As the month of August begins, the Saturn-Uranus opposition has just peaked for the final time, after two years of spinning us dizzy. Mars is conjunct Saturn and opposed by Jupiter, which is conjunct Uranus; and they are all squaring Pluto (dismantling) in Capricorn (nation states; the economy). Into this fraught setting the New Moon will arrive on August 9th.

These transits have the feeling of a wad of combustible material ready to burst into flame. All the ingredients are there: Saturn is stasis; Uranus is revolution; Pluto is break down; Jupiter is international scope. And Mars is the spark.

The most literal form an explosion can take is geological. Fittingly, a few weeks ago the story broke about a huge undersea methane bubble at the Gulf rig site, the ignition of which could cause a tsunami.

Explosions can also take financial form. In his writings about the global economy, Andrew Palmer has described this period as “a tinderbox moment”.

The Dollar

This past Spring saw bank runs spreading like wildfire from Greece to Portugal and Spain, giving the lie to the EU’s claim of economic and social cohesion. Despite the “shock-and-awe” economic rescues cobbled together by Europe’s governments to save its debtor states, there is straining at the seams. These transits augur disintegration on many levels, not excluding that of political unions.¹

Right now, we have not only Pluto, but Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars – any combination of which are quite capable of cleaving unions – all configured together in the Cardinal Climax.

The USA is a notoriously isolationist nation, and most Americans seem to think Europe’s troubles have nothing to do with them. But this is as short-sighted as imagining that because we can’t see oil in our drinking water it means the disaster in the Gulf has nothing to do with us. If Chiron going into Pisces (on the very day the DeepWater Horizon blew up) tells us anything, it is that what’s going on in any one part of the matrix of life has impact upon the whole. The fact that on April 20th the planet of wounding (Chiron) ingressed into the most universal of water signs (Pisces) while conjunct the planet of oceans (Neptune) is perhaps the most telling feature of the Gulf explosion chart.² The Chironic warning at the root of the calamity: that we deny at our peril the interconnectedness of all things.

This includes social systems. Americans are not yet rioting in the streets; but like the Greeks they are living in an economic tinderbox, their enormous debt being the most obvious point of comparison. Pluto began opposing the US (Sibley) Venus and Jupiter (money, expansion) in 2008, just as Wall Street hit the skids. Since then, Pluto’s partners in the Cardinal T-square have assembled. The whole pattern has been slowly gathering strength, hammering the USA Sun cluster in Cancer.³

The extraordinary transits upon the US chart indicate that beyond the worries brought on by employment, surreal federal debt and bankrupt state governments, something even more fundamental is looming for the country. The USA is undergoing an identity crisis tantamount to an individual going through a nervous breakdown. And given the country’s self-concept as proud masters of the material realm, this breakdown is being played out financially.

Pluto’s opposition to the country’s Venus (resources and value) is not merely changing spending habits; it is gutting assumptions about worth. Even if Pluto were the only actor in this planetary line-up, it would be more than enough to threaten, for example, the perception that US bonds are the safe haven they have historically been. With all these other planetary heavyweights involved as well, America’s meaning as a financially viable entity is being rocked to the core.

The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is no longer unquestionable, and it is clear that Washington’s borrowing behavior cannot continue as it has. American pundits may talk about the economy “getting back on track” and “returning to normal,” but the transits suggest this attitude is delusional. The world is not going back. It is going forward; and it is headed there fast.

Post-Isolationism

The change in America’s relationship to China in recent years has been absolutely stunning, though the shift seems not to have penetrated the USA’s collective consciousness. A vague but fervent Sinophobia ⁴ left over from the 1950s appears to be afoot; as well as, perhaps, a sense of shame — often an ingredient in Pluto transits – connected to being in debt to one’s ideological enemy. These confused Cold-War attitudes only serve to obscure the harsh realities of the USA’s precarious financial position. But it won’t be possible to postpone much longer. China, to whom Uncle Sam owes a trillion and a half dollars, is working on ways to reduce its dependency on the US Treasury. It sells more now to European than to American customers.

The failure of most Americans to consider the implications of their massive deficit is on a par with their failure to consider what’s going on in the rest of the world. The truth is that at this point in human evolution, isolationism is an anachronism. The human race is on an evolutionary trajectory that leads beyond the illusion of physical or psychic separation from the entire web of creation.

Speak No Evil

In addition to this pummeling from the Cardinal Cross, the transit spotlight remains on the USA through the Neptune-Chiron conjunction. For several years this pair has been harrowing the US Moon. They peak again in November of this year.

This transit has been a teaching about mass denial. Americans have been exposed to an avalanche of evidence about how deluded we are as a culture; having witnessed during this period everything from the unmasking of the banking industry to the myriad corruptions of Big Oil and the collusion of our government in these corruptions. And we have been presented with plenty of opportunities to wake up from the delusion.

Where the economy is concerned, Americans’ delusions are legion. Deeply ingrained in the collective imagination is an image of the country as a great cornucopia of uninterrupted plenty (US Jupiter conjunct Sun in Cancer); a font of endless growth. We can see why this where this imagery comes from. Cancer, an emotionally conservative sign with more attachment to the past than the present, governs food, protection and security. Though the USA’s aid to developing countries is miniscule compared to other industrialized nations,⁵ the nation still sees itself as a benevolent breadbasket for the world.

Shock and Fury

As economist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written, there is typically a lag-time between economic shocks and social fury. When people are hit with a drastic cutback in their resources, there tends to be a stunned interval that eventually erupts into a backlash against the established orders.

The wild card here is consciousness. Those observers who see things in terms of human evolution are finding nothing surprising about what’s happening; nor do they see cutting back as necessarily unhealthy. The bigger a perspective one takes, the more likely one is to see global economic changes as a cosmic corrective for the excesses of an old world we are leaving behind.

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Notes:

¹ The situation makes me think of something astrologer Liz Greene wrote in the late 1970s. Transiting Pluto was approaching the Sun in the chart of the USSR at the time, and she saw it as signifying that that Union would go through “a break-up.” Hard as this was to imagine at the time, so it happened, as soon as Pluto moved into position.

² For a detailed interpretation of the explosion chart, see “Disaster in Deep Water: The Astrological Message of the Gulf Coast Oil Crisis,” The Mountain Astrologer, August 2010.

³ The money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near-zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

⁴ Consider the case of the California parents’ group that took to the airwaves in July to protest the Chinese language program being offered at their children’s school. Their fear was that learning Chinese would expose their little ones to “communist propaganda”.

⁵ More than half of the US aid budget is spent not in the poorest parts of the world but in middle-income countries, in the Middle East; and for military and strategic purposes, not to feed people.. Only $3bn a year goes to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The next major milestone of the Cardinal Climax centers around this month’s Full Moon (see lecture series box in right-hand column).

“Honoring the gods” is a handy metaphor for engaging with the universal laws that planets represent. It makes them less abstract, helping us to cultivate a relationship with them.  If we don’t take it too literally (as, alas, so many fundamentalist religionists do), a little anthropomorphizing allows us to go deeper with our understanding of the planet than our intellects alone can go.  It allows us to tap into a part of ourselves that’s already in touch.

Notice how children, who think archetypally by instinct, understand the meaning of characters’ behavior in fairy tales. They know, without being told, that the haughty young man in the story is being supremely unwise to insult the old beggar woman. From legends worldwide, people of all ages know that one honors the god when he or she comes to call; even – maybe especially — if she appears in a scary disguise.

When we allow ourselves to think archetypally, we use understanding to benefit from astrological transits. If we are fortunate enough to be visited by Uranus, the wild-eyed god of liberating change, should we bolt the door? Just the opposite: we should bring out wine and flowers. If Mars is doing something significant in the sky, should we hide under the bed? On the contrary. We might put a red cloth on the altar and lay upon it a prayer of thanks for the courage he bestows.

Some transit trackers like to ritualize ingresses with a candle, which brings spiritual energy to the moment. When you strike the match, think about the planet you’re invoking, and what it means to you. Sweeten your prayer with thanks. Sincere gratitude brings out the best in a transiting planet.

July Ingresses

In addition to the Sun going into Leo on July 22^nd, five planets change positions this month.

Uranus goes retrograde on July 5^th, heading back towards Pisces until it turns forward again in December.

If your life has been a roller coaster since late May, when Uranus entered Aries, this is your chance to check in with The Great Awakener and thank him for the freedom he is bringing you. Practically speaking, it makes sense to appeal to the essence of the planet rather than forcing it to hit you over the head with a 2-by-4…. which it will, if you try to ignore it.

The essence of Uranus is liberation. When we resist his teachings, we feel panicked and chaotic; when we understand and accept what he’s about, we feel the thrill of living in the moment. Make time on July 5^th to proclaim your openness to being changed. Open a window in a room where they’re usually shut.

Mercury leaves Cancer for Leo on July 9^th .

This inaugurates 2 ½ weeks of emphatic self-expression: the stories you tell during this period will have fire behind them. Your performing skills can be usefully deployed and communications charismatic if you maintain perspective about  your need right now to generate applause.

Venus begins a month in Virgo on July 10^th.

This is a modest and sober placement for the goddess of socializing, recreation and aesthetics. The energy lends itself to straightening out your living space and personal effects. Express affection in small, helpful ways.

Chiron re-enters Aquarius on July 20.

Chiron tentatively entered Pisces, sign of the oceans, on April 20: a matter of hours after the Deep Water oil rig explosion. Its return to Aquarius this month will take us through Feb. 8, 2011, at which point it returns to Pisces for eight years. Chiron in Pisces will be an undercurrent of the tumultuous period ahead , that is dominated by the Uranus-Pluto square. This fall and winter, Chiron will once again meet up with  Neptune . Remember the Super Conjunction? That was the melt-down transit that took over the skies in 2009 and February of this year. In November the Neptune-Chiron duet will be back for their swan song about the nature of illusion

Saturn re-enters Libra on July 21^st.

Saturn’s ongoing square with Pluto (Nov 09-Aug 10) is strengthened with this ingress. So is its opposition with Uranus, which peaks for the last of five hits on July 26^th. With all three planets in Cardinal signs at the same time, the T-square they form together is made particularly tense and unstable, especially in the last part of the month.

The last time the Uranus and Saturn opposition reached exactitude was in April, when the Deep Water Horizon rig blew up¹. With Pluto (corporations, corruption, death) squaring them both, we got an explosion (Uranus) not just of fire but of consciousness . This harrowing event has deeply sobered (Saturn) many people into paying attention to what’s at stake in the world right now.

July marks the next step in this learning curve. What will we do with this newly awakened consciousness?

Mars enters Libra on July 29^th

At the end of the month, Mars will join in to the Cardinal T-square. On July 30^th and 31^st it will oppose Uranus and conjunct Saturn. Mars is a provocateur, agitating and energizing whatever it touches. There will be action, there will be high drama, there will be martial energy unleashed. Our job is to keep it constructive. The global themes that have been festering will be shaken up like a smoothie in a blender. We should be prepared for anything. Mars’s involvement here exaggerates the Aries theme of activism that underlies the Cardinal Cross years.

These transtits do not support sitting at home twiddling our thumbs. This is not to suggest that every one should sail to Gaza on a flotilla or join an agitprop theatre — although such creative expressions of righteous feeling will appeal to an increasing number of people. What it does suggest is that the spark of action is enlivening all of us, each in our own unique ways, and that it is a call to be heeded.²

Leadership  — signified by the Cardinal signs — can express itself in a myriad of different ways. In whatever way the impulse expresses itself in you, pay attention to its promptings. These transits are about agency. They are dispelling passivity, and replacing it with a healthy pride in our individual capabilities. Their lesson is that we are agents of the world we want, and of the lives we want to lead.

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Notes:

1 See the August issue of The Mountain Astrologer for my analysis of the rig explosion chart. Media sources place the explosion time at 9:53 p.m. CDT on April 20 (0253 GMT on April 21).

2 An example of a less overtly political but equally apropos use of this energy is the spiritual activism of the Unity Wave collective, . who have planned local and global intention-setting activities, including synchronized meditations and prayers, in response to the desecration in the Gulf. Their main program takes place on July 17th and 18th.

What’s happening on June 26th is not just any full Moon; it’s a Lunar Eclipse. (My lecture series on the 2012 years begins with this eclipse; see announcement in right-hand column).

And it isn’t just any eclipse: it’s the world’s formal debut into what astrologers are calling the Cardinal Climax. Its chart features a tight Grand Cross made up of no less than seven planets. We’ll have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto in a T-square; with the Cancer Sun supplying the final vertex. The reason predictive astrologers are watching this chart like a hawk is that the extreme tension in such patterns is often associated with dramatic outer-world events.

But humanistic astrologers see things somewhat differently. We don’t see transits as operating by cause and effect. It isn’t as if the eclipse will cause this or that to happen. It just describes the great themes afoot, telling us what time it is. Moreover, it’s not particularly empowering to sit around waiting to react. In order to learn from this or any other transit, why wait to see what the group mind will cook up by way of illustration? We don’t need the news in order to engage with the eclipse.

Tale Told by an Idiot

Then there is the fact that the mainstream news is highly unreliable as an indicator of significance. The commercial subtexts and outright falsehoods streaming into people’s living rooms day in and day out make most of what’s shown on television more mind control than teaching tool. Though the American mass media, especially, displays a diabolical psychological genius, and a state-of-the-art aesthetic sophistication as far as the promotion of consumer goods is concerned, artistically and intellectually we would have to consider it an embarrassment and a failure.

It is true that if we carefully decode the welter of distorted reporting, we may find clues in the media with which to parse transits. But on its own terms TV and radio are worse than worthless as interpreters of meaning. Those who want to connect with cosmic messages must maintain a skeptical distance from our society’s lowest-common-denominator savants, the talking heads.

What TV tells us is going on in the world is a far cry from “the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite used to say. Consider the way stories are prioritized on US TV. It’s not as if the crisis of the Euro had nothing to do with Americans because they don’t hear as much about it as they hear about the juvenile infighting of their own two political parties. It’s not as if the slaughter in Central Asia isn’t happening¹. On May 28th the US death toll in Afghanistan reached the grim figure of 1,000, but you’d never have known it from my big-city newspaper, whose front page reported a local sports event.  Most insidiously, it’s not as if the USA, a country where special interests pay for votes in Congress, and where candidates for high office have to be millionaires or billionaires to pay for their campaigns,² deserves to be called a democracy just because the pundits, the government and the schools use the word.

It is time to engage, deeply and authentically, with the era we have incarnated into, and that means telling the truth to ourselves. Some of us may do so by aligning with path-showing teachers, by joining groups that speak truth to power while providing safety-in-numbers, or by choosing allies wisely. We can all do so by seeking out reliable information. When we access clean data and stay connected to the moment, we attract the truth. We draw to us exactly the right people and opportunities to help us make sense of our unique role, and perform it boldly.

The Big Four

The way to tune into the energies of this month’s Eclipse is to feel them in the belly. The pattern‘s lunar emphasis suggests that the current economic and political climate in which we’ve been stewing lately will be felt on a direct, emotional level by all who are not shut down.

In order to fully make this transit your own, look at the houses in your chart where the four cardinal points fall: zero degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn. Notice whether any planets or angles fall on or near them. These placements in your natal wheel represent the crossroads you’re standing at.

For the world at large, these four vertices represent the lessons humanity is being taught right now:

–The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (June 8^th 2010 – January 2011) expresses cardinal fire; the energy we feel, for example, in rousing street demonstrations that speak truth to power.

– Pluto in Capricorn expresses cardinal earth, cool and mercilessly realistic. It is telling us Eliminate the corruption in your monetary systems or they will fall apart like a house of cards. It is saying Either save this planet or you will not survive.

– Saturn (regulation, contraction), having retrograded back into Virgo for the first iteration of the Cardinal Cross, will re-enter Libra on July 21st. This is cardinal air, so the lesson is that we take the responsibility to review our moral and social laws; such as governmental limits on industry.

– The summer Cancer transits will express cardinal water, the most emotional of the four. For those open to it, it will feel like a reminder that neglecting our planetary home amounts to a kind of planetary matricide .

Do you keep a journal or write in your calendar? Pay attention to what happens for you at the Eclipse on June 26^th, internally and externally. If you do rituals, ask for a message about your place in the world moment. If you have your chart read, ask your astrologer to describe your life purpose.

Difficult to Ignore

These transits are hell-bent on change, and the world’s dying institutions will not withstand their assault. Issues that have been heating up already will demand to be acknowledged: global debt (of which Greece, Portugal. Italy, Ireland and Spain; much of Asia; and all of Africa, are bellwethers), resource depletion and systems collapse.

For those who are receptive to what’s trying to happen, the stale bromides of conventional wisdom will chafe. The little lies of everyday life will feel unbearable. Platitudes will vex us, like toxic food in the belly that wants to be purged. The injustices and corruptions of the world will be increasingly difficult to ignore.

Uranus in Aries

The conjunction in early June of Uranus and Jupiter, fresh from their ingress into Aries, makes this corner of the Cross the most palpable of the four right now. It should put the spark of rebellion into all of us; and our goal should be to express this as mature, self-aware rebellion. Certainly we will find no lack of things to rebel against. This energy is often unconscious; and we have good reason to make it conscious this month because Jupiter’s presence will amplify it.

Regardless of what transits are happening, each of us has a lifelong relationship with Uranus, which feels like a champing-at-the-bit urgency. Your natural way of channeling it is indicated by the planet’s placement in your natal chart.

Every seven years, Uranus’ electric urgency takes on a new set of issues; and natives born under its aegis break away from whatever that sign represents. En masse, a generation is consigned to buck the trend in that particular way.

For those of us born under Uranus in Cancer (1949-56), it was our parents’ version of domesticity that felt unbearable: we couldn’t get away from it fast enough. For the Uranus-in-Leo generation who came along next (1955-56 to 1961-62), it was about repudiating old forms of creativity: new forms had to be invented that looked like nothing what had come before. As for you Uranus-in-Virgo people, you know who are you are: you find conventional attitudes towards work and health intolerable; and goddess bless you for it.

In those charts where Uranus is natally pronounced, there is an explosive urge to repudiate complacency. Now that Uranus has moved into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, we’re going to have a crop of babies whose defiance will be pumped into full-speed-ahead action. And for those of us already full-grown, these skies are bestowing – and demanding – that we actively rebel from the inauthentic.

Everyone a Risk-Taker

We are moving into a period when we’ll need to know ourselves exceptionally well; as high-risk athletes, cliff climbers and stock car drivers do. We’ll need to know our limits because we’ll be driven to push them further.

Most of us won’t play out these energies physically. Like tournament chess players and suicide hot-line staffers, the high stakes may be psychological. If we are artists, our risks may take aesthetic or conceptual form. Like Bjork, who has Uranus is on the Midheaven to the degree.³

It’s never been more important to live through your chart. There are revelations to be had.

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Notes:

1 A report from 2009 estimates that over the past three years the War in Afghanistan – or, more accurately, the war in Pakistan – has been responsible for the deaths of 700 civilians and 14 “suspected terrorists”. That’s about fifty of the former for every one of the latter. One would think that more Americans, still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, would see their government’s current murder spree of Muslim innocents as highly dangerous to themselves; in that it could not help but fuel anti-American rage among Islamicists worldwide. With barely any pundits of national stature connecting the dots in this way, we have to ask ourselves how much use the corporate media is as an aid to understanding.

2 Influence-peddling has always existed. But in America, which wins the prize for taking the lobby system to the most dysfunctional extreme, the grotesque cost of political campaigns, and the disparity between these sums of money and those being emptied out of the government agencies that serve the public in everyday ways, has brought a new level of surrealism to what is dubiously called “the democratic process.” It is not unusual for US elected officials to spend several days each working week trolling for dollars to pay for TV spots. Without funding from big financial interests, no campaign could be waged. This is a plutocratic, not a democratic, scenario.

3 Born November 21, 1965, 7:50 AM, Reykjavik, Iceland

Uranus will form a significant corner of the Cardinal Cross, a world-altering configuration with many peaks between now and 2015. For about half a year Jupiter will be orbiting next to Uranus, putting a bellows to the flame. ( See box at right for more information about my Lecture series on these transits)

Jupiter and Uranus will create leaders and heroes.

They will help us wake up, fast.

Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction

Uranus and Jupiter conjoin every thirteen years. This time we’ll get a series of three exactitudes that begins on June 8^th, 2010, and extends through January 1^st, 2011. Only the first hit is in Aries, and it will probably make the most noise. The other two hits will probably usher old issues to the fore again, such as health care reform in America and the tribal political warfare that flared up around it. ¹

There will be those who receive the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction as an infusion of vigor and alertness, like the exquisite tightrope walker in the documentary “Man on a Wire.” Those sensitive to this transit will be inspired to precipitous acts of independence, like the artists and visionaries to whom we look for moral, intellectual and artistic leadership, like Bill Moyers, Diane di Prima and Peter Joseph . A spotlight of public visibility (Jupiter) will be focused upon those thinkers for whom the era is ready (Uranus).

Aries is about activism, which we may define as the urge to act in the service of life. Jupiter (social reform) and Uranus (genius) will inspire in many people sudden cravings to engage in the outer world.

Then there will be those who will manifest the puerile side of the conjunction. In the absence of spiritual maturity the forces of pseudo-populism are likely to be excited even further than they have been. In the USA we have been seeing a kind of mob mentality, characterized by a wildly ideological fervor (Jupiter) and a highly selective notion of individual freedom (Uranus).

Two-Step Process

There is a lot of talk among astrologers and other big-picture thinkers about the need for radical change during the Cardinal Cross years. But in order to begin to apply this rather abstract idea, we need to think about it as part of a two-step process:

1. We need to wake up to what’s happening in the world.

2. Then and only then can we act to change it; in whatever large or small-scale ways our chart indicates.

The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction will be a shot in the arm where both steps are concerned.

Denial

Denial is the norm in the modern industrialized world. The system could not survive without it, and it has so far been very effective in keeping the most incongruous realities in place in the supposedly educated West.

America’s Tea Party enthusiasts are the latest embodiments of this sorry state of affairs. They indulged in a veritable orgy of denial during America’s health care wars. Instead of calling out the role of the insurance industry and the corrupt politicians — from both parties — that these companies finance, they have been misdirecting their righteous rancor onto those positioned a notch or two beneath them on the social ladder: the uninsured, the undocumented and the indigent.

Taxes, too, loom large in the rhetoric of these folks. So one would think they’d have found it newsworthy that, this past tax day, most of America’s big corporations — after earning staggering profits in an economy in which everybody but themselves is suffering — paid virtually no taxes at all. This is business as usual, of course. It is no secret that a web of loopholes written into law by corporate-sponsored Congressfolk protects America’s biggest industries from paying even a smidgen of their fair share. But again we might wonder: why  aren’t the red-white-and-blue crowd up in arms about this?

The answer lies in what they are — and are not –  hearing on the radio and TV. In the case of corporations not paying taxes, they’re hearing almost nothing. And what they are hearing puts the emphasis in quite the opposite direction.

Last month, under the Dark of the Moon leading up to tax day, Fox News –- number-one in viewership among the cable networks — aired a story about that great threat to the civilized world, the welfare mother. Tens of millions of Fox viewers watched as news vans full of intrepid reporters descended upon the modest dwellings of a couple of random families so poor that they pay nothing in taxes .

This is who you should be angry at, audiences were told.

Divide and Conquer

Divide-and-conquer strategies have a long and ignoble history. Thus have the few at the top maintained their control over the many at the bottom since the advent of hierarchical social orders. Since time immemorial, emperors and kings have successfully drawn their subject people’s attention away from the injustices they suffer by inciting popular wrath against witches, Jews, heretics, dark-skinned people, the poor, “suspected terrorists’… whatever Other was handy.

But we have an exponentially more insidious situation here. Because of the reach of the corporate media in the contemporary world, public opinion is being manipulated across greater swaths of humanity than ever before. It is manipulated not with royal edicts backed up by the gallows, but under the innocuous guise of information dissemination; the most egregious example being Fox, which gets away with calling its ham-fisted  propaganda “news”.

Dollars for Death

There is also entrenched denial about the global economy, and the way countries spend what’s left of their money. Most of us harbor an understandable resistance to thinking about the fact that, right now, every country on Earth is in debt to some other country. Most of the governments of the world’s “developing” nations (the term is anachronistic in this era of systems collapse) are completely dysfunctional, and systemic bankruptcy is on the rise in Europe.

But in most of the Western world the middle classes are expecting things to get back to normal. Which begs the question, what do we mean by “normal”? My sense is that most folks who hold this expectation also hold an awareness — more conscious in some, less conscious in others; but still, an awareness — that the world is irrevocably changed by global warming, resource depletion and a new kind of warfare that is borderless and endless. Yet despite being aware of these  game-changing scenarios, the expectation still exists of a return to the familiar ways: mass-polluting consumerism in an economy set up to fund the powers that perpetrate asymmetrical military campaigns.

So long as the collective mind is still caught in this strange cognitive dissonance, the government and its media arm are not about to change their ways. Despite the hype around “greening”, the amount of resources being pumped into systemic change is paltry, whereas the amount being pumped into the same old places remains stable, and seems quite as acceptable to consensus thinking as it always has been.

The most flagrant example of this blind acceptance is the USA, whose people allow more than half of their tax bill to go to the single most impoverishing place a country’s resources can go: the military.  Despite the fact that one pole of the political spectrum is waxing apoplectic about spendthrift government, and the other pole is presumably still opposed to endless war, both remain bizarrely silent about these  gargantuan expenditures. Amidst all the brouhaha about the economy, the citizenry en masse seems not to realize that the surreal amounts of money they spend on death and destruction dwarf in magnitude any other part of the national budget.

While public fury is directed at petty Congressional earmarks, and while parks are closed, schools and hospitals shut down, public transit gutted and even jails emptied out for lack of funds, 720 million dollars a day continue to pour unabated into war. And the vast majority of Americans don’t bat an eye.²

Seven hundred and twenty million dollars a day. Without factoring in this stunning figure, it is clearly impossible to see the current recession in perspective. If a serious discussion about the economy were truly the object here, we would expect this statistic to be discussed at anti-tax conventions, to be taught in schools, to be broadcast on the news.

But this does not happen, thanks to the telecommunications industry; whose skewed information fits the needs of the government of which it is an organ. And given that our government is itself an organ of the military-industrial complex, there’s little chance of our hearing about that 720-million-dollar figure on the mainstream news. Even such august media organs as the New York Times rarely mention the costs of war. Information like this stays locked away in a repressed little closet of the public mind.

Over the years ahead, it will be harder and harder to avoid looking at realities like these. In time, the planetary invitation to break out of denial will become a summons.

Monkeys

Those who sang the praises of the Age of Aquarius back in the day may recognize, with a sudden sense of recognition, that these are the times we heard were coming. We who are alive now can be an active part of it, which means contributing our unique skills to the universal attitude shift that wants to happen. (What are my unique skills, you may ask? Look at your chart. It’s all there.)

Or we can play the old “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” game, where “evil” means “truth.” The trouble with that option is that it does damage. It harms others and ourselves, in body, mind and spirit.

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Notes:

1 The purpose of retrogradation is to give us a couple more shots at understanding what the issues in question were really about.

The second and third exactitudes of this transit feature Uranus in Pisces (chaos, universality) again, opposed to Saturn in Virgo (health) again. See Dena de Castro’s piece on this in The Mountain Astrologer, April/May 2010.

2 It remains to be seen whether the peace movement will remember how disillusioned they once felt about Obama’s escalation of the bloodshed in Central Asia , where civilian casualties continue to climb.

Where does this degree fall in your natal chart? Here is where you are getting glimpses of enlightenment, of a peculiarly modern sort. It’s also where you are vulnerable to the most curious addiction of our age.

Socializing our Pain

I have written elsewhere about Chiron’s association with woundedness, and about Neptune’s with self-loss. When you put the two together in Aquarius (collective interaction), you get a teaching about how we socialize our pain.

The sign Aquarius wants to share ideas. It knows that groups can conjure mental energy in ways that single individuals cannot. And because Neptune universalizes whatever it touches, this transit has been leading us to join the biggest group of all: the human race. It’s given us the urge to merge with the undefined masses across the world.

If the terms of this merger are anonymous, so much the better. Neptune induces us to do a strange disappearing act, whereby we downplay our identity in interactions; as if we were a blacked-out silhouette in a witness protection interview.

Or a username in an online conversation.

Cosmic Pun

Neptune lures us to escape from individuality, which is pretty much the opposite of what we say we want. This is why its transits are so confusing. Our conscious self values and promotes our uniqueness, whereas the unconscious part of our self represented by Neptune feels uniqueness to be a burden and a trap.

So what do we get with this planet in this sign? Depending on the awareness with which we wield it, the transit shows up either as a longing to escape (shadow Neptune) into the group mind (Aquarius), or as the inspiration to plunge into spiritual union with it (fully realized Neptune).

Chiron’s role in the conjunction brings out the hardships of being human, which the transit suggests can be resolved by diving like a raindrop into the great ever-shifting sea of human communication.

This symbolism fits cyber-networking so exactly that it’s like a cosmic pun.

Ego and Soul

There’s been a lot of consciousness-raising during the 12 years Neptune has been in Aquarius. All over the world, people have been led to surrender their ego-selves to compassionate service or spiritual search. They’ve been following a siren call to link up with humanity as a whole.

Others have surrendered to the sprawling mass of ones and zeroes in cyber-space, searching for links of a less exalted nature. Since Neptune entered Aquarius in 1998, digital socializing has exploded into a universal phenomenon.

There is quite a gulf between Neptune at its best and Neptune at its worst. It’s easy to see why, when we factor in cultural conditioning. The very idea of ego-transcendance goes against everything we moderns are raised to do. We’re taught to avoid anything that smacks of self-undermining, a neurosis guaranteed to mess with our career arc, our sexual performance, or our SAT scores.

But Neptune only undermines the individuality in order to give us a vaster frame of reference within which to understand the mystery of identity.

No Shamans

This transit is right on top of the USA’s Moon. Americans have been marinating in it, on a day-in-day-out level. For a society like ours, its message is particularly difficult to assimilate. This is because it’s an explicitly otherworldly transit, and ours is a very worldly society.

Materialist societies give their citizens few frameworks with which to interpret Neptune’s promptings. We have no shamans to translate for us the non-pathological meaning of angst. We barely have philosophers any more: the pundits have replaced them. Nor do we champion the artists, under whose direction we might contact these sublime yearnings. And fat chance of the church lending a hand: contemporary Western religions tend to be far more Saturnine (rule-bound) than Neptunian (mystical).

This leaves the material realm to absorb our existential pain, and it isn’t subtle enough to do so. So the dark side of Neptune (passivity, obliviousness) in Aquarius (technology) has become the transit’s primary expression.

It is not the internet itself that is the problem, of course. Like all game-changing human developments, the internet revolution has provided a context for genuine genius to arise in a million different ways, and has allowed connections between thinkers that would’ve been inconceivable at any other time in human history.²

But in terms of collective spiritual maturation, it has hindered rather than helped us. Our misuse of cyber-communication has created a gaping social emptiness.

Weakness and Passivity

The philosopher Jacob Needleman chalks up the insanity of our times to “the weakness and passivity of our attention.” Astrology sees this as a signature of misapplied Neptune.

Even at its best, this planet will sap our vigor and initiative; and if we don’t use it with spiritual intelligence, it’ll make us tired, restless and zoned out. With the conjunction going back and forth over the Sibly chart’s Moon for several years and counting, the USA is a poster child for this enervation. Distracted and superficial, America’s popular culture, with its dumbed-down media and its indulgence of our quick-fix tastes, reflects back to us the weakness and passivity Needleman is talking about. The cyber-centric lifestyle has swallowed up these expressions of Dark Neptune into a sea of normalcy.

It bears repeating that our unhealthy use of this or any other transit isn’t the planets’ fault, nor is it a “bad” thing in the big picture; it’s just a symptom, one that we can learn from if we pay attention. Chiron’s involvement tells us that the purpose here is healing; and holistic theory tells us that we cannot heal anything – not the flu, not heartache, not spiritual disquiet — until or unless we face the wound at its source.

Our first step is to concede that our society encourages us to cover up our symptoms (take a pill for pain, drink coffee for fatigue, browse the internet to procrastinate). The next step is to distance ourselves from what “everybody else” is doing, and look deeper at our malaise.

A Still Mind

We Westerners have always had trouble understanding what Eastern sages meant when they talked about cultivating a still mind.  We are trained to do things. Why should we aspire to just be (whatever that means)? Why take the time out to meditate when the brass ring awaits those who get things done³?

Cyber-multitasking has exaggerated — to a sociopathic degree — our avoidance of self-reflection. Tweeting ⁴ and texting from morning till night, lost in the ingress and egress of information of ever-more-dubious significance, we keep ourselves in a state of nonstop pseudo-alertness that has diluted our focus to the point of mindlessness. ⁵

It was Neptune in Aquarius that ushered the acronym ADD into the vernacular. Though officially considered a disorder (which drug companies are more than happy to address), ADD has become so widespread that it is not seen as suspect any more. If “everybody” does it, how can it be unhealthy? Here we’re up against the sneaky codicil of misused Neptune: the blindness of conformity, as when we partake in mass addictions. Once a social phenomenon has become universalized, most people lose the ability to evaluate it critically.

To be a slave to one’s digital machines is no longer the exception but the rule. What’s exceptional is seeing it as slavery.

It is no longer considered rude to yak loudly on a cell phone in a public space, submitting strangers to the details of where you bought your awesome new boots. It is now commonplace for pedestrians to cross the street in front of traffic, the gadgets in their ears making them unable to hear the truck that nearly ran them over. It is de rigeur for the check-out clerk to attend to her cell phone while she does business with the flesh-and-blood customer standing in front of her, attending only partially to either person.

Generation Gap 2.0

The electronic saturation of everyday life feels especially normal to “digital natives”, of course, and especially alarming to oldsters. Many wry jokes have been made by hapless older parents whose children, born with tech savvy in their blood, help us geezers out with our perplexing new machines.

But less thought has been given to the dark side of growing up in a wired world. A recent study found that children average almost 7½ hours a day on various electronic devices (including video games, cell phones, TV and the Internet). There’s plenty of research pointing to a link between this staggering usage and sinking academic performance, in case we needed studies to tell us what we already know from common sense. And as every parent knows, getting kids to curb their usage becomes harder and harder to do as more and more of their peers are raised without such boundaries (dark Neptune).

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of our mass attention disorder is what it is doing to very young children, who depend on creative social interaction during their critical formative years in order to build the social skills they’ll need later in life. These questions arise when we see a toddler stumbling along beside his parent who, instead of communicating with the child about the sights and sounds of the outing, is talking on her cell phone as they walk down the street. In terms of language skills lost and psychological modeling neglected, what will be the repercussions of this child’s missing ongoing interface with his mother? In terms of emotional bonding, what inference will the child draw from the fact that whoever she’s talking to matters more than he does?

What significance will the child draw from the fact that the little piece of polymer attached to his mother’s ear matters more than the here-and-now?

Enmeshed

Our love affair with our gadgets has become, as the psychologists say, enmeshed. We are headed for a crisis, and it may be that texting while driving is the issue that sends us over the edge. Of all our cyber-centric pathologies this one is the most blatant and therefore most likely to get our attention first.

It seems a no-brainer that texting while behind the wheel is unwise to the point of suicidal; but as we know from observing the psychology of substance abuse, addiction does not bow to common sense or even survival instinct. It was only when the fatal statistics starting coming in that laws against texting while driving started to be tentatively introduced.⁶

Neptune, the key player in this transit, has nothing to do with reason. It governs drowning, whether psychological – as when we drown our sorrows in drink – or intellectual – as when we are so flooded by data from electronic devices that we become oblivious to our immediate environment and everything in it.

What do we do when we’re drowning? We do something to get grounded. Astrology offers the big picture as a grounding device. Its symbolism here is asking us to consider the tech revolution in the larger context of human evolution, and then to recognize our misuses of what is essentially a tool.

A little basic astrology can give us an entrée into the deeper significance of the transit. We know that Aquarius is the sign of friendship, classically defined as a meaningful sharing of ideas that makes us more human. It’s telling to reconsider Plato’s ideal, which stresses the quality of our interactions, and contrast it with the phenomenon of cyber-friending, with its emphasis on the quantity of our interactions. Thinking about this contrast with an open heart will get us into the Chiron part of the transit: a teaching about the pain of disconnectedness.

Chironic work is not for everybody. But it is the key to turning this strangely soulless period into one of transcendent understanding.

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Notes

1 This is where they were at the Super Conjunction of 2009 (which featured Chiron, Neptune and Jupiter); and at the exact conjunction between Chiron and Neptune in 2/16-17/10. Chiron will dip its toe into Pisces in April 2010, only to go retrograde and re-enter Aquarius in July. When it goes direct again in November 2010, it will do so at the same degree: 26 Aquarius.

2 Many astrologers connect the personal-computer explosion with the Uranus and Neptune conjunction of 1993, a once-in-171-year event.

3 Study after study has shown, however, that even worldly achievements – e.g. those aspired to by business folk and competitive athletes — are easier for those who meditate; because it teaches them how to concentrate. Focus is focus, no matter what its object.

4 The tweeting phenomenon can be seen as having crossed over from marginal fad to mainstream activity when it was first tried — on the air!– by celebrity everywoman Oprah Winfrey. This milestone was reached on April 17^th, 2009, five weeks before the first hit of the Aquarius conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune.

5 Our social pace has gotten so frenetic that a backlash against it was bound to arise. Thus, the popularity of yoga, eco-tourism, the slow food movement… we might call this whole balancing trajectory the Slow Living Movement.

6 It would be naïve to ignore the billions of telecommunications industry dollars that depend upon customers not thinking about these things too carefully. Consider the studies that link cell phone radiation to cancer: the German research on this goes all-but-unreported in the USA.

About thirty years ago I was at a lecture by Rob Hand, whom I vastly admired (still do), that blew my mind. I haven’t thought the same way again, about history, ecology or the state of the world.

But at the end of his talk, he said something that appalled me.

His was discussing how the concept of a maternal Earth had changed over the eons. He talked about how, before the advent of what historians call “history,” people lived with Nature as if they saw themselves as children of the Earth^1.

I found myself profoundly moved by this. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the Earth-as-Mother idea; but I‘d always heard it framed in a lyrically metaphorical way. It struck me now, though, that early peoples must have felt the idea quite literally. To them it was not a concept but a fact, and the most important fact of existence. They were born of the Earth Mother, fed, sheltered and held by Her. She took care of them every day in a thousand different ways.

I started feeling, in my body, what it must have felt like to be as intimately connected to the Earth as an infant feels connected to its mother.

Instinctive Ecology

I don’t mean to romanticize pre-industrial cultures. We can well imagine the hideous brutalities of ancient life. But, clearly, pre-civilized humanity had a far more “civilized” attitude when it came to stewardship of the planet. How could it not be so, if they saw her as their mother? I doubt if we moderns can fully fathom the implications of a deity-devotee relationship this personal.

I think we can assume that the idea of human-created pollution would have been quite unimaginable to these early tribes^2.. The closest analogy we have is the sense of blasphemy a Muslim feels when he perceives the Koran being befouled, or a Christian when she sees a cross defiled. But for ancient devotees of Mother Law, surely the idea of fouling the air on a planetary scale would have seemed not only a mass sacrilege, but a subjectively horrible one; because of the mother angle. They would have seen it as macrocosmic matricide.

Not to mention, suicide. Like a fetus uncorking a vial of poison while in the womb.

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As I sat in the auditorium I started to think about the difference in emotional tone between the more recent sky-god religions and that of the Earth goddess^3.. For the ancients, “God” wasn’t some power-wielding boss, demanding slavish obeisance and passing judgment. She was the life force; adored as a baby adores its all-powerful, all-providing mother. Nor was she seen as remote, sitting on a throne up in the clouds. She was right there; in every rushing stream, in every plant growing, in every pregnant woman.

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At this point I became aware of a mass yearning flooding the lecture hall. I could feel every proto-ecologist in attendance (remember, this was in the ’70s) aching to return to that golden age. It was heartbreaking to consider the difference between the way humanity had seen itself before — as beloved, protected children — and the way we have come to see ourselves now — as masters and destroyers of our planetary home.

Leaving Home

Hand went on to describe how the collective viewpoint slowly evolved from tribal identification into individualism. It had to be so, if humans were to develop into unique selves⁴.

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It made sense to me, that this would be part of the cosmic plan. Just as each child must develop a singular ego if she is to mature properly, the human race itself had been in a juvenile state, beyond which we needed to mature. In the process, we left behind that undifferentiated identification with Mother Earth. We separated from her. And, finally, we went way too far; to the point of denying Her (as hurtful teenagers often do, with their human mothers), in our wayward attempt to cultivate full agency and rational minds.

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We were expelled from the Garden, or expelled ourselves. And it was for a reason: we had to grow up. We moved from an aboriginal state of ontological infancy – seeing ourselves as part of the universe, afloat in the undifferentiated All-That-Is – to a state of being cosmically un-tethered. At that point we found ourselves all on our own: big boys and girls who had to figure things out from scratch (thus Copernicus, Descartes; The Enlightenment)^5..

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Then Hand dropped the bomb. “Perhaps the Earth is not a Mother after all,” he said, “but only a womb.”

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I was aghast, hearing this. As a devotee of the ancient ways, I felt I was hearing a blasphemy. The murmur of distress rippling through the auditorium told me I wasn’t the only one.

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But that lecture was a long time ago in my conceptual process. And it was before the 2012 years had brought humanity to the precipice.

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Beyond Terra

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The times we find ourselves in have been blowing minds all over the world, triggering paradigm shifts as radical as the transits in the sky. My own worldview has changed many times over since Hand gave that lecture. For me it is no longer a negation of Terra, or a withdrawal of reverence from her in any way, to see her as part of a vaster Mother Force.

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For most of human history, the view of Earth as the beginning point and end point of all things had a physical and religious logic to it. But as the world^6. has grown smaller through exploration and technological advancement, our perspective on it has mutated.  Those with a reverence to the Divine Feminine may find their allegiance expanding beyond the literal planet. The Earth-as-womb idea suggests that our bodies were born here, and our consciousness got its start here; but that neither is limited to here.

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In a telling piece of synchronicity, the blockbuster hit “Avatar” — a glorious celebration of Nature-loving — debuted around the time of the Copenhagen summit, where the case was made once and for all that if we don’t stop fouling our planetary nest, we are toast.

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“Avatar”’, whose action takes place on some other planet, is a passionate case for reverence for one’s planetary home. The movie’s timing is a manifestation of the Cardinal T-Square now upon us, whose absent vertex is Cancer: sign of the Mother. “Avatar” is an extension of the Gaia idea, but one step farther out along the trajectory we have been considering. The movie proposes that our acknowledgement of Nature’s bounty, and our gratitude for its nurture, need not be equated with and limited to the planet where we were born.

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Bigger reference points are beckoning.

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I imagine that when Ptolemy introduced his gridded globe in the second century, that those who saw it felt similarly beckoned. They were being invited to see the Earth from above. For my generation, a similar revelation dawned when the first NASA photograph of Earth was sent back from space. Seeing it for the first time filled me with a visceral sense of wonder. What would the implications be, in the group psyche, of seeing Earth from afar?

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The moment that photo entered the collective visual lexicon, our planet went through a radical meaning shift. It was no longer merely the solid mass under our feet, as taken-for-granted as the color of our own eyes — which, because we are looking through them all the time, we cannot see. The Earth was now an object; a beautiful, fragile, precious thing.

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These incremental shifts in the ways humans see the Earth are part of an inevitable unfolding of species consciousness. We can see it happening on many levels. On the technological level, the more scientists explore space, the more we will be — literally — seeing Earth from afar. This will be accompanied by a shift on the conceptual level, as our explorations prompt more questions about life on other planets.

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Humanity will not be able to harbor for much longer the same geocentric assumptions that our Terra-worshiping ancestors harbored. A parallel trajectory is doubtless underway on the spiritual level. Among those tuned into the spirit of Gaia, the idea will gain ground — without any reduction in our devotion — that we are now shifting towards the conception of a more abstract sense of Home.

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This is not to suggest that Earth is not our mother. It is to suggest that the whole Universe is.

__________

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Notes

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1 Though trivialized by modern anthropologists as “fertility cults,” these aboriginal cosmologies, with their talismans of huge-bellied, faceless females, did not view  Mother Nature as a minor goddess. They saw Her as the ultimate Source and Creatrix of the cosmos. They were devoted to the Earth every bit as reverentially as the Abrahamic religions were devoted to their gods, who showed up much later.

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2 As ecological axioms go, not fouling one’s own nest would seem to be a pretty practical one. Prehistoric humans observed that the other flora and fauna of the Earth did not foul their own nests. They watched how wolves and hares kept their habitats clean, and felt the same desire. They had not yet lost the ability to identify with the other animals, and to benefit from animal instincts. Indeed, they watched the planet itself clean up: through organic decay, cyclical rains, forest fires, and all the other mechanisms through which natural detritus is regenerated into new life. What we now call “recycling” – a concept foreign enough to us moderns to require its own special term — must have once seemed utterly obvious. It must have seemed inseparable from sanity.

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3 Though it is equated in the modern mind with the whole concept of “religion,” the reign of the big-three sky gods (Yahweh, Mohammed and Jehovah) was in fact very brief; and very recent, by contrast with the countless millennia during which “pagans”  worshiped the Earth Mother. See Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Ecyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, HarperSanFrancisco 1983.

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4 Also in the 70s Riane Eisler came out with The Chalice and the Blade, which presents a similar view of the prehistoric worldview idea. Rick Tarnas was writing about it, too, linking it –as was transpersonal psychologist Stanislov Graf — to astrological symbolism. Demetra George introduced a similar perspective in her work on the asteroids . And now, in the 2010s, we have the Bioneers and many others, implementing the neo-Nature-worshiping worldview with a new, postmillennial urgency.

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5 This is the macrocosmic parallel of Carl Jung’s theory about how individual human awareness evolves. He proposed that in order to fully develop, we each have to “leave home” – to repudiate the familiar: the forces that nurtured us originally — only to come back home again.  at a higher level of awareness.

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6 Consider the word “world.” Though we rarely think about it as such, it is a relative term. To Ptolemy it meant “the known world;” meaning, the Roman Empire and those patches of the globe that classical travelers had written about. To scholars of the European Renaissance, it meant Christendom. What does it mean, to you, modern reader? The planet Earth? The solar system? The unknowable, limitless universe?

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 , just hours before the Solar Eclipse

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.

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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. .