Sometimes feeling overwhelmed is a good sign. Under skies like these, to feel overwhelmed means we’re not shut down. Personally and globally, late July and early August should raise urgent questions in every one of us. The Full Moon on 7/25^th and the New Moon on August 9^th (see the lecture series announcement in the right-hand column) are bookends to an explosive two weeks.

The oil rig holocaust gave the collective mind a definitive image with which to illustrate the Cardinal Cross period. The boys at BP, bless their villainous little hearts, have made millions of people think about the relationship between Planet Earth and the life forms She supports.

Big truths are afoot — truths that we have collectively failed to process, or even admit to — about the kind of world we’ve created for ourselves. It’s a world where we’ve given our power away to nonhuman profit-generating entities: corporations. It’s a world where addiction to soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur ooze is almost universal. It’s a world where newborns have 180 man-made chemicals in their umbilical cords. It’s a world where life-and-death realities like these are still pushed to the margins of media discussion. They’re not considered as important as “politics.”

How bizarre it is that the fate of the Earth isn’t at the core of all public discourse. You’d think planetary survival would be the first thing any serious aspirant for public office would address. But with the exception of the Greens, party platforms prefer to focus upon personality politics and Barbara Boxer’s hair. Instead of choosing between leadership visions, citizens choose between deeply insincere contenders in auctioned-off-to-the-highest-bidder elections. Cheering on our guy while condemning the other guy is imagined to be our highest expression of social consciousness.

This approach to collective life may have passed muster in the Eisenhower ’50s, but it would be deadly to hang onto it now.

Pluto’s square to Saturn in Libra is making clear that most of the political and economic ideologies now in use are anachronistic and irrelevant. This shouldn’t surprise us, given that they date from a pre-ecological mindset. As the Zeitgeist movement points out, socialism, capitalism, neo-liberalism and colonialism all buy into a common  illusion: that we can go on exploiting the planet’s resources forever and ever, like a spoiled child who hasn’t yet learned the concepts of karma (Saturn) or balance (Libra). Even the most sacrosanct ism of all — nationalism — will have be reexamined if Earth is to survive.

The corner of the Cardinal Cross that involves Jupiter (ideology) and Uranus (acceleration) suggests that we don’t have time to spend a few decades tweaking our favorite old belief systems. And for there to be a shift to new beliefs there must be a shift in collective thinking about what it means to hold beliefs in the first place.

The long square between Pluto and Uranus forms the core of the Cross that coalesced this summer, and it will endure several years beyond it. Under this square, our 19^th-century-style perspectives will lose their credibility, clearing the stage for post-millennial ways of looking at things. The trouble is, of course, that the old isms are taken so seriously by their adherents — and no less so by their detractors – that, for most people, alternative viewpoints seem downright unthinkable.

A profit-driven society like ours doesn’t put a lot of stock in ethics or philosophy. We aren’t encouraged to use this part of our mind creatively. Instead we learn to align ourselves with some kind of  team in a public competition, like sports or party politics, and parrot its vocabulary. In the USA, this boils down to a war between consensually agreed-upon pairs. You are supposed to be either for capitalism and against socialism; or for communism and against democracy; etc. It is stunning how reductive the public conversation has become.

Issues of huge moral and global import — such as the fact that the USA is pumping more money, not less, into its aging weapons infrastructure – are discussed, if they are mentioned at all, solely for the purpose of attacking or applauding one or the other side of America’s political duopoly. Rather than responding with human feeling, with intelligence, or – goddess forbid — with simple common sense, the great problems of our day are labeled in terms of which party’s administration they’re happening under. Problems of international scope are labeled in terms of whether the country in question is an ally or foe of Washington. (For example, when an adulterer is stoned in Iran, it makes the headlines of US papers; but when it happens in Egypt, there’s nary a tut-tut).

As a stand-in for our own lack of imagination, we have created a pundit culture whose talking heads reflect this binary worldview back to us. We get no more surprises forthcoming from Glenn Beck and whoever he’s debating this evening than we get from a meal at McDonald’s. Watching these faux-debates on TV has the numbing feel of witnessing punch-drunk fighters stumble through their last round, aspiring to nothing so much as to not fall down.

Whether it’s liberals-vs.-conservative, labor-vs.-management, East-vs.-West or some other pair, none of the conventional debates leave room to confront the most relevant reality of all: that the planet is in peril.

The horror in the Gulf , as well as the mass poisonings from gold mining in Nigeria, unchecked logging in the Amazon and a multitude of other devastations that go on every day everywhere on Earth, are the results of an approach to the environment that has become the norm. The collateral damage to flora, fauna and whole ecosystems caused by offshore drilling, strip mining and other industrial abominations are not aberrations. They’re factored in, as “acceptable risks,” by the corporations and by the consumer-populace that allows them to happen.

It is disingenuous of us to act all incredulous when we hear of an accident at a nuclear facility like Chernobyl or at an offshore oil rig. Such events are not merely probable; they are inevitable. This is what karma is all about. You put something out, you get something back. This is the message of the Saturn corner of the Cross.

The level of consciousness that has allowed humanity to tolerate ecocidal insults such as these has reached a dead end, and so have the ideologies that allow us to ignore them. As ecologists already know, there is an infinitude of bold new ideas out there – e.g. renewable energy potentials like solar, tidal, geothermal, that exceed current energy consumption by thousands of per cent – that are only kept back from implementation by the dead weight of the old paradigm. The years between now and 2023 are intense enough to bury it.

Those of us who were born into these years were meant to use the creative minds and the wise hearts Nature gave us. In living through our charts, we put them at Her service.

I know I’m not alone in feeling perversely gratified that the oil has made its way to the white sands of Florida. Certainly I wish no ill to the local tourist industry, any more than I wish more suffering to befall the fishermen in Louisiana (who, screwed and angry, are calling the compensatory pittance BP has offered them “shut-up money.”)

But there is a bitter justice in the fact that the slick might become visible in Pensacola. It feels just that more and more humans will have to see the desecration up close.

Normally we can get away with pretending our waterways are not being poisoned, day after day, by industrial pollutants, because the toxicity is relatively invisible. And we can defer thinking about the occasional catastrophe when we hear the anchormen say, as they did after the 2007 San Francisco spill, “The oil is floating well away from shore. Nothing to worry about. It’s headed out to sea.”I say, bring on the tar balls. Let brown streaks leave their mark on white sand. Let sludge ruin expensive sandals.

We have upped the ante so high on our tolerance for the intolerable that it took a trauma like this to rouse us out of our complacency. We cannot look away.

We are watching more than an oil slick spreading. We are watching a sea change in our thinking about human civilization. The insults to which our society submits the environment are being seen by many people as if for the first time. The public has been watching TV reports for two months now about the horrors created by “Pandora’s well,” as geologist Jill Schneiderman calls it. People are hearing that it has turned marshland into dead zones. They are seeing photos of oil-soaked pelicans suffocating on the sand.

Over the two years that Uranus (rude awakenings) has been opposite Saturn (big business) there has been a shift in how people define corporate accountability and social acceptability. With the DeepWater incident this trajectory has crested. There is a mythic quality to the disaster; everything about it is larger than life. This is not surprising, given that when the disaster began, Jupiter (exaggerated size) had moved into a key position in the sky. The big gas giant, whose dark side is excess, was conjunct Uranus (explosions) and opposite Saturn (failure) when the rig blew up.

Negative Jupiter manifests as hubris. The ambitions of the oil-drillers – who are still operating a dozen other deepwater rigs of equally fatal size, right now, lessons unlearned – were all out-of-proportion to common sense. It is now well known that BP did not subject its stupendously ill-advised project to even the barest minimum of testing or planning. Misused Jupiter leads to puerile recklessness.

The oil company’s petition to drill was riddled with short-cuts and flat-out lies. As Naomi Klein has observed, in BP’s assurances to the feds of how little risk the drilling would entail, they talk about Nature as if She were a predictable, agreeable junior partner; sort of an unpaid subcontractor. After the explosion occurred, they scrambled to put together clean-up strategies that were so astoundingly ineffective they’d be comic if they weren’t so hideously tragic. The spirit behind these failed fixes, even their names, seems to derive from a bad action movie. Top kills, junk shots and laser-directed robots with diamond saws? It sounds like little boys dreaming up cool comic-book rescues. Goddess forbid the oil executives would admit, even now, that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Through its malfeasance in obtaining the green light to drill, its incompetence in safeguarding the operation, its botched efforts to clean up the mess and its dishonesty in spinning the disaster to the public, BP is embodying the skewed perspective that allows these disasters. That is, the blind imperiousness of unfettered corporate power. Their approach expresses contempt for the safety and welfare of living systems, and an oblivious condescension towards Nature Herself. The world is bearing witness to the all-around cluelessness of the unbalanced Masculine.

The Cardinal Climax is upon us. Pluto, planet of subterranean (and submarine) riches is now T-squaring Saturn (responsibility) and Uranus (revelations)/Jupiter (global implications). Together they have ushered into the group mind a blowout drama that is bringing up many urgent questions at once. From the point of view of consciousness evolution, these questions are the reason this had to happen. The disaster has triggered an unusually emotional public response. People are viscerally engaged. They are thinking about the role of cars in their lives. The phrase “oil addiction” has been coming up a lot.

Many have started thinking differently about water.

There is a growing sense among the populace that if a bay is fouled miles away, our personal relationship to water is accordingly compromised. From an ecological perspective, this is a literal fact; and clean water is fast becoming the most precious resource on the planet. More people die from polluted water every year than from all forms of violence, including war.

The physical and esoteric meanings of water parallel each other. We learned in biology class that humanity’s ancestors were single-celled sea creatures, and that all waters find their way eventually to the sea. On a symbolic level, water is the universal matrix from which we all arose and to which we will all return.

To assuage the anguish that the clean-up crews and the oil companies and the government have failed to assuage, we can press into service, right now, the symmetry between the physical and the mystical meanings of water. As astrologer Adam Gainsburg and other supporters of the Unity Wave have suggested, one way to spiritually engage with what is occurring in the Gulf is to connect with the waters of our bodies. Such an exercise can help us come home to the universal matrix that water represents, to resonate with it, to pledge allegiance to it. This ritual promotes a healing that is appropriate to the injury at hand.

Since April 20th I have heard many people say that they feel the Earth has sustained a gushing, bleeding wound. This image is pure Chiron, which has been conjunct Neptune (the collective unconscious) for two years now. At the moment of the explosion, Chiron had just entered Pisces, the most universal of the water signs, for the first time in 41 years.

Because it departs so uncomfortably from our psychological assumptions, Chiron is one of the most problematic symbols in astrology. It dares to propose that although human pain is a fact of life, when we follow its lead fearlessly pain becomes soul medicine. Understanding this distinction between pain and suffering, which is also essential to Buddhist thought, is the key to Chironic healing. (If we miss it, we’re in the same boat as the student of Pluto who reads death/rebirth as merely death.)

The Gulf disaster is one of those learning moments for humanity, created by the group mind. It has escorted us into the summer of the Cardinal Climax, a season long heralded as a time of revelation.

The planetary patterns of 2010 and beyond are astounding.

This summer we are feeling the approach of the long-anticipated square of Pluto and Uranus: the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross. As the angle between these two celestial heavyweights becomes more and more exact, the potential increases for the people of the world (Uranus) to realize how much power (Pluto) we have.

The transits of the Cardinal Climax period have no counterpart in recent memory; but as a point of comparison, the 1960s were a harbinger. Those years of tumultuous consciousness growth occurred when Uranus and Pluto were conjunct in the sky, and now they are ninety-degrees apart (if the sixties were the New Moon, now we’re in the First Quarter). We should expect a similarly raucous breakdown of old ways.

But the stakes are higher now. Since the last big Uranus-Pluto aspect the people of the world have grown into big boys and girls. We have been through the sexual revolution, the discrediting of the Mother Church, and the tech revolution. We are awake to what’s happening to the rain forests. The wars being waged are of a new, state-less kind. We are less naïve about the financial cartels that control the world economy.

We are ready to embrace our responsibilities to a planet in peril, and wake up to a new kind of freedom, against the backdrop of the dawning of a New World Age.

What a time to be alive.

The first and second lectures in my series of lectures on the transits surrounding the 2012 years is available now, by CD or digital download. Please see box at right for more information.

A decade ago when the millennium was freshly hatched, Pluto (dirty secrets) was on the Ascendant of the USA chart, opposite Saturn in Gemini (official stories). A major threshold for the country and the world, that period was when the worms started crawling out of the can. Information about the Enron scandal trickled out from the nooks and crannies of the world of finance into the headlines. Bush & Co’s many lies oozed out of their hiding places.

Now it’s too late for worms crawling out of cans. That’s too slow. It’s no longer about trickling and oozing. Revelations are coming out in geysers. (Did you see the video of the oil gushing out of that pipe in the Gulf? A violent blast of spewing black poison, the oil companies are delicately describing it as a “leak.”)

As the 2012 era takes shape, the configurations in the sky, and the worldly events that represent them, are growing increasingly urgent. With planets intersecting in angles this tense, their energies act like a pressure cooker. To get our attention the cosmos is pulling out all the stops.

Now we’ve got hurricanes, volcanoes and tornadoes, thousand-point-in-one-day stock market drops, riots in Greece and Thailand, regime change in England, and the most devastating oil spill perhaps of all time.

April 20th ‘s fatal blast in the Gulf of Mexico happened under a sky that featured Saturn (business as usual) exactly opposed to Uranus (explosions), which is moving into position with Pluto (hidden power) for their long-running square. Ceres, the asteroid of the Earth Mother, conjoined Pluto, the despoiler, in the sign Capricorn (corporations) within a degree.

The fact that this was no ordinary oil spill became clear right away as the disaster moved through several quick meaning changes in the public mind: from that of an accident brought on by the failure of a mechanical device, to that of an example of how government fails to regulate oil companies, to that of an entire system where corporate interests are allowed to commit travesties against Nature.

The rig explosion coincided with the entry of Chiron (wounding) into Pisces (oceans) that very day. Horrified TV viewers saw aerial photographs of the blue sea turning into a conflagration of toxic crude. According to a report cited by Al Gore, the sheer size of the befoulment amounts to an Exxon Valdez every four days. The mind reels. The heart recoils.

The negligence leading up to the accident appears to be so gross that one might expect the company in charge to be out of business in a New York minute … if that company were any other than Halliburton. But that’s whose careless work cementing the oil well is being blamed — by BP America (talk about the pot calling the kettle black) — for the disaster.

The rogues’ gallery on display during this latest phase of the Saturn-square-Pluto period include Big Oil and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, who stand accused of environmental desecration; and, at the hearings in Washington, the Goldman Sachs boys, who stand accused of gaming the financial crisis for personal gain like weekend gamblers on a tear. Like all archetypal figures, these characters are a reflection of the group mind. They mirror back to us the toxic greed of the capitalist world.

At first the media tried to make hay out of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The infotainment industry is, like our Wall Street gamblers, amoral. Their job is to focus on what viewers enjoy, and box office numbers tell them that the public enjoys fireballs. So the first response of the news programs was to milk the calamity for its sensationalist appeal. But the media bites its tongue when the dirty secrets percolate to the top. Such as the evidence unearthed by astrologer Eric Francis showing that the spill occurred in a marine dump area (Pluto governs dumps and garbage): a body of water whose secreted depths hid unexploded bombs and torpedoes.

This is the latest in a series of blistering scenarios whose cosmic intention is to wake us up to what’s at stake. As revelations about the cartels that pull the strings in our world percolate to the surface over the years ahead, it will be increasingly obvious that conventional media channels, while very good at framing a certain version of reality for their viewers, are very bad at revealing truth. To make sure we have the clear sight we will need, we must keep our distance from polluted information streams.

Just as we would recoil from taking a drink of the water around that oil rig right now, we should back away from the stream of disinformation presented by the corporate news.

If we look for it, there is plenty of clean information around; and when we read it and see it, our minds start to revert to our healthy instincts and natural ability to think clearly. What is particularly exciting is that, during the couple years that Saturn has been opposite Uranus (popular uprisings), the cultural climate has been favorable to groundswells of genuinely grassroots activism.

The bigger their numbers and the more aware they are of what’s going on, the more difficult to ignore ordinary people become. We can expect the Uranus-Jupiter conjunction this summer to inspire groups which express the zeitgeist so aptly that they are covered by the media in spite of itself. Such as the righteously appropriate and commonsense idea that Reuters picked up on at the New Moon in May: the Seize BP Campaign is demanding that the US government seize the assets of BP — a company that rakes in $93 million a day in profit — and use them for compensation and damages. Demonstrations took place on May 12th at the company’s offices across the USA.

I am putting together a CD lecture series on the milestone transits surrounding the year 2012, configurations that are too charged and complex to give justice to in a blog. The first of these discusses the Lunar Eclipse on June 26th, which features seven planets in a Grand Cross — all backed by the power of the summer solstice.

The planetary messages that occur between now and 2015 deserve all the attention we can give them. We do not need to know “what will happen,” on a literal level, over the years ahead; indeed, we cannot. But we can know what it will mean.

The 40th anniversary of Earth Day this week falls under a Saturn-Uranus opposition.

One more milestone in the 2012 period, the exactitude on April 26th marks the 4th of five times that Saturn and Uranus reach that magic 180-degree angle in the sky. The first time was November 4th, 2008 — remember that day? — and their last will be July 26th of this year. This transit is about accepted norms (Saturn) shattering (Uranus) like concrete blocks in an earthquake. All over the world, stasis is being confronted by the necessity for radical change.

Most people’s first response to hearing things like this is “Will the changes be good or bad?” But such evaluations aren’t what this is about.

What it’s about is waking up.

Uranus splashes cold water in the face of our complacency. And when we consider that Jupiter, too, will be in the mix from 6/10 to 1/11, we’re talking about an even more dramatic scenario. We’ll get the cold water and, at the same time, an alarm clock going off – the old-fashioned kind with a clanging bell.

Uranus is associated with surprises. But what it is calling for here is more of an acknowledgment, by suddenly aware individuals, of what we already know.

In this epoch the old ignorance defense does not fly. We are drowning in data by the hour; with tweeting, it’s by the minute. We have exponentially greater access to more intelligence than at any other time in history. So why do we need this extraordinary cosmic alarm right now? Because a fatal gap exists between the realities we vaguely know about and those we’re fully awake to.

Let’s talk about one of these realities: consumerism and the fate of the Earth.

One of the visionaries stepping up to the plate during these critical years is Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Movement, whose comprehensive video lays out, point by point, the reasons why our current approach to Earth living is unsustainable.

Consider oil, that nasty black goo whose coveted status causes such suffering to humanity and such harm to Gaia. It took Nature 60 million years to create a gallon of oil; and once dug up and used, it can’t be used again. Yet under the current system we neither preserve it nor put anything more than negligible efforts into replacing it with healthy alternatives. Instead we allow those in charge to waste precious time and resources chasing after more soon-to-be extinct dinosaur slime. Almost every country in the world is scurrying around trying to find places to drill. Our own dear Obama has just opened up new coastal and wilderness areas to the oil companies.

This makes no sense. But that’s the way it is with addiction. Our extreme dependency on fossil fuels has kept us in a mindless stupor, which is why the cosmic alarm clock is set at such a high volume. Our goal should be that of the sleeper who wakes up instinctively, just before the alarm clock goes off.

This means recognizing the all-encompassing scope of the change required. We can’t do this piecemeal. If we want to fend off global systems collapse we’re going to have to see these issues not in isolation but systemically.

Substituting a hybrid for a gas-guzzler isn’t enough: it’s about recognizing the role of fossil fuels in every nook and cranny of our lives. Like food. As the locavores have been telling us, there are ten calories of hydro-carbon energy behind every calorie of food.

And money, an equally charged issue. A lot of people lapse into fatal peril just thinking about it. Finances are related to the first and second chakras, those of survival.

It will probably take a series of sustained economic blows to shock the populations of industrialized countries into connecting the dots between the specter of ecocide and the monetary system now in use. It is already generally understood that consumerism is not cool any more. But most haven’t thought through the implications of it all. If we did, we would end up with the question: What’s the likely end result of a profit-driven global economy based on continuous, incessant consumption, on a planet that has finite resources?

Rapacious consumerism isn’t just a random lifestyle choice: it’s integral to the global system. Using up resources as fast as possible is the goal of the business model in use worldwide. If people didn’t use things up and then replace them right away, the market economy would fall apart. Buying, not saving; spending, not conserving; consuming, not recycling, all keep the GDP booming and the stock market up. This translates to a way of life that is antithetical to ecological health.

Yet the word “ecology” didn’t even exist for previous generations, and now it does. Over the past few years, here and there across the globe, green consciousness has been making inroads. People have read about Big Oil pulling the plug on the electric car. They realize that this season’s fashions are designed to be discarded a year later. They have figured out that their electronic gadgets are built to break so the manufacturer can preserve market share.

So the challenge here is to acknowledge, in a new way, what we already know. This will be an immense leap for many to make; which is why both Uranus and Pluto are necessary ingredients of the Grand Cross forming above us. That these two titans are squaring Saturn (status quo) simultaneously is a function of how steep the learning curve is. Battering rams (Pluto), buckets of ice water (Uranus),  blaring alarm clocks (Jupiter)… the sky is hauling out everything in its arsenal to wake us up.

The world will change very fast over the years ahead, and each of us has the capacity to grow in awareness right along with it. Or, ideally, just ahead of it.

In the end, that’s why all this is happening.

If you tried to invent something to symbolize the Aquarius conjunction that’s been dogging the US Moon for a couple of years now, you’d never come up with anything more perfect – in a perverse kind of way — than what actually happened. Up in the sky Neptune (universality) has been orbiting alongside Chiron (healing) and Jupiter (reform) in Aquarius (medicine). Boom: health care reform.

Now that Jupiter has sped ahead and left the conjunction, the reform piece seems to have dropped out: it’s just Neptune and Chiron again. As the transit wafts along into its third year, it’s time to take stock of some of the other dimensions of its symbolism.

Neptune is about illusion: it teaches that things are never as they appear. As a Buddhist truth, this is pretty unarguable. But in the absence of spiritual maturity, the fullness of the idea doesn’t translate; and we get stuck in the transit’s dark side. We become vulnerable to deception: a crippling (Chiron) of our ability to discern the real from the unreal (Neptune).

There is nothing wrong with stagecraft per se, of course. When it’s used consciously, it becomes an art form. But when stagecraft is not seen as such by its audience, negative Neptune takes over. This is what’s happened to  American politics.

The agencies set up to inform misinform instead, with a mess of flashy distraction and deliberate lies. The bills that pass are the results of bought-and-paid-for politicians brokering backroom deals. The national conversation has all the dignity of a food fight in a grade school reformatory.

But these are symptoms only. As a fever can be symptomatic of a whole-body disease, the corruption and ludicrous incivility of America’s current political discourse are symptomatic of an all-encompassing social illness. To arrive at an understanding of it, we need to float up above the fray and cop a planets’-eye view.

From the moment we turn off the TV and leave the propaganda behind, we see in the health care debacle a set of meanings very different from those received wisdom has conferred upon it. First of all, we see a bill apparently rooted in GOP principles — in that it’s market-based and eliminates any chance of buying insurance from the government — that the Democrats passed and the Republicans unanimously stonewalled. This should be our first signal that there’s something fishy in how it’s being served up.

Before the propaganda went into full swing, it was clear that the majority of US voters wanted a public option. Democratic politicians – who are billed, per the script, as champions of the working stiff — appealed to this majority in their campaigns. Once elected, however, they did a little bait-and-switch number: they changed the plan to one that would subsidize the insurance companies, claiming that they lacked the votes for a public option. The fact that they still had a clear majority was empirically verifiable; but they shamelessly refused to hold a vote to prove it. The truth is, of course, that these guys had just raked in record-breaking amounts of campaign money from the insurance industry, just as their counterparts across the aisle had. Towards the end, drug companies were actually hunkered down with the Dems in unpublicized meetings, lending a hand to help the bill pass. But the public didn’t see this part on TV.

What the public did see was what they’ve been trained to expect: the ol’ two-teams-mixing-it-up trope, displayed with increasing degrees of acrimony. Like TV wrestlers breaking fake rebar over each other’s heads for the amusement of a boozed-up crowd, the Democrats and Republicans are putting on a show. Health-care, like many another high-profile issue, has been presented as a rousing, nasty, “Left-vs-Right” match. But if we want to learn anything from the Neptune (drama, masques) transit, and that of the Cardinal Cross, we need to look beyond this cartoon narrative.

No way did Republican politicians truly believe the bill was “socialistic.” They knew quite well the opposite was true. But they were pledged to the script. As for the Democrats, at the same moment that Obama was declaring the bill a victory for “ordinary working folks,” in another part of Washington the insurance execs, who had just been promised 32 million new customers, were throwing themselves victory parties.

And the show goes on.

As suggested by the Pluto-Saturn-Uranus T-square, the reasons for this charade go as deep as we dare to look. The multi-billion-dollar spectator sport that is American politics is designed to distract the public from the singular truth of US society: the one Jim Hightower was referring to when he said, “The true political spectrum in this country is not right to left but top to bottom.”

Most Americans are so brainwashed by the Right-to-Left narrative that they can’t imagine asking any other question except Should the bill have passed or not? But the partisan madness surrounding this issue, orchestrated to compel our undiluted attention, is not where the meaning lies.

The meaning lies in the fact that our politicians are funded by corporations through the lobby system, and that the media is too.

To overlook this fundamental fact in all the culture-war hooplah is to lose sight of the power of these times, as signified by the most critical of current transits, the epochal Cardinal T-square. Once sucked into the narrative of the powers-that-be, we neglect to ask the trenchant questions. This happened to the tea-party bunch, who had their script handed to them by Fox News, and obediently transformed themselves into a vicious mob. And it happened to the “Anyone-who-doesn’t-back-Obama- is-a-traitor” liberals, who likewise accepted the terms of debate that had been dictated to them.

Either too dumbed-down by the way issues are framed to ask Qui bono? or so dispirited that they zone out in angst, most Americans neglect to use the power of their minds to repudiate the nonsense, the power of their votes to throw the bums out, or the power of their numbers to demand reforms of public benefit.

But the era is demanding that we address the fact that the country is a plutocracy. It’s a fact that we’ll either be subsumed by or do something about.

On April 6^th, Pluto will station at 5 Capricorn (monetary systems), exactly opposite the US Jupiter. This should be a pivot point in Americans’ understanding of their depression-a.k.a-recession. But Pluto is still being squared by Saturn from the US midheaven (official agencies), an aspect that brings out fascistic tendencies in ruling elites; in this case, not so much our nominal authorities, but the power behind them: the bankers.

The Uranus piece of the transit picture is the wild card. This is the planet of The People. It is still opposed to Saturn and getting ready to explode into Aries. Uranus is showing up as citizen dissenters of every stripe, from the informed to the brainwashed, and we can expect the action to accelerate. The tea party folks will keep turning out in their clean white athletic shoes as long as Fox News keeps calling Obama a socialist; peace activists will keep filling the streets in their frayed jeans as long as most of our tax bill goes to the Pentagon.

The 16-year-long saga of Pluto in Capricorn is showing us what makes the money wheel go round; particularly in those countries whose Suns receive a hard hit (e.g. the USA, China and England). Each time there is a peak point along this trajectory — such as Pluto’s station next month, the Uranus ingress in May and the Grand Cross in June — those citizens who can stomach it will glimpse unsavory truths about the workings of money and power.

The US public has not, in the main, been quick to grasp the dark realities that their financial crisis has disclosed. In the American mind, a certain apple-pie nationalism (Cancer Sun cluster) is conflated with free market capitalism. But the years ahead will sorely challenge sentimental anachronisms. Americans who thought they were getting apple pie might find four-and-twenty dead blackbirds in there instead.

But the Cardinal Cross years will offer tantalizing material for those who like to ask questions. Such as: Who runs the Fed? What is the Fed? How many Congressfolk with the power to decide whether Wall Street should be regulated were/still are Wall Street insiders themselves? What happened to all that bailout money? And who comes up with the jobless figures they put on the news?

We are now hearing that the US economy is getting better, though the job situation is getting worse. Is this not a very odd pairing of ideas? It seems to mean that things are looking up for everybody except those who are out of work.

My guess is that the savvy spin-meisters who cook up gems like this for the newscasters to disseminate are all too aware that we, the rabble, don’t really know what “the economy” means. That is, we know in a general way; it has to do with the country’s money, right? But to declare that Things-are-getting-better-but-not-for-the-jobless presumes that “the economy” is a thing apart from each citizen’s material well-being. Whatever these “things” are that are “looking up,” they apparently don’t have anything to do with our job status.

So what does the economy refer to? Does it mean what the stock market is doing? Does it refer to something The Fed did — that arcane institution whose surreal powers and unfathomable purposes are unknown to all but insiders?

Propaganda, a dark expression of the only opposition in the US chart, is a curious thing. If it works, it’s invisible (Pluto): that is, it isn’t seen for what it is by its target audience. (Exception: advertising. The public cheerfully accepts attractive disinformation campaigns if they’re designed to sell products; all’s fair in the free-enterprise game. But even in this case, the law of propaganda prevails: the most effective ads seduce us into thinking they’re not lies. As in “Maybe if I buy that jar of goo I really will look ten years younger.”)

In the current cultural climate, if a public figure were to identify as propaganda the official pronouncements about the economy that we hear from news anchors and the White House, she’d risk being smeared as a conspiracy-theorist-wingnut-socialist-moonbeam [that last one is a slur from 40 years ago that the Right has resurrected to defeat Jerry Brown for governor of California]. And probably a traitor, to boot. This is because conventional wisdom dictates that one’s own country cannot, by definition, engage in propaganda (except in wartime; in which case it’s patriotic and called “intelligence”). Propaganda is what the Other Side does.

But the things-are-getting-better-but-not-for-the-jobless oxymoron is a classic example of in-house propaganda, designed to throw us off the scent and to deactivate our ability to think. By contrast, there is plenty of uncensored information to be had, if we look. Such as the studies that report the percentage of US unemployed to be closer to 20% than 10%.

We need to discern point-of-view in order to spot the difference between propaganda and clean information. And if we want transformation instead of power plays, we need to eschew the propaganda. These transits reward the courage to spurn easy lies. Pluto’s knife is cutting beneath the crust of appearances, giving us the power to turn breakdown into rebirth.

This is the part of the nursery rhyme where the birds begin to sing.

We are in a rare window of opportunity right now, and it’s available to anyone with an imagination.

Neptune (image-making) and Chiron (universal pain) are conjunct in the sky. Saturn (status-quo reality) and Pluto (breakdown) are square each other within a degree, and Uranus (radical change) is moving closer in, intensifying the T-square. Jupiter too, will join the fun in April. What a time to loose the bonds of our minds.

If we believe that consciousness precedes manifestation, this is our chance to prove it. It’s about letting the imagination soar to places beyond the here-and-now, and then beckoning the here-and-now to follow.

John Lennon conducted this sort of thought experiment through songwriting. Like all great artists, he hit a collective nerve. He wasn’t the first to come up with the ideas in “Imagine,” and he won’t be the last. He was reiterating archetypal longings (Neptune): hopes for the human condition that have been expressed across the reaches of time, in prose, poetry, and prayer. Even old Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged them: “I think that people want peace so much.” he said, “that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

But visions like this have an enemy: misused Saturn. That is, the consensual picture of “the way things are.” If we allow this picture to take on more realness than it deserves, it stifles the imagination. We must remember that Saturn doesn’t represent the absolute truth: it just establishes a shared construct, so the group psyche will have something to cohere around. If we aren’t careful, before we know it we’ve entered into an unspoken agreement with our society to pretend that what “Everybody knows…” is the last word in what’s so. That’s when we do violence to a subtle part of our being.

The misuse of Saturn limits our aspirations and enforces dead-weight conformity. Genuine Saturn does not squash dreams; it builds them. But when the Saturn force is abused – either manipulatively, or out of ignorance – it keeps us from putting our energy where our hearts know it should go.

This is the main pitfall spiritual seekers need to be wary of when it comes to working magic in the societal realm. On the face of things, Saturn governs nuts-and-bolts notions like “common sense” and “practicality;” but in common parlance such concepts are often just used to obstruct. They are hauled out to shoot down creative impulses; as in “You can’t launch a software revolution in your garage, Sergei; it’s unrealistic”. Or they are used to deny or delay evolutionary processes (Pluto); as in “Senators, it’s unrealistic to change “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” right now”.

I propose we reclaim Saturn, using it as it should be used: to steady ourselves, so that we can open up to the rest of the 2012 transit picture. We must ground ourselves in positive Saturn before we do anything else. This means getting out of denial. What else is “realism”good for?

At the same time, we need to reject the low-level versions of Saturn floating around in the mass mind. This means approaching notions of what’s “normal” with a cool, crisp skepticism. If high-level versions of Saturn were being used instead of low-level versions, we’d be measuring cultural ideas in terms of their effectiveness and stabilizing effect — rather than because they provoke volatile emotional reactions from crowds.

Consider the way America uses its money. Here’s a nice down-to-Earth topic, one that suits Saturn’s penchant for statistically verifiable facts and figures. A high-level use of Saturn would hunker down with the actual financial realities, and make pragmatic decisions based upon them. Rather than, say, indiscriminately thwarting any and all changes to a hideously unworkable system such as for-profit health-care.

We can always count on a certain sector of society to use Saturnine slogans as a smokescreen: “military preparedness,” “safety,” “homeland security.” But we are living in a historical moment in which the power of the human mind, infused with spirit, can defy these mendacious old con games.

Can you imagine what would happen if Uncle Sam withdrew its troops from everywhere on the face of the Earth where they have set up camp? (Osama Bin Laden had something like this in mind when he issued his three conditions for peace with the Arab world, though few Americans paused to even consider them. Whether or not you believe him to be a madman, his bullet points were and are unarguably sane.) We’d be out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and all the other places that don’t get as much press: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Columbia, et al (and oh yes, now perhaps Yemen. Is it not astounding how casually the Yemen thing is being discussed? As if: What’s one more war?)

What would a high-functioning collective Saturn make of this situation (its placement in the USA chart, at the Midheaven, has this potential)? I propose that it would go about building the most efficient policy it could, first of all availing itself of all the relevant information.

Such as: that the military costs US citizens $720 million per day.

How remarkable it is that, in the ceaseless public debate about how the USA spends its money, this most critical bit of data is never referred to. If it were mentioned in the mass media, do you think our excitable pundits — the guys who sputter with indignation over “unchecked federal spending” when it comes to healing the uninsured — would be blithely tossing around the idea of invading another country? If the staggering amount of money that goes into these wars were openly discussed, isn’t it likely that a lot of Americans would say to themselves, “My goodness, what a lot of money we could save if we didn’t spend it that way”?

Of course, it is hardly an accident that facts like these remain unmentioned. The brainwashing of the populace by the US media is part and parcel of the old system. The long arm of the media supports the body politic. The public is both denied the facts that really matter, and deluged with factoids that do not matter. The flood of distracting non-information that pours out of the average American TV set effectively erases curiosity; to the point where we don’t know what we don’t know. Ignorance (negative Saturn) and dis-empowerment (negative Pluto) are two of the themes being hammered into group awareness by the 2012-era transits.

This is where the metaphysical perspective becomes critical. Folks with no taste for petition signing or agitprop can skip that level, if they choose. They can work directly on the energetic plane. Others may choose to work on several fronts at once. The important thing is that we repudiate the false cultural narrative and take back the power to define what is real. Then we allow the precedent-shattering outer-planet energies to course through us.

This kind of imagining brings on paradigm shifts, which fill us with power. On the personal level, we may discover that our minds have changed about what’s realistic and what isn’t. We may decide that dedicating our time to gorgeous bouts of creativity is practical, because the energy it generates feeds even the material aspects of our lives. We may decide that the ritual of sitting on a park bench for an hour, just us and the birds in the quiet of the morning, is not just uplifting, but sensible; in that it does more for our health than pumping our paycheck into health insurance.

On a collective level, this shift could manifest as populist movements motivated by life-enhancing, rather than life-destroying, social visions. It is already becoming obvious to a critical mass of people all over the world that ideas once derided as naive are in fact the most workable solutions of all.

Such as the idea of funding peace instead of war. It’s common sense.

As Saturn moves backwards down the ladder of early Libra, it is now returning to an exact conjunction with the Midheaven (top-dog status) in the Sibly chart of the USA.

Saturn authorizes things: it names people and entities to positions of authority. In this placement it is submitting the country’s corporate and moral leadership to an exacting redefinition process, clarifying who bears the staff of state. At the same time, Pluto (corruption) is continuing its long, slow opposition to the collective Sun-Jupiter-Venus conjunction (ethics and values) . The square between them is showing us who really sits on the throne in this kingdom.

It sounds like a cliché, but it must be said: This is a battle (T-square) to the death (Pluto) for the nation’s moral (Jupiter) core.

The Eclipse of January 14^th, which took place as Saturn was stationing, was in Capricorn (the sign governed by Saturn). Last Thursday, after the stunning energies of the week before had prepared the ground, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that allows American corporations more rights than they have ever had before. The transits that showed up in Haiti as crumbling physical edifices (Saturn) and mass physical death (Pluto) showed up in the USA as the crumbling of the edifices of a government: another phase in the death of this democracy.

Layer by layer, the full meaning is being revealed of the USA’s Pluto in the 2nd  house (money) — the signature of plutocracy.

Our government’s perfidious lobby system has long been in place, as a corrupter of the legislative process; and  Wall Street’s crimes suddenly became front-page news two years ago when Pluto entered Capricorn and the karma of capitalism crashed into public awareness. But once Abramoff had been packed off to the slammer, the headlines forgot about K Street. And when the pundits announced that the recession was easing up (Nothing to see here, folks; just move along), we were to believe that the free market had staggered to its feet. A show of closure was performed last week when the titans of the finance industry were trotted out before the TV cameras to mumble semi-apologies into microphones.

It is clear that the powers-that-be have every intention of trying to cover up the rot at the core of the system, rather than digging it out to allow healing to begin.

Now that the Saturn-Pluto square is in full gear, we are seeing a new kind of national sacrilege: the cherished American notion of “free speech” has been pulled into the slime. The ruling last Thursday auctioned off US elections to the highest corporate bidder; not merely effectively (Pluto) — as it has always been –but explicitly (Saturn in Libra: through rule of law). Far more destructive to the republic than the strident warnings that get big news coverage — such as the complaints of tea-bag patriots or the name-calling of alarmist pundits — this judicial act re-defines (Saturn) the empowerment (Pluto) of the larger-than-life business entities to which Americans have vouchsafed their commonwealth.

The corporations have been given new life, but they have been given none of the responsibilities that go with life. Companies like Bechtel, Bank of America, Monsanto, Exxon et al are allowed to live and grow and sue for their rights, like humans; but they can’t go to jail. Should they be fined, their immense wealth will protect them from financial danger.

Moreover, unlike humans, they are held by neither a social nor a moral imperative to “do right” (Pluto opposed US Jupiter). Humans tend to form allegiances to this or that wider group, but corporations have no incentive to identify with any public good; their only allegiance is to their shareholders. The profit motive is morality-free (not immoral, necessarily; simply amoral.) In any case, with non-US citizens on their boards of directors, why should multinational corporations identify with America’s proud First Amendment trip? Are they likely to revere the spirit behind the law? Of course not. But Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big You-Name-It, are to be treated as if they had the same status as a creature with a sense of allegiance, a conscience, and a heart.

Pluto governs monsters: perversely unnatural creatures that are often the results of experiments-gone-horribly-wrong. This is the archetype behind the malformed atrocities of literature; the deformed villains and the hybrid demons with beasts’ faces and birds’ claws. Legends depict such beings as both terrifying and powerful; as humanoid but devoid of human feeling.

At this point in the Pluto-Saturn cycle we find the USA in the role of Dr Frankenstein. The super-corporations are our monsters. We created them, and they are dangerous.

Remember when we were young, and some mean kid would come up behind us and twist our arm, demanding that we “cry Uncle?” That’s sort of what the planets are doing to us now. But they’re not doing it to be mean.

Up in the sky are a series of transits that are designed to humble us; to squeeze the arrogance out of us. I realize most of us don’t like being humbled. But as you’ve probably heard me say before, liking has nothing to do with anything except Venus. Whether we like or dislike a transit is neither here nor there. The only question is: Are we going to learn what it’s trying to teach? The Cardinal Cross and the Aquarius transits are major humblings. Their motive is to curb our excesses, clarify our blind spots, and make us more human.

To astrologers who track the US Sibly chart, it’s no surprise why the American populace is feeling so anguished right now. Our collective self-image is being stripped bare by the Pluto-Saturn-Uranus T-square. Ouch. Like a giant band-aid being ripped off raw skin, the mask is being stripped off the reality.

As the transits zero in on the national Midheaven (public face), one of the facades that’s being stripped away is that of the Good Cop (Saturn). As a kid, I learned that the reason the USA was top dog in the world was — though it was never spelled out explicitly — our moral superiority. This is what schoolchildren in Victorian England were taught, too, about their country’s God-given right to govern one-quarter of the world. Past empires were quite unapologetic about their belief that a higher power compelled them. Thus inspired, they  galloped into undefended parts of the globe, appropriated the resources, and took up “the white man’s burden.”

How appalling this sounds to the post-millennial mind! But it is the attitude still being proclaimed by the self-professed patriots here and now who speak of “good guys” and “bad”.

My schoolbooks told me that part of our entitlement had to do with our being a champion of peace between nations (the US chart features Midheaven in Libra). In the mid-sixties — which was the last time we saw transits similar to what we are seeing now — Watergate and Viet Nam disabused large numbers of Americans of such delusions. Now, with the transits stripping off the country’s blinders more mercilessly than ever before, there is disillusion on an even larger scale.

Pluto was opposing the US Jupiter cluster (moral high ground) and Saturn was almost on top of the US Midheaven when it was announced that Obama would be awarded the Nobel Prize. What is so intriguing about the timing here is that the announcement actually exacerbated, rather than dispelled, the discontinuity between America’s peace-cop self-image, on the one hand, and the truth of its incessant militarism, on the other.

It wasn’t just a smattering of snide critics who pointed out the irony here. The first thing on observers’ minds worldwide was the fact that the peace prize was being handed to a man who was just about to green light more bloodshed in Afghanistan. The transits — sneaky buggers that they are — were exposing, in a backhanded way, the gaping contrast between the country Americans think they live in and the country the rest of the world sees.

Saturn has been crisscrossing the US Neptune (mass illusions) and Midheaven (standing in the world) for several years now. At the same time, Uranus (jolts and shattering) has been opposing Saturn since late 2008; and Pluto (exposure of decay) has been opposing the country’s natal planets in Cancer. The economic meltdown was the signal manifestation of all this; and it is not over, any more than this transit system is over. It is segueing into the 2012 years.

It does not take an astrologer to see that the world will probably experience a financial crash of even greater intensity than the one in late 2008. But it takes mental discipline to forestall the fear associated with this idea; and it takes spiritual commitment to focus instead on the ultimate meaning of what’s happening.

On the level of cultural observation, it takes independent thinking to ask some very simple questions; questions we would surely ask if we were more closely in touch with our common sense than we are with what the media says.

With Saturn (status quo) being blasted by Uranus (revolution), there is intense discontent on Main Street — the kinds of rumblings that historically have led to popular revolt (the real thing; not just the tea-bag kind). In the USA and elsewhere, millions of people will continue to lose their jobs while their social safety nets disappear, while at the same time, more and more power will become concentrated in the hands of the exclusive club of multinational forces that oversee the world’s governments. It seems to me that the question we should be asking is not “Will there be a mass uprising?” but rather, “Why are we not seeing a mass uprising?”

The answer to this lies in the manufactured deceptions that keep us moderns estranged from ourselves and each other. American pop culture is the engine for this malady of the soul. As the premier exporter of fads and commodities as thin and empty of nourishment as potato chips, the USA is the world leader in products whose purpose is to help us avoid self-confrontation.

The Chiron-Neptune conjunction, whose job is to point out our delusions, will be right on top of the US Moon when it reaches exactitude next month (February 16-17^th, 2010). These are extreme transits, and as such they are showing up in extremely different ways for different people. Over the last several years, many consciousness-seekers have been inspired to more clarity and purpose than they have ever known. But others have given in to an orgy of escapism, made easy by a cultural environment awash in ways to medicate ourselves (Neptune) and cover up our pain (Chiron).

Since the conjunction came into orb, we have seen an explosion of gadgets and trends aimed at keeping us from the truth of ourselves; from social networking — the conceit of “friending” electronically, rather than being a friend — – to the democratization of cosmetic surgery – an effort to win love and approval through plasticizing the body. In the ten years since Neptune went into Aquarius, compulsive consumer entertainments have proliferated– from video games to Indian reservation casinos (a stunning phenomenon, the tragedy of which runs many layers deep). These amusements render self-reflection all but impossible. Designed to distract, they keep our minds off our isolation and loneliness.

At this moment in history the human psyche is at a crossroads. Those who take up the challenge of transformation are breaking through lifetimes’-worth of old pain. Others are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, unable to concentrate. For the latter group, despite all the pseudo-communicating being done on little hand-held doodads, the failure to deeply connect has never been more evident.

The conjunction of Neptune and Chiron, which extends through 2011, is trying to teach us where our malaise originates. It is in essence a spiritual transit, intended to show us the paucity of genuine interconnection (Aquarius) in our lives, so that we may realize how profoundly we yearn (Neptune) for it. This is the humbling that is called for: that of admitting our pain, self-forgivingly, and crying Uncle — after which we can be released to heal (Chiron).