| Copyright © 2003 all rights reserved by Planet Waves Digital Media. |
| Planet Waves offers syndicated monthly, weekly and daily horoscopes to the editorial community. Planet Waves Weekly is $49.95 per year for individuals, published 52 times per year. Not a subscriber? Subscribe directly by secure credit card transaction at http://www.ericfrancis.com/orders.html Planet Waves Weekly home | Planet Waves home | About Renewals, Subscriptions & Customer Service - Chelsea Bottinelli support@planetwaves.net | (206) 463-STAR (7827) or (877) 453-8265 For Friday, April 25th, 2003 | Version 1.0 |
| The Pros & Cons of Miracles Dear Fellow Freak upon the Road of Life: It seemed like one way or another I was going to be writing about religion today, a theme which has come up a few times recently. This morning Chelsea and I were talking about various out-of-body phenomena, and I started telling stories from Miracle Manor, which I described as my spiritual boot camp, a one-year live-in experience of doing A Course in Miracles. I lived there from mid-1986 to mid-1987. Like lots of people, Chelsea had heard of the Course but didn't know quite what it is. I've been thinking for years that I would write an essay called "The Pros and Cons of Miracles," and today seems like the day. Basically, A Course in Miracles is this blue book available for purchase in most book stores. It's actually three books, a text, a workbook, and a teacher's manual, now sold in one volume. The book came into being by a channeling process that started in 1965. There were two people on the channeling team -- Helen Schuchman, who worked at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in the medical psychology department, and her boss, Bill Thetford, who was chairman of that department. Helen was an atheist, but she started having what you might call visionary dreams of stuff like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then a few months later began hearing a voice in her mind. The voice, which later identified itself as the spirit of Jesus, is what gave her the Course, in the form of seven years of dictation which she took down shorthand in about 100 steno pads. Now if you think it's weird that Jesus would dictate some kind of 'course' in the 20th century, imagine what a couple of medical psychologists at Columbia University with no special religious leanings would think. Let's not forget that hearing in a voice in your mind technically makes you crazy. When Helen initially heard the voice, she called Bill and asked her what he thought she should do. He suggested that she write down what it was saying. So, she did. It said: This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. A required course? Were they channeling the Academic Affairs Dean, or the Cosmic Christ? It's explained in the Course that the book you're holding is merely one version of a universal program (fortunately for those in Tibet). It goes on to explain that when you choose to take the Course is voluntary, which is to say that free will means choosing when you want to do something, but not what you want to do. In other words, this is material that we will learn one way or the other, in one form or another. Hmmm. The short introduction ends with the statement: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Ponder that for 10 or 20 years, please, and tell me what you come up with! So it was that Helen and Bill started channeling, with Helen scribing the material and Bill typing it up early each morning as the two of them worked in his office with the curtains drawn, horrified at the prospect of anyone discovering what they were up to. What came through over the next seven years was essentially a course in spiritual psychology, often written with religious references and inferences. The material is presented in blatantly Christian terminology, with continuous and ongoing references to the Father and the Holy Spirit and so forth. It's in the male mode of God: He, She or It is always referenced as He. The Course has a lot to say about God, making no apologies and engaging in no theological debate or theorizing. The purpose of the Course is to teach the student to become aware of God's actual presence. Basically, if you want to do the Course, you just have to get used to the lingo and deal with the material: in other words, the content, not the form, and the Course does more than a few songs and dances about the necessity to distinguish the difference. The text begins with the 'principles of miracles', the first of which is, There is no order of difficulty of miracles. One is not harder or bigger than another. If you read the text one section at a time each day, it takes less than a year to finish, though the material really requires three or four passes through. The workbook is organized into 365 lessons, one for each day of the year. The first lesson is Nothing I see means anything. The lessons are done in the form of what are called practice periods, or brief meditations or exercises based on the day's lesson. Some of these occur morning and evening, and for other lessons as often as every half hour or the first five minutes of each hour. Some of the lessons are repeated many times, particularly the old standby, I am not a body, I am free. The teacher's manual is presented in question and answer format, and addresses the fact that the way one learns anything is to teach it. In the Course's words, Everyone teaches, and teaches all the time. Hence, by doing the Course, you become a teacher. Though many people consider the writing in the Course to be unnecessarily cerebral, there are many elegant passages and excellent ideas in its pages. A few that come to mind are God is but love, and therefore so am I. Or, The past is gone; it cannot touch me. Or, There is nothing to fear. Or, I am here only to be truly helpful. My own favorite chapter in the text is 'The Illusion and the Reality of Love'. My next favorite is 'The Branching of the Road'. The Course is designed as a self-study program; working with it in a live-in community situation is pretty unusual, though a number of communities do exist. A lot of groups have formed to study the work, and a couple of churches have surfaced, and a whole TV movement in California, but the Course itself makes no reference to any of this being necessary, and ultimately, all the real work goes on within one's own mind. Much of the material is skeptical of organized religion, and points out its hypocrisies. It's also pretty skeptical of psychotherapy. Now, I recognize that in the rational world, we're way out in Lunatic Fringe Territory with this stuff. Even in the Froot-Loopy American religious world, we're working the edge. Most devout Christians would say we're dealing with the work of the devil. Others would dismiss the Course because it's taking the word of God from somewhere besides the Bible (very devilish). Most secular-types, or feminists, or woman-centered spiritual practitioners, or nature-lovers, would likely object to the whole Guy God scenario, and for sure, it is extremely annoying at times. Those who are spiritual rather than religious, Taoists and the like, might not appreciate a personified God per se, since the Tao you can talk about ain't the real Tao. Then we have the issue of 'which God?' and 'whose God?' and how about: why God at all? Isn't nature enough? Then, presumably, we would have the secular therapy community objecting to the Course's insistence that the body is not part of reality. God only knows what theologians would say. And so on. As I say: Lunatic Fringe, all the way around. We can take one more step in the general direction of the frilly edge with the whole issue of miracles with which the Course is specifically concerned. From reading the text there can be no mistake that the intention is to teach students to facilitate miracles. Miracles are defined as expressions of love, but also include experiences which specifically violate the commonly-understood laws of space and time, as well as facilitating the healing of physical and emotional situations, and being able to function in what could reasonably be called impossible circumstances. Much of what the Course teaches is being able to listen for the voice of Spirit within one's mind, and to hear it under any circumstances, particularly the ones in which you need it the most (i.e., not when things are necessarily as serene as a meditation garden). Somewhere within the work students are told that the real Course in Miracles is not the book but rather the sequence of miracles that occur as a result of working with it. These experiences break the hold that the old, limited picture of reality had on the mind, while at the same time demonstrating in deeds and not words that faith is perfectly justified. And most people who delve into the Course discover that miracles actually do happen -- as do many other people. All of this leaves room for all kinds of speculation and skepticism, as does anything without scientific proof available, and most things with, and all things religious. What can't be denied is that the Course exists, that its history is well documented, that it has been deeply influential in the modern spiritual revival, and that many hundreds of thousands (I've read a million) people have worked with it, all of whom influence those around them. Once you learn the material, it's basically impossible to unlearn. Many one-time Course students have gone on to write their own books, become ministers, teachers and therapists, form companies and do fun stuff like start an astrology web page. What's also fairly obvious is that the material itself is consistent with the essence of the world's great mystical traditions, for whatever that's worth. There are included some very practical applications of ideas that also appear in Buddhism, Hinduism and Gnostic Christianity, among other traditions. Yet the work, in its Father, Son and Holy Spirit terminology, is aimed straight into a culture where we can go on television and openly claim that the loving, all-merciful God of the Christians wants us to kill people in other countries, or execute prisoners, and where most of us to some degree, lesser or greater, have had our hearts and minds and lives torn apart in the name of Jesus. Religion exists and it isn't going away. It seems clear that if we are going to deal with the errors of religion, that part of how we will need to do that is from within religious frameworks. Do I believe in A Course in Miracles? To me that's a similar question as, 'Do you believe in astrology?' I can't honestly say I believe in either, but they both work pretty well as tools to get certain jobs done. -- To Be Continued Next Week -- Oh, Shiit I was a little concerned that astrology wasn't living up to its potential after the neat-and-clean, convenient and orderly victory of our assiduous Halliburton, Bechtel and Carlyle Group forces in Iraq two weeks ago. The war started with the sun void-of-course and the moon close to void-of-course, suggesting that things would look good in the beginning then slip out of control, which I proposed would be good astrology only if their astrologer were out to sabotage the military. And right in the thick of it was the Mars-Chiron conjunction, which described an uprising by the underdog and the downfall of the dark. Then a full moon turned Dubya's chart inside-out. But everything went positively fantabulous (if you don't count all the Mesopotamian cookware turning up on eBay), there were wild, out-of-control celebrations at the Pentagon and White House, Laura Bush danced on the table, and even John Ashcroft took a sip of champagne, yielding to intense peer pressure from Donald Rumsfeld and Andy Card. However, it appears that after the party, James Ridge of the Homeland Security Office stole the glass and had the saliva entered into the national DNA database of drug abusers. In any case, things now appear to have not gone as planned for The Boys. The underdogs, the oppressed Shiit Muslim majority in Iraq, is rumbling and thundering. Neighboring Iran is getting into the act, working to involve themselves in Iraqi politics, and we may see a reunion of those two great nations, Under God. I just clicked on MSNBC, the pulse of the galaxy, for the latest. Here is what I learned. WASHINGTON, April 24 -- Iraqis will be free to form their own government as long as it is not an Iranian-style theocracy, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. "If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn’t going to happen," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. God love these guys. I admire their unmitigated arrogance. It's so pure. It's so real. It's such an example to our young people. I can smell it coming off the computer screen. Excuse me while I open the window. Horary and Tarot Eric is doing Horary Astrology and Tarot professionally these days. Horary is the astrology of a question or specific issue. It does not use the natal chart. It's the antithesis of what he's best known for, which is an interactive counseling process, but the thing about Horary is that it works. It can handle very complicated issues, and there are very strict rules, which make it one of the more consistent branches of astrology from practitioner to practitioner. Sessions run from 15 minutes to about 45 minutes, though they can be longer, and the answer can also come as a simple yes or no, if that's appropriate to the form of the question. Horary is good for mapping out complicated situations where you need to know who stands where on the issues, what a sequence of events is likely to be, and the underlying causes of a situation. Tarot is a more intuitive game, using pictures instead of technically focussed and cerebral astrology charts. It talks in pictures and colors instead of mathematics and angles, turning on the other side of the brain. Tarot can be applied to specific questions, or to general life readings that look (in my preference) at moderate periods of time -- a season or a year. Tarot is also available in a half-hour format. If existing astrological clients are interested, we'll create a half-hour astrology format -- a check-in -- but only for people who have already done chart work with Eric. Please let us know if you're interested. For booking or more information, contact Chelsea Bottinelli at (206) 463-7827, or email her at chelsea@planetwaves.net Current Astrological Highlights The sun is now in Taurus, Venus is in Aries, Mars is in Aquarius and Mercury is about to be retrograde in Taurus. With Mercury retrograde we hear a lot about things going wrong, and sometimes it happens weeks ahead of the actual station, which this time around is on the 26th. But I've got another theory, which is that things that appear to be wiggy during Mercury Rx are often in fact not. The problem can be an illusion, a crisis of point-of-view, or a mental block of some kind. True, real problems occur. But more often than not, it's a kind of game. One must be patient enough to leave a computer problem alone, and see if it works out. It's not a good time to go digging into problems because the digging often makes them worse. Minimalist approaches, gently-applied patches and simple solutions work best during Mercury Rx. If the estimate comes back too high, wait and try again. That kind of thing. Webcasting Comes to Planet Waves, or Vice Versa Every Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. PST or 11:45 a.m. EST, I do a live webcast at http://www.voiceofvashon.org/ hosted by Susan McCabe. Please spread the word. Planet Waves by Eric Francis http://www.PlanetWaves.net/ Early Taurus Birthdays This is a year of making decisions, or perhaps one enormous decision on which it seems your whole life hinges. Don't worry -- it does. Our lives hinge on every decision we make. But this one is so fundamental to who you are, and to who you are becoming, that it calls for considerable time to be worked out, and its implications appreciated. It is fair to say that you are involved in a process which will shape your values for a considerable length of time This is a year, moreover, of getting to know your thought process so well that you learn exactly how you make decisions, and why, and thus discover the way to determine when you're really thinking, when you're really feeling, and when you're basically bullshitting yourself out of fear and inflexibility. Action is the fruit of knowledge. We can 'know something' but knowledge, as a force in nature, exists in a state of potential until it is converted into the energy of choice and movement. With Venus, your ruling planet, in Aries right now, action might come gracefully. On the other hand, Aries is the last sign before your natal sun, and that means that action that does not match your visions and what you feel is the promise of a new life for yourself is just not going to fly. In short, you simply must dream, and then make sure your worldly choices each take you a little closer to what might seem so subtle, unreal or idealistic, but which is no less true for you. Dreaming often happens alone, and a lot of time by yourself is going to nourish and help cultivate your sense of who you are becoming. This will work well for you, since close partners continue to need a lot of space to work out their own situations and personal growth. But you may find that in relationships, adding a little space makes you a lot closer. Aries (March 20-April 19) Respond to who and what responds to you. This is no time to play the games of anyone who teases, taunts or tantalizes. Minimize your own use of these social devices, which are deeply culturally engrained and exist as unfair methods of evening out the score in situations where there's a perceived power imbalance. Such inequities mask a deeper level of disconnect on the level of values, that is, what is really important to us, and relating to what is truly meaningful to the people we connect with. There can be no tantalizing in such meetings, only an exchange of that which is valued by two people who really understand. Taurus (April 19-May 20) Ultimately when you get through scrutinizing your life and assessing the details of every decision, you will need to mourn your losses and move on. I'm not talking about anything you have yet to lose. I speak rather of what is long gone, and which you are not expecting to return. You may be feeling this, yet without recognizing how much power there is in goodbye. You may not recognize how much of your past you are holding onto in the symbolic act of not letting go of one particular person or situation. But the river of time is rushing at you, calling you new places, and to a new life. Gemini (May 20-June 21) Chaotic states are usually considered unhealthy states by holistic medicine and even by traditional medicine. But you are currently working with a method of seeking resolution to a certain healing crisis by dipping into the fertile void. Pushing order on any system does not work. What works is connecting with a source of insight, power or inspiration, and slowly bringing the neighborhood under control. It needs to happen so gradually -- that's the important thing. But at this particular juncture, starting with where you are, acknowledging your confusion about one particular issue and then drawing strength from not knowing, will get you pretty far. Cancer (June 21-July 22) Unusual activity in your solar 11th house, which deals with your relationship to your community, your circle of friends and the wider public, could put you in a position where you feel scrutinized or insecure. But if you lay low and stick to what's important to you, you'll learn a lot about what people think, what they feel, and the half-truths they tell themselves. Often people find it somehow important to obscure what is most important to them. Go slowly and resist the temptation to lay blame. The scenario can be put to work for you, and provide a solid opportunity to completely re-establish your position as a public benefactor. The religion of greed may be popular, but it's also pretty sick, and people know it well. Leo (July 22-Aug 23) You are in a critical stage of learning to balance your professional needs and your security needs. Most of the time in our world, balancing is synonymous with communicating. It's important to check your communications two or three times when you're dealing with either situation, whether at home or at work. You're acting as a beacon right now, and you may feel unusually visible in the world. You may also feel unexplainable bursts of emotional insecurity from time to time over the next few weeks. These tremors represent a change in orientation, a shift in your beliefs about what really makes you safe in the world. This is a good thing, since for the most part, safety depends on our ideas about it. Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) Relationships are very much a spiritual matter, and to the extent that their themes involve a mode of discipline and routine, they are a religious matter. The whole question of forgiveness, so central to both spiritual and religious questions, would be meaningless outside the context of relationship -- except of course for the question of self-forgiveness. You appear to have a situation on your hands where you've caught yourself dishonoring your relationship to your higher self or higher power. The question, now, is what to do. One possibility resides in mimicking how you were treated as a child in your treatment of yourself. The other possibility is what you might call another way. Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) A particular career situation continues to be a puzzle, but fortunately it can be a fun project of putting the pieces together. There is no rush; the clues you collect now will come in handy later in the spring, when the mighty Saturn crosses your career angle for the first time in 29 years and so much that seemed impossible or out of reach is suddenly right where you can touch it. More on that in due time. For now, you need to keep stretching your mind on the not-so-subtle point of how your beliefs seem to interfere with what you experience as reality. Take some target practice. Change a belief and watch your world expand. Then try it again. Don't stop. Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) Mercury retrograde can make life feel like we're wearing clothes that don't quite fit. Mercury happens to be cruising past Earth at warp-speed in your opposite sign Taurus, which suggests that a certain relationship agreement may not quite fit and be in need of renegotiation. It's fair to assume this is about a one-to-two month stretch of careful working out. Part of the complexity in the situation, as you know, is you. A long spell of inner renovations and upheavals, unusual even by Scorpio standards, has left you wondering what you want, what you need, and wondering who understands you. Your closest confidants continue to be your same-sex friends (or lovers). But even where it's not today, understanding will come. Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22) An extremely interesting mix of outer-worldly forces continue to work you over, changing your viewpoint and reminding you that you're in this world, but not of it. The deeper theme is putting you into contact with your spiritual instincts, though to you they may often feel like "human weaknesses," "baser desires" or "obsessions" -- not what your average guru would be likely to encourage. But your relationship to this world is somewhat backwards. You have a way of turning darkness to light, and using light to enter the darkness where few would dare to venture. At this point, I suggest you trust whatever you feel and honor the calling of whatever you feel you need. Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) The "take a risk -- no don't dare" contradiction is in full blossom right now. This seems to involve an idea, and it's funny how threatening ideas can be. You would do well to consider, though, just what they threaten. Without giving away the answer, I can tell you that ideas threaten other ideas, since we can reach those moments where two possibilities you want to be true cannot be true at the same time. Eventually one of two things happens. The discomfort becomes so great you just finally concede one point or the other; or the pressure builds to the point of an explosion, a kind of psychic orgasm that leaves you floating in the best of all worlds. Anyway, ideas can't hurt you. Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) Fear is power turned inside out. Power is what we get when we tap into the source of our fear. Between power and pleasure, pleasure is to many the greater virtue. That's often because pleasure is a passive condition whereas power is very much an active one. Pleasure has its risks, though one of them is not having dared the difficult, challenging or impossible and failed. To feel your strength, you have to risk failure. It's a kind of token offering to your own psyche, an acknowledgement that you're not so attached to success that you can't give it all up. It's also a reminder that power does have its limits -- for example, when you're no longer having fun. Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) The next few days will bring you considerable reassurance that you're on the right track. But it's up to you to put that information to work. Pisces natives have been accused of having every trait in the known cosmos at one time or another, but what can't be denied is that you have available to you, at the least, a high level of initiative, substantial resources and -- the catch -- a way of cutting yourself out of the deal. Is it subtle mistrust? Is it your imagination throwing the worst possibilities onto the projection screen? Practice dealing yourself into the game, and practice holding people to their word. They know you've been true to yours, and that your gain is nobody's loss. How do newspaper horoscopes work? Planet Waves Weekly and PlanetWaves.net are edited by Eric Francis, with help from Chelsea Bottinelli and the Vision List. This newsletter is $49.95 per year and published 52 times per year plus the monthly horoscope. We encourage our readers to contribute their artwork and writing to the Planet Waves project and to cultivate themselves as creative forces in the unusual and socially formative times in which we live. |
| |