This is rare astrology, the Sun, Moon and a bunch of very large planets aligned in an "x" pattern, with the Earth at the center, where x marks the spot. At that moment, the Sun and the Moon cross paths, creating a shadow that falls on the Earth in a swath across Europe.
My sense is that the changes associated with the eclipse will come upon our society and our personal lives like a rapidly rising tide of energy, or perhaps a bolt of energy. Even small eclipses can gather the entire society into one consciousness; this is a very unusual one. It's difficult to say just when, but I would estimate that as June progresses, the effects of this accumulating energy vortex will be unmistakable, and by late July, many people will really be wondering what's up. I have a lot to say about this event, juicy stuff of which I have not written before. It is of a very personal nature, about how we can take advantage of the energy shifts as they occur.
To me, this astrology signifies one of the most powerful turning points possible in the lives of awake, alive people, of which I trust you are one. If you are looking for the word "positive" in connection with the eclipse, though, that's not guaranteed. But it is definitely an option.
But first I must start with a brief history lesson, which will provide the necessary background for my astrological proposal. Back in late 1997, when we were all much younger, a "scandal" emerged in which the President of the United States was allegedly involved in doing something wrong. For the next 15 or so months, the entire federal government, and the entire American media, and a large chunk of the international press, were captivated on the intricacies of this "issue." People had all kinds of opinions, even dull, unopinionated people. The alleged crime was sex, compounded by spoken words denying this act.
After the investment of untold human energy and hundreds of millions of public dollars spent investigating and prosecuting the supposed crimes, DNA analysis of the blue dress, the fees and costs of all kinds of lawyers and experts and reports and witnesses, with centuries of overtime paid to federal employees from body-guards to stamp-lickers with all of it fortified by utterly countless hours of around-the-clock "news" coverage and endless, endless discussion of nothing at all, with uncountable opinion polls reporting Clinton's popularity hourly -- then -- the whole thing anti-climaxed, astonishingly, in a presidential impeachment.
The second ever in US history. And it was so boring.
Remember -- it's very easy to forget -- that the president was essentially on trial for having sex, a normal human biological function. Maybe that's why senators were falling asleep. Imagine how ridiculous it would be to put the president on trial for eating dinner.
Several weeks ago, so-called NATO forces (in reality, the American military, under the command of Bill Clinton) dropped one of those "smart" bombs on a refugee caravan in Yugoslavia, killing 74 of the people we're allegedly there saving. "NATO" (actually, some United States military PR guy) quickly issued a press release saying that we regretted what had happened, in a fashion similar to when a newspaper makes a mistake and then puts a blurb into the next day's edition that it regrets any inconvenience.
Oops. Sorry.
P.S., it was your fault anyway, for having refugees in the first place.
In any war, such "collateral damage" is inevitable. Collateral damage means the people you kill along the way to killing someone else, for example, 74 refugees, and God knows how many others unreported. It is difficult to see quite where you are dropping a bomb from 15,000 feet at 500 miles per hour, even if you have a nice computer helping you. So there is always collateral damage in war. And, given that in any modern war we are always risking the possibility of somebody using chemical weapons, biological weapons, or nuclear weapons, little screw-ups can have big consequences, sickening and killing many, many people. My term for this, by the way, is "Revelation Games." The big shots know all the Bible, Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce prophesies, and they go in anyway and throw the exploding dice.
Everyone who takes part in the war effort is part of all the killing that occurs, including a tool manager for a bomber plane, the cook in the kitchen, and the person who made the uniform. Many people are on the payroll, and it's going to increase, well, like the Dow. For the moment, the military has a Help Wanted sign in the window; but remember kids, you're all registered for the draft.
Proper budgeting for the Kosovo onslaught -- $6 billion (six thousand million dollars) -- is being secured by President Clinton to cover extra war expenses through September, not counting what it already costs to run the whole military. I have read that the Pentagon is asking for a call-up of 33,000 reservists (civilians who serve part-time in the military) to support the effort. Ground troops are likely to be ordered in as well. Their job, put bluntly, will be to kill people, and to participate in the killing of people, and to destroy property -- that is to say, ancient Europe.
For the most part, particularly in the United States, people seem fine with this all. We have enormous tolerance for hypocrisy here, indeed, a ravenous appetite for it. I don't say we're "fine" meaning that you wake up in the morning thrilled that the campaign is proceeding, or that you personally endorse what is happening with patriotic letters to the local newspaper, or by waving a big American flag in a park (that's all passé, from back during the Gulf Oil War). By "fine," I mean it's likely that you probably keep paying your taxes and not doing anything to actively resist what is occurring in your name, and at your personal expense, karmic, financial or otherwise.
Correct?
Furthermore, nobody knows what we are doing there, in terms of our theoretical political rationales (the actual reality of why we're there is another story entirely). I know only one person on the planet who personally comprehends the situation in the Balkans, and since it goes back about 700 years, it takes him a while to explain it. But worse, nobody seems to care that nobody understands what this is all about. It's just like, oh, we're killing the Yugoslavians. Nice and casual, totally blasé, cut to a Gap ad. Meanwhile, newspapers feature articles about prom dresses printed in colored streamers across the top of page one. I logged online one day and actually saw the headline, "Kosovo pictures. Easter egg tips. Click Here."
Then, one day right in the middle of the beginning of this blasé, rapidly-accumulating war, it happened that two students walked into their high school (on what happened to be Adolph Hitler's birthday), in the middle of Middle America, Pleasantville, it's being called, and turned that into a war zone, killing or severely wounding dozens of their classmates, and leaving time-bombs and booby-traps behind for police and rescue workers and explosive-sniffing dogs to stumble into. How many people made the connection from Littleton to Kosovo?
Television, by the way, may not have made that particular point, but it covered the whole thing live. In Denver, there were news reports indicating that students had called the media before they called the police as the building was taken under siege. This is what you call a sign of the times. It is all virtual reality; the students called for help in cyberspace before they called for help on the physical plane. Not that either could have helped much.
History lesson over. Now, let's dabble in philosophy.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if the Pentagon called up 33,000 of its fit, healthy military personnel, the strongest, most buff young men and women of America, to go over to Europe and be available to make passionate love with the French? A kind of sex intervention, with actual ground movements, rolling on the grass: in effect, the military listening to the hippies, finally deciding to "Make Love, Not War."
Why would we do this? Well, just because.
There would be no shortage of explosive commentary and protest. People would say this is sick. Disgusting. Immoral. Outrageous. In-com-pre-hen-si-ble. Storm the Capital, march on Washington, dump the bastards from office, because this is not fit for children and decent family values.
Indeed, we now know that it takes far less sex -- a few blow jobs -- to strike the nation's moral spinal cord.
Yet we are able to go to Yugoslavia and murder people (murder, historically, often involves rape) and to show the blown-apart corpses and mass graves during dinner. Dinner! And people watch, with great interest, totally blasé.
I have a theory about this all, and here it is--
Personally, I cannot separate how zealous people are to kill, to support killing, to be thrilled by killing, to sponsor killing, or to simply ignore killing, while at the same time getting caught in raging furies over the morality of sex.
To deal with one, therefore, we will need to deal with the other.
You might ask: Well, why do we need to do something about sex? Why can't we just stop war and aggression? I must give a simple answer: We could not be so conditioned to participate in, and tolerate, slaughter, sadism and violence without having had our sexual instincts crushed first.
Sex is the seed of life. There is no other. If we are so into death and so indifferent to life, maybe we have a sex problem.
The very missing or stifled "emotional openness" that the psychologists are saying was behind the shootings in Littleton, Colorado, has a lot to do with crushed sex. If not everything to do with it -- you went to high school. It is difficult to consider anything that happens in the life of a 17-year-old as apart from sex.
With eros working properly, with the sexuality conscious, with emotional outlets functioning, the human spirit is usually centered on life, passion and creation, and there is little desire to kill or harm. Turn sex, the act which creates life, into a crime or a disease, and everything else becomes a moral free-for-all.
We know that there are numerous long-term campaigns afoot to crush sexuality (most of which advance the cause of war at the same time). It's been this way for thousands of years, and, coincidentally, war has persisted, growing increasingly systematic and impersonal as the anti-sex campaigns became more cold and mechanized. In our times, for example, AIDS was both allowed to proliferate by government authorities, and to become the theme of a massive, government-sponsored global anti-sex campaign. Everyone with a similar agenda (anti-gay, anti-foreigner, anti-art, anti-minority and others) signed on as a co-sponsor.
Efforts to educate children about sexuality have been consistently undermined by the so-called Religious Right, which, among its social-reform projects, has used its influence on the State Board of Regents to ban basic sexuality pamphlets from the New York City schools. The public schools, not just the parochial schools.
Meanwhile, in these very years, we have waged one military attack after another, in country after country around the world, with increasing frequency. Just summing up the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years (a short time-span utterly meaningless to most young people, by the way) we have waged long-term military campaigns against, had secret military operations in, provided weapons to, and/or went in and bombed the living shit out of, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, Libya, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Somalia, Colombia (among many other places as part of the "war on drugs"), Mexico (supplying weapons for Ciapas), as well as enforcing a trade blockade against Cuba (which is a way of attempting to starve a little island to death, and is legally considered an act of war).
Within the United States, we have seen the bombing by state and city police of a city block in Philadelphia (the MOVE bombing in 1985), the federal attack on the Koresh family in Waco, Texas, the New York City police firing 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, plus numerous other well-documented assaults on citizens, including the highly-publicized gang-rape and near-murder of a man named by the police, in the precint house. I am personally aware of evidence-tampering scandals in police departments in several states, and I know of two instances of police opening fire on, and killing, unarmed people.
We have seen 38 states implement the death penalty after the Supreme Court decided it was no longer "cruel and unusual punishment" in the '80s, and the passing of the 1996 federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which added a long list of some 30 death-penalty crimes to federal laws. There are 3,000 men and women -- the population of a small town -- waiting to be executed on various Death Rows across the Land of the Free, while prisons have become America's largest (if not only) growth industry, with one to two percent of the U.S. population behind their walls.
Television, film and electronic games have paralleled this growth boom. Shows like 9-1-1 and Cops are on nightly, and what you witness there are constant scenes of screaming police kicking in doors, chasing folks and waving Glock 9mm pistols at real people every single night of the week. Many electronic games are merely visual, physical and psychic exercises in killing large numbers of (virtual) people, and lately, physical students.
And sex is immoral. Dangerous. Remember.
LATELY I'VE BEEN PERUSING George Orwell's 1984, one of my favorite exposés on the psychology of love and the Police State. At one point, Orwell comments that, unlike his lead character Winston Smith, Julia, Winston's young lover, "Had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control, and therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual deprivation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship."
Indeed, many genius autocrats in history have figured out that sex was bad for tyranny, from a wide array of conquering popes, to Adolph Hitler, whose campaign to reform Germany included an all-out fight against birth control and sexual reform. Hitler's method failed; it's long been said that it takes a regimen of soldiers, or a single priest, to control a population. Indeed, sexual repression is such a critical part of social control that it's always the first warning you're being invaded. It gets the territory ready for conquering. Even the crushing of free speech, which is often called the "fundamental liberty," must come much later in the process.
Sexual repression (including denial, guilt, ignorance, pain and violation) leads to violence and many other forms of mental illness, depression, and general difficulty with life. In the end, it is something we do to ourselves, and which only we can stop doing. I do not care to cover this territory any more than I already have. The phenomenon is well-documented, and additional information can be found in the works of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, among other eminent researchers of our century.
I am not calling for a wide-scale sexual revolution. Actually, that would be no fun at all, because it would become so cool to be liberated that the whole point would be lost. OK, well, ALMOST no fun. But how we create our lives now, as individuals, is another story. If the forces of darkness, those friendly fascists, gain their power through poisoning love and passion, then the key to freedom is, well right in our fingers. ++
