May 2011
Spiritual Sound Bites

From now until 2025, the world will be treading the waters of Neptune-in-Pisces. On April 4^th Neptune glided into the sign of the oceans, where Chiron had been waiting for it. That very week, Japan dumped 15,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

Recall that a year ago last April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf on the very day of Chiron’s last entry into Pisces. Thus has the theme of wounded waters announced itself as a key teaching of the Cardinal Cross period.

Environmental horrors like these are uniquely attention-grabbing; this is part of their cosmic intention. But it is the symbolic meaning of a polluted sea that grabs us on a soul level, and it is on this level that we need to begin our search for a response.

To heal these abominations we need to understand mass psychic unconsciousness.

Psychic Pollution

Chiron (woundedness) and Neptune (impressionability) in Pisces sensitize us to circumambient mental and emotional noise. All around us, the content of the collective mind seethes and roils like the ocean. And like the actual sea, this energetic sea is susceptible to being poisoned.

If we want to be part of the clean-up crew, we must recommit to our life purpose (i.e. Know thy chart), meanwhile taking care to add no more negativity to humanity’s pooled experience. This means staying open, while at the same time avoiding the spikes of anxiety and reactivity that attend groups in crisis.

How do we stay open, yet avoid the negativity all around us? It’s a daunting paradox. But then, this is a daunting era.

To keep our wits about us while we do our soul work, we have to vigilantly identify group fears that enter our energy field. Then we allow them to wash over us and pass through us, so they cannot carry us away.

So, to begin, we have to know pollution when we see it. Such as the noise streaming forth from our infighting politicians, which is growing increasingly hysterical. So are the religious End-Time theories and the fear-driven pictures from pop culture. Regardless of their lack of merit, these pictures are all charged up with the insistence of the collective voice. Times of crisis have a habit of bringing up every fear known to humanity.

Since all fears ultimately derive from the fear of death, let’s cut to the punch and talk about it.

Reincarnation

I see it as highly likely that human beings were created by the same force that created everything else in the Universe. If this is true, then our consciousnesses must have the same access to cosmic intelligence, and our physical beings must follow the same rules. Maybe it’s all the Taurus in my chart, but to me it seems only logical that if Nature thought her Laws were good enough for pigeons and potatoes, she’d apply them to human beings too. I think it must be true that, like every other living thing on Earth, human beings get recycled.

We know that every other organic system is wired to get rid of their built-up toxins, decompose and self-re-create. Everything in Nature decays and then gets reborn, into a new form. I realize that to many people reincarnation seems like a wild and crazy leap of faith, but to me it seems just plain consistent to posit that, like fallen leaves in damp soil, our bodies break down and our constituent parts mutate into new forms; releasing our spirits to take off for parts unknown.

Spooked by Death

If we could view death from Mother Earth’s point of view, would we see it as a tragedy? I think that despite our charged feelings on the subject, most of us would agree that death is inevitable and natural (unless you subscribe to the very weird theories of early Christian propagandists ). Moreover, from the point of view of spiritual astrology, death is miraculous; as are all processes governed by the outer planets (Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). We don’t think of the tail end of the Pluto function – dying – as any less miraculous than its front end — being born.

But the in the post-Enlightenment, secular West, we’re terribly spooked by the idea of dying. Not just ourselves dying, but of anything dying. Like all fears, this one derives from ignorance. We can’t think clearly about death because we humans are, compared to other sentient beings, staggeringly out-of-touch in the cosmic truth department. We’re brought up to believe that we have precious little in common with flora or fauna. We seem to imagine we’re not part of the warp and woof of the planet we live on, an insanity that has gotten to the point of poisoning the sea and – as the latest news from Japan suggests – even the rain.

But I don’t believe this insanity is permanent and ineluctable. And I don’t think we were always this clueless.

I very much doubt that aboriginal humans saw themselves as apart from the great life-death wheel. I think they looked around and saw how things worked, and drew conclusions from the parallels. They saw dogs shedding their winter fur in the summertime; forests self-recycling after a fire; the ocean cleansing itself with every wave… everywhere they looked they saw the creation and destruction of form — while the whole of Life kept on going.

They noticed that each thing’s underlying essence (e.g. bear energy; rabbit medicine; essence of green bamboo) remained inviolate, though its outer shell morphed into some new shape. I think it’s very probable that they believed in reincarnation as a fundamental and universal given, humans not excepted. And they saw that the endings and beginnings of cycles blended one into the other, supporting each other, as rotting leaves on the forest floor fertilize the soil where the new saplings are taking root.

At this point in human history it would help us immeasurably to get back in touch with this perspective. It would shed a lot of light on the world’s current paroxysms. It would remind us that whole civilizations have death phases and renewal phases, and that these interpenetrate each other — the dregs of old societies fertilizing those to come.

End-Time Pictures

When (not if) we find ourselves caught up in the death throes augured by the Cardinal Crossroads , our best bet is to keep in mind humanity’s allegiance to Nature’s eternal laws.

To forget them is to risk flailing around in panic, in which state we tend to grab at whatever idea is around. This will, unfortunately, become easier and easier to do. There will be an increasing number of emotionally charged theories blasting from the television and flitting around the internet; there will be toxicity in the mass mood, born of confusion and unprocessed emotion. There will be a lot of chasing around after something to blame.

A great hunger is building for explanations. In response, there will be no dearth of quickly graspable parables on offer: Hollywood-packaged modern myths, like the film “2012”. People want predictions, even though the future is not yet written. And they want their predictions nice and simple, framed in good-or-bad terms as in an action movie. But we won’t assuage any of our anxiety by reducing the vicissitudes of human evolution to a cartoon.

Fundamentalist religions — which claim to possess more legitimacy than science fiction movies, but which appeal to the same instincts — are having a field day with the apocalyptic buzz in the air. But if all they do is simplify everything to a caricature, they’re not teaching us anything. There have always been priests, in every religion, who frighten their parishioners with tales of heaven, hell, deliverance and Armageddon. When social systems are breaking down and the populace is freaked out about the future, there is a huge market for apocalyptic scenarios.

These can be entertaining, like a good yarn. And if viewed with detachment, they can be psycho-sociologically instructive: they tell us where the mass mind is at. But identifying with them emotionally and intellectually is dangerous.

Truth Stories

To see these scenarios as truth stories undercuts our spiritual intelligence. Getting attached to End-Time pictures interferes with our ability to entertain subtleties; such as the Natural Law about endings blending into new beginnings.

Worse, buying into the polluted sea of fear stories prevents us from manifesting elegant and creative realities. I think we can concoct a future more sophisticated than reptilian extraterrestrials (The Earth invaded!) and vanquished supervillains (We got bin Laden!).

What will it take to create a more copacetic collective future? Consciousness. The process starts and ends with individual consciousness. That’s where each of us comes in: living through our charts, as if the fate of the Earth depended on it. Which it does.