An Aquarian vision

We are squarely in the middle of winter here in the northern hemisphere, Aquarius season. My portion of the Earth is at its coldest, with the Sun just beginning to regain some of its strength to warm us back up. 

Aquarius is the water-bearer, the one who pours out the waters of life and wisdom into the community. As the penultimate sign of the Zodiac, it has much to do with our collective vision for the future, yet we reach that collective vision through our individual contributions. As the sign of the scientist, the outcast and the revolutionary, Aquarius supports us to find our inner truth, and resist the pressure to conform. The conscious expression of Aquarius is in thinking for one’s self, recognizing the patterns of life around and within. Its shadow is ‘groupthink’, the mentality of the mob. As it is ruled by Saturn traditionally, Aquarius drifts into shadow territory when it is borne by fear, rather than integrity.

Thursday’s New Moon in Aquarius, with all but one of the visible planets in this revolutionary sign (something that hasn’t happened since 1962), provides us with an initiatory opportunity to reclaim our own wisdom, our unique combination of experience and knowledge, and the freedom to think for ourselves. In a time when there is tremendous pressure in our culture today to see the world in a specific way, thinking for ourselves could not be more critical. Nearly every media outlet, television program, advertisement, and official information source is telling one story, an old story of war and conflict, invisible threats, and technology-as-savior – from drugs to vaccines to AI to online everything. 

Yet there is another story, one that brings us ‘full spiral’ back to ancient wisdom, but for modern times. It is a story that includes technology, but in service to Nature, including humans as ‘part of’ rather than’ apart from’ Nature. This story of basing our models of the world on the patterns in Nature is not new, but our understanding of those patterns is changing, and with it our world view – eventually. As with the time of Copernicus, who was burned at the stake for challenging the prevailing view of the Earth as center of our solar system, there is an immense inertia holding in place the view with which most of us grew up.

As an astrologer, I am often challenged by someone telling me there is no scientific basis for using the movements of the planets to understand and even predict the affairs of humans.  What we (and I) have been taught and have daily reinforced in our culture is that we live in a cold, dead, mechanistic and materialistic world of objective, measurable physical and chemical reactions without purpose or design. Yet, in the “new and ancient story” of my vision for our cultural future, everything is conscious, with intelligence and purpose, from ants to plants to planets. Astrology, Ayurveda, and all indigenous wisdom with which I am familiar tells this story. 

There are fundamental, and often unconscious, assumptions of the old worldview. A few of the most familiar:

• The history of humankind is one of linear progress and we are more sophisticated today than at any point in our collective history;
• The natural world is one of competition and survival of the fittest;
• Humans are the only conscious beings;
• There exists a factual, observable reality independent of us;
• If we do not know how to measure it, it can not be real.

The worldview of these assumptions was not our ancestors’, and is – I hope – not our children’s. Whether we have entered the ‘age of Aquarius’ or are simply in an Aquarian phase, there are many of us questioning the old story and working to create a new one based in connection, cooperation, self-organizing systems, and other principles from Nature. And perhaps, being branded heretics espousing ‘disinformation’ in the process.

If you have read this far, maybe you are with me on the fringes, wondering on many days if you are crazy to see the world differently than what you are told. My Aquarian gift is the revival of the ancient wisdom, the re-membering ourselves as integral members of the natural world, through classes and readings and newsletters and blog posts. And a reminder that being considered crazy by a world gone insane is perhaps the single best indicator of sanity.

Thank you for being here.