Life Is Suffering, The Afterlife – America The Fluke?

sin eaterI’ve got these intense transits to my natal Mercury at this time. I’ve trying to comprehend a number of things and string them together in a way that may be original. At the very least, my thinking is uncommon.

I feel this is my personal puzzle, since it’s hard to find people interested in what I am interested it. It’s also hard to make myself understood, and punishing when I fail at that.

I gather from my husband (and from his son for that matter), that my thinking is abstract…it’s too abstract?  I don’t know what to say about that. My thinking is  my thinking.  My husband sits around and makes up his own math. Is that not abstract?

In whatever case, I have Mars conjunct Mercury in the 9th house. I am bound to be interested (Mercury) in what people believe (9th). I am specifically interested in the action they take (Mars) because of what they believe.  And I like to look at the big picture (9th).

Today, people take action based on their beliefs. In the 1600’s, people also took action, based on their beliefs. In the 300’s they did the same thing. The beliefs of the collective have changed over time.  This is what captivates me.

I have been studying sin-eating for a number of months. I’ve made an vigorous effort (Mars) to discover sources of information that may be obscure, because come on!  Families felt compelled to pay a shadow figure in their community  to come in and eat a meal off the corpse of their loved one. They believed the sin-eater relieved the deceased of their sins, which allowed them to have a peaceful afterlife.

So what were they trying to avoid?  What’s a “un-peaceful” afterlife look like?  This depended on the time and the place.  Hell? Purgatory?  But some were trying to avoid being sent back to walk the earth again.  Think about that.

Today, the idea a person has multiple lives is romanticized.  “If I mess this up, I’ll just come back and do it again and again until I get it right…”

Big difference there. One population believes they have endless chances, and apparently, all of them merry and kind. The other population bends over backwards to insure they don’t have another go ’round. You have to admit it’s curious.

I finally had an opportunity to talk to my husband about this. He’s got a lot of knowledge.

He feels that America is a fluke.  We’ve had it made here for this short amount of time, but if you look throughout history, around the world, life for most has been little but suffering. So of course they want to graduate!

I thought this was interesting. Maybe you agree.

source of illustration

28 thoughts on “Life Is Suffering, The Afterlife – America The Fluke?”

  1. Avatar
    fairhaven maven

    It IS interesting, Elsa. I love your “Big Picture” ramblings. What could be MORE interesting than trying to figure these things out?

  2. Looking deeply into things so you can string them together in an interesting way is something I relate to. I live my life that way as well. My cultural roots (Kanaka … Hawaiian) are ancient and to live a contemporary life with America, requires digging deep to remember the beliefs that are sustaining. Stringing things together is what I find MOST interesting about this life. America is a very new country balancing on a very fine tip(ping) point.

    It’s a great time to be alive to experience the sorting out; and the stringing together is what makes life a very interesting story.

  3. i totally agree with your husband! it is a fluke. i really don’t want to come back, but i feel there is a good chance i might. so i am really trying to make things right with people like my leo sister. it’d be easy to cut her off but what if we come back and it’s worse??

  4. I agree with your husband. And, I’ve been trying to string together this financial mess the world is in to get a fix on where we are now. Lotsa history books, lots and lots. I think he’s dead-on about the fluke part, however, the US is seen by the rest of the world as the place to be, to strive for, the least risky, most solid and our minds have the freedom to invent. Even with our wheels falling off, the US is still all of what I said. That’s my 9th house speaking, I think, it’s so jammed with planets. So many of them are Rx that I’ll probably be pronounced dead then snap back.

  5. I feel that it’s America’s destiny to be a strong country for centuries. Yes, we’re not perfect and yes we might even fall, but yes we will also rise back up. I don’t feel America a fluke, but I also understand what your husband is saying. I feel America a gift from the universe.

    As for sin eaters, now THAT’S something my Gemini and Capricorn would love to read about! 🙂

    As for afterlife, I believe we come back to different places because everyone makes different choices. Some come back as a starving kid in Africa, some come back to the same/similar place. And don’t come back, but transcend to another dimension, with many more levels/dimensions after that.

    Just a belief/opinion.

    Great post by the way!!

  6. Avatar
    handsome jack

    As far as what an un-peaceful after life must look like, or what hell or purgatory must look like, I would point to a bad lsd trip I did when I was a teenager. It was so intense, so real, and there was no escaoing it as I took it around with me.

    As for reincarnation, I know I am reincarnated. My earliest memory is not of this world, shall we say.

    Whether we choose to come into this life and to what circumstances, I would have to say no.

    What I can be positive about is that we continue from our past life to a certain point. Its our attitudes, beliefs, opinions that somehow survive. You might say something of our previous personality.

  7. The material abundance here has been a fluke. However I don’t agree that it comes without suffering. It’s not material suffering, but that in itself sets you up for other kinds of suffering brought on my gluttony, sloth etc. The source of suffering is the desire for things to be another way. If you have a full belly and roof over your head the desire transfers to wanting more of it so you never have to do without. Or a roof in a better neighborhood. If you are not too materially inclined it migrates to intellectual achievements or emotional connection that fill you, and secure you so you never suffer again.

  8. sin eating? thats so weird that i’d be interested in hearing more about. . .

    as far as the fluke thing…. well, all big empires fall at some point. so did athens, so did rome. and i truely believe, it is already on the way out and whatwe are seeing is only the desparate attemots to hold on to what once were the glory days.

  9. I have Libra Mercury in the 9th along with my sun, & I like the Buddhist view which incorporates karma and past/future lives, but also that every moment counts.

  10. For some reason, last night I decided that I needed some new information…like I had been ‘missing’ something… I found this interesting article…
    http://www.zaporacle.com/a-gnostic-view-of-mind-parasites/

    Sort of dark stuff…but I can’t be ignorant and completely avoid the dark…especially if that darkness feels like it’s still a ‘part’ of me.
    I was reading this article off and on when I could during work…afterwards I went to see a movie on my own called ‘Pacific Rim’… in the trailers, and the film.. I felt I had sort of more ‘opened’ eyes to what was REALLY being presented in front of me…very strange…like a huge message of any dark currents underneath humanity…or something..there’s veil in need of being lifted for me…I can’t quite fully understand just yet, but like you Elsa it’s putting these puzzle pieces together.

    hrmm anyway… it’s seems unlike me to be doing research HAH.. but I suppose that’s a good thing!

    Cool Article Elsa – not sure how much I had added to it…or if my comment was relevant enough!

  11. They’re interesting topics; I’d struggle to find anyone to talk to about them too though. Funny how so many people like to read about these sorts of things or go to movies about them, but finding someone to actually talk to about it is a challenge.
    I’m not excited about coming back but realise I probably will. But I also know that however I see it or understand it from this perspective, is not how the part of ‘me’ that will determine the next stage will see it or understand it. Hard to comprehend from this earthly plane that all this suffering is just a blip or something; relative.

  12. Elsa, I don’t find your thinking dark or strange…but then I have a Mercury Rx in Virgo as part of a large stellium that includes Uranus and Pluto. I am thinking ALL the time and writing ALL the time. During Mercury Rx periods, my brain is smoking with thoughts and I am typically writing deep convoluted things *but my brain moves faster than my fingers can type. Sometimes during Mercury Rx I get writer’s block for a bit because I cannot articulate all the thoughts (no one around to really go that deep with) and then I think much faster than I can possibly type and I feel like if I tell all the epiphanies I have in my head…lol they will lock me up somewhere.

  13. Whats interesting if you believe in multiple past lives is that WE, our very souls, could very well have been the ones who didn’t want to come back to Earth again and clearly we failed and now some of us love the idea of it 🙂 Maybe life is just an acquired taste 😉 You know I used to hate coffee and never wanted to drink it again and now I go to starbucks twice a day. Maybe life is like that, just a bit more complex.

    @jGibney are you talking about forehead wrinkles? I can’t imagine anyone having 70 of those!!

  14. What astonishing courageous honesty you have Elsa. You and your husband and the Buddha agree: “All life is Suffering” is the First Noble truth of Buddhism. Maybe Buddha was a 9 h Pisces, Globalizing the belief (9h) that all is suffering (Pisces).

    America is not so much a fluke, I think, as the era of fossil fuels is a fluke. And I have to say that I think the audacious, optimist faith in each other at the heart of the American democratic experiment should be separated from the materialistic madness that has infected us.
    I don’t know the astrology, but some evil progression from the best of Jupiter to the worst feels more like this stage of the American experiment.

    And a species that has no faith in each other is not a species long for this world.

  15. America’s not a fluke. Nor is having the blessing of being born or living there. Actually i feel it’s been a blessing for all of us. No it’s not without failure and guilt, but when you think of all the links between individuals and the whole and the inter relating countries, well what a fruit salad. Organized Chaos. Yes we come back. Happy about it? mm..don’t know about that, like everything life has it’s blindingly beautiful moments and it’s crucifying pain also. All part of the journey.
    Is it fate or free will? I say it’s both. Balanced out over many lifetimes and blended in with what others are doing. Giant mish mosh far too delicately incrypted for my little brain to calculate.
    Britain was for so many centuries a power beyond reach. Who would have forseen her dwindling star. Rome burned and the unbeatable gladiators and the great scholars of Greece passed into history also. America as all great empires, will pass into history also. But my how brightly she shone.
    I get chills to think i messed it up. For me it means i have to come back and go through it again and pay my karma..Ouch. It also means i screwed it up for someone else and that means the whole bigger picture is less brighter because i let the team down.
    Interestingly my country, Australia, has a Capricorn Sun, and yes we have pluto transiting. In capricorn we have many structures here, goverment control(the nanny state) and policy mad, we are wealthy beyond imagination compared to everyone else. Red tape takes on a ridiculous meaning over here. But we are all very well looked after. Free education, free medical, mass systems to support the public, financially supported retirement, financially assisted..pretty much from birth to death. I live in a very lucky country, was it a fluke? I think not. I do my best to serve universal law, do my bit, and live a life of gratitude. I do not think our beloved America will be going anywhere in a hurry. Not in this lifetime. She was a generous and gracious leader. She has many friends. She is much beloved by far too many. We will come to her aid when called.

  16. “I feel this is my personal puzzle, since it’s hard to find people interested in what I am interested it. It’s also hard to make myself understood, and punishing when I fail at that.”

    This really resonates with me. I love finding the patterns and solving “puzzles.” I have a friend who has a Gemini Sun, Moon, and Mercury, and even she said to me one time, “WOW. You really ARE in your head, aren’t you??”

  17. Avatar
    handsome jack

    About ‘sin eating’. It suddenly occured to me to mention the ‘cargo cults’ of the pacific islands. Just for the cheap seats at the back – the cargo cults were a product of the allies in the second world war and what the natives beleived what was happening and why it happened. Basically, the allies would build an airstrip on an island then planes would start landing packed full of western goods (would not happen now as the west does not produce anything much). The planes would unpack and fly-off. The natives began building their own runways with towers that would have their men with flags waving at the end of the runway. The idea was that it was the runways, the towers and having men with flags would magically produce planes from thin-air and deliver goods to them.

    Could sin eating be a form of this? The action and magical thinking will produce the result.

  18. Not waitin around or rushing towards an afterlife or next life. Heaven on earth is where it’s at now. This is it. No beginning, no middle, no end. Just now in the continuum. The rest just confuses me. Neptune transits on the horizon.

  19. Elsa, reading your stuff reminds me of a group of intuitives (typology-wise) that I get together with to just talk/philosophize. All abstract, conceptual, big-picture type thinkers. We had our monthly meeting tonight, and I just love it 🙂

  20. Have you read Dr. Brian Weiss’ “Many Lives, Many Masters”? Do you take or do yoga? Try Kundalini. I never really thought about reincarnation until the past decade and now I’m a total convert. Basically because of my own relationships and the fact I knew I knew my ex-husband in another life way before a psychic told me. I told him from the start his ancestry was Cajun French from New Orleans. He always said No. A psychic told me we lived together in New Orleans before and I was the man … blah, blah. Anyway, yes, life is suffering. And it’s not so much that we come back because it’s merry as it’s what our soul requires to learn. An old wise crone told me I’ve lived 86 – 100 times before. Now when I pray to God I ask him to allow me to fulfill my dharma, because I haven’t decided if I want to come back again. It’s only when we’ve cleaned all the karma and fulfilled the dharma that we get to choose. P.S. I’ve always called “retirement” graduating 🙂 Some other interesting reading is “Glimpses of Heaven” by Trudy Harris.

    1. More relevant every day! Cultural beliefs — heaven, hell, karma, reincarnation, void, whatever — can’t help but influence interactions on both individual and global levels.

  21. Just today I was wondering if my country can still call itself the UNITED States of America at this point.

  22. When I read this again, it triggered a memory. Shiny Taurus was fascinated with the concept of the sin-eater at the end of his life. Saturn and Pluto were passing through his 12th house. Last year he wanted me to ask you about sin eaters, I guess to learn more since it’s a topic on the blog.
    He would watch The Green Mile, and Coffey’s suffering as the sin eater resonated with him for some reason. Maybe he felt he was taking on others’ suffering and that’s why his health was so bad?

    1. There is a Heath Ledger movie on this theme, I’ve not seen (yet).
      There is also a 2022 movie called “Sin Eater” which I don’t think I will see /horror and it looks awful.

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