suggestive next developments

I am posting an article at a subscription Vedic astrology magazine about the coming transits. I am summing up its main argument here though I know RR/SR is not particularly a friend of predictions or astrology in particular. Which I can understand, given the two aspects that we are guardians at earth stations where ingression of novelty is happening, and that most Western astrologers I know are quite dogmatic and instead of the probabilistic themes, they are apt to present their findings in a sabe-lo-todo manner which rightfully irritates many people including my own self... whereas Indian pandits, while revealing surprising techniques about the rhythms of the mandalas of time, sound medieval at times... My modern inquisitive mind rather says that it is likely that certain themes are brought up in certain times...

Strictly speaking, my brand is Neo-Vedic astrology, since outer planets are in my argument - in the Indo-Tibetan zodiac which has 108 parts - and these are not featured in orthodox Vedic astrology which BTW places constellations where they are seen and not into a virtual zodiac as tropical astrology does.
So, as we discussed many times before, there are two caveats : one is that astrology works on fixed archetypal patterns and there is also "ingression of novelty" at times - and all the time - to use Terence McKenna's expression, and the other is that IMHO themes are appointed by archetypal waves but not their exact solutions. Especially by masses of people with unknown variables at play. That is hard for ordinary believers of astrology to support since they tend to endow astrologers with a vision like "seers" based on predestination - somewhat like the Oracle in the Matrix. (In fact true astrology is more like an empirical soft science of studying pattern correlations like sociology, only, it is based on more archaic empiria.)

That said, soon we will hit the long transit of Saturn in Sagittarius with Pluto there - the sign of beliefs, ideas, shamanic insights and the Inquisition. The agreement of astrologers is usually that Saturn's transit usually cleans things out or makes karmic things to appear obligatorily in response to earlier karmic patterns, individual and collective. Since Pluto is also there - in the Venusian nakshatra of Purva Shadha - I would expect more religious fanaticism, Theocratic wars and so on. More planets join later, in 2018 and 2019, and suffice it to say that where Pluto is now, is where Adolf Hitler's main planets that signaled his past lives and his fanaticism had been.

Soon we will have the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when a young priest in Germany, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door before the evening mass on All Hallows' Eve, October 31. That started long-ranging religious conflicts, peasant rebellions and other socially motivated conflicts, and Europe never returned to the pattern of the Middle Ages before. Luther was particularly criticizing the corrupt practice that rich Catholic people were able to buy tickets of church forgiveness for various sins. (Today they would get online and buy church pardons for transferring a few bitcoins...) He also criticized the Mass and the rituals being in Latin, and it appears that he was dissatisfied with the institution of the Pope itself - first why is everything supposed to be sacrosanct truth, when it was obvious to an average German buergher that what the Pope does and says frequently simply reflects the interests of rich people particularly those closer to him in Italy.
Luther wished that people in Christian lands would return to what the Christ was actually preaching, which was a sort of equality among other things, and for that end, he later translated the Bible into German. He figured if you already can't make out the text itself, there's no chance in hell that you would understand its deeper meaning. Despite all his faults, Luther appeared to be a strong critic of the mainstream Theocracy of his time, weakened by the rise of cities, trade and the Renaissance, as well as the existence of some scientific research at universities etc.

The unique thing from the POV of this astrology - using Indian and Tibetan counting, but also the outer planets of the West - is that most of his followers were born in years where the outer planets were grouped like they were in 1989 - more precisely, between 1988 and 1992. According to my research with astrology programs, this was the only other time in history since the supposed Christian calendar when a "compulsory renewal of faith" was signalled by the planets simultaneously appearing in the original sign of faith, Sagittarius: Neptune, Uranus and Saturn together, all retrograde towards the preceding sign, Scorpio. Translated, that means a possibility for a new thinking and a total emotional disengagement with the old religion, as well as a forcing karmic need to renew faith, and whenever something does not work at the level of faith and society, it is to be destroyed or totally transformed. No compromise. The Reformation had a decisive violent streak as well as the concomitant counter-Reformation. Added to that, around 1489, for example, exactly 500 years before the revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe and got as far as Tienanmen China, people were also born with Pluto in the Indo-Tibetan sign of Libra. That adds in astro explanation that conforming to authority is the farthest thing on their minds, though in superficial trends such as fashion, they also tend to be overconforming.

Luther himself was born earlier than this constellation, equipped with a very sharp mind. He was trying to effect all possible compromises as a Catholic priest but he could not come to terms with it finally. Had he been born six years later, he would have been a misfit early on and a violent revolutionary like some of his followers.

Who knows why this wave was more successful in turning Western history upside down - we know of earlier "heretic" movements in the West as well as bloody peasant revolutions. Some of these were, as well as the learnings at the Universities, were instrumental in the founding of the Invisible College. Yet 1517 October 31 appeared to be a turning point from which there was no more turning back.

While the discovery of America is controversial for Native Americans, one can say perhaps that 1492 started a new modern age in history, a coincidence is that certain Yogic calendars of cyclical time also - tentatively - suggest the ending of Kali Yuga around that time (plus-minus a hundred or so years), so the beginning of what they call Dwapara Yuga with its described advances of reason, individuality and technology.

When Luther's theses appeared on the door of the Wittenberg Church, Pluto and Saturn were already meeting in Sagittarius and a fierce time of religious debates began which had a social and a deeper meaning. Such is the constellation we are approaching now. Those born around the 1988-1992 years are at the end of their twenties.

The questions are what it is that is so corrupt at the level of beliefs of our society that they need immediate renewal at a very ancient basis, even for a person that basically believes most of its basic tenets, such as Luther did believe in Christianity?

I only have a tentative answer, personally knowing some people who were born in those years. Perhaps - just like in those times - our belief in the justice of a social order and rulership of money is one belief that needs to be turned upside down and it is turning upside down. People of the 1989 generation, though some of them are certainly tempted by a fundamentalism of their own brand of faith - generally share a common feeling, in my experience, that the social order is unjust, they cannot simply fit in any more - whether that order is the Soviet order or neoliberal capitalism - and that various religions are merely used to keep people in place.

Just as then, now we have a bunch of provocative rulers - the extreme rightwingers are taking our major cultures one by one. Their philosophy is that "you are what you have" (quoting Hungarian State Minister János Lázár). I have heard all sorts of arguments for why that isn't true from this generation soon approaching their thirtieth year, and though they ideologically differ, they share a common feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with fossil fuels, the rich getting astronomically richer and defrauding and destroying all social structures that existed before. Perhaps Thomas Piketty is one person who voiced the fundamental problems of money distribution in society the most eloquently since the harsh criticisms of Karl Marx. And we could add that the Arab Spring was started by mostly the same generation though one can safely say that in the backwards societies of less urban Arab settings, it backfired into endless conflict and Fundamentalist forces.

The environment is another common theme with this generation, at least here as well as in the West. When we are facing the 2 degrees Celsius forecast, with humanity either dying out in a few decades, along with countless biospheres, or some lucky ones escaping to the bottom of the sea or to Mars, fossil fuels and oil wars seem to appear in a different light. Together with our provocative Mr. Trump who abolished the climate page of the POTUS web site on the very first day of his presidency.

It isn't very far-off to envision that if we are to pass this test in the coming decades, after heavy conflicts, some sort of environmental dictatorship could be expected to ward off damages to untold future generations. Diesel cars or using live trees for Christmas decorations - to be thrown away in communal trash within a week or two - as well as plastic wrappings not ready to be taken apart and recycled since that is contrary to manufacturers' interests, these all make a mockery of even the most orthodox economic theories. Any power that simply bases all its existence on oil and dirty nukes is suspect now of contributing to a planetwide ecocide. Period.

Perhaps at depth we are not ready to be destroyed - visionary sources suggest piecemeal solutions to much of our ailments - but by and large I find that I should support the outrage of that generation.

There is a mistaken view of money at depth of all the false economies - most economists on the Left do not share it -, but everyday language conceals the true nature of money. Money is abstracted at economic schools from tangible values owned personally such as food or clothing, then thought jumps to the agreed value of gold etc. and pretty soon we are at the level of robots trading with our virtual money. The whole thing is as far from its original meaning as can be - money merely expresses a relationship or an agreement within human society. (I come from a family of economists, exposed to the classics from Adam Smith to Marx's Mehrwertsteuer early on). If you have a property in a city, that does not mean that your body somehow has developed some sort of arcane relationship with that piece of a backyard or half of a wall and it did not develop a relationship with whatever is beyond your property limit - such as a lilac bush on the neighbor's yard. We all feel how totally absurd that is, children and teens especially. My owning a piece of property and having an address merely means that there is an agreement in my society that other people basically could not enter or use it unless I agree to that entry and use (until the state wants to dig uranium there, but then normally even they would try to pay for taking it away). In other words, there is no "it" at the center of a proper economic definition of value, on the contrary, "it" is a yin understanding (best understood by the social background and its surroundings) but our language masks it as yang (being at the center, directing etc.) Ideology here dictates a reversal of figure and ground. If I enter a store with a 100 Euro note (as I did this month to buy a tobacco steam vaporizer) I have a measured amount of abstract power and the clerk will offer me something she can sell for the agreed value. I'm not trying to restate the obvious but what even Marx explains at the beginning of Das Kapital is elusively stretched out by our everyday language in our kind of capitalism yet all practical people seem to have a good grasp of it at a basic level.

Extending intellectual property rights of Monsanto to modified seeds or suing someone for whistling a copyright tune are two more things that appear absurd for both an archaic mindset and a future utopia (I hope).

Well, I'm not out here to spout prophetic truths, this is rather aiming to be a conversation starter...

reg, #1:

reg: I am posting an article at a subscription Vedic astrology magazine about the coming transits. I am summing up its main argument here though I know RR/SR is not particularly a friend of predictions or astrology in particular. Which I can understand, given the two aspects that we are guardians at earth stations where ingression of novelty is happening, and that most Western astrologers I know are quite dogmatic and instead of the probabilistic themes, they are apt to present their findings in a sabe-lo-todo manner which rightfully irritates many people including my own self... whereas Indian pandits, while revealing surprising techniques about the rhythms of the mandalas of time, sound medieval at times... My modern inquisitive mind rather says that it is likely that certain themes are brought up in certain times ... So, as we discussed many times before, there are two caveats : one is that astrology works on fixed archetypal patterns and there is also "ingression of novelty" at times - and all the time - to use Terence McKenna's expression, and the other is that IMHO themes are appointed by archetypal waves but not their exact solutions. Especially by masses of people with unknown variables at play. That is hard for ordinary believers of astrology to support since they tend to endow astrologers with a vision like "seers" based on predestination - somewhat like the Oracle in the Matrix. (In fact true astrology is more like an empirical soft science of studying pattern correlations like sociology, only, it is based on more archaic empiria.)

RR response: I interpret the above as meaning that the difference is between Western and Vedic Astrology is the former is based on the belief that future events can be predicted as if they had already happened and the latter on trying to gather information about the forces in the past and present that CAUSE future events. However, my own interpretation is that Astrology, like the I Ching the Tarot, and a number of other useful systems of divination simply provide complex hints about various details of how these forces are now operating that the person doing the divining can use as inspiration to make intuitive guesses about what will happen next. In other words, "You yourself are the instrument."

reg: That said, soon we will hit the long transit of Saturn in Sagittarius with Pluto there - the sign of beliefs, ideas, shamanic insights and the Inquisition. The agreement of astrologers is usually that Saturn's transit usually cleans things out or makes karmic things to appear obligatorily in response to earlier karmic patterns, individual and collective. Since Pluto is also there - in the Venusian nakshatra of Purva Shadha - I would expect more religious fanaticism, Theocratic wars and so on. More planets join later, in 2018 and 2019, and suffice it to say that where Pluto is now, is where Adolf Hitler's main planets that signaled his past lives and his fanaticism had been.

RR: This goes along with what I wrote above. There is a complex interaction between the changes attributed to the movement of heavenly bodies and the mythological meanings attributed to these bodies in both the West and the East. These are comparable to the ambiguities produced by the interplay between many different specific details revealed by consulting the I Ching or doing a Tarot reading.



reg: Soon we will have the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when a young priest in Germany, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door before the evening mass on All Hallows' Eve, October 31. That started long-ranging religious conflicts, peasant rebellions and other socially motivated conflicts, and Europe never returned to the pattern of the Middle Ages before. Luther was particularly criticizing the corrupt practice that rich Catholic people were able to buy tickets of church forgiveness for various sins. (Today they would get online and buy church pardons for transferring a few bitcoins...) He also criticized the Mass and the rituals being in Latin, and it appears that he was dissatisfied with the institution of the Pope itself - first why is everything supposed to be sacrosanct truth, when it was obvious to an average German buergher that what the Pope does and says frequently simply reflects the interests of rich people particularly those closer to him in Italy. ... Luther wished that people in Christian lands would return to what the Christ was actually preaching, which was a sort of equality among other things, and for that end, he later translated the Bible into German. He figured if you already can't make out the text itself, there's no chance in hell that you would understand its deeper meaning. Despite all his faults, Luther appeared to be a strong critic of the mainstream Theocracy of his time, weakened by the rise of cities, trade and the Renaissance, as well as the existence of some scientific research at universities etc.

RR: IMO, your last sentence above is the most important. The Reformation was grounded more in technological advances and their politico-economic impact on Western civilization than in religion per se. Significant improvements in ship-design and navigation launched the Age of Discovery in 1492, and simultaneously, the ever-increasing use of gunpowder revolutionized warfare both at sea and on land. The invention of printing led to an immediate increase in literacy and interest in education among the general population. And these advances were just a few among the many that empowered secular governments and private businesses more than they did the Catholic Church.

reg: The unique thing from the POV of this astrology - using Indian and Tibetan counting, but also the outer planets of the West - is that most of his followers were born in years where the outer planets were grouped like they were in 1989 - more precisely, between 1988 and 1992. According to my research with astrology programs, this was the only other time in history since the supposed Christian calendar when a "compulsory renewal of faith" was signalled by the planets simultaneously appearing in the original sign of faith, Sagittarius: Neptune, Uranus and Saturn together, all retrograde towards the preceding sign, Scorpio. Translated, that means a possibility for a new thinking and a total emotional disengagement with the old religion, as well as a forcing karmic need to renew faith, and whenever something does not work at the level of faith and society, it is to be destroyed or totally transformed. No compromise. The Reformation had a decisive violent streak as well as the concomitant counter-Reformation. Added to that, around 1489, for example, exactly 500 years before the revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe and got as far as Tienanmen China, people were also born with Pluto in the Indo-Tibetan sign of Libra. That adds in astro explanation that conforming to authority is the farthest thing on their minds, though in superficial trends such as fashion, they also tend to be overconforming. ... Luther himself was born earlier than this constellation, equipped with a very sharp mind. He was trying to effect all possible compromises as a Catholic priest but he could not come to terms with it finally. Had he been born six years later, he would have been a misfit early on and a violent revolutionary like some of his followers. ... While the discovery of America is controversial for Native Americans, one can say perhaps that 1492 started a new modern age in history, a coincidence is that certain Yogic calendars of cyclical time also - tentatively - suggest the ending of Kali Yuga around that time (plus-minus a hundred or so years), so the beginning of what they call Dwapara Yuga with its described advances of reason, individuality and technology. ... Who knows why this wave was more successful in turning Western history upside down - we know of earlier "heretic" movements in the West as well as bloody peasant revolutions. Some of these were, as well as the learnings at the Universities, were instrumental in the founding of the Invisible College. Yet 1517 October 31 appeared to be a turning point from which there was no more turning back.

RR: This all makes sense to me, even though it's very difficult for me to believe that the position of the planets had anything to do with the political and religious upheavals of the time. What's especially mystifying to me is that the positions of the three then-undiscovered outer planets are in the mix. However, over the course of a long life, I've read dozens, maybe even a hundred or more, of similar exlanations for the events of the time, so it's impossible for me to just dismiss them.

reg: When Luther's theses appeared on the door of the Wittenberg Church, Pluto and Saturn were already meeting in Sagittarius and a fierce time of religious debates began which had a social and a deeper meaning. Such is the constellation we are approaching now. Those born around the 1988-1992 years are at the end of their twenties. ... The questions are what it is that is so corrupt at the level of beliefs of our society that they need immediate renewal at a very ancient basis, even for a person that basically believes most of its basic tenets, such as Luther did believe in Christianity? I only have a tentative answer, personally knowing some people who were born in those years. Perhaps - just like in those times - our belief in the justice of a social order and rulership of money is one belief that needs to be turned upside down and it is turning upside down. People of the 1989 generation, though some of them are certainly tempted by a fundamentalism of their own brand of faith - generally share a common feeling, in my experience, that the social order is unjust, they cannot simply fit in any more - whether that order is the Soviet order or neoliberal capitalism - and that various religions are merely used to keep people in place. Just as then, now we have a bunch of provocative rulers - the extreme rightwingers are taking our major cultures one by one. Their philosophy is that "you are what you have" (quoting Hungarian State Minister János Lázár). I have heard all sorts of arguments for why that isn't true from this generation soon approaching their thirtieth year, and though they ideologically differ, they share a common feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with fossil fuels, the rich getting astronomically richer and defrauding and destroying all social structures that existed before. Perhaps Thomas Piketty is one person who voiced the fundamental problems of money distribution in society the most eloquently since the harsh criticisms of Karl Marx. And we could add that the Arab Spring was started by mostly the same generation though one can safely say that in the backwards societies of less urban Arab settings, it backfired into endless conflict and Fundamentalist forces.

RR: It looks to me like the Information Revolution, which can be said to have started around this same 1989 time frame, may have created a politico-economic environment similar to the one that produced the Reformation. However, I still can't reationally explain the astrological tie-in.

reg: The environment is another common theme with this generation, at least here as well as in the West. When we are facing the 2 degrees Celsius forecast, with humanity either dying out in a few decades, along with countless biospheres, or some lucky ones escaping to the bottom of the sea or to Mars, fossil fuels and oil wars seem to appear in a different light. Together with our provocative Mr. Trump who abolished the climate page of the POTUS web site on the very first day of his presidency. It isn't very far-off to envision that if we are to pass this test in the coming decades, after heavy conflicts, some sort of environmental dictatorship could be expected to ward off damages to untold future generations. Diesel cars or using live trees for Christmas decorations - to be thrown away in communal trash within a week or two - as well as plastic wrappings not ready to be taken apart and recycled since that is contrary to manufacturers' interests, these all make a mockery of even the most orthodox economic theories. Any power that simply bases all its existence on oil and dirty nukes is suspect now of contributing to a planetwide ecocide. Period. ... Perhaps at depth we are not ready to be destroyed - visionary sources suggest piecemeal solutions to much of our ailments - but by and large I find that I should support the outrage of that generation.

RR: My WiH channelings say very clearly that this problem is going to be solved by the die-off of about 80% of the human race from infectious disease within a short period of time. I've never been emotionally capable of dealing with this constructively, but I still tend to believe that it's the only way human civilization on Earth is going to survive much longer. And I'm absolutely certain that the technology to cause such a catastrophe already exists though it's easy for me to imagine it working too well and destroying 100% instead of 80%.

reg: There is a mistaken view of money at depth of all the false economies - most economists on the Left do not share it -, but everyday language conceals the true nature of money. Money is abstracted at economic schools from tangible values owned personally such as food or clothing, then thought jumps to the agreed value of gold etc. and pretty soon we are at the level of robots trading with our virtual money. The whole thing is as far from its original meaning as can be - money merely expresses a relationship or an agreement within human society. (I come from a family of economists, exposed to the classics from Adam Smith to Marx's Mehrwertsteuer early on). If you have a property in a city, that does not mean that your body somehow has developed some sort of arcane relationship with that piece of a backyard or half of a wall and it did not develop a relationship with whatever is beyond your property limit - such as a lilac bush on the neighbor's yard. We all feel how totally absurd that is, children and teens especially. My owning a piece of property and having an address merely means that there is an agreement in my society that other people basically could not enter or use it unless I agree to that entry and use (until the state wants to dig uranium there, but then normally even they would try to pay for taking it away). In other words, there is no "it" at the center of a proper economic definition of value, on the contrary, "it" is a yin understanding (best understood by the social background and its surroundings) but our language masks it as yang (being at the center, directing etc.) Ideology here dictates a reversal of figure and ground. If I enter a store with a 100 Euro note (as I did this month to buy a tobacco steam vaporizer) I have a measured amount of abstract power and the clerk will offer me something she can sell for the agreed value. I'm not trying to restate the obvious but what even Marx explains at the beginning of Das Kapital is elusively stretched out by our everyday language in our kind of capitalism yet all practical people seem to have a good grasp of it at a basic level. Extending intellectual property rights of Monsanto to modified seeds or suing someone for whistling a copyright tune are two more things that appear absurd for both an archaic mindset and a future utopia (I hope).

RR: IMO both the Marxists and the advocates of free-market capitalism have failed to realize that modern technological advances have made their basic economic theories obsolete. Automated industrial production has already made it possible to create an economy based on abundance rather than on scarcity and rendered obsolete both the capitalist standard for producing wealth and the labor standard for distributing it. I read the works of Louis Kelso in the Seventies and already knew about this when I did the WiH channelings, but never asked my Guides about it because it didn't seem relevant to the basic subject of humanism versus theocracy. However, after I came back on line in 2005, I did ask and was told it will happen spontaneously after the Earth's population is reduced.

reg: Well, I'm not out here to spout prophetic truths, this is rather aiming to be a conversation starter...

RR: It looks to me like you have indeed mentioned some "prophetic truths" that are going to become increasingly important if the population is reduced and the suvivors start building a Class 1 civilization on this planet.

reg: Please repost the text of your last message. It disappeared when I tried to post the reply below:

I'm beginning to hope that this old body survives till this happens. It would be cool to get back home and exchange greetings with whoever was guiding the people who wrote the letter that started, "Dear Tarquin, don't bother coming back to Rome. Your job has been eliminated..."

I only wrote a brief note which I will repost but your replies made me start thinking and questioning many things... and I post these questions to myself frequently, I could not deal with astrology honestly if I didn't.

What I wrote was in essence that as far as astrology is concerned, such a transit - and we are not talking about a short thing like the phases of the Moon, rather a conjunction lasting for years both in the years leading up to the Reformation and now - has not happened since the founding of the Roman Empire, 753 B.C. (I am not sure of any time before but I checked this) and will not until 2800 A.D. (again, I am not sure when it will ever happen in the Solar System but I checked every year until that year).

What this means depends upon what you think of planets and their associations. I do not have a ready theory of how astrology correlates with anything at all, I just merely note that it does, and that the Eastern techniques bring far better results, and the Western thinking is deeper and more esoteric about the matrix of archetypes.
All we know is that planets are fundamental deities and parts of the setup of the everyday world in both India and Ancient Greece. At least, the largest part of the panthenon deals with things related to planets - or better said, celestial bodies the movement of which can be easily observed from Earth. The phenomenon of the week as ordering human time is known since ancient times in China, Tibet as well as Europe and the mediterranean, Celtic and Germanic traditions. The week is obviously related to the seven visible bodies around Earth - Sunday/Sun, Monday/Moon, Tuesday/Mars (Mardi in French), Wednesday/Mercury (Mercredi in French), Thursday/Jupiter (Thor and Zeus), Friday/Venus (Freya, Aphrodite) and Saturday/Saturn (Shanivara in Hindi). The only reason we know that it is Tuesday now is that it has been Monday before and that goes back thousands of years. It seems that such a division has been common everywhere in all the high civilizations of the Eurasian continent as well as North Africa. High civilizations in North America used markedly different calendars but the Maya also observed the cycles of Venus with a keen eye.

I read speculations about numerology and also purported parallels with subatomic particles, but perhaps it is futile to try to ascertain a direct cause and effect relationship with the movement of the planets in the Solar System and the framework of what happens on planet Earth. One merely notes meaningful correlations - synchronicities - and in this, you are right, the basis is no different from the Tarot readings or the I Ching. The latter do not say anything about macro-patterns of time, however, when you ask a question, you receive an answer. Terence McKenna tried to establish an I Ching based theory of cycles, with questionable results though he devoted a large amount of time towards the end of his life.

Perhaps all I can say is that the planetary realia (movement of planets viewed from Earth) moving within a traditional numerology setting (the 27 lunations and the 12 solar months coming to a total of 108 parts of the zodiac) is merely reflective of our collective consciousness. One thing is certain, astrology in all its forms is more about why or how things are the way they are, when are time windows to change it, and what themes you can examine to work something new. I think it is possible that we simply have to come back to a level of what we discussed many times, the joint platform of Hindu and Greek thought, in order to surpass it.

This is a planetary minimum. When most people will accept and recall former lives, other planets, and there will be no more wars, no more discrimination for lack of resources etc. and people will learn to get in touch with their Guides at an early age, there will be no more need for either astrology or most forms of psychology either. But we have digressed from our development as a planet, and we need to be able to go on from that planetary minimum.

It is a side note to me that Greeks and Indians probably did not see the planet Uranus (though at certain times it is allegedly visible to people with very sharp eyes) and certainly did not see Neptune, Pluto, not to speak of Chiron, Ceres and Lilith which some astrologers calculate. They could have a correlation with events - at the levels and within the limits I outlined above - before the time they were discovered by European astrologers, even if we merely suppose that the major bodies of the Solar System participate in a loose parallelism with major windows of earthly events and they do not determine or cause anything.

Perhaps that is what this change window is all about. There is a global Renaissance culturally with East and West coming together - unless we blow it. Europe was a closed world unable to create this new age until the repeated waves of loosening up Christian dogmatism happened, and perhaps the Reformation was a breakthrough of centuries of repeated attempts. If that is true, we can suppose without knowing anything for certain, that we can reach a global minimum this time, which would also mean we would examine the roots of our archetypes and become thereby able to surpass them.

Another speculation worthy to maintain is that perhaps at the time we are able to surpass the meaningful framework of the week, the planets, the months, and other traditions correlated with the planets of the Solar System, we will be able to move beyond physically - at least within a small area of space. That is to say, then we would really be looking back upon astrology as a system of ancient tribal superstitions, but this needs at least a global renaissance and entertaining unimaginably good developments of the future, which is I believe the essence and real target of the teachings of yogic time cycles (I wrote about them in another thread) and not a really cyclical time of earthly civilizations... As the Bible says, we will not need to see through a glass darkly, but face to face. Astrology, I am ready to grant you, is trying to see through a glass darkly ("smoky mirror" in Hungarian).

Back to Luther, part of what he represented to me was that Christian religion should mean what it says, it should not merely serve interests of power. Actually, the present Pope is like that too...

reg, #4:

reg: I only wrote a brief note which I will repost but your replies made me start thinking and questioning many things... and I post these questions to myself frequently, I could not deal with astrology honestly if I didn't. What I wrote was in essence that as far as astrology is concerned, such a transit - and we are not talking about a short thing like the phases of the Moon, rather a conjunction lasting for years both in the years leading up to the Reformation and now - has not happened since the founding of the Roman Empire, 753 B.C. (I am not sure of any time before but I checked this) and will not until 2800 A.D. (again, I am not sure when it will ever happen in the Solar System but I checked every year until that year).

RR: Actually, my reply was wide of the mark, because what came to my mind was the revolution that started the Roman Republic, which happened several centuries after the 753 BC date you gave. The actual founding of Rome, as a kingdom with an absolute monarch, is described only in vague legends involving Romulus and Remus, etc. that have never made much sense to me. However, there were great political upheavals going on all over Europe and the Middle East at the time you mention, and in other parts of the world as well.

reg: What this means depends upon what you think of planets and their associations. I do not have a ready theory of how astrology correlates with anything at all, I just merely note that it does, and that the Eastern techniques bring far better results, and the Western thinking is deeper and more esoteric about the matrix of archetypes. ... All we know is that planets are fundamental deities and parts of the setup of the everyday world in both India and Ancient Greece. At least, the largest part of the panthenon deals with things related to planets - or better said, celestial bodies the movement of which can be easily observed from Earth. The phenomenon of the week as ordering human time is known since ancient times in China, Tibet as well as Europe and the mediterranean, Celtic and Germanic traditions. The week is obviously related to the seven visible bodies around Earth - Sunday/Sun, Monday/Moon, Tuesday/Mars (Mardi in French), Wednesday/Mercury (Mercredi in French), Thursday/Jupiter (Thor and Zeus), Friday/Venus (Freya, Aphrodite) and Saturday/Saturn (Shanivara in Hindi). The only reason we know that it is Tuesday now is that it has been Monday before and that goes back thousands of years. It seems that such a division has been common everywhere in all the high civilizations of the Eurasian continent as well as North Africa. High civilizations in North America used markedly different calendars but the Maya also observed the cycles of Venus with a keen eye.

RR: I always figured the origin of the week was simply the division of the lunar month into four parts of seven days each, and the association with the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (and the deities associated with them) came later. And I assume that an extra, unnamed, day was originally added between months when needed to guarantee that each of the thirteenth contained exactly four weeks and started on Sunday. However, when the twelve month solar year came into use, there's no sign of attempts being made to co the same thing.

reg: I read speculations about numerology and also purported parallels with subatomic particles, but perhaps it is futile to try to ascertain a direct cause and effect relationship with the movement of the planets in the Solar System and the framework of what happens on planet Earth. One merely notes meaningful correlations - synchronicities - and in this, you are right, the basis is no different from the Tarot readings or the I Ching. The latter do not say anything about macro-patterns of time, however, when you ask a question, you receive an answer. Terence McKenna tried to establish an I Ching based theory of cycles, with questionable results though he devoted a large amount of time towards the end of his life.

RR: It looks to me like both the ancient Chinese and Hindus made a hard division between astrology and mechanical forms of divination like the I Ching. The former was cyclical and based on the timing of events relevant to the question and the latter were based on "games of chance" using cards, dice, yrrow stalks, etc.

reg: Perhaps all I can say is that the planetary realia (movement of planets viewed from Earth) moving within a traditional numerology setting (the 27 lunations and the 12 solar months coming to a total of 108 parts of the zodiac) is merely reflective of our collective consciousness. One thing is certain, astrology in all its forms is more about why or how things are the way they are, when are time windows to change it, and what themes you can examine to work something new. I think it is possible that we simply have to come back to a level of what we discussed many times, the joint platform of Hindu and Greek thought, in order to surpass it.

RR: Reading the above, the thought just popped into my mind that astrology may represent our collective consciousness and mechanical forms divination our collective UNconsciousness. The former puts more emphasis on WHEN we do things and the latter on HOW we do them. Timing is always related to consciousness of the passage of time, but method is related to unlocking information from the subconscious.

reg: This is a planetary minimum. When most people will accept and recall former lives, other planets, and there will be no more wars, no more discrimination for lack of resources etc. and people will learn to get in touch with their Guides at an early age, there will be no more need for either astrology or most forms of psychology either. But we have digressed from our development as a planet, and we need to be able to go on from that planetary minimum.

RR: Yes! From what I've been able to learn about truly advanced civilizations, none of them feel the need for faith-based belief, divination, or even educational and justice systems as they exist in more primitive societies. If lying is impossible and "mental illness" can be treated as just another form of physical illness, a lot problem-solving that's impossible or very difficult for societies like the present earthly ones turns out to be quite easy.

reg: It is a side note to me that Greeks and Indians probably did not see the planet Uranus (though at certain times it is allegedly visible to people with very sharp eyes) and certainly did not see Neptune, Pluto, not to speak of Chiron, Ceres and Lilith which some astrologers calculate. They could have a correlation with events - at the levels and within the limits I outlined above - before the time they were discovered by European astrologers, even if we merely suppose that the major bodies of the Solar System participate in a loose parallelism with major windows of earthly events and they do not determine or cause anything.

RR: The thought just came to me that astrology, both Eastern and Western, was put together over long periods of time with a lot of input from people who channeled useful information from spirits with advanced scientific knowledge from ET sources, or themselves had past life memories containing such information. I don't know exactly how this fits in with what you said above, but I have a strong intuitive feeling that it does.

reg: Perhaps that is what this change window is all about. There is a global Renaissance culturally with East and West coming together - unless we blow it. Europe was a closed world unable to create this new age until the repeated waves of loosening up Christian dogmatism happened, and perhaps the Reformation was a breakthrough of centuries of repeated attempts. If that is true, we can suppose without knowing anything for certain, that we can reach a global minimum this time, which would also mean we would examine the roots of our archetypes and become thereby able to surpass them.

RR: According to what my Guides are telling me in real time at the moment events like the wave of right-wing populism that's now sweeping over the whole Northern Hemisphere are also part of this global Cultural Renaissance. It's going to swallow its own tail and disappear quite soon, bringing earthly civilization closer to that cultural minimum that will allow us to understand and surpass our present archetypes.

reg: Another speculation worthy to maintain is that perhaps at the time we are able to surpass the meaningful framework of the week, the planets, the months, and other traditions correlated with the planets of the Solar System, we will be able to move beyond physically - at least within a small area of space. That is to say, then we would really be looking back upon astrology as a system of ancient tribal superstitions, but this needs at least a global renaissance and entertaining unimaginably good developments of the future, which is I believe the essence and real target of the teachings of yogic time cycles (I wrote about them in another thread) and not a really cyclical time of earthly civilizations... As the Bible says, we will not need to see through a glass darkly, but face to face. Astrology, I am ready to grant you, is trying to see through a glass darkly ("smoky mirror" in Hungarian).

RR: I suspect you meant to say "physicality", not "physically" and if so, this is one of the most important passages I've ever seen you write. Especially the part about "surpassing the meaningful framework of the week, the planets, the months..." However, I'm not able to understand the deeper meaning of the piece directly, and will have to let it sink into my subconscious and surface in terms related to my own experiences over a very long lifetime of trying to trulyu imerstand "the nature of spiritual reality".

reg: Back to Luther, part of what he represented to me was that Christian religion should mean what it says, it should not merely serve interests of power. Actually, the present Pope is like that too...

RR: Yes! The present Pope is indeed a lot like Luther would have been if he'd been elevated to the Papacy rather than being driven out of the Church...

Long reflections on my part...
I would reflect on two elements: the calendar and the coming transcendence.
"RR: I always figured the origin of the week was simply the division of the lunar month into four parts of seven days each, and the association with the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (and the deities associated with them) came later. And I assume that an extra, unnamed, day was originally added between months when needed to guarantee that each of the thirteenth contained exactly four weeks and started on Sunday. However, when the twelve month solar year came into use, there's no sign of attempts being made to co the same thing."
Could be. In recent years despite my poor eyesight (strong glasses) I could see planets so frequently that my personal experience is that any culture that would navigate by the stars either at sea or in a desert would figure them out soon.
Last year I spent a couple of months translating a book into English by a Hungarian architect on the calendrical use of the three main pyramids, and the timing of the shadows of small pyramids casting shades at them and also analyzing some wall paintings and calendars. It seems to be that by that time - pretty late in Egyptian history - the rising of the phases of the Moon as well as the four cardinal points and some major constellations were worked out and the length of the year was known in a way that adjustment was only needed once every several years when the Pharaoh declared Sun/Moon holidays. The four weeks of the lunar phases was clearly marked on the Kom Ombo calendar, especially suited for timing women's periods. Some of the sites in the desert were obviously suited for regular observation of rising stars, as were the "ventilation holes" in the Great Pyramids. 14 and 7 come in simple texts too. Pi was known to a few decimals - though they used cubits - marked by proportions, and it is easy to infer that the average distance of the time the Earth is closest to the Sun was marked by the architectural proportion of Khufu's pyramid but that appears to be a conjecture, just in case they knew the angle change needed to theoretically transport the pyramid to the Equator. (This may need some explanation but it is a reasonable hypothesis).
Each day was shown on the original coverings (a reasonable hypothesis) by the shadow of the small pyramids. The Egyptians were obsessed with marking the precise observation of the Sun and allowing the seeker to see the Moon (which basically rises at the same height in the same months only in about 18 years). I do not know about Egyptian principles (gods etc.) being correlated to planets but I do not know enough on this.
It seemed odd not to notice the 27 1/3 rhythm of nearly equal lunar distances in the sky - the Vedas already name them so they must be thousands of years old. I guess Indus valley civilizations also had it. Making the synodic month (appr. 29 days from Full Moon to next Full Moon or New Moon to next New Moon) the first unit after the year with the four cardinal points (solstices and equinoxes obviously resulted in a rounded 12-month system. Osiris was what we call Orion today and they were practically obsessed with the Dog Star as it was marking the flooding of the Nile.
However, the Indians clearly noticed the 27 small contellations with fixed stars if you take the other cycle which is how much the Moon covers against the sky in one day's length. Their months have been named by the nakshatras and the sign system may have originated in the West - Greek and Egyptian. They already knew the planets for sure - they are deities in the Vedas, including the two places where the Moon goes outside of the Tropics and where it returns - called Rahu and Ketu.

I recall reading a medieval Chinese novel where there was a festival called the Feast of the Seven Planets. To the people of the time, with a less scientific way of looking it could be a natural coincidence that the Sun and the Moon are equal size viewed in the sky (1 degree out of 360) and that the Moon has rhythms of seven days when there are seven obviously visible moving planets in the sky. It may have came later indeed, earlier in India (which was not such a solar and yang-obsessed culture) than in Egypt. But as soon as you have at least a couple of generations of star gazers serving some king or maharadja it would be apparent, along with the observation that the whole background of starts moves one degree about every 72 years.
Astrology was pretty strong in both cultures and I have not been digressing about Mesopotamia.

So it's a mysterious subject and because so many Theocratic regimes were persecuting it, oir doing it in secrecy - it may truly be about "the movements of collective consciousness" which you termed right but I would suggest the term "movements of the Collective Unconscious" to follow Jung. Not "unconsciousness" though! Precisely because by "the unconscious," just like it is posited in NLP by Milton Erickson, had a vast array of useful aarchetypes guiding you toward individuation - your Guides' pictorial Twitter messages would include our collective images of Gods and Goddesses and many things more known from folk tales and dreams translatred to modern terms, like buses and trains and undergound and bridges.
Whereas the term "unconsciousness" has a negative connotation to me - wowo, I gotta get out of this ASAP since this is unconsciousness... somehow the grammatical form allows you to play with it or makes you have an alarm to get out...

reg, #6:

reg: Long reflections on my part... I would reflect on two elements: the calendar and the coming transcendence. "RR: I always figured the origin of the week was simply the division of the lunar month into four parts of seven days each, and the association with the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (and the deities associated with them) came later. And I assume that an extra, unnamed, day was originally added between months when needed to guarantee that each of the thirteenth contained exactly four weeks and started on Sunday. However, when the twelve month solar year came into use, there's no sign of attempts being made to do the same thing." Could be. In recent years despite my poor eyesight (strong glasses) I could see planets so frequently that my personal experience is that any culture that would navigate by the stars either at sea or in a desert would figure them out soon.

RR: IMO, it's important to realize that navigation has to rely heavily on planetary movements, but the management of the politico-economic system as a whole can operate on the solar day and week alone. However, there's plenty of evidence that the human estral and reproductive cycle was tied to the lunar month long before such systems existed, when all humans were still hunter/gatherers. And the origin of deistic mythology also seems to be rooted in the family relationships that are natural to such a culture.

reg: Last year I spent a couple of months translating a book into English by a Hungarian architect on the calendrical use of the three main pyramids, and the timing of the shadows of small pyramids casting shades at them and also analyzing some wall paintings and calendars. It seems to be that by that time - pretty late in Egyptian history - the rising of the phases of the Moon as well as the four cardinal points and some major constellations were worked out and the length of the year was known in a way that adjustment was only needed once every several years when the Pharaoh declared Sun/Moon holidays. The four weeks of the lunar phases was clearly marked on the Kom Ombo calendar, especially suited for timing women's periods. Some of the sites in the desert were obviously suited for regular observation of rising stars, as were the "ventilation holes" in the Great Pyramids. 14 and 7 come in simple texts too. Pi was known to a few decimals - though they used cubits - marked by proportions, and it is easy to infer that the average distance of the time the Earth is closest to the Sun was marked by the architectural proportion of Khufu's pyramid but that appears to be a conjecture, just in case they knew the angle change needed to theoretically transport the pyramid to the Equator. (This may need some explanation but it is a reasonable hypothesis). Each day was shown on the original coverings (a reasonable hypothesis) by the shadow of the small pyramids. The Egyptians were obsessed with marking the precise observation of the Sun and allowing the seeker to see the Moon (which basically rises at the same height in the same months only in about 18 years). I do not know about Egyptian principles (gods etc.) being correlated to planets but I do not know enough on this.

RR: IMO, this all ties in with what I pointed out above. The economic base of the ancient Egyptian culture was tied to the rise and fall of the waters of the Nile with an elaborate irrigation and drainage system that operated automatically, so there was no actual need to be able to predict it. And the climate in the area at that time was sub-tripical, with little rainfall and almost no cold weather, so there was no need to be able to predict these either. This has led me to believe that there was little correlation between the facts about the pyramids you just pointed out and either the religious or secular life of the Egyptian people themselves, both the aristocrats and the commoners.

reg: It seemed odd not to notice the 27 1/3 rhythm of nearly equal lunar distances in the sky - the Vedas already name them so they must be thousands of years old. I guess Indus valley civilizations also had it. Making the synodic month (appr. 29 days from Full Moon to next Full Moon or New Moon to next New Moon) the first unit after the year with the four cardinal points (solstices and equinoxes obviously resulted in a rounded 12-month system. Osiris was what we call Orion today and they were practically obsessed with the Dog Star as it was marking the flooding of the Nile.
However, the Indians clearly noticed the 27 small constellations with fixed stars if you take the other cycle which is how much the Moon covers against the sky in one day's length. Their months have been named by the nakshatras and the sign system may have originated in the West - Greek and Egyptian. They already knew the planets for sure - they are deities in the Vedas, including the two places where the Moon goes outside of the Tropics and where it returns - called Rahu and Ketu.

RR: My own belief is that the Indus Valley Civilization spoke a language in the Tamil family and there was never an "Aryan Invasion" of the sort described in most modern history books. What actually happened was that people speaking Indo-European languages started migrating into India as early as 3000 BC and resided in their own communities, interacting peacefully and constructively with the people who were already there. The origin of the Vedic culture was simply a religious movement similar to the spread of Christianity during the late Roman period much later, and the Sanskrit language replaced the original languages all over the sub-continent mostly because it generated large amounts of written documents.

reg: I recall reading a medieval Chinese novel where there was a festival called the Feast of the Seven Planets. To the people of the time, with a less scientific way of looking it could be a natural coincidence that the Sun and the Moon are equal size viewed in the sky (1 degree out of 360) and that the Moon has rhythms of seven days when there are seven obviously visible moving planets in the sky. It may have came later indeed, earlier in India (which was not such a solar and yang-obsessed culture) than in Egypt. But as soon as you have at least a couple of generations of star gazers serving some king or maharaja it would be apparent, along with the observation that the whole background of stars moves one degree about every 72 years.

RR: IMO, it's important to realize that the Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures all became literate and left documents that still survive today several thousand years before the Hindu culture did. And all three were much more solar and yang-obsessed.

reg: Astrology was pretty strong in both cultures and I have not been digressing about Mesopotamia. So it's a mysterious subject and because so many Theocratic regimes were persecuting it, or doing it in secrecy - it may truly be about "the movements of collective consciousness" which you termed right but I would suggest the term "movements of the Collective Unconscious" to follow Jung. Not "unconsciousness" though! Precisely because by "the unconscious," just like it is posited in NLP by Milton Erickson, had a vast array of useful aarchetypes guiding you toward individuation - your Guides' pictorial Twitter messages would include our collective images of Gods and Goddesses and many things more known from folk tales and dreams translatred to modern terms, like buses and trains and undergound and bridges. Whereas the term "unconsciousness" has a negative connotation to me - wowo, I gotta get out of this ASAP since this is unconsciousness... somehow the grammatical form allows you to play with it or makes you have an alarm to get out...

RR: I completely agree that Astrology, as well as Numerology and most mechanical methods of divination, tends to guide people towards individuation simply because it aids whatever efforts they are making to answer questions and solve problems through learning by trail and error. This indeed is why Theocratic regimes tend to oppose all of them and encourage blind belief in whatever is handed down by political and/or religious authority figures. And in a sense, this also explains the dichotomy between "collective consciousness" and a "collective unconscious". The former is based on empowering the conscious mind and the latter by empowering the subconscious. And of course the reality is that BOTH approaches are necessary if we are to ever to achieve true wisdom.