Putney, Vermont: August, 2011
Cosmic Weather Report: Transcendence Within by Mark Borax
In August, 1963, another Year of the Cat, like this year (some call it Year of the Rabbit, but I prefer Cat: See the January, 2011 weather report for more details.) Martin Luther King, Jr, led a march in Washington, where he gave his immortal 'I have a dream' speech. Fourteen years later in August, 1987, another Year of the Cat, came the Harmonic Convergence, the celestial event which ushered in a twenty-five year purging of our culture. (I use that event to open my first book, 2012: Crossing the Bridge to the Future.) Fourteen years later finds us entering another August, Year of the Cat.
If those earlier Augusts are indicative of a pattern, then something dramatic is in the works. I've been trying to fathom what could follow 'I have a dream' and the Convergence, and
wondering if another sweeping worldwide dramatic spectacle is on the way, or if this time it has more to do with an inner spectacle, more deeply rooted, perhaps, in the very way we see and know things, which is where the revolution of our time has to occur for true liberation to take place.
This August is the first time in years that all three outer planets Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto will be retrograde, or backwards at the same time for a whole month. (Although scientists demoted Pluto from its planetary status a few years ago, I don't buy it, since Pluto represents the unconscious under-side, or shadow of our culture. Are they stating we no longer have a shadow?) Because these three planets mark the farthest point our local family of planets stretches away from the sun into the cosmos, they carry the most advanced and transcendent energies of all. Uranus is the most advanced part of your consciousness, the part of you absolutely free, high and clear, who sees things in total cosmic clarity, beyond the entanglements of karma and ego. Neptune is the shaman who initiates collective consciousness to a new stage of evolution. Pluto is the destroyer who breaks down old forms, making way for the new.
With all three retrograde, tremendous surges of power turn inward this month. We can still be influenced by external versions of these forces; we can still learn of transformation through books and articles, songs and movies, communing with nature, gathering with others in pairs and groups, going to workshops, but their core force is now pumping down inside each of us, requiring deeper self-understanding.
Transcendence is one of those ambiguous terms, open to misinterpretation, because it often becomes synonymous with escapism. To transcend something doesn't mean to avoid it or bypass its lessons, but to gain the fuller meaning of it so clearly that you no longer need to be restricted by its limitations, and can pass on to the next stage of development. This is what we're desperately in need of as a world culture at the current moment in history. The world body is struggling to burst out of its ancient cocoon of thought, to transcend the paradigm that's strangling the world by pitting one thing against another, one group of people against another, one demographic group, race, ethnicity, religion or gender against another. This bipolar extreme is an excellent way of selling merchandise and hawking a corrupt and obsolete two-party political system, but it suffocates the soul of a species sick and tired of the old and in great need of something new.
To transcend these ancient polarity karmas, which have fueled countless wars, crusades, pogroms, inquisitions and persecutions, you can look within this month to become aware of the part of you that may be turned against itself, because the outer split in our thinking can only persist when we avoid uniting with ourselves. When our fractured awareness splinters our higher knowing from our daily existence, we live a split life, often without realizing we've been cut off from our full power.
Each of us is a chamber of great miracle and wonder, capable of rising to tap that high cosmic awareness, but also capable of plummeting into the confused emotional morass of disowned darkness within us. When we recognize that we ourselves are our own greatest enemy and ally, we claim a clear and sober self-understanding beyond cultural conditioning and the illusions of ego. We carry Martin Luther King's dream beyond its racial boundaries into liberation of not just blacks and whites, but all human beings who suffer from being cut off from their greater awareness. With such transcendent force surging through us this month, this kind of freedom is beckoning you to penetrate the limitations of your own thought, and unbind yourself from those life structures that hold you back from fulfilling your own unique destiny.
Who are you really? What are you here to do?
How much longer are you going to wait?
Forward!
Mark Borax
Soul Level Astrologer
Thanks to all you sharp-eyed readers out there who noticed the error in the August CWR -- the Oriental years occur every twelve years, and Mark was referring to a 24-year cycle, not a 14-year cycle --
Marcella & Mark
