The whole world is melting, as the transits are making clear with tragic-comic literalness. And individuals of an Aquarian bent are embodying this amazing process on a personal level. Therefore Aquarians1 have a particular responsibility to become conscious of what this transit means. Their job is to model the multi-leveled liberation that is its ultimate purpose.
As discussed in recent columns2, Neptune, Chiron and Jupiter are conjunct right now in the sign of the Water Bearer. Their intention is to undermine the world’s outdated sureties, while waking us up to the fact that we humans are all connected.
As June begins, this is the premier idea occupying humanity’s collective mind, on whatever level each of us can discern it.
The notion that all beings are part of the same Whole is the cornerstone of all spiritual thinking, throughout the ages, all over the world. Yet it remains a revelation; not a new one, but an endlessly reiterated one. Every time a human being gets it, the revelation feels like a first-time epiphany. The word universe itself is a hidden-in-plain-sight clue: from Latin uni (all; entire) + versus (turning): the word meanscontinuously-turning-into-one.
Those spiritual seekers for whom the We-Are-All-One idea is old hat and unarguable are getting the chance to experience its truth on a more visceral level than ever before. Others, for whom this notion has little meaning on a conscious level, are getting the chance now to experience a sense of universal identification with groups (Aquarius) whose members they would never before have considered to be their brothers and sisters.
The traditional dividing lines that have separated humanity into factions are melting down. Consider the once-sacrosanct idea that national boundaries are eternal (tell that to the states of the former Soviet Union) and inviolable (tell that to the swine flu virus.) Pluto (breakdown) in Capricorn (boundaries) is wreaking havoc on the sense of permanency that once gave nationalism its raison-d’être. And the transit of Neptune (dissolution) over the US Moon (homeland) is making sure people get the point on a feeling level.
Assumptions abound in every society about the “natural” differences presumed to exist between races, genders (see my blog on same-sex marriage ), religions and nationalities. These are now rising to the surface of the group mind and opening themselves up to question, exemplified by a gay parade in Russia and a mixed religious marriage in the Arab world that took place as the transit was peaking.
The spot-on conjunction to the Moon in the US Sibly chart makes this period especially poignant for Americans, whose long-held certainties about what constitutes Us and what constitutes Them will no longer have the hold that they used to have. It’s all very confusing, as shifts towards freedom always are.
Could it be that we are our brother’s keeper, after all? If so, what might that look like?
How apt it is that the one man who stands head and shoulders above all others right now as the object of global fascination, America’s new president, has had Neptune on his Ascendant for the past two years. One doesn’t have to be an astrologer to see that Obama has been appointed by the epoch itself to the position he holds. But here we see it spelled out in the pure symbolism of geometry. Obama, who has 18° Aquarius rising, was fated to be a walking mirror of the transit’s meaning.3
From the point of view of Jungian astrology, Obama’s elevation to a place of such freighted world prominence has taken him out of the realm of being a mere individual. He is an archetype now, and we must read his chart accordingly. Even the most “personal” part his chart – the Ascendant, or persona— has taken on a mythic dimension. Like rock stars, sports heroes and long-dead historical figures, he has become a composite of the desires and fears of the mass mind.
For those who want to understand the meaning of the cosmic teachings upon us, Obama’s personal and political vicissitudes are well worth the scrutiny they are universally receiving; but from rather a different perspective from which they are generally being viewed. From a mystical point of view, he is a bellwether, reflecting back to fans and foes here and abroad the myriad potentials, from the revelatory to the apocalyptic, of the collective imagination. 4
From this perspective, personal traits are not where meaning lies. Yet Obama’s provide clues about his exceptionality: what would seem to be merely random personal features, such as posture and comportment, are in his case a symbol of what he represents in this political world moment. Our first heads-up about the significance of the Obama Phenomenon is the way he strides into a room. We had all but forgotten what corporeal ease looked like until he came along.5
One of the most Neptunian things about the man is the otherworldly cool — in all senses of the word — that he expresses on a body level. The muscular grace of his limbs and the relaxation of his smile are utterly unlike anything observers of the American political scene have witnessed in recent memory. By contrast, the profound disingenuousness that tightens up the facial muscles and bodily comportments of every other mainstream politician on view broadcasts the presence of artifice.
Never before has the studied insincerity of the majority of these players seemed so obvious. Through word and mien, every one of Obama’s colleagues reminds us of how normative this public insincerity has become. Though the tendency for public figures to say and do false things is not new, it’s now in America’s face like never before that we have allowed mendacity to become institutionalized.6
The awareness is dawning (Jupiter) in Americans that this habituation (Moon) to dissemblance (Neptune) has contributed to the heart-numbing sickness (Chiron) that pervades the collective mind.
Cosmic forces operate on many levels. On the level of cultural mores, Obama’s policies and strategies make him a lightning rod for the daunting culture wars that are fated to accompany humanity’s entry into the Cardinal Climax years.
As a politician Obama is both extraordinary and extraordinarily predictable. His speeches are masterfully delivered; and, most of the time, he says all the right things. His early calls for bipartisanship, for instance, hit just the right note with the American public, whose nerves had been frayed like split ends in a dust storm by the intense polarizing that went on for eight years of Bush. But it soon became clear that bipartisanship wasn’t going to happen.
At the moment the American Right seems to be losing its marbles. Fox News has taken to exhorting its followers to dress up like tea bags and show their support for free market capitalism, an economic model now staggering around like a corpse refusing to be buried.
Radio personalities like O’Reilly and Limbaugh are, oxymoronically, calling Obama both a fascist and a communist at the same time. These hysterical aspersions do not even pretend to make ideological sense any more, with the result that the bald truth of the whole partisan game is becoming embarrassingly obvious: i.e. that the red-vs.-blue fight has never been about anything other than two cynical groups vying viciously for power; deploying whatever cheap shots they can muster, no matter how meaningless, to inflame the public against the other side.
The American Left has been watching with chagrin as their hero green lights such loathsome policies as wiretapping civilians, rendition, protecting Bush-era torturers from prosecution and, last but not least from the point of view of public relations, refusing to crack down on the polluters that endanger polar bears. Though his promises to run a transparent shop started to break during his first 100 days in office,8 the epitomical example of this trend — his backpedaling on disclosing the torture photos – exploded into the headlines just as the transit was reaching its first peak in late May.
As for Congress, Obama’s decision to hire as his chamberlain the biggest piranha in the tank, Rahm Emmanuel , seems to have been borne of the realization that the president was going to need somebody really tough to corral disappointed Democrats back into his camp.
Meanwhile citizens from all over the political map are watching in helpless bewilderment as his administration not only fails to break up the financial firms which have robbed the country blind, but continues the bailouts; emptying the national coffers into the bank accounts of the whitest-of-the-white-collar thieves who gambled away the wealth of the commons in a winner-take-all shell game.9
Obama’s continuance of these plutocratic shenanigans can surprise no one who has noticed how many hats he wears. On a sartorial level he always shows up in the same long clean lines, but on a psychic level he wears a dozen different costumes.
The new president is the star of a very complicated American drama right now, and if he is going to survive politically he must be able to bend and flex like Gumby. This is a capacity of Neptune, which squares the Sun in his natal chart as well as conjoining his Ascendant by transit. Natives with strong Neptune influences are like circus contortionists: they are able to make the most tortured segues appear smooth and seamless.
Obama’s shimmeringly smooth public performance is begging deeply uncomfortable questions about the difference between illusion (Neptune) and reality. His fans are beginning to realize that there is a fine line between our admiration for the man’s artful display and our self-deception about the realities it masks.
Those of us who have struggled with delusion in ourselves and those close to us know only too well how slippery a Neptunian slope can be. There is a point at which our identification with a loved one – our empathy — can short-circuit our critical capacities. In psychological terms, this is when support becomes enabling.
In the case of a public figure, when does the robustness of optimism segue into the laziness of credulity?
Just before he invaded Iraq, George W. Bush was the most hated man in the world. As 2009 began, Obama was the most beloved. He was the focus of millions of people’s most desperate and exultant aspirations. That whole hope thing was no joke. But discerning observers are noticing that the change thing is not so much about substance as it is about tone.
As far as financial policy is concerned, much has been written about Obama’s retention of the architects of de-regulation – Rubin, Geithner and Summers – to steer the economy that they played such a key role in destroying. Less has been written about Obama’s retention of the architects of Bush’s foreign policy (e.g. Robert Gates, kept on “for continuity’s sake”) despite six years of failed and murderous military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, with occasional illegal forays into Pakistan, Georgia, Syria and Iran. One hears very little dismay voiced by Obama’s constituency about his proposal to increase the Pentagon’s budget by more than 15 billion dollars. Given all the hue and cry over the wasteful and corrupt use of our tax money, it is remarkable that there is so little objection to the new administration continuing to spend one dollar out of every $3 on “defense” and “security.”
In their reluctance to see these outrageous expenditures for what they are, the Left is leaving the field wide open to the unhinged Right. The only protests on the evening news right now are from the loonies howling about the USA “going socialist.“ 10
Clear thinking is not one of the features for which the current era will go down in history. The planet Neptune is associated with euphoria, infatuation and emotional overwhelm. Cartoonist Lloyd Dangle has depicted Obamaphiles melting into puddles of warm goo when they see their hero at the podium. Heart-warming though this state of affairs may be, as a political force a liquefied mass of adoring fans doesn’t wield a whole lot of power. Right-wingers who rail against the presumed tyranny of the Reign of Obama, says Dangle, don’t seem to realize they are railing against The Tyranny of The Puddle.
The impact of a planetary configuration depends on how we use it. This transit could either reduce us to befuddled passivity or launch us as a group on an unprecedented11 spiritual adventure.
We are all melting in one way or another. That’s a given. The only question is whether we can do so with awareness. Neptune has a listless, unconscious side, and it has a creative, conscious side. One can spend this transit wandering through one’s days feeling like flotsam and jetsam tossed around by the sea; or one can pour oneself into a collective effort that makes one feel like a meaningful participant in the great churning thrum of humanity.
That was active Neptune we saw last November, when Obama supporters everywhere joined together in an ecstatic post-election bliss-out. And that was active Neptune operating in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/01, inspiring in millions of people all over the world an outpouring of shared grief. Whether the feeling is one we consider positive or negative, genuine mass emotion creates the experience of interconnectedness that is Neptune’s whole purpose.
Festival of Humanity
Sometimes it’s useful to read a bit of history to get a hit on the ways our society handles things, which otherwise seem utterly unquestioned and natural because we’re so used to them. Especially enlightening are the solutions to eternal human problems worked out by medieval or prehistoric societies, that we moderns consider primitive beyond imagination (and they absolutely were, in many areas. In any case, it isn’t about yearning to go back to another time – as moot a point as the yearning to have been born with a different Sun sign — it’s about copping a perspective for use in this lifetime).
I’m thinking about the villages in Old Europe. Each had their village idiot, conversing privately with his demons or angels in the town square. The burgher or the Keeper of the Poor Law was charged to keep an eye on these persons; the merchants bustled around him on market day; the minstrels sang about him in their ballads; he was part of the group. Again, it isn’t about romanticizing such societies, which were rife with abominable cruelties. But in general, the sick were looked after, often by the local religious orders; and the king felt a duty to them. These communities, despite being so rife with injustices that we moderns scorn them as models, at least seemed to accept without embarrassment their indigent and infirm members, and take responsibility for them, in a way that is absent in our modern urban age.
Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a column a few weeks ago whimsically proposing an Adopt-a-Homeless-Person Program:
There is a mood of musing about these matters right now. In spite of – or because of — the chaos that fills the air, the mass mind is in a state of openness; an openness that is the precursor of manifest social change . The Neptune-Chiron-Jupiter transit overhead is not offering us a tidy new set of replacement policies; it is melting down our old sureties and setting us free to mull and ponder (Neptune) about how humans in groups (Aquarius) could become more humane.
What opportunities exist in your life to express the liberation of sharing your humanness with others? Have you ever been to a concert where beautiful music filled every nook and cranny of the performance hall and you felt everyone’s heart ascending, with the music, together? Have you ever joined in the streets at an anti-war march and felt everyone there to be your brother and sister? Have you ever done a beach clean-up with families and dogs and, at the end of a long day of picking up litter, felt like you belonged on the planet in a new way?
What ocean of shared experience is lapping at your feet, ready to take you in?
1 I refer not merely to people with Sun in Aquarius, but to those whose charts emphasize the sign; especially with planets or angles in the degree range being hit by the transit: 20°- 29°.
2For more about this transit, see the Skywatches from May , April and February . After its second peak, in December 2009, the triple conjunction will segue into a double conjunction of Neptune and Chiron; which will come to exactitude in Febrary 2010.
3 Obama announced his candidacy just after the transit’s last exactitude in early 2007. For details on the progressions and transits that coincide with Obama’s career, see Frank Clifford’s article in The Mountain Astrologer Magazine (April/May 2009).
4 The pronoun “he” is misleading. It isn’t really “him” doing it, but the image of him that we receive through the filters of modern cultural construction. Obama-the-human-being has mutated into a media concoction (Neptune).
5 I have been told by shamanic initiates that Obama’s uncanny imperturbability suggests that he has had such training.
6 As soon as Neptune ingressed into Aquarius, lying started to lose its power to shock. See my discussion of this period in the video on Conscious Media Network .
7 The transit has made duplicity the object of pop culture fascination. As the transit above approached its first exactitude last month, another steroid-taking sports hero was exposed: Manny Ramirez; and a documentary hit the theatres about closeted Republican politicians: Kirby Dick’s “Outrage”.
8 The torture memos issue is only the most visible example of Obama’s pattern of keeping politically sensitive information under wraps. Others include his decision to keep secret financial information about high-level administration appointees; his continuance of Bush-era press briefings by “senior administration officials” who demand anonymity; his assertion of the right to restrict communications between federal workers and Congress; and his secret meetings such as the one with Gorbachev that took place in Joe Biden’s office, away from the prying eyes of the press.
9 According to a recent Zogby poll, only six per cent of Americans approve of the bailouts, and analysts warn that the policy does nothing but inspire banks to merge. See the dispatches of Ralph Nader ,who is still telling the truth.
10 It would be naïve to overlook the pernicious role of the mainstream media in the public’s skewed priorities (see my blog Tell Me No Lies ). Despite the humongous proportion of the federal budget that goes to the Pentagon and homeland security, you won’t hear about it on the corporate news; which prefers to give air time to such trivial expenditures as funding for birth control clinics. Miniscule by comparison, such budgetary details fall into the emotional-hot-button category; and pander to the public’s eagerness to engage their prejudices rather than their brains.
11 Some astrologers contend that the current Aquarius grouping is not only rare but has never occurred before (discussed in my interview with Adam Gainsburg of Soul Sign Astrology ).
