February 2009
Spring Melt

We wanted change, and we are getting it. Just not, perhaps, the kind we expected.

Speaking astrologically, what’s going on in the sky confirms that major change is here and more is coming. Planets that rarely change signs are doing so. Pluto has just moved into Capricorn, and over the next three years Neptune, Uranus and Chiron will make ingresses too. This augurs huge shifts in the energy field. The collective will have its mind blown. If each of us stays awake to the current moment, the way we relate to our world should shift accordingly.

Saturn and Uranus make their second opposition on the 5th of February, continuing the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since September 2008. Then comes the transit that will dominate the skies this Spring: Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune will come as close as they will get this year to conjoining in Aquarius. Here we have one more in a string of world-altering configurations that will peak several times within the space of a couple of years.

For ten years now, Neptune, the planet of disintegration, has been in Aquarius, the sign of humanity. Under this transit the world’s consciousness was hit with the bombshell of global warming. Unthinkable 15 years ago, human-caused climate change has now entered the global lexicon. Sarah Palin may believe the “jury is still out,” but for just about everybody else it’s a traumatic learning curve: the psychological equivalent of a child finding out there is no Santa Claus.

Barring radical international policy changes to counteract it, drought and its incongruous counterpart, rising seas, will come to the First World as they have come to the Third World. Those who dismiss the relevance of climate change to their personal lives will soon find this an impossibility. We would all do well to give a thought to the psycho-spiritual meaning of the situation in order to confront this scenario now, the better to ward off Neptune’s literal expression.

Neptune governs disillusion (the taking-away of illusion) as well as dissolution(melting). Our thinking about our planetary home will never be the same. In a scant few years we have seen the disappearance of a set of associations that had been lodged in the mass mind since the dawn of time: the perception of the physical Earth as the ultimate rock-solid mass, the epitome of security and stability. Consider the quiet distress felt by parents reading their children the Christmas stories they listened to when they themselves were young, and having it dawn on them that by the time these children read the same stories to their children, Santa’s home, the North Pole, may have become open ocean.

The issue of climate change resonates with a universal story about waters returning in a deluge; a mythic flood whose purpose was to wipe out a corrupted human race. This apocalyptic imagery has always existed in the collective unconscious. The profound disquiet attached to global warming derives from the fact that we’ve always known about it. The role of the transit is to raise it to the surface. We are being reminded that among the myriad potential futures we could create for ourselves, we could choose this one.

The unsettling visions upon us — of parched landscapes, levees breaking, freakish weather, as well as of technological marvels and ecological utopias — invite us into territory that is not physical at all. It is the psycho-spiritual state of the modern human mind. Now to be joined by Jupiter and Chiron, Neptune in Aquarius has set the tone for an all-encompassing destabilization. We are entering a time of the melting of old forms into a sea of undifferentiated possibility.

Neptune’s job is to break up whatever is solid and return it to source, as ice turns to water and makes its way back to the sea. The esoteric message conveyed by its gently but deeply disturbing transits has to do with the lie of physicality. We are being reminded that formlessness is more basic than form; that chaos lies behind structure; that our timeless souls lie behind our time-bound lifetimes.

For those who are especially receptive to them, Neptune transits provoke an existential sense of claustrophobia: of being trapped in the corporeal body. We should understand this dread sensation as a prompt to spiritual understanding. The nagging restlessness we feel when Neptune is strong is a call to pour ourselves into something larger than ourselves; to disappear into a way of life that speaks to something beyond the ego.

When this yearning is not seen for what it is, it manifests as a desire to merge blindly with whatever’s handy. In Aquarius, Neptune seeks merger with the group. In an immature state, this search expresses as a desire to conform as a path of least resistance: to plan our wardrobe around the “What the Hottest Stars Are Wearing” column in People Magazine.

Aquarius is associated with cutting-edge technology. So ever-present now that we take them for granted, the high-tech machines that have been devised over the past decade have created a global revolution.

When channeled creatively, this idea-pooling is not only healthy but revolutionary. Ordinary people have been empowered to participate in a collective conversation of infinite scope. In a significant move that ostensibly confirms the brand new day signified by the new American president, the White House is being fully wired. Obama’s tech people swept into the archaic federal computer lab while the swearing-in bible was still warm.¹ The generation credited with getting him elected is contributing its brightest nerds to the effort of implementing an inter-active system for a 21^st century democracy.

In the months to come, Neptune’s 14-year passage through Aquarius will swell into a massive oceanic crest. Jupiter, which exaggerates whatever it touches, will expand and inflate our urge to merge. People will either pump these yearnings through the many available outlets of groupthink (file-sharing, Facebook, etc) or they will allow a surrender of a more sublime sort. At the same time, Chiron will expose the shared wounds that make these yearnings so poignant.

Neptune, the planet of deceptions and scams, has been in Aquarius since the Clinton impeachment scandal: a paltry sex fraud upon which were displaced all the other truly impactful frauds that were going on at the time. The gargantuan con games at Enron and WorldCom passed right over the heads of many news-viewers who were riveted on that stained blue dress. Many Americans are just now starting to realize that the definitive dismantling of Depression-era protections in the financial industry occurred not during the Bush years but under good ol’ Bubba Bill.

From Neptune we get deregulation. Neptune loosens strictures, strips things of definition, renders amorphous that which had been bounded.  Combine Neptune with Jupiter, the planet of runaway growth, and you get the astrological recipe for full-fledged economic chaos.

Jupiter is often simplistically described as a benefic force. But when expressed by an immature person or a group it creates greed, sky’s-the-limit spending, size-for-the-sake-of-size. Consider the treasury department’s statement a couple of months ago that the agency had set $700 billion as the amount for the financial bailout because “we just wanted to choose a really large number.”

If we then factor in the Moon, the part of the US chart over which Neptune, Jupiter and Chiron are passing, we see the pieces falling into place. The Moon, symbol of an entity’s security base, governs the housing industry. What this Spring’s transits will do is force us to look at the harm done (Chiron) by the USA’s giddy tendency towards mindless exorbitance,² of which the credit-card mortgage crisis is the most obvious effect.

But the housing bust is a symptom of deep systemic issues. We have to ask what forces in the national mindset allowed the real estate bubble to become so grossly disproportionate; what forces allowed those fancy financial-instrument fabricators to run wild while no one was watching the store; what forces allowed the mortgage industry to get away with issuing all those predatory loans; what forces allowed the lenders to encourage homeowners to spend the equity they didn’t have on junk they didn’t need. ³

At the same time, another transit is driving the downturn deeper: Pluto (death) is opposite the US Jupiter and Venus (values),⁴compelling a nation addicted to cheap money, cheap gas and cheap Chinese imports to question its spending patterns.  As chastened Americans listen to the air hissing out of the economic balloon, many are realizing that the whole WalMart consumer mentality is on trial.

At this point all the old shibboleths as regards to spending, saving and taxes are moot. Obama’s economic stimulus legislation may sound comforting to the middle classes, but years of out-of-control fraudulence require far more outlandish thinking. It is clear that what is needed is a whole new economy. What is unclear is whether the US political system will be able to create it. Short-sighted and recalcitrant forces in the government as it is currently constituted  are holding on tight to their old ways. On the plus side, this holding-on is starting to look very silly to more and more people (e.g. the GOP voting as a block to reject any bill that raises any taxes anywhere).

Meanwhile, many of the Uranian visionaries who foresaw the current crisis are now being listened to.  If sufficient consciousness arises in the collective, the forces of Uranus (invention) and Saturn (implementation) will feed each other rather than polarize against each other. Consider the $18 billion in venture capital money that flowed into California last year alone, some of it funding such efforts as turning algae into jet fuel, and developing carbon-negative cement. Big money could be made on these sane, planet-healing ventures. Counter to what the culture warriors would have us believe, these wild-and-crazy ideas will turn out to be good for business.

Our work as citizens in this new era is to insist that policymakers move the money in these directions. This includes holding our extraordinary new president accountable (Saturn) for the change (Uranus) he inspired us to envision. We, not he, are responsible for what he does next.

This means staying in the public conversation. Just because he’s superior in every way to his odious predecessor does not mean Obama can do this alone. If we find that his tax breaks to non-green businesses fit the old picture instead of the new one, we must be awake enough to respond accordingly. If we see that his efforts to expand highway systems do not match the reality of a post-petroleum world, we‘d be remiss if we sat back and let him do it.

The truth is that while Obama compares his plan to that of FDR, so far his plan looks very little like the New Deal. One is heartened to see his impulse to create green jobs; but unless this plan is carried to fullness – shifting away from the electricity grid, the obsolete transport system, away from nuclear and fossil fuels – the radical nature of the times upon us will continue to outstrip his solutions.

Most historians and economists agree that what ended The Great Depression was massive public spending: huge investments in infrastructure & jobs for the working class. Tax cuts — upon which, at this writing, the compromised plan is to devote forty percent of the stimulus package — played no part in The New Deal. Nor did government layoffs. FDR did the opposite: he taxed and he spent, big-time. And all that tax money was scrupulously channeled into huge public programs and projects, not showered upon incompetent, felonious business titans via the bailouts that Obama has unwaveringly supported.

Obama’s allegiance to Bush’s bailouts is noteworthy, considering the all-but-unanimous popular outrage that rose up against them when they were first proposed. The new president has gone so far as to pledge to veto any bill that Congress might have the temerity to come up with that would stop the remaining billions from being handed over. In those rare instances when he’s been called upon to explain this mind-bogglingly counter-intuitive expenditure, Obama echoes Bush’s strategy of “Quick: this sucker could go down” – albeit in more eloquent words — without providing any justification for the bailout scheme on its merits. As the facts roll in, it appears that there does not seem to be any urgency.⁵ Nor do there seem to be any merits. ⁶ What there does seem to be is an immense unasked question, buried under the puckered-out balloons from all those inaugural balls: Why are these billions still being handed over to the Big Money men who sank the economy?

Obama, who raised more Wall Street money than any other presidential candidate, seems to be playing the old pay-back game, like every other Washington insider before him. Only with bigger stakes. There are fat rewards for the donor class in his corporate welfare proposals. He has even floated a tax cut for banks.

One of the key visions of Neptune in Aquarius of that of individuals pooling their resources so that the common weal may thrive.⁷ The pattern in postwar America, of course, has been the opposite.

In the USA the national myth has long been that of individual self-advancement — not through public service, but through private business; an ideal which, unchecked and unbalanced, has led to the current era of massive privatization. Now, as everything from hospitals to the military is taken over by for-profit corporations, many Americans are remembering what taxes are supposed to be for.

During the Vice Presidential debate, Joe Biden tried to make the point that paying taxes was patriotic — after all, it’s illegal not to pay taxes, right? ⁸ But as old Joe found out, it’s a dread political faux-pas to so much as mention it. The situation has reached the level of black comedy in the California legislature, where Republican lawmakers are using the state’s financial meltdown as a chance to stage a who’ll-blink-first contest on the tax issue. The state is losing millions of dollars a day as these tough guys play showdown at the OK Corral. Particularly absurd is the governor’s refusal to reinstate the vehicle license fee of 2% — where it was prior to the dot-com boom – preferring to axe services to the sick and elderly.

Most significantly of all, we have yet to hear any federal policymaker challenge the unspoken rule that says no one is supposed to mention the billions that go to the military. A gentleman’s agreement seems to exist whereby politicians would rather slash public education than consider withholding a penny from the Pentagon and the CIA.  But it should be obvious to all persons of common sense and concern for the human race that any critique of federal spending which fails to factor in the unimaginable waste of our unchecked military budget⁹ will also fail to heal the mess we are in.

This month, as Uranus and Saturn oppose for a second round, the popular energy that ushered an intelligent, capable leader into the White House must be pumped into guiding him from below.

Over the course of the next few Skywatches, we will be looking at how to use the transit now building for deepened understanding rather than allowing ourselves to be swept away in mass anxiety, hero-worship and loss. There is no more humbling a transit than that of Neptune. In the case of this conjunction Jupiter is increasing the scope of the fall, while Chiron is giving us the opportunity to learn through our pain.

1 The degree to which Obama will be receptive to the feedback he has invited from his wired electorate remains to be seen. It is noteworthy that the results of one of his first interactive polls revealed that his fans’ top concern was the legalization of marijuana. The president responded that this wasn’t going to happen.

2 As James Surowiecki has pointed out, “On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough…” with upper-crust con men like Bernard Madoff taking advantage of investor euphoria. (The New Yorker, 1/12/09)

3 For details on this and other themes in the USA chart, see my book Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America (2008).

4 See January’s Skywatch.

5 The New York Times reported in mid-January that “the Treasury says there is no urgent need” for additional money.

6 The Congressional panel charged with overseeing the money complained about “shifting explanations of [the bailout’s] purposes,” and concluded that “hundreds of billions of dollars injected into the marketplace have had no demonstrable effects on lending.”

7 Neptune is associated with socialism and other models that seek to vest in the community as a whole both the control and the benefit of a group’s resources.

8 That is, it is illegal in theory. Hardly a secret, though rarely expressed in public debate, is the fact that those who could most easily fill the nation’s coffers do not pay taxes; they pay instead for the politicians who allow them to keep their money. America’s mega-companies have vast legal teams and lobbyists in Washington, and its wealthy private citizens have Cayman Islands bank accounts.

9 See blogspot.