Today was a very busy day. Not only are we enjoy­ing the New Moon Eclipse, but sev­er­al oth­er align­ments are also in force. The most sig­nif­i­cant, Jupiter con­junct Uranus was the sig­na­ture aspect for 2010. Now we expe­ri­ence their third and final con­tact. What have we expe­ri­enced in this align­ment; and what can we expect?

Jupiter and Uranus come togeth­er in a con­junc­tion (like a New Moon) about every 14 years. Their rela­tion­ship com­bines and releas­es the Uran­ian (unusu­al, inven­tive ener­gies) with the Jupi­ter­ian (expan­sive, boun­ti­ful ener­gies). 2010 was a year that “seed­ed” new ideas and inven­tions in the sci­ences and tech­nol­o­gy. We will see these dis­cov­er­ies and appli­ca­tions become more wide­ly expe­ri­enced and trans­form our lives over the next many years.

If we go back and look at their align­ments, we can see this rhyth­mic release of inspi­ra­tion play­ing out in our per­son­al lives, cul­ture and econ­o­my. For exam­ple, their con­junc­tion in 1983 was accom­pa­nied by: The dis­cov­ery of the virus that was the cause of so much con­cern, AIDS. The change of some­thing called Arpanet into what we now call the Inter­net. Com­pact discs are released, we’re going dig­i­tal, say good­bye to vinyl records. The FCC autho­rizes Motoro­la to begin test­ing some­thing called “cel­lu­lar ser­vice”. Humans “leave” the uni­verse; Pio­neer 10 becomes the first object to move out beyond our solar system.

In 1997 we cre­ate life for the first time; through cloning Dol­ly, a sheep is made through genet­ic engi­neer­ing. IBM’s Deep Blue defeats Gary Kas­parov; for the first time a com­put­er bests a human in a chess match. Mars Pathfind­er lands on Mars; we have a rov­ing explor­er on anoth­er planet.

In 2010, we expand­ed our def­i­n­i­tion of “life” beyond our car­bon mod­el, find­ing evi­dence of arsenic based life forms. We crossed the thresh­old from manip­u­lat­ing life to cre­at­ing it; researchers cre­ate the first total­ly arti­fi­cial and func­tion­al genome. We stare into the mys­tery of cre­ation itself, and to the abyss posed by the mir­ror-image of our uni­verse; sci­en­tists cap­ture anti-mat­ter for the first time.

But that is not all, for Jupiter and Uranus com­bined togeth­er also speak to the quick­en­ing in oth­er impor­tant aspects of our real­i­ty too, like social and cul­tur­al changes. Since Jupiter rules our prin­ci­ples of rela­tion­ship, its con­join­ing with Uranus releas­es new forms of social and cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na and there­by cre­ates new realities.

In 1983 the US Embassy in Lebanon is bombed and what has become the so-called war with rad­i­cal Islam is said to have begun. The first woman and first African-Amer­i­can are launched into space as more bar­ri­ers to equal­i­ty fall.

In 1997 parental frus­tra­tion with the decline in read­ing by chil­dren is thwart­ed by a lit­tle boy wiz­ard name Har­ry Pot­ter. The more gen­er­al acknowl­edge­ment that the nations of the world need to coop­er­ate to address our very sur­vival is wit­nessed by a com­mit­tee at the UN in the Kyoto Pro­to­cols on Glob­al Warming.

And, what have we expe­ri­enced in 2010? For the first time in human his­to­ry, the num­ber of humans who are in a state of star­va­tion are matched by those who are over­weight or obese, (we know that we have to do some­thing about how we take care of our self and one anoth­er). A sin­gle indi­vid­ual and his web­site shake the foun­da­tions of insti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ments around the world; Wik­ileaks lifts the veil of secre­cy in mil­i­tary and diplo­mat­ic realities.

Tru­ly, we will only know in ret­ro­spect how and in what ways Jupiter and Uranus moved our sto­ry along this year…but they did, and do and will always be one of the means by which we grow beyond our mere con­di­tion­ing. We are not human beings.…we are human becom­ings, and the future is in our own hands and writ­ten in the stars.