Even in astrological terms, indeterminacy and creative unpredictability are part of the archetypal pantheon, as essential manifestations of the Uranus-Promethean principle. All periods involving major Uranus alignments tend to constellate these themes in concrete events, each cycle doing so with different inflections according to the second planet involved. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 2010 and the early 2011 will take place during the peak of the T-square, and is likely to coincide with unexpected new beginnings, expansive impulses, and creative breakthroughs of many kinds that will shape the larger whole—some immediately visible to public awareness, some of a more hidden nature that fully emerge later.
A crucial role will be played during the years of the T-square and beyond by the coming to power of the generation born during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s and its aftermath. So will the coming of age of the generation of children born during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction just ending. Moreover, for many years to come, the sustained infusion into the collective psyche of the idealistic cultural impulses, creative visions, and spiritual awakenings that emerged during that long Uranus-Neptune era will continue to unfold its consequences for many years into the future, often in new ways that cannot now be predicted. Finally, the very knowledge of the powerful archetypal dynamics involved—the foreknowledge of the planetary alignments, their timing, and their potential significance—could provide us with an important further level of insight and self-awareness by which we might better navigate this critical transition in our world’s history.
Nothing is certain, or at least nothing can be said to be certain. When it comes to the future, we are all seeing through a glass darkly. Yet some glasses are perhaps less opaque than others. Given the consistent pattern of correlations involving these planets in the past, it does seem reasonable to prepare for the possibility that the years of the upcoming Saturn-Uranus-Pluto T-square configuration will present the human community with a convergence of major challenges on many fronts. The Uranus-Pluto square that will continue through 2020 could well represent something like a combination of the 1930s and the 1960s in a twenty-first-century context: a sustained period of enormous historical change requiring humanity to radically expand the scope of its vision and draw upon new resources and capacities in ways that could ultimately be deeply liberating. Whatever form this coming era will take, I believe that the great global transformations and emancipatory movements that have coincided with the long sequence of axial alignments of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto surveyed in this book, as well as the deep human suffering and moral evolution that took place during the Saturn-Pluto, Saturn-Neptune, and other such challenging alignments, have prepared the world to enter this critical threshold with a collective awareness that could make a significant difference in its outcome.
One last planetary alignment should be mentioned. We have discussed the various upcoming dynamic or hard-aspect alignments of the outer-planet cycles. There still remain the trines and sextiles of these cycles. Of these, by far the most significant is the century-long Neptune-Pluto sextile, which began in the mid-twentieth century and will continue until near the middle of the twenty-first. This long sextile takes place once each five-hundred-year Neptune-Pluto cycle, beginning about a half-century after the conjunction. Its unusual duration results from Pluto’s eccentric 248-year orbit, which twice each Neptune-Pluto cycle brings it close to and, briefly, even inside Neptune’s orbit—the first time as a sextile, the second as a trine.
Historically, such sustained sextile or trine alignments of Neptune and Pluto have coincided with long epochs in which a certain profound evolution of consciousness appears to be propelled and sustained in a gradual, harmoniously unfolding manner, moving beneath and through the fluctuations and crises that might occur at a more immediate empirical level. The grand trine of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in the 1760s and 1770s cited in the previous chapter, which coincided with the peak of the Enlightenment, the birth of Romanticism, and the beginning of the American Revolution, occurred as part of the most recent much longer Neptune-Pluto trine of the eighteenth century. These century-long epochs generally seem to impel the collective experience of a more confluent relationship between nature and spirit, between evolutionary and instinctual forces (Pluto) and the spiritual resources and idealistic aspirations of the pervading cultural vision (Neptune). The archetypal dynamics involved characteristically provide, at an almost subterranean level in the collective psyche, a sustained stabilizing impulse.4
This particular category of alignment has special significance: first, because it involves Neptune and Pluto, the two outermost planets; and second, because it lasts longer than any other planetary alignment. The current sextile is also historically noteworthy because of its role in the larger cyclical movements of all three outermost planets, since it coincided with the first Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune conjunctions to occur after the Neptune-Pluto conjunction of the 1880–1905 period. From a long-term historical perspective, therefore, we are living today at the moment when all three of these cycles, the largest planetary cycles known to us, have just completed their conjunctions in succession, marking the full initiation of the corresponding archetypal dynamics for the next several centuries.
If we consider, then, the unfolding cycles of the three outermost planets—taking into account the current alignment between Neptune and Pluto, the number of years since the most recent Neptune-Pluto conjunction a century ago, and the completion of the subsequent Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune conjunctions of the 1960s and 1990s, respectively—our present moment in history is most comparable, astronomically, to the period exactly five hundred years ago with which we began the book: the era that brought forth the birth of the modern self during the decades surrounding the year 1500. This too was an epoch of extraordinary turbulence and uncertainty, and also of great cultural creativity and dynamism. It was the moment of the High Renaissance of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Erasmus and Thomas More, in the immediate aftermath of Pico della Mirandola’s new vision of human possibility in the Oratio and Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence—a period shaped by the rapid spread of a powerful new medium of universal communication, the printed book; the first expeditions to a vast new world that, at enormous human and ecological cost, led to the opening of the global community to itself; and the immense spiritual and cosmological transformations, still unfolding, represented by Luther’s start of the Reformation and Copernicus’s conceiving of the heliocentric hypothesis.
Our postmodern age of ceaseless flux and irresolvable complexity, for all its metaphysical disorientation, and despite the collective entrancement produced by the mass media and corporate marketing, has nevertheless brought forth new conditions and possibilities that could prove invaluable for our future. As a result of the many extraordinary changes—cultural, psychological, spiritual—that have unfolded in the past half-century, the collective psyche has undergone a pervasive and in certain respects deeply benign transformation that cannot easily be measured and yet, for all its subtlety, is no less pregnant with historical significance. The rapid dissemination during this era of a fundamental new openness to the perspectives and realities of different cultures, eras, religions, races, classes, genders, sexual orientations, age groups, even different species and forms of life has been an essential characteristic of our time. It is perhaps not too much to say that, in this first decade of the new millennium, humanity has entered into a condition that is in some sense more globally united and interconnected, more sensitized to the experiences and suffering of others, in certain respects more spiritually awakened, more conscious of alternative future possibilities and ideals, more capable of collective healing and compassion, and, aided by technological advances in communications media, more able to think, feel, and respond together in a spiritually evolved manner to the world’s swiftly changing realities than has ever before been possible.
Opening to the Cosmos
With increasing accord and insistence, many disciplines and per
spectives in our time have been pointing towards a more participatory and spiritually informed vision of the cosmos, as if a greater underlying impulse were at work through these diverse intellectual and cultural streams. Yet outside the private intuitions of a few and the private yearnings of many, the encompassing power of modernity’s disenchanted cosmology has continued unabated. The world picture that emerged and established itself during the Enlightenment in the wake of the Scientific Revolution still effectively informs the activities and values that most influence the world today, and the various challenges to its hegemony have until now been largely peripheral and tentative. The modern self still lives in a vast and, in a fundamental sense, alien universe that is the random consequence of exclusively material evolutionary processes—a universe devoid of any meaning or purpose, indifferent to humanity’s spiritual and moral aspirations, and relentlessly silent.
In the course of our civilization’s history, this determinedly “neutral” world picture has in certain respects been deeply emancipatory. It has freed the modern self from long-established structures of cosmic meanings and purposes that, while perhaps sustaining and numinous, were often problematically interpreted, shaped, and enforced by cultural authorities—whether political or religious—whose vision was not always profound, their motives not always beyond question. We have come to realize, however, not only the great liberation but the great loss that the triumph of the mechanistic world picture brought in its wake. The liberation and the loss at the heart of modernity have been inextricably connected.
It was in response to this realization that I proposed the thought experiment of the two suitors. If our intellectual self-awareness now requires a further evolution, perhaps the first step is to recognize that our engagement with the universe would be more deeply fruitful if it more resembled a genuine dialogue. When the cosmos is assumed to be fundamentally incapable of purposeful communication, of depth and complexity of meaning, then no communication at that level can possibly take place. Such communication is excluded at the very outset of the inquiry. Yet in any authentic relationship—that is, in a relationship of true reciprocity—the potential communication of meaning and purpose must be able to move in both directions, in this instance between self and world. For this to occur, a patiently developed sense of intellectual and imaginative empathy—of receptive, respectful, trusting observation and analysis, inward and outward—is essential. Awareness of this need has moved our age to turn with new respect to those eras, traditions, and cultures in which such epistemologies have long been cultivated: ancient, indigenous, shamanic, mystical, esoteric.
Compared with the modern stance of systematic self-distancing and objectification, it appears that our present task is to cultivate a capacity for opening ourselves more fully to “the other” in all its forms—to listen with more keenly discerning ears to other voices and perspectives, other ways of being and knowing, other cultures and other ages, other forms of life, other modes of the universe’s self-disclosure. As in any genuine dialogue, we must be willing to enter into that which we seek to know, not keep it distanced as a silent object imprisoned by the framework of our limiting assumptions. We need to allow that which we seek to know to enter into our own being.
Our best philosophy of science, like our most acute self-reflections, has taught us the radical extent to which our assumptions configure and create our world. Not only reason and empiricism but depth of self-honesty, inward receptivity, richness of imagination, openness to beauty, steadfastness of passion, faith, hope, spiritual aspiration all play a major role in constellating the reality we seek to know—as do fear, prejudice, mistrust, stubbornness, egocentricity, greed, impatience, lack of imagination, absence of empathy. And this is perhaps the underlying message of our modern Enlightenment’s unexpected darkening of the world: At the hidden heart of cognition is a moral dimension. As the Greeks knew, the quest for the true cannot be separated from the quest for the good.
Nor, perhaps, can the search for the true and the good be ultimately separated from our search for beauty. The modern world view recognizes cosmic beauty as only an accident, an arbitrary coincidence of subjective human perception and superficial local appearance. Yet that beauty secretly inspires all cosmologists, even in their attempts to explain the entire cosmos with an abstract “theory of everything” that falls so conspicuously short of the world’s rich complexity, mystery, and interior depths. A fundamental yet virtually unexamined issue in cosmology today is the question of whether all beauty in the universe is merely a random product of blind evolution and subjective circumstance or whether that beauty is in some sense significant and intentional, an expression of something more ensouled, more profound, intelligently relational, mysterious.
“Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty,” Jeanette Winterson has written, “but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.” Whatever their conscious motivations, scientists have always been compelled by a theory’s aesthetic superiority. Yet perhaps our understanding of what is aesthetically superior in a cosmological theory must be fundamentally expanded, beyond that of mathematical elegance alone as in contemporary science, to encompass what might be infinitely deeper dimensions of the universe’s aesthetic reality. Perhaps what we regard as a rigorously “scientific” engagement with the cosmos must be radically enlarged and developed so that the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral imaginations of scientist-philosophers of the future are fully integrated, deepening and enriching each other in their mutual interplay. It is possible that the deeper truths not only of our spiritual life but of the very cosmos require, and reward, an essentially aesthetic and moral engagement with its being and intelligence, and will forever elude a merely reductive, skeptical, objectifying judgment issued by a single proud but limited faculty, “reason,” narrowly defined and rigidly isolated from our full being.
Yet this larger engagement with the cosmos will require of us a profound shift in what we regard as legitimate knowledge. It will demand an initial act of trust in the possible reality of an ensouled cosmos of transformative beauty and purposeful intelligence. In the inner politics of the modern mind, a “hermeneutics of suspicion” has completely overpowered and eclipsed a “hermeneutics of trust.” That suspicion has been directed towards nature, towards the universe, towards other cultures and other world views, towards the spiritual dimension of life, even towards the human being in her embodied and ensouled wholeness. From Bacon and Descartes on, the modern mind directed its suspicion at everything except its own stance of skeptical objectification. The modern blindness to its own posture was precisely what many postmodern thinkers sought to correct, yet in doing so the postmodern strategy tended to produce an even more absolute negation: all reality perceived as nothing more than a social-linguistic construct, a local projection serving power and enforced by power. Because the postmodern intellectual milieu uncritically continued the modern assumption of cosmic disenchantment, the major modes of postmodern deconstruction essentially made their valid critical insights the final limit of any metaphysical understanding. Every attempt at a larger coherence, every discernment of an underlying spiritual meaning or purpose, was fundamentally suspect as nothing more than another totalizing move, another surreptitious attempt to expand the power of one part over the whole. Every imagination of an intelligible whole imbued with a larger significance drew deconstructive forces towards it like heat-seeking missiles.
In the course of the modern and postmodern periods, the necessary balance between the two basic intellectual postures of suspicion and trust, that essential creative tension of opposites, was lost. The consequences of this loss and imbalance have been immense. The fundamental skepticism of the modern and postmodern mind, its state of chastity that once served a larger purpose, has become a permanently confining end in itself, an armored state of intellectual constraint and spiritual unfulfillme
nt. The strategy of skeptical self-distancing from the world has impelled and shaped the modern self—differentiating it, empowering it, but eventually so isolating it that it has come to dwell inside a solipsistic prison of its own assumptions. Worse, in its inflation and increasingly manic desperation, the civilization possessed by that objectifying stance has now become a centrifugal force of destruction and self-destruction in a world too intimately interconnected to accommodate such a titanic juggernaut so out of balance with the whole.
Humanity’s “progress of knowledge” and the “evolution of consciousness” have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For our whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all our faculties—intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational—enter the process of our knowing. How we approach “the other,” and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including our own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate. Not only our personal lives but the very nature of the universe may demand of us now a new capacity for self-transcendence, both intellectual and moral, so that we may experience a new dimension of beauty and intelligence in the world—not a projection of our desire for beauty and intellectual mastery, but an encounter with the actual unpredictably unfolding beauty and intelligence of the whole. I believe that our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.
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