself from the present? Is being in that mode a kind of addiction to therapy that can keep you from healing, choosing to heal?
The potential benefits of therapies exist outside of how we use them. You can respect a modality and encounter a practitioner of it that makes you think twice about trusting it. The juice is in how it’s used. I do think about past lives a lot, it’s my work. But if they’re made useful to present tasks of healing, there’s nothing wrong with thinking and talking about them a lot. I can speak for how I use them in my work: To understand the present, we have to understand the past. The goal of the work is in helping you live here and now, but if you’re using the past to keep you from the here and now (which we all have done and many of us actively do), we have to talk about the past to learn how be here now, which is learning to move on.
Here’s something: The soul knows no time. You come into any given life with a soul agenda, and you will create circumstances to give you the opportunities to experience the themes listed on that agenda. The multidimensional nature of the symbols (that, for instance, Mars is aggression/violence as well as defense/rescue; Saturn is the burden of hard work as well as achievement/recognition once hard work is done) means that the themes on the soul’s agenda can be studied and checked off the list, so to speak, in many different ways.
What I’d like you to hear today is this: You are reliving your past lives right now.
Right now, the fears you’re learning to either heed or heal can be traced to a past life.
The joys and passions you’re presently expressing and craving to express can be traced to a past life.
Each life is an opportunity to experience the desires and heal the wounds of the soul.
Whatever themes your chart reflects, learning to understand your deepest desires, intentions and fears takes you closer to consciously understanding the journey of your soul. Healing something now is healing something that exists outside time. When you shift (heal) your perception about the circumstances of your life, you increase the level of restfulness of your soul. And the more restful is your soul, the more you will be inclined to figure out how to bring your deepest gifts to the world.
Which is what I guarantee you your soul truly wants to do.
That’s the foundation goal of my work as a karmic astrological counselor (there has to be a more manageable term! I’ve been called a “soul doctor,” but that doesn’t even really cover it). People in all stages of the journey to getting to know their souls come in, and I do what I can to address the needs of the stage they’re in, whatever it is in the moment they sit down with me. Some people need to be recognized or seen at the soul level, while some need to share their personal vision with someone and find out what it feels like to acknowledge their soul’s deepest desires to another person. And there are others who come in with a need to learn to sort out what it means to work with soul, given the conditioning they’ve picked up about what life is and is about.
For all of them, there’s a suspicion that there’s more going on than they were taught. In every case, it’s evidence that the soul is trying in one way or another to break through the confines of the ego. In each of the stages there’s a component to this, as the grip of the ego operates on multiple levels. The healing work we do to allow the ego to take second chair to the soul happens in layers, and I recognize that a big portion of my work is to encourage people to have patience with the process as they crack through layer after layer, and still don’t feel they have the ultimate prize/destination. All resistance to the process is from the ego, as is all judgement about the ideas of speed and progress of the process.
Ego is a construct of defense mechanisms intended to guide us through the painful maze of life. Ego consists of a number of scripts we use to shield us from the harshness of the world. Healing the soul’s wounding involves releasing dependence on these scripts to the degree that soul can come forward and take the wheel.
Each of us is living with wounds to our souls. Evolutionary astrology aims to uncover that wounding and help people learn to heal themselves. In effect, evolutionary astrology is a tool to help you make nice with and learn to heal your soul. In my version of evolutionary astrology, this aim undergirds a belief that the more of us who release dependence on ego and heal the wounding of the soul, the less relevant the divisiveness we employ as defense mechanisms to keep us from each other. What’s the point of racism, colonialism, exploitation, slavery of any kind? What’s the use? Those of us consciously employing them are disconnected from soul, and those of us unconsciously supporting these modes are equally disconnected from soul.
Whatever healing at the soul level you do now, you’re actually working outside time. You’re traveling in time - did you know?! And it’s just this work outside time that is the key to healing anything in our own time. Real change in the world is the result of real change of individuals.
How much energy do you spend outside time?
How’s your relationship with soul developing?
Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.
August 18, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Transit Lab: A Lucifer Return
Aha.
That’s it.
I’m a(n astrological) minute from having a Lucifer return. The asteroid (1930) is natally on my Sun, and seeing that I’m at the end of one chapter and the beginning of another is the only thing that’s made sense about the self-inflicted drama and fireworks of the last few days.
My ego is fighting its imminent death like crazy, like never before. I’m being asked to give up my need for control and open to what’s better than what my control can bring me. And for a 2nd house Scorpio, giving up control can be quite a challenge.
For any return, this chapter idea is this: Your experience of any energy in life is divided up into chapters. Returns of the bodies delineate the chapters, and big moments regarding the energies can be created around the time of the return. The transiting, returning body’s function in your life is highlighted during the return, and you’re supposed to have a great time when the return happens. In truth, though, the infusion of the returning planet’s energy into its natal position, into you, will reinforce whatever’s happening with the energy in your life. Birthdays, for example (solar returns), are supposed to be great. You get an infusion of solar energy into your Sun. Ever had a birthday that sucked? They suck when the solar energy you’re running is already subpar or unhealthy; whatever you’re doing with your Sun energy is magnified and highlighted.
As I continue on a path of opening more to what my higher self or spirit guidance is offering me and asking of me, my own Lucifer work (= my learning to choose to give up control) gets a little more rocky. Lucifer is the separating influence, what in us decides if we’re going to recognize and serve something greater than ourselves. With it on my Sun natally, I will naturally have lessons in this life of finding out just how big the ego can be and what it should serve (itself or something higher).
I’ve been “answering the call” of Spirit lately, including moving to an area of town I specifically never wanted to live in, changing my eating habits from something I thought was really good for me, beginning to learn a foreign language I’ve resisted learning my whole life even though presented with an absurd number of cues to learn it, and giving up relationships of various kinds - basically, as I understand it, everything that I’ve chosen for myself is being replaced by something else I’d clearly decided I didn’t want. Its like living the life you specifically chose not to live, and being asked to learn to love it. A little dose of feeling in a strange reality where someone else seems to have chosen for you the life you’d already opted not to live.
Immature Lucifer energy considers giving up control a threat to its being. Lucifer energy needing to mature is in fact an egocentric control freak sure that God/the Universe/Creation doesn’t love it. I’ve been experiencing this in spades the last few days, as I feel I can’t have anything that I want for myself. By the way, if you give this part of yourself time to make some noise, you’ll see that you’re a crazy mofo in no time. (And what an awesome exercise this can be - I can’t recommend it enough - find out what really makes you tick by giving into the egocentric control freak inside you that you go to great lengths to hide from everyone, including probably yourself.)
In order for Lucifer to mature, the ego has to find the right sort of expression and place in the rest of you. Which is to say that the ego needs to find a healthy role in the workings of the overall life. He needs to find the right seat at the conference or dinner table, you might say - he thinks he’s deserving of the seat at the head of the table, and for developing personality and soul maturity, he needs to learn to be okay with any other seat at the table.
For many of us, we need to experience something that wows us in order for the ego to choose to take another seat. Some sort of numinous/soul enlargening experience that knocks the logic-clinging pants off your egocentricity. (I’m reminded of Angels in America, when that dude with the name I forget meets and wrestles with the angel played by Emma Thompson.) This is another way of saying that the intellect must learn the benefit in choosing to take a back seat in running the life. In the end, the ego must merge with the heart/emotional guidance system, but Lucifer in no way can conceive of this and so must learn to choose the second seat.
In me, this fight in necessary. I’m not yet at the big wowing experience that convinces my ego to chill out and serve the rest of me. It’s on its way, I know, and it could take one of many forms (I’m open to what it is, and terrified of what I’ll be asked to do - ego never thinks it’s ready to choose to relinquish the illusion of control). In the mean time, I’m letting the fight happen because I thereby show myself, all of myself, what are the issues needing to be addressed in order for healing the wounded part of the ego.
And for each of us, healing needs to happen along the way to ego relinquishing the insistence on (illusion of) control. I see in my work as an evolutionary astrologer and counselor the effects of wounding to the ego, as if my life itself isn’t enough. Its insistence on supremacy is a reaction to feeling out of control in the past (the past of this life is informed by the past of other lives - we’re talking about all of them). Learning to trust something higher is the lesson for all of our Lucifers, and working with this in my counseling work is about healing the relationship with Spitir/God/Creation/the Universe - pick whatever word works best for you.
So, at this return I have the opportunity to see all of the fireworks I’ve been setting off and, reading between the lines, heal something about my willingness to trust the unfolding of the bigger show, the one that’s larger than my conscious mind/ego/Lucifer can grasp or ever devise. After writing all this out, I can finally see what’s happening, and what is the use for all the feelings and anger that’s been coming up - until I noted that I’m having this return, I was pretty sure everything as I knew it was over and I was headed for some unstopped existential drain, and in a hurry.
Speaking of returns, returning is the inevitable conclusion of anyone’s Luciferian journey. Anger at the bigger authority is what leads to the separating behvaior. At root, each Luciferian reason is anger at the perception and feeling of having been betrayed, and all Luciferian scheming, plotting and resistance to the bigger - someone else’s - version of things are attempts to protect one’s self from feeling betrayed again. Feeling forgotten by God, etc., is pretty serious wounding, and each of us has some version of it.
The return of Lucifer is the return to love. To accepting the love of the greater reality (again, choose your label for it). To releasing the need to be separate in order to prove a point about exhibiting on one’s sleeve evidence of the deep existential hurt.
And in the end, Lucifer healing hinges on our willingness to accept that the hurt is about our perception that we’re separate from that greater thing. In the mythology, Lucifer rebels against God because he takes the fact that God is sending a son to earth (whether Adam in the Hebrew tradition or Jesus in the Christian); he takes this as a clear signal that God does not love him as much as he thinks God does. The pain of Lucifer stems from his decision that he’s got the market on defining love. The question for him becomes this: Can he give up his narrow definition of love? Of course he can. Will he choose to do so?
And since this journey is being taken by each of us, can you? Can I? I know I can, can choose to, and at the same time recognize there’s more fight left in me because there’s more healing to be done on this karmic wounding to the relationship with God[/your word here].
And that’s where I am today at this Lucifer return. Egads, do I feel better. Amazing what some caffeine-driven blogging can do for an existentially wounded (& healing) spirit.
August 15, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Rx Venus Trine Rx Pluto: Pleasure-seeking Behavior
As long as retrograde Venus in Leo is conjunct Saturn and trining retrograde Pluto in Sagittarius, and Jupiter’s turned direct on my Mercury-Moon:
I’m being reminded of the health issues/epidemics we’re facing because of how we eat. A few years ago I for some reason was up on a soapbox re the reversability of Type II diabetes (which both my parents have) with my mom, and when I stopped to take a breath, she excitedly told me I should go on tour as a motivational speaker to get people revved up about taking control of their lives by learning about what their bodies actually need.
Venus is our values, and also pleasure-seeking behavior, and Pluto’s about digging. In Leo and Sagittarius, respectively, and we’re talking about a deepening of review of our personal relationship to pleasure-seeking behavior. What’s the truth of what you’re doing to please yourself? What are you learning about what you think makes you happy? There’s truth trying to come out of underneath your expectations and desires – are you open to hearing it?
Some other questions: Are the old things still working for you? What are you eating? Why did you eat it? Does it still work? What feels right for you right now? Can you open to changing your behavior to see if there’s something better for you in this moment? Can you listen to the signals your body gives you about what you actually eat? How does your body react as you chew it? Swallow it? After it lands in your stomach? What about five minutes later? Twenty? Two hours? The next morning?
The key to feeding your body what it needs is choosing awareness of what you’re eating. That’s the bottom line. And the key to health in large part is developing this kind of relationship to your body…and honoring it. Venus retrograde is a great time for Venus-related course corrections, by the way…
Currently (& inexplicably), I’m eating a lot of Mexican food. I’m not sure why this is happening, but it’s what feels right. Recently I was transplanted to an area of the city that seems predominantly Mexican, prompted to learn Spanish and eat what the locals are eating. I’m not sure I’m fully clear on what this immersion is about, but deviating from my mostly-raw diet of the last 18 months or so has been interesting. It’s become fully inconvenient to travel to get the raw dairy & meat I’m used to, and even for a while to get to farmers’ markets. So, I get to review why I eat what I do and why, what makes me want to eat what I’m used to. And it just hit me a few minutes ago that the trine between these two retrogrades is an opportunity to do it.
I’m currently a human, so being led away from my habits is the opposite of comforting. But I have to believe there’s something useful to learn with this, since it’s so insistent on happening.
During the recent new Moon of Leo, in my 11th house and squaring my Sun and sextiling my 1st house Uranus, I was at a talk given by a raw vegan dude screening the teaser for a documentary he made about reversing diabetes with 30 days of a raw food diet. It reinforced what I’ve been harping about for years but had kind of forgotten about of late, and now I’m living in an area with people who are either in the diabetes ranks or likely to be in danger of it. If you know me, you may have heard my dinner party soapboxing about the reversability of diabetes or the connection between what you eat and how you feel. (And if you’re a client and heard this in your session, I hope I relayed it with love as an invitation to live in a deeper state of compassionate awareness with yourself.)
In my philosophy studies in college, I ran across an idea of Nietzsche’s (in some book - I can’t remember which - The Genealogy of Morals?) that the problem with the German-speaking philosophers’ ideas is that what they eat is heavy, deadening, the opposite of life-affirming – in other words, the problem with the thought coming out of those cultures is what the people in them eat. Their philosophy is dead because what they eat is deadening. That it leaves them with a general and persistent indigestion that adversely affects their ability to think clearly. I remember putting N. on my list of favorites forever when I read this (especially as I wondered why the people he was criticising always made me feel like I’d eaten too much of the wrong thing – I mean, have you read any Schopenhauer lately?! I have to tell you that I repeatedly endangered my life by nearing comatose states as I parsed line by line of several chapters of some impenetrable English translation of an even more impenetrable German original work of his that I’m content to report I’ve blessedly forgotten even the title of).
It’s a good thing I’m too hopped up on this fine Mayan mocha to focus any of my rambling – we could be here all day…
By Tom Jacobs
Transit Lab: Uranus Square Saturn (Outer Events Show You Inner Realities)
Last night I stopped in my tracks after my roommate removed the drywall from the bathroom. I realized that she’s Uranus-squaring her own house’s Saturn, and I saw that there’s an outer reality thing that’s showing me some inner reality stuff.
The first thing catching my attention was my noting that most of the renovations she’s doing to her property have to do with water. A large koi pond is going to replace the guest house we tore down over the last week, and the bathroom’s being totally redone. Sure, I thought, retooling some emotional focus and expression is part of my job these days.
But then my part in this work came home: Our arrangement for my staying there involves work on these projects. I’m getting that the more I tear down with my hands old structures on her property that are outmoded, unpermitted or in need of upgrade, the more opportunities I have to see and spend time with my inner parallels to the work, and tear some things down and let others be torn down.
She warned me when I agreed to move there that it’s chaos, and I told her that I’ve been inviting it in (since it’s been knocking so pesistently and loudly). I told myself I’d do what I could to relax into it, in an effort to make space for Uranus squaring my Saturn to do its work.
Now, living in a Uranian-square space and not being able to uphold your Saturnian status quo can inspire a fair amount, or universes, of resistance. A few days last week saw me negotiating that resistance in trying to figure out what I was going to eat (my normal food sources, including the raw grocery, is 20 miles away and I haven’t been since I moved). What am I supposed to put in my food hole in this transition? I haven’t known, and so have been improvising, losing my rules. The result does include, to be fair, some choices that six months ago I would have run from, but the whole having rules thing seems not to be working.
I thought I would dread carrying rubble to the street. I did it for an hour this morning, and it was kind of fun. Kind of comforting - removing the pieces of the things that no longer work and need to go. Until tomorrow there’s a rental dumpster thing in front of the house that contains all the debris. Part of this morning’s work involved hauling debris in a big plastic planter as a bucket and dumping it over the side. I dropped it in a few times and had to scale the side and get in to retrieve it, and there was something entirely cool about seeing all that rubble in there, climbling back out and knowing it’s being haued away tomorrow.
Also, I realize that my roommate’s orientation to the chaos is useful for me. I’m learning to see it as what’s on the menu, what’s happening right now. She’s helping me keep an eye on the expected results, at least the general kind of results that can be expected. Holding a vision of possibilities that open as a result of my stepping into this transition is steadying. In other words, I can override the Saturnian resistance to change by remembering the new structures coming in going to reflect the needs and features of the present, something Saturn in its focus on the past and familiarity isn’t usually on board with.
So, there’s another installment of Uranus square Saturn. I hope that you’re helped in looking at your own outer planet transits the deeper I’m able to go into and explain mine. Outer planet transits in their slowness offer the opportunity to build great significance over time, and the changes in your life will be happening on many levels. Giving yourself time and awareness to get into the changes they invite on all levels is a big part of living more consciously.
August 9, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
Transit Lab: Sun Square Sun
I envision a day when I get back to writing posts about something other than my own transits, but for the time being it seems useful.
Today I had the transiting Sun in Leo/10th square my natal Sun in Scorpio/2nd. A few days ago I remembered this was coming up, but didn’t think much about it. Transits of the Sun are not super significant because they’re brief; they don’t have time to build into significance. I still watch them from time to time, however, as having a giant light shining for about three days now and then can show you something interesting about myself. In the course of the year, the Sun hits everything in your chart in every way. Again, it’s not the biggest show in town, but if you’re taking the day off from wrestling with an outer planet square or opposition, you might entertain yourself a bit with solar transits.
The square brings friction and requires something to change (to have resolution of the friction), and the transiting Sun shines light. We’re therefore looking at some thing I might see today about what my Sun needs to open up to in order to proceed. Very often a transiting planet squaring a natal planet is asking that natal planet to open to something new (or forgotten) about what the transiting planet is about.
I have some visions of my work and place in the world that have been coming together slowly. Yesterday, I ran across a passage in a book that gives words to my vision, and I was appropriately whelmed. The picture got a little clearer, some dots were connected, and suddenly here were words in front of me stating plainly things I’ve been unable to articulate but that have been shaping my work and heart stuff about that work for quite a while.
One of the expressions of 2nd house Sun people is a self-reliance. The 2nd is about values, skills, resources, self-esteem, and so the sanity of the person can seem to rest on how much he can do himself and not need to ask for help. I reached a moment today when that 2nd house Scorpio Sun got very clear that I need help, input and guidance to continue this transformation. I relaxed into the moment and asked to be shown what to do next. Asking for guidance is not foreign to me, but in that moment I opened up to be lead to do things I wouldn’t normally include in my 2nd house transformative tool belt. From Leo in the 10th house, the message is something like this: If you want to show yourself to the world (10th house), you have to open up to expression (Leo) that you wouldn’t normally dig (square). Your focus on deep transformation (Scorpio) of self (2nd house) needs to add some expressive stuff (Leo) to its repertory.
I can’t wait to see what’s coming. I’ve been reading a book about modern-day vision quests, and have found myself challenged by imagining participating in some of the practices. Today I said that if that’s the best thing for me to do, then I’m willing to do it. It’s not even the big stuff (fasting in the wilderness for 3 or 4 days, etc.), but some parts of the preparation for it that would cause me to look at my life and self in new ways.
A square to the Sun is in effect a challenge to who you think you are, how you organize your coherent sense of self. A square from the transiting Sun is just enough time to show you something interesting, but not enough time to dig deep and drag something out of you, as with squares from the outer planets.
Because the movement of the Sun is the basis of the Gregorian calendar, you can figure easily the dates when you have solar squares to your own natal Sun. Three months before and after your birthday is when this happens. Build it up like this: Wherever the transiting Sun is in your chart, ask yourself what the house and sign it’s transiting would have to say to your natal Sun in its house and sign. The example here is, what’s the challenge Leo in the 10th house offers to Scorpio in the 2nd house? The italics above are one kind of answer.
August 8, 2007 By Tom Jacobs