The purpose of life is to become a wise lover.
How? By becoming timelessly present enough to see through the veil of personality to the soul’s divine intent, then shrewdly assessing the way this ageless innocence gets twisted by ego on its way out into the world, and how we might magnify their blessings even as we inspire, by our own wise-loving actions, a cleaner translation.
This mandate to see through the veil of personality to soul-intent applies equally to the persona of the planet: the tumbling veil of me-stories we so blithely refer to as “the news.”
Is media-consumption an extension of our soul-seeing practice or has it devolved into a cynical ego-hardening ritual?
Are we falling for the collective “trait bait” or are we demonstrating unshakable faith in the divine play?
A healthy news-watching practice
Time to pause the video and ask:
Am I being a half-hearted detective, voyeuristically absorbed in the antics of smelly egos? Or am I digging deeper to the golden shadow: the unborn, undying presence trying so desperately to shine through?
Notice:
Screams of profanity and hatred provide flashes of adrenaline-induced no-mind. A crowd lost in a trance of vitriol and rage achieves quasi-communion via the intimacy of shared aversion.
Is this violence or reverie? Maliciousness or crude stabs at union?
Note for fridge: Malignant commenting seeds cacophony of war.
The key to a healthy news-watching practice is remembering: opinion (right or left) unventilated by the Merciful Witness, is grim atheism.
Could deep breathing moments in front of an angry screen be the urgency-generating practice we need to see past orphaned ego to eternity-with-eyes?
The good news: There is no better month to divinize our newsy practice!
October is brimming with benevolent Trines and forward-moving opportunity. Whatever we radiate returns to us as a rich harvest.
The focus now is on vision, dreams and spiritual needs: How we can embody them more fully and how can we weave them into our Libran relationships?
The Two Weights
A delicate balance is possible now, providing we work with the two weights: lamentation and praise.
Oh Mother Mystery, this sober dying makes no sense. That’s why you douse me in radical emptiness.
On one side of the Libran scales is reckoning, repentance and grief. On the other side: communion, praise and baptism into the holy instant.
Clearly, neither sobriety or intoxication, individuation or communion, is the answer.
Which side of the scale tips heavier in your life?
What happens when the impulse to give thanks with abandon is repressed? When the glorifying part of us gets constipated and goes putrid over time? When our dream-animal nature is denied and we live mythically malnourished, pacing behind the bars of the explicit and banal?
What happens when we refuse to wholeheartedly flush ourselves of grief? When heartbreak over this mosh pit of archetype slaves is numbed into oblivion by attention-fracturing texts and online infotainment?
How can we balance what is never fully owned, embodied and felt?
A messy, presence-soaked soul accepts: heartbreak and Halleluja are two halves of the same thing. They restrain and temper each other.
Getting off the Heroin
For the sake of the millions of minds hooked on the heroin of “gift with no wound,” or “wound with no gift” may we embody a more psychedelic, category-confounding option:
Unhurtable Presence with cheeks for tears.
I once asked my favorite dharma teacher, What is the core suffering? Her eyes turned misty as she replied, “When the dream turns solid.”
Bottom line: We are all Bodhisattvas. We cannot in good conscience, mystically eject without taking as many souls along with us as possible.
Sober immersion in the matrix loves to be counterbalanced with intoxicated Inter-Being and, to the extent that the scales tip hard to one side or the other we make a mockery of faith through “idiot compassion” or blacken the world with stone-faced gravitas.
The trick is to remember who we’re talking to.
Mind-on-a-countdown is inherently depressed and outraged at its existentially orphaned status. The powers that be know this, so they co-opt our “shepherding presence hunger” into hunger for a horizontal herdsmen (politician) who, when his or her feet of clay are exposed, keep the masses disillusioned, compliant and controllable.
Better to wrestle prayerfully with our own flawed authority and raise our fists for a worthy prime minister: the seamless field of sentience.
October 6th Full Moon in Aries:
The death of Beliefism and the resurrection of a pray-able god
Widely square to Jupiter, this Full Moon ignites “difference of belief” in a way that calls into question the validity of belief altogether. The New Moon in Libra on the 21st then offers an elegant solution.
Mercury is in muckrakey Scorpio most of the month, conjuncting Mars in Scorpio in a compassionately confrontive grand water Trine involving Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter. This holy intervention culminates on the Oct 21st New Moon in Libra and extends all the way to the end of the month.
With Pluto in Aquarius now direct, a lonely, society-wide paradigm is breathing, imperceptibly shallow, on its deathbed. It will require great spiritual faith to release that final breath– delivered, perhaps, by the exact Saturn/Neptune conjunction on Feb 20th, 2026.
Imagine plopping a soul down in the dirt with no nuanced and accessible soul-map. Who could honestly trust in, and prayerfully commune with, such a god?
Was the Church’s suppression of umediated contact with the divine at play in each other’s planet-fashioned face the beginning of our numbing to the personal face of God?
Could working with our divinely assigned birth chart be the bridge between “God as timeless presence” and God as a pray-able personal ally?
Closing Prayer
Lay down some twigs on those smoldering embers
of prayers you forgot, but your childhood remembers.
C’mon, just let a spark wander into the sky.
Doesn’t even matter if you lie.
Mama’s gunna make you feel like crying out for something real.
Mamma’s got some time to heal that robosapein mind.
-Hunter Reynolds
October Transits
Oct 6th- Full Moon in Aries
Oct 6th- Mercury enters Scorpio
Oct 13th- Last Quarter Moon in Cancer
Oct 13th- Venus enters Libra
Oct 13th- Pluto goes direct
Oct 21st- New Moon in Libra
Oct 22nd- Neptune retro into Pisces
Oct 22nd- Sun enters Scorpio
Oct 23rd- Jupiter square Chiron
Hunter Reynolds
linktr.ee/hunterji
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