This post continues the exploration of Uranus transit of Taurus bringing the focus to ground level within the human and natural environments. Many arenas of change have been left out here in favor of those which are perceived to be predominant, so this is not an exhaustive analysis. It does however offer context and give flavor to the trends discussed last time, in relation to our decision making within the mundane world. This is also the environment concurrent with the more metaphysical aspects of this transit, so it is essential we go there before coming to the next level of speculation, as we will in the final part of Uranus in Taurus.

Cycles and Aspects

Uranus, at the time of writing, is in the midst of a brief recce into the fixed earth sign having recently stationed retrograde. Saturn is currently also retrograde in Capricorn, going direct on September 6th 2018. Uranus and Saturn’s present trine, which has held a close orb since May, will last through to November 2018.

The steady if gradual developments we have witnessed through this time give way to a period which increasingly demands attention and decisiveness. When in March 2019 Uranus enters Taurus for the long haul we see this dynamic sustained throughout the first year until the Saturn Uranus square comes more fully into play in 2020.

During the first year of Uranus transit of Taurus Saturn is busy, a hectic conjunction between Pluto Saturn Mercury and the Sun in Capricorn on January 12th 2020 introduces the first phase of a watershed zone. At that time Jupiter will also be conjunct the Moon’s south node in early Capricorn. As the year progresses, Jupiter will catch up with Pluto and after converging with Mars in the first degree of Aquarius Saturn will retrograde back to form a stellium with Pluto and Jupiter which will sustain through the rest of the year.

This heavyweight combination represents a struggle between opposing forces in which extremes begin to attempt cancelling each other out, a process which will ultimately result in them losing power and from this point will resolve themselves into a new phase of building – this image could also apply to the long term process we are entering.

The stellium closes on the December solstice 2020 with Jupiter and Saturn conjoining, again in the first degree of Aquarius, to begin a new cycle although the polarised standoff highlighted through the entirety of 2020 will continue, conditioning the beginning of the new Jupiter Saturn cycle. That cycle will be highly instructive in laying the ground, and infrastructure for the establishment of a post-political technocratic landscape – we will come to look at the latter in more detail in part 3.

This watershed moment reveals two things, the first being how much of a softening up process has been at work over a prolonged period of time, repeatedly oscillating between growth and forced containment, at times vigorous and intense, at others deceptively placid, but always occurring within recognizable parameters. We are living amidst circumstances which have increased our attention level but which have yet to trigger really major systemic change.

The second is that through this process long held blockages to deep memory and historical truths have been made malleable and porous – a reassessment of the past is underway, a quiet revolution in itself, however, when this initial period of Uranus transit comes to fruition in early 2020 it will not be an understatement to say that ‘the past looms large’. Global circumstances at this time will echo past events which have had universal effect so this Saturn Pluto Jupiter stellium and the time surrounding it will need much closer examination nearer the time.

From mid 2020 onwards when the square also comes into closer orb the choices being faced are not only limited increasingly by ‘circumstance and policy’ but are informed by a deepened and growing understanding of the past. We will find ourselves living in what appear to be very ‘conditioned’ circumstances. The latter will bring deceptions and false narratives to light which reveal how extensively human perception has been subverted and which demand a serious revision of the historical narrative.

At a more personal level feelings raised by major environmental events will carry a familiarity about them, an indication that connections are being made with deep memory. Whether this brings strong and clear recollection will depend on the memory and the individual who holds it; we will return to this experience in the third of these articles, but, there is a sense through these experiences that we are going through a ‘reality shift’, blurring the lines between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’.

The square, when it arrives however, tells us we have entered decision time.

This aspect will highlight more of the antagonistic dynamic between Uranus and Saturn – its not going to be a one-off either as the square will reform three times during the period through to the last quarter of 2023, never entirely leaving orb during those three years.

This being the waning square in the current Saturn Uranus cycle this will be a time in which issues first raised through the opposition (2009-11), previous waxing square (1998-2000) and the conjunction which began this cycle (1988) will be brought once more into focus, ultimately to be resolved.

The cycle began in February 1988 with Uranus and Saturn conjunct in alignment with the Galactic center, opposite Chiron and squaring the Moon’s nodes. Portents of what is now unfolding were appearing.

The collapse of the ecosphere was first registered, and even capitalised upon, as a ‘global warning’ within this period. The health of the planet had been on the scientific radar for decades, but, its impact was beginning to come through more clearly within public consciousness as the century came to closure. Our future and its relationship to the human imprint from the past came more into focus.

This was also the year in which the WWW was first talked of at CERN and the ‘Internet Worm’ made history as the first major computer virus; it was the year in which President Ronald Reagan visited the USSR, the year of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’, and the onset of the collapse of the Soviet Union; it was the year in which the first exo-planet beyond the solar system was detected and man-made global warming was declared a ‘reality’; the year in which the Piper Alpha North Sea oil platform was destroyed by explosions and fires to the loss of many lives.

‘Resolution point’ and the completion of the current Saturn Uranus cycle is reached in Gemini in June 2032, when the two planets meet once again exactly opposite their 1988 starting point. The fruits of decisions made during the coming waning square will ‘come home to roost’ at that time – this is a cycle that invariably ends in the sign opposite to the one it began in. It is the polarity which provides closure.

The Symptoms

During the first half of Uranus 7 year transit of Taurus the dynamic between the individual and the masses will change. Humans will have to reconfigure their choices to a much more individual level, in step with the times. There can be no guarantees about what this will look like, the exact effects it will have, but, based upon current trends, the evidence from Uranus short foray into Taurus, and the predominant features of the planetary matrix through this time, we can speculate with a high degree of probability.

At the most superficial level we could be forgiven for thinking this looks like starting off as a seven year ‘love it, use it or loose it’ scenario, but we will soon discover that these are ‘consequential’ decisions, choices ‘on steroids’.

At the very least we can expect to come face to face with the need to revise our material attachments – never a bad thing to undertake voluntarily, this however will be revision demanded of us more by external events and forces. Neither is this an extension of the political agenda manifest in the idea of ‘austerity’ – but, major political change is on the way.

Stepping up a notch, we will see a steady shift towards a more deeply pragmatic sense of how to live life, already a choice for many choosing to ‘opt out’ of the ‘mainstream’ western way of life. Within the seven years of Uranus transit his will increasingly become a reality experienced more through necessity than choice, the result of both human and natural events.

At the next level is an increasing erosion and destabilisation of cultural identity, especially within ‘western’ countries.

Attempts at radical liberalisation and counter-resurgent protectionist defence of national identities and fundamentalist ideologies which we have seen emerging in recent years will continue but will begin to shed their recognisable political clothing as the transit progresses, especially towards the later stages with Uranus approaching the Gemini cusp.

The political identities of the past are in fact heading for extinction.

Where previously within political thought and ideology we had seen a competitive dichotomy in practice, symbolically represented by the ‘left’ and ‘right’ branches of politics, a new interactive duality inherent to the political arena will be defined more by tensions between ideological determinism, which now veers more sharply towards realising the role played by ‘non-physical’ technologies such as the internet, and pragmatic realism, which is defined more by external conditions, both imposed and naturally occurring . The technocratic revolution begins to bear fruit at this point.

By the time Uranus arrives at the cusp of Gemini the understanding will be that ‘political relativism’ is itself an interim stage on the way to developing and embodying a more radically conceived form of human ‘management’.

The shadow of Agenda 21/30 begins to loom large here.

The movement here becomes a longer term process which will see the traditional western notion of ‘politics’ diminish, its basis ultimately giving way to purely ‘functionalist’ philosophy manifest through regulation and governance. Although this might suggest a movement towards bureaucracy, the incline is towards a structurally diverse modular distribution of ‘policy’ based governance in which centralised ‘government’ is ‘function’ rather than ‘policy’ based.

The basis and meaning of ‘policy’ itself will radically change, but, that’s a discussion we will have to come back to in part 3, partly as it focuses on the technological developments which are in process at time of writing.

The seeding part of this process, which we are presently within the first stages of, will feed into and accelerate the breakdown of cultural aesthetics and social mores, a process which will encourage their rebuilding based upon a revised foundation of values. The fulcrum point for initiation of this process is the Venus retrograde in May 2020, but, as a longer term global process this re-evaluation was initiated the last time Uranus was in Taurus in the nineteen thirties, a period of political opportunism, economic instability and propagandist manipulation which signalled the onset of technocratic foundation building, and which very much resembles this time in many ways.

One of the main differences between that time and this will be seen in the impact of ‘natural’ events upon infrastructure. But, the long term impetus here relates more to the influx of a template for living which aligns more fully with the Aquarian ideal. We should always remember that there are two sides to what that ideal might be.

Earth Movements

The impact of large scale natural events, the forerunners of which we are already witnessing, will escalate as the transit progresses. Many of these events will bring unnaturally destructive power to bear on human infrastructures. Some will be induced by human interventions, some of which which have accumulated over time, compounding disruption to natural cycles and interrupting the planet’s own self regulatory systems. Many among them however will be seen to have been caused through deliberate intent, employing frequency technologies like wifi, and weaponising climate systems and bio-energetics, for example.

An increasing proportion of the larger ‘natural’ events will however be driven by sources which are currently barely understood and rarely acknowledged, except perhaps within a fringe minority of engineers, physicists, scientists and cosmologists, a large majority of whom do not operate within the mainstream.

Where we see particularly stubborn Saturnian resistance to change, especially within ‘the orthodoxies’ of the human world, the issues surrounding need for change will become increasingly forceful, and the forms that change takes become more deterministic. In fact, change is not negotiable.

We will see highlighted the intrinsic inadequacy, instability and threat to human and environmental health, which many existing infrastructures present; this will apply especially to those connected with power generation, energy distribution and transport, but also with regard to health risks.

The need to make radical decisions about the future of both solid state fuels and ageing production facilities, such as nuclear power stations, will of necessity become part of a rigorous re-evaluation within the accompanying restructuring process. However, although ‘alternative’ solutions in energy and power production and distribution are already at hand, their general release will only accelerate through the second half of Uranus transit of Taurus, as it approaches Gemini ingress.

We are in a short space of time, barely a few years in fact, heading towards rapid reconfiguration of priorities. The good news is that, for all the disruption, it will pave the way for hitherto unrealisable transformation, the kind of change which will induce the embodiment of a more creative and expansive phase, initiated through the second half of the transit and beyond.

Experimental breakthroughs, for example, will mark the later phase of Uranus transit through Taurus and will open possibilities for a new physics to enter the mainstream. Consequently, new ways of thinking about natural resources, especially those related to energy, its production, how it is accessed and, more especially, how it is used will emerge. Here, it is the thinking which will facilitate the greatest change.

As Uranus traverses the third decan of Taurus and approaches the cusp of Gemini the same impetus will bring an overhaul of commerce and expansion of communication, the latter well beyond our current capabilities. Uranus in Gemini will see this impetus become more manifest as a reality and our understanding of ‘reality’ change with it. At first however, we must go through this process of dissembling and disorienting ‘restructuring’.

Coming back to this side of Uranus transit of Taurus, this ‘restructuring’ will undoubtedly be the driver for radical cultural revision, social and political re-organisation, both through an exacerbation of current issues, such as those surrounding migration and the control of borders, and through a deeper range of controls being set on distribution of resources and a re-ordering of economic infrastructure.

In fact, economic and financial arenas will see some of the most radical changes – one of the longer ongoing trends in global change we will be seeing as Uranus transits Taurus, Gemini and beyond is micro and macro level change brought to economic models, functions, infrastructure and understanding.

Future Economics

In this longer term outlook the flow of ‘capital’ and the form which capital takes in particular will undergo changes which will fundamentally restructure not only the current financial markets at a global level, but, extend change along more novel pathways which have already opened up. We are familiar in current times through e-commerce, non-physical currencies, and tech based credit, with the dematerialisation of finance and capital, but these too will be seen retrospectively to have been a phase shift within a larger process.

In its first stages the process will trigger growth within shadow and hidden markets, non-official which is to say ‘alternative’ currencies, a trend we already see happening. We will see a socially based diversification and resurgence in ‘group’ based and ‘private’ trading schemes which bypass national and globally controlled commerce and economies.

This of course is not a new idea, many such groups have existed in one form or another for centuries, including the exclusive clubs and milieu of the ultra-priviliged and so called ‘elite’, the most influential having functioned primarily as global mafia, but, the idea and its appropriation in this new context is tantamount to a revolutionary insurgence.

In the light of what is to come over the next few decades, the initial surge is however going to amount less to a revolutionary wave of change than a re-arranging of the furniture already existing on deck within these human realms. The more revolutionary import of these processes will begin to be more fully realized around Uranus opposition with Pluto, a generation hence.

The timescale on these ‘economic’ changes is not limited by Uranus transit, but all the above shifts, changes and transformations will inform the process. If fundamental political reform is foreseeable within the medium term, radical economic re-evaluation is a longer term issue. But, it will come, the first real signs taking shape as Uranus ends its run through Gemini, and the form it takes is going to be outside of any current model, thinking or understanding.

During the run up to Uranus opposition with Pluto in 2045 we are heading for a time in which traditional physical notions of currency will lose their predominant influence. In fact, our understanding of value itself will shift so radically that, looking back, we will be able to discern a distinct watershed within history and global civilisation.

Changes in the level of interaction and embedding within infrastructures which humans participate in will include natural as well as human made systems. We will talk more of human integration with natural systems in part three, but, this integrative process will enable the new economy and its modus operandi to emerge.

This technology will evolve rapidly and affect human life radically. The individual’s quota of intelligence and nous will become equivalent to currency, not only in terms of its ‘sociological’ value, but, in relation to the notion of what we now call ‘the market place’ itself.

This is not a new notion, in fact it is very much a part of a sociological hierarchy of value which already exists. It does however become an extension of technological advances which will render existing ‘class structures’ within the economic model redundant; here, individual intellectual property and mental real estate become black market commodities.

The infrastructure for this development is already in place and much of this has been facilitated through the all pervasive installation of surveillance, a global phenomenon which touches every area of life.

Looming behind this process is Ai. A benign threat already present to humans artificial intelligence is often the screen onto which human fears are projected in future scenarios. As an integral part of the technological developments which Uranus transit of Taurus and Gemini will accompany, Ai’s role will be predominantly centered on expanding and evolving the new infrastructure through which the new economy, and politic, will function.

The shift in human values we are seeing here means that the main decision which will be discussed through this time around Ai has more to do with technology in general, is more centered on how much of life humans want to retain authorship and participation in than in whether the latent threat of superior intelligence through technology can be risked.

In the meantime, while humanity is discovering new frontiers, this side of the border the most radical shifts at a planetary scale will be seen more within the realms of nature. Here technology makes its biggest impact. Conversely, the true potential for human development lies not in technology but in nature itself. It is those whose cultural nexus is Nature who will be the true radicals through these times. Their time will also come when Uranus opposes Pluto from Virgo.

Coda

The crucial nature of awareness being invoked in advance of this ‘decision time’ cannot be over emphasized; as the Earth herself will adequately demonstrate, humans need to get things back in perspective. Reconfiguring how we live and showing that we are capable of at the very least letting ‘respect’ lead, and of acting accordingly is essential.

Rather than letting blind ‘progress’ lead us, or those who would lead us do so from a blindly ‘progressive’ platform, without regard or respect for life, this is a conscious choice whose decision is very much in the nature of our collective journey into maturity. It seeks to find the integration of Uranus and Saturn, a core element of the transition which humanity needs to make to both escape the long term behavioral loop it has sunk into and to reach the next levels of maturity it is capable of.

No matter the choices, the dance itself is also one of development into personal maturity, the attainment of which can offer to the individual the gift of natural dignity.  In fact the greater process is dependent upon this development within the individual. It is also dependent on both political will, how this is enacted and re-eassessment of true values.

However, where Uranus is involved even though progression and growth can be achieved it involves the challenge of facing the unknown, an inevitably initiatic experience in which Uranus plays an evolutionary role, if met willingly. And there’s the rub – many spurn initiation, for manifold reasons and, even though our decisions may be in Uranus favor, we can never be certain of what that means or what it will bring. Being able to integrate ‘freedom from the known’, which is the initiatic experience, is a measure of such maturity as humans might rightfully aspire to.

Conversely, to respond negatively to Uranus can lead us into shadow lands within our own psyche, resistance to change bringing heavier burdens; this has been, historically, the predominant experience, mostly in the face of forces that seek to stifle and suppress the Uranian impulse – remember Prometheus?

We know what the Promethian gift can give us, but we are beholden in this time to remember the prerequisite respect of power that it also requires. Here, we must be careful to distinguish between ‘power’ and ‘authority’, especially when the latter is synonymous with ‘control’. We have almost exclusively seen use of that gift as the prerogative of the Saturnian, with its emphasis on control and the dictates of the status quo.

We must not forget that the choice cuts both ways and those who choose contrarily will seek different outcomes. Technology has become our antidote to lack of true creativity, in the Taurean sense, and the panacea for the cultural failings which result. It is a compensation for a species specific depression, but, despite the material development of technologies which allow us to ‘escape’ our own shortcomings, as well as extend the reach we have within the cosmos, the shadow cannot be escaped.

The most powerful antidote is within the soul of every individual, where true freedom of choice is found. It is into this realm that we will follow Uranus next through this time of change and exploration of the transit of Taurus.

Images

top : Chernobyl, The Elephant’s Foot

the symptoms : Chatillon Car Graveyard

earth movements : Wheel Martin Rust, Rob Purday 2018

future economics: Sculpture, Emily Young ; photo Rob Purday, 2017

coda : Lynx Vilden, Kiliii Fish