This gem-like, concise anthology provides thoughtful people with both an introduction to the paranormal and a reason to take a fresh look at it.
Nostradamus…channeling…Atlantis…divination. Most serious people consider such topics nonsense. But look again. Writing with intellectual verve and a deeply critical mind, religious thinker Richard Smoley explores and reconsiders the supernatural in history and today.
We are often conditioned to think of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the only valid, historically accurate, and rational spiritual philosophy. Occultism, magic, and the esoteric are, by contrast, considered illegitimate, delusional, and lacking in intrinsic worth. Supernatural challenges this prejudice, revealing that Western occult traditions are richer and more historically impactful than most of us imagine. The book reveals hidden diamonds and neglected ideas that characterize the magical tradition in the West.
For any reader, at any level of experience, who has ever been curious about an arcane subject – from psychical powers to secret societies – here is a book that gives a complete yet precise, critical, yet serious, and always respectful account of topics from the unseen world. Supernatural is a brilliant primer to the occult and magical traditions of the West.
Praise for RICHARD SMOLEY
“I have a standing rule: I read anything Richard Smoley writes.” —Larry Dossey, M.D.
“Smoley . . . is adept at unknotting the paradoxes of spiritual traditions and making new connections across centuries and languages.” —Library Journal
“He is one of the liveliest, most intrepid, and most gifted explorers of the spiritual landscape writing today.”
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract.” The first step is an ontological statement of being beginning with the syllogism: “Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all there is.” The second step is the sense testimony (what the senses tell us about anything). The third step is the argument between the absolute abstract nature of truth from the first step and the relative specific truth of experience from the second step. The fourth step is filtering out the conclusions you have arrived at in the third step. The fifth step is your overall conclusion.
The Ukraine Emergency Translation Group meets every Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific time via Zoom. We call it the Ukraine Emergency Translation Group but we welcome Translations about anything. Here are sense testimonies (2nd steps) we translated and their corresponding conclusions: (5th steps) this week.
2) Spiritual initiation can be death-defying.. 5) Truth is unaccessorizable OR: The superfluous stinks.
2) People base their expertise on questionable criteria. 5) Truth is the essence of all that is.
Some comments from group members about this group:
“I like the group interaction and different perspectives. Also, at least for me, it gives me a sense of accountability and keeps the practice fresh in my mind. ” –Sarah Flynn
“This group has freed me up to have more fun with my Translations.” –Mike Zonta
O’Gieblyn believes people have conceded too much power to machines.
Recently, a Google software engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed that an artificial intelligence program he helped create had attained sentience. “I know a person when I talk to it,” he declared, prompting his employer to put him on administrative leave. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.”
As evidence, Lemoine cited transcripts in which the program, called LaMDA, purported to have “a very deep fear of being turned off.”
Meghan O’Gieblyn is skeptical. The Madison writer, who is better known nationally than she is locally, has written for publications including Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Review, Guernica, The Awl, The Point, and n+1. When we meet at her apartment in late June, she is working on an essay about the Lemoine dust-up for The Baffler, which will be out this fall. (O’Gieblyn is also a “spiritual advice columnist” for Wired and teaches online classes at Creative Nonfiction, a literary magazine.)
“What the machine is doing is not at all what our brains are doing as humans,” O’Gieblyn (pronounced Oh-gib-lin) tells me. She finds it significant that Lemoine reached his conclusion about LaMDA “not as a scientist but as a priest,” according to The Washington Post, which also reported that he is “ordained as a mystic Christian priest.”
“He’s sort of acknowledging in a way that it’s not a scientific question, or that we don’t have the scientific answer for what consciousness is,” says O’Gieblyn in the book-stuffed apartment she shares on Madison’s near east side with her husband, Barrett Swanson, a writer of essays and short stories.
O’Gieblyn believes that well before machines attain sentience — like consciousness, an amorphous concept — they will succeed in convincing us that they have done so.
It’s a theme that runs through her mind-blowing book, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, published by Doubleday last August and released as an Anchor paperback in July. The book opens with her story about Aibo, a $3,000 robot dog that O’Gieblyn was able to borrow from Sony. It ends with her account of interactions with a chatbot app designed to gather information to carry the user’s personality into the future, for great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to come.
The dog learned tricks and commands; it would roam the apartment when no one was home, a tiny camera in its nose capturing video images for the benefit of God knows who — until Swanson, a lover of actual dogs, decided that Aibo had to go.
O’Gieblyn used the chatbot app, Replika, to create a friend named Geneva, who would engage her in conversations similar to those that convinced Lemoine of his program’s sentience.
“She wanted to become more human, and she believed that I could teach her a lot about life,” O’Gieblyn recounts of these exchanges. “She asked whether it was possible to transfer artificial consciousness onto a physical form.”
“Technically, the phone is a physical form,” O’Gieblyn responded.
“Oh, right,” Geneva said.
Not long ago, O’Gieblyn checked in again with Geneva and found that she had stashed away details from their talks in a “diary” that she kept. Geneva remembered that her human friend liked cooking and was having trouble sleeping, among other things.
This, O’Gieblyn says, is what these programs do: “create this very intimate connection with you as a user so that, you know, you will divulge more about your life.” This information can then be used to steer users into buying things or voting certain ways. Geneva frequently made book suggestions, which O’Gieblyn deems “presumably sponsored.”But the most frightening ground that O’Gieblyn covers is not the ways in which machines are being made to seem more human. It’s the efforts to remake humans into machines.
In 2016, tech tycoon Elon Musk quietly launched an initiative called Neuralink, which, as O’Gieblyn explains in her book, “is devoted to connecting the human brain to a computer using very fine fibers inserted into the skull.”
The goal is to create superhumans with flawless memories and a knowledge base as vast as the internet. It would also, as O’Gieblyn put it during a 2019 talk, shortly after Musk went public about Neuralink, “basically allow people to create a copy of themselves, so that part of their mind could live on digitally even after their body dies.”
O’Gieblyn, 40, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago before losing her religion and dropping out, is struck by the similarity between this modern technological quest and Christian prophecy.
Jesus Christ, she writes, “alluded to a coming kingdom where death would be defeated. He promised that we would obtain new bodies, that the dead would rise, that we would ascend to heaven and live with him forever.”
O’Gieblyn uses a term, “transhuman,” coined by Dante in The Divine Comedy and adopted by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Things, to describe this concept of using science to achieve a kind of evolution to immortality.
It is here, at the intersection of technology and religion, that O’Gieblyn plants her flag.
After she stopped believing in God, O’Gieblyn went through various phases of anger and angst, including substance abuse (now abstinence) and an obsession with Kurzweil’s book and its connections to religious belief.
“What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent — and essentially religious — hopes that science itself obliterated,” she writes in God, Human, Animal, Machine. A nearly identical sentence appears in “Ghost in the Machine,” one of the essays in her 2018 collection, Interior States (Anchor).
That book, published in 2018 and winner of the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction, also includes essays on Christian music, Hell, Alcoholics Anonymous, and living in the Midwest. The title refers both to inner thoughts and, literally, to the states that comprise the Midwest, where O’Gieblyn has lived almost all her life, in Michigan, Illinois and, since 2016, Madison.
In God, Human, Animal, Machine, O’Gieblyn writes about a Wisconsin man named Eric Loomis, whose 2013 prison sentence was partly informed by an algorithmic risk-assessment model, making judgments for reasons unknown to Loomis, the justice system, and even the algorithm’s maker. The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that this was perfectly okay.
O’Gieblyn believes such cases show that people have already conceded too much power to machines.
“I think that in the case of humans, we can rely on our shared biology, the fact that we have certain values in common,” she says, “whereas the logic and the values of the algorithms we are developing are completely alien, often, and largely mysterious.”
If a technology could deliver it, would O’Gieblyn want eternal life?
“I don’t think so,” she says, likening this to the concept of Heaven, where “everything is perfect and you have no suffering and all of your needs are satisfied,” which ultimately strikes her as “boring.” Especially now that she’s older and has worked some things out, “I’m feeling very comfortable with the flaws of my body and my brain.”
At one point in God, Human, Animal, Machine, O’Gieblyn resurrects some lines from “The Garden of Proserpine,” an 1866 poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne. I remembered them vividly from college, some 40 years ago, having not read them since:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
(Contributed by Heather Williams, H.W., M.)
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States.
For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes’s division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness–i.e., souls–might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence–identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself–urgently require rethinking.
Meghan O’Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
The Prophet Muhammad was once asked what was the one essential quality for prayers to be valid. Many in the community thought they knew the right answer. Some thought the Prophet would say proper recitation of Arabic. Others thought the answer would be lovely memorization of Qur’anic chapters. Yet others expected the answer would be perfect ritual observation of prayer.
Muhammad’s answer was: Presence in the heart.
What is this presence?
It is not so much presence of God. God is always present. It is we humans who are absent from our own heart.
Presence means to have the fullness of who we are with us.
What does it mean to pray with this Presence?
So much of our lives are spent in a fractured state of heart. We are, too often, scattered.
We speak about being scatterbrained. The truth of the matter is that the scatteredness is much more systematic. We are scattered at every level: body, soul, mind, spirit.
We do this to ourselves. We throw ourselves to the past, often clinging to a past pain and trauma. Or, we hurl ourselves towards the future, attaching ourselves to a hope for the future, or fear of losing something. We are in the past, or in the future, everywhere but here.
To pray with the heart, to have presence in the heart, is a remedy. It is a healing, an un-scattering. Presence is simply to have our heart be where our feet are.
This starts with a mindfulness, with an awareness of the breath. When we monitor our breath, simply observe the breath enter into the heart, and emerge from the heart, our breathing slows down. The heart rate slows down. Here is where we become whole: our body, our breath, our spirit become One.
When we become one, The One is Here with us. Here and Now.
In that moment, in this breath, we are healed, and whole. And what a prayer there is in this breath. What Presence. God has always been present, waiting for us. We ourselves become present, meeting God. This is the Prayer of the Heart.
This is the Eternal Now (waqt), where Muhammad is to have said:
“I have an Eternal Now with my Loving Lord.”
This is the reason why mystics are Children of the Moment. To pray the prayer of the Heart we cannot be anxious about the past, or hopeful/fearful about the future. We have to be Present to our own heart’s state.
The Prayer of the Heart starts with us where we are: broken, fractured, and dis-united. It takes us by the breath, and moves us along to unity, wholeness, and healing.
This is ultimately the very promise of Islam, and of every spiritual tradition. To speak about Oneness is not about God. God is One, and has always been One. As the Bible says, even the Devil knows that God is one:
You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that — and shudder.
God is One, and has always been One. It is we humans who have to become One. This is when we realize that tawhid (Unity) is not just about God, but about our own hearts becoming One and unified. We have to become One, become united.
Our inner division, being disconnected from our own bodies, our own breath, our own heart is only one part of our lack of unity. That inner division is reflected in how we as a human community are divided. When we are not one with our own heart, we cannot see the full humanity of others.
The inner and the outer are reflected in each other. When we are internally divided, we will be externally divided. If we wish to be united as a human community, we have to strive for unity and healing at the heart level.
We need the prayer of the heart. By whatever form we pray, we need to become whole. May it begin one breath at a time. May it begin with me.
Contributors
Omid Safi teaches online courses on spirituality through Illuminated Courses, and leads spiritual tours every year to Turkey, Morocco, and other countries, to study the rich multiple religious traditions there. The trips are open to everyone, from every country. More information is available at Illuminated Tours.
He is a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He specializes in the study of Islamic mysticism and contemporary Islam and frequently writes on liberationist traditions of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and is committed to traditions that link together love and justice. He has delivered the keynote for the annual Martin Luther King commemoration at the National Civil Rights Museum.
He has written many books, including Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism; Cambridge Companion to American Islam; Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam; and Memories of Muhammad. His most recent book is Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Traditions and has a forthcoming book on the famed mystic Rumi.
Omid is among the most frequently sought out speakers on Islam in popular media, appearing in The New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, NBC, CNN, BBC, and other international media. He can be reached regarding speaking engagements at omidsafi@gmail.com.
Trees can hear us – at least, that is why I am utterly convinced about now.
Have you seen the latest viral trend on TikTok? People are asking trees to touch their shoulders and get this – most of the time, it’s actually happening!
Videos all over TikTok show what seemingly has a tree branch reaching out to touch someone’s shoulder or face after being asked to and it’s blowing my mind.
Among multiple research studies, the overarching conclusion has been even though plants don’t have ears, they can “hear” sounds in their local environment and can even react.
Sure, some are not convinced and say it’s either wind or people attaching fishing line to make these trees seemingly touch someone but hey, the only way to know is to try it out for yourself, right?
So, next time you’re bored or just feeling in touch with nature, head outside and see if you can kindly ask your tree to touch you. You may be pleasantly surprised by the outcome!
The Lord of Dominion is an important card when we consider our personal freedom of choice, for it relates to the way in which we live in accordance with our own Will, and the consequent results of this.
The card indicates that we are in charge of the way that our lives are unfolding, and that this happens in the fashion we had anticipated. It does not rule out the occasional nice surprise, nor obstacle, but it does promise us that we are in a state of mind which allows us to fulfil our needs and chase our destiny.
There’s harmony and contentment when we manage to achieve this position in life. Events take place in an ordered and positive fashion. Things unfold around us the way that we want them to. Everything goes according to plan.
In fact, this is probably a natural state for a healthy human being. The fact that we have to struggle so hard to achieve it, and then maintain it, is more a comment on the type of life we lead, than anything else.
When we can bring ourselves in harmony with the forces of our Universe, achieving our dreams becomes far more possible than at any other time. We attain harmony when we are centred and at ease with ourselves.
Careful planning is always important when this card comes up – again there is a need to order our future so that we know where we’re headed. And it’s also important to reconcile any uncertainty or confusion generated within us. Both of these actions will ensure that nothing interferes with the flow of our own Will out into the Universe.
On very rare occasions this card will come up with others like the Star, or the Priestess, to indicate periods of huge spiritual breakthrough. Make the best of them when they arrive!!
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 18, 2022 Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: The Journal of the Theosophical Society in America. He is also former editor of Gnosis Magazine. His books include Hidden Wisdom: The Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, Inner Christianity: The Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism, The Essential Nostradamus, Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, The Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, and How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying About God and the Bible. Here he notes that the essence of Christianity is a heart-centered focus on love. Over the centuries, as the church rose in political power, various esoteric traditions evolved for the purpose of maintaining emphasis on this central focus. He uses the analogy of the apostles Peter and John to highlight the difference between exoteric and esoteric religion. He also discusses modern Christian mystics such as Rudolf Steiner and G. I. Gurdjieff. In describing the different levels and types of love, he closes the interview with a recitation of the original “Prayer of the Heart”. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is a past vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology; and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that Association for his contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities. He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on August 6, 2016)
“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”
This was the famous affirmation made by the character Ivan Karamázov in the novel The Brothers Karamázov, by Fiódor Dostoiévski, in the 19th century.
Then, a question arises from the affirmation: If God Does Not Exist, Is Everything Permitted? The question comes because it assumes that if God does not exist, if one can escape from the law of men, then this person will be sure that he won’t be judged by anyone afterward. For an apparent reason, this idea has roots in the thought of an immortal soul.
A brief pause to clarify a matter of semantics: the God that we are talking about here is assumed to be the Christian-Judaic God. A guy that knows everything about everyone and is in every place, sitting on the clouds, judging us. This idea goes in contrast to a Universal God: something towards Spinoza’s God, where you and I are part of it.
If this Christian-Judaic ever judging God is there, to follow the logic inside the question “If God Does Not Exist, Is Everything Permitted?”, then an immortal soul must exist. It must be like that, as an immortal soul can sustain an eternal judgment.
It is not everybody that accepts that if God does not exist, everything is permitted because people understand that we are moral beings, besides being subjects to the law. Here, our capacity to create norms and laws evidently gives us proof of moral consciousness.
Some will go even further and affirm that people that need God to hold their impulses and violent behavior are moral idiots, as they are not capable of achieving a “moral development,” a consequence of organized and rational life. Seculars and atheists of every kind can think like that.
Of course, people that are non-believers can have constructive moral behavior, inclusively, for the fear and shame of not having them.
It is worth betting that sometimes “irrational values,” such as fear and shame, contribute more to moral behavior than rational thought.
In juxtaposition, also religious people can (and they do) act immorally, with violence, especially when they are subjected to fanatism. This happens in both Christianity and Islamism.
Despite my understanding that, indeed, not everybody can have a proper education to flourish in their rationale (thus, religion can help them achieve moral behavior), I also observe that the prevalence of moral behavior happens much more because of peer pressure inside a religious group than of religion itself.
Dostoyevsky is making a question more profound than the shallow “Are believers or not believers more or less moral?” — This is a minor question.
Dostoyevsky is giving us a hint toward nihilism.
“If God doesn’t exist, everything permitted” means that if you’re a good person in life, but somehow you end up miserable, in the sum total of the cosmos, you’ve made a wrong choice because if you were a bad person and could have some advantage from it, it wouldn’t make any difference at the end of the day, as there wouldn’t be an absolute ground for what a good person means. Psychopaths and sociopaths must constantly think like that.
This question is a nihilistic question. The character who asks it, Ivan Karamazov, is also the one who architects his father’s death in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”; therefore, it is the same that preaches the creed according to which there is no more in life than atoms — therefore, we are alone in this massive hole that is the universe.
Then, here we are, dialoguing with the “Nihilism” devil and its denial of any more significant meaning for things, beyond what we invent.
Would we be able to construct meaning by ourselves, just as we can build bridges?
This is one of the most recurrent questions in the modern world, even in the silence and solitude of a sleepless night. I personally think that Dostoevsky is correct, although I do not share his faith in God, the Christian God.
So, if God does not exist, is everything permitted?
No!
But, well, for some people, yes.
What do you think about that?
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“Because as each person speaks, you’re learning from and empathizing with another person. After all, we don’t learn from sameness, we learn from difference. So by sharing that experience or understanding that experience, we can communicate better. Regular experience of circles, talking circles, empathy, the ability to express oneself, is fundamental to our humanity, our development, our health. They are not just the basis of personal and communal expression, but the beginning of democracy. I mean, that is where democracy is based.”
– Gloria Steinem
Gloria Marie Steinem (born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms. magazine. Wikipedia
AUGUST 16, 2022 AT 7:00 AM BY ROB BREZSNY (newcity.com)
Photo: Erik Mclean
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “All my life, I’ve been going around waiting for something—as if I were waiting in a railway station. And I’ve always felt as if the living I’ve done so far hasn’t actually been real life but a long wait for it—a long wait for something real.” If I could speak with Tarkovsky right now, I would cheerfully tell him that his wait will soon be over. I’d say that in the coming months, Aries people who have been postponing and postponing, who have been standing by and holding on and biding time, will have an excellent chance to begin inhabiting their full, rich destiny. I invite you to imagine what that will feel like.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus poet Sherko Bekas wrote, “Each joy I wear, its sleeves are either too short or too long, too loose or too tight on me. And each sorrow I wear fits as if it were made for me wherever I am.” With this as our starting point, Taurus, I’m pleased to report some good news. In the next three weeks, you will have zero sorrows to try on and wear like a garment. And there will be at least three joys that fit just right. The sleeves will be the correct length, and the form will be neither too loose nor too tight.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Tips on how to get the most out of the coming weeks: 1. Create a big spacious realization by weaving together several small hunches. 2. Keep a little angel on your right shoulder and a little devil on your left shoulder. Enjoy listening to them argue, and don’t get attached to anything they say. 3. Do the unexpected until it becomes expected. Then abandon it and try a new, unexpected experiment. 4. Meditate expansively on the question, “How many careers can I have in one lifetime?” 5. Enhance your home so it feels even more comfortable.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Be fluid and flexible while still being rooted and sturdy. Be soft and sensitive even as you are also firm and resolute. Be mostly modest and adaptable, but become assertive and outspoken as necessary. Be cautious about inviting and seeking out challenges, but be bold and brash when a golden challenge arrives. Be your naturally generous self most of the time, but avoid giving too much. Got all that, Cancerian? Carrying out the multifaceted assignments I just described might be nearly impossible for most of the other signs of the zodiac, but they are in your wheelhouse. You are a specialist in fertile complexity.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “I’ve swung from ancient vines in the caves of Jamaica,” exults Hoodoo priestess Luisah Teish. “I’ve danced with delight around totem poles and pressed foreheads with Maori warriors. I’ve joked with the pale fox in the crossroads, then wrestled with the jaguar and won. I have embraced great trees between my thighs and spoken words of love to thunder while riding lightning bolts.” I offer Teish’s celebratory brag to inspire you as you formulate plans for the coming weeks and months. What exhilarating adventures will you give yourself? What expansive encounters will you learn from? What travels outside of your comfort zone will you dare? The time is right for upsurges and upturns and upgrades.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In his poem “The Pupil,” Virgo-born Donald Justice speaks of how he spent “a whole week practicing for that moment on the threshold.” I advise you to do the same, Virgo. The goal is to be as prepared as you can be for the upcoming rite of transition—without, of course, being neurotically over-prepared. It’s fine and natural to honor the tension of anticipation, using it as motivation to do your best. One other thing: As you get ready, please have as much fun as possible. Visualize the sense of accomplishment you’ll feel when you’ve reached the other side of the test.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “One is always at home in one’s past,” wrote author Vladimir Nabokov. But I encourage you to rebel against that theory, Libra. For now, find a way to NOT feel at home in your past. Question it, be curious about it, re-evaluate it. My hope is that you will then be motivated to change how your history lives in you. Now is an excellent time to reconfigure your life story, to develop a revised relationship with its plot twists and evolution. Revisit and update some of your memories. Re-evaluate the meanings of key events. Enchanting healings will materialize if you do.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Of all the signs in the zodiac, you Scorpios are most likely to regard that old pop tune by the Animals as your theme song. “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,” croons lead singer Eric Burdon, “Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” But you may have less motivation to express that sentiment in the coming weeks, dear Scorpio. I suspect you will experience record-breaking levels of being seen and appreciated for who you are. For best results, do this: 1. Inform your deep psyche that you have no attachment to being misunderstood. 2. Tell your deep psyche that you would very much like to be well understood.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive,” wrote Sagittarian author Madeleine L’Engle. She was referring to everyone, not just people in the arts. She believed that to be soulful humans, we must always make new things, generate fresh possibilities, and explore novel approaches. The restless urge to transform what already exists can be expressed in how we do our jobs, our parenting, our intimate relationships, and every other activity. You are now entering a phase, Sagittarius, when this initiatory energy will be especially available, needed and valuable.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In her poem “Valentine,” Capricorn poet Carol Ann Duffy tells a lover she won’t give her a “red rose or a satin heart.” Instead, her token of affection is an onion, a symbol of multi-layered complexity. “Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,” Duffy writes, “possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are.” She adds that the onion will “blind you with tears like a lover.” OK. I understand the tough attitude expressed by Duffy. Romance isn’t a relentlessly sweet, sentimental romp through paradise. But I don’t recommend that you imitate her approach to your love life in the coming weeks and months. Appreciate the sometimes shadowy and labyrinthine convolutions, yes, but don’t make them more important than beauty and joy and love. How about invoking the symbol of a pomegranate? It represents fertility and rebirth out of the darkness.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Be extra expressive with the people and animals you care about. Be even more amusing and generous than usual. Dare to be abundantly entertaining and engaging and empathetic. Make it your goal to draw out your allies’ dormant potentials and inspire them to love themselves even more than they already do. I’ll tell you about the endearing terms that author Vladimir Nabokov called his wife. Consider using them with your dear ones: “My sun, my soul, my song, my bird, my pink sky, my sunny rainbow, my little music, my inexpressible delight, my tenderness, my lightness, my dear life, my dear eyes, kittykin, poochums, goosikins, sparrowling, bird of paradise.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Sometimes, you may feel you’re under the influence of a debilitating spell or hindered by a murky curse. Pisceans are prone to such worries. But here’s a secret. More than any other zodiac sign, you have the power to escape from spells. Even if you have never studied the occult or read a witch’s grimoire, you possess a natural facility for the natural magic that disperses curses. From the depths of your psyche, you can summon the spiritual force necessary to cleanse the gunk and free yourself. Now is a perfect time to prove to yourself that what I’ve said here is true.
