By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I write this on Black Friday, otherwise known as the busiest shopping day of the year. Knowing what we know about how “calling in” energy and “naming” it can lead to self-fulfilling prophecy, I find myself wanting to shake the nation like a rag doll and tell it what I tell my loved ones when they speak thoughtlessly: This is NOT a black day! Take it back! Do NOT put such a description out into the universe, giving it permission to reflect back to you!

Black Friday. The origin of the term began in the 1960s in Philadelphia, when police bemoaned the day after Thanksgiving — and beginning of holiday sales — as a snarl of traffic and headaches. Since then, we’ve come to know it as the day sales enter the black for many businesses that have operated in the red throughout the year, anticipating the annual holiday madness that will put things right at the end. Today, capitalism throws a bone to the little folks, while for the Pentagon, Big Pharma, insurance companies and industrial-complexes of all kinds, EVERY day is flush with holiday spending. They no doubt Fa-La-La all year long, but for the rest of us, the joy-joy starts now!

Visiting with my daughter and grandkids here in California, we joined other family members on Thanksgiving, a total of 27 of us. Our yearly reunion found us rejoicing over a couple of hapless, but succulent, turkeys, and trimmings too numerous to mention. Driving to my cousin’s house, my son-in-law went out of his way to cruise by Best Buy, circling the building to estimate the number of people camped out in advance of the midnight opening. At noon, there was a cue of thirty or forty, camping in tents or sitting in lawn chairs. Scouting the possibility of snagging a discounted television, we took an alternate route home at dusk. At another store location, numbers had tripled, lines forming to the side and rear of the massive building, overseen by a uniformed security guard. Deciding to shop via internet instead, we drove home past two WalMarts with crammed parking lots, thinking that a benign sign of shopping excess. Turns out WalMart was scariest of all this year.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Aries monthly for Nov. 20, 2006.

You have more secrets than you think, but the really good news is, so does everyone else. Rather, they have more secrets than they think. This is the best month in the last 5,125 years to play truth or dare, twenty questions or spin the bottle.

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.

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality || By Naomi Wolf | for The Guardian

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that “It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk.”

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Kingston Plaza. Photo by Eric Francis.

For nothing is so cherished and protected, as is a goal the mind accepts. This it will follow, grimly or happily, but always with faith, and with the persistence that faith inevitably brings. — A Course in Miracles

Today is Friday, November 25, 2011. An eclipse of the Sun took place overnight in Sagittarius. That is a conjunction of the Sun and the Moon. Currently both are in Sagittarius, close to the eclipse, which takes place at 1:09 am EST. Mercury stationed retrograde yesterday; today let’s focus on the Sun-Moon conjunction, a New Moon eclipse close to the lunar North Node.

Eclipses shift continuity; what seemed to be happening in an uninterrupted sequence gets a chance to change. They’re useful that way — though they need to be handled with intention. If you’re in a pinch, the time around an eclipse (that exact day, few days or even a few weeks) is when to jump out of one movie and into another.

Eclipses can also be used to set a pattern as well as break one, which implies something different emerging than was happening before. This is not always a pleasant experience. Some eclipses represent radical, even violent changes in the flow of events, but any negative effects can be mitigated by working with them consciously. It’s only recently that astrology generally accepts that they can be used constructively. The old books (and many fairly recent books and articles) take them as negative events, but most astrologers you ask will tell you that they take on the meaning that we give them.

In Sagittarius, the general subject matter includes our ideas about how we relate to existence. This is the sign that encompasses faith, belief and vision. It’s associated with the content of religion rather than its form, which means the actual presence of the divine rather than a bunch of ideas about what it’s supposed to be. Sagittarius can hold the archetype of our highest ideals, such as what justice is supposed to represent rather than the imitation foisted on us too often. Sagittarius is therefore the sign of faith rather than of hope. You can think of the difference this way: Hope is a hollow emotion, grounded neither in our inner source or in tangible action; faith is connected to source and often leads the way directly to action. Hope is a kind of mockery of faith. You could say that this eclipse comes with the idea ‘abandon hope’ and connect to something deeper.

A Course in Miracles points out that we don’t have the choice whether to have faith — only where we invest it. This is like saying everything that’s alive has to breathe; the question is how. One useful exercise is to question what you invest your faith in, and why. Faith is extremely powerful. It’s the result of connecting to a direct power source, whatever that connection might be to. If we connect faith to fear, we will get fearful outcomes. If we connect our faith to love, creativity or healing, that’s what we will get. The problem is not that faith doesn’t work; rather, we can struggle when we don’t recognize how we’re using faith.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Leo weekly for Feb. 26, 2010.

These weeks of Mars retrograde in your sign have not been easy. You seem to have something new to get clear about every day; you seem to have to work out some new wrinkle in your psyche every hour or two. Your energy may be all over the place and you may have some adrenal exhaustion. Mars retrograde is the picture of resistance; there are many ways to address that, though at this point the best way would be to not resist that particular quality. I am more concerned about what happens when Mars stations direct on March 10, which I would sum up as: take things gradually and consciously and slowly as you resume your forward motion. You may feel inclined to bounce right into action, and I would say, a subtle shift of momentum is more than enough.

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.

This weekend, we will leave the subscriber area of Planet Waves open to all readers. It’s essentially a list of articles, about two years worth on one page — and then you can go back further if you like. It’s kind of like a library with about 1,000 of my articles (and perhaps 500 to 700 horoscopes) in it. They are organized by year. There is a monthly horoscope archive set aside separately.

Here is the page.