Given we are on the edge of a huge and important shift in global perspective, today we’re taking a new look at where we stand as we navigate our Transitional Era between the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius.

There are countless opinions about whether we’re already in the new Age of Aquarius, or about to enter it, or have to wait as long as a couple of centuries before we’ll be in the new Age. In order to understand the time line when discussing Great Ages, we must remember that due to the length of a Great Age, it can take centuries for one Age to transition to a new Age.

What Is A Great Age?

What is a Great Age? A Great Age is 1/12 of what is termed “The Circumpolar Cycle,” or the transit of the Precessional point through its entire cycle. As that’s approximately 26,000 years, that makes any Great Age 2100+ years long. As each sign is 30 degrees, it yields about 72 years per degree in a Great Age, meaning an average human life is approximately the same as one degree of a Great Age.

Given the short span of a human life, even for those who live to be 100, our perspective is very limited when it comes to events which take centuries to develop. We measure our life in terms of how fast or slow things happen in our limited time frame, but understanding how one Great Age shifts to another requires a much larger perspective than we are accustomed to.

The Shift is A Process, Not A Fixed Point in Time

Over the years I’ve heard countless people proclaim we entered the Age of Aquarius at various points in time, including the American Revolution, the Industrial revolution, the Aquarius stellium in 1962, the legendary Summer of Love in 1967, all the way up to December 12 or 21, 2012. Others proclaim various other fixed points in future time will be “the cosmic moment” when the world will “be in the Age of Aquarius.” The problem with this approach is that life usually does not proceed like a Hollywood movie, with everything occurring in definite measurable steps, action beats, and a climax where the hero wins the day and the evil-doers are vanquished.

The evolution of an Age is more like the movement of a glacier, with very gradual shifts that may not be noticed for many years or decades. Of course, using that metaphor is fraught with potential implications right now, given the rapid melting of glacier ice in both North and South polar regions. Things are shifting rapidly on our Earth, which we are told is a portent of larger shifts in the human condition.

Shifts in a Great Age also correspond with shifts in worldly power structures, economies, belief systems, and even larger ecological changes. The prelude to any new Era with its emergent new forms coming forth and being widely accepted requires periods of relative chaos and the dis-integration of old forms, since an old order is never open to a new order that can supersede it.

We also are told that humanity must have reached a state of tension, of yearning for something new, that will satisfy basic human needs not being addressed by the old systems. It is fairly easy to see that we have hit that situation globally in our world today.

Are We Already “In the Age of Aquarius?

My sense of things is that we are still at the very end of the end of the old Age of Pisces, and are approximately somewhere near the middle of the first degree of that sign, preparing to enter the Age of Aquarius after mid-century. (The precession of the Equinox is why we are moving backwards through the signs from 30 degrees to 1 degree before moving into the next sign.)

If we conservatively estimate that the first 4 degrees of a sign and the last 4 degrees of the preceding sign represent a transition period, then if each degree equals approximately 72 years, then we're looking at a transition period of about 288 years. Even if we shorten the transition to 3 degrees exiting and entering signs, we're still looking at about 216 years defining the heart of any transitional period. So transitional eras between Ages can last almost 300 years!

H.P. Blavatsky offered us in her masterwork The Secret Doctrine that in humanity’s past, the overlap between Root Races and subraces lasted in some cases for many thousands of years. Proportionally, that would probably hold true for the smaller time cycles we call the Great Ages within the “Circumpolar Cycle” of 26,000 years. She makes it clear that in any transitional era, there will be those who cling to old ways of thinking who exist simultaneously with those who represent the new Era.

Remember, given human nature, it’s not like everyone on Earth immediately changes their way of relating to consciousness, life, matter, and human existence when a larger shift is going on. Even now we have 19th century thinkers insisting their values should be more important than 21st century necessities.

That means even when we finally “enter the Age of Aquarius” there will still be many alive on Earth with Age of Pisces consciousness. It could take as long as another century before the current consensus reality agreement is extinct, and Aquarian approaches and values are accepted as a universal norm.

Our Age in Transition

I believe we began to move into the transition zone leading us out of the Age of Pisces about 240 years ago, around the time of Uranus' discovery, the American and French Revolutions, and the end of the "divine right" of kings, queens, and the priesthood that allowed them to believe they were better than the rest of humanity. While it might be fanciful to believe the Age of Aquarius is already upon us, unfortunately the reality is that we are still dealing with many elements of Piscean thinking and belief systems throughout our present world. That implies we are in an Age in Transition, a mini-era of overlapping approaches to reality blending past, present and future, sometimes more harmoniously than others.

To me, it’s obvious that throughout the world we’re still dealing with divisive religions and other dualistic systems (Piscean problems), and those belief systems have grown more virulent in their assertions of their own “rightness” and the “wrongness” of other systems. That would seem to show we have not yet left the Piscean era with its ghosts of "belief versus doubt," and the need for the mass of people to follow leaders and saviors.

However, we cannot deny that many signs and signals of the new Aquarian era are already functioning as practical realities in our world. We’ve had technological advances humanity couldn’t even dream of a hundred years ago. We have global attitudes representing various types of Aquarian virtues which exist simultaneously with the old Pisces supersititions. And since the new Aquarian Age will feature cooperation where each brings their gifts and skills to the table of community, we can see this already happening in various groups around the world, who work with goodwill to synthesize their efforts to create a better world that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number.

The Edge of Time Can Be Known By the Spiritual Planetary Cycles

If my computations are correct, we will be slipping into the Age of Aquarius sometime in the third quarter of this century. As we’re already completing the long transitional passage out of the old Age, everything that we confront in the near and distant future will aid the coming of the next era, and will show us even more evolved transitional forms which will be the preliminary building blocks for life in the next era. So how can we take advantage of what is, and is yet to come, so that we move into our higher possibilities both individually and collectively?

This is where "past is prologue" to the future. Uranus transited Aquarius between April 1995 and December 2003. During that span, Uranus awakened a new Aquarian response in each of us, leading us to different opportunities to individuate and find our unique talents and place in the worldly drama we call Life. This awakened energy interacted with our natal planets in countless ways to bring forth facets of our individuality.

Any planets we have in Aquarius were revolutionized, resulting in new expressions during that time span, and no doubt if it happened to you, you're living a radically different life in that area than you were before 1995. It was a time of awakening to countless opportunities to practice the Aquarian ideal and ground Spirit in matter in our own unique way so we can express our unique genius in the future.

Since Aquarius exteriorizes through Leo, its polar opposite, this period offered many opportunities to demonstrate Leo energy in a new sense of purposeful creativity and genuine, spontaneous sincere engaged Love in every life approach. Between 1995 and 2003, all who were receptive to awakening to some form of an Aquarian ideal came to a new sense of how to express their ideal. It is easy to see we are collectively in a completely unique "unknown zone" as a human race relative to the atmosphere we lived in before 1995. The internet is but one manifestation of that new collective atmosphere.

If Uranus awakens us to a Transpersonal individuality, Neptune “dreams” us into a new Transpersonal collective awareness. During the time Uranus was awakening new Aquarian energies in each of us, Neptune began its transit of Aquarius. From early 1998 through early 2012, Neptune weaved and blended that awakened Aquarian energy into the holographic matrix of both collective consciousness as well as the collective unconscious. When Pluto eventually crosses those same points, it will awaken the seeds of the Aquarian era, which will look very differently than most 20th century thinkers suspect.

Still, because these Transpersonal planets represent the invisible long wave transformational energies of Spirit, all of this momentous activity in Aquarius is just a prelude to the next Great Age of 2100+ years, which will take clearer shape in the world as Jupiter and Saturn move through that sign in 2020-2023, setting structures and opening pathways in Aquarius which Pluto will begin to give life to in March 2023 when it enters Aquarius for the first time since it last left that sign in December 1798. After those Plutonic seeds have sprouted and been purified between 2023 and 2043, we shall see even newer Aquarian structures and efforts when Saturn again transits Aquarius beginning 2050.

In the next article in this series, we’ll discuss more about the Neptune and Pluto transits in Aquarius, and how we have holographically molded the collective future through our dreams during the time of Neptune in Aquarius, preparing us for the exciting prototypical Aquarian sub-era we’ll be going through over the next 20 years!