Mar 2011
Come Hell or High Water
For terrestrial life, water is important to the point of definitive. And it is becoming more so.
For at least part of the month of March, no less than six planets — the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Chiron and Uranus — will be in Pisces, the wateriest of the three water signs.
Pisces can manifest as confusion or bliss, depending on how we approach it. This is our preview for next month’s grand, epoch-defining ingress, the most profound of 2011: On April 4th Neptune launches into Pisces, the sign of its rulership, for the first time in 168 years.
The Mother of All Illusions
We’ll have the choice to either float on top of the chaos or drown in it. It all depends on how well we understand this most elusive of signs. Pisces is said to govern illusion; but it also promises to steer us through illusion, all the way to the other side. This sign represents the part of the human spirit that pierces through the illusion of separateness.
According to many sacred traditions, separateness is the mother of all illusions: the illusion whence all other illusions arise. But Pisces refuses to be taken in by separateness. It sees right through the various barriers that purport to divide us. It doesn’t honor the much-touted differences between white and black, haves and have-nots, Norteños and Sureños, I and thou. From Pisces’ point of view, all such demarcations are nonsense.
Every sign is the guardian of a particular truth; a special wisdom that is its specialty. The one attributed to Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac, can be seen as the last word on truth:
Distinctions are apparent; interconnectedness is fundamental.
Single Origin
In Pisces again since early February, Chiron (wounds) is offering us a teaching about how much we have hurt ourselves, en masse, by pretending we can deny our interconnectedness.
As if throwing a plastic bottle into a river were an act of disposal.
As if Chevron’s dumping 18 billion gallons of oil into the rain forest has nothing to do with me, because it’s happening so far away.
The key symbol of this interconnectedness in the physical world is the ocean. When we look at a world map, landmasses look like islands floating in a unified sea. Two-thirds of the globe is covered with water. The great continents seem almost like an afterthought.
Consider how our worldview expands when we gaze at a photo of the Earth from space. If we look long enough at that Nasa photograph of our singular blue planet, the much-touted differences between all the various countries seem like no big whoop. We may start to see the whole business of nationalism as tragically shortsighted; even ridiculous. Especially since you can make out, just by looking, how the continents used to fit together. Africa looks like it fits right into the cleft of the Americas, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
The all-surrounding seas give the lie to the isolation pretended by national borders. And Pisces, which governs the seas, gives the lie to the appearance of isolation between people and things. Everything does indeed fit together, and everything has a single unified origin.
Chiron and Neptune
Chiron has been using this oceanic metaphor as a teaching tool for several years already, since it began orbiting with Neptune. It has been showing us that we’re all in the same boat.
This understanding is the central, over-arching theme of human consciousness development. Gradually, inexorably, we are moving away from the belief in separateness, towards the understanding of our interconnectedness.
During these years of Cosmic Crossroads we stand at a major juncture point.
For its nine-year sojourn in mutable water, Chiron will continue to mirror back to us the craziness of our efforts to close ourselves off from each other. When Neptune moves into Pisces next month and stays there for fifteen years, we will be shown not only how painful this is, but how futile.
During these years of crisis, examples of such futility abound. They include Western Europe’s attempts to impose quotas on Eastern European immigrants, the USA’s efforts to stem the tide of refugees from Mexico, Israel’s walling-in of Gaza, and the containment of civil war refugees in camps throughout Africa. All attempts on the part of one group to try to build fences and walls against another group will appear to more and more people as not only inhumane, but pointless.
Learning Curve
The skies suggest that we have the chance right now to experience a spike in our learning curve. Another way to say this is that it will become harder and harder to stay in denial.
In starkly literal terms, it will be increasingly difficult to avoid the physical reality of water. The floods that inundated Pakistan last year, and Sri Lanka, Brazil and Australia as 2011 began, are only going to get more intense. And the seas are rising1. Scientists report that a further two-degree rise in global temperature will cause enough melting to inundate the existing coastlines on every continent.
Although many people seem blind to water’s warning, on the level of the collective unconscious all of us are aware of it. Our melting ice caps and flooded islands are triggering an archetypal teaching: the warning inherent in the story of the Great Flood , a universal image that resides deep within humanity’s group imagination.
Like canaries in the mine, the world’s low-lying countries, such as the aptly named Netherlands, are taking steps by necessity. The Dutch have looked far enough in to the future to develop a 200-year plan to adapt to the rising waters. Like in the folk tale of the prescient little boy putting his finger in the dike to save the village, Dutch engineers are widening rivers, creating barrier dams, repairing old dikes and building new ones.
Precious and Rare
At the same time that salt water is creeping inland, fresh water is becoming scarce. What happened in Bolivia in 2000 should serve as a warning to us about the kind of power plays that could arise in a water-deficient future: In a move that would have seemed — just a few years before it happened — too far-fetched even for a science-fiction novel, Bechtel made a deal with the corrupt Bolivian government to privatize the public’s drinking water. Until street protests in Cochabamba forced an end to the policy, Bolivians were charged even for collecting rainwater from their own roofs (a movie about the incident has just come out: Even the Rain .)
It is becoming clear that water will be the new oil.
Before we recoil with foreboding from this idea, we need to remember that one of the features of a rare commodity is that it begins to be valued as precious. Mystical thinking has always held water as precious; and primal, as the matrix element whence all else manifests. Astrology associates water with the psychic arts: it is the element that conducts emotions and intuitions. Scientists are coming to similar conclusions, as shown by the astonishing studies by Masaru Emoto of water crystals.
If the element water is dominant in your chart, you may find yourself appreciating water in extraordinary new ways; even learning spiritual truths from it. Particularly if you have planets in Pisces, the years to come will help you understand that you are here to embody what water knows.
_______________
Notes:
1 Climate scientists believe that if greenhouse gases persist unchecked, global temperatures will be 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the preindustrial era before 2100. An increase of 2 degrees would mean the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs and the disappearance of most of the its mountain snow packs. See Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hartsgaard.