We are living in a thrilling moment in history. As 2012 hits the ground running, deep-structure change is in the air.

Pluto, the planet that shows us the mortality of all things, is strengthened during the month of January by the Sun’s passage through Capricorn, the sign of economic theories and political structures. There are reminders everywhere that even those institutions we tend to see as eternal are merely temporary constructs. Pluto asks one question of the systems governed by its resident sign: Are they promoting the healthy functioning of human beings and other living things? If not, they must go the way of everything else in decay. If a social institution has started to turn against the people it was set up to serve, it’s dustbin-of-history time.

Capitalism is one of these systems. In its current state it is rotting from within. Despite the fact that most of us are conditioned to equate capitalism with modernity — indeed, with civilization itself — this economic model is no more immortal than anything else under the Sun. Under skies galvanized by the Longest Arm of the Cross, everywhere we look we see “free market” capitalism in its death throes.

Neoconservatives don’t talk much about the dubious effects of the capitalist flood that swept over Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor about the environmental and cultural desecration wrought by China’s voracious entry into the GDP sweepstakes. As for Uncle Sam, king of capitalism for the last two centuries, he is finding himself smack dab in the middle of the Uranus-Pluto square (America’s natal aspects become a full-on Grand Cross when the transit is factored in).

With a self-image that revolves around material wealth, America is now going through not just a financial trauma but a breakdown of its core identity (Pluto opposite US Sun). The notion of being the richest country in the world is so central to the nation’s view of itself that many Americans have failed to grasp the fact that right now, in 2012, the only thing the US economy leads in is military might and people in prison.

In many ways, of course, robber-baron-style capitalism has been wildly successful. It has generated untold amounts of wealth for a tiny sector of humanity, and has established networks of profit that have undermined whole governments – as, for example, the donor-lobbyist-representative axis in Washington that has undermined U.S. democracy. Follow the logic of capitalism along its natural trajectory and you get the immensely profitable business of trafficking and selling illegal drugs, which constitutes what is perhaps the most stunning financial success story of our era (worldwide, it is thought to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry), ranking it right up there with the oil companies and the arms trade.

But under skies like these, visionaries are challenging even the most entrenched and the least questioned of Capricorn operations. Uranus, the planet of people power, is capable of transforming the plutocratic state (Pluto) of modern capitalism. An example of this is the entry into the public discussion of indie capitalism, a radical challenge to business as usual, in every sense of the phrase.

Indie capitalism is based not on trading old value, but on creating new value. It is not globally but locally oriented. It is concerned not with quantity but quality; and its modus operandi is sharing rather than exploiting.

Consider Kickstarter, the internet creative funding phenomenon whereby people invest and observe the growth of products that mean something to them personally. In this model, says proponent Bruce Nussbaum, consumer, investor, audience, fan, helper, and producer conflate. People find and prepare their food the same way they find and prepare their music. And then they share it all.

The courage to challenge (Uranus) and reformulate (Pluto) even such a powerful phenomenon as big global capitalism may seem like a David and Goliath battle. But tackling huge power differentials like these is exactly what this transit is about. Giants are big, but they are mortal, and not exempt from Plutonian law. The symbolism in the skies suggests that when entities such as these start to putrefy, we should collectively grab our shovels and bury them.

After being caught with their pants down for a few weeks, the media seems to have found its voice as regards the Occupy movement. Editorials condemning the encampments are coming out thick and fast. Mayors who were on the fence are caving in to city councils suddenly all up in their tough-guy boots. Reporters are furrowing their brows with sympathy as they listen to shop owners complaining that the presence of protesters downtown is scaring customers away from their designer soaps.

An article on the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle seemed intended to psychologically prep the public for today’s eviction of the tent city. The photo they chose to accompany it featured a scruffy, barefoot camper looking down from his perch in a makeshift tree house, wearing a malevolent Charles Manson-like grin.

What rationale are our city fathers using to justify their shift to strong-arm tactics? It seems they are concerned about health hazards among the Occupiers. This was suggested not so much by empirical evidence, because there wasn’t any, but by troubling associations some folks at City Hall have with camping equipment.

Funny thing: during Tahrir Square, you didn’t hear many complaints about hygiene.

Another historical parallel we might draw is that of the tent city that sprang up in San Francisco after the quake of 1906. Back then, every park and public space was covered with survivors cooking stew over campfires in front of ragged lean-tos.

But unlike the Occupiers in Oakland last month and in New York this morning, the squatters in 1906 weren’t cited for violating zoning laws. They weren’t dragged out of their tents by police and beaten with batons. In fact, I imagine the officers did all they could to help them. After fires, floods and power outages, people tend to see past the rules. Zoning ordinances mean little in a crisis.

What is being overlooked by those who are protesting the Occupy protests is that what’s happening right now is a real-time, world-scale, bona fide crisis.

Unconsciously, of course, everybody knows this. The movement’s middle-class foes, clinging to the shreds of their American Dream, wish the protesters would just go away. But their discomfort comes from being reminded of the ugly truths to which the occupiers are calling attention. Those who have seen Walker Evans’ Depression-era photographs may look at the new tent cities and shudder, seeing the Hoovervilles of the 1930s. The parallel is valid.

With Pluto in Capricorn (financial infrastructures) being inflamed by Uranus in Aries (militant rebellion), demonstrations against economic injustice have sprung up from East London to Johannesburg, from Rio de Janeiro to New Zealand. Europe is an economic war zone. The governments of Italy, Ireland and Portugal have been toppled; in Greece there is rioting in the streets. In Somalia and other African states the bloodshed is fueled by mortal poverty. In India there are fifteen suicides every hour due to financial despair.

In the USA, unregulated tycoons and untaxed corporate billionaires stockpile ever greater stores of wealth while unemployment and homelessness soar. Young people stagger out of school under the weight of obscene amounts of debt from student loans, while their college administrators award themselves sky-high raises.

Here in liberal Northern California, elected officials affect a solemn sincerity when explaining their policies towards the Occupiers. The other day, before the cops routed the tents, the mayor’s spokes-flack seemed especially ambivalent in front of the cameras. The official eviction announcement was prefaced, as usual, with a statement about how much “we sympathize with them” (always them); and ended, as usual, with a stern reminder that they are breaking the law.

Elsewhere in the news we heard that Chevron’s third-quarter profits were more than double last year’s, and just shy of an all-time record for any quarter.

It expresses the world moment so precisely that it seems to have arisen full-blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Germinating since 2008 when Pluto entered Capricorn, it is an organic consequence of the dirty secrets that were revealed when the economy went bust.

Four years later, no one who has been paying attention requires a bullet-point explanation of “what the protestors want.” In a society where corporate criminals get six-figure bonuses while unemployment remains in the double digits (if you count the jobless who have given up looking), the question would seem to be not “Why are these people in the streets?” but rather, “Why aren’t 99% of us in the streets?”

None of the Wall Street gamblers was punished after their greed and chicanery pitched the world into a recession; indeed, right now their henchmen are lobbying their tiny little hearts out in the halls of Congress, trying to gut proposed regulations that could prevent another meltdown. None of these One-Per-Centers went to jail; none had his ill-gotten gains repossessed. By contrast, plenty of protestors have been arrested, some violently attacked by police (this video was shot on October 25th, in Oakland). Many have had their tents seized and their bare-bones equipment impounded.

Some of the OWS campers traveled hundreds of miles to make their voices heard. They have no party backing to launch campaigns, so they put their bodies on the ground. They have no corporate funding to pay for media ads, so they put the word out through Twitter. They can’t afford to stay at hotels, so they bring their sleeping bags to city squares and parks — the last public spaces that remain, in a society that’s hurtling towards full-on privatization.

And what do we hear from the White House, as the most significant mass movement since the ’60s spreads like wildfire to thousands of cities around the world? We hear about a “terrorist threat” featuring Iran, a country the Pentagon has been hankering to attack for years. And we hear about the assassination of yet another Bad Guy, this time in Libya.

Those who observe the American media from a distance will have noticed a pattern in these news stories. They are a testament to just how big a threat the OWS movement poses to the One Per Cent, who tend to pump sabre-rattling incidents into the public conversation whenever they think the 99% need distracting.

Oh, and suddenly the president has decided to crack down on medical pot.

It is clear to most Americans that the issues the protestors are identifying cannot be solved from within the hopelessly corrupt system of electoral politics. The power behind OWS comes from forces that exist outside of the official narrative, just as the outer planets that symbolize these forces exist outside the orbit of Saturn (status quo).

This cultural paroxysm, a domestic version of the Arab Spring, is a manifestation of the definitive transit of the 2012 years: the square between Uranus and Pluto. Uranus works by disruption. It interrupts the complacency of everyday life, challenging society to change; like the protestors whose presence downtown disturbs business as usual. Pluto works by exposing decay, so that what is degenerating in a collective can cede the way to regeneration.

Degeneration is just as crucial as regeneration; breakdown is just as sacred as rebirth. During the years ahead Uranus and Pluto will finger what is standing in the way of evolution, so that obsolete structures can cleanly fall away. But neither of these planets presumes to offer solutions. What they do is point the finger at problems.

What happens after that? Here’s where human will and ingenuity come in.

The existence of each one of us is also part of the cosmic plan. All who are alive during these crucial years bring to the table a unique experience, an inimitable creative intelligence, and the ability to perform a crucial role in this world moment. When we tap into these resources, keeping our eyes and hearts open, we know what to do.

Consciousness-seekers have learned that the best way to solve our individual problems is to tap into our inner resources, while staying alert to what’s happening around us. This is also how to solve society’s problems. When we follow the lead of our essential beings – when we live through the center of our charts – we know instinctively how to respond as the diseased old order cracks around us, as it should, as it must.

They tried to distract the public with the usual meaningless faux-controversies. But the Equinoctial transits were so powerful that even these non-issues came with  subtexts that were inadvertently on-the-mark. Consider the pertinence of Rosanne Barr’s “tasteless” behead-the-rich joke.

Even the hoopla about Obama backing a failed solar energy firm fell right into step with OWS’s message. As many pointed out, when you compare the amount of taxpayer money that went into bailing out companies like AIG, the amount lost to Solyndra is infinitesimal.

When OWS became too big to ignore, the media pundits reacted, en masse, with a resounding “But it’s not clear what they want” (a non-response, patterned after Sigmund Freud’s notorious “But what do women want?” Both questions reveal nothing about the spoken-about, and everything about the unconsciousness of the speaker.) “They’re protesting about so many things,” fretted the journalists.

Why, yes, we are.

As astrologers had foreseen, all the various manifestations of the key transit of our era, the square between Uranus and Pluto, have leaped, flaming, into the American public discussion. There is an understanding among the new activists (Uranus in Aries) that the world’s richest 1% (Pluto in Capricorn) use more than one mechanism to keep themselves in power.

One of them is the war machine. The march last night down the main drag in San Francisco marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan; but the chants and placards drew a link between the war and myriad other injustices afflicting  human beings everywhere. “Money for jobs and education; not for war and occupation”.  “Tax their a$$ets.” “It is a class war.”

Each of the battle cries illustrates the same essential issue: the conflict between the interests of ordinary people (Uranus) and the interests of a tiny elite that controls global operations (Pluto) through money, munitions and media.

The march in San Francisco made this point through the route it took. We marched from the Federal Building, headquarters of a government that spends $3 billion every day for war and surveillance, up to a luxury hotel where service workers were picketing for a living wage. We continued down to the bay, where Occupy SF has been encamped — in front of the Federal Reserve building. When the march reached the encampment, from the joyous whoop that arose you’d have thought the thirteen lost tribes had reunited on Market Street.

Poor, beleaguered Obama. No doubt realizing that a failure to exploit this latest American drama would win him the biggest booby prize in his four-year collection, he tried to strike the right tone in his statement about the OWS. The “American people feel frustrated,” he said, “[because] Wall Street doesn’t always follow the rules.”

“Doesn’t always follow the rules“??

The truth is that whatever he said would have come off as lame. It isn’t possible to transform a plutocracy while being its figurehead. No matter how much more intelligent and humane this president may be than his predecessor, Obama embodies a system in which “following the rules” apparently means rewarding the very swindlers whose deregulation of the financial industry caused it to implode, and assassinating the evil-guy-of-the-week with goon squads and targeted drone strikes.

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon sprang into life on September 17, 2011, when Mars, patron of warriors both righteous and unrighteous, was opposing Pluto (powers-that-be) in the chart of the USA (see Mary Plumb’s detailed analysis). This stunning chart says it all.  Any entity born under this symbolism would be a blow to the jugular of the US power structure.

But Wall Street itself is a symbol; and by putting it at the center of their crusade, the movement is transcending the American narrative. It is transcending the ugly infighting of national politics. It is going all the way, addressing the skewed state of power in the postmillennial world. The Longest Arm of the Cross, which will peak seven times between now and 2016, presides everywhere on Earth under a shared sky.

Under the waxing Moon, the energy of last night’s march was nothing short of joyous. A sense of vitality filled the air; vitality and relief. At last, the crowd seemed to say, our benumbed country is shaking itself awake.

It was a great reminder that being awake is more fun than anything.

On this tenth anniversary of you-know-what, I don’t want to write about 9/11. I’ve written elsewhere about the implausibility of Washington’s story about what happened that day, as have many other astrologers (see especially the blogs of Eric Francis), and the explosive transits under which it happened (see Rick Tarnas’ monograph). It was the first Big Lie of the 21^st century, and has amassed so much refutation that a cultural movement arose to hold it.

What I want to look at is the nationalistic energy that dominates the public conversation every September since 2001, the emotive form of which is a strangely compulsive patriotism.

There was a lot of verbal tribute being paid today about those who died in New York ten years ago. Even the comics in the Sunday paper gave it a mention. Some strips featured the characters taking off their hats; some showed family members embracing each other.

I appreciate the solemnity in the air. It’s a rare thing to witness America slowing down and taking off its collective hat, in a mass ritual rooted in unselfishness. It’s something to savor. You can sense people making the effort to recapture that brief, transcendent moment a decade ago, when a magic blend of grief and shock forced the US populace into its collective heart. Our tormented, secular society was provided with an opportunity to reach something like spiritual communion.

As an astrologer I credit the importance of a person living in a certain place. Like all other points of karma, the fact that we identify with one nation and not another is anything but random. But where the 9/11 mourners lose me is the definitive distinction they seem to draw between the tragic significance of their own countrymen dying and that of people in other countries dying. I hear about the three thousand Americans killed in New York that day and I think: Far more than three thousand civilians have been killed in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, by Pentagon drones; right now, this week. And I think: There is a famine spreading through Somalia that is killing a hundred children a day.

But experience tells me that pointing this out is all but universally unwelcome, especially around September 11th. For understandable reasons. It is always grotesque to compare one atrocity with another. It is unseemly to respond with anything other than respect to people who are in the throes of genuine grief, as so many Americans are in this month of remembrance.

The founding fathers are mentioned a lot these days. Their ghosts seem to loom over this anniversary. My neighbor in the Tea Party and I interpret their ideas quite differently, but we both see these 18th-century gentlemen as being central to any discussion of American patriotism.

When I read the political writings of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, I am amazed, every time, by the prophetic quality of their vision. They could not have imagined body scanners at modern airports, or the prospect of having their data mined by Facebook. But they could and did imagine the general tendency of governments to use fear to curtail a citizen’s freedoms, and they didn’t like that at all. Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine clearly foresaw the danger it would pose to a democratic republic if citizens were forbidden to criticize their leaders. They passionately denounced the practice of one citizen calling another a traitor for questioning official pronouncements.

Among us today are the postmillennial equivalents of these bold gents: Dr Judy Wood, for example, and the members of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

With profound respect for the importance of this milestone in American history, I too salute those souls who incarnated into this land mass with me, during this critical era — for these first decades of this century are the moment of truth for America –  and who died ten years ago under mysterious circumstances. And I take my hat off to those patriots who show up for the task of uncovering what really happened.

As individuals, we can’t afford to lose our minds amidst the madness, nor lose sight of our own moral compass. To stay engaged yet sane and humane, we must observe collective psychopathy while keeping a distance from it. One way to do this is to see current events as myths being played out (discussed in detail in my latest lecture).

Art mirrors life, and life mirrors art. Watching our world happen as if it were a story being told, we learn from the symbols couched in events; just as we do when we take in the truths of a parable or legend. In the news headlines, we find themes from great works of fiction; such as Lewis Carroll’s enduring parody Through the Looking Glass, written 130 years ago without ever going out of print.

Political cartoonists have made hay out of the fact that the current Tea Party movement bears the same name as the psychotic shindig in Wonderland. As America’s cultural landscape gets more and more grotesque, more and more parallels are appearing between Carroll’s fictional characters and our own real-time crackpots.

We’ve got candidates like Mitt Romney, whose changes of position mirror the way the Mad Hatter and the March Hare arbitrarily jump up and switch places around the tea table. We’ve got Fox News bullies verbally abusing their opponents in the same way the Hatter insults Alice with over-“personal remarks”. We’ve got empty-headed blowhards like Rick Perry, whose challenges to Obama mirror the Hatter’s unanswerable riddles — to which he does not have an answer himself. We’ve got demagogues like Sarah Palin who, when challenged, can only stonewall with mean-spirited sarcasm; just as the Hatter mocks Alice when she asks him a commonsense question.

In the story, you will recall, this behavior eventually drove Alice away. Will the American public, too, finally get sick of the insanity, and get up and leave the table?

A first step in doing so would be refusing to buy into the jerry-rigged duopoly that drives American politics. All Americans know, on some level of consciousness, that no social change can come of the farcically hyped-up contests between the two major parties, both choreographed by the same cabals. It is understood that the system is set up to silence any contenders outside of a few hand-picked Tweedledums and Tweedledees.

During a recent debate about the country’s tailspin into financial chaos, it was interesting to see outsider Ron Paul play the role of Alice. He was the only speaker who mentioned military spending, and he was met with eye-rolling dismissal by the other Republicans. They actually smirked when he proposed reconsidering the wisdom of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – which a new study says could end up costing $4.4 trillion.

Let’s write that in numerals: $4,400,000,000,000.

When Mars slammed into the Cardinal Cross and ignited the US chart in early August, Democrats and Republicans approved their much-touted “compromise” which, while cutting services for the unemployed, the poor, the elderly and schoolchildren, leaves tax breaks for the very wealthy intact and the war budget untouched.

The USA’s penchant for stupefyingly selfish leaders and fatally ignorant citizens will only get more absurd as the Uranus-Pluto square plays itself out. During its peak years (2012-2016), the corruptions of America’s political and financial institutions will be laid bare for all to see. It’s essential that we avoid outrage fatigue; anger and incredulity can take us only so far. It’s time to ground ourselves in the larger meaning of cultural breakdown.

Sky watchers achieve this perspective by isolating the cosmic lessons encoded in astrological archetypes. Another way is to track what’s happening through the lens of apposite fiction and myth.

We may find it not only appropriate, but healing, to respond with a dark Carrollian laugh to these latest incarnations of Wonderland lunatics.

It must say something about our society that the use of irony has become so all-pervasive. Why do we rely on it so much in writing? Why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes?

It strikes me that irony is essentially a self-protective mechanism, disguised as a stylish gesture. It works by holding its cards close to the vest. When we’re being ironic, we allude to our point instead of throwing all of our weight behind it. We make a show of holding back our sincerity. Irony makes no claims to opening the heart, in either the speaker or the listener.

I think we often resort to irony out of frustration. I know that when I hear about, say, Obama’s cave-in on drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, or about working class reactionaries voting for tax breaks for the rich, I can feel the exasperation rising, forming itself into a scathing remark like a stalagmite of the soul. What would be the alternative to coming out with an inverted, bitter jibe? In this case it would mean confronting, head on, a momentary feeling of anguish. I think I make an unconscious decision that that would be too painful.

David Foster Wallace said irony was built on despair.

Adolescents are notorious for irony; which I think must be related to the fact that they haven’t yet formed a solid ego structure, and tend to care a great deal about being seen as cool. Astrologically speaking, Scorpio is the ironist of the zodiac. But because we understand the nature of water, we know that the sarcastic barbs for which this sign is notorious have their source in emotional vulnerability.

It’s remarkable, by contrast, how un-ironic writers from earlier epochs were. Many of the Victorian thinkers, even the sober, philosophical ones, come across now as eye-rollingly naïve. A good example is Charles Dickens, who condemned the injustices of his time in prose that strikes our modern tastes as unbearably sentimental. But there is one thing about his un-ironic tone, with its unabashed outrage, its florid idealism (he had an Aquarius Sun and a Sagittarius Moon conjunct Neptune, for heaven’s sake) that you can’t argue with: it passes the test of time. Irony is less able to make this claim.

We don’t have to delve back into history to find writing free of irony. Every now and again we find intelligent modern thinkers who lay bare their hearts without irony’s brittle armor; but they are rare. If we were to make a distinction between the smart and the wise – putting spiritual teachers like the Dalai Lama and Eckert Tolle in the second category — I think we’d find that the latter group use irony very infrequently, and then only with the gentlest touch imaginable. Most of the points these speakers make are put forth boldly and forthrightly. They tend to make their assertions simply, without a bunch of ornate qualifications, as acts of faith. They dare to condemn what needs to be condemned without putting their tongue in their cheek and without pulling any punches.

When, for example, Martin Luther King spoke out against “the madness of militarism,” he was making use of many skills, a poetic command of language and a deft public relations savvy among them. But he didn’t need irony to come up with a consummate catchphrase that rings in our ears fifty years later.

The Neptune in Pisces years (2011-25) are about feeling everything, even those feelings we are afraid of because we have labeled them as painful; though that is a problem born of our expectation. As we enter into this long Neptunian exercise, questioning our emotional conventions would be a good idea; because I don’t think we can feel fully and deeply within the censorship of self-insulating mechanisms like irony.

Daring to suspend irony would mean reaching into our hearts and feeling everything. This will certainly be humbling, which is the Neptunian lesson.

Maybe humble will become the new cool.

Glimpsed sneaking away from the mayhem: none other than Goldman Sachs, whose world-famous (this was before they became world-notorious) consultants helped Greece mask its debt crisis with the same credit-swapping tricks that trashed Wall Street. I swear, not even the snarkiest black humorist could have come up with a scenario this outrageous. (I’m obliged to reader Preston for turning me on to an excellent article by Michael Hudson on the deeper echelons of the financial crisis.)

We are seeing a stunning encapsulation of everything astrologers have been expecting, as the summer Eclipses trigger the showdown between Uranus (revolution), Pluto (breakdown) and Saturn (debts come due).

Karma is an overused term, but astrologers have a very precise meaning for it: the results of processes we set in motion. This is Saturnine Law. In July’s Skywatch I discuss what happens to us when we get seduced into transformative action without remembering these laws. All hopped up by our fancy new technologies (Uranus) and enthralled by their immense power (Pluto), humanity’s got the bit in its teeth right now. But when we fail to factor in the potential results (Saturn) of what we’re doing, we get the kind of thing that happened in Japan in March.

In the karma department, the USA’s Saturn Return is peaking; its last exactitude is this August. Everywhere Uncle Sam turns, chickens are coming home to roost.

Buried beneath the big news stories on the Eclipse in mid-June was a disquietingly touching item about the war in Viet Nam, that military morass which kick-started The Sixties for many insular Americans. It was announced that Washington will join together with the Vietnamese government to clean up the defoliant Agent Orange, with which the Pentagon laid waste to that nation 50 years ago. The Cardinal Cross has offered up another parallel between our own era and that of the last rendezvous between Uranus and Pluto (1965-6), this one with a Saturnine twist: an invitation to take responsibility for crimes committed when the Cross was born.

And yet another old sin came forward to be redeemed, as the lunar Eclipse started to wane. The day before the Solstice, a group of Native Americans were awarded the largest settlement ever approved against the US government. It seems Washington stole or squandered billions of dollars worth of royalties intended for American Indians in exchange for grazing and other leases. The suit had been pending for more than a century.

The July first Eclipse is one of a series of portals of consciousness; opportunities for drastic breakthrough. I talk about these in my latest lecture, Something’s Happening Here. There are individuals all over the world who are making extravagant leaps of awareness right now.

It takes courage of a special kind to take this leap . Depending on the potentials within your own chart, these leaps could take various forms: active, private, whimsical or deeply solemn. They might take the form of unplugging from the internet for a week, as a means of reclaiming your brain. They might take the form of questioning conventional wisdom about current events; asking yourself, for instance, whether this latest quest for regime change in Libya has anything to do with the fact that that country has the largest oil reserves in Africa. They might take the form of letting yourself feel – in your belly (governed by Cancer, the sign of the Solstice) – the significance to the World Soul of a massive drought in China, a country that is home to 20% of the world’s population.

Don’t get stuck in “But what can I do about it?” Activism may be in the cards for you at some point; but the first step, for the purpose of this exercise, is to feel the questions. To defy the urge to deny. If we can obviate our usual blocking mechanisms and simply let the thought in, we are answering the call of these Eclipses. Musings like these stimulate the part of us that aches to be connected to the planetary moment.

Think up your own thought-seeds on July first. Use them to get a running-start leap through the portal.

This month’s Skywatch discusses the series of squares taking place from Neptune in Pisces, the Great Dissembler. I thought of this ingress last weekend when I heard about the yogi Swami Ramdev, whose protest against corruption in government (Pluto in Capricorn) took a Neptunian turn. Accosted by the police during his hunger strike, the yogi fled into the crowd disguised as an old woman, covering his black beard with a white shawl.

My June column in DayKeeper Journal, titled “Weakening the Bones,”

is about Saturn, which stations on June 12th at 10 1/2 Libra.

The biggest news this month surrounds the Solstice, which trines Neptune in Pisces — the first time in our lifetimes that we have experienced this winsome water trine. And, as it has for the past three years, the first week of summer sets off the explosive Cardinal Cross. Global dramas financial, political and revolutionary cluster around the Aries Point.

This year, two Eclipses flank the Solstice. First, there’s the total Lunar Eclipse on June 15th, hitting the mind-boggling Galactic Center. Then there’s the Solar Eclipse on July first. I go into detail about both of them in my new lecture, “Somethin’s Happenin’ Here” (a reference to the Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth”).

Astrologers, especially us vintage types, are forever talking about the parallels between the planets’  placements now and what they were in the mid-1960s. The parallels are about to get even more striking. And when they do, I recommend we make use of the notion of sanity. Transits this potent are a signal that we need sanity more than we need anything else.

More than ingenious technology, more than lots of money, more than cool friends or charismatic leaders,  we’re going to need sanity over the years ahead. Especially considering that we are living in a world where attention seems to magnetize around ideas and people who express the opposite of sanity. Case in point: Donald Trump and Sarah Palin sitting down together for a photo op at a franchise pizza outlet: media magnets without the encumbrance of meaning.

Around the same time as the Palin-Trump powwow, scientists from the International Energy Agency convened to release their estimate of greenhouse gases, though few were paying attention to their meeting. They declared that worldwide emissions had increased by a record amount last year.

So despite all the cant we’ve been hearing from every quarter about the world going green, the truth is that if this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, according to the IEA it will be all but impossible to hold global warming to a manageable degree. The incalculable suffering that humanity faces unless we change course is, according to Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, “a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Are we sane enough to seek to reduce it? This is the question that lies behind the issue of human choice in our era. Will we seek to reduce this risk, each of us, in whatever way we can? “In whatever way we can” means in whatever ways might be appropriate to our own unique situation. It won’t do any good if we try to address the situation by mimicking somebody else’s approach.

More so than the idea of right and wrong, the idea of sanity has legs. I think it will prove far more useful during the years of the Cardinal Cross than the promotion of any particular ideology or behavior. After all, everywhere we turn we see the pointlessness of trying to foist any one idea or course of action upon people. As astrologers, we know such attempts are doomed. Think about it: how could a singular approach be right for every person, given that everyone’s chart is by definition unique?

The notion of sanity, on the other hand, is one-size-fits-all.

President Obama claims that “justice was done;” seeming to gloss over the associations the word justice has with charges, public trials, evidence and so on. Does it matter, if we flout international laws by sending killers to off people on foreign soil? Does it matter, if we violate our own Constitution by waging war on Libya without Congressional approval? Apparently, if the cause is popular enough, it doesn’t matter. I guess those Americans who think that what happened in Abbottabad is an example of “what makes America great” took away different ideals from 5th-grade social studies than I did.

The assault occurred at the Dark of the Beltane New Moon, with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus all in Aries. This stellium bristles with the potential for subterfuge, violence and militarism; but, like every other daunting transit of the Cardinal Cross period, we were given it to learn from. Of course, this is only possible if we open our ears and eyes… not a strong suit of the American public.

I have written elsewhere about the strange events of  September 11th 2001, and will look at it again in an upcoming Skywatch. Most Americans did not ask questions then, and they are not asking questions now. They seem to prefer watching earnest airheads on TV ask questions (and not questions that genuinely seek information; just questions that play gotcha to score political points.) We like to let our pundits do our non-thinking for us.

At first blush the Osama killing seems like a classic American showdown, the kind we could find between the pages of any X-men comic book. But it is highlighting a jarring ethical divide for the US public. Transiting Pluto — the most critical piece of the Longest Arm of the Cross — is approaching exactitude in its opposition to the US Jupiter (ideals), and the group mind is at a crossroads of moral ambiguity. Many people are feeling profoundly disquieted by the shift; others are cleaving blithely to the old simplicities. But my sense is that all of us are experiencing this one in the gut, where we keep our deepest notions of right and wrong.

Neptune, now in its glory in Pisces, is also about ambiguity; which comes in two flavors. There is the reasoned kind of ambiguity, which opens us up to the subtlety of nuanced understanding. Then there’s the blind kind, where we get lost in a fog. We slip into the latter when, for example, we become hypnotized by the media’s engineered version of events.

To resist this, we might notice that those elements of this bloody adventure that are attracting the fewest questions are far more interesting than those being repeated ad nauseum on the news. One example: I found myself wondering about the unnamed women and children who had to watch Osama get shot in the head. One of them was apparently his twelve-year-old daughter (the White House has been changing its story about this child, which ought to make us even more curious).

The  existence of these tragic bystanders parallels the killing of Moammar Khadafy’s youngest son and three grandchildren a few days ago. The White House didn’t devote much time talking about them, either. And I haven’t heard a peep in the mass media about the murder — all-but-forgotten but newly relevant — of Khadafy’s baby daughter in 1986, by a US missile strike (does it not chill the blood to imagine this man’s feelings about America right now?).

It’s pretty clear why these specimens of collateral damage are being given scant air time. It would complicate things for the American public to think of their designated Evil Ones, bin Laden and Kadafy, as human beings with actual flesh-and-blood daughters. The fact of their humanity (in the literal, not the ethical sense) does not justify or diminish bin Laden’s or Khadafy’s crimes. All it does is complicate things.

It throws off the narrative, by leading us to other thoughts.

It might lead us, for example, to think about the millions of lives destroyed by Uncle Sam’s wars. And that might get us thinking about how the Iraqi and Afghan and Pakistani widows and orphans must feel, watching clips on Al-Jazeera right now of Americans gleefully singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

And then we might start thinking about the disparity between the number of Arab dead and the number of US dead in the World Trade Center. This is not to say that crimes against humanity can be quantified. But any line of inquiry that provides perspective is called for under transits like these; and we are talking about the difference between some 753,400 deaths in Iraq (WikiLeaks figures are available up until 2009) and Afghanistan; in comparison with fewer than 3,000 deaths on 9/11 in New York.

Thoughts that complicate things invite nuance into our thinking, and nuance creates confusion in a time of fevered groupthink. This is why, in all the brain-numbing hours of TV coverage about the extra-judicial assassination of bin Laden, we hear so little historical context. The mass media will not touch with a ten-foot pole any subject that flies in the face of the neat, dumb simplicity of the official narrative.

Such as the fact that before bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were styled as arch-villains, both spent several years on the CIA payroll. I’m not suggesting this makes them any less odious. For some of us, it makes them more odious still. But what does it make the US government?

Moral ambiguity is not easy to embrace. Nor are any of the other wrenching cultural changes upon us between now and 2023. But on a soul level, we know we are ready for them. In the monthly Skywatches, we’ll continue to talk about how to use transits to negotiate the turbulence from the center of our charts — the only vantage point that allows us any understanding.