The Astrological Forecast for 11/11/11 at 11

This is the celestial outlook for that master number on that master day at the master hour we have all been promised.  Many are anticipating this moment’s arrival with much excitement and many celebrations of the meditative kind are planned throughout the world.  This is the moment many in the new age/ascensionist movement have been waiting for, couching it in terms of our mass spiritual lift-off from our mundane, terrestrial bonds.

The celestial arrangement overhead on that day does, indeed, contain a lovely, harmonious Grand Trine between Pluto, Jupiter and Mars.  They are all, however, firmly rooted in the Earth signs:  Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo, respectively.  This particular Grand Trine is actually what is known as a kite, and the anchoring thread and intended bulls eye is Neptune/Chiron in Aquarius/Pisces.  At the time, the Sun and Moon will be just past their full opposition, with Sun in Scorpio and Moon in Taurus.  Earth, water and the overall motion of descent are the actual overall themes in this particular transit.

The configuration overhead has a lovely, resonant geometry, as all Grand Trines do.  However, their collective presence in the Earth signs means that, rather than standing on our imaginary mountain, arms spread wide, looking up toward some new horizon, we should, rather, be bowing our heads and gazing downward, upon the very ground where our feet should be firmly planted.  That is the work of this hour and this day, as well as our larger task during this particular epoch in human history.  The celestial sounding here clearly indicates we need to conduct more thorough archeological digs on the cultural foundations we have constructed ourselves.  We are here to take up the shovel and the spade and do the real healing work on planet earth we have thus far, continued to avoid.

With Pluto a primary anchor in Capricorn, very real death and decay of our old paradigms is part and parcel of our celestial pattern and will be in the mix until 2024.   Death is naturally accompanied by a period of silence and grief and mourning.  Once the decaying body has been removed, it is a time when we draw the blinds of our souls closed and reflect upon the life now gone from us, of viscerally taking in all of its brutal facts:  the voice of our loved one we will never hear again, the familiar sight of their gait and facial expressions that fade into the walls, the odors of their personal scents wafting down empty hallways, the necessary cleaning out of the closets of their now useless possessions and clothing.  These reflections are meant to be accompanied by a solitary and profound silence, experienced alone.

Those who have summoned the courage to sit through the dying of another know it is also as a painful gift: a time to reach out and touch our own mortality, to contemplate the errors we have made, to imagine into how we want to be remembered after we, too, succumb to the natural rhythm of the cycles of life.  It is an extraordinarily beautiful, poignant time to take stock of the coordinates of our own personal compass and reset them to take us to the place of our more noble selves.  We can only do so through our willingness to turn over the stones of regret, of paths we could have taken but did not, of opportunities we missed to enter into more real and authentic relationship with the ones we have lost.  Owning every single one of those regrets, mistakes and errors is what it means to be a full adult.  They are no less a part of our experience than the successes and joys we usually focus on.  As the adults at the funereal wake, not the children sent out to the backyard to scan for alien ships in their best clothes while the grownups grieve indoors.

Indigenous Calendars Are Ending:  The Real Facts

The Mayan Calendar is ending.  The Hopi end times have arrived.  The truth of the matter here is that the Mayan Calendar and the ancient hieroglyphs of the people who wrote these and other indigenous master works actually contain very little predictive statements at all.  No promised states of bliss, no light descending upon the people, no transportation into another dimension. The fact is that these calendars simply end, without explanation.  Then, a void, a blank.  This state, the profound silence after activity has ceased, is the cyclical part of life and death we are here to master.  It is the period of time humanity is entering.

Unfortunately, western societies have, over centuries, built walls and institutions designed to remove us from the unavoidable facts of death and our relationship with the natural cycles of ebb and flow, of feminine spiritual wisdom, of the constant of infinity.  We have sequestered our dying in sterile rooms attended by professionals, far from our homes and hearths.  In our modern world, we have been taught to continue on our way despite the presence of death and to busy ourselves with the busyness of life.  We have, in effect, been stripped of our ability to sit with it and know death’s intimate permutations.  We strive to stave off that impending, irrefutable moment we will all face by skipping out on those of our friends and family.  We rabidly consume  pine nuts, surgical procedures and weekly shots of botox to mask its constant presence in our lives.  Such are the activities conceived of in an adolescent brain, still feebly trying to avoid the fact of our own mortality and, instead, inventing fantasies designed to gain control of processes which are, and always will remain, beyond our manipulations.  An end is an end.  Period.  The period of nothing that follows in its wake is a necessary part of our process.  This is what lies at the “end of the calendar” here.

Time to Grow Ourselves Up

Indigenous cultures know this, as well as individuals who have refused to sever their intimate and abiding connection with the divine mother, waxing and waning as she does throughout the cosmos and down into the roots of our planet, into our very cells.  Our job here is to ground ourselves down into her sustaining wisdom and grow ourselves up to meet its challenges, not run off toward some new horizon like the herd of juveniles we have are right now.

It is, in fact, northwestern hemisphereans who have created all kinds of exciting new adventures for us to ooh and aah over in the face of the end of the indigenous calendars. Unable to summon the courage to face the period of the necessary Void before us, they have rushed in to fill the impending darkness, hawking their baubles of renewed abundance, spewing reams of book and workshop babble, and assuring us that only positive events shall unfold.  It is akin to scheduling a full makeover for a comatose patient in the ICU in her last 24 hours of life.  And there are plenty of makeup artists out there.

They are nothing more than the most recent propheteers of our time.  They are the equivalent of a spiritual branch of the TSA, deployed to “protect” us from our terror of death, decay and the unknown.  The new age/progressives have failed to realize the full extent to which they have been co-opted into the mainstream theme of institutionalized, hierarchical control of the masses.  The new age/ascensionist/non-duality proponents are our current pied pipers of institutionally supported denial, leading the groups of sheep out into huge spiritual playgrounds promising lots of sugar plumbs to their devotees, who are merely the large group of plain folk also unable to meet the adult realities of the failure of our way of life and, ultimately, of our transient bodies.  Like our own government, which kicks the can of truth of our economic bankruptcy continuously down the road, the new agers are here to serve a similar purpose in trying to disguise our spiritual and moral bankruptcy from us as well.

We come into the world alone and we leave it alone.  These are very solitary activities.  So is the pursuit of art and creativity. Those who have not developed their own, personally intimate relationship with the cosmic mother and their own internal wealth are those still sitting in the audiences of conferences promising new realities, buying the books and dvd’s, and quoting their favorite new guru while doing their feel-good workbook exercises with similarly spiritually developmentally delayed cohorts.

Americans in particular have been trained to believe in the very juvenile concept that we should always be experiencing more:  more abundance, more joy, more happiness, more money, more goods and services to consume.  Out of this depleted state of immaturity, we created the bubbles of finances, real estate, information and government.  Sorry, but those balloons have all popped and reaching out for the new and improved spiritual balloon will fail us as well. So will our notion that we deserve the goodies without doing the real work necessary here.

Graduation Time

So, the message is that it doesn’t matter how much makeup you put on that corpse , uh, yeah, the dude’s still dead.  And by the smell of it, for a bit of a while already, too.  We need to stop, right now, participating in the group mind of Head Start children our larger culture has relentlessly tried to turn us all into.  And succeeded in, to a very large extent.  I am refusing to treat us all like children at the amusement park, spinning one-sided yarns out of the cotton candy machine and feeding you more fluffy, non-nutritional foods.  Better to wake up and recognize the truly condescending insults to our intelligence such efforts really are.

Our heavenly bodies refuse to participate in such human nonsense as well.  The message of the Grand Trine of 11/11/11, at 11 o’clock, is plain and clear.  Pluto in Capricorn in the 2nd house in the chart of America, is all about kicking our old structures and value systems out from underneath us.  Many astrological writers have already written of this and I am certainly not covering new ground here.  Pluto and her revelations of secrets is the good swift kick in the butt we never received in spiritual junior high.  The destruction already well under way in our structural framework is not limited to our financial and governmental institutions, however.  Included in that destruction are the emotional and relational bonds we have constructed from the scaffoldings of those institutions.

At the hour of the unfolding of this master number, in the city of america’s birth, Pluto sits in the 12th house, the house of our karmic debts.  This is not a coincidence.  America and its population do, indeed, have an enormously large karmic debt to settle with the rest of humanity.  Whining and pointing the finger at others is not going to work.  If you have found yourself incarnated as an american at this time and place, you have chosen to do so for a reason.  You did, indeed, choose to physically manifest as an individual within the collective of america and the spiritual assignment of that choice is just beginning.  Taking responsibility for our very large collective debt to the planet is what we have signed up for as a people and as individuals enjoying the privileges of inhabiting this country.  While we have helped ourselves quite conspicuously and abundantly to the privileges, we have utterly ignored our real responsibilities.

The utter and appalling wrongs of our colonialist and arrogant mindset, developed over centuries and philosophically and physically exerted through our multiple and illegal military occupations of other nations, as well as our concomitant pillaging and raping of others’ rightful resources and murdering of other humans, is part of the package we are meant to deal with. Utilizing that hegemonic group mind, as the new agers do, to try to transport us out of the field of responsibility to some new frontier, full of newer and better possibilities, doesn’t cut the mustard.  We have a duty to fulfill here.  You.  And me.  And we are not going anywhere until we do.

Unlike the pathological human brains that thought up the idea, Karma doesn’t keep two sets of books, and the time of our reckoning has arrived for all of us to bear.  Pluto, the spiritual, forensic auditor has arrived.

That arrival just so happens to dovetail nicely with that brand new movement Occupy Wall Street.  And who are these protestors?  Largely, they are the middle class who are only now voicing outrage because they have begun sorely hurting in the pocket.  Such outrage is the narcissistic whining of the spoiled child.  Busy accumulating their wealth and flat screen tv’s and fabulous homes while the times were good (for them), it is only when their way of life is threatened that they summon their selfishly-motivated passions for justice and equality.  These are, however, the same group of people who were all about Not In My Backyard when it came to elevating the poor out of poverty and who ignored our spiritual and moral need for justice and equality in caring for the vulnerable and underprivileged of us in decades past.  As long as they were realizing outrageous expansions in their assets through real estate flipping and speculative investing, they stayed nice and comfy inside the horizons of their own living rooms.

Now, they are on the streets.  Many of these newly angered OWS are members of the former sixties love gang who, decades ago, traded in their peace signs and head garlands of daisies  for the very same chairs in those corporate executive offices they now vilify.  These are the same people who parked their vw camper vans in the backyard and hitched their bmw’s to those brilliant, immoral and unethical shenanigans of the boys of wall street.  And these newly-minted OWSers ate up the gravy train of profit earned off the backs of billions of humans doing the real work for slave wages and the raping of our global environment while they lounged around watching their portfolios rise.  Anyone who “earned” those external and artificially constructed privileges by investing in, and indebting themselves to, the very same banks/mortgage companies that they now throw stones at should realize they are, indeed, directly responsible for the vast abuses of our mother earth and a huge majority of her population of flora and fauna.

Failure to cultivate, on our own and for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do, the necessary internal qualities of adult relationship: humility, humbleness, gratitude and respectful relationship, leaves us with having to learn our lessons externally through humiliation, deprivation, injustice and limitation.  That would sound familiar if americans bothered to view our actions from the perspective of those who have had to suffer at our hands.

As we all know, our new found and growing limitations are the role Saturn plays in the lives of those unwilling to get the message on their own.  America is still feeling the reverberations of our Saturn return of December 3, 2010.  Saturn is trine to Neptune/Chiron at the moment and we will find ourselves feeling the need to descend deeper into our personal emotional dishonesties right now.  As Pluto progresses toward her own date of return with the natal chart of america (exact on February 20, 2022), the dark squeeze is going to continue.  Welcome to the realms of the Void after the death of the old way of being.  With Saturn on the scene, it looks like its going to be the hard school of education for most.

Mars in Virgo in the 8th house trining Pluto is our warrior planet in the house of the occult, secrets and sexuality, sharpening her sword to ensure our perfect precision (Virgo) in piercing into our collective psychosis of organizing institutions and behaviors.  All of our unconscious notions of relationships, from business to marriage partnerships, as well as our notions of trust and intimacy, are going to be exposed under the knife here.  The meditation for this master day should focus on summoning the courage to look deeply within and beginning the process of moral, ethical and spiritual correction we need to undergo.

Mars opposite Neptune/Chiron signals that our work is to be found in unraveling our spiritual and emotional ties (Neptune) to, and the karmic wounds suffered (Chiron) by, our attachments to the institutional frameworks (Pluto), now crumbling, of our former life.  As noted previously in this article, this Grand Trine is actually a kite formation, Neptune/Chiron forming both her anchoring point and the bulls eye that the drawn bow of Mars in Virgo is about to release.  Neptune/Chiron is sextile Pluto here and we can reap great rewards of insight and enlightenment if we take up the task at hand.  There is an enormous amount of anguish and suffering we have all gone through together within the limiting and abusive structures of our political/financial/military institutions.  Our job is not to slap on that new age face and play pretend yet again, but rather to allow that anguish and suffering to transmit to us emotionally, mentally and kinesthetically when the point of the Mars arrow strikes its mark. In our own feelings of victimhood, we uncover the face of ourselves as abuser.

Neptune requires us to let go of ourselves personally and dissolve our personal consciousness into the collective sufferings of all.  Her placement, briefly, in the mental sign of Aquarius, now moving forward again after a retrograde, is our signal to examine the exact machinations of our mental illness in having wrought such horrors upon others.  Calypso’s (Neptune) future descent for a long period of time into Pisces will be our opportunity to examine the emotional/spiritual imbalances we have cultivated and experienced as a result of  the larger political/social/economic institutions inside of which we have imprisoned our natural responses to the world.  That would be the voice of the “We,” which has been gagged into the “I” by the guiding philosophy of profit through consumption at any cost.  This is the beginning of our ability to exercise compassionate judgment and activity toward others.  This is reflexive compassion:  as we are able let go of our singular focus on ourselves and gaze upon the wounds of others at our collective hands, so also can we then see and feel our own.  Until then, we simply stay put in the adolescent sociopathic narcissism at which we have become the most advanced adepts on the planet.

Jupiter in Taurus is the third arm of the trine and is straddling the third and fourth houses on 11/11/11 at 11.  We are dealing here with a reckoning of our foundations in our cultural “family ” (4th house) and thought/form communication (3rd house) processes.  Jupiter in Taurus represents our opportunity to heal the wounds of our previous disconnection to our Cosmic Mother and her physical manifestation, Mother Earth.  The Moon in Taurus underlines this in bold.  Many familiar with ancient (that is, pre-patriarchal forms of social and cultural organization) cultures will remember that the Cosmic Mother is often represented in such civilizations as the Cow or Bull.  Her milk was drunk frequently by the temple priestesses/priests and lay people alike in honor of, and in reverence for,  her endless gifts of the nurturing fluids of life.   We have, over time, been duped into accepting an artificial replacement for the abundant and continual sustenance of the Cosmic Mother’s milk:  dry pieces of paper called dollar bills doled out by the pallid, pasty, white hands of our patriarchs – our reward rations for obedience.  We have been sucking at the wrong anatomy for millennia now, and any grown up knows that that particular fluid has no nutritional nor sustaining value.  It is no wonder we feel like starving, needy children.  We have to get up off our knees and learn to stand up, here.

A shift toward re-consecrating our relationship to the Cosmic Mother through her earthly representative (Taurus) is what is being asked of us.  The rewards are great if we are able to let go of our current addictions to external power and begin fortifying ourselves with real substance:  Jupiter’s role and promise here.  This point is underlined on this day by Jupiter’s sextile relationship to that Neptune/Chiron conjunction.  The way through is to recognize the depth of our disconnection from, and our subsequent abuses of our divine female, and to come into an adult, honoring relationship of her and her powers.  Cleaning our polluted waters is part of the spiritual cleansing offered on this day.

The Triple Hit of the Jupiter/Pluto Trine 2011/2012

After the Grand Cross of June, 2010, Jupiter began making its way toward a trine with Pluto, entering that orb in June, 2011.  The Jupiter/Pluto trine has come to exact twice already, first on July 7, 2011 (another direct hit on our on-going Cardinal Cross as well on that day), and again on October 28, 2011. Its next direct station will occur on March 12, 2012, another Grand Trine in the Earth Signs amongst the exact same players I am detailing here, though in that one Venus will be added into the mix conjunct Jupiter.  Jupiter will move out of its trining orb in April, 2012, not to return again until 2015, when it shows up again as Pluto has progressed further along in his journey through the de-structuring of our outdated structures (at 13 degrees then).

Many such direct hits like this in a short period of time should grab our attention.  Jupiter is here intensively offering the benevolence of potential transformation into our higher selves (Sagittarius being its home base) to us if we do, in fact, sink into our darkest selves and do the work of self-discovery.  Jupiter’s soft and helping hands are critical opportunities to be taken in descending deep into the caverns of ourselves.  Venus entering conjunction with Jupiter in March will be tantamount to the good witch of the North casting extra special beauty stars on that upcoming grand trine.

The work at hand is about finding our own personal Gollum’s, of exploring the exact nature of our own evil and by finding the precise substance and shape of that evil – our personal “Precious” – which we all hold within.  And we do. All of us.  Every one. Trying to hide and deny it, as Frodo continually does throughout that epic, places us in the dangerous, hypnotic trance of its power.  This is, indeed, the place most americans inhabit.  We remain in that place of denial at the peril of losing our individual and collective lives.

It is easy to always take up the hero’s cloak and cast ourselves as the Aragons or Legolas’ or Gandolphs in our epic tales.  That has been our collective and individual mistake thus far, which is why we continue to inhabit the realms of the pre-adolescent and why the scaffolding of our culture is finally coming down.

Our job here is to take on a different kind of hero’s task:  to follow the trail of that hideous, hairless little creature, once a man (er, hobbit), now distorted into some grotesque, slinking shadow/wraith of his former self, rendered devoid of his former humanity out of his obsessed need to possess his “precious.”  Gollum fondles and fawns over it; crawls and skitters about on all fours, naked, dirty and indecent in his lust for a thing.  That thing of power, the one he has succumbed to, is the very thing that disempowers us.  That is what we have made of ourselves as a people, personally and collectively.

“As within, so without.”  We must conduct the exploration of ourselves – find the stuff of our own internal, ugly “precious” material – first.  What does our private picture of  Dorian Gray – the face of our personal Gollum – actually look like?  What is that thing we feel we cannot do without?  What is that thing we would kill for?  What is that thing that represents our own personal ring?  Whether is is a material thing or something more intangible (ego or fear of loss) it must be known within us.  Our external cultural/social/economic structures will alter all on its own once we have found our answers to those questions and detached our sense of identity from their fatal powers.  Jupiter offers herself during this time as our wise sage, our Gandolph the White, showing up at critical junctures to steer us true on the path to that higher self, as we pick our way through the dark,  endless and foggy bog on our journey into Mordor.  Those unable to recover themselves from the obsessions of their personal desires will, like Gollum, plunge to their death in reaching for it.  Those who learn its lessons will return to their homes, take up their humble tasks and go about the unglamourous and unannounced business of just being a decent human being, that much wiser in how precious a gift that state of being truly is.

IN CONCLUSION

Yes, a glorious grand trine awaits us on this master day.  But all points on it are earth bound.  No amount of adolescent fantasizing about avoiding its message will alter it.  Spiritual law dictates that we get to ascend, to experience the thrill of  initiation into the next level of enlightenment, only after we do our homework.  Contrary to our narcissistic ideas of ourselves, we have not even begun that homework.  This Master Number Day is an opportunity to start.

Some accuse me of being too harsh. Unvarnished truth is how others describe it. Here, I offer in response to that criticism, one of the only predictive statements from the Hopi Elders regarding our future.  They have said for a long time already that we are well past the 11th hour now and, should we fail to become aware of and correct our erroneous ways, this is our most likely fate:

“Humans shall wander the face of the earth forever, crawling like animals on all fours, without heads.”