People of the Book have been fighting over wells since the dawn of technology, and such disputes continue, in the sense that as we retreat from inequality we are bulldozing the repositories of wisdom controlled by dead white men. How meekly did so many submit to the truism, ‘Control the water, control the community’, as though mindfulness of their descent from victors at the well might absolve them of any further enquiry into the principles of excavation, water-tables and climate change, if only they could include themselves among the historically controlled. Xeromorphism as a drive towards relative independence from water allocation is just one more example of how relativity, and dependent arising, and shame, file their claims to reified identity.
We are accustomed, are we not, to imagine the night as a well, or welling, of the personality, and the horizon retains the same power over the unconscious it enjoyed hundreds of thousands of years ago. As attractive as we may find it to put our post-colonial selves in another’s shoes, can we still look between our own shoes at the ground of our being beneath the horizon? Ah, would that we could gaze into our own well, and from that well we could draw our place, our country, our belonging, our bucket of creation!
Instead, the place we occupy is becoming transparent as we multiply its perspectives. Is it distance from the immediacy of remembering which clouds the well? Are old people doomed to relativism by the acceptance of loss? Or is the Other the joyous birthright of the ageing bereaved? The inhabitants of the Moon can see all but a fingerwidth of what lies beneath our horizon. ‘We’re the Hekawi!’ we might joke to our loved ones up there, but they’ll be trying not to get splinters in their fingers, as they absolve themselves of our ancient history.
I am going to migrate to country which is sacred, in which relativity’s deconstruction of absolutes such as subjects and objects releases me from good form, bad form or any kind of form, to laugh at my reflection in the well, here in the cross-hairs of bullseye.
You know exactly where you are if you know where the Sun is. That is one benefit of the bottomless relativity which constantly unravels Fourth House negotiations: reputation is where your critics are coming from. We are located at the bottom of the Sun’s well, a dot against the background about 4 thousandths of a degree wide, or one five-hundredth of the width of an outstretched human finger.
It feels good to be on the road, finding my way to the shortest shadows with Stellarium in my pocket. You, my fellow-travellers through the Constellations defined by the IAU, black, white or brindle, rich or poor, man, woman or child, Fourth House or Tenth, will be with me today in Leo. But top of the yin metal beef Southern Late Summer morning to you.
“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.” Randy Newman, “In Germany Before The War”, Little Criminals, 1977.
Today is an important day in Townsville, Australia. Locations south of Toolakea witness their noonday shadows to their south for the first time since the Sun’s declination moved south of Townsville’s latitude on 19 November. In astrological terms, the noon Vertex moves from the 9th House to the 4th, or in simple geometrical terms, the overhead intersection of the Ecliptic with the Prime Vertical crosses from the east to the west, transformed from anti-Vertex to Vertex. Another way to relate to this phenomenon is to imagine the complete reorientation of your sense of direction when the Sun goes from rising on your left to rising on your right, how mindful of your shadow you would need to be in terrain with no landmarks, and how familiar with landmarks you would need to be in the tropics. You would expect our ancestors in the tropics to travel a lot at night and know the stars like the back of their hands, wouldn’t you?
The longing for the divine partner underfoot in eternity is transformed by material greed or secular cynicism into the archaeology of imperial trophies, and, by what Greta Thunberg called “fairytales of eternal economic growth”, into the replacement of religious obedience by scientific enthralment. Is that what happens? Can the Earth’s obliquity really single out the residents of Townsville for such an influence during their lunch break today? And can we really know the exact day the Sun’s declination equals the latitude of anywhere before the noon shadows of the locals announce it? [The sine of the Sun’s declination equals the sine of Earth’s obliquity multiplied by the sine of the Sun’s ecliptic longitude. The Vertex ‘flip’ occurs at the longitude after the Summer Solstice Point (either one) whose sine equals the sine of the latitude divided by the sine of the obliquity, and before that Solstice Point by the same degree. Since sine 0 = 0, those longitudes at the Equator are 0 and 180, the Equinox Points.]
And finally, is there a more logical basis for the application of Sun Signs to places without four seasons than which horizontal hemisphere the noon Sun is in, North or South? As the Sun retreats towards the Northern Hemisphere in our late Summer, we welcome back more of the Tropics to our shared perspective; or the more of us there are, the further away the Sun. [It takes two months for Australia to get all of its Tropics back from the Northern Hemisphere, but the South gains Singapore at noon on March 24, Monrovia on April 5, Bangkok on April 27, Mexico City on May 17, the Kaaba on May 28, Hong Kong on June 3, Havana on June 11 and ultimately Mazatlán on June 13.]
Whatever the flipping of this mysterious recently invented influence on the heart from sidereal Cancer in the House of Aspiration to sidereal Capricorn in the House of Reputation signifies, you can imagine it has a huge bearing on the price of fish, up and down Australia’s tropical east coast. Even with GPS, the unwary visitor who cannot smell the sea will begin westward when trying to find the fishing co-op! No aid will be forthcoming from the locals, either, who will be down on hands and knees with plumb-bobs and rulers, trying to calibrate the turbulent hormones which cascade during a four-hour period in Townsville at different times of day. Perhaps the visitor is of a mind not to ‘lose it’, but simply to go without fish today. Such a person might well be absent in their own country, and not lost at all. What kind of country might that be? Not a culture of power relations and commodities, oppression and exploitation, perhaps, but unfortunately a world of innerness without outward form or utility to anyone else.
Miraculous though its panorama certainly is, the tenancy of country with a small ‘c’ becomes null and void, any freehold extinguished, at death. Whatever ancestors or previous inhabitants might have put into place, for however long the grandfather clock might have ticked, or the eels teemed into the traps, country did not exist until its tenant came along and made it. Has the tenant lived an impoverished existence, up to their ears in debt, even enslaved, banished, children gone in war and marital strife and migration? Very likely! But you know how beautiful their country is? How awesome to be its only inheritance? You probably don’t because, embedded in history, social theory and economics, identity and law, or perhaps the search in therapy for love and validation in your existential victimhood and educated blame, it is too soon for you to stand here on the banks of the Lethe, dissolved in awe of karma created by hope, error, sorrow and submission, defeat, addiction, intoxication and joy, which for all eternity has been the haunt of our ghosts. When the time comes, welcome to cosmic individuality, the practice of awe, where even scientists and high priests acknowledge the relativity of their faith in platitudes about life’s journey.
Let’s whizz to the moment in time, several hours before Townsville noon, customarily identified by the Academy of Scientific Astrology and the Uniting Church of Oncology, Climatology, Astrometry and Extragalactic Dynamics as New Moon. So here we are, ready to argue about signs and influences, but suddenly aware that the only thing we know for certain is that we know nothing. It may or may not be the case that this is not a dream, that the underworld is the outside looking in, or that the many mansions of my Father’s house are the wards of a detention centre’s psychiatric hospital, the hours which mark the various ways the autonomous spirit of everything gasps for survival under the putrefaction of my corpse, or the seams of my resistance to the emptiness of consciousness, time and illness. The following relativities of geography, Milky Way mythology and rotational orientation may or may not be helpful in sustaining the dialogue you might have with the Moon this year. [They are all plotted using Stellarium 0.19.2 and paint.net 4.2.7.]
Every one of these snapshots could begin a dialogue between insiders and outsiders typified by a line in the sand separating absolutist and relativist: do not assert your truth over mine, because I am right and you are wrong. Presented together, they offer the elusive prospect of a system which ties them all together, which should remind us that our most conspicuous lack is not respect for difference, but a spirit of solidarity, an ethics of presence, a sharing of silence. In fact, it is relatively easy to discover systems on the outside, but it is not easy to share from the inside one’s creation, of love and obedience, integrity and awe. The oaths sworn by the gods in honour of the goddess Styx, the elm tree at the entrance to the ancient underworld to which false dreams cling under every leaf, the varieties of madness in the no-man’s-land of the bardo, and the experience of life in death I call ‘country’, are concepts borrowed from other times and cultures, and elements like the oils on a canvas, with no intrinsic meaning or independent agency, of an astrology of empty identity, time and place.
The profession to which I have not professed, eminently qualified though I may be, has rigorous rules which I deplore, and so not one conventional astrology examiner has confirmed to me my eligibility. Jewish humour appeals to me as much as to you, but a God who suddenly realizes that the meaning of life is an answer, and in order to understand whatever the question might be, in case He is ever asked, decides to become human—who else?—is less humorous than perversely unoriginal. Those unfortunates like myself who idealize a beloved as the question are the dupes of das Kapital, for the narcissists who lie in wait for us are truly Gnostic shards of the answer to no known question. Of course, nobody these days has ever heard of Professor Joad, one of the BBC’s Brains Trust who famously opined, “It all depends …”, but it might be time for his relativism to make a reappearance. Anything, surely, would be better than dispassionate astrology, God disguised by a pen? How could I be envious of eternal gratitude accorded to gurus who alienate us from our own sky? But it does all depend, you’re right, on you, it seems.
A lion cannot be patted like a pussy cat. Toxic masculinity may be the problem du jour, as we continue to undermine pride as the basis for community in favour of shame, but it may be the case that toxic masculinity would disappear if we revived the distinction between wild and domesticated human animals, and reestablished pride on the same footing as shame, so that it might not be shameful to feel no shame, but rather a matter of pride. In my experience, the shame offered by the shadow of pride cannot match the presence of the shadow of shame! Lucky me? Yes, Pride and Shame are a Team, like daylight and darkness, or emptiness and substance. It might appear that the Conferences are they which pit themselves against each other at Superbowl, but in truth, it is they whose independence continues to make the anguish of America great.
As you travel the journey you are exhorted to make your life, Grasshopper, you will occasionally meet someone who wants you to cut off your hair. It is in this sense that moieties, such as male and female, can represent enemy territory. Your strength is foreign, at every stage of your journey, until the moment of your seduction to stay, that moment when in shame you might stop making calendars or listening to Mahler. North of the Lethe they invented a projection called Justfriendistan, where they don’t watch clocks or slit their wrists, I’m told. Be that as it may, migration is the beginning of everything: time, foreignness, marriage, gender, hair. It is only by walking away down each of the paths which converge at intersectionality that you discover what the theoreticians think you think they mean: emptiness is intersectional; we are mis-made of pluralities of victimhood. In fact, back at the intersection, only Miss Polly’s Dolly needs to heal, because the rest of us weren’t born anything, let alone perfect. Are you coming quick, Ms Muslim or Christian Post-Colonial [PC] Indonesian or Anzac Immigrant, or quite fainting away in your doctoral Miss Polly projection? I hope you will realize before your children do, that we are politely turning our gaze inward on how ridiculous you look. Look up ‘evolved’ in the Urban Dictionary: it does not refer to the ecology of a tidal rock-pool, much and all as many of us would like to crawl back under a rock.
Shadows are smallest at noon, have you noticed, or never connected ego, reputation and shadow? And after lunch they lengthen towards the east, but is that naturally on your left or right? In other words, do you measure direction from the north or south? People are either clockwise or anticlockwise in their experience of time. Which are you? Is 9 in the sky left of 3 or right? Do people who count lefts and rights on a map belong to the same species as people who negotiate right angles by correcting north and west to go northwest by the afternoon Sun in the Southern Hemisphere or its morning shadows in the Northern Hemisphere? Do you even know what I’m on about? Has it never happened to you that GPS coverage left you high and dry? Talk about pre-migratory! Would you know that it was the cliff the lemmings were running towards? Who on Earth are you, love? Oh well, when all else fails, we can always ask directions from the same kind Brotherhood volunteer on a student visa who saw our inner child safely home at 3am last Sabbath, can’t we?
When those around you who deride your sticks marking sunset and sunrise and the blind clap halfway between ask you how to explain law and ceremony to their abusive elders and suicidal children; when you cannot find a companion for a southward migration from Bamaga to Fitzroy because nobody has a father who has danced the journey, nine hops that way, four that, four fingers, three, two, one, a squat, one finger the other way, two, three, four, five; when all around you are unable to recognise a single star out of the corner of the eye of the collapse of their cultural memory into deprivation, squalor and shame and simply recognize an accumulation of vomit as the end of the wet; when your initiation is in your neurones, not written in a wandering academic’s sky map; when you know what how and when to go depend on, and why your ancestors are telling you to go now: you will be a roadbuilder, or a cave-rescuer, and we’ll be proud of you, my son!
Identity is the cusp of Pride and Shame. The question which torments relativism is not, ‘what are things in themselves?’ but, ‘where is “Out Of Story”?’ The 3am ‘Aha!’ is the refolding of a disease around a misspelled antigen: “Did I simply lack the guts to be one thing or the other?” Women have lived in a foreign country so long that they have trouble realizing the real men have left. Perhaps the last Imams to leave are right: women in their country have half a brain. Anyone who cannot see the trees for the forest may leave the room. You’re right, relatively speaking: you don’t belong here, though your broken journey bless us, where the intersection blurs in evaporating tears.
The task of astrology, which is always true and always false, is not to define personality but to frame it. Every morning I wake up in the dark, and listen to the sound of silence. In the dark distance may be the drone of a truck, or the cries of a bird. I do not hear them, my ears and brain do that. I am the witness at the doors of perception, who hears darkness, and silence, and emptiness. I enter the experience of being a body here in the umbra, populated here and there by meaning in a sleeping world. I am the joy of country’s creation in my mind. It is what I don’t hear which frames itself, and my hearing, and me. Astrology is like the cries of birds in nocturnal country.
Country is an imaginary map of intersectionality, superimposing on the landscape of finitude an interplay of cardinal powers, law and ceremony, language and ethnicity, which leaves the centre free to be inhabited by the spirit. It represents the will to be, the need for recognition, and the silent well of resilient kindness at the heart of duty in the everyday prison of everyone’s expectations. It is known as ‘my space’, notoriously hard to find, not only for being unmapped in most cases, but also because your space is an invasion of mine. My speech repels your silence; your resentment is a betrayal of our relativity.
Country has a bewildering array of layers then, in a multicultural society, made more profuse, not less, by the dissolution of social ‘facts’ like masculinity and femininity, authority and sovereignty, truth and habit, beauty and objectification. The assumption is that beneath the layers of rules for what not to do or think there can be a bedrock of meaning, but this is not so. My space, my country, stripped to the bone of its culture, is empty, and emptiness cannot be shared. Two worlds: speech, the ceremonies of relationship; and the subjectivity of death, the spirit. The cardinal directions towards and away from the noonday heat of the sun represent in the nexus of reason and instinct the defeat of death by dream, as the sunrise-sunset nexus of intuition and inference represent death’s defeat by language.
Relativity is not merely the obvious connection of everything to everything else in space and time, but the existence of everything only in relation. Not only the individuals who have migrated to ‘Australia’, but their cultures and religions, including tropical astrology, have jostled to impose new layers on country, but in essence the aboriginal meanings themselves were layers, layers of ceremony, layers of story, layers of language, upon what cannot be ignored and yet cannot be spoken, the emptiness of relativity, of ‘my space’. Can you see altruism anywhere? It is absurd to think Europeans could believe they could stamp their seasons on this mysterious continent, but that’s what they did. They brought ‘my space’ with them.
Since the birth of language, the vehicle for all cultural meaning and impact, we have tried to govern, and not be governed by, two competing forces, greed and fear. And all the while, lurking beneath the layers of culture, there has been art, the glimpses of the primary layer, the mortal view, framed by eyelashes, greedy for ever more elaborate masks of fear, fraught, ambiguous, taboo. Would conflict and victimhood have been avoided if everyone lived in empty country? Impossible! Children require parents who share a language and a culture, layers on country. But would the world be a better place for comprising true country beneath its layers, the vista of a world looking in through a fringe of eyelashes, the rising sea-level of death lapping at the beaches of memory and story? Perhaps.
What truth will remain after my death? This question holds many ambiguities. Am I grasping for absolute truth, or personal truth situated in a cultural sharing, or am I already absenting myself in a matrix of emergent doubt? Is there an I? ‘I’ formed within a fifties hit parade of love songs. Love comes close to enfolding me in the eternal, but only as an idea. In practice, those I have loving relationships with love me back in ways I seldom understand, for the lyrics they liked are so different. My love will not survive my death, nor will ‘thou’, if my love is not thy love. How could it, when it emanates from country?
When I awake from my siesta, I find myself amid a profusion of artefacts, each a fantasy of completion, a cry to eternity, a semblance of permanence, and all the trees are cynically felled in the mechanics of installation. When you’re young, finitude hits you like a ton of bricks. I was seventeen, in my second year of university, my family asleep throughout the house, when I discovered the immensity of the universe, and the status of emptiness in it. It took some years to cultivate an antidote. Each of us has adopted the habit of being a saint, a poet or a fool, imposing on country an overlay, a template, of bog, labyrinth or tower, our strategy for understanding now in context. Are we alienated from a present created by the past, right in a wrong world? Is the future our opportunity to update the past to accommodate new interpretations of the law, to add our contribution to the sum of human knowledge? Is the experience of now dissolved in a playful ambiguity of past and future which makes even breathing a creative enterprise and absolves us from responsibility by revealing the emptiness of all form?
The New Moon is framed by convention along the plane of Earth’s revolution around the Sun. It is a prediction of mathematical models evolved over thousands of years. It is never visible against the backdrop of the stars, although it is there, behind its eyelashes, a bird calling in the dark.
There is no doubt in my mind that one of the great contributions to philosophy in the twentieth century was I and Thou, by Martin Buber. There is no ‘I’ existing in and by itself, Buber says, only an ‘I’ which stands in relation in either of two pairings: I-Thou and I-It (or I-He/She). The Vertex reminds me that my love-image, my attachment style and the success of my intimate relationships all hinge on my capacity to experience my self in relation, to recognize what I am projecting, and also to enjoy myself as a beloved.
Some totalitarian tweeted the other day his faith that same-sex marriage would be embraced by Australian society, and this would be a repudiation of the ‘concept of the other’. One of us is out of step, and it could be me. This is an ‘I-It’ attitude. Australia has embraced same-sex marriage, and this might be interpreted as the consolidation of an Australian identity, a swelling of the ranks of a majority who see eye-to-eye. It might also be interpreted as a recognition and celebration of difference, that we love, and share our ‘country’, our personal space, with the Other, as the ‘I’ in ‘I-Thou’. I for one realize that inclusion does not confer identity when it is an act of love, and exclusion and inequality do not imply enmity and ought not be used as weapons by totalitarians to inflame it.
Astrology does not have clean hands when it comes to the totalitarian claims of identity politics. Object-permanence may be an essential intuition in early childhood development and an important element in a sense of self, but experience should lead us to the understanding that only the past and other objects can carry our desire for fixed meanings. No person or thing can properly be understood as enduring in time or occupying unambiguous space. I cannot hate you for not understanding me, or sharing my culture and its beliefs. How could I, when I am not the same person two days in a row?
I have not worked on the Vertex to enshrine it in the pantheon of formative influences, but to connect my hormones to my concepts, to empty both of fixed definition, and to broaden the internal debate about what personality entails by enhancing my focus on what I and the Other may be projecting. I must admit, I am drawn to the ambiguity of its offence, and its compartmental categories of latitude are irresistibly mischievous.
The Anti-Vertex is the elephant in the room.
The Ecliptic is fixed on the equatorial grid, which makes it easy to predict and time its movement. The tropical location generating the chart above sees the Zodiac passing directly overhead and high and low in both hemispheres, and I am definitely envious of the spectacle. However, it is totally unempirical speculation on my part to relate the symbols of our deepest affections to the altitude of the Ecliptic. The worship, not to say the fetishization, of eternity and permanence could not be imagined as a localized phenomenon, could it? Would not such a suggestion be an invitation to outmoded concepts like the ‘noble savage’ and ‘the Other’?
This little corner of the USA could not possibly offer emotional or daemonic experience unavailable in the rest of the country! I am really more interested in the movement of that red line than in real estate values, but what if resistance to culturalist pieties found itself drawn to enclaves further and further from the pernicious influence of a Vertex of conformity, even as the pietist preachers of victimhood were succumbing to the transference of exotic love-objects from sub-tropical climes?
How would you react if around 2020 you started to become aware of strange new yearnings unsatisfied by good old-fashioned marriage, self-improvement and illicit sex? Instead of idealizing youth, you began to hanker after a winged angel on your marble sarcophagus? Or instead of people being turned away by your cynical intellectualized dismissal of spiritual life, they began in droves to revere you as a messenger from another dimension, taking holy orders and even their own lives to be with you in eternity?
Computing the exact latitude of date of the Vertex in the realm of Eternity demands seven decimal places, or 11 millimetres at the red line, to minimize its duration to less than 2 seconds, so if you’re right on it, stay put. Its rate of migration is 16,000 millimetres p.a. and its disconcerting wingbeats will pass over and be gone in 4 hours. Besides, the maximum sub-conscious reach of the Vertex for antipodean day-dreamers is the Gemini Winter Solstice (tropical Cancer), where it coincides with our Lethe Crossing and ‘Forgetting’ is the universe’s middle name. In the North, Eternity coincides with the Sagittarius (Capricorn) Solstice at the woeful heart of our galaxy, and you must continue to drown deprivation as is your winter wont.
The chart above locates the Vertex above Marcoola Beach, but in the very same moment (03:35 Eastern European Time) it is in the Fourth House above the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III in Luxor, which is still forgetting at the Lethe an entry to the underworld 3,172 years later.
He was assassinated by a wife.
Roughly 4 hours later over Marcoola–woeful Luxor Eternity was roughly 8 hours ago: Eternity comes first–Permanence is a little more worrisome than Eternity, because of its tantalizing visibility, that is, it lurks in the House of Reputation, where consciousness is ever doing mortal combat with wokeness, and the next-door House of Attachment sublimates fear. Can you believe that enlightenment has been struggling with inherent properties for thousands of years, yet books purporting to contain the Word of God still top the bestseller list? Be mindful of the possibility that while you were deconstructing everything, your children were finding parasitism in the entrails of relativity and deprivation a most undesirable lifestyle. And note that in the Southern Hemisphere it is Cassiopeia, not Crux, in the First House. Don’t be surprised if your children convert to Islam because you’re just not permanent enough.
From Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to no longer use skills one had barely time to acquire;
not to observe roses and other things that promised
so much in terms of a human future, no longer
to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to even discard one’s own name as easily as a child
abandons a broken toy.
Strange, not to desire to continue wishing one’s wishes.
Strange to notice all that was related, fluttering
so loosely in space. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a
trace of eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. Albert Ernest Flemming
Can we be relatively confident there is no absolute truth when we are absolutely confident that everything is relative? Is a pitched battle on the street a refusal on both signs to deconstruct truths which are ignorantly clung to as fundamental, or is one side right and the other wrong? How do some truths resist deconstruction? Consider this chart:
Do you dream of destiny, good burghers of the North? Sleep on, because a snake slithers across your bed, and it is a crab who usurps your throne. We of the South know our way around your underworld, as you do in ours. Shall we continue to fight with you over whether the Sun is high in our consciousness or low in your repair? Will you continue to fight each other over who is king, crab or lion?
My fundamental belief is that everything is made out of time, and that space is simply the dimension in which we construct the illusions which give our brief, almost virtual existence the insights and values which inure us to the instantaneous and meaningless. Space gives life the evolutionary impulse of perspective, but the mirage of place. Time insists on relativity, but it can deliver community.
I suggest to you that time can be experienced in three different ways, and that we all develop attitude which centres us in one of these ways more or less integrated with the others. Seekers, it seems to me, are focussed on dissatisfaction with a synthetic space, and the fundamental organizing principle constituted by their experience of time can remain hidden to them.In grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.
My archetypes for these attitudes are respectively, Fool, Poet and Saint, and this website engages in an exploration of their many guises. Suffice to say here that the Fool is plagued by care, the Poet by uncertainty, and the Saint by evil. Integration is a necessity, normally undertaken in sleep. The highest form of evolution is not the rule of law, in secular or religious guise, but equanimity. Birds have it in spades, but humans do not. Instead, we have identity, and property, and boundaries.
It is within the confines of those primitive categories that we have curdled our cultures and raised our children during the whole of the ‘Age of Pisces’. All of our laws have evolved to reduce offence, because anger, hatred and conflict are uncomfortable. It is deplorable to live a life which is nasty, brutish and short. Privilege and repression have been our means of dealing with anger.
With breathtaking confidence in non-dualism, pluralism and the economics of globalization, privileged people all over the world have been dismantling boundaries, sharing property and merging identity, but not their own, and they have unleashed such anger that they cannot understand how to deal with it. Their own reactive anger is uncomfortable indeed. It belies their confidence in the Now. It is so correct, so impersonal, and so vain!
So how realistic is hope for a New Age of equanimity and enlightened loving-kindness? Is this hope better-founded in human brain function than the submission to chastity of Islamic and Christian patriarchy? Can post-modernism teach the emptiness of each of the ways of experiencing time, and yet by promoting the value of integration dissolve our differences?
You cannot slay the dragon, Sir Knight of the European Round Table. She is in each of your daughters and sons—heads on them like rabbits! But what you could do, Saints, Poets and Fools of the “United” Nations, is find the Holy Grail for us. Hmm? Could there be an absolute truth? Is Jerusalem one or many? Eh? Eh? The sleepwalker on stage is not whole, and how empty is sleep?
In grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 