Banned TED Talk: The Science Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake at TEDx Whitech...

Uranus in Aries - Jessica Murray

We know, just as animals know a storm is coming, that we are alive during a tipping point on planet Earth. More and more of us are feeling drawn to engage with the world, not to deny it. Whether our engagement is direct or indirect, spiritual or secular, it springs from the same idea: that the meaning of global events is part of the meaning of our lives as individuals. This means that the sufferings of the wider world are not just background noise. The corruptions of our society aren’t merely a cosmic plot to wreck our career. Global events are not random tragedies that the Metaverse decided, on a mean-spirited whim, to cook up in order to mess with our peace of mind. The melting of polar ice caps, the ISIL fighters in Iraq, the gang rapes in India, the jailing of journalists in Egypt and everything else are part of our lives for a reason. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we are part of these happenings. Our souls wanted to learn from them. It takes spiritual courage to keep the mind open when our hearts feel like closing in distress. This is when it’s good to remember a basic astrological premise: If we’re alive during these years, we are, by definition, up to the challenge of these years.And right now we have access to an extraordinary dose of courage, during Uranus in Aries (2010-19), square to Pluto is being triggered by the Sun as I write. Its key teachings are: 1. the freedom of the individual and 2. the power of ordinary people. This is the transit that brought the issue of income inequality to the forefront of the mass mind. Since then, the 1% has been working overtime doing damage control. Their blasphemies against everything Uranus stands for have been getting more and more flagrant. Can you imagine the reaction of Uranian genius Thomas Jefferson, for example, upon hearing that the US Supreme Court had granted corporations the cropped status of individual persons? Madison Avenue has been busier than ever since Occupy, co-opting its populist cri de coeur. Have you seen that commercial for PayPal, assuring us that because we, the 99%, are consuming their product in droves, fattening the coffers of the 1%, somehow this means that “people rule”? To hold onto our freedom of thought amidst a daily barrage of plutocratic propaganda, we have to stay exquisitely alert. And it must be an alertness attuned to this particular world moment. Our dangers are as native to current times as the plague was native to Elizabethan Europe. The pestilence we face is that of 21st-century mind control. We’re up against the ubiquitous commercial messages of wired life (Uranus), and the virtually unlimited political resources at the disposal of the powersthat-be (Pluto). The only way to meet these challenges is with the inner resources that are ours by birthright. We start with our goddess-given intelligences, separating out real information from disinformation. Where advertising is concerned, most of us in the capitalist West have gotten used to doing this: we’re not going to faint with surprise when we find out, for example, that our expensive pomegranate drink in fact contains only 3/10 of a percent of pomegranate juice. Where the news is concerned, however, often a fog of credulity descends over the collective mind. The news about Iraq, for instance, tends to arrive in the West pre-packaged in NATO’s narrative: a doctored storyline that in no way prepared American observers for what’s happening there now. But astrology has been giving us, all along, a sense of what was waiting in the wings. We knew the cardinal cross would be about world-destabilization. That’s its point. We expected national boundaries (Capricorn) to break down (Pluto) in some way, as is now happening with the Syria-Iraq 539812border. The sudden segue of one war [Syria's] into another [Iraq's]; the armed (Mars) takeover (Pluto) of cities like Mosul and Tikrit– places we hoped to never again hear war reportage about – are part of the crumbling of a toxic paradigm of world governance. Worldwide, sureties are disappearing, making us need more than ever to stay in touch with the era-specific gifts with which our birth chart comes equipped. Each of us has an inborn nose for the truth. When we’re accessing our common sense (Mercury) and holistic perception (Uranus), we’re far less likely to get seduced into the fake infighting of national factions. We’re able to spot the propaganda hiding behind the reportage of mainstream journalism. We see military language for the manipulative ploy that it is. In the case of the Iraq war, we are able to point out the elephant in the room: That this was a war for oil, profit and control. Washington’s plan was to divide the country along sectarian lines in order to conquer it. They managed the first part, and haven’t given up on the second. To ask qui bono? about the war in Iraq is to see that the major shareholders of such agencies as Boeing and General Dynamics profited handsomely. Millions of other human beings, of course, lost everything, including their lives. As the Cross pummels the US chart, Washington’s underlying motives, together with its careening incompetence, are undergoing a long, rocky series of exposés. At the moment we are watching yet another American president sending yet another shipload of “military advisers”to Iraq, to be followed up by troops and guns.A question that should be asked at this point is: Which Iraqis, exactly, want Uncle Sam back? It certainly isn’t the people (Uranus) of Iraq. It is the dubious Nouri al-Maliki and the masters of war in Washington (Pluto) who installed him. In talking about the Uranus-Pluto square this way, I do not mean to suggest that Uranus is the good guy and Pluto the bad guy. Each of these powerful planetary archetypes has both a trans-egoic capacity – its heroic side — and a shadow capacity – its dark side. The latter manifests when we fail to understand the planet’s higher purpose. The shadow side of Pluto – warlords, plutocrats and the destruction of the environment through human greed – is all too obvious in these years of the cardinal cross. Harder to see is its heroic side: the complete makeover of obsolete structures that stand in the way of our evolution. Uranus’ shadow side is exemplified by disconnected technology: data used without empathy; bio-tech that abrogates the laws of Mother Earth. Its heroic side is the capacity of individuals to convene together in support of each other’s shared humanity. It is the whimsy of the best political theater, the idea-sharing of dissidents, the courage of activists who rise up to protest injustice. It is the righteous crowd that, no matter how many times it is overpowered by police, spy agency or military, will not disburse.