Live from UAC: Alan Oken on Uranus, Neptune, Pluto

Dear Friend and Reader:

Wrapping up today’s presentations was one that had to be moved to a larger room. Incredibly, I sat through the whole thing. Alan Oken set out to tell us about the three traditional outer planets: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and he succeeded. It helps that Oken is funny in a way that Michael Moore could only aspire to; it helps that he knows his astrology; and it helps even more that he is steeped in the work of Alice Bailey, but knows how to present it in a subversive way.

He began with a take on Uranus that I had never heard — transits of Uranus to itself can result in a person specializing. Principally they will specialize in being themselves, but he added that such transits (Uranus opposite Uranus at age 40 or so, for example) will be the time a butcher decides to specialize in lamb and the green grocer specializes in grapes. Finally, we get to hang up a big sign that says, “I am me.”

Uranus is the planet of revolutions, inventions and rebellions, and this is what happens internally when we reach one of those crux points involving its movement (the two big ones are at 21, the first square, and 40, the opposition; there is another square at about 61 and a return at 84 years old).

He made a point that I found truly worth repeating — at these moments, this process of being oneself must resonate in some way with the collective; that is, it’s not Being Me in a self-serving way but rather in a way that works for the community as well. You must maintain your objectivity, or in losing (or failing to gain) it, you run the risk of becoming evil. This is not an overstatement: that objectivity, which I would describe as the ability to see oneself and the other fairly, is what makes it safe to have creative power. I don’t think there is true objectivity but what I think he means is the ability to be witness to yourself; and through that, gradually learn a kind of impartiality.

Alan’s take on Neptune, the next traditional outer planet away from the Sun, was the most informed by Bailey’s Esoteric Astrology, but presented in a creative and accessible way. Neptune is considered by most astrologers to be the planet of illusion and “higher” love. Alan described the kind of astral polarization that can come when we don’t have a clue how to use Neptune, leading us to live by instinct, petty preference and disconnect from the heart. The kind of astral polarization he described relates to what Bailey calls the single most serious problem afflicting the world, an obsession with glamor. Oken astutely pointed out that most people experience Neptune on the level of the Moon — cycling rapidly between preferences, loving conditionally, and relating from unconscious, instinctual patterns.

In this expression, Neptune can be obsessed with sensation; not with feeling or actually sensing, but rather an obsession with sensation. We see this all the time in our hyperstimulated culture — a TV on in every room, triple mocha lattes, supersized everything, and drugs to calm us down, perk us up, stabilize us, all washed down with flavored “water.” He described our addiction to oil and oil wars (cast as wars of idealism) as Neptune issues making his one direct reference to the work of Bailey — it’s 6th ray stuff. That is, idealism gone too far.

It turns out that Oken may be the source of the reference to people with Mars and Neptune (in combination and out of control) as having Kamikazi approach to existence, something I heard years ago and have noticed often enough.

How we rise to the occasion of Neptune often comes through the process of Neptune transits, where we get a LOT of the energy to process and learn how to deal with. “Neptune transits are very tricky for human beings,” he said. These are times when we are compelled to find our integrity or drown in our lies to ourself. Neptune transits give us a lot to sort out. Currently the world is obsessed in this kind of material, not just through its addictions to products and media, but also to holy wars and the pious opinions of religion (we Christians love everyone, unless you’re not Christian).

Consider a fairly traditional interpretation of the 6th ray, summed up by this website:

The positive qualities of this ray can be seen in many of the world’s religions – in the intense devotion and mysticism of Christianity in the Middle Ages of Europe and in the lives of many great mystics and saints, and strong adherence of humanity to certain religions or ideologies. The 6th ray influence expresses itself in its higher aspects as intense devotion and love for an ideal or an object. The lower aspects (i.e. when people express the 6th ray energy in a distorted way) are fanaticism, self-righteousness and emotional “clinging” to an object , and these qualities have also been prevalent in the many religious and ideological conflicts of the last 2,000 years.

Last, his take on Pluto’s tendency to totally restructure, rearrange, change and blaze through our lives with sometimes excruciating slowness made an excellent mediation. As others have noted, he said that Pluto is always about a death, but it’s death with a rebirth stage added. Mars, he said, just shoots. Pluto slowly applies its transformational power and calls on us to cooperate with the process by not clinging to everything.

“You have to take responsibility for the deaths,” he said. “You have to lead them.” This is a creative use of a potentially destructive transit. The way I would translate that is, you are wise to choose what you are giving up; be willing to let go of what does not work, and admit that it does not work.

“After a while, it does not matter if the transit is a square, trine or sextile,” or any other aspect, he noted. Usually, squares and oppositions are considered more difficult aspects, though he has noticed that with maturity, Pluto transits bear clear similarities no matter what the angle of approach. Pluto changes everything it touches, and if we do the process of a Pluto transit consciously, we come out stronger, more deeply integrated and closer to ourselves. He summed up the way to handle a Pluto transit in the words of Richard Alpert (Ram Dass): Be (I originally typed ‘He’) Here Now.

Speaking of Pluto, tonight we are being treated to a production by Vanity Fair astrologer Michael Lutin called Plutopia. I will be there as your faithful photographer. I think they’ve sold about a thousand tickets — not shocking, as the conference has so far attracted close to 1,600 attenders. News of the event is rippling out over the wire services. Here is a sample of the press coverage so far. We will keep adding to this list if we hear of new additions.

Stay tuned.