Min­er­va by Abbott_Handerson_Thayer-1929

Astro­log­i­cal Mus­ings — Order and Dis­or­der – Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty ver­sus Com­mu­nal­i­ty, and our Moral Crisis

(If you wish to lis­ten to the show instead, here is the link on BlogTalk or Apple Pod­casts)

I thought it would be help­ful to pull back again and to assume a “big pic­ture” view of this moment in human his­to­ry. As many of you know, I like to focus upon the long-wave or the prin­ci­pal dri­vers of our spir­i­tu­al jour­ney by under­stand­ing the place­ments, pat­terns and mean­ings that are formed by the three out­er plan­ets, Uranus, Nep­tune, and Pluto.

As I have not­ed in numer­ous shows and post­ings, our present-day cir­cum­stances car­ry the echoes of ear­li­er his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, most notably the ear­ly to mid-1500’s and the late-1700’s. In both of those eras, a sim­i­lar series of place­ments and align­ments were hap­pen­ing that are very much like our own peri­od. And both of those peri­ods, like our own, were remark­able as to how they rep­re­sent­ed the end­ing of both a spir­i­tu­al-cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic ordering.

But always remem­ber that the plan­ets only hold the Ener­gy-Forms that inspire, inform, and guide our jour­ney on Earth, but the actu­al con­tent of what is formed, of what hap­pened and will hap­pen, that real­i­ty is made by us, by the com­plex of ener­gy-forms we humans weave upon this Earth, forged by the liv­ing spir­it of we human actors, so what we are faced with, both our dan­gers and our oppor­tu­ni­ties, this was made by our ances­tors and by you and me today. The chal­lenges we face today, we made, and there­in lies our true hope, for we can be the ones to make it bet­ter, we can make a bet­ter future if we try.

Tri­ad of Spirit
The three out­er plan­ets must always be con­sid­ered or held togeth­er as one. That is because they hold and form the hier­ar­chy of ener­gy-forms of what I call the Tri­ad of Spir­it. It is these three out­er plan­ets that hold as one the prin­ci­ple behind the pow­er of Spir­it, which is the “Pow­er of Becom­ing” held in each mon­ad of spir­it. This is the essen­tial nature of every­thing, of what is known as Swab­hā­va, which is that every ener­gy-form or par­ti­cle of cre­ation is formed by “the self that is becom­ing”. Uranus, Nep­tune, and Plu­to are for us the avatars of the “Three as One”, which we know as the Mind, Love and Will of the One.

Uranus is the Avatar and vehi­cle of Mind or Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty for us, the alchem­i­cal agent or Ener­gy-Form that holds one of the essen­tial root forms or qual­i­ties of spir­it, which is that every­thing and every­one is part of the Mind of the One. This means that every sin­gle part of Cre­ation is Alive and Con­scious. From the dimmest forms of aware­ness to the most sub­lime con­tem­pla­tions of the hier­ar­chies of the “shin­ing ones”, the qual­i­ty of Mind is the foun­da­tion for one essen­tial qual­i­ty of Spir­it, that each par­ti­cle of Spir­it is formed as an Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, each one of us is a unique spark of the Divine.

Nep­tune is the Avatar and vehi­cle of Divine Love for us, the alchem­i­cal agent or Ener­gy-Form which is the pri­mal or root form of spir­it which we expe­ri­ence as the uncon­di­tion­al love of the One. The whole of Cre­ation is formed of the One, the body of the One is Cre­ation, rang­ing from the most mate­r­i­al of sub­stances to the most sub­lime and ethe­re­al of Ener­gy-Forms, every­thing and every­one is formed through and by Divine Love. Through Nep­tune we are held togeth­er by our mutu­al attrac­tions with and for one anoth­er, bring­ing us the gifts of love, empa­thy, and com­pas­sion. The essen­tial qual­i­ty of Nep­tune is the coun­ter­bal­ance to that of Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and Uranus, it is the equal­ly pow­er­ful essen­tial qual­i­ty of Spir­it, which is Com­mu­nal­i­ty, which is that each one of us is held in ever greater cir­cles of fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, and fel­low­ship too, with our ulti­mate real­i­ty is that we are all held togeth­er as one in the One.

Plu­to is the Avatar and vehi­cle of the Will for us, which is the Alchem­i­cal agent or Ener­gy-Form that forges the expe­ri­ence for any being as “a one”, sep­a­rate in their own sacred space. Each par­ti­cle of Cre­ation, and each and every being, is formed from a spark of the Divine, by its Mon­ad, and it is by the will that it is formed as sep­a­rate from any oth­er par­ti­cle or being and held in the sacred space in which it exists and over which it pre­sides. As beings become ever more self-aware, like we in our human king­dom of life, the expe­ri­ence of the will leads us to our spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing, which is that we are to learn to use this gift of the spir­it for ever greater self-con­trol or self-mas­tery, so that the will is turned back upon one­self rather than being used to tres­pass, or to dom­i­nate and con­trol or vio­late the space of anoth­er. Instead, we are here to join togeth­er in shared sacred spaces, our rela­tion­ships, that we have cre­at­ed in order to love, work, and live with one another.

The Three-in-One
Our dynam­ic and pro­tean lives formed by spir­i­tu­al growth and evo­lu­tion, held with­in the Space of the Will by Plu­to is pro­pelled by the inter­play and dynam­i­cal­ly shift­ing bal­ance between Nep­tune and Uranus, with one being the dri­ve to One­ness by Love for Com­mu­nal­i­ty, ver­sus the dri­ve to Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty by Mind for Inde­pen­dence. In our human-made worlds of fam­i­ly, tribe, com­mu­ni­ty, and nation states, the bal­ance between the com­mu­nal­iz­ing and indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing forces with­in our monadic natures cre­ates our jour­ney through the var­i­ous life­ways, cul­tures, and civ­i­liza­tions as we walk the path of spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing for human­i­ty on this Earth.

Indi­vid­ual vs. Community
For us humans, this ten­sion between the Indi­vid­ual and their Com­mu­ni­ty has waxed and waned with­in any group­ing, cul­ture, and civ­i­liza­tion as well as between them. For exam­ple, when we look at the var­i­ous forms of lifestyle or life ways, like the Hunter/Gatherer, of the Farmer/Craftsperson or in our soci­ety for exam­ple of Rural/Suburban/Urban, we will see dif­fer­ing mix­tures and bal­ances of the rela­tion­ship between how much free­dom an indi­vid­ual may expe­ri­ence, and how much lim­i­ta­tion of their free­dom they do accept in order to live with oth­ers and in their communities.

It is most cer­tain­ly true that we would not be human with­out one anoth­er. We are a social species, and with­out fam­i­ly, com­pan­ion­ship, and com­mu­ni­ty we would not be able to live at all. Some form of com­mu­ni­ty is essen­tial for all human beings, for their shared sense of belong­ing to some­thing larg­er and more encom­pass­ing, and because that very com­mu­ni­ty pro­vides the care one needs in the ear­li­est years of life, and over the lifes­pan cre­ates the con­text of mean­ings, val­ues and beliefs which form each indi­vid­ual in that com­mu­ni­ty. As I like to say, we are more of a “we than an I”.

A Moral Order
To forge and main­tain these com­mu­ni­ties, this dynam­ic and inte­gral bal­ance of our Indi­vid­ual and Com­mu­nal natures leads to a con­stel­la­tion of mean­ing, a sense of what is right and good in our con­duct with one anoth­er, form­ing our moral com­pass of how we should live for our­selves and for oth­ers too.

This Moral Order, and the bal­ance of Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and Com­mu­nal­i­ty wax­es and wanes with­in any sys­tem, and over the arc of his­to­ry for any sys­tem. As the beliefs behind the order evolve, and the struc­tures of rela­tion­ships evolve with them, there are peri­ods of more gen­er­al agree­ment and accep­tance for the group, com­mu­ni­ty, or cul­ture with this moral order.

But in times of cri­sis or change as we most cer­tain­ly face today, these com­mon­ly accept­ed norms of con­duct, of what is moral and right, of the bal­ance of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and com­mu­nal­i­ty, may bend and break down as dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als, mem­bers and groups pull apart to form their own par­tic­u­lar sub-group or groups. It may lead to peri­ods of great con­fu­sion and con­flict, espe­cial­ly when a divide occurs with­in a group or nation, and the res­o­lu­tion to a restored moral order may only be secured through some great con­flict, as in our very own Civ­il War in the 1860’s.

1500’s, 1700’s and Now
As I have not­ed many times before and since 2008, we are wit­ness­es to the “end of an age” lead­ing to the birth of a new one. We are going through the break­ing down of an old Moral Order, and the neces­si­ty of build­ing a new one. Prin­ci­pal­ly I have attrib­uted the tim­ing of this trans­for­ma­tion to the pas­sage of Plu­to through Capri­corn as the end of the age, and then its move into Aquar­ius as the strug­gle to estab­lish a new order, which is what we are now expe­ri­enc­ing from 2024 until 2044. If we look at the major shifts in pre­vi­ous peri­ods in his­to­ry, we will see that there are sig­nif­i­cant insights for our time as well.

1500’s
Over 500 years ago, the pas­sage of Plu­to in Capri­corn was from 1516 to 1532, and the sub­se­quent strug­gle to cre­ate a New Order with Plu­to in Aquar­ius was from 1532 to 1553. In Europe, his­to­ri­ans date this peri­od to the end of late Mid­dle Ages and feu­dal­ism, and to the so-called rise or expan­sion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. With the fall of the one Catholic order after Mar­tin Luther’s the­ses, the break­ing of the par­a­digm of a divine immutable order of the uni­verse fueled by sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies, this led to a great dis­rup­tion in the order­ing of the moral, eco­nom­ic, cul­tur­al, and polit­i­cal orders in Europe. The attempt by the Catholic King­doms to main­tain their pow­er led to dev­as­tat­ing wars between them and those who broke away to form Protes­tant realms. The old order, with its feu­dal sys­tem based on land­ed pow­er and the one Catholic Church was giv­ing way to the rise of absolute mon­archs accom­pa­nied by a new eco­nom­ic order empow­er­ing a grow­ing mer­can­tile class. But I believe that per­haps one of the most trag­ic Plu­ton­ian expe­ri­ences of death and rebirth in this peri­od, was the Span­ish con­quest of the Aztec and Incan empires in North and South America.

1700’s
The most recent pas­sage of Plu­to in Capri­corn was from 1762 to 1778, and the sub­se­quent strug­gle to cre­ate a New Order with Plu­to in Aquar­ius from 1778 to 1798. His­to­ri­ans char­ac­ter­ize this peri­od as age of Enlight­en­ment and the age Rev­o­lu­tions, with the rise of the sci­en­tif­ic method of inquiry, the rise of lib­er­al ide­ol­o­gy, and with it the Amer­i­can colonies engag­ing in our Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War against the King­dom of Great Britain, and the over­throw of the Monar­chy in the French Rev­o­lu­tion. The world was turned upside down again, the old moral order ques­tioned and thrown down and the lib­er­al order that spread from this time became a norm for many peoples.

Though both these Plu­ton­ic peri­ods of trans­for­ma­tion rep­re­sent­ed the end of an age and the start of a new one, the Nep­tun­ian influ­ence for each peri­od was quite dif­fer­ent. And I believe this will help us to under­stand which peri­od is more like our own and what that might mean for us.

Plu­to in Capri­corn and Aquar­ius – Nep­tune in Virgo/Libra or Pisces/Aries
On its own, Plu­to in Capri­corn is the end of an age, and Plu­to in Aquar­ius her­alds the birth of a new insti­tu­tion­al order. But when we weave into that expe­ri­ence the influ­ence of Nep­tune, we can see how dif­fer­ent each Plu­to pas­sage will be. Giv­en the ratio of their orbital peri­ods, it turns out that Nep­tune will be pass­ing through either Vir­go or Pisces, and then move onto Libra or Aries when­ev­er Plu­to is in Capri­corn and then moves into Aquarius.

With Plu­to as the Avatar of the Pow­er of Alche­my or the shaper of Spir­it-Mat­ter, and the wield­er of the Will, and Nep­tune as the Avatar of our Fields of Dream and Imag­i­na­tion or the ves­sel of our Hopes or Fears, the type or kind of re-shap­ing and re-form­ing by the pas­sages of Plu­to in Capricorn/Aquarius can be dis­cerned by the very dif­fer­ent influ­ences ema­nat­ing through Nep­tune mov­ing through Vir­go then Libra ver­sus Nep­tune mov­ing through Pisces then Aries.

Nep­tune in Pisces-Aries or Virgo-Libra
What I believe we will see is that the pro­tean trans­for­ma­tions of the Nep­tune in Pisces peri­od, gives birth to a re-dream­ing of the dream, lead­ing to a very bold restate­ment of a new Moral Order or Iden­ti­ty as the new Age emerges when Nep­tune goes through Aries. This is what occurred in the 1500’s and is sim­i­lar to what we are expe­ri­enc­ing today. Let’s com­pare the place­ments of Plu­to and Nep­tune in the 1500’s to that of the 1700’s.

Pluto/Neptune in the 1500’s
In the peri­od of the 1500’s, with Plu­to in Capri­corn and then Aquar­ius, and Nep­tune in Pisces and then Aries, the entire Euro­pean order­ing of life was turned upside down. The moral struc­ture of the social order was defined by faith, from the Divine Right of Kings and with the order­ing of belief hier­ar­chi­cal­ly arranged from Pope to Priest to the peo­ple. This world was smashed by the Ref­or­ma­tion, which turned that social order and way of mean­ing com­plete­ly around. Faith became per­son­al, it emanat­ed from the per­son­al expe­ri­ence of the “Word of God”, as the bible was now avail­able in the com­mon tongue. Faith became Indi­vid­ual, and no longer medi­at­ed by the priest­hood and Pope. And over time a grow­ing sense emerged that humans should order their lives around the sanc­ti­ty of the indi­vid­ual con­science, and this informed and shaped the need to orga­nize our insti­tu­tions towards self-rule and democracy.

Pluto/Neptune in the 1770’s
When Nep­tune was in Vir­go and then Libra in the 1770’s, the dreams of that Plu­ton­ian end­ing of an age and reorder­ing were focused through the cri­tiquing, defin­ing, and refin­ing lens of Vir­go. That is because when Nep­tune is in Vir­go, we are asked to reimag­ine how we order our world, how we find our order of life with­in our­selves, and then in the Libra peri­od we move from this with a renewed sense of self into the attempt to forge a new space of rela­tion­ship for our mutu­al benefit.

Rather than the strug­gles over Faith and Belief as in the 1500’s, the strug­gles in the 1700’s were over the Ideals about polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic rights, it was about prin­ci­ples, rights, and the rule of law. I believe we might want to approach every Virgo/Libra time of a Plu­to trans­for­ma­tion as the result of, maybe the refine­ment and com­ple­tion of what began in the pre­vi­ous Pisces/Aries peri­od that came before. That is in the Pisces/Aries phase would be the pri­ma­ry peri­od of rad­i­cal change, as we expe­ri­ence the dis­solv­ing of an old order and the begin­ning of a com­plete­ly new order, and that this leads to the refine­ment or adjust­ment and restate­ment of the new moral order in the Virgo/Libra phase.

Our Time
If that is so, what can we under­stand about our own peri­od, and by com­par­ing our peri­od with the 1500’s rather than the 1700’s? What I believe that means is that we are expe­ri­enc­ing a shift that is much more fun­da­men­tal, much more rad­i­cal, requir­ing us to make a much big­ger shift in our beliefs and in our moral order. The par­a­digm that has more or less been the dom­i­nant order­ing of mean­ing since the 1500’s, which over­threw and led to the fall of a more faith-based cul­ture and moral­i­ty and the rise of a sys­tem where sci­ence and rea­son became the new faith, that moral uni­verse is cer­tain­ly chang­ing if not ending.

Just as our ances­tors in the 1500’s faced a rad­i­cal epis­te­mo­log­i­cal cri­sis, a cri­sis of how they knew and how they under­stood what is true about their world, so do we now too. As has been quite evi­dent to most of us, and cer­tain­ly since Nep­tune entered Pisces in 2010, our agree­ments about what is fact ver­sus fic­tion, what is true ver­sus false have become very dif­fi­cult to dis­cern for even the most rea­son­able as well as the most intu­itive among us.

And when the foun­da­tions for know­ing what is right or wrong, of dis­cern­ing truth from false­hood fail you, when you can­not know for cer­tain about so many things, when doubt over­whelms hope, it is then that you find your­self in a world where your moral foun­da­tions and prac­tices are bend­ing, fail­ing, and falling, and you find your­self in a world where seem­ing­ly any­thing is pos­si­ble, and noth­ing is true.

How can you know right from wrong, truth from fic­tion? Rather than the medi­a­tion of truth and fact being adju­di­cat­ed by some trust­ed hier­ar­chy of author­i­ties, whether that be in the realms of Faith, Sci­ence, Cul­ture or Pol­i­tics, we find our­selves cap­tured by our indi­vid­u­al­is­tic par­a­digm that emerged in the 1500’s. Because of this “indi­vid­u­al­is­tic dilem­ma”, which is now fueled and accel­er­at­ed by the dig­i­tal alche­my of our inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty to immense data­bas­es of data and infor­ma­tion, (but unfor­tu­nate­ly for the most part not of Wis­dom or Humil­i­ty), we find that many peo­ple believe that they can fash­ion and for­mu­late their own ver­sion of real­i­ty from a self-curat­ed menu of data and points of view, which they have gath­ered from self-select­ed sources, and the vast major­i­ty of these so-called facts have not been rig­or­ous­ly test­ed and vet­ted by knowl­edge­able and trust­ed sources.

And with­out the means to sort facts from fic­tions, the truth from half-truths and lies, we are at the mer­cy of the storms whipped up by those who prof­it from out­rage and fear. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, what we have cre­at­ed is a chaot­ic cacoph­o­ny of truths and half-truths, of rev­e­la­tions and delu­sions, of wis­dom and nonsense.

What can you do?
What can we do; what can you do?

We must begin with the heart of Cre­ation, which is that the entire­ty of the Uni­verse is the One. Truth is not to be found over here or over there; Truth is eter­nal and omnipresent, and it is what forms every par­ti­cle of Cre­ation, includ­ing the stars and plan­ets and you and me. The Truth is with­in us as much as we are held in a ver­i­ta­ble ocean of truth that is the cos­mos itself. And it is this immutable real­i­ty that makes truth knowable.

What this means is that whether you go inwards to lis­ten to the qui­et, still voice of your high­er intu­itive self, or you choose to go out­ward­ly to observe and learn from realms rang­ing from the most ethe­re­al to the most sub­stan­tial, you will come to truth. You may (or should) turn to those who came before you, to the seers and teach­ers through­out the ages, who left pearls of wis­dom and truth to guide your steps, and you equal­ly should look to those who live by this light as they pre­serve these gifts by their con­duct and ser­vice here today.

But for your­self, as in every life, you must hone your own spir­i­tu­al intu­ition and under­stand­ing by doing what we have done since the dawn of our awak­en­ing, you must share what you have observed and under­stood with oth­ers; and, most impor­tant­ly, you must equal­ly let them share what they have dis­cov­ered with you. You can­not find the way by your­self because you are made of one anoth­er, and you need one anoth­er to lift the veil of mis­un­der­stand­ing, to hone your dis­cern­ment by tem­per­ing your under­stand­ing in the cru­cible of shar­ing, con­trast­ing, and renewing.

You must remain where you tru­ly are, with­in your own spir­i­tu­al tem­ple, for it is by your Tri­ad of Spir­it that you will stay on the roy­al mid­dle path of Truth.

So, by Uranus use your high­er mind to free your­self from more lim­it­ed per­spec­tives so that you may per­ceive the indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and diver­si­ty in all the realms of life that form the cosmos.

By Nep­tune, open your heart to “the greater under­stand­ing”, as you feel what your mind can­not yet per­ceive, so that your love remains cen­tered in the Uncon­di­tion­al love by which all things are made.

By Plu­to, remain cen­tered in your will, so that you may main­tain your integri­ty and self-con­trol, like the dia­mond body of spir­it that shines in your spark of the Divine.

As I have said before, the Light of Truth is with­in you, and you can obtain and secure it by an Open and Ques­tion­ing Mind, that is held from excess­es by Uncon­di­tion­al Love, and togeth­er with your Rea­son and Com­pas­sion, you remain firm­ly cen­tered in your high­er spir­i­tu­al nature by your Cen­tered Will.

I know that is a restate­ment of what I say all the time, but I think it deserves repeat­ing giv­en the time we are in right now. I know it is a very trou­bling time, with trou­bles far and wide and near at hand, and all of us are try­ing to find our way through this to make the right choice or a bet­ter choice, to turn away from fear and turn towards kind­ness and love.

You know that what we do and how we treat oth­ers mat­ters, and we real­ize that those indi­vid­u­als who are trou­bled, who are per­haps bring­ing about harm to them­selves and to oth­ers, that most of that is because of fear. Peo­ple who are not in con­trol of them­selves, because they are not being guid­ed by their high­er nature, it is because of this that they cause harm.

If we can approach one anoth­er with under­stand­ing and open­ness, with­out judg­ment, but with under­stand­ing and com­pas­sion, we might be able to melt that fear away. We can hope to open one anoth­er’s hearts, so that we can have these deep con­ver­sa­tions and con­nec­tions which may hope­ful­ly build and cre­ate the new moral order that we all are here to make hap­pen for one another.