Note: This will be a long, involved post, more essay than quick take. Please take your time in absorbing its impact.
First, look closely at the above chart. See the Sun/Moon conjunction at 18°56 Pisces (on the right). Now look 180° across from that position, to Jupiter, also at 18°, of Virgo. Then look at the midpoint (below) of Sun/Moon opposite Jupiter: Saturn, at 16°11 Sagittarius, only two degrees from exactness from Sun/Moon and Jupiter. This four-planet configuration, called a “T-cross” (one 180° opposition, plus two 90° squares) occupies the heart of our New Moon epistemological learning curve, which I will address below.
Tangential, and deeply implicated with this T-cross are Uranus, on the Descendant, also at 18°, of Aries, and Pluto at 17° Capricorn. The energies releasing from this disruptive square aspect electrify our epistemological predicament, and make it utterly imperative that we learn how to work with both the complexities and the simplicities of our various modes of knowing. Let’s start with the Uranus/Pluto 90° square.
Uranus/Pluto Square
If you have been following this blog, or that of any other serious astrologer who writes for the internet, then you are already perhaps nauseatingly familiar with the “Uranus/Pluto square.” It began around the turn of the second decade in this new millennium, and has been ongoing since. The exact square took place between 2012 and 2015, with seven direct hits. The square is now “waning,” that is, it is beginning to move out of alignment; however, it’s still only 1° from exactness!
This square is associated with conflict, both breakdown and breakthrough, both terrorism and activism; with the fracturing and erupting of old cultural, economic, and political Capricorn structures due to increasing unrest, fury and violence of “the people”: Uranus in Aries: Call it the 1% vs the 99%. Call it what you will: the few against the many; the rich against the poor; oligarchy against populism. There are many ways to characterize what is happening, and all of it traces back to 40 years ago, the late ’60s, when these two planets began a brand new cycle, a Uranus/Pluto conjunction. (This cycle, between two long-cycled “outer planets,” is rare; its punctuations help define the zeitgeist. The last cycle of Uranus/Pluto began during the Civil War.)
The Uranus/Pluto seed was planted in the late ’60s to early ’70s. Anyone still alive who went through those years remembers that time as both exhilarating and terrifying. We were doing our thing, growing our hair long, freeing ourselves from traditional male/female roles, and from the tyranny of the conformist ’50s. We were wild and crazy with sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll; and we were furious about this nation’s Vietnam War which used our young men as fodder. We knew, we just knew: the revolution was at hand.
I think back to that time and I’m amazed that I actually thought that way. So did my peers. We just knew we could do it, change the world. Immediately. Instantly!
Huh?
That was before I had lived a long time, and prior to my discovery of astrology, its depiction of of long outer planet cycles, cycles that do work like clocks, but so subtly, ubiquitously and profoundly, with so much occurring in the deep underground, that when their periodic, and entirely predictable, eruptions do occur, we tend to be surprised. On the other hand, any astrologer worth his or her salt knew what was coming. I wrote a primer on what was coming in 2007.
Between the revolutionary ’60s and the second decade of the 21st century, deep underground, the Uranus/Pluto seed was working its magic, bursting, putting down roots, and finally sending up the stem now pushing out of the soil, seeking the sun. No more business as usual. We are legion. We are furious. And we will now take back this world from the ever increasing hegemony of not only the Military-Industrial-Medical-Political-Educational-Scientific Complex, we will bring all that we have learned since those storied days in the ’60s to bear on this new time which stems from that one.
Or, that is, some of us will, the ones who are left. Many of us have since died, or “went over to the other side,” became obscene, obese materialists, with the hedge funds, the McMansions, the giant SUVs, the corporate jobs. But there are a few of us old hippies left, who never did betray our early ideals. And we are beginning to live among young ones who feel similarly, and who still play our old music! They too, know that we must change the world. Burdened with student debt and inserted into a downwardly mobile world of “service jobs” on a planet that is rapidly being destroyed, they are up against an impossible future, and unless they do change the world, we are all lost.
So we old ones can serve these new beautiful young ones, hopefully, at least in helping them see how this time reflects that one, and how cycles do come round again, and that when they do, we must be ready, prepared for action.
So, as I begin to talk about the upcoming March New Moon/Solar Eclipse, remember that its T-cross configuration with Jupiter and Saturn is also linked into into the still extremely potent and ongoing, and at best, activist Uranus/Pluto square. But first . . .
Neptune in Pisces
The Uranus/Pluto square itself lives within an even larger, longer-lasting 165-year cycle of another outer planet, Neptune, moving through its home sign of Pisces from 2011 through 2025. Since it rules Pisces, Neptune can exert a more powerful influence than usual, running the gamut from deception, distraction illusion, addiction all the way up to high high spirituality, empathy, compassion, oneness. I’ve posted on Neptune in Pisces a number of times (see, for example, this and this) and I do feel that ultimately, and at the very least, Neptune in Pisces helps to soften and dissolve the hard, jarring edges created by Uranus square Pluto; in the best of all possible worlds, Neptune in Pisces will help us to realize that we really are ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, as our fearless old hippie activist Bernie Sanders keeps exclaiming.
New Moon/Solar Eclipse
New Moons symbolize new beginnings. A New Moon which is also a solar eclipse features the Moon in front of the Sun in a direct line from Earth through Moon to Sun so that, from some places on Earth, the Moon completely obscures the Sun. (Think about that: the Moon is 400X smaller and 400X closer to Earth than the Sun, which accounts for eclipses, the rim of one exactly covering the rim of the other. How is that possible? I used to think the very idea of Solar and Lunar eclipses miraculous, due to divine intervention. Now I think the relationship among Earth, Moon and Sun probably relates to some kind of ET project. What kind? Good question. Here’s an interesting recent “take” on the anomalies of our Moon.)
This New Moon/Solar Eclipse is located in Pisces, along with Neptune at 9°, Mercury at 6°, and conjunct both wounded healer Chiron at 20° Pisces (not shown in chart) and the karmic South Node of the Moon at 21°. So lots of Pisces featured in this New Moon in Pisces chart. Lots of capacity/necessity — for example, with the enormous flow of refugees — to dissolve our boundaries, blur our edges, resonate with the the soul in every Other.
Now let’s add Jupiter and Saturn to the mix. Here’s where we move into the necessity/opportunity for a new epistemological learning curve.
Jupiter square Saturn
First some background.
Jupiter and Saturn have a 20 year cycle. The last time they were conjunct (i.e., the last time this cycle began) was in 2000, when they met in earthy Taurus. I actually remember that time very well. I was during that month of May consciously attempting to ground myself and put roots down in Jackson, Wyoming, where I had parked myself for 18 years. And it was during this conjunction when I realized that I couldn’t do it! That energetically, for me, fully rooting myself in there was impossible. I can now look back and realize that this was the first of a number of impulses that brought me to Bloomington, Indiana, where I have been able to truly ground and root myself in (via the Green Acres Ecovillage project, the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden, and our two-house Green Acres Eco-Pod) for the first time in my long, peripatetic life.
Now Jupiter and Saturn are in the closing or waning square of this cycle. They move back and forth out of exactly squaring each other three times from August 2015 through May of 2016. This month, March 23, will feature the second exact square between these planets.
Okay, now to the heart of the epistemological learning curve. It involves the fact that all of these planets (Sun/Moon, Jupiter and Saturn) occupy mutable signs, wherein we continuously learn about the world and communicate with others. There are four mutable signs: Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces.
Gemini and Virgo symbolize left-brain functions; Sagittarius and Pisces right-brain functions. Gemini names, identifies and describes bits and pieces of the passing flow of sense data: facts and factoids. Virgo analyzes, corrects, perfects, discerns, figures out, aspects of how the bits and pieces identified in Gemini relate to one another, or not.
Sagittarius looks at the entire picture drawn by the Gemini/Virgo project — identification and analysis — and attempts to draw conclusions, meaning, to get perspective, the Big Picture; to build a world-view based on the existing “data base.” And Pisces moves from the brain to the heart, asking us to feel into and dissolve the boundaries that separate concepts, world views, other humans, animals, plants, minerals, water, fire, air — Nature, and Cosmos. So we might say that Sagittarius symbolizes “Truth” or better: the quest for the ever-receding larger truth that hides just over the next horizon; and Pisces symbolizes beauty, love, mysticism, the allure of the divine that hides inside the illusion of separation.
So, epistemologically, can you begin to see what is going on with this New Moon/Solar Eclipse? Of the four planets directly configuring the T-cross, one sign is missing. That’s Gemini, representing in this case, the Internet, where everybody in the world can find an ever flowing, indeed, utterly overwhelming infinity of bits and pieces. But how to carve one’s way into infinity? How to choose what to look for? And how make sense of one’s findings?
Enter expansive Jupiter in Virgo, its equally infinite attempts to discern what is real and what is not, what is info and what is disinfo. Here’s an example of this kind of analysis.
Then comes Saturn, stern strict Saturn, in Sagittarius, asking us to come to conclusions, to figure out once and for all, what is real and what is not, and how to think about it. Here’s where we recognize the epistemological balkanization that I posted on several days ago. Wow! It seems like everybody in the world has his or her own “take” on “what’s happening;” that they think they know what’s true and what’s not, what’s real and what’s not, and furthermore, not only do they disagree, but everybody is getting his or her information from only a certain selected number of sources, leading to very different conclusions! It’s as if we’re all talking past one another, having no idea what others are saying, and not caring. We just want to preserve and protect our own “take” on events. As if we are the ones who have the whole truth! And others be damned!
Here’s where it gets scary. Here’s where we need to rear back and realize that there is no “final take” on what’s going on because the “map” is always a simplified abstraction from the “territory” it purports to represent. That the patterns it identifies would be vitiated if we could just see beyond the “bits and pieces” that were inevitably, whether consciously or unconsciously, cherry-picked to “add up to” and thus “justify” the preferred pattern. There’s simply no such thing as a final perspective, the BIG TRUTH beyond all the smaller ones. To think that there is a final truth, and especially, that we can discover it, is the worst of sheer hubris, not to mention actual idiocy.
This is why I always say, and this time with my sternest Saturn voice, “take off your conceptual helmut and shake out your hair.” The world is always much, much bigger than anyone’s philosophy.
Okay, now to Pisces, the fourth arm of the mutable cross, where all those bits and pieces, all that data and patterns found in them and philosophical and theological perspectives drawn from them dissolve into something larger. Here’s where we do, finally, recognize that space is infinite, that it contains an infinite number of points, each of which, when seen from close to, dissolves into another infinite space with its own set of infinite points. In other words, there is no end to the mystery. And rather than try to “figure it out,” we would do well to surrender to our heart’s beat, beating in concert with all hearts. Yes, let us realize that, inevitably, we float on the surface of the river; so we might as well trust ourselves to absorb and reflect the changing currents of Becoming, recognizing that the whole, Being itself, is always, always, way much bigger than we are, so much more mysterious and magical than any of our, especially our oh-so-serious “scientific” attempts to explain, dominate, and control it.
Conclusion: combine the mutable quest with cardinal activism and what do we get?
Let us consciously strive to both use the Internet to inform ourselves, while realizing that any cut that we make into the infinity of sources on the Internet is biased, that is, it’s coming from it’s own “point of view,” and cannot possibly reflect the whole. Let us recognize that some sources are indeed better than others, and as far as possible, attempt to ascertain what values we hold that drive us to focus in one direction rather than another. Let us develop perspectives to hold our findings, always with the caveat that these too, will evolve, as we absorb more and more “information,” become more and more astute “critics” of what’s “out there.” And finally, let us trust the universe, this mysterious dance of Being and Becoming, knowing that we are here for some special purpose, each of us, that requires our informed awareness in order to be fulfilled.
This purpose is being activated during the Uranus/Pluto years. Each of us, as a Uranus in Aries individual, takes his or her own Pluto in Capricorn power, to create, ignite, inspire ourselves to create the beautiful world that Neptune in Pisces promises, once we recognize the Oneness that flows through our unique individual selves.
Here’s one example of someone who’s taking his power, doing his thing, with all the passion and creativity he can muster. Reverand Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir.
And here’s an excerpt from a John Rappoport post that shows what happens when we see through the matrix (or, that “world view” foisted on us by the MSM), and ignite our own realities.
There are many people who have discovered that the Information Chiefs on this planet are lying to them. They have discovered more: these lies are stitched together, day by day, to form a series of images and meanings, in a kind of continuously running movie—
And this movie is called Reality.
Many people have discovered this. Based on experience, I would say millions of people out there know this.
They don’t know the names of all the Information Chiefs or the names of the men behind them. Nor do they know all the techniques of propaganda that are being deployed. But they know enough.
They don’t know all the names of the groups and secret societies to which the Reality Makers belong, but they know enough. They’ve seen the movie and identified it as a movie.
They have not fully considered that these Reality Makers are artists. Perverse artists who are trying to monopolize the production of What Exists.
This is an important clue. Why? Because it suggests that other kinds of art and artists exist, who can do something else, who can perform an end-run around the central movie of reality and invent their own movies—their own highly individual and unique and powerful movies of exceedingly different Realities.
This fact leads to an explosive insight.
No matter what its content is, One Central Reality is an illusion. It is always the result of an attempt to attain a monopoly.
And then another insight follows. No one is excluded from the status of Artist. No one.
Every person, every individual is capable of creating his own movie and entering it into the world. This is the bottom-line meaning of decentralization of power.
It does not engender chaos. It emboldens individuals. Free Artists can relate to one another. They can see one another’s production of Reality. They can interact. They can finally put aside shallow social conventions and deepen their insights.
In order for this profound kind of decentralization to occur, people have to become artists by tapping into and deploying their imaginations to the fullest degree possible.
And let me clarify one point: individuals making their own movies of reality are also inventing their own futures, the futures they most deeply desire. This is one of the most important facts about human existence freed from its chains.
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Happy New Moon/Solar Eclipse! May you utilize this month to inaugurate both a new left/right brain and heart way of thinking and your own very specific, individual activism that will help free us all from the illusion that there’s only one way to think, and that all actions must fall within the parameters set by those who would rule us forever.
