We are in a rare window of opportunity right now, and it’s available to anyone with an imagination.

Neptune (image-making) and Chiron (universal pain) are conjunct in the sky. Saturn (status-quo reality) and Pluto (breakdown) are square each other within a degree, and Uranus (radical change) is moving closer in, intensifying the T-square. Jupiter too, will join the fun in April. What a time to loose the bonds of our minds.

If we believe that consciousness precedes manifestation, this is our chance to prove it. It’s about letting the imagination soar to places beyond the here-and-now, and then beckoning the here-and-now to follow.

John Lennon conducted this sort of thought experiment through songwriting. Like all great artists, he hit a collective nerve. He wasn’t the first to come up with the ideas in “Imagine,” and he won’t be the last. He was reiterating archetypal longings (Neptune): hopes for the human condition that have been expressed across the reaches of time, in prose, poetry, and prayer. Even old Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged them: “I think that people want peace so much.” he said, “that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

But visions like this have an enemy: misused Saturn. That is, the consensual picture of “the way things are.” If we allow this picture to take on more realness than it deserves, it stifles the imagination. We must remember that Saturn doesn’t represent the absolute truth: it just establishes a shared construct, so the group psyche will have something to cohere around. If we aren’t careful, before we know it we’ve entered into an unspoken agreement with our society to pretend that what “Everybody knows…” is the last word in what’s so. That’s when we do violence to a subtle part of our being.

The misuse of Saturn limits our aspirations and enforces dead-weight conformity. Genuine Saturn does not squash dreams; it builds them. But when the Saturn force is abused – either manipulatively, or out of ignorance – it keeps us from putting our energy where our hearts know it should go.

This is the main pitfall spiritual seekers need to be wary of when it comes to working magic in the societal realm. On the face of things, Saturn governs nuts-and-bolts notions like “common sense” and “practicality;” but in common parlance such concepts are often just used to obstruct. They are hauled out to shoot down creative impulses; as in “You can’t launch a software revolution in your garage, Sergei; it’s unrealistic”. Or they are used to deny or delay evolutionary processes (Pluto); as in “Senators, it’s unrealistic to change “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” right now”.

I propose we reclaim Saturn, using it as it should be used: to steady ourselves, so that we can open up to the rest of the 2012 transit picture. We must ground ourselves in positive Saturn before we do anything else. This means getting out of denial. What else is “realism”good for?

At the same time, we need to reject the low-level versions of Saturn floating around in the mass mind. This means approaching notions of what’s “normal” with a cool, crisp skepticism. If high-level versions of Saturn were being used instead of low-level versions, we’d be measuring cultural ideas in terms of their effectiveness and stabilizing effect — rather than because they provoke volatile emotional reactions from crowds.

Consider the way America uses its money. Here’s a nice down-to-Earth topic, one that suits Saturn’s penchant for statistically verifiable facts and figures. A high-level use of Saturn would hunker down with the actual financial realities, and make pragmatic decisions based upon them. Rather than, say, indiscriminately thwarting any and all changes to a hideously unworkable system such as for-profit health-care.

We can always count on a certain sector of society to use Saturnine slogans as a smokescreen: “military preparedness,” “safety,” “homeland security.” But we are living in a historical moment in which the power of the human mind, infused with spirit, can defy these mendacious old con games.

Can you imagine what would happen if Uncle Sam withdrew its troops from everywhere on the face of the Earth where they have set up camp? (Osama Bin Laden had something like this in mind when he issued his three conditions for peace with the Arab world, though few Americans paused to even consider them. Whether or not you believe him to be a madman, his bullet points were and are unarguably sane.) We’d be out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and all the other places that don’t get as much press: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Columbia, et al (and oh yes, now perhaps Yemen. Is it not astounding how casually the Yemen thing is being discussed? As if: What’s one more war?)

What would a high-functioning collective Saturn make of this situation (its placement in the USA chart, at the Midheaven, has this potential)? I propose that it would go about building the most efficient policy it could, first of all availing itself of all the relevant information.

Such as: that the military costs US citizens $720 million per day.

How remarkable it is that, in the ceaseless public debate about how the USA spends its money, this most critical bit of data is never referred to. If it were mentioned in the mass media, do you think our excitable pundits — the guys who sputter with indignation over “unchecked federal spending” when it comes to healing the uninsured — would be blithely tossing around the idea of invading another country? If the staggering amount of money that goes into these wars were openly discussed, isn’t it likely that a lot of Americans would say to themselves, “My goodness, what a lot of money we could save if we didn’t spend it that way”?

Of course, it is hardly an accident that facts like these remain unmentioned. The brainwashing of the populace by the US media is part and parcel of the old system. The long arm of the media supports the body politic. The public is both denied the facts that really matter, and deluged with factoids that do not matter. The flood of distracting non-information that pours out of the average American TV set effectively erases curiosity; to the point where we don’t know what we don’t know. Ignorance (negative Saturn) and dis-empowerment (negative Pluto) are two of the themes being hammered into group awareness by the 2012-era transits.

This is where the metaphysical perspective becomes critical. Folks with no taste for petition signing or agitprop can skip that level, if they choose. They can work directly on the energetic plane. Others may choose to work on several fronts at once. The important thing is that we repudiate the false cultural narrative and take back the power to define what is real. Then we allow the precedent-shattering outer-planet energies to course through us.

This kind of imagining brings on paradigm shifts, which fill us with power. On the personal level, we may discover that our minds have changed about what’s realistic and what isn’t. We may decide that dedicating our time to gorgeous bouts of creativity is practical, because the energy it generates feeds even the material aspects of our lives. We may decide that the ritual of sitting on a park bench for an hour, just us and the birds in the quiet of the morning, is not just uplifting, but sensible; in that it does more for our health than pumping our paycheck into health insurance.

On a collective level, this shift could manifest as populist movements motivated by life-enhancing, rather than life-destroying, social visions. It is already becoming obvious to a critical mass of people all over the world that ideas once derided as naive are in fact the most workable solutions of all.

Such as the idea of funding peace instead of war. It’s common sense.