The Middle Way

This post has been gestating for some time, but finding the place to begin has taken a lot of reflection. Clearly, everyone is now aware that we are at a turning point in history. I am not a predictional astrologer, but there is a tremendous concentration of energy in a relatively small arc. Let me word this a little differently. The circle has 360 degrees but all the planets are in a wedge spanning just over a third of the Zodiac. This concentrates the focus and there are some echoes from mythology that are worth a moment of our attention.

Before going deeper here, I would like to remind people that I am an astrologer and philosopher with a special focus on healing. I am not a journalist who relies on sources nor a politician with a need to persuade in order to attain a goal. I recognize that everyone is different; but to survive, we must maintain a certain level of balance. To prepare for this time of change, I have written dozens of posts on the need to align, on balance, on stress, and on personal sovereignty. One of the least read of posts was on karma, yet if we do not understand the law of action and reaction, we do not see how adjustments are made when the actions are potentially destabilizing.

The Planets

Uranus, ruler of Aquarius, is in early Taurus. It seems obvious that there will be some kind of major change of the world’s financial systems. Uranus has an 84-year cycle so the previous transits to where we are now occurred in 1936-7 and 1852-3.

To give an idea or context for this, look at the publication of a book by John Maynard Keynes’s: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It became a major text and basis for much macroeconomic thought. It was so pivotal that we refer to it as the Keynesian Revolution. It can be argued that new ideas are at first regarded as heretical. In the case of Keynes, the heresy was in the classical view of full employment and its relationship to wages and purchasing power. Purchasing power determines the demand for goods and services; ideally, there would be a perfect match between the level of output and consumer demand. This is all rather too complex for a post so let’s simply say that the emphasis placed on wages resulted in unions and legislation to guarantee minimum wages whereas the emphasis put on what is called discretionary income defines the personal value individuals and the society at large put on savings versus consumption. There is much more to Keynesian economics, including the “devil in the details” with respect to the role of the multiplier effect. I have explained this through reposting a joke that made the round of the Internet that now has many versions. All however make it easy to understand that money is not viewed so much as an asset but as an instrument for energizing capitalistic markets. I will explain this in very simple terms. Let’s say you have a pound of potatoes or rice. It has a monetary value that correlates to the cost of production and transport to the final beneficiary. To the individual, we could argue that the actual value is in caloric or some other nutritional benefit, one that can be measured in terms of biological and chemical properties. If the market is flooded with commodities, the price may drop, but the needs of the individual do not really change. However, the volatility of the market changes if there is either surplus production or more demand than supply.

Here’s one version of the multiplier effect:

It’s a slow day in some little town……..
The sun is hot….the streets are deserted.
Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town.
He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store.

The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit.
She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner.
The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves.

No one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.

If you really understand this, you perhaps also understand how an economy can be completely overhauled with little or no impact on the true economy which is based on a combination of resources, productivity, and market demand. So, let’s say we had a debt jubilee like the “little town” in the joke, what would actually happen next would depend on availability of credit because most people’s consumption in today’s modern world depends on the amount of credit allowed by a system of totally corrupt institutions who actually do nothing but manipulate who has the right the right to consume and who doesn’t. Think about it, and think about how many alternatives there might be to Keynes.

However, I want to go on record stating that I do not think Uranus rules “change” so much an innovation. Going from paper currency to digital currency is no longer innovative. This is true for several reasons. First, the theories are not actually different so all that would happen is that the regulation of credit would depend on who has control of the system. Going from Keynes to Marx would not be innovative. We could go into immense detail, but in the end, my point will be that Marxism is also an old economic theory and thus fails the Uranus litmus test.

 

Inauguration Date

Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide victory in 1936 and was the first president to be inaugurated on January 20th. On February 5th, he tried (and failed) to increase the size of the Supreme Court. There are several other events with eerie parallels to our present times, including a feature of the New Deal addressing lawlessness.

To avoid the appearance of ethnocentricity, I will add that going back to the 1852-3 Uranus transit, we see the Taiping Rebellion. The word “Tai” mean “Great” and “Ping” means peace, but the rebellion was bloody and waged by converts to Christianity against the Qing dynasty and its power. It is estimated that 20 million people died in combat-related incidents and as many as 100 million died as a result of famine and other issues. The Qing prevailed.

It is very hard for a person such as myself not to see a parallel between history and modern times and to speculate that some of the actors we see today are perhaps reincarnations of those who played similar roles in the past.

 

Saturn and Pluto

In mythology, Saturn, represents Time, both the ravages of Time and death. I would like to enable the application these rulerships by discussing two points that may not jump out at everyone. First, Saturn functions with delegated authority. One can see Saturn. The person representing Saturn has authority and usually a title. It may be as familiar as “father” or anyone else who has acquired certain responsibilities and rights such as the principal of a school or police officer. This authority may go very high, all the way up to positions acquired through appointment. Let’s say someone is elected to high office. There are many positions to fill and usually many candidates for each position so Saturn rises higher by performing well and not outshining the one granting the titles and whatever favors are attached to the positions. A person under the influence of Saturn will wait for propitious moment, and will nearly always conform so as to enjoy the pleasure of the patron, who is often Pluto-ruled and invisible. It does not mean that Saturn does not have an agenda of His own, merely that he knows the system and how to climb within that system.

There are a couple of axioms from both ancient Chinese as well as Greek and Roman philosophy that have a Saturnian flavor. Kronos. In the I Ching, a major Taoist text, there is frequent discussion of the superior man. This is not a reference to position but rather moral character. It is, for example, never a mistake to wait for the propitious moment. Someone may bide his time, wait for years, and then perform the deed. He may be rewarded by the person served or by seizing the moment when the adversary is weakest. In mythology, Kronos, son of Ouranos (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), castrated his own father and tossed the parts into the ocean where they became Aphrodite.

Uranus can represent irrevocable change, such as loss of genitalia, infertility, gender issues, and countless other situations, but it is worth noting that with the Age of Aquarius, the gender issues are probably only just beginning.

The second Saturnian “detail” — in my opinion — is that as ruler of Time and the Ring-Pass-Not, Saturn is a third dimensional figure so the ability to move into other dimensions depends on crossing beyond the Ring-Pass-Not. It is, for most people, an unpredictable journey. Again, in my experience, the ability to function consciously in a higher dimension would also depend on the capacity to use the higher chakras, especially the third eye. This has been assaulted in numerous ways through fluoridation and massive use of advanced technologies.