It's stranger than strange, but it's difficult to put your finger on it. We've never been conscious to this degree while so many strange things are taking place. We've only known of Pluto for 75 plus years. This year it dawdled at the Galactic Center and we are now rearranged to a galactic orientation rather than solar. Maybe we're just tired of global warming and we're choosing to worship the galaxy instead of the Sun. At any rate, it is very difficult to get a handle on anything now. Along with that, we also have the amazing shift of Pluto from Sagittarius to Capricorn, which is the darkest day of the year when the Sun passes through there. It is an intense shift from chaotic expansion to orderly contraction probably better known as the out of control/in control pattern. Notice that in any given area of your life you swing wildly from thinking that you are in control/out of control around such issues. Likely you are running out and cold to extreme; the planet is. Once Pluto goes into Capricorn, we just might start to get symptoms of global cooling.

Hot or cold, it is still the Dream. Remember that. If you start to make any of it real, the whole fabric gets real. Then you'll be raked over the coals and the cold. Added to that is this every two year cycle when Mars goes retrograde for several months. It's going to be backing up into zero Cancer, which is the summer solstice point, opposing to Pluto. More hot/cold, life/death, maternal/paternal, good/bad, victim/tyrant crud. Two years ago, Mars was retrograde in Scorpio in the middle of about a year's worth of Fixed Grand Crossness. Now Mars is retrograde in Cancer mostly in a Grand Trine with Water Signs which makes things very spacy rather than very grindy. Mars backs into Gemini on the last day of the year and then we'll have all four of the Mutable Signs filled with the feeling of Grand Crossness and being stuck and grinding again. After that, Venus enters Capricorn a day before Pluto goes into Capricorn on 1/26/08. Several days later, Mars will go direct. It'll enter Cancer again 3/3/08, thereby opposing Pluto in earliest Capricorn. Be aware the Ides/Ids of March!

This week brings a variety of shift right before the Solstice. Jupiter harbinges on 12/18 at 12:12 pm when it enters Capricorn. It hasn't done that since 1995, which is when Pluto made its last shift of Sign into Sagittarius. These are heavy times indeed. Likely your body is the heaviest it has ever been. The world is almighty heavy. The weight of extinguished species and ecosystems and cultures/languages weighs heavy on us. Once we went galactic, we lost our weigh. The gravitas is shifting. No where to hang your hat or ass. Topsy turvydom.

This is only a prelude. I recommend that you claim your own consciousness to clear your identification in the Dream machinery that is going to grind and spit ferociously insanely for a decade or two. If you buy into power/powerless, you are doomed to meekly trying to inherit the Earth of some patch of existence or go chasing after your bits like a soul retriever. It is all a fractured, projective dream that has nothing to do with you. You are not in it like you think. It is not you. All you need is love, but that'll never fill that hole/whole of need. It'll just knead you to the bone and then you'll get another change on which to exercise the same old gnawing of the same old bone.

What is depressing and sufferful is not all the gross grotesque chicaneries of the coming and goings. What is depressing is that you have not realized your being. Instead you realize the mind, especially the higher mind and then you've realized the Dream. Making this Dream real at this time will make the tsunamic waves real, will make the attacks and defenses real, will make the degradation and hope real. Take your pick. Be or do. Do or undo. Be done unto or come undone. Or else, you'll take your pickin's from the bone pile of your re-mixed karma while thinking you are getting somewhere towards a happy hunting ground of the promised landing. You will land Escherlike just where you projected from. You'll become your enemy, but not it the dream of supposed Oneness. You'll become the victimizer that victimed you in the past. Or you'll be the endless forgiver who's taken to endless tasks by the endless takers. The choice is yours; the control is not.

Saturn goes retrograde in Virgo 12/19 at 6:11 am PST. Now the mind will really start gnawing on folks. They'll start acting out much more than gunning for the mall. A lot of people you know are going to go down, down hard and projectively. You've seen it already, but the dam/damn has burst. Suicide will become much more common. Attacking out will continue, but attacking in is more likely for awhile. As the years go by, much more severe acting out will happen armageddonly.

On 12/20, Mercury enters Capricorn 6:43 am PST. Several hours later it will conjunct Jupiter which entered Capricorn several days before. More harbingering. Death and woe rattles are likely with everyone puking up the old beliefs of higher powers that are better than everyone else's and the rest be damned. Now the unrest becomes undammed. It's always been there by the way; let the stuff come up and clear your identification in it all. It won't get you if you be and if you let it be. To ice the cake, later that day, the Sun conjuncts Pluto a little more than a day before Winter Solstice.

So likely you'll feel like you are bottoming out on something that has no bottom. Ugh. Let the end times end for you. Give up chasing after ends to justify their own means. End beginnings, middlings, endings and nows. It's all artifact of the software of the mind. Let the Dream unroll. Let the mind unrock.

Being with you,
Mark