PALDEN ON SATURN-NEPTUNE

In Glastonbury, UK, where I live, a few of us astrologers get together and babble every 2 weeks. Palden Jenkins is one of them, and here's an email I just got from him:

Dear DR

A while ago you mentioned that, if I had a contribution to your astro blog, I was welcome. Well, I found myself writing something to a fellow geopolitics buff and astrologer in New York State, Curtis Lang, in response to an article by him which started like this:

"Many of our friends, family, clients, customers and neighbors – primarily Americans -- have spoken to us recently about what they describe as a general feeling of malaise, pessimism, and futility they have been experiencing for the last year or two.

It has been perhaps a hundred years since the ruling classes in America have been so bold, so arrogant, and so dominant in every aspect of political, economic and cultural life.

A climate of fear and helplessness pervades the country. This unpleasant climate was triggered by 9/11 and has been tirelessly promoted by a self-serving political elite and a corporate media controlled by a handful of global corporations dedicated to the expansion of their wealth and privilege at any cost."

So I hereby submit the following as a testimony about the deeper effects of the Saturn-Neptune opposition - and perhaps some other things too, such as the back end of Pluto in Sag (proliferation of beliefs).

Palden

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Dear Curtis

I think the malaise you talk about is dead serious. I believe it's also not entirely due to the machinations and propaganda of power-structures, obvious and hidden, but it goes deeper - since it is affecting people who are not directly influenced by media machines and the normal pressures most people are influenced and controlled by. It is affecting some of the most conscious and clear people too, like a psychic cobweb settling on planet Earth. Nothing is clear and simple any more - it wasn't before, but a new level of obscuration and befuddlement has come about since around the millennium, though it began perhaps around the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993.

The positive aspect of this is that, before something is 'found', it has to be 'lost' - so perhaps we can see this as the prelude to a new set of developments in which the scenery and situation will become clearer, and illusions will be removed from our eyes. But it's still dead serious. Today I was reading a very critical piece in Le Monde Diplomatique about the negative impact of the current mania about biofuels, and the way so many people believe biofuels are a solution, when in fact it is bringing about enormous problems, and is veiled as a further centralisation of power in the hands of corporations and a replication of the existing over-consumptive system. This is just one issue of very many.

I have no easy solutions. But I am aware that we must not just look 'out there' at the identified 'bad guys'. I'm aware, for example, that the arrival of Internet, in which you and I have both played our part, adds to the befuddlement simply through the proliferation of noise - a rapidly-propagating profusion of ideas and viewpoints which actually complicate things while trying to clarify them. I have been part of this.

But there has indeed been a triumph of the propaganda - and of ordinary people's simplistic ways of reaching conclusions and forming opinions. Thus, in my own work with Hamas, a new political force in the world which has immense potential for cleaning up the world's politics and changing things, while many developments are good when seen from an informed and balanced viewpoint, actually things have got worse, and Hamas' accepted status as a terror organisation has strengthened - to some extent despite facts and reality. The crop circle movement is decimated and neutralised. Glastonbury is slowly being taken over by capital-rich incomers from London, who bring their own agendas and weaken the alternative pole of insight that has been built up here for decades. I suddenly find myself disagreeing with my old friends in Greenpeace over certain crucial issues. Everything is getting fouled up.

Much of this is to do with the general public's tendency to reach for simple, neat answers - but this is partially a response to the proliferation of ideas and viewpoints on the market today. People are too busy to think - or, more, to *feel* and use their instinctual commonsense. This includes us. Even the ideas around 2012 have been corrupted by people who think it's about disaster. Even the Green movement is now advocating a mindset about global warming which might not be true. And people rush off to rock concerts, dish out money and then feel as if they've done some good - when in fact, little changes. I even find that goodwill meditators are thinking up crazy themes to organise meditations for, while overlooking enormous chunks of reality because it doesn't fit neatly into their 'forces of light/darkness' mindset, or the idea that this global linkup will make the big difference. But haven't we already learned that, as soon as you think "I'm having a good meditation", the power of meditation is lost? How naive of us to believe that meditation can solve all things - yet such a proposition is both true and untrue simultaneously.

Saturn opposition Neptune - dis-illusionment, and bigtime! Or perhaps we're talking about the uncontrolled proliferation of beliefs and worldviews symbolised in Pluto coming to the end of Sagittarius, or the worldview-churning effect of Uranus in Pisces.

It would be easy to lapse into apathy at this stage. I certainly have gone quieter in my geopolitical judgements and pronouncements - partially because of the silent or "who knows?" response of many people to fresh ideas. I find myself doing battle with old friends who accuse me of 'collaboration' because I don't rail against Big Brother in the way they do (outwardly projecting the problem onto others, as if to make oneself 'right'). I find myself being accused of being a spammer, anti-semitic, or supporting a male-chauvinist mindset because I'm working with Muslims and Jews. I find myself suspected of corruption because I try to raise funds to support my work.

No easy solutions. We've got to live through this one. It's not isolated to USA - though USA has an amplified version of it. It's not limited to the neat notion that the capitalists or the 'syndicate' are bringing this about (though there's still truth in that). It's something deeper, a consequence of what we have all subscribed to and done, and omitted to do, over many, many years. It goes back to 6,000BC or further. I don't think we're helpless in it, but I do believe it goes a level deeper than we might be looking. And it might also be an historic-scale period of delusion we're in - hopefully the prelude to a breakthrough, but even the idea of a 'new age' or breakthrough can be part of the big illusion.

I think a large part of the problem is that we believe in and look for a Big Answer, which will resolve all things. There is a concept called The Truth - a bit like 'God'. But really, there is truth and untruth within all things, and things can both be true and untrue in the same equation. This doesn't mean we must sit on our hands and just feel confused and resigned. It means we need to reach a deeper level of discernment and understanding - and we must quit trying to establish The Big Answer. John Lennon once sang "God is a concept by which we measure our pain" and, similarly, Truth is a concept by which we measure our confusion and feel inadequate about how we actually are.

Depressing stuff for old campaigners. But we must not give up, and we must give up giving up, and not give up not giving up. Giving up smoking has led so many people to transfer to eating and other consumptive behaviour. Perfectly good people with good lifestyles are falling over with cancer - and I heard of a smoker who finally stopped smoking at the age of 101. This reveals that there's a level deeper which leads us back to a deeper level of transformation by which our voracious needs become quietened, not by giving up, but by coming to a new baseline and standpoint.

I have no neat solution. But I do have a feeling we must go a level deeper. And perhaps world circumstances are building up which are leading us toward this. We need to stop struggling for the big answer and the big strategy and look again at the landscape we're located in. Look real hard, and not just jump up saying "I've got it!".

In Britain, we voted for Tony Blair because he looked as if he had some answers and good motivation - and the reality is, he did and he didn't (and the same applies to folks like Al Gore, who's riding high at present). People now think Tony Blair was wrong - but he was and he wasn't, and that's a biased, reactive, narrow judgement. He did what he did, and he was the best that we could manifest at the time, but he proved to be fallible and as subject to the Faustian contract as much as anyone. So it's back to square one. We must give thanks to George Bush, because he is at least visibly an asshole (that's a narrow judgement too) - but we mustn't fall foul of the erroneous idea that someone else will come along with a magic wand to make it all right again. It's all much deeper, wider and bigger than that, and we must look at the Faustian formula itself. How are we ourselves part of this problem?

Best wishes

Palden