Dear Friend and Reader:

I WENT through a phase early in my astrology career when I got into conversations with young tarot card readers. Maybe there were just two or three such conversations, but they seem to stand out as a distinct phase of gaining an understanding of life. Anyway, one of them would say to me, “I don’t feel right about charging for my work. It’s not right to charge people to help them.”

Planet Waves reader Deb Silverman of San Francisco dreamed for years of being an acupuncturist, and with much work achieved her goal.

One day I parsed the logic and replied: “Well, do you think it’s better to charge to hurt them?”

This pretty much obviated the issue. In truth, however, it usually works out that it’s easier, more efficient and more profitable to hurt people rather than to help them. A quick scan of the history of industrialization — including PCBs, asbestos, cigarettes and the Ford Pinto — establish this pretty quickly.

The question is not why people do it, but rather why we put up with it and even help them; and why we are, as a society, so resistant to investing our money where it’s going to make a positive difference. Notably, we are currently spending $230 million a day on a war in Iraq. Would it have been remotely possible to put that money to work for social causes, or is our only option with that much capital to create mayhem?

With this theme, we embark on the topic of values, which in my astrology is the core theme of Taurus. Values embraces the question of what we would do with our money, collectively and individually, if we noticed that we have a choice in the matter. But it goes a lot further than that.

I was first acquainted with the term values in Philosophy 101 at SUNY Buffalo, taught by Prof. Paul Kurtz. It arrived in the title of a textbook called Ethics and the Search for Values. I know that, for this reason, I equate the idea values with that of ethics. It may actually be easier to think of values as a subset of ethics: one’s personal inventory of right or wrong. Values are the inner psychic elements by which we determine what is right or wrong for us, as individuals — if we take the time to stop and think.

In effect, a value is a contract with oneself by which one guides one’s life. It is a commitment to invest vital energy (of which money is one form) somewhere that we feel is right, and to divest it from where we think it’s wrong. That requires an ethical judgment, or it calls for one. Usually this pertains to a person, to some activity in the world and very often where we put our cash. Usually in the process of relating to the material world, the ethical assessment is overlooked entirely. What we want is determined externally, by how brilliant an advertising person is; by how manipulative a videographer is at morphing a Mercedes with a slinky young woman; or by what pre-established, conditioned appetite is acting up at the moment.

Meantime, we are taught by long conditioning and tradition to acquire what we are told we want and not worry about the consequences. The packaging industry is not helping. There is absolutely no way to avoid plastic in Western civ at this time. Look around and consider your life, and tell me if you think it’s possible. Continue Reading »