A Migration of Eagles

In the spring of 1968, a seminary classmate slide-projected multimedia images upon the altar, another tossed rolls of toilet paper from the chapel balcony, a third led sermon discussions from the pews and a fourth tape-recorded interviews with worshippers. Our class was presenting an experience that reflected individual choice in contemporary culture.

Across the road, Seabury-Western's Episcopalian seminarians were reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, their former chaplain. On nearby Deering Meadow, the Chairperson of Northwestern University's Religion Department squirted grape juice into students' mouths at a "be-in" -- "Holy Communion," he said.

In the 1960s, Pluto conjunct Uranus transformed secular and religious institutions with Civil Rights marches, student demonstrations and universities-without-walls. That era's "Death of God" theology said ordained clergy and professors do not know any more about "God" than laypersons do. So, church coffeehouses were created for open forums and multimedia worship.

After graduation, I introduced a world religions curriculum and congregational sharing in worship. However, most church members wanted a duly ordained representative of Western civilization's patriarchical religion. Martin Luther's Reformation theology, however enlightened, was as authoritarian as the Roman Catholic doctrine he disagreed with. He encouraged the persecution of anyone whose theology was more radical than his own.

In a lecture on the causes of Nazi Germany, theologian Paul Tillich said the trouble with his homeland was "the loss of their symbols," i.e., their mythical Fatherland. The people were plunged into economic chaos and a spiritual abyss after losing World War I.

The 1960s Pluto-Uranus conjunction facilitated Self empowerment -- by hurtling us into a similar abyss between an old and new age, between the ego and Higher Self. The accompanying fear, when projected upon the world by Christians or New Agers, creates illusory saviors (Utopian communes, gurus, etc.) similar to hierarchical Christianity and Nazi Germany.

During the 1960s, America's Right and Left often expressed a self-righteous authoritarianism that continues among the Religious Right and politically correct Left. After the 1968 Democratic Convention, liberal clergy and their Liberation Theology became so oppressive in my own denomination that I decided to leave.

When Alan Watts left the Episcopalian Church, he wrote The Wisdom of Insecurity -- and in a letter to his friends said, "Insofar as the Church is committed to a desire for and a clinging to authority, permanence, spiritual safety, and absolute guides of conduct, it is clinging to its own death. By such means, belief in God, the hope of immortality, and the quest for salvation, become only escapes from the inner emptiness and insecurity which most of us feel in the depths of our being when confronted with the loneliness, the transiency, and the uncertainty of human life. But that inner emptiness is not a void to be filled with comforts; it is a window to be looked through" (In My Own Way, Alan Watts).

The abyss is a result of the Pluto, Uranus and Neptune transits our Higher Self creates. Unemployment, divorce and death uproots us from the past, removes the ego's blinders and plunges us into a twilight zone, a window for glimpsing our soul. "Aquarian Age Unity," in any age, comes from an Inner Vision of the god/goddess within.

In another age, Friedrich Nietzche's Self-empowering challenge of Christianity pushed him to an insane edge, "He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle's eyes, -- he who with eagle's talons graspeth the abyss: he hath courage .... Mine eagle is awake, and like me honoureth the sun. With eagle talons doth it grasp at the new light" (Thus Spake Zarathustra).

"He spoke of very simple things -- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form" (Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach).

"The present astrological era, the age of Pisces, began around 1 A.D....a spiritual age that gave birth to many religious leaders: Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao-tse and, more recently, Martin Luther, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mohandas Gandhi and Mary Baker Eddy among them. It is also an age of martyrdom that produced stoning, crucifixion, etc." (Compendium of Astrology by Rose Lineman and Jan Popelka).

Lineman and Popelka also say the age of Aquarius (circa 2,000 A.D.) is "observable in the great technological strides made for the twentieth century, the current growing concern for human rights and welfare.... A new society based on humanitarian principles could develop on Earth.... Will the Aquarian age go down in history as the age of the humanitarian or the anarchist? the genius or the fanatic? the liberated or the libertine?"

Neptune, which rules Pisces, dissolves any structures incongruent with our universal Oneness. Uranus, which rules Aquarius, nurtures telecommunications and one's Inner Voice. In the 1990s, they conjoined to facilitate spiritual unity in an interdependent social, religious and political global village.

Eastern religions and holistic counseling are thus accelerating along the same electronic ley lines as political extremism. Such resources as the Unity Church with its Self healing understanding of Jesus and co-dependency groups nurture our growth through the abyss.

Aquarian Age unity grows as we recognize our Selves as a family of Eagles soaring, phoenix-like, through many lifetimes. "Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom," Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, "and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature...."

. . . As Marilyn Ferguson said, "The Whole Earth is a borderless country, a paradigm of humanity with room enough for outsiders and traditionalists, for all our ways of human knowing, for all mysteries and all cultures. A family therapist says she urges her clients to discover not who is right or wrong but what they have as a family" (The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s).

In my youth, a Scoutmaster in Upstate New York told stories of the Iroquois Nation and gave us space to grow. Like the Seneca and Mohawk, we became Eagle Scouts who learned to fly our own Way. The Iroquois Nation's constitution refers to our Healing Earth, to eagles who bless us with the energy of the Great Spirit.

"Offer thanks to the earth where all people dwell -- To the medicinal herbs and the trees, to the forest trees for their usefulness, to the animals that serve as food and who offer their pelts as clothing.... To the messengers of the Great Spirit who dwells in the skies above"

"Should any man of the Nation assist with special ability or show great interest in the affairs of the Nation, ... he may sit in the Confederate Council. He shall be proclaimed a Pine Tree sprung up for the Nation... (Constitution of the Five Nations)".

. . . and migrating eagles shall nest in his/her limbs.

Brock Elk Horn does clairvoyant readings, and holistic counseling that facilitates healing of mind, body and spirit. Telephone: 312/338-3329. For more information, see the Chicago Pulse - Practitioners in this issue of TMA.