Great Conjunctions, New Ages, and the Heart and Soul

Transcript:

0:06
Hi, everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology, happy great conjunction, happy Winter Solstice to everybody. What a remarkable day it is astrologically. I wanted to come on and do a live cast today, to add a few thoughts to the series that I already made on the great conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn. I was feeling like there were a few more things that were worth communicating about this. And so after further reflection, I wrote up one last talk to help us celebrate, and perhaps meditate and go inwardly a little bit on a really special astrological moment. It feels to me if nothing else, like the start of a new solar year, and the start of perhaps turning the page after what was a very difficult 2020 for many of us. And both collectively, and I'm sure that the transits of 2020 were hitting people's birth charts in a lot of very powerful ways as far as I saw my practice in my own life, too. And so if nothing else, this great conjunction and winter solstice, for me feels like a turning point in the story. And as someone who loves stories, who I went to graduate school and studied creative writing, and an MFA in a in a master's degree as well. And one of the things that I come to understand about myself is that even more than writing stories, which I like to do when I wrote a book, but I love hearing stories, and I love watching stories, and I love noticing them in my own life and coming to realise that I'm taking part in a story. And no matter how a story turns out, I love it. You know what I mean? And there's something about that, that seems to save me in my life over and over again, I don't know if you guys feel the same way. But when there's a critical turning point in a story, I celebrate it, because I just love stories so much. And I want to talk a little bit about that today and about the imaginal value of this transit, the imaginal meaning or value of the new age or the idea of a new age. What does that mean? What is the what is the archetypal meaning of this concept or idea of a new age? And what value does it have for the heart and soul that we celebrate such a moment and that there's so much like, like I think of like the tinsel on a Christmas tree. And I feel like this day is surrounded by psychic tinsel. Because there's so much riding on it. There's this sense of it being a turning point in a story. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

2:56
Before I dive in, I want to remind everybody, first of all, in the comment section, please tell me where you're coming in from I love to hear where you guys are listening from that's always really fascinating to me. And, as well, I'd love to as you listen to this talk and you have any reflections to share in the live chat. Or if you're listening after this live talk is over in the comment section. I'd love to hear you know, how is 2020 been for you? And what are you looking forward to in 2021. I don't always have time to respond to everybody's comments, but I love reading them. And I just I love seeing, you know, sharing in something with other kindred spirits. So thank you all for a beautiful 2020 and I'd love to hear your reflections on the year as we celebrate this turning point in the story. I also want to remind people that I have let's see here, uh, 11 days left in my Kickstarter, which is running up until January 1. So I'm going to put the link to that into the live stream. And if you would like to pitch in and support my work in the year ahead, I deeply appreciate it. If you like this channel, he listened to it, you share it. Your support helps me do a lot of things helps me build cool things in the future. support my family in this way support a staff of three people that helped me every single day. There's the link in the chat box, you can pick up different exclusive talks and little readings that I give as gift rewards, as well as half off tuition to all of my online training programmes in 2021, including my advanced programmes or my year one ancient astrology for the modern mystic course. We're doing really well. We're trying to meet our stretch goal, which is to get to 1000 backers. And we are we have about let's see 140 left to go. So by the New Year, so hopefully we can get there and thank you everyone already for pitching in. If you have So, and if you can't pitch in, you know, just send up some prayers that this channel would can tend to be a hospitable place for spiritual growth. And that Iget better at what I do, too. Those prayers are as good as a donation to me. So thank you.

5:08
Alright, so I've been reflecting a lot. And what I want to talk about today is that I've been reflecting a lot on this idea that we're entering the Age of Aquarius, or that this is the signalling of a new age of 200 years plus of great conjunctions and air signs. And it's been really fun to imagine what that might mean. And to predict what that might mean. And to get excited about it. I fielded more questions and the videos that I made on on the great conjunction, were more popular than anything I've ever done in my 10 year career. So everyone's really dialled into this right now. But I've also noticed some things surrounding this that it feels like are worthy of meditating on. At first, it was like, I wanted to put out some videos that were just purely informational and reflective on the archetypal combination and what you might expect. But then there's this secondary level of any transit, which is the way in which we as a collective start to surround the transit and adorn it with all of our different psychic projections, right, and those projections are can be very beautiful, and some of them can be destructive, and, but we surround it's like, imagining that there's a theatre, in medieval Europe somewhere, and there's a Shakespeare play that's about to happen. And the play itself is going to be amazing, because Shakespeare's this masterful playwright, but imagine that there's also a crowd of people anticipating the experience. And so part of the Shakespearean experience is also the thrill and hype and crowds and fanfare that surrounds the theatre. And that has to be understood as a part of the imaginal extension of a Shakespeare play in this analogy that I'm using, right? So I started reflecting on this and being like, wow, there's this whole level of psychic tinsel service, you know, that we're adorning this transit with? And what is that? Because that's a part of the transit too, it might seem like it's external to it, like we're separate reflecting upon it and adding things to it. But it's actually also something of an expression of the transit itself, all of the different projections and fantasies and hype in the news and on social media and everything like that. So I started thinking about and I started thinking, Well, what is a new age because a lot of the tinsel that I see wrapping this transit, right now is about a new age, a new like a new era. So I started reflecting on this, well, here's a short list of what I have understood new age to be and how what I've noticed that it seems to mean to other people, a new age, whether we're talking about it right now, or you know, when I think it was hair came out, and that song, The Age of Aquarius came about or we're talking about the Mayan 2012 calendar date, you remember that one, too, there was a lot of new age talk surrounding that calendar date as well. And it was on the winter solstice, back in 2012. What does a new age mean?

8:39
I see that it's often associated with the idea that human beings as a whole, or at least maybe some elect or select group of people are going to take a huge leap forward, either in their understanding of something or in their actual consciousness, that there's going to be like, potentially almost like a random mutation of some kind that's going to happen. And that's one way that people have of engaging with the idea of a new age. On an imaginal level. That's one of the imaginal pictures that we get of a new age. And it's recurring. It's not just right now, that's always something that's been there around New ages, even for 1000s of years. Right? So it's often associated with kind of a leap in consciousness. It's often associated with what I would call different forms of utopian idealism. And I'm not trying to be insulting by saying that because I to dream of better worlds, as I'm sure many people do. But there's this sense of the future delivering us the world that we've been waiting for. That's another imaginative idea that society somehow is going to change or that the rules or governing ideological constructs are going to that are going to come out and guide us to better days, come forth and guide us to better days. It can mean something, also very different depending on which ideology governs that New Age. Right. So you have, historically you have groups of people from all over the world in different religions and traditions and cultures, whose idea of that new age, you know, wrapped in a different ideological vision of the future, will prevail, and that, that that diversity of futures is related to a diversity of ideas, ideologies that would guide or lead the way to that future. And that's really diverse, it looks very different from one person and group to another. It often means that the past is dark, the New Age means the past is dark, and the future will be better. Or it can also mean that sometimes it's that the past was good, the status quo is bad. And the future will bring us forward in some kind of full circle to a golden age that was forgotten or lost. I think, for example, even recently, of the political mantra, whether you were on one side of the political spectrum are not just on an archetypal level, the phrase Make America Great Again, it assumes that there was a kind of a golden age and that we should get back to that in the future, we're going to go forward to that past. So sometimes the new age, and this is not to pick on that movement right now, or to highlight it at all. It's just to say that there's often like, I remember when I was first getting into the world of Terence McKenna, Alan Watts, you know, drinking ayahuasca a whole bunch over many years of my life. And there was the sense of an archaic revival, that was a phrase that was actually used. And this was also a kind of New Age thing, because we're talking about bringing something back that's been lost that if we have it going forward will somehow bring out the best in us. So sometimes a new age can be thought of in terms of the revival of certain things from the past, or perhaps a marriage of the past with certain new technologies or advances or evolutions. But those are, broadly speaking, the kinds of rhetoric and ideas or fantasies that I've noticed, surrounding this moment right now and other moments in my life as an astrologer, particularly the 2012 moment. So I'm not here to hate on any of those things today, but I am here to unpack them as psychic and archetypal realities, so that we can reflect upon them and engage with them. As long as astrology has been around, there's been two ways of engaging with the planets that astrologers have talked about. You have the idea of the planētes asteres, the wandering star, as an individual entity that's wandering according to its own idiosyncratic nature, the planets in the sky, each follow their own different natures and courses and speeds and synoptic cycles. And this can be understood as reflective of our are deviating somehow from cohesion with the whole that the stars have always had this way of potentially reflecting our our deviant wanderings in life somehow missing the whole picture somehow falling away from harmony with the whole, harmonia as the ancient Greeks called it or vrta as the Indian astrologers called it. So the stars can reflect that. The word for planets in Indian astrology grahas meaning grabbers, something that if we are not conscious of will grab us and will reflect our wanderings or slumbering, an ignorant wanderings in the material energy asleep somehow. And yet the very same study of astrology by becoming aware of the presence of the grahas, of the wandering stars. It's a mirror that helps us to become aware of our own wanderings, illusions, delusions, asleepness and unconsciousness so that we can come into some kind of conscious participation in Divine creation in the lila of God in creation. And so astrology is such an interesting thing because it shows us that almost like the karmic laws governing our wanderings in slumber, but at the same time, it can be the gateway to conscious participation. So, whenever something comes up, even the way that we tend to be engaging with astrology itself, it is archetypal. So in other words, the tinsel surrounding this great conjunction, the celebratory excited anxious projections of New Age fantasies, all of these things are not good or bad, but archetypal. So it's really important so that we're not grabbed and seized, because most of the time with great collective planetary events, that that level at which we are engaging with and talking about the transit is the very first signs of how the transit is starting to grab us unconsciously. And so to become conscious of how we're even interacting with a transit is the first step to having a participatory relationship with it. And so we have to become aware of what is the archetypal nature of New Age thinking? And what does it do for the soul that the soul loves and values to the extent that sometimes it can get totally swept up in it and lose itself? But also, you know, what is its value so that we can participate with the the meaning of a new age constructively, or reflectively, or aesthetically beautifully?

16:20
Well, let's talk about some of the potentially unconscious results of thinking about the new age in the ways that I've outlined so far. One of the things that can happen if we want to make a leap forward in consciousness is that we can leap outside of ourselves, we can leap out of our own mind, we can leap out of the present moment, we can leap out of our own hearts, and we can, in our excitation about something new that lies in the future, we can sort of dissociate and leap out of ourselves. That's one potential danger doesn't mean that you have to has to be that way. But it could be that way. So it's something to be aware of. Another potentially unconscious thing that happens when we're grabbed by New Age excitement, is that we may condemn the world as it is. Anytime that we get into futuristic thinking that can happen. Or we can condemn the world as it was sometime in the past, which by objectifying it in some way is, is it can be like an act of psychic violence. And if we think that reality doesn't respond to the way that we think about it, we're really mistaken. When we think of the past, when we think of the present, as dead, what we're really doing is we're saying something to somebody, reality is sentient reality is a being not just dead stuff. So when we say, well, the past was dead, and the future is going to be something more, or the status quo sucks, and the future will be something more. If we do that unconsciously, there may be elements of truth to those statements. But if we do such things unconsciously, it helps to understand that what we're doing is saying something toward or at reality and ourselves and each other. And that objectification can happen. And these are things that Aquarius in particular, as a sign is prone to, we're going to talk more about why that is the case a little bit, but in idealising something we can also objectify things and people and timelines and periods of history. When we do that, the world doesn't become any more or less objective, it becomes more or less objectified. And then we start to have a different kind of relationship with it as a result.

18:44
We can dissociate through the lens of ideology. I'm not saying that ideology is undesirable, I'm just saying, we can dissociate when we live through the lens of ideology. We can also when we think about future ages, and so forth, we can also discard the wisdom or beauty of the past. We can also lose I think the most important thing is that we can lose the felt quality of timelessness, what is timelessness it, Plato said this, and I'll probably say this again today. He said that time is the moving image of eternity. And so in our relationship to the time bound realm of experiences, it's really important to remember that time itself from at least from the standpoint of ancient mysticism from east and west, time itself was timeless, which means time is like a merry go round that's always been going around. It has the appearance of movement in a linear manner, just like a horse is going in a circle. Does but has no starting point or ending point? Because it it is that movement itself is a reflection of the wholeness of eternity. That's a really important thing that ancient astrologers believed and held on to. How does it change our thinking about a new age, if we also are thinking to ourselves that everything is eternally held that everything is it eternal, and that the distinctions of past, present and future are held within the totality of eternity. I know that's like, kind of sounds really grand. But I think that is really, really important. To hold the perspective of eternity as we think about whatever it might mean for there to be some new age. It doesn't mean we can't think about a new age that's off limits, don't you know, everything is timeless? No. A new age is something that feeds our soul, the thought of it the desire for it. It is an archetypal imaginative fantasy that is somehow necessary for life, otherwise, life wouldn't keep needing it and expressing it and creating it and destroying it. But it is about how can just like any planetary transit, how do we hold the kind of numinous ideal of a new age, within the perspective of timelessness? And I think that if you can, if you can think about that, even once a day in the year ahead, as we're going through this, you know, this great conjunction, if you can just once a day, write that down? How do I think about this newness within the scope of eternity? It's like a little koan, you know, and it will, I believe, it will change our lives to keep considering that and not go away from the question, not try to answer it either. But to just have it as something that we come back to.

21:58
Ancient mystics believed that ages cycled between light and dark. So and you had actually between the East and the West, you have mirroring, four stage cycles, in some cases, where you have the descent through light ages into dark ages and the ascent from Dark Ages into light ages. And this cycling, of ages of light and dark was itself timeless was was itself endless. You have some of the most beautiful religious iconography in the world, coming from India, in my opinion, when you see the worlds emanating from Vishnu, the pores of Vishnu, his body as he's laying on the causal ocean, and then when the day and a night of Brahma have passed, the worlds are collected back into his body. And that this itself is like the breathing of reality. Without origin without end, these pictures, stay with us, they really deeply, deeply deliver the soul from the peril of literalistic thinking, they deliver us from the peril of trying to figure out our place within the confines of of doubt, and, and having to figure out the literal objective beginning and end. And, you know, we try to circumscribe reality, and such images like Vishnu and the the world's pouring out and coming back in. They're there to save us from the traps of literalism, getting caught in the literalisms of time bound thinking. So that when we go through time, we're going to encounter new ages, Dark Ages, light ages, yes, but those images of eternity and understanding time within the scope of eternity, deliver us to timelessness within each moment within each age, no matter if it's dark or light. So that's why we need them there. This is what the purpose and study of astrology, whether you're studying ages, or the nature and meaning of planets and karma, in the ancient world were all about.

24:16
We have so much evidence of the cycling of light and dark, at least anecdotally, in our view of the cosmos from the standpoint of our human consciousness. I often wonder you know, what would astrology be like on another planet? I think that's a really interesting question too. But from our perspective, the sun and the moon cycle through light and dark, right daily the sun cycles through light and dark monthly, the moon through light and dark yearly, the sun through light and dark. What is time itself calendars that we've built in made, if not an expression of our of our trust in the nature of reality as the cycle and so the cycles in the ancient world were between light and dark. But it was not just a way of keeping track of linear time it was a way of encapsulating linear time within the eternal fluctuation between these opposites is constant. In other words, and we're not trying to overcome one opposite at the cost of the other in the mystical, spiritual practice of astrology, we are trying to learn how to hold the tension of those opposites within the soul. And the soul itself is said to be that the timeless medium of these experiences, we're here to have these experiences in and through the heart and soul which are timeless, unborn and undying, and incapable of actually being harmed or destroyed, as Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita. There's two ways that ancient astrologers, specifically in the West, at least, I can't say as much about India, but I assume is probably similar. There were two ways that opposites were thought about. And we can see this trickling down probably from Pythagoreans through the Platonists. And, and perhaps some of the roots of the Pythagoreans coming from, you know, the early forms of Egyptian mysticism that Pythagoras was said to be influenced by so who knows exactly where it comes from. But the two types of opposites which Jung also expounds, upon in, in his modern archetypal psychology work, which is really deeply mystical. There's two kinds of opposites there are opposites as contraries never mixing. So there's a sense in which light is dark and dark is is light is not dark, and dark is not light, they stand as fundamentally opposed categories. And then there are opposites that exist as a long a spectrum that is constantly moving and changing along a spectrum. For example, hot and cold, you're sort of relatively more warmer or colder and, and so there's, there's this kind of constant movement along a spectrum. So you have two different ways of understanding and dealing with opposites that ancient astrologers were aware of. And you can see these different types of opposites reflected throughout the actual technical language of astrology, for example, in the difference between domicile and excitation rulerships versus exiles or falls, you have masculine and feminine signs, you have dualities of rulerships, versus signs that only have one planetary ruler, these all of these are reflective of this very intricate philosophy of opposites that was very similar in nature to the eaching, which is this kind of elaborate calculus of Yin and Yang.

28:05
The two different kinds of opposites are important to understand, though, for a few different reasons. They're important to understand because they reflect different ways that we experience reality itself. In a sense, you have the one and the many, the one being the timelessness, the soul, spirit, source, God, the unity of all things, of which our soul is part and parcel, non different from, right and then you have the many, which is a simultaneously existing way in which everything is apart, separate, fundamentally other. And those two things exist paradoxically, simultaneously, in a sense, they themselves are opposed to one another. So we have an experience of being in a fallen sublunary world. As the ancients put it, we have an experience of being other and alienated from God from the universe from each other from ourselves from nature, and that other that fundamental otherness has an actual reality. It's not just an illusion, it has an actual kind of ontological truth value. At the same time, paradoxically, we're fundamentally connected to everything else and never actually lose that connection. In bhakti, we call this achintya-bhedabheda-tattva, which is simultaneous and inconceivable oneness and difference. And so in ancient mysticism, we have these two different categories of opposites through which we experience each other reality itself ourselves, others, in one way we will and they exist. At the same time, we will experience each other as a duality, a sense that I'm separate from you You're separate from me, we're not the same. But at the same time, we're going to see ourselves existing in a kind of spectrum, in connection with those, or anything that we see as other from ourselves. So in this sense, ancient mystics were thinking of reality and the reality of the soul and its experiences in this realm. It's experience with God, God's experience with us and God's experience with reality as a lila, which is to say, a play a play between the one and the many, a play between eternity and time. So you, we have to understand that time itself. Or let's put it this way, the word new, which we often associate, which with the new age, the word new, is sometimes opposed to the word old. But the word new is also this Eternal Word. It's an eternal experience that exists outside of time, and not at all in any kind of relationship with the past or the present. It's an archetypal dimension of experience that's always there in every experience, even as there can be times where we feel that there's something new and it's really, really different from something that was old. That paradox, that's the little koan, that I'm saying, we need to place on our, our little desks or whatever, take it with us in our backpacks to the school of life. What does it mean in this newness, that all things are also timeless? If we don't understand this, then we can't really receive what is really new. Which we have to learn to understand as an archetypal phenomenon that exists in the heart and soul and not just in the literalness of time. When we literalize the New Age, in other words, it will concretize and only be experienced in terms of opposition's to the past or to the present. And it's my sense that not bringing in the archetypal nature of New Age, trips us up and it deepens our misunderstanding of one another of reality itself. And we tend to start objectifying people and things we spend, we tend to start living captured in prisons of ideology about a future that can't live up to. It simply can't live up to the depth of desire that we're projecting onto this future.

32:46
So when we imagine a new age from the reality of the soul, which is timeless, then we experience the real meaning of the word Renaissance, which Jupiter and Saturn great conjunctions have always been associated with. The real meaning of the word Renaissance is rebirth. To rebirth something does does not mean birthing something for the very first time because it's never existed because we've been so messed up up until now, it means that something that has always been is returning is coming back to the light. Just like the circle carries things around and brings them forth as new again. That doesn't also mean that something from the past is literally coming back to save us. It's an experience of newness exists archetype really in the heart and the soul. And in through time, we see its reflections. This is a way that's helpful to remember all of this. Remember that Aquarius is traditionally the exile of the sun. The sun is in its detriment or exile. I don't like the word detriment because it just sounds like, Well, you've chosen a bad outfit for the day. You know, what an ugly outfit choice you've made how detrimental? No, when the sun is in exile in the sign of Aquarius, what we're really talking about is an inherent archetypal tension between the sun and Saturn. The sun is in its home sign in Leo, in its exile in the sign of Aquarius. Why is that? Well, because the sun represents the eternal, the eternal, and in the sense of that which is ever luminous the light of consciousness, the light of spirit, as a symbol, not literally, as a symbol it represents that whereas Saturn represents the time bound, right the form that comes and goes that dies, that is impermanent, and the two are pitted against one another and Saturn is said to be the planetary ruler of the opposition aspect in astrology. But there's always a secret alchemy in the opposition. And that is that whenever something literal dies, it brings us back to the ever present origin, it brings us back to the light of spirit that cannot die. And so dying and undying are in this dance with one another. We realise over and over, we're reborn over and over and over again, through death through impermanence through change. And, for example, in the Bhakti tradition, what do we say that enlightenment looks like? The picture is not of some drowning out of form, and experience and very variety and diversity and manyness, those are the same traditions that tend to condemn everything sort of lunar and created. And no, we say that we go to a world where the same lila is taking place, but we experience the fluctuation, the change the impermanence, from the wholeness of the heart from the perspective of an awakened illumined soul. So what we see in the world, in a way is as good as it gets, it's just that we aren't experiencing it from the pure consciousness of the bliss, knowledge, truth, beauty of our undying and unborn soul. And so Saturn and the sun stand in this opposition, where we can very easily make time the enemy and consciousness the Saviour. But understood, just like Plato said, time is the moving image of eternity. Saturn, not surprisingly, was a planet that ruled feigned appearances, which means things that are supposed to look a certain way but can't live up to it or are false or misleading in some sense. And of course, this is in contrast to the sun, which was associated with the light of the real forms, for example, in platonic thinking.

37:06
Also notice how the journey to illumination can't be made. Without the prisoner, in the chains in the cave with the shadows dancing on the wall, like Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we need that. That's a part of the grid against which we grind up against it to work out our salvation in love, that substance is the the variegatedness, the experiences in time, the experiences of the old and the heaviness of the old, and the desire for the new in time. Those experiences are sanctified in the spirit and soul, when we move through them with an eye for eternity. When we move through them with an understanding of eternity, or even just a desire for the eternal, those experience become the breaking open of the bread. That is the christening of our own consciousness is our little Halo starting starting to glow, you know, around us. So that these two planets have this opposition too and one of the unfortunate, very literal ways that they tend to show up is past/present bad future good future is where the light is. But the future can't ever carry that heavy of a mantle. Our projection of God, goodness, salvation, in the future, even in some afterlife, even in something that we earn or ascend to in some merit based system, anything like that is deceiving us, and is a feigned appearance that has to crumble under the weight of time. Eventually, that's what Saturn means when we say that Saturn is the ruler of feigned appearances. And so rebirthing, Renaissance, real Renaissance requires reclaiming the projections of light that we constantly cast into the future. It's not that we can't project ideals into the future, it's that we have to understand that that is indeed what we are doing and somehow maintain the ability to commune with the present and with the heart and soul that exists in all time. So rebirth is not of the new but of the timeless. That's a really important distinction. rebirth is not of the new but of the timeless. The new can't really be the new without the timeless because otherwise you're leaving one part of the equation out. You can understand these dualities and the dance of these dualities and why you can't separate them. When you look at the figure of the yin and the yang and you see within the young a little speck of light and in the in a little speck of dark and in the Yin, you know the dark you see a little speck of light they have to have a way of relating to each other constantly.

40:05
So this is a little off topic, I guess. But some people have asked me, do I see this as an ideal time for electional astrology? Should I start a new business or start a new enterprise? And I'm not, admittedly, I'm not really an election astrologer. I don't spend a lot of time and people ask me why. And I, I tried to explain it without sounding like I'm trying to condemn people who do use electional astrology, I tend to use the I Ching for asking advice about when or how to do something. And sometimes I look at the transits. astrologically. But when it comes to trying to almost like, manipulate the planets and start something at a time, when I know that I'm going to get some kind of desired outcome or result. I feel like I've in doing that in the past, I've run up against the same thing over and over, which is that I always get the opposite of what I intended. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, that seems to be a lesson about trying to manipulate or guarantee an outcome too much. I'm not saying that I'm someone who walks around the world not trying to manipulate outcomes, because that would be hypocritical of me. But I am saying that, you know, I think that it's another it's another possible way, at least for me, I can only speak for myself, and I'm really trying, I really don't want people to feel condemned. If you're like, I'm so excited to start a new business today, or, you know, you're using this energy for something in your life. You know, there's certain ways that I use astrology, you know, like that, but very few. And the reason I think it's important to mention is that I tend to get the opposite of what I think I'm going to get when I try to manipulate outcomes, when I try to project forward into the future, some desired outcome. What I think is remarkable about astrology is that the chart that seems to depict my success will have this deeply poetic way of having described my ignorance or my ego, or my failure, or my disappointment. And so I'm always amazed at the universe's insistence that we remain poetically in love with what is. And that's the lesson that I've gotten over and over and over again, in the times that I have tried to use such big transits to manipulate and get something. So I can only speak for myself, but I've gotten so many questions from people and emails asking me, is this a good time to do such and such thing? And that's kind of my response to that. I think that it's possible to make basically the same mistake that we make when we're trying to project forward with this transit, some kind of great new age in the future, that if we use transits to project forward some great final outcome, it's a feigned appearance. Because if we aren't already in the heart, which is the greatest outcome of them all, what good could anything in the future really do us other than to bring us back to the heart, which will often do through the failure or disappointment of that which we intend for? So I'm careful about electional astrology, I'm not I'm not condemning of it, but I'm very careful with it, I tend to look and say, I'm feeling like maybe I should write this email right now, you know that I look at the transits. And there's a moon Mars opposition, I'm going yeah, I'm coming from a place of anger. So I use it to kind of check my intentions, and to make sure that I'm steady in the heart. And I think if you're using it as navigational help to just stay in your best self, I think that's great, and I wouldn't condemn that at all. And that's kind of how I use it, and how I think about this moment.

43:54
You know, what was unique about the Renaissance, it presented an imaginal way of engaging with reality, that for some reason, we keep going back to it keeps coming back. And what was that imaginal way in the Renaissance, as in ancient, you know, Greece, so to speak, you see, this fabled marriage of math, music, science, art, religion, in this beautiful view of the cosmos. Right. And it links all of these different disciplines together in imaginative spiritual cohesion. That's why the Renaissance keeps coming back. That's why astrology can't die because astrology is something that wants us to see math, us you know, astronomy, geometry, psychology, religion, it brings those experiences together in this great mandala. And regardless if it's objectively "true" or not, it serves something in the soul to have that kind of tapestry of meaning in our lives. So the Renaissance presents us with an imaginal way of engaging with reality where maths, music, science, art, religion are all linked imaginatively in this kind of cohesive view of the cosmos. I'm not saying it was airtight, perfect, you know that there weren't questions, debates, etc. But that's what draws us in, it's like, we're, we were so taken in by that view, we make the mistake though, of thinking that such an image, we must find some image like that, that is the final answer to everything. And at some time, in the future, when we have that final cohesive picture objectively understood, then we'll finally be in full and complete knowledge. You can feel this in the writings of the early modern astrologers, I want to read you a few things that I think you may appreciate. These are some of the things that early modern astrologers were saying about what they thought they were on the brink of a new age in astrology.

46:22
This comes from an article by Sue Ward on the meaning of the outer planets. I don't agree with everything that she says in this article. But one of the reasons that I really like it, and I have my students read it in my year two class is because you get a sense of what the mindset of early modern astrologers was, and how that kind of this kind of New Age idealism, as an archetype was infusing their their thoughts and in some ways, we're all prisoner to our moments. So I'm certainly not trying to charge them with anything. But it's important to hear what they were thinking about the present and the past astrologically. So this comes from an early modern astrologer from the early 1800s. He said,

47:19
"Continually finding certain effects to follow the cause of which was unknown to them, the ancients would frequently attribute partial effects to fallacious causes. Hence, the theory of the terms and phases which the experience of the present day lead us to reject, and he ends up going on to call them a relic of ancient superstition, superfluous and void of truth. He also says, substitutes were used to supply the place of the mystic planet Uranus, in horror area, astrology, the old traditions were either lost or had become so corrupted and distorted that astrology could no longer be called a science, but rather a mere mode of divination."

47:59
So you can hear this guy wants astrology to be a comprehensive, objective science. And he's saying any reason that astrology was ever wrong in the past is because they didn't have sophisticated enough scientific understanding. And it was just this mere old ancient superstition. That way of looking at the past is, is a part of what New Age thinking is guilty of sometimes. There's another quote from an early modern astrologer. This was from the astrologers magazine in London published in 1891.

48:36
"What our forefathers as astrologers lacked in deficient astronomical knowledge through which much of what they said was regarded through a superstitious eye only is more than replaced in modern times by advanced scientific knowledge."

48:54
So yeah, so there's a lot of quotes like this, I'll read you a few more. The new age and Theosophical Society and some of the things that they were saying are also important to hear. I mean, thank God for the Theosophical and New Age movements in some ways, because we wouldn't have had, you know, depth psychology, we wouldn't have had a renaissance of astrology in the West. So it's certainly not saying this to condemn, but it's also just to give us some historical context.

49:27
"We learn from those more advanced in knowledge than ourselves that she Venus is inhabited and that her humanity has reached a very high evolutionary stage. For each planet as we shall later learn is the physical world for the purpose of spiritual evolution. In the lowest class stand undeveloped an untrained souls those who are yet young and evolution in the highest, those who are older and more experienced souls practising self control and using reason and reflection in thought and action. Between these two stand by far the largest class In which are found the majority of souls of our present age were in the will has not yet full power, while on the other hand, it is not entirely plastic, there is sufficient receptivity to respond to certain vibrations and not to others."

50:12
Now, whether you like this or not, these are some of the thought forms that were present for modern, early modern astrologers, which was this picture of linear progress in time for different races and species and I'll be honest with you, I'll let you read through that article on your own if you want search for it, it's Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and their meanings by Sue Ward, you can find a PDF online, there's a number of those statements that end up becoming racist. And, and sort of, I would say that they take on the, the quality of that kind of cultural colonialism. And I'm not trying to condemn them, because I think that there's again, there's, it's not black or white, there's many really remarkable things that these these groups of astrologers do to bring astrology forward. But there's also this relentless feeling that history is a linear chronological development and that souls are evolving toward higher and higher stages. And the only thing I want to point out is how different that is, from the view of time and eternity, that mystics in the Buddhist, yogic, ancient Western hermetic traditions had. It's just very different. So he says, one more thing that's worth hearing.

51:56
"A few students looking more deeply into the esoteric side of the study have discovered that there are higher vibrations than those generally attributed to the influence of the planets, but the failure of those coming under any particular planet to respond to these higher vibrations has caused this side of the study to be neglected."

52:18
So there's also this view that starts coming forth in what I would call a kind of New Age movement of astrology, that suggests that you also have to have like a higher vibration to even do or understand the planets or astrology and that, and these gradations and sort of delineating or marking out who's advanced and who's not, who can receive the vibrations and who can't, and, and the ancient astrology was all messed up, because it didn't have the outer planets and things like that. These views, you'll find frequently in their works, that they believed that astrology was taking us to this, this new pedestal of societal experience, scientific advancement, spiritual advancement, etc. So, this is kind of just to give you a sense of how those things can play out. And again, just drawing a contrast to some of the differences in the way that ancient people looked at time and history itself. They believe that history in a sense repeats itself. Yeah the times change, but the same basic interplays of the opposites recur. And in that sense, there's also nothing new under the sun. Nothing new under the sun doesn't mean that there literally isn't anything new. It means that archetypally all things recur. Archetypally all things are eternal. So, there's another really great quote that I want to read you that comes from maybe my favourite book by CS Lewis called The Discarded Image. Now, CS Lewis was a medievalist, he studied mediaeval Renaissance literature. And he wrote this book, it was the last one before he died, I believe. And he's talking about the beauties of that Renaissance model of the cosmos, where you have math, astronomy, science, music, everything's a part of this kind of cohesive, imaginative, spiritual view. So that math in spirit, you know, science and art, these aren't they come together to say something about this beautiful in sold reality. Here's what he says at the end. He says,

54:32
"I hope that no one will think that I am recommending a return to the medieval model." So he's not saying so we have to go back to the Renaissance to get the real truth. It was buried in Atlantis somewhere. He says, "I'm only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all models in the right way. respecting each and idolising none. We are all very properly familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted model of the universe. But there's a two way traffic. The model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind."

55:11
See, so the theosophists they're not wrong necessarily, but they're engaging with reality through the lens of this archetypal construct that we call New Age. And that construct you have to remain aware of it as a construct as you engage with it, or you'll get lost by the trap of its literalism. But there's a two way traffic he says the model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind, "we must recognise that what has been called a taste in universes is not only pardonable but inevitable, we can no longer dismiss the change of models as a simple progress from error to truth."

55:57
Right, it's not just past was wrong future will be more true. "No model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomenon known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many, but also no less Surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age is knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity. Hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. It is not impossible that our own current model will die a violent death ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts unprovoked as the Nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when and because far reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new model will not be set up without evidence. But the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great, it will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we asked her. Here as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross examiner can do wonders, he will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But in relation to the total truth in the witness's mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil, it determines how much of that total truth will appear, and what pattern it will suggest."

57:37
So you see, it's not that there was an old age and that there's a new age and one is better one is worse, it's that we come to relate to reality, reality the beautiful, reality the being, you know, in a relationship, we come to relate to it through the paradigms that we use or understand about it, that those paradigms are like communicative mediums with God with each other with the universe. And what we're really saying when we want a new age is that we want a new way of communicating and relating with each other and with the universe. And we have to be very careful, because the approach that we take about what that should look like, the approach that we take in terms of the questions we ask about what is true, or what is real, will, in turn, give us a new paradigm through which to relate. So we have to be conscious and reflective about how we're thinking about new ages and new paradigms and new desires and new ideologies and so forth. And this is why we've never really stopped living in a new age, in an imaginal reality. So we don't, we don't know what we're really calling for. I think when I see all the tinsel surrounding this, what I hear in that is, I want a new heart, I want renewed mind, I want renewed spirit, I want renewed heart, I want renewed commitment to the play of divine creation. And maybe I don't feel engaged with it right now. Or the mode through which I'm seeing and communicating with God with soul with source with others, is somehow not doing doing it for me. Being aware of that is a much better starting point. Then being captured and ripped like Ganymede being abducted by Zeus by our own projections and fantasies into the future. Our own starry idealism becomes the bait for you know, higher forces to just abduct us and rip us right off into a future that we can't possibly imagine. We that we can't possibly imagine what the actual outcomes will be like. There was something else that I wanted to read you. This comes from one of my favourite books of all time, which is called the thought of the heart and the soul of the world by James Hillman. This is called the thought of the heart and the soul of the world by James Selman, I just want to read you a few passages to close. He says,

1:00:21
"When we fall in love, we begin to imagine and when we begin to imagine we fall in love. To this day depth, psychology is caught by the necessary connection of love and imagination, which it has not yet had the philosophy to place."

1:00:39
I feel the same way about astrology. I feel the same way about the kind of New Age hope and sometimes fantasies and delusions, all of the above that surround great transits in astrology, that we have yet to become reflective about why we get captured by any of this in the first place, which is necessary if we're to make actual use of this, not just be grabbed like the grahas.

1:01:07
"Now to the disguises when in our exile we stand in the contemporary heart and imagine from it. Our images move in several directions, each one a philosophy about the heart. Let us review these commonplace imaginings as expressions of the heart in our culture. First, my heart is my humanity, my courage to live my strength and fierce passion. By means of it Nothing is foreign to me, all can be admitted to its Kingdom of dignity. My most noble virtues emanate from the heart loyalty, heroic boldness compassion, let us call this the heart of the lion coeur de leon. Second, my heart is an organ of the body. It is a muscle or a pump and intricate mechanism and secret holder of my eventual death. Let us refer to this pump, pumping heart as the heart of Harvey. Third, my heart is my love, my feelings, the locus of my soul and sense of person. It is the place of intimate interiority, where sin and shame and desire and the unfathomable divine to inhabit. Let us call this the personal heart, the heart of Augustine."

1:02:18
So, first of all, he's trying to help us understand what is the heart and why am I mentioning this because remember that Aquarius is the place that is detrimental or it represents the sun in its exile. That's a very, very important thing to remember right now. And so, a little like, topography of the heart is necessary. But let's go further than that and talk about when the heart tends to get in trouble.

1:02:42
"Thus the task of consciousness for the heart of the lion lies in recognising the archetypal construct of its thought that its actions, desires, and art and beliefs are all imaginations, creations of himma, and that what it experiences as life love and world is its own enthymesus presented outside as the macrocosm alchemical psychology remarkably condenses the two traits of the Lion heart, the conformity of its thought and its objectification into the outcome, chemical substance sulphur, the principle of combustibility, the magna flama. Where is the sulphur to be found asks Kramer, a 14th century English Benedictine. In all substances, all things in the world metals, herbs, trees, animals stones are its or everything that suddenly lights up draws our joy flares with beauty each bush a god burning. This is the alchemical sulphur, the flammable face of the world. It's phlogiston it's orioli of desire. And the nice is everywhere. The fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the act of image and each thing, the act of imagination of the Anima Mundi that fires the heart and provokes that out. At the same time that sulphur conflict rates it also coagulates." and this is why by the way, Aquarius is also associated with respiratory cardiovascular issues. "It is that which sticks, the musilage, the gum the joiner, the stickiness of attachment, sulphur liberalises. The heart's desire at the very instant that the thymus enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable. What I burn with attaches me to it, I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus, in exile from my heart at the very moment that I seem most excited. We lose our soul in the moment of discovering it, 'Sweet Helen!' says Marlowe's Faustus, 'Make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck for My soul see where it flies!' Hence Heraclitus had to oppose thymus and psyche, whatever thymus witches, it buys at the expense of soul. Psychology now calls this love in the heart of the lion compulsive projection. The alchemical basis of this kind of projection is actually the sulphur in the heart that does not recognise, it is imagining. The objective himma is literalized. And the object of its desire, imagination is thrown outward, into the future, ahead of itself. And so the task is less to take back these kinds of projections, who takes them back and where are they put, but more to leap after the projectile that we hurl from our hearts reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognising that himma demands that images always be experienced as sensuous, independent bodies, they are styles of projection."

1:05:55
And that's what Lewis was saying as well. "Cordial projection requires an equally lean mode of consciousness, pride, magnanimity, courage to desire and to see through our desires. This is the courage that the heart requires."

1:06:10
So that is like, mic drop James Hillman in my book anyway, I love him. And that's how I see it, we can hope so much that we lose our own hearts in the process of projecting it forward. And as Hillman said, the point is not to condemn projections about the future, it is to understand them as expressions of the heart and to not go getting stuck in their literalisations, which is what I fear sometimes that New Age thinking does to us. So I hope that this today was a valuable talk in meditation on the archetype of the New Age. And the question that I'm left with is not ooh, stupid, new age. It's what a beautiful archetype it is. How can I relate to it without losing my heart and soul without it being the case of the sun, going into its exile, and Saturn ruler of feigned appearances, deceiving me into a future that will only disappoint because we know that the wheel keeps moving. So that's what I have to say today. I hope that you guys all enjoyed this talk that it gave you something good to meditate on for this winter solstice, this beautiful turning point in the story. I think it's a turning point in a story and I feel my heart leaping out of itself into the possibilities of what the future might bring, and I'm celebrating that as well. But being sure to to recognise those projectiles of fantasy and imagination as my own hearts enthusiasm, and what joy there is in that right now, regardless of whatever may come in the future. So with that, thank you guys for listening. Today, we are just 140 backers away from meeting my goal for the year, which is a stretch goal now of 1000. backers. If you enjoy this work, I'm going to put the link one more time into support me in the year ahead, support my staff and all the projects that we build. And you can pick up half off tuition, lots of cool rewards when you do I hope that you guys all have a very blessed Solstice today. And I also will be back later this week with lots lots more content seeing us into the new year. Okay. Take care everyone. Bye.