Nov 2011
Coming Home

Eleven Eleven Eleven

Get your yellow highlighter out. It’s time to mark your calendar; the Full Moon this month is a stand-out.

First off, it peaks on the eve of eleven-eleven-eleven. Eleven is considered a master number in numerological tradition. Even just one eleven is enough to raise the eyebrows of those who assign to numbers a numinous significance. As the lunar cycle peaks, we will get the power of eleven iterated by three, itself considered a perfect number by the ancients.

Make yourself a tuning fork during the two-and-a-half days before and after the lunation’s peak (12:17 pm PST Nov 10th). Allow yourself to resonate with the vibrations of these powerful numbers. Let in what is happening at this moment in your life; both its blessings and its tests.

Grand Trine in Earth

One of these tests has to do with entitlement complexes.

During the second half of November, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto will make a perfect equilateral triangle in the sky. I talk about the Grand Trine in Earth in a recent lecture, suggesting how we might take advantage of its invitation to free ourselves from limiting cultural notions about wealth and poverty.

This transit is a learning opportunity that has both personal and collective applications. It is coming along at a time when humanity’s old assumptions about resources will not work any more. Dramatic shifts are afoot — global access to food and clean water foremost among them — to which the wealthy individuals of the world will not be immune.

Smug and Isolated

The cultural bubble that surrounds upper- and middle-class Westerners allows us to be physically removed, psychologically disconnected and spiritually estranged from the atrocities of penury. This isolation is considered good and right by those encased in it. In fact, it’s considered a birthright.

Some members of this small class of world denizens use ideology to justify their material smugness. There are religious Americans, for example, who’ll tell you that there’s something uniquely deserving about (white) denizens of the North American landmass. For others of this demographic,  it’s not so much a belief but a vague, unstated assumption that Those dreadful things only happen in other countries.

Whether conscious or unconscious, spiritual isolationism is an obstacle to the cosmic learning curve represented by the transits overhead. One of the questions posed by the Grand Trine in Earth this month is this: In a world where a famine in Somalia has killed 30,000 children, does it feel appropriate to whine about the fact that we can’t afford to go out to restaurants as often as we used to?

Entitlement Complex

I am not proposing that we should, instead, upbraid ourselves for having a full belly, or indulge in a fear of lack. These reactions slow down our growth, and can even incapacitate us. For those who wish to get beyond them, November’s Grand Trine in Earth is a good time to work on identifying within ourselves any vestiges of deprivation anxiety; to which Americans, who live in a culture obsessed with dearth and abundance, are particularly susceptible. Now is a good time to work on purging this fear, by catching it in action, noticing what a drain it is, and saying No to it.

Nor am I proposing that we discount the income disparities that exist within even the most affluent societies, dividing the citizenry up into haves and have-nots. Domestic imbalances of wealth deserve our attention as much as international ones; and are getting it, thanks to the Occupy Wall Street protests.¹

What I am proposing is that the First World, in general, start to re-think the strange economic exceptionalism with which we view ourselves. It’s time to review our astonishingly outdated expectations of material abundance, some of which date back to the Eisenhower era, During the Pluto in Capricorn years (2008-2023), entitlement complexes both individual and collective will become more and more ethically, spiritually and even pragmatically ill-advised.

In a very practical sense, this false sense of exceptionalism blinds us to the world moment. To imagine that the ideal way to live is to have a big, fat house with a three-car garage is a grotesque anachronism in a world that is running out of oil. There are new material ideals to aspire to now. In those countries where most people live in cities — where the disconnection from our food sources is most acute — we’ll need a new set of creative responses to the years ahead.  Those who know how to live simply, and who can adapt creatively, will not only survive but flourish.

By contrast, the more we expect the economy – and the larded lifestyles of former times — to get back to “normal,” the harder a time we will have… if by “normal” we mean two dozen pairs of shoes and imported fruit in our cocktails.

Lessons in Empathy

Ceres, Neptune and Chiron all make direct stations in the days immediately surrounding the Full Moon. The purpose of these three bodies is to teach empathy and the acknowledgement of pain; both of which lead to healing when entered into full-heartedly.

Ceres in Pisces has been stretching and extending our nurturing impulses, so that they embrace the least fortunate denizens of our world. We are being called upon to be more ambitious with our empathy. If you’re in touch with this transit, you feel a yearning to universalize your spiritual focus.

Neptune will strengthen this yearning. Now in the last couple of degrees of Aquarius, Neptune has spent more than a decade blurring group boundaries, a job that is almost complete. For those who have tuned in to Neptune’s lesson, it’s harder than it was 13 years ago to confine our identity to one dinky little niche of the human family. We feel more a part of the whole teeming seven billion.

The station of Chiron, that most ambivalent of celestial creatures, is at zero Pisces. Our susceptibility to the world’s wounds is very high right now. In order to take them in without drowning in them, we need to confront a fundamental stumbling block of the mass mentality: the illusion of dualism.

Dualism is the essential falsehood that says < I occupy one realm and everybody else occupies a different realm>. It’s the big lie that holds modern culture in thrall and keeps us blind. Those who follow any kind of spiritual path must come back around to it again and again.

For consciousness seekers, slaying this dragon wins the key to the kingdom.

Us vs. Them

Dualism shows up as the way we judge our experience, in big and little ways. A bad habit of the collective mind, it is considered normal. This makes it even more of a trap.

For most of us, this evaluating and judging is so incessant that we can’t imagine not doing it. A cloudy day is bad and a sunny day is good. When we’re ill, we view our own worth as less than when we’re hale and hearty. And we buy into group judgments, those of our family and our culture, without even thinking. We harbor the unconscious assumption that poor people are less worthy of our respect than wealthy people. Pretty people have more social value than the rest of us.

The granddaddy of dualistic viewpoints is Us vs Them. We build whole worldviews around this one, by means of intricate social and global hierarchies. A dark-skinned applicant is less valuable to the condo association than a Caucasian applicant. The death in war of one of our countrymen is more tragic than the death of a foreigner.

The media panders to this simplistic schema so completely that most television watchers seem not to realize there’s any other way of seeing things. If you support human rights for Palestinians, you must be against Judaism. If you criticize Obama you must be Republican.

Every life circumstance is reduced to a zero-sum game.

Beyond Dualism

The alternative to dualistic thinking is experiencing life as a unity. When we live as if we and everything else were part of an unconditionally inclusive whole, we free ourselves from the trap.

One way to get there is ecological consciousness. An understanding of Earth’s interconnected systems can’t help but encompass unity thinking. So do any number of legends from wisdom traditions the world over (even those, like Christianity, whose appalling histories as institutionalized powers have rendered them suspect in other ways. Consider the beautiful image of every-sparrow-falling and every-grain-of-sand). All spiritual teachings are founded upon the premise that everything in existence is inextricably linked.

There are innumerable variations on this theme, but there is only one truth. Consciousness is the way we interpret that truth.

Carrot and Stick

For those who are ready for it, this month’s transits will give us a glimpse of what it might feel like to go find an interpretation of that truth that goes beyond dualism. The teaching is coming at us from several different directions.

Cosmic intelligence always offers us both a carrot and a stick. The stick in this case is our realization that if we stay stuck in Us-vs.-Them we’ll kill ourselves and the planet. The carrot is the feeling of peace that we feel when we know ourselves to be part of a universe in perfect synch with itself.

When both Neptune and Chiron are in Pisces together, many will take this leap, and there’ll be no turning back.

Opening our heart to what’s happening in the Amazon Valley, in Afghanistan, in the Congo and Ethiopia – daring to feel the truth of what people there are going through as if it were our truth, too — will make the years ahead feel like coming home.

________________

Note:

1 Right on time, the OWS movement has arisen to educate millions to the process by which modern democracies have turned into plutocracies. The Uranus-Pluto square, a.k.a. the Longest Arm of the Cross , has the USA chart in its cross hairs, breaking down Americans’ delusion that they live in a class-free society. See my blogs Whose Streets? and Fingering Wall Street.