This Spring and Summer we have an opportunity to witness a series of remarkable astronomical events. The beginning of May featured a Super Moon, the largest appearing closest moon of 2012, and this Sunday there will be an annular solar eclipse. In the USA, it will only be visible to those living on the west coast. Annulus is Latin for “little ring”. Near sunset the moon will slip in front of the sun and block out 94% of its light. The sun will appear as a fiery ring behind the moon. Unfortunately we won’t be able to see it on the East Coast, because the sun will have already set by the time the eclipse occurs.  Annular solar eclipses are fairly rare events, requiring the sun, moon and earth to be in a particular alignment. The last one occurred in the United States in 1994.

This eclipse will be visible on a path from northwestern Texas through New Mexico, northeastern Arizona, southern Utah, Nevada, northern California and southwestern Oregon late in the day on May 20. People are organizing viewing parties in sites along the eclipse’s path. One of the best sites to view the eclipse is a tiny town of 300 in Utah, Kanarraville, which is bracing itself for a potential flood of 1000 visitors. Officials are setting up public toilets and parking to accommodate the skywatchers. A winery in Lubbock, Texas is offering blankets and a glass of wine to patrons who wish to view the eclipse, and a ski resort in Southern Utah is advertising a lift ride to the top of the mountain and solar glasses to behold the eclipse for $8, before it sets behind the mountains. Almost every western National Park is hosting a viewing and astronomy program.

As the sun continues on its path, the eclipse will then be visible over the North Pacific, in southern Japan and southern China on the morning of May 21.

Solar eclipses occur when the moon comes between the Earth and the sun. A total solar eclipse is when the moon aligns exactly with the sun and blocks out all of its light. Partial eclipses cover only a portion of the sun’s face. Annular eclipses are similar to total eclipses in that the moon precisely lines up with the sun. But in this eclipse,  the moon is close to its farthest point from Earth in its elliptical orbit around our planet, at the point called apogee, and thus appears too small in the sky to cover the solar disk entirely. As a result, a ring of bright sunlight will still shine around the moon’s circumference.

Viewers must use special filters to safely look at a partial solar eclipse or risk retinal burns, which can damage eye sight and even cause “eclipse blindness.” During an eclipse, the eye’s natural defense against light, pupil constriction, does not occur in the normal way. In the dim light of an eclipse, the pupil remains dilated and thus dangerous light radiation can enter the eye and burn the retina.

Throughout ancient history solar eclipses were often feared and seen as evil omens, presaging war, devastation and an overthrow of the natural order of things. The Greek word for eclipse literally means abandonment, as if the sun is abandoning the Earth. The mythology of diverse cultures portray the solar eclipse as the sun being eaten by various animals or demons. The ancient Chinese believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon trying to swallow the sun. If they knew an eclipse was coming, they would bang gongs and shoot off fireworks to scare it away. In Japan wells were covered to prevent poison from dropping into them from the sky.

But not all myths about eclipses are so negative. In the North American Inuit tradition, there is a belief that during an eclipse, the Sun and Moon temporarily leave their places in the sky and check to see that all is well on Earth.

Since a solar eclipse is essentially a very powerful new moon, i.e. the sun and moon are together in the sky, the astrological meaning is similar to that of an ordinary new moon, only amplified. The new moon correlates with planting a seed, the birth of something, a new beginning. This eclipse will occur in the sign of Gemini, which is associated with knowledge, communication, and adaptation amongst its many meanings. The energy signature of an eclipse lasts for 6 month, so we can anticipate that between now and the winter solstice, that there will be an emphasis on new knowledge, important messages and the need for us to adapt. The specific meaning of an eclipse for an individual can be refined by looking at which portion of the sky Gemini falls in their unique birth chart, and the meaning of that placement.

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In other posts I have written about my belief that the health of our ancestors was founded upon their awareness of the cycles of nature and of their relationship to the cosmos. This weekend a celestial event will occur which will be hard to overlook if the skies are clear.

A spectacular Super Moon will occur this Saturday, May 5 at 11:34 PM Eastern Time,  the brightest and largest moon of 2012. It will appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than other moons of 2012. This moon will be approximately 16,500 miles closer to the earth than usual.  The moon’s distance from the earth is not always the same due to the elliptical shape of the moon’s orbit around the earth. When the moon is closest to the earth it is called at perigee-syzygy, when it is farthest away, it is called at apogee. The best time to view the moon is at moon rise and moon set when it is near the horizon. When there are objects in the foreground like trees or houses, it makes the moon appear even larger and brighter.

This super moon coincides with the cross quarter point, the moment in time that is between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It is marked by Beltane, the Celtic holiday, a fertility festival which celebrates the height of Spring and approach of Summer. In folklore, Beltane is the time when the veils between the worlds are the thinnest, and there is magic in the air. This full moon will occur in the sign of emotionally intense Scorpio, a sign associated with phenomena that are typically hidden from every day consciousness. Paradoxically, as the full moon illuminates, perhaps with a Super full moon in Scorpio, that which is typically hidden will be revealed. Astrologically full moons are associated with events, circumstances, and processes coming to a culmination or climax, and with a Super Moon, this is amplified more so than usual.

In the culture there is a belief that exists that emotions run high on a full moon, that psychiatric emergency rooms are busier, that crime rates increase. The word “lunacy” is related to luna, the latin word for moon. Others dispute this and claim it is a superstition. It is hard for me to imagine that we are not impacted  by the effect of the moon upon us.

It is also, of course, well known that the moon affects the earth in terms of the tides. A Super Moon typically increases the tides by a small amount, unless it coincides with a storm, when its impact can be greater. There is controversy about whether or not the super moon is related to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and extreme weather.  Some sources say no, others point to the super moon of 2005 and the 9.0 earthquake in Indonesia, and to the super moon of 2011 and the 9.2 earthquake in Japan. We will see what this super moon brings us.

One thing is certain, that if it is a clear night, it will be a sight of great beauty and not to be missed.

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A very very dear old friend of mine is dying from pancreatic cancer. She has struggled courageously, and availed herself of all treatments, both conventional and alternative.  Fifty percent of patients with pancreatic cancer are dead within six months of diagnosis, the one year survival rate is twenty percent, and the five year survival, four percent. My friend is almost at the 5 year mark since her diagnosis. It has been an inspiring privilege to witness her journey and the grace with which she has handled it all, as well as heartbreaking to see her suffer. Despite the fact that she lives on the west coast, we saw each other regularly and she has been a true friend to me, in sickness and in health; totally there, supportive and accepting. Her condition has never been far from my mind since her diagnosis, and now particularly, as she will not live much longer. She is tired and in pain, and I think, ready to go.

I was astonished this Sunday to see the piece in the New York Times Magazine section about the therapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs to ease fear of dying in terminal patients, as it was so apropos to what has been preoccupying me. I wanted to write about it, as dying and death are very much on my mind, and I think that the potential benefit to dying patients is huge, and the public should be aware of this treatment and it should be readily available.

Dr. Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor UCLA Medical Center has been administering psilocybin, the psychoactive component of magic mushrooms, to dying cancer patients to see if he could reduce the fear of death. His research showed that the administration of the drug could be done safely, and that it  greatly improved the quality of the patients’ lives, as they felt much less anxious and depressed about their impending death. The drugs caused the patients to have access to transcendent experiences which resulted in sustained perceptions like “Death is never just an ending, but part of a process.” and “My death does not end my personal existence.” After transcendent experiences, people have much less fear of death. One patient who was part of the study stated,

“I now have the distinct sense that there’s so much more,”  “so many different states of being. I have the sense that death is not the end but just part of a process, a way of moving into a different sphere, a different way of being.”

“Researchers acknowledge that it’s not clear how psilocybin reduces a person’s anxiety about mortality, not simply during the trip but for weeks and months following. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” Grob says. “I don’t really have altogether a definitive answer as to why the drug eases the fear of death, but we do know that from time immemorial individuals who have transformative spiritual experiences come to a very different view of themselves and the world around them and thus are able to handle their own deaths differently.”

“On psychedelics,” Halpern says, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now. The experience gives you, just when you’re on the edge of death, hope for something more.”

The following quote describes one couple’s experience who was part of Grob’s research. Norbert Litzinger was the husband of Pam Sakuda who was dying from metastatic colon cancer:

“Norbert Litzinger remembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.”

In terms of the mechanism of the mechanism of action of this substance:

“The researchers found that the states of “unrestrained consciousness” that accompany the ingestion of psilocybin are associated with a deactivation of regions of the brain that integrate our senses and our perception of self. In depressed people, Nutt explains, one of those regions, the anterior cingulate cortex, is overactive, and psilocybin may work to shut it down”.

Its interesting to speculate what this means in terms of other psychiatric conditions. I could imagine that states in which the sense of self as separate is accentuated, could cause anxiety and feelings of alienation and depression.

I wish that this treatment  would be readily accessible to my friend to ease her passage. Given the greatly improved quality of life experienced by the patients in the study,  it would make sense for it to be part of a regularly available protocol for end of life medical care.

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“It was in the garden of a madhouse that I met a youth with a face pale and lovely and full of wonder.
 And I sat beside him upon the bench, 
and I said, ‘Why are you here?’

And he looked at me in astonishment, and he said, 
”It is an unseemly question, yet I will answer you.
 My father would make of me a reproduction of himself; so also would my uncle. My mother would have me the image of her illustrious father. My sister would hold up her seafaring husband as the perfect example
 for me to follow.
 My brother thinks I should be like him, a fine athlete. And my teachers also, the doctor of philosophy,
 and the music master, and the logician, they too were determined, and each would have me but a reflection 
of his own face in a mirror.
 Therefore I came to this place. I find it more sane here. At least I can be myself.” Then of a sudden he turned to me and he said,
” But tell me, were you also driven to this place 
by education and good counsel?”
 And I answered, “No, I am a visitor.” And he said, “Oh, you are one of those who live 
in the madhouse on the other side of the wall.” Kahlil Gibran

Though patients do not frequently come into my office complaining that they do not really know who they are, this sometimes lies at the heart of their more typical complaints of depression and anxiety. I believe that one of the most important functions of psychotherapy is helping a patient to be most fully him or herself. There is so much pressure on many individuals to conform to the expectations, projections and belief systems of the family, as well as the cultural and societal norms, that it can feel as though the life that they are living is not their own. This can lead to a feeling of alienation, of going through the motions, rather than feeling fully alive.

Sometimes when an individual gets in touch with the fact that they are living out their parents’ dream, they feel angry and feel tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water. They feel the need to reject in a wholesale way identifications with their parents. It may well be that they would choose their parents’ dream as their own, or aspects of the dream, if they could do so in a way that felt like a freely made choice.

Psychotherapy can help a person become aware of the unconscious patterns he or she has felt compelled to enact. This may involve choice of profession, partner, style of relating with children, attitudes towards money, leisure, food, the body, really any aspect of living can be an unconscious repetition of ancestral patterns. With awareness eventually comes the possibility of choosing to accept or reject those expectations and projections which have been so influential in our psyches. Free choice generally translates into a greater sense of meaning, joy and a greater sense of authenticity.

Many of these patterns form through repetitive chronic interactions with parents and siblings, which sculpt and form and deform the psyche. I think of the metaphor of erosion, like the geological forces of water and wind that over time produce the earth’s canyons and rock formations. In today’s climate of managed care for mental health, a patient may be given 10 sessions to deal with an issue. This is a totally inadequate amount of time to help someone shift deeply ingrained patterning.

Psychotherapy is a process that takes time to effect deep and lasting change. It can be a meandering, often inefficient and organic process that can be truly transformative, given the right chemistry between clinician and patient. Ten sessions may provide a bandaid, deal with an immediate crisis, but that bears no resemblance to what I am talking about here.

Part of Monday Mania

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Many Americans are very worried about their sleep. They firmly believe the common assumption that they should get a solid uninterrupted eight hours. If they find themselves awake in the middle of the night, they feel as though there is something seriously wrong with them. Many go to their physicians who diagnose a sleep disorder, and are prescribed sleep medications. These medications are not benign. Many cause a hangover; the next day the individual feels tired and sleepy and functions sub optimally. There are also more dramatic side effects such as sleep walking, amnesia and hallucinations. Between 2000-2005 Americans were prescribed 60% more sleep medications than in previous years.

Several years ago my friend, psychologist Dr. Joan Goldberg, mentioned the intriguing concept of segmented sleep to me. The theory goes like this: Our modern idea that a solid 8 hours represents healthy sleep is a myth. Historically human beings naturally slept in two distinct phases, with a period of wakefulness separating the two phases. There is evidence from sleep research, as well as from the reports of individuals, that this bi-modal sleep pattern, combined with a midday nap results in the experience of greater wakefulness during the day time, than uninterrupted sleep. During that period of wakefulness, the brain secretes high levels of prolactin, a hormone associated with a feeling of calm and well-being.

Historically this time of wakefulness between the two sleep segments was considered a special and even sacred time. Laborers tired from working the fields would have the energy to have sexual relations after their first period of sleep, people engaged in spiritual practices such as prayer, reflection and meditation, and others used the quiet time to read and write. Dreams were more available to be remembered during that time than upon awakening in the morning.

A recent article in the BBC news magazine reported on segmented sleep. The historian Robert Ekirch summarized in his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the abundant historical evidence that humans previously slept in two separated segments.  This custom was common knowledge and there are many references to it. Here is an interesting passage from that article;

He unearthed  ”more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.”

This article from the BBC generated some buzz in the Paleosphere when it was published a few months ago. Robb Wolff of The Paleolithic Solution took issue with the normalization of our poor sleep habits in contemporary culture. He noted the deleterious effect upon health of too few hours of sleep, as well as the disruptive effect electric light has on the natural diurnal circadian rhythm of Cortisol, which creates insulin resistance, increased appetite and inflammation. He did not comment upon the beneficial calming effect of Prolactin released during the segmented sleep pattern or the potential psychological and spiritual benefits of this special time.

It seems to me that Americans want to do everything efficiently, and that includes sleep. Segmented sleep is not efficient, power sleeping a solid 8 hours minimizes time in bed so that a person can get back to the important business of  “getting and spending”.

Yet we also crave rest and a huge 20 billion dollar industry has been created around sleep: pillows, mattresses, herbal remedies, sleep centers and prescription medications.

Here is a passage from a recent article about segmented sleep in the Guardian,

“But while once viewed as a great leveller (Sir Philip Sidney called sleep “the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, the indifferent judge between high and low.”), sleeping long has become regarded as an indulgence, a weakness. Today careerists operate a sort of competitive sleeporexia, seeing who can function on the least amount of sleep, fuelled by tales of Thatcher and her four hours.”

I wonder if we made an effort to align our sleep more with the rising and setting of the sun, going to sleep earlier in the winter and later in the summer, and arising with the sun, and returned to honoring the pattern of segmented sleep, but resisted the use of electric light during the period of wakefulness, if it would still impact cortisol levels.

It is also true that sleep changes over the course of the life cycle. Children sleep very deeply compared to most adults, and older adults sleep less than younger people. People with mood and anxiety disorders often have atypical sleep patterns. It seems important to gauge the healthfulness of  your sleep habits in terms of how you feel. How is your energy? How alert do you feel? These are the most reliable indicators of whether or not you need to tweak your practice.

It is my opinion that the habit of segmented sleep could offer a special personal private time, an oasis. It potentially offers a dedicated carved out time and space for just being, and could potentially yield physical, psychological and spiritual benefits to our harried souls.

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I was planning to write about something else entirely this morning, when I received this article in an e-mail from my dear friend in Hamburg, Dr. Gunnar Lindstrom.  The article is entitled “Incarceration Nation” authored by Dr. Fareed Zakharia, and appeared in the April 2, 2012  issue of TIME magazine. I found its message so important, that I am going to include it here in its entirety. The bold print are points that I wish to emphasize.

“Televangelist Pat Robertson recently made a gaffe. A gaffe, as journalist Michael Kinsley defined it, occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Robertson’s truth is that America’s drug war has failed and that the country should legalize marijuana. This view goes against the deepest political, moral and religious positions Robertson has held for decades, so imagine the blinding evidence that he has had to confront-and that has been mounting for years- on this topic.

Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life. “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fact of our country today, ” writes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “overall there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America-more than 6 million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts.

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That is not just many more than in most developed countries but seven to ten times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain-with a rate among the highest-has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems, have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show the 700 Club, “we here in America make up 5% of the world’s population, but make up 25% of the world’s jailed prisoners”

There is a temptation to look at this staggering difference in numbers and chalk it up to one more aspect of American exceptionalism. America’s is different, so the view goes, and it has always had a Wild West culture and a tough legal system. But the facts don’t support the conventional wisdom. This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,00 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost 10 fold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison for drug convictions. in 2009 alone, 1,66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault and on larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.

In the past four decades, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the war on drugs. The results? In 2011 a global commission  on drug policy issued a report signed by Geoerge Shultz, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan: the arch conservative Peruvian writer politician Mario Vargas Llosa, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker; and former presidents of Brazil and MexicoFernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo. It begins,” The global war on drugs has failed…Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measured directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail critical supply or consumption.” Its main recommendation is to “encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.”

Bipartisan Forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and Liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990′s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American politics, there is a money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.

Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisoners vs. $5.7 billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.

The results are gruesome at every level. We are creating a vast prisoner underclass in this country at huge expense, increasingly unable to function in normal society, all in the name of a war we have already lost. If Pat Robertson can admit he was wrong, surely it is not too much to ask the same of America’s political leaders.”

To Mr. Zakharia’s last point;  mandatory imprisonment for possession of marijuana, results often in the exposure of average American citizens to the brutal dehumanizing conditions of imprisonment. There they are thrust together in intimate proximity with dangerous sociopaths, and are at high risk of violent victimization both of a sexual and non-sexual nature, which commonly results in the disabling psychiatric condition of post traumatic stress disorder, with significant subsequent dysfunction.

Adam Gopnik wrote in his January 30, 2012 New Yorker piece, “The Caging of America”,

“That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded.”

“The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.”

There is also a huge racial and socio-economic bias in terms of who is in danger of incarceration. Again, from Adam Gopnik,

“For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.”

And as mentioned above, this is at a cost to the tax-payers of $45,006 a year. Were we to provide this same individual with a college education, it would cost a $8, 667 a year, and the result would be a contributing productive member of society, vs. a citizen who has been psychiatrically disabled through exposure to highly traumatic circumstances while incarcerated, often for the trivial crime of marijuana possession.  In Texas alone there are 400 teenagers who have been sentenced to life imprisonment. There is no gain to anyone with this appalling sadistic legal system, except to those who are profiting from the building and maintaining of prisons. And in fact, the entire society is morally undermined and degraded by this completely ineffective, destructive and horrifying policy.

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Have you recently noticed two very bright large stars close together soon after sunset in the western sky? These are the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. They approached each other for the past two weeks, then passed one another on March 13, and are now separating, as Venus continues to climb higher in the sky and Jupiter sinks towards the horizon. Last night they were joined by the silver crescent of the new moon, which will be visible tonight and tomorrow. Don’t miss it. It’s totally gorgeous.

Venus and Jupiter will not appear together in a fully dark night sky again until June 2015.  Their orbits are quite different in length; while Venus takes 224 days to make one orbit around the Sun,  it takes Jupiter just under 12 years to do the same, since it circles the sun from much farther away.

Venus, the Queen of the Heavens, shines four times brighter than Jupiter. In western astrology Venus is traditionally associated with love and Jupiter with knowledge. Gary Caton, an astrologer in Asheville, North Carolina, commented that a comparison between the two reflects the fact that  ”love trumps knowledge”.

Many modern urban people rarely look up at the stars to experience this incomparable beauty. It is another example of our divorce from nature, which leads to a distortion about who we are, our place in the universe and what are our responsibilities to each other and the planet. Out experience of ourselves is completely out of context.

Astronomer Lucianne Walkowizc in a TED talk titled, “Look Up for a Change”, comments that we are so busy looking at our screens, that we rarely look at each other, let alone the night sky. Light pollution is destroying our access of seeing directly into space. She describes the night sky as a precious natural resource, like a park that we can visit, but that if we do not protect it, it will slip away from us.

There is an organization that protects the night sky, IDA, International Dark-Sky Association, which you can join, if this is a cause that speaks to you.

Here is Lucianne Walkowizc’s TED talk:

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Koyaanisisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word that is translated as ”life of moral corruption and turmoil” or “ a state of life that calls for another way of living”.

It is the title of a cult movie directed by Godfrey Reggio from the early 80′s, that made a big impression on me when I was still young. It’s a film without words using time lapse photography, which juxtaposes images of the Southwest desert and New York City, set to an evocative and haunting soundtrack by Phillip Glass. The theme of the movie is humanity’s increasing disconnection from the natural world.

The word Koyaanisqatsi springs to my mind frequently these days when I think about the frightening impact of global warming on the planet, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima in 2011, and most recently when I heard about the proliferation of the Burmese python from Southeast Asia in the Florida Everglades, which is decimating the mammalian population.

I first heard about the python invasion on NPR’s On Point. I was fascinated and horrified by this ecological nightmare. Giant Burmese pythons, an invasive species, set loose by owners in the Florida Everglades when they grew too large to be safely kept as house pets, in addition to those that were accidentally released into the wild during hurricanes, have multiplied like wildfire. Many mammals and birds are totally disappearing; Raccoon populations down 99 percent. Opossum, 98 percent. Deer, 94 percent, Bobcat  87%, fox and alligator, all devoured by the Burmese python, which cannot be suppressed, let alone eradicated. Giant snakes such as these can survive eating only once a year.

Based on fossil evidence, it has been 15-16 million years since there were giant snakes native to the Florida Everglades, which were large enough to eat a small mammal. Now within 20 years, due to human impact on the environment, these snakes which can grown up to 17 feet and weigh up to 150 pounds, number in the hundreds of thousands. They have become the apex predator, able to eat even an alligator. There is real concern that they will spread north to significant portions of the South, which also has a suitable habitat for them. Scientists have been shocked to discover that they are good swimmers, able to tolerate salt water and are threatening the Florida Keys.

We are so clueless about the destructive impact that our thoughtless actions have upon the environment. It’s Koyaanisqatsi. I am actually surprised that I do not hear more about these worrisome events from my patients. I believe this is because these phenomena are so overwhelming and so anxiety provoking, that they are held at arms length, and the focus is on more manageable topics like conflicts around love, work and diet.

The brilliant quantum physicist, David Bohm (1917-1992), wrote about the insensitivity to “incoherence”, which is I think another word for Koyaanisqatsi, that is fostered in us in order to stabilize society. He wrote in 1989:

“I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence starting with very young children. If people could see the vast incoherence that is going on in society they would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do something. If you’re not sensitive to it you don’t feel disturned and you don’t feel you need to do anything.
I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her mother, “this school is terrible, the teacher is terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy things,” and so on. Finally the mother was saying, “You’d better stop this–in this house the teacher is always right.” Now she understood that the teacher was wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use. Even the message may have been right in some sense, but still it illustrates that the predicament is that in order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very young children, we are trained to become insensitive to incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.”

Here is a video of an fight between a Giant Burmese Python and an alligator in the Florida Everglades, made only possible by Koyaanisqatsi:

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In Western Astrology the planet Neptune is associated with transcendence of ordinary reality. Some concepts linked with Neptune include the sea, the unconscious, blurring of boundaries, spirituality, idealism, imagination, creativity, illusion and delusion, madness, confusion, sacrifice, glamor and the media, pollution and poison, escapism and addiction.

Neptune’s orbit around the sun is approximately 164 years. It remains in each sign of the zodiac for 14 years, before moving on to the next.

In the beginning of February, Neptune moved into the sign of Pisces from Aquarius. This shift portends a greater receptivity, vulnerability and prominence in the collective consciousness to matters related to Neptunian themes. Neptune’s sojourn in Aquarius (1998-2012), the sign associated with the future and technology, was reflected by the increasing centrality of the internet in our daily lives. Each planet is linked with a sign of the zodiac where it feels most at home, and where its effect is most powerful. Neptune’s recent entry into its natural home sign of Pisces, signifies a time when the conditions and energies related to Neptune will be particularly heightened in our experience.

A classic illustration of themes represented by Neptune in Pisces was evident in the cover article of the Sunday New York Times Magazine this morning titled What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy. This is a quintessential tale of Neptunian confusion. It involves an epidemic of a tic disorder which afflicted 18 high school girls in the working class town of Le Roy, outside Rochester, NY. One by one, girls attending the same Le Roy high school awoke from sleep with twitches, and spasms and vocal outbursts.

After full medical and neurological evaluation, the consensus was that these girls were suffering from Conversion Disorder, a condition characterized by physical symptoms, which are an expression of unconscious psychological conflict and stress which cannot be verbalized.  In Freud’s time, Conversion Disorder was called Hysteria. The development of psychoanalysis, “The Talking Cure”, was largely based upon the treatment of this condition.

The affliction in Le Roy was contagious, and specialists suspected a mass psychogenic illness. Exposure to someone suffering from this condition triggered it in the next vulnerable individual, who mirrored the symptoms. A similar phenomena is witnessed when we yawn when we observe someone else yawning. The brain initiates a physical reaction that mirrors an activity that we witness in another. Yawning represents one end of the spectrum and mass psychogenic illness the other.

Worried parents were not satisfied with this explanation. Some suspected that the tic disorder was a result of environmental contamination. In January Erin Brokovich sent a team there to test the soil, as a derailed train in 1970 spilled toxic chemicals which may have leeched into the earth. There was also speculation that a former Jell-O plant in LeRoy had dumped manufacturing waste, which could be implicated in the epidemic.”Some of the older residents remember that they could always tell what flavor the Jell-O factory was producing on a given day based on the color of the water in Oatka Creek. What else, they wonder, got dumped on Le Roy?”

National news media began to converge on the town. The girls condition worsened as media attention increased. Investigation ultimately revealed no link between environmental contamination and the neurological condition afflicting these girls.

Some of the girls are now improving as TV news coverage slows down. Some of the stricken have responded well to antibiotics, which were prescribed on the hunch that the girls may have a rare condition in which a streptococcus bacteria can alter brain chemistry. The cause of the epidemic in Le Roy remains an unsolved Neptunian mystery.

The NPR radio show, “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook featured a fascinating episode on March 2, a month after Neptune moved into Pisces, called The New Age of Reformation. He interviewed a religious historian, Diana Butler Bass, who has written a new book titled Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. She writes about the current erosion of Americans’ belief in conventional systems of religion, and a decrease in affiliation with organized religious institutions among Jews and Christians alike.  (Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist denominations are not declining due to immigration and higher birth rates) Yet simultaneously, Butler noted an increased longing in many individuals for connection with God and neighbor. She cited a statistic which I found remarkable:

In 1962 only 22% of Americans claimed to have had a personal mystical experience of God.

In 2009 48% confessed to having had a mystical encounter with the Divine.

What is going on here? How is this to be interpreted?

I was amazed to see a feature article in this week’s “Psychiatric Times“, a weekly newspaper published by the American Psychiatric Association, the principle organization of mainstream American psychiatry, that was titled “Spirituality and Religion in Mental Health: A Concise Review of the Evidence”. The article stated, “emerging research findings suggest that spirituality and religion are in fact related to well-being at multiple levels and may play important roles in both the prevention and treatment of mental illness.” The article noted that “While a third of all physicians believe it is acceptable for physicians to pray with their patients, psychiatrists are significantly less likely than other physicians to pray with patients. (See my post on the legacy of Freud and Jung for a discussion on psychiatry’s historical antipathy to spirituality.)

A USA today poll of more than 1000 respondents found that almost 80% of patients believed that prayer can help patients recover from illness, but “only 11% of persons who pray in an effort to improve their health disclose this fact to their physician.” “75% of individuals who seek medical care for any reason feel that their religious or spiritual beliefs are directly related to their health concerns, while only 16% of physicians or nurses inquire about these important matters.”

It appears that spirituality in the medical context has been relegated to the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” category. Spiritual practice, as a central adaptive response to illness, is routinely omitted from the clinical conversation.  The likely result of the avoidance of this seemingly taboo topic, is a lack of authenticity between patient and caregiver, reflecting a lack of trust, and which ultimately undermines the power of the healing relationship.

The article concluded with “an invitation for open-minded discussion and debate about the quality of emerging research evidence and the appropriate role of religion and spirituality in health care and mental health care”. This is actually quite an astonishing shift given the historical dismissiveness with which these matters were treated by mainstream medicine, and psychiatry in particular. Neptune in Pisces is already working its magic.

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These buttery cookies are simply delicious. It’s hard to behave sensibly with them, they are so good. They are full of nuts and seeds and just lightly sweet.

They come from a cookbook called Grain Free Gourmet by Jodi Bager and Jenny Lass. The author wrote that one of her friends tasted them and said that they tasted like sunshine. I see what she means.

If you properly prepare the nuts and seeds by soaking and drying them, they will be more easily digestible. Soaking and rinsing nuts and seeds rids them of phytates and toxic enzyme inhibitors that can interfere with their digestion. The recommended soaking time for sesame, sunflower seeds and almonds are 7 hours to overnight. After soaking and rinsing them well, they should be spread out thinly on a cookie sheet and dried in a low oven at 120 degrees or in a dehydrator.

GOLDENMARSH COOKIES

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter

1/2 cup honey

2 eggs

1/3 cup water

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 cups almond flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup sesame seeds

1/4 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut (optional)

1 cup slivered almonds

1 cup raisins (optional)

Method

1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

2. Mix the butter and honey together until well combined.

3. Mix in the eggs, water and vanilla.

4. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

5. Chill the batter in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

6. Place tablespoon portions of the dough on the cookie sheet and flatten. They can be placed fairly close together because they will not spread.

7. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until golden brown on the edges. If you prefer the cookies crisp, return the cookies to a 170 degree oven and bake for one hour. Turn off the oven and let the cookies cool in the oven. Store crisp cookies in an airtight container.

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