Neptune conjoins Chiron to the degree on the 16th -17th of this month. Neptune is the planet of dissolution; that is, what sugar does in hot tea, and what our self-control does when we have an emotional melt-down. Neptune dissolves, erases and effaces things.

On a personal level, Neptune is associated with the little ego-effacements we endure in the course of living: those moments when our sense of competence disappears. It can throw us off-message; make us feel sloppy, ungrounded and confused. Such experiences weaken our focus on the external world, and humble our pride. This we do not like at all.

Part of the reason we don’t like it is that we’ve been conditioned not to like it. Modern societies define strength in terms of robust activity and competitive accomplishment. Humbling is for 15th-Century nuns; not for us. We equate humbling with humiliation.

But we will miss the point of Neptune transits entirely if we measure ourselves in terms of Type-A activity. These transits have nothing to do with worldly success per se (though they don’t preclude them; they’re just not about them). Neptune is about spiritual awareness. If it has to, it will weaken whatever stands in the way of soul wisdom.

Walls

The conjunction this month¹ is happening in Aquarius, the sign of collective intelligence. The most obvious place to look for this blurring and effacement right now is in the human collective. False separations are melting. illusions of superiority that make one group think it is different from other groups are gradually being erased. Neptune is trying to get humanity to see its inter-connectedness.

This planet, named for the god of the sea, makes its statements in watery terms: it floods, erodes and wipes out. It isn’t just the deltas and habitats of Earth that are threatened right now. Also being wiped out are the boundaries that separate countries. It’s bringing to the surface the fundamental arbitrariness of apartheid of every type.
It’s showing us the madness of the USA’s attempts to keep Mexicans from crossing its border with a literal wall. It’s making us look again at Israel, whose blockades and checkpoints have kept the people of Gaza trapped in their bombed-out peninsula, and whose leaders are now building a wall to keep out African migrants.

Such efforts are not only cruel but stupid. They are doomed to fail. While Chiron makes the wound of class and race divisions more and more obvious, Neptune is making our efforts to divide ourselves from each other as futile as building sand castles at high tide.

Cap and Trade

The world has been taking a crash course in Neptune symbolism since it opposed Saturn (consensual reality) in 2004-07. This was the transit that saw climate change cross the threshold from theory to common knowledge. Last year, Jupiter (dissemination of knowledge) added its promotional skills to the campaign, and the balance was tipped: for more and more people, global warming suddenly got very real. At the tail end of the year, in Copenhagen, the great powers of global officialdom admitted en masse that climate change posed a unique threat to life on Earth.

So people are listening up in a new way. The acceptance of climate change has opened the door to the acceptance of other aspects of our poor stewardship of the Earth, such as species extinction and the increasing shortage of clean water. To admit to the truth of these issues is a huge leap of consciousness. Sometimes the truth hurts, as we know; and letting all these things sink in has, over the past couple of years, has left many of us shocked and numb (negative Neptune).

We have been thrown off our bearings, and this makes us vulnerable. In this state we need to be particularly selective about what information we plug into. Should we listen to the big-power G12 delegates who convened in December — the guys who were driven to Copenhagen in specially commissioned stretch limos? Should we listen to the talking heads on TV, who portrayed the protestors there as irresponsible criminals?

To avoid being overwhelmed by the magnitude of what is happening — and to be of any use to our world — we need to cultivate an eyes-wide-open realism.  This starts by disabusing ourselves of the illusion that America’s elected officials and pundits – funded, as they are, by deep-pocket interests — can give us a workable way forward.

The powerful interests of the world have their stories ready about our various global crises, and it is these stories that fill the airwaves. But in order to make use of this information, we need to decode it. The “Cap and Trade” schemes being cooked up by Western powers and Wall Street bankers would allow mega-corporations to profit from the pollution they cause. While the conscience-driven activists who poured into Copenhagen from all over the world were gassed with chemical weapons and thrown in jail, the delegates inside the polished halls busied themselves with setting up an international speculative market that would buy and sell carbon emissions. It really is something out of a Stanley Kubrick parody, when you think about it.

If what we want is an understanding that is as vast as possible, once we establish a clear-eyed geopolitical perspective we must put what we know into cosmic perspective. These two levels of understanding do not conflict with each other. They are both true, and they are both more necessary than ever.

Cleaning Up Our Act

With denial out of the way, we face the knotty problem of facing the emotions that tend to arise when information this daunting begins to sink in. Fear, despair and helplessness are no fun, and we don’t like feeling them; but if we have made the spiritual decision to say No to denial, it is our responsibility to negotiate these feelings if and when they come up. By allowing ourselves to feel them, I don’t mean to say that we should stay stuck in them. That doesn’t help. It doesn’t help the Earth, and it doesn’t help us.

But the sense of catastrophe we are feeling does have a meaning. We are feeling this urgency for a reason; in the same way that the warning light on the dashboard of your car is there for a reason. Its raison-d’être is to point to something else. The various systems collapses of the 2012 years are pointers to show us how ignorant we have been, so that we can clean up our act.

If we could anthropomorphize for a minute and consider the situation from Neptune and Chiron’s point of view, we would see that worldwide calamities were the only way the recalcitrant human race was going to get hip to the fact that we are all in this together. The cosmos realizes that humanity missed the memo on this one; and as a corrective, it is stepping in. If it takes global warming and the breakdown of world financial markets to make us realize how interconnected we are, so be it.

When we assimilate this understanding as it applies to groups of people — for example, the wackiness of human groups trying to erect racial caste systems to try to prevent miscegenation — we can’t help but extend it further, to every buzzing particle of life on the planet. We start to realize that separating devices of all kinds are man-made ideas. Not Nature’s idea.

As the Bioneers say, “It’s all alive. It’s all intelligent. It’s all connected.”

Our fellow Earth-dwellers from the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms can teach us a thing or two. It doesn’t matter to the flora and fauna whether humanity calls their habitat Rhodesia or Zimbabwe. The Earth’s minerals don’t care which superpower owns the rights to them. Earth’s river and ocean systems don’t give a fig about how we categorize their tributaries. The mountains that loom over the plains don’t care what colors are printed on the flags men stick into them.

All On Board

We will be hearing a lot of “I told you so”s from the world’s visionaries in the years ahead. Those prescient souls who saw these crises coming decades ago are increasingly having their voices heard.

It has never been more obvious that necessity is the mother of invention. As the waters rise and the droughts spread, so are the profiles of once-dismissed theorists such as the hippie-engineers who develop clean cooking stoves for third world populations ; the African conservationist who has just been awarded a Goldman Prize; the urban planners whose advocacy of rooftop farming was once met by blank looks.

The women’s spirituality movement, which was seen as silly at best or blasphemous at worst to mainstream thinkers up until a few years ago, is now informing scientists, who call it the Gaia theory. We don’t hear the embarrassingly ignorant phrase “tree-hugger” too much any more. What we hear of is of thousands of young people graduating from green programs in college campuses worldwide.²

Earth-lovers who saw the writing on the wall have waited a long time to assert themselves in fully creative ways. Now, under the Aquarius conjunctions (collective activity) they are pooling their resources. The sustainable agriculture folks are joining forces with the clean-energy researchers; the anti-strip-mining activists in West Virginia are supporting the Nigerian farmers under siege by Shell Oil. Interconnectedness is the name of the game.

Butterflies, businessmen, spotted owls, soccer moms and Brazilian child street hawkers: we are all in this together, watching the old world get washed away.

Just like in the tale of Noah’s arc, we’re all in the same boat now.

______________

Notes:

1 The conjunction is the transit’s only exactitude this cycle, but we have been under its auspices for a while now. Chiron has been in Aquarius for 5 years (Feb 2005-Feb 2011), Neptune has been in Aquarius for 12 years (1998-2012), and they will meet up again in April 2011. The Super Conjunction of 2009 included Jupiter, too, exaggerating Chiron and Neptune’s lessons so we couldn’t miss them.

2 Many of the graduates of such programs seem to recognize that their relatively affluent upbringings allowed them to choose to acquire this knowledge, as a means to back up their idealism. If it seems surprising that this group lacks the sense of entitlement typical of their age, it makes sense astrologically. Born when they were and raised where they were, the best of them are aware of the sense of responsibility for the state of the planet reflected in the Cardinal Cross. At some level of consciousness, all of us know that we were born under a certain set of circumstances for a very specific set of reasons. The world situation is, in every case, the perfect backdrop for our soul development — not random; not a thing apart.

]]> http://www.mothersky.com/2010/02/skywatch-2/feed/ 0 http://www.mothersky.com/2010/01/skywatch/ http://www.mothersky.com/2010/01/skywatch/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:01:13 +0000 jessica http://www.mothersky.com/?p=2628 The period we’ re in is so dramatic, it is downright cinematic --documented not only by astrologers and ancient seers, but by makers of Hollywood blockbusters.¹ For a decade now it has been getting more and more obvious to more and more people that we are living in a very unusual period on Planet Earth. As we sweep away the confetti and champagne corks and face the dawn of 2010, let us consider what’s in front of us. We are beginning not just any old year, but the year when the Cardinal Cross peaks for the first time. Mid-month features a surge of energy. Saturn’s station on January 13^th, just hours before the Solar Eclipse Read More >>]]> The period we’ re in is so dramatic, it is downright cinematic — documented not only by astrologers and ancient seers, but by makers of Hollywood blockbusters.¹ For a decade now it has been getting more and more obvious to more and more people that we are living in a very unusual period on Planet Earth. As we sweep away the confetti and champagne corks and face the dawn of 2010, let us consider what’s in front of us. We are beginning not just any old year, but the year when the Cardinal Cross peaks for the first time.

Mid-month features a surge of energy. Saturn’s station on January 13^th, just hours before the Solar Eclipse, will exacerbate the tension building between Pluto and Uranus,² whose square is the anchor of all transits between now and 2016. When Uranus moves into Aries this Spring,³ the forces of cardinality will be hugely intensified. It will be like a spark igniting dry straw.

For the next six years, ⁴ the conflicts indicated by these squares and oppositions will be at the forefront of human affairs. If we want to know the meaning of this era, the Cardinal Cross is our first tier of interpretation.

The second and third tiers of meaning are spelled out by the more quickly-moving planets. Their interplay provides the subplots in the world’s developing story.

Part of the show

There will be plenty of action. As January begins, Mars is flexing its muscles, fresh from its retrograde station. It will be nipping at our heels all winter. For those Baby Boomers with natal Pluto in Leo, the red planet has been inspiring obsessively productive focus (at best) and low-down, gut-deep power plays (at worst).

For all of us, of every generation, Mars is forcing a distinction: that between what we think we want vs. what our soul wants for us. When every part of us is aligned with what our soul wants, that’s when we become full participants in this extraordinary era.

This means we need to stop reacting to what isn’t there, and start responding to what is there. It’s really very simple. Then why does it feel so difficult?

Much of the problem stems from the climate of constant of distraction that keeps most modern people’s minds in addled, reactive mode. If we were able to tune out the noise, and listen to the cues with a silent mind, we’d be in much better shape to handle this month’s challenge: that of truly responding (Saturn) to the moment, and actively engaging (Mars) in what it has to offer.

For those who can manage this, there is tremendous power available this calendar year. It’s a power that explodes into being once our conscious mind gets in touch with our super-conscious mind (symbolized in this case by the Uranus-Pluto square). Our goal should be to show up for the cosmically-ordained rendezvous each of us set up, pre-incarnate, with the mysterious dimension of our selves who decided it wanted to be part of this show.

No one will be forced to do anything, of course. In high-stress times, just as in low-stress times, we have a choice. We can either allow ourselves to be taken over by the lower chakras of survival (negative Mars) and thereby waste our vital energies running scared, or we can get our more primitive drives to work with our more sophisticated drives. The latter type, associated with the upper chakras, are the ones that know how to create realities.

Transits of Mars, and of the other personal planets, can be used as a stepladder, helping us reach the full empowerment augured by the transcendental planets (the ones furthest from the Sun). This is when we start to identify with the deeper purpose of our chart. At that point it stops being a vague, wished-for concept. We start to feel it.

This is when our lives start to become fluid. Beneficial scenarios arise naturally, both in the outer world and the inner world. Organically, we feel driven to do the “right” thing. Herein lies the answer to the question so often asked by consciousness-seekers about the years ahead: But how will I know what to do?

When we’re living in the Now, we happen upon exactly those solutions that the moment requires.

Systems Collapse

The Saturn-Pluto square, which reached exactitude in mid-November, peaks again on January 31^st. This will push to a new breaking point the global systems collapse that broke through the crust of mass denial two years ago when Pluto (breakdown) moved into Capricorn (social institutions). Saturn, the planetary ruler of Capricorn, is echoing Pluto’s merciless purge of governments and financial systems worldwide. Each time this square peaks, the pressure mounts.

The fractures in the old power structures are turning into gaping crevices. Like eroding ravines, the walls of corrupt governments all over the world — in Africa, Afghanistan , Italy, Eastern Europe, North and South America — are crumbling in upon themselves.

In November’s Skywatch we discussed the death of the age of empire, a hot topic since Pluto entered Capricorn two years ago. Obama’s decision in early December to amp up the occupation in Afghanistan (to call it a “war” is misleading) was announced when Saturn and Pluto were exact to the degree, and surprised no one except those voters whose relief at seeing the end of George W. Bush still has them blinded.

Another layer of Pluto in Capriorn‘s meaning is the death of financial structures, which we can also infer from Obama’s decision. As Congress niggles and frets over the cost of health care for the poor, hundreds more billions of dollars have just been green lighted for robot planes to kill civilians in the mountains and plains of Central Asia.

Epochal Mistake

This decision was not just a mistake; it was an epochal mistake – one that matches the epochal transits above. Hearing Obama’s speech made one want to send him a copy of Heaven’s Command, in which James Morris describes the massacre of British occupiers at Kabal in 1838 ⁵. This tale of revenge is only one of a long series in the collective memory of the Afghan people. A century and a half after the English were driven to their deaths in those unforgiving ravines, Morris went back to Afghanistan and asked a toothless old villager what would happen if his country were occupied again. “The same!” he hissed.

By caving in to his generals and their war-contractor buddies in this decision, Obama has demonstrated that he has not only failed to learn from the fates of the Mongols, the British and the Russians; he has not even learned from his own government’s eight-year history in Afghanistan.  Since Uncle Sam’s bombs started falling on them, the Muslim world in general and Afghans in particular now have far more reason to agitate against the West than they ever had before. It is overwhelmingly the dirt-poor civilian population who, after being brutalized by forty years of war, are being martyred by the Pentagon’s killer drones. As for Al Qaeda — they’ve moved to Pakistan.

The stupidity of these politicians and warmongering pundits is morphing into insanity as they try to use the old imperial tricks to maintain power. But these tricks cannot work in our postmillennial world. They can only backfire.

As global infrastructures — meteorological, political and financial — further collapse over the course of this calendar year, it will become monumentally evident that humanity’s various status quos (Capricorn) are dying of old age (Pluto).

Only Respond

It really is quite a show.

As individuals, our experience of it will hinge upon our willingness to participate. Some of us will play our parts in a more overt way than others; everyone has a different modus operandi. Whether we respond to the Cardinal Cross by moving deeper inside ourselves in spiritual practice, or by exploding outwards in political activism; whether we convene meetings in an auditorium or hold hands in a hospice — what matters is that we act through our charts. That is, authentically.

In the years upcoming, many people will not respond at all; instead they will react to the energies around them. They will suck up the fear being pumped into the collective mind by unscrupulous voices in positions of authority, and they will frame their lives in terms of the faux-realities fashioned by the mass media. These folks will probably have a dreadful time.

Others will spend these years expressing who they are to the fullest. They will grow into the purpose revealed by their unique natal chart. They will attract into their lives people, ideas and activities that resonate to that purpose. Whether public or private, their energies will raise the vibration of the planet.

These are the people who will help the world transform.

_______________

Notes

1 The apocalyptic action film 2012 was an example of Hollywood exploiting the public’s anxiety, in this case cannily bestowing an archaeoastronomical gravitas to a standard-issue action flick. But the timing of the movie’s release reveals its other layers of meaning. 2012 hit the theatres two days before Saturn and Pluto squared for the first time (11/13/09).

2 So will the Mercury station on the fifteenth: two days after Saturn’s, with the Eclipse in between.

3 Against the backdrop of the Pluto-Uranus-Saturn T-square, in mid-May Jupiter will join the grouping; and, a few days later, so will the Moon — at the most storied degree of the zodiac: zero Aries. These will be followed by an extraordinary lunar eclipse in June.

4 There is no absolute boundary for the Cardinal Cross Years; Nature operates in gradualisms and transits bleed one into the other. But many astrologers mark its tenure by timing the square between Uranus and Pluto. This is the longest-running piece of the Cross, involving the most powerful and slowest-moving planets. It is exact seven times between 2012 and 2016.

5 Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, Harcourt Brace,1973.

Now that Saturn is in Libra, it’s time to look at the issue of fairness.

Libra is an idealistic sign, and its tenets are a point of pride for many conscientious folks. Who doesn’t like to think of themselves as fair-minded? Saturn, however, does interesting things to the sign it’s passing through. This planet does not indulge our self-imagery; it exposes our inconsistencies.

Saturn’s two-and-a-half-year tenure in Libra is a teaching about fairness in the archetypal sense. Does this definition of fairness have anything to do with its conventional meaning? That’s what we’ll find out.

U.S. Saturn Return

In the USA, whose natal chart features Saturn in Libra, fairness is a big deal. For most Americans, “fair” means “both sides must be represented.” But which two sides? This question is seldom asked, because of the reductive premise that lies behind it. In American public discourse, when people think of “both sides” they think “Democrats and Republicans.”

Saturn, however, is the enemy of shaky premises and vague assumptions. It likes things solidly defined. When in Libra it will raise questions such as: Who says there are only two political parties? (Well, we know who. That is, we know that the powers-that-be have a vested interest in maintaining the Dems-&-GOP polarity as the only game in town. And we know they’d like Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Matt Gonzales et al to go away. But let’s leave the question rhetorical for the time being.)

This transit will force into the open a peculiarly American dilemma. The USA’s crowning Saturn (Sibley tenth house)¹ makes us esteem fairness and equality as supreme virtues. We grow up feeling special that our country allows for the expression of divergent views. But the provenance and integrity of these views are seldom considered. The vast majority of the American populace doesn’t have enough information to cobble views out of. They don’t know what’s going on in the world, or how their own country works.

Are viable debates possible when the debaters lack rudimentary information? Students of American history will remember that the founding fathers’ number-one fear was exactly this. The Constitution warns, over and over again, that an ignorant populace cannot self-govern.

Informed vs. Uninformed

I have registered elsewhere my opinions about the American penchant for dividing voters down into two groups (for example, Red and Blue). Though these divisions are forever being referred to as conflicting ideologies, they aren’t really. That is, they are conflicting, but they aren’t ideologies.

We certainly have two opposing camps, with an abyss between them. Sometimes the battle is referred to as Liberals-vs.-Conservatives; sometimes it’s referred to as Elitists-vs.-Real-Americans. Whatever it’s called, the polarity here is not really about My-Ideas-vs.-Your-Ideas.

It’s about Informed vs. Uninformed.

No offense implied; I’m not calling anybody stupid. There’s nothing wrong with ignorance that can’t be corrected. I’m just saying, let’s call a spade a spade. It’s not a real debate if one side doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I’m not interested in conversations where I’m supposed to “give equal time” to somebody who thinks Obama is a muslim, or that Acorn is a threat to democracy. Better these folks should clue in to some basic facts than waste time in debates.

I don’t blame Americans for misconstruing what’s going on. As readers of my screeds know, I blame the mass media. And, like Gore Vidal, , I blame the policymakers behind the US school system, who seem to have decided some decades ago that if the USA was going to be a global empire it’d be best if the citizenry didn’t know beans about the rest of the world.

A populace that is knowledgeable about other countries is less likely to go along with the destructive geopolitical decisions of its leaders. Take the ol’ We’re-bombing-these-people-to-give-them-freedom approach to foreign policy. I propose that the odds of an American voter finding this policy sociopathic rise in proportion to the amount of accurate information that voter possesses.

For example, geographical information. It seems to have been decided at some point that the work of empire-making would be a lot simpler if Americans did not know where other countries were located, at least until after Uncle Sam had finished invading. After that, news broadcasts could show little maps to illustrate where the bombs were falling.

But if a country wanted to save a few trillion dollars in military expenses, a little education would come in handy. I‘m pretty sure that any fifth grader who looked at a map and saw Afghanistan located smack dab in between Pakistan, Iran and Russia would see immediately why a superpower would want to control it. Give an American kid a map and a history of the Silk Road and she’d understand right away why her parents’ taxes were funding this occupation.

Education is good for people. But it’s bad for the military-industrial complex.

Devolution Now

The breakdown of America’s self-image is part of a greater process. Western culture is in the process of devolving right now, so that humanity can evolve.

It is not just astrologers who have pegged the period we are in right now as world-altering. Environmentally conscious scientists have been trying to tell us for several decades that the upcoming crisis of peak oil represents a line in the sand for the modern world.² For an even longer time, the ancient Mayans have been posthumously warning us that ours is the era of ultimate choice. Many spiritual traditions have legends depicting this epoch as being about a long, wayward process playing itself out.

The USA, as the world’s hyper-power, plays a key role in this unprecedented drama. This struggling empire is undergoing a crisis of maturity (Saturn) , and of essential values (Pluto in the second house) at the same time.³

Americans who are up to it will want to get on the bus. This means embracing the immense collective changes afoot – not just as a political slogan, but as part of our soul path. It means conceding that if we are American, we are American for a reason. We each have a role in this critical re-framing of national identity; and if we want to live up to our charts’ fullest potential, we may have some self-deprogramming to do. Certain ideas we were brought up with will have to be closely reexamined. Some will have to be discarded as false.

Where in your chart is Saturn in Libra passing right now? This is where you are witnessing the deconstruction of the grand ideals of fairness, justice and balance.

Civil Conversation

How might we approach this deconstruction on an individual level?

To get off on the right foot with Saturn in Libra, we might press into service some old-fashioned rules (Saturn) of engagement (Libra). Though out of vogue for several decades, politeness and graciousness in personal encounters will be increasingly appropriate. It is time to develop a post-millennial etiquette. The pithy pronouncements of social guides like Miss Manners a.k.a. Judith Martin, the wonderful newspaper columnist, will become more and more relevant.

In intellectual discussions, the ability to reason will be tested. Saturn in Libra is about having grown-up conversations again. We can honor the transit by refusing to engage in disrespectful arguments. Remember Roberts’ Rules of Order? In grade school we learned to structure group discussions, and found that by cleaving to such boundaries as setting an agenda, raising our hands and awaiting our turn to speak, the proceedings were not only more civil, but they allowed us to decide things (Libra) and work towards a goal (Saturn). The trouble is, the state of American public discourse has become so chaotic and debased that a remedial step needs to happen first.

We will have to call out “debates” based on false premises.

A couple of years ago the brilliant political analyst Brian Becker was invited to appear on CNN. It was one of those shows that profess to give everybody their four minutes to speak, and he was to be their token anti-war voice. But Becker’s lucid, complex answers to sound-bite questions came off as out-of-synch. His intelligence didn’t fit the format. When he tried to explain an interesting idea, he was interrupted; when he resisted having his points simplistically rephrased, he was scorned. When he requested to be allowed to finish his sentence, he was shouted down.

We need to understand that this kind of format is a con. The word “debates” suggests meritocratic matches; but these exhibitions are about something else entirely. The networks’ true intention is to provide a gladiatorial blood sport. I am not so much condemning the bear-baiting aspect of these affairs – let people choose their entertainments where they will – as proposing that we understand the misrepresentation involved.

Fairness and balance is not possible when your opponent has rigged the game.

Terms of Debate

This transit is giving us an opportunity to clarify the collective conversation, and its first teaching concerns what happens even before the words and ideas start flowing. Before we do anything else, we need to identify the hidden infrastructure (Saturn) of the exchange (Libra).

We need to know who’s dictating the terms of debate.

As an astrologer, I am sometimes asked to debate scientists. It is thought that a feisty dust-up between a special-guest-science-teacher and a professional mystic will prove entertaining to an audience. Early in my career I earnestly took up the challenge. Doing my best to explain the Dark Mysteries to left-brain thinkers, I climbed up on the soapbox and tried to be persuasive, in an effort to out-authority the authority.

It was years before I realized that it was a trap, posing as a level playing field. The set up was that the scientist, as an exponent of the linear viewpoint we are all taught in schools, would sit in judgment of the circular viewpoint of the Divine Feminine. But this was apples and oranges: one cannot judge one paradigm using the vocabulary of another. In the context of this “debate,” not only was the paradigm-of-choice already established (it was of course the culturally normative one), but it was presumed to be the only one in existence. I was expected to use the criteria of that paradigm (empirical evidence, statistics, cause-and-effect) to explain realities that transcend such criteria.The windowless room of the radio studio, with its blinking machines and aura of technological mastery, itself bore witness to the unquestioned superiority of modern mechanistic materialism over ancient spiritual principles.

I resolved to respond henceforth to all such invitations with a statement of my own conditions. To wit: I would enter into such debates only if they were held on the beach under a Full Moon.

______________________

Notes:

See my book, Soul-Sick Nation, , Chapter Six.

There is reason to be skeptical of the information being disseminated by the official agencies tracking oil and gas supplies. A whistleblower with the International Energy Agency has said that the organization’s claims that fuel production will not peak before 2030 have been deliberately underplayed for fear of triggering panic buying . An Oct 09 report by the UK Energy Research Centre moves the forecast closer to the range of Cardinal Cross and the US Pluto Return, predicting that worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could “peak and go into terminal decline before 2020.”

In addition to its Saturn Return, its upcoming Pluto Return and its skewering by the Grand Cross , the USA chart is experiencing a conjunction of Neptune and Chiron to its Moon (self-image). With Jupiter involved for the last time, this grouping will peak again this month at the solstice.

Okay, now things are really getting exciting. The Cardinal Cross period has passed another milestone.

Saturn has entered Libra, the sign of its exaltation. Throughout November it is within two degrees of an exact square to Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth. And because Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn – the sign Pluto is in — the energy between these two dark gods has an especially ambivalent and intense quality. Meanwhile, Uranus, still in opposition to Saturn, is inching its way closer to an exact square with Pluto. The symbolism contained within this pattern is so complex, and the issues so pressing, that the best interpretative approach might be to isolate the levels (e.g. material, psychological, esoteric) and consider them one at a time.

On the material level, the question asked by this transit is: How will the world handle its wealth, energy¹ and power?

The square between the Great Awakener (Uranus) and the planet of Breakdown (Pluto) will be exact seven times between 2012 and 2015. This tells us that its various lessons are being taught in careful stages.

We will get nothing we cannot handle.

Wealth

Over the next few years, the issue of right use of resources will be topic number one. Battles over supplies and valuables are nothing new, of course, in the annals of human experience. But has become obvious over the past several years², the denizens of Earth have reached a tipping point in the ecological arena. in order to underscore the fact that we, the peoples of the world, are all in the same boat, the Grand Cross will use our mismanagement of global resources as a teaching tool.

Many seers and prescient economists saw the financial crisis coming years ago, and are now predicting that the coming years will further concentrate global resources in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite. Certainly we can see this image in the astrological symbolism: the tiny little planet of powerful, amoral cartels (Pluto) is moving into direct confrontation with the planet associated with

ordinary people (Uranus).

Those astrologers who consider the future to be mutable – decided at every moment by the imagination and will of aware individuals – see such a scenario as one possibility among many. But it is the scenario towards which our current levels of collective numbness and panic lead.

The critical point here is that denial will no longer be possible, even for the wealthy. Meanwhile, the denial in which many of the non-wealthy are shrouding themselves is at least as poisonous.

In the developed nations, the most dangerous threat to change is not unscrupulous leaders. It is the forces of ignorance and stasis in the masses, whose materialist worldview keeps them imprisoned in fear. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: “If the country fails it will be because of the corruption of the people.”

Consider the anti-Obama forces whose hysterical accusations of “socialism” have all but taken over the national conversation in the USA. Although these folks seem to be getting their ideas from the ravings of corporate-sponsored radio and TV pundits, Messrs. Beck and Limbaugh find fertile ground in the paranoia and reactivity of their audiences. It is these good citizens who are holding hostage the forces of reform. They represent the Saturn pole (status quo) of the Saturn-Uranus Opposition, as they cling to the tenets of an economic model that is being exposed as ludicrously fraudulent by an avalanche of evidence that grows more damning with every month that passes.

While corporate kleptocrats continue to rake in sky-high profits against the backdrop of rising unemployment, foreclosures, de-funded social services and homelessness, the false promises of “free enterprise” maintain their grip on a surprisingly large chunk of the American imagination. These self-styled patriots seem to view any challenge to capitalism as a threat to the millions of dollars they believe they have a shot at making, someday. The “American Dream” may be corrupt to the bone and falling apart at the seams, but it’s their Dream; and they’ll fight tooth and nail anybody who says otherwise.

Quantum Leap

Yet there is cause for celebration in the fact that the problems humanity faces are becoming quite unmistakable, and are being discussed with increasingly creative energy. It is dawning on more and more people that, in our role as stewards of the Earth, the human race has been oblivious for several millennia.³ The population experts would say that the reason we’ve gotten away with our cluelessness for as long as we have is that the global population was of a manageable size; but it no longer is. We can no longer sustain ourselves at a level of awareness this low.

So what is the conscious person’s response to the perils of economic meltdown, climate change and the global systems collapse associated with peak oil?

People who read analyses like this one will have heard many times that a quantum leap of awareness is the only thing that will save humanity’s sorry ass. In the spiritual view, this leap is the whole point. If the cosmos can be said to have an intention, it is that humanity’s current perils will break our resistance to the great paradigm shift that must take place.

This month, with Saturn fresh into Libra, would be a good time to let this theory – which has perhaps sounded rather remote, until now — become more real. How would our own personal thinking about life be changed, were we to let this idea sink into our minds and hearts? For a start, it’d make us more able to accept, without fear or value judgment (Saturn in Libra) the collapse of rotten cultural structures (Pluto in Capricorn). Even when we don’t know what would replace them.

Imperialism

Against the backdrop of these assembling energies, it is more important than ever for us to keep track of our leaders’ military and political decisions (and not just those reported in the mass media , which are as likely as not to be smokescreens for the truly significant ones). Pluto in Capricorn is isolating the various forms of patriarchal power for us to look at good and hard. The various toxic expressions of Father Right that have held the world in thrall for centuries will wax extreme before they finally crumble away.

This includes the type of geopolitical arrogance that motivates big, greedy nations to move in and occupy other sovereign nations. Old-fashioned imperialism is coming under the spotlight.

People see intra-national bullying differently than they once did. Over the years, notions of individual rights and national sovereignty have come into being. The world has gotten smaller, communication has gotten easier, and enlightened ideas about the behavior of governments have opened up to question previously taken-for-granted notions like colonialism, expansionism and manifest destiny.

Founding Fathers

The last time Pluto was in Capricorn was from 1762 to 1779. To consider the difference between its previous tenure in this sign and its current one, let’s use as an example what was going on in the USA. This was the era when America’s revered forefathers were rebelling from the craggy old despots back in England.

In retrospect we can see that the new Americans were expressing in a nascent form some of the understandings that are now becoming available in a more sophisticated, post-millennial form.

Pluto had not yet had its first Return in the USA chart when the Founding Fathers (Capricorn) conceived their analyses about freedom and oppression. It’s a good bet that these bright, bold lads were quite oblivious to the fact that their incursions into indigenous American territory would be judged as atrocities by later generations. I think we may assume that in the minds of men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, there was no comparison at all between their own tyranny over aboriginal and enslaved peoples, and King George’s tyranny over themselves.

So it is noteworthy that the treatment these early patriots meted out to the native tribes and to the Africans who worked their plantations is seen by much of modern humanity in a very different light than it was seen by18^th-Century thinkers. Despite the fact that it is still in practice, the principle of might-makes-right is no longer unquestioned.

This shift of viewpoint can be understood in terms of the Pluto cycle. The planet of power is once again in the sign of political maneuvering, having made its way through almost the entire zodiac, back to where it was in 1776 (it will reach exactitude in 2022). The kind of power-mongering that was the accepted standard the last time Pluto was in Capricorn has a new meaning now.

Geopolitical perspectives have a life span just as everything else does. Racism, though still alive and well, has been given a name; the first step in the devolution of a cultural assumption. The divine right of kings, once de rigueur, is now moribund. Imperialism will join these in the Capricorn graveyard of obsolete constructs. We can see it happening. The moral and financial credibility of the latest world empire, the USA, is crumbling by the week.

But as we know, human evolution is no walk in the park. The agencies that have benefited from these decaying ideas will not go gently into that good night. The battle between dying cultural models (Pluto) and their emergent replacements will register explosively on the world’s radar (Uranus) during the years ahead.

What Next?

As Pluto kills off the old Capricorn frameworks, we may well wonder what will take their place. If imperialism bites the dust, how will the world define national power?

Economist Barry Buzan has this to say: “The strength of states is primarily measured by their resilience, not by the number of fighter-planes or tanks. Many weak or failing states have strong military forces, and in the case of Pakistan. even nuclear weapons. The strength of internal repression, and the use of torture, are increasingly the mark of weak or failing states such as Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, and Pakistan. The outcry over the apparently routine and widespread use of torture by the United States may be ultimately based on the unspoken understanding that the USA is undermining the legitimacy of its existence … acting like a weakened power.”(“People, States and Fear, An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era”, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1991 (2^nd Edition).

It is not as if any one of us, alone, is responsible for coming up with the future; but collectively, our thoughts do make a difference. Many of us are all too aware of how we don’t want global power to express itself; and here is where we must use our imaginative energy with care. If we believe that reality is created afresh at every moment, it follows that the contents of our minds and hearts must be managed responsibly. Even as we acknowledge all these dystopian visions as potential realities, we must observe them from a distance. Otherwise fear may induce us to inadvertently pump energy into places we don’t want it to go.

By contrast, fear gets crowded out of the picture when we approach the future creatively, with a sense of excitement and a trust in Natural Law. This implies a trust that the new structures will arise organically from the old, like green sprouts pushing up through the ashes of a forest fire.

________________

Notes:

As the climate crisis deepens, energy theorists and conservation experts will have to be careful not to work against each other. For example, consider the poorly-thought-out enthusiasm for bio-fuel. Once thought to be a panacea, in the main it is turning out to be a water-guzzling and forest-destroying nightmare.

It was under the Saturn-Neptune Opposition (2004-7)that the idea of climate catastrophe broke through mass denial in the educated world and became part of the collective consciousness.

This writer believes that it was not always so. Before the notion of social hierarchy became dominant, about five thousand years ago, humanity lived in relative peace and equality. This pre-historical phase of the group soul’s development had to be outgrown, per the mysterious laws of evolution; but trace memories of it can be inferred from references, in legends and myths worldwide, to a long-lost Golden Age. .

The Fear Monster

With its opposition to Uranus still in orb, Saturn will move into Libra on October 29th; introducing the next major phase of the Cardinal Cross (2008-2015). Right around Halloween (Samhain to Wiccans ) we can expect another spike in the ongoing global drama.

This is the perfect moment to begin practicing freedom (Uranus) from fear (Saturn).

Transiting Pluto (breakdown) is still opposed to the American chart’s Venus (money), approaching its next exactitude in December. Astrologers are not the only observers who have associated the years ahead with the end of the dollar as a world currency², the breakdown of the US Federal Reserve³ and resource depletion on a global scale. Though this writer does not believe in predictions per se,⁴ even making a hypothetical reference to such scenarios is enough to freak out a lot of people.

Be that as it may, freaking out is contraindicated for several reasons. Mostly because it distracts us from the wisdom we could be learning from this extraordinary historical moment.

It would be better for our bodies, minds and spirits if we were to back up, take a breath, and consider with clear-eyed dispassion events as they arise. I’m not proposing that we deny the freaking-out that’s happening all around us; fear does exist. It’s just that fear is not the most interesting thing about the situation. If one believes that there is a cosmic plan behind this period of global distress, isn’t this plan worthier of our interest than the fear it arouses?

To tease out what the plan is, we have to look at the situation energetically. This means, first of all, separating the subject matter from the charge emanating from it. The subject matter here – that which is being reacted to — is our perceived loss of material security; or, more precisely, the idea that our financial status quo is going to change in some way. Consider that the charge emanating from these ideas is not the same thing as the ideas themselves. The emanating charge is an energy pattern with its own unique quality, texture and force.

To notice this distinction is our first step towards freedom: the freedom from being sucked in by fear. Imagine being chased by a monster in a nightmare, and, instead of focusing on how scared you are, you focus instead on the color of the monster’s fur.

This approach could teach us some useful truths about fear in general. Ancient tradition links panic to the first and second chakras of the human body, the ones linked to physical survival. (If you are someone who can read auras, you might see a lot of people flashing red and yellow right now from their coccyx and groin.)

When we observe reactive energy with detached curiosity, the most salient feature we notice is its sheer power. Which leads us to the pivotal question: If all that power wasn’t going into fear, where might it go instead?

Power of Money

Meaning of Money

By metaphysical law, events in our world bubble up from the unseen arenas beneath manifestation. All forms originate from this substructure of formlessness. Our tangible realities arise from thoughts, attitudes and yearnings engendered in a zone that is not tangible at all⁷

This is not a new idea. It has been stated in innumerable iterations throughout the annals of mystical tradition, and it finds widespread agreement among modern consciousness seekers. Yet it seems to be qualitatively more difficult for people to apply this idea to the world of money than to other areas of life.

There seems to be a tendency to suspend cosmic laws where money is concerned. We seem to think of financial matters as occupying a unique kind of reality; as in “I don’t have the luxury of getting all philosophical here. I’m talking about the real world. How am I going to pay the rent?”

Though I’ve never heard a client say it out loud, the prevailing assumption seems to be that the everything-is-just-energy rule doesn’t apply where money is concerned. In astrological discussions, money matters seem to have a velvet rope cordoning them off. The practitioner may be invited into this arena – indeed, the anxiety surrounding it results in frequent invitations — but he is expected to handle it differently. The client wants him to suddenly suspend all symbolic interpretations and go literal.

By contrast, as regards relationships, I find that people will nod knowingly when you suggest that they create their own reality. And where their career arc is concerned, they tend to be fully open to the notion that internal drives are at work. Similarly, in terms of their spiritual lives they have no trouble at all seeing their current state as the result of unconscious energies assembling in cosmically appropriate ways.

But to suggest that the same processes are at work in our financial lives is to provoke an automatic defensive posture. The client’s lower chakras go on red alert. She may move into an animal crouch, as if her meat were about to be grabbed away.

When all is said and done, surely this is the most interesting thing of all about money.

In our more sanguine moments, were we to apply the precepts of humanistic astrology unconditionally, we would have to conclude that even money is just an end product of aboriginal energies that have nothing to do, ultimately, with the physical world.

They aren’t born there. They just end up there.

Transits

Haves and Have-Nots

The majority of people on Earth live hand to mouth. During the upcoming years, the have-nots of the world will be pressed by material hardship on a scale unimaginable to the relatively tiny proportion of the global population with enough financial security to worry about losing it.

According to Gwyn Kirk of the AGAPE Foundation , a billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day; another billion live on less than two dollars a day. The world’s wealthiest 946 people, identified by Forbes Magazine in 2006, comprised about 0.0145% of the global population, with a net worth figured to be $3.5 trillion: about 3% of the world’s wealth.  The UN estimates that just 500 rich people in the world earn more than the 416 million poorest people.

Then there’s the rest of the First World, the merely middle-class. As the have-nots scramble to survive, many of this latter group will spend the next few years pumping their vital energy into stock quotes, interest rates and retirement funds.

The Karma of Money

Numbers vs. Image

Notes:

What begins when the Moon is New comes to a head when it is Full.

This is the core idea of the lunar cycle, and it is a very primal one. Transit-trackers have used it to interpret the sky’s messages since the beginning of time. When the New and Full Moons in question are eclipses, the cycle reaches deeper and further in its significance; but it does not depart from this basic formula.

This is why the best way to understand what’s in store for August is to understand what happened in June and July . As an exercise, try re-feeling the main dramas in your life that have occurred since late June, when this series of lunations began. When you relax your body, close your eyes and reflect upon these events, the themes they represented will rise up from visceral to conceptual understanding.

Your belly will tell your mind what they meant.

Let yourself remember what was up for you the week after the 4th of July¹, and then for the week of July 20th. Everything that took place during those days, from the momentous to the innocuous, was there to be decoded; as a brilliant analyst would unravel the mystery of a dream. Whatever occurred was the universe’s way of spelling out the key plot points not only of the summer of 2009, but of years to come.

If you were jarred and jangled by June and July, it means you are paying attention. The New Moon on the 21st – the rarest and most profound astrological event of the season — was a total solar eclipse, which means a super-charged beginning. It was a time to start implementing dramatic new realizations about how your life really works, and about how the world really works.

The last of this eclipse series is Wednesday August 5th, at which point the processes that got their start on July 21st will come to a head. Like the final steppingstone across a river, this Full Moon should reveal the purpose of your having made the crossing.

Super-Conjunction Summer

How do these lunations fit in with the Super Conjunction in Aquarius? Though Jupiter has moved out of orb (it will be back in December), Neptune and Chiron are still traveling together, making life confusing at best and incomprehensible at worst for every one of us. Doing your best to gracefully manage the chaos that is your life is a major feat right now. Don’t think there’s something wrong with you if you feel like you’re barely treading water. Give yourself credit for not drowning.

This whole year is about letting go more fully than we ever have. It’s about forgiving ourselves for not knowing what we can’t know, allowing for frequent mood shifts, and it’s about holding plans — if we must make them — with the lightness with which we would hold a bird in our open palm.

And that’s just on the personal level. What is the human family as a whole being asked to let go of?

The fact that a lot of prominent people are flipping out is telling. It may not mean what the pundits say it means, but it does convey something about the energy afoot. The erratic behavior of public figures this summer is symptomatic of a worldwide destabilization process. Sara Palin’s surprise resignation as the Capricorn eclipse (leadership) was building seemed to epitomize the mood in the air: confused and taken-off-guard.² Societal (Jupiter) uncertainty (Neptune) is the name of the game.

Have you noticed that most of the lead news stories lately are about illusion and fraud (Neptune)? From the adultery of public figures (Berlusconi, Gov. Sanford et al) to allegations of rigged elections (Zimbabwe, Iran³ et al), cultural signposts that once stood tall are careening giddily. As their economies collapse, governments all over the world are foundering, trying to patch together policies that all but the most credulous of their citizens wearily perceive to be made of smoke and mirrors.

More fundamentally, as global warming undermines the very topography of the planet, the Neptune conjunction is perpetrating a parallel undermining of the psychological grounding of the collective mind. We are being given no choice but to relinquish our 19th- and 20th-century ideas about being masters of Mother Earth.

The material realm has a different meaning than it has ever had before. It is not solid at the moment. It is fluctuating, unpredictable and elusive, like the ever-shifting sea.⁴ And if we suspend — even fleetingly — our fears about what’s happening, and our good-vs.-bad judgments about it all, we may be inspired to understand this period we are living through from a whole new vantage point: from the other side of letting go.

The radical changes the Earth is going through right now are obvious to every sentient being. Even people who do not follow current events in a socio-political or intellectual way are hip to the reality of what’s happening. We know it because we are animals (a fact the proud human mind denies): we are blessed with sub-rational animal knowing. And we know it because are all connected to the Earth’s fate through super-rational knowing, too; a kind of knowing the Aquarius conjunction is trying to deepen.

Many conscious individuals all over the Earth are struggling right now with the question of what to do with what we know. The answer to this conundrum sounds complex, at first blush – even self-contradicting — yet it is fundamentally as simple as pie: If we let go in the way the Neptune conjunction is guiding us to do, we will be able to detach enough to tolerate the truths that must be known if the planet is to survive.

This use of the term detachment does not mean uncaring or unemotional. Quite the opposite; it refers to a state of distanced compassion, in which the heart is fully and vitally engaged. Detachment like this makes us strong enough to face how serious the situation is. Then we can go one step further, and acknowledge that we know what we know. Each little acknowledgement becomes a creative act.

By contrast, playing dumb hurts the soul.

Worldwide Web

Since Uranus (cyber technology) and Neptune (universality) conjoined in the early 1990s, the Earth has been transformed into a buzzing ball of continuous information-connectedness. From the symbolism of the transits then and since, we see that the plethora of facts and figures that call out to be acknowledged by us every day are not just some random background condition of modern life but a key characteristic of this era and a very definite part of the cosmic plan.

Contrast this situation with the almost quaint standard of naiveté that characterized  Western societies in the 1950s. We cannot hide behind that kind of informational vacuity any more, or anything like it. It will not fly.

There is more accurate information available now to the average person than there has ever been in the history of the world.

Here are some examples of facts that are pretty universally accessible: Despite the collapsing global economy, roughly $129, 000, 000 per minute is being spent internationally on “defense” ⁵ More money is spent on militarism in six hours than has been spent on the environment in the last two decades.

We must let this information in. As intelligent beings in alarming times, we need to become open and stay open to lucid, relevant information.

Another bit of news that would seem highly relevant for the taxpaying public to consider: Last month American senators from both parties ⁶ fought hard for the construction of seven obsolete fighter planes at a cost of $1.75 billion. The Pentagon doesn’t want them, but the contractors who build them do. So they pay lobbyists to sell them to congressmen who then justify the project by bloviating about “jobs” (political code for Vote my way or you’ll be in the poorhouse).

Stripped of the nonsense with which politicians and newscasters dress them up, these facts are stark, astounding and appalling. But one thing they are not is secret. Information like this is no longer classified nor the province of specialists. One doesn’t have to be a biologist to know that a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals are in danger of extinction because of global pollution. One can turn on the radio and hear it.

Statistics like these are not opinions but realities, and they are so indefensible that the only way to not be repulsed by them is to stonewall them.

Media Myopia

Michael Jackson’s death the week after the Solstice came at a very fortuitous time for doghouse-dwellers like the governor of South Carolina, whose exploits had monopolized the news immediately before. More significantly, the Jackson necro-fest deflected the public’s attention away from another bit of news that would probably never have reached the front pages in the first place, lacking as it did the buzz of either sentiment or sex: June 30 was appointed “National Sovereignty Day” by the puppet government in Iraq.

This announcement was made with nary a reference to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis maimed, killed, tortured or made refugees by the US invasion and occupation. Indeed, Washington’s Iraqi henchmen thanked their occupiers profusely for placing them in power. In a grotesquely revealing move, Baghdad marked their new “national holiday” by opening up some of its massive oil and gas fields to foreign firms.⁷

And though “journalists” stumbled all over each other to cover whom Liza Minnelli sat next to at the King of Pop’s funeral, scant airtime was devoted to the new mega-embassy whose ground had just been broken in Islamabad. ⁸ Readers patient enough to delve into the bowels of their newspapers would have learned about this new use of their tax dollars on May 27th, the day Jupiter (exaggerated size) and Neptune (swindles) conjoined.

Clarity in the Fog

The mass media in its current state, and the vacuous American pop culture of which it is a part, are examples of Neptune in its unconscious form. But the transits are simply presenting us with both sides of this archetype, as transits always do. And misused Neptune is no match for consciously used Neptune.

There can be no fence-straddling now. People will either align with fear and denial, or they will truly respond to the urgent realities upon us. This latter approach is what astrologers call living through the chart.⁹ Those who choose it will quite naturally find their place in the New Age being born . All we need to do is pour ourselves into the moment, and let go to what wants to happen.

____________________

Notes:

1 The Full Moon of July 7^th was not only an eclipse but the culmination of whatever energies had gotten started two weeks before, at the Solstice New Moon which inaugurated the summer season.

2 For a review of Palin’s transits, see Nancy Sommers‘s blog of July 11th 09.

3 Though the media is portraying the situation in Iran this summer as a clear-cut case of The People rising up against an autocracy  — a story many progressives are swallowing hook, line and sinker — the scenario becomes a good bit more complicated when we factor in the covert and overt shenanigans of the CIA over the past year (and well before, of course. Washington has been trying to undermine every Iranian government since the1978 revolution; not to mention the Anglo-American collusion in 1953 to take back control of the Iranian oil industry via the coup that installed the Shah.) From their concerted disinformation campaign to their financial support of pro-Western factions in Tehran , Washington policymakers have been doing their best to orchestrate regime change in Iran in a way that they hope won’t cause them as much trouble as the one they orchestrated in Iraq.

4 See my article in the August/September issue of The Mountain Astrologer Magazine. The triple conjunction came to its first peak in late May, sustained a series of squares from transiting Venus and Mars in July,  and will peak for the last time in December.

5 The term “defense”, as used by the USA, is one of the most insidious euphemisms of our time. At an earlier point in American history the US Defense Department was called the Department of War; but our militarists grew too psychologically savvy to allow such bald accuracy. This is a shame; because if the American public wanted to know what was really going on geopolitically it would be very useful to go back to the agency’s old moniker — the better to distinguish between offensive militarism and the truly defensive kind. Whatever one calls this astoundingly profligate agency, it is the world’s costliest military enterprise at $102 billion a year; and under Obama it is becoming even more expensive.

6 Those who presume substantial differences between the two dominant political parties in the USA might consider that Democrats Edward Kennedy and John Kerry joined the fight to build these mass-murdering boondoggles.

7 I thought John Stewart was making it up when he said that the US military gave Baghdad officials the key to their own city back; but, no: this surreal ceremony actually took place. Uncle Sam, the great hyper-power, officially bestowed upon Iraq’s local functionaries nominal authority over the ongoing robbery of their country from its people. Journalist Patrick Cockburn: “According to Transparency International the only countries deemed more crooked than Iraq are Somalia and Myanmar, while Haiti and Afghanistan rank just behind. In contrast to Iraq, which enjoys significant oil revenues, none of these countries have much money to steal.”

8 At $736 million, the embassy in Pakistan will be the second most expensive ever constructed, only $4 million less than the sprawling embassy in Baghdad (which is as big as the Vatican. See Chalmers Johnson).

9 By this I mean: aligning with the highest expression of who we are. To live through your chart is to draw fully upon the unlimited potential you were born with. And that no one else was born with. They have their own resources, but they’re not like yours.

]]> http://www.mothersky.com/2009/08/the-other-side-of-letting-go/feed/ 0 http://www.mothersky.com/2009/07/third-posting/ http://www.mothersky.com/2009/07/third-posting/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:13:27 +0000 jessica http://mothersky.tod0.com/?p=5

“I have such a feeling of solidarity with everything alive that it doesn’t seem important to know where the individual ends or begins.”

–Albert Einstein

Uncle Albert

Like the scientists, mystical thinkers honor Einstein as extraordinary; but from a somewhat different point of view. For us, the wispy-haired old fellow with the unforgettable eyes exudes a wisdom that trumps intellectual smarts.

In fact he was prodigious on both scores: that of mental acuity (Aquarius) and spiritual understanding (Pisces)¹. I can’t think of another scientist whose face has been reproduced on postcards, lapel buttons and tote bags. Though Western culture tends to reserve the word “genius” for people gifted in conceptual thinking, those of us who hung posters of Einstein on our dorm room walls did so for other reasons. I, for one, was enchanted by the rumor that he didn’t wear socks.

It’s a good time to consider why we are so drawn to Einstein. Right now in particular, humanity is hungry for his embodiment of both knowledge and knowing: a combination symbolized in astrology by Neptune in Aquarius, the key player in the Super Conjunction that dominates the skies this calendar year.²

Neptune and Chiron have been retrograde since late May, drilling their relentless lessons into the obdurate mass mind. Chiron is trying to teach us how to use our pain to achieve true humanness. Jupiter, whose role in the transit will peak again in December 09, is pushing us beyond our provincialisms, stretching our grasp of what’s going on in the wide world beyond our normal frames of reference. And Neptune, star of the show, is blurring the boundaries between the ego-defined self and the rest of Creation.

Just as we might hang a mandala on the wall right now to focus upon during meditation, we could gaze at a picture of dear old Albert. His eyes reflect the mysteries the universe is inviting us to understand.

Cardinal Cross

The Aquarius cluster is welcoming us into the world-altering 2012 years, during which our identification with certain groups over others will mean more than it ever has. Consider that we are doing nothing less than determining the planet’s future. The Aquarian transit is asking us to choose our allies accordingly. Who will best bear the standard for humanity’s forward movement?

The next few years will blow our conventional assumptions about leadership out of the water. Leadership is signified in astrology by the cardinal signs, all four of which will be part of the great configurations in the sky. It will be a time of asking who we want our leaders to be, and what we’ll do with them once we’ve chosen them. It won’t be enough to show up at the ballot box and then go home and go back to sleep.

Pluto in Capricorn, which opposed the Solstice New Moon last month, is the first member of the Cardinal Cross to establish itself. The planet of breakdown in the sign of authority has already gotten to work, aiming its wrecking ball at the mightiest and sturdiest of national governments.

This is not to say that the planet “caused” this state of affairs; Pluto does not create decay; it merely reveals it. All over the world patriarchal systems are crumbling under their own weight. Among the big players are China
(Pluto square Sun), whose corrupt old boys’ network is cracking with the strain of world attention (focused upon, for example, its relationship to Tibet, human rights, pollution and out-of-control urbanization); England (Pluto conjunct Sun), whose ruling party is coming apart at the seams; and the USA (Pluto opposed to Sun).

Many traditions besides Western astrology have called attention to the age we’re in right now, characterizing it as a time when false leaders would be exposed. In the Kali Yuga, which translates as The Dark Time (in this usage the word kali means discord and strife), the Hindu scriptures declare that in our era leaders would become a danger to the world.³

Moral Meltdown

Aquarius is the only one of the twelve signs that singles out the human species: it symbolizes those qualities that separate us from other creatures. What this transit is doing is begging questions about the essential nature of human society; such as, What is the point is of having these extraordinary minds, unique in the animal kingdon? What benefits does planet Earth draw from what we call civilization? What makes a human group civilized, and what makes it uncivilized?

This is the question underneath all the others in the debate about torture.

Growing up in the USA, most of us were conditioned to believe that our country not only did not torture its enemies, but would never do so; could never do so. This made us special. So integral a part of the national self-image was this belief that, only a generation ago, most Americans would have found it unimaginable that they would one day be debating the issue. One didn’t debate the unthinkable. But as soon as Pluto (taboos) started opposing the Sun cluster (self-definition) in the USA chart , that’s exactly what we started to do.

When we remember the core meaning of Pluto aspects, it is easier to make sense of the crossroads at which the USA finds itself. Such transits constitute a profound threat to an entity’s self of self. Historically, the American public’s conviction that their country would never engage in torture both established a point of moral pride and underlay a geopolitical sense of entitlement. That is, so long as they believed their system to be superior – morally, politically, economically — to every other, Americans felt justified in acting like kings of the world. But this fundamental belief has been shattered.

Against the backdrop of the Pluto opposition, the Super Conjunction began to form. Neptune started to cloud issues once deemed utterly clear. Over the last three years, the closer Chiron (wounding) got to Neptune, the more distressingly blurred societal certitudes became. During Chiron’s opposition to transiting Saturn, torture hit the headlines: when the Abu Ghraib photos were released on 2/15/06, visible proof arose to disprove the lie (Neptune) at the country’s righteous core (Jupiter). A blood-curdling visual icon was introduced into the vocabulary of the American imagination, dealing the deadliest blow yet to the country’s sense of self.

For the American conscience, the publication of those photos marked the end of the era of deniability. By the time Jupiter (ethics) ingressed into Aquarius in January of 2009 the issue had become the centerpiece of America’s moral meltdown.⁵ Anti-war activists had long argued that the Bush regime tortured its captives in order to coerce false testimony that linked Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks — testimony that would have provided an alibi for the invasion of Iraq and handily avoided the Nuremberg definition of a war crime. This scenario is no longer merely the opinion of a fringe minority. That which had remained unadmitted by the majority of the population has broken through the crust of collective awareness.

American schoolchildren reading their history books may find themselves making comparisons that would never have crossed their parents’ minds. Such as, how was the CIA’s treatment of Saddam Hussein’s chauffeur any different from the treatment meted out by the royal interrogators of Tudor London, who routinely postponed hanging their victims in hopes of getting them to implicate others while strapped to the rack?

The torture issue is the most visceral of several violations to America’s self-image that have corresponded with Pluto opposition to the US Venus-Jupiter conjunction, signature of the country’s values. The old assertion that We are good and our enemies are evil has started to ring hollow, and as a consequence the simplistic tropes of American foreign policy are no longer going to fly. Now, when Washington tries to justify its imperial moves with the old saw that the USA epitomizes all that is right and true, it will strain the public’s credulity like never before.

Slapped in the Face

It has taken a dramatic economic downturn to expose the American populace to the runaway corruption (Pluto) inherent in the government-business hybrid that runs their country. The downturn is a mass trauma, as Pluto teachings always are.

Thousands upon thousands of small economic injustices, together with a handful of enormous high-profile injustices, are painting a picture whose contrast is stark enough to shake up the multitudes. Americans are seeing their favorite mom-and-pop stores go out of business after serving their neighborhoods for decades; while bloated, bailed-out bankers are not only still in business but getting richer than ever by hoarding their TARP funds. Citizens who never before considered themselves “political” are fuming. Their sense of decency has been flouted.

In this climate a wide swath of Americans are realizing things about their country that the larger world has known for a long time. Such as the fact that a larger proportion of the American population lives in destitution and in prison than is true in any other industrialized nation, even as the country maintains its status as the wealthiest and most militarily powerful on Earth. It is a slap in the face to the average American-Dreamer to consider, for example, that income disparities in his country are equivalent to those in the Third World. But such realities can no longer be refuted.

These transits are about rupturing complacency, a profoundly effective cosmic teaching tool. With Uranus, the Great Awakener, moving into its square with Pluto next year, the American consciousness will receive a succession of rousing blows.

As individuals, our wisest move would be to purposefully wake ourselves up before the transits are forced to do it for us. Our goal should be to deliver — metaphorically or, better yet, ritualistically — a bracing splash of cold water to our faces every morning, as a reminder to stay alert to the world moment.

New template

The election of Barack Obama provided a powerful example of the country’s craving to change from the inside out, which is the only kind of change that will satisfy Pluto. Obama rose upon the crest of this deep craving in the collective soul.

It is not just that we got a new president. Indeed, policy-wise, not much is new at all . It is the template of leadership that is different now. As I have written elsewhere , as a singular leader Obama is less significant than as a rallying icon. It is for this evolutionary role that history will remember him, and it is this perspective that will serve us best as we observe his ongoing vicissitudes.⁶

The Saturn-Uranus opposition that ushered Obama in last November offers us clues about this new template. It told us that people’s expectations of government (Saturn) were radically changing (Uranus); a situation that is both healthy and deeply destabilizing. Meanwhile, the status quo is holding tight to its stale old ideas; as exemplified by the Republican Party’s endless invocations of the virtues of Ronald Reagan. But Uranus is shattering the old clichés, as the transit has shattered the GOP.

The frenzied culture wars we are seeing at the moment mask a desperate yearning on the part of many to believe in the old lies. With the Super conjunction on top of the Sibley Moon, the force of unconscious Neptune (hypnosis; self-deception) is immensely strong in the USA right now.

When the planet was stationary in late May, a small event took place that spoke volumes about the mythmaking that underlies our political stagecraft. California Republicans passed a bill to get rid of a statue in the Capitol Rotunda of Thomas Starr King – a Unitarian abolitionist who was known as “the orator who saved the nation” – and replace it with one of Ronald Reagan, a mediocre actor-turned-corporate shill-turned-Teflon president.

That the right wing would choose this guy to canonize is astoundingly ironic, given the catastrophic results all over the world right now of his notorious “trickle-down economics”. And the fact that the GOP would substitute a statue of old Bonzo for that of a spiritual giant like Thomas Starr King betrays a lack of historical and moral perspective of bewildering proportions.

We can take fair warning from this incident about the foggy underbelly of the Neptune transit. There will be a lot of mass denial to slog through in the months ahead.

Retrograde summer

Since this transit cycle began, the pace of developments on Earth has been fast and furious for the world and for each of us individually; and it’s only natural to feel overwhelmed. Those who don’t shut themselves down by means of the ubiquitous escape mechanisms available cannot help but feel inundated by the intensity pulsing in the atmosphere.

This is why the Goddess invented the retrograde cycle. It’s time to review and take stock. Four planets are retrograde now: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. We are supposed to be waxing introspective, the better to allow the meaning of current events to sink in.

Hearts and Minds

To absorb the deepest levels of meaning that we can from the months ahead, we’ll need to keep our wits sharp and our hearts open.

Our guide in this is the Aquarius conjunction, which has arrived right on cue to help us to make sense of these times. Jupiter is reminding us to stay informed; Neptune and Chiron are reminding us to stay connected to our souls.

And we are not alone. Each of us is surrounded by groups and individuals who are perfectly situated to model knowledge and knowing, and to support us in our work. Brilliant young thinkers, wise elders and finger-on-the-pulse visionaries are everywhere. We just have to notice them.

We will know them by the energy that comes out of their eyes, as we know Einstein.

__________________________

Notes:

1 His chart features a midheaven Sun in Pisces (ruled by Neptune) and an Aquarius Jupiter opposite the planetary ruler of Aquarius (Uranus).

2 Recent writings about the conjunction include the Skywatches from February , April May , and June 2009.

3 Leadership lessons will be taught on a personal level as well as a group level. Readers should check their charts for planets occupying the first few degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn; and/or make note of the houses these degrees fall in. This will show us the parts of ourselves where we may be inspired to demonstrate initiative with family, in one-to-one relationships, or on a societal stage.

4 Some scholars say the yuga that’s now ending started in 3102 BC (very near the date of the beginning of the Mayan Calendar: around 3100 BC). The Kali Yuga also predicted unseasonable weather conditions, and the estrangement of human beings from the gods.

5 The change of US presidents has not lessened America’s quandary. Congress has backpedaled on its vow to close Guantanamo. Its prisoners have been identified by federal lawyers as being “not persons,” thus torturing them is supposedly legal. And after blasting military commissions as “an enormous failure” on the campaign trail, Obama has revived them; a move Amnesty International has called “a disastrous misstep”. The president’s national intelligence director, Adm. Dennis Blair, has declared he believes that torture works; another senior official has been accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala; still another is an apologist for the late war criminal Pinochet.

6 Obama, who originally ‘unequivocally’ opposed that notorious $87 billion war appropriation, later supported four separate war appropriations to the tune of $300 billion. He voted against a proposal to remove most of the combat troops from Iraq by this month, and supported the GOP resolution to keep military funding flowing there. He’s now saying that up to 50,000 will be left in Iraq indefinitely.

]]>