Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong’s superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain’s foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume.
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: Power leads to money which leads to covert acts of corruption.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) Truth is the incorruptible flow of power, money, and ability, housed everywhere, hidden everywhere, the only way.
2) One Infinite Consciousness, is the motivating agency of absolute dominion — limitlessly enabling unfathomable value, to express and be made visible, in every manifestation, that is an authentic realization of Itself.
3) Truth, the Essence, Unlimited Guidance, Omni – All seeing Eyes of Authority, this Priceless Equivalent of Valuation, the Incorruptible Enactment, Force of entrance, Re- enforcing that All is Consciousness Aware of Itself as Consciousness Awareness, Principled in Universal Integrity.
4) The specific value of each and every individuation of All One Mind Truth is self evident, all powerful, all knowing, all present, able, clearly guiding each and every individuation of being and all agreement soundly strongly as well being. // Truth is Well Being, guiding all clearly, valuably, as the only power and agreement any individuation can express.
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THE HEAVENS—Reminiscing over how much time had passed since His days as a younger deity, God, Our Heavenly Father, expressed His nostalgia and delight Wednesday after stumbling on the old, beat-up planet He carved ‘Mötley Crüe’ all over. “Holy shit, I haven’t seen this in decades!” exclaimed the Lord, noting that He can still remember the hours spent scrawling every lyric from “Shout At The Devil” into the planet’s northern ice cap while daydreaming of one day fronting his own heavy metal band. “Oh, man, this is really bringing Me back. I used to stash all My Zippos and rolling papers under those mountains back there and just rock out. Good times. I suppose it is a little embarrassing to see how into Vince Neil I was, but hey, I was just a kid back then. I didn’t know any better. In my defense, I got super into Slayer and Megadeth just after this.” At press time, His Holiness was using a 4-track to finally record the demo album He had always planned on releasing.
By Matthew Stelzner – January 24, 2020 (stelz.biz)
Hey Everyone: We have moved into another portal, what I’m calling the Heart Chakra Portal of 2020, and I’ve got a new video about it, just released on YouTube. Some of you journeyed with me through the Heart Chakra Portal of 2019, and that portal really began a new phase of my approach to astrology. I started my course “Tarot and Flow” under that alignment, and it was an exploration of how the tools of astrology and tarot are ultimately self-love practices that are meant to help us open our hearts to receive loving messages of guidance.
At that time I started to bring more focus to the conjunction phases (when two or more planets come within a close range in the same part of the sky) of the planetary cycles of time. It is the conjunctions of the planets that represent the ending of one cycle of time, and the beginning of a new cycle of time. These moments are opportunities for the integration of the previous cycle and also for visioning, and setting intention for the new cycle. These times can bring a fresh start with regard to the qualities and themes associated with the two planets in conjunction.
Some conjunctions happen often (like the conjunction of the Moon and the Sun each month at the New Moon), others happen yearly or bi-yearly (inner planet conjunctions) and others are much rarer, like our current Jupiter-Saturn conjunction which happens every 20 years. Other cycles of time begin even more rarely, like the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto conjunction that I’ve been exploring in recent videos and blog posts, which won’t come into another powerful alignment for more than a thousand years.
The Heart Chakra Portal is a conjunction of Venus and Neptune and it happens approximately once per year. The last time they conjoined was in late March/early April of 2019, and the next time will be late April/early May of 2021. Now is a moment to reflect on the time period since last April and consider how you’ve done with the themes of the Venus-Neptune combination. These themes are explored in my new video, and I hope you will check it out.
Venus is the planet of love, beauty, art and music. It represents the human need for intimacy, friendship, and the pleasures of life. Neptune is associated with our spirituality, our imagination, and our relationship with the divine. It is related to consciousness exploration, moments of inspiration, our connection with the water element, and the dissolving of boundaries (with other people, with our higher selves, and with other dimensions of reality). Some questions to ask yourself as you consider this past year and start to set intentions for the year ahead:
“How am I doing with opening my heart to the love of the divine?”
“How am I doing with practicing loving kindness towards myself and others?”
“How much time have I devoted to prayer, and practicing loving self-talk?”
“How have I given myself the medicine of sweet waters, and how have I shared sweet waters with others?”
“How much time have I invested in experiencing and creating sacred music, sacred art, and sacred dance?”
“What are the heart medicines that I’ve found and received in this past year?”
In the recent posting on the Dragonrider Portal conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, I wrote about how I feel Kwan Yin is a great model for riding the dragon of 2020 and transforming the intense energies in the direction of peace and kindness. I feel like this Heart Chakra Portal can really help us develop intimacy with Kwan Yin as the Venus-Neptune cycle of time is sacred to her and is her natural frequency. This is especially the case when the Moon (the mother force of the universe and the planet associated with nurturing and caring for oneself and others) joins Venus and Neptune in a triple conjunction, as it will from the 26th to the 29th of this month (most precise on the 27th and 28th here in the US, and on the 28th and 29th in Europe and further east). I focus on this special triple conjunction in the videoand use chart software to illustrate it.
I really encourage you all to try to observe the Moon Venus conjunction, which will be visible after sunset close to the western horizon. On the 26th and 27th you will see a beautiful crescent Moon below a brilliant Venus, and then on the 28th and 29th the Moon moves above Venus. I hope you will go observe this alignment and do some sort of ritual, extending yourself out to the Moon and Venus, and then going further past them in your imagination, in a strait line all the way out to Neptune. I would encourage you to pray to these massive expressions of consciousness, to pray especially for guidance towards sacred love, sacred art, sweet waters, soul mates and awesome music. Extend yourself outward, raise your frequency to the heart chakra, and then turn within to receive loving messages of guidance.
The Aquarius New Moon brings a blast of fresh air, beyond the shadows of recent eclipses. However, with the Sun and Moon square Uranus, planet of the unexpected, some developments may arrive as searing bolts from the blue, not gentle breezes wafting away the cobwebs! While Aquarius is associated with fairness, we may be quite struck by how unfair a set of circumstances seems.
Whether or not we feel motivated or empowered to do anything about it is perhaps an issue for the longer-term future, since a New Moon often coincides with a situation that feels “too early” for clear and confident action. But we can still work on the seeds of a possible plan, with a “to be continued” storyline underpinning it.
Any fallout some of us may have to handle, around this Uranus square, could take extra time and energy to manage. With a Uranian-style lightning strike, there may be no denying that something has changed, but taking in all the details of the change requires inner and outer adjustments. These can involve levels of rebuilding, quite fitting for Uranus in Taurus, which is linked with construction.
With Uranus aspecting the Sun and Moon, it could seem as though there is some collective inevitability around any unusual activity we encounter, which may be accompanied by a sense of frustration over lack of individual power. There might be another way of seeing the situation, though. Whatever Uranus represents may have a protective quality, more akin to the well-meaning guardian than the despotic ruler!
Since this planet is associated with sweeping out the old, it could, for instance, be that circumstances force us to get rid of anything that has exceeded its use-by date. While we may have continued to hold onto something, we might have lost touch with the obvious rationale behind keeping it. Any lack of clarity is underlined by the Sun and Moon semi-square Neptune. And any such blurriness could soon be erased, as the more clear-cut Uranus focus takes over — bringing restoration to a fresh level of sanity with the introduction of something new.
If the tornado-like dynamism of Uranus seems too much to cope with at times, we can also take some comfort in knowing that, with the New Moon’s square to Uranus emphasizing early degrees of the fixed signs of Aquarius and Taurus, we are really just at the beginning of a new order. Things may be up in the air — even torn adrift — but this is just the start of a much-needed shakeup. With outer-planet activity, we can be fairly sure that nothing is purely personal; events are related to a force coming to the surface at a collective level, since what is afoot is best for the whole group.
This might not seem so easy to accept if we are experiencing private turbulence, but it may become so when we choose to connect more with others. We could soon realize that we are truly not alone, even if some of our circumstances have a uniquely individual signature. Again, this is part of the challenge of the Neptune semisquare: to be able to spot where there are similarities with and reflections in other people, rather than concentrating only on our individual trials.
This article is from the Mountain Astrologer, written by Diana Collis.
Michael Lucas Campaign of Hate: Russia and Gay Propaganda A Film by Michael Lucas As most of the world moves forward toward gay equality, Russia is seemingly heading backward. Antigay sentiment and legislation are spreading rapidly throughout the country. In 2013, the Russian parliament passed a ban on so-called “gay propaganda” that effectively makes nearly any public discussion of gay equality a crime. The city of Moscow has outlawed Gay Pride parades for the next 100 years. Adoption of Russian children is forbidden to citizens of any foreign country that permits gay marriage. And legislation is now being considered that would permit the Russian government to remove gay people’s children from their homes. The Kremlin has chosen the LGBT community as its scapegoat in a populist campaign against supposedly decadent “Western” values, and there are ominous signs of much worse to come. Violent attacks against Russian gays or suspected gays are more and more common. Videos of young LGBT people being taunted and tortured have been widely distributed on the Internet. Those are the stories that get the headlines, but there is much more to the Russian LGBT men and woman I have met. It is my hope that this documentary will educate viewers to their reality.
Legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) is best known as one of literary history’s titans, but he was also a brilliant entrepreneur and pioneer of self-publishing. Under the auspices of his enterprising wife Anna, Dostoyevsky overcame his ruinous gambling addiction to become Russia’s first self-published author. But it was the release of A Writer’s Diary (public library) — the same collection of his nonfiction and fiction writings that gave us Dostoyevsky’s memorable recollection of how he discovered the meaning of life in a dream — that turned him into a national brand.
In February of 1876, reflecting on the unanimous acclaim with which the first volume of the journal had been received, 55-year-old Dostoyevsky contemplates the paradox of people-pleasing and writes in the very diary whose success he is pondering:
I am interested only in the question: is it, or is it not, good that I have pleased everybody?
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
From this, under the heading “On the Subject That We All Are Good Fellows,” he springboards into an exquisite discussion of our deepest goodness, emanating a deep faith in the human spirit — all the more impressive given what Dostoyevsky himself endured — and a conviction that we are inherently good despite the badness we sometimes put on like an ill-fitting suit to impress by imitating those we mistake for impressive.
We are all good fellows — except the bad ones, of course. Yet, I shall observe in passing that among us, perhaps, there are no bad people at all — maybe, only wretched ones. But we have not grown up to be bad. Don’t scoff at me, but consider: we have reached the point in the past where, because of the absence of bad people of our own (I repeat: despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches), we used to be ready, for instance, to value very highly various bad little fellows appearing among our literary characters, mostly borrowed from foreign sources. Not only did we value them, but we slavishly sought to imitate them in real life; we used to copy them, and in this respect we were ready to jump out of our skins.
While much of Dostoyevsky’s discussion of such misplaced imitation pertains to that specific point in Russia’s cultural history, embedded in it is a broader reminder that, to borrow Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable words, “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” In a remark particularly poignant in the context of Russia’s troubled present-day civic climate, Dostoyevsky considers the allure of imitating such villains:
We used to value and respect these evil people … solely due to the fact that they appeared as men of solid hate in contradiction to us Russians, who, as is well known, are people of very fragile hate, and this trait of ours we have always particularly despised. Russians are unable to hate long and seriously, and not only men but even vices — the darkness of ignorance, despotism, obscurantism and all the rest of these retrograde things. At the very first opportunity we are quick and eager to make peace… Please consider: why should we be hating each other? For evil deeds? — But this is a very slippery, most ticklish and most unjust theme — in a word, a double-edged one… Fighting is fighting, but love is love… We are fighting primarily and solely because now it is no longer a time for theories, for journalistic skirmishes, but the time for work and practical decisions.
Noting that the Russian people must recover from “two centuries of lack of habit of work,” he articulates the more universal and rather lamentable human tendency to deflect insecurity by lashing out:
The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.
And yet Dostoyevsky approaches the problem with deep compassion rather than harsh judgment:
What, I may ask you, is there bad about it? — Only, that this is touching — and nothing more. Look at children: they fight precisely at the age when they have not yet learned to express their thoughts — exactly as well. Well, in this there is absolutely nothing discouraging; on the contrary, this merely proves to a certain extent our freshness and, so to speak, our virginity.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from ‘Let’s Be Enemies.’ Click image for more.
He observes how this tendency plays out in his own craft — something undoubtedly amplified today, when criticism is not only professionalized but also sensationalized for profit by the commercial media industrial complex:
In literature, because of the absence of ideas, people scold each other, using all invectives at once; this is an impossible and naïve method observed only among primitive peoples; but, God knows, even in this there is something almost touching: exactly that inexperience, that childish incompetence even in scolding in a proper manner.
But underneath such defensive insecurity and cynicism, Dostoyevsky argues, lies a deeper, most earnest yearning for goodness:
I am by no means jesting; I am not jeering: among us there is a widespread, honest and serene expectation of good (this is so, no matter what one might say to the contrary); a longing for common work and common good, and this — ahead of any egoism; this is a most naïve longing, full of faith devoid of any exclusive or caste tinge, and even if it does appear in paltry and rare manifestations, it comes as something unnoticeable, which is despised by everybody… And why should we be looking for “solid hate”? — The honesty and sincerity of our society not only cannot be doubted, but they even spring up into one’s eyes. Look attentively and you will see that … first comes faith in an idea, in an ideal, while earthly goods come after.
It is our responsibility as human beings, Dostoyevsky suggests, to peer past the surface insecurities that drive people to lash out and look for the deeper longings, holding up a mirror to one another’s highest ideals rather than pointing the self-righteous finger at each other’s lowest faults:
A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.
He urges that such compassion be granted to the Russian people, but in his words there is to be found an enduring case for all disenfranchised groups and harshly judged communities:
Judge [the people] not by those villainies which they frequently perpetrate, but by those great and holy things for which they long amidst the very villainy. Besides, the people are not composed of scoundrels only; there are also genuine saints — and what saints! They themselves are radiant and they illuminate the path for all of us!
Somehow, I am blindly convinced that there is no such villain or scoundrel among the Russian people who wouldn’t admit that he is villainous and abominable, whereas, among others, it does happen sometimes that a person commits a villainy and praises himself for it, elevating his villainy to the level of a principle, and claiming that l’ordre and the light of civilization are precisely expressed in that abomination; the unfortunate one ends by believing this sincerely, blindly and honestly.
With the wry caveat that he is “speaking only about serious and sincere people,” Dostoyevsky reiterates his appeal at the heart of his creed:
Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become.
A new book suggests that scientists take a closer look at a seemingly bizarre idea: that it’s not extraterrestrials piloting UFOs, but time-traveling humans from the future.
“We know we’re here. We know humans exist. We know that we’ve had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future,” author Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University, told Space.com. “I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us [flying UFOs].”
For Science
Masters isn’t the first to float this idea. But in his new book, he attempts to support it by drawing on his expertise in anthropology. If future scientists could go back in time to see what today’s humans were like — rather than trying to learn from ancient relics — it might be hard for them to pass up the opportunity.
“The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature,” Masters told Space.com. “It’s probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can’t without access to that technology.”
Time Tourists
But scientists aren’t the only future humans Masters thinks could be visiting us via UFOs — he believes time travel could be a big tourist industry in the future, too.
“Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history,” he told Space.com. “Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru… old and prehistoric sites.”
