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Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter October 10, 2018

Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
October 10, 2018
FreeWillAstrology.com

Proposed bottom-line spiritual philosophy: For any one of us, our life is based on the principle that whatever hurts other people hurts us; that the injustices experienced by others are also injustices experienced by us.

None of us can truly be free, fulfilled, and powerful unless we are working to ensure that everyone can be free, fulfilled, and powerful.
These are not vague abstract ideals. They’re the central source of our soul's code and how we organize our beliefs, our emotions, and our actions.

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THE MESSY DARKNESS

Don't pretend you can't see the messy darkness. Admit to its presence. Accept its reality. But don't get tangled up in it, either.

Gaze into the abyss so as to educate yourself about its nature, but don't become entranced by its hypnotic power.

Scheme to reclaim your power from soul-sucking influences. But don't turn the process into a blood-and-thunder showdown that wreaks epic chaos.

You may be amazed at how much protection and relaxation you can generate for yourself simply by being a poised lover of life who is free of melodramatic reactions.

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THE DEVIL'S LONELY

The devil follows me day and night, because he is afraid to be alone.

- Francis Picabia

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CAN THE IMAGINATION SAVE US?

Feminist philosopher Susan Griffin relates a story that exemplifies the possibility of envisaging solutions that defy conventional logic:

Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner.

Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent.

But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned.

Improbable as it is, Desnos reads the man's palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.

As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems so inarguable.

They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions.

So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks.

Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

The story poses a question. Can the imagination save us?

Robert Desnos was famous for his belief in the imagination. He believed it could transform society. And what a wild leap this was, at the mouth of the gas chambers, to imagine a long life! In his mind he simply stepped outside the world as it was created by the SS.

Full story by Susan Griffin: tinyurl.com/yder25lt

Radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright Susan Griffin is on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/susan.griffin.549

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SANCTIFY YOUR INTERESTING WOUNDS

Steal some useful fire. Imitate a dusky breeze. Praise the wavering sky. Sanctify your interesting wounds. Mutate a waning pleasure. Alchemize your mysterious sighs. Untame your timid healing. Redraw the map of your wild heart. Trick eternity with your electric humor.

Mock gratuitous sarcasm. Swagger some lusty justice. Sing your best fury. Retool your amazement. Analyze the beauty in your original breath. Memorize a new future. Rebirth your achy symbols. Celebrate your surrender to forgiveness.

Anything you'd like to add?

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WE ARE BEYOND "THE RESISTANCE"

We are beyond “The Resistance.” We are the catalysts for freedom, justice, and equality for all.

Michelle Alexander writes: "Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle, leading us to forget our ultimate purpose and place in history.

"Every leap forward for American democracy — from slavery’s abolition to women’s suffrage to minimum-wage laws to the Civil Rights Acts to gay marriage — has been traceable to the revolutionary river, not the resistance. In fact, the whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all and those who resisted."

MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

All the below good news comes fro a great website, Celebrate Small Victories:
tinyurl.com/y8pw462e

Women and people of color are the majority of Democratic nominees heading into the midterm elections, making this the first time ever that white male candidates are the minority.

200 Congressional Democrats have been given the green light to sue Trump on the grounds that he has violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause in the Constitution.

A meatpacking plant has agreed to pay $1.5 million to Muslim employees who sued for discrimination—and will now accommodate prayer breaks, too.

The House and Senate passed a bill banning a gag rule on pharmacists so they will now be allowed to tell patients if they can save money on their prescriptions by paying out of pocket.

Thanks to a 17-year-old student who spoke up and pushed for change, her Pennsylvania high school is no longer teaching abstinence-only sex education.

A court vacated a ruling that would have denied legal representation for immigrant children, so the case will be reargued in December.

California passed a new set of laws that will expand funding, education, and screenings for maternal mental health disorders.

Following backlash from users, Facebook pulled ads promoting gay conversion therapy. And in Nova Scotia, a bipartisan bill was passed banning the practice.

A federal court reinstated protections to hundreds of grizzly bears living in and around Yellowstone National Park.

A federal judge in Missouri ruled that the state must provide information to make it easier for people to register to vote when they change addresses.

With help from the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, a mass bailout—possibly the largest one to date—is underway to free women and teenagers from Rikers Island.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that requires dark money donors to be revealed —thankfully, ahead of the November elections.

After 25 years of organizing, people in Morocco are celebrating the passage of a law that criminalizes sexual violence against women.

In India, a 158-year-old law that granted husbands more rights than wives has been overturned.

(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They aren’t advertisements, and I get no kickbacks.)

Please tell me your own nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES: Truthrooster@gmail.com.

Read old but still useful archives of Pronoia Resources: pronoiaresources.com

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning October 11

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):

My astrological analysis suggests that life is conspiring to render you extra excited and unusually animated and highly motivated. I bet that if you cooperate with the natural rhythms, you will feel stirred, playful, and delighted. So how can you best use this gift? How might you take maximum advantage of the lucky breaks and bursts of grace that will be arriving? Here's my opinion: be more focused on discovering possibilities than making final decisions. Feed your sense of wonder and awe rather than your drive to figure everything out. Give more power to what you can imagine than to what you already know. Being practical is fine as long as you're idealistically practical.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21):

How far is it from the Land of the Lost to the Land of the Lost and Found? What's the best route to take? Who and what are likely to provide the best help? If you approach those questions with a crisply optimistic attitude, you can gather a wealth of useful information in a relatively short time. The more research you do about the journey, the faster it will go and the more painless it will be. Here's another fertile question to meditate on: is there a smart and kind way to give up your attachment to a supposedly important thing that is actually quite burdensome?

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

In her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald described her main character like this: "She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did." That's a bit too much like fairy-tale wisdom for me to endorse it unconditionally. But I do believe it may sometimes be a valid hypothesis—especially for you Sagittarians in the coming months. Your faith in yourself and your desire to have interesting fun will be even more important than usual in determining what adventures you will have. I suggest you start now to lay the groundwork for this exhilarating challenge.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):

Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff taught that most people are virtually sleepwalking even during the day. He said we're permanently stuck on automatic pilot, prone to reacting in mechanical ways to every event that comes our way. Psychology pioneer Sigmund Freud had an equally dim view of us humans. He believed that it's our normal state to be neurotic; that most of us are chronically out of sync with our surroundings. Now here's the good news, Capricorn. You're at least temporarily in a favorable position to refute both men's theories. In fact, I'll boldly predict that in the next three weeks you'll be as authentic and awake and at peace as you've been in years.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18):

In the late 19th-century, American botanist George Washington Carver began to champion the nutritional value of peanuts. His influence led to the plant being grown and used more extensively. Although he accomplished many other innovations, including techniques for enhancing depleted soils, he became famous as the Peanut Man. Later in life, he told the story that while young he had prayed to God to show him the mystery of the universe, but God turned him down, saying, "That's for me alone." So George asked God to show him the mystery of the peanut, and God agreed, saying, "that's more nearly your size." The coming weeks will be a great time for you to seek a comparable revelation, Aquarius.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):

Every year, people discard 3.3 million pounds of chewing gum on the streets of Amsterdam. A company named Gumdrop has begun to harvest that waste and use it to make soles for its new brand of sneakers, Gumshoe. A spokesperson said the intention was to "create a product people actually want from something no one cares about." I'd love it if you were inspired by this visionary act of recycling, Pisces. According to my reading of the cosmic omens, you now have exceptional powers to transform something you don't want into something you do want.

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YOU'VE ALWAYS GOT MORE HELP AVAILABLE THAN YOU IMAGINE

What do you want to be when you grow up? Is it possible that you will eventually develop beautiful capacities and sublime understandings that you can't even imagine right now?

I might be able to help you move in the direction of becoming more of the person you were born to be. Tune in to my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

To listen to your Expanded Audio Horoscope online, go to RealAstrology.com.

You can also listen over the phone by calling 1-877-873-4888.

The cost is $6 per sign on the Web (discounts available for bulk purchases), or $1.99 per minute by phone.

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ARIES (March 21-April 19):

In his book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen describes his quest to glimpse the elusive and rarely seen creature in the Himalayas. "Its uncompromising yellow eyes, wired into the depths of its unfathomable spirit," he writes, give it a "terrible beauty" that is "the very stuff of human longing." He loves the snow leopard so much, he says, that it is the animal he "would most like to be eaten by." I bring this up, Aries, because now would be a good time, astrologically speaking, for you to identify what animal you would most like to be eaten by. In other words, what creature would you most like to learn from and be inspired by? What beautiful beast has the most to give you?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20):

Richard Nelson is an anthropologist who has lived for years with the indigenous Koyukon people of Alaska. He lauds their "careful watching of the same events in the same place" over long periods of time, noting how this enables them to cultivate a rich relationship with their surroundings that is incomprehensible to us civilized Westerners. He concludes, "There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains." I think that's excellent counsel for you to employ in the coming weeks.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20):

"It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you," writes Gemini author Jamaica Kincaid. I disagree with her because she implies that if you're human, your life is a complete and utter mystery; whereas my observation has been that for most of us, our lives are no more than eighty percent mystery. Some lucky ones have even deciphered as much as sixty-five percent, leaving only thirty-five percent mystery. What's your percentage? I expect that between now and November 1, you can increase your understanding by at least ten percent.

CANCER (June 21-July 22):

You Cancerians may not possess the mental dexterity of Virgos or the acute cleverness of Geminis, but you have the most soulful intelligence in the zodiac. Your empathetic intuition is among your greatest treasures. Your capacity to feel deeply gives you the ability to intensely understand the inner workings of life. Sometimes you take this subtle acumen for granted. It may be hard for you to believe that others are stuck at a high-school level of emotional skill when you have the equivalent of a PhD. Everything I just said is a prelude to my advice. In the coming weeks, I doubt you can solve your big riddle through rational analysis. Your best strategy is to deeply experience all the interesting feelings that are rising up in you.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):

Do you ever experience stress from having to be so interesting and attractive all the time? It may on occasion feel like an onerous responsibility to be the only artful egomaniac amidst swarms of amateur egomaniacs. I have a suggestion that might help. Twice a year, celebrate a holiday I call Dare to Be Boring Week. During these periods of release and relief, you won't live up to people's expectations that you keep them amused and excited. You'll be free to be solely focused on amusing and exciting yourself, even if that means they'll think you're dull. Now is an excellent time to observe Dare to Be Boring Week.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):

A Chinese proverb says, "Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." I'm happy to let you know that you are currently more receptive to this truth than maybe you have ever been. Furthermore, you have more power than usual to change your life in ways that incorporate this truth. To get started, meditate on the hypothesis that you can get more good work done if you're calm and composed than if you're agitated and trying too hard.

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HOMEWORK:

Name ten personal possessions you'd put in a time capsule to be opened by your descendants in 200 years. Testify at FreeWillAstrology.com.

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Submissions sent to Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter or in response to "homework assignments" may be published in a variety of formats at Rob Brezsny's discretion, including but not limited to newsletters, books, the Free Will Astrology column, and Free Will Astrology website. We reserve the right to edit submissions for length, style, and content. Requests for anonymity will be honored. We are not responsible for unsolicited submission of any creative material.

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Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter October 10, 2018