CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

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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. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  
 
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Thank you. Thank you very much for welcoming me here again. We have once again gathered to take a look at the heavens and get a sense for you know where, what the what the major archetypal dynamics are of the time. It's been nine months since, since we were, since I came to you in the same forum. It was in April right after the lockdown produced the pandemic here in the United States had had fully clicked in… and at first in March and then later April by the time we sat down for this, we were deep into it.  

And this talk tonight will both be in continuity with what I presented there, and will you know to some extent build on it, but I also want to, I imagine a good number of you who are here tonight or who are watching this in future recordings or listening to it would have been there to listen to the earlier one, but I want this to also stand as an independent presentation. So to some extent I'm going to you know cover overlap with what I did last time, particularly in order to get across the larger frame of reference and you know the big picture is one in which… I mean we could see at that point the archetypal astrological perspective that so many of us have been doing research in and exploring, and teaching, and learning… it was very clear looking ahead by most astrologers years ago that 2020 was going to be a very, very demanding year. And that those demands had already fully kicked in by last spring and it didn't really let up.  

And I remember when you know I did the best I could to kind of frame what we were going through. It’s almost as if the great planetary transits that we're going through right now are almost like tailor-made for… constellating a great moral crisis and transformation. Yes political, social, ecological, epidemiological, all those. Yes psychological, spiritual… but there are certain elements in the convergence of transits that took place over this past year that particularly brought up the extent to which human moral agency and capacity for ethical discernment and for, in a sense reality, testing and courage to meet the demands that were unfolding during this year. In all these respects, it's as if the planetary transits were kind of designed as it were for constellating something that would you know to some extent require a heroic response by many people. And I mean clearly a heroic response was mounted by many people.  

From the people who work on the front lines of the of the medical profession in the hospitals in all sorts of healthcare professional ways. That's one huge part of it and then all those that here in the United States, where a good number of my you who will be viewing this or are watching this are from the United States, will be aware of just what a terrific mass effort it was to engage the election, the campaign. Election day itself which, I almost felt was like a kind of D-day of clashing armies that had been you know in this case tens and like 70 plus million people on each side shaping not only the future of who's going to be in power in the United States but to some extent as many, many people recognize  affecting the long-term prospects of our planetary, of our Earth community… the decisions being made in positions of power, those in Washington DC in particular, just having a tremendous consequence for the larger Earth community.  

My sense is, I mean what we could see at that time a year ago, was just that the energies that had been building up over the last 10 or more years under the Uranus Pluto square, that kind of 60s French Revolutionary mass, tremendous energies of radical change etc. and emancipatory impulses, and rebellious, and defiant impulses and very disruptive energies as well, technological advance. All those were kind of coming to a climax at the very end of that long Uranus Pluto square with the arrival of Saturn into the configuration, and I'm going to take a moment here to just show you visually what that looks like as I did last time, but in this case I'm going to first share my screen and show you an that shows the three main, excuse me, the three main planetary alignments that have converged at this time, particularly like 2020, 2021. These are the peak years of it. It was coming in already in 2018, 2019 as Saturn came into the conjunction with Pluto, and now in that conjunction with Pluto is still there with Saturn.  

I'll kind of unpack the archetypal dimensions of that in a minute, the meanings, the qualities, the phenomena that we see… that's still going for approximately another year. But coming in this past year was also the Saturn square to Uranus which is now in this year at its most intense form. So, I want to just convey that to you with this this handy graphic that was put together by a colleague of mine, who is Kyle Johnson. So, there you can see, starting roughly in 2007 just before both the beginning of the presidency of Obama, but also just at the time of the beginning of things like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements, and so forth but also the great financial meltdown and this was the last time that Saturn was lined up right here at the 2008, 9, 10 period when the global financial crisis hit. And so that Uranus square Pluto has been going on for this entire time and is now just moving out of orb, and this is the I mentioned this as being the Pluto impels and compels whatever it touches with tremendous force, and if it's in major aspect to the to the principle of change and rebellion, emancipation, upsetting of old structures, the impulse for the new that Uranus represents… you get basically this you know approximately 12, 13 year period, much as in the 60s and in the early 70s, much as in the 1840s and 50s, under the last conjunction during the height of the abolition movement, and the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement and so forth, and much as during the French Revolutionary epoch 1787 to 1798 just to name three of the most iconic periods that had this particular Uranus and Pluto combination.  

That's been going on all this time and the feeling that we're living under you know just with a tremendous intensification of the impulse for change, and reform, and transformation… to bring forth the new, to participate in evolutionary and revolutionary change in one's life. It tends to activate artistic and scientific creativity, tremendous technological advance. I mean so much has happened technologically that we're just now accustomed to that wasn't there at the beginning of this. I mean we were not all using smartphones. The social media just became far more prevalent, powerful from you know Facebook, and of course Instagram and so forth. The drive for social justice reform, and you know equality, and freedom, and ecological awareness. All these have been tremendously pushed into human consciousness, and you know constellated with great force as a kind of archetypal field that we all participate in. This is kind of a zeitgeist that something's in the air. 

But all these configurations also have very challenging elements to them as well, and like sudden… the intensification and acceleration of experience can be overwhelming, it can be distressing. Also, there can be an eruption of indiscriminate kind of compulsion to make radical changes, and subvert the status quo, and just destroy structures, and also to be on the receiving end of these kinds of things. The impulse towards radicalization, which was such a characteristic of the 1960s, for example or the French Revolution… this has clearly been in the ascendant over this last over this last decade. And in addition to the cultural iconoclasm, there's also an unleashing of the Plutonic id on a collective level so you get more mob energies, which can be when they're expressed in disciplined ways as in the great things like the great women's marches after the Trump inauguration four years ago, or so many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, not only throughout the United States and in small towns and large ones but across the world. Highly… that kind of massive expression of the impulse for emancipation and recognizing the dignity of all human beings, but the Plutonic archetype has to do with this kind of Pluto, Hades, KaIi, Dionysian underworld energy that, while it at one level can have the potential for great transformational regeneration, at another level has a real potential for you know upsurges of you know violent rage and or hatred, or the projecting of deep shadow material onto others. Onto immigrants, onto people of another race, or of another way of thinking, and this can unleash the will to power. There can be mass street movements that result in mob behavior that's violence, that creates upheaval and chaos.  

So, and also this is another thing, you can see here, the latter part of it during the Trump administration here… when what Trump brought in was to a great extent this kind of combination of the shadow side of both Pluto and Uranus the shadow side of Pluto was this kind of I don't know underworld mobster energy and the Plutocracy, the imposition of power in authoritarian ways, and also the evocation of the kind of like the reptilian instinctual drives in large numbers of people, and liberating that. And the liberating quality comes from the Uranus Prometheus archetype, which is liberating Pluto, which can be liberating the deep underworld into the positions of power and then giving permission for many things that were kept in the shadows to be expressed openly.  

You know racism, and sexism, and various forms of collective hatred, and projecting, and splitting, etc. So that's been part of the picture. I mean both the multivalent quality of the two archetypes involved have been in full efflorescence during this whole period, but what we knew was coming was that when Saturn would come into the conjunction to Pluto and square Uranus, I'm going to move over in a second to show it in a circular form going around with the Earth at the center so you can see where the planets are in geometrical alignment with each other with respect to the Earth, which is also moving but as you can see here just in terms of what this graph represents which comes from the archetypal explorer dot com website, is that as it gets close to the exact alignment,  that's when it reaches its peak. And you can see between 2012 and 2015, basically the Uranus square Pluto was reaching exact alignment several times over that several year period. But it was within orb, what we call an orb, which is like the number of degrees on each side of exact alignment where it is archetypally operative, you can see it approaching, it's already quite active through all these years. These are the Obama years for example, where even if everything that progressives might have wanted to have happen were not necessarily happening, but just to have an African American at last in the White House, African American girls running around it as their home, the noble dimension of that and then of course the empowerment of egalitarian impulses that was happening throughout the world in many Occupy movements and attempts to throw off tyranny as in in the Middle East, etc.  

So, all this has been going on, but then you can see Saturn and coming on to conjunction with Pluto and square to Uranus during this period right at the end of the Uranus square Pluto. Now I just need to say two more quick things about these. This graphic. One is that with world transits, even though you have this phenomenon of coming into exact alignment, its peaking and its closeness with astronomical pre-exactitude to the 90 degree aspect each other and then moving to you know five degrees away from exact seven and then ten degrees away from exact… even though you've got this kind of bell curve, with world transits something else happens that is different than with individual transits, and that is that we have the phenomenon of a kind of snowball effect because so many individuals, and so many communities and movements have in a sense have started… have gotten the energy, have started carrying it forward, have started implementing practices, policies, actions that carry that energy that by the later part of the transit, and even as it's getting past its 10 degree orb… even 10, 12 degree orb it has a greater archetypal intensity and magnitude than at earlier times in the transit because it started the snowball rolling. We see this in the 60s, where in in the early 60s it comes into orb, the mid-60s, 65-66 it's exact, and indeed the energy, the revolutionary impulses, student movements, civil rights movements, women's movement, environmental movements, African independence movements and so forth right across the world. Gay liberation, all those are cooking in the mid 60s but even after it's exact into the late 60s, 68, 69, 70s there was even the countercultural drives. Think of like, for example Woodstock, or think of the massive demonstrations in Paris in 68 or Columbia or Berkeley and Harvard in 69 or in Mexico City, Japan, Tokyo. It was even more powerful later and that's because of this snowball momentum that takes place, all right.  

And so, when we knew that Saturn was going to come into alignment as well, then we saw that Saturn brings in a great gravity a heaviness, a weightiness, a quality of this becomes very serious, consequences are very long lasting, judgments are made. It's a great contracting energy, and I'll unpack this more because each one has its own particular character. I want you to notice that there's a 15-degree orb for the conjunction. While we keep to the more of a 10-degree orb for the square. The conjunction and opposition seem to have slightly larger orbs and that's why it's defined in that way. But what we could see is that during this period, where they're all kind of converging, and which we are very much in the middle of, or in I would say the moving towards the second half of, that kind of energy is a… we knew it would be like an eye of the needle. That everything that we had been going through, that had been building up was now going to come to a kind of dramatic confrontation, and also that the chickens were going to come home to roost, that's a classic Saturn Pluto thing. Or the rubber is going to meet the road. Or the reality principle is going to kick in with great, great force. So that's one part of the picture.  

Now I also want to just show you one other thing… here are the world transits, I'm just going to bring in not only Pluto that's this symbol here, and Saturn and Jupiter, which were in the triple conjunction for all of 2020, but I brought in Mars. Because Mars has played a huge role over this last year. Much more so than it usually does, and that's because it went through a long, first because it conjoined this triple conjunction almost a year ago, and secondly because it went retrograde direct and over a several month period during later 2020 it really made the… it brought… Mars is a triggering transit. So, I'm wanting you to see now we're here a year ago. So, look at how you've got this big triple conjunction of Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter. We talked a lot about that last year. That triple conjunction went all year and squaring 90-degrees to Uranus, so this is what's called a heart aspect, a dynamic aspect. Things happen under it, it requires consciousness to take account of the eruption of the archetypal energies, and deal with it, and go through deepening or transformation on pain of fate taking over. You know Jung often used to say what we don't confront consciously is going to happen to us as fate, as if from outside of us, because it's part of the Gestalt and it's going to manifest itself one way or another, and if we if we keep it in the unconscious, suppress it, deny it, ignore it, then that's when things tend to be constellated in such a way that they come at us from outside and we seem to be on the receiving end, or a victim.  

Now as we move forward here, you can see a month later Mars has come into in March it's coming into this triple conjunction, and all through all through March and April it is just, I'm just going to move it… this is moving day by day at a pretty quick pace and you can just see how Mars has just gone right across all these and that was last spring, when Mars basically triggered the crisis… that the triggered the action of this triple conjunction and square. Now as the summer progresses, Mars keeps moving forward, but then something happens quite remarkable, and that is when it gets to late Aries here it starts to slow down, this is in apparent motion from the Earth, and then it stations. And where did it station? It slowed down and stationed right in the square to this triple conjunction… so when the 90-degree square happens after the conjunction that's when things that were planted, you know as it were planted the seeds during the conjunction, now things take place that come into concrete manifestation that usually involves a kind of crisis, an intensification of the energies that have to be dealt with. And all through the election season here in the United States, but also all through the world in terms of the state of the pandemic, it continued to be playing a huge role. So, all this time it's retrograding, you can see it's maintaining the square to these to these planets and then it stations and goes direct… and notice that here as we get into November and December it starts to come onto the… it's still tight square to all these planets, but day after day it starts moving into this conjunction with Uranus until January 6th. You've got the conjunction with Uranus that Mars, Uranus is the most volatile alignment you can get, especially when it's squaring Saturn and Jupiter and Pluto like that. Just the Mars Uranus energy, it's bold warrior energy at its best. Courageous, breaking past the boundaries of constraint that are oppressive etc. But the shadow side of it is, it's like this, it's like juvenile delinquency energy, the fire brand who is full of their own aggression and breaks the glass breaks in. It's classic for what happened on January 6th and the insurrection, particularly when it's got the mob energy that is potential coming with the square to Pluto.  

So, I'm going to now come back to… but I want to discuss with you now, more about what each of these planetary archetypal complexes in coming together at this time with such force, with such a convergence. It's pretty rare when you get even the three of those planets all in hard aspect at once Saturn, Uranus, Pluto. Even just two of those with Saturn and Pluto, those are that's a very big deal. The last Saturn Pluto opposition was 2001 to 2004 with 9-11, the beginning of the so-called war on terror, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan all the horror and hardship that unfolded from that… from the first Cheney Bush term and all the contractions of energies that took place then that were still you know that kind of security state quality that ramped up at that time that is still with us. That Saturn Pluto cycle that we're in again this conjunction is a huge one 2018 to 21 that we’re most of the way through now, but we've got this this year still very much with us, and much complexified and exacerbated by the fact that Uranus is in the picture as well in the square and the fact that therefore you've got Saturn square Uranus, which has its own dynamic which I'll be unpacking in a second.  

The Saturn Pluto alignment you see with the cycle has been very important in terms of the Cold War. It began, the conjunction of 1946 to 48 which was the conjunction two cycles ago, obviously was the time at the beginning of the of the Cold War, the erection of the Iron Curtain, the great enmity between the communist east and the so-called free west, and genuinely free in so many ways, but also as any African American can tell you and many others hardly a paragon of emancipated perfection. Nevertheless, that Cold War energy it comes into a full form there under in the 46 to 48 period, and when's the next conjunction? 1981-84 the first Reagan administration, which was the height of the Cold War. Those of you who were kind of politically engaged then will remember how much the threat of nuclear holocaust was so prominent that you know millions around the world marched for nuclear disarmament because the nuclear missiles were poised at each other from the Soviet Union and the United States, Reagan's calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, things are at a kind of maximum of danger and mutually assured destruction, threats… and fortunately there was a pulling back from the abyss, which many people were looking at that abyss, and Gorbachev came into power in the Soviet Union and many good things unfolded and starting in the late 80s all through the 90s that great Uranus Neptune conjunction that had many, so many positive expressions as well as problematic ones, but that's not on our agenda tonight.  

And now we're at another Saturn Pluto conjunction and we again see the Cold War, maxed out of intense enmity between an assertive aggressive Russia, also China and the United States in this kind of volatile unpredictability for the last four years and now another moving into a new phase. So, my sense is, let me just address the pandemic for a second. My sense is that we’re past the midway point, kind of like just past the midway point, if I'm looking at it just astronomically and astrologically, we're just past the midway point of this tremendous eye of the needle crucible that we've been going through the last couple years that is centered on the pandemic crisis. You could say that the crisis is… we have to always remember that the pandemic is one crisis that is like nested inside a series of other extraordinary crises. The largest one being the great ecological crisis, the catastrophe of our time, and the climate crisis. But there's social justice crises that are happening around the world and in our own country. There's the international tensions and international peace issues. All of these have their own kind of timing and their own arc, but they're all being constellated right now to a kind of fever pitch, and this is a time when our actions have a great deal of consequence.  

I want to just say a few things I that those of you who heard this talk a year ago, or nine months ago, this earlier state of the world report so to speak from the point of view of the archetypal dynamics of our time, the world transits, the state of the collective zeitgeist. I want to just bring up a few points that I think are important to mention once again. All of us who are looking at these invisible, these invisibles, you know these… you know the archetypal is both very tangible and yet at the same time, it's not like measuring atoms or billiard balls or temperatures and so forth… they are the archetypal is a kind of, it's kind of like it's spiritual and energetic at the same time and the whole evolution of the archetypal perspective from the time that they were the archetypes were experienced as gods and goddesses or great kind of powerful beings by hunter-gatherer tribal traditions and then the gods and goddesses of the great archaic civilizations and going right up to the great mythologies that in the western tradition Greece and Rome bequeath us… but every civilization has its mythological background.  

Well, those became those archetypal mythic potencies, those essences of particular qualities that transcend the human, and yet inform the human, that influence us, that come from within as well as without. Those became re-conceived during the great philosophical revolutions of the axial period, particularly in Greece with Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others. Recognizing these in terms of archetypes, which is where the term comes from, is from the platonic tradition. Something is beautiful to the exact extent that it is participating in archetypal beauty in a transcendent absolute essence form of that quality. Same thing with justice, same thing with all the different qualitative differentiations of human experiences all have archetypal cores or hearts to them. Now that archetypal perspective gets kind of recovered in the last hundred years through the depth psychology tradition when first well really Nietzsche with his understanding of Apollo, Dionysus, and his very direct kind of non-ordinary states of consciousness that he could tap into that he wrote about. He, in his descent into the deep psyche, he kind of opens the way for depth psychology. Freud opens it further, brings in a scientific dimension and aspiration, and he too he brings forth as what Wittgenstein called a great mythology… with Eros and Thanatos, the id, the ego, the heroic ego, the hero archetype, the superego, which is essentially Saturn, the cenex principle in in Jungian terms… but then it was Jung who really just wide open brought us to a fuller grasp of the archetypal pleroma, the whole, the great pantheon of many mythic archetypal principles that are at work in the collective psyche, and then also in each individual psyche. Yeah, Joseph Campbell used to say that Freud, who is recognizing the unconscious and paying close attention to it and recognizes that something deep is going on there, something of great significance and looking for through dreams for help, and you know religious motifs, and art and so forth for how symbolic how the unconscious was speaking symbolically to consciousness through those modes, but as Joseph Campbell used to say, Freud was fishing, but he was sitting on a whale and in many ways it was Jung who recognized the magnitude of the psyche, of soul. And that it was not just something inside us, inside the human cranium, but that we are in psyche, we are in soul, and as Jung's thought evolved, he came to recognize that this archetypal psyche informs the cosmos, all of nature, and as well as the human being and the collective human psyche. And this, and we call that the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Again, a term from the platonic tradition, although in in its Latin form.  

So, I remember, you know Campbell would always say myth, which is the narrative form of the archetypes, you'd say it would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the cosmos pours its inexhaustible energies through into human cultural manifestation. See he's pointing to the cosmos pouring its archetypal energies into human manifested, cultural manifestation. Using myths for example, using dreams, using religious experiences and mythologies, and also coming in very powerful non-ordinary states of consciousness through sacred medicine journeys and so forth, meditations. But the Ira Progoff, a Jungian once said the archetypes are mediators between the individual and the cosmos. And that's right on, that's very telling, and I think what our research points to is the extent to which the cosmos not only is informed by the archetypal, but in some sense, it has permitted us a kind of… it's permitted us a kind of sign, a signal of what archetypes are being constellated at what time and in what relationship to each other.  

Plotinus talked about the reason, the way astrology works is that it's as if the heavens seem to be a kind of script that the soul of the world is writing, and that the reason that the movements of the planets and as well as many other aspects of nature, and the cosmos have meaning is that meaning pervades everything and goes all the way down. It's not just like meaningless matter and then human beings and complex brains come along and suddenly meaning gets created ex-nihilo out of the blue, out of nothing. Meaning and sentience and consciousness goes all the way down in some form or other, awareness we're in a pan psychic universe, but even beyond that, this pan psychic universe seems to be capable through this great as Plotinus said, everything's interconnected, and everything is interdependent, and everything is breathing together so that the movements of the macrocosm is in some way precisely correlated with the movements of the archetypal dynamics of human life, and that gives us a great insight into what  gods are at work and or at play at a given time and how we can participate more intelligently and not get carried for a ride in quite potentially destructive shadow forms of those same of those same essences, those same very powerful principles.  

I think as human beings, we're always seeing through the neuro-chink in our cave. You know, we see through a glass darkly, but we do seem to have a glass… an archetypal telescope as it were that does give us remarkable glimpses into the deeper forces and fields that are constellated right now and the timing of their unfolding. Now these archetypal, these planetary alignments that I've been talking about, and then I'm going to explicate a bit more in a second I just want to emphasize that I don't believe that these are causing human affairs to take a certain form in some linear mechanistic manner that is built on the model of you know billiard balls hitting each other, or gravity pulling heavy objects down to the Earth, or electromagnetic radiation or something like that. The evidence is way too multi-dimensional, it's too many splendored in its meanings. There's a creativity to it, it seems to respond to human participation in a way that that suggests a very you know… sentient response of being… in the same way that our Indigenous brothers and sisters are able to look around at nature and have a sense of… which they feel embedded in... and have a sense of this kind of continual communication from the world around them as being in a sense part of their kinship, kindred beings. Not these non-human objects that lack any consciousness or claim on our moral attention. Just the contrary. Well, that sense of being embedded in a world of meaning and communications that's pregnant with significance and is in some sense providing us with signs of the unfolding qualitative meaning that is shaping our reality. That's something that most societies have lived with, most peoples have lived with, in the history of humanity, since time immemorial, but it's modern humanity that is the one, that is waking up to the fact that we are in an ensouled universe, and that our treating it as a soulless, purposeless, meaningless, universe, and non-human nature that is just somehow subject to our exploitation… is to an enormous extent, the cause of the catastrophe that we're in. And the same objectifying that happens with respect to nature by the modern human is also a kind of objectification that happens with respect to each other, to other human beings.  

And what seems to be emerging in this time of you know what I would regard as a kind of initiatory crisis that many of us see as a great rite of passage in a sense for humanity to die to its old identity and wake up to be born into a flourishing kinship with the rest of the Earth community, and with this cosmos that somehow cares miraculously enough to have the movements of the planets around our moving Earth be meaningful to us and carrying archetypal significance. It's a kind of bathing of us and our planet and each of our individual lives and each moment in our lives and each epoch we're going through right now. It's bathing us with meanings and purposes that are so helpful for... it gives us an orientation of a frame of reference to live our lives with greater sense of grounding, and knowing which way the wind is blowing, and being more skillful sailors on the seas of this life.  

And so, this is much more of a synchronous correlation. Not mechanistic causality, and these planetary archetypes don't have just one meaning that just comes through in one way, they've got a spectrum of possible meanings, which I've been trying to kind of share with you here… and our participation in these will affect the outcome, and also the future that will unfold. Now let me say a few things about the Saturn Uranus, which has really kicked in this year. It already was coming in last year, but it's coming in with considerable force right now, it's so tight as you can see in the diagram that I was showing you.  

So, Saturn and Uranus, it's basically a synthesis or a clash between the principles of change, freedom, the new, and the liberatory; and then on the other side the status quo, or the old, but also the wise structures: prudent restraint, the noble side of tradition as well as the oppressive side of tradition. All those are possible with Saturn. And you get those two together and it tends to be a tense energy. It's, you know, if I were to step back and think about where we were last year, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction had fully kicked in, that weighty sense of like, oh man we're locked into... this is very grave. Everything that Saturn represents is going to be catalyzed with volcanic intensity. Things like being separated from each other, being alone, facing isolation, facing disease, mortality on a collective level, dealing with great constraints, dealing with loss, with loss of resources, loss of jobs, impoverishment, deprivation. All those hard things about Saturn that one could see that coming with Saturn Pluto even at the same time that Saturn Pluto also gives this potential for great kind of courageous facing of the hardest aspects of existence and bringing one's kind of steely determination and backbone and effort to push the Sisyphean boulder up the mountain even however hard it is. That Saturn Pluto that we've all been going through here for the last year, that feeling of almost being locked in cement at times and things are going just so slowly. The progress is so minimal if at all at times and then at the same time you've got this Uranus Pluto energy which is just hyper activated. The rapidity of change. The acceleration of change and the… you bring those two together and Saturn squaring Uranus you've got this kind of crisis of contradictory energies or opposing energies hitting each other and there can be… so it's a defiance of a lot of ways of bringing out this Saturn Uranus.  

First of all, I want to just say… while last year had more that sense of being locked into a very slow-moving, grave situation that was going to take so much hard work to deal with, and so much discipline, and courage, etc. We still got that in the picture, but as Saturn Pluto moves out of orb and gradually in the course of this year or towards next year, Saturn Uranus is fully engaged, and that's a more volatile energy. And one reason when I was asked by the public programs to do this talk, you know sometime around early this year I said, “let's wait till after January and do it in early February.” One because I wanted to... we needed to be able to integrate who you know election, the inauguration, but I particularly... looking at January it was so clear what a hyper volatile month this was going to be… and Mars was going right across that Uranus, the insurrection just was kind of like the worst nightmare realization of the shadow potential of what these configurations were about, the kind of the eruption of the mob mentality, the inflation of it, the depredations of it.  

And then you've got the… two weeks later with the inauguration things have shifted, evolved a bit more. A lot of the energies are still fully engaged but just much more benign, life-enhancing, aspirational potentials got activated during that time, and those of you who saw the inauguration all the way through starting actually with the profound memorial service the night before for all the COVID victims, and then the ending on the inauguration night with the great Lincoln Memorial concert. All the musicians, the poets, the dancers, the celebration of diversity and creativity and the possibility of living together… in not just with tolerance, but with gratitude and appreciation for all the differences and the sheer explosive creativity that came through. All these... it's as if we'd gone through a near-death experience for our very imperfect democracy on January 6th and in a sense everything that could have been lost was then experienced during inauguration day with a new preciousness. You think of Amanda Gorman's incredible poetic performance or Lady Gaga you know her fist, the flag is still there and in that noble way or the very moving rendering at the very beginning of the celebrating of America that night by Bruce Springsteen of “Land of Hope and Dreams.” Just him in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial with just his guitar and singing this song, this person that's been so politically engaged, and has over the years and to just carry that aspiration, that hope, that this land of hope and dreams. Many people feel that around the world, and this country is carrying something precious as well as deeply a great shadow that it's had to see more vividly than ever before in this last several years and in this last month in particular, so we're really going through such a great transformational crucible at this point.  

Let me say a quick number of things here… there's a few essentials that should be gotten across. The Saturn Uranus energy can be an energy that ideally what you want to do is to be making wise... this is the time for making creative structural change, reconfiguration of structures in order to permit wiser living, greater freedom for all, not freedom just for whites or white males, or white males without a clue, but freedom for all. Also, technological reconfiguring is very important with this Saturn Uranus. Uranus has so much to do with technology and Saturn can bring in technological problems, glitches. We've already seen it you know the great... can even happen with like more airline issues, even like pilot error has been a big issue in the last month they've been tracking it because pilots are out, haven't been doing as much and it's been noted… but I'm thinking of the larger need to bring in wise structures, wisely conceived structures that take care of, that help our Iranian-promethean, technological-social-media-Facebook and the other forms of the social media. Also, the internet, also governmental you know like security breaches and things like that; all these have to be addressed with… this is a very good time for doing that. The problem with Saturn Uranus is that if one doesn't make a prudent or wise, intelligent, skillful, incremental change within otherwise valuable structures that are nevertheless flawed, if you don't do that then great breakages, sudden collapses of structures tend to happen.  

This is also true in relationships. Saturn Uranus is a sudden break energy, it's a disruptive energy, it's a divorcing energy. I mean and so they're you know... I think of all the people who have been kind of pressed into the same household, and there needs to be a lot of relational work in order to bring forth the best possibilities out of this Saturn Uranus period. At its very best, the overall movement of Saturn and Uranus is a kind of conjunction of a sacred marriage of the past and the future, and we are the crucible of it, and if we can somehow carry what is most valuable of the past and discern what is most promising from the future and then bring these into concrete structural practical form in our laws, in our legal institutions, and justice system, and prison system, and in the market… in the financial sector, and in international relations and so forth, this is a really crucial period.  

I apologize a little bit to those from outside of the United States who you know, where I'm going to say something about the U.S. chart and transits now, but unfortunately the United States is a kind of elephant in the room, I mean fortunately in some ways, unfortunately particularly in recent times… it plays an outsized role, and the United States has been going through its Pluto return during these years and it's a huge... it kind of pinpoints our country as a potential ground zero for destruction and transformation and hopefully some kind of regeneration and rebirth during this decade, and the amount of the shadow side of our country that has surfaced, you know through the Trump catastrophe and the Black Lives Matter protests and revelations of how we have been… how white supremacy has infected our nation from its beginnings. This deep confrontation with shadow is crucial to our psycho-spiritual, our moral transformation as a country, and in these next couple of years that Pluto return is going to be coming to exact alignment but one of the things I didn't mention last time, but we can see coming is that as... starting in a couple of years, 2023, Uranus is going to trine Pluto in the sky for everybody, the whole world. It's moving out of that square and it's right at the cusp now of moving into the more harmonious relationship to each other. The trine, the 120-degree alignment and that's going to last all through the 2020s. The rest of the 2020s starting about 2023, but stronger and stronger 4, 5, 6, 7, and in 2028 Jupiter's going to... Jupiter and Uranus and Pluto are going to form a grand trine in the sky for everybody.  

Very promising for a more confluent unfolding of evolutionary change and emancipatory transformation… and in addition what's remarkable is that this is going to happen in the United States chart at the same time as we get our Uranus return. Out first Uranus return, you know, the 1776 chart is when we were born, July 4th, and then the first Uranus return takes place with the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved peoples in our society and then still the long, long process of realizing that more fully. Anyway, we are right now approaching what's going to be our third Uranus return. Well, it's our first Pluto return because that's a 248-year cycle. We're born with Uranus trine Pluto. That's one of the best parts of the United States chart and Uranus and Pluto are going to be right on their natal positions as the 2020s progress. I'm saying all this because my sense is, we still are in the full throes of a great crisis, but the whole world is going to experience some I think alleviating of these tension-producing and crisis constellating energies and move into the potential of a more flowing, harmonious interaction between these great gods and goddesses, these archetypal principles, and within ourselves and the U.S. will be getting its own version of it. I think we have gone through a great... I don't have to say this to anybody, we've obviously gone through a great crisis in this country and continue to, in this world as well and the climate crisis is going to take more and more focus, it'll require it, we'll be more and more aware of it as each year goes by, but the more we can see that, I mean, at last some sanity, and competence, and compassion are in the White House. What a difference. It brings some grounds for not moving in the exact opposite direction of what would be best for our planetary community.  

Let me just end with one last thought I had. Over the weekend I was reading during my non-existent spare time actually while eating lunch. I was reading an article that is an excerpt from a new book that's coming out by Dorothy Wickenden. The name of the book is called The Agitators. Three friends who fought for abolition and women's rights. And the excerpt was published in the New Yorker a week or two ago and it's about remarkable women, three or four in particular, Frances Seward is one, the wife of… I think it's Henry Seward, who was part of the Lincoln Cabinet, and who had been a long anti-slavery proponent, but his wife Frances was really something. It’s worth reading this New Yorker article if you care to. And then Harriet Tubman is another one who is playing a role in this, and they're all interconnected with what they're doing.  

The reason I'm bringing them up, besides the fact that we are in a kind of spiral moment where we're having to reconnect to that whole period in American history that has come to the surface like a long suppressed, long denied shadow that needs to move to a new birth of freedom to use Lincoln's term… the reason I bring that particular narrative up with those particular women is that as you're reading about them and you realize that… you feel like what constraints they are working within. Even these white women of some means, the constraints of patriarchy that were so maddeningly frustrating. Not being able to have one's own autonomy in so many ways and then not have a vote etc. And then Harriet Tubman, who's a slave and a Black, African American who frees herself from her slavery herself and then courageously over and over again goes down into the danger and frees more and more people up.  

What these women were doing, I'm going to try to describe why I'm so... I mean but it’s so moving anyway for anybody to read... I think but what I was particularly getting into about it was that in their lifetime, they didn't necessarily see everything, I mean they were seeing great things happen, but they didn't see everything that they wanted and needed to happen, and they were doing it under unbelievable constraints. All of us are working under extraordinary constraints right now, whether it's from the pandemic, or whether it's because we don't have our fingers on the levers of power, or because we're dealing with voter suppression, or watching helplessly as predatory corporations exploit and extract from our natural worlds in such a way that has such horrific consequences… all of us are working against great constraints. And yet how noble those women were, and they will go down in eternity for the nobility of what they did and the courage that they brought to their tasks and that's what we're being asked to do [Tears up and voice cracks]. Those of us who are elders you know in our 70s, 80s, 90s even, we're you know we're in our final stage of you know, our last act, act three or whatever.  

Those of you who are younger, you have so much in front of you to be able to take... I mean we who are in my age need to do what we can do and impart what we can impart in the time that's remaining to us. [Voice wavering] We didn't choose, at least in any conscious way, to live in such a time of crisis, of turmoil, of unpropitious circumstances, but that's not up to us. As Tolkien says… none of us want to be born to such a period, but having been born into such a period, it's what we do with it that counts. And I think we're shaping our own souls and the collective soul of humanity right now with what we're doing. 

And no matter what happens, no matter what emerges out of this great crisis… including the climate crisis, and the species extinction, and even if no human being manages to... if we as a species don't manage to survive the century as some belief, or a civilization doesn't survive, etc. 

Something has entered into the whole. Everything that you do and say, and feel will not be lost. It's forging, it's going into the soul of the universe and it will continue. It will go on. In new forms that you don't... we don't know how they'll unfold. [Voice wavering] Sorry to be a bit on the emotional side, but I think we're all aware of what a time we're in. and we really want to… [sighs] bring our full game to it, and do our very best, and work together. Call on the energies of others when our own energies are flagging, and I have great... I personally have great, great hope for the future. I don't know what form it'll take, but I have great trust and faith in this cosmos that we're in, in this magnificent Earth community that we're part of and that has... and in the great human experiment that has brought forth everyone who's alive today for a reason. And I wish you all the very best. Okay. Thanks for listening with me this evening.  

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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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