Chopped, Not Minced

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This post was originally an e-mail that I sent to a discussion group moments ago, so if you belong to that group you've already read it. It's Saturday and a little bit warmer than it's been for weeks, and that makes me lazy like spring fever even though it's not Spring.

I suspect I don't have a standard way to interpret a natal chart and horary charts get even weirder for some people who have a more formal approach. In the past, prior to my setting all my ephemerides and interpretation books on a black rock at some National Park in southern Utah where they have a canyon full of whodoos, and walking away never to draw another chart. Not because there was anything wrong with the system. It's the lingo that got me off-track and unappreciated by people who meant me no harm. They just didn't and still don't do nothing to cross Jesus and their worship of the Bible. 

I learned astrology by creating natal charts of specific people and then interpreting their chart in their presence to gather feedback as to what might or might not seem true between the two of us. Some woman from up in Boston told me I should make a thousand charts and do readings on my own work to figure out what's wot according to the conversations I had with real people and not other people's graven images. My own graven images is what she told me was important, and I pretty much went along for the ride. So, as usuall, I drew at least two thousand natal charts and used other systems for horary data. 

I began astrology after I had traveled around the country with this dude who taught me the tarots layouts every night after work for months on end. Both strung out on white crosses. Chronic fatigue and study seem to go hand and hand with my shoddy accomplishments in this regard. I ended up with this crazy living with this crazy woman in Key West, and had started using palm reading instead of tarot, when I became aware that astrology is the mother of all occult "sciences". I needed to know astrology to do better palm readings. I began holding hands with people while interpreting their natal charts. Who doesn't like holding hands?

It was palm reading that discouraged me from drawing charts after twenty years or so. I could be breezing along saying what i saw in some other's palm when my use of the astrology lingo interfered with people trusting me because of what they had been taught by some church. It really interfered with my flow for them to be suspicious. I was born in the Year of the Rabbit. We don't do confrontation with power, but provoke and retreat. Provoke and retreat. Movement and rest, movement and rest. First this, then that. First this, then that. Neti-neti.

When I use the term "perseverance", the me-and-thee-ing of it derives straight from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. The lingo in this classical Chinese book (one of the five) ruffles no feathers. Unless I bring it up myself, nobody suspects I'm using a system, although I might throw in a biblical phrase or two if they're obviously of a Christian upbringing. The GoT makes that more fun. They know, but they don't gnow, and confusion is the first step of hypnosis. 

I talk out of my head, but from real time images that are like drifting thoughts I capture with words. Some mine, others... well, they could come from anywhere or originate in anybody present or past, but I treat what drifts in as if it's from the other whether it actually is or not. Nobody knows. 

Saturn could be represented by anything "in the other person" in real ti-me. Why would I use historical data from dead prophets when the whole point is that I'm holding the hand of a living one. I only talk to hypnotize and suggest they are secretly their own prophet, and they need to tell me what they'll only remember as something I sayid, but in actuality wasn't me, but them. 

Granted, Saturn in my natal is in 22° Aries in it's Fall, and in weak conjunction with my sun in 0° 2" Taurus that is in close conjunction with the Descendent. I let their credentials (they don't know they have, yet) overwhelm me and my perceivable weakness elicits the strength of how Saturn makes them walk the line. 

I may frame it in feminine or masculine terms according to wot they sot before me. Sometime I force them to use their strength to rescue me from myself in order for me to continue to astound them with their own unkn-own discipline. It's better for both of us that way. I really have nothing to lose. I have great recuperative powers with Mars exalted in Capricorn, and the Moon exalted in Taurus, and Venus exalted in Pisces conjoined to Jupiter the old co-ruler of Pisces, both trine to Pluto. It's actually fun to let people get over on me while all the ti-me knowing nothing at All is lost by their gain. 

One aspect of Saturn and Capricorn and Aquarius that continues to intrigue me (although I've obviously put astrology on the back burner) is the Roman god Janus (Janu... worry) and the fact that Saturn is one of the seven planets that can be perceived with the naked eye consciously, and your anus (if you have any couth or never mind at all) is unseen, yet Mercury is exalted in Aquarius. Mercury represents the mind, and the taint is the wholiest spot in one's  physical (earth) body. Is that why some people can fly by the seat of their pants or why Jack keeps saying I pull all my rude statements from out of my ass? Okay, I do. So what? Sha-men gnow sha-me mo' bettah than yo' average bear. '-)

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One Sweet Morning

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This wireless thing is killing me again. I know that I wrote before that if humans are wireless since the umbilical cord was cut, then each of knows everything there is to know about wireless technology, but I have one problem. Knowing what question to ask to get the universal mind to be specific with it's answers on what means wot?

In my own assessment of my personal needs, visualization plays a huge part. I have other ways of finding satisfaction with what's wot, but visual is the one modality that has always had legs for me. I hate going blind, but that's nothing compared to what's coming up. Maybe one sensory reception system after the other. I'm already legally deaf and have cataracts so cloudy I don't see well on a clear day.

I can't see what I need to know to know where to look to solve my problems. The problem is never in my mind or my visionary process, but has roots in the real world if I just knew where to look. To know where to look I have to ask my nebulous sources the correct question. They indubitably gnow the answer.

Learning to ask the right question is the most powerful lesson I feel like I learned from using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching daily for over thirty years. It was a simple deal that wasn't hidden in the slightest. If I asked the oracle the real question that acted as impetus to my seeking it's wisdom, then the results I got finished the deal.

If I didn't ask the question that truly resided in my heart, then the oracle's response was non-sensible gibberish. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it's omens (pun intended).

There are admonitions throughout the Yellow Book (The I Ching, The Emperor's Yellow Book, The Book of Changes) warning that repeated questions indicating doubt of it's original pronouncements would be repudiated, and no answer would be given.

This is about like Percival leaving the Grail Castle after failing the Grail King's test, and the drawbridge it crossed to leave jumped up at the last second causing his horse to stumble, and a voice was heard that indignantly guffawed "Bumpkin!"

The question to the oracle has to be the sa-me question that your heart wants answered. How the Book of Changes knows when you've been naughty or nice isn't so clear to me. I mean, I know, but I don't yet gnow what I know. I am is me.

One Sweet Morning

Day after day, night after night,
I sit in awesome wonder,
and behold the thoughts I thought before,
that set my life asunder.
The controlling power of bygone years,
has lived within innately.
I've lived my life along with tears.
Some times the sun shines brightly.

I know not the reason for your mourning,
but I understand that you must cry.
The world is turning rather slowly,
while your heart is in the sky.
I feel the pulse within a'pounding,
as you slowly walk away.
Your melancholy is contagious,
the blue of clearness returns to gray.

But, soon within you'll find the answer.
Soon within the tide will flood.
The light will then break through the darkness.
The rainbow's red will turn to love.
The thought of changing will not frighten.
The past is lost in yesterday.
Then, one sweet morning I'll come a'calling,
when you have found the other way.

fmp
October, 1973

Edited: Today

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A Red And Yellow Basket

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What makes me who I am? Who makes me what I am? I can only know abstractly by the imaginative constructions I create from curiosity. At times I disbelief they are my own constructions, but already exist by their own right. Like the term "cornucopia". I didn't invent this term, but rather adopted it from an existing group of terms that somehow find a way of fitting themselves into my lexicon.

I found myself out of body nearing some "place". It was displaced from the abstract dimension associated with the sensory domain. Yet it was/is more real than what I dream up to comfort myself when I'm afraid no thing has more me-and-thee-ing than any thing else.

That's what meaning is to me. Whatever it takes to make a you that my me can try to find agreement with. As in "where there are two or more together, there am I" or more mundanely, "It takes two to tango." Maybe communication is the only-est thing that does need two to tango. That's why I use my poetic license to foolishly claim that meaning requires a me and a thee. Meanding. I wonder what happened to the "d"?

My obsession with me in the first person singular got replaced at so-me point in my life by an intrigue with the-more-of-me-than-you-can-see obsession. The more of me than anyone can see started including what I saw of myself in others. Freaked me out. Contrary to my presumed academic goal of individuation.

I like to have gone crazy trying to stop that process. Eventually there was nothing much left of me in the first person singular to fight for or about. That's how I began to understand that there ain't but one me, and each of us think we're that One me, and we are. That's the way I got it figured, but your milage may vary.

If I had real psychic power I would cause the huge Army helicopters hovering endlessly over my house to find some other place to practice their war games. Instead, they're coming here more frequently and staying longer.

I am helpless as an individual against the United States Army. It's not a joke. I seem convinced that if I complained again the Army's invasion of my privacy I would get a visit from Homeland Security. Maybe they would just threaten me or I might never be heard of again.

Apparently every person who lives in this area is just as helpless as me to do anything about it. Instead of protecting us against war the Army has declared war upon the very citizens it's sworn to protect. Sorta like my immune system has. During the first part of my life my immune system protected me. Now, in my dotage, my immune system has reversed roles and is now hell-bent on killing me.

The value of a human life is altogether personal. The only aspect of another person that any witness cares about is what they see of themselves in that other person's behavior. If the observed person gets killed, it's like a part of ourself as witness of their existence gets killed also.

If enough significant others in any one person's life get killed or naturally die close enough in time together, then the living have nothing of themselves left to live for, unless they stop investing in others as themselves, and bring it on home to the whole me.

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Snow And Rain

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One of the significant aspects of my dotage is that I do know who has been naughty or nice. People tell me what they're up to all the time. They just don't know they're betraying themselves by accusing other people of being the way they are. Candidly, it's not that interesting to know the intimate facts of life that other people reveal through self-betrayal.

It is not beyond me to blackmail people a little by reminding them that I was listening when they accused somebody else of doing what they regularly do. The blackmailing I do is not very rewarding. Mostly I use the information people betray about themselves to keep them off my back.

I don't want other people to use me as the object of their betrayal. I don't want them to use me as the mirror they use to project their own idea of themselves without knowing it. Ignorantly. To punish them I point out what they're ignoring. It doesn't have to be that way, and usually ain't unless they get pushy.

If they do, I just tell them they are like what they accused other people of being like. I can't possibly go wrong. I get the information straight from their own conversations without bothering to rearrange the very words they chose to address their own issues.

Most people don't remember what they said themselves five minutes ago. I learned that from studying hypnosis and NLP. One of the ways the training seminars in NLP helped me was having to practice remembering what people said, in order to repeat it to them five minutes later.

Doing that is what it seems to take for me to institute a conscious practice situation about anything I find myself interested in. Part of my learning process is that when I become aware that some point of understanding goes beyond the scope of where I usually take it, I have to make that awareness a part of my conscious operation in order to be on the lookout for incidences and events that sort of prove that understanding might be useable.

Setting up a conscious practice routine for doing or biding my time seems important to my process for being a human at this time. It's not like I've never been human before "this time". I suspect, because I've told stories with this moral, that I haven't been without a human body for millennia or more.

Over the last four or five years I've been involved in teaching myself to play the major and minor scales on my pretty nice Yamaha Grand Portable Digital Piano. Despite the painful bouts of rheumatoid arthritis I've experienced during this period of time, I think I'm doing pretty good.

I might miss a day or two now and then, but I consistently work at doing it daily. It's not like I'm trying to get ready to play a concert in Carnegie Hall, or at all. It's not like I like being persevering, I just need to be persevering because I got no talent for it.

I have to keep on keeping on for reasons I only sometime fathom. When I do seem to be possessed by lucidity it's hard to hold on to and to make it a part of my long-term memory. For me, that's why I have to create or generate a practice routine. To get to the same place people with a gift or a talent for doing it get to automagically.

There ain't no time table for when I feel proficient at playing the scales that I practice most days. All I know is that it is up to me to recognize when what's wot. By that, I mean to say that the practice I've been following through on has revealed a fatal flaw.

The system I'm practicing itself seems prone to informing me that no matter how much more energy I put into this particular project, the results will never be really favorable. No 'Atta boys' or calls for "Encore! ... Encore!", even if I keep it up for a thousand years.

Contrarily, if I ignore the omens to cease and desist, my valiant efforts may end in shame and humiliation. Who could possibly know that is true more than me? That's the fatal flaw a native born with the planet Mercury passing through the astrology sign Aries has to deal with.

In my natal chart this configuration has a weak trine to the Midheaven in Leo as it's only aspect. There are no negative aspects to Mercury, so I can't imagine what life would be like for somebody with Mercury in Aries that was conflicted. Aries is the home of the Greek and Roman god of war. They will boldly go where no man has been before. Not usually with the results that Einstein had. It's not the sort of astrological layout that aids and abets a cozy domestic lifestyle.

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