Last Week to Hear My Big-Picture Audio Forecasts

What story will you create for yourself in the coming months?

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE with my MID-YEAR AUDIO PREVIEW of YOUR DESTINY for the REST of 2019 and beyond. This is the last week they will be available.

What transformations would you like to bless yourself with in the coming months?

Could you use some inspiration as you mobilize your higher powers and deeper understandings?

Are there new ways of looking at your destiny that I might provide?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE. Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Term Forecast for Second Half of 2019."

How can you dream and scheme to move yourself further in the direction of your heart's desires?

What actions could you take to dissolve your suffering and foster liberation?

How might you shift your attitudes and expectations so as to bring more joy and gratification into your daily rhythm?

Call on me! Let me help.





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DO YOU HAVE A SOUL?

Some people imagine the word "soul" to be a New Age term, a lazy woo-woo concept favored by fuzzy thinkers. As evidence that this isn't the case, I offer references to "soul" by writers who don't fit those descriptions, starting with Walt Whitman.

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of
hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself — the latter I
translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

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How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!

—Henry David Thoreau

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The soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.

—Emily Dickinson

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This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth. The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of the earth, and the intelligent, immortal being, the soul in the individual being—each is honey to the other.

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

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Ondinnonk is an Iroquois word with two related meanings: 1. a secret wish of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams; 2. the spiritual part of our nature that longs to do good deeds.

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In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down into the underworld by Hades, whose title is "Pluto." But in earlier, pre-patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively seeking to graduate from her virginal naiveté by exploring the intriguing land of shadows.

"Pluto" is derived from the Greek word plutus, meaning "wealth." Psychologist James Hillman says this refers to the psyche-building riches available in Pluto's domain. Hades, he says, is "the giver of nourishment to the soul."

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Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

—Oscar Wilde

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"There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears," writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes. But the magic of that formula may not unfold with smooth simplicity, she says: "The teacher comes when the soul, not the ego, is ready. The teacher comes when the soul calls, and thank goodness—for the ego is never fully ready."

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What is the "soul," anyway? Is it a ghostly blob of magic stuff within us that keeps us connected to the world of dreams and the divine realms? Is it an amorphous metaphor for the secret source of our spiritual power? Is it a myth that people entertain because they desperately want to believe there's more to them than just their physical bodies?

Here's what I think: The soul is a perspective that pushes us to go deeper and see further and live wilder. It's what drives our imagination to flesh out our raw experience, transforming that chaotic stuff into rich storylines that animate our love of life.

With the gently propulsive force of the soul, we probe beyond the surface level of things, working to find the hidden meaning and truer feeling.

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Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

—Pablo Picasso.

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"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness," said the painter Joan Miró in describing his artistic process.

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"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul," wrote environmentalist Edward Abbey.

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"I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity," wrote author Sue Monk Kidd in her memoir. "When I looked it up in my dictionary, however, I found that the words 'passive' and 'passion' come from the same Latin root, pati, which means 'to endure.' Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work . . . It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely."

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If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

By waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe."

—Tom Robbins

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As part of the Beauty and Truth Lab's ongoing crusade to wrestle the English language into a more formidable servant of the ecstatic impulse, we're pleased to present some alternate designations for "soul." See if any of the following concoctions feel right coming out of your mouth:

1. undulating superconductor;

2. nectar plasma;

3. golden lather;

4. smoldering crucible;

5. luminous caduceus.

If none of these work for you—or even if they do—have fun creating your own terms.

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"Each person is a story that the Soul of the World wants to tell to itself," writes storyteller Michael Meade.

What does that Soul want to say through you?

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At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles — wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

– André Gide

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The soul moves in circles.

—ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus

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Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.

—philosopher Voltaire in a letter to his partner Marie Louise Denis

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You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

—Albert Camus

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I note the echo that each thing produces as it strikes my soul.

—Stendhal

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I am not quick moving. I have to wait for myself—it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude — so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.

When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul—and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.

—Friedrich Nietzsche





I'm re-posting these wise ideas from Amanda Yates Garcia.

To-Do List while Mercury is in Retrograde from July 5 - July 31:

* Finish a creative project that you'd set aside.

* Tell a truth that's been crying out to he spoken.

* Shower adoration on something you've neglected.

* Try something you've never had the courage to try —but have always wanted to do.

* Practice increasing personal magnetism. For instance, practice describing the beauty instead of complaining.

* Turn self-criticism into celebration. For instance, don't like your hair? Step up your flamboyant hat game.

* Practice assuming the best of your friends and loved ones.

* Enjoy yourself!

Amanda Yates Garcia is on Facebook
and Instagram.





EVIL IS BORING

I heard an interview with the German film actor Udo Kier. He specializes in playing villains. "Evil has no limit," he sneered, blustering like a naughty genius. "Good has a limit. It is simply not as interesting."

How many times have I heard that idiotic cliché? Most everyone everywhere seems to agree with Udo Kier. And I'm in a tiny minority in my belief that evil is boring. There seem to be few thinkers, communicators, and creators who share my curiosity about exploring the frontiers of righteous pleasure and amusing truth and boisterous integrity.

Some pretenders do make counterfeit attempts: Hollywood producers who produce sentimental fantasies with artificially happy endings, advertising executives who sell the pseudo-positivity of narcissistic comfort, and New Age gurus who ignore the darkness with their one-dimensional appeals to sweetness and light.

But how dare Udo Kier—and all his like-minded devotees of the entertainment value of evil—proceed on the assumption that "good has a limit" and that "good isn't as interesting" when there are so few smart artists and thinkers who are brave and resourceful enough to explore the frontiers of beauty and truth and joy and compassion?


See the video of me presenting "Evil Is Boring": https://bit.ly/EvilIsBoring





HEALING LESSONS

Many of us have a superficial notion of the nature of healing, writes Peter Kingsley in his book *In the Dark Places of Wisdom*. We think that “healing is what makes us comfortable and eases the pain.” But the truth is, “what we want to be healed of is often what will heal us if we can stand the discomfort and the pain.”

I invite you to work with this theme. See if you can stave off your urge for ease as you marinate longer in the aching confusion.

“If we really face our sadness,” says Kingsley, “we find it speaks with the voice of our deepest longing. And if we face it a little longer we find that it teaches us the way to attain what we long for.”





"May I feel all I need to feel in order to heal; may I heal all I need to heal in order to feel."

- Marguerite Rigoglioso





What thought or trick do you use to help liberate yourself from unnecessary suffering?

What joke do you play on yourself when you're taking yourself too seriously?

How do you compassionately bust yourself when you realize you've been indulging in hypocritical behavior?





"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."

- Elizabeth Gilbert