I doubt that anybody feels comfortable when they pull this card in a reading. The Lord of Sorrow almost always indicates some sort of disruption which will cause pain and uncertainty. Such disruption leads to loss of balance and disharmony.
At worst, the Three of Swords will indicate loss or separation. In order to determine how serious this is liable to be, you need to consider the cards surrounding this one. With Death, or the Tower, the loss is liable to be of a serious and deeply distressing nature.
With cards like the Seven of Disks, you’d expect to find unexpected changes in the working situation – redundancy for instance. With Cups, the impact will probably be felt in the emotional area. Wands could indicate loss or damage to your inner nature – a big blow to the self-esteem, as one example.
However, sometimes, particularly when the Lord of Sorrow is not badly aspected by the cards around it, there’s another more complex reason for its appearance. This card will always come up during a period of unhappiness, confusion or disturbance. There will be doubt (especially of the self), inability to make decisions, sometimes ill-health which wears you down and makes you feel that you cannot cope.
And often during times like this, there are choices and decisions to be made, which you feel too uncertain to tackle. Yet the fact that you are unable to make your decisions perhaps prolongs a difficult or unsatisfactory situation, adding to your anxiety and worry.
To identify this as a meaning for the card, look for cards indicating weariness and apathy – Seven of Swords,Five of Disks,the Moon etc – and the absence of other ‘bad’ cards. If you feel that the Three of Swords is indicating that you are too untrusting and insecure to make important decisions, first and foremost, agree to give yourself a break!
Let things develop on their own for a while. Rest and allow yourself time to build up your energies. Then you will stop feeling quite so inadequate, and will be able to make the choices which will shape the next phase of your life.
And if the Lord of Sorrow brings grief and sadness into your life, try hard to look forward in the reading to the start of the recovery period, in order to give yourself something positive to hold onto. Sometimes this card will appear to mark a shocking unexpected event which, whilst painful, is not as awful as it might first appear. It helps a little to know when the tide is going to begin to turn in your favour.
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 claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always) be based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore all-inclusive, therefore otherless, therefore one, therefore united, therefore harmonious. I think, therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I, being, am all, total, whole, complete, all-inclusive, otherless, one, united, harmonious. Since I, being, am Truth and since I, being, am Consciousness/Awareness, therefore Truth is Conscious/Awareness.
2) Intense emotions can be overwhelming
Word-tracking: intense: extreme, most out, farthest, last emotion: move out, move, change location overwhelm: to take over
3) Truth being all that is, there is nothing other than Truth to take over Truth, therefore Truth is not overwhelming. Truth being all and there being no limit to all, therefore Truth is infinite. Truth being infinite, one cannot move out from Truth, therefore emotion/movement in Truth can only occur within Truth. Since emotion in Truth can only occur within Truth and since Truth is limitless, there can be no extreme emotions, extreme movements. There being no otherness to Truth, therefore there is nothing exterior to Truth, therefore Truth is infinitely interior
4) Truth is not overwhelming. Truth is infinite. Emotion/movement in Truth can only occur within Truth. There can be no extreme emotions, extreme movements. Truth is infinitely interior.
5) Truth is a moveable feast, not overwhelming, not extreme, not exterior.
The Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation as well. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
• This cycle is based on empirical data meaning enough data was observed and recorded to make it possible to suggest attitudes and reactions. Keep in mind that we all have free will and thus results will vary from one individual to another.
• The graph shows the energy high at the beginning of the cycle (not unlike any other astrological aspect) followed by a slow down before it gets strong and again this reflects years of tracking and noting feedback from our many students.
• If you are making a decision during this time you might want to let it set for a day or two then check your decision again to see if it still makes sense. However, you can feel into the ebb and flow and find good times to work on self emotionally in both the low and high points. Impatience, emotion and acts without thinking are common.
• With practice you can feel when the energy is there to help bring completion to tasks, goals and projects you may be working on.
SEATTLE—Debuting a new, streamlined classification system, librarians at the Seattle Central Library announced Wednesday that they have officially dropped the Dewey Decimal System in favor of organizing all titles under “B” for books. “This is going to make things so much easier for staff, as well as for patrons who may not know the intricacies of the old proprietary system,” said head librarian Margaret Grady, gesturing toward a giant pile of thousands of books under a piece of computer paper printed with the letter “B.” “Once you get the hang of it, it’s really simple—they’re all right there in one place. It’s far more intuitive, too. Now, no one who wants a book on, say, analytic geometries has to remember that those are all under classification 516.3. They just come in, think to themselves, I am looking for a book—I’ll look under ‘B’ for book, and they’re off to the races. Not to mention, it makes reshelving a breeze. We’re hoping the ALA will consider making this the new nationwide standard.” At press time, Grady was overhead informing a patron that the DVDs had all also temporarily been filed under “B” until they thought of another place to put them.
We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).
“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”
Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age (public library).
Simone de Beauvoir by Barbara Klemm. (Städel Museum)
Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
Old age is not a necessary end to human life.
[…]
A particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.
And indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact — something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
She writes:
Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): When I was still an up-and-coming horoscope columnist, before I got widely syndicated, I supplemented my income with many other jobs. During one stretch, I wrote fortunes for a line of designer fortune cookies that were covered with gourmet chocolate and sold at the luxury department store Bloomingdale’s. The salary I got paid was meager. Part of my compensation came in the form of hundreds of delicious, but non-nutritious cookies. If you are offered a comparable deal in the coming weeks and months, Aries, my advice is to do what I didn’t do but should have done: Ask for what’s truly valuable to you instead of accepting a substitute of marginal worth.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): My mentor Ann Davies said that of all the signs of the zodiac, you Tauruses are most likely to develop finely honed intuition. At least potentially, you can tune in to the inner teacher better than the rest of us. The still, small voice rises up out of the silence and speaks to you clearly and crisply. Here’s even better news: I believe you are entering a phase when your relationship with this stellar faculty may ripen dramatically. Please take advantage of this subtly fabulous opportunity! Each day for the next fourteen days, do a relaxing ritual in which you eagerly invite and welcome the guidance of your deepest inner source.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): New College in Oxford, UK has educated students since 1379. Among its old buildings is a dining hall that features beams made of thick oak trees. Unfortunately, most oak wood eventually attracts beetles that eat it and weaken it. Fortunately, the fourteenth-century founders of New College foresaw that problem. They planted an oak grove whose trees were specifically meant to be used to replace the oak beams at New College. Which they are to this day. I would love you to derive inspiration from this story, Gemini. What practical long-term plans might you be wise to formulate in the coming months?
CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the Northern Hemisphere, the astrological month of Cancer begins with the sun in its greatest glory. Our home star is at its highest altitude, shining with maximum brightness. So then why is the sign of the Crab ruled by the moon? Why do the longest days of the year coincide with the ascendancy of the mistress of the night? Ahhh. These are esoteric mysteries beyond the scope of this horoscope. But here’s a hint about what they signify for you personally. One of your assets can also be a liability: your innocent openness to the wonders of life. This quality is at the heart of your beauty but can also, on occasion, make you vulnerable to being overwhelmed. That’s why it’s so important that you master the art of setting boundaries, of honing your focus, of quaffing deeply from a few cups instead of sipping from many cups.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The coming weeks will be a delicate time for your spiritual unfoldment. You are primed to recover lost powers, rediscover key truths you have forgotten, and reunite with parts of your soul you got cut off from. Will these good possibilities come to pass in their fullness? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how brave you are in seeking your healing. You must ask for what’s hard to ask for. You’ve got to find a way to feel deserving of the beauty and blessings that are available. PS: You ARE deserving. I will be cheering you on, dear Leo.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Whether or not you have been enrolled in a learning institution during the past twelve months, I suspect you have been getting a rigorous education. Among the courses you have almost completed are lessons in intimacy, cooperation, collaboration, symbiosis and togetherness. Have you mastered all the teachings? Probably not. There were too many of them, and they were too voluminous to grasp perfectly and completely. But that’s OK. You have done well. Now you’re ready to graduate, collect your diploma, and apply what you have learned.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): History has provided contradictory reports about Isabeau of Bavaria, who served as Queen of France from 1385 to 1422. Was she a corrupt, greedy and indecisive fool who harmed France’s fortunes? Or was she a talented diplomat with great skill in court politics and an effective leader during the many times her husband, King Charles VI, was incapacitated by illness? I bring these facts to your attention, Libra, hoping they will inspire you to refine, adjust, and firm up your own reputation. You can’t totally control how people perceive you, but you do have some power to shape their perceptions—especially these days.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The next four weeks will be an excellent time to create and celebrate your own holidays. I recommend you dream up at least four new festivals, jubilees, anniversaries, and other excuses to party. Eight or more would be even better. They could be quirky and modest, like Do No Housework Day, Take Your Houseplants for a Walk Day, or Write Bad Poetry Day. They could be more profound and impactful, like Forgive Your Parents for Everything Day, Walk on the Wild Side Day, or Stay Home from Work Because You’re Feeling So Good Day. In my astrological opinion, Scorpio, you should regard playful fun as a top priority. For more ideas, go here: tinyurl.com/CreateHolidays… tinyurl.com/NouveauHolidays… tinyurl.com/InventHolidays
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a god who stole fire from his fellow gods and gave it to humans to help them build civilization. His divine colleagues were not pleased. Why? Maybe they feared that with the power of fire, people would become like gods themselves and have no further need for gods. Anyway, Sagittarius, I hope you’re in a fire-stealing mood. It’s a good time to raise your whole world up to a higher level—to track down and acquire prizes that will lead to major enhancements. And unlike what happened to Prometheus (the other gods punished him), I think you will get away with your gambits.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Let’s discuss magical doorways. Each time you sleep, you slip through magical doorways called dreams. Whether or not you recall those adventures, they offer you interesting mysteries utterly unlike the events of your daily life. Here’s another example: A magical doorway opens when an ally or loved one shares intimate knowledge of their inner realms. Becoming absorbed in books, movies, or songs is also a way to glide through a magical doorway. Another is when you discover an aspect of yourself, a corner of your being, that you didn’t know was there. I bring these thoughts to your attention, Capricorn, because I suspect the coming weeks will present an extra inviting array of magical doorways.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Psychiatrist Myron Hofer specializes in the mother-infant relationship. Among his findings: The first emotion that a newborn experiences is anxiety. Struggling to get out of the womb can be taxing, and it’s shocking to be separated from the warm, nourishing realm that has been home for months. The bad news is that most of us still carry the imprint of this original unease. The good news, Aquarius, is that the coming months will be one of the best times ever for you to heal. For optimal results, place a high priority on getting an abundance of love, support, comfort and physical touch.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Curious blends and intriguing juxtapositions are in the works—or at least they should be. Improbable alliances might be desirable because they’re curative. Formulas with seemingly mismatched ingredients might fix a glitch, even if they never succeeded before and won’t again. I encourage you to synergize work and play. Negotiate serious business in casual settings and make yourself at home in a wild frontier.
Homework: Is there any area of your life where you are not giving your best? How could you improve? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
New study on anal pleasure shows there’s so much more than penetration
This large-scale study sheds light on women’s actual lived experiences with anal sex, revealing previously unnamed, distinct behaviors many women discover to be pleasurable
Indiana University and For Goodness Sake researchers conducted thefirst-ever, large-scale, probability sample study about the specific anal touch techniques that are pleasurable for women. The paper was published today, June 29, 2022, at PLOS ONE.
The researchers gathered discoveries from 4,270 women from around the world in surveys, conducted 1,000 one-on-one interviews, and analyzed the results to find themes and underlying patterns. Those shared patterns then informed this quantitative, nationally representative survey of 3017 women, ages 18-93.
A key finding: ‘Anal sex’ has long been narrowly defined as in-and-out penetration. But three previously unnamed, but distinct, anal touch techniques also emerged from the study that many women find pleasurable:
40% of women find ‘Anal Surfacing’ pleasurable: sexual touch on and around (not in) the anus. 35% of women find ‘Anal Shallowing’ pleasurable: touch just inside the anal opening, no deeper than a fingertip/knuckle. 40% of women find ‘Anal Pairing’ pleasurable: touch on or inside the anus at the same time as vaginal penetration or clitoral touch.
Why does this matter? Clarity about the specific kinds of touch that feel good enables women to better identify their own preferences, communicate about them and advocate for them. Specifically, acquiring more words for what you find pleasurable, and seeing you’re not alone but that those preferences are shared by lots of other women, has been shown to increase sexual agency, advocacy and pleasure.
More about the research group:
For Goodness Sake is an organization that believes human pleasure will lose its stigma, and that in the future, people will look back in disbelief at our traditions of sexual shame and unrealized pleasure. To pave the way for this future, in partnership with Indiana University and Kinsey Institute researchers, they conduct the first-ever large-scale nationally representative studies to uncover, name and describe the range of specific sexual practices women actually find pleasurable. They hope to replace the anecdotal sex–tips and slang sex-acts with truths from women’s collective experience. This knowledge is then provided freely to scientists, medical schools and clinicians and for a small fee to the public via the website, OMGYES.com.
Here is a fact sheet with more background and study findings, including diagrams and descriptions of the three techniques (caution, contains illustrations of the techniques!!)
Here is a link to the paper, published today in PLOS ONE, titled, Women’s techniques for pleasure from anal touch: results from a U.S. probability sample of women ages 18-93.
To request an interview or ask questions of the authors or the leadership at For Goodness Sake / OMGYES, email press@fgsake.org
The Wheel of Fortune is numbered ten and is usually shown as a great wheel. Sometimes Fortuna is seen, turning the wheel for all eternity. There are people or animals on the Wheel – some are falling off to be crushed, some are struggling to stay on, while a solitary figure makes no attempt to maintain its position but succeeds anyway.
Fortune is not the same as luck. We make our own luck and follow our own destiny. Good fortune comes from the still centre which contains the very heart of ourselves. The seasons will continue to wheel, the sun will rise and set, the planets will move in their allotted courses – with or without us.
If we struggle against the flow of life, we become those struggling to ascend the Wheel, or even one of those crushed beneath it. However, if we realise our own power to create a beneficial future and then trust in that vision, we shall become the still figure, master of our own universe.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 21, 2023 Nanci Trivellato is cofounder, with Wagner Alegretti, of the International Academy of Consciousness. She is author of Vibrational State and Energy Resonance: Self-Tuning to a Higher Level of Consciousness as well as Astral Projection, a Primer: Introduction to Out-of-Body Experience. Her website is https://www.nancitrivellato.com/ Here she summarizes her experience of training thousands of individuals, around the world, to have out-of-body experiences over the last three decades. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:17 Childhood experiences 00:11:44 Projectology 00:21:37 Fact or fantasy 00:39:53 Problem of language 00:46:15 Nuances & subtleties 00:51:43 Risks and dangers 01:05:38 Everyone can do it 01:13:35 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. 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 June 3, 2023)
Tenebrae Choir Oct 15, 2018 Allegri’s haunting Miserere is famous for both its ethereal beauty and for the mystery surrounding its composition. It is written for 2 choirs, who alternate phrases and then unite for a final resolution. Buy the album https://www.tenebrae-choir.com/record… We are crowdfunding to record our next album. To find out more or support the campaign, please visit https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/bach-… Allegri’s Miserere was filmed at St. Bartholomew the Great, London Tenebrae, directed by Nigel Short Produced and edited by John Coates
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
Old age is not a necessary end to human life.
