The New Age is dawning. A new consciousness is rising. New movements are coming forth to change the world. This chapter, and this book, describes how I see this new age unfolding.
We can see the New Age dawning everywhere. All over Planet Earth, people are waking up to the miracle of life, and to their potential to create beauty and joy. All around the world, people have more access to wealth and prosperity than ever before. New technology connects each of us to everyone, in every country and in every city and town on the planet. People have been freed as never before from old restrictions, and we can pursue lives that we want. More people seek a higher purpose in life than mere survival, and have greater freedom to unfold it. We are no longer restricted to one career path chosen for us by the authorities for our entire lives, but can continue to change and develop new talents. The limited goals and expectations of the past are behind us, as the people of every race, gender and creed stretch beyond the ancient barriers put upon them, and claim their rights and their powers.
No longer can tyrants and bigots hold us down without suffering the consequences, at least eventually. No longer can a few rich tycoons and barons hoard the wealth of the people without feeling that their days of domination are numbered, and that they will suffer the reckoning and realization that the world belongs to all of us, not just to them. No longer can one nation or tribe claim our sole allegiance, as we realize that we are linked together as one humanity, that we are all in this life together, and that peace is our destiny.
No people in history has ever had the access that we have to all the knowledge and experiences in the world. Buried and restricted from our sight for centuries, all the great art and architecture from all of humanity's cultures and traditions has been revealed to us, and it can inspire even greater works than these. Books, movies, libraries, concerts, schools, universities, and the vast resources of the internet are all available to us. No people in history has had such ability as do we in the New Age to learn about any subject and acquire any ability. No people in history has ever possessed more tools and more media in which to express our inspiration and imagination than we have, just waiting for us to take up our brushes, pens, graphics, instruments, cameras, and high-tech multi-media, and make it real.
New experiences have awakened and inspired us. Modernist movements, counter-cultures, human potential techniques, social liberation movements, cyber worlds, fairs and festivals, new age spirituality, psychedelic agents, teachers and gurus, and spontaneous spiritual awakenings; all these and more have helped bring the New Age to life for us. It has been expressed in our music and visionary arts, including in new age and ambient sounds, in the most inspired of rock n roll music, through brilliant song-writers, and in imaginative paintings and multi-media creations few could have seen anywhere on Earth before recent times. Barriers have been broken in human relationships too, as possibilities have opened up for us to be more authentic, more alive and more intimate, and to discover what it really means to be human. We've learned how to release ourselves from the repressive programming of the past, as we discover how to truly care, value and respect ourselves and each other as the amazing miracles that we are.
The New Age worldview is spreading, despite efforts to suppress, co-opt and marginalize it. The New Paradigm is here, and can no longer be denied. We are liberated from authoritarian, confining traditions and beliefs, whether they come from dogmatic religion, or from limited, outdated scientific notions. No one religion or one scientific theory or method can be held up any longer as the absolute truth, or as the only way that renders all others as heretics and superstitious fools. We all have immediate access to the truths from all lands, all times, all peoples and all sources. We are no longer slaves to what we are told to believe, but can know and discover the truth for ourselves. Nothing can be hidden away from us anymore.
Quantum physics shows us how every particle of light and every wave of energy is entangled, and how we the observer are intimately connected with everything we observe. Ecology and the environmental movement have impressed upon us how all life forms are interwoven and interdependent on our whole, conscious Mother Gaia Earth Being. We know now that our every action affects everyone and everything on our planet, and that we must take care of Her if we wish to survive and prosper in the future. We know now that we can continue to grow and learn throughout our lives, and that our age in years is almost irrelevant. We know that the miracle of conscious awareness cannot be reduced and explained by mechanical forces, and that the idolatry of falsely modeling the universe upon our own human ability to discover and use forces of Nature to create and build our own machines has become apparent to us. We know now that technology and commerce cannot define and confine our life and our spirit.
In the New Age, esoteric and occult knowledge from East and West has become available to us again, and our psychic and intuitive powers are opening up. We are looking not only into the once-hidden realities of life on Earth, but into the spirit worlds beyond this life, and into the divine being within all. We are discovering our connections to eternal Infinite Spirit, even amidst the changing and eternal here and now. We are finding that the old hidden hermetic maxim deep within Western Tradition that says "as above, so below; as within, so without" applies to every aspect of our lives, as revealed in the holographic nature of reality, in fractals and epigenetic DNA, and in the rebirth of astrology and alchemy in our time. As the New Age dawns, the world is becoming more and more enchanted again, more alive with subtle, mystic, tender beauty again, and alive with wonder and joy again.
But all this is only the beginning. The New Age has only just started. Much remains to be discovered, and many problems and challenges remain. And there's many different opinions about the best ways forward. Again, this is how I see it.
In my previous book, upon which this one depends and which it extends, I asked whether we were entering hell or paradise. Was a golden age dawning, I asked, or was the world coming to an end? That book, Horoscope for the New Millennium, laid out in print the landscape of time, showing where we came from, where we were, and where we were going, as the milestone of the Year 2000 (or Y2K as it was known) approached. Many other prophecies were being made from many sources too in those years; some reliable and some not. Many people feared for the future, just as they had done when the previous new millennium was approaching 1000 years before. I laid out the cycles and positions of the planets in order to provide some perspective and clarity from the larger view. I looked into the temporal telescope to chart the rhythms of hundreds and thousands of years of history, and relayed to my readers a vision into where these rhythms and cycles might take us. I gave verifiable evidence that the planetary cycles are reliable guides to the course of events on Earth, the provided the first complete account of how astrology explains what's happening. What I found was conclusive evidence that indeed, a golden age was upon us, and that a new age was dawning.
At that time, in the 1990s, we had just elected the first president from "my generation," the so-called Baby Boomers; a president who intended to bring back some progress and some shared responsibility to our nation. The "cold war" between two superpowers and two alliances that had threatened the world with nuclear destruction had just come to an end, opening up the prospect of a "peace dividend." Many new nations had been formed, bringing new freedom to the world. The last president from the world war two generation had just declared a "new world order" in which the United Nations for the first time could actually enforce rules of good behavior among nations, as had been its original purpose. The high-tech inventions of personal computers, the internet and the world wide web powered an unprecedented economic prosperity in the "dot.com boom," and brought the world together in communication as never before. It seemed like commerce was shifting forever away from brick and mortar stores to an online realm. The multi-media cyber-world gave everyone for the first time the ability to publish their works and their views to the whole world, and opened up whole new vistas of amazing computer art creations. The exciting possibilities of psychedelic culture, first explored in the mid-1960s, was coming back in new ways in the wonderful group dances called "raves," with their elaborate new electronic music that was sweeping through the youth cultures of the world. My prophecy of a golden age seemed plausible, back then.
But as the New Millennium actually began, the war clouds that I predicted would hover over this new dawn appeared. The United States and some of its allies went right back to unending war, this time with "terrorists" as the enemy, in the wake of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York City on 9-11-2001. With this horrendous terrorist act as a pretext, the next Baby Boomer president decided that the United States had the right and the duty to "spread democracy around the world" by invading other countries without reason, and so the USA attacked Iraq in March of 2003, in spite of the largest protests the world had ever seen. The peace dividend was squandered, and the USA national debt was forever inflated beyond redemption. In the years from 1994 to 2017, shared responsibility was often ditched again in favor of unleashing the unrestrained free market. The clouds were gathering again, and people once again feared for the future. The new golden age lost its luster. Were we entering hell, after all?
As I predicted, the economic crash and great recession in 2008-2010 resulting from these policies brought down the dot.com boom and destroyed prosperity for untold millions. Waves of revolution thereupon spread across the world starting in 2011, causing unprecedented civil wars and waves of refugees from the third world to the first, again just as I had predicted would happen in my previous book. The greatest ecological disaster ever caused by humanity broke open hundreds of oil wells to pollute the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. This amazing calamity only further warned the world that our continued use of fossil fuels for energy, our meat farming, and the tearing down of our forests was warming the globe to such an extent that the continued existence of civilization was threatened. But the warning of global warming went largely unheeded. In spite of unimpeachable evidence, the old outdated and dirty energy companies financed a campaign of denial and conspiracy theory that delayed action to solve the climate crisis, in spite of a worldwide agreement to do so in 2015. Then, as the late 2010s proceeded, a host of demagogues and tyrants regained or ascended the thrones and oval offices of many governments around the world, cutting off the revolutions for freedom that had erupted in 1989 and 2011, and using the refugees and "terrorists" as scapegoats. Meanwhile, the younger generations and many older ones seemed swept up again in the old modern and traditional skepticism, as the outdated physicalist dogmas and religious fanaticisms obscured once again the new age vision that had opened up in the decades before the New Millennium began.
And so, the question remains unanswered. Where we are going? What lies beyond that marker of time in 2012 that became famous as "the end of the world as we know it" indicated in the Mayan Calendar? Can the promise of the New Millennium ever be fulfilled? The challenge remains for the people to rise up and bring about the New Age; to create a peaceful and sustainable world with freedom and prosperity for all. The prospect remains to fully unleash human potential, and to continue rekindling and restoring the wonder and miracle of life from the clutches of mind and soul-destroying old religious and scientific dogmas and false ideologies.
What do "the stars" have to say about this prospect? Maybe this newly revised vision in the horoscope for the new age cannot be so gloriously and glowingly optimistic as the first version from the 1990s was. Maybe my years have brought more realism into my forecasts. But the stars also indicate that an alternative course from inevitable destruction is still possible. The planets predict that the crisis of the 2020s and 2030s can be successfully overcome, despite the inevitable conflicts, and that a new progressive era will unfold in these decades as I originally predicted. We can meet the challenge of climate change; it's not too late. We can restore progress again. We can depose the tyrants and the racist reactionaries again. We can bring back shared civic responsibility and economic opportunity for all, and restrain the greedy again.
No, it's not too late! We still have all the potential for greatness that we had before the New Millennium arrived. We can still transform the New Millennium into the New Age. So please read ahead into this book, and see how things are likely to unfold. Discover what a thorough, continued investigation into the rhythms and cycles of the planets can reveal about the future. Examine the evidence of my predictions, and decide for yourself if astrology works, and to what extent. I have laid it all out for you again, without flinching and without prejudice. The basic landscape of time is the same for all, even though there's other interpretations of it besides my own spiritual, idealistic and progressive one. The road map is in your hands. It's up to us to use it for the best.