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Introduction Greetings loyal readers! This month's column addresses regarding how progressive-minded people can deal with their feelings in the face of the sheer evil being directed at us by the powerful greed-obsessed beings controlling this planet. Going into anger and hatred is an easy response to Republicans trying to accomplish such vile deeds as ending public education, abolishing the corporate tax and doing whatever they can get away with to enhance their own wealth while increasing the terrible hardships currently endured by the poor and working classes. The retrogrades of Mars, Neptune and Pluto increase the difficulty of the challenge, but at least we can derive comfort from the fact that planets don't stay retrograde forever! Exposing the Myth of Compassionate Conservatism Let's face it - there is no compassion in the conservatism preached by our Thief-in-Chief Spurious George and his various partners in crime (Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Paul O'Neill and everyone who agrees with them). The only people this Republican Mafia has compassion for are themselves. I would like to think they have compassion for their own children and grandchildren, but they don't. If they did, they would show more concern about the environment. Mindlessly clear-cutting old-growth forests, digging up oil, coal and gas and polluting the air and water with them and resisting all efforts to develop clean, sustainable, renewable energy sources is not evidence of caring about the well-being of subsequent generations. The George W. Bushes of the world ought to be asking themselves what good it will do their children and grandchildren to inherit vast wealth when there will be no clean water to drink and no clean air to breathe on this planet! It's pretty clear what the compassionless conservative agenda is. The New World Order wants to enslave everyone on this planet who is not in their evil little cabal. They want a police state where everyone but them is a mind-controlled biological robot existing only to serve the morally bankrupt, soul-less elites creating so much misery in societies around the globe. So what should be our response to this moral depravity? .This is going to sound REALLY weird, but the answer is that our wicked rulers deserve our compassion. I'll say it again - the New World Order deserves our compassion. Granted, it is extremely difficult to have compassion for beings that are misusing power and hoarding resources and creating misery for billions of souls on this Earth. Why should we have compassion for them? Here's why. Once you really understand the depth and breadth of the New World Order's moral and spiritual depravity, it is difficult not to have compassion for them. For one thing, these people are so racist that they are unable to enjoy or appreciate most people and most cultures on the planet. When people are busy feeling superior to most of the rest of the population, and seeing all those "others" as less than human, there is so much less on this planet for these people to enjoy! They are so twisted by lust for material wealth that they cannot appreciate nature's beauty. They want to harvest and destroy all that is beautiful in nature, because all they can appreciate is money. They can't appreciate the sound of a bird or the sun shining on new spring leaves. If they did appreciate it, they wouldn't be trying so hard to destroy it. Which means, of course, that the New World Order maniacs cannot experience love. They mistake lust for love, then fail to understand why they are never satisfied with what they have. Love is the only thing that has any true meaning, because Love is the divine creative force. Love occupies the space between the molecules. Love is what holds the universe together. And Love is what unites all life and all matter. Enlightened people realize that all universal creation is connected. If everyone saw this there would be no war and no oppression, for how can loving souls kill and oppress other parts of themselves? If everyone understood this principle of connectedness it would not be possible to enslave anyone, because everyone would understand that as long as one person is enslaved, no one else is truly free. Of course it is reasonable and proper to be angry with people who are trying to hurt us and hurt those we care about. I am not advocating denying or repressing one's anger. However, it is important to experience the anger and to let it move so that it is not held in the emotional body. Repressed feelings held in the emotional body lead to physical and mental illness. So read the paper and watch the news and let yourself get angry if that is what you want to experience. However, once you have honored the anger and let it move, then you can create space in your emotional body to allow the compassion in. And how do we access this compassion? Start by having pity for someone like John Ashcroft. Poor John Ashcroft - he's so sexually and emotionally repressed he does not believe in dancing. As any self-respecting anthropologist can tell you, dancing is a primal and universal human impulse. So people who repress the fundamental urge to dance are repressing one of the fundamental urges of human life. Sex is the fundamental creative principle. It is how we co-create with God. It is how we express our deepest and most profound feelings. It is how we transcend three-dimensional reality into the multi-dimensional world of the spirit. Poor John Ashcroft. He is so racist he can't ever have any friends from other cultures. He can't appreciate other culture's music and dance (he can't even appreciate his own culture's dance!), he can't experience home-cooked ethnic meals or the décor of dwellings of people of color (because he doesn't have friends from other cultures so he can't get invited to their homes). Why? Because he's so filled with hatred for people outside his narrow spectrum of culture and belief system that he can't begin to appreciate over 99% of the population. The John Ashcrofts of the world are so busy feeling superior to other cultures that they can't begin to see what there is to be learned from them. So here is John Ashcroft, who claims to be a Christian, yet he does not know the first thing about Christ or Christianity. The Christ spirit, working through the historical figure known to us as Jesus, preached unconditional love and acceptance for all of creation. Christ-centered beings are incapable of destroying pristine ecosystems, because Christ-centered beings love all of creation (plants, animals, rocks, trees, stars, planets, etc.). Christ-centered beings are incapable of racism or murder. So ultimately John Ashcroft and George W. Bush and the entire New World Order deserve our compassion because they live so far away from God. Going to church every Sunday and thumping the Bible and talking about God's love is not a meaningful substitute for actually feeling God's love and expressing it. By the same token, talking about compassion is totally different from feeling and expressing it. Where is the compassion in cutting the budget for school lunches? Where is the compassion in wanting to launch missiles in space and increase this country's arms build-up? Where is the compassion in allowing arsenic to be present in drinking water? Where is the compassion in advocating death to abortion providers and running arms and guns to third world countries for the slaughter of peasants that disagree with free-market principles that greatly advantage the wealthy to the tremendous detriment of everybody else? The members of the New World Order are incapable of experiencing love. They are capable of experiencing lust. They are capable of experiencing power. They are capable of obtaining pleasure from perversions such as masochism, capital punishment (a euphemism for state-sponsored cold-blooded murder), pedophilia and violence, but they are not capable of experiencing love. Try to remember that the next time the New World Order pisses you off. Try to remember, and try to experience compassion for them and send them love. It may not help the New World Order, but it definitely will help you. Energy is magnetic - you attract what you send out. So send love to the forces of evil and bask in God's glow. Mars, Neptune and Pluto Retrograde Have things been feeling kind of foggy for you the past few months? Is there a surreal quality to some of your days? Do you have the feeling that things just aren't moving fast enough, or aren't going in the direction they are supposed to go? If so, then you may be feeling the effects of the some recent planetary retrogrades. What is a planetary retrograde? As regular readers of this column can tell you, a retrograde planet is an optical illusion arising from the combined motions of the planets and the Earth. There are times when it appears to us, from our perspective on Earth, that a planet is moving backwards in its cycle instead of forwards. Of course, the planets don't move backwards - they only move forwards. Those periods when the planets appear to be backing up are referred to as planetary retrogrades, and they have a special meaning in astrology. When a planet is direct (i.e., not retrograde) the planet is expressing its full power as a planet, as modulated by the qualities of the particular sign the planet is traveling through. When a planet is retrograde, the energies governed by that planet (as modulated by the sign the planet is traveling through) are held back. Right now (and for the past month or so) Mars and Pluto have been retrograde in Sagittarius and Neptune has been retrograde in Aquarius. Mars is a personal planet, while Neptune and Pluto are social planets. A personal planet affects each individual’s chart differently. A social planet affects an entire generation in a particular way, instead of affecting each person differently. Mars in Sagittarius (a fire sign ruled by Jupiter) is about expansion (Jupiter) and action (fire). Sagittarius seeks to traverse the boundaries of philosophy, thought and religion. With Mars retrograde in Sagittarius people are trying to expand their mental perspective, but the energy is stuck. People know they are seeking something different intellectually, but they don’t know what it is or how to find it. Neptune governs an entire generation’s sense of vision, a collective imagination. Aquarius embodies a rebellious spirit and a devotion to expression of individual uniqueness. Neptune in Aquarius is a time when people feel freer to express themselves more idiosyncratically than at other times during the fashion cycle. The Internet has facilitated a great variety of choices for those with access to its wonders. With Neptune retrograde in Aquarius people are striving to achieve a collective vision of mass individual expression, yet the energy is contained. People are conforming to certain conventions out of habit, although their hearts are pulling them in a different direction. Likewise, Pluto represents a generation’s deepest level of consciousness. Since consciousness is mutable, Pluto is about transformation, regeneration and rebirth. Pluto in Sagittarius facilitates a massive shift in worldwide consciousness at a deep subconscious level. With Pluto retrograde in Sagittarius, people are yearning to understand at a deep level the visions that Neptune in Aquarius is conjuring up, yet the retrograde position is preventing them from invoking the transformation process. Look for some major changes in a few months when everything straightens out. This will augur some substantial global change in global consciousness, both mentally and spiritually. Rock on! Copyright 2001 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com. |
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