Pluto in Aquarius

Sunday inspiration: The Five Mindfulness Trainings for awakened communities

Many of us are hoping that the Age of Aquarius will bring an enlightened new future after 2150 years of the Piscean Age, and Pluto entering Aquarius is likely to give this a kick-start. There is plenty of bad news surrounding Pluto’s entry into Aquarius and transforming the realms of technology and science (Russia threatening nuclear war, the threat of artificial intelligence taking over), but Aquarius is also the sign of awakening and community.

Yesterday I watched a beautiful biography of Thich Nhat Hahn, the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, in which he called for ” a real awakening, a real enlightenment. New laws and policies are not enough. We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things.” To support this awakening he has offered a framework of five mindfulness trainings to reflect on actions, thought and speech to create more happiness and peace in the world around us. I have reprinted them here for you but you may want to read them in the original, linked here. “If we live according to the Five Mindfulness Trainings, we are already on the path of a bodhisattva. Knowing we are on that path, we are not lost in confusion about our life in the present or in fears about the future.”

Reverence For Life

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that […]

Share this article...
By |2023-04-02T11:08:14-04:00March 26th, 2023|Inspiration|13 Comments
Read More

Planetary news this week: Aries New Moon at the Equinox, and Pluto in Aquarius

Astrological update for the week of March 20-27, 2023

art by Lightstar on Deviant Art

This week we have three planetary bodies changing signs, including a zero degree Aries New Moon at the Equinox. This is a whirlwind of planetary motion, so hold onto your hats and prepare to let go.

There are times when we can create our own present and future, and times when we can exert power over the workings of the Universe. This is not one of them. This week in particular, with so many intense planetary energies blowing a new wind into the workings of the world, the very fabric of our experience is being altered and will change the way the future unfolds. This is a week for self-care: for calming our nervous system, for strengthening the bonds of our relationships, for taking care of the physical body through nutritional attention and physical activity. (This is because of several Ceres aspects I’ll discuss later in this article.)

Aries New Moon and Vernal Equinox

Whether we are in the northern or southern hemisphere, the March equinox marks an equal balance of light and dark midway between the Solstices. These are turning points at the zero degree point of the cardinal signs which mark the change of seasons. When one of these turning points occurs at a syzygy (new or full moon), the alteration effect is magnified and that is what we see here. We are at the edge of the first sign (Aries), ruled by Mars (action), at a time when the light begins to dominate over dark.

The chart for the New Moon is pretty potent: the Aries Sun and Moon are opposed by Ceres (integration of body, mind and spirit). Four planets […]

Share this article...
By |2023-03-20T08:55:07-04:00March 20th, 2023|Uncategorized|4 Comments
Read More

Pluto in Aquarius: 2023-2043

art by me and Midjourney with help from ChatGPT

The meaning of Pluto.

The planet Pluto is associated with death, destruction, and regeneration. In psychological astrology he represents the Underworld of the psyche – the secrets that we hide from others and from ourselves, the dim recesses of the mind where our darkest emotions are tucked away.  In the transformational astrology that I practice, Pluto shows up as what I call the “Will of the Higher Self” – the part of us that encourages us to transform our secret darkness into an awakened Self through wisdom and understanding.

We often think of Pluto as being a ruthless Lord of Death and destruction, but this early association of Pluto/Hades with protecting the dead reveals a secret to the Pluto archetype that we don’t often consider – Pluto’s real role is to facilitate our personal evolution if we allow it to.  Under Pluto’s influence we find ourselves facing life in a far more intense way than might be comfortable, but it’s all for the sake of deepening our awareness and facilitating our awakening.

The discovery of Pluto in the 1930s coincided with the scientific breakthroughs required to release the atomic bomb which symbolizes Pluto’s destructive force which sometimes requires complete annihilation followed by a necessary rebuilding phase.  But it also coincided with the groundbreaking work of Freud and especially Carl Jung into the workings of the human psyche and the idea that if humans were able to better understand themselves, they could change the world around them and ultimately, their destiny.

Pluto enters Aquarius this week, really just dipping its toe at the zero degree point before retrograding back into Capricorn. This is just a taste of what is to come, but it does feel as […]

Share this article...
By |2023-03-20T10:42:58-04:00March 19th, 2023|Featured posts, Future Shock, Planetary cycles|9 Comments
Read More

Ever closer to the Singularity under Saturn in Pisces

art by Samuel Ferrand

The Singularity is a theory that was proposed in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer who suggested:

When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

read the entire article here.

I’ve written quite a few articles about this over the past 15 years and I shouldn’t be shocked that we seem to actually be in the Singularity now that the new version of the bot ChatGPT has scored in the top 90th percentile on the bar exam. Pluto in Aquarius, the sign of technology and science will likely upend all of our concepts about the very nature of life and the idea posed by Ray Kurzweil that humans and technology would merge by 2045 is seeming much more likely. Coincidentally (?) Pluto will remain in Aquarius until 2044.

You might be asking yourself at this […]

Share this article...