Dear Friend and Reader:

On the first night that the Sun was in Scorpio, I fell asleep a bit early on the bed in my photo studio and awoke a few hours later from a lucid dream — a dream in which I knew that I was dreaming.

I was in an attic room. John Kennedy was expressing his rage, ever so politely but rage no less, that the American public fell for the cover-up of his murder.

He was incredulous that such an obvious fraud could hold up to any scrutiny at all.

What I recall most vividly was his conveying the feeling of, “How could this be possible, how could anyone fall for this?”

He explained that the FBI had killed 150 people in the process of ‘investigating’ his murder.

He was healthy and in good condition, wearing a suit, leaning up on his elbows on a small bed. Kennedy went on for a while, explaining certain particulars of the case.

There was one other person there. I don’t know who; I never saw his/her face. I don’t believe we were direct collaborators but rather that we had a similar mission. I understood that Kennedy was speaking to me in a gesture of trust: that I would understand that it was real, and that I would not be silent.

There was a stairway going down from the attic, which I knew was my route out of the dreamtime and into the physical world. I woke up at about 1 am, described the dream to a friend in a short email, recorded the time and cast the chart.

My rational mind started to piece together what had happened. I understood it was a visitation from someone on the other side.

I have had several of these in my life and they have a feeling distinct from an ordinary dream — in particular, a sense of cohesion of the circumstances, and my full presence and awareness within the dream space.

On awakening I felt alert and clear, relieved to have seen him and aware how much I love him. I knew I was being given a gift of trust as well as voluntarily accepting a responsibility.

Even as a child of about seven, from the first time I heard the story of the events of the assassination — that JFK had been shot, that Lee Harvey Oswald, his purported assassin, had been killed two days later, and that the guy who killed Oswald was dead just three years after that — the whole scenario seemed ridiculous.

I didn’t know the word ‘cover-up’ but I intuitively grasped that both Oswald being killed and Ruby mysteriously dying were designed to prevent the truth from getting out. I remember being angry. I remember wanting the truth and being amazed that anyone could content themselves with anything less.

In the month since my experience of meeting JFK, I’ve gradually figured out that my response to his assassination helped shape me into the person I am. Part of that response includes not being fooled or intimidated by lies, no matter how grand the scale. And another aspect involves wanting to do something about it.

Not the Same Question Today

The message I have today, on the 50th anniversary of his death, is that the question of who killed Pres. Kennedy is a different one than it was in 1963, or even 10 or 20 years later. If you listen to pundits and broadcast ‘news’ reporters today, they ask the question the same way it’s always been asked. With half a century between then and now, we have a lot of context. That context makes it clear what happened next, that being half a century of nonstop war.

Lyndon Johnson wasted no time plotting the expansion of the Vietnam War. Meetings and top-level memoranda written on Nov. 23, 1963, a Saturday, with the dead president’s body still on the autopsy table, reveal what was on Johnson’s mind.

Within nine months, Congress would grant Johnson a blank check and total power to do whatever he wanted in Vietnam. Troop levels would immediately rise steadily, peaking at 543,482 on April 30, 1969. Nixon would expand the war to Laos and Cambodia.

War means the expenditure of countless billions of dollars, nearly all of which go to military contractors, enriching the banks along the way. The national wealth is pumped out of the people, and given to corporations that kill people all over the world.

There is no balance of power here. Every branch of government goes for it; all the companies that profit, from Microsoft providing operating systems for aircraft carriers to beef suppliers selling hamburgers to Halliburton, love it. War means millions of people killed, injured, orphaned and displaced, for the profit of private individuals. It’s always sold to us as a patriotic act of defending the motherland, not as a private (but government-funded) investment scheme.

I have no doubt that Kennedy saw the folly of Vietnam and would have brought the troops home after his re-election. He was not an interventionist and he knew from what happened at the Bay of Pigs, a disastrous attempt to invade Cuba, that his top military brass were a bunch of idiots.

To think, however, that Kennedy’s killing was merely about his plans to pull the so-called advisors home from Vietnam after he was re-elected does not take the logic the full distance. We can debate the point of what he might have done, but there is no debate about what happened next, by which I mean the next 50 years.

When I say that Kennedy’s murder was a violent coup by what Pres. Eisenhower, JFK’s predecessor, called the military-industrial complex, I am not theorizing. I am describing what happened in the following 10 years of the Vietnam War; then numerous coups and wars in South and Central America; the United States messing with the war between Iran and Iraq beginning in 1981; the first Bush war in Iraq in 1990-91, which lasted clear through till the second Bush war in Afghanistan; and Iraq from 2001-present.

Think about it. We have, directly or indirectly, been bombing Iraq for 33 years. The War on Terror has gone on for 13 years, with actions in countless countries; the War on Drugs has raged on, domestically and internationally.

The Vietnam War never ended. Even as those particular troops came home and everyone muttered ‘never again’, the United States waged war after war in remote parts of the world, under a succession of excuses, and continues to do on this very day. From Wednesday’s New York Times:

Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Wednesday that the United States and Afghanistan had finalized the wording of a bilateral security agreement that would allow for a lasting American troop presence through 2024 and set the stage for billions of dollars of international assistance to keep flowing to the government in Kabul.

I have probably read 50 times that “Afghanistan is not the new Vietnam.” That is correct. It is the new, improved Vietnam. Astonishingly expensive, impervious to protest and being fought for no reason anyone understands except to move cash through banks, conglomerates and military contractors, it has the added benefit of lasting forever.

As for international assistance? That must mean coming directly out of our paychecks.

What We Lost in JFK

Kennedy was a man with the independence, the guts and the integrity to stand up for what he believed was right, and to challenge what he believed was wrong. That alone was enough to create many enemies, and along with that, considerable confusion over who might have killed him.

It was the Mafia because he was against the Mafia. It was somebody’s husband because he fucked the guy’s wife. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, um, why exactly? Because Kennedy hated Cuba, which Kennedy had repeatedly refused to invade?

These theories are ridiculously short-sighted. In an article called Storm Warnings, published at this time last year, I described how Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby went up against the perpetual war machine, which decided they had to be moved out of the way.

His death was a resounding message that no future president should be foolish enough to ever do that again.

We often wonder why presidents always seem so lame, never able to get anything done or to stand up for any real principles. When Obama took office, one of my readers wrote to me and said that she thought it possible that moments after a new president was inaugurated, he was taken into a side-room by a couple of CIA officers, shown the film of the Kennedy murder and asked if he had any questions. Every president since Kennedy has certainly acted as if that’s exactly what happens.

So in a sense we lost not just the president but the presidency, in its expression as the president being the autonomous chief executive and commander-in-chief of the military. Today we accept that the president has little actual power, and that he’s heavily influenced by outside corporate forces and the shadow government. He owes little to the people who elected him.

The power structure that we live within — the actual full manifestation of the military-industrial complex — is so out of control that we all now assume that everything we type on the Internet or speak into our phones is recorded in a searchable database.

By whom? By an agency whose current function is to wage covert war, not just against some foreign enemy but also against the people of the country they are supposed to be protecting.

There’s a spiritual issue, though, that comes closer to explaining the core psychology of losing Pres. Kennedy. Many have noted that he was a father figure, one who was never replaced. Though there are other factors, one product of this has been the anarchy we live with today.

A Mass Psychology Experiment

Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Kennedy murder was the mass psychology experiment that it was. Something shocking was done, a lame or even totally absurd cover story was floated, and the endless war was begun.

The JFK assassination was not the invention of the Shock Doctrine, but it was its first full manifestation as a domestic event in the United States used against the domestic population. One momentous use of this device was in Germany in 1933 — the Reichstag fire. (I’ve been wanting to do a review of that chart for years, and the anniversary is coming up.)

As long as people are scared enough, the perpetrator can blame anyone and do anything. Though this technique has been used many times, there’s only one event in American history that stands up to the JFK assassination — the events of Sept. 11. The three days of speechless shock, followed by weeks in a stupor of disbelief, followed by a rearrangement of everything, make these events seem like matching bookends.

Sept. 11 was a military coup, which we know because as with the events of Nov. 22, 1963, the military took over. The MOs of both events are identical: the most shocking thing ever happens, someone who had nothing to do with it is blamed in 90 minutes, and the war rages on.

Then the true story is refuted, and either hardly anyone cares that much or hardly anyone believes it. Those who do are called conspiracy nuts.

I don’t have the answer for what to do about this, but I know that to find it, we must be a lot smarter, and shrewder, and more perceptive than we are. We need to personally take up the qualities we admired the most in our ancestor JFK — his guts, his independence, and his willingness to fully embody his role.

Most of all, though, we need to cultivate the hunger for truth and the refusal to believe lies. You might say that the lies make all of these turns of events possible, but they would be worthless if nobody believed them.

Lovingly,

Note, I have covered the astrology of the JFK assassination recently in two places — in my article Storm Warnings from two years ago, and in an edition of Planet Waves FM last year.