Week of January 21st, 2021
Who Will You Be in 2021? Who Do You Want to Be?
Here's your mantra for the next 33 days: "I know what I want and I know how to get it. I know what to do and I know how to do it."I've gathered together all of the Long-Range, Big-Picture Horoscopes I wrote for you in the past few weeks, and bundled them in one place. Go here to read a compendium of your forecasts for 2021.
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In addition to these, I've created EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES that go even further in Exploring Your Long-Term Destiny in 2021.
What will be the story of your life in the coming months? What new influences will be headed your way? What fresh resources will you be able to draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?
To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here.
Register and/or log in through the main page, and then access the horoscopes by clicking on "Long Range Prediction." Choose from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Each part is a standalone report, not dependent on the other two.
If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.
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Each of the three-part reports is seven to nine minutes long. The cost is $6 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.
P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week.
FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Read past issues of the newsletter.
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THE REVOLUTION OF CARING
Johanna Hedva writes: The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring.
To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community.
A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.
—Johanna Hedva
PRONOIA IS NOT ABOUT DENIAL
As anyone who has read my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia knows, cultivating visionary optimism never means ignoring or downplaying pathology and hatred.
In that spirit, I think it's important to be clear about the dire cavalcade of dangerously fascistic events, which is now upon us—as evidenced by the attack on the Capitol and the continued activity of rightwing extremism and terrorism.
Yes, I can and will call attention to other positive things going on. But I won't minimize the severity of our present crisis, which we are not even close to being done with.
THE SECRET OF SECRETS
What is the Secret of Secrets? The Great Work? The fulfillment of the Quest for the Grail?
I suspect it's the heroic trick of dispersing fear; of becoming clear to experience life without the rumbling subtext of chronic anxiety.
And I suspect that’s at the core of EVERYONE’s struggle.
In my personal story, the cure is most possible as I cultivate a relaxed capacity to perceive the presence of Divine Consciousness at work in every action everywhere.
I'm not there yet, but am making some progress! How about you?
END OF THE NIGHTMARE
Tobias Barrington Wolff wrote all the words in this section.
I have an exhortation to offer as we approach the end of this nightmare. For the last five years, I have been using the tools and lessons developed from surviving a childhood with a dangerous and malignant parent to understand, explain, and guard against the depredations of the toxic madman who has been occupying the U.S. presidency.
I will continue to be on guard these next days, as will we all, but I am finally starting to anticipate releasing that hyper-awareness and vigilance and never, ever spending my days thinking about this monster again. I urge you to do the same.
One of the lessons I have learned in my journey is the danger of becoming too attached to your arsenal of tools. When you put in the difficult and intense work of learning to understand a toxic abuser, dissect their motivations, predict their behavior and thwart or sidestep their assaults, you feel a sense of accomplishment.
It may be a perverse form of gratification, but the gratification is real. When you have no choice but to deal with an abuser, you feel good about yourself for learning how to deal with them successfully. That is a human response, and when you are in the danger zone it can be an emotional necessity.
If you are not careful, however, that gratification becomes a trap. You start returning to the abusive situation in order to show how well you can deal with it, to remind yourself how gratified you feel when you figure out or thwart or sidestep the abuse.
Or you feel a sharp lack of resolution in the situation because the abuser has never admitted their crimes, asked forgiveness, been properly humbled, and so you keep returning to the abusive situation armed with your arsenal of tools to try to extract that satisfying resolution, gratified and pleased that your tools will let you deal with the abuser successfully every time you reengage.
That is not freedom. Freedom is leaving the abuser permanently behind you in a cloud of dust. And it is not healthy. Healthy is recognizing that you should use your tools and the lessons you have learned to avoid ever engaging with a toxic, malignant person again.
Every one of us has been in an involuntary relationship with an abuser for the past five years. Four days from now, when he is no longer in a position of authority and there is no longer any imperative to dissect or predict or thwart or sidestep his depredations, embrace that freedom.
Choose to be healthy. Erase him from your consciousness. We will deal with him as needed: we will follow the reporting of his criminal trials, see his impeachment trial, uncover the corruption and debasement that have riven our government for the last four years.
But on a day to day basis, I urge you to lay aside everything that you have built up these last five years, honor yourself as a courageous warrior for surviving the experience, and purge him from your soul.
—Tobias Barrington Wolff wrote all the words in the above section.
TRUE CONSERVATIVES
As the Trumpocalypse comes to its whimpering, desolate, ignominious end, I will celebrate the fact that many Republicans opposed the cruel tyrant feeding the vortex of doom.
Here's a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed Trump
URANUS IN TAURUS
How to Respond to Uranus in Taurus (where it'll be until April 2026) — by Olivia Pepper
Reevaluate your possessions. All of them. Give away or destroy items that are holding you back spiritually, especially expensive items that you do not use.
Stop throwing good things away. Now that you have reevaluated your possessions, take deep and attentive care of the things you own. Patch items creatively and lovingly. When something breaks, turn it into something new. Learn to work with your own hands. Move away from a disposable culture.
Celebrate beauty. Revere the rise of new beauty standards and relationships with gender. Let Uranus in Taurus liberate you from oppressive, rigid modes of viewing physical beauty and presentation. Practice beholding, displaying, and appreciating a variety of physical beauty.
Transform the way you eat. This can be something that is both luxurious and deliberate. We’ll likely be seeing a worldwide shift in diet and food culture, perhaps even the long-awaited downfall of the agro-industrial complex as we focus on local, bioregional, sustainable, and indigenous food sources
Start a garden. Even if it is just a planter box of herbs in your apartment window, take this opportunity to connect with the process of growing your own food.
Invest in alternative economies. Prepare for the rise of cryptocurrencies and the potential of upheaval in the global financial markets. Begin to participate in barter and gift economies in your communities.
Separate your worth from your wealth. It is hard for us in a late capitalist society to do this. We were raised with the adage “time is money,” but time is not money. Time is not anything except an arbitrary way of measuring our experience in a constantly changing universe.
And, while we’re on the subject, money is not anything either! It is merely an outmoded symbolic system that technology can replace, as soon as we are ready to let go of attachment to hierarchy. You are not your bank account.
—Olivia Pepper
THE TRUTH ABOUT MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
A reader tried to tell me that at this precarious moment we need to rise above partisan politics; that we need people who have no ideology fueling their perspective; that we can't afford to be feeding argument.
This person invoked Martin Luther King Jr. as fitting this description. They said that King brought people together like no one has done since.
The truth is very different. Martin Luther King Jr. was fiercely anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war and anti-militarism. He did not hold anything back in his criticisms of the corrupt American system. And he alienated a great number of white people.
Historian Nathan Connolly says it's important to remember that King was considered a divisive figure, both in his lifetime and after his death. Some people today try to make him into a consensus builder. But the fact is that he never watered down his commitments to justice,
It's true that he specifically advised us to avoid physical violence. But he was a staunch fighter, a vehement defender of what's right, an uncompromising force advocating a fundamental remaking of American politics and culture.
It's not hard to imagine how King would have responded to the White Supremacist President and his White Supremacist terrorist army.
King saw Three Evils in the World,
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Other quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr.:
"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores."
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“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”
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"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
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"This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor."
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"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
IDIOT COMPASSION
Pema Chodron says that one of the enemies of compassion “is idiot compassion. This is when we avoid conflict and protect our good image by being kind when we should definitely say 'no.'
"Compassion doesn't only imply trying to be good. When we find ourselves in an aggressive relationship, we need to set clear boundaries. The kindest thing we can do for everyone concerned is to know when to say 'enough.' Many people use Buddhist ideals to justify self-debasement. In the name of not shutting our heart we let people walk all over us.
"It is said that in order not to break our vow of compassion we have to learn when to stop aggression and draw the line. There are times when the only way to bring down barriers is to set boundaries."
—Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
CONSPIRITUALITY
Conspirituality — the overlap between the New Age and conspiracy beliefs:
CITIZEN OF DARK TIMES — by Kim Stafford
Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.
When things go wrong, do right.
Set out by the half-light of the seeker.
For the well-lit problem begins to heal.
Learn tropism toward the difficult.
We have not arrived to explain, but to sing.
Young idealism ripens into an ethical life.
Prune back regret to let faith grow.
When you hit rock bottom, dig farther down.
Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song.
Keep seeing what you are not saying.
Plunder your reticence.
Songbird guards a twig, its only weapon a song.
—by Kim Stafford
DISAPPEAR YOUR FEAR
Here’s your mantra: “I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”
Say it or sing it. Maybe let it flow out of you after you wake each morning and are still lying in bed. Or make it the last sound on your lips as you drop off to sleep.
Have fun with it. Dip into your imagination to come up with different ways to let it fly. Say it as your favorite cartoon character might say it, or like a person with a Swedish accent, like your inner teenager, like a parrot, like the person you’ll be when you’re 84 years old.
“I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity. I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”
FATE BAIT
Sometimes we have a strong sense of what our destiny is calling us to do, but we don't feel quite ready or brave enough to answer the call. We need a push, an intervention, a serendipitous stroke—what you might call "fate bait."
It's a person or event that awakens our dormant willpower and draws us inexorably toward our necessary destiny; it's a thunderbolt or siren song or stage whisper that gives us a good excuse to go do what we know we should do.
Do you have any ideas about how to put yourself in the vicinity of your fate bait?
YOU ARE THE HIDDEN GOD
You are the hidden God. Wake up in the dream. Read between the lies. To question is the answer. The frontline is everywhere. There are no innocent bystanders. Truth is a three-edged sword. Practice infinite tolerance except for intolerance.
Achieve strength through joy. Embrace your shadow. Change is stability. Creation never ends. Everything is verb. The way in is the way out. All things connect all the time. The going is the goal. Today is the day!
—Reverend Adtrian Cain
SACRED ACTIVISM
A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history.
On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions.
When, however, the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic and social institutions, a holy force—the power of wisdom and love in action—is born. This force I define as Sacred Activism.
—Andrew Harvey
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Those who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others.
They will communicate nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about ends and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America.
—Thomas Merton
LET'S COLLABORATE TO PUT THE PANDEMIC BEHIND US
To my dismay, some Americans still downplay the devastation being caused by the virus. This is despite the fact that the US leads the world in number of infections and number of deaths.
Some of the deniers say that the virus only kills a small percentage of the people it infects—thereby ignoring the fact that it damages and disables a substantial percentage of the people it infects but doesn't kill. Many people who haven't been killed by the virus report lingering symptoms that feel disabling.
There's another factor the deniers ignore: The more people who are infected, the greater the chances are that the virus will mutate. And some of those mutations (as we have already seen) are more contagious, perhaps more lethal, and could possibly turn out to be immune to the vaccines.
Another factor the deniers ignore: The virus results in so many people being hospitalized, it taxes our medical system and our medical providers. It also makes it harder for people who have other health problems to be treated.
ONGOING RIDDLE
It's an ongoing riddle about how to deal with people who lack empathy and thrive on delusion. I try my best to be fierce in my boundary-setting in relation to them, but without getting personally riled up.