Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today’s Scorpio New Moon edition of Planet Waves FM is ready. My guest is CT Butler, one of the world’s leading minds on the theme of conflict resolution and consensus, who is talking about Occupy Wall Street’s leadership challenges and how he is working to inform the movement of a formal consensus process as opposed to a casual one. That’s in the second half of the program. In the first half of the program, I talk about the New Moon chart, and the many aspects that are happening right now, most of which involves Scorpio and its ruling planets; or Pisces and its ruling planets.

Inside the podcasting mill.

Then I talk about the chart for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Monday, The Mountain Astrologer posted a guest column by me about that chart, set for Sept. 17 in New York City. This is a chart that’s all about a message — to the chagrin of those who would accuse the protest movement of having none. It’s so obvious that you cannot miss it unless you are determined to.

Our musical guest is Seth Davis, with a song called “LA Burning” from his CD Prettier than Blue. Seth is a friend from New Paltz, the co-creator of Karma Road, a vegan café. I just love this song — notice the horn solo about two minutes in. Can you tell what instrument that is? It almost sounds like a trombone.

Then the interview with CT — much of the conversation involves consensus process and how this relates to the usual American way of thinking. CT has a lot of perspective on activism; it’s been his career since a young age. At the end of the interview, CT describes his plan to do a kind of Consensus Tour 2012. He’s looking for sponsors and participants. If you would like to reach him, you can find him easily via his website, consensus.net, which lists his contact information.

Here is your podcast in the old player, which also includes an archive of all of my past programs — more than 75 of them. They’re also available on iTunes. Note, if it’s not there yet — the file transfer isn’t quite ready.

There are many ways to use Planet Waves horoscopes, written by Eric Francis, but only one way to read them: become a subscriber. You’re invited to try them out free for one month by clicking here. Then decide for yourself if you’d like to keep them with you on your path. Subscriptions include horoscopes on Fridays and articles by Eric on Tuesdays and Fridays, plus access to full-issue archives and the Oracle divinatory tool. Stop by the Planet Waves Store to see the full range of written and audio astrology offerings.

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

Following on from the first part of this short series on the Celtic Cross tarot reading — where I gave an overview of the Celtic Cross and the card positions — this week, I put theory into practice using cards drawn from the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck.

The Cross section of a Celtic Cross reading using the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. Click on the image for a larger version.

This is a ‘sample reading’, but you might find that it is not as arbitrary as you might expect. The nature of tarot is that it rarely, if ever, takes holidays. However, I invite you to take a step back and see this particular reading from a technical, as well as an intuitive or personal, perspective. It is only when we understand the rules of a reading that we can work with them to access a flow that sits in parallel with it. Both rules and flow then inform our experience of the cards and the mirror they are holding up for us.

Here are the first six cards of the Celtic Cross reading and how I might choose to interpret them. The second part of the reading will follow in a few weeks.

Initial Overview

The first thing I do is to look at the cards as a group — in terms of suit, number, arcana, colour, the detail in the images and how they interact to form strings of narrative. What I see here are several different things that I don’t necessarily try to fit together immediately.

First, the dominant suit is Wands: there are three of these, followed by two Swords, and one Pentacle. There are no Cups. The greatest things at play here are creative energy — libido in a psychoanalytical sense — and intellect/thoughts. There is a sense of working with the physical world (the Two of Pentacles) but this is secondary to me — which doesn’t mean that it is any less important or can be pushed to one side.

Second, there are no major arcana cards in this cross. This means we are dealing with the ‘lived aspect’ of life — how it plays out practically. Again, this is no less important; it is just a different experience. This is how we move through our day, how we interact with others, how we are in and of ourselves — how all of this manifests.

Continue Reading »

April Singley as Pisania and Eric Darrow Worthley as Cloten in Naked Shakespeare's production of Cymbeline Underground, in Battery Steele, Peaks Island, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.

Today is Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011. The Sun and Moon are in Scorpio, along with Mercury and Venus. This week, flanking today’s New Moon (which is at 3:55 pm EDT), those two planets are squaring Mars in Leo. In the case of Mercury square Mars, in particular, we have an interesting opportunity. At this time of thin veils between worlds, costumes and masks, the transformative potential of Scorpio and dark, scary emotion, we all have an opportunity to be actors in the best senses of the word.

Please don’t confuse acting with being dramatic. In our everyday lives, ‘drama’ is a distraction from real issues and from self-inquiry. ‘Drama’ eats valuable energy, whether engaged in as an intentional power play or semi-consciously, as when we’re hijacked by emotional triggers and projections.

No, the art of acting is different. People often misconceive actors as simply ‘pretending to feel’ emotions. While it could be said that we pretend to be characters, any actor ‘pretending to feel’ instead of actually feeling will immediately stand out – and not in a good way. That actor’s performance will likely feel fake; audience members will not find themselves identifying with the character, will not be moved. To the contrary, skilled actors allow themselves to feel authentic emotions — that is the essence of the art.

For some, this comes naturally; for others, various personal blocks may need to be dissolved in order to open up to allowing genuine emotion to flow through, and there are techniques for learning this. For years, I felt like a fake when I stepped on stage. I knew what good acting was about. I also knew what most others did not, though some could sense: I had this internal block, just like a glass wall. I could see where I wanted to go emotionally, but I couldn’t get there.

Continue Reading »

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Pisces weekly for July 11, 2008.

I trust that by now you’ve noticed the value of letting people have their problems, and not making them your own. Usually they have worked hard to create them, and they tend to value them like dwarves hoard gold and jewels. Sooner or later, most people figure out that they don’t need their problems, but there is only so much you can help them with that. As for what you need, in a word, it is focus. Focus is clarity; focus is the ability to tune into a plane of reality (a focal plane) and see what is going on there. Most of the time, you see most clearly what you look at most directly. I suggest that you initiate a new cycle of experience in your relationships, and focus on people who are not so devoted to their negativity; people who speak in terms of what they are creating rather than what they are critiquing; people who know that freedom is not a game, and if it is, it’s one we either win or lose together.

Note, The Oracle is a random selection from the Eric Francis horoscope archives. Each day we publish one entry from among the 10,000 in our database. It’s a little slice of horoscope history — but chosen by our Oracle program, which always speaks to the present moment. New horoscopes are published each Friday plus twice a month in Planet Waves subscriber edition and Planet Waves Light. And for your annual reading, check out Light Bridge.

Look at our democracy, such a powerful enemy”
Sekou Sundiata

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, let’s be clear that I have come to bury Qaddafi, not to praise him. But please, a moment of silence is in order for our heathen nemesis, our swarthy enemy and ourselves.

When Qaddafi came to power in 1969 during the last three years of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, little did we know how long, treacherous and dangerously close our relationship would turn out to be. After forty years we came to know Qaddafi’s quirks very well, and he knew ours. The U.S. relationship with Libya was a stormy affair, a form of ‘satellite animosity’ that characterized American foreign policy during the Cold War with the then-Soviet Union. It began with years of intense and violent tits for tat in the 1980s between Libya and the U.S., starting with the Gulf of Sidra incident where the U.S. Navy responded aggressively to a surface to air missile attack by Libya. This lead to a retaliatory Libyan attack against American servicemen at a Berlin disco, followed by the climactic bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Everything changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s. Libya re-aligned itself and began improving its image in the West, atoning for the Lockerbie bombings, working diligently to diplomatically remove the U.N. sanctions against Libya for their involvement in the killing of innocent civilians. During the 1990s, as oil flowed freely from underneath Libyan soil, there was never any doubt that Qaddafi would survive, or at least we never took him down directly. Crazy as Qaddafi was, and yes he was crazy, as Juan Cole notes, Qaddafi — like Mubarak in Egypt, Musharraf in Pakistan, and Ben Ali in Tunisia — became a useful tyrant to our allies in the west.

Continue Reading »

Lockheed Martin employees at work in the company's NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Center, which monitors Internet threats, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. (photo: Eric Schulzinger/Lockheed Martin)

By Zachary Katznelson, American Civil Liberties Union

Cybersecurity is the new buzzword in Washington, capturing a wide range of potential responses to internet-related threats both real and imagined. Congress is starting to play a role, considering legislation that purports to make cyberspace more secure. But many of the solutions being offered echo those of the deeply flawed Patriot Act, enacted ten years ago this month.

Just as the Patriot Act swept aside long-standing constitutional protections against government prying into private lives, current cybersecurity proposals threaten to expand the government’s ability to collect personal information – even when there is no indication that the people targeted have been involved in any wrongdoing.

Over the past decade, we have learned that such policies fail on two fronts: they are largely ineffective and they violate civil liberties.

The Patriot Act presumes that if the government could know more of what we do with our daily lives by monitoring our e-mails and phone calls, downloading our financial transactions, and tracking our locations, it could spot patterns and find terrorists. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches have mattered little as claims of national security swept such concerns aside.

That thinking has led even further, to warrantless wiretapping and government databases so massive that numbers most of us have never heard of (like yottabytes) have to be used to quantify the data taken in. But counter-terrorism officials consistently lament being swamped with reports and analyses while trying to come to grips with the astronomical amount of data our powerful computers struggle to collate and interpret. In seeking the needle of terrorism, we have built the biggest haystack in history.

Continue Reading »

Occupy Wall Street received a surprise visit Monday from several leading Egyptian activists, including 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. She is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which is the group credited with helping to organize the January 25 protests that eventually toppled the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

While the months succeeding Mubarak’s ouster have not been smooth (I recently read of resumed violence by Muslim Egyptians against the country’s Coptic Christian minority, despite unity between the two groups during the protests), Egypt’s transformation is far from complete. I believe Planet Waves has observed before that having the Uranus-Pluto square heat up via revolutions in what is considered the cradle of humanity seems like a pretty telling sign — and the world is a lot smaller than it was in that infancy. Said Mahfouz in New York yesterday, “Many of U.S. residents were in solidarity with us. I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say to them, ’the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will succeed in the end.”

Meanwhile in California, Occupy Oakland was rather brutally raided by police. Authorities say about 75 people were arrested, after police fired teargas and “beanbag rounds.” And as if cued up by Jen Sorensen’s Slowpoke cartoon we ran yesterday, Greg Palast investigates the story behind Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to pull out of a fundraiser for the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street.

Check your email if you're a subcsriber; subscribe below if you're not.

Today’s new subscriber issue of Planet Waves includes the November monthly horoscope for all 12 signs, by Eric Francis. The article covers the Scorpio New Moon, and is an inquiry into the jealousy/control dynamics being stirred up by the Venus-Mars square in that chart. To purchase this single issue, just click here. Or you can subscribe here for three months, and keep your finger on the astro-pulse as you move through your inner transformation.