The Sky is my Mirror

From Violence To Compassionate Strength

I began this series of posts by discussing the concept of the sacred activist, as it is being developed by Andrew Harvey.  As I see it now, having worked my way through this Mars-Pluto portal – see below for links to previous posts in the series – the true task of the sacred activist is to create an environment where compassion prevails over the potential for violence.  This does not mean simply rolling over and playing dead in the face of aggression, injustice, or the violent taking of either schoolyard or planetary bullies.  It does mean conscientiously and intentionally avoiding the fatal pitfall of seeing the other, however despicable, as the enemy. 

On the last day of Andrew Harvey’s workshop, we were instructed by an ex-special forces marine in some basic martial arts moves for taking down aggressors – a skill Harvey ominously hinted would be necessary in the days to come, although he didn’t specify why or where he thought these skills might come in handy.  Be that as it may, as I understood the instructions, the essence of the teaching was that a would-be opponent is easier to take down when you align yourself with him (or her), and move in such a way that you allow a space for their own energy to work against them. 

While I can’t imagine doing this, or having to do it myself, I can see its value as a metaphor for a compassionate approach to violence or the potential for violence.  As another teacher whom I respect – American Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron – once said (Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, p. 103):

The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having worked with loving-kindness for yourself.  Then there is no condescension.  This nondualistic approach is true to the heart because it’s based on our kinship with each other.  We know what to say, because we have experienced closing down, shutting off, being angry, hurt, rebellious, and so forth, and have made a relationship with those things in ourselves.

This is not about problem resolution.  This is a more open-ended and courageous approach.  It has to do with not knowing what will happen.  It has nothing to do with wanting to get ground under your feet.  It’s about keeping your heart and your mind open to whatever arises, without hope of fruition.  Problem-solving is based first on thinking there is a problem and second on thinking there is a solution.  The concepts of problem and solution can keep us stuck in thinking that there is an enemy and a saint or a right way and a wrong way.  The approach we’re suggesting is more groundless than that.

Although my relationship with Mars-Pluto is a lifetime work in progress, where I find myself now as I move through the first portal of the new cycle, is in alignment with Pema Chodron’s approach.  I think it is important to stand my ground with the bullies of the world, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.  What I like to think I am gradually learning in my own bull-headed way is to stand my ground with no teeth – anger, fear, or projected blame – hands in my pocket, looking for common ground on which violence can have no footing, or if need be on which the one I might have previously called my enemy will simply fall down with the weight of his or her own unbalanced momentum.

Onto Phase Two for the testing.  To be continued then.


This is the last in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within
  

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength (this post)

Questing for Common Ground

When I lived in Santa Fe, NM in the 1980s, I worked for a short time for an organization called The Trinity Forum, whose mission it was to help people on opposite sides of a political issue to find common ground, and use it as the basis for dialogue.  My job included coordinating conferences, taking care of the logistical details, and following up with program evaluation.  I learned a great deal.

One of the conferences I organized was a dialogue between various factions in the Nicaraguan war between the Contras and the Sandanistas.  Participants included a Sandinista representative, a Contra leader, and two US ambassadors of opposite political viewpoints.  The dialogue was mediated by Dr. Merle Letkoff, Chair of The Trinity Forum Board and a professional conflict management consultant.

Despite the sharp differences between participants, they discovered a common desire for democratization of their country, and agreed on several parameters by which movement toward democracy could be measured, as well as several key issues that would first need to be addressed before a genuine democracy was possible. 

Although the discussion became rather heated at times, and at the end of the dialogue, fundamental differences remained, all participants agreed that they had gained a better understanding of the interests and positions of the other parties, and that it was helpful to identify key issues, even if agreement about addressing those issues remained somewhat elusive.

Through my minor role in this process, I learned that the more common ground one can find with those on the other side of any fence, the less potential there is for violence, and in fact, the more potential there is for radical creative breakthrough and unprecedented cooperation toward positive ends. 

I have seen this work in the Pacific Northwest, when environmentalists and loggers explored their shared interest in sustainable timber management practices; in negotiations between Greenpeace and Home Depot, when a market for sustainably harvested timber was created, cultivated and supplied through the cooperation of former adversaries; and here at home, when members of my own land cooperative – often at odds with each other over common-land management decisions large and small – banded together seamlessly for two days to cut our way out of a forest in chaos.

More recently, I have experienced this in my sometimes difficult relationship with the horse logger I have hired to log the salvage timber on my property.  The relationship has been difficult, in part, because it is happening much more slowly than I had anticipated, and I am having to be more patient than I am used to being. 

For example, one day, B___ was supposed to return for another round of work, but failed to show.  I called him, and discovered that he couldn’t come because his brother-in-law’s pacemaker had failed and he needed B___’s attention at the hospital.  B___, himself was sick with a bad cold, made worse by frigid weather.

Though disappointed, I felt a twinge in my own bruised ribs (see last post), and simply sighed.  We all – it seems – had fallen down, fallible humans one and all.  “OK, then,” I said, “I’ll see you when I see you.”  B___ also sighed, then said, “Thank you.  I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

As I enter more deeply into my Mars-Pluto portal, I cannot help but feel that something more important than my own small interest in completing a logging operation is at stake here.  It’s not about the agenda, I’m thinking now, so much as it is learning to become more fully human, and to exercise more intentional compassion toward every enemy, real or imagined.  I know that tomorrow I will forget, but today, it seems the answer to my question: “How can I more effectively deal with those who feel threatened by my words, or my actions, or simply feel some need to oppose me for whatever reason?”

This post is the ninth in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within
  

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground (this post)

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

Falling Down into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

In the last two posts, I’ve illustrated a method for “putting your question to the world,” developed by Robert Moss, that my partner and I took with us on my birthday trip to Eureka Springs.  My question was “How can I more effectively deal with those who feel threatened by my words, or my actions, or simply feel some need to oppose me for whatever reason?”  I discussed the first half of the response from the world in my last post.

The other half of my message came to me toward the end of my time in Eureka Springs.  With all the physical work that I had been doing lately – with my chain saw and various other chores around my ten acre homestead, preparing for winter – my body was wracked by aches and pains, and I was looking forward to a weekend of indulgence in our little Jacuzzi suite.  We both had a soak the night before, and massages late in the day on my birthday, and I was starting to feel more relaxed. 

Then, on the morning of the day after my birthday, I got up before dawn to pee, as I usually do, and then somehow managed to trip over my suitcase, and hit my ribs on a wooden bench that just happened to be there.  After writhing in agony for about ten minutes, I spent the rest of my day clutching my chest and wincing every time I took a deep breath.  As I write this, nearly a week later, I am still feeling sore and tender.

Again, as with my encounter with the friend who had no teeth, this seemed like something out of a dream that demanded symbolic consideration.  Sitting with it for a few days, I started thinking about how fragile we are in these temporary bodies – held up by quite breakable bones; wrapped by skin that is easily cut and bruised; housing tender organs that can fail without warning; subject to invasion by strange viruses, rapidly moving objects, and environmental toxins. 

It is really a wonder that we make it as far through this world as we do, when the simple act of crossing a street at the wrong time, breathing the wrong air, drinking the wrong water, or falling down in the wrong set of circumstances can end the adventure.

The Fragility of Being Human

On the other hand, it seems that falling down is an essential part of being human.  There is no one among us – neither the most enlightened of spiritual warriors, nor the most despicable of violent takers – who will not at least once in their life, fall down and hurt themselves badly.  In the end, we will all fall down and die. 

Beyond the literal act of falling down and hurting ourselves physically, we also fall down in any number of other ways.  We get laid off at work; we have a blowout fight with our partner, and end a relationship; our kids turn to drugs or get in trouble with the law, and we suffer a profound sense of failure as parents; a youthful dream languishes and eventually dies in the corner of a closet in our practical, mundane life of endless responsibilities and no time for ourselves.  There are countless ways in which real life falls down, when measured up to our ideals, our fantasies, and our expectations.

This simple fact, as I see it, levels the playing field and turns any potential battlefield into an arena for the meeting of hearts and minds.  As Rumi said:

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloud cover thick, I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I’m already under
and living within the ocean.

Does sunset sometimes look like the sun’s coming up?
Do you know what a faithful love is like?

You’re crying, You say you’ve burned yourself,
But can you think of anyone who’s not
hazy with smoke?

The fact that we’ve all been burned, and that we’re all hazy with smoke – simply because we are fallible human beings, housed in horribly fragile bodies, struggling to get somewhere according to the pitiful plans of a vulnerable ego, somehow gives us common ground, if we can put aside our differences long enough to see it that way. 

This is not always easy, but it is, I think, a recipe for changing the world – especially where the potential exists for violence.  It is – where it is possible – a step onto the path of equality through the Realm of Two that potentially leads to “creative synthesis, love, mutual respect, compassionate tolerance of differences, and a synergistic interaction in which the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.”

This post is the eighth in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within
  

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion (this post)

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

In my last post, I described a process for approaching waking life as though it were a dream developed by Robert Moss that I decided to experiment with on a birthday trip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas with my partner Sara.  The question that I took with me into this exercise was the one I have been exploring in this series of posts: “How can I more effectively deal with those who feel threatened by my words, or my actions, or simply feel some need to oppose me for whatever reason?”

My first clue – in possible response to this question – came on our way out, before we had made it to the main road.  By “coincidence,” we happened to run into an old friend of mine – one who in times past had also often been an adversary with whom I butted heads, but a man I admired nonetheless for his integrity, his courageous political zeal, and his willingness to fight for various environmental causes, sometimes at great personal expense.  Had he had more of a spiritual practice, or one I didn’t know about, he would have been a great sacred activist of the kind Andrew Harvey wanted to train.  As it was, time had taken its toll on his body, if not his spirit, though he was still fighting the good fight, as far as I could tell.

After we had exchanged a few pleasantries and went our separate ways, Sara said to me, “Did you notice, T___ had no teeth?”  I hadn’t, but the question immediately put me in mind of our exercise, since it was the kind of thing that might have happened in a dream, and T___ being who he was, our encounter seemed somehow synchronistic.

After allowing myself to simply be with the “symbolism” of T’s missing teeth all weekend, without immediately grasping for an interpretation, it suddenly occurred to me that the message was about the counter-intuitive, but deliberate decision to disarm before going into battle.  “Don’t go into battle,” the essence of this message became, “without taking out your teeth.”

A Memory of Taking Out My Teeth

I actually remembered doing this once before.  When I turned 21, my college friends took me bar hopping.  We walked into one bar, just as some hulking fellow wheeled around on his bar stool, obviously drunk, and barked, “I want to fight someone, anyone.”  Then locking eyes with me – just as I happened unluckily within his field of sight – he said, “You!” and started lunging forward. 

Instinctively, I put my hands in my pocket, and said, “Why do you want to fight me?  You don’t even know me?  Why don’t you let me buy you a drink, and we can talk about it?”  He thought about this for a moment, grunted, and waddled back to his bar stool.  I went with him, bought him a drink, and spent the next hour listening to his sad story – how he had just lost his job, how his wife had left him, how his kids didn’t understand him, and so on.  By the time he had finished, his anger had momentarily diffused, and I took advantage of the respite to take my leave.  As I stepped back out into the street with my astonished friends, I heard a voice behind me saying, “If want to fight someone, anyone….”  I kept going and didn’t look back.

Obviously, nothing had really shifted for this man, but I had at least managed to sidestep becoming his victim.  More recently, in at least some of the close encounters mentioned during my last Mars-Pluto cycle, I had also instinctively kept my hands in my pockets, and took out my teeth before battle, and gotten more mileage out of this strategy than I would have had I geared up to fight. 

Cultivating the Toothless State as a Response to the Potential for Violence

During one incident mentioned under the waning sextile, for example, this strategy seemed to help.  During this period, I was compelled to confront a logger about working on land cooperative land in the rain, after we had asked him not to.  When I reminded him of our agreement, he became surly and scowled at me.  “I was just quitting,” he snarled, even though it was quite clear to me that if I had not confronted him, he would have kept working as long as he could.  I do think, had I said the wrong thing, this confrontation might actually have led to violence, as this man obviously did not take kindly to my reminder, however diplomatically I presented it.

Somehow, however, I was able to take out my teeth and disarm both myself and my potential opponent.  “Look,” I said, “I know what it is like to have to quit when it rains. I had a painting business for many years, and every time it rained, I had to quit,  I hated it, and I’m sure you do, too.  But that’s just the reality of the kind of businesses we have chosen to be in.”  He seemed to understand.  He remained silent for a few seconds, then said, “Well, ok then.  I guess I’ll see you around.”  And that was that.

Except that over the course of the next few weeks, I made it a point to check on these loggers every few days or so, and usually struck up a conversation of some kind.  One day I showed up with my chain saw goggles perched on my hat and my ear protectors around my neck, covered from head to toe in wood chips, obviously fresh from a session with my own chain saw.  They gradually began to see that I was, if not one of them, at least not “the enemy.”  We had something in common, and over time we developed a respect for each other.  I began to understand more about what compelled them to work in the rain, and they became increasingly curious about who I was, what I was trying to do on my own land, and why what they were doing on the cooperative’s common land mattered so much to me. 

Now if I have a concern, I can approach them and they will listen without being threatened.  I understand, and they understand that I understand that there is a line there, and a limit to how much we can ask of each other.  But moving back and forth across that line is not the potential powder keg it once was, and I think that is progress.  I had taken out my teeth and the snapping and snarling subsided.

Taking Out Your Teeth

As Andrew Harvey pointed out in his workshop, you cannot deal effectively with anyone on the opposite side of an issue, as long as you are angry toward them, afraid of them, or projecting your own shadow stuff onto them.  If any of these emotions cloud your interaction with them, you will enter that interaction baring your teeth, your adversary will bare theirs, you will fight, and one or both of you will lose.  Thus the concept of “taking out your teeth before battle” means looking to see when and where your teeth are bared in reflex reaction, and working internally to disarm your own triggers to a violent or potentially violent response. 

I know when I am armed to the teeth when there is agitating dialogue before and/or after an interaction with another.  I am gradually learning to back off when that happens, and work to calm myself, to understand how and why I have been triggered, and to take responsibility for my own discomfort, whatever form it might take.  It is not always possible to do this, especially when something happens fast.  I am usually not very good at thinking or responding on my feet.  But as one of Andrew Harvey’s co-teachers taught us on the closing day, you have to develop a set of habits that are rooted in your body, not your mind, so that when you are in a situation that requires immediate response, you don’t have to think about it.  Your body simply knows what to do.

Beyond taking out my teeth before battle, then, it seems to me that the task before me – at least in dealing with my own Mars-Pluto capacity for attracting conflict and potential violence – is to learn how to live without teeth, that is to say, without anger, fear or the need to project.  Is this possible?  I don’t know.  I think we all need to stand up to the bullies of the world – the takers who would leave this world we share violated, damaged and abused.  But somehow, we need to learn how to do this without marking them as the enemy.  They are not the enemy.  Or as the main character of World War II cartoonist, Walt Kelly’s comic strip – Pogo – once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is the seventh in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within
  

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle (this post)

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

Putting Your Question to the World

In the midst of the beginning of this new Mars-Pluto transit, I had made the decision to spend my birthday with my partner, Sara, at a romantic getaway in Eureka Springs, a small tourist town about 3 1/2 hours from here.  A day or two before we left, I had read something interesting in a book by Robert Moss, called Conscious Dreaming. 

I had become interested in Robert Moss’ work, after Sara had stumbled upon it, and shared a link to his website with me.  This past year, Sara and I have become increasingly interested in dreamwork and shamanic journeywork as a pathway to internal guidance.  Robert Moss combines both in his approach to dreams. 

In particular, two days before our trip to Eureka Springs to celebrate my birthday, I came across these passages, about “putting your question to the world,” outlining a practice for approaching waking life as though it were a dream:

Shamanic dreamers recognize that waking life is also a dream, and that the world will speak to us in the manner of a dream, if we know how to attend to it.

. . . Just as shamanic dreamers recognize dreams as real experiences, they play close attention to the symbolic meaning of the incidents and patterns of external reality.  “As within, so without.”  Everything has meaning, everything is related.

. . . As you become more alert to the play of synchronicity around you, you will learn to use coincidences, as well as dreams, as navigational tools in daily life.

… the tools of divination are all around us: in the flight of birds, in a chance encounter, in a snatch of a stranger’s conversation overheard on the street.  The world speaks to us in many voices, in the manner of dreams.  These voices often seem a cacophony, because we persist in dismissing messages that defy linear sequence and logic.  You have a better chance of collecting your messages from the world – as from your dreams – if you can create a frame for synchronicity that will bring events into focus.  The easiest way to do this . . .  is to find the question you need answered now. . . , carry your question into the world, . . . (then) read the sign language of the world.

Sara and I decided to do this on our trip to Eureka Springs, using the trip as a frame for synchronicity within which our questions could be answered.  My question was the same posed earlier: “How can I more effectively deal with those who feel threatened by my words, or my actions, or simply feel some need to oppose me for whatever reason?”  In the next post, I'll describe how my question was answered ...

This is the sixth in a series of ten blog postings that includes the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal
  

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World (this post)

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

In my last post, I described my chronic angst with the systemic violence I see increasingly entrenched within the very fabric of our culture, suggesting that any hope we might have for the future depends upon us consciously and intentionally making different choices.

I myself have been seeking to choose something different for a while now.  All my life I have carried a tremendous capacity for anger.  This anger was originally born of a childhood wound in which the other children in my neighborhood attacked me during a game of king of the mountain in my grandfather’s backyard.  Although I do not know if there was in fact ill intent behind their actions, I became violently ill with pneumonia in the wake of the attack, and sustained psychological as well as physical damage. 

I also maintained a certain a wariness of the intent of others, and a chronic sense of disempowerment that followed me into adulthood.  I have written extensively about this incident and its aftermath in my book, Tracking the Soul With an Astrology of Consciousness, and have worked on the core complex of issues generated by it all my life.  I have no intention of belaboring the discussion here, within the context of this post, except to note that incident took place on or around the time of a Mars-Pluto conjunction.

In my natal birthchart, Mars and Pluto form an uneasy semi-sextile aspect to one another.  The semi-sextile is an aspect of friction – the kind of irritation caused by the juxtaposition of two very different and often irreconcilable energies, where the potential for conflict, and in this case, violent conflict is often high.  In my new book – Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers – I speak of the semi-sextile as one of the prime aspects indicating entry into what I call the Realm of Two:

The number Two encompasses the principle of duality – the idea that every conceivable dimension by which this reality might be qualitatively measured is counterbalanced by some other dimension that is in some fundamental way opposite.  Among the more basic of these polarities are light and dark, male and female, hot and cold, wet and dry, odd and even.  Out of consideration of these contrasting opposites, consciousness arises and in turn gives rise to the possibility of choice. 

Within the Realm of Two, we can chose a path of equality that entails no judgment of right or wrong, good or bad, but rather an understanding that both sides of any polarity are necessary to balance and wholeness.  Or we can choose a path of inequality, along which one side is favored at the expense of another.  Inequality generally leads to conflict, while equality leads to creative synthesis, love, mutual respect, compassionate tolerance of differences, and a synergistic interaction in which the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.  The path of equality facilitates the process of becoming, while the path of inequality generally leads back into the Abyss.

I see this dilemma – an inability to consciously or gracefully negotiate the Realm of Two – to be at the root of our systemic capacity for violence, both as a culture and as individuals. On the personal level, it remains my conundrum at the beginning of this new Mars-Pluto cycle.

After the ash pile incident, I spent my first two years in school getting into fights on the playground nearly every day.  In one way, shape, or form, these fights have continued, although now they are rarely physical in nature.  I am less prone to the knee-jerk reaction that often marked my reckless youth, and led to consequences I would have preferred to avoid. 

Still, if I look back at this last Mars-Pluto cycle – a standard astropoetic technique for personalizing your understanding of any planetary dynamic – I see that although the characters, stage settings, and screenplays dramatizing the play of life have changed, the theme and the issues behind the theme, remain.

During the last conjunction of transiting Mars to natal Pluto, for example, I had a run in with a secretary in the Nursing Department of a college I routinely visit with my day job (buying and selling textbooks).   This person, whom I had never met before, told me that they no longer allowed book-buyers in the building, and wanted me to visit the dean.  I told her I didn’t have time, that I was busy running a business.  When she told me I had to, I told her I didn’t have to do anything and stomped off.  I am glad I stood up for myself, but was angry that I would be losing regular customers, by having to mark the Nursing Department off my list.

During the waxing sextile, I experienced a moment of road rage when another driver flipped me the bird after I passed him.

During the waxing square, I became outraged over Google’s attempt to do an end-run around copyright law in appropriating the written work of others for their own commercial use in their Library Project – subsequently writing about it on my publishing company blog.

The waxing trine found me arguing with my neighbors over who has the ultimate authority to make decisions in the land cooperative where I live; and with a fellow astrologer by email about whether or not astrology could rightfully be called a science – an argument that had begun between us during the opposition.

During the waning trine, in the immediate aftermath of the storm mentioned earlier, I was debating with my neighbors the best way to address the massive blow down of trees everywhere throughout the forest.  It appeared some of my neighbors wanted to maximize the opportunity to capitalize on the sale of salvage timber, while others of us were primarily motivated to want to do what was best for the forest.  This was a continuation of the argument about the authority to make decisions mentioned during the waxing trine.

During the waning square, I ran into additional college policies directed at book-buyers, similar to that encountered during the waxing sextile.

During the waning sextile, I had an argument with a friend about the state of the world today; debated what to do with a letter I had just written to a neighbor outside of the land cooperative who had hired loggers that basically trashed his property; and nearly got into an altercation with another logger whom the land cooperative had hired, when he insisted on working in the rain, and tearing up the ground, in violation of our agreement.

During this new conjunction, I was engaged in this argument with B___ about the nature of violence.  I had just been to an Andrew Harvey workshop where I had often been compelled to assume an adversarial role.  And I had just had another difficult discussion with a horse logger I had hired to help clean up the salvage timber on my property, who basically told me that if I wanted him to finish what he started, I would have to do it his way.

Clearly, given this recent history, it appears that life – perhaps my life in particular – continues to be marked at nearly every turn by the potential for conflict, and that with my Mars-Pluto semi-sextile, I am somehow a magnet for it, or compelled to address it.  Granted, few of the conflicts I experience ever come close to actual physical violence.  But they all leave a mark of violation, whether on me or on someone else; many of them do damage; and some of them feel downright abusive. 

Thus at the beginning of this new cycle, the question remains, “How can I more effectively deal with those who feel threatened by my words, or my actions, or simply feel some need to oppose me for whatever reason?”  Or in terms of the challenge posed by the Realm of Two, ”How can I more consciously choose the path of equality in relation to those situations in which the potential for conflict or violence exists.”


This is the fifth in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal
  

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story (this post)

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

 

Shortly after the second war in Iraq began, I bought a popular bumper sticker for my car that read, “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.”  I was outraged, as I imagine most of you reading this post were as well, by the outrageous actions of the Bush administration in conducting his pre-emptive strike on a country without the capacity to harm us, suspending habeas corpus in the name of national security, torturing prisoners, blithely ignoring the threat of global warming, plunging us into unprecedented debt, and thumbing his nose at both national and international law, all with what I would consider a cold, dark, hidden core attitude of violent intent.  Or, if he did not intend to violate, damage and abuse the entire country for his own benefit and that of his corporate cronies, that has certainly been the result.

Beyond the actions of this dangerously misguided man, however, I am also outraged and utterly alienated by the violent culture in which I live, which as I perceive it, has been teetering on the edge of self-destruction, sliding down the slippery slope a little more each year.  Everywhere you look, and whatever your place in life, it is not hard to see an incredible build-up of intensity and severity in the untamed forces that we ourselves – collectively and individually – have unleashed.  In the immediate future, within our lifetime, we face the cumulative impact of environmental devastation, fueled by population explosion, aggravated by consumer mentality and corporate culture in denial of natural limits and natural law, setting the scene for the resource wars of the future, an unstoppable flood of refugees, increased genocide, and increased pressure toward totalitarian repression of individual rights. 

As a child of the 60s, I thought the world would be a different place by the time I became an adult.  It is a different place, but not in the way I have imagined it.  If anything, the culture of violence that seems to make the world go round has become more entrenched, more institutionalized, more acceptable to more people who have become increasingly resigned to it. 

Although there are many good people in the world – those like the participants in Andrew Harvey’s workshop – who truly want to make a difference and leave the world a better place for their passage through it, there are also, it seems to me, increasing numbers of what Daniel Quinn referred to as “takers” in his book Ishmael – people who are just out to get what they can get and to hell with everyone else.  I see these people on the highway when I drive, in my spam box when I check my email, on television during rare occasions when I watch it while out on business, and right here in my own small, relatively insular community.  While most of these people are not outwardly violent, according to the dictionary definition, their actions do violate, damage and abuse – other people, the environment, and the social fabric of the culture we share.  These people, of course, existed when I was growing up, have always existed and probably always will.  Yet, it seems to me that, by and large, we now live in a culture of takers, where the covertly violent arrogance of widespread self-aggrandizement has become the norm.

As our culture continues to indulge this pernicious attitude, we careen by fits and starts toward the abyss.  Our collective hopes and expectations have recently been raised by the election of Barrack Obama to the US presidency.  Certainly this is a vast improvement over the recent administration, and I do continue to hope that change of the kind, scale, and scope that is necessary to create a sustainable, humane, cooperative culture is still possible.  At the same time, I fear that we have passed a point of no return; that no amount of back-paddling at this point, can save us from plunging over the falls into chaos and destruction. 

I am not a pessimist by nature; but neither can I be an optimist without sliding down the slippery slope of denial.  Thus the dilemma that took me to Andrew Harvey’s workshop, and generates my interest in the intentionality behind violence.  For if violence is merely a force of nature, as B___ suggests, then I see little hope for our future.  If it a matter of intention, then we can choose something different.

This is the fourth in a series of ten blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst (this post)

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

A Dialogue About Violence

In my last post in this series I described the opening of a portal (opportunity for growth, in this case associated with transiting Mars conjunct my Pluto) that began with a Facebook status update.  I had written: “I am returning from an Andrew Harvey workshop on Sacred Activism pumped up with a renewed sense of the possibility of making a difference in this whacked out, wobbly world.”

No sooner was this update up than I received a reply from a friend and astrological colleague of mine, B___, who was apparently triggered by it.  He wrote:

It has always been and will always be a whacked out, wobbling world, chaos in praise of the source, peace brings stasis and stagnation, the universe trembles in violence and discord and the world celebrates.

I argued back that I didn’t think violence was ever anything to celebrate.  He responded:

Violence has allowed for the creation of the universe, the creation of stars and their cessation, the creation of land mass in volcanic eruption, the marvelous new beginnings that occur with tsunami, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, wildfire, and the grand expulsion from the uterus.  Creation is not a fluffy, namby-pamby, easy-going process. It is generated from the tormented artist, the suffering composer, the angst ridden writer in the midst of ecstasy and chaos.

While I agreed with B___ that creation – neither in nature nor through human endeavor – was a pastime for sissies, I could not agree with him that nature was violent. 

In May of this year, I had just experienced an horrendous storm – a derechio, or inland hurricane – that devastated the forest home where I live. In a mere 20 minutes, it had uprooted hundreds of old trees, and knocked out power and phones for miles around.  I had to cut my way out of the house, when one huge tree blocked our door, and it took twenty of us two full days of work with chain saws to clear the dirt roads connecting our 1000-acre land cooperative with the nearest pavement.  As I wrote to B___ later, I experienced this storm as awesome (in a spiritual sense, not as a synonym for “cool”), beyond comprehension, and unbelievably powerful, but I did not consider it violent.

Violence, it seemed to me, required intent.  The first definition for the word “violence” in my dictionary was “physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing.”  The third definition allowed for the kind of violence that B___ was ascribing to nature – “intensity, or severity, as in natural phenomena; untamed force.”  The hurricane had certainly been an untamed force of unprecedented (at least in my experience) intensity and severity.  Still, I felt the need for a different word to distinguish the kind of violence that humans were capable of in their worst moments from what nature did, as a matter of impersonal course, without intention.

Astrologers will, of course, recognize a discussion of the nature of violence to be germane to a Mars-Pluto transit, since this particular combination of planetary archetypes has been noted by astrologers to be implicated in the charts of both victims and violent offenders when acts of human violence are committed.  But the discussion was not merely academic to me.  It was, in fact, at the core of what drove me to Andrew Harvey’s workshop in the first place.  In his book, The Hope, Harvey says:

If you and I are not outraged by what is happening everywhere in our world, we will remain where so many find themselves, in paralysis, apathy and denial.  Yet if our outrage masters us, we may become irrational, violent, and destructive in our turn, inwardly ravaged by rage at, and hatred of our opponents that will not only dehumanize us, but also cripple our effectiveness.

If we work with this anger and outrage, however, without repressing or judging or denying it, within the crucible of spiritual practice, it can be transformed into a reservoir of purified passion, compassion and wisdom that will give us power and stamina.

It was this promise that drew me to his workshop, and this possibility that still burned passionately within me at the beginning of this new Mars-Pluto cycle I had entered at the ripe old age of 60.

This is the third in a series of ten blog postings that includes the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

• A Dialogue About Violence (this post)

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

In my last posting, I suggested the first portal I would explore in this series of blog postings is marked astrologically by a triple-pass Mars-Pluto conjunction, that is to say transiting Mars conjunct my natal Pluto.  The first pass (allowing a 1 degree orb) ran from November 29 – December 11, 2009, and this first series of posts is my account of what happened.

The portal associated with this transit began when I posted an update on my Facebook page that read, “I am returning from an Andrew Harvey workshop on Sacred Activism pumped up with a renewed sense of the possibility of making a difference in this whacked out, wobbly world.”  Andrew Harvey is a mystical scholar and spiritual teacher, who founded the Institute for Sacred Activism in Oak Park, IL.  Sacred Activism is the idea that political activism can be more effective when it is fueled by a deep spiritual practice, and can in fact be rather ineffective, misguided, and even dangerous without it.  This is not a new idea, but rather one that has been embodied by many – Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama – to name a few.  What Andrew Harvey has done is to revive the tradition of the sacred activist within the context of an actual curriculum that he teaches. 

Just before this Mars-Pluto transit began, my partner Sara and I attended the 4th in a series of workshops through which Harvey was presenting the beta version of this material – a module focused on the body.  Aside from the attractive nature of the concept Harvey was reviving, spelled out in his recent book, well worth reading - The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism – Sara and I were drawn to the workshop by the synchronicities involved.  It so happened that she was presenting at a conference of physical therapists interested in aquatic bodywork (one of her many talents) in Chicago (of which Oak Park is a suburb) at the same time as the conference, and her schedule allowed her to attend most of Andrew Harvey’s workshop.  It also happened that a friend from Oak Park, who had heard of Andrew Harvey, was interested in the workshop as well.  So the timing was right, we had a place to stay, and everything fell easily into place in the way I have discovered life often does when an important portal is opening.

From the opening lecture of the workshop, I found myself engaged with Andrew Harvey himself in what has become for me an accustomed role of devil’s advocate.  In particular, I found myself questioning the kind of spiritual elitism that assumes those who attend these workshops have the answers, while ordinary people are essentially asleep.  I begged to differ with this assumption, suggesting that there is no one that I knew – including the good old boys here in the Ozarks, for whom the very concept of sacred activism would be quite foreign – who does not know that something is fundamentally broken in the larger society that we all share, and that if we are to survive in some meaningful fashion as a culture, something quite fundamental needs to change.  Though we probably disagree on exactly what, there is no one that I know that doesn’t believe we have a problem.

The only real question is what could an ordinary person do – especially one saddled with family responsibilities, chronic economic angst, and perpetual stress tilting toward overload.  Andrew Harvey seemed to think that if one were aligned with one’s intention to wake up and do something, the clear path forward would reveal itself.  I was not so sure.  In fact, I was bringing that very question to the workshop, hoping to get answers,  The people I know – everybody I know, in fact – is in one way or another, wrestling with the same question.  In a world that is rapidly coming apart at the seams, is it even possible any more to do anything that can ultimately make a difference?  Or is it all – at this late hour – just triage?

Andrew Harvey had clearly invested everything he had in the possibility that building a more conscious system was possible, after the old had been dismantled.  I admired his energy, his passion, his integrity, his stamina, and his fierce determination, even as I occasionally butted heads with him throughout the weekend.  But I also sensed a sort of angry desperation within him, a lack of attention to details (where the devil dwells) and an optimistic naivete – that I did not find reassuring.

Ultimately, Andrew Harvey did not have an answer to my question, but oddly enough I did get my question answered – in retrospect, I think just by attempting to clarify my own position in relation to his, whenever it differed.  What I realized was that I was in fact, already a sacred activist, that there was nothing I needed to do to join the club, or anything I needed to change, really, in order to make a difference within my sphere of influence, other than to just keeping on keeping on, learning and refining my approach to my own life, as I went. 

An old Chinese fortune cookie I keep pasted above my desk says it all: “What you will do matters.  All you need is to do it.”  I left the weekend workshop convinced that it really is that simple, and this was the source of the new optimism I had shared within the Facebook update I posted the day before this Mars-Pluto transit began.

This is the second in a series of blog postings that include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within (this post)
  

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

Into a Mars-Pluto Portal

I’ve had in mind to begin this blog for a while, but haven’t actually been able to clear my deck until just recently.  As the space to write my new blog emerges, I find myself at the beginning of three new astrological cycles.  Having just past my 60th birthday, I recently experienced a solar return.  Since my natal 12th house Sun is conjunct my Ascendant, I also experienced the beginning of a new cycle in the Sun’s annual transit through my houses.  Of much more interest to me, however, as I sit down to write the first installment of The Sky is My Mirror, is the new Mars-Pluto cycle also just begun. 

This transit is of interest to me, in part, because it is what I call a triple-pass transit – in the metaphorical realm of life-changing transformations, perhaps not unlike triple bypass surgery, although I confess, I have not yet had that particular pleasure.  In any case, a triple-pass transit begins with a direct pass, after which the transiting planet goes retrograde, transits the natal planet a second time, goes direct, and transits again a third time.  Some astrologers call these moments exact hits.  I prefer to think of them as stages of successive deepening.  Whatever is introduced during the first pass shows its wounded underbelly during the second half, then gropes toward healing in the third pass.  Or at least, that is the theory.  What I will do in this series of blog postings is observe and see what actually does happen, at least within the subjective context of my own experience.

In this instance, what we are looking at – allowing a 1 degree orb for tight observation – is a first pass from November 29 – December 11; a second retrograde pass from December 29 – January 9, 2010; and a final direct pass from May 11 – 18.  In this first pass, I am looking to see what themes, issues and questions arise for my deeper consideration, and what sort of portal I am being offered by life.

This series of blog postings will include the following installments:

• Into a Mars-Pluto Portal (this post)

• Looking for the Sacred Activist Within

• A Dialogue About Violence

• My Chronic Mars-Pluto Angst

• My Personal Mars-Pluto Story

• Putting Your Question to the World

• Taking Out Your Teeth Before Going Into Battle

• Falling Down Into the Bottomless Well of Compassion

• Questing for Common Ground

• From Violence to Compassionate Strength

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