Thousands of people will join Silent Unity®—an international, trans-denominational, 24/7 prayer ministry—and Unity churches and centers around the world on September 10, 2020, for Unity World Day of Prayer. The theme of this 24-hour prayer event is “From Fear To Faith”.
This year’s affirmation for the event is: Standing in truth, I move from fear to faith.
First Unity Church of St. Louis will be holding an all-day prayer vigil on September 10. Our doors will be open from 8 a.m. until 7:00 p. m. We welcome you to come by and either leave a prayer request in our sealed prayer box or pray with one of our prayer chaplains. Please be assured that we are strictly following social distancing guidelines. Be sure to bring a mask with you.
Our prayer chaplains are trained to hold all prayers in confidence. At the end of the day, all prayer requests will be sent to Silent Unity® where they will be held in prayer for 30 days. We also invite you to light a virtual candle at https://www.unity.org/wdop/candle to represent your light shining in prayer.
We look forward to supporting you with prayer.
“Prayer may seem at times to work wonders. But the wonder-working potential is always within you, waiting to be released.” Eric Butterworth
Aaron Le Conte ★ Find and contact me here: ★ IG: https://www.instagram.com/beinginthenow ★ Facebook http://fb.me/Aaronleconte FREE HUGS! Blind Trust Experiment in London Just before leaving to go traveling, I did a free hugs experiment event in Trafalgar Square, London, England. This was a blind trust experiment and I had to open my heart and let go of fear to give love to those who came to hug me. Standing there waiting for the first hug felt like forever, but then the hugs started coming. There were hugs from all ages, genders, sizes, economic classes, none of this mattered hence the blindfold. None of these attributes has anything to do with who we really are. I wanted to offer love openly to anyone who was open to receive it, and I was open to receiving their’s freely too. The beauty is that I am naked to the world, I cannot see, and I have to surrender to other people, I don’t know what’s going on around me so trust is so important. Overall I would say the blind trust experiment was a huge success and a beautiful one at that. I was able to surrender to love and offer that option to others too. Much love to you all New Free Hugs Video from Istanbul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZIOH… My experience here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaD4a… Music: https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free… Camera: https://amzn.to/2GoNrfW
On September 9th, 2020 Mars goes retrograde at 28° Aries. Mars spends 2 months in retrograde motion and turns direct on November 13th, 2020.
Mars retrograde is not your usual retrograde. Unlike Mercury or Venus retrograde, which are conjunct the Sun, Mars retrograde is OPPOSITE the Sun. So Mars retrograde is not a “New Moon” Mars, but a “Full Moon” Mars – a time for manifestation.
Unlike Mercury and Venus retrograde, Mars doesn’t disappear under the glare of the Sun, but instead, is at its brightest. Mars retrograde is Mars on steroids – and will amplify and bring to culmination whatever Mars stands for.
Many people believe Mars retrograde slows us down, but the opposite is true. Mars retrograde is focused, determined, and ready to take action. Especially so when it is in its home sign, in Aries.
You will embody Mars, you will act like Mars – you will be Mars, and finally, act on your true desires.
And while some things may indeed slow down… these obstacles will drive you to take action more forcefully than usual, and from a more authentic place.
Mars Retrograde is NOT a time to shut down your instincts, on the contrary, this is a time to listen to them, and to follow Mars’ lead from a place of awareness.
Mars retrograde’s goal is to help you find what really drives you, what makes you say “I want this so bad, that I’ll do anything to get it”.
The Hero, The Villain
Mars plays an extremely important role in astrology because Mars is the 1st planet to go a full circle around the Sun.
Before we embrace Mars we don’t have an identity of our own; we are totally dependent on our parents. It’s only at the age of 2 (when we have our first Mars return) that children become aware of themselves as differentiated and unique entities.
Being the 1st planet to go around the Sun, means that Mars is the first planet to apply squares and oppositions to the Sun. We can only develop our identity (the Sun) when the Sun is actively engaged in aspects other than the conjunction (the other personal planets Mercury and Venus never travel farther than 48° from the Sun).
Mars’ journey around the Sun is a metaphor for the Hero’s journey – the initiatic journey of self-discovery and character formation.
The Hero’s journey is a template created by the mythologist Joseph Campbell to describe the path every Hero – in stories throughout the world – takes.
In fact, all Hollywood blockbusters follow Joseph Campbel’s Hero’s journey: the story begins when the Hero is presented with a great challenge – to “fight the dragon”, “save the princes” etc.
Ultimately, the goal of this journey is to transform the prince into a King – to transform the Hero into a true guide.
Mars’ or the Hero’s journey takes 2 years and starts when Mars is conjunct with the Sun (that was September 3rd, 2019).
Mars always goes retrograde in the middle of the cycle; this is when the Hero has to “fight the villain” – and win the fight. Fighting the villain is a necessary part of Hero’s process of individuation.
That’s why people tend to be more “angry” and aggressive when Mars is retrograde. Fighting the villain is not an easy task!
But who is this villain? Your neighbor? Your boss? The state? Someone with a different opinion?
The villain is a metaphor for our dark side, or the unintegrated part of our psyche – what we dissociate ourselves from and project onto other people.
If we want to successfully complete the journey, the villain inside needs to be embraced. When we learn how to establish healthy relationships with other people and see them for who they are – without projecting our dark side onto them – we finally find wholeness within ourselves. And this is what the Hero’s journey ultimately is all about.
What Happens When Mars Is Retrograde?
Mars retrograde is the rarest of retrogrades and also the longest of all the personal planets. That’s why the most significant events in one’s life tend to happen when Mars goes retrograde.
Mars goes retrograde at 28° Aries, and goes direct at 15° Aries. This means Mars spends a lot of time covering only 13° of the zodiac. The stakes are high. There is something about that part of your chart you need to understand, revise, and ultimately take action upon.
Mars retrograde can reveal you an alternative route, an approach that takes you on a path that you have never considered before. By the end of this retrograde, you will find a new solution to an old problem.
The most important Mars makes to other planets are the challenging squares to the slow-moving planets in Capricorn. Here is a snapshot of these dates, including the shadow phase:
Mars enters shadow – July 25th, 2020
Mars square Jupiter (1st) – August
Mars square Pluto (1st) – August 13th, 2020
Mars square Saturn (2st) – August 24th, 2020
Mars goes retrograde – September 9th, 2020
Mars square Saturn (2nd) – September 29th, 2020
Mars square Pluto (2nd) – October 9th, 2020
Mars square Jupiter (2nd) – October 19th, 2020
Mars goes direct – November 13th, 2020
Mars square Pluto (3rd) – December 23rd, 2020
Mars leaves shadow – January 2nd, 2021
What is interesting is that Mars only gets to apply 2 squares to Saturn and Jupiter (instead of the regular 3) before Jupiter and Saturn leave Capricorn and move into Aquarius. This indicates that the final outcome of this Mars retrograde is nothing like we expect it to be.
One thing is clear. Mars will still confront Pluto – his higher octave planet. Mars retrograde square Pluto will ask us some tough questions:
Am I crystal clear about what I want?
Do I act with integrity?
How can I use Mars’ energy to find solutions to old problems, without hurting others?
Which areas of my life need honest, decisive action?
… and will ultimately push us to find more truthful reasons for our actions.
I invite you to CALENDAR my upcoming 40-minute talk – Sunday, September 13th. I’ll talk about how important our creativity is today. As you already know, our world is reeling with the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment, political divisiveness, rising white supremacy, conspiracy theories, police violence and more!
My friend, Hiep sent me this drawing he did of me some time ago. I think it works here! Thanks Hiep!
Heather Williams, HWM Artist, Author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity High Watch Mentor with The Prosperos School of Ontology Retired ART & Sp Ed middle school Teacher
Wired | AI-Powered biotech can help deploy a vaccine in record time
Simulators that can rapidly test trillions of options would accelerate the slow and costly process of human clinical trials.
by Ray Kurzweil
The magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic will largely depend on how quickly safe and effective vaccines and treatments can be developed and tested. Many assume a widely available vaccine is years away, if ever. Others believe that a 12- to 18-month development cycle is a given. Our best bet to reduce even that record-breaking timeline is by using artificial intelligence.
The problem is twofold: discovering the right set of molecules among billions of possibilities, and then waiting for clinical trials. These processes ordinarily take several years, but AI holds the key to radically shortening both. This is where combining AI with biotechnology is headed, and within several years all vaccine and medication development could be done this way. We can already shorten the development time of a Covid-19 vaccine using this method.
Although a human trial of a vaccine or other treatment is regarded as necessary today before widespread use is approved, even large-scale trials are very imperfect, time-consuming, and expensive. A human doctor may come up with a few dozen drugs that may treat a disease. The actual number of theoretical drug possibilities is in the trillions. The current method for testing these few treatments is to organize a few hundred human subjects and then test them over about a year and a half, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Very often, the first several solutions tested on humans are not ideal and lead to other solutions that also take a few years to develop and test. We are literally stuck, watching people succumb to a disease for years while only a few possible solutions are tested. Not much can be advanced until those results are available.
We are seeing the beginnings of a profound paradigm shift in health technology. AI simulations have the potential to test all of the trillions of possibilities with tens of thousands of (simulated) patients for a (simulated) period of years, and do all of this in a matter of hours or days.
In 2019, for example, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, created a “turbocharged” flu vaccine in part by using a biology simulator that used AI to find drugs that activate the human immune system. In a matter of weeks it created trillions of chemical compounds, and the researchers used another simulator to see if each compound would be useful as an immune-boosting drug against the disease agent, selecting the ideal formulation. US researchers are now testing this optimized flu vaccine on human subjects.
Moreover, in the search for antiviral drugs for Covid-19, Argonne National Laboratory has used five of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to narrow a billion molecules down to a few thousand. Then, with a combination of physics simulations to model the microscopic chemistry and deep learning for pattern recognition, they identified about 30 of the most promising candidates for laboratory study. To fight the coronavirus much more rapidly and effectively, more labs need to use AI to simulate trillions of possibilities, and then use human trials for the most promising ones.
These examples mark only the beginning of AI’s contribution to overcoming health problems. Today we can simulate how small molecules interact with certain virtual or human proteins. As these methods take off in the coming years, we will be able to test all trillions of possible solutions to each health problem very quickly. Using neural nets with sufficient computational power will go way beyond what humans can possibly do on their own. Given the exponential nature of progress in this field, I believe that by the end of the decade we will be able realistically model all biology and simulate interventions for diseases without the need for human trials.
Amplifying progress in creating new medications for diseases is among the most profound near-term objectives of AI. Such technology will improve medicine for a vast array of diseases, but it will also be enormously valuable when the next pandemic strikes — whenever that happens. It might have a natural origin. It might be a terrorist bioweapon. It might spread faster than Covid-19, and be 10 or 20 times as lethal. Deploying an effective cure in weeks instead of a year could save tens of millions of lives.
about | Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
He’s received: a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology, the National Medal of Technology, 21 honorary doctorates, and is an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Kurzweil has written 6 national best-selling books, including the New York Times best-seller The Singularity Is Near (year 2005) and How To Create a Mind (year 2012).
Forgiveness is not just personally rewarding. It’s also a political necessity, says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He explains how forgiveness allowed South Africans to imagine a new beginning-one based on honesty, peace, and compassion.
BY DESMOND TUTU | SEPTEMBER 1, 2004 (greatergood.berkeley.edu)
Malusi Mpumlwana was a young enthusiastic antiapartheid activist and a close associate of Steve Biko in South Africa’s crucial Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was involved in vital community development and health projects with impoverished and often demoralized rural communities. As a result, he and his wife were under strict surveillance, constantly harassed by the ubiquitous security police. They were frequently held in detention without trial.
I remember well a day Malusi gave the security police the slip and came to my office in Johannesburg, where I was serving as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. He told me that during his frequent stints in detention, when the security police routinely tortured him, he used to think, “These are God’s children and yet they are behaving like animals. They need us to help them recover the humanity they have lost.” For our struggle against apartheid to be successful, it required remarkable young people like Malusi.
All South Africans were less than whole because of apartheid. Blacks suffered years of cruelty and oppression, while many privileged whites became more uncaring, less compassionate, less humane, and therefore less human. Yet during these years of suffering and inequality, each South African’s humanity was still tied to that of all others, white or black, friend or enemy. For our own dignity can only be measured in the way we treat others. This was Malusi’s extraordinary insight.
I saw the power of this idea when I was serving as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. This was the commission that the postapartheid government, headed by our president, Nelson Mandela, had established to move us beyond the cycles of retribution and violence that had plagued so many other countries during their transitions from oppression to democracy. The commission granted perpetrators of political crimes the opportunity to appeal for amnesty by giving a full and truthful account of their actions and, if they so chose, an opportunity to ask for forgiveness—opportunities that some took and others did not. The commission also gave victims of political crimes a chance to tell their stories, hear confessions, and thus unburden themselves from the pain and suffering they had experienced.
For our nation to heal and become a more humane place, we had to embrace our enemies as well as our friends. The same is true the world over. True enduring peace—between countries, within a country, within a community, within a family—requires real reconciliation between former enemies and even between loved ones who have struggled with one another.
How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation? After a husband and wife or two friends have quarreled, if they merely seek to gloss over their differences or metaphorically paper over the cracks, they must not be surprised when they are soon at it again, perhaps more violently than before, because they have tried to heal their ailment lightly.
True reconciliation is based on forgiveness, and forgiveness is based on true confession, and confession is based on penitence, on contrition, on sorrow for what you have done. We know that when a husband and wife have quarreled, one of them must be ready to say the most difficult words in any language, “I’m sorry,” and the other must be ready to forgive for there to be a future for their relationship. This is true between parents and children, between siblings, between neighbors, and between friends. Equally, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.
Those who forget the past, as many have pointed out, are doomed to repeat it. Just in terms of human psychology, we in South Africa knew that to have blanket amnesty where no disclosure was made would not deal with our past. It is not dealing with the past to say glibly, “Let bygones be bygones,” for then they will never be bygones. How can you forgive if you do not know what or whom to forgive? In our commission hearings, we required full disclosure for us to grant amnesty. Only then, we thought, would the process of requesting and receiving forgiveness be healing and transformative for all involved. The commission’s record shows that its standards for disclosure and amnesty were high indeed: of the more than 7,000 applications submitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it granted amnesty to only 849 of them.
Unearthing the truth was necessary not only for the victims to heal, but for the perpetrators as well. Guilt, even unacknowledged guilt, has a negative effect on the guilty. One day it will come out in some form or another. We must be radical. We must go to the root, remove that which is festering, cleanse and cauterize, and then a new beginning is possible.
Forgiveness gives us the capacity to make a new start. That is the power, the rationale, of confession and forgiveness. It is to say, “I have fallen but I am not going to remain there. Please forgive me.” And forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. Not to forgive leads to bitterness and hatred, which, just like self-hatred and self-contempt, gnaw away at the vitals of one’s being. Whether hatred is projected out or projected in, it is always corrosive of the human spirit.
We have all experienced how much better we feel after apologies are made and accepted, but even still it is so hard for us to say that we are sorry. I often find it difficult to say these words to my wife in the intimacy and love of our bedroom. How much more difficult it is to say these words to our friends, our neighbors, and our coworkers. Asking for forgiveness requires that we take responsibility for our part in the rupture that has occurred in the relationship. We can always make excuses for ourselves and find justifications for our actions, however contorted, but we know that these keep us locked in the prison of blame and shame.
In the story of Adam and Eve, the Bible reminds us of how easy it is to blame others. When God confronted Adam about eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam was less than forthcoming in accepting responsibility. Instead he shifted the blame to Eve, and when God turned to Eve, she, too, tried to pass the buck to the serpent. (The poor serpent had no one left to blame.) So we should not be surprised at how reluctant most people are to acknowledge their responsibility and to say they are sorry. We are behaving true to our ancestors when we blame everyone and everything except ourselves. It is the everyday heroic act that says, “It’s my fault. I’m sorry.” But without these simple words, forgiveness is much more difficult.
Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.
If the wrongdoer has come to the point of realizing his wrong, then one hopes there will be contrition, or at least some remorse or sorrow. This should lead him to confess the wrong he has done and ask for forgiveness. It obviously requires a fair measure of humility. But what happens when such contrition or confession is lacking? Must the victim be dependent on these before she can forgive? There is no question that such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive, but it is not absolutely indispensable. If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit’s whim, locked into victimhood, no matter her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust.
In the act of forgiveness, we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to change. We are welcoming a chance to make a new beginning. Because we are not infallible, because we will hurt especially the ones we love by some wrong, we will always need a process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those unfortunate yet all too human breaches in relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.
We have had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa that was not retributive but restorative. Traditionally, when people quarreled, the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations. This was the animating principle of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For Africa is concerned, or has traditionally been concerned, about the wholeness of relationships. That is something we need in this world—a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people. It is also something we need in our families and friendships. For retribution wounds and divides us from one another. Only restoration can heal us and make us whole. And only forgiveness enables us to restore trust and compassion to our relationships. If peace is our goal, there can be no future without forgiveness.
About the Author
Desmond TutuDesmond Tutu is the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, retired as Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, 1996. He then served as chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This essay draws from his latest book, God Has a Dream (Doubleday, 2004). Audio of Archbishop Tutu reading from his book can be heard at http://www.godhasadream.com.
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