Dear Friend and Reader:
On the first night that the Sun was in Scorpio, I fell asleep a bit early on the bed in my photo studio and awoke a few hours later from a lucid dream — a dream in which I knew that I was dreaming.
I was in an attic room. John Kennedy was expressing his rage, ever so politely but rage no less, that the American public fell for the cover-up of his murder. He was incredulous that such an obvious fraud could hold up to any scrutiny at all. What I recall most vividly was his conveying the feeling of, “How could this be possible, how could anyone fall for this?”
He explained that the FBI had killed 150 people in the process of ‘investigating’ his murder.
He was healthy and in good condition, wearing a suit, leaning up on his elbows on a small bed. Kennedy went on for a while, explaining certain particulars of the case.
There was one other person there. I don’t know who; I never saw his/her face. I don’t believe we were direct collaborators but rather that we had a similar mission. I understood that Kennedy was speaking to me in a gesture of trust: that I would understand that it was real, and that I would not be silent.
There was a stairway going down from the attic, which I knew was my route out of the dreamtime and into the physical world. I woke up at about 1 am, described the dream to a friend in a short email, recorded the time and cast the chart.
My rational mind started to piece together what had happened. I understood it was a visitation from someone on the other side.
I have had several of these in my life and they have a feeling distinct from an ordinary dream — in particular, a sense of cohesion of the circumstances, and my full presence and awareness within the dream space.
On awakening I felt alert and clear, relieved to have seen him and aware how much I love him. I knew I was being given a gift of trust as well as voluntarily accepting a responsibility.
Even as a child of about seven, from the first time I heard the story of the events of the assassination — that JFK had been shot, that Lee Harvey Oswald, his purported assassin, had been killed two days later, and that the guy who killed Oswald was dead just three years after that — the whole scenario seemed ridiculous.
I didn’t know the word ‘cover-up’ but I intuitively grasped that both Oswald being killed and Ruby mysteriously dying were designed to prevent the truth from getting out. I remember being angry. I remember wanting the truth and being amazed that anyone could content themselves with anything less.
In the month since my experience of meeting JFK, I’ve gradually figured out that my response to his assassination helped shape me into the person I am. Part of that response includes not being fooled or intimidated by lies, no matter how grand the scale. And another aspect involves wanting to do something about it.
Not the Same Question Today
The message I have today, on the 50th anniversary of his death, is that the question of who killed Pres. Kennedy is a different one than it was in 1963, or even 10 or 20 years later. If you listen to pundits and broadcast ‘news’ reporters today, they ask the question the same way it’s always been asked. With half a century between then and now, we have a lot of context. That context makes it clear what happened next, that being half a century of nonstop war.
Lyndon Johnson wasted no time plotting the expansion of the Vietnam War. Meetings and top-level memoranda written on Nov. 23, 1963, a Saturday, with the dead president’s body still on the autopsy table, reveal what was on Johnson’s mind.
Within nine months, Congress would grant Johnson a blank check and total power to do whatever he wanted in Vietnam. Troop levels would immediately rise steadily, peaking at 543,482 on April 30, 1969. Nixon would expand the war to Laos and Cambodia.
War means the expenditure of countless billions of dollars, nearly all of which go to military contractors, enriching the banks along the way. The national wealth is pumped out of the people, and given to corporations that kill people all over the world.
There is no balance of power here. Every branch of government goes for it; all the companies that profit, from Microsoft providing operating systems for aircraft carriers to beef suppliers selling hamburgers to Halliburton, love it. War means millions of people killed, injured, orphaned and displaced, for the profit of private individuals. It’s always sold to us as a patriotic act of defending the motherland, not as a private (but government funded) investment scheme.
I have no doubt that Kennedy saw the folly of Vietnam and would have brought the troops home after his re-election. He was not an interventionist and he knew from what happened at the Bay of Pigs, a disastrous attempt to invade Cuba, that his top military brass were a bunch of idiots.
To think, however, that Kennedy’s killing was merely about his plans to pull the so-called advisors home from Vietnam after he was re-elected does not take the logic the full distance. We can debate the point of what he might have done, but there is no debate about what happened next, by which I mean the next 50 years.
When I say that Kennedy’s murder was a violent coup by what Pres. Eisenhower, JFK’s predecessor, called the military-industrial complex, I am not theorizing. I am describing what happened in the following 10 years of the Vietnam War; then numerous coups and wars in South and Central America; the United States messing with the war between Iran and Iraq beginning in 1981; the first Bush war in Iraq in 1990-91, which lasted clear through till the second Bush war in Afghanistan; and Iraq from 2001-present.
Think about it. We have, directly or indirectly, been bombing Iraq for 32 years. The War on Terror has gone on for 12 years, with actions in countless countries; the War on Drugs has raged on, domestically and internationally.
The Vietnam War never ended. Even as those particular troops came home and everyone muttered ‘never again’, the United States waged war after war in remote parts of the world, under a succession of excuses, and continues to do on this very day. From Wednesday’s New York Times:
Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Wednesday that the United States and Afghanistan had finalized the wording of a bilateral security agreement that would allow for a lasting American troop presence through 2024 and set the stage for billions of dollars of international assistance to keep flowing to the government in Kabul.
I have probably read 50 times that “Afghanistan is not the new Vietnam.” That is correct. It is the new, improved Vietnam. Astonishingly expensive, impervious to protest and being fought for no reason anyone understands except to move cash through banks, conglomerates and military contractors, it has the added benefit of lasting forever.
As for international assistance? That must mean coming directly out of our paychecks.
What We Lost in JFK
Kennedy was a man with the independence, the guts and the integrity to stand up for what he believed was right, and to challenge what he believed was wrong. That alone was enough to create many enemies, and along with that, considerable confusion over who might have killed him.
It was the Mafia because he was against the Mafia. It was somebody’s husband because he fucked the guy’s wife. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, um, why exactly? Because Kennedy hated Cuba, which Kennedy had repeatedly refused to invade?
These theories are ridiculously short-sighted. In an article called Storm Warnings, published at this time last year, I described how Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby went up against the perpetual war machine, which decided they had to be moved out of the way.
His death was a resounding message that no future president should be foolish enough to ever do that again.
We often wonder why presidents always seem so lame, never able to get anything done or to stand up for any real principles. When Obama took office, one of my readers wrote to me and said that she thought it possible that moments after a new president was inaugurated, he was taken into a side-room by a couple of CIA officers, shown the film of the Kennedy murder and asked if he had any questions. Every president since Kennedy has certainly acted as if that’s exactly what happens.
So in a sense we lost not just the president but the presidency, in its expression as the president being the autonomous chief executive and commander-in-chief of the military. Today we accept that the president has little actual power, and that he’s heavily influenced by outside corporate forces and the shadow government. He owes little to the people who elected him.
The power structure that we live within — the actual full manifestation of the military-industrial complex — is so out of control that we all now assume that everything we type on the Internet or speak into our phones is recorded in a searchable database.
By whom? By an agency whose current function is to wage covert war, not just against some foreign enemy but also against the people of the country they are supposed to be protecting.
There’s a spiritual issue, though, that comes closer to explaining the core psychology of losing Pres. Kennedy. Many have noted that he was a father figure, one who was never replaced. Though there are other factors, one product of this has been the anarchy we live with today.
A Mass Psychology Experiment
Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Kennedy murder was the mass psychology experiment that it was. Something shocking was done, a lame or even totally absurd cover story was floated, and the endless war was begun.
The JFK assassination was not the invention of the Shock Doctrine, but it was its first full manifestation as a domestic event in the United States used against the domestic population. One momentous use of this device was in Germany in 1933 — the Reichstag fire. (I’ve been wanting to do a review of that chart for years, and the anniversary is coming up.)
As long as people are scared enough, the perpetrator can blame anyone and do anything. Though this technique has been used many times, there’s only one event in American history that stands up to the JFK assassination — the events of Sept. 11. The three days of speechless shock, followed by weeks in a stupor of disbelief, followed by a rearrangement of everything, make these events seem like matching bookends.
Sept. 11 was a military coup, which we know because as with the events of Nov. 22, 1963, the military took over. The MOs of both events are identical: the most shocking thing ever happens, someone who had nothing to do with it is blamed in 90 minutes, and the war rages on.
Then the true story is refuted, and either hardly anyone cares that much or hardly anyone believes it. Those who do are called conspiracy nuts.
I don’t have the answer for what to do about this, but I know that to find it, we must be a lot smarter, and shrewder, and more perceptive than we are. We need to personally take up the qualities we admired the most in our ancestor JFK — his guts, his independence, and his willingness to fully embody his role.
Most of all, though, we need to cultivate the hunger for truth and the refusal to believe lies. You might say that the lies make all of these turns of events possible, but they would be worthless if nobody believed them.
Lovingly,
Weekly Horoscope for Friday, Nov. 22, 2013 #976 | By Eric Francis
Aries (March 20-April 19) — The Sun’s recent ingress into Sagittarius will help you get your mind off of joint financial issues, emotional matters and power struggles and remind you that there is a world outside of all of that. This is likely to feel like moving to a higher elevation and seeing the whole landscape rather than the little cave you were hanging out in. Yet the landscape you will be looking at will give you a perspective that extends forward in time, so that you can see potential expressions of yourself in the future. The catch is that doing this very thing may make you long for the familiarity of your present time, location and emotional state. You must remind yourself that progress implies change, and change implies unfamiliarity. Plenty more would get done in the world if our greatest visions didn’t get mired in our unresolved insecurities. You can get mired, or you can have an adventure.
Taurus (April 19-May 20) — Try not to be frustrated by what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. Your chart suggests that speaking honestly, listening with an open mind and moreover feeling where people you care about are coming from will melt those blocks or loft you over them. I don’t want to make this sound easier than it is, but I also know that just about everyone turns what could be easily resolved into some sour shade of impossible by refusing to speak, listen and feel. Many elements of human nature get in the way, the main one being a stubborn lack of flexibility that no longer serves you or your relationships. What you are really doing as you patiently move to a new place of sincere, actual communication with the people closest to you is to open up another realm of sharing with them. There is potential that you may have only considered and deemed impossible or too scary; in truth it is neither.
Gemini (May 20-June 21) — You know you’ve reached a limit on certain tendencies you have, especially needlessly clashing with authority. You can think of this as a distorted way of asserting your independence, when really all it does is compromise you and keep you boxed into the same set of feelings, ideas and practical limits that stunted your growth before. There’s a close relationship between this and any health-related issues you’ve been facing, which are likely to have a stress-related emotional component. All in all, I suspect you have the sensation that you’re reaching the end of a certain way of life, though I would remind you that this must be done in more than words and wishes. You need to act, and to sustain that action, which also means understanding your relationship to the past. In short, you must replace the parent-child relationship with adult-adult relationships. That will take time, but it’s not impossible, and you can start now.
Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You may be looking right at who you want to connect with the most, yet not recognize them for who they are. People who have a more conservative appearance can be more adventurous, rebellious or even radical than you think, so this is an opportunity to pay attention and go beneath the surface. I suggest you pause on any temptation to ‘tell all in the name of honesty’ with someone you don’t know well. Who you are comes through to others more than you may imagine, even if you think you’re being inscrutable. If any contact with a new friend or erotic prospect goes in the direction of intellect — that is, talking and ideas — rather than in the direction of animal magnetism, I would count that as a good thing. The situation is not lacking for sexual energy, though what it does have going for it is a tendency to gravitate in the direction of meaning.
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — It will come as a great relief for you to have the Sun in Sagittarius. It may feel like you have extra rooms added onto your house, ideas that have wings and an overall brighter outlook. The emotional bog that came along with the recent run of the Sun in Scorpio will begin to dry up and feel like something more workable, feeding your energy rather than draining it. You may still feel like there’s an aspect of yourself that is inside a glass box, and can only see the sky rather than actually fly up there. Here’s my reading of that factor (retrograde Jupiter in the 12th house): Rather than expanding outward, this is an invitation to expand inward. Think of it as a safe container rather than as something that is holding you in. If you encounter a limit, consider it a resource rather than something you have to resist. The first time this maneuver bears some excellent fruit, you will trust it more the next time.
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Hot, fiery Mars is continuing to make its way across your sign, though you seem to be getting a handle on how to work with this quality of energy. In a word, with precision. You’ve seen some of what happens when you lose your grip on your power tools. The first thing to do is remember that they are just that, and require that you handle them with skill, care and respect. This is particularly crucial between now and when Mars leaves your sign on Dec. 7, because it’s in a position where it has little or no external structure to contain it. Translated into human terms, for the next couple of weeks, you must be unusually self-regulated while not suppressing, or being afraid of, your own power. Work with a plan and a backup plan, follow basic safety and security protocols, and as Paul McCartney said, when you’ve got a job to do, you’ve got to do it well.
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — In order for your worst fears not to run away with you, you must question them every time you feel them. Consider how little of what you think will go horribly wrong actually does. Very few houses burn down; cats rarely get caught in the garage; kids tend not to fall down the stairs and break their heads. Since you don’t deal cocaine, the government probably doesn’t care about you. Given all of this, most people respond by being reckless. So while you’re busy not believing that the worst will always happen, it’s essential that you not react in the other direction and assume that nothing could ever possibly go wrong. The wide, pragmatic middle ground is to focus your senses, use your awareness and use what you know. If you have a concern, use logic to assess its validity. If you have a problem, use logic to solve it. Remember that you do exist and that people care about you. Invite people you love into your home and you will feel that more.
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — The Sun has just left your sign, which will help you draw your energy inward, and keep it concentrated, where you need it to be. Your solar chart describes you working out a deep issue associated with maturity. It is not enough to act mature, or to convince others that you are. Rather, what is essential is that you make contact with the place in yourself where you have an authentic inner dialog. You are susceptible right now to being influenced by what others think, or what you fear their opinions might be, and this could easily go out of control, manifesting as a storm of self-criticism. Other factors suggest that you may be feeling insecure, which is why I am suggesting you remain vigilant and thoughtful and don’t associate with negative people. Keep your communications meaningful, and over the next few days try to spend time only with people who are intelligent and emotionally grounded.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Be not deceived by the unreal. Embrace what is true. It may take you a few days to figure out one from the other, so slow down and observe, listen and consider what you learn. Over the next week, the influences in your chart shift from idealism and denial to awakening. If you make the effort to be objective now, your awakening will be one of resplendent clarity rather than a shock. Therefore, make an effort to consider several sides of every equation, and most significantly, to stick to your most important goals rather than allowing yourself to be distracted by entertainment or diversion. You may have to remind yourself from day to day or even hour to hour, and consciously maintain a balance between the larger scenario and the important details. If you’re getting mired in trivia, set it aside and go back to your top priorities. Keep at this for a while and you will be unstoppable.
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — There seem to be two relationship situations or intimate encounters developing simultaneously. One has the sensation of you seeking someone who you admire but who is, at the moment, aloof and inaccessible. At the same time, someone is making an approach to you, though you may not feel like they’re up to your level. The whole aloof thing is getting old, is it not? Relationships need to be about more than dreams and wishes. But you do have your standards — which I suggest you set aside until you really get to know whoever may be taking an active interest in you. You have that opportunity, though it looks as if you may not even be noticing that someone is interested. One other take on your charts right now is to make sure you set a high priority on taking care of children and teenagers in your environment. Take a gentle approach, listen carefully and help when you can.
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — There is a bit of information you need that will help you with your abundant responsibilities, and it’s coming straight to you. The problem is, you might decide it’s not important enough to act on or even to acknowledge. You may also believe you can get better news from someone else, and set out to shop for something you prefer. The news you want is what is accurate, so that you can address whatever circumstance you’re dealing with. I suggest you not allow yourself to be biased by fear or any form of negative expectation. Be bold and devote yourself to getting all of the facts; don’t stop until you’re satisfied that you actually understand the full scenario. Once you do that, you will discover another dimension to the situation that provides you with a whole set of alternatives you would not have found otherwise. Pay attention to the specifics. The details matter, a lot.
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Push yourself, but do so gently. You’ve reached that time in the year when you feel the imperative to get things done, and the only thing that makes this year different is that you’re starting to grasp that you actually can achieve what you set out to do. You’ve been facing challenges the past few weeks that have only increased your desire to rise to the occasion, and have given you both determination and courage. Yet I suggest you disengage any emotions that may be driving you, and rather than push yourself, merely guide yourself in the direction you want to go, using your existing momentum and only adding minimal new energy. You may believe you would be setting aside your ambition and thus your dedication to your goals, though your astrology suggests that the opposite is true. You’re heading in the right direction, and have taken many of the right steps. What you will avoid is blowing yourself off course, or wasting energy sailing against the tide.