With the solar Eclipse of July 1st upon us, Greece is in flames. The cradle of Western civilization is exploding with the Cardinal Cross.

Glimpsed sneaking away from the mayhem: none other than Goldman Sachs, whose world-famous (this was before they became world-notorious) consultants helped Greece mask its debt crisis with the same credit-swapping tricks that trashed Wall Street. I swear, not even the snarkiest black humorist could have come up with a scenario this outrageous. (I’m obliged to reader Preston for turning me on to an excellent article by Michael Hudson on the deeper echelons of the financial crisis.)

We are seeing a stunning encapsulation of everything astrologers have been expecting, as the summer Eclipses trigger the showdown between Uranus (revolution), Pluto (breakdown) and Saturn (debts come due).

Karma is an overused term, but astrologers have a very precise meaning for it: the results of processes we set in motion. This is Saturnine Law. In July’s Skywatch I discuss what happens to us when we get seduced into transformative action without remembering these laws. All hopped up by our fancy new technologies (Uranus) and enthralled by their immense power (Pluto), humanity’s got the bit in its teeth right now. But when we fail to factor in the potential results (Saturn) of what we’re doing, we get the kind of thing that happened in Japan in March.

In the karma department, the USA’s Saturn Return is peaking; its last exactitude is this August. Everywhere Uncle Sam turns, chickens are coming home to roost.

Buried beneath the big news stories on the Eclipse in mid-June was a disquietingly touching item about the war in Viet Nam, that military morass which kick-started The Sixties for many insular Americans. It was announced that Washington will join together with the Vietnamese government to clean up the defoliant Agent Orange, with which the Pentagon laid waste to that nation 50 years ago. The Cardinal Cross has offered up another parallel between our own era and that of the last rendezvous between Uranus and Pluto (1965-6), this one with a Saturnine twist: an invitation to take responsibility for crimes committed when the Cross was born.

And yet another old sin came forward to be redeemed, as the lunar Eclipse started to wane. The day before the Solstice, a group of Native Americans were awarded the largest settlement ever approved against the US government. It seems Washington stole or squandered billions of dollars worth of royalties intended for American Indians in exchange for grazing and other leases. The suit had been pending for more than a century.

The July first Eclipse is one of a series of portals of consciousness; opportunities for drastic breakthrough. I talk about these in my latest lecture, Something’s Happening Here. There are individuals all over the world who are making extravagant leaps of awareness right now.

It takes courage of a special kind to take this leap . Depending on the potentials within your own chart, these leaps could take various forms: active, private, whimsical or deeply solemn. They might take the form of unplugging from the internet for a week, as a means of reclaiming your brain. They might take the form of questioning conventional wisdom about current events; asking yourself, for instance, whether this latest quest for regime change in Libya has anything to do with the fact that that country has the largest oil reserves in Africa. They might take the form of letting yourself feel – in your belly (governed by Cancer, the sign of the Solstice) – the significance to the World Soul of a massive drought in China, a country that is home to 20% of the world’s population.

Don’t get stuck in “But what can I do about it?” Activism may be in the cards for you at some point; but the first step, for the purpose of this exercise, is to feel the questions. To defy the urge to deny. If we can obviate our usual blocking mechanisms and simply let the thought in, we are answering the call of these Eclipses. Musings like these stimulate the part of us that aches to be connected to the planetary moment.

Think up your own thought-seeds on July first. Use them to get a running-start leap through the portal.