Jan 2011
Sharpening Our Attention

Would you like to sharpen your attention in 2011? This is a New Year’s resolution that would be warmly received by the cosmos, and the New Moon on January 4th is the best day to send your intention forth. It’s an Eclipse, making it a doubly appropriate time to visualize a new beginning. It is also the day that Jupiter and Uranus re-conjoin to the degree of arc.¹ , setting the tone for the whole year to come.

On January 22nd, Jupiter regains the position it held last spring, when it first made its way into Aries. This re-entry should jolt us into action. Where in your chart does zero degrees of Aries fall? Look again at the natal house, planets and aspects involved. Here’s where circumstances may arise to prompt you into a new vitality.

Since September 2010, when Jupiter retrograded back into Pisces, we’ve had a little break from Cardinal fire. That champing-at-the-bit feeling backed off for a few months. The cosmos wanted to give us time to mull over the questions raised by that frenetic summer. Now we’re ready to consider the implications of 2010’s key challenge: that of living an inspired life.

Last year’s Cardinal Climax was meant to prompt the question: What kind of activism would suit my personality and spirit? Now that the Aries transits are returning to direct motion, it’s time to break out the superhero cloak and leap back into the fray .

Transits build on each other. When we paying sharp attention to each one, as it occurs, we prepare for the next. By honoring Jupiter’s re-entry into Aries now, we’re optimizing our reception to Uranus’s on March 11^th . Both planets have to do with looking for knowledge and expanding awareness. We’ll feel an impulse to move beyond our limits, overtly, passionately, and courageously.

And recent months have deepened our sense of why such courage is necessary.

Common Thread

This coming year, all over the world, alert human beings will be working on the same basic learning curves. They will be using different words and coming from different points of departure, but they will all be expressing the same thing: that if Earth is to survive, humanity needs to acquire knowledge quickly and boldly.

Environmentalists are organizing their analysis around overpopulation, resource depletion, climate change, species extinction and the advent of peak oil (which, according to some analysts, will be reached in 2012; the year Uranus and Pluto first square each other to the exact degree). Geopolitical observers are bringing our attention to the systems collapse underway in, for example, almost every country in Africa; and to the corrupt regimes worldwide whose pseudo-governments are showing themselves to be threadbare, such as in Pakistan, Haiti and Afghanistan. Economists are pointing out the cracks and fissures that have appeared since 2008 (when Pluto entered Capricorn ) in the international financial system.

Not all of the voices being raised are coherent. We are also hearing from jihadists whose idea of seizing the day is to blow up marketplaces; from Zionists whose vision of choice is Palestinian genocide; and from Christian zealots warning us that Armageddon is nigh because of our tolerance of homosexuality. We have survivalists building up militias in the woods, and deus ex machina hopefuls waiting for deliverance by UFOs.

The visions being received run the gamut, from visionary to mindlessly destructive. But they share a common thread: the idea that the human race is teetering on the edge of something. The astrological approach holds that whatever is not life-affirming must be abandoned now, so that the greater whole can thrive.

Butterfly Effect

Most of us would immediately agree that it’s good to widen our knowledge about the world we live in. Who wouldn’t want to have their consciousness raised? But let’s think a minute about what this entails. As Adam and Eve found out, knowledge can lead to complications.

In times of critical change (Uranus), acquiring knowledge must be accompanied by spiritual wisdom and moral responsibility (Jupiter). The kind of learning world citizens need to do now isn’t merely about information intake. It involves sharpening our attention about the relationship between ourselves and the wider world. This means getting real about both our collective and personal realities, and looking for the interface between them.

For metaphysical thinkers, the idea that everything in the world impacts every other thing is not merely an abstract concept. Environmentalists talk about the butterfly effect: the idea that a seemingly inconsequential event like the flap of a butterfly’s wings can impact distant telluric systems halfway around the world. But mystics go the whole distance with this idea, applying it to human thought, feelings and spiritual impulses as well. The mysterious interconnectedness of all things applies to everything in the universe, and it starts at home. Where do we, as unique individuals, fit into the way things are? What impact does our lifestyle have on planet Earth?

We hear, for example, that in the not too distant future, clean water will be as precious as oil is now. If we allow ourselves to learn a bit more about this daunting fact, it could change our lives. We might discover, for example, how much water goes into the production of an 8-ounce piece of beef.² That might get us feeling differently about our hamburger habit.

To believe that the universe is inextricably interconnected is to understand that the tiniest little things we do make a difference. What used to seem like an unremarkable choice no longer seems unremarkable. Will we bring our own tote bag to the grocery store, remembering that plastic bags are accumulating in the oceans, choking the fish?

A typical first reaction to hearing disturbing information that involves complicity on our part is to indignantly defend ourselves against presumed blame. (“It’s not my fault that Steve Jobs used slave labor to make my iPod!”) This makes sense if our goal is political point-scoring or ego competition. But if our goal is sharpening our awareness, then pointing fingers has nothing to do with anything. Neither blaming others nor blaming ourselves³ (feeling guilty) has any relevance.

Guilt feelings are the last refuge of the well intentioned. At first blush, they seem an innocuous enough response; even sort of limpidly noble. But the more we sharpen our awareness, the more we realize that feeling guilty is no response at all. It’s a substitute for responding. It’s a diversion.

If sharpening the attention is our goal, we must begin by the simple acknowledgement of our role in the interconnected world. We acknowledge that it is our destiny to be alive here and now. We accept that we have a role to play in these mad times. We open up to them, perils and all, and instead of fear we feel the thrill of learning.

At that point, the transits begin to fuel us.

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Notes:

¹ And it makes an exact opposition to the USA’s Sun (see January’s America in Transition on DayKeeper Journal.com).

² It takes 630 gallons, because of the staggering amounts of water required by the grain crops consumed by the cattle. The “water footprint” in affluent countries is around 1,800 gallons per day per person.

³ Psychologists propose that the reason we blame others is because it’s less painful than blaming ourselves; and that the former is a cover for the latter. But energetically, blaming others and blaming the self are made of the same stuff, and both are beside the point in this context. Taking responsibility in the archetypal sense means making full use of one’s Saturn, symbol of the universal law of karma.