Anandamayi Ma was once asked how someone would know whether to choose the renunciate life. Replied she, “Would one deliberate on whether to flee a massacre?” (1)
We all know what she was talking about. Who among us, if they’ve been paying attention at all, would not view human existence in the twenty-teens as a massacre?
But this recognition is just the beginning.
Not everyone has the chart of a renunciate (and of those who make that claim, many seem to be motivated not so much by a spiritual quest as by a desire to escape.(2)) In these individualistic times, there are as many different ways to creatively respond to global events as there are individuals alive.
Tipping Point
We know, just as animals know a storm is coming, that we are alive during a tipping point on planet Earth. More and more of us 
are feeling drawn to engage with the world, not to deny it. Whether our engagement is direct or indirect, spiritual or secular, it springs from the same idea: that the meaning of global events is part of the meaning of our lives as individuals.
This means that the sufferings of the wider world are not just background noise. The corruptions of our society aren’t merely a cosmic plot to wreck our career. Global events are not random tragedies that the universe decided, on a mean-spirited whim, to cook up in order to mess with our peace of mind.
The melting of polar ice caps, the ISIL fighters in Iraq, the gang rapes in India, the jailing of journalists in Egypt and everything else are part of our lives for a reason. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we are part of these happenings.
Our souls wanted to learn from them.
Spiritual Courage
It takes spiritual courage to keep the mind open when our hearts feel like closing in distress. This is when it’s good to remember a basic astrological
premise(3): If we’re alive during these years, we are, by definition, up to the challenge of these years.
Right now we have access to an extraordinary dose of courage, during Uranus in Aries (2010-19), whose square to Pluto is being triggered by the Sun as I write. Its key teachings are:
1. the freedom of the individual and
2. the power of ordinary people.
This is the transit that brought the issue of income inequality to the forefront of the mass mind. Since then, the 1% has been working overtime doing damage control.
Their blasphemies against everything Uranus stands for have been getting more and more flagrant(4). Can you imagine the reaction of Uranian genius Thomas Jefferson, for example, upon hearing that the US Supreme Court had granted money-making agencies the
legal rights of human beings?
Madison Avenue has been busier than ever since Occupy, co-opting its populist cri de coeur. Have you seen that commercial for PayPal, assuring us that because we, the 99%, are consuming in droves the product of one-percenter Peter Thiel, that somehow this means “people rule”?
Exquisitely Alert
To hold onto our freedom of thought amidst a daily barrage of plutocratic propaganda, we have to stay exquisitely alert. And it must be an alertness attuned to this particular world moment. Our dangers are as native to current times as the plague was native to Elizabethan Europe.
The pestilence we face is that of 21st-century mind control. We’re up against the ubiquitous commercial messages of wired life (Uranus), and the virtually unlimited political resources at the disposal of the powers-that-be (Pluto).
The only way to meet these challenges is with the inner resources that are ours by birthright. We start with our goddess-given intelligences, separating out real information from disinformation.
Where advertising is concerned, most 
of us in the capitalist West have gotten used to doing this. We’re not going to faint with surprise when we find out, for example, that our expensive “pomegranate juice” in fact contains only 3/10 of one percent of pomegranate juice.
Where the news is concerned, however, often a fog of credulity descends over the collective mind.
Iraq
The news about Iraq arrives in the West pre-packaged in NATO’s narrative. This doctored storyline in no way prepared most observers for what’s happening there now.
But astrology has been giving us, all along, a sense of what was waiting in the wings. We knew the cardinal cross would be about world destabilization. That’s its point.
We expected national boundaries (Capricorn) to break down (Pluto) in some way, as is now happening with the Syria-Iraq 
border. The sudden segue of one war (Syria’s) into another (Iraq’s), and the armed (Mars) takeover (Pluto) of cities like Mosul and Tikrit– places we hoped to never again hear war reportage about(5) – are part of the melting and crumbling of a toxic paradigm of world governance.
Worldwide, sureties are disappearing, making us need more than ever to stay in touch with the 
era-specific gifts with which our birth chart comes equipped.
Each of us has an inborn nose for the truth. When we’re accessing our common sense (Mercury) and holistic perception (Uranus), we’re far less likely to get seduced into the fake infighting of national factions. We’re able to spot the propaganda hiding behind the reportage of mainstream journalism.(6) We see military language for the manipulative ploy that it is.(7)
In the case of the Iraq war, we are able to point out the elephant in the room: That this was a war for oil, profit 
and control. Washington’s plan was to divide the country along sectarian lines in order to conquer it. They managed the first part, and haven’t given up on the second.
To ask cui bono? about the war in Iraq is to see that the major shareholders of such agencies as Boeing and General Dynamics profited handsomely. Millions of other human beings, of course, lost everything, including their lives.(8)
As the Cross pummels the US chart, Washington’s underlying motives, together with its careening incompetence, are undergoing a long, rocky series of exposés. At the moment we are watching yet another American president sending yet another shipload of “military advisers”to Iraq,(9) to be followed up by troops and guns.
A question that should be asked at this point is: Which Iraqis, exactly, want Uncle Sam back? It certainly isn’t the people (Uranus) of Iraq. It’s the dubious Nouri al-Maliki and the masters of war (Pluto) who installed him.
The Shadow and the Hero
In talking about the Uranus-Pluto square this way, I do not mean to suggest that Uranus is the good guy and Pluto the bad guy. Each of these powerful planetary archetypes has both a trans-egoic capacity – its heroic side — and a shadow capacity – its dark side. The latter manifests when we fail to understand the planet’s higher 
purpose.
The shadow side of Pluto – warlords, plutocrats and the destruction of the environment through human greed – is all too obvious in these years of the cardinal cross. Harder to see is its heroic side: the complete makeover of obsolete structures that stand in the way of our evolution.
Uranus’ shadow side is exemplified by disconnected technology: data used without empathy, bio-tech that abrogates the laws of Mother Earth.
Its heroic side is the capacity of individuals to convene together in support of each other’s shared humanity. It is the whimsy of the best political theater, the idea-sharing of dissidents, the courage of activists who rise up to protest injustice. It is the righteous crowd that, no matter how many times it is overpowered by the spy agency, the police, the military or the court, will not disburse.
Notes
<Blog title> The Crowd Will Not Disburse is a song in the new play by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, artists who make us laugh at the same time that light bulbs are going off in our heads. They just opened one of the best shows I’ve seen in the forty years I’ve been a fan. Their patriotism is exuberant, their jokes are funny and button-pressingly-topical, and they are astonishingly good at their craft. “Revolution is not a violent threat,” sings a character in the play. “It’s a mindset.”
1) Anandamayi Ma was making a generalization about levels of spiritual consciousness. She was contrasting ordinary states with the sublime 
mindsets to which we’d have access if we were fully awake (cf. Hindu sannyasi).
2) As a fully awakened being, Anandamayi Ma was not advocating running away from human violence and suffering, but proposing a big-picture way of understanding them. She warned against ignorance, a word that has the same root as ignore: to pretend something is not happening. Trying to not-know what’s going on in the world is contraindicated for consciousness-seekers (see Take Back Your Jupiter).
3) The presumption here is that every epoch has its own particular agonies and ecstasies.These can be glimpsed in the placements of the transpersonal planets in our charts: the ones farthest out in the solar system. Every birth arises from a distinct time-&-place recipe that includes these outer-planet placements. (See “The World Moment” in the anthology Transpersonal Astrology).
4) We would expect nothing less, given Uranus’ square to Pluto – the planet that pushes things to extremes, in order to break them down and start all over. It was in late April 2014, during the peak of the cardinal cross’s exactitude period, that the fighting escalated to a whole new level.
With Mars (military) and Jupiter (expansion) aligned with the exact Uranus-Pluto square, Iraqi helicopters attacked an ISIS convoy inside Syria, the first 
time Iraqi forces have struck outside their country’s borders since the early ‘90s (provoking “Operation Desert Shield,” one of the Pentagon’s creepily juvenile, comic-book-style coinages).
5) I cover the astrology of Iraq war 1.0 in Soul-Sick Nation.
6) As Patrick L. Smith points out in Salon, the New York Times, supposedly a bastion of liberal trustworthiness, put quotation marks around the word 
doctors in its coverage of the charitable medical relief sent by Cuba to Africa. “… the Cuban ‘doctors’ sent to Angola…” The effect here is to insult and de-legitimize a worthy gesture on the part of Cuba, a nation that Washington insists we see as a bad guy.
7) Not that many years ago, back when it was the USSR who was occupying Afghanistan, the native guerrilla soldiers fighting the Russian invaders were called “freedom fighters” in American news reports. Now that the USA is the invader, these fighters are called “militants” and “terrorists.”
8) Washington’s bombing and “sanctions” killed 1 million Iraqis between 1991 and 2003. Ten years of war and thousands of US casualties later, another million Iraqis had died and 5 million were refugees. One estimate for deaths during the occupation itself is 461,000: just under half a million people.
9) Somehow these white-collar gents are supposed to be more innocuous than hardcore soldiers. “Military advisers” served as the advance guard in the Viet Nam War, also. JFK sent them.
