As the next cycle began in 1966, the "flower children" and their mantras of peace and love signaled yet another wave of consciousness expansion. Spiritual consciousness began to infiltrate the collective as the hippie generation experienced the first levels of spiritual awakening. This was the first generation to awaken consciously to higher-dimensional frequencies. They dropped out, dropped acid, and the Maharishi came to town. LSD and other psychotropic drugs, along with the sudden fascination with Eastern forms of meditation, blew the doors wide open to the higher dimensions of reality. For the first time, a generation no longer "bought" the prevailing materialistic conception of the universe; it simply didn’t fit with what their expanding consciousness was revealing. An entire group of beings simultaneously became aware that there was a whole lot more going on than our physical senses were telling us.

This cycle took 13 years to complete, bringing us to 1979. This is not a year that brings to mind significant outer events. But something happened during this year that, while few people were aware of it at the time, nonetheless had a potent impact upon us all. In 1979, Pluto, the farthest planet from the Sun, entered within Neptune’s orbit, a relatively unusual astronomical occurrence. Because Pluto customarily inhabits the furthest reaches of our solar system, it might be considered the gatekeeper to the rest of the universe, the boundary of our known identity. In mythology and astrology, Pluto represents the process of death and rebirth, the deep, mysterious world of the subconscious, and the void—the place in which all identity dissolves. Neptune represents the collective unconscious. When the planet of death, rebirth, and psychic excavation went inside the orbit of the planet of the collective unconscious, the process of redeeming the collective shadow began in earnest.

The higher-dimensional frequencies that began entering the planetary energy-fields in 1945 were, by now, gathering considerable momentum. By 1979, these energies began to catalyze an intense dredging of the collective unconscious, a "roto-rooting of the psyche." Accordingly, it was about this time that the collective became fascinated by experiences ranging from primal therapy and depth psychology to Rolfing and other body therapies that released stored emotions and catalyzed greater freedom.

While we were busy looking at our own shadows, the collective shadow emerged through the regressive Reagan years, a time when corporate greed took over the planet, and the very few plundered the pockets of the many. Did we really believe that if the kings prospered, the peasants somehow would, too? Or were we simply too self-involved to notice what was being put over on us?