Right now a lot of people are feeling like a character in a fairy tale, making their way through a dark forest.

Remember how these stories sometimes featured an old beggar woman, or a troll or talking animal, who showed up to offer the hero a sword of invincibility or a magic cloak?

Often the young traveler is a younger sibling, with two arrogant elder siblings who travel the path before him. We see the brothers also meeting the mysterious figure, but they cluelessly spurn her gift. Our hero, by contrast, accepts it with gratitude, humility and curiosity. It ends up supporting and protecting him at key juncture points in his journey.

Like a talisman in a dark forest, planetary patterns can offer us safe passage through intense times. But it takes spiritual maturity to know how to use them. The facile, superstitious use of astrology is analogous to the two older brothers’ ignorance of the magic gift.

In every time and place, there have been people who have used astrology from a place of passivity and fear. There’s still a tendency to see transits as lucky or unlucky. The planets are still often portrayed as godlike forces that make things happen to us, while we just sit around helplessly.

Using celestial cycles to understand what’s going on right now is a great idea. But if it’s self-awareness we want, we’re going to need a more sophisticated approach than is offered by sound-bite astrology.

The Cross is Peaking

In last month’s Skywatch we talked about the entry of Mars into the grand square that has been forming in the sky (for a review of its four corners, see January’s Skywatch). To accept the transit’s gift of meaning, we have to ask some version of the question: Why did I decide to be born into this particular era? In what ways does living right here, right now, match my soul path?

By now, readers have probably read countless essays about the storied cardinal cross (peaking 2012-2015) as it applies to the world in general. It’s been at work for several years, breaking down and renewing humanity’s understanding of civilization.

But this month — especially around April 21,^st when the Uranus-Pluto square becomes exact, for the fifth time, to the minute of arc — the impact of the cross will be felt in an especially immediate way, as the personal and the transpersonal layers of its meaning slam up against each other.¹

What happens when a part of the self that isn’t used to relating to anything but its own desires (Mars) finds itself face-to-face with the world moment? What happens to our need to believe in something (Jupiter)?  What happens when Time As We Know It speeds up so fast as to alter the concept of Now?

What shape is your ego in?

Let’s start with the first question. To negotiate the Mars corner of the cross, we need a healthy ego (the me within.) We need a clear and grounded sense of “I want.” It’s okay to not know what our wants are, but we do need to know that we have them.² When working well, Mars gives us agency, force and vigor. It translates our impulses into real-world behaviors.

But that isn’t enough this month. These transits are teaching us that our desires and behaviors have impact. They are part of a bigger picture. Unless and until we see this, our ego will feel under threat.

Mars is T-squaring Jupiter, a planet of broad social scope, and also Uranus and Pluto: vast, cosmic forces that leave our singular ambitions flailing in the dust. Unless it gets the big guys on its side, our ego might be feeling psycho-spiritually crucified on the cardinal cross; that is, our sense of self may be getting lost in the  collective chaos.

But to the extent that we allow these energies to work together, April’s planetary mix will provoke personal breakthrough.

We get there by recognizing that our personal goals are being fueled right now by the trans-personal. This means seeing the urgency of our times not as a threat to our survival, but as a resource.

The Meaning of Time

The Uranus-Pluto side of the cross, its longest arm, is the most powerful piece of April’s configuration. There are as many ways to resourcefully use it as there are birth charts, and, without seeing the individual chart, an astrologer is hard-pressed to interpret it in specific terms ³. But let’s look here at one important layer of its meaning that applies to everyone.

These days, even young folks — who are born hardwired for digital intelligence — are noticing that information is coming at us so fast, the amount of data is so vast and the tools we use so quickly outdated, that it’s impossible to keep up. On one level, we can chalk this up to Uranus (technology) in Aries (bursts of acceleration).

But it isn’t just a question of speed. As the first planet beyond Saturn (chronological time), Uranus’ job is to defy our expectations of the reality established by clocks and calendars. Pluto, squaring Uranus right now, is transforming this reality from the inside out. What’s happening here is not just quantitative but qualitative.

Since the cardinal cross years began, I’ve been suggesting that our old construction of time is morphing into something very new. That is, our ways of looking at time are morphing. We use phrases like “Time itself is changing” or “Time really is speeding up”… but that’s not really it, because “time” itself is just an idea. What’s changing is our perceptions and assumptions about it.

What’s changing is the Western world’s relationship to past, present and future as an organizing story.

Create a Narrative

The brilliant Douglas Rushkoff has coined the word presentism for the obsession we in the wired world have with what’s happening right now. “Without a guiding narrative to make sense and create purpose,” he says, we end up with an “amplification of everything that happens to be occurring at the moment, and a diminishment of everything that isn’t.”⁴

Traditional stories had beginnings, middles and ends. Our media-generated reality doesn’t supply this anymore. Millions of tweets and posts per minute are parsed and analyzed as if these confetti-like bits of opinion, conjecture and fancy somehow coalesce into a story. But they don’t.

Pundits often wring their hands about the public’s short attention span, but few questions are being asked about the impact of this phenomenon on the way people perceive and create reality.

Our relationship with the world is being transformed by the outlandish expectation that we be plugged-in 24/7. Our understanding of outer events derives from a media that has eschewed in-depth narrative and historical context for bullet points, elevator pitches and 140 characters. Even the most self-moderating of us must exist in a system of continuous and instantaneous feedback. This scenario is inherently destabilizing (Uranus) and addictive (Pluto).

Uranus transits are designed to throw us off: this is the planet of lightning storms and roller coasters. Pluto transits are designed to zero in on our complacencies and annihilate them completely. The two of them together are simply not permitting us to ignore the energies of this world moment.

Our only safety here is to focus in our essence: to connect with that plumb-line that links us to the core of our being. I call this living through the center of the chart.

Right Here, Right Now

April’s sky patterns are like the deep, dark forest of a fairy tale. To move through them with grace we must try to understand our role in the story. We must remember that our presence in this story is part of a plan.

What is the alternative?

If you think that what’s happening to the oceans has nothing to do with you, that the violence in the Ukraine fits nowhere in your picture, that drone deaths don’t concern you because you’re not a terrorist, that the beggar doesn’t deserve your empathy because he’s someone else’s son, and that you exist in another dimension entirely from the plutocratization of the world economy, then you’re out of alignment with the biggest transit of our age.

If, on the other hand, the crazy notion has ever occurred to you that the chaotic, glorious, decaying, mind-blowing trips the Earth is going through right now are somehow also part and parcel of your own personal evolution, hold that idea close. Cherish it. Put it on.

It’s your magic cloak through the forest. 

Notes

1 It’s a complex formation, made up of not only different planets but different types of planets. Two corners of the square are transpersonal planets (having to do with the evolution of humanity as a whole) and two are personal (pieces of the individual psyche). For a thought-provoking excursion into the relationship between the inner and outer planets, see the anthology Transpersonal Astrology.

2 Even a healthy Mars isn’t always able to identify what it desires (especially if it’s in Pisces or aspects Neptune), but it knows that having desires is part of life. This is the planet that says “This is me, and there’s only one of me;” it is naturally solipsistic. It must be well-balanced with the other planets in our chart, in order to achieve a degree of self-orientation that is neither too much nor too little.

3 See footnote 4 of January’s blog.

4 Contrast this perspective with that of social theorists a century or two ago. The modernists’ ideal of progress was that humanity moved in accordance to an organizing narrative, one whose heart and soul concerned the unfolding of time. This notion, Rushkoff suggests, has been drowned out by the onslaught of everything that is happening right now. For example, he points out, Americans over-respond to each new school shooting, but afterwards lack the sense of follow-up to do anything to stop other such disasters from occurring.