Breathe in the Joy

Breathe Out the Confusion

During your first descent to the abyss years ago, you were a raw rookie with few skills to navigate the dark, dank regions. You returned touchy & scarred.

But in each stint down below since, you've gained proficiency at remembering who you are even when you feel lost.

Somewhere you passed a crucial threshold. You learned the difference between repetitive, unnecessary pain & useful pain that rejuvenates & empowers. You sharpened your soul's vision & enriched your creative passion.Congrats!

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Painting by Jean Bourdichon

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Dear Readers,

I've gathered all the long-term, big-picture horoscopes I wrote for you in recent weeks, and bundled them in one place. Here's a compendium of your forecasts for 2024:

https://tinyurl.com/BigPicture2024

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In addition to these, I've created EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES that go even further in Exploring Your Long-Term Destiny in 2024.

What will be the story of your life in the coming months? What new influences will be headed your way? What fresh resources will you be able to draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here:

https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, click "Play Readings", and then select "Part 1" or “Part 2” or “Part 3” of the "Long Term Prediction for 2024."

Each of the three parts is a separate report, though related to the other two.

If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.

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Each of the three-part reports is seven to 13 minutes long. The cost is $7 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week. (Jan. 16, 2024)

P.P.S. You can also still access my Sneak-Peek at 2024. In these Expanded Audio Horoscopes, I describe some major themes I think you'll be working and playing with in 2024. After you register and/or log in, click on the reading for Dec. 19, 2023.

THREE-PERCENT MASTERY: AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH — excerpted from my new book

To achieve “beginner’s mind,” we dispense with our preconceptions and enter each situation as if seeing it for the first time. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” wrote Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “but in the expert’s there are few.” 

As much as I love beginner’s mind, I suggest we also practice beginner’s heart. That means approaching every encounter with a fresh wave of innocent, tender, generous curiosity. It’s as pure a feeling as if we are invoking it for the first time. 

When we cultivate beginner’s heart, we do so to enhance our ability to understand reality. It doesn’t mean we indiscriminately make ourselves vulnerable to people and situations that might exploit or hurt us. 

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The ever-evolving truth is far too complicated and fluid and slippery and scrambled and gorgeously abundant for one soul to understand—even for genius bodhisattva avatars. (I have heard rumors that there have been a few such characters.) 

I am lucky to have bumped up my personal degree of mastery to about three percent. That’s how much (how little) I understand of the Maddening and Delightful Mystery we are embedded in. 

Shocking! I am missing 97 percent of the truth—even though I have always been greedy to learn and experience as much as I can. 

Out of necessity, to compensate for my gaping ignorance, I have come up with a strategy to guide me. I formulate amusing, nonbinding hypotheses about what the Great Mystery might be like. Then I collect the experimental data generated as I test my hypotheses. Finally, I observe and analyze the results to determine how well each hypothesis works. 

• Does it liberate me from suffering, and does it inspire me to help liberate other creatures from their suffering?  

• Does it make me a smarter and kinder and trickier and humbler fool?  

• Does it motivate me to embrace what I call the FLUX MOJO? In other words, does it fuel me to overthrow my fixations, cooperate enthusiastically with the never-ending change that life asks me to deal with, and continually reinvent my attitudes, perspectives, ideas, and feelings?  

• Does it engender in me a lust for life and a primal urge to respond creatively to the glorious privilege of being alive and conscious?  

• Does it fuel my longing to inspire and nurture and play with those who are interested in sharing destiny with me? 

THE PERFECT SOMETIMES UNDERMINES THE GOOD — excerpted from my new book

Now and then, I quote or discuss a person who is less than a perfect exemplar of my noble ideals. 

Some readers rage at me for doing so. Don’t I know, they scold, that so-and-so is a jerk? 

I usually do know. And I certainly don’t approve of the quoted or discussed person being a creep. I wish they weren’t. I’m mad at them for the dreadful things they have done.  

On the other hand, if I refused to learn from people unless I agreed with and liked everything they had ever said and done, I would never learn from anyone. 

If I condemned to oblivion everyone who didn’t reflect all my noble ideals, if I crossed everyone off my list unless they were immaculate angels, I would be bereft of influences except for Mickey, my beloved stuffed bunny from childhood. He is irreproachable. 

My general philosophy is that everyone on the planet, including me, is a jerk at least some of the time. In fact, I’m suspicious of people who are apparently so flawlessly well-behaved that they are never jerks.  

Here’s the key to making a deeper assessment: How sizable is each person’s Jerk Quotient? If it’s below 15 percent—maybe even below 20 percent—I’ll probably give them a chance to be influences in my life—especially if they’re smart and interesting and wild and kind a majority of the time.  

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I’m not sure there’s anyone in public life whose influence hasn’t been at least somewhat harmful, even if they have mostly bestowed blessings. A person’s noble intentions don’t guarantee the intentions are interpreted and used with love and intelligence. Even the Buddha’s followers commit crimes against humanity, as we see in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. 

What about you? I invite you to cultivate a capacity to derive insight from people who are not untainted saints. Have fun learning from 15-percent jerks or imperfect thinkers you partially disagree with. 

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Here are examples of people from whom I have drawn teachings despite their offenses: 

Dr. Seuss had an affair with another woman while his wife was suffering from cancer, and his wife subsequently committed suicide. 

Einstein cheated on his wife and treated her horrendously. 

William Blake lived in filth. 

Gertrude Stein arrogantly declared she was as important a writer as Shakespeare and Homer. 

Early feminist author George Sand cheated on her husband. 

Edgar Allan Poe married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 26. 

Pema Chödrön did nothing about the sexual abuse going on within the leadership of the Shambhala community over the years. 

Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized parts of his PhD dissertation. 

The painter Peter Paul Rubens married a 16-year-old female when he was 53. 

Walt Whitman had temper tantrums. 

Many of the needy causes that Mother Teresa raised money for never received much help. Just seven percent of the donations she raised went to the organizations to which they were donated.  

In his older age, Gandhi slept with young women in his bed to test his resolve to remain “pure.” Among these women was his grandniece. 

John Lennon battered women. He was also a cranky guy who was chronically annoyed. 

Kurt Vonnegut had a dark, sad, cruel side. 

Bob Marley spawned many children and didn’t financially support any of them. 

Some of my readers even find fault with people I have considered wonderful, like Dolly Parton and Thich Nhat Hanh. I don’t have the heart to repeat the claims, but I found them without any trouble.

How about me? What’s my Jerk Quotient? Here are some awful facts: When I was younger, I broke up with one of my girlfriends in an unconscious and insensitive way, and I still regret it. 

Again, when I was younger, an older friend of mine was dying of cancer, and I couldn’t bring myself to go see her. This is the most shameful thing I’ve ever done. 

Would you care to confess the sins of any of your heroes, teachers, and role models? Or yourself? 

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Naturalist Charles Darwin called clergyman Thomas Malthus a “great philosopher.” In his magnum opus The Origin of the Species, he said his theory of evolution was based on Malthus’ ideas.  

As Darwin knew well, Malthus advocated genocidal measures to control population growth. In his famous “Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society,” Malthus proposed killing off underprivileged people.  

“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor,” he wrote, “we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build villages near stagnant pools, and encourage settlement in marshy and unwholesome situations.  

“But above all,” he continued, “we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”  

The evidence is clear that Darwin’s theory of evolution had a grotesque pedigree. It was rooted in the work of a would-be mass murderer. Should we therefore dismiss it altogether? Not in my opinion. What’s useful is not always derived from what’s good. 

At the same time, we shouldn’t regard this fact as inconsequential. To evaluate all the implicit impacts of Darwinian ideas, we need to know the influences they emerged from. It’s crucial to acknowledge the pathology that may color a perspective that’s so central to Western culture. 

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Is there a comparable situation in your own life? Are there essentials you benefit from even though their origins are problematical? 

You could be a leader in the effort to be conscientious about investigating the origins of key ideas at the heart of our culture. You could help people you know to become aware of unconscious biases and bigotry they may have absorbed in taking on those ideas as our own. 

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
For This Perfect Moment

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In the fall of 1903, The New York Times published an article that scorned human efforts to develop flying machines. It prophesied that such a revolutionary technology was still at least a million years in the future—possibly 10 million years. In conclusion, it declared that there were better ways to apply our collective ingenuity than working to create such an unlikely invention. Nine weeks later, Orville and Wilbur Wright disproved that theory, completing a flight with the airplane they had made. I suspect that you, Aquarius, are also primed to refute an expectation or prediction about your supposed limitations. (Afterward, try not to gloat too much.)

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Your sweat and tears are being rewarded with sweets and cheers. Your diligent, detailed work is leading to expansive outcomes that provide relief and release. The discipline you’ve been harnessing with such panache is spawning breakthroughs in the form of elegant liberations. Congrats, dear Pisces! Don’t be shy about welcoming in the fresh privileges flowing your way. You have earned these lush dividends.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries chemist Percy Julian (1899–1975) was a trailblazer in creating medicine from plants. He patented over 130 drugs and laid the foundation for the production of cortisone and birth control pills. Julian was also a Black man who had to fight relentlessly to overcome the racism he encountered everywhere. I regard him as an exemplary member of the Aries tribe, since he channeled his robust martial urges toward constructive ends again and again and again. May he inspire you in the coming weeks, dear Aries. Don’t just get angry or riled up. Harness your agitated spirit to win a series of triumphs.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus actor Pierce Brosnan says, "You struggle with money. You struggle without money. You struggle with love. You struggle without love. But it’s how you manage. You have to keep laughing, you have to be fun to be with, and you have to live with style." Brosnan implies that struggling is a fundamental fact of everyday life, an insistent presence that is never far from our awareness. But if you're willing to consider the possibility that his theory may sometimes be an exaggeration, I have good news: The coming months could be less filled with struggle than ever before. As you deal with the ease and grace, I hope you will laugh, be fun to be with, and live with style—without having to be motivated by ceaseless struggle.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini author and activist William Upski Wimsatt is one of my role models. Why? In part, because he shares my progressive political ideals and works hard to get young people to vote for enlightened candidates who promote social justice. Another reason I love him is that he aspires to have 10,000 role models. Not just a few celebrity heroes, but a wide array of compassionate geniuses working to make the world more like paradise. The coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to gather new role models, dear Gemini. I also suggest you look around for new mentors, teachers, and inspiring guides.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I want you to fulfill your desires! I want you to get what you want! I don’t think that yearnings are unspiritual indulgences that divert us from enlightenment. On the contrary, I believe our longings are sacred homing signals guiding us to our highest truths. With these thoughts in mind, here are four tips to enhance your quests in the coming months: 1. Some of your desires may be distorted or superficial versions of deeper, holier desires. Do your best to dig down and find their heart source. 2. To help manifest your desires, visualize yourself as having already accomplished them. 3. Welcome the fact that when you achieve what you want, your life will change in unpredictable ways. You may have to deal with a good kind of stress. 4. Remember that people are more likely to assist you in getting what you yearn for if you’re not greedy and grasping.

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LET'S IMAGINE WHAT INTERESTING MYSTERIES MIGHT BE COMING YOUR WAY IN THE COMING YEAR

Would you like some inspiration as you muse and wonder about your upcoming adventures in 2024?

You can still listen to my long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in the coming months. Each report in the three-part series is 7 to 11 minutes long.

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here:

https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page. Under “Select Reading to Play,” choose "Part 1" or “Part 2” or “Part 3” of the "Long-Term Prediction for 2024."

The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $7 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)

A new short-range forecast for this week is also available.

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"Your Expanded Audio Horoscopes provide me with the Rest of the Story. I'm not necessarily a believer in the scientific accuracy of astrology, but I do think you've got a lot of practical wisdom to impart."

—M. Tennenbaum, New York

"No one knows more about me than me. But you're right up there near the top of the list of people who do understand something about how I tick. How is that possible?"

—R. Goren, Albuquerque

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LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I regard Leo psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) as a genius with a supreme intellect. Here's a quote from him that I want you to hear: "We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy." You may already believe this wisdom in your gut, Leo. But like all of us, you live in a culture filled with authorities who value the intellect above feeling. So it's essential to be regularly reminded of the bigger truth—especially for you right now. To make righteous decisions, you must respect your feelings as much as your intellect.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Poet Rainer Maria Rilke exalted the physical pleasure that sex brings. He mourned that so many "misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant to the tired spots of their lives and as a distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments." At its best, Rilke said, sex gives us "a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing." It is a sublime prayer, an opportunity to feel sacred communion on every level of our being. That's the erotic experience I wish for you in the coming weeks, Virgo. And I believe you will have an expanded potential for making it happen.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Even if you are currently bonded with a spouse or partner, I recommend you consider proposing matrimony to an additional person: yourself. Yes, dear Libra, I believe the coming months will be prime time for you to get married to your own precious soul. If you’re brave enough and crazy enough to carry out this daring move, devote yourself to it with lavish abandon. Get yourself a wedding ring, write your vows, conduct a ceremony, and go on a honeymoon. If you’d like inspiration, read my piece “I Me Wed”: tinyurl.com/SelfMarriage

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Talking about a problem can be healthy. But in most cases, it should be a preliminary stage that leads to practical action; it shouldn’t be a substitute for action. Now and then, however, there are exceptions to this rule. Mere dialogue, if grounded in mutual respect, may be sufficient to dissolve a logjam and make further action unnecessary. The coming days will be such a time for you, Scorpio. I believe you and your allies can talk your way out of difficulties.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian cartoonist Charles M. Schulz wrote, "My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?" I suspect that in 2024, you may go through a brief phase similar to his: feeling blank, yet quite content. But it won’t last. Eventually, you will be driven to seek a passionate new sense of intense purpose. As you pursue this reinvention, a fresh version of happiness will bloom. For best results, be willing to outgrow your old ideas about what brings you gladness and gratification.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): We all go through phases that feel extra plodding and pedestrian. During these times, the rhythms and melodies of our lives seem drabber than usual. The good news is that I believe you Capricorns will experience fewer of these slowdowns than usual in 2024. The rest of us will be seeing you at your best and brightest on a frequent basis. In fact, the gifts and blessings you offer may flow toward us in abundance. So it’s no coincidence if you feel exceptionally well-loved during the coming months. PS: The optimal way to respond to the appreciation you receive is to ratchet up your generosity even higher.

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