There is such a thing as thinking

Today is Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011. The Moon is in Libra for the entire day. The rest of its cohorts in Libra mentioned yesterday — Mercury, the Sun, Venus, Saturn and Juno — will continue their respective journeys through the sign of balance, relationships and justice for a while yet. This means that if you have found material coming up for you — shadow or otherwise — having to do with these themes in your life, there is sustained support being offered in several facets of life. The challenges are coming from the angles other planets are making to this Libra stellium. The first few degrees of Libra in particular constitute a hot spot: they pick up on the Uranus-Pluto square. Today Mercury plugs its cord into the socket.

Specifically, Mercury is square Pluto today at about 10:26 am EDT. Any chance you’re feeling a bit obsessed with certain ideas, even if you usually have a butterfly’s attention span? Is the sound of the birds and the bees buzzing in the back of your mind proving to be a formidable distraction from your responsibilities of the day?

Be aware that Pluto’s undercurrents of sex and death added to Mercury’s astro-ADD could mean spiraling out of the land of smoke and flowers and into a darker obsession. Isabel Hickey notes the tendency toward obsessive thoughts and fanaticism with this square. Between yesterday’s post about New Moon fear and Saturday’s article by Maria Padhila on our cultural fascination with and denial of STDs, it would seem these themes are coalescing.

In fact, one could say that when you add Pluto’s fear factor to Mercury’s thinking tendencies and our cultural sex obsession, we get a certain kind of death mania in the form of STD phobias. One of the biggest problems with this kind of obsession is that there are at least two ways to handle STD phobias, but our culture seems predisposed toward only one: denial. And denial leads to playing this bizarre kind of Russian roulette with the very things we’re terrified of and obsessed with: disease and death. Not exactly birds and bees and butterflies.

The antidote? Think. No — I mean it: remember to think. Remember that there is such a thing as thinking — and asking questions, and searching out answers, and following those to more questions. It could also be called curiosity. You know — that thing that moved you to get up close and personal with those butterflies and bees and birds and trees when you were a kid, and had not yet learned that you’re supposed to be afraid of yourself and the world. It cold take some real effort; fear likes to hold on. Our primitive survival brain wants us to stay safe. Curiosity can be exciting. Asking questions can feel like a risk and risks, even fun ones that might ultimately make us happy, can still trigger the fight-or-flight adrenaline responses our primitive brains try to protect us from.

The thing is, these days we are facing unprecedented media overload, political ‘messaging’ and corporate greed. It’s all piled on top of familial/ancestral guilt, religious indoctrination and a dependence on technology instead of a walk in the woods for knowledge. There are a lot of factors working against thinking and curiosity. So if you’re finding yourself in a mental loop — whether about sex, or death, or death through sex or even something else — remember to stop and notice your thoughts. Remind yourself that you are safe, that it is ok to look under the edges of the obsession. Nothing is going to jump out and bite you if you simply observe, ask questions, listen for the answers and then ask more. Sure, this sequence may eventually lead to making choices, taking action and living a little differently. But it might even lead to living with a little less fear.

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