Last time we explored the history of the transiting Neptune midpoints that led up to the current mini triangle between Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Neptune midpoints happen only once every 500 years and they represent huge shifts in our understanding of ourselves and how we organise society as a result. We’ve now reached another turning point which will usher in a new zeitgeist that will transform civilisation in ways we can’t imagine.

As we saw, the last Neptune midpoint happened in the early 1500s and coincided with the Reformation of the Christian church in the West. This was made possible by the invention of the printing press which allowed new ideas to spread and encouraged people (those who could read) to think for themselves. It opened the way for further revolutions that would go on to transform society.

The most profound revolution came from Copernicus and his assertion that the Earth wasn’t at the centre of the universe but that it orbited the Sun. This wasn’t a new idea and it goes back to the ancient Greeks. But over time it produced a paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic cosmology with its silly epicycles and transformed our view of the cosmos and our place within it.

The willingness to question authority coupled with the scientific revolution ultimately led to a collapse in belief in the church and in God. And this has brought us to where we are now – at least in the West – in the depths of a crisis that the modern secular mind seems unable to resolve.

The modern mind and worldview developed slowly over the centuries after the Reformation and the Copernican revolution. According to Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind, it shifted our focus away from God towards man, from dependence on external authority to independence, and from transcendence to empirical and material realities.

Humanity came to be seen as evolving and progressing rather than as fallen and in need of redemption. These ideas also came to be seen as scientific and objectively true – not mythological or supernatural but factual.

At the start of the scientific and industrial revolutions that may have seemed reasonable. There were many breakthroughs in understanding and real achievements that transformed society. In the 18th and 19th centuries they believed that they were on the cusp of understanding everything about reality. Science and progress became the new religion and Reason became the new God.

But then at the start of the 20th century the quantum revolution happened and it all went to shit.

Science and philosophy started to question themselves – the mind turned on itself, deconstructing all its old ideas. Reality broke apart into subatomic particles and energy. The mind broke apart into postmodernism and started to fragment. Reality suddenly didn’t make sense anymore. It became fluid and relativistic.

By the mid-20th century technology had started to take over and the dehumanisation process that began with the industrial revolution accelerated. Mass consciousness was on the rise with mass media and urbanisation and individuals were reduced to economic units. Mastery over nature had become a war against nature.

The counterbalance against this was a rise in romanticism and a desire to return to a simpler life, to go back to tradition, return to nature and escape the machine. This reflects the split in the Western character between mind and soul, or the head and heart.

There’s always been two sides to the Western mind: the idealist side and the materialist, empiricist and rationalist side. These don’t have to be at odds and can balance and complement each other. The tension between the two can be creative and you need both. But there’s a tendency to split and side with one or the other: the transcendent and the immanent, spirit and matter – Neptune and Saturn – and that pushes the rejected side into the shadow.

The Western mind tends to reject transcendence and embrace materialism. The rejected spirit is then unleashed against us from the unconscious causing all manner of delusions and substitute religions. This is also related to the archetype of Pisces with the two fishes swimming in opposite directions. For more read: The Age of Pisces and the Transition into Aquarius

It may be that postmodernism is the revenge of our repressed need for transcendence and, followed to its logical conclusion, it could return us to wholeness. But this requires a massive shift in consciousness and a willingness to surrender our precious little egos. So far, things appear to be going in the other direction, as Tarnas says, Western ‘man’ has gone:

“from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to…[the] opposite condition.”

That is: a loss of metaphysical significance and spiritual faith, feelings of personal futility, uncertainty in knowledge, the destruction of nature, and insecurity about the future. Could this be the biggest nosedive in history?

All the great achievements of the West have been deconstructed into meaninglessness. The foundations of the modern worldview have been dissolved and we’re drowning in postmodern confusion.

Our obsession with technology is probably a reaction to that – an attempt to regain control and assert meaning, to keep believing in the progressive lie that things will keep getting better. Technology is held up as a kind of saviour: the great AI God that will solve all our problems. Meanwhile the culture is riddled with nihilism and mass disillusionment, no matter how well disguised.

The basic principles behind postmodernism include a denial of grand narratives and absolutes and the assertion that everything is relative and subjective. Reality is fluid and we participate in its construction. It all depends on your perspective and everything is open to interpretation.

In other words, the human mind (and heart) isn’t separate from reality. This is a profound religious/spiritual truth. To understand it you need to be open to a mystical perspective of reality that is comfortable with paradox and complex logic that goes beyond the duality of subject and object, as found in Western mysticism and other cultures, such as India and China.

If we participate in the co-creation of reality then we have a responsibility to understand that process better and that means understanding ourselves better. But we don’t even know who we are or why we are alive – because these are religious questions and we killed religion (or tried to).

We’re in the middle of an epistemic crisis because we don’t know how to make sense of reality. We don’t even know what reality is – of course, we think we do, but we’re deluded. Our narratives don’t work anymore and we don’t really believe in them anyway. We don’t even know how to figure out what’s going on – where would you start?

For more on the epistemic crisis of the West listen to this great podcast: Mystical American Patriots Society series 1 episode 49 (from about 44 mins in)

When the Roman Empire collapsed it created an epistemic crisis that resolved itself into the Medieval worldview. That then morphed into the Modern worldview when the cosmology changed at the last midpoint. The Enlightenment continued the process by rewriting history and creating new narratives for people to believe in – the myth of progress and the dead machine universe being key points.

But this materialist cosmology isn’t true – it’s just a story we told ourselves and have chosen to believe. Seeing ourselves as separate from reality, locked inside our own minds in baffled confusion and alienation, comes from trauma. This is an archetypal experience of being cast out of Eden, or born into this world. But it isn’t our true state. Tarnas points out the irony of this position:

“just when the modern mind believes it has most fully purified itself from any anthropomorphic projections, when it actively construes the world as unconscious, mechanistic, and impersonal, it is just then that the world is most completely a selective construct of the human mind.”

We chose to see the world as a machine and to believe that only humans are conscious and can find meaning. Now we’ve gone further and deny humans are even conscious and want to turn them into machines. Tarnas again:

“it is the modern mind’s own impersonal soulnessness that has been projected from within onto the world.”

Just like the printing press triggered a tsunami of change at the last midpoint, the current midpoint has been influenced by the development of the internet. It has flooded the world with information and accelerated the loss of faith in authority while increasing the confusion about the nature of reality. Perhaps it’s pushing us towards some kind of breakthrough but I doubt it will look the way we imagine.

In another excellent episode, the Mystical American Patriots Society discuss the sweet spot when the internet worked and explore how to escape the nihilistic worldview of scientism. At one point, Smokestack says, “maybe humanity will learn…” and is interrupted by Sumo’s hysterical laughter, saying:

“the most optimistic sentence ever!”

And this is the problem. We never learn.

To move forward we need another revolution in how we see ourselves in relation to the cosmos and reality. We need a new cosmology or myth: a participatory or mystical epistemology.

The Copernican revolution removed the earth/man from the centre of the universe and put the Sun there instead. But if we see the Sun as representing God, that puts God at the centre. So maybe it’s time for us to internalise that truth and get our pesky egos back into alignment with our souls and eternal spirit.

We need to grow beyond duality into non-duality and paradox. Obviously, this requires emotional maturity and a willingness to take responsibility for your shit and integrate your shadow and balance the opposites within your psyche. How many are capable of doing this right now? How many even know it’s possible? But it must be done.

The Western mind must learn to go beyond itself. Or continue to destroy itself in nihilism and cynical despair. In other words, breakthrough or breakdown. (more here: Notes on Apocalypse – WTF is going on?)

We’ve reached the end of modernity and are ready for a new beginning (Saturn Neptune in Aries). How that plays out is anybody’s guess but clues may be found in the alignments that make up the mini triangle. Two of these alignments are the same as those we had during the previous Neptune midpoint.

In the 1500s Neptune was sextile Pluto during the Reformation following the conjunction in 1398. The last Neptune Pluto conjunction was in 1891 during the quantum revolution and the opening up of our consciousness, and we’re now in the long opening sextile again.

Meanwhile, Uranus was trine Pluto in 1514-18 during the Reformation following the conjunction in 1455 when the printing press was invented. The most recent Uranus Pluto conjunction was in the 60s during a period of social revolution and the start of the internet with the development of packet switching. And we’ve now reached the opening trine again.

How does this play out in society? That will depend on you. So the next post looks at how this mini triangle and Neptune midpoint will impact your natal chart…

For more on how this 500-year cycle has influenced the history of Christianity, listen to this excellent episode of the Mystical American Patriots Society where they discuss the 21st century ‘rummage sale’ of civilisation (starts about 1 hour 23 mins in). In fact, you could just listen to all the episodes – they’re great!

Images: Mirror; VR; Woman

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