{"id":32488,"date":"2010-12-24T07:50:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T12:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=32488"},"modified":"2010-12-24T11:17:11","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T16:17:11","slug":"friend-to-friend-a-bit-of-quaker-astrology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/friend-to-friend-a-bit-of-quaker-astrology\/","title":{"rendered":"Friend to Friend: A Bit of Quaker Astrology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note to Readers:<\/strong> This week I’m posting the subscriber edition of Planet Waves to the open side of the website. This is the last weekly horoscope of 2010. You can receive these columns by subscribing to Planet Waves (which includes longer articles) or Planet Waves Light (which includes horoscopes only). Happy holidays! –efc <\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

Today is Christmas Eve, so I thought I would do something borrowing from an old Christian tradition. I’ve only mentioned being Quaker a few times on these pages, though it’s a significant piece of my philosophical heritage. I made this discovery as a kid, after attending Friends summer camps for five years (Quaker is old-fashioned shorthand for The Religious Society of Friends).<\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo by Eric Francis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can think of Quakerism as a form of Zen Christianity. It’s a religion without dogma, without hierarchy and with few words spoken. Each person is encouraged to develop his or her own relationship to God, the Creator or existence. There is no minister; each person speaks, if moved to do so, in the midst of silent meeting.<\/p>\n

There are no set rules or doctrines, only flexible guidelines for living. We’re so used to religions telling us that this is how it’s supposed to be, and this is the law, and you have to do that or God doesn’t love you, that we may lack any concept that something else is possible. Friends\u2019 guidelines for living include being dedicated to peace, doing business with integrity, not swearing oaths, and seeking divinity or the voice of spirit within. Quakers call this the ‘inner light’. It is considered a natural part of the human psyche, not something we have to earn.<\/p>\n

One of the notable things about Friends is that we do not go to war, we so not advocate war, and we don’t advocate the cause of war in any form, for any reason. It is that simple. Warfare is unnecessary, immoral and stupid (besides being waged by businessmen and based entirely on deception and greed). We’re the people you come to if you don’t want to get drafted. Quakers saved the lives of a lot of young men who would have otherwise ended up in Vietnam because we know how to make the case against war on ethical grounds.<\/p>\n

One of the modes of Quaker discourse is in the form of ‘advices and queries’. This is one of the basic models I use in writing my horoscopes, which I view as an ongoing inquiry about the nature of existence. In this last weekly horoscope of 2010, I thought I would borrow from the Quaker style and present queries based on the recent experience of astrology for each of the Sun signs. By recent, I mean going back as far as seven years for one of the signs, five years for another, and a bit less for the others.<\/p>\n

Continue Reading \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note to Readers: This week I’m posting the subscriber edition of Planet Waves to the open side of the website. This is the last weekly horoscope of 2010. You can receive these columns by subscribing to Planet Waves (which includes longer articles) or Planet Waves Light (which includes horoscopes only). Happy holidays! –efc Dear Friend … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}