60: NAUGHTY NAUGHTY!
Fri 23 Nov 05.39 - Mooning Monthly Edition 60 not joining the guilt trip....
How goes it dear Mooners?
There's a full moon on the rise in Gemini just before sunrise on Friday. Traditionally represented as twins, Gemini is the star sign of contradictions and during the next fortnight their legion of inextricably paired, often schizoid, dualities could well be fluctuating wildly.
Individuals influenced by this Gemini Full Moon are likely to experience the odd crisis of confidence in the coming week as its bright, illuminating light uncovers our hidden contradictory habits and behaviours. This is not likely to be a comfortable process. Imagine having the duvet whipped off your butt naked form on a cold winter's morning before an assembly of enquiring family and friends. There will be nowhere to hide one's modesty or most intimate indulgences. Privacy on any level may prove hard to maintain.
In the spotlight, centre stage is likely to be the 'evil axis' between our desires for instant personal gratification and our social conscience. In a modern age where we have come to expect a constantly available menu of instant satisfactions, do our actions contradict our own, socially conditioned, rhetoric? We all know we're up ecological shit creek but does our behaviour actually give adequate consideration to the issues currently facing our planet, its people, plant and animal inhabitants?
A number of excoriating reports have been published recently giving a truly worrying picture of the state of play across Planet Earth.
The UN report on the War in Yemen (link here) declared that if the remorseless bombing doesn't cease, half the Yemeni population will be in danger of starvation, potentially the worst famine the world has seen in over a century.
In the UK, a further UN report suggests ten years of austerity economics since the financial crash of 2008 (link here) have cast an ever-widening, politically motivated net of poverty over a growing proportion of people living in Britain. The current demand at food banks across the UK is at an all time high - the abhorrence of street bound homelessness and associated suicide is tangibly on the rise and yet recent public finance was found to fund tax breaks for higher earners rather than being directed towards helping those in dire straights (and we don't mean Mark Knopfler).
Perhaps most notably, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has published a report from leading scientists that details how humankind has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970 (link here). We are facing the much publicised Sixth Mass Extinction on Planet Earth, which, it's not difficult to predict, will extend to humanity itself before long if our current trajectories of consumption are maintained..
The week after Armistice Day centenary commemorations across Europe publicly denounced the disaster of war, we nonetheless continue to face the same political rhetoric of nationalistic divisiveness that gave rise to Nazism. The contradictions inherent to such belief systems, and the attendant human misery, are plainly evidenced under this chilling Gemini Full Moon, for anyone with eyes to see.
These circumstances are happening now dear Mooners. In our lifetimes - on our watch.
We here at Mooning HQ tread a fine line in these missives. We are keen not to add to the global currency of fear and loathing. This torturous path is currently being engineered into a full blown, multi-lane superhighway by political leaders, governments, religious groups and industrial lobbyists, all with their own agendas. We see no value in the fear their hyperbole creates. It is a road we see no value in travelling. Its destination is disaster.
Neither are we interested in engaging in a blame game - seeking out those perceived as culpable for our expanding list of planetary ills as a means to deflect from our own personal responsibility to live in a way that minimises harm to anything. Blame is as negative an emotion as fear without an active plan for change. It encourages a 'them and us' mentality; itself the root to identification of self as 'victim': a helpless bystander to the carnage perpetuated around us, but for which we bear no responsibility. The news, dear Mooners, is that there is no them, there is only us and it is entirely our responsibility to remedy the situation we have created.
Nor are we interested in creating a collective guilt trip because as individuals we haven't done anything to make a positive difference to the status quo before now. Guilt is simply the most useless, stultifying, emotional response of all emotional responses that generally, only leads to the worst of all human reactions: inertia.
In the stark, crystal clear light of this Gemini Full Moon; in full view of the contradictory lifestyles and faddish mores we have designed specifically to bypass any meaningful self knowledge or enquiry, we have the opportunity to consciously adapt in the way life has previously had to adapt in order to survive. It is, of course, the continuing story of intelligent evolution as we know it although currently, in human terms, devoid of intelligence.
We have become a species of spenders and users; archetypal parasites; insatiable consumers. The author Neville Goddard has suggested we have become spenders rather than investors, in our thoughts, words and deeds. We typically spend energy in worry, blame and guilt rather than investing it into imagining a world where none of those responses might be necessary. Our actions merely reproduce in the world what our internal dialogue believes to be 'true'.
We spend our vital energies worrying and blaming ourselves into the cancer of self hatred rather than investing that same energy in imagining ourselves as the creative giants we truly are, capable of manifesting any reality we focus our attention fully upon realising.
The suggestion here is that by consciously harnessing our imagination - our greatest asset - we can create a more evolved, intelligent internal dialogue in alignment with the ongoing, natural evolution of our planet and its diverse inhabitants. In imagining a new truth, a new storyline, which may contradict habitual thinking and behaviour, a new world by necessity must emerge.
Matter follows consciousness, as quantum physics continues to discover, so to dream big and to live that dream as though it were real is to make that dream come true. It's the starting point of all manifestation, the arbiter of all change and to consciously engage in this process is quite probably the greatest investment we can make in our lives. It quite literally is the means by which we can change the world and a practice we affectionately like to call in these column inches, Mooning.
Last weekend, 6,000 people came together in an act of mass participation, civil disobedience to block five bridges in central London to voice concern over the looming climate crisis (link here). The action was the latest part of a mass civil disobedience organised by a new international group, Extinction Rebellion, which wants to force governments to treat the threats of climate breakdown and extinction as a crisis.
"The 'social contract' has been broken...[and] it is therefore not only our right but our moral duty to bypass the government's inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty and to rebel to defend life itself," Gail Bradbrook, organiser.
Conventional politics is failing us. Perceived economic 'wisdom' is hurtling us towards a precipice of disaster. Short term political and economic gains are, quite literally, being traded for the long term future of life on this planet.
The political and economic systems we have employed need to be reimagined. Our relationships with each other, with our fellow inhabitants of Earth - animal, vegetable and mineral - need to be reimagined. Above all, the relationship with ourselves needs to be reimagined yet it's the one we spend the largest proportion of our time and energy trying to avoid.
Under this Gemini Full Moon we really are going to reap what we sow. Our harvest is in the circumstances we experience and contribute to now.
In the lead up to this year's festive season and the forthcoming consumer horror show of Black Friday, how many of us are prepared to examine the contradictions evident in our own habitual behaviour, that are reflected outwardly in the painful contradictions we manifest in the world around us?
Who is served by the purchase of new, unnecessary products, often manufactured by people on minimum wages in poor working conditions when most of us spend a good deal of energy in the New Year throwing excess stuff away?
Who is served by the perpetuation of armed conflicts across the globe when most of us agree we want to live in peace?
Who is served by the continual construction of unaffordable luxury housing whilst we have homeless people, in abject poverty, living on the streets of our cities?
Who is served by the screened parade of deified 'perfect' Hollywood bodies whilst children in many parts of the world barely survive, emaciated by hunger?
The contradictions and polarities naturally abound. Our experience of life is essentially dualistic. But, as this lunar year comes to a close, an opportunity exists (as it always does) for us to reappraise our desires and consciously commit to that which we truly want to see and be in the world. The forum for that commitment is the imagination, the conversation an internal one. That conversation is the way out of limitation into freedom. According to our mate Neville Goddard, that conversation unspoken, "...has made the world a battlefield and penitentiary where blood and sweat alone are expected, when it should be a place of marvelling and wondering." That inner conversation, "..is the first step to becoming what you want to be."
Be still dear Mooners
Be quiet.
Marvel and wonder.
Imagine.
Be what you want to be - contradictions and all.
Love, 'til next time
