Inside Degrees Engl

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Inside Degrees

Developing Your Soul Biography Using the Chandra Symbols Ellias Lonsdale

ISBN 1-55643-241-0

In much the same way in which he characterized planets and asteroids as powerful, gendered beings in Inside Planets, Ellias Lonsdale gives new depth and nuance to degree analysis, an area often seen as technical or reduced to cliche.

Lonsdale builds on three main degree interpretations: Dane Rudhyar's concept of the Sabian Symbols described in The Astrology of Personality and An Astrological Mandala, Marc Edmund Jones's Sabian Symbols in Astrology, and John Sandbach's recent Chandra Symbols. Beginning in 1988, Lonsdale worked with his wife Sara in tracking the Sabian symbol, the Charubel Symbol (the most useful of the other sets of degree symbology) and the Chandra Symbol. After Sara died in 1993 Lonsdale worked with her (as Theanna) and their friend Alita "to pierce through the veil," as he says in his Introduction, "to find the angel behind each degree. This ultimate version is won from death and fused with rebirth and each word shows this power."

The degree symbols are most useful in elaborating a personal birth chart. One can learn about personal cycles from studying the place of a transiting or progressed planet by degree at a given time, revealing collective as well as personal timings. The Zodiac degrees also act as an

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oracle. One can open the collection anywhere for a given day, or in reponse to a question. The degrees will reveal what is happening now and if we are attentive and responsive to the cues, what is required of us. Comparing charts of friends and famous people who are known for certain qualities, one can gradually discriminate among the degrees.

These beautifully written and fully imagined readings of the Chandra degree symbols speak to a deep level of personal change and authenticity.

Ellias Lonsdale is the author of Star Rhythms, The Book of Theanna, and Inside Planets. He lectures widely on astrology and is an astrological counselor in Santa Cruz, California.

This book is dedicated to Theanna in loving devotion

Contents Introduction

Taurus in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Virgo in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Sagittarius in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Pisces in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Leo in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Aquarius in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Aries in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Libra in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Capricorn in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Cancer in the Degrees

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Gemini in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Scorpio in the Degrees

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 ~ Top ~

Acknowledgments and Special Note

We are using a sequence of signs discovered as the Atlantean Life Streams, the Star Genesis pattern. Instead of Aries into Taurus into Gemini, the seasonal sequence, this is Taurus into Virgo into Sagittarius and so on. Through the course of these books, this Star Genesis pattern is coming alive and progressively revealing its truth. Each degree of the Zodiac is an energy wave, calculated to start right away, e.g., 17 degrees Taurus is from 16 degrees 1 minute to 17 degrees 0 minutes.

For each degree, the Chandra symbol is the initial phrase. The following paragraph shows the interpretation we are giving.

Each and every planet in a given chart can be read by its Chandra symbol and depiction. First, meditate on the symbol itself, then feel the given planet's energy, and then read the description to match that planet in your chart.

With a grateful heart, I wish to acknowledge all of those who have helped with the degree work over the years.

In completing this book, my co-workers are Theanna Lonsdale and Alita Bonaventura. Those most instrumental in other ways are Isaiah Williams, Mark Borax, and John Sandbach.

A number of friends and clients have, through their interest and involvement over the years, sustained me, accompanied me, contributed profoundly. Here I would include Ladybelle McFarlin, Pamela Brown, Penelope Youngfeather, Cathy Rose, Diana Lonsdale, Chris Neumann, Robert Schiappacasse, Robin Macrae, Susanna Bluestein, Rob Callahan, and Charlyn Brenda.

My students have also been here with me in the evolving of this material. All of them are part of what we share here.

Introduction

I started out in Astrology with an enthusiasm born of a radical communal experience the previous year, which left me so stripped bare that I was ready for my destiny to strike. The year was 1970, the collective atmosphere supercharged with significance and power. It was appropriate to encounter Astrology in another radical commune and to go into it full force right away, as though I had just been waiting for it forever.

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Within months, I was staying at a more conventional commune in California and reading Dane Rudhyar's pivotal book The Astrology of Personality. A chapter there takes the Sabian Symbols for each degree of the Zodiac and interprets these aphoristically. When I came upon this section, I felt it to be the center of the whole star pattern. From that day to this,

investigation and research into the degrees has been my primary focus throughout a wide-ranging star work.

Soon after that, I encountered the only good book on the market to take the degrees further into depth and detail. This was Marc Edmund Jones's Sabian Symbols In Astrology. Here the project began to get really interesting. Jones was attempting to decode the degrees in a highly systematic and esoterically guided fashion. He was using the original version of the Sabian Symbols that had come through in the 1920s, the brief and bare version, but was interpreting these extensively and intensively. That book became my reference point for every reading over years to come.

I was blessed by destiny soon thereafter to find the original lecture lessons in Symbolical Astrology that Jones had done in the early 1930s, from which Rudhyar had drawn his revised degree interpretations. These were a gold mine. Not only did each and every degree have a brief interpretation by Jones that was far more accurate than either Rudhyars' version or Jones's later one, but the whole way he worked in the early days was for a small group of trained souls in the Sabian Assembly, and so Jones as esotericist could divulge far more in every word than he was to do later on in his public books. My own inward nature was far better served in this fashion, for I could begin to read the degrees for myself from an expanded awareness.

Still within those halcyon days of the early 1970s, I was shown Dane Rudhyars' new book on the degrees, An Astrological Mandala, before its publication and even tried to write a book review of it. This was an even more curious production than Jones's Sabian Symbol book. In both instances, these highly experienced and quite wise and mature souls were baffled by the degrees of the Zodiac, unable to get comfortable and to find a flow of inspiration and

attunement. After reading twenty or thirty books by each man, and looking into their degree interpretation, I was surprised to discover that the intellect blocks the imagination. Because I also found this same dilemma in subsequent encounters with those trying to interpret the degrees, I was made keenly aware, over and over again, that I would have to retain my own imaginative depths of seeing if I ever wished to give the degrees their rightful internal sounding.

Ten years passed before I found anybody writing in a major way about the degrees of the Zodiac. During those years, I dove further and deeper all the time into the Sabian Symbols and their meanings--in a chart, in a cycle, for divination, or just as themselves. And although I found a psychic, Chris Neumann, to reinterpret the Sabian Symbols in an intriguing fashion, I was somewhat baffled by the degrees. Something was blocking free interpretation. I never stopped battling, but I could not get in.

Finally, at the end of my cycle of knocking on a door and being refused entry, Eric Schroeder came out with a degree interpretation keyed to the Sabian Symbols, but also encompassing two other earlier versions of degree symbology. His book, Zodiac, was extremely stimulating to me. Jones had mentioned him prominently in Sabian Symbols, and now here he was, the man who had obsessed upon the degrees, trying to interpret them perfectly. Because I was in the early 1980s at my lowest point of this lifetime, the most asleep I have ever been and

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therefore the most negative, I hardly noticed at the time that Schroeder was darkly discouraging and depressive in his entire outlook. So I went down even further with the degrees, seeking the bottom of things way down under.

The Sabian Symbols never would have gotten me there, to the center of the mystery. In retrospect, it is clear that their quality is to suggest, to imply, to elusively bring such a slight clue. Other versions of interpretation of these symbols have come into my hands since

Schroeder's did in the early 1980s and they are consistently in that mode of giving a taste, but nothing fundamentally nourishing.

In late 1984, I found the book, Degree Analyses Part II: Chandra Symbols in the Horoscope, by John Sandbach (Seek-It Publications). This was my long-anticipated breakthrough. Sandbach had been guided the year before to tune into each degree and was shown an image to be called the Chandra Symbols. In complete contrast with the Sabian Symbols, these are concrete, magically imbued with a quality of imaginative wholeness. Sandbach himself gives a brief interpretation of these symbols, but he makes the same mistake as those who searched into the Sabian Symbols. He sticks with a rigid intellectual orientation.

By 1986, I was ready to enter the realm of degree interpretation in a living way, with full imaginative power retained and sought vigorously. My wife Sara read an image to me and I interpreted it within a context of attunement to a guiding light, a power of seeing beyond the personal intellect altogether. This first serious attempt, which we called the Chandra

Channelings, was successful in staying close to the images and truly bringing them back alive. In that same time frame, I was at last able to tune in with beings of light in order to receive personal and universal mediation and assistance. My entire world of inner and outer work was blasting free dramatically.

After teaching classes in these Chandra Symbols and becoming more and more fluent with them, an opportunity came to me that was hugely transformative. In early 1988 the beings we had been working with suggested that we could tune into them much more fully and attempt a truly comprehensive cosmic renewal of the Zodiac through the degrees. We would track with the Sabian Symbol, the Charubel Symbol (which we considered to be the most useful of the other sets of degree symbology), the Chandra Symbol, and then a summarizing paragraph to bring the whole degree together. This time, we would work slowly, thoroughly, with precision and detail.

Each week, for a year and a half, we tuned in to a few degrees and lived with the

interpretations as our life blood. I would hear it and feel it, speak it slowly, and Sara would write it all down. This was our labor of love together.

When, in the summer of 1989, this comprehensive cosmic version of degree interpretation was complete, I felt that it was definitive, and that at last I had done what I had set out to do. Each degree was right there before us, in an inspiring vista, profound and stirring to the spirit within.

However, as it has turned out since, this was really only the beginning. We wrote book after book the same way in 1990, 1991, and 1992, all on Astrology, all spiritually attuned and wondrous to participate in co-creating. And then something happened which I cannot accurately reduce to words.

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My wife, Sara, had cancer tumors spreading, and was as well in a spiritual crisis of even greater proportions than her health crisis. Our entire effort concentrated on attempting to pull her through. By late 1993, the health crisis had become terminal, deadly. And in perfect synchronicity, Sara's spiritual crisis came to its peak power. When Sara, under severe

pressures, worked through her spiritual crisis and came out the other side, her physical body could not go with her--it was too ravaged by the tumors. When her body died, her spirit flew free, and started a path of work with me and with our perfect companion Alita that will be going on for a very long time to come, in an ever-unfolding path of dying and reborning. The three of us have gotten together for many kinds of inner work from early 1994 onward. As soon as we were ready, we collaborated on tuning in to the Chandra Symbols afresh and writing the version you now have in your hands. What was the breakthrough that made this version so utterly different from all the previous ones?

I would tune in to Sara, who is now Theanna, and she and I, in spirit realms, would combine forces completely to pierce through the veil to find the angel behind each degree and let her show us the essence of what is there, of what needs to be known. I would speak it aloud and Alita would responsively write it down so that we could live these degrees fully. This ultimate version is won from death and fused with rebirth and each word shows this power.

Throughout the time I've been so engrossed in investigating, researching, plumbing the core meaning of the Zodiac degrees, I have been a full-time Astrological counselor, teacher, and explorer. For those unfamiliar with what degree interpretation can do in the many Astrological applications, here are a few of the experiences I have had over the years.

The basic application is in a personal birth chart reading. A mental habit greatly obstructs the work of most Astrologers. They think they know already what a given sign of the Zodiac, let us say, really means, how far it extends, what its parameters are. Then they apply this

preexisting idea any time that sign shows up in a chart.

What I have consistently and persistently found is that a sign is a vast land, full of unknowns, not to be mentally tamed. I use the Chandra Symbols and their interpretations to individualize, and fine tune the reading, to drop it down out of Astrological abstractions and cliches and into an imaginative journey, a shamanic initiation into which each one of us is called--through the position of the Sun in our birth charts, or the Moon, or any planet, or the angles, or whatever we need to focus on.

Each time, I allow the degree to work upon me, to show me how it is working through a given lifetime, a certain destiny of a particular individual. And I make sure to be wide open, to be free of preconceptions. I tap the direct energies of the degree to assist me in staying very focused and grounded and specific in all of my perceptions.

The more extended applications of these degrees are multiple. You can easily learn a lot about cycles by seeing where a transitting or progressed planet is by degree at a given time. They reveal collective timings, as well as personal ones. As an oracle, they are unsurpassed. By whatever manner of selection, the Zodiac degrees will reveal what is happening now and what is required of us, if we are attentive and responsive to the cues.

My own favorite way to work with the Chandra Symbols, as well as with the Sabian Symbols and other sets, is to build up examples from people I have worked with and from famous

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people who mean something to me, and to quite gradually discover the degrees by how they operate in many instances. I now have thousands of charts to work with in this way.

There is definitely one caution I wish to offer in working with the degrees in practical application. Nothing can be wiser than you are. You cannot use a wisdom vehicle and hook into it to tell you things that you yourself refuse to learn and come to understand. All degree work is entirely as valid and accurate as the one who is working with those degrees can allow to happen inside of their own soul. This should be obvious, but seldom is.

Perhaps I might also add a word concerning why the degrees in this version of Inside

Degrees are so very condensed and visionary in their wording. The guiding force behind our work has insisted that we call forth an Earth dimension in everything we do. If we were going to stay high and spiritually correct, we could speak in a more mentally straightforward style. But if we wish to get under the skin of all the contemporary ways to think about things, we are compelled to say it fast, say it strong, and put a great dose of visionary power into the description. In doing so we give a kick start to the dormant imagination and help it to get on even terms with the intellect so that a qualitative knowing can be attained.

I feel very comfortable and at ease with the interpretations in this book. I know that it will take a while for what is here to sink in and flesh itself out. But all my favorite reading is of books that do it this way. We need heart and guts, intuitive flow and awesome possibilities, if the work is to serve the living future now stretching ahead of us all.

My desire is for this Star Genesis, this not-so-Astrological approach to speak for itself, to show its own ways, to be self-evident. If the intellect must yield to subtler awareness, each one can find their own bearings best if the degree angel speaks in her true inward tongue and is not excessively interpreted within limited cultural models.

Or to say it bluntly: Our knowingness is far broader, higher, deeper than we have been living in recent centuries. It's time to restore the missing levels. The degrees are the perfect starting point for such a venture.

~ Contents ~

Taurus TAURUS 1

A red garnet ring. The garnets glow.

A passion for bearing ripe fruits. Feeling transported by an ongoing realization that you are in your own element, doing what you need to do and subtly fired by an inner purpose that clarifies everything. The glow of your central intent warms you through. This quality of soul is simple and direct. It makes for a primal, elemental presence. One cannot grasp complex matters in this sphere. But you know what you need to know, and you're on the beam so palpably that nothing much matters except being there. You distinctly charge the atmosphere with a pranic renewal, a source sustenance, and the whole idea is to make way for the

universal life-force to stream right in and bless with its all-forgiving radiance. ~ Contents ~

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TAURUS 2

Wilting flowers form a graceful pattern in a vase.

Supreme resignation. A twilight soul mood. You adapt to the limits imposed by time and situation. Dreaming ceaselessly. Waiting forever. Not very attached, not very involved; fostering illusions, fixed notions, and habitual states. At the mercy of context. Somewhat unable to change. Prone to multiple weaknesses. Self-indulgent. Old-fashioned--remembering when. Ancestors in the blood. You have a fabulous imaginative capacity but very little active life--indwelling the phases of the moon and the recesses of the world. In a suspended soul condition, drifting with the tide. Sweet, naive, and wishful. Solitude and ever-afters. A wondrous soul underneath a pile of old stuff, wanting the best for all.

~ Contents ~ TAURUS 3 A sleepwalker.

Everything begins with an inward cast, and then if you wish to get anywhere you must go there on the inside and meet yourself there when you arrive. You feel a desire to memorize the territory of all the inner ways--to remember them, to recognize them and to be able to follow them when it counts. You feel like you've been taught in the dream state, shown everything in dreamless sleep and through dreams. You're subtly and pervasively closely accompanied by a protective guiding spirit. Held within the soul's alembic. Entrusted to the angels. Living in threshold sensitivity, attuned to the edge. Led by the spirit through darkness into light. Subliminal, enchanted, anxious, and at peace. Always searching for something more. Remembering in your soul the lost Earth ways and giving over to spirits, you belong to the infinite and wander through the finite worlds. You are like a stranger, knowing something else is at stake here. Something else is going on here. Something else is completely involved. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 4

A man talking in his sleep.

A psychic faculty is dreamt into and sustained, leaving everything wide open for passive absorption. Going so deep in there, an altered state, that you become karmically thrown into the dilemma of translation between the worlds. Being used by astral forces, and learning to adapt. Indwelling a place reserved for those who are not ready to activate. But, oh, the dreams, the vapors. Remembrance. Recapitulation. Return. Longing for connection between the worlds, you may be able to take the underworld route through if disciplined attunement is fostered. Creative powers are dammed up and filtered through into naive wistfulness. You wait, hope, and are drawn back and back until the inner worlds have been heard and respected and the balance can be restored.

~ Contents ~ TAURUS 5

Tiny porcelain figures of people.

Wandering along the forgotten places, you feel saturated with memories and reflections. Enchanted and left alone to sift through all of it in your own good time. Subtly and pervasively removed from what is going on around, you are adrift in your own inward pictures. What comes of this is highly variable. It can be a fertile cycle to melt into the moon and come out refreshed and rewoven. It can be heavily seductive and habit-forming, in which

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case you sink into a world apart and are really held there in subtle chains. Or it can be a secret doorway into the faery kingdoms in order to commune with those who animate the elements and the inner worlds. One way or another, it is one of those regions that you can never

navigate through unless you belong there. And if you do, you may be lost there or you may be found there, with everything dependent upon your heart force and your depth of resolve to stay, faithfully, with the subtle cues.

~ Contents ~ TAURUS 6 A pink diamond.

The heart feels everything. It burns with a fever. Inside the burning something marvelous is forming. Grace permits the realization of the heart's desires. You become a vessel to

demonstrate, to share the beauty, the love, and the light. Yet all of this is implicit, is inherent, is inward. It is not seen by outer eyes. You are warming through slowly, contemplatively, those qualities of soul that are best entered upon free from reflection. The inner life is rich beyond measure with seeds which will be fertilized and are given forth in the fullness of time, with a consummate touch of having been through the fire to attain what is true and lasting. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 7

A large ruby inscribed with a prayer.

A beautiful dream that comes true. Conceiving in your heart that a fresh life current is here to be met in the physical. Being magnetized to the spot where the New Earth arises. You feel deeply drawn to give yourself over completely to what the new life-wave asks. Sensing acutely that this is all that counts, and suffering for all of those who are shut off from the bounty. Knowing how hard it is to feel dejected and forsaken, and never forgetting the ache, the longing, the distances, and what it takes to earnestly clasp new life and realize you belong to the heavenly kingdom in the Earth and will never again be out in the cold.

A very complicated hedge maze.

Self-confounding. Fascinated, you are engrossed by the fabulous disattunement you seem to be stuck with. Suspended, enchanted, held fast by ancient errors, rendered safe or innocuous. Being held down by an old curse and not being able to find any way out of it. Nothing comes together. Meanwhile, you are entertained by myriad factors as diversions, living out secondary circuits, trying to be content. You're good at reality adjustment, practiced in the art of making it work somehow, but deeply frustrated, profoundly alienated, and existentially doubting just about everything in sight. Waiting as patiently as you can for something to shift somewhere, anywhere. And becoming quite witty and bemused, with a biting edge that says "it is not funny."

A talkative woman with tape over her mouth.

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truth--that everything personally generated fails to satisfy. Spirit is ached for in its absence. Something missing. Massive pride screeching to a halt. A very high vibration. Inward places calling you. But the abyss features radical self-overcoming. And there is nothing to say, everything to do, with nobody left to do it--except the forgotten one inside who knows the way.

A man exhaling clouds of iridescent smoke.

Having something to say, a lot to show for your efforts. Bringing through archetypal realizations, and giving yourself over to all that this involves. The perfect instrument for something new to be revealed. Selfless service obedient to the Gods. Played-through by visions, pictures, images, impressions that gather to form breathtaking wholes. Someone who has worked upon this faculty for a long time and now it is quintessentially ripe. You feel the tremendous surging momentum to say it, name it, evoke the spirit, what needs to be seen. When dazzling gifts are in the works, the destiny is already written in the book of life. It is simply a matter of getting out of the way, paying attention, becoming exceedingly disciplined. And then gathering a fresh synthesis for the many to recognize themselves reflected with transparent, evocative accuracy, a perfect portraiture, direct from nature's workshop, cooked up for the occasion.

A woman with flames for hair.

Direct, full on, and unstoppable. Pushing for optimal outcomes, you are self-convinced and hard-driving. So passionate about your own desire and impulse that anything off to the side is far out of the picture, and all that counts is to have your say, to make an impact. Something long-gathering suddenly emerging as rage, self-intent, need, and craving. Personal to the Nth degree. Almost solipsistic. "Me" mattering after being counted out. You feel the surge of power of someone who recognizes that they are bearing a life-force that can no longer be put down, and you follow the brightness wherever it takes you, blindly, insensately, and

beautifully. ~ Contents ~ TAURUS 12

A very old elephant.

Nostalgia and intimately familiar worlds in that each character is known very well. Living inside a hologram which contains every world you have ever known. It is slow, reflective, interior, and recedes into lunar caverns. All is moonlit and invokes philosophical reflections. There is time. There is room. There is permission to be one who brings back the country, the quiet times, the special touches, who quietly, unobtrusively keeps the fiber steady.

Resourceful and unique--the very best of small town life. A trail left to follow. Nothing is ever lost. The stones do not forget.

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TAURUS 13

A treatise on imaginary creatures.

Pretending to be caught up in the game, playing out the image. Everything becomes contrived and spins out ever further. You have an appetite for self-confounding, musing upon what it might be like. Stepping back from one thing to think about another thing, leading to irony and reliance upon wit. Standing away from the world. Caught in a byway of the personal self and wandering aimlessly but purposefully. The ultimate intent is to see this one through, to take it on and play it out and be through with it. But meanwhile it is beguiling and ensnaring to live so far inside with so little real outlet, and such a load of concepts and memories and desires to carry around everywhere you go, as though this were what individuality means.

An old lady selling bunches of violets on a street corner.

Caught inside a strange predicament--you no longer belong to worlds you always dreamed into before, and you have only a light connection with worlds calling you forward from here. Caught in a time warp, being neither this nor that. It is a stark and merciless dilemma. Your heart is divided between memories and visions, sentiment and knowledge. Inside this

quandary, something else is going on. You are distracted from all solid allegiances in order to overhaul your way of being, even while remaining stubbornly adamant and resistant. You get around your own paranoid system by subtle and subliminal means, eroding the ego base and bringing yourself through a humiliating stage. Make yourself ready for deeper challenges ahead by stripping away your importance; you who have leaned back hard on self-importance for your very identity, and who now must let go despite not wanting to at all. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 15

His best friend sings a song at his funeral.

Love penetrates all barriers. It arises the greatest wherever it most profoundly needed. And it is perpetually astonishing in its fullness, its rich sustaining power. Love is also held in a grieving and a mourning for what was and is no longer and sometimes love becomes enrapt in a twilight mood, and can no longer see through the sentiments and the attachments to touch the limitless source of love--staying attuned to that place. Love can be a rocky ride. It pulls in great lessons. It feels too much. And love is wedded to death, which it sometimes wishes to divorce itself from. Love is a limitless doorway and discovers how to navigate all the realms it is called into fluently, willingly, and gladly, stripping away all the ideas about what it should look like and how everything needs to be to gratify and appease and make secure when love needs none of these things to endure.

A young girl and boy explore a perfume counter.

Weaving polarities adroitly with alchemical awareness of what can come from the right combinations. You are fascinated and awestruck by all the various combinations, facets, and ways the life-force distributes itself and plays itself out. The rapt admirer of the wisdom and beauty of nature, transfixed by what happens around here. Coming at things always from yet another side, yet never feeling it is enough. There is more to be done, infinitely more to

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partake in and enhance. The world is an open book. And it magnetically, almost hypnotically draws your attention and interest to what is needed next, to what is emergent and outstanding as life matches dreams and dreams encompass fantastic variety and vivid spectrum to lose yourself in and discover everything through, from one end of the Earth to the other.

A pomegranate broken open.

The spilling out of blood and guts--arriving at the critical point where it all comes out. Huge relief and release. Something held forever, with great tension and pressure, yet destiny brings such a reckoning of all the places at once that you will postpone it as long as you can. The freeing up of karmas when all else is lost. The glory in defeat. The great turnaround is always in you, and waiting for it is the hardest thing you will ever do. It has to be so ripe to bursting--the moment that counts. Timing is bursting--the great art. Everyone freed as you are freed. Nothing held back any longer ever again.

A woman with hundreds of breasts.

The fruit of the vine. Limitless supply is the rhythmical law of the Divine Mother. There are those who are given over to the Divine Mother and her earthly counterpart, She of Earth, and who are called upon to give of something beyond them and to do so selflessly. A heavy responsibility to take on, because there are no boundaries to it. A certain rapture in being able to serve in this fashion, with multiple undertones of realization and fruition. Yet the ritual gesture, the signature, is so given over to the Mother that what dominates every breath is the explicit need that is here--to live inside that need, to be surrounded by it everywhere, to know only that there is somebody, that is everybody here who asks, who must have sustenance and inspiration. The growing into the task, the becoming worthy of the investiture and the singular dedication to complete to the Mother's satisfaction all that is intended in perfect conscientious endowment.

A crown turns into goat horns.

A remarkable instinct for the next lesson. Finding it, learning it, and drawing everything out of it that you can. Specialized in destiny activation and interested in nothing else. Purposively driven to take up karmic lessons all the way. Wildly given over to what is taken on. Working the territory as hard as you can. Making way for something new by wearing out the old. Assigned to tough situations, yet knowing it is appropriate. Super strong, and especially tenacious and relentless. In deepest essence, sacrificing yourself so that something can happen here that is going to take a lot of doing. And inside it all, you are curiously resigned to

whatever arises, not very concerned because long range results mean everything here. And a moment's or a lifetime's discomfort is a small price to pay when destiny is truly involved. ~ Contents ~

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TAURUS 20

A fork in the road with a blank sign post.

Getting inside of things. Discovering what they are like, when you have no idea any longer what you want out of things or where anything really is going. All the riches of subtle texture can only begin to arise now, and to touch your soul. This journey has gone on forever, but now the deep Earth calls you once again and you cannot refuse. All roads lead to this same place, where it all flips over and you're tumbled to the inside where you meet yourself for the first time. This was not who you expected to see. This other self has lost everything, but has found its way to be here at last, on the inside of the world, ready for anything, no preferences, nothing to accomplish, nowhere really to go--just here, in the fiber of existence, home free. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 21

A statue of Hermes decked with brightly colored garlands.

Hermetic wisdom revived. Two extreme polarities: the far inside and the far outside. Expressively playful, tricky, fluent, and engaging. Inwardly contemplative, studious,

brooding, and lost to the world. Guided from within to stay entirely secluded and solitary in your inner life, yet transmuting your solemnities into accessible bits and pieces in all familiar contexts. A way to render unto Caesar and still serve the highest. An arduous track. The ultimate challenge--to throw the self off and take the self on as it is appropriate. Strategic incarnation, under special assignment.

A blindfolded woman who sees the future.

Witnessing dispassionately the flow of time. Standing outside of all linear progression and knowing what is likely to happen here. Supremely disengaged from surface affairs, even lightly dismissive of all secondary considerations, but tuned right in to the thread of prophecy and inner vision. Granted a certain grace to follow the inner track. And serving a larger function as part shaman, part seer, and part commonsensical advisor. Salty wit, earthy and pithy, no nonsense. You know where the bones are buried. Penetrating insight. A throwback to simpler worlds. One who warns of dangers ahead, and is not amused by factions and

fragments and phantoms of common assumption. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 23

A salamander glowing red-orange.

Burning up with the inner flame of creative activity in the soul realms. The inner life raging with power--an insistent force. A level of attunement to the central flame of your being that will not quit. The impassioned desire to manifest perfectly what lives inside. The alchemical intention to burn away the dross and return to pristine selfhood at long last. An extremely sharply motivated path of development. Difficult to harness, yet the mastery called for is just what you seek to embody, and anything more reasonбble seems easy and lazy. One-pointed drive to strip away all but self and be true to self in a fashion which will burn a hole in the world.

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TAURUS 24

A man with no mouth.

Nothing to say, everything to do. The self cannot be articulated because it is far too busily pressed out into emergency mobilization twenty-four hours a day. No personal life, no personal world, no personal self. Just fantastic availability to the call, the collective vigil, entered upon willingly and selflessly. The demands and rigors of this position and stance are punishing and extreme. You are so hardpressed, so rabidly attentive that nothing else exists. The assignment is clear, brutally so. Be on the spot at every level, maintain order, keep everything going and stay tuned to everything unusual and strange. Follow it out, keep it in your sights and make absolutely sure that you stay sober, integrity sworn and minutely diligent to hold the center and uphold the law with a steadfastness that is beyond belief, and simply true.

Bees returning to their hive.

Thematic worlds coming round again just as before, just like always. The highest and the best, maintained and sustained beautifully, impeccably, superlatively. Knowing inside that what counts, what is essential, is to abide, to be. You are a vast world unto yourself, an

extraordinary network of intersecting dynamics. But the witness consciousness is blissfully sitting back in a restful perch, letting everything go by. And in the very center of this

dispassion and wakeful scrutinizing, one indwells a Buddha realization attained by hard work in many lives and now being your innermost identity in an identityless way.

Grotesque rocks in a sand garden.

The inward image and the outward reflection are worlds apart. Building up inside to a state of being that carries immense challenges. You see your own personal nature as an objective universal force to be reckoned with, and persist in seeing egocentrically. Preferring massively your own company, contained within yourself, imaginatively self-enchanted. Yet also capable of radical turnabouts and rebirths. Awakenings false and true, great and small. Knowing yourself to be somebody special. Self-consciousness enshrined. A dead-end or a path, oblivious or realizing the way of things, getting out of the way or being squarely in the way. Self-importance and its overcoming.

A man sculpturing hedges into animal farms.

Making a great deal of something out of almost nothing is the mark of fantasy or uninhibited imagination. You prefer to be presented with basic, simple, and ordinary things. Inside your soul you turn these into what they originally were, releasing their primal power. When alchemy runs this close to the bone, it is astounding what it can do. Tackling longstanding knots and obstacles of every kind is sensed as nourishment and opportunity. A sacrificial incarnation can best frame itself in fantasy and imagination and thereby hug the edge between worlds perfectly. The path here is to stay under while peeking over the top, and to play it as

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straight as can be, while coming from an irrepressible source that can come through this peculiar form with flying colors.

A man making candles out of beeswax.

The sweetness is in the returning to those sacred places always known and now being at ease there. The natural man strips away false layers and finds somebody underneath who is poignantly familiar and resonantly true. The search, the quest, the process. The intricate, extended process. For everything depends upon entering the process and giving yourself over to the master-craftsman-hands of the Creator Beings. You are simply a seed blown by the wind, and to become this completely is blissful fruition inwardly smiled into being. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 29

A man amuses himself by drawing strange shapes.

Crystallized imagination. The inside of the inside remembered and evoked whimsically. There is no form, no pattern, no binding reality. Dreaming the world into being from a greatly bemused stance--other. Twinkling observer-witness consciousness. Off on tangents that call, a life, a cycle, a realm set aside for inventive play without boundaries. You feel exultant in the freedom. Swept away beautifully. Answerable to nobody and nothing except the muse. ~ Contents ~

TAURUS 30

Snakes at rest on a rock in the sun.

Remembering everything. Living in retrospect. In touch and in tune with myriad pasts. You view these at leisure, lingeringly. Sometimes you go through them again in a very familiar fashion and other times all you have to do is see it. But there are so many karmas and

everything feels like it has been going on forever. A certain soul mood of nostalgia laced with regrets. The backward gaze cannot quite be shaken off, for mighty things have happened. And as you ruminate upon all of it, you deeply, inwardly decide slowly and gradually your future and much about a larger future. With the keynote being whether you can come to a true affirmation of this earth process and journey, or whether instead you subtly curse or scorn what you are reviewing, simply because it is all too much, and it is so tempting to put it down or in its place, and to feel superior in a way that blights the future.

~ Contents ~

Virgo VIRGO 1

A volcano erupting at night.

Burning through the restrictions of the day. Taking on and transmuting the world of ordinary consciousness. Inwardly erupting with all that it leaves out, you become a conduit for the suppressed, the repressed, and the denied facets of self and life. Exposing yourself to the

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onslaught of conventional ideas and their consequences. Aching and longing to turn the world around, you are given to subtle or obvious ways to channel and express what lives inside, you feel intensively committed to bringing it all together within the ordinary compass of everyday life. Saturated with deep impressions of what this Earth is moving through, you are being given the chance to stand in for that--to bring it, and perhaps even to become it.

~ Contents ~ VIRGO 2

A man hanging upside down from a tree.

Out of phase with the personal ego-mind, in phase with the greater laws, you are absolutely forced to stay put, to sit tight, to watch and listen and say and do as little as possible. A fair witness to what is happening all around, with no personal vantage point. Being a truth vessel--perfectly designed to hold the truth and nothing but. Uncomprehending of perversity and corruption, and naive to all radical distortion, but you are surpassingly aware of what is good and what is true and of the ways in which the greater laws are being played out in this world. Gifted in observing and appreciating how the Divine Will prevails, how the light penetrates the darkness. Simply there to be with the constructive and the upbuilding energies and forces. The pure idealist in the perfect position to be strictly transparent.

A woman doing delicate embroidery.

Painstaking labors in several different planes of existence. The mind being restrung slowly and systematically and by erosion of what was assumed or taken as a given. Multiple worlds crying out for refinement, repair, repolarization, and release. The most sensitized and self-conscious and fine-tuned way of being imaginable. Attending to subtle, underlying echoes and resonances. Lost in time. Existing in a void or parallel world or altered state; doorkeeper between the worlds in an unlikely form. But inside the spiral, there lives a knowingness and a beingness in tune with Earth and Heaven, and it is rhythmicallysynchronized with the ancient and the future, the forgotten and the unknown. Just there, to be with the transition, and stay in touch throughout.

A small piglet dressed in baby's clothes.

Trying exceedingly hard to fit perfectly within prescribed standards and the attitudes and values that are traditional or conventional. Intent on memorizing each gesture, every turn of phrase. You are almost hysterically straight and narrow outwardly in juxtaposition to how you really see, feel, and respond to things. Inside there is quavering, an intensely alive and

overwhelmingly primal life-force generator. But any way you try to put it forth is troubling. There is no place for utterly other, totally maverick spirits in the midst of ordinary life. So you engage in a thousand disguises, try absolutely everything, ultimately ending up forced to be transparent, direct, throbbingly real, and so ardently sincere that it becomes just the way you are. And you need to be part-of-the-mix as the ingredient we all need, so that the Earth comes through and speaks and dances and reminds the others that they too are surpassingly strange. ~ Contents ~

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VIRGO 5

A skull on a pole at the entrance to a dark wood.

The mind of death always knows ahead of time each and every danger, problem, and

dilemma. The Cassandra complex warning self and world of what will go wrong. Cautioning, tempering, and suppressing, you can afford no mistakes. The mind is set upon doing it just right from start to finish. When there are hitches and snags, you hit the roof with qualms and doubts. The self against itself. The mind standing over the spontaneous one and saying, "No, you can't go that way." Forebodings are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The self proves itself right and wrong. Right about nothing working, and wrong to be in that position. This is a mind-set to be eroded and worn out, supplanted by fresh inquiry with no agenda, no worry, and just the truth that there is death in everything and life to follow if you let go into it completely.

A banyan tree that creates an entire forest.

A towering stature. Containing within yourself a vast creative force that can fill the world with its diverse and multiplex awareness. You have a graphic ability to evoke, to capture, to epitomize a realm, a world, to draw it forth, to highlight it. And this then extends into many others, such that the illumination, the fresh angle is sharply relevant and universally resonant. Experiencing for yourself the wisdom of the ages, proving it out afresh by experimentation and open discovery. Piercing to the core with your fluent presence in this world. Saying in so many different ways "Here it is, here it is again. I have found it over here"--the living proof that nature is totally alive, that the creative power is everywhere, and that all of it yearns to be given voice, to be celebrated, to be acknowledged by one who can reach to the vasts and penetrate to the details and make macrocosm and microcosm one.

A pie thrown in someone's face.

Action and reaction. Reflexive mirroring of self by world and world by self. You are forced to confront yourself everywhere. Starkly compelled to deal with karmas of the past returned: who did what to whom. Conflict, strife, tension, and pressure. Mischief and the unexpected . On guard. Agreeing to meet yourself through others and to find intimate reverberations from every side. You have an overwhelming experience of running into the consequences for even what you thought--a wrap-around world of breakthroughs, quandaries, alliances and dangers. On red alert twenty-five hours a day, knowing that you cannot turn your back on threat or opportunity. Everything is obvious and supersubtle, gross and elusive, tightly known and vastly beyond conception.

A man thinking up names for colors.

The mind is a hilarious thing. It populates the world with its many ideas on top of what is there and then can no longer see things in themselves in their pristine light. We trade direct experience for a culturally rich consciousness. This mental set is marvelously intricate and detailed. Becoming conversant with the human sphere takes up all your time and energy, drawing you ever further into complexity, multiplicity, and appreciation for the beauty and the

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brilliance of the best in culture and civilization. The refinements and elaborations are infinite in scope. You become an expert, a central force, an adept in working the mind's magic. In the largest picture, this is a perfecting of human intelligence in its concrete, penetrating power, combined with its far-ranging spread into variety and universal brotherhood. It remains narrow-spectrum, rational throughout, but does this up the best it can be done and a little bit better.

A man mixing cement.

Jammed tight with concepts. Thinking about what you are doing. Interpretations, evaluations, opinions, and surmises. Void of heart-force. Believing in progress, bent upon success. You strictly, rigidly carry out what the mind dictates, a form of ignorance that is very clever. Something missing in the soul. Compensations on top of compensations. Exceedingly busy, hyper, with plans, projects, and enterprises. You are very good at achieving results. Riveted to the phenomena. But prone to casting shadows that come back to haunt. Shortsighted and hooked into what is convenient and pragmatic, perfect in small outer things--all of existence becomes small outer things.

~ Contents ~ VIRGO 10 A pin cushion.

Turning yourself into an object of common use, you literally and mentally take on the

maintenance and the minor and the mediocre to keep the outer mind preoccupied. Meanwhile, deeper inside you are far elsewhere. By being efficient, productive, helpful, and exemplary in outward behavior you make very sure to throw everyone off track and keep your world at bay. The inner one is connecting with worlds that are best spared curious prying. The

innocuousness and the miscellaneous doing-good are laid on thick. The inner life burns with so many possibilities, each one of which is nursed along, keeping the flame alive. Even though the maidenly outer one is so good at pretending that there is nobody here but we good people, doing our best to keep everything going neatly and splendidly.

A four-year-old girl dressed as a nurse.

Innocence has its ways to persist. You can grow up, yet retain the stance of the novice, the beginner, the wonder-worker. You foster a knack of renewing your original, basic values and way of being at every critical juncture--a quality unique and unmistakable. At any age and within all situations, coming at things as though we all just got here and we are simply trying things on for size. The best of this quality is a sticking to prenatal resolves of a lofty integrity that refuses steadfastly to fall under the weight of the critical mind. The worst of this quality is that in its zeal, its dedication, and its self- insistency, it invariably puts others to shame and generates in others the self-consciousness and self-judgement you are yourself bypassing. Therefore, what is good for yourself proves to be bad for others, and results in a quandary, a confusing and puzzling situation, eventually impelling you to add one borrowed ingredient: the ability to take yourself lightly.

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A dog sniffing a dead animal.

Searching for clues, you probe the straight line and the intricate curve, tapping the mind's powers for intricate operations. Prone to find the pathological, the destructive, and the inverted, the bloodhound sleuth checking everything out everywhere. Curious, fascinated, alive with speculations, hunches, notions. Wanting to track something down, to get resolution. Needing to know, poking about in the dark. You possess remarkable senses and an almost purely telepathic mind, tremendously skilled and adroit. But you can get poisoned by

skepticisms and by too heavy an exposure to the dark underbelly of things. Desperate to learn how to also accept and embrace all that is, unconditionally, to let go into rightfulness and goodness in the very thick of things being rotten and pervasively wrong.

A man with hair on his back.

Peppery, fiery, contentious, and spoiling for a fight. Born ready, shot from a cannon, one of a kind--volatile in the far extreme. Convinced of things. Taking sides, even inventing them, you are impelled by the polarized consciousness to be so fiercely partisan that the destructive overwhelms the constructive. Incited to riot by what is wrong with the world--not reconciled, not accepting, not at peace. Self-righteous and headstrong. In perfect moments, ebullient and magnificent and the most charming a being can be, much of the time you are feuding and bickering and blindly consumed by the lower mind. Keenly good at self-deception, the world's best at blind self-fidelity. The perfect promoter of the unpopular cause. But you feel tormented by the way in which all of this perpetuates itself and cannot find freedom. You search for a way through, hungry for self-overcoming, and needing so badly to emerge from the thicket of the mind, to be affirmative of existence with no doubts making the world intolerable to sit in one more moment.

A long steel screw.

Set in place, the die is cast--the past determines the future. Held within patterns and

syndromes of the habitual and the pragmatic--literalistically identified within strictly severe frameworks. You are at the mercy of conditionings and programmings, and chronically mentally obstructive, up against the grind of the outer mind droning onward. Radically non-creative, noninnovative, you follow the party line. Waiting until the loss of real direction has played itself out endlessly, and hoping that a different phase altogether will knock you over the head and pull you onward from this dead end.

A man inherits a vast fortune.

Aristocracy takes many forms. Whether by karmic predisposition or by bloodline or both, being granted the ultimate pedigree for serving effectively. Those who have ruled can serve. Those who have mastered can give themselves over. Those who have attained can extract the

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essence of what they have come to before and utterly discard the rest. Showered with blessings. Filled to overflowing with the streams of your background, you are yet definitely motivated to use all this as a springboard and not to lean back on it. You feel the impulse to renew gifts, treasures and mysteries--to revitalize the old streams, to make relevant and essential what has previously proven to be steady and enduring. And most of all, endowed with a fluency in drawing from the well something fresh and new, and being so at home in bringing it all through that you become an individual here in the midst of things, who just happens to know and be familiar with just about anything you need to access from the well that never runs dry.

A jar of camphor crystals.

The mind profoundly divided between the supremely constructive and upbuilding, and the radically destructive and fragmenting. The intention is to gather the best, to do the right thing, to be exemplary. But somewhere along the line this energy runs out, and there slips in its shadow which runs wild. Creating your own troubles, cleaning up after yourself. Being at the mercy of a fatal dualism that splits you terribly, the plight and dilemma of one who has wandered into the territory of tempting forces. Consciously blameless and innocuous; subconsciously charged with mischief and mayhem. And the hardest part is that it feels too late to turn this around. As you experience the fatalistic notion that this is just the way it is, you have arrived at the center of the temptation, and must learn the art of radical letting go. ~ Contents ~

VIRGO 17

An old bald woman talking to her dog.

Internal dialogue in which self and world are constantly discovering where they stand with each other. Having no pretense or guile. Speaking to each one in the way you speak to yourself, in the way you speak to everything. No rituals, no ceremony, no special cases. Unvarnished honesty and truth. Intent on getting at what is underneath, what is inside. You penetrate right through the personality, the ego-mind, without thinking about it. Knowing that life needs a voice and that being that voice is natural and inevitable. You feel close to the ground, basic, and foundational. Not very nice, not very easy-going. The pure

straight-shooter, as real as can be, and almost too much so. You are the reminder of how it would be if we stayed with integrity and conviction and threw out the rest.

Eyeglasses which cause one to see rainbows.

Seeing through the eyes of anybody, everybody, all worlds together, all worlds differentiated sharply, you are able to switch perspective from the personal vantage point to any conceivable other. Drawn to extend the range of perception and the worldview to encompass what it looks like from the inside of each and every one. Clairvoyant, telepathic, and mythically potent with the power of story. Keenly guided to unfold consciousness into its evolutionary potential. You are thoroughly convinced that if all sides can be respected, honored, and lived into,

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by an affirmative life-giving perspective to open doors and make this world a brighter place, with simple, straightforward brush strokes of cosmic common sense.

A fire breathing dragon the size of a mouse.

Big things and little things trade places. Big things become off screen, too demanding and formidable, oppressive. Little things become unquenchably full of life and there to be entered upon with passionate conviction. Little things proliferate wildly. Soon they are everywhere, clamoring, yearning, asking for attention and energy. Each little thing grows very big--incarnation, embodiment. Coming to the brink of immense commitment into the earth, you have a craft, a fine touch of beholding, witnessing, and responding to each facet of life unto itself. The most rigorous of paths--to be there into the details. Will and mind become one, a discipline, a harnessing that is magnificent and very hard to accomplish. Yet you recognize that this is what remains to be done, to light up the jewels of life and let them arise

everywhere. ~ Contents ~ VIRGO 20

The expanse of the Himalayas in the distance.

When you place a spiritual/cosmic perspective upon every single little thing that happens, you will either overshoot the mark or discover perfect meaning. The overshooting of the mark happens when the little mind and the greater mind become warped in their relativities. Proportion tumbles before pregnant magnitude. Everything is sprinkled with archetypal overtones. Perfect meaning arises here when the truth is the yardstick and you simply align yourself with the truth in a nondogmatic fashion. The spirit of discovery becomes the spur. The unknown makes the known precious and poignant. You finally get it right that every microcosmic situation is a jewel in the making, and only needs to be appreciated and boosted by faithful beholding. The passage is from thinking about it to becoming at home within the path of bringing all worlds together, just as the occasion makes possible, with a light touch and an easy grasp of the reins.

Dark river and distant bell.

So much to be done. So many fragments to move with. Such a confounding. The one inside is calm and quiet, poised and accepting, knows what shall be. The one outside is frantic with events and experiences which do not add up. Severe conditions to test the soul and give the mind quite a scare. The process is to keep going into it a little further, despite yourself, and to keep losing who you thought you were in the bargain. But there is somebody to be when there is nobody left to be, and only then.

A woman writing with the tip of her fingernail.

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So much to say, such a lineage to articulate and reveal. Being brilliantly tuned in to every nuance of your own superfine sensibility and not missing a stitch. Eerily intent upon staying on course and witnessing how it is done, why it is done, with dispassionate gaze. Selected by destiny to be the one to exemplify the way it should be done. Willing and able to do this forever and do nothing else. So straight and narrow that it becomes idiosyncratic and Self-referential. The name of the game is to call the shots, to stay on top of the situation and to tap every level of intelligence to make your way purely and precisely where you were intended to be, in the master plan being followed utterly.

Giant cacti blooming in the desert.

Knowing beyond knowing what is real and what counts. Commonsensical, good, and true. Containing so much knowledge and wisdom that you bear the record of all that is worthwhile in human evolution. Fascinating and extraordinary insights, realizations, and observations--an independent way of seeing. Integrity and conviction, sterling and impressing--a perfect grasp of essentials. Dedication to holding faithful to the earth and her ways. You have an almost abrasive style of sticking to your guns and making it clear what is correct and furthering and what is not. Tremendous mentality demanding self-command to harness and make effective and helpful. willing to do the work. Always prepared.

~ Contents ~ VIRGO 24 A silver trident.

Psychically in tune with the collective and assigned the task of maintaining a vigil of collective awareness, you are sent to outposts to stay tuned and partake in the universal communications network. Singularly devoid of self-drive. Sacrificial incarnation. Immensely far removed from the usual territory of the mind, you have been granted the opportunity to serve and to suffer. Exquisitely sensitized. Brilliantly astute. And seeking and searching for ways for everybody to reconnect. Solitude, seclusion, stillness. Wishing and yearning for the world to be at peace and for people to understand each other, you contribute constructively. Consecrated, mystical, and right there on the inside of life, you wait timelessly for all good things to come in their season.

A gold ring in the form of a snake swallowing its tail.

Knowing who you are, with your own greater self right there standing above you, showing you the way. Impressing the mark of advanced selfhood upon everything in sight, you are clear as a bell that you must hold true to your nature. This life's journey is sensed as a true biography, a story for the ages which completes itself and comes back to the beginning at the next octave. Knowing beyond knowing the nature of the quest, and being especially aware of the how of each little step to pass this on. It is a delicate matter to know this much. Many who attain this point will employ their conscious mind to cover all this up and generate a busy outer facade. However, the substantive attunement to the mysteries cannot be missed by any angel, and suggests that this is a culminating and a consummate way of being which speaks from the vital center and is there beyond all attempts to throw it off.

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An old man counting gold coins.

Getting your bearings, determining your limits, finding a reality fix. Making sure that everything is there; checking out the manifest details over and again. Coming down to earth and becoming sober and straight and clear. You are overwhelmingly convinced that there must come this cleaning-up and clearing-up. Sick and tired of pretense and hype, hungry to get down to basics, and somewhat hooked on the quantitative intelligence. Blurring distinctions. Intent upon being viable, correct, and self-sufficient. If all these things are taken up with a twinkle of humor, they are digestible. But if they become self-serious and a little too proper, they are deadly and sickening. You learn to throw off the attitude and to cleave to the substance of getting things right, unapologetically and steadfastly.

The magician disrobes. He has no sex organs.

We bear a dream within us. In that dream, we can magically disperse every partisan

consideration and make the truth a commonsensically shareable thing. We endow that dream with more of ourselves than any outwardly existing realities. Slowly we foster its seeds. There just must be a way to find the common point, to no longer be jerked around by gender politics and all the other antibrotherhood, antisisterhood currents. So we endow the dream with our heart's aspirations, and when we give our all to it, the dream comes true. but until that point, we are worlds apart from others in harboring the dream of our coming reunion with

everybody. ~ Contents ~ VIRGO 28

Autumn leaves pressed into a book.

The mind is a funny thing. It pours over experience with a fine tooth comb, yet only sees what it expected to see. The mind programs itself, indoctrinates itself thoroughly and intensively in the fine art of imposing the familiar and the assumed upon all of life. This is a maddening way to operate, yet it does not register as being so. Instead you like it this way, prefer it, advocate it, simply because it is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. You are after elaborate

confirmations and validations that the little self is perfectly splendid just as it is. And you will be sure to get these. The transaction is guaranteed. But there is an unknown self who cannot breathe in this atmosphere, and who knocks at the door seeking entry and is not very pleased to be tuned out and pushed away and told that we are fine as we are and do not need to be stirred up by the voice of the rest of existence.

A witch preparing magic mushrooms.

Within the delicate, formative stages of major departures into the unknown, there is

encountered an extraordinary task and lesson that detains you a long while. It becomes self-evident that it is everything that comes before that makes the difference. There must be a fully attuned, magical sensibility to make the future possible. Coming to this requires arduous

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discipline and elaborate ritual, internal initiation. This becomes such a labyrinth of

discipleship and apprenticeship that you wander through the maze discovering everything you ever needed to know. All is played out within. There is no need to make anything happen on the outer. You are assigned to empty yourself out, to strip everything away, to become invisible. And if you excel at your craft, so many ventures and initiatives will be seeded, that this inner planes total mobilization will prove to be more fruitful and productive than any premature thrusts of outer mind, no matter how impressive or seemingly necessary. The entire path lies well within, and needs no surface success to substantiate itself.

Supersensible beings manifesting through geometric forms.*

Sacred geometry inscribes the pattern of the world going through its great shifts, its quantum leaps. If you learn to stand back and be within the greater archetypal motions, you find yourself being placed in perfect strategic positions, in exquisitely rightful initiations and assignments. The transparency of things is superlative to behold. You are called to serve the highest, to respect and honor all manifestations, to be there for everybody. Interior

steadfastness and implacability; knowing the law, the code, the way. Magnificent in applying vaster awareness to life's particular, detailed variations on the theme of how everything fits together perfectly and is woven by divine design. The fine tuned sensibility of the master craftsman, particularly adept in staying modest, unadorned and straight on. It is the exemplar of the way it is done when you know who you are and how things are around here, and when you see it coming through in every jewelled detail with little lost in the translation.

*_{Please note that the original Chandra symbol was worded, "Supernatural beings appearing as}

geometric forms." John Sandbach agrees that this current wording is a clearer rendition of what was intended.

~ Contents ~

Sagittarius

SAGITTARIUS 1

A woman, manacled in solid gold chains.

Vividly attached to your own personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, and karmic backlog, you are identified within the strict circle of familiar difficulties, dilemmas, issues, and problems. Habituated to a thick atmosphere of being surrounded and enveloped by all the places you have hung out forever. Immobilized in your will and truly feeling incapable of overthrowing the past. You feel chaotically fascinated by and deeply saturated in patterns, syndromes, and subconscious escapes. Yet in the fiery midst of this very enchantment, you can go free if you inwardly come to a place where all the old spells no longer work and your resurgent spirit simply refuses to confound itself any further.

~ Contents ~ SAGITTARIUS 2