~ April 2011: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised~
Last month Uranus entered Aries, where it will stay for seven years, the planet of Revolution entering the sign which trailblazes a new path through old stuck territory. This month Neptune enters Pisces, where it will stay for fifteen years, planet of shamanic initiation entering the sign of deep surrender. As outer planets, these forces direct the higher side of human nature. It's not easy to get to and stay with outer planet forces, but it's helpful to know their design, because it's the higher side of what's happening around here.
Across the world the plot thickens internationally as forces of evolution and devolution clash. The bright future trying to come in from the high side is crashing into all the reasons it can't happen. Humanity is wrenched through its greatest growing pains. The part of us that absolutely believes in the truth of love is bumping into the parts of us that constantly choose something less than that. Inside each person our urge for transformation is wrestling with disbelief, in a planetwide initiation that will be the key signature of the next twenty years.
The central irony of our time is that duality is being twisted to the breaking point to get to something beyond duality. Millions of people are in despair, which sets the stage for revolution. As the recent film "Inside Job," narrated by Matt Damon, so aptly portrays, the economic plunge of recent years was not an accidental whim of unforeseen market forces, but a well-designed theft of major world banks by the bankers themselves. The individuals mentioned in the movie made billions of dollars while screwing everyone else. Does that piss you off like it does me?
What's worse, Obama appointed the top criminals to key roles as economic advisors in his administration. His recent trip to South America had an economic motive you won't see in network news: to sell nuclear plants to Chile, since they're no longer wanted in the US. As Japan struggles to emerge from nuclear meltdown, our president has become an errand boy for the failing nuclear industry. How long will our leaders pretend to have no shadow? How long can false words continue to run things before it all falls apart?
Here in Vermont, just a few miles from where I sit, Vermont Yankee is the same kind of plant they had in Japan, with forty-year-old leaky pipes. Its license expires in 2012, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commision just gave them a clean bill of health. So radioactive waste continues to pile up on the banks of the Connecticut River, just like it does outside every US reactor, because no state wants to be the dumping ground for toxins that last hundreds of thousands of years. Vermont, however, is unique because it's the one state where the state itself has the power to keep nuclear plants open or closed. The NRC has never closed a plant no matter how old or dangerous it is. Last year the state senate voted overwhelmingly to close the plant. But the NRC and the plant's corporate owners are spreading lies to keep it open. Ironically, the horror in Japan is helping the cause in Vermont, which has government by town meeting, as thousands of parents concerned for their children's future, are speaking out at meetings and rallies.
Like the banking industry, in the nuclear industry the foxes have been put in charge of guarding the henhouse. This is a radical turn of affairs, much different by degree than anything our parents had to deal with. This extreme state of delusion can free us to design our own world.
The US is fighting in Libya now, along with Iraq and Afghanistan. The New York Times reports one out of every four children in the US is on food stamps. Due to economic manipulation, the current US generation has the dubious distinction of being the first one with less education and prosperity than their parents. What is going on with our world?!
In the 1960s and 70s when we got stoned, dropped acid, and read underground comic books out loud in Stratford, Connecticut and Laguna Beach, California, even in our most radical dreams we never imagined a world so twisted, a politics so warped as the one we call normal daily existence in the year 2011. Those of us with young children are having to reach extra-hard into some secret corridor of hope to imagine a bright future.
What high course do the planets have to say about all this?
Uranus in Aries fires up each of us to get so pissed about the warped state of affairs that we push off it into something radically new. When normalcy is twisted take a risk on something abnormal. Neptune in Pisces infuses the soul with deep undercurrents of love and joy and regeneration. Uranus in Aries tells us to stop putting faith in false leaders. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, federal politicians are caught like addicts in deluded states that have little to do with anything real. Neptune in Pisces says yes to all that, but read Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, the Ramayana, the Old Testament - it was always that way; we're just dealing with the current version of a warp that's been with us from the beginning. There have always been forces of corruption vying with the deep good buried in humanity.
No matter what market disasters and political uprisings occur, the answer today is the same as it was then -- we must dredge up a force of love fiercer than the hate. We must seize a truth deeper than the lies. We have to heal the sickness of a world gone mad, by finding something healthy in ourselves, in our very thought forms, in the very way we're willing to conceive of reality. This transformation has to take root from the ground up rather than the top down. It comes down to what you do for a living, where you find right livelihood, who you love, how you speak the truth of your heart, the dreams you abandon and those you plant.
The revolution of our time will not be reported on the six o'clock news. You won't read of it in the New York Times. As Gil Scott-Heron said in the 1970s, the revolution will not be televised. It will not be launched in halls of congress, where millionaires make backroom deals that warp the fate of our children like pawns on a chessboard. The revolution will not be restricted to "third world" countries, where the clash between classes is so life-threatening that they have no choice but to revolt. It will not come from Democrats, Republicans, or Plutocrats or NeptuneCats or Rupublicrats or Demolicans. It won't come from Tea Parties but Free Parties and Be Parties and You and Me Parties.
The revolution of our time begins the moment you realize you're here to find your deepest truth and follow it to the ends of the earth regardless of what it asks of you. The revolution begins the moment you realize you're not here to piss away another incarnation, but seize the moment to make your life count for something besides paying the bills and keeping your car clean. The revolution begins when you take the high truths of spirit and build a life around them here on earth.
As Uranus pushes into Aries the next seven years we're being asked to push through the crazy dilemmas of our time and find a clear path through deception that opens new territory. With Neptune in Pisces for fifteen years, our hearts are being wrenched to find a magical affinity with our world, with our time, knowing that even the strangest times have an inner reason to be, a buried treasure within. As the lies and distortions sweep mass consciousness, we're being asked to join growing legions of people, across the planet, who, despite the insanity of their leaders, are rising out of the muck of the past to find something real.
