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America In Transition

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Bianca
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« on: July 28, 2008, 08:59:41 am »










Challenging the Authority of Reality

At first blush, this transit feels as if it is pitting the boring old here-and-now against the idea of a more perfect alternative. But there is a deeper riddle to solve here. Every few decades when these two planets reach the opposition point in their cycle, humanity is given the chance to melt down some of its most basic assumptions about reality.

Saturn, the planet of solidity and substance, declares that it—and it alone—knows what is real, whatever the word means in any given context. Meanwhile Neptune is associated with the unreal [4]—a slippery concept, best arrived at through process of elimination. Over the past couple of years, Neptune has been mercilessly mocking many of our most cherished convictions, with the result that the authority of reality has been challenged everywhere we turn. Reality shows, identity theft and Scooter Libby’s prodigious memory loss are examples of this process.

What is real and what is unreal—really? Though we run our lives by these distinctions, we rarely stop to think about them. In American culture, for example, we are brought up to believe that a stone is more real than an idea. Money is presumed to be more real than, say, a poem. In some cultures, the secret name given to a baby by the tribal shaman is considered more real than the name she is called by her community. The fact that Paris Hilton commands big bucks for showing up at a party makes her activities seem more real to many people than the doings of a gifted nobody. These notions are clearly very relative, yet to those who hold them they seem obvious and absolute; and since they are rarely questioned, they don’t run up against much controversy. This is why the transit is so unsettling: it is inviting us to question them.

The word "myth," for instance, is used in the vernacular to mean “not true.” But which is realer: a literal event that affects no one, or a myth that affects billions of people? And who defines what’s real? Is an idea real by virtue of being repeated over and over in the media until it assumes the patina of normalcy? In these high-stakes times, this is another assumption the transit is asking us to consider. Does the phrase “war on terror,” coined by our government and ubiquitously applied to the occupation of Iraq, refer to something real?

Also causing consternation is the issue of financial realness. Already a great source of anxiety in the USA, the concept of material security has been getting less and less concrete. At earlier points in their history, Americans were able to assure themselves of their worth in terms of acres of farmland and pieces of gold; by contrast, these days more and more people are investing their savings with Wall Street, where wealth is abstracted into a series of flickering numbers on a screen.

With massive national debt looming in the background, the realness of material worth has never seemed more illusory; and the Saturn-Neptune opposition has brought the point home. The stock market rout on February 28th that sent the Dow Jones average down more than four hundred points and erased more than a half a trillion dollars of market value occurred within hours of the transit reaching exactitude. From a cosmic point of view, the most apposite question here is a philosophical teaser: Did what was erased (Neptune) ever occupy actual form and space (Saturn) in the first place?

The Saturn-Neptune opposition is not about producing answers or assuaging doubts. It is about stimulating questions. It is a nudge to detach ourselves from fashionable but arbitrary verities, and to replace them with understandings that come from a deeper place.

This is the only way to achieve peace of mind during this transit. We must get our bearings in essential truths if we are not to be swamped by collective lies.
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Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


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