Aquarius Rising

A Time of Opportunity and Responsibility

Each day of an Earth Year dawns, rises, casts light on previous day’s retreating dark. And so it is with each age of a celestial Great Year.

The 1960s rock musical “Hair” was an apocalyptic proclamation, indeed a revolutionary revelation, of a new age now taking the stage. It’s an era of human consciousness that is to last 2160 years or so (and then what??) and that will usher in such values (for humans, anyway – other species may be ahead of us in that regard) as those described in the show’s theme song, “Age of Aquarius” (by Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado):

          When the moon is in the Seventh House
          And Jupiter aligns with Mars
          Then peace will guide the planets
          And love will steer the stars
          This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
          …
          Sympathy and trust abounding
          No more falsehoods or derisions
          Golden living dreams of visions
          Mystic crystal revelation
          And the mind's true liberation, Aquarius

And then the song’s call to “let the sun shine in,” shining light on the darkness, revealing the heretofore hidden. That light will nourish the blades of grass already rising out of rubble left by the collapse of the values, mindsets, and consequent institutions of the passing Piscean Age. For those of us who happen (or, as some would say, chosen) to be alive at this moment, our role is one of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. And it is three-fold.

First is to accept, without resistance, that this is much more than a time of momentary transformation but of inevitable, irreversible, and lasting metamorphosis. Such acceptance is a process of surrender – not in the sense of waving the white flag, giving up in resignation, and withdrawing from the game, but rather of giving over to and joining the flow.

Think of the Piscean caterpillar voraciously eating everything within reach, without regard to planetary limits. It can’t be a pleasant process for that creature to enter the chrysalis and dissolve into goo, resisting all the way, hanging on with white knuckles (if it had any) to the tried and true. But there is no going back, and resistance only serves to increase suffering. If it only knew that it would ultimately emerge as an Aquarian butterfly, both beautiful and unbound.

(As an aside, we often cite metaphorically the metamorphosis of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. To our human eyes, the butterfly is beautiful and, as a pollinator, contributes to planetary abundance. We do not, on the other hand, look with similar admiration upon the maggot-turning-into-fly process, which is identical.)

With acceptance, then, we can move on to our next role, which is to participate in co-creating the new world emerging. Buckminster Fuller advises we not waste time trying to salvage and patch up the Piscean old, rebuild from the rubble what was there before. Rather, he urges we work to build the Aquarian new. (See the reference to Donella Meadows’ leverage points in another The Green Pen post.)

So, how do we do that?

Albert Einstein notes that we can’t solve problems from the same way of thinking that created them in the first place. Rather, we have to think outside the box, from a different mindset. This takes imagination. Going back to the butterfly analogy, we can serve as the imago cells that drive the process of turning caterpillar into goo and goo into butterfly.

Finally, as the fresh, re-imagined mindsets and institutions emerge from the rubble, we can come together to focus the rays of the Aquarian dawn on those blades of grass for all to see, to midwife their birth, and to nourish their growth into the Aquarian garden described in the song.

As I say, this is a time of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. This is our time.