{"id":45071,"date":"2011-09-05T00:01:02","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T04:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=45071"},"modified":"2011-09-06T14:10:49","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T18:10:49","slug":"astrology-borasisi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/astro-daily\/astrology-borasisi\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun opposite Borasisi: Knowledge and Belief"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reminder, along Route 28 (the road to Woodstock). Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today is Monday, Sept. 5, 2011<\/strong><\/a>. It’s Labor Day in the United States, a holiday to honor the working class, or what is left of it — strategically located far from May Day so that we’re not associated with the communists and socialists. The Moon is in Sagittarius today until it enters Capricorn at about 10:03 pm EDT. Along the way, the Moon will make a conjunction to the Galactic Core, which gives a flavor of mysticism, spiritual longing and may have the emotional tug toward ‘home’ that the Galactic Core represents.<\/p>\n

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The mid-Virgo Sun is aspecting all those small, slow, weird planets we mentioned in Friday’s subscriber edition \u2014 especially the ‘bonfire of the vanities’ aspect of Narcissus conjunct Phlous and the Great Attractor. There are many others involved, and the Sun will aspect them by conjunction, square or opposition.<\/p>\n

All week we’ll be on a big adventure through the dusky side-streets of minor planet astrology, with the rare opportunity to witness what few astrologers have had a chance to observe. The thing about these minor planets is, they tend to reveal themselves when they’re taking aspects from the Sun. One of the ways we learn is to tune in and watch.<\/p>\n

Today the Sun is opposite minor planet Borasisi<\/a> in Pisces. Borasisi, a slow-mover taking about 292 years to orbit our Sun, was discovered in 1999. It was named by some imaginative astronomers after a concept in the fictional religion of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle<\/em>. The novel plays on the themes of world destruction, and what happens when the masters of technology lack any ethics. The Pisces New Moon back in early March was conjunct this little planet, and was the subject of a Friday subscriber issue called With Love from Borasisi<\/a>. This foreshadowed the Fukushima disaster nearly six months ago. (This was a little weird. The story of Cat’s Cradle<\/em> comes out of General Electric, and so did the designs for the reactors that melted down.)<\/p>\n

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Borasisi is a patron saint of our days, which many politicians are selling to us as the ‘last days’ or end times. This is a fantasy perpetrated by leaders of the far-right fundamentalist Christian faction of American religio-politics, and it’s pure Borasisi — carrying the theme, ‘If I believe it, it must be true’, or, in its flip incarnation, ‘If I don’t believe it, it isn’t true’. This planet is the poster child for blind belief, denial of science, and those who perpetrate their unquestioned beliefs on others \u2014 in other words, a symbol of our current moment \u2014 though arguably this is not news.<\/p>\n

Opposite Borasisi is the Sun in Virgo, which can represent concrete knowledge, applied science, healing techniques and the work that it takes to create these things. But who really wants to do the work? Who wants to check their beliefs to validate whether they’re true? It’s easier to deny science than to investigate it, or to let it challenge your preconceived ideas.<\/p>\n

An article published elsewhere a couple years ago on religious belief and understanding in America pointed out something illustrative. Although the U.S. professes separation of church and state, our separation is not so clear-cut. The notion of ‘the Creator’ is all over our political documentation, and In God We Trust is plastered in every courtroom. Our alleged superiority in this regard comes with knee-jerk fear and condemnation of countries (especially Islamic countries) governed by religious law. What we in fact have is a nation that is primarily Christian, of a certain kind: often ignorant of its own ideas. We lack thorough education about religion, its concepts and its theology, our own or those of others. What we have left is indoctrination. Actual religious education began declining in the 1800s as Christian sects argued about which Bible was the ‘right’ Bible to teach in schools. As a result, we have come to a point of being essentially a Christian-run country (on both sides of the party aisle), but we’re a nation of believers without understanding. Many people cannot even see this as it happens, even as the ideas of religion are conflated with democratic notions.<\/p>\n

Unquestioned belief plays an enormous role in this, running at a fever pitch culturally (whether that is ‘belief in’ or ‘disbelief’), for the most part lacking understanding of what is believed. This is a reaction to the mysteries of existence, and the many pressures we’re under. We crave certainty; there is little to be had, so we fill in the void with belief. The rush to say ‘I know’ and ‘I believe’ is a REACTION to mystery. Those who cannot abide mystery — who cannot simply sit with, coexist with, a state of not knowing — have to make up a story and inflict it on everyone else out of fear, or to gain an advantage.<\/p>\n

But fear of what? Fear of not being, fear of death, fear of existing on our little planet on the edge of the galaxy, with no certain knowledge of where we are or why we’re here. This translates to the fear of life; or rather, a fear of this existence: that it means nothing after all. That’s a pretty big fear, and to truly sit with it and allow the questions to sink in, with no obvious answer readily available or promised or necessarily even likely, is not easy. Most of us probably don’t really do so, even when we think we do.<\/p>\n

Many of us have read the existentialist and absurdist plays that dive into this line of inquiry with post-modern glee. Some of us even like them. But exactly how much have we taken the mirror they present to heart? How many of us watch Vladimir and Estragon bumble through Waiting for Godot<\/em> \u2014 desperate to be seen, recognized, remembered; desperate for time to make sense; desperate for the new and unknown and yet desperate for the familiar and comfortable \u2014 and allow the desperation its moment of recognition in our own hearts? And when we find it, how many of us are still able to laugh? In Godot<\/em>, the characters struggle with questions like trying to figure out what happened on what day. As our days blur past, we might ask that one of ourselves.<\/p>\n

Not everything can be proven; not everything can be left to faith. The Virgo Sun opposite Borasisi in Pisces describes our need to stretch across the seeming contradiction between mindless belief and grounded intellectual process. And that’s where we are right now.
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\n–with Amanda Painter<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is Monday, Sept. 5, 2011. It’s Labor Day in the United States, a holiday to honor the working class, or what is left of it — strategically located far from May Day so that we’re not associated with the communists and socialists. The Moon is in Sagittarius today until it enters Capricorn at about … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1734],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45071"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}