It is a once-in-168-year event. In a year chockfull of world-altering transits, it is one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now begins a calendar year that’s been well worked over before it was born. Variously interpreted eschatological imagery and dubious pop culture prophecies have been pouring forth for years now, exploiting poor 2012 like an MGM child star. Now that it’s here, let’s separate the hype from the essential meanings that underlie it.

The Longest Arm of the Cross

The star of the transit show is a first partile 90º angle, a First Quarter square, between Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn. It will be exact to the minute of arc seven times between this Spring and March of 2015. During 2012 the transit comes into its glory, with its first two exactitudes in June and September.

If you follow Western astrology you’ve been hearing a lot about this square, the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross. The sky has been leading up to this transit for at least four years. To understand what will take shape in 2012 let’s look at the themes presented during the transit’s approach.

The Cardinal Cross era can be said to have begun when Pluto entered Capricorn and initiated the Wall Street scandal in 2007-9. This financial cataclysm seemed to have to happened overnight, but of course it was really years in the making: the deregulation of the financial industry and the government-abetted corruption of the banks took place under successive US presidential administrations, right under the noses of the public.

But upon deeper consideration we see that the economic crises upon the world now have their origin in failed policies that have held sway since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Uranus (massive disruption) and Pluto (decay) represent cosmic forces that are breaking down models of social organization so deeply ingrained in the mass mind that most people can’t imagine that the world could work any other way.

As it had a long on-ramp, this transit will have a long off-ramp. Humanity will be integrating its effects until at least 2023.

Transits

In addition to its June and September exactitudes, the Uranus-Pluto square will be activated when it is hit by trigger planet transits, on which I will release lectures throughout the year. Astrologers expect extreme events each time a quickly-moving planet moves through the early degrees of Cardinal signs; such as Venus in February, Mercury in March and Mars in July.

A noteworthy singular event this year is the occultation of Venus (money) in early June. While retrograde, Venus will pass over the disc of the Sun. As Julija Imas has noted, the Wall Street meltdown took place at the midpoint between the last Venus occultation, in 2004, and this coming one.

Then there is the extra-long passage of Mars in Virgo, 8 months long due to its retrograde-direct dance, which will agitate mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) wherever they reside. One of the peak times for this transit is January 23rd, when Mars will station at 23º (hitting natal Mars and Neptune in the US chart).

Resistance

In taking the pulse of the year to come, we should use what we already know about life on Earth. We need to factor in human nature, which isn’t going to change overnight. It’s not realistic to nurture fantasies of a sudden, magic awakening, where all beings on Earth see the light and drop their fear trips. Such expectations are no more helpful than those of a spontaneous ascension into heaven of the faithful, or of a UFO swooping down to fetch the cognoscenti.

It doesn’t happen like that. Evolution is slow and incremental, even when in the throes of a steep learning curve.

We know that change – especially change as immense as the world needs now — provokes resistance. The deeper the changes required, the deeper the status quo is going to dig in its heels. Every spasm forward is likely to be met by denial, at best, and by violent reaction, at worst, from the forces of stasis.

Our focus should be to zone in on the burgeoning wave of creative, health-affirming energy all around us, at the same time that we avoid being naïve about the negativity that human entities tend to express when under threat. We need to keep both of these realities in mind. One without the other won’t work.

We want to maintain a perspective that will protect us upcoming from overwhelm, confusion and fear. Knowing how to observe, with detachment, humanity’s resistance to change is no less important than knowing how to support humanity’s fundamental desire to be free and made new.

Backlash and Vision

Resistance to change can take either active or passive forms. An example of the latter is induced escapism: large numbers of people diving into self-loss, with a little help from manipulative agencies. When Neptune reenters Pisces in February it meets up with Chiron; their conjunction will be exacerbated by retrograde Mars. We can expect the media-consuming public to indulge in a surge of fantasies. These may include a paranoia about “terrorists” fed by psychological propaganda, and reactive consumerism fed by a no-holds-barred advertising industry (e.g. ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall ads in heretofore public spaces, such as transport terminals, and city buses shrink-wrapped in advertising).

At the same time, we will doubtless see the anti-consumerist movement grow increasingly imaginative and committed. Prescient pioneers in this area include Adbusters Magazine¹ and the brilliant Bill Talen², of the Church of Stop Shopping.

Almost everywhere in the world, I expect the backlash expression of the Uranus-Pluto square to take the form of coordinated efforts of government, military and police agencies to crack down, no-more-mister-nice-guy-style, on protests and cultural critics, as began to happen with the Occupy movement (see Naomi Wolf’s analysis ) when Uranus was at the Aries Point under the solar Eclipse, in late November 2011.

In American politics and perhaps elsewhere, we may probably see an increase in Throw-the-bums-out syndrome: the undiscriminating reaction, on the part of most members of the public against any and all incumbent leaders. Whoever had the job last will be blamed for society’s increasing hardships, regardless of their ideas, character or actual responsibility. As we are seeing already, this public attitude opens the field to extreme and unhinged ideologues, making for a highly unstable, unserious candidate pool.

Uranian Voices

We need to be more and more selective about whom we give our energy. As the action ramps up throughout the year, it will prove a waste of time to give too much energy to the elements of society that are fighting change tooth and nail, though their resistances will make big claims on our attention as they wax ever more absurd, idiotic and heavy-handed. We need to be remember that, realistically, it is never more than a small minority of the population at any given time who grasp the world-altering changes required by the whole.

These are the visionaries, the Uranian voices of the future. We will recognize by their life-affirming messages. Our focus and support should go to them, and to the parts of ourselves that we see mirrored in them.

________________

Note:

1 The glossy quarterly magazine whose editors conceived of Occupy Wall Street.

2 Talen, a master parodist, has been known to collect soil from mountains that have been strip-mined, stroll with his cohorts into bank lobbies with an air of having been invited by an art curator, and proceed to sculpt dirt peaks while singing; thus exorcizing the demons out of the ATMs.

This Solstice season, bells are tolling for the death of the Old Paradigm. You can hear them all over the globe.

The shifts they signal are too profound to stay local, or national. The changes upon us right now are not confined to either the First World or the Third World; the Northern of the Southern hemisphere; the 99% or the 1%.

Ours is a world made up of intricately interlocking systems. Rising sea levels and other environmental degradations don’t give a pin about boundaries and borders. Non-physical changes, too, are spreading like wildfire. Not even the Great Wall of China will be able to keep out the impulse that was ignited in Yemen last year when a fruit vendor, protesting his government’s corruption, set himself aflame. An epoch is coming to an end, and its death knell is reverberating across seas and continents.

Die Hard

Unfortunately, some things die hard. There are big, dying entities that are tightening their grip on the world rather than going out gracefully. Even movements that once bristled with life and promise, like the industrial revolution, tend to turn nasty when obsolete. Forward-looking members of humanity are up against stubborn resistance from adherents of the old ways.

The industrial revolution has turned counterrevolutionary. In its current, toxic form, it brought us the Gulf disaster of April 2010, and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan one year later (when Uranus was exactly where it is right now, again, at its station December 9th) Once world-alteringly creative, the machines-over-Nature model has turned anti-life. But it is not about to quit on its own.

The industrial approach, joined at the hip with a profit-driven approach to world management, can only continue repeating its old mistakes, enabled by a governmental system that has grown too corrupt to help us out. We should not be surprised that the US Department of the Interior has recently granted BP permission to resume oil and gas exploration in the Gulf, nor that the Japanese industry is champing at the bit to get their reactors up and running again.

We will wait in vain for the powers-that-be to graciously usher themselves out. It is we who hear the bell tolling who must make the call.

Neptune

As the Longest Arm of the Cross nears exactitude, we see this happening everywhere. As Neptune (oil and gas) slowed down for a station in early November, thousands of environmentalists — many of them wealthy former donors — surrounded the White House to protest Obama’s support for the disastrous Keystone XL Pipeline

The uprisings we are seeing right now, all over the world, feel fated, irresistible. Yet we know that, human nature being what it is, many people will resist to the teeth their call for change.

For better or worse — depending on your point of view — resistance will become increasingly difficult. At this point, to deny what’s going on is tantamount to plugging our ears against the sound of the Now.

Euro Peril

The bell is tolling for the economic models of the past.

As we saw at the Pluto ingress into Capricorn (monetary systems) in 2008, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank left no country untouched by their accumulated corruptions. Four years later, Goldman Sachs’s advice to their top international clients is worth our attention as a bellwether for upcoming trends. Not what they tell the public, which is that everything is going to be just fine; but what they are telling the highest tier of their clientele: to bet on a huge financial collapse.

The European Union teeters on the brink of disintegration, as the still-nominally-solvent countries scramble to contain the spread of their neighbors’ bankruptcy. The Euro crisis is making it all too clear that these member states are indeed their brother’s keeper.

We hold on to our national provincialisms at our peril. Neptune (universal values) is about to re-enter Pisces (meltdown of boundaries), where Chiron (humanity’s wounds) has been waiting for it. Just before the Full Moon in November, Neptune went stationary direct and opposed Mars in the sky. The symbolism expressed precisely what Europe was struggling with that week: the reality that no one country operates in a vacuum.

Nervous market commentators are using the word “contagion” to describe the probable effect of one country’s financial crisis on the others. It’s a coinage that sums up the collective mood. The catastrophe in Greece – which may turn out to be dwarfed by that of Italy — is being compared to a microbe that multiplies and spreads like an epidemic.

The USA itself, whose debt is anywhere from fourteen trillion dollars to many times that, is believed solvent right now only by means of the wildest possible suspension of disbelief. Pluto is still opposing America’s Jupiter — a bottoming-out of credibility/credit.

Too Big to Fail

You could hear the bell tolling in New York City just before the Autumnal Equinox, with Pluto direct in the sky. Before his handlers could shut him up, Mayor Bloomberg gave voice to the worst nightmare of the rich: He said the poor might riot.

Calling unemployment and poverty in the United States a potential powder keg, Bloomberg was speaking on WOR Radio the day the OWS encampment began. This was before anybody had any idea how big it would become, nor how important.

The specter of the great unwashed hordes rising up en masse has struck fear into the hearts of the upper classes since patriarchy was born. It is now, at this crossroads in human history, closer to happening than it has ever been. All it would take is a mindset shift: the simple realization, among the denizens of the world, that 99% makes for a lot more people-power than 1%.

Everybody’s starting to realize something, all at once, something quite marvelous: that it is the 99% who are too big to fail.

Occupy

The Occupy movement is a manifestation of energies that had been festering below the threshold of collective awareness, waiting to explode. They erupted into public consciousness just as the Equinox transits (discussed in my “Emperor” lecture) provided the spark of ignition.

To many astrologers it is nothing less than thrilling to see a cultural phenomenon cleave so tightly to the archetypes behind the defining transit of our time: the square between Uranus (revolution) in Aries (raw, unmediated activism) and Pluto (demolishment) in Capricorn (corporations, financial structures). We cannot doubt the authenticity of a movement that serves so precisely the purposes of these two celestial giants.

Six years ago, writing in Soul-Sick Nation about the significance of Pluto in Capricorn, then two years away, I said the transit would bring fatal challenges to hierarchical models of organization. Capricorn governs the concept of layered tiers of power: hierarchies of every stripe. Astrologers knew that when Pluto – which breaks down whatever is distorted beyond repair – went into this sign, serious threats would arise worldwide to the vertical model of authority.

It’s happening before our eyes. The deliberately leaderless Occupy movement, with its ingenious “human microphone”, its über-democratic assemblies, and its  avoidance of demagoguery through rotating authority figures constitutes a stunning rebuke to the stratified structures of the corporate-centered state.

By contrast with traditionally liberal agencies (e.g. the unions, NPR, MoveOn.org, the Democratic Party) the Occupiers are not part of the establishment, and they don’t want to join it.  They are up in the bell tower, throwing their whole weight into pulling the ropes, making it known– to everyone who hasn’t plugged their ears — what is wrong with the Old Order.

Think Cosmically

Nothing less than a world-encompassing perspective will help us now. Never has that great aphorism of the ‘60s been truer: we must act locally and think globally. Better yet, we might update this advice to Think Cosmically.

When we watch these crises from a cosmic perspective, we remember that these death knells are also baptism bells. Brand new human systems are waiting to be created from the ashes of the old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleven Eleven Eleven

Get your yellow highlighter out. It’s time to mark your calendar; the Full Moon this month is a stand-out.

First off, it peaks on the eve of eleven-eleven-eleven. Eleven is considered a master number in numerological tradition. Even just one eleven is enough to raise the eyebrows of those who assign to numbers a numinous significance. As the lunar cycle peaks, we will get the power of eleven iterated by three, itself considered a perfect number by the ancients.

Make yourself a tuning fork during the two-and-a-half days before and after the lunation’s peak (12:17 pm PST Nov 10th). Allow yourself to resonate with the vibrations of these powerful numbers. Let in what is happening at this moment in your life; both its blessings and its tests.

Grand Trine in Earth

One of these tests has to do with entitlement complexes.

During the second half of November, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto will make a perfect equilateral triangle in the sky. I talk about the Grand Trine in Earth in a recent lecture, suggesting how we might take advantage of its invitation to free ourselves from limiting cultural notions about wealth and poverty.

This transit is a learning opportunity that has both personal and collective applications. It is coming along at a time when humanity’s old assumptions about resources will not work any more. Dramatic shifts are afoot — global access to food and clean water foremost among them — to which the wealthy individuals of the world will not be immune.

Smug and Isolated

The cultural bubble that surrounds upper- and middle-class Westerners allows us to be physically removed, psychologically disconnected and spiritually estranged from the atrocities of penury. This isolation is considered good and right by those encased in it. In fact, it’s considered a birthright.

Some members of this small class of world denizens use ideology to justify their material smugness. There are religious Americans, for example, who’ll tell you that there’s something uniquely deserving about (white) denizens of the North American landmass. For others of this demographic,  it’s not so much a belief but a vague, unstated assumption that Those dreadful things only happen in other countries.

Whether conscious or unconscious, spiritual isolationism is an obstacle to the cosmic learning curve represented by the transits overhead. One of the questions posed by the Grand Trine in Earth this month is this: In a world where a famine in Somalia has killed 30,000 children, does it feel appropriate to whine about the fact that we can’t afford to go out to restaurants as often as we used to?

Entitlement Complex

I am not proposing that we should, instead, upbraid ourselves for having a full belly, or indulge in a fear of lack. These reactions slow down our growth, and can even incapacitate us. For those who wish to get beyond them, November’s Grand Trine in Earth is a good time to work on identifying within ourselves any vestiges of deprivation anxiety; to which Americans, who live in a culture obsessed with dearth and abundance, are particularly susceptible. Now is a good time to work on purging this fear, by catching it in action, noticing what a drain it is, and saying No to it.

Nor am I proposing that we discount the income disparities that exist within even the most affluent societies, dividing the citizenry up into haves and have-nots. Domestic imbalances of wealth deserve our attention as much as international ones; and are getting it, thanks to the Occupy Wall Street protests.¹

What I am proposing is that the First World, in general, start to re-think the strange economic exceptionalism with which we view ourselves. It’s time to review our astonishingly outdated expectations of material abundance, some of which date back to the Eisenhower era, During the Pluto in Capricorn years (2008-2023), entitlement complexes both individual and collective will become more and more ethically, spiritually and even pragmatically ill-advised.

In a very practical sense, this false sense of exceptionalism blinds us to the world moment. To imagine that the ideal way to live is to have a big, fat house with a three-car garage is a grotesque anachronism in a world that is running out of oil. There are new material ideals to aspire to now. In those countries where most people live in cities — where the disconnection from our food sources is most acute — we’ll need a new set of creative responses to the years ahead.  Those who know how to live simply, and who can adapt creatively, will not only survive but flourish.

By contrast, the more we expect the economy – and the larded lifestyles of former times — to get back to “normal,” the harder a time we will have… if by “normal” we mean two dozen pairs of shoes and imported fruit in our cocktails.

Lessons in Empathy

Ceres, Neptune and Chiron all make direct stations in the days immediately surrounding the Full Moon. The purpose of these three bodies is to teach empathy and the acknowledgement of pain; both of which lead to healing when entered into full-heartedly.

Ceres in Pisces has been stretching and extending our nurturing impulses, so that they embrace the least fortunate denizens of our world. We are being called upon to be more ambitious with our empathy. If you’re in touch with this transit, you feel a yearning to universalize your spiritual focus.

Neptune will strengthen this yearning. Now in the last couple of degrees of Aquarius, Neptune has spent more than a decade blurring group boundaries, a job that is almost complete. For those who have tuned in to Neptune’s lesson, it’s harder than it was 13 years ago to confine our identity to one dinky little niche of the human family. We feel more a part of the whole teeming seven billion.

The station of Chiron, that most ambivalent of celestial creatures, is at zero Pisces. Our susceptibility to the world’s wounds is very high right now. In order to take them in without drowning in them, we need to confront a fundamental stumbling block of the mass mentality: the illusion of dualism.

Dualism is the essential falsehood that says < I occupy one realm and everybody else occupies a different realm>. It’s the big lie that holds modern culture in thrall and keeps us blind. Those who follow any kind of spiritual path must come back around to it again and again.

For consciousness seekers, slaying this dragon wins the key to the kingdom.

Us vs. Them

Dualism shows up as the way we judge our experience, in big and little ways. A bad habit of the collective mind, it is considered normal. This makes it even more of a trap.

For most of us, this evaluating and judging is so incessant that we can’t imagine not doing it. A cloudy day is bad and a sunny day is good. When we’re ill, we view our own worth as less than when we’re hale and hearty. And we buy into group judgments, those of our family and our culture, without even thinking. We harbor the unconscious assumption that poor people are less worthy of our respect than wealthy people. Pretty people have more social value than the rest of us.

The granddaddy of dualistic viewpoints is Us vs Them. We build whole worldviews around this one, by means of intricate social and global hierarchies. A dark-skinned applicant is less valuable to the condo association than a Caucasian applicant. The death in war of one of our countrymen is more tragic than the death of a foreigner.

The media panders to this simplistic schema so completely that most television watchers seem not to realize there’s any other way of seeing things. If you support human rights for Palestinians, you must be against Judaism. If you criticize Obama you must be Republican.

Every life circumstance is reduced to a zero-sum game.

Beyond Dualism

The alternative to dualistic thinking is experiencing life as a unity. When we live as if we and everything else were part of an unconditionally inclusive whole, we free ourselves from the trap.

One way to get there is ecological consciousness. An understanding of Earth’s interconnected systems can’t help but encompass unity thinking. So do any number of legends from wisdom traditions the world over (even those, like Christianity, whose appalling histories as institutionalized powers have rendered them suspect in other ways. Consider the beautiful image of every-sparrow-falling and every-grain-of-sand). All spiritual teachings are founded upon the premise that everything in existence is inextricably linked.

There are innumerable variations on this theme, but there is only one truth. Consciousness is the way we interpret that truth.

Carrot and Stick

For those who are ready for it, this month’s transits will give us a glimpse of what it might feel like to go find an interpretation of that truth that goes beyond dualism. The teaching is coming at us from several different directions.

Cosmic intelligence always offers us both a carrot and a stick. The stick in this case is our realization that if we stay stuck in Us-vs.-Them we’ll kill ourselves and the planet. The carrot is the feeling of peace that we feel when we know ourselves to be part of a universe in perfect synch with itself.

When both Neptune and Chiron are in Pisces together, many will take this leap, and there’ll be no turning back.

Opening our heart to what’s happening in the Amazon Valley, in Afghanistan, in the Congo and Ethiopia – daring to feel the truth of what people there are going through as if it were our truth, too — will make the years ahead feel like coming home.

________________

Note:

1 Right on time, the OWS movement has arisen to educate millions to the process by which modern democracies have turned into plutocracies. The Uranus-Pluto square, a.k.a. the Longest Arm of the Cross , has the USA chart in its cross hairs, breaking down Americans’ delusion that they live in a class-free society. See my blogs Whose Streets? and Fingering Wall Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why, yes, we are.

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

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

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

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

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

“Doesn’t always follow the rules“??

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

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

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

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

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

To get a bead on the energies of this month, let’s first consider its place in the solar cycle. A time of Dark Mysteries, Scorpio has a strong seasonal character. It is governed by the planet Pluto, governor of taboos and secrets.

Not only the Sun, but Venus and Mercury ingress into Scorpio in October. This will make for a potent Halloween (or Samhain [pronounced SOW-en] in Wicca): our annual celebration of the human desire to know forbidden things .

Mars will conjunct the natal Plutos of a good many baby boomers this month, as it moves from early to late Leo. For some people, the transit will worm its way into pockets of shame, or touch off power plays. For others, it will stimulate a relentless work drive. It all depends, as always, on the level of awareness we bring to bear.

The Longest Arm

To understand this month’s place in humanity as a whole, we need to look at what the Longest Arm of the Cross is up to. Right now it’s just hanging there in the sky, waiting for us to catch up to its meaning.

Uranus is heading backwards and Pluto is proceeding forward: their orb of exactitude is lengthening. This gives us a slight break from the intensity of the square, like the breathing room a laboring woman experiences in between contractions. The birthing process is still underway, and it’s further advanced than ever; but right now we are being given a few months to assimilate it.

Uranus stations direct on December 9^th, after going all the way back to the inflammatory Aries Point (I have discussed elsewhere this uber-intense zodiacal degree, which was reached by Uranus the day the quake hit Japan).

Pluto, god of darkness, is in his glory. Each of us is being invited to take on unsavory material. This is especially true if your natal Pluto is being transited right now. You boomers may have it conjoined by Mars, opposed by Jupiter and/or squared by the other personal planets.

It’s about confronting dark issues in order to transform them through the light of consciousness. In our personal lives, psychologically difficult matters are nagging at us now. We are being dared to dig beneath the surface of the very things we least want to look at.

The Unspoken

On a collective level, the Pluto corner of the Cardinal Cross is calling our attention. This is about secrets hidden in plain sight. What are the key taboos of our day? What are the biggest issues given the least discussion?

I think we‘d have to say that, for Americans, a big contender for the prize is the money the nation is shoveling into the death pit of war.

To call it ironic that this much money is being spent in this particular way, when the country’s gargantuan debt is causing all hell to break loose, is an understatement. It feels insufficient to describe as counter-intuitive the fact that while entire states are going belly-up, the Pentagon budget is rising. The outrageousness of the situation is so extreme that normal logic doesn’t suffice to explain it.

But Plutonian logic does.

The clue that Pluto is afoot is the lack of discussion. The disparity that exists here between the degree of America’s financial investment in war and the paucity of public debate about it is so striking as to suggest inverse proportion.

This is a defining feature of Pluto. It is the governor of any issue that dares not speak its name.

The Dark Continent

“Do you think they’d be bombing the place if its main export was broccoli?”
– Global Exchange’s Kevin Danaher in March 2003, just before the Pentagon’s assault on Baghdad.

The latest place to make the Pentagon list is Africa, once dubbed by Westerners “The Dark Continent.” The true darkness here is that of ignorance and unconsciousness, on the part of those non-Africans who have been raping and pillaging Africa for hundreds of years.

England, France, Italy and the USA conducted more than eight thousand bombing attacks on Libya between mid-March and mid-September 2011. Were the good citizens of these countries to reflect upon the fact that Libya possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa, it would probably not take long for a substantial number of them to connect the dots and discern a pattern.

Oil is obviously the engine behind NATO’s involvement (discussed in detail in my column in this month’s DayKeeper Journal). But to call it “obvious” needs qualification. The geo-military role of oil is obvious only in the Plutonian sense: hidden-in-plain-sight. It is taboo for governments and their media arms to mention it. It is utterly left out of the official accounts.

My belief is that in the absence of propaganda to the contrary, everyone would see as clear as day that the Great Powers — as these NATO governments used to call themselves — have laid waste to any sovereign government unlucky enough to have the sticky black stuff beneath its soil.¹

Kill the Bad Guy

But among a media-hypnotized populace, the fantasy prevails that the evilness of a given foreign leader constitutes an open invitation to swoop in and bomb his country to smithereens.

Not all evil foreign leaders, mind you. Not those of, say, Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal oligarchies on Earth. This is a place where a king’s promise to grant women the right to vote (in three years!) is being lauded as an enormous step forward; where courts can sentence a woman caught driving a car to be publicly whipped; and where any hint of dissent is met with imprisonment, torture and execution. The reason the Great Democracies of the World don’t touch a hair on the head of this despicable regime is clear to all. We have been granted petro-privileges.

But the Let’s-kill-the-bad-guy scenario is sexier, and it has so seized the public imagination that there seems to be no brain space left over to consider anything else. Such as the implications of the fact that Libya’s “rebel fighters” have been directed by NATO’s own ground forces and commando units.

Americans like their morality neat. They like their foreign policy in no-frills, good-vs.-evil terms, just as they remember from Sunday school and children’s cartoons. It is a story line designed to streamline complex ideas for ingestion by juveniles. In its simplicity, it presumes the absence of any more complicated intellectual function.

One of the most insidious features of the kill-the-bad-guy approach to warfare is that it blurs any distinction between a dictator and his populace. By limiting their focus to Gaddafi as an individual, Americans have been able to ignore the effect upon Libya’s citizenry of all those US Tomahawks and nuclear submarines.

What else do we miss, by framing the military assault upon Libya as a noble, tyrant-eliminating crusade?

We blind ourselves to the lessons of history. With all the emphasis on Gaddafi’s wickedness, geopolitical context goes out the window. The citizens of the NATO countries – after all, it is we who are financing the slaughter — are prevented from seeing the campaign as one more example of straight-up colonialism (see former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s video).

This assault on Libya is just the latest salvo in what was once called “the scramble for Africa,” a series of invasions perpetrated by the same Western powers. Indeed, Gaddafi rose to power 42 years ago on the wave of the Libyan people’s backlash against Italian domination.

X-Ray Vision

It could be argued that the very reason for the darkness of this era on Earth is to force truth-seekers to learn to see in the dark.  Many souls are meeting these transits’ challenge right now; piercing through the ambient noise of cultural corruption and social nonsense with a bold (Uranus) X-ray vision (Pluto).

We do so by asking questions. Such as, in this case: From what set of assumptions does the notion derive that because Muammar Gaddafi is bad, destroying the country he rules must be good? It derives from our enslavement to a dualistic worldview. We’ll be discussing this further in next month’s Skywatch.

As to whether such assumptions have been proven valid by global events, we need only remember that this Libya story uses the same argument that was deployed by the same cabal eight years ago. Remember when all objections to the US bombing of Bagdad were countered by the non-sequitur about Saddam Hussein being a torturing brute?

We might further ask ourselves: Does a familiarity with military history suggest that war is a good idea, or that warmongers are friends of the human race?

By asking common-sense questions, it is possible to stay engaged yet unscathed by the violence and mendacity of these intense times; even to be inspired by them. It is possible to use the perversions of mass thinking as a grindstone, against which to hone our own independent thinking sharper than it has ever been.

It is possible to see clearly, whether or not the Sun is out.

_______________

Notes:

1 An article in the 8/22 New York Times Business section made no bones about it: “”Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for the international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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