WHAT IF it's true that how we experience ourselves is not just the way we experience the world, but the way the world becomes? I am not suggesting that your life is some kind of personal, subjective experience but rather something deeper: a way of actually changing the world from the inside out, and as a result impacting everyone around you. You could look at history and see many examples of how, when someone changed their ideas about who they were, and lived this fully, the world itself actually changed.

This is true of anyone who has in fact changed the world; and anyone who has succeeded at rising above personal adversity and changing their own life.

On one level, you already know that the story of your life is the story of how you feel about yourself. I don't mean your opinion; I mean how you feel and what you really and truly and firmly value. This is never as simple a matter as it may seem, even in Fire Sign Theater, where life is lived with decisive passion, whether on the dark side or the light side; whether the inside, or the outside.

Nobody is simple, and the long odyssey of Mars in Taurus, including the retrograde (spanning, by the longest reckoning, late summer 2005 through midwinter 2006), has pushed this point. I would imagine that at times there has been unspeakable complexity and a sense of questioning so deep as to be existential. There have been one or two moments when it seemed that nothing at all mattered -- which is a state of affairs highly unusual for you, because you can always find something worth living for. And there have been those moments, too: where you suddenly found your hand on the secret, hidden treasure within yourself, and knew you were living for something beyond any meaning anyone else could see.

In between, as you know, there is a lot of territory. Assessing and experiencing all your feelings about yourself; all that you value, or have ever valued; and in particular, understanding the many ways you were shaped by your environment as a child, and how your environment (mom, dad, caregivers, siblings) responded and changed, and how this shaped you back. Aries is a fairly pushy sign and this is energetic to the core; you were doing it back when you were a fetus.

The dynamics that surround you, personally, are so intense because you are so intense. There is a feedback loop involved, which is true of everyone, but in your case, it's particularly powerful because what you represent is so new and in many ways shocking to others. You live in this cloud of energy, kind of like Pigpen from the Peanuts, only it's not dust -- it's a cloud of high voltage electrons.

Grok Your Recent Past

If perchance you have not applied any of these ideas to your experience, you are free to borrow them and take a look, and see if that helps you make any more sense of your journey. The more you understand about the very recent past the better, because there is contained in that experience something of the journey of the next two years -- one Mars cycle. This takes you to late 2007, where the spiritual test (if you look at it that way) becomes one of emotional security (Mars retrograde in Cancer, your 4th solar house). And if you want to do your homework early, and tighten up your ship along the way, keep an eye on this whole theme of when you feel safe and when you don't; when you deny your feeling of uneasiness, and when you honor it. And when you notice that others do not feel safe -- and when you don't.

But more immediately, the journey is one of living in a way that is meaningful to you every day; not, for example, planning to do so tomorrow. You are an Aries. So it's not "going to happen." As the bearer of initiative, you are going to make it happen, which is entirely an internal gesture -- and one that begins with awareness.

And then begins the great creative experiment. There are two factors early in the year that I'm tracking carefully as regards your Sun sign, the first of which is that Mars, the planet signifying you, changes environments rather dramatically from Taurus (where it's been for two full seasons) to Gemini. This turns things inside out; it will shock your mental process and stir up your environment; any and all polarities that were hidden in dark, hot, earthy Taurus, will suddenly be revealed in Gemini. This counts for internal ones as well as interpersonal ones.

Mars and you with it shift to the mental, verbal, local level, rather than the introspective, brooding, brewing dimension of Taurus. And this is a very big change, one that may come with some complications as you learn to take full control of what you're perceiving and, in essence, learn to refrain from arguments you have no business engaging in with anyone but yourself; and even playing it very cool when it comes to those. Once you work it out within yourself -- in as amicable a fashion as possible -- you can work it out on the world, in that order.

This leads to the second factor: a total eclipse of the Sun in your sign on March 29. This is the event that suggests, proposes and informs us that what is going on in your inner life quite literally becomes the world and your experience of it. Mars in Gemini is like a test run for the eclipse, amplifying your experience and letting you see what's really going on in your mind, perhaps in a shocking way. But it will provide you with sufficient time and opportunity to make some fast, important adjustments so that you can be in precisely the mental space you need to be in when 3/29 arrives.

At this point, the world itself will be throbbing, changing, growing and bursting into entirely new territory -- as will you. Stuff that nobody can believe will be happening in the world; you will be feeling these kinds of astonishing, unlikely and even impossible shifts within yourself.

And the relationship between you and the world will be anything but abstract, and indeed, have the power to shape your life for many years to come. This eclipse is an Aries Point event, within a few degrees of the first degree of your sign; and that means B-I-G.

What you are becoming inside will shape the reality around you, in every conceivable way, indeed far deeper than the "specifics" of love, work, and play, and deeper than any immediate circumstances. The discovery will be that your ideas affect others; your interpretation of life and of yourself shapes how people around you see, feel and experience their lives. We do not live in little bubbles, or like Oscar the Grouch in a garbage can, no matter how weird our neighbors, coworker or boyfriend's parents are. It's as if the very ground of reality is moving not just under your feet, but by the energy from your feet, and so this is a time to tread both lightly and consciously. You are far more powerful than you think, and this will prove to be no idle discovery.

You may be asking why this is happening, and we can discover additional information in two of the year's most challenging developments and what they reveal in your personal chart. Let's start with the Saturn-Neptune opposition, which has been a factor since last summer, but which really comes into focus in August. To an Aries, or one with Aries rising, Leo and Aquarius represent your 5th and 11th solar houses.

Exploration and Expression

You can think of the 5th as the art studio and the 11th as the exhibition space. The 5th is the theater the night of dress rehearsal, and the 11th is the same room on opening night. The 5th is the impassioned creative breakthrough, and the 11th is its mature result in the world. Both sides of the polarity are vital in the life of someone who is actually alive. In essence, the 5th is what we have that is uniquely our own, the product of our most daring creative process; and the 11th is the way we express that in relationship to the world.

Both of these houses are getting potent transits now; and that is calling you to take action.

Neptune has been transiting your 11th solar house since the late 1990s, and slowly but certainly during this time, a vision has been forming: a vision of what you want to give the world. It may have been somewhat vague; showing up as a hope, an ideal, the sense of true service as a coming reward for your hard work, or something you will achieve with the help of the people around you. Any of the above may be true and some elements of all will be a factor. Yet Neptune can have a distressing, invisible, intangible quality. We may fear that it's all a dream. We may get uneasy and avoid the places it goes. You may have long wondered whether some of your friends were a little out to lunch or missing the point on some obvious issues.

And Neptune can lead us to make great sacrifices of priorities that seem the most important to us -- but these are sacrifices that will, if we allow them, become the gestures that, in the end, lead us to where we need to be, and to accomplish what we need to accomplish.

But please do your best not to fret over lost time or unlived past opportunity; because you are in a tremendously vital moment of NOW, and in a space of true opportunity for achievement that you will feel if you maintain the dauntless quality that has been your greatest asset in life.

To the Neptune in Aquarius equation we need to add two recent ingredients. The first is Saturn in Leo (your 5th solar house), which is pushing you to work for what you want to create. Saturn may not seem like fun, and it may seem to deprive you of fun, but in reality, Saturn offers us some of the most satisfying fun we can have in this life. And in Leo, it is offering you the compelling need to work firmly within your creative process to make your ideas and visions real. Saturn is, in many ways, an entirely compelling force; we must face its fears, do its work, and in the end, accomplish what we know we must.

The meeting of Saturn and Neptune, which is a more or less continuous event through 2007, with several notable peaks, represents meeting places between your creative dreams and the practical work that will make them real. Yet to this, we can add another factor: Chiron in Aquarius. Everything that Neptune in Aquarius has been lacking, Chiron will suddenly deliver. Indeed, Chiron is a great friend to the at times incomprehensible outer plants because it makes them accessible in human terms. Chiron is the planet of practical spirituality, applied creativity, learning through awareness and healing as a natural way of life.

But there is one last factor of Chiron in Aquarius that we must consider, which will be especially potent for you: the tribal theme. As an Aries, you have a mind that your greatest accomplishments are your own work, and that the involvement of others in a group process can at times seem incidental or seriously get in the way. It's time to consider the opposite as your only truth for a while. Aries is the ultimate sign of individuality, but on our particular planet, few individuals get much of anything accomplished without some kind of coordinated support.

But few consciously strive for that support.

We all possess deep wounds of acceptance by a culture that seems to reward very few things of any integrity. Indeed, there is a system of rewards in place for giving up what is authentic, personally relevant or of true cultural importance, specifically to be accepted by the group. People sometimes wear clothes they hate just to look cool; some say things they don't believe just to sound like they belong (weird, I know, and a lot of them are newscasters). It all starts with the family, where plenty of people go through massive crises of rejection, and then we carry these dynamics into our adult lives.

Notice where you find yourself in any group or collective situation, how you respond, and what kind of needs and expectations are placed on you. Note what expectations you place on yourself. Notice what happens when you dare to be different. One of the reason groups are so powerful in so many cultures is they specifically remove the responsibility of individual thought and decision making. The quest is simple: you must maintain your individuality while at the same time learn to participate fully in the affairs of the world. And, in that order.

You will have many opportunities to encounter group dynamics this year -- in large measure due to your creative impulses -- and you need be truly mindful as you do so. Remember you are free. Yet take nothing for granted. Remember that you owe nobody your conformity. At the same time, it's wise to consider the reality of the tribe in every way; as your immediate circle of friends; your colleagues; society itself; and think every thought you are willing to do to get acceptance fully consciously. And consider where you relate in all of these dimensions. It's time to reclaim what you have sacrificed in order to have that acceptance long ago, which you probably never got and, in the end, take the risk that when you dare to be you, it might not actually be there. That is the risk that any true artist takes, and for that matter anyone adept at the art of living.