May You Live In Interesting Times

Outer planet transits and the Nostalgia for Samsara

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“The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.” —Camille Paglia

DOOM TALES MONOPOLIZE our inner landscape because speeding up to the end means a new beginning is just around the corner — or over a cliff. That’s one theory.

The catch, of course, is how we resist alternative narratives — we’re trapped in a vague, free-floating abeyance. But it’s wise now to think beyond the parameters of being a garden-variety human being. Or at least make a gesture toward unimagined terrains.

This is the nut of the ‘message’ from the ongoing transits of Neptune and Pluto through the closing section of the Zodiac (Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces), while Uranus in Taurus continues to trigger our survival instinct.

When food, money, energy, and optimism are scarce, we become attached to whatever hoard we’ve come to associate with as a means to see us through to the new phase. Be it our meager savings or how Plutocrats hog all the wealth and investments in their seemingly exempt world.

As worries increase, we shift our perspective to the outsiders closing in on our turf — ready to turn them away. Or, as we’re witnessing between Israel and Palestine, annihilate them completely.

As The Wheel Grinds Round

So we’re looping right now. Sort of like the behavior animals demonstrate before being eaten by a predator. You’ve probably seen videos like this on those YouTube nature channels. The prey runs around and around in a hysterical circle before the predator administers the killing bite. Right?

The weirdness factor is heightened when we observe ourselves observing others and the world we coexist in. If we’re not dwelling on our own crisis of faith, we want to tacitly read about it in the news or watch it in a sci-fi or horror film—our way of confirming that everyone’s going crazy simultaneously.

Fact or fiction doesn’t matter — just that we’re registering, in constant blips and beeps of data, that a point of no return has been crossed.

Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill

My astrologer’s field notes show that Uranus is associated with time warping. A hybrid process of time speeding up, which means our subjective experience of time is altered — a condition that forces us to try and peer into the future despite our best efforts to avoid confronting the disagreeable. 

This quickening to our anxiety commenced while Uranus transited Aries between 2010 and 2019. It was very much a putting out the fire with gasoline transit.

The sense of urgency to remove constraints, to strike out at the perceived opposition — that tension imparted a ticking time bomb feeling. Uranus was the hair shirt we wore. People made crazy-ass decisions: Brexit, Trump, and greenlighting Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

But then there were Pluto’s bass note reverberations to try and fit into the rhythm of our days — no easy task.

Pluto is akin to a black hole generator. When Pluto breaches our awareness, nuclear fission occurs, meaning we phase between one reality and another in such a way that forces us to leave the former and pop into the latter, which our survival instinct conflates with the annihilation of the familiar. And so we balk, freeze, and stall. 

And yet the wormhole beckons

We might have New Age notions about surrendering or ‘letting go and letting god’ — but as my dad used to say: “Everyone wants to get to heaven, but no one wants to die.” That sums up the Pluto part of the equation.

Pluto’s transit through the Zodiac marks where the old world/new world dichotomy gets real traction in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way.

Thus, Capricorn’s reality matrix was split in two, creating enormous gaps between factions and extremes. The seeming polarities that divide reality were thinning. This exposed rich to poor, hetero to homo, white to Black, oppressor to oppressed, and Trumpers to, well, everyone else on the planet.

Neptunian Soma

Complicating this is the peculiar hallucinatory subtext of Neptune’s ongoing transit through Pisces. You sense the loony impact of this transit with the escapist, unhinged-from-reality scenarios that dominate popular imagination: Colonizing Mars. Self-driving cars. Goggles you clamp over your face to free you entirely from reality.