VISIONS

(A note on this post: this is my third attempt to post successfully with charts included in the text. If the old one is still posted below this, I apologise - I am hoping I have removed it! The space between text and charts may be variable. Pam.)

I am looking at the most beautiful face. I could look into these eyes for an eternity and it would be rest to my soul. The first time I saw him, he was waiting for me in a caravan, and I was astonished at the meeting; his hair was short, darkish and quite curly, and the eyes were all love, laughter and joy. Desperate to remember, I woke up. No effort with a pencil on my part could do justice to the face of this re-embodied Jesus.

But here he is, as if my computer screen were a window and his gaze would melt the glass. He has been brought to life in a painting called 'The Prince of Peace' made in 2003 by a then eight-year-old girl from Illinois, who in visions from the age of four has been painting at the request of God. She has painted Mary, too, and captured the ineffable sweetness that invaded my soul in Lourdes.

Her name is Akiane Kramarik, and a visit to her official website ( www.artakiane.com ) told me that she was born (to non-relligious parents) on July 9th 1994 in Mount Morris, Illinois. My first chart for her is a Q-chart (not having any birth time) set for 4 am, which is the time she habitually starts work on the day's painting. At this time, Venus is at the IC and her Mercury rises! The Moon is just past New, in Cancer; her Sun is in the exaltation of joyous Jupiter, and these happy Lights are most powerfully configured with all three outer, spiritual planets - opposite the conjunction of Uranus/Neptune, and trine Pluto with the Moon's Ascending Node. Her extraordinary creative gift is clear from an immensely strong 5th harmonic - Mercury biquintile Pluto and tredecile Saturn, Leo Venus biquintile the Uranus/Neptune conjunction and decile the Sun. Not only is her output prodigious - she is very, very shiny!

How did I find her? After a restless night, once the seagulls woke up this morning I gave up trying to sleep and settled down to watch a video taped 11 days ago. It was a programme screened by ITV at 9 pm on August 18th, its title 'Superhuman: Genius', and it began with Akiane. By 7h30 I was down in the study and online to her website to find out as much as I could about the blonde little girl who was born in the year I went to Jerusalem and took my first small booklet on the Birth of Jesus to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. From that website, this wonderful face will meet you.

It is when you enter the dwad chart, leaving the material for the conscious self, that the real magic happens. At work time, 4 am, Pluto and the IC meet; a transformation is taking place. The steady flow of her inspired and guided work is guaranteed by the 'kite' formed by the trines of Mercury and Neptune to Sun and saturn opposed across the Monn's Nodal axis.

The second chart for Akiane is her Q chart with Jesus (born 7th May, 5BC), set for his time of 18h43m55s and zone -2:20:48, at her birth location. First of all, it gives her a 10th-house stellium, and his work has become her vocation. But look what happens when the dwad is added! Neptune/IC comes to her Ascendant, Jupiter sets, Ascendant meets her Mercury, and of course that Capricorn/Cancer Sun/Saturn opposition straddles the nodes from South to North in the dwad chart as we have already seen, collecting her Uranus/Neptune and the late Cancer Moon into a spiritually, karmically intense 'full moon'. Dwad Moon/Mercury is conjunct her radix South Node. This whole picture is of a sacrificial soul on a lonely and focussed path, bound to Christ and her destiny, and totally tuned to the Voice which guides her all the way.

A third chart was necessary, too; the Q-chart of Akiane with Mary (born 4th August 24 BC), thus in her zone -2:21:12, at her time, 12h49m21s. Again it is stunning. Her Cancer New Moon rises with dwad Mars to energise her; again Neptune and Jupiter are angular, dwad Neptune on radix IC and a dwad conjunction of Jupiter and Midheaven. In the dwad, Venus sets with Ceres; and her dwad Sun/South Node meets radix Uranus/Neptune again on that same 'full moon' axis as before. Across those two powerful horizons Akiane relates directly to all the sweetness and motherliness of Our Lady, taking from her encouragement and strength in the Mars and Jupiter.

As for the Composites, they left me momentarily speechless. Akiane/Jesus has Pluto on Asc, a trio of Chiron/Sun/Mercury in Gemini opposite Neptune, and the MC conjunct Venus and the South Moon's node. This is an old, old love bearing fruit in the present, a powerfully spiritual relationship centred on inspired teaching.
The past becomes present with Mary, too; the Sun and Venus go to the South Node (so close to Akiane's Moon!); Saturn (and maybe Ceres? - I have no idea if it is accurate for births BC) conjoins the MC to discipline and guide, and the trio of Mercury/Moon/Mars in Leo on Our Lady's Sun/Pluto burns with creative dialogue. In both these Composites there are hardly any stresses; the aspects are sweet.

And of course the chart for the programme is no less expressive. Here I have put the dwad at the centre of the biwheel - to show you that the Prince of Peace is indeed present. Because the dwad has the conjunction of Sun and Jupiter setting, just as Jesus does at his Nativity ... and they are still together, and still on the horizon, in his dwad. Akiane herself is shown in the sensitive, painterly trio of dwad Moon/MC/Neptune, as well as the radix pattern where the Pisces Moon has just risen conjunct Uranus and still opposite the 6th-house Mercury/Venus. Pluto is radically on the MC: Akiane and the other four people in this study are all exceptional people. But she has chosen the most exceptional life of all.

DEAR RICHARD DAWKINS ...

... what would I say to you if we came face to face? You seem desperate to present yourself as a nice man, yet everywhere you go, a hundred hackles rise.

First, on the current scientific understanding of evolution I am 100% with you. I have strolled home from Great Orme's Head with my pockets full of fossils, and who could doubt their antiquity? Secondly, I share your admiration and respect for Charles Darwin, and all the pioneers of practical science. But thirdly - how do I not accept and integrate my own experience and that of thousands of other sane men and women who have found their souls to be more than 'a collection of neurons'?

I take my hat off to the science teachers who 'stuck to their last' and refused to attack the faiths of their sensitive pupils; these may indeed be indoctrinated by their priests and parents, but however odd, however skewed, their beliefs - like mine - are founded on authentic and disconcerting experience. Now, I cannot personally vouch for that authenticity in most cases, so where I would share your ambivalence toward a particular faith, all I can do is give its adherents the benefit of the doubt - and my respect. But there remain certain incontrovertible facts.

1. The mobility of consciousness.

My husband-to-be, in straitened circumstances, was soaking in one of the men's public baths in Sittingbourne when he found himself floating near the ceiling; from this unexpected vantage-point above the partitions he could watch the local vagrants splashing and drinking in the adjoining cubicles. After a few minutes he was looking through his physical eyes again and could only hear the sounds of the men.
A close friend was listening to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall; he was so shocked to find himself looking down on orchestra and audience from the ceiling of the dome that he shot straight back into his seat.
Another friend was out walking when she saw herself several yards ahead. She followed herself, alarmed and fascinated, for several minutes until she rejoined her body.

This kind of experience cannot be dismissed as a dream state - generally in dreams we do not inhabit and navigate the immediate space and time. The above experiences and hundreds of others documented in OOBE research over several decades point to individual consciousness - at least in humans - inhabiting and exploiting rather than arising from the evolved structures of body and brain.

2. Cosmic integration.

This is a difficult one for someone like you. Let me begin by stating that for 25 years, since I was 40, I have had to endure frequent and crippling migraines. Trying to coax one's life into some kind of acceptable shape around these bouts of miserable illness is a real challenge (which, for all I know, you may share.) At least I knew when I was at risk; the migraine always came around ovulation and menses, so I steered clear of commitments at these times. But a total hysterectomy at 46 put paid to all that. Neither did it rid me of the illness; instead its timing became chaotic and my life, personal and social, was in ruins.

Here's the bit you won't find easy to accept: since my teens I had had an interest in astrology, and in my twenties began studying it seriously. By my forties I had become a counsellor, teacher, researcher, lecturer, writer and occasional broadcaster on this unorthodox subject, respected by my peers, and still full of delight in its endless intellectual and philosophical adventure. I had always been a bright child; I could turn my hands and my mind to most things with noticeable success - and I had been brought up to value criticism and analysis, so anything that failed to 'do what it said on the tin' would be dismissed as a total waste of time and effectively binned. Astrology, unlikely as it will seem to you, consistently rose to my challenges, decade after decade. As you are probably as unfamiliar with its language as I am with Urdu or Mandarin Chinese, there is little point trying to explain much of its technique; but the fact is that it gave me my life back. It was the only tool I had in 1989 (in the absence of effective treatment, which didn't turn up till 1992) to get a handle on the apparent chaos of the attacks.

I will now inflict upon you a little of the terminology ... knowing that the planetary energy of Mars connected with pain, heat and blood-flow, with acute symptoms, strong stimuli, and traditionally with the head, I started watching its interactions with my own birth pattern, both natally and as the sky diagram turned slowly through the days and years in what we call 'progression'. In brief, whenever Mars approached the meridian or horizon, Moon, Sun or inner planets of any of my astrological charts within 2 degrees of arc, even if my circumstances were relatively stress-free the migraine would hit. Several concurrent hits on different charts, a cluster of impacts, would coincide with intensified symptoms. As soon as Mars separated from the vulnerable degrees, the migraine disappeared. I could go through quite a busy and potentially stressful period which in theory should invoke an attack - yet if Mars was not impacting on any of my patterns I would not become ill. A common reaction to such findings is that they are merely self-fulfilling prophecy. I can assure you this is not the case; the studies I made were retrospective, based on my diaries. Soon I had the confidence to plan my engagements around the movements of Mars, and was at last able to keep my promises and stop letting people down at the last minute. I have lived this way for 20 years now - quite a decent long-term test of migraine management, don't you think?

Notable amongst the planets, Pluto ('demoted' or not!) has an energy which is potentially devastating. When its slow progress against the ecliptic brings it (for between one and three years) onto a sensitive natal degree, life gets pretty heavy. These are the times when the greatest moral dilemmas have to be faced, or the greatest physical challenges. Power - its use and abuse - is often involved. Temptation to take the destructive, selfish path comes at you from every direction. Empathy, compassion, loving-kindness, altruism, are the strongest armour in this spiritual battle. Pluto's purpose is to wake one up to the core values of one's very existence, and sometimes it takes trauma to do this. One can come close to death, as I did, giving birth to my first son by a nearly fatal emergency Caesarian, having to learn to walk again, and then coping with an autistic child. Pluto was in my rising degree. One can become the object of collective hatred for sticking to a principle, as my husband (a Bishop) did in honouring his calling and ministering to a friend who had done something very stupid that landed him in prison for two years. This test of conscience was extremely hard; but he achieved the moral victory. Pluto was on the degree of his Sun. When it made a right-angle (we call this a 'square') to my own Sun-degree, circumstances drew me into the Christian Church - a major step for this free-thinking woman! - and since then I have applied myself to the astrological study of its history.

The implications are that human lives (and probably life in general) are inextricably linked to the movements of the Solar System - and ultimately the observable universe - through meanings locked into relative position and orbital geometry. Poetically, we are phrases in a mighty and stirring music; or tiny, vital cells in an immeasurable body. Each human consciousness is a living and possibly eternal fragment of the consciousness of eternity itself, a huge mind comprised of or generating billions of fractal minds, whose totality we might call God. Each mind is itself an evolving thing, and shifts dimension into the material to learn how to grow and improve, using a body that evolution has declared fit for purpose. And because Mind is the over-arching reality, communication between embodied and discarnate minds can take place under favourable conditions to offer guidance to those who are floundering, and aid to people in danger or in pain.

You are currently in a very good position to test some of this for yourself, if you have a mind to. Your own natal tropical Sun is in 5 degrees of Aries close to the descending node of the Moon at Aries 1, in a friendly relationship with Pluto at 2 degrees of Leo, and in a tight square to recently 'promoted' Ceres at 4 degrees of tropical Capricorn. Venus is not far back, at 29 degrees Pisces. All these positions are being challenged by the transit of Pluto over the next three years, ( it has already been affecting your relationships and resources through Venus ) with its maximum impact in February-June 2010 ( including very hard work, even struggle ), September 2010-February 2011 ( big opportunity/success here if all goes well ), and August-October 2011, when the personal significance of the previous years' experience should give you pause for thought. It is meant to be a period of conscientious soul-searching - but for you of course this would mean acknowledging that you do not just have but are a soul!

On this point let me round off my comments with a brief look at your pattern. To use another image, each one of us is, astrologically, a minute shard of the macrocosmic hologram, specific to our birth-point in space and time. The sky patterns at birth are charged with complex meaning, which reflect both who we are and what we are endeavouring to become. I have seen few patterns as polarised as yours, torn as you are between the passionate science pioneer who wants to be the first and the best and to win every argument by verbal force if need be, and the diametrically opposed soul within who believes on principle in fairness, justice, kindness and balanced dialogue. Driven by a compulsive sense of mission, you can over-heat to the point of arrogance, betraying that gentler, fairer self - and this Aries combativeness is what will inevitably undo all the good that you have achieved, if you insist too often on picking a fight and fail to listen to - and honour - your neighbour's point of view. The focus of this inner contest will always be the relationship between nature and time - nothing but the structures of evolution (Ceres in Capricorn) could ever hold such fascination for you. By embracing in your work and in your life the competitive principle, don't forget that ultimately it is only through peaceable collaboration that you will attain real success. All people born with the Sun close to the Moon's descending node have to make sacrifices, and in your case it is that provocative stance and the very drive to win, that can turn friends into enemies and careful argument into incoherent bluster.

I respect your passion and your work, and I like the other man I see beneath the determined atheist. I hope he will take to heart a little of what has been said.

Rev. Pam Crane

Here is a poem of mine where I have some fun with ideas of God and Cosmology....

BIG BANG

One day which never existed, God
in solitary rage surprised Himself with a Thought
so unsustainable in the here-to-fore
He cracked the unflawed sheer shimmer of Monad in Equilibrium,
He broke Mind
mirrored in all directions,
He shivered Infinity
and the incorporeal mighty Hand that held it,
thus beginning seven days of Bad Luck as Time was born in the vortex.
Being God,
Resourceful, He stretched forth His other hand
upon the vortex, with an opposite charge -
And Said: LET THERE BE LIGHT, and There Was light
flashing from splinter to splinter,
aeon to age;
suns of a shattered hand blinked fire into and out of a myriad million dizzy reflections
glinting Godhead back,
curled time-shards
reduplicating spin-drift, inkblot, starclot and coalsack -
by which light a God could see His scattered parts
And Being
God, He Said:
LET THEM FLY
Asunder upon the wind of
My unparalleled Imagination,
LET THEM SEED where a
plus-minus meets in the heart of light
a microcosmic god in the anti-mind, for this
is Matter of Moment; let there be Life, therefore,
so let there be Soul - let there be male, and female
warring and mating; let there be holes for light to penetrate,
dramatic poles, north and south in collision, upwards, down -
as in My excess I find
sorrow I cannot drown
in the necessity
for light to
mend Me by,
so will mySelf,
enantiomorphic
twin of Me and
friend
be lover of that Light,
his flesh a bandage for My fractured dignity
for a seven-night.
Till then,
Let every action have its equal and opposite reaction.
Let there be
Polarity, pendulum, fractal, parabola
And parity.
Thus Spake God.........
.........One Day that suddenly existed,
as
a myriad million fragments of Forever
took their first lesson in strife and alchemy;
towards which sex, war, succour, science and sainthood,
the long, vain struggle to tie the strings of symphonies
between grass and the galaxy, Caligula and Christ -
So many poles of puzzlement, poor man-thing! -
making itself slowly in God's other image,
feet on a star, head in the coalsack.
God forgot
to make men like snails. Here it is Sunday lunch
And still we have not mapped our route for the last afternoon
of our life; the future winks only briefly at us
out of the healing mirrors.
Some are struggling
To put their eyes out on stalks and see around corners
of the inconceivable before the last trump
is played, the last supper indigested and
the disbelievable unMichaelangelic Hand
reach forth to converge the silver trails
of the slow, vulnerable, visionary sun
housing the soul in helix.
Here they come,
a few at a time,
the unrejected cells;
a Miracle is made.
The Wound closes.
Thy Hand, O God
may close the eyes of Time - but it is built of us!...
We who have put out the cat may be most unwilling to
put out the stars the cat and we have hunted our dreams by,
may be discontent;
may fidget with the smoothed fabric of Space,
finger the substance of the Maker's Dream,
flex the muscles of a new idea -
Spring a surprise.

MIND IN THE COSMOS

A couple of days ago I was watching, fascinated, the film 'Dangerous Knowledge', re-screened on BBC2. It concerned the obsessions of mathematicians and the consequences for their sanity.

Georg Cantor spent his life trying to get a mathematical handle on (of all things) infinity. He got to the point where he was even adding 'infinities' together and making them jump through conceptual hoops. It drove him mad.

With a south node in Aquarius I must be careful where I send my thoughts!... but it did get me pondering. A number of questions arose in my mind which may or may not make much sense, but here they are for what they are worth.

Cantor was tantalised by the number of possible points on the circumference of a circle ( and we astrologers deal with circles Great and small all the time.) Take a circle, draw radii from its centre to the edge until there is no room left on that edge - and the area will be black with lines - and you have a finite construction. But as soon as you widen that circumference, the original radii will of course fan out, leaving spaces on the new perimeter! So the number of radii in a circle is infinite, assuming the potential circumference is infinitely far away.
My question is - why start from the centre? Wherever the outer limit of any Great Circle is (and if it is Infinity, so be it, because it is beyond the conception of a finite mind) it can be completed with as many nano-nano points as it has room for, and then they can form the origin of radii to the circle's centre.
Maybe a silly thought, but let's play with ideas!

This whole conundrum arises because mankind insists on dividing things. So another question is, why assume division is appropriate? Why not try the other assumption that some phenomena function as unified Wholes?
As Astrologers we work with wholes in the form of Ideas that are grouped in twelve sections of a circular heaven. The Great Circle is the Ecliptic, and the 12 sections are what we call the Zodiac. These can be subdivided (yes!) into 144 subsets known as the Dwads; and there are a number of differing great-circular frameworks that place these Ideas in different contexts of human life and earthly existence. We also deal in Degrees - 360 of them in each circle - and in minutes - 60 to each degree; and degrees themselves carry individual meanings. But small as these are, detailed as they become, they are still Wholes, and we don't need to mess with them too much! We also work with the geometry of the circle to assess the harmony or lack of it between zodiacal Ideas that are focussed by the presence of a planet, or the Moon, or a key spatial node such as the Ascendant, the Midheaven, or the Nodes of the Moon (there are others.) But there is little to be gained in understanding by straying beyond the kind of geometries that would produce recognisable music on a taut string. So beyond 12ths or 24ths not many 'aspects' are used; 11ths are, but odd geometry is tricky to understand and work with. So why not work with Wholes elsewhere instead of constantly dividing? Maybe lines spread out into membranes? surfaces into mobius loops and toroids? Waves, particles, strings and superstrings all fall into this category, I daresay. And as astrology is more wave-like and rhythmic and musical than particulate, my feeling is that it is in this category of cosmic phenomena that the astrologer and the physicist/chemist/cosmologist will eventually meet.

And then there's Pi.
Following on from that last argument, why are folks not content with the elegant fraction, 22/7, and forever going on about Pi not resolving to a neat decimal place?
1/3 doesn't either - it's 1.3333333333333 on into good old infinity again, and yet we recognise a third of something when we see it. It doesn't have a fuzzy edge that wafts us away into hyperspace (unless you insist on examining the quantum conditions around your slice of short-cake - in which case there may be no hope for you.)
I say, let's get back to fractions. Decimals are all very handy but they do throw up this infinity problem again, as does any BaseN arithmetic. Yes it's very entertaining, and people spend their lives pushing Primes and ratios and divisions to their impossible limits - but where is understanding in all of this? (Except to recognise, forcefully, our own limitations as an incarnate family!) Look at Phi. Beautiful. Not because it's 1:1.61803...(etc) but because of the proportion itself that is built organically into so many living and wonderfully architectural things.

Somewhere in all this maths and cosmology there has to be the place where Mind Is. When you have knocked around the worls for 65 years as I and many of you have, and spent 40 or so of them as an astrologer, healer, and and general mixer with friends unseen, you know the spiritual dimensions are a reality, that they interpenetrate the apparent world, and Science will always fail until it allows for that reality in testing its own propositions. It tends on the whole not to. I've met quite a few scientists in various fields and even if they profess a belief in spirituality, or in God, I don't really see this in their work. It gets parked just outside while they go in the lab for the day to study multi-dimensional theory. One day the penny will drop, and some bright young person will get the most deserved Nobel Prize in history.

This ubiquitous Mind - consciousness - meaning - purpose - is ultimately the basis for our Astrology. The Universe is permeated with it. It is our Matrix. We are the Cinderella of Science. Look - astrologers recognised millennia ago the 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' that is integral to modern Chaos Theory. Astrology is likewise fractal in its nature (numbers 12 and 60 being key to our work with the intelligent cosmos.) We are manifest Thought.

I have a paper that I wrote a few years back, on the properties of the Circle and muliple dimensions, that I may put up here later on if I can get the diagrams to go on the blog with it. Watch this space.

That'll do for now. Have to get tea at some point this evening!