Black holes, like this one 330 million light years from Earth, are vortices of creation and destruction.

In the three weeks since the Star of David formed, the sky has become more fiery.  The power that it’s now generating is that of its two primary elements, water and fire.  It’s the power of steam, the form of water that releases toxins and is a source of enormous power.

It’s been just three weeks since the Star of David formed in the sky, opening within us and around us the cosmic pattern  known as a merkaba.  Astrologically, the merkaba consists of six interconnected sextiles spanning the entire sky.  Six is  the number and the sextile is the aspect sacred to Venus, the Cosmic Feminine known to the ancient Sumerians as Inanna.   The merkaba, author Drunvalo Melchizidek says, is “the primal pattern that created all things and all universes,both visible and invisible.” 

The largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter rules the part of the sky that contains both the Galactic Center, the Great Attractor, and more black holes than any other sign of the zodiac.

Since the Star of David formation on July 29, Jupiter has been adding pressure to the energetic signature of our time — the ongoing square between Uranus and Pluto.  With each passing day, the titanic 33-month clash between these two mighty forces is becoming more palpable. As we begin to sense the direction forward, we also begin to understand the power that is available to help us get there.  It’s the power that created the Universe itself.

On his seven-year journey through the path-breaking energy of Aries, Uranus is awakening the human spirit to a new spring.  Moving through the depths of Capricorn — the sign of age, antiquity, and hierarchy —  Pluto simultaneously cracks open the dry husks of our consciousness and our social structures, shedding dead skin and releasing trapped energy.

The conflict between these two — between new and the old, between the individual and the social order, between liberation and power — reaches into the very heart of our lives, and taps the energy of the Source itself.  And now, from the watery, creative depths of Cancer, the vulnerable yet powerful sign of the ancient Cosmic Mother, Jupiter challenges both Uranus and Pluto in a pattern we’ll feel well into September.  The dynamic pattern of energy we’re living is known as a T-square. It’s a conflict so deep and volatile that it offers only one strategy for resolution — an expansion of consciousness and the creation of a new, yet-unimagined reality.

Revelations from a Quantum Universe

Simulation of a gas cloud after a close encounter with the center of the Milky Way, from the Southern European Observatory

A clue about what lies ahead of us — and all around us as well — came today from Mercury.  Quickening our ability to hear the revelations of a quantum universe, not only around us but within us, the Messenger trined Uranus in the early hours. With precision timing, Space.com published within hours the recent discovery of a pulsing star near the Galactic Center that reveals a powerful magnetic field around this vast cauldron of cosmic energy (Odd Star Reveals Magnetic Field Around Milky Way’s Monster Black Hole) around which our Star, with the solar system in tow, circles every 26,000 years.

Like all black holes, the energy of the Galactic Center is a quantum vortex of creation and destruction. Its energy of a black hole is mind-altering and reality-bending.  When a planet or a chart point is aligned with a black hole, things can turn on a dime.  Perception and reality can be altered.

While people across the planet read about the magnetic field around the Galactic Center today, Luna was helping us feel its reality.  Our Moon was moving, and is moving still, through Sagittarius. It’s the part of the sky ruled by Jupiter, the giver of blessings, abundance, and grace, who’s turning up the heat within our planetary journey of transformation.  The two most powerful points in the Universe for Planet Earth are located in Sagittarius — the center of our Milky Way and the mysterious the Great Attractor towards which not only our galaxy but 30 others are moving as fast as they can.

The center of our Milky Way Galaxy is a super-massive black hole.

This sign of  Sagittarius, where our Star and its solar system were formed, is the part of the sky where more black holes are located than in anywhere else in the zodiac. As Luna moves through Sagittarius, absorbing the energy of each of them, we’ll feel it in the part of the sky that she rules — the unconscious awareness that includes 96% of everything we know.  As I write these words, Luna is in the same degree of the sky as the Great Attractor, which exists at the potent, catalytic midpoint between two black holes.

People who probably have the best understanding of black holes are probably those who have had near death experiences, believes. Harvard research astronomer Dr. Rudy Schild (a co-author of the landmark book, The Discover of Alien Extra-Terrestial Life: The Origins of Life,about the discovery of cyanobacteria fossils in meteors older than the earth) . Schild notes how many of these people recall “an ecstatic experience of being everywhere in the Universe at the same time.  That, he continues,  [is the equivalent of   ]being in a mega wormhole” – the portal into entirely different dimensions of reality.

Enter Venus: Expanding the Finite Game into One That is Infinite 

Tomorrow, Venus moves into Libra and ups the ante.  Over the coming week, as the Cosmic Feminine forms a powerful Grand Cross with Jupiter, Pluto, and Uranus, she will change our understanding of the game we’re being pushed into by the Universe itself —  a game that is infinite, as James Carse wrote in his still-revelatory 1987 book, Finite and Infinite Games:

“There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.

The finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play,
…and bringing as many persons as possible into the play.

Finite players play within boundaries;
infinite players play with boundaries.”

And as Bill and Marilyn Veltrop point out, the “4.54 billion year evolution of nature on this plant is our best example of an infinite game.”  All of the world’s great spiritual traditions are founded on an understanding of life that could be described as “an infinite game,” and its greatest art is sourced in a similar awareness.  The consensus reality that has created the dilemmas with which the world now grapples, on the other hand, is quintessentially finite — a game with the single purpose of either winning or losing.

Libra is one of the two signs of the zodiac that the Cosmic Feminine rules.  It’s a party of the sky saturated with the energy of relatedness.  Like all air signs, it brings the objectivity we need to care about another person’s point of view and to make connections with other realities.  For air is the element that connects us all most intimately and immediately. As we all breathe the same air, we all participate each moment in a kind of cosmic “inter-being,” to use the term coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, and author Thich Nhat Hanh, to describe the central Buddhist principle of interdependence.

In Interbeing: 14 Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism,  Thich Nhat Hanh observes that everything that looks like a separate individual is actually interwoven with something else. This is an understanding embodied astrologically by Neptune, and also by Venus.

(It is a truly fascinating aside that both Interbeing and Finite and Infinite Games were published in 1987, a year when the three outer planets Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were all traveling through degrees of the sky that contain black holes. Equally fascinating is the fact that between 1964 and 1966, Thay, as his devotees call him, founded a Vietnamese Buddhist order known as Interbeing.  The years 1965 and 1966 were those when Uranus and Pluto met in the same degree of Virgo, creating the seed energy that is now being tested in the seven squares that are defining our times.)

As Venus enters the energetic field leading from the merkaba to next week’s potent Full Moon in Aquarius, the issues that will be surfacing include  the nature of what we desire and value, the prices we pay to be related, and the meaning of love — and the reality of interbeing.

As Luna waxed to her First Quarter phase this week, she made contact with half the planets in the solar system.

Enter Luna:  Making It Personal

Last week, as the opposition between Jupiter and Pluto became exact, these issues began to arise with great immediacy. As the Moon moved through Scorpio’s intense waters, themes of power became very personal, reaching to the roots of our identity.

In the course of two and half days earlier this week, Luna made contact with half the solar system.  She merged with Saturn, flowed with Neptune, challenged Mercury, created opportunity with Pluto,and tflowed with  Chiron. And she merged with her own North Node, the point in the sky that is saturated with evolutionary energy.

At each of these contacts, she helped us to feel, all the way down to our cores, the emotional realities that live deep in our guts and in our dreams and memories. We felt our boundaries and our dreams, our perceptions and our power, our wounds and our capacity to heal. And we began to sense, deep in the cells of our body, where the Universe is calling us to go next.

It was during her powerful journey through Scorpio that Luna reached her First Quarter point.  The new energy that was created at last week’s New Moon in Leo pushed above the surface.  We’re on the journey now to the Full Moon in Aquarius, the sign that belongs to Uranus, the Cosmic Awakener.  Each day, he’s etching his signature more deeply on our consciousness.  Be ready to be astonished by what is about to bloom.