CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme Music]  
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land.  

This week, we are revisiting an episode originally recorded early in the COVID-19 pandemic during one of our first live streaming online events on April 23rd, 2020. 

In this episode, CIIS professor and renowned scholar Richard Tarnas shares astrological insights into the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he describes as “a time in which there are volcanically intense evolutionary pressures for the radical reconfiguration of all life’s structures.” 

Richard will be joining us live online again this year on February 5th for a sequel talk on the current state of our world and the planets in 2021. For event details and registration, visit our online winter season brochure at ciis public events dot com. 

To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis dot edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

 
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Richard: All right, so I'm Richard Tarnas, as you now know, and I want to thank Alex for the introduction and CIIS for hosting this event. Hosting the event both for our community and also for the larger number of people around the world who have tuned in tonight. I taught at CIIS for 25 years and have been very grateful for the home that it's offered to our Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program (PCC), but also for being at that kind of cutting-edge that is of the Paradigm evolution in our time in so many ways. The kind of material that we're setting forth tonight is one of those ways. In some ways, something like what we're doing tonight, we're taking a very serious look at what's happening in the Heavens to help provide us with a larger context for understanding what we're going through now. This grave and astonishing moment, it calls out to many of us for getting a deeper understanding, a larger context, a frame of reference that can help us navigate our way.  

In a way, doing something like this in our time can seem pretty paradigm-shifting or cutting-edge, but the fact the matter is this what we're doing tonight has been done countless times over the Millennia and centuries going back to ancient Babylon or in Alexandria or in Rome or in Banaras or in Renaissance Italy or medieval Paris or Shakespearean London. This kind of reflection on an inquiry into basically trying to get a sense for which way the winds are blowing. What's the stance of the the astral Gods right now with respect to us and our planet. What in God's name is going down right now? I used to do an annual state of the world report, so to speak, probably a decade ago, each year here at CIIS and often have done it at other places too, like Jungian associations around the world and places like that. I remember particularly the week of 9/11, that concentrated everyone's minds and it brought many to look for a larger framework of meaning and understanding the timing of things and what's happening. It was actually after that that the New York Publishers got in touch with me about could I please hurry up and finish Cosmos and Psyche. It's often under critical conditions that we open up. We recognize our need for a larger perspective. People are drawn towards go[ing to] see a therapist, they would consult an astrologer. Something happens that breaks down the armor that allows for one to open up to a larger perspective. So I'm going to do my best tonight to convey what's happening, the major dynamics that are most vividly at work.  

Astrologers have known for quite a while that this year's lineup of planets was something very significant. They've had deep concerns of course, but also hopes and I might add for good reason in both cases. This is a rare convergence of multiple transits that are very powerful and that could go a number of different ways depending on how we respond to them. We could say that this convergence... we have to keep in mind as we're looking at what's going on right now. Of course the world is hyper-focused on the Coronavirus, a pandemic, and what its meaning to all of us as individuals, as families, as communities, as societies, as a civilization. That's very clearly uppermost, but also what's going on is taking place against the continuing and ever-worsening global emergency of the planet, of climate change, and the mass extinction of species. Just in general not knowing necessarily about a pandemic coming, although that has in the past, these transits have converged, coincided with major pandemics, but it can take many other forms. Even without the pandemic at the top of our minds right now, we were aware of the fact that what's happening in the world is an extremely dramatic situation in which, in a way, all of human history, the entire birth history is in some ways in the balance.  

So let's take a look at a chart. I'm going to just show one visual image tonight, just to kind of give you a clear sense of where the planets are. I will for those who will be listening to this as a podcast later, I know that they're going to send this image, this chart out along with the podcast. I'm just going to be showing the outer five planets. These are the ones that are really carrying the action right now. Let me just bring that up there. [Motions toward screen throughout] I believe that you can now see at the top of your chart, at the top of your screen you'll be able to see a triple conjunction up here. That's Pluto at the very top on the right, Jupiter is right next to it. Looks like a stylized four and then Saturn, and recognizable Scythe the crossover. That's Saturn. So that's huge, rare, potent. The Pluto-Jupiter-Saturn triple conjunction, particularly this Saturn-Pluto conjunction. That's what everybody's talking about. That's where the absolute gravitas, the kind of encounter with kind of a mortal emergency that completely focuses all activity and has so much shaping our society, social life, and Consciousness right now. That's particularly the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that Jupiter brings in a whole another element, which I'll unpack. Then all three of these are in a square to Uranus, which is over here on the left. These four planets, these are the ones that are “the heavy hitters” right now, and that's where the drama is especially taking place and I'll be focusing on that. I'll give you a little sense for the timing of these right now. The longer Saturn-Pluto conjunction that I just was talking about, that began in 2018. It got much stronger last year, 2019, and it reached exact alignment this year, and it will continue pretty strongly right through next year. So that's very typical of Saturn-Pluto conjunction [to] last that long. We're at the kind of the peak of it right now. Saturn will go back and forth, getting back closer to Pluto again and then going forward.  

The bigger transit that is happening that has been going on for the last 12,13, 14 years, is this Uranus square Pluto, which we’re moving right to the very end of now. That square of Uranus to Pluto. That's the one where all of the revolutionary changes, the emancipatory movements, the drive for radical reform (we’ll unpack that very soon). Also many other qualities of the last 10 to 15 years, the hyper speed of the technological advances, the widespread movements of social protest and impulses for freedom. At the same time, it can arouse mob energies, a kind of collective id with very problematic elements like the will to power. Then the Jupiter coming into the triple conjunction, that is basically the conjunction to both Pluto and Saturn is basically a transit for this year. It started at the beginning of this year (January) and it's going to go into the beginning of next year. So that one's a shorter transit. It tends to kind of expand and give a more global reach, international quality to whatever it's touching. In this case, the enormous contraction of history that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction represents.It can bring in greater elements of benevolence, or generosity, or faith in a positive outcome, etc. It also tends to, especially with Pluto, it tends to bring a quality of high drama and geopolitical high drama is very characteristic of it. Then the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, also very important. Social justice issues tend to come right to the surface with that, between the Jupiterian impulse for well. Saturn is related to poverty, for example, deficit, lack of resources, and so forth. Jupiter can be wealth. It can be the elevated parts of society. When it combines with other dimensions of this Saturn-Pluto, which have to do with moral principle, jurisprudence, and social justice issues. With Pluto driving this to tremendous intensity, all sorts of things that have been going on for a long time such as the vast social inequality that our society is dominated by, ridden by is just being compelled to the surface with an extremely potent force right now with the platonic impulse right there. I'll talk about each of these in more detail and their meanings, but I just wanted to give you a sense. This triple conjunction up here at the top of the chart and the squares to Uranus. Neptune, too, has got some interesting action going on, which I'll mention in the course of the next hour.  

I want to mainly focus, at this point, on the reaction between these four really intensively constellated dynamic energies. I'm going to stop the share now and come back. One thing I didn't mention is that about two months ago, Mars crossed into that triple conjunction there and that reached a kind of trigger point right as the pandemic was reaching a trigger point. Mars, which often serves as a, what we call a “trigger transit.” Because it moves faster, it tends to kind of assertively, energetically push things into action that are already in the wing, so to speak, but it drives forward. Mars came right across that starting a couple months ago just as the pandemic started really crusting in world significance. For most of these last two months, it's been right in that triple conjunction and it's just now been leaving. It's squaring Uranus as well during that time, which brings in a whole lot of other things as well. 

Now I'd like to unpack a bit each of these for you and how they're combining and a little more about their timing. If I were to try to sum up in a single sentence the current moment, taking in the convergence of these four planets working together and the archetypal energies that they reflect, I would basically say that this is a time in which there are volcanically intense evolutionary pressures for the radical reconfiguration of all life structures. That's basically it. I mean that's not “it” but in terms of all that's happening, that is a headline that does a fairly good job of summarizing the kind of central through line or vector of what we have going here, right now.  

A few background principles to keep in mind. It's just so important to do this in our time when the, you know, many, many people are not already initiated into the astrological perspective. I imagine that there's about 500 people on this webinar tonight and even more than that number have signed up to receive it afterwards across the ocean on the east coast and so forth to be able to watch it. I can't expect that all of you necessarily have already been initiated into the astrological mystery, have a knowledge of some of the basic principles with which either astrologers in general work, but particularly the kind of analysis that we in our community at California Institute of Integral Studies and Archetypal Research Collective. This work began about 40 years ago with Stan Grof and myself at Esalen Institute and it's just kind of grown since then. What we have found are certain fundamental principles that are important to keep in mind when we do this kind of analysis, that came after years of watching how it works. The first thing is these planets don't work as a kind of linear mechanistic causality, as if the planets are making things happen here through electromagnetic radiation, or gravity, or like billiard balls hitting each other in a Newtonian way. It's not like that. It seems to reflect something more like a universe that is profoundly integrated. Celestial and terrestrial. Human and more than human. Psyche and Cosmos. It's integrated all the way down. It seems that the movements of the planets have an ongoing orchestrated correlation with the archetypal patterns and movements of human experience. That relationship seems to be well described in Jung’s notion of synchronicity and he himself studied astrology for most of his lifetime. He became quite practiced with it, he used it with his patients, right to the end more and increasingly so. This helped influence his notion of synchronicity where the archetypes could be reflected in external events as well as what's going on in people's interior life, their dreams, their visions, their emotional states. They could find reflections in things that could not be readily recognized as having been caused from... there wasn't a causal relationship between the two that could be recognized. The ancient Greeks would be able to talk about there's a formal causal relationship. That's the archetypal quality and then there's a final cause relationship, namely that there seems to be purposes that are unfolding through these. They, Aristotle in particular, had a broader comprehension of what causality was. We moderns have largely since the Scientific Revolution kind of compressed causality down to mechanistic causality, at least until quantum physics got into the picture.  

Really one of the finest descriptions of this notion of how the planets are connected is from Plotinus, the great neoplatonic philosopher from the ancient Roman Hellenistic period. He said the stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other, as has been said, everything breathes together. That's the key idea: everything breathes together. Jung said in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Near the end of his life, he said our psyche is set up in a chord with the structure of the universe and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimals and most subjective reaches of the psyche. That's basically the kind of causal framework. 

One other key principle to keep in mind: this is not a deterministic system. It's not fatalistic and this has to do the very nature of archetypes. These energies are very powerful, their numinous, they shape and inform things both in the interior psyche and the end the outer world. Each of these archetypes has a distinctive if complex character, but they have a kind of rainbow iridescent variation of possible manifestations. They are multivalent. They can be enacted in multiple ways. Our agency, our capacity to exert our will and bring in our intelligence and our insight and so forth. Our agency plays a role in how these archetypal energies will manifest themselves. It's not like a one-way system. It's a participatory dynamic. Because the archetypes, as you'll see, has this range of potential manifestations from light to shadow, from very life-enhancing to destructive, trivial to profound. Because they have all these different ways, that's why astrology, I think, properly understood is not concretely predictive rather it is archetypically predictive. If you can get the difference. It's not concretely predictive. It's archetypically predictive. It doesn't tell us that this particular strain of Coronavirus is going to emerge in December in China and then start spreading through the world in 2020 through much of the rest of the world, but it does say the Saturn-Pluto conjunction along the square root of Uranus. Where it does say sudden, very challenging events that can bring an extraordinary confrontation with mortality on a collective scale, very much one of the possible manifestations of this particular archetypal conflicts. Again, the more consciousness we can bring to the table, the more courage, the more self-awareness, the more intelligence, and imagination, and compassion that we can bring into participating in these very powerful archetypal forces that are working through the world right now then the more free we are and the more skillful we can be in receiving and participating in these in these energies that are coming through us and around us.  

What I'd like to now do, let's first focus on that Saturn-Pluto. I'll spend a few minutes on each of the big archetypal combinations. The planets when they come into hard aspect alignment, hard aspect being the conjunction, the square, the opposition. These are the dynamic aspects that are the alignments with respect to the Earth that really tend to make things happen and they also tend to require more. We put more demands on us. We have to kind of rise to the occasion compared to the softer aspects like the trying, the sextile, 120 degrees, 60 degrees. Those tend to just kind of flow in and you can work with them or not, but they're kind of like opportunities that you can run with, their gifts. The hard aspects, they demand and they are also the ones that require, as a result of what they demand, they make the difference in that they are what shape our character and our personal lives. They are what shape a generation's character and they are the periods that we look back on in history, which I hope that we all can look back on this period in history as a time when we rose to the occasion or when we were able to make profound transformational actions and put in new structures for society, for economics, for our ecological relationship to the to the rest of the Earth community, and our own psychological structures, and our ways of structuring our daily lives in all those ways. We have to work with these. They're going to affect us one way or another but the more we can be conscious of what's going on and the more we don't deny or suppress or project onto others scapegoat, etc., then the more fruitful will be this time in a very, very important way.  

Let me say some of the things about the current Saturn-Pluto conjunction. Again, this is the one that began about two years ago, but it got much stronger last year, and this we'll kind of crest the peak right now. People get these transits as personal transits too and, depending on which transit it is, Saturn to Pluto or Pluto going across one's natal Saturn. You get these as a personal transit when they cross your personal chart, your birth chart. That can happen at any time either. Let's say Pluto or Saturn might cross the other planet in your natal chart and then you'd get this kind of energy for a few months or for even several years. What is happening now is that the entire collective psyche is being informed by this powerful Saturn-Pluto conjunction. That's why we call it a world transit. What I showed you on the screen there is something that Saturn-Pluto is conjoined for everyone in the world. The world keeps spinning and so that Saturn-Pluto may be overhead or rising or the base of the midnight position or might be setting in different parts of the world at any given time. Everybody is within the embrace, so to speak, or that grip would be a better term for the Saturn-Pluto of that conjunction. That's a world transit. Now the thing about world transits is that they're also going across everybody's individual charts in their own individual way each person's getting their own inflection, their own version of these that depends so much on your own life and character and personal birth chart which kind of is carrying the deeper kind of formational qualities of your being. We each participate in this whole in different ways and yet with big world transits like this we’re all immersed in a larger collective Gestalt, a Zeitgeist that is very much in the air. Everybody knows it, everybody can feel it. That's what we're focusing on right now.  

Here are some of the characteristics of Saturn-Pluto archetypal qualities. There is often a sense of the environment as dangerous or the world is a dangerous place. Certainly there's a sense of confronting dire circumstances or a sense of life or of the environment being such that that went that one feels the need for erecting protective barriers or boundaries, extreme security precautions, fortifying borders, increased regulation, restrictive laws, even Draconian measures. This happens regularly with Saturn-Pluto aspects. For example, under the very last Saturn-Pluto opposition —see we are in the conjunction now which is like the new moon position when the Sun and Moon come together. See, we're at the end of the lunar cycle and the beginning of the next one. Well, we're at the end of this Saturn-Pluto cycle and the beginning of the next one right now. It's both a kind of dying and a birthing, which is extremely relevant to the archetypal nature of these two planets, which I'll get into in a second. In terms of that impulse for feeling that there's something in the environment that is dangerous, predatory, invasive and the need to put up boundaries, structures, regulations, security measures, that's what is in under the opposition of Saturn and Pluto. The last one was from 2001 to 2004 and 9/11 happened right at that just as it was really coming into tight alignment and in the whole anti-terrorist measures that got put into place then. Also the whole political reality of the Bush-Cheney administration, that kind of radical conservative empowerment, a reactionary empowerment that combined to set in motion all sorts of let's say security measures by which we are still living every time we go to the airport, for example. I'm focusing right now on some of them more challenging elements of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. I'm going to unpack this... there's a lot of very good things that come with us as well but I don't want to just jump to that without addressing directly the elephant in the room, well the dragon in the room [laughs], which are the conditions that we are facing today. This is that feeling of we're in a very dire situation. There can also be a feeling of being trapped or in prison, being forced underground, for example. Of course millions of people are feeling claustrophobic and closed right now. Because Saturn has to do with the principle of limit, of constriction, of reacting and setting up boundaries. It has to do with illness, aging, mortality anxiety. Saturn is the archetype of the problematic aspect of life. I mean, it's much more than that too, I mean Saturn is not only the skeleton and the skull that are the symbol of death. It is the skeleton that allows us to stand up straight, that gives us a backbone, that gives us a capacity to stand for what we believe in. It's both heavy, heavy like lead but it's also in grave and it's also the gravitas of moral gravitas. The gravitas and wisdom that comes from experience, that comes from the capacity to be able to speak with authority has to come from experience and from suffering and from time— Chronos, time, age, aging. All of those are part of the Saturn complex.  

Pluto's nature, which is this kind of volcanic energy that is like the overwhelming intensity of the volcano, of the hurricane, it's from the depths. Pluto, Hades, Dionysus are these great Greek gods that combined carried a lot of the powerful meaning of what we astrologically call Pluto, the elemental energies of life that are both destructive and creative, regenerative. It is very connected to Freud's ID, to nature's will to power and Schopenhauer's Will. In the Mythic terms, it's like the Hawaiian goddess Pele, or the certain qualities of the Indian goddess Kali, and also the god Shiva, these gods of basically death and rebirth, destruction and regeneration. All that's Pluto and Pluto whatever it touches tends to drive with tremendous intensity. Whatever other archetype it's in their interaction with, it tends to tremendously empower and empell overwhelming proportions that can also become destructive as well as deeply empowering. When you put these together, we see these periods of confronting mortality on a large scale, which for example I already did with 9/11 and in the period after that, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War. It's still been going on all this time. Both world wars, World War I, 1914, World War II, 1939, began under Saturn-Pluto in hard aspect. Those were especially intense and heavy versions of them, of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, because they happen on each side of the discovery of Pluto in 1930. That whole period had this kind of plutonic kind of eruption from the underworld and the great powerful evolutionary forces and the violence and the nuclear energies that got released and so forth. We've got a lot of that now. I might just mention, on the side, the United States in particular has been getting an especially heavy duty version of the plutonic over the last few years because the United States is going through its Pluto return. That is, Pluto's whole cycle takes almost 250 years to go around once and you know how People go through their Saturn return between age 28 and 30 and all sorts of classic Saturn things happen. That's a period of real maturation. It's a maturational threshold, the ending of youth and the beginning of one's adult responsibilities or all sorts of ways that come through. We're going through (the country the United States) is going through its Pluto return, which no individual would ever go through at least at this point living that long a period and it's quite remarkable. I mean with how plutonic in 2016 when the Trump election happened, Pluto also happened to be opposing the U.S. sun at that point. This is the July 4th, 1776 birth chart of the U.S. that's widely used. I mean, it's just like the Jaws of Hades, in some sense, opened up and pulled the soul of America, Persephone, into the depths of the underworld. It abducted Persephone and, in a sense, the country has been reeling from that event and recognizing the kind of plutonic shadow that exists in our country and having to confront it in a way that one doesn't have to confront if one doesn't have that kind of person in the leadership. That was also taking place against the backdrop of the big Uranus-square-Pluto period that we were getting so many more hopeful signs, like having the first African-American president and family in the White House. In the beginning part of this Uranus-square-Pluto, the Occupy movements, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren's candidacies, and having women presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton. All these were classic expressions of the Uranus-Pluto energy, which, in a way, is what I mentioned Pluto impels and drives whatever it touches. In this case, it's Uranus, that Uranian Promethean energy, which tends to bring sudden unexpected changes that can be very liberating, reformist and opening up new horizons.  

Let me say a little bit more about Saturn-Pluto and then get back to this bigger. Uranus-Pluto transit that we've also been, that is in the kind of deep background of what we're going through. Confronting mortality Saturn-Pluto. Confronting mortality on a large scale, the atmosphere of doom, apocalyptic anxieties. These are often, like now, are relative to the covid-19 pandemic but it speaks, ultimately,more deeply to the global climate change crisis and the vast destruction and kind of apocalyptic atmosphere that has been emerging decade after decade. Really under these periods, Saturn-Pluto, they tend to come to the fore with great force and people become much more conscious of it. People who are born under Saturn-Pluto periods, like Greta Thunberg or Thomas Berry or Rachel Carson. They carry this awareness of the need to protect nature and against degradation. See that Saturn-Pluto goes both ways: protect against nature, which is, in some sense, what the lockdown is doing. A very Saturn-Pluto word, “lockdown.” So is the whole area of incarceration, imprisonment. Why the focus on prisons, incarceration, prison reform is so uppermost right now over these last recent years, that's very typical under Saturn-Pluto. Then there's the armored personality. There's the buffered self that goes with Saturn-Pluto, the attempt to control nature within and without, also efforts to resist human exploitation of the environment. These are all because Saturn has to do with loss or deficits, lack, the going down, the depression. Pluto-Saturn periods often bring major recessions or depressions, sometimes psychological but also economic, economic losses, also the need to erect structural reforms to control wildly irresponsible financial actors. That's another part. That's a positive side of the Saturn-Pluto, to regulate the free market. See, freedom isn't always just life-enhancing. Freedom can also be irresponsible and havoc-producing and very narcissistic and Saturn-Pluto at its best puts in wise regulation. For example, to ameliorates injustice or severe economic hardship.  

Now this theme of financial repression, depressions, or recessions. We've seen more than the usual amount of this in the last 12 years because Saturn. This is one of the rare times that this Saturn-Pluto hard aspect is also in there with Uranus, which tends to catalyze suddenly and drop, in this case, drop the bottom out of the market. We had the Saturn-Uranus-Pluto-T-square that is those three planets. Saturn opposite Uranus, Pluto halfway between 2008 and 2011. That coincided with the great economic collapse of financial banks, unemployment around the world, etc. That really played a big role in constellating the quality of life after that and it affected the politics including the rise of forms of like xenophobic populism and authoritarian impulses that get aroused. That Saturn-Uranus-Pluto t-square of 2008 to 2011 period, that was the only one of t-square of those three planets since 1929 to 1933, which was the last time there was a sudden global financial collapse and that in turn totally shaped the rest of the thirties, which was the last time Uranus and Pluto were Square. The Uranus-Pluto-Square from 1928 to 1937. Then the conjunction all through the 60s, which is that more 60s and early 70s energy. Iran is Pluto conjunction of the empowerment, of the impulse for freedom, and for radical change, in the new and so forth.  

Now we've been getting the square of these, so I'm kind of interweaving both the Saturn-Pluto and Uranus-Pluto now, it's pretty rare that you get Saturn twice coming into hard aspect during one of these longer 10-15 year Saturn-Uranus-Pluto periods, but this is one of them. We got it at the beginning, 2008-2011, and we're getting it right at the very end. We were aware that if we didn't go through the big fundamental structural changes, social, economic, ecological that were so clearly needed when the various collapses happened. This is also the timing with the Japanese nuclear disaster, earthquake, tsunami, and many other things that were requiring us to rethink our mode of life. What you get with these cycles, is that if you don't respond adequately to what's needed then the next time, in this case, Saturn comes into hard aspect, and, in this case, the conjunction, the climax of the cycle, then the chickens come home to roost. This is when the screws tighten. It’s when the reality principle, Saturn, gets driven into our lives with just ruthless intensity by the plutonic impulse.  

I want to say a few words about Saturn- Pluto, very positive things that you can do with these energies and that are visible and the people of kick are born with these aspects and carry it through their lives in noble ways. Often, by the way, there's a feeling of carrying the weight of history  on their shoulders and having a great work that they have to do (Thomas Berry's phrase). I think of Greta Thunburg carrying the weight of history and that seriousness that she carries in her face. That's the Saturn. Saturn is serious. It's a spirit of gravity and it's exactly what's been called for out of the the deaths of the collective psyche to have a figure like her speak truth to power. A capacity for sustained effort and determination, that's something that Saturn-Pluto tends to constellate for people. Capacity for intense focus and discipline, to direct your will and mobilize resources and personal energies on behalf of a purpose, of a chosen purpose for sustained periods of time, as in the hard labor of birth for example. If you think about it, Saturn is labor. Saturn is contraction and Pluto propels and dries with volcanic all the elemental energies of nature. That's what birth labor is about. The mother feels the potency of the Nature's energies moving through her that are simultaneously propelling in a platonic way but contracting in a Saturn way. These two together are like basically the aspect of birth, but it's a combination of a death contraction, a dying-to-be-old identity, a dying to the old to the womb, and a separation from that past and a tremendous propulsion through contraction into another mode of being, into a new identity, into a new organism of birth.  

These, I'll just say, that the three planets I've been talking about there's Saturn,Uranus, and Pluto. They are the archetypal complex that rules the death-rebirth process and they're very potent historically and psychologically. It's no accident that the two psychologists, depth psychologists, of the last century who most grasped the fundamental nature of the death-rebirth process, the death-rebirth mystery, psychologically, elementally, archetypal were CG Jung and Stan Grof. They were born in 1875 in Jung’s case; 1931 in Stan Grof’s case. They both were born with that t-square of Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto. By the way, there was another major global financial crash prior to the Great Depression of 1929 in the 30s, was in the 1873 to 1876 period. They called it “The Long Recession.” Around the world, financial collapse. Jung was born with that and both Jung and Grof have a profound understanding of what is at stake with these tremendous thresholds of transformation to become oneself in the individuation process, to go through a dying to the old identity and a spiritual, psychological rebirth. It's not if you just accept that a little rain has to fall sometimes and then you're going to have nice things like flowers. It's not like that. It's far more grave and titanically demanding. Dying, when Jung writes about it in The Red Book or when Stan Grof describes the ego death and the perinatal process, there talking about the Dark Night of the Soul. They're talking about facing the hardest conditions of life, that the darkest most demanding and even facing not just danger but facing the shadow, facing evil and really taking it on. It's an initiatory process and many of us have for a while been conscious of the fact that we are as a species, as a planet, as a civilization, we're going through a profound rite of passage, an initiatory transformation. We're in The Crucible right now. More and more people are becoming aware of it. It's been going on for a while, but it's just kind of reaching extreme intensity right now. The drama could hardly be more taut but it probably is going to get more taut. There is a profound sense of uncertainty that always accompanies any transformation on that scale of an initiatory rite of passage. You have to have uncertainty about the outcome. You have to feel that everything is on the line or else it won't have psychological power. It won't produce the profound moral reconfiguration of one's life. That facing death does. There is nothing like an encounter with death to reconfigure one's moral values and you really have to feel that life is on the line for that to happen. In a way our civilization today, now, has more of an opportunity to go through this transformation than it ever has before. Those of us, who I know so many of you who are listening tonight, have devoted your lives to going through this kind of transformation within your own individual life journeys, but also as part of a collective effort to make to transform our world and to enter into a more life-enhancing relationship with the larger Earth community. To come into contact with the great deeper meanings and purposes of our ensouled Cosmos and this is our time in many ways.  

A few more things here. There's a capacity for great thrift or conservation of resources for greater organizational disciplines, heavy construction, rebuilding things from the ground up, the capacity for extraordinary physical or mental discipline, character-building, forging structures and habits that will endure. This is a time to do heavy lifting. What you put into place what you work hard on, the hard labor right now of your life can set up structures that will last for the rest of your life and so take the opportunity. On the problematic side, I want to just point out there is a tendency under these alignments to project shadow and evil unto others, demonization, judgment, j’accuse moments moments, great trials, psychological splitting, othering, scapegoating. All those are things be very conscious of and that's why the greater the psychological awareness that we bring to it, the better. The bigger background of this Uranus- Pluto...I have just a couple more words about the Uranus- Pluto alignment that we've been going through for the last 15 years, approximately. There’s going to be a film documentary series coming out called Changing of the Gods that had bioneers Kenny Ausubel, Louie Schwartzberg, Max DeArmon, and Theo Badashi (from our own Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program) have all been working on this. They're going to be doing this on the entire period of the Uranus-Pluto and all the powerful movements towards world transformation, social, political, ecological, psychological, etc. that have been so evident over these last 12 to 15 years. Also, the hyper technological advance. This cycle is the one that connects us to the 60s whole period from ‘60 to ‘72 and all the tremendous social, political, ecological movements that happened, that originated then and in many ways are coming to a new level of empowerment right now. So also is the shadow side of the 60s, we have to remember. I mean, that's when Nixon became president. It's when great forces of reaction came in and racism and in new ways the patriarchal resistance to the Feminist Awakening and so forth. It tends to happen on a mass level. If we go back, it's easy to see all these energies that were that classic case the Uranus-Pluto alignment of the French Revolution,1787-1798. Everything was there: the entire eruption of the emancipatory impulse and also the shadow of the violence, in the will to power that can get mixed in with the Revolutionary impulse. In a way, the Rolling Stones who carry this energy so much with their great music from the 1960s, you take songs like “Street Fighting Man,” “Give Me Shelter,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” or “Midnight Rambler,” they are carrying in all these different ways the [quotes Rolling Stone lyrics] “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching ,charging feet. The time is right for the Palace Revolution. I shout and scream. I killed the king. I rail all his servants. My name is called disturbance. Today people would say my name is called disruption.” That's the energy that we've been working with over these last 12 to 15 years or so, and that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is now just bringing in the reality principle and the great kind of threshold that we need to cross with considerable courage.  

Let me just say something. I mentioned Jupiter. In there Jupiter conjoining Pluto and well the entire configuration. I'll just say Jupiter tends to bring in more of a kind of expansive quality, more global. I mentioned it tends to bring in a quality of high drama of geopolitical power dynamics. It can bring at its best profound capacity for leadership and which we're seeing obviously not in certain highly placed venues, but on the on the level of civil society at the level of Governors in our own country, of the medical profession, and a greater deeper confidence and inner kind of moral strength to bring a transformation, a regeneration, and a rebirth to our time. People like Lincoln, for example, were born with that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction and really carried it, or FDR, and many others could mention but they just jumped to mind. It also can bring in inflation. It can bring in like authoritarian regimes, can make power grabs under this, under the crisis atmosphere, and expand their authoritarian Will To Power. That's a shadow side of that. Then the Jupiter-Saturn, I alluded to it a little bit, but that combination tends to really bring in. I'm sure every person listening tonight is conscious of how many people are out there right now who are on the front lines who are doing the things that are absolutely crucial to keep the human experiment afloat and are radically underpaid or dismissed or not given adequate health care or health care insurance at all, who are not even welcomed into the country, but “Oh, yeah we need you now,” that sort of thing. Social justice and injustice issues tend to get pressed to the surface with great intensity when you got Pluto right on it. This is like the time to think through social justice and programs of social transformation, on all levels. The feminist, LGBTQ, race, ethnicity, class, poverty, and then the international community, which is so radically unbalanced as well in terms of wealth and justice and inustice.  

I mentioned that Neptune's doing something. I'm almost at the end here and then I'm going to open up to questions. Neptune, besides the ongoing sextile with Pluto and the and the triple conjunction, that sextile lasts about a hundred years, that's the kind of ongoing thing. I won't talk about that right now, but Neptune is in a semi-square with Uranus right now, and that's a much shorter transit. That has a lot to do with a kind of altering of Consciousness that can be disorienting. You see it at times, for example, in some ways we've all gone through the looking glass in the last two months. It's just like this reality shift has brought about a Consciousness shift that can be disorienting. Also, the amount of time that people are spending on the electronic image, the screen, the high-tech way of communicating. It's very Uranus-Neptune all those Zoom meetings and teaching and so forth. Also, everybody that's watching Netflix movies every night or streaming films and stuff. There can be an escapist tendency to it as well. There also can be that we really see how much the infrastructure that has been created technically, technologically over the last 20 years or so and just so accelerated with social media and the internet in the last 15 years has given us a kind of lifeline of communication in so many life-enhancing, benign ways that we can be grateful for as we continue to be conscious of all the ways in which it may not be quite so unproblematic.  

Let me finish with a quotation from a couple people whom I greatly admire before our time. One is Joanna Macy. Joanna, whose birthday is just coming up here in the next few days, is 91 years old, great, great teacher of our time and she said this: “Out of this darkness, a new world can arise. Not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams, even though we cannot see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts. This is a dark time filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it's natural to feel the trauma of our world. So don't be afraid of the anguish you feel or the anger or the fear, for these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your inner connectedness with all beings. To suffer with is the literal meaning of compassion. Many people don't get involved in the Great Turning because there are so many different issues which seem to compete with each other. Shall I save the whales or help battered children? The truth is, that all aspects of the current crisis reflect the same mistake, setting ourselves apart and using others for our gain. So to heal one aspect helps the others to heal as well. Just find what you love to work on and take joy in that. Never try to do it alone. Link up with others, you'll spark each other's ideas and sustain each other's energy.” I think she's a woman of great, great wisdom. I think we can keep in mind these words as great aid to us right now.  

This is from Václav Havel, the great dissident against the communist government in Czechoslovakia, then he became president in 1990, and then he was part of Stan Grof’s generation there in Prague and he came here to Stanford and gave a talk about 26 years ago, 1994, and Stan and I were there. He actually addressed Stan’s work and the universal meaning of Grof’s psychological findings and practice. He said these words that have always stuck with me ever since. He said, “Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together. The authority of a world Democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe. The authority of a world Democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else with the revitalized authority of the universe.” Havel was a prophet and he saw this clearly and I think these are important. It's important to keep in mind.  

Those of you who want more resources for getting more information along this line, I know I kind of compressed a lot into the last hour and a half, but you could go to the cosmosandpsyche.com website. That's got an introductory essay that you might find very useful and other essays and videos and so forth, other resources that you might find helpful. There's the Archetypal View website that Chad Harris runs that has lots of good videos on archetypal cosmology, astrology. You can also track your own transits through another website that another PCC member of our community, alum Kyle Leimetter, set up with great labour called Archetypal Explorer that you can check out. These are all really worthwhile tools that you can use and you know get a good reading. I particularly recommend astrologers who have a good grounding in depth psychology, have taken in Jung, taken in Grof. Someone at the Archetypal Prism website is very good there. Anyway, get a good astrological reading and in addition, just keep in mind those noble words from Friedrich Nietzsche. He said towards the end of his life, “All pain is held by birth pain.” In a sense, all pain is birth pain and what we're going through is the birth labors of the new, a new humanity, and a new Earth community. This is the time. I mean, the transits are so potent. They are so lined up and it's our time to rise to the occasion and bring everything that we've been learning over these decades. Okay. Thank you very much for being with me this evening and go forth and take the world to a new place. Thank you. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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