Where do you stand with any power imbalances in your life? What about questions of competition versus cooperation, or your sense of responsibility and discipline versus constriction?

Outlet channel carving the sand at Seawall Beach, Phippsburg, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.

These questions are emerging because we’re under the influence of a fair number of aspects to Saturn in Scorpio right now.

People often dread Saturn, because it can feel heavy, authoritative or limiting in some way. But Saturn, when you embody it yourself, can actually motivate you to work toward tangible goals – the kind of motivation that comes from within, rather than something that’s imposed on you.

When you take the helm like that (even in small ways), navigating the waters of your life feels damn empowering. Notice that word “empowering”: it has the word “power” in it. Power can be wielded fairly and for the highest good of all concerned; it can also be used to push others down as you maneuver yourself up.

This is all to say that the astrology now and heading into the weekend is a little cloudy – and the implications for cloudy weather (astrological or meteorological) will vary from person to person. But just as clouds in the sky are made from water vapor, so too does this astrological cloudiness involve water – in the form of planets in Scorpio.

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Today the European Space Agency landed a probe on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the first time this has ever been accomplished. Image: ESA/Rosetta-Philae team/The New York Times.

Earlier today, Nov. 12, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft deployed the Philae lander, which it’s been carrying for over a decade. Somewhat miraculously, it actually landed — though unfortunately its anchoring harpoon failed to deploy. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out more news, because the Rosetta spacecraft is on the “dark” side of the comet.

Eric will be writing about this event in depth in tomorrow’s subscriber edition, within the context of comets in astrological history in both Eastern and Western traditions.

No matter what, this is a pretty incredible feat of aeronautical engineering that could have easily missed its mark. As Planet Waves researcher Carol Van Strum remarked today, “Of course they almost didn’t make it! Ask any hunter how hard it is to hit a moving target, and then imagine the target moving as fast as your bullet. The tiniest flaw or glitch could have deflected the lander into space.”

For those of you tracking such things at home, the signal of successful landing arrived at the mission control center at Darmstadt, Germany, at 5:04 pm local time (11:04 am EST) according to The New York Times.

In searching for this week’s piece on sex and relationships, I came across a blog post by Betty Dodson, Planet Waves’ honorary godmother of orgasms, in which she features a Kickstarter drive started by a man named Kevin Hinchey. Hinchey is working on a documentary of Wilhelm Reich’s life.

Wilhelm Reich

Betty writes, “I have always referred to Wilhelm Reich as my Hero. Much of what I’ve read about Reich, I’ve incorporated into my practice with close to 100% success rate teaching women how to enjoy their orgasms. His book The Function of Orgasm sits on my bookshelf.”

Eric, too, has often cited Reich’s research as an essential counterpoint to the work of Freud, who got caught up in his “death drive” idea (Thanatos). Eric has written that, “[Reich] believed that Freud and his cadre were afraid to deal with sexuality honestly, and he was correct about this. Reich left the fold and focused his subsequent work on developing therapies that helped people let go of what he called personality armor, and develop their capacity for pleasure.” (From Part 6 of It’s Not About Sex. It’s About Self.)

In the video above, Hinchey outlines Reich’s life, and the importance of finally bringing to film a full accounting of his controversial (and misunderstood) research, and subsequent persecution by several Federal agencies. The Kickstarter campaign has about two weeks left to meet its goal. Below is Hinchey’s summary from that page — though to get the full flavor of Reich’s life and why his story is so compelling, watch the video:

Austrian-born Wilhelm Reich, M.D., (1897-1957) was a brilliant psychoanalytic student of Sigmund Freud and a neuro-psychiatric student of Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg.

Reich’s wide-ranging social, medical and scientific work included promoting sexual health, standardizing and advancing therapeutic techniques, analyzing the psychology of fascism as manifested in both Nazism and Communism, conducting cellular research, investigating the origin of cancer and other diseases, developing experimental treatments for terminal cancer patients, and carrying out innovative climate research.

Tragically his books and published research journals were banned and burned by the United States government in 1956 and 1960, and Reich died in a Federal penitentiary in 1957.

How could such a thing have happened in America, the country to which Reich — an outspoken antifascist — had emigrated just four days before the outbreak of World War II? What was in Reich’s publications that so threatened people in power that they felt they must destroy them to keep people from reading them?

For decades Reich’s ideas and work have been carelessly and dishonestly misrepresented in the academic, medical and scientific communities, as well as in the media and on the Internet — including Wikipedia — by those whose knowledge of Reich is not based on accurate information.

Finally, a factually accurate, full-length documentary film about Reich has been meticulously researched and written, and a serious effort is now underway to fund this film. This documentary will not only correct the distorted narratives about Reich, but will also educate viewers about the potential benefits of Reich’s work for today’s medicine and science.

I, for one, would like to see this project make it to the big screen. And in the realm of filmmaking, the fundraising goal for such an ambitious project is fairly modest. Hinchey’s Kickstarter page details all that must be done to complete the film, which is fully written and researched.

A little more about Reich:

— Revolutionizes psychoanalytic techniques (1920s).
— Opens clinics which provide access to birth control (1920s-30s).
— Publishes The Mass Psychology of Fascism after fleeing from Nazi Germany (1933).
— Develops the first psychosomatic therapeutic techniques (1930s-40s).
— Conducts laboratory research on the development of cancer cells (1930s-50s).
— Discovers a biological radiation in specific micro-organisms that can kill bacteria and cancer cells (1939).
— Discovers this same radiation in the atmosphere (1940).
— Conducts experimental treatment of patients with terminal cancer, early cancer and other diseases (1941-50s).
— Fights the investigative abuses of the State Department, the FBI, the FDA, and the Immigration & Naturalization Service (1940-57).
— Struggles against the collusion of the FDA and the medical profession (1947-50s).
— Warns of pharmaceutical influence on the medical profession (1950s).
— Conducts weather experiments in Maine and Arizona to alleviate drought conditions (1953-56).
— Confronts censorship and First Amendment issues when a Federal court seeks to ban his publications from interstate commerce (1954).
— Challenges the right of a court of law to judge scientific research (1954).
— Witnesses the FDA’s burning of his publications at his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine (1956).

A 10-mile line of 8,000 illuminated balloons called Lichtgrenze (translation: “border of light”) will stretch along part of the same path where the 96-mile Berlin Wall once stood. Light artist Christopher Bauder and his filmmaker brother, Marc, came up with the idea before the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall, but needed more time to complete it. Visualization by Christopher Bauder.

Beginning today, Nov. 7, until Nov. 9 — the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall that once divided East and West Berlin — Christopher and Marc Bauder’s Lichtgrenze will stand. On the evening of Nov. 9, 8,000 Berliners will line up with each of the balloons, and using a key, will release each one in succession into the sky, carrying a personal message.

For these three days in between, residents of Berlin will be able to walk through the line of balloons — but vehicles will be blocked. Along the route, video screens will play archival footage of the days before and after the fall — contextualizing how much has changed in the last 25 years.

“This will trigger understanding of what it meant to have a wall in front of your door,” says Marc Bauder. “There were people coming out of their homes, and they couldn’t even cross the street because a wall was there.”

You can read more about the Lichtgrenze and see other visualizations of the commemorative piece at Wired.com.

Below is a discussion of the astrological chart for the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall by Eric, taken from the Feb. 3, 2012, Planet Waves subscriber issue titled Sea Changes: Neptune Enters Pisces.

Tear Down the Wall: Capricorn Alignment of 1989

By Eric Francis

Before I get into some ideas about Neptune in Pisces, let’s check in with an outer planet event focused on 1989: a series of conjunctions in Capricorn. These involved Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which were basically all conjunct one another in a long series of events from ’89 through around ’94. In a sense, all the changes we are seeing in the world — including the manifestations of Neptune in Aquarius that we’ve been reviewing this week, as well as Uranus in Aries, come back to one particular epicenter in 1989: the chart for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Chart for news about the Berlin Wall opening up, which led to the Berlin Wall actually opening up. Notice the planets with a 10 next to them — the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, precisely opposed by Jupiter. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were hanging around in a conjunction for a long time, and came with many changes in geopolitics. Conjunctions represent the beginnings of cycles, which are still active today. Then in a perfectly hilarious commentary, the chart says “broadcast with impact!” with the Sun, Mercury and Pluto in Scorpio rising. This astonishing story is worth reading — here is the Wikipedia page. Then look at the chart to see the similarities.

This is an important chart because of the conjunctions that it contains. Conjunctions start cycles, and this chart includes a triple conjunction of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that is at the root of the world we currently inhabit (and often take for granted). This publication is produced with the help of our buddy Anatoly in the Ukraine. Before 1989, we were taught in school that he was ‘the enemy’. In 2012, he’s one of our best friends. Go figure.

Younger readers may not remember or even know about the manic terror of communism that was driven into the American soul between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, which came down with a press release and the sound of a champagne bottle popping overnight between Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, 1989. Before then, you were either worried about Commies hanging out in garbage cans, or infiltrating Hollywood, or shooting missiles across the ocean at our cities. Many of our parents endured relentless duck and cover drills, hiding under their school desks, freaking out in honor of seemingly imminent nuclear war.

The chart is for the West German newscast the night of Nov. 9 that announced that East German refugees could exit directly through crossing points to West Germany, and that private travel between the two would be allowed. It’s one of the most amazing charts of the 20th century and I want to make contact with it for a moment, so we have some grounding. The events that were sparked off this day had a cascading effect that we are still living with today — as do the Neptune cycles that are described in the chart.

Let’s consider the aspects — then their implications. The simplified chart you’re looking at includes a four-planet conjunction in Capricorn, with Saturn and Neptune in a precise alignment. That aspect precipitated or symbolized (as you prefer) the dissolving of the boundary between East Berlin and West Berlin; hence, East Germany and West Germany; and hence, the whole “iron curtain” that divided Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from capitalist Western Europe. The boundary is represented by Saturn and Capricorn; the dissolving by Neptune. The other two players are fast-moving Venus (for love) and slow-moving Uranus (for the sustained power of revolution).

To add a dash of humor to the chart, we have Jupiter exactly opposite Saturn and Neptune. To measure the alignments, look at the numbers next to the planets. The closer the numbers, the closer the alignments. These are really close. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are aligned with the Earth to the degree on that very day.

I’ve also left in a witty conjunction that was rising exactly, as in exactly rising, exactly at the time of the event — a Sun-Pluto-Mercury conjunction in Scorpio. Remember that this is the chart for a news broadcast — talk about a TV show with impact. Remember how fast the ascendant moves — a degree every four minutes. You would think the announcement was timed by an astrologer. Actually, it was timed by the universe.

Once the announcement was made on German television, life imitated the media and chunks of the Berlin Wall became hot souvenirs as the wall was torn down. Photo by Dmitry Vrubel.

Remember that this was the same year China came up on the radar — Tiananmen Square happened, having much the same effect as the fall of the Berlin Wall — the merging of the East and the West, the most significant global boundary at the time. In 1989, Walmart existed in much smaller form but more to the point, 90% of the products were not made in China. That all happens after the Tiananmen Square incident, which was supposedly about liberty and ended up being about capitalism.

Included in this alignment is a truly rare event — the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, which happens less than once per century. It hadn’t quite happened yet as of this chart, but it’s still very close, close enough to be in full effect during this chart and historical event. Lining up Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn blew up nearly every boundary you can think of, particularly in geopolitics. The Eastern Bloc fell apart and dozens of ‘new’ countries showed up on the map.

Within 10 years, the border crossings had disappeared from across Europe, the Euro was imminent, and the big boys were reorganizing the world into new trade zones, encoded in GATT, NAFTA and other treaties. One day in 2006, I was driving from France to Belgium and came across one of these abandoned border crossing checkpoints. Seeing the abandoned booths and parking lots with grass growing out of them made the whole notion of borders seem as ridiculous as it is.

So in our current era of boundaries falling and everything becoming more permeable, and information from your wallet sitting on numerous computer servers around the world, remember that there was a brick-and-mortar parallel that happened long before what we are now experiencing — and it starts with the alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — the four largest planets, with three of the four being in Capricorn, the sign of boundaries and containers.

The moral of the story is that when these planets get busy, actual stuff happens. And this particular chart is becoming active again because Pluto is in Capricorn going over all those planets there, and Uranus is in Aries, about to square them all. Maybe that will help us get rid of the absurd new border crossings that have been installed — that is, the ones currently run by the ever-charming TSA, which can’t seem to stop groping people, stealing from them and accusing them of being terrorists on the basis of a bottle of Poland Spring water.