Saturn, Uranus & Optimism in 'Worsening'

7.6.08


The pink elephant in the room is how tough times are getting…

… at least if you buy into the obvious economic indicators and the mainstream news reports we're receiving. (Can we not?)

In my capacity here, I'm in the business of consciousness, making me both responsible for communicating what I'm personally conscious of and not fueling the fires of fear or panic, instead offering a hopeful perspective.

Yet, bombarded by continued—and accelerating—reports of job cuts and crime spikes, war and corruption, health care woes and administrative shortfalls, and the foreclosure crisis bearing down on homebuyers purposely sold unsustainable mortgages on properties far enough from urban job centers that the tripling and quadrupling of gas prices robs every spare penny, what are we supposed to think?

Let me be clear: I am speaking as an American consumer, taxpayer and TV-watcher. I know this is not 'the end of the world', though I acknowledge it indeed may feel that way to many of my country-kin. (It could definitely be the beginning of the end of a certain type of existence built on credit and willful ignorance, however.)

I cannot imagine the very different experience, for instance, of the exuberantly expanding middle classes in places like China and India… thrilled with exposure to the concept of 'disposable income' and all those glittery goods and services I've long taken for granted. Nor can I imagine being one of the billions of the world's poor, so very accustomed to living with nothing that they may witness little recognizable 'toughening' of times… and/or may secretly (or not-so-secretly) entertain a vindicating delight that our society of wealthy imperialists is finally getting our turn to stretch prostrate on the wheel of fortune and take it.

But from this spot on the holographic globe, things are far from pretty. Or shall I say: The 'unprettier' social aspects appear to be rising to the surface of our cultural awareness, seemingly affecting a larger number of people in a more direct way. We're face-to-face with the limiting (disastrous, even) consequences of our collective structures. Many of us can't go on like this much longer.

Has anything really changed here on the ground? Or is it merely a change in the tides of our awareness? With everything we know about quantum reality, is there really a meaningful distinction?

I am hardly a doomsdayer (though begrudgingly admit my bit of sick fascination with dramatic developments on the world stage). I know this is a cyclic reorientation, repeating itself in trends of boom and bust throughout all lived history, so I cannot muster the generational hubris to believe we, right here right now, are wrecking everything everywhere forever.

However, I also know enough to currently see us as on the verge of an increasingly difficult period in history, one which is likelier to worsen in its apparent societal challenges than it is to fundamentally 'get better' in the next few years. And yet, almost contradictorily so, I perceive that this very act of 'worsening' is indeed essential in order for certain improvements to take place on a grander scale. From that acrobatic perspective, I'm actually deeply optimistic.

Thanks to astrology, I can read this visible trend in the impending opposition of Saturn and Uranus, the first in more than forty years: A faceoff between the now-crystallized forms of social authority (Saturn) and the potentially explosive will of the people (Uranus), one that periodically reappears, emphasizing whatever glaring slippages have developed as each side looked out for its own advantage.

The Saturn-Uranus opposition will be one of the defining astro-energies of the coming few years, pitting the collective drive for innovation, rebellion and liberation (Uranus) against the structures designed to hold the status-quo in place (Saturn). The opposition will be within a 5-degree orb of influence from September 2008 through mid-2011, with five exact peaks. The first one falls exact on Nov 4 08—otherwise known as Election Day in the US. (Synchronicity?) And it dovetails with the other defining macro-aspect, a Uranus-Pluto square, to form a hyper-dramatic T-square in 2009-2010 that reveals no indication of 'smooth sailing' anytime soon.

The last example of such a configuration? Saturn and Uranus opposed each other roughly from 1964 to 1967, while Uranus was also conjunct Pluto. Think civil rights fights, student uprisings, an unpopular war, a presidential assassination and a loss of faith in authority, everywhere you looked rapidly changing social mores, leaving more than a few people anxious to the core. We lived through it all, of course… lived to tell the tale, if not learn from it.

Just as I personally welcome the legalization of gay marriage, a social trend I don't see reversing itself though it may not be a 'straight shot' (ooh, how punny) from here to there… I also recognize that, to many people with different values than mine, such a cultural shift would appear to signal exactly 'how tough times are getting' (or indeed the 'End Times' themselves). To me, it is unquestionable our laws will head in this most just direction eventually, yet I recognize it's no less painful to the traditionalists having their traditions ripped apart.

And the worst-of-all, ever-worsening energy crisis—the skyrocketing price of oil and its impact on every other industry, the environmental fallout and the battle to impede its effects (if, that is, we can even agree there are any)—shows no signs of magically resolving itself, certainly not before it reaps further devastation on the American economy and its families' cherished way of life.

Yet, it's that same crisis which will eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) lead our greatest minds to develop new economically-and-environmentally viable technologies to rescue us from this mess we're made. I have no doubt it will happen—and that it requires such a dire situation as the one we're sinking into, to force us to evolve.

The times, they appear to be getting tougher every day… a fact for which, perhaps, we should be thanking our lucky stars. Without challenge, we become lazy and self-indulgent, lacking compassion for those who always have it tough every day. We need this, like we need our mother's water to break in order to be born or a surge in bodily hormones to develop into adults.