The Visionary Activist and Planet Glee

Last Saturday, a week ago, I got to meet a person I'd heard on the radio--KPFA--many times and have always had something to say to. It was very weird. I had listened to her lecture at the Green Festival and then bought her book. I stood in line and bought her book. After talking with her, I see that she is a person thinks deeply on some of the same topics that I do. I'm not into American politics the way she is, for instance. Maybe I don't understand her point of view completely. We differ in that she uses western astrology for her interpretations and I believe that Vedic is more accurate.

I'm writing about Caroline Casey (I almost wrote Carolyn Myss--who is that?). Her book is entitled MAKING THE GODS WORK FOR YOU. Yeah. I read about my least favorite one of the gods, Shiva, Saturn. He is not one to be ruled! She writes, "Saturn is our...basic center. In fact, this god lives in our real center, the psychic uterus, right below our navel.

The word hysteria, derived from the Latin word for uterus, addresses this Saturnine issue of loss of center...A therapeutic colleague once described hysteria as occurring when one evters a world that is not of one's own definition. THe process beigns with detachment, which becomes loneliness, which becomes hungry yearning. Hurngy yearning tilts us off balance so that we easily fall into someone else's game, where we then thrash crasily like a hooked fish. Thrashing crazily could be called the predomeineant symptom of the last twentieth century. But flailing is actually a healthy raction to an unhealthy situation, as when a fish attempts to become unhooked. (p.86)"

Caroline is a genius. Saturn is impossible to comprehend. But she demystifies this force while making it even more mysterious--akin to our "center," not in the Derridean sense or Freudian, but in the psychic sense, the realm of Ouspensky and Gurdieff, of the esoteric school.

She and I agreed that Vedic has its similar interpretations of the planets. The first Vedic text I read was Robert Svoboda's Light on Life.