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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

__________________

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many have started thinking differently about water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

_____________________

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

The planetary patterns of 2010 and beyond are astounding.

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

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

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

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

What a time to be alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

____________________

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.

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

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

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

What it’s about is waking up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

_________________________

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the show goes on.

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

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

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

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

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

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