August 2009
The Other Side of Letting Go

What begins when the Moon is New comes to a head when it is Full.

This is the core idea of the lunar cycle, and it is a very primal one. Transit-trackers have used it to interpret the sky’s messages since the beginning of time. When the New and Full Moons in question are eclipses, the cycle reaches deeper and further in its significance; but it does not depart from this basic formula.

This is why the best way to understand what’s in store for August is to understand what happened in June and July . As an exercise, try re-feeling the main dramas in your life that have occurred since late June, when this series of lunations began. When you relax your body, close your eyes and reflect upon these events, the themes they represented will rise up from visceral to conceptual understanding.

Your belly will tell your mind what they meant.

Let yourself remember what was up for you the week after the 4th of July¹, and then for the week of July 20th. Everything that took place during those days, from the momentous to the innocuous, was there to be decoded; as a brilliant analyst would unravel the mystery of a dream. Whatever occurred was the universe’s way of spelling out the key plot points not only of the summer of 2009, but of years to come.

If you were jarred and jangled by June and July, it means you are paying attention. The New Moon on the 21st – the rarest and most profound astrological event of the season — was a total solar eclipse, which means a super-charged beginning. It was a time to start implementing dramatic new realizations about how your life really works, and about how the world really works.

The last of this eclipse series is Wednesday August 5th, at which point the processes that got their start on July 21st will come to a head. Like the final steppingstone across a river, this Full Moon should reveal the purpose of your having made the crossing.

Super-Conjunction Summer

How do these lunations fit in with the Super Conjunction in Aquarius? Though Jupiter has moved out of orb (it will be back in December), Neptune and Chiron are still traveling together, making life confusing at best and incomprehensible at worst for every one of us. Doing your best to gracefully manage the chaos that is your life is a major feat right now. Don’t think there’s something wrong with you if you feel like you’re barely treading water. Give yourself credit for not drowning.

This whole year is about letting go more fully than we ever have. It’s about forgiving ourselves for not knowing what we can’t know, allowing for frequent mood shifts, and it’s about holding plans — if we must make them — with the lightness with which we would hold a bird in our open palm.

And that’s just on the personal level. What is the human family as a whole being asked to let go of?

The fact that a lot of prominent people are flipping out is telling. It may not mean what the pundits say it means, but it does convey something about the energy afoot. The erratic behavior of public figures this summer is symptomatic of a worldwide destabilization process. Sara Palin’s surprise resignation as the Capricorn eclipse (leadership) was building seemed to epitomize the mood in the air: confused and taken-off-guard.² Societal (Jupiter) uncertainty (Neptune) is the name of the game.

Have you noticed that most of the lead news stories lately are about illusion and fraud (Neptune)? From the adultery of public figures (Berlusconi, Gov. Sanford et al) to allegations of rigged elections (Zimbabwe, Iran³ et al), cultural signposts that once stood tall are careening giddily. As their economies collapse, governments all over the world are foundering, trying to patch together policies that all but the most credulous of their citizens wearily perceive to be made of smoke and mirrors.

More fundamentally, as global warming undermines the very topography of the planet, the Neptune conjunction is perpetrating a parallel undermining of the psychological grounding of the collective mind. We are being given no choice but to relinquish our 19th- and 20th-century ideas about being masters of Mother Earth.

The material realm has a different meaning than it has ever had before. It is not solid at the moment. It is fluctuating, unpredictable and elusive, like the ever-shifting sea.⁴ And if we suspend — even fleetingly — our fears about what’s happening, and our good-vs.-bad judgments about it all, we may be inspired to understand this period we are living through from a whole new vantage point: from the other side of letting go.

The radical changes the Earth is going through right now are obvious to every sentient being. Even people who do not follow current events in a socio-political or intellectual way are hip to the reality of what’s happening. We know it because we are animals (a fact the proud human mind denies): we are blessed with sub-rational animal knowing. And we know it because are all connected to the Earth’s fate through super-rational knowing, too; a kind of knowing the Aquarius conjunction is trying to deepen.

Many conscious individuals all over the Earth are struggling right now with the question of what to do with what we know. The answer to this conundrum sounds complex, at first blush – even self-contradicting — yet it is fundamentally as simple as pie: If we let go in the way the Neptune conjunction is guiding us to do, we will be able to detach enough to tolerate the truths that must be known if the planet is to survive.

This use of the term detachment does not mean uncaring or unemotional. Quite the opposite; it refers to a state of distanced compassion, in which the heart is fully and vitally engaged. Detachment like this makes us strong enough to face how serious the situation is. Then we can go one step further, and acknowledge that we know what we know. Each little acknowledgement becomes a creative act.

By contrast, playing dumb hurts the soul.

Worldwide Web

Since Uranus (cyber technology) and Neptune (universality) conjoined in the early 1990s, the Earth has been transformed into a buzzing ball of continuous information-connectedness. From the symbolism of the transits then and since, we see that the plethora of facts and figures that call out to be acknowledged by us every day are not just some random background condition of modern life but a key characteristic of this era and a very definite part of the cosmic plan.

Contrast this situation with the almost quaint standard of naiveté that characterized  Western societies in the 1950s. We cannot hide behind that kind of informational vacuity any more, or anything like it. It will not fly.

There is more accurate information available now to the average person than there has ever been in the history of the world.

Here are some examples of facts that are pretty universally accessible: Despite the collapsing global economy, roughly $129, 000, 000 per minute is being spent internationally on “defense” ⁵ More money is spent on militarism in six hours than has been spent on the environment in the last two decades.

We must let this information in. As intelligent beings in alarming times, we need to become open and stay open to lucid, relevant information.

Another bit of news that would seem highly relevant for the taxpaying public to consider: Last month American senators from both parties ⁶ fought hard for the construction of seven obsolete fighter planes at a cost of $1.75 billion. The Pentagon doesn’t want them, but the contractors who build them do. So they pay lobbyists to sell them to congressmen who then justify the project by bloviating about “jobs” (political code for Vote my way or you’ll be in the poorhouse).

Stripped of the nonsense with which politicians and newscasters dress them up, these facts are stark, astounding and appalling. But one thing they are not is secret. Information like this is no longer classified nor the province of specialists. One doesn’t have to be a biologist to know that a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals are in danger of extinction because of global pollution. One can turn on the radio and hear it.

Statistics like these are not opinions but realities, and they are so indefensible that the only way to not be repulsed by them is to stonewall them.

Media Myopia

Michael Jackson’s death the week after the Solstice came at a very fortuitous time for doghouse-dwellers like the governor of South Carolina, whose exploits had monopolized the news immediately before. More significantly, the Jackson necro-fest deflected the public’s attention away from another bit of news that would probably never have reached the front pages in the first place, lacking as it did the buzz of either sentiment or sex: June 30 was appointed “National Sovereignty Day” by the puppet government in Iraq.

This announcement was made with nary a reference to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis maimed, killed, tortured or made refugees by the US invasion and occupation. Indeed, Washington’s Iraqi henchmen thanked their occupiers profusely for placing them in power. In a grotesquely revealing move, Baghdad marked their new “national holiday” by opening up some of its massive oil and gas fields to foreign firms.⁷

And though “journalists” stumbled all over each other to cover whom Liza Minnelli sat next to at the King of Pop’s funeral, scant airtime was devoted to the new mega-embassy whose ground had just been broken in Islamabad. ⁸ Readers patient enough to delve into the bowels of their newspapers would have learned about this new use of their tax dollars on May 27th, the day Jupiter (exaggerated size) and Neptune (swindles) conjoined.

Clarity in the Fog

The mass media in its current state, and the vacuous American pop culture of which it is a part, are examples of Neptune in its unconscious form. But the transits are simply presenting us with both sides of this archetype, as transits always do. And misused Neptune is no match for consciously used Neptune.

There can be no fence-straddling now. People will either align with fear and denial, or they will truly respond to the urgent realities upon us. This latter approach is what astrologers call living through the chart.⁹ Those who choose it will quite naturally find their place in the New Age being born . All we need to do is pour ourselves into the moment, and let go to what wants to happen.

____________________

Notes:

1 The Full Moon of July 7^th was not only an eclipse but the culmination of whatever energies had gotten started two weeks before, at the Solstice New Moon which inaugurated the summer season.

2 For a review of Palin’s transits, see Nancy Sommers‘s blog of July 11th 09.

3 Though the media is portraying the situation in Iran this summer as a clear-cut case of The People rising up against an autocracy  — a story many progressives are swallowing hook, line and sinker — the scenario becomes a good bit more complicated when we factor in the covert and overt shenanigans of the CIA over the past year (and well before, of course. Washington has been trying to undermine every Iranian government since the1978 revolution; not to mention the Anglo-American collusion in 1953 to take back control of the Iranian oil industry via the coup that installed the Shah.) From their concerted disinformation campaign to their financial support of pro-Western factions in Tehran , Washington policymakers have been doing their best to orchestrate regime change in Iran in a way that they hope won’t cause them as much trouble as the one they orchestrated in Iraq.

4 See my article in the August/September issue of The Mountain Astrologer Magazine. The triple conjunction came to its first peak in late May, sustained a series of squares from transiting Venus and Mars in July,  and will peak for the last time in December.

5 The term “defense”, as used by the USA, is one of the most insidious euphemisms of our time. At an earlier point in American history the US Defense Department was called the Department of War; but our militarists grew too psychologically savvy to allow such bald accuracy. This is a shame; because if the American public wanted to know what was really going on geopolitically it would be very useful to go back to the agency’s old moniker — the better to distinguish between offensive militarism and the truly defensive kind. Whatever one calls this astoundingly profligate agency, it is the world’s costliest military enterprise at $102 billion a year; and under Obama it is becoming even more expensive.

6 Those who presume substantial differences between the two dominant political parties in the USA might consider that Democrats Edward Kennedy and John Kerry joined the fight to build these mass-murdering boondoggles.

7 I thought John Stewart was making it up when he said that the US military gave Baghdad officials the key to their own city back; but, no: this surreal ceremony actually took place. Uncle Sam, the great hyper-power, officially bestowed upon Iraq’s local functionaries nominal authority over the ongoing robbery of their country from its people. Journalist Patrick Cockburn: “According to Transparency International the only countries deemed more crooked than Iraq are Somalia and Myanmar, while Haiti and Afghanistan rank just behind. In contrast to Iraq, which enjoys significant oil revenues, none of these countries have much money to steal.”

8 At $736 million, the embassy in Pakistan will be the second most expensive ever constructed, only $4 million less than the sprawling embassy in Baghdad (which is as big as the Vatican. See Chalmers Johnson).

9 By this I mean: aligning with the highest expression of who we are. To live through your chart is to draw fully upon the unlimited potential you were born with. And that no one else was born with. They have their own resources, but they’re not like yours.