Midlife Transits

Someone asked a good question recently. If all these people have learned how to tune into the Law of Attraction to attract wealth, why did we fall into the worst recession in decades? It is kind of ironic, isn’t it? All those people believing in infinite abundance, busy trying to attract riches of all sorts, witnessing the single greatest loss of wealth in human history (in absolute not relative terms). Literally trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth were lost during the financial collapse a year ago. I guess you could call it a cosmic joke. The universe does seem to love a good laugh at human expense.

Or you could say it was those Law of Attraction folks themselves that precipitated the crash. You could speculate that their mass of thoughts of abundance just tipped the financial system right over into collapse and revealed it for the house of cards it was. You could say they thought us into a terrible recession. And they did.

Sort of.

Of course, most of the people scooping up false riches during the run up to the collapse weren’t practicing Law of Attraction folks. At least, they didn’t know they were. But they were believing in a world of infinite abundance just the same. They believed housing prices could never fall. That their mathematical models could never fail. That money was just there for the taking and it would never go away. That the economy would never stop growing. They didn’t believe in limits. They believed in infinite wealth.

They believed us right into collapse–because people aren’t supposed to believe in things like unlimited abundance. Housing prices do fall. Mathematical models do fail. No market economy grows uninterrupted forever. There is no unlimited wealth.

Everybody knows this. By the time the average person is two, he or she figures out that unlimited abundance isn’t feasible or realistic and he or she starts hearing and using the magic word ‘no.’ Because there are limits. The toddler can’t do everything and have everything. It’s precisely because everyone knows this that Law of Attraction gurus worked so hard to convince people to overcome their poverty consciousness.

Everyone sensible has a poverty consciousness and is supposed to. Because everyone has known deprivation. No one has ever gotten everything. (Not even Brad Pitt.) That poverty consciousness is not supposed to go away. It is supposed to inform our experience of life, not determine it, but inform it.

Astrology knows this. Astrology is a lot older than any of the Law of Attraction gurus and it is all about the human attempt to figure out and remember (often with great difficulty) what the average two year old knows. Which is what human life is really like.

Abundance thinking in astrology is indicated by the planet Jupiter. Everyone has one in his or her natal chart. We’ve all got abundance thinking and we’ve all got some form of abundance in our lives. Sometimes we recognize it; sometimes we don’t.

Poverty consciousness, or more upliftingly, the knowledge of limits, is represented in astrology by Saturn. We’ve all got Saturn in our natal charts. We all have a sense of limitation. Of scarcity.

The rule of thumb in astrology is that the further away from the sun a planet is, the more powerful it is. (More or less.) Saturn is further out than Jupiter and Saturn trumps Jupiter. We can fly high in our higher minds (Jupiter is the symbol of the higher mind), but we’ve always got to come back to reality (Saturn). What goes up, must come down. Saturn grounds us. He’s real life.

Consider that until the late 1700s, Saturn was the furthest planet known in the solar system. Saturn and its rings bounded human consciousness. Awareness of scarcity was the final arbiter of human destiny.

Then Uranus was discovered and science opened up the doors to further perspectives on the human situation. Collectively, we smashed through some of our previous limits, endured the Industrial Revolution, and learned to live with never-ending change (Uranus is the symbol of rapid change). Neptune and Pluto opened further doors.

But Saturn never went away. The principle of limits didn’t stop being valid. The awareness of scarcity is still an important part of our human legacy and we ought to respect it. If we don’t, quite frankly, we will probably do as many a previous species has done, and destroy the habitat that supports us. It is the awareness of scarcity that allows us to treat our resources and planet as precious and worth saving.

We’ve just finished up, in 2008, a long cycle of Jupiter abundance thinking, due to outer planets (Uranus through Pluto) transiting through the sign of Sagittarius since the 1970s. Sagittarius (ruled by Jupiter) is followed in the zodiac by Capricorn (ruled by Saturn). Knowledge of scarcity follows knowledge of abundance. None of us will see these outer planets in Sagittarius again in our lifetime. An era is over.

We’re now going through the last 16 years of outer planets in Capricorn. When Pluto leaves Capricorn in 2024, another era will end. Neither abundance nor scarcity will resonate in quite the same way.

But that doesn’t mean that Jupiter and Saturn will go away, nor the human imagination of abundance or fear of scarcity. Without the ability to imagine more, we’d never even try to create what doesn’t already exist. But without the knowledge that nothing is infinite, we don’t have the wisdom to responsibly use what we create.

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