CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

Our transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human editors. We do our best to achieve accuracy, but they may contain errors. If it is an option for you, we strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast audio, which includes additional emotion and emphasis not conveyed through transcription. 

[Cheerful theme music begins] 
 
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. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Richard: Hi everyone. Welcome to our annual overview of the planetary situation, the archetypal state of the world that we try to discern around this time of the year and while a little bit older especially during these kinds of years. Seems like, the Kronos has been particularly potent. Let's just say that. So that was Changing of the Gods, the first episode, the meaning of course of “the changing of the gods” has to do with that great passage from Jung that he wrote in 1956 in The Undiscovered Self when he described our, this overall time of history that we are in, as a time of such radical transformation: of death and rebirth, destruction and creation happening at such a profound level that he said, it is the Kairos, the “right moment” that Greek word Kairos the right moment for a changing of the gods of the fundamental principles and symbols, and that's basically, the gods have to do with that deep kind of archetypal shift that can happen in a civilization, in a culture that shifts one Epoch to another as a result of really the very foundations, and assumptions, and principles and dominant symbols that shape our consciousness and that help us navigate in life and give us a sense of orientation. All those go through some fundamental change. Usually as a result of a crisis, which of course, there are a few little signs of that in our time. I wanted to just say a brief word about the episode that many of you just saw and that others, who are watching this, as a recording later, can see separately.  

The Changing of the Gods is based on Cosmos and Psyche, where I traced a number of the most important planetary cycles and the correlated archetypal patterns in history. And I track these quite carefully through history over many centuries, but this series, this 10-part documentary series Changing of the Gods, focuses on one important cycle, the Uranus Pluto cycle and particularly the alignment that we have just undergone, and we're still in the kind of overflowing waveform in our time. Although, I've been doing this research pretty steadily for, you know, since the 1970s so almost half a century now. I'd finally gotten around to writing Cosmos and Psyche about 20 years ago, basically, 2001 to 2004. And so, all the writing was done, that went into the book was done before this recent Uranus Pluto square alignment emerged. It began a few years later around 2007 when we have something like 2007 to 2020. I mean, it's a, it's a waveform and it's coming in, I mean, in the same way that there is a shift in the light before dawn and then at dawn, then after dawn, same thing, at sunset. It's got that kind of gradations and it's not an on-and-off-again light switch, and you can't measure it right down to a specific day or a month.  

But I did a lot of, kind of meticulous research tracking when things happened and what month they happened. What day that bore this archetypal signature of that particular alignment. It was pretty clear that the conjunctions and oppositions of the outer planets, those correlations tend to occupy a good 15-degree orb, for example, the 1960 to 72 period. The square is a little closer to 10 degrees and that's, in this case, this 2007 to 2020 was the approximate curve of that. But the pattern of- the reason I'm bringing this up right now, is that, because I had finished the book prior to the film coming out, way prior to the film coming out, but prior to the transit, the next world transit of the Uranus square Pluto. What I could do in my book was basically say, well, here's what happened in the past historical correlations with that particular cycle. And these are the ones that are so vivid at each point that those planets come into certain quadrature alignments, conjunction opposition, the two squares like that. That I felt it would be worthwhile to set out the major themes that I saw, from those alignments that we might see playing out in the next transit that will be upcoming. And basically, what we would then see how the upcoming years, which we have now just past, might resemble what happened during the 1960s, conjunction for example, or what resemblances might be to the previous square, which was the 193’s. And you could in retrospect now see that what we just have gone through over this last decade and slightly more, is a kind of very interesting creative combination of the 1960s and the 1930s.  

Plus, there's all the other great revolutionary and emancipatory epochs that also happen to coincide with Uranus Pluto alignments that I traced in Cosmos and Psyche. And the big themes that I kind of pulled out and then described were the social and political revolutions, women's suffrage and feminist liberation movements, abolitionism and civil rights, racial justice movements. Another big theme was like technological revolutions and advances. The major scientific paradigm shifts and breakthroughs, sexual revolutions, affecting everything from the literature, and the arts of the period and the fashions to the social mores and so forth. The rise of psychedelic exploration and research and the signs of an ongoing, well the science really of an emerging worldview across many scholarly disciplines and fields of activity. Those are the things that we would tend to see over and over again during these periods. It's not that these things never happen in between those periods. But during these alignments, there is a very clear intensification of those particular motifs within human history across many cultures and across many disciplines so many fields of human activity. And things just seem to come to a boil but reflecting that particular, whatever particular archetypal complex is relevant in this case, it's the Uranus Pluto combination.  

So, Changing of the Gods is the brainchild of Kenny Ausabel, who's the co-founder of Bioneers, and that began production about eight, nine years ago. It was originally planned as a single feature length documentary, but as the team of really remarkable film makers that Kenny gathered around him as they worked on it and about, by the way, that team includes our own Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi from our PCC program alums from that program and there was just actually quite a contribution. In many ways, I suppose this is a kind of Bioneers, CIIS PCC kind of collaboration. But the decision was eventually made to kind of expand the project to include ten separate 30-minute episodes. Each of which is devoted to one of those big historical cultural themes that I described, you know, political social revolutions, scientific breakthroughs, women's rights, Liberation movements, the Civil Rights movements and abolitionism, etc. And because I had set these out before the decade began, the film ended up being a kind of living ongoing test of the hypothesis as to whether the historical patterns, bearing these archetypal features would indeed bear out it, during this period. And of course, you know, whether it was the election of a Black president to the United States for the first time or the Black Lives Matter or the Me Too Movement or all the other categories of the legalization of gay marriage, the rise in awareness of trans, and the rights and dignity of trans people, the legalization of marijuana and the resurgence of psychedelic research after all these years since the 60s, etc. So, the whole period just became this kind of really interesting exploration to do the film on, and in this case to do all the documentary episodes.  

Okay. Now to the planetary situation in 2022. I imagine I'm basically speaking to three different audiences here: on the one hand, one group is like the astrologically initiated and perhaps even quite learned, and then a second group would be astrologically interested and who may also have a good depth psychological knowledge and symbolic sense. And then third group is probably no doubt like astrologically uninterested and perhaps might be even un-psychological but is nevertheless looking for any clues at all about what the hell is going on with our country or the world, going to hell in a handbasket or however else they might frame our situation, which is pretty clearly critical.  

And so, as an overview just to begin with, we just that, those of you saw the episode. And those of you who've seen my last two, either one of my last two kind of archetypal state of the world reports on the world transits that I've done in 2020/2021. You'll be familiar with the fact that I- you know, the basic nature of the Uranus Pluto, huge alignment and archetypal energy that's been, you know, more or less, the energy's really been shaping the Zeitgeist so potently for this last decade and a half, but then what happened, was that towards the end of it around, 2018, Saturn got into the picture and it conjoined Pluto and that's no joke. And then it squared Uranus right after that or actually overlapped with it, so they all overlap, they're all kind of constellated together. You could really feel the action like last, a year ago last January, like January 6th really kind of carried all the, all the forces at once into a concrescence to use Whiteheads’ term of a powerful event.  

So, the end of this last decade and the start of the one we're in now because of Saturn joining, the Uranus Pluto energy, it's sustained that energy longer. It shifted it in important ways, kind of Saturnian ways and it made it all the more a sharply, like a conflict of sharply opposing forces. Lyle, I wonder if you could just put up the first slide here, and it could be helpful for us to be able to look at that for…okay. Looks like you've got it up there. I'm seeing a different way, but now I see it up there. Okay. So, what you see there is that those are like the bell curves of the- that kind of overall, wave, archetypal waveform that's coming into history into the collective psyche, kind of shaping motivations, shaping our perceptions, helping to constellate a kind of energy and, you know, the kind of events that we care, that typically reflect that archetypal energy and you can see that it is pretty widely- I can open that up here so that I can, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to just bring it up here so I can see it on my big screen and have a slightly more. There we go. Yeah, so you can see it begins back there in 2007 and it comes all the way there and to just past 2020. So that's when the entire transit is within 10 degrees orb, but notice how towards the end of it, the Saturn Pluto conjunction comes in with its own shorter more kind of condensed curve and then right after overlapping with that as well the Saturn square Uranus.  

All these are happening at once at one point, but one thing to keep in mind is that this wave that let's take the big one that as it kind of is descending there and is joined by the other two. Something I've emphasized in the past in speaking with you is how when we're talking about world transits, the archetypal forces that are set in motion during that overall period, they take root in this community and that they begin, they initiate movement of different kinds. Films are made, books are written, music is composed and heard and performed. And initiatives are begun. And then they don't just stop when the Uranus square Pluto has reached a certain number of degrees past exact so much has been set in motion that there's a kind of momentum so that the later part of ta world transit like this, even though there's a declining curve in terms of the astronomical situation, archetypally, this really kind of keeps extending. As those of you who may remember the 60s, and how much it went- that energy went into the 70s. Early 70s were very much coherent with a continuation of and at times, even an intensification of what happened and that's why like the second half of a decade like that it is often more potently reflective of that complex than the first half. Because so much more and more is getting set in motion.  

Okay, so the next, let's see. Could we just look at the, the next slide as well, Lyle for a second? And there you will see. This is, if we were to track more carefully, all the exact, you know, the planets are, are all moving around the Sun, as is the Earth, and the results of those complex combinations of movements and orbits means that there is a retrograde direct movement and from the point of view of the Earth is that these planets will come closer, and then farther away, and then closer, and then farther away to the exact alignment. And that's what you see with this more detailed tracking of the planetary cycles distances, but for our purposes it's actually much more accurately reflective of the big picture, even though there are these kinds of ups and downs, waves, things come in a crescendo and then diminish, but overall and let's go back to the main, the first one that we were looking at Lyle.  

Overall, these are quite, they’re more helpful in getting a sense for the whole, because there is so much more continuity, more momentum and it's really from the first time that a transit comes into orb, till it's the last time that it comes within, orb. It tends to be quite active. Okay, so we can, we're done with the slides now, but I just wanted to give you a sense visually of that overall tracking of the major, those are the big biggest three. We will talk about a couple other things tonight as well. But those are, those are really huge, and I think you've got more- enough of the Uranus Pluto under your belt, that we don't need to say much more about that. But with Saturn coming onto that alignment and then one by one really coming in, on Pluto. I mean, this whole, the whole pandemic, deeply, deeply reflected that Saturn Pluto conjunction. All the sense of well, the collective encounter with mortality, the enormous crisis, you know, so many people are saying that we haven't had anything like this since 9/11. Well, that was the last time Saturn and Pluto were in an axial alignment, the opposition and this is a conjunction.  

And then you also have the, just generally speaking, when Saturn hits Pluto or in this case, both of them, it's kind of like when the when the rubber hits the road, the screws tighten, the pressures increase, the reality principle asserts itself, extremely potently, that's the Plutonic and in unpredictable ways and erratically and that's the Uranian influence. And the accelerating tensions tend to reach a crisis point. So, as I talk about these different current alignments. I'm going to try to address both the collective level and, and how these same world transit alignments can be felt in our individual lives and an inner experience as well. Because that's, we all participate in the, World Soul, the Anima Mundi, Soul of the World, the collective psyche in Jung's terms. The beauty of turning the collective psyche, or the collective unconscious into recognizing that it's really, the Anima Mundi is one: it helps us recognize it, just because it or part of it might be unconscious to us, doesn't mean it's unconscious period. But also, it helps us recognize that our deep psyche is actually the deep psyche of the cosmos. It's not just, we're not in our isolated brain corners as individuals, nor even as a species. We are embedded in a collective psyche that is, could be seen as like the species mind or the homosapiens collective psyche, but that ultimately is embedded in deeper and larger fields of consciousness and agency, and identity that includes the whole Earth community and ultimately like the solar system, and the galaxy, and the cosmos itself. And people who do deep explorations, whether it's through psychedelics or through deep meditation or sometimes it can come in in just an epiphany out of the blue while you're walking through the woods or washing dishes. The people who do have those encounters with their own really deep dimensions of their psyche, tuned into the fact that in a certain way all of the cosmos is in each of us, as well as each of us being in all the cosmos. It's a very mysterious relationship.  

So, a couple of last, I think crucial points. I kind of made them in, I think these were included in the interviews that were done with me in the film, which was recorded. I think my parts were mostly recorded about seven years ago of 2015 or so, but again, basic principles. This is not mechanistic causation. It's not like linear efficient causes coming from the planets, like, electromagnetic radiation, etcetera, gravity that's causing things to be this way in a certain way. It doesn't seem to work that way. It's more synchronistic. It's more synchronous correlation that is meaningful through and through meaning is what is cohering it. Jung, who's the person, of course, who grasped or coined that term for something that had been observed for millennia- Indigenous cultures totally living in a synchronistic universe. You only need the concept of synchronicity for a modern mind to be able to start grappling with what most of humanity's actually lived in all along, but discernment is important. You can always be projecting things. And that's where discernment, so it's a real I/thou relationship with the world around you and the events and not just a projecting of what your needs are, or your skepticism or whatever, but there's an openness to the meaning being communicated. So, it's synchronicity, everything breathing together, rather than mechanistic causality. And then the archetypes that are the fundamental principles that we’re studying here. They really need to be seen as multivalent.  

They have a range of ways of manifesting while being faithful to themselves, that includes light, and shadow, and everything in between. Noble and ignoble, trivial and profound, and so forth. And that's where human agency comes in and that's where we have a responsibility to play our role in the whole. We are the cosmos who have been given a kind of- or which has evolved through us to reach a certain form of consciousness that happens to have an awareness of the planets and the correlations with these archetypal principles. Who happens to have this kind of gift of being able to be more conscious of, what would be otherwise unconscious in which case we'd be more puppets of those energies. And now we can be kind of tracking them, being a little more aware of more life-enhancing versus more destructive ways of living out these energies.  

So, it's always, we're always going for participation here. For more co-creativity, greater level of discernment, and conscious awareness, and self-discernment, and bringing a moral attitude towards our engagement with these forces. And then these great archetypal patterns seemed to synchronically manifest across many individuals and cultures at the same time during these world transits, but they are also diachronic through history. Each time the alignments come into each kind of those cycles, come into alignment. And then finally, there's a kind of cumulative evolutionary quality to the whole picture. It's not just a repetitive cycle, novelty human agency and who knows what other invisible factors are at work that shape and evolve the manifestation of these energies?  

Okay. So, let's say a few things now about the Saturn square Uranus. It's totally kind of dominating the show these days very much. You can't read a headline today without recognizing how much it’s present. The Uranus principle of course, is related to the unexpected, the trickster energy, the rebellious energy. It wants freedom. It is pushing towards the new, the future. It's connected up with youth, as well, Innovation, originality, but also kind of highly unpredictable resistant to restraint or order etc. Well, Saturn is just the opposite, it’s order, It's constraint, it's inhibition, it's the weight of the past. It's the foundations that allow us to get to this point. It's our backbone. It's our, it's our sense of gravitas. It's what we learned over many years of experience etcetera, but it also can be oppressive. It can be stuck in resistance and so forth. And so, you bring these two together and it's a highly unstable combination. There's a tendency to build up pressures between the forces for change and the forces for resistance to change and that, did I bring that down bring here, but that's okay. I'll do it by memory. There's a tendency for this to kind of build up like within a closed system. The tension of the pressures for change and the resistance to change or the enduring power of the foundational structures that are already in place in the status quo. Those can be equally active, kind of poised, vis-à-vis each other in such a way that it builds up to a crisis point. And then, there tends to be either a collapse, breakdown, an accident, a split, schism, a separation, divorce, a civil uprising, dissidence, divisiveness, tensions between groups, between conservative and progressive, between right and left, but also within each of these two, there'll be these divisions, these kind of powerful, schismatic, impulses, the circular firing squads as they call them, as they're called in the Republican party now, where the more radically right are out to get the traditional Republican or in the Democratic party, the more, whether you want to call it radical or the more progressive versus the more moderately liberal within the Democratic party being in real combat with each other at times, or it's the divorce from within the family between marital, but also can be professional.  

Think of Freud and Jung for example, who separated, had their divorce as it were, breaking under their Saturn Uranus transit, which went right across their Sun and Moon connection that it, you know, it was, you know, Jung was viewed by Freud as his crown prince and then this great disappointment when Jung who had Saturn Uranus himself and went through his own kind of break down, break through, and resistance to the Freudian dogma. And so, there is this great divorce which in some ways is still a significant divorce in the field of depth psychology and psychotherapy, you know, between Freudian psychoanalysts and Jungian analyst and archetypal psychologists etc.  

Though many bridges are being made these days including somebody, like Stan Grof, who really did a brilliant job of integrating the overall Freudian, Jungian perspectives and much more. And that's also the idea of the bridge, the bridges that are being made between the opposing forces. That's good, it's the same thing like with infrastructure, Saturn Uranus is so dealing with infrastructure. Engineers often have Saturn Uranus, it's this combination of practical pragmatic material structures and inventiveness and coming up with solutions and safety measures and so forth and when Saturn Uranus periods come up there tends to be simultaneously lots of problematic events in that area, electrical grid breakdowns, power grids, power outages, bridges collapsing and so forth. And there's a great prep push for infrastructure like rebuilding, retrofitting, repairing and so forth, and that's totally what Saturn Uranus is about as well. You could say, you know, I think, I think of all the, let me go through some of the major themes of Saturn Uranus.  

You could say just generally speaking the whole idea of crisis and crisis management. Those are key themes for Saturn Uranus. Crises tend to happen, but they tend to come unexpected like the pandemic is declining and then Omicron comes on, or then this kind of, you know, the great instability of life today not knowing, not only about the pandemic but also about, there's also such disruptions. It's disruptions of the supply chain. It's also many people quitting jobs and the assertion of their freedom to, you know, within the work realm, which is very Saturnian often that it's a real, tendency to make a break, the end of a type of a, of a way of being in some way. I think I might have talked about last time people, like, in terms of crisis and crisis management. Like somebody, like Sully Sullenberger, who's born with Saturn Square Uranus, the early 50s version of it, and he had quite a potent version of it in his natal chart, Mercury on it, and he taught aviation safety and how to handle crises as a pilot and then he had it happen to himself and he's the one that safely landed the jet on the Hudson. The couple days or so before back in 2009, just before Obama's first inauguration. That's a perfect example of a well, of a well-integrated, well-lived Saturn Uranus. Because Saturn Uranus was both in his birth chart and it was happening at that point it was a Saturn opposite Uranus in the in the sky. That was the last world transitive Saturn Uranus. Think of somebody like Churchill who also had it Saturn Uranus often brings mistakes. People make a lot of, there's a lot of errors, errors just happen because of technical breakdowns, the internet stops, knock on wood tonight. [knocking sound in background] People having difficulties with Zoom or whatever, platform the computer crashes, or it could be, you know, many other things like that tend to happen, but there's also a tendency to make mistakes in judgment. It has to do with like Saturn being like, here's the structure, and then the trickster comes in and a disruption happens, whoops. Whoops. That wasn't supposed to happen. And then the Saturnian quality comes in again as you're gonna have to pay for that. That's going to, you know, this is that there's a price for that it's got consequences. Saturn brings consequences for your actions. It is the archetype of problem. The archetypal principle of the problematic dimension of life, which the Uranian when it's connecting to Saturn brings in through its unpredictable events. But I bring up Churchill because he made great mistakes, but he also was a great crisis manager, through World War Two. Biden was born with the conjunction. He's running for president and he says a couple years ago. He says we're going to manage the hell out of this crisis. That's such a Saturn Uranus attitude. It's such a good example, actually, of all the political rhetoric he could draw on. He would express his own Saturn Uranus conjunction and that's because archetypal complexes put unconscious pressures on metaphors selection that we spontaneously use or on word selection or on policy preferences and so forth.  

A big element in Saturn and Uranus is between the past and the future, but also the old and the young. Different generations, there can be generational conflicts and it's not just- and it's often not something that is pushed by the generations against each other, though that can easily happen. But it also can be the something that happens kind of by virtue of circumstances beyond everybody's control, like the fact that the effort to preserve the life of older people during the pandemic meant that much younger people had to suppress their activities more than they might have had to otherwise, because they could bring home the virus to their grandparents or somebody who has immune vulnerabilities and etc. And then right now this like, it's time to let children go back to school without masks and etc and play. And that's so you can just see how there's that kind of conflict. But it's also been very potent during these last three years. Looking at it between generations, where older generations are holding onto the jobs while the younger are unemployed, that can be an issue, it can, it can take many forms. It can also take the form of even generations that are, for example, much younger than mine. Like I'm a baby boomer, and there are, I've talked to Millennials who are describing both, the cultural interests and also social media choices and styles as being beyond them. It's like there I think there's almost an acceleration of generational change, partly technologically mediated anyway, so this can happen in many ways.  

But the whole idea with all these is to, help bring about a- help bring about a- some kind of an integration of Saturn and Uranus so that there's more of a quality of- I mean this is what the dialectical synthesis is all about. Hagel was born with Saturn Uranus and that's what it's all about. Jung was born with it. The opposition and he's all about, like, holding the tension of opposites, be faithful to both sides. And then, if you can sustain that tension with a profound enough engagement, you can also be able to be the place within which an unexpected integration takes place. The divine third unpacks and emerges of its own accord. The sacred marriage of the opposites. The complexio oppositorum, the conjunction of opposites takes place and you can't, it's a live birth, you can't predict exactly how that might happen, but we can work towards it.  

Okay, I'm running out of time here. Let me just say a couple words about the, I probably got enough here to talk about without the episode, but I'm glad, but I'm glad you all got to see the episode. It's well worth it. And it communicates a lot. We're all going, the United States is going through its Pluto return. As a matter of fact, it reaches exact alignment this next week, but it's with any of these big returns, that means Pluto's coming back to where it was in 1776. You don't see this ever happen in an individual's life because Pluto has such a big cycle, but you do see Pluto transits in individual lives, and we have a very good sense for what that's about. And we can see that all the major qualities that the Pluto return has is, has already activated in the US. We can see it vividly already because of the US’s outsized influence in the world. It's morphic field disseminates so readily into the zeitgeist of the larger world and the larger world already had its Plutonic potential fully activated from the Uranus Pluto square it's been going through the past decade and a half. But this overall period just looking at our own, you know, US situation and what we're deep in the center up right now and is being worked out, I mean we're in a crucible underworld of transformation and the social political universe kind of is imbued with this Plutonic energy spoken of like Hades swallowing up Persephone, the soul of America as it were during the Uranus Pluto square, and the last few years of the political administration that was in charge, but also I really want to emphasize so important the flushing to the surface of the demons, of the poisons of the shadow of the collective, our national shadow and the repressed and concealed depths that can only be confronted and addressed and possibly transformed if they are brought to the consciousness of the nation.  

And we've been doing that big time for these last few years, but we have to recognize that we inevitably are going to be seeing and already are seeing really a lot of Plutonic themes like the decay and destruction of existing conditions and beliefs and structures that requires a really deep transformation and renewal of life. Above all on the level of our Earth community, ecological justice, social justice, biodiversity and just kind of waking up to the fact that we are participants in a larger communion of bio spiritual subjects in our Earth community. But in the meantime, Pluto, typically we see like power struggles with dominating individuals or institutions, clashes of will, autocracy, tyrants, encounter with destructive forces, either inside us or outside us, also inside the nation as well as outside the nation or geopolitical. There is an unconscious attraction towards dangerous situations or environments that are marked by life-and-death urgency. And encountering the violent forces of nature: storms, fires, fires, thunder and lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes, all Plutonic.  

But the other side of it is, you know, a great potential for tremendous transformation: strengthening of the will, personal renewal, sense of one's life being moved and transformed by deep evolutionary energies that are coming through us in the same way that a mother feels when they are giving birth and in some ways yes, they're giving birth and they're bringing their all into it, but there's also, like, something bigger is coming through them. It's like nature itself, Mother Nature. Everything is just moving to bring about this and one is participating in it, bringing ones’ all. And at the same time feeling it come through one as something in some ways, in some sense, distinct from or encompassing ourselves. And that's what we're, I think, all involved in. Were all participating in an enormous, transformational moment, and crucible.  

I’m just going to mention that there's a Jupiter Neptune conjunction. That's just coming into orb right now, and it's an extreme- and that will go for the rest of this year. Basically, it'll be coming, be most tight during the next few months, over the spring early summer, but it really will be coming back into a state and more or less staying within orb this entire year right Into January next year. That Jupiter Neptune energy, it's a very, it’s idealistic, it tends to expand the imagination. It tends to bring a greater faith in life, more hopefulness, tendency to trust life's generosity. There can be greater humanitarian impulses or more joyful altruism. There can also be an urge to enter into one's imaginative life more fully. There can be more mystical experiences, feeling at one with the universe, that's getting into things like film, theater, music, those kinds of Neptunian transcendent kinds of expressions of the imagination that can elevate us. At the same time, there's a tendency with Jupiter Neptune all have their shadows, there could be unrealistic optimism. There can be misguided idealism, gullibility, naivete, there could be misplaced sympathy or sentimentality. There could be sometimes overly concerned with celebrity and celebrity image and kind of bedazzled by media and advertising images of success, and happiness, and that kind of thing. Or there can be this tendency towards a kind of spiritual bypass in which we are trying to always see everything in such a positive light, and we ascribe all events to benevolent intentions and overlook significant differences that we should be attending to serve this kind of mythic ideal or unity, sense of unity. So, we have to use discernment.  

OK. Thank you for being with me again another year for our little annual overview of the state of the zeitgeist and how we can best explore and how we can best contribute to its positive unfolding in the future. 
 

[Uplifting theme music begins] 

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. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

[Theme music concludes]