Draw your chair up close to the precipice and I'll tell you a story ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Image sourced: Miriadna.com
Archive for August 29th, 2011
Devil’s Fool Cake
August 29, 2011The most popular form of this saying—“You can’t have your cake and eat it too”— confuses many people because they mistakenly suppose the word “have” means “eat,” as in “Have a piece of cake for dessert.” A more logical version of this saying is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” meaning that if you eat your cake you won’t have it any more. The point is that if you eat your cake right now you won’t have it to eat later. “Have” means “possess” in this context, not “eat.”
Reference
Asteroid 7256: Bonhoeffer
August 29, 2011Asteroid 7256 Bonhoeffer is a mainbelt asteroid discovered on 11 November 1993. The main asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter and is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. Maybe half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: 1 Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea.
Bonhoeffer dwells in my natal Sixth House at Aquarius 11 Man tête-à-tête with his inspiration. With the triple energies of Mars/Orcus/Lucifer in the Eleventh House sextiling Pluto in the First House, their Fistful-of-Yod points right at Bonhoeffer, conjunct Pallas, sextile Ceres and quintile Hygiea. Estoteric astrologer Alan Oken writes that the quintile is an aspect which will only have meaning in a chart of a spiritually progressiing individual, for it indicates the ability to harmonize the energies of the planets involved on an inner plane of understanding. It is an aspect of evolutionary potential. Make that revolutionary.
Where is Bonhoeffer in your chart? He embodies the archetypal energies of Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, Maverick, Righteous Gentile. On a sacred ordinary level, the placement of Bonhoeffer in the natal asks: What is the cause that you are willing to die for and is it a worthy one? Is your job “killing” you, your relationship, your family, your busyness, your diet, your addictions, your shoulds/musts/have-tos………your shoes?
I like Bonhoeffer. He’s my kinda guy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Image Sourced: Living Wittily
The film Valkyrie claims to tell the story of the ‘July 20 1944’ plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One name was missing……….
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr. He was a participant in the German resistance movement against Nazism and a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943.
A Long Loneliness
“Dietrich became a theologian because he was lonely,” said Eberhard Bethge, his friend and biographer. Bethge could be right; Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (The Communion of the Saints) and many of his later works, such as Life Together, dwell on the subject of creating Christian communities.
Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the Nazis left him isolated in many ways. His support of the Pastor’s Emergency League and Confessing Church placed him in opposition to many established churchmen he had admired. Restrictions on his right to speak and publish prevented him from exchanging ideas with others. His rejection of anti-semitism set him apart from a society propagandized into hysterical jew-hatred. His work with the Schwarze Kappelle had to be carried out in secret.
By 1943 his greatest consolation might have been his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer.
They were an unlikely couple: Maria von Wedemeyer was a vivacious, fun-loving girl of 18 and Bonhoeffer was a 35-year-old religious scholar. He made her a bet that she could teach him to dance; she said he was a hopeless case. He responded that, of the two of them, he was the better cook. Her innocent enjoyment of life was a tonic for a man whose phones were now tapped and correspondence read by the German government.
“You must know how I really feel and must not take me for a pillar saint…I can’t very well imagine that you would want to marry one in the first place– and I would also advise against it from my knowledge of church history,” he wrote to her.
Three months after the couple announced their engagement, Bonhoeffer was arrested.
There are a number of memorials in Germany honoring those who fought the Nazi regime from within. A plaque at Flossenburg commemorates Bonhoeffer, Canaris, Sack, Oster and Gehre; another in Berlin honors von Stauffenberg and the German Resistance.
But Bonhoeffer left another memorial, a living legacy. His life and work retain a meaning beyond a daring attempt to end a brutal dictatorship; they are more than the musings of a theologian contemplating his own death. His writings have influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Thich Nhat Hanh. They point to a way that all people of conscience can exist in a flawed world:
“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, July, 1944.
Maria von Wedemeyer.
Would you dance if I asked you to dance?
Would you run and never look back
Would you cry if you saw me crying
Would you save my soul tonight?
Would you tremble if I touched your lips?
Would you laugh oh please tell me these
Now would you die for the one you love?
Hold me in your arms tonight?
I can be you hero baby
I can kiss away the pain
I will stand by you forever
You can take my breath away
~lyrics “Hero” Enrique Iglesias
Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on April 8, 1945, by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defence in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp, three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Like other executions associated with the July 20 Plot, the execution was particularly brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with thin wire for death by strangulation.
Maria stayed faithful to Bonhoeffer to the very end.
References:
Deafening Silence ~ Valkyrie’s Forgotten Man: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Prison Writings in a World Come of Age: The Special Vision of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Tesseract
August 29, 2011What Is A Lunar Return?
Your Lunar return is the monthly chart of the instant the Moon in the sky returns to the exact position it was at your birth. It’s kind of a monthly birthday, and the arrangement of planets it displays reflects the patterns of your coming month. Each month, this re-birth-day works out its potential for you and then is renewed once again 27 1/2 days later with a new set of surprises and opportunities.
How Does It Work?
Like your natal chart, or any other kind of horoscope, a Lunar return is a chart of a beginning – in this case, the monthly beginning of the lunar cycle that started at your birth, which is the cycle of your response to your environment, including your emotions, feelings, interactivity, social well-being, and generally how creatively you react to the challenges and opportunities of life. It works on the principle that when you begin something – anything – everything that flows from it is bound up in the initial conditions under which it started. The beginning is your foundation, and you build and rest upon it until you are finished. A Lunar return is the astrological depiction of the new beginning you make each month and what results from it until the next cycle begins.
Text sourced from ClaytenTylor.com
My travels through all things astrological have brought me to checking out the Lunar Return and discovering that from 17 August until 13 September, I have a Cosmic Cross vibe happening. This is interesting because it was on 17 August that I gave my IT chappie the go-ahead to build me a new computer (which by the way has adjusted to my energies so I can now frolic at Astrodienst to my heart’s delight). The Cosmic Cross then switches to a Grand Trine on 13 September.
The good thing about the current Lunar Return Cosmic Cross is that it is balanced in the four elements of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Esoteric astrologer Alan Oken writes “the Cosmic Cross is an extremely difficult pattern to master, although it leads to great strength and growth if used wisely by the individual in question. It calls for a very self-contained individual, possesing a great supply of inner strength and stamina.” Yup, I’ve got that in spades and then some.
Alan then offers this about the Grand Trine: “If the energies contained within the Grand Trine are not wisely directed, however, the result is much like what happens to a squirrel in an exercise ring – it causes the individual to go around in circles.” Too funny!
What does this all mean? Well, the Sabian Symbols provide the key for the energies of the Cosmic Cross:
Pluto Capricorn 6: A dark archway and ten logs at the bottom
Mars Cancer 10: A large diamond not completely carved
Saturn Libra 14: A noon siesta
Moon/Uranus Aries 4: Two lovers strolling through a secluded walk
The theme? It’s Kairos time……walk don’t run.
Tesseract
Throughout time people have told stories to help them understand the nature of reality. Artists have illustrated those stories. The modern day equivalent of these stories is science. The science that deals most directly with questions about the nature of reality is physics. The stories that physics tell about the nature of reality are expressed in equations.
E=mc2, the most well known of these equations, can be written out as energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. To understand this equation requires four dimensions. Mass occupies space which is commonly understood as having three dimensions. Speed requires movement. Movement is change from one location in space to another over time. Without time there can be no speed. Space and time are inextricably woven together. Without time there is no space; without space there can be no time.
The common cube exists within three dimensions of space: height, width and depth. It is drawn on a flat plane, i.e. on paper, on canvas, etc., with vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. The diagonal lines represent the third dimension. A tesseract is a four dimensional cube: height, depth, width and time. Because we are not equipped to see in four dimensions, a tesseract cannot be seen with the human eye. To draw one requires a second diagonal representing the fourth dimension.
But science does not stop at four dimensions. Alternative realities are often thought to exist in a parallel dimension, a fifth dimension that contains all the alternative possibilities your life could have played out as well as those of all the other people who ever have or ever will exist. The fifth dimension, then, includes all possible universes.
Two diagonals are used to reduce the four dimensional cube down to two to allow drawing the tessaract on a flat plane. A further reduction can be accomplished conceptually by slowing time to zero. The fifth dimension expands and becomes the fourth filling the space occupied by time. Movement through time becomes movement across the range of alternate realities. This experience is common to many mystical traditions. Buddhist enlightenment, for example, is achieved in this way through meditation.
One needs no knowledge of physics to access the mystical layers of the tesseract. By gently focusing on the center of the painting, you will notice a lively motion. Lines appear to move, disappear and re-appear. The more you are able to let go of grasping at the pattern and to relax into observing without holding, the slower time seems to pass. An epiphany occurs when the pattern disappears entirely. Time stops and alternative realities are accessible.
Text and Imaged sourced from: CharlesWinstead.com
The Violet Hour 