May 2009
Mastery from Chaos
Astrologers are paying special attention to the window between 2011 and 2015, with another spike at the USA Pluto Return in 2022. The world is in for quite a ride. To approach the Cardinal Cross years with our eyes open would be a very useful prayer to incorporate into our spiritual practice right now. We are dealing with big energies here, and we need to draw on the highest parts of ourselves.
My first recommendation for how to approach the next few years with a maximum of grace and a minimum of fear is to remember that our higher selves chose to be here. (Granted, not everybody believes that they have an immortal soul that selects what dimension they want to incarnate into, and where on the Earth they want to live it out. But those who don’t believe it aren’t likely to be reading this column.) If one does profess to such a belief, now is a good time to consider its implications.
Such consideration is not merely an abstract exercise. It’s a rush. When we get in touch with the part of ourselves that “remembers” why we incarnated here and now — instead of, say, 12th-century France, or prehistoric China – something in us explodes open.
I believe we all come equipped with cellular memory of our antecedents. All the agonies and ecstasies of our karmic past are stored in some deep basement of our pysche. When we access this part of our knowing, something in our awareness that was disconnected before is suddenly connected, igniting a new state of aliveness. We “get” it, on a visceral level: that we and the world around us are part of the same system.
When we identify with our soul-intention we start to look at our birth chart with new eyes. We start to see in it the “skill set” our higher selves gave us to deal with the years ahead. And not just to
cope with the years ahead, but to come into mastery through them.
The fact that the human race has experienced previous End-Time scenarios is well documented by historians. There have been plenty of tsunamis, plagues, floods and other mass extinctions over the many millennia of humanity’s existence. Through weather, warfare or tectonic shifts, the Earth has shuddered like a dog; with human beings, like fleas, getting radically resettled or picked off entirely. And for those of us who presume that human lives recycle, as everything else in the universe does, it follows that many of us were around during these past crises.
These earlier incarnations are breaking through the surface of consciousness for many people. Whether or not we are aware of them
per se, we all have a vast reservoir that we are drawing on; with a pointed emphasis, right now, on those lifetimes that featured some world-altering crossroads. Soul-memories number among the resources we came in with.
I believe that on some level we are each fully aware that we’ve been waiting all our lives for the years upon us right now. There was even a public announcement of this idea, at the Harmonic Convergence in 1987; when the spiritual anthropologist Jose Arguelles gave us a preview by introducing into American popular culture information about of the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012.
So here is my second recommendation: Remember that there is no lack of information flowing in, and no lack of support. Teachers, embodied and otherwise, are everywhere. Global visionaries and ancient wisdom models, like astrology, are more easily accessible than ever before.
It is axiomatic in metaphysical law that people hungry for consciousness will attract into their lives any number of different teachings that resonate with a subtlety of intelligence sufficient to encompass what is happening to their world right at a given time. To link into these higher ways of seeing, seekers need to detach from many of the information streams we’ve been conditioned to see as normal.
Bringing us to recommendation #3: Turn off the TV1.
May continues the retrograde movement of Pluto (breakdown), whose station on April 3rd was in exact opposition to Venus in the chart of the USA.The fact that Venus is the planetary ruler of money should come as no surprise.
Pluto, the most powerful planet in the sky, is slowly creeping backwards in the USA’s first house (self-image), flushing out new revelations with every week that passes. The Dark God is unburying America’s financial myths, opening up for inspection the crypts that held our family jewels. What is being exhumed here are not merely the toxic (Pluto) financial instruments that were cobbled together, Frankenstein-like, by those greed-crazed Wall Street traders. On a symbolic level what is being laid bare are America’s core values (Venus).
Pluto goes direct again at 0° Capricorn on September 11th 2009. As all retrograde cycles do, this one is taking us back over ground recently covered, so that we can get a better understanding of what happened. America’s stories about itself are being shattered (Uranus-Saturn T-squaring the US Mars-Neptune). Our illusions about what was going on for the past thirty years are going up in smoke.2 We are in the midst of a national trauma. And as those who have gone through trauma on a personal level know only too well, it takes a while to assimilate.
Retrogradations are analogous to the resting time we get between contractions during childbirth. A subplot of the greater Grand Cross period, these five months of Pluto retrograde are providing us with time to stand back from recent events and take stock. Pluto, the God of the Underworld, is doing a mid-year inventory; good accounting being a virtue even in Hell.
So what the hell just happened?
America has just had the biggest credit bubble in history burst in its collective face. This blowup exposed the raw truth about our ethos of consumerism: a worldview that was envied, despised and imitated throughout the world. Only now that it is all coming undone can we ask the question: How is that American consumerism became the Holy Grail of modern life? Surely social historians of the future will look back and marvel at the fact that, during the post-WWII years in the West, humanity’s ultimate yearnings focused themselves upon the prosaic experience ofbuying things.
The cult of materialism came to be known throughout the world by its mantra “The American Dream,” a phrase that has remained blissfully undefined. Did it refer to the American citizen’s entitlement to spend to his heart’s content? Or to an impoverished immigrant’s right to someday live like a king? Whatever it meant, it has now given up the ghost. This calendar year, 2009, with Neptune on the US Moon, is the year of its wake.
The planet of illusions (Neptune) is asking the USA to reconsider everything we thought we needed to feel secure (Moon).
Did an upsurge of hedge-fund millionaires make America feel as secure as a food bank in every neighborhood? Did the chance to strike it rich with a condo deal in an inflated real estate market make the buyer as secure as free hospital care would have? For a generation, Americans acted as if this were the case.
The general belief seemed to be that the availability of illusory financial gambles was worth crippling the programs that supported people’s basic needs. The idea prevailed that it was acceptable to funnel the government’s resources to the wealthy through tax cuts, and to allow self-appointed “conservatives” to loot government coffers the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses. As part of their campaign to cut social funding to shreds, politicians were applauded when they proposed “to shrink the government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.”3
But of course these big-talkers didn’t shrink the government at all. They enlarged it, and made sure its revenues trickled upwards. John Kenneth Galbraith’s prediction of “socialism for the rich” morphed from a wry figure of speech to the actual game plan in the USA.
As Pluto scans the territory we have just been over, we are being given the chance to consider the implications of the November election and of a newly engaged citizenry. We must also factor in the damage that can be expected from old dinosaurs thrashing around in protest of their own extinction.
Obama has given vast policymaking power to a pair of gentlemen who, more than perhaps any other pair, have the wet blood of the wrecked economy on their hands: Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. These appointments were early signs that the new president’s pledge to fill the ranks with new voices must be taken with a grain of salt.
Even the moderates among the American intelligentsia are now calling on the government to nationalize insolvent banks, suspend payroll taxes and offer every homeowner in the country a cheap mortgage. Obama knows that gestures such as these, as obviously appropriate as they are, would induce an apoplectic fit in the old guard. Those with ill-gotten gains are not known for ceding their power voluntarily. But if our new president wants to be like FDR, as he claims, he’s going to have to express not just with his words but with his actions that he understands what Pluto has now revealed: that the American financial establishment is corrupt to the bone, and that placating the dinosaurs is a losing strategy.
With men like Geithner and Summers in charge of policy and genuine visionaries shut out of his cabinet, will Obama be able to overhaul the economy? This raises the rhetorical question: Can a problem be solved using the same mindset that caused the problem?
It is not from the bowels of the political establishment that we will get change deep enough to satisfy Pluto. Whether the forces of evolution can happen within the political structure at all depends upon whether the system can be dismantled and rebuilt so radically that it would be all but unrecognizable from what we have known.4
As discussed in last month’s Skywatch, Neptune (drugs, hospitals) goes retrograde at the end of this month, in Aquarius (medicine). This station represents the peak of the most powerful conjunction of 2009: that of Neptune (universality) with Chiron (wounds) and Jupiter (social reform). The symbolism is crystal clear. Given this transit, there’s no way the explosive issue of universal health care can be put off any longer. It was fated to go public in a new way this year.5
What does it mean that this transit hits the Moon in the US chart? The Moon is thecollective Inner Child. The reason this issue is so emotionally charged is that it evokes our most poignant need: that of being cared for when vulnerable.
Moreover, when we factor in the transit of Pluto opposite Mars that kicked off this calendar year, we can better understand the implications of the political power plays involved in health care reform. 6 Forces intent on total control are circling this issue like dark clouds announcing a storm. Any challenge at all to the entrenched American insurance industry constitutes the premier David-and-Goliath battle in a year that is being defined by such battles.
One of the gravest disappointments Obama has dealt his supporters so far is his “taking off the table” the eminently rational system of single-payer health care. The reason for its removal from public debate is clear: it would eliminate private insurance companies.
Under the plan Obama has just removed from discussion, the public would still get their choice of doctors and hospitals; but the exorbitant administrative costs and obscene profits that insurance companies add to the health-care bill would be eliminated. This is, of course, how it works in much of Europe, where health care does not number among life’s worries. Is it any wonder that the powers-that-be don’t want us to think about it? For Americans to spend any time at all imagining how their lives might feel without the constant threat of falling ill and going bankrupt might make the for-profit system we have now seem too absurd to tolerate for one more day.
Its cost-effectiveness, fairness and workability make the idea of single-payer health care one of the most dangerous threats that exist to the current plutocratic system. It is for this reason that the media almost never mentions it.7 The only mainstream context in which it comes up is when ill-informed, corrupt politicians indirectly allude to it in their bizarre rants against “European-style socialism.”
Also in play is the other major influence of this period: the ongoing opposition of Saturn and Uranus, whose message is that if real change is to occur, it will not be through established channels. 8 It will be through ordinary citizens thinking creatively and acting surprisingly.
Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, is an example of the Uranian archetype in action. Mokhiber plans to station himself outside the American Health Insurance Plans convention and burn his insurance bills. He and his cohorts are carrying forward the torch of the Viet Nam war protesters a generation ago, who lit their draft cards on fire when conventional means of arguing against the war hit a brick wall of establishment corruption and popular apathy.9
Guerilla theatre is Uranus’ cup of tea. And as Grand Cross watchers know, the Great Trickster is moving into Aries, the sign of sparking and igniting. What is happening to the popular mood will feel familiar to those of us who danced in the streets a generation ago. There is a clear astrological parallel between the creative disruption we will now be seeing and the wild antics of the 1960s. 10
Let the games begin.
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Notes:
1 See my blog on the mass media, Tell Me No Lies.
2 See The Great and Powerful Oz
3These are the words of anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.
4 For this change to happen outside the political structure, the American public would have to recognize and do something about the way the corporate media coöpts popular dissent and incipient rebellion. Thus the Goliath that needs to be slain first is a two-headed giant: the telecommunications-industry/government alliance. See Pluto and the Media.
5 The conjunction of Neptune and Chiron, which will continue beyond Jupiter’s involvement, peaks for the first time in Febrary 2010 and for the last time in November 2010.
6 See DayKeeper Journal, Things Start Breaking Down.
7 See Put Single Payer on the Table.
8 According to Amy Goodman (op cit), a study just released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in the week before Obama’s health-care summit, of the hundreds of stories that appeared in major newspapers and on the networks, only five included the views of advocates of single-payer—none of which appeared on television.
8 Previous Skywatches which discuss this transit in detail include those for Januaryand March 09 and December 08 .
9 For details. see Burn Your Health Insurance Bill Day.