NorthPoint Journal:  Your guide to planetary energies for March 5 to 11, 2018 By Pam Younghans

NorthPoint Journal 

Your guide to planetary energies for

March 5 to 11, 2018

By Pam Younghans

Highlighted Aspects this Week
MON: Mercury enters Aries
TUE: Venus enters Aries
WED: Pluto semisquare Juno
THU: Jupiter stations retrograde
FRI: Last Quarter Moon 3:19am PST (11:19am GMT), Mercury trine Ceres
SAT: Venus trine Ceres, Mercury square Saturn
SUN: Mars trine Uranus, Sun sextile Pluto

HAVING COMPLETED their journey through the heart-opening realms of other-worldly Pisces, both Mercury and Venus enter the vivid landscape of forthright Aries early this week. This move from the twelfth sign to the first may be the most abrupt of all sign changes, taking us from water to fire, from lessons of compassion and completion into learning about courage and initiative.


As Mercury makes this shift on Monday, it will inspire many to take action on their words. The upcoming "March for Our Lives" set for March 24 in Washington, DC, is a prime example of the type of activity supported by Mercury in Aries. In general, communications are more direct and less conciliatory under this influence; words can fly from our lips before we realize what we're saying.


Although it may be hard to do so in the middle of a proclamation or a diatribe, we are advised to remember that Mercury will be going retrograde on March 22. Anything we say off hand in the next few weeks will quickly come back to haunt us. Boomerang karma, anyone?

WITH VENUS entering Aries on Tuesday, our values and priorities also go through an adjustment. Instead of letting Piscean sensitivity and understanding motivate our interactions, we are driven by the Arien desire for excitement and immediate gratification.


This shift will affect all areas that are ruled by Venus -- love relationships, what we do for pleasure, our aesthetics, financial dealings, partnerships, and alliances. In other words, over the next three weeks while Venus journeys through Aries, we are more inclined to spend money spontaneously, and to fall in love just as quickly.

JUPITER stations retrograde on Thursday, which means the planet is basically at a standstill throughout the coming week. Whenever a planet pauses in preparation for changing direction, its influence is heightened, so it will be interesting to watch what unfolds.


We've already seen some striking examples of the effects of Jupiter's journey through secretive Scorpio, as the planet holds its magnifying glass on all that has been hiding in the shadows. Since Jupiter entered Scorpio last October, the deluge of revelations has been stunning, giving birth to the #MeToo and Time's Up movements. In other arenas, investigations into the misuse of power and influence continue, with new truths being revealed on an almost daily basis.

ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, Jupiter's retrograde phase, which will last from March 8 to July 10, calls us to enter a time of reflection on what we believe in and what motivates us.


In his book Dynamics of Aspect Analysis, Bil Tierney writes that when Jupiter is moving backward, it is "a marvelous time for gaining deeper insights into spiritual or philosophical matters, as wisdom can flow easier from the superconscious and make contact with the conscious self."


Jupiter's four-month retrograde phase may have consequences on a broader social level, too, as Tierney goes on to describe:


"By turning within for greater understanding, we may now gain a greater perspective concerning social values. We may feel detached from what is socially expected of us during this period and may reject such pressures in favor of listening to our own inner calling. By examining our social affairs more carefully and deeply, we may judge and evaluate the rightness of such activities according to our own personal, unique guidelines for living. Hopefully, when Jupiter finally turns direct again, we will adopt fresh, new attitudes concerning how we can enrich and elevate our associations with others in our community. Our participation can become more purposeful and fulfilling."

A SERIOUS NOTE is struck next Saturday, when the Moon aligns with Saturn in Capricorn and both square Mercury in Aries. This may be a time of reckoning for some, coming to terms with the reality of a situation. It is not a good day for negotiations, as communications will feel stilted and unproductive, and there is a tendency to negative thinking.


The atmosphere shifts considerably on Sunday, however, when Mars trines Uranus and the Sun sextiles Pluto. These are very liberating, energizing, and empowering aspects, inspiring us to take risks that may very well transform the course of our lives.


IF YOUR BIRTHDAY IS THIS WEEK: Your inner vision is your guide and greatest ally this coming year. To take advantage of the wisdom that is available to you, first connect with physical reality in some way -- through working in the garden, playing music, creating art, or doing another activity that engages your physical senses and enables you to lose track of time for a while. As you emerge refreshed from these experiences, your thinking will be clearer and you will more easily be able to assess the situation from a practical viewpoint, while also accessing your higher knowing of best action.

In light,
 
Pam
 

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9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down by David from Raptitude

9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down
by David from Raptitude

Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever.

The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it.

Maybe you’ve had some of the same insights. Or maybe you’re about to.

1. You are not your mind.

The first time I heard somebody say that — in the opening chapter of The Power of Now — I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What else could I be? I had taken for granted that the mental chatter in my head was the central “me” that all the experiences in my life were happening to.

I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience. Thoughts are no more fundamental than smells, sights and sounds. Like any experience, they arise in my awareness, they have a certain texture, and then they give way to something else.

If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? Don’t answer too quickly. This question, and its unspeakable answer, are at the center of all the great religions and spiritual traditions.

2. Life unfolds only in moments.

Of course! I once called this the most important thing I ever learned. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t part of a single moment unfolding. That means life’s only challenge is dealing with the single moment you are having right now. Before I recognized this, I was constantly trying to solve my entire life — battling problems that weren’t actually happening. Anyone can summon the resolve to deal with a single, present moment, as long as they are truly aware that it’s their only point of contact with life, and therefore there is nothing else one can do that can possibly be useful. Nobody can deal with the past or future, because, both only exist as thoughts, in the present. But we can kill ourselves trying.

3. Quality of life is determined by how you deal with your moments, not which moments happen and which don’t.
I now consider this truth to be Happiness 101, but it’s amazing how tempting it still is to grasp at control of every circumstance to try to make sure I get exactly what I want. To encounter an undesirable situation and work with it willingly is the mark of a wise and happy person. Imagine getting a flat tire, falling ill at a bad time, or knocking something over and breaking it — and suffering nothing from it. There is nothing to fear if you agree with yourself to deal willingly with adversity whenever it does show up. That is how to make life better. The typical, low-leverage method is to hope that you eventually accumulate power over your circumstances so that you can get what you want more often. There’s an excellent line in a Modest Mouse song, celebrating this side-effect of wisdom: As life gets longer, awful feels softer.

4. Most of life is imaginary.

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.

5. Human beings have evolved to suffer, and we are better at suffering than anything else.
Yikes. It doesn’t sound like a very liberating discovery. I used to believe that if I was suffering it meant that there was something wrong with me — that I was doing life “wrong.” Suffering is completely human and completely normal, and there is a very good reason for its existence. Life’s persistent background hum of “this isn’t quite okay, I need to improve this,” coupled with occasional intense flashes of horror and adrenaline are what kept human beings alive for millions of years. This urge to change or escape the present moment drives nearly all of our behavior. It’s a simple and ruthless survival mechanism which works exceedingly well for keeping us alive, but it has a horrific side effect: human beings suffer greatly by their very nature. This, for me, redefined every one of life’s problems as some tendril of the human condition. As grim as it sounds, this insight is liberating because it means: 1) that suffering does not necessarily mean my life is going wrong, 2) that the ball is always in my court, so the degree to which I suffer is ultimately up to me, and 3) that all problems have the same cause and the same solution.

6. Emotions exist to make us biased.

This discovery was a complete 180 from my old understanding of emotions. I used to think my emotions were reliable indicators of the state of my life — of whether I’m on the right track or not. Your passing emotional states can’t be trusted for measuring your self-worth or your position in life, but they are great at teaching you what it is you can’t let go of. The trouble is that emotions make us both more biased and more forceful at the same time. Another survival mechanism with nasty side-effects.

7. All people operate from the same two motivations: to fulfill their desires and to escape their suffering.

Learning this allowed me to finally make sense of how people can hurt each other so badly. The best explanation I had before this was that some people are just bad. What a cop-out. No matter what kind of behavior other people exhibit, they are acting in the most effective way they are capable of (at that moment) to fulfill a desire or to relieve their suffering. These are motives we can all understand; we only vary in method, and the methods each of us has at our disposal depend on our upbringing and our experiences in life, as well as our state of consciousness. Some methods are skillful and helpful to others, others are unskillful and destructive, and almost all destructive behavior is unconscious. So there is no good and evil, only smart and dumb (or wise and foolish.) Understanding this completely shook my long-held notions of morality and justice.

8. Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.

Believing something is not an accomplishment. I grew up thinking that beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider. Beliefs are easy. The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because “strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself. As soon as you are proud of a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made it a part of your ego. Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless you believe the same. It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are chasing. Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door. Take on the beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never be afraid to lose them.

9. Objectivity is subjective.

Life is a subjective experience and that cannot be escaped. Every experience I have comes through my own, personal, unsharable viewpoint. There can be no peer reviews of my direct experience, no real corroboration. This has some major implications for how I live my life. The most immediate one is that I realize I must trust my own personal experience, because nobody else has this angle, and I only have this angle. Another is that I feel more wonder for the world around me, knowing that any “objective” understanding I claim to have of the world is built entirely from scratch, by me. What I do build depends on the books I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had. It means I will never see the world quite like anyone else, which means I will never live in quite the same world as anyone else — and therefore I mustn’t let outside observers be the authority on who I am or what life is really like for me. Subjectivity is primary experience — it is real life, and objectivity is something each of us builds on top of it in our minds, privately, in order to explain it all. This truth has world-shattering implications for the roles of religion and science in the lives of those who grasp it.

***

Article by David from Raptitude