Sometimes I can be gob-smacked by the totally obvious. It’s happened again. About how this era is echoing and growing the themes of the ’60s. Yes, we can see the unpopular war, new idealism for politics again, mass movements of a populist nature coming up against powerful established interests willing to do anything at all to crush the movements.
These are all themes we share with the ’60s, and both periods are characterized by the conflicts of hard astrological aspects between Uranus, Saturn, and Pluto. And we can see that many of the social issues of that time are in front of us again. Even health care for everyone, as a bookend to the 1960’s Medicare legislation that now no-one wants to give up.
But what is the larger picture? When these aspects move around the circle for another round of events, it’s typical to see the same issue come up. But there is a deeper theme.
Remember the old line “Never trust anyone over 30.”??? WHY was that a theme? What was it about passing the Saturn Return that made people untrustworthy to young people? Well, that’s the time people settle down to responsibilities. More importantly, to the youth of that time, 30 was the point at which people sold out their ideals in favor of money and security. They “sold out”.
Anderson and Ray, in their fabulous book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World point out how many of the “weird new ideas” of the 1960s and early ’70s are totally mainstream now. Back then, Yoga was “like really WEIRD man”. Now there’s a yoga studio in every strip mall. Meditation, organic food, eco-consciousness, even mind-altering experiences are part of mainstream reality and have merged into a new consciousness. If you want to open a new yoga studio, you’d better put your advertising on recycled paper (or no paper) using eco-friendly (or electronic) ink, and you’d better serve carefully selected herbal teas and bottled water in your snack bar. These trends got started in the ’60s, but they are very much alive today.
But what was the big deal about the “sell-outs”? It was putting materialism over consciousness. Putting matter above spirit, soul, conscience. That was the big deal. Selling out your conscience for power and money. Now, in the ’60s, these change-producing planets were in mutable signs. They could change feelings but they didn’t change the whole world. Now our changes are coming in Cardinal signs… and at zero cardinal at that! Why is this important? Zero degrees of a Cardinal sign is considered to be the degree that brings matters to WORLD attention. Pluto is dancing around zero Capricorn. Saturn is moving toward zero Libra, and Uranus is moving up on zero Aries. This change will be forced on the world at large.
So what is the most pressing problem in the world today? The staggering greed of rampant capitalism, which created “consumers” out of citizens. This gluttony of overconsumption on the part of the rich (which includes the entire western world) and of businesses who sold out conscience in every way to grab as much money as they could in any possible way, has now brought the world economy into a tailspin. Again, we are seeing the sell-out of values for money. And this time we’re seeing it on a vast scale.
Those who were young people in the ’60s did their own sell-out. They grew up to lead companies through this time of exponential greed. And it’s interesting to think about the “over 30” expiration date. It’s at age 29 that we experience our first Saturn Return, and decide how we want to spend our adult life. Young people from the ’60s are now beginning to experience their Second Saturn Return… and we are now deciding how we want to spend the rest of our lives. Let’s hope we can all stick together, old, middle-years, and young people, to reduce the materialism of our culture and bring spirit, soul, and conscience back into our world.
Out with the anti-materialism of the past, which brought us hippies and communes, and IN with the anti-materialism of now, which says that ALL of us need to live in a smaller footprint, with respect and reverence for all the natural forms of life on this living earth–including our fellow human beings.
