Revolution

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our growth and our freedom lies our response.” Viktor Frankl

Revolution may not be the obvious choice for Mars octile Uranus, but that is precisely why it works!

The song is not about tearing down. It is about the quality of consciousness that must accompany genuine change if that change is to mean anything at all. Lennon wrote Revolution from inside a genuine reckoning with what change actually requires of the person who claims to want it. He had withdrawn from the world at its most convulsive moment, sitting in stillness in Rishikesh while Paris burned and Vietnam bled, and what emerged from that withdrawal was something far more uncomfortable and far more honest than a battle cry. He asks whether the revolutionary impulse, in its urgency and its righteousness, has actually looked at itself!

The song’s radical proposition is that the system being dismantled outside is also living inside the person doing the dismantling, and that without attending to that interior architecture, the new order will simply inherit the pathologies of the old one. Liberation that skips the inner work merely relocates the prison.

The meeting between Mars and Uranus in this balsamic octile carries the quality of a current running through a circuit that was built for a different voltage.

Our personal and collective will is being asked to become something it has not yet been. So this ain’t a week for forcing. It is, however, a week for feeling into where the force itself wants to go when it is finally released from the grooves it has worn into the collective psyche over years of familiar expression!

There is a particular quality of frustration that belongs to this configuration. It is the frustration of genuine capability meeting a world that is operating on a frequency that has quietly shifted. The rules have changed, though nobody has formally announced it! Our collective finds itself pushing with all the skill and passion it has developed, yet the world can no longer respond in the way it once reliably did.

Mars in its balsamic relationship to Uranus is completing something in the collective relationship to will itself. The long transit of Uranus through Fixed Earth has been an education in desire as a material and embodied reality, in what it means to want something and to build patiently toward it, to allow passion to become form. That education is now at its completion point, and completion points have their own particular exhaustion in them. The collective body is tired in a way that goes beyond the physical, tired at the level of a particular way of being in the world that has served its purpose and is ready to be transfigured rather than simply rested.

The kundalini quality of this octile is also worth sitting with. There is a charge moving through the collective system that is genuinely reorganising something at the level of instinct and spiritual will. For some that will manifest as an unusual restlessness, an edginess that has no obvious object, a sense of being electrified without knowing where to direct the current. For others it will arrive as an unexpected flatness, a sudden absence of the drives and appetites that have previously felt reliable and self-evident. Both are the same phenomenon experienced from different ends of the same spectrum, and both are asking for the same quality of conscious attention.

The invitation is to reflect on the nature of anger, of desire, of the impulse to assert and to initiate, in a way that goes beneath the habitual. Can you ask yourself - what they are actually reaching for when they arise.

The martial principle at its most evolved is the capacity to direct life energy with precision and integrity toward what is genuinely worth fighting for. This week asks the collective to rediscover what that is, at a level that may surprise it. Lennon’s insistence on working out the mind before working out the street is exactly the octile’s demand. The will wants to act. The soul asks it to become something worthy of the action first.

A Meditation for this Heat

You are not wrong in your burning hunger.

You are not wrong to want.

Only now your flame asks to know itself more deeply, to feel the difference between the heat that consumes and the heat that illuminates, between the force that breaks through and the force that opens the way.

Teach me the courage of the unfamiliar gesture, the prayer of the unhurried impulse, the grace of wanting with my whole soul rather than merely my will.

Let what has driven me be what inspires me.

Let what has pushed me be what calls me forward into the shape I have not yet dared to inhabit.

May I be patient to feel where the fire truly wants to go, and brave enough to follow it there.

Beannachtaí

Andrew