OMEGA INSTITUTE, JULY 31 – AUGUST 4, 2023   

Here at the FCEA, we’ve always had an ambition to eventually do some live conferences where we can actually meet each other. Most of us miss the warmth of those direct human connections. The combo platter of Zoom and Covid have of course changed the world – many of you are starting to feel like familiar friends to me, despite our never having been in physical proximity to each other. Compounding those realities, we also have the complicating factor that our FCEA tribe is international. If we were to meet in person, where could we do it? California? Shanghai? Berlin? Obviously there is no possible answer that works fairly for everybody.

The bottom line is that I will be doing a five-day astrological intensive in the US state of New York this (northern!) summer, and you’re all invited. I understand that for some of you, attending would simply not be feasible. I’m truly sorry about that. I do hope that at least a few of you can come. It’s something I am doing anyway, and smiled when I realized how nicely it might fit into one of my favorite dreams for the school – that at least some of us could meet in person.

Omega Institute (www.eomega.org) is a fabulous place, and I’m honored to be invited to speak there. The first time I did was way back in 1984, and I’ve taught there several times since. The Institute is both prestigious and unpretentious, which is a hard balancing act to sustain. “Everybody who’s anybody” in the world of cutting edge, body-mind-spirit thinking has spoken there – Gloria Steinem, Eckhart Tolle, Pema Chödrön, Deepak Chopra, Jane Fonda, Van Morrison, Bobby McFerrin, Paul Hawken, Maya Angelou, and Ram Dass to name a few. But I still feel right in characterizing Omega as “a hippie summer camp.” That’s what it feels like. The campus is spacious and way out among the forests and farmlands in the deep upstate New York countryside. There’s a lake. People can swim. Everyone dresses casually. We stay in simple cabins. Mostly-vegetarian food is served in a gigantic mess hall, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Best of all, the attendees are generally terrific – I’ve often felt, looking at the faces around me there, that if the entire world were full of exactly these kinds of humans, we’d be living in paradise.

My Omega class will officially go on sale in early January. It’s not yet listed on their website since it’s still many months away. I do want to emphasize that this is not an “official” FCEA event – I’m under contract to Omega, and the class is open to the public. The last time I taught there, I had around fifty students. Their faces reminded me of your faces, and vice versa. I’d anticipate a seamless social integration, in other words. In teaching, I’ll downplay any FCEA angle to make sure that everyone feels welcome. But I would love to see as many of you there as can make it happen!

The title of the class is Cutting Through to the Heart of the Birthchart. Here’s the course description:

Why do you have the astrological chart that you have? As soon as we ask that question, we leave the dreary world of merely cataloging “personality traits” and enter the dynamic world of evolutionary astrology. In this system, it is your fate to face certain questions and certain possibilities in this lifetime. Beyond that, we have no use for the word “fate” at all. Instead, the power of your magic, your choices, and your intentions takes over, and they are pitted against old karmic reflexes that might otherwise imprison you in looping, dead-end patterns of behavior rooted in unresolved hurts from prior lifetimes. Anyone who has internalized the basic language of astrology –  for example, by reading Steven’s book, The Inner Sky – will be able to benefit from this five-day workshop. Our aim will be to cut through the confusion that naturally arises as we contemplate the myriad of signs and planets and make a bee-line for the holy grail of any astrological counselor – the healing wizard-words that go straight to the client’s heart and ring of pure, liberating truth.

As you can see, it’s a fairly generic description of evolutionary astrology. There is always some spontaneous improvisation in classes such as this as I assess the skill-level of the students. I anticipate it will run deep, and that we will spend most of the time diving deeply into the analysis of specific charts – probably some famous people, and certainly some class members. Five days gives us a lot of breathing room. I’d also say that Omega’s schedule is gentle – long lunches and there’s one half-day in the middle.

My apologies to those of you who are too far away for attendance to be feasible. I certainly understand. There will be no “FCEA credits” given to attendees or anything like that – anything else would be unfair to students who cannot be there. But it will be deep and magical – and I hope I finally have a chance to hug a few of you!

ON ANOTHER NOTE ENTIRELY…

There’s a bit of controversy brewing in the world of traditional astrology. All of this is many miles from how we practice in FCEA, but it may be of some interest to a few of you. Over the past few decades, a lot of interest has arisen in “traditional astrology,” which is a catch-all term for everything practiced from about 200 B.C.E. up through the European Renaissance. Its earliest Greek expressions have been alleged to employ Whole Sign Houses — which means that if Gemini is your Ascendant, then anything in Gemini is in your 1st house, anything in Cancer is your 2nd house, and so on. The system has been popularized and has attracted many younger astrologers.

Along comes Deborah Houlding, a respected traditional astrologer in England. She was the editor of The Traditional Astrologer magazine and is the principal of the School of Traditional Horary Astrology. She’s delivered a talk that’s stirred up a hornet’s nest in the “trad astrology” camp. She alleges that no astrologers actually ever used Whole Sign Houses until these past few decades and that the whole thing is based on a mistranslation of an ancient text.

You can imagine the hoor-rah of a tempest that’s brewing in those teapots! None of this has any relevance to the timed-Ascendant system we employ in evolutionary astrology, but for those of you who are interested in the historical bigger picture, you are invited to read her article, “The Problems of House Division”:

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/houprob_print.html

And here’s a link to her actual talk, which runs about an hour (cost is £5.00):

https://www.astrologicalassociation.com/product/the-sign-the-whole-sign-and-nothing-but-the-sign/

As you’ll see, she is quite a scholar. I wrote to her to congratulate her for her courage. She wrote back that “I never felt so good as I did the moment after that talk was delivered.”