“Knock, And He’ll open the door Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”
~ Rumi
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, commonly known as Rumi, was a Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the Islamic brotherhood known as the Mevlevi Order. His family hailed from Balkh. Rumi is an influential figure in Sufism, and his thought and works loom large both in Persian literature and mystic poetry in general. Wikipedia
Latin American Coming-Of-Age Celebration Dates Back To Triassic Period
Published: August 4, 2026 (TheOnion.com)
BOZEMAN, MT—Upending long-held beliefs about how the prehistoric reptiles commemorated a juvenile female’s transition into adulthood, new evidence published Thursday by researchers at Montana State University suggests that dinosaurs had quinceañeras. “As we examined fossilized footprints in a traditional waltz pattern at dig sites across multiple continents, it became clear that dinosaurs did in fact throw lavish 15th birthday parties for their female offspring, usually with friends and extended family members present,” said paleontologist Edwin Scanlon, who cited the prevalence of petrified las últimas muñecas in sedimentary rock layers and observed that the practice of holding a Catholic mass to mark the 15-year-old’s emergence into Mesozoic society appears to have been common among tyrannosaurs, diplodocuses, and other dinosaurs. “There is a quite well-preserved specimen of a young female iguanodon in a tiara and an elegant dress that features floral appliqué, sequins, and lace. She appears to have been dancing with her father at the moment they were both buried in volcanic ash 125 million years ago.” The discovery follows a study published last year that revealed how dinosaurs evolved the complex vocal cords necessary to chant Torah portions at their bar mitzvahs.
For those of you in your sixties and seventies and even beyond:
You may periodically get messages like the following, either subliminally or directly: “Your becoming is finished. What remains is arrangement. Tidy your affairs. Downsize. Distill your wisdom into digestible anecdotes for the young, who won’t listen anyway. Make your peace.”
I’m here to tell you that this is all a lie.
Here’s what’s true instead: You have more compost than anyone, 60 or 70 years of it. All of it has been breaking down in you this whole time, becoming the richest soil: every failure you metabolized, every love that ended oddly, every job that hollowed you out, every belief you had to abandon—plus all the glorious, gorgeous, generous stuff, too: the masterpieces you’ve crafted in the realms of art, intimacy, learning, and rigorous, vigorous living.
You’re not running out of material. You’re standing on a mountain of it.
And you now possess a power that younger people don’t have access to: You have less to lose.
The career or reputation or vocation you’ve been nurturing and protecting has already given you a lot of what it’s going to give you. The people whose approval you were angling for are either dead, irrelevant, or revealed as ordinary. The long apprenticeship in being palatable is over.
You are free.
Not free in some vague, inspirational-poster sense. Free in the specific, dangerous, operational sense of having little that you need to bargain away.
You can say the true thing at the dinner table. You can start the affair with the mandolin or the tide pools or the god you stopped believing in at 19.
You can become the disreputable elder who shows up with the wildest sign at the protest, who tells the family secret, who dyes their hair a color not found in nature, who falls in love at 74 with a preposterous intensity that embarrasses everyone but you.
Elders with nothing left to prove are a subversive force that our culture needs. That’s why the culture works hard to convince elders that they’re done.
I won’t insult you with the fantasy that your body isn’t changing. It is. Things hurt that didn’t used to. Maybe the dead have started to outnumber the living in your address book. You have looked directly at the fact of your ending, and you didn’t flinch.
Good. Now you know what a 25-year-old can’t know: that the ending is real, and therefore this exact Tuesday and this specific slant of light isn’t a rehearsal for something later. There is no later that isn’t also this. Mortality isn’t the thief of the present moment. It’s the reason the present moment is worth so much.
So no: The story isn’t over and you’re not in the epilogue. You’re in the part of the book where the protagonist has lost things they thought they needed and is finally, at long last, free to do ALL of what they came here to do.
You are still magnificently unfinished. You have simply been unfinished longer, and better, than everyone else.
The image is from the cover of a book by Eugene C. Bianchi: Elder Wisdom: Crafting Your Own Elderhood
Intellectual Deep Web May 29, 2020 James Hillman’s keynote lecture at a conference organized by the Center for Process Studies at Claremont University Center (1983). “The difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident.” ― A. N. Whitehead The Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, ed. by David Ray Griffin: https://amzn.to/3gEa1PR
Vietnam War U.S. troops wading through a marsh in the Mekong delta, South Vietnam, 1967. Brittanica.com
By Mike Zonta, BB editor (and ChatGPT)
Me:
In Vietnam, is it true that soldiers would throw a grenade into the tents of officers who had “lost it”?
ChatGPT:
Yes. There is solid historical evidence that this occurred during the Vietnam War, although it was relatively uncommon and should not be thought of as a routine practice.
The phenomenon became known as “fragging,” from the use of fragmentation grenades.
Fragging referred to the deliberate killing or attempted killing of a superior officer or noncommissioned officer by one of his own troops. Although shootings and other methods were also used, fragmentation grenades were especially associated with the practice because they were difficult to trace to a specific individual.
Why did it happen?
Several factors converged during the later years of the war (roughly 1969–1972):
Some soldiers believed certain officers were recklessly endangering their men through poor leadership or aggressive tactics.
Morale in many units had deteriorated as the war became increasingly unpopular.
Many soldiers were draftees who did not want to be there.
Racial tensions, drug use, and declining discipline affected some units.
In some cases, merely threatening to frag an officer was enough to change that officer’s behavior.
How common was it?
The U.S. Army officially recorded hundreds of suspected fragging incidents during the Vietnam War, with dozens of deaths and many injuries. Historians caution, however, that not every reported “fragging” was actually an intentional attack on an officer; some incidents were accidents or could not be conclusively solved.
Most officers were never attacked by their own men. Many were respected and admired. Fragging became notorious because it represented a profound breakdown of trust and military discipline, not because it was the norm.
The broader significance
Many historians see fragging as a symptom of the Army’s deteriorating cohesion during the final years of the Vietnam War. Military sociologist Charles C. Moskos and others have argued that it reflected the collapse of confidence in leadership in some units, combined with the unique stresses of that conflict.
The U.S. military took the problem very seriously, and after Vietnam it implemented significant changes in leadership training, unit cohesion, and the transition to the all-volunteer force.
So the basic claim you’ve heard is true: there were documented cases in Vietnam where soldiers threw fragmentation grenades into the quarters or tents of officers they believed had “lost it” or were endangering the unit. But it was an exceptional and highly illegal act, not a standard or widespread practice across the Army.
–Theo Barklem Biggs as soldier Joseph Ryland in Silent Witness, Season 14, Episode 6, First Casualty, Parts 1 and 2, speaking of his commanding officer who had just died.
“The position which he [Jesus] attributed to himself was that of a superhuman being, and he wished to be regarded as sustaining a higher relationship to God than other men. But it must be remarked that these words, “superhuman” and “supernatural,” borrowed from our petty theology, had no meaning in the exalted religious consciousness of Jesus. To him nature and the development of humanity were not limited kingdoms apart from God–paltry realities subject to the laws of a hopeless empiricism. There was no supernatural for him, because there was no nature.”
“All the social revolutions of humanity will be grafted on this phrase [‘kingdom of God’]. But, tainted by a coarse materialism, and aspiring to the impossible — that is to say, to found universal happiness upon political and economical measures — the ‘socialist’ attempts of our time will remain unfruitful, until they take as their rule the true spirit of Jesus, I mean absolute idealism — the principle that, in order to possess the world, we must renounce it.”
“The ‘party of order’ (I use this term in its mean and narrow sense) has ever been the same. Deeming the highest duty of government to be the prevention of popular disturbances, it believes it performs an act of patriotism in preventing, by judicial murder, the tumultuous effusion of blood. Little thoughtful of the future, it does not dream that, in declaring war against all innovations, it incurs the risk of crushing ideas destined one day to triumph.”
The Life of Jesus” is a book based on the idea that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical document. Renan attributed the idea of the book to his sister, Henriette, with whom he was traveling in Ottoman Syria and Palestine when, struck with a fever, she died suddenly. With only a New Testament and copy of Josephus as references, he began writing. The book was based largely on the Gospel of John, and was a scholarly work. It depicted Jesus as a man but not God, and rejected the miracles of the Gospel. Renan believed by humanizing Jesus he was restoring to him a greater dignity. “The Life of Jesus” promoted racial ideas and infused race into theology and the person of Jesus; the author depicted Jesus as a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, and that Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish influences.
August 2026 comes with 2 powerful eclipses: a total Solar Eclipse in Leo and a Lunar Eclipse in Pisces. The eclipse season is officially ON!
Eclipse season is – and you can quote Astro Butterfly on this – THE most eventful, life-altering, news-making time of the year.
And while some eclipses land more personally than others, there’s something about the collective atmosphere they create that we all end up feeling.
There are plenty of metaphors used to describe eclipses – from portals and thresholds to cosmic wild cards.
And while all of these are true, there’s something about the astronomy of eclipses that makes its core purpose clear.
An eclipse is, fundamentally, a reversal.
At a Solar Eclipse, the Moon overtakes the Sun. The day literally turns into night – at least along the path of totality.
At a Lunar Eclipse, the shadow of the Earth falls across the Moon, and the Moon turns red. The dramatic sight is a perfect metaphor for what happens when the Earth principle takes over the Lunar one.
Basically, at any eclipse, what is supposed to happen is overturned, overruled, and rerouted. Something that was not part of the original plan comes in to flip the script.
And while these reversals can look disruptive from ground level, from a larger perspective, they are realignments.
Eclipses are acts of restoration – call them karmic if you like – where things get recalibrated so that what needs to happen, happens.
No wonder eclipse season is so intense. The script changes, and life moves in a direction we may not have chosen – but is nevertheless needed.
In addition to the 2 powerful eclipses this month, August also features high-intensity Mercury and Venus aspects, as well as a rare, supportive Jupiter-Saturn trine at the end of the month.
But let’s take a look at the most important transits of the month:
August 6th, 2026 – Venus Enters Libra
On August 6th, 2026, Venus enters her home sign – and that’s good news, because when Venus is happy, everyone is happy.
This ingress, however, carries extra karmic weight. Venus will retrograde in October in Scorpio, return to Libra later that month, remain there throughout November, and only leave Libra on December 4th.
So pay attention to the themes that emerge around this ingress, because they may be the opening scene of a much longer story. What begins now may return, reverse, complicate itself, and demand a second look later in the year.
August 10-11th, 2026 – Venus And Mercury Activate The Outer Planets
Around August 10th-11th, Venus and Mercury begin firing aspects at the outer planets. This is one of the most astrologically charged clusters of the month!
As a basic astrology rule, the more exact aspects we have packed into a short window, the more eventful the astrology becomes.
Does it ‘help’ that all of this happens the day before the eclipse? YES, it does.
Just look at the geometry:
August 10th: Venus trine Pluto
August 10th: Venus opposite Neptune
August 11th: Venus trine Uranus
August 11th: Mercury opposite Pluto
August 11th: Mercury trine Neptune
Venus and Mercury activate the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto configuration we’ve been talking about since 2025, pulling our personal stories directly into the larger collective plot.
What was previously operating in the background now gets a tag: “Ah. So this is what it’s about”.
August 11th, 2026 – Mars Enters Cancer
On August 11th, 2026, Mars leaves Gemini and enters Cancer, and our actions become more emotionally driven, protective, and connected to safety and belonging.
To understand Mars in Cancer, think of a warrior – Mars – crossed with a crab – Cancer. This is a crab with a hard shell and a soft belly.
With Mars in Cancer, we take a “crustacean approach”, where we act tough as a defense against the fear that our needs and vulnerabilities might be exploited or used against us.
Mars in Cancer learns to read the room – very quickly – because it understands at a visceral level that there is danger out there.
Repeated again and again, what began as a defense mechanism becomes street smarts: knowing what to do, who to trust, and how to be in the right place at the right time.
August 12th, 2026 – Total Solar Eclipse In Leo
By far, the August 12th Eclipse is the biggest event of the month.
This is a Total Solar Eclipse at 20° Leo that will flip the script around who we are and what that means in the real world.
The Sun is our identity, and Leo is also our identity – not the instinctual Aries drive to exist, but the identity we wear on our sleeve: I’m a mother. I’m a doctor. I’m an artist.
When the lunar principle comes in and overrides the Sun, our conscious identity becomes flooded with unconscious material we were not aware of, had neglected, or had simply decided wasn’t that important.
But when the dam breaks, the dam breaks.
All those buried needs, desires, and truths come rushing through, demanding to be acknowledged.
The Eclipse cracks us open at an identity level, showing us what is crucial for our development and what MUST be integrated so we can become more fully ourselves.
The Solar Eclipse is trine Saturn, supporting long-term growth and giving structure to whatever is trying to emerge.
And there’s further support: Mercury is sextile Uranus, bringing breakthroughs and new perspectives, while Mars is sextile Chiron, giving us the courage to act on what has been exposed.
August 15th, 2026 – Mercury Conjunct Jupiter In Leo
On August 15th, 2026, Mercury is conjunct Jupiter at 10° Leo.
Think of the most confident, funniest podcast host you know – one of those people who can turn a random tangent into a great story and entertain us precisely because they’re a little bit audacious. That’s Mercury conjunct Jupiter in Leo.
And we can all borrow some of that energy. Say it bigger. Pitch the idea. Make the announcement. Tell the story as if it matters.
Big ideas, bold statements, confident decisions, and a louder public voice can amplify whatever emerged around the Leo Eclipse – giving it words, reach, and an eager audience.
August 17th, 2026 – Mars Square Neptune
On August 17th, 2026, Mars at 3° Cancer squares Neptune at 3° Aries.
Mars wants to act. Neptune dissolves the map.
When Mars squares Neptune, direction can feel blurred, energy may scatter, and we may struggle to tell whether what we want to do is realistic – or whether we’re picking up noise in the signal.
Is it intuition? Fear? Wishful thinking? A genuine calling? Under Mars square Neptune, they can all sound suspiciously similar.
The good news is that, on the same day, Mercury trines Saturn and Venus sextiles Jupiter. Mercury-Saturn brings facts, structure, and common sense, while Venus-Jupiter keeps doors open and people on our side.
So yes, there may be fog – but we’re not driving without headlights.
August 21st, 2026 – Venus Opposite Saturn
On August 21st, 2026, Venus at 14° Libra opposes Saturn at 14° Aries. Reality-check time!
Venus asks, “Do I want this?” Saturn asks, “Can this actually work?”
The Venus-Saturn opposition creates a negotiation table between the 2, where we are asked to define the terms and decide what is and isn’t sustainable.
Saturn challenging Venus doesn’t mean the end of romance, money, or all the good things Venus stands for.
It’s the moment when something moves from being a beautiful possibility – something that “makes us happy” in our imagination – to something that can actually exist in the real world.
August 22nd, 2026 – Sun Enters Virgo
On August 22nd, 2026, the Sun enters Virgo. Happy birthday to all Virgos out there!
Virgo season shifts our attention from the Leo “holiday season” back to work.
And by work, we don’t necessarily mean chores, obligations, or something we’d rather avoid.
Virgo is the kind of work that makes us focused, productive, and good about ourselves because something is finally getting sorted out.
If Leo creates, Virgo rolls up its sleeves and makes it work.
August 25th, 2026 – Mercury Enters Virgo
On August 25th, 2026, Mercury enters one of its home signs.
Mercury in Virgo is the only planetary placement where a planet is traditionally considered both in domicile and exaltation.
That should tell us something about how good Mercury feels in Virgo.
So if you have Mercury activities planned for late August and the first half of September – writing, studying, analyzing, or making an important decision – you’re in luck.
2 days later, on August 27th, the Sun conjuncts Mercury at 4° Virgo. This is the Full Moon phase of our current Mercury cycle – the moment when an idea or project that began around the July 12th Mercury cazimi reaches a culmination or becomes fully visible.
This can also bring a major shift in how we understand a situation. The missing piece clicks into place, the facts line up, and suddenly we can see what was right in front of us all along.
August 28th, 2026 – Lunar Eclipse in Pisces
On August 28th, 2026, we have a partial Lunar Eclipse at 4° Pisces.
This is a Lunar Eclipse – a Full Moon – so it brings something to a culmination. And because it’s a North Node Eclipse, this is not simply about closing an old chapter; it’s about being pulled toward a future we haven’t mapped out yet.
Things might happen unexpectedly – and unexpectedly fast. The Virgo side of the Eclipse is conjunct Mercury, while the entire Eclipse axis squares Uranus.
“Lady, if I told you, your mind would explode” – said Louis Armstrong, when a woman asked him what he thought about while he was playing his music.
And sometimes our minds need to figuratively explode, because our existing mental framework is exactly what prevents us from seeing what is really going on.
This Lunar Eclipse is not a time for letting-go ceremonies. A North Node Eclipse wants us to say yes to something – a message, a development, a possibility – even if we haven’t figured out the details yet.
This Eclipse is volatile, surprising, liberating – and once the information lands, impossible to un-know.
August 31st, 2026 – Jupiter Trine Saturn
On August 31st, 2026, Jupiter at 13° Leo trines Saturn at 13° Aries. This is one of the most constructive transits of the month – and, dare I say, of the year.
When Jupiter and Saturn – the 2 architects of the social world – agree on something, the rest is logistics. This is one of those rare times when vision and reality simply click.
On a personal level, we have both the confidence AND the discipline to build something lasting. And for once, the world – instead of placing another obstacle in our path – might actually cooperate.
When the vision is sound, the system says YES. When the structure is bulletproof, Jupiter gives us the confidence to take it further.
The result? Not just wishful thinking. Not just grim responsibility. A YES-YES-YES with an actual plan.
August 2026 is quite a month – several reports dedicated to the Eclipse season will follow in the next few days.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 3, 2026 Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. Rogow’s other books of poetry include Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music. His play Colette Uncensored (coauthored with Lorri Holt) had its first public reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; was performed in Berkeley and in London. Rogow is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the U.S.A., The Face of Poetry, from University of California Press. He has also translated two books by André Breton, considered the “godfather of surrealism”, Arcanum 17 and Earthlight, which won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Award for translations. In this video, rebooted from 2021, he discusses the history of surrealism as a movement influencing both painting and writing. Paradoxically, the surrealists emphasized the spontaneous productions of the unconscious and of coincidence or synchronicity. Yet, they developed a rather rigid social structure. They enjoyed playing games, and Zack shares some of his poetry expressing these games – as well as other poems from his book, Irreverent Litanies. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “Parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Thursday, February 12, 2021)
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