Conspiracy seems to have been with us from the get go. Anyone who has looked into humanity’s history cannot fail to note how this business we call "conspiracy" has been a central aspect of the great unfolding. I was trying to think of a piece of literature or an episode of history that was not tinged, as it were, with the stain of conspiracy on some level. I could not think of one really significant historical episode or novel or play. In fact, a great deal of our finest literature is about humans struggling against some conspiracy to achieve dignity—as in Henry V—or with the implementation of some evil scheme to gain personal aggrandizement at whatever bloody cost—as in Hamlet and Richard III or All My Sons or Absalom, Absalom.

That conspiracies exist is doubted only by the naïve. And today, of course, there are conspiracies on every hand. The apparent failure to "prove" that John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin King were the victims of a conspiracy has done little to make most people doubt that they were not. In fact, conspiracies are so common that the subject of conspiracy has become acceptable grist for the Hollywood movie mill.

Conspiracy, rapidly becoming a way of life, has already become, if not a socially acceptable tool of planning, at least a very commonly used tool. There are, of course, international and national political conspiracies on a daily basis. For example, just yesterday, it came to light that the army in Malaysia (the country of the embattled dictator Suharto) started the awful riots of last April in which hundreds, if not thousands, of people were killed and injured so that they could declare a state of emergency and initiate martial law.

And a growing awareness indicates that, in the world of commerce and finance, conspiracies are simply a way of doing business. Three examples of these: Microsoft claims that Netscape conspired to set it up with the Justice Department while Netscape is simultaneously claiming that Microsoft conspired to eliminate it from the browser business and dominate the Internet. Both of these claims are probably true.

Also, remembering that conspiracy is a crime, what to my mind is one of the most heinous crimes of the last two centuries is the perfectly awful conspiracy on the part of the international drug cartels known as tobacco companies to control the amount of the addicting drug, nicotine, they placed in their products. The most recent conspiracy to come to light in the general field of commerce, of which I am aware, is the conspiracy of several giant corporations—the Caterpillar Corporation being the best known—to rig their truck and heavy equipment engines to unlawfully pass our nation’s pollution tests.

To this sad but very partial list, we must add the use by all of these players of a phenomenon known as "spin doctors." A better name for these people, who are really very skilled magicians, would be Chaos Generators. The purpose of these men and women is to cloud the facts that reveal the conspiracies with layers and layers of verbiage and illusion.

The big problem with conspiracy, however, is not the conspiracies themselves, which include not only long-range efforts such as the one that has ensnared the President or the one which many people say killed Princess Diana, but the small day-to-day use of plotting to lay a trap, or the use of negative advertising which twists a fact or even makes up stuff for the purpose of damaging a person’s image or chances for success, of which I could give hundreds of examples…. The real problem, however, is not the individual incidents of conspiracy, but the overwhelming presence of this stuff. We are awash in the kind of energy that conspiracies embody. The everyday, almost casual, use of conspiracy planning and its obfuscating, glamour-generating energy—this is the problem.

When we really see what is at the bottom of conspiracy—or behind it, or in it, as it were—I think we will not be surprised at the prevalence of this phenomenon. What the growing prevalence of this kind of energy does is cloud human vision and undermine trust. It hides the light. It has the effect of making every interface, every human relation, whether it be with another human or with an idea, start from a place of suspicion. It undercuts our faith in truth and in our belief that we can know the truth and that it can make us free. We begin to doubt that justice will prevail. It brings to the forefront of human relations and makes dictums of the methodology of Machiavelli’s Prince.

With this stuff in place and growing as it is, you have a rather formidable veil lying between us and the light…. Creating this veil is obviously the purpose of conspiracy and, although one might think that the creation of the veil is the point of the conspiracy, it is not. The veil is in itself part of an even bigger conspiracy. I call this the Really Big Conspiracy. The Really Big Conspiracy is the ancient and relentless highly-skilled effort on the part of the forces of retrogression to maintain the illusion of separation and to thus hide the truth of our essential divinity and our unanimity.

How—you have to ask yourself—how could a group of highly intelligent men conspire to build and use a computer whose sole purpose was to determine whether the heavy industrial engine upon which it was mounted was undergoing a test for environmental pollution compliance? When the computer determined that the engine was undergoing such a test, it would change the air/fuel mixture of the engine so that the engine would pass the test. When the computer determined that the engine was not undergoing such a test, it would change the air/fuel mixture so that the vehicle—and we are talking about huge semi-trucks, tractors, cranes and so forth—so that the vehicle would use less fuel.

However, with this air/fuel mixture, the engine will produce an abundance of the hydrocarbons that we see and know as smog. Many of these hydrocarbons are known carcinogens and poisons that lead to lung and heart disease. With this air/fuel mixture, the engine would, obviously, fail the test.

These American corporations had engaged in this deliberate effort to circumvent the laws from 1988 until it became apparent in 1997 that the engines were failing the pollution compliance tests in foreign countries which used different methods for testing, thus making it impossible for the computer to detect that its engine was being tested. Only then did they get caught and stop the practice. Given the track record for conspiracy here, one would have to assume, had these companies discovered the foreign testing procedures before they were caught, they would have modified the computer so that it would work in the foreign country.

Why would these highly intelligent people do such a thing? They must know that we all breathe the same air, drink the same water and so forth. Well, the quick and easy answer is, of course, money, lots and lots and lots of money, and the stuff that money gets you—prestige, power, privilege, material goodies, houses, planes, yachts, jewels and luxuries … things beyond the comprehension of most people.

But the reason is actually much more subtle than that. There is a deeper, more insidious force than the apparent gratification of desire at work here. If you ask why power and money and material things are so important that they would make a person forget that if he poisons the air he is poisoning his own children, you will eventually come face to face with the ages-old force of the unreal, of darkness and death, with the great illusion of separation.

We know, as workers in the vineyards of the Lord (see, my trip to the wine country wasn’t for naught), we know that we must bring to light the fact of the 5^th kingdom. This is our overriding directive, our number one priority. However, in doing that, we are going to have to see and recognize the fact of the great illusion and bring it, too, into the light … bring its very real existence, too, to the attention of our intelligentsia. It is time for humanity to recognize this force, to see it and to understand the power it has over our minds.

Yes, power. Obi Wan was not fooling when he said to Luke Skywalker, "Do not underestimate the power of the Dark Side, Luke." The Dark Side—Humanity’s Shadow—the ages-old thought form of separation is extremely powerful. I have given one example; let me give another even more incredible example. Somehow, even though our scientists have demonstrated over and over again that we live all together in one very delicate biosphere … that we are, in scientifically indisputable fact, totally interdependent … that we either all live or none of us live—even though most members of the planetary intelligentsia by and large recognize these facts; even though, one could almost say in spite of, these rather obvious facts of life, and simply so that their profit margins will rise, people engage in long, drawn-out conspiracies to make nicotine addicts of our children … indeed, of their own children. For, whether one knows it or not, or likes it or not, all the children belong to all of the people.

You see, it is scientifically demonstrable that it doesn’t take a community; in point of fact, it is a community. Separation is, after all, an illusion and the community that is us either lives or dies as One. Now, the power that can cloud men’s minds so that they would do these things—destroy their own children, the rivers, the air—for money, for prestige, for privilege and exclusivity … this is the power of the great illusion of separation.

It is the power that has been behind the atrocities that have been committed by us on one another, usually within the context of an insanity known as war, over the centuries. These atrocities have, for the most part, been distant and easily ignored. However, as we grow the light, more and more of these things are being brought forward and are demanding our recognition and acceptance, like the Holocaust and the recently-brought-to-light slaughter of many millions of Chinese by the Japanese as reported in the recent bestseller The Rape of Nanking.

If we are going to be able to see the 5^th kingdom, we are going to have to pierce the veil of illusion and see these things. What they represent, as I have said, is the power of the forces of retrogression. These things are the results of the denial of the light. And they are really just small-time precursors of what is in store for us if we persist in pursuing the illusion of separation.

Sounds bleak … but as you will soon see, the revelation of so much darkness is a natural result of the rising of the light … besides, it is Scorpio, and in spite of what you may have heard about Scorpio being painful, it is the sign of humanity’s salvation because it is the sign which reveals the flaws in our efforts to evolve.

Time to see how we measure up.

I have a problem talking about Scorpio without getting into Aries, because it is what was going on in Aries that is of moment now in Scorpio. I know that it seems like Aries occurs in March/April, but Aries, as you know, is really a concept—it is a place in consciousness rather than a place in time. It is probably a magic word, too. That is, a word of power. I imagine that when God has his Plan together, when He thinks it is ready to come out of the eternal oven of nothingness and move into form in space and time, He says, "ARIES!" because every thing starts in Aries. If you can imagine an explosion that takes several billion years to happen and call it a big bang (a strictly local big bang, however), it would be Aries. We probably should have called Genesis "Aries". Aries is when local time begins, local worlds and solar systems start their long cycles of incarnation "down or out" through involution and "up or in" through evolution.

So, on an individual basis, what we have under the microscope of Scorpio, just now, are all of those seeds we planted last April. If we want to get a handle on what is going on at the moment in our lives, we need to try to remember what we were into last Aries. What were our plans, and not just the ones we talked about? Did you have any sort of undercover plans … sometimes called fantasies … maybe conspiracies … that you knew about but sort of kept quite about … sort of just dreamed about them, and they were probably not all nice and helpful?

It is amazing to realize just how much of what happens to us is the working out of these fantasies or, in some cases, actual conspiracies which part of our self is into making against the rest of our self. Thoughts truly are things. They are like little children, and the attention we give to them is what keeps them healthy and growing. And they can turn into wonders of beauty and power or monsters of darkness…. The Great Illusion is just such a thing.

These fantasy issues are, in addition to the life issues with which we incarnated, those goals and objectives we set for ourselves before we said "Aries!" or were born. The platitude, "Energy follows thought," suffers from being a platitude, but it is, friends, absolutely true. It is an indisputable fact. Everyone has heard of how Gray Davis started dreaming of being a Governor when he was a small child … well, here he is.

It has also been said that President Clinton dreamed of being president. These two cases, Davis and Clinton, could be considered examples of major life goals, determined by these two souls, perhaps, even before incarnation. Yet, if we were to take an inventory of how we spend our thought life, I think we would be surprised to realize how much of our thought time is devoted to the nurturing of our semi-consciously wished for desires and fantasies. Very often, it is precisely these fantasies and desires—and in some cases these self-destructive conspiracies, these daydreams—which are the pebbles or grains of dust that arrest the wheel of our plan for an incarnation, that damage or destroy the Soul’s best efforts. Need I mention our President again?

So, if there is some really weird stuff going on just now in your environment, look to the daydreams, the fantasies, the desire life.

Even if everything is "Jake" in your present environmental situation, which is highly improbable, look to your thought life. It is precisely there, in our thought lives, where we must become masters. This is possibly the major message that Scorpio has for us. Our burning ground is in the mind. It is what we dream and hope for that matters because it is what we dream and hope for that will manifest either as disaster or progress. Our salvation is also in the mind. It is the clear cold light. "The ‘clear cold light’ is the light of pure reason, of infallible intuitive perception…." (A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Volume V, p.38.) The "clear cold light," I might also point out, is thinking in the heart and is another name for love.

So, I have just mentioned our present little life, but we mustn’t forget those seeds we planted eons and eons or incarnations and incarnations ago in our original Aries. It would be most beneficial for us, and for those unfortunates who share our environments, too, if, through our hearts, we would all try to become a little more conscious of what we are doing in our heads, and if we would try to lengthen our sense of place and time to include more than the next two minutes.

Modern disciples need to do two things, right away: we need to develop a very much more conscious awareness of our thought-life, and we desperately need a longer, much longer range of vision, which includes a holistic comprehension of life…. In other words, we need to become group conscious ... right away, yesterday … let’s not put this off. It is very important.

Related to the importance of this issue is one of even greater importance. The tests of Scorpio play out on an individual and on a planetary scale. Just as there is a micro-Scorpio and a microscope under which to view it, there is a macro-Scorpio and a macroscope under which we can view it. The Big Conspiracy is macro-Scorpio stuff. But all of the nine tests of Scorpio, whether we are talking about a macro or micro situation, bottom line, deal with the Great Illusion of separation and with the Great Conspiracy to keep it in place.

No matter which of the three planes, physical emotional or mental, or which of the nine areas is concerned, the tests of Scorpio determine the ability of the individual disciple to discriminate between the dark and the light, between death and life, or, in a word, the ability of the disciple to pierce the veils of illusion which separate us from the light, to know the difference between the real world of unity and harmony and the unreal world of separation and illusion. This Christ demonstrated for us when he rejected the deal of a lifetime and told the Great Obfuscator to get behind him.

The key to breaking free is the ability to see the One. Seeing the One will be the pass through all/any Scorpio test ... the One in each One. This, of course, requires the ability to recognize the One, and, as we know, there is a big difference between seeing and recognizing.

The key to recognition is love. Let me be clear here. There is nothing wrong with affection and emotional warmth and good feelings of companionship and closeness, nothing wrong with "warm fuzzies" and so forth. However, those are not really the ingredients of love. Love is not feel-good stuff, not emotional at all. Love is "the clear cold light." Love enables recognition. It allows us to recognize what we see. It removes the "scales from our eyes." Love is the power that lets us know what is needed. Love reveals everything about anything … lays open to view all aspects of any thing’s relationship to all others.

When we send love to a brother, we are sending the ability to see the truth to that brother so that he may know the truth and set himself free. We say, "Touch our hearts anew with love so that we too may love and give." Love—Christ Consciousness—is the power that lets us know what to give. I ask, what does love mean? When I say, "I love you," and I truly do, what it means is that I see you exactly as you are … I know you as myself … and I know exactly what to give or "send" to you to heal, to enable, to lift, to liberate … to encourage you to set yourself free, for no one can set another free. Each of us has to do that for him- or her-self. It is what the Path of Discipleship is about … but that is getting into Sagittarius.

When we invoke the return of Christ to earth, we are invoking the ability to recognize, in the clear cold light, the One. We are asking for the veils to be rent from top to bottom. I suppose we all can understand why "Love governs the way into the life of the Hierarchy and is the foundation for all approach to, and appreciation of and acceptance of truth." (Ibid, p.46.)

Djwhal Khul has pointed out that, "The world today is in the throes of agony. Just as in the evolving Ego, the moment of greatest development is oft the moment of greatest pain (if apprehension measure up to opportunity), so in the evolving world. To those of you who have the inner sight and the intuitive comprehension [He might just as well have said, "To those of you who can love."] comes the opportunity to aid that apprehension and to lead a despairing world—deep cast into darkness and distress—one step nearer to the light." (Ibid. p.11.)

The great illusion blocks people’s apprehension of the presented opportunity. It fuels our fears and heightens the astral light so that we cannot see, so that we are unable to be, at all times, what we are at our highest and best times. The answer to this situation is love.

Humanity is facing a crisis, ladies and gentlemen, a crisis of courage. The issue before us, friends, is whether we can love enough and give enough to bring in the 5^th kingdom and dissipate, at last, by exposure to the light, the Great Illusion of separation.

I do believe, I think, that we can do this. I do believe that … Aries and Aries ago … we aimed our Selves to be here now, to do this work, to play this part in the Plan of the Really Great One. Let’s not disappoint our Selves or, through a bunch of getting and spending, become just new victims of the great illusion. We matter, and if we have the courage to love enough, we will make a difference.

This is the time of year when the old adage, "Beware of what you wish for," catches up with those of us on the spiritual path. We all readily invoke new light in Taurus, but few of us are ready for what that light reveals by the time Scorpio rolls around. Too often our Wesak aspirations have deteriorated into moans of, "Why me?" when Scorpio tests arrive and the light points out what must "die" for progress to continue.

Scorpio is the quality assurance monitor of the zodiac. In test after test, on the physical, emotional and mental planes, Scorpio remains a taskmaster until the separative, selfish will of the personality is completely vanquished. The good news is that we do eventually graduate from Scorpio’s need to test us, but only when the third initiation is passed. In the meantime, disciples need to remember that Scorpio’s tests are always self-imposed, even if we have temporary amnesia about having invoked the purifying process. The tests are not punishments or random torture. Rather, they indicate we probably have been doing something right. We have succeeded in attracting new light into our beings and have a new opportunity to rebalance ourselves on a higher level, by seeing and giving up whatever the light reveals as unserviceable.

Scorpio tests deal with all of the misuses of energy. The nine common culprits include issues with sex, money, power, speech, fear, hatred, cruelty, pride and separativeness. These tests can be particularly discouraging when an old weakness that we thought was behind us resurfaces. What probably has happened is akin to what we do when unexpected company calls and says they will be at our home in ten minutes. We make a mad dash around the house, gathering up all our junk, and shove it under the bed or some other hiding place. Once out of sight, it is easy to put these messes out of mind and neglect to deal with them. We tend to do the same thing in our psyches, cramming unsightly, unowned aspects of ourselves and unresolved problems into the shadows of our unconscious. However, when we are successful in bringing in new light, eventually that light demands the "space under the bed" and our messes are shoved right back out in the middle of our conscious living space for another crack at cleanup. Knowing energy will grow weeds even faster than flowers, Scorpio spotlights the weedy remnants of our Dweller. It tests whether we still can keep those remnants in check at a higher energy level. Scorpio, thus, protects us from bringing in too much energy before we can handle it constructively. We can console ourselves with the fact that no one escapes this progressive testing and cleanup process. We can bypass a lot of self-pity and procrastination if we accept the fact that were we to try and take our "messes" with us to the next level of energy, the messes themselves would get energized and be harder than ever to clean up. Clinton provides a wonderful lesson in this regard.

Can you imagine the pain of having your unresolved Dweller issues exposed to the whole world, or while that humiliation is going on, being expected to keep your mental focus steady enough to negotiate a Middle

East peace accord, deal with a world monetary crisis, salvage your family and get your cohorts elected to Congress.

Such excruciating tests of having to stick to one’s purpose, no matter what the circumstances (or one’s responsibility for those circumstances), provide hearty incentives to clean up our stuff as we go along.

Before castigating our leaders personal failures, we would do well to remember our oneness. Our leaders are not so different from us. They simply operate on a wider stage and a likely higher turn of the spiral, where exponentially more energy must be balanced. They are mirrors for the entire culture and show us what we all need to relinquish, if the Soul of the Nation is to reign. Much of the country’s desire to get Clinton’s transgressions behind us is likely Soul motivated. To the extent our intention is to move the country’s thoughtlife into more constructive channels so unworthy aspects can fade away through lack of reinforcement, the desire is sound. However, the country’s Dweller may favor the same strategy, in hopes our collective vices will simply be returned to the shadows and continue to run rampant, unhindered by the light of public conscience. Hence, the ongoing need for Scorpio’s relentlessly discerning attention!

Djwhal Khul has warned humanity does not have much longer to pass its tests, if a very dark time on Earth is to be avoided. On a more hopeful note, he states humanity is very near to the Path of Discipleship. Scorpio rules this section of the Path. For those who step onto the Path and develop group consciousness, Scorpio also becomes a conduit for a much higher energy–the potent, loving vibration of Sirius stepped down by the Hierarchy. Earth’s immediate fate may, thus, lie in the hands of disciples and aspirants. If we can face up to our "tests" by invoking the special energy available to us in Scorpio, we can help swing the tide now toward the fifth kingdom. All we need is a little courage to keep facing the light, and an acquired taste for recycling our garbage regularly.

Miki Webb
Scorpio 1998