― Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. Wikipedia
What maintains stasis is really unreconciled conflict between differences. Differences are essentially defined in terms of black and white, darkness and light, evil and good, and impurity with danger (tebhel) and purity. Resistance and complacency often lead us to believe that we are resolving and reconciling differences, but we really are not. Instead, we remain in conflict with the tension apart from reconciliation resulting in fear which leads to anxiety and other emotional and psychological issues.
Somewhere in Plato’s cave, when we are at the bottom or even the middle of it, we see ourselves only there for we see the delusion of light (the fire behind us). Only when we climb near the top or even to the top, then we realize that the light that we saw was not the true light at all. Often when we see the true light (the sun), we are dazzled by it, and feeling pain from it will drive us back to darkness for a time depending on each of our dispositions.
(c) Copyright 2022 George Hage
Counseling From The Heart
Suzanne Deakins, Ph.D., H.W.M.
Dec 2022 (rcreader.com)
By Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries painter Vincent van Gogh was renowned for translating his sublime and unruly passions into colors and shapes on canvas. It was a demanding task. He careened between torment and ecstasy. “I put my heart and soul into my work,” he said, “and I have lost my mind in the process.” That’s sad! But I have good news for you, Aries. In the coming months, you will have the potential to reach unprecedented new depths of zest as you put your heart and soul into your work and play. And hallelujah, you won’t lose your mind in the process! In fact, I suspect you will become more mentally healthy than you’ve been in a long time.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “The soul is silent,” writes Taurus poet Louise Glück. “If it speaks at all, it speaks in dreams.” I don’t agree with her in general, and I especially don’t agree with her in regard to your life in the coming weeks. I believe your soul will be singing, telling jokes, whispering in the dark, and flinging out unexpected observations. Your soul will be extra alive and alert and awake, tempting you to dance in the grocery store and fling out random praise and fantasize about having your own podcast. Don’t underestimate how vivacious your soul might be, Taurus. Give it permission to be as fun and funny as it yearns to be.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The coming weeks will be an excellent time to expand your understanding about the nature of stress. Here are three study aids: (1) High stress levels are not healthy for your mind and body, but low to moderate stress can be good for you. (2) Low to moderate stress is even better for you if it involves dilemmas that you can ultimately solve. (3) There is a thing called “eustress,” which means beneficial stress. It arises from a challenge that evokes your vigor, resilience, and willpower. As you deal with it, you feel hopeful and hardy. It’s meaningful and interesting. I bring these ideas to your attention, dear Gemini, because you are primed to enjoy a rousing upgrade in your relationship with stress.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Long before he launched his illustrious career, Cancerian inventor Buckminster was accepted to enroll at Harvard University. Studying at such a prestigious educational institution was a high honor and set him up for a bright future. Alas, he was expelled for partying too hard. Soon he was working at odd jobs. His fortunes dwindled, and he grew depressed. But at age 32, he had a pivotal mystical experience. He seemed to be immersed in a globe of white light hovering above the ground. A disembodied voice spoke, telling him he “belonged to the universe” and that he would fulfill his life purpose if he applied himself to serving “the highest advantage of others.” How would you like a Buckminster Fuller-style intervention, Cancerian? It’s available if you want it and ask for it.
LEO (July 23-August 22): Leo-born Judith Love Cohen was an electrical engineer who worked on NASA’s Apollo Space Program. She was also the mother of the famous actor Jack Black. When she was nine months pregnant with Jack, on the day she went into labor, she performed a heroic service. On their way to the moon, the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft had encountered a major systems failure. In the midst of her birth process, Judith Love Cohen carried out advanced troubleshooting that helped save their lives and bring their vehicle safely back to Earth. I don’t expect you to achieve such a monumental feat in the coming days, Leo. But I suspect you will be extra intrepid and even epic in your efforts. And your ability to magically multitask will be at a peak.
VIRGO (August 23-September 22): When you’re at the height of your powers, you provide the people in your life with high-quality help and support. And I believe you could perform this role even stronger in 2023. Here are some of the best benefits you can offer: (1) Assist your allies in extracting bright ideas from confusing mishmashes. (2) Help them cull fertile seeds from decaying dross. (3) As they wander through messy abysses, aid them in finding where the redemption is. (4) Cheer on their successes with wit and charm.
LIBRA (September 23-October 22): A blogger named Daydreamydyke explains the art of bestowing soulful gifts. Don’t give people you care for generic consumer goods, she tells us. Instead, say to them, “I picked up this cool rock I found on the ground that reminded me of you,” or “I bought you this necklace for 50 cents at a yard sale because I thought you’d like it,” or “I’ve had this odd little treasure since childhood, but I feel like it could be of use to you or give you comfort, so I want you to have it.” That’s the spirit I hope you will adopt during the holiday season, Libra – as well as for all of 2023, which will be the year you could become a virtuoso gift-giver.
SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): In 1957, engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes invented three-dimensional plastic wallpaper. No one bought the stuff, though. A few years later, they rebranded it as Bubble Wrap and marketed it as material to protect packages during shipment. Success! Its new use has been popular ever since. I suspect you are in a phase comparable to the time between when their plastic wallpaper flopped and before they dreamed up Bubble Wrap. Have faith in the possibility of there being a Second Act, Scorpio. Be alert for new applications of possibilities that didn’t quite make a splash the first time around.
SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): I applaud your expansive curiosity. I admire your yearning to learn more and more about our mysterious world as you add to your understanding of how the game of life works. Your greed for interesting experiences is good greed! It is one of your most beautiful qualities. But now and then, there come times when you need to scale down your quest for fresh, raw truths and work on integrating what you have already absorbed. The coming weeks will be one of those times.
CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): Better than most, you have a rich potential to attune yourself to the cyclical patterns of life. It’s your birthright to become skilled at discerning natural rhythms at work in the human comedy. Even more fortunately, Capricorn, you can be deeply comforted by this awareness. Educated by it. Motivated by it. I hope that in 2023, you will develop your capacity to the next level. The cosmic flow will be on your side as you strive to feel the cosmic flow – and place yourself in closer and closer alignment with it.
AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): Anne, a character in a book by L. M. Montgomery, says she prefers the word “dusk” over “twilight” because it sounds so “velvety and shadowy.” She continues, “In daylight, I belong to the world … in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk, I’m free from both and belong only to myself.” According to my astrological assessment, you Aquarians will go through a dusk-like phase in the coming weeks: a time when you will belong solely to yourself and any other creature you choose to join you in your velvety, shadowy emancipation.
PISCES (February 19-March 20): My Piscean friend Venus told me, “We Pisceans feel everything very intensely, but alas, we do not possess the survival skills of a Scorpio or the enough-is-enough, self-protective mechanism of the Cancerians. We are the water sign most susceptible to being engulfed and flooded and overwhelmed.” I think Venus is somewhat correct in her assessment. But I also believe you Fishes have a potent asset that you may not fully appreciate or call on enough. Your ability to tune into the very deepest levels of emotion potentially provides you with access to a divine power source beyond your personality. If you allow it to give you all of its gifts, it will keep you shielded and safe and supported.
Homework: Make a prediction about the best thing that will happen in your life during 2023. Visit FreeWillAstrology.com.
Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of — from the small luxuries of naps and watermelon to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love — are the stories that shape our lives. Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.
The more vulnerable-making the endeavor, the more reflexive the limitation and the more redemptive the liberation.
That difficult, delicate, triumphal pivot from self-limitation to self-liberation in the most vulnerable-making of human undertakings — love — is what poet and philosopher David Whyte, who thinks deeply about these questions of courage and love, maps out in his stunning poem “The Truelove,” found in his book The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (public library) and read here, by David’s kind assent to my invitation, in his sonorous Irish-tinted English voice, in his singular style of echoing lines to let them reverberate more richly:
THE TRUELOVE
by David WhyteThere is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to themand how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to loveso that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
“The Truelove” appears in the short, splendid course of poem-anchored contemplative practices David guides for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation toolkit, in which he reads each poem, offers an intimate tour of the landscape of experience from which it arose, and reflects on the broader existential quickenings it invites.
Couple this generous gift of a poem with “Sometimes” — David’s perspectival poem about living into the questions of our becoming, also part of Waking Up — then revisit the Noble-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on great love and James Baldwin, who believed that poet are “the only people who know the truth about us” — on love and the illusion of choice.
The Lord of Peace is a friendly Sword, which comes as something of a relief when we have spent so much time dealing with his more belligerent cousins. However it must be noted that the card often comes up to indicate that a conflict has been resolved or a breach healed, so there will have been trouble earlier on.
It indicates that a painful and difficult situation is being reconciled. Friendships are rebuilt, old wounds are healed. However in this context it is very important to look carefully at the cards which follow it, for there is often a feeling that a relationship will never be quite the same again as it was before the conflict or quarrel. If the Four of Swords comes up nearby, this is a clear indication that one should remain cautious and thoughtful, not giving too much in the way of trust, for some time. If the Moon was up in the reading, we would be forced to consider the possibility that all is not as it seems.
At an inner level, the Two of Swords really comes into its own, for it marks the period of tranquillity and calmness that can arise when we have finally made difficult decisions, and acted upon them. Often it will come up to show that, now we have got to grips with our confusion, we can rest and recover.
The card will also come up to show that we have let go of old fears or anxieties that were holding us back. It’s a still card indicating a time to rest and recuperate.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
The Lord of Oppression is a hard card to come to grips with, for it indicates blocked or thwarted Will. We want something badly, and yet we seem to stand no chance of getting it. We feel frustrated, irritable and disappointed.
If a situation marked by the Ten of Wands goes on for too long, we will begin to feel trapped and deeply unhappy. We will begin to lose faith in ourselves, and our abilities to make our lives into what we want.
There are a couple of things to bear in mind if the influence of the Lord of Oppression is a fairly fleeting one – sometimes we have to wait for the right moment to get our heart’s desire.
However it’s worth bearing in mind, if you ever read on a specific situation, and this card comes up in the final result position, the reading is probably telling you not to waste any more effort on a conflict that you cannot win. Sometimes we are better off just walking away.
The long-term appearance of this card carries a warning with it that you really cannot ignore. If the Ten of Wands is a regular feature of your readings for some time, you are probably hurting yourself more than you care to admit. You are not fulfilling your needs, and you are leaving yourself open to negativity.
Time to get a little bit of Ace energy in there, and sort things out!
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Dec 13, 2022 Jude Currivan, PhD, has advanced degrees in both physics and archeology. She is author of several books, including The Wave, The Eighth Chakra, The Thirteenth Step, CosMos (with Ervin Laszlo), The Cosmic Hologram, and most recently The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet. Here she points out that we can observe the fundamental building blocks of life – amino acids, sugars, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, etc. – in the enormous gas and dust clouds within our own galaxy out of which stars and planets are formed. So, it is likely that we will find biological life throughout the galaxy. She describes the evolution and enormous intelligence of cells, even though they possess no nervous systems. The conversation covers enormous details leading up to modern humans, the last of the surviving hominids, the children of Gaia. 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 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 November 23, 2022)
12 DECEMBER 2022/BUSINESS & TECH/JAY BARMANN (SFist.com)
Nuclear physicists from the Bay Area will be center stage Tuesday at a Department of Energy announcement about a breakthrough in fusion technology that could ultimately lead to clean energy plants without hazardous nuclear waste.
A big advance in nuclear fusion — maybe the first in two generations? — is coming out of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Tuesday, and it’s one that physicists have been waiting on for a long time. Reportedly, an experiment at the lab involving its National Ignition Facility (NIF) succeeded in generating more power than it required to produce the reaction — which Gizmodo refers to as the “holy grail” of fusion research.
The Financial Times broke the story about the experiment’s success, and the New York Times separately confirmed the story through retired plasma physicist Stephen Bodner. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will be helping make the announcement Tuesday, which is said to be about a “major scientific breakthrough.”
If you want to delve into the details, the NYT’s Kenneth Change explains it thusly:
Fusion is the thermonuclear reaction that powers the sun and other stars — the fusing of hydrogen atoms into helium… NIF consists of 192 gigantic lasers, which fire simultaneously at a metal cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser. The cylinder, heated to some 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizes, generating an implosion of X-rays, which in turn heats and compresses a BB-size pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium, two heavier forms of hydrogen. The implosion fuses the hydrogen into helium, creating fusion.
Up until now, fusion reactions have been synthesized in doughnut-shaped reactors called tokomaks — a technology that dates back to the late 1950s in Russia. The giant laser array at NIF, which the Times notes is very expensive to operate, takes a different method known as “thermonuclear inertial fusion.” And the breakthrough experiment was reportedly able to generate a reaction in which “the fusion energy produced exceeded the amount of laser energy hitting the hydrogen target.”
“For that to occur,” the Times explains, “the fusion reaction had to be self-sustaining, meaning the torrent of particles flowing outward from the hot spot at the center of the pellet heated surrounding hydrogen atoms and caused them to fuse as well.”
While significant in terms of the science, multiple sources caution that we are likely many years away from building facilities at scale that can efficiently and effectively replicate this process.
“It’s about what it takes to boil 10 kettles of water,” says Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London, speaking to CNN about the amount of energy that was produced in this experiment. “In order to turn that into a power station, we need to make a larger gain in energy – we need it to be substantially more.”
And as the Times explains, “The [NIF] laser complex fills a building with a footprint equal to three football fields — too big, too expensive, too inefficient for a commercial power plant… [And] a manufacturing process to mass-produce the precise hydrogen targets would have to be developed.”
Photo of Lawence Livermore Lab via Wikimedia
The Lord of Prudence is not quite as austere a card as it first sounds. It’s another of those Disks that works on more than one level. In the purely material and mundane sphere it indicates a period where financial resources must be carefully managed.
So long as it does not appear with cards like the Ten of Swords or the Five of Disks, there will not normally be any grave material problem. But there is a warning here that there may be unexpected expense, and good money management will enable us to fund whatever arises.
At the next level, the Eight of Disks can apply to a period where you enter into additional training in order to enhance your career projects. In this case look for cards like the Three of Disks, or the Ace, to indicate some new area of study. Then look for cards like the Universe, or the Sun to indicate the successful outcome of your efforts.
Finally in the spiritual area, when the Lord of Prudence comes up with cards like the Priestess, Death, the Moon, or the Hierophant, you’re approaching a period of rapid spiritual development – almost an initiation. In this case, this card is warning you to be alert for opportunities, ready to deal with stress and pressure, and to manage your energies thoughtfully and carefully. You can perhaps see the correlation which exists with regard to energy management between the material and spiritual definitions of the card – in either case energy must be regulated and respected in order for life to go smoothly and for you to get the best out of your experiences.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
