A Philosophical Map of the Revolution, 2016

SO YOU’RE ALIVE DURING A REVOLUTION. FUCK. WHAT TO DO?

SOME PRELIMINARY IDEAS AND TALKING POINTS.

(Written at the Full Moon / November 13^th and 14^th 2016)

Because we are in the midst of a social, cultural, and political revolution, I decided to step away from my normal forecast format of writing about the week’s astrological transits. I’ve instead put together some thoughts on some of the slower-moving transits that directly reflect this current climate. They are: Saturn in Sagittarius squaring the nodes of the Moon in Pisces and Virgo, Jupiter in Libra opposite Uranus and Eris and Aries, Saturn semisextiling Pluto in Capricorn, and Pluto in Capricorn opposing the natal Sun of the chart of the United States (July 4, 1776).

For the sake of organization and brevity (4000 words later 🙂 …), I will not be explaining what the archetypes or geometry or alignments mean in every one of these sequences; I will mostly be listing out potential and noted manifestations. Please use your own discernment when reading if something resonates with you or not. Also, many of these points are energetic and philosophical undercurrents. Let them sit in your consciousness for a bit; and their meaning of how they tie to current life and world events may flower.

Keep in mind all of the following manifestations of these energies can play out for an individual and for a group of people.

Any thoughts, questions, stories or shares that come up for you in response to this article, please write them in the comments! My intention and prayer for these words is that they can be a template for further unfolding discovery through these times. I value your autonomy and agency. Please share this article and spread the word! And now let’s go down the rabbit hole.

 

Saturn in Sagittarius semisextile Pluto in Capricorn

 Corresponds with these Problematic/Distressing Qualities:

1. Loss of meaning and disillusionment – thinking that the structures of power stood for justice and then it is revealed they do not.
2. Structures of power are dissolving and crumbling until 2020, in which new ones will begin to form. These structures are at the end of their life cycle. Their crumbling creates insecurity and fear, because we don’t know what’s coming next.
3. Poignant experience of hopelessness, helplessness around loss of security and loss of perceived control.
4. The loss of the feeling of support – seeing that something you thought was holding your reality in place simply isn’t.
5. The final product or emergence of building circumstances (these events did not come out of nowhere; they are directly related to cause and effect).

Includes these Opportunities:

1. The opportunity to focus on a new vision. There is less attachment to the structures that are crumbling, and people’s imagination is activated to begin enacting a new future.
2. Think of the government (or insert form of security here) occupying a space in people’s consciousness where there is a basic amount of trust that allows this part of consciousness to be dormant. Now, the support has been removed; people have to come forth with their participation in world affairs. The people/things we passively thought would do it for us are becoming more and more of a joke and/or dangerous and/or nonexistent. People are shocked into becoming more engaged. Think of the chain reaction: if a populace was sleepwalking and had terrible leaders, what kind of leaders emerge from a lucid population?
3. Compassion arises: as the status quo crumbles, people can’t grasp onto it. They begin to encounter other forms of security, such as divine/spiritual security, or the interconnectedness of people and community.
4. Patterns of what has led up to the current state of affairs become very clear and accessible – their clarity implies our readiness to meet them and adjust. It is up to our free will to do so.
5. Loss of trust in the government or social structures leads to people discovering other more reliable sources of security and authority within and by connection to higher self – with more humans holding this vibration from within, we advance as a society.
6. The loss of stability within patriarchy allows for other realities to become more appealing to people. As the knowledge that this patriarchal reality is not ‘all there is’ due to its failing to meet people’s needs, alternative visions that used to be fringe become more centralized, and this contributes to the wellbeing of people and of society.
7. Consider this beautiful analysis from Paul Levy: “The archetype of the dark father has to do with domination and force over others, as compared to being in relation. The archetypal, negative patriarchy has to do with the suppression of the feminine, of feeling, of spontaneity, of life itself. The negative patriarchy, synchronistically, just so happens to be the deeper archetypal process which is animating events in our world today. Alchemy is a collective dream of our ancestors which also happens to be profoundly relevant for our world today. The archetype of the negative father is initiatory, which is to say it is revealing something to us which is most important for us to know. Seen as a compensatory dreaming process, the figure of the negative father, with its willful lust for, and abuse of power, is challenging us to connect with our intrinsic, God-given power. Our true power is a power infused with the spirit of eros, with relatedness, feeling and relationship, with love and connection, all of which are elements in the magic elixir which transmutes the poisonous aspect of the draconian figure of the negative father.”

 

 

Pluto in Capricorn opposing the natal Sun of the chart of the United States (July 4, 1776):

 Corresponds with these Problematic/Distressing Qualities:

1. Terror and oppression directed at women and/or birth rights.
2. Social systems of power or corruption including incarceration, threatening the cohesion and rights of families.
3. Heightened polarity around the personal and the political; the feeling that to go on and live a life that is comfortable and safe, one has to get involved in the social or political landscape. The job is no longer in trusted hands. The feeling of being forced into action.
4. Having to take on more than one feels ready to handle; one’s innocence feeling threatened.
5. American people awaking from a long sleep – starting to see how they have been mistreated or misled.

 Includes these Opportunities:

1. Heightened polarity around the personal and the political: more and more people become socially active; the people get more active in grassroots change.
2. The body of American people is ready to become an equal with its government. That is, instead of the government being its parent or overseer; the people become the government.
3. Over time, increasing ability to humanize and forgive people in power who seemed to have lost their humanity. They are under a kind of an inherited pressure we are all freeing ourselves from. The duality dissolves. It is similar to the process of forgiving a parent for the mistakes they made raising you. But this point in the storyline is not yet about that for many – it’s about the sheer wake up call that your parents fucked up in some regard and the way that this mobilizes consciousness in an extreme, and oppositional fashion. Also down the line – the ability for the ‘parent’ in this story to step down from their adultist, “I know better than you” throne and to learn from the wisdom of the child they had ignored or mistreated.
4. Major turning point as a country.
5. People in positions of power at a turning point emotionally – cannot be numb to the real effects of their actions any longer. Crisis and change around how they operate.
6. People in positions of power or privilege deciding to use it to empower and serve others in a truer sense, or to adjust social systems for increased equity.
7. The country as a whole maturing emotionally because of this shock.

 

Saturn in Sagittarius squaring the nodes in Virgo and Pisces:

 The astrology: Skipped maturation or social development due to spiritual bypassing; belief systems that have necessitated ignoring the body and the Earth in favor of humanity’s conception of Spirit in patriarchal religion. A collective crisis in which the familiar path is to continue to rationalize the crisis through hopeful beliefs. There is a collective crisis regarding the social norms that originate from the Garden of Eden myth and the implications it carries about women, men, and sadomasochism. The entire dynamic of systematic, unconscious sadomasochism, punishment, Sin, that pleasure is wrong and suffering is right, and how it relates to a patriarchal government, punitive government, and also any crisises that arise because of these distorted belief systems that imprison the natural world, imprison women, and imprison humanity in beliefs that require certain behavior to be good or worthy of love. People don’t have to be religious to feel this: it is pervasive within the culture.

This transit signifies that the skipped maturation and social development is being recovered not through further spiritualization designed at ignoring the ills of the body or of earth but in showing up for the actual problems right in front of us. It asks for a critical gaze upon that which is not functioning/causing distress and to discover what the truly helpful adjustments and solutions are.

On a personal and political level, it is about a great sobering – waking up to Reality. Yet of course, what consensus reality is, is influenced by how the culture narrates it. To discover what Reality is outside of culture is a potential of this transit, the gateway is showing up for problems rather than allowing a belief system to help you believe there is no problem. And likewise, it is about the discovery that certain value judgements upon which is natural IS the problem and not the thing being judged itself.

There is a huge quality of innocence here, in which social structures that are unnatural/manmade and causing suffering are perpetuated by many who truly believe in their hearts that it is the “right” thing or what God would want. People are simply shocked that good intentions don’t equal good results. The issue here in terms of collective development is that the process of discerning right and wrong has been outsourced to a belief system that offers an emotional sensation of being righteous, without that actually being the practice. To take a look at what is actually not working would cause ego-death in a massive way; and though it will open up the capacity to feel even greater pleasure and enjoyment in life eventually, the trip past the gate of all those fears is quite frightening.

In this belief paradigm, perfection became unattainable or not of Earth, and one had to strive upward, while ignoring what was right in front of them. As this skipped step gets reintegrated, the concept of perfection itself changes so that perfection is right here, right now. Perfection experiences a new humility; humanity accesses a new tenderness that comes from respecting the body as inherently perfect and listening to its wisdom, rather than subjugating it to the ideals of man. This also includes the ability to listen to the signals the emotional body is sending, rather than believing these signals to be misguided and in need of suppression.

 Corresponds with these Problematic/Distressing Qualities:

1. Religious and spiritual beliefs or dogmas that require some kind of suppression.
2. One is not inherently worthy; one has to earn it. How one earns their worth is determined by an external judge.
3. The body/flesh is sin.
4. Gates of fear, i.e. “that which is outside of my belief system is the devil tricking me, I will go to hell”
5. Historic echoes around colonialism and modern colonialism, in which a group of people’s supposed elitism gave them the feeling that they had authority to destroy or dominate other groups of people.
6. Skipped developmental stages within the emotional body because of spirituality or spiritual beliefs (spiritual bypassing).
7. A great fear that analyzing problems makes a person “negative”, choosing to pretend everything is okay for the sake of manifestation or law of attraction magic.
8. Overriding the specifics and the problems that are occurring with spiritualism re: Oneness, or “I don’t see color, we’re all the same”. This is a Piscean kind of delusion here. The unresolved immaturity is around discernment in regards to belief. You can “believe” we’re all equal, but if that’s not your practice, then it’s not real.
9. Differences exist. The need for competency within navigating differences, instead of electing systems that provide support for one group while demanding conformity from others.
10. Simultaneously making unhealthy choices and enduring the hardship that results, harboring beliefs that glorify the endurance of hardship and suffering, rather than discerning a solution or showing up for the real work that the crisis implicates. Example: A man believes that being a good person means that he helps people in need. He regularly goes out of his way to do nice things for other people, even though it gets in the way of his own needs. He ends up hurting his back from doing physical labor for other people that is, in addition, free of pay. He believes that his suffering is noble and that while he suffers now, he will be rewarded in heaven. Though he performs all of his labors without complaint, he also feels victimized and resents his friends for not noticing how much they are putting him out. On a developmental level, his spiritual beliefs prevent him from learning emotional lessons such as how to set boundaries, how to give and receive, how to not give, how to communicate honestly. His spiritual beliefs encourage him to ignore the needs of his body and his emotional body, in favor of an ideal.
11. Deep-seated belief that sacrifice is the route to success, whether it is one’s own sacrifice or someone else having to be the sacrificing party.
12. Lack of equity.
13. Extreme judgement of something natural (like sexuality, earth magic) and the suppression and persecution of that.
14. People out to lunch, have no clue about privilege or how they occupy it, will have delusional ideas about what reality is for people who are not them. When this is pointed out to them as they stumble into a confrontation they have no clue they instigated, they will feel victimized. Only when they are willing to do the work of learning about other realities will they mature.
15. Conflict cropping up around being very innocent or naïve about some facet of reality to which you had been supported to be blind about, but is now loudly demanding your attention, especially in the form of criticism, illness, or reoccurring crisis.
16. Taking up a de-facto God – pedestalling something or someone. Disillusionment or crisis that results when it fails to hold up to the expectation.
17. Social memory, socialization that equates being “wrong” with Hell, gives people such a fear about being wrong. Having an organized system tell them they are virtuous is a shelter from that fear, regardless of the validity of that organized system’s ethics.
18. Desire for others to be punished. Desire to return mistreatment for mistreatment, which perpetuates negative cycles.

 Includes these Opportunities:

1. Infinite Self Worth. As one identifies and regularly meditates on the concept of being infinitely worthy of love, their reality will shift. Moments in which one’s previous programming determined they would judge themselves or feel somehow inadequate begin to be de-programmed. If we know we are inherently worthy of love, we make different choices that in effect dismantle oppression and internalized oppression. We also can recognize the inherent worthiness of others.
2. Infinite self-worth is the balm to belief systems built on conditional love.
3. Listening to what feels ‘off’ and seeking a solution that truly solves it, not just gives us the illusion that it is fixed.
4. Growth happens by truly addressing and solving problems, not by coming up with ideals that are really a form of avoidance. Avoidance is rooted in the dynamic of ‘you can never be perfect so why try?’ Perfection is not the aim, nor is arriving at a final destination where we can just relax and settle in forever. It’s the learning potential of the process, which holds so much abundance when we just embark upon it, again and again.
5. The ability to face problems one had to put away on a shelf just to be able to continue to survive.
6. Adjustments to one’s health, routine, or diet altering consciousness, the ability to take on more of our dreams in life because we feel healthy.
7. Removing punitive dynamics from consciousness – no longer seeing cause and effect as “punishment” or “bad karma” but becoming increasingly aware of how reality works without the projection and mythos of sin.
8. New ethics emerging which are more natural, less manmade. Ethics based on love and being in harmony with all of Creation, versus being in harmony with the rules of society at the cost of the natural world.
9. Making healthy choices that change your standards and cause you to disengage from abusive relationships.
10. A new relationship to the Universe in which wishes are fulfilled through vibrational and energetic alignment and actions that reflect that, versus having blind faith in a system of rules wherein following those rules perfectly grants you your prayers. Alignment with the Universe versus alignment with manmade spirituality builds self-authority, rather than enforcing social and spiritual hierarchy. In developmental psychology, children that are not allowed to learn how to do things on their own can be stunted developmentally. Erikson calls it “intiative versus guilt”, where we learn the courage to try new things or we learn to be scared to try at all. As spiritual beings, having a rigid system of rules that disempowers us from learning has stunted people spiritually. We have the opportunity to develop spiritually in ways that culturally have experienced longstanding repression.
11. Engaging in a radically empowering relationship to the body, the discovery of extrasensory abilities and direct experience with the chakras, clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.
12. Many people don’t pray or have a spiritual practice because they don’t like religion. There is an opportunity to be discerning here; to not throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing. You can have a spiritual practice, you can pray, you can do magic, and you don’t have to do it in any rigid kind of prescribed fashion. Explore and have your own direct connection to the Universe.
13. Medicine that is holistic, paradigms of healing that are returning to an infinite sense of worthiness, rather than fixing oneself to be ‘back to normal’.

  

 Jupiter in Libra opposite Uranus and Eris and Aries:

 Corresponds with these Problematic/Distressing Qualities:

1. Feeling of antagonism between oppressors and oppressed groups that goes on both sides – so even the oppressor somehow feels victimized by the people they are oppressing! It is essentially a reactiveness which, instead of being able to listen to the realities of marginalized parties, the non-marginalized party wants to take it personally and enact tone-policing or try to otherwise silence the marginalized part to maintain their own comfort or feeling of righteousness. This is partly because if the reality of the marginalized party is to really sink into the person’s mind who holds political/social capital, part of them will die. They will be forced to transform who they think they are; their very identity. For a time, they will resist.
2. People taking extreme action because they have been backed into a corner and don’t feel like they have anything to lose.
3. The injustice of backing someone into a corner and then judging or policing their response.
4. A dramatically swinging pendulum. One moment seems like amazing progress, the next like a backwards dystopia.
5. The belief of the non-oppressed that oppressed people who are upset should just calm down and be peaceful. Similiarly, the internalized belief of the oppressed that they should just be quiet and let things be, that to speak up is to somehow be “negative” or “whiny” or any other judgement.
6. In an environment that is increasing in need and desire to be aware of diversity and social inequality/inequity, people who are unsure of how to access this education or do not make the space to will feel anxiety or feel at risk of character attack. Some people can get stuck in defensiveness, not wanting to learn because it’s not their fault that social injustice exists/not their responsibility. In this defensiveness, they also shame people who do speak up.
7. Similiarly to #6, being so consumed with defensiveness that one refuses to listen to other people.
8. Telling people to just come together when there’s a conflict that needs to be solved and completely overlooking the nuance of the situation as well as the growth potential in engaging in conflict where it actually exists.
9. The feeling of marginalized groups being on trial – having to explain themselves to people who don’t get it when they are already expending a lot of energy just to survive, or feeling like they have to behave normally even though it’s actually harder for them to than it is for the privileged people who are behaving normally because the system is designed in favor of the privileged. This power dynamic is imbalanced.
10. To better treat ourselves and one another with the love we deserve, as a society, requires an awareness that systematic abuses are actually occurring, and the nature of them so we can address and transform them at the root. “Love” in the patriarchy asks us to endure our lumps well, shut up and behave. Silencing viewpoints that challenge power and status quo right now is not a road to peace. That’s largely what got us here in the first place.

Including these Opportunities:

1. Social justice in a direct relationship to cultural trauma – Justice is listening.
2. Active listening is expansive and opens up new realities.
3. An expansion of the conversation around marginalized groups and how they are marginalized; an expansion of dialogue and practice regarding how to change this. The feeling of antagonism and duality making way for the heart of humanity to rally together in a way that is actually inclusive of diversity without whitewashing. To do this, privileged people have to care about the realities of other people without making it about themselves.
4. Hack it – don’t wait for people to listen to you. Learn how to be an active listener and truly, truly listen to people. Psychologically, people are naturally inclined to reciprocate when they feel really heard.
5. The radical, extremely potent sense of self that emerges when one loves and advocates for themselves in circumstances in which their social reality is largely against them; the fiery, grounded power of someone who has faced adversity and survived. (Also applies for communities as a whole.)
6. The fight for the underdog is on. This will not just be reflected in the culture philosophically, but in law and practice.
7. The art of persona coming from people in marginalized groups; creating an aesthetic identity that is radical and empowers others to love themselves too. Fashion/adornment as resistance. Dressing like a God/dess of your own making.
8. Trauma bonding. People becoming friends over sharing/recognizing the same cultural traumas.
9. Refusal to keep engaging in games of false peace, especially when it comes to disempowered people placating people who won’t listen to them. Asserting boundaries and autonomy AS peace. The marginalized having increasing support among themselves and allies to not take on the task of making ignorant people comfortable.
10. A new vitality and willpower that emerges from refusing to normalize and participate in abuses one is receiving: to know that taking a stand is not wrong in any fashion the oppressing party makes it out to be.
11. The expanded understanding of when peace is false makes way for real peace.
12. People who have privilege will find increased enjoyment of their reality when they listen to other groups of people and investigate social justice and participate in allyship. Instead of this diminishing or threatening their sense of self, which is the operating fear, it could actually add onto their sense of self and community.
13. Learning how disengaging from mistreatment is a gift to oneself that one is inherently worthy of, and a gift to no longer enable to abusive party.
14. Opposition inspires self-knowledge: because Trump is so visibly prejudiced and rallying together prejudiced ideologies, the opposite discourses also become more visible in response. This allows for integration in the future, whereas if these liberation-based discourses did not come forward because the populace was comfortable enough to keep ignoring them, we would not get to advance in this way. The conversation is now out in the open – being polite and sweeping stuff under the rug is not an option anymore.
15. The opportunity to learn that it’s not rude to engage in political arguments. These are issues that matter; and being passive to keep the peace is not the same as justice.

Yes, love each other. But it’s got to be real love. Not “love” disguised in the perpetuation of problematic behaviors and abuses.

Let’s talk not about silencing people who are upset.

Let’s talk about what love really is.

Let’s ask people how THEY want to be loved instead of telling them how they need to be loved.

~Sabrina Monarch

 

Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys yoga, hiking and creative writing. You can subscribe to receive her weekly forecasts by email here.

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