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Deborah Koff-Chapin

After 27 years Saturn, Lord of Karma, has plunged back into the deep dark waters of Scorpio, where toxic sludge from our misguided civilization has gunked up the Main Evolutionary Chamber of the Species, and the world is dying. 

This comes with great impact but little surprise to those of us who have been studying the meaning of our time in our mystery school that began decades ago under the Redwoods of northern California. (You can read about the school in my books 2012 and Cosmic Weather Report, and check a current version in our online College of Visionaries & Wizards.)

The end of the world comes as little surprise because it became clear to us shortly after Saturn left Scorpio the last time in 1985 that there is more than one world here. There is an artificial world, a false planet that, like papier-mâché, is wrapped around the living earth. This False Earth is hawked by politicians and newscasters as if it was the real thing, and it grips each of us wherever we are most susceptible to getting hooked on the illusion.

Deborah Koff-Chapin

The False Earth is a brittle shell, an industrial wasteland, drained of innocence and wonder, glued in place by mass media, corporate food systems and false ideas that batter the senses with supermarket tabloid images and TV sitcom laugh-tracks. Each choice you make to go along with that charade glues the false world in place, and the papier-mâché coating gets thicker, until very few people are actually plugged into a planet that's real and deep and true.

Then there is a radiant blue-green gem of the cosmos, the Living Green Earth, glittering as she flies around the sun, vibrantly alive, chamber of miracle, source-spring of pristine waters that regenerate mind, body and soul. This is the planet whose molten heart beats deep below the lies of pundits and politicians. Beneath the papier-mâché coating of false diet and false education and false media, a planet of vast diversity continues to grow and change as she swings through space. 

This Living Green Earth is the world that children and poets and visionaries see through to with x-ray vision, despite the growing toxic dump heap of our time, despite a society designed to make the rich richer at everyone else's expense, despite all the attention lavished on papier-mâché. As Saturn plunges into its three-year tour of Scorpio, forces of chaos thrash the system, revealing tantalizing glimpses of all that lies below. 

Scorpio presides over unclaimed treasures stored in the deepest regions of the soul. Saturn's passing through these regions charges them with potency. Something is pulling on the human spirit now, and it's the dawning awareness of how much potential we have as a species that we haven't claimed yet. 

Deborah Koff-Chapin

As Saturn returns to Scorpio the summons resounds through the corridors of the soul: Wake up! Get Real! Don't piss away another incarnation! BE THE LOVE THAT YOU ARE! BE THE LOVE THAT YOU ARE. Don't let anything come between you and your truth....

During this three-year passage, every sinew that hooks you to the false world is stretched to the breaking point. Every lie you swallowed since childhood gurgles in the gut. Every relationship you maintain at the expense of deeper truth burns in the sacred fire of this Year of the Dragon. Every dark corner of the undersoul is being roto-tilled, exposing the fertile bottom soil life is based upon. Even when change is blocked on the surface, the soul of the species remains capable of regeneration down below, and it is toward those hidden depths we must look to now in order to pull off a miracle.

This means we need massive doses of vision to counter the rampant blindness that prevails through our society. We must fight off numbness and apathy. We need a great uprising of the soul, beyond any ism. Our inspiration must be to discover what we own and disown the rest. We need a primal love that this time can go the distance, because it at long last knows the full measure of what we're made of. We need a love greater than the naive love that sprang up in the hearts of runaways who left their Midwestern homes in the 1960s searching for the Promised Land. We need a love that only grows stronger when the love-ins end and the acid wears off.

Similar to the 1960s but much more so, our elders have lost their way and gotten seduced by false gods, and these false leaders must be dethroned. Ironically, the sickness that infects our culture is its only cure, because, like in the 1960s, no great and lasting change can occur without first undergoing a massive dissatisfaction and unrest. Food allergies and nausea and vertigo remind us of our allergy to lies and falsehood. The irritation that chokes off our system is our only chance at finding the antidote, for it is only when we can no longer tolerate the old that the slumbering brute of mass consciousness stumbles out of its cave, blinking in daylight, to try something new.

Wherever people gather in one-to-one heart talks, and in small groups -- that's where the Revolution of our Time is being waged more than in the halls of politics, for the halls of politics have become shamefully enslaved to Big Business, and, unlike in the 60s, mass media has followed suit. 

But below the last gasp of a dying culture the underground culture is ready to rock. Each month small groups gather in fifty states to venture beyond the known in ceremonial journeys with plant medicines. Shamans are springing out of the woodwork, coming from all over the world, spreading news of the soul. The Tribal Drumbeat is summoning pilgrims on the verge of Aquarius to reinvent life and purpose. A great unrest has begun to ripple against the Machine and it is our only chance to sweep away the madness.

Deborah Koff-Chapin

Remember?

Remember, below each loss and grievance, who you are?

Remember why you came here?

Remember the truth of wholeness that lives

below every story of brokenness?

Here in the early weeks of his three-year excavation through Scorpio, the Lord of Karma is dredging the species. The great dark gift of Saturn in Scorpio is to restore wholeness by stripping away filters that kept out the truth. Each fragment, each broken shard, each failed love, each dead dream that got buried in the bone yard is being probed to see if it's up for resurrection. 

The great love of Saturn, who is not known for being a loving planet, is closing in on us now, refusing to let us off the hook, rejecting each new excuse we drum up for being less than we are. The obsession of Scorpio is to restore a love that matters, a sex that penetrates to the soul, a world that counts.

Deborah Koff-Chapin

In his massive plea to awaken the human race, the great seer Rumi does not say, 'Lord, help us change'. He says 'Make us afraid of the way we were,' because Rumi discovered a great truth: If you show people a better way that appeals to their lofty aspirations and noble instincts, they will rarely take it. Only when people become more afraid of staying the same than of changing will they change. Only when the motivation for something different sinks down into the primal ooze of the reptilian brain will change become immanent.

Deborah Koff-Chapin

As the world ends we are summoned to awaken the glittering dream that rose up in one incomparable moment in the 1960s when a team of midwives called Malcolm and Martin and John and Jimi and Bobby reached their hands into the bloody madness and produced the newborn love that they saw sleeping inside you and me.

 

We are the future of their past.

You and I and everyone alive now have a great moment before us, upon which rests the fate of our planet. From deep down in the soul the choice is maddeningly simple: EVOLVE OR PERISH.