Dear Friend and Reader:
The astrology continues to be a crucible, though today I want to start as eternal student of Gestalt therapy rather than as astrologer. Fritz Perls (1893-1970) was one of the pioneers of this method, which is a practical, verbal, body-centered approach to growth. He was an important leader in the development of new therapy methods that many have benefited from and which are now all but forgotten.
Here is an example of how he worked. If you tell your therapist a story and he notices that your hand is clenched in a fist, he might pause you and ask you, what’s in there? You look down and, yes, your hand is on the armrest, in a snug little fist, and you hadn’t even noticed.
The art of Gestalt therapy is that of noticing. Not judging. Not diagnosing. Not explaining. Noticing and perhaps understanding. Astrology can be a form of Gestalt. That’s what the chart is: an organized whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.
What Have you Got In There?
“Would you open your hand slowly? Tell me what you’re aware of as you do.”
You let go of the tension you were holding and as you do, you start to notice things that you were feeling but not articulating.
The chances are you were holding something and it will reveal itself as you gradually extend your fingers. You might be surprised to discover some memory or feeling you were hiding from yourself. It was manifesting as a potential threat, leading to you feeling defensive, like you might have to slug someone.
When you realize what it was and acknowledge it, that’s not magic. It’s the way your body holds feelings and speaks a language you can learn to understand. You learn why it’s much better to do therapy in person, so that you can be heard in your real voice and seen in your whole person.
The Triple Conjunction
Presently the planets’ hands are clenched in a fist, and it’s clamped down pretty tight. We’ve noticed, and over the next few days it’s about to open up and we’re going to find out what’s in there.
The fist I’m describing is a three-planet conjunction that unfolds over the next few days, peaking on Sunday April 19, after Friday’s Aries New Moon. The New Moon chart is itself sizzling and dizzying, activating the Chiron-Eris conjunction at full-strength. More than any other aspect, Chiron-Eris is the zeitgeist. And. I keep noticing that astrologers leave out Eris.
This is like leaving Pluto out of the chart of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK or the Woodstock festival. You miss the source of potency, and the key to understanding what exactly our particular moment is about.
Pressure and Fog
Friday’s New Moon chart also describes a high-pressure situation with a fog of deception, delusion or denial — it includes a conjunction of Mercury (mind, language) and Neptune (some blend of spiritual bypass, intoxication, deception, mental fog or denial). Sadly, for most people Neptune has nothing whatsoever to do with inspiration.
There are other pressure spots. Uranus is about to change signs, entering human-sign Gemini. Venus is creeping up on Uranus, about to form a conjunction. Juno is in a conjunction with Pluto, which describes the stress on marriages and the necessity to transform or evolve the concept in some way. Outside of the specifically personal context, Juno-Pluto is pissed off and wants revenge.
So while all this is going on in the New Moon chart, a new pattern develops. Two days later, Mercury, Mars and Saturn form a conjunction in early Aries. This looks and feels like an explosion; like a dam releasing a lot of energy.
What Do These Symbols Stand For?
As is written in A Course in Miracles, symbols stand for something else. There is no point working with them if you don’t seek an understanding of what they’re talking about. The chart is not an abstraction, a thing of mystery. It’s a practical tool, like a map. It’s also a set of symbols that relate to one another.
This cluster of planets looks a lot like a military blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. I’ll come back to that; first let’s take all this Aries in the personal sense. The concentration of both planets and events in Aries is a crucible of growth.
Yes, the growth that people put off, forget about, sleep through or save until next time. The growth that would compel them to make the changes they know they need to make. To me this endless sleeping through and putting off and saving for next time is the most compelling proof of reincarnation. Most people act like they have 100 more lifetimes to get it right, or for that matter, to do anything.
Heck, forget about getting it right. What about asking or even hearing a question and not going into a gag-reflex of panic and denial?
The whole notion of growth, of evolving, of maturing, has been replaced by things like magical candles, workshops, idol worship, and various shades of “self improvement” that often involve bubble baths and positive affirmations.
Most growth comes from actually facing challenges. It happens when people are backed into a corner. There’s a little bit of ‘no atheists in foxholes’ to the approach that most of the world takes. And here we are, in what may be the biggest foxhole in history.
You May Not Agree
I read in The New York Times (my bellwether for what the average American probably thinks, or is being brainwashed into thinking) that 51% of our countrymen don’t think that bombing Iran was/is worthwhile. That means that, per this claimed, reported statistical survey, 49% of Americans think it is worthwhile. That’s a statistical tie — and a big WOW. The Times reported that the survey was taken after the cease-fire and after President Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
Worth what? What exactly does it take for something to be a bad idea?
This makes as much sense as 49% of the population thinking that a blocked coronary artery is worthwhile. Forget about the bombing of a girls’ school; the United States is in love with “collateral damage” (that took some training — at least three wars over several decades, wars we no longer seem to notice).
Apart from the people killed and the quarter-trillion dollar allocation, what, exactly, is worthwhile? The Iranian nuclear program is somewhere between a WMD phantom and far in the future.
More than one-fifth of the world’s oil has been cut off; and a tremendous amount of natural gas and liquid petroleum; one-third of the world’s fertilizer; much of its helium and aluminum; and god only knows what else. Nearly half of Americans think this is a good idea? Which part is so good?
By Any Means Necessary
I’m friends with a full-on Trump supporter. He is of the Republican Catholic pro-Zionist persuasion. You might ask why; we go back about 20 years so we’ve had a long time to get to know one another. Nobody actually understands why we’re friends, which my slightly perverse Aquarius Moon thinks is funny.
We’re not exactly peers but we share ideas and sometimes food and I love his family and I’m welcome in his office and his secretary is the beneficiary of my homemade Sicilian wine sauce.
He’s had a lot of experiences I have not, and I value that too. (His prior professional background is counterinsurgency and antiterrorism; I am not at liberty to say more.) So naturally, I asked him what he thought about the goings-on in Iran and the U.S. involvement there. He replied:
“The entirety of the Iranian radical Islamic government structure needs to be fully eradicated by whatever means necessary.”
That is a dog whistle for the H-bomb. He’s really not that crazy. I suspect that his point of view is fairly commonplace, as the data reported by the Times suggests.
Let’s go to the other side of the spectrum: my now-deceased friend Jon Cohn, a semi-conservative Jew (semi-kosher household), who owned the big hippy shop in the former Deadhead enclave of New Paltz. In our last in-person conversation, he said it would be necessary to nuke Tehran. Yes, nuke Tehran. These are not isolated opinions. The Iran-is-evil brainwashing goes back half a century. There is no actual tribal animosity between Jews and Persians.
Hey, at least a few people objected when Trump threatened to obliterate an entire civilization overnight just last week. He had a much better idea: block Hormuz! I believe that is a diversion, however.
What That Conjunction is Really About
We could say that the Aries crunch is about personal development and evolution. If Fritz were alive we could have some fantastic group therapy sessions. But as is often said, it’s not the Sixties anymore.
The conjunction seems to be about the mind-control that is converting many people into what you might call self-actualizing robots. Evidently it will take louder and louder wake-up calls to get people in touch with their humanity, and I have no evidence that will work.
We forget that this whole war — for we, the spectators — is being experienced inside the robot. All of the perceptions come through the digital large language model generative A.I. hallucinatory world of the internet, where nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about except someone getting your pronouns wrong.
I know I have to keep saying this. When I mention the all-of-the-above digital environment, I am talking about the state of mind created by the technology. And that state of mind seems to be awfully passive.
We are becoming like it faster than it is becoming like us. I don’t know if sufficient self-awareness exists for enough people to realize the damage that has been done to them through conversion into their robot-self. Enough, that is, for society to reach a tipping point or critical mass level.
Those who are self-aware are the ones a little less transformed, or maybe fully in contact with their humanity. It seems like everyone else is sitting in the cockpit as the cabin pressure drops and the oxygen runs out.
A Matter of Conscience
Those who are awakening are the ones whose conscience says no. They are the ones who know their resistance and objection matters. I’m wondering what everyone else is waiting for.
We are currently reliving the spring of 2020, only on a whole new scale. Like 2020, we are now in a manufactured crisis that bears no resemblance to what we’re being told is true. All of this has various terms: The Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the 4th Industrial Revolution, and a diversity of others of which “covid” and the present scenario are just stages of development.
We on the writing and research end of Planet Waves have never stopped covering the preplanning, the aftermath and the long, multi-track continuum of the 2020 crisis, of which we are now in the latest stage. While I suspect that on the whole, my readership knows what this is about, I can’t be sure. What do you see happening?
Meanwhile, that fist is about to reach maximum clench, after which, around Sunday or Monday, we will find out what’s inside there.
I’ll be discussing where this could all go from here on Friday’s Planet Waves FM, at the top of the program.
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ —
PS — Anyone wondering why there are no student protests against the genocide in Iran and Lebanon can thank the IDF-like assaults and arrests on dozens of campuses across the United States. Protests are no longer tolerated at U.S. colleges and universities. Photos from spring 2024 here.
