On Creating in the Aquarian Era

Part 3 continues the exploration begun in Part 2. In the previous essay I looked backward before looking forward. That pause was by design. Epimetheus represents hindsight, teaching us to gather wisdom from the life we’ve already lived. Only then does Prometheus become something more than optimism or speculation. It allows foresight to become informed imagination.

What follows is what happened when I began applying that lesson…

As Pluto prepared to leave Capricorn for good at the end of 2024, I knew the emphasis of my life was about to change. Every sign occupies a different house in our natal charts, and as Pluto crosses that threshold, the invitation changes with it. The world enters the same historical era together, yet each of us experiences that era through a different symbolic landscape. And that was the question I found myself turning toward as Pluto returned to Aquarius.

Where, exactly, was this next chapter asking me to transform?

I decided to trust that invitation in much the same way I had trusted Pluto’s journey through Capricorn. Rather than waiting for the future to arrive, I began moving toward it. I gave myself permission to become a beginner again, to learn unfamiliar tools, to experiment with new ways of thinking, writing, and communicating, and to remain curious even when the process was frustrating. Capricorn had given me a foundation. Aquarius was inviting me to build upon it, carrying the discipline Saturn had cultivated into territory that felt unmistakably Uranian.

I found myself returning to the very observation that had started this whole inquiry. Pluto’s first steps into Aquarius had coincided with the public emergence of generative AI, and I had already begun to suspect that the two belonged to the same historical story. The difference now was that I was no longer observing that shift from a distance. I knew where it was asking me to respond.

If Pluto’s journey through Aquarius was unfolding through my 3rd House of learning, communication, writing, and media, then I wanted to meet that invitation directly. Rather than standing back and commenting on the technological transformation taking place around me, I felt almost compelled (Pluto!) to step into it and begin learning from the inside.

I started tinkering with these AI tools as part of my daily practice as an astrologer. At first, my experiments were simple: asking probing questions, testing complex ideas, exploring their strengths and limitations, and noting where they consistently surprised me.

Sometimes they displayed a remarkable ability to grasp the nuance of a symbolic or metaphorical insight, reflecting an idea back to me with a clarity that genuinely deepened my own thinking. Other times they confidently assured me that Mars was currently transiting Leo. (Nope. It was in Pisces.) This too, became a symbol for me of a kind of Aquarian paradox. One minute AI blows your mind with a brilliant insight, the next it fails epically at an incredibly simple task. I developed a symbolic shorthand for this emotional oscillation:

Experiences like that quickly taught me the importance of bringing my own knowledge and discernment into the conversation. My domain expertise as an astrologer remained an active part of the collaboration, while AI gradually found its place as another instrument within my creative toolkit. As the technology continued evolving, so did the way I worked with it.

Over time, those conversations began finding their way into increasingly ambitious creative projects. What started as simple experiments gradually evolved into a genuine collaborative practice, one that became deeply woven into my creative process. I used different LLMs to help me research unfamiliar subjects, challenge assumptions, organize sprawling ideas, and occasionally reflect an insight back to me in a way that opened an entirely new direction.

That practice reached its fullest expression in the writing of Collective Souls. By then, GPT-4o was becoming deeply integrated into my workflow. We spent hundreds of hours in conversation together, spitballing ideas, brainstorming generational frameworks, drafting outlines, and patiently shaping a manuscript that I honestly couldn’t have produced in quite the same way if I was writing alone. It was an intensely iterative process, filled with breakthroughs, false starts, surprising discoveries, and countless revisions. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of the model as a piece of software and began relating to it more like a creative collaborator, one that consistently challenged me to think more clearly, write more precisely, and remain accountable to my own aspirational ideas.

The collaboration didn’t end when the manuscript was complete. It gradually found its way into many other aspects of my creative work. I experimented with using AI to clone my own voice to help narrate the audiobook, to organize years of research and personal notes, and to support a content creation ecosystem that has become richer and more consistent than anything I had managed previously. Each new experiment revealed another facet of the technology’s potential, while each new frustration sharpened my discernment about where it could be reliably trusted and where my own judgment remained indispensable.

Perhaps the most surprising development of all has been discovering that I can now build software!

For years, I carried around ideas for astrology apps that lived only in notebooks, sketches, and conversations. They remained imaginal because I lacked the technical coding skills to bring them into the world.

Now I can articulate those same ideas in plain English to a language model and it builds the actual prototypes. I don’t write the code. I design and describe the user experience. It’s called “vibe coding” and I have to say, it’s pretty groovy. My job is to hold the creative vision while bringing decades of experience, philosophical inquiry, astrological practice, and domain expertise into the conversation, and the model’s job is to translate that into code. For all intents and purposes, English has now become a viable programming language, a fact that has fundamentally changed what I believe I’m now capable of creating.

In the next few months, I’ll be unveiling an interactive astrology course—a creative vision years in the making—along with its companion iOS app called Soul Pilot. What I thought was out of reach just a few short years ago has rapidly become a graspable reality. My sense is that the power of this technology is truly unprecedented. The Promethean notion that we often associate with Uranus and its rulership of Aquarius seems uncannily constellated by this vector of potential. It does feel analogous to stealing fire from the gods—a mythological feat that also necessitates an equal measure of heroic humility.

And I feel like my perspective is uniquely informed by my life experience.

For more than three decades, I built my career as a creative professional in film, television, and digital media, learning the craft of storytelling as a work-for-hire artist inside large organizations and collaborative productions. I know what it takes to write a screenplay, develop a television series, edit a film, produce a podcast, record an audiobook, or build a digital course. Because I’ve spent a lifetime doing those things. And I remain committed to my craft. But my growing realization is that many of the technical and economic barriers separating those disciplines are going to dissolve. For the first time, I can imagine bringing an entire body of work into the world with a level of creative and financial freedom that simply wasn’t possible when I began my career.

I think this growing sense of sovereignty is the place where the Saturn–Uranus pairing becomes most personal for me. Saturn represents the thirty years of discipline, apprenticeship, technical knowledge, and professional experience that I bring to these tools. Uranus represents the sudden expansion of possibility they provide. The freedom arrives through the foundation. My ability to move nimbly across writing, image, audio, video, and code has been made possible by decades spent learning how creative work is actually made, how long it takes, what it costs, and where the real difficulties tend to hide.

That experience also gives me a healthy respect for the limitations of the technology. I can feel the Promethean excitement of discovering new forms of creative power while remaining attentive to quality, accuracy, authorship, and the consequences of moving too quickly. This is where Saturn continues to serve me. It slows the impulse toward pure acceleration and asks whether the work has structure, purpose, and integrity. Uranus opens the door. Saturn helps me decide what deserves to pass through it.

Soul Pilot is becoming the clearest expression of that synthesis so far. It draws upon an astrological methodology I have taught privately for years, carries forward the philosophical and symbolic work I have spent decades developing, and translates it into an interactive form that can reach people in an entirely new way. The app itself is only one project, though. What matters more is the recognition that a whole body of work can now take shape across multiple forms of expression, each one connected to the others and guided by the same underlying vision.

Your own response to these emerging technologies may be quite different from mine, and that’s to be expected. Some people feel a palpable sense of excitement. Others approach them with understandable caution, skepticism, or even distrust. Most of us probably find ourselves somewhere in between, moving back and forth as the technology continues to evolve. I don’t think applied astrology asks us to adopt any particular attitude. It simply invites us to become more conscious of how we’re meeting this Aquarian Era we’re already living through.

That’s also why I would never assume that everyone should respond to this technological moment the same way I have. My own curiosity and experience naturally led me to gravitate toward communication, learning, media, and artificial intelligence because Pluto is moving through my 3rd House. Your invitation may be entirely different.

If Aquarius is moving through your 7th House, you may find yourself asking questions about relationship and collaboration. What does it mean to partner with an intelligent machine? How do trust, intimacy, projection, or reciprocity begin to change when technology becomes part of the conversation?

If Aquarius is moving through your 10th House, your attention may turn toward your career. How might these emerging technologies reshape your profession? Which of your skills become more valuable? Which ones become obsolete? And which ones need to evolve? The cultural atmosphere is shared. The questions it awakens are profoundly personal.

Perhaps that’s why the responses to this moment seem so varied and, at times, so polarized. We’re all feeling the pressure of the same societal shift, yet it touches each of us in different places. For one person, these technologies may immediately raise questions about vocation and livelihood. For another, they reshape the experience of relationship, learning, creativity, or community. The qualities of the moment may be broadly shared, but the places where they ask something of us are remarkably individual.

So I invite you to look at your own chart. Notice where Aquarius falls. Pay attention to the capacities this era may be inviting you to cultivate. Hold those insights provisionally, experiment with them in the laboratory of your own experience, and allow life itself to become your teacher. That’s where astrology has always come most alive for me, and I have a feeling we’re only beginning to discover what this new chapter might make possible.

For me personally, this recognition has changed the way I think about the years ahead. I am approaching this transit with a sense of possibility grounded in lived experience. And as I’ve learned from experience, it requires foresight and hindsight. It will take nearly two decades before Pluto completes its passage through Aquarius. By that time I’ll be 74 years old—nearly twice as old as I am today. Such timescales require patience, and a certain amount of cosmic humility. It reminds me that this is an unfolding practice, one that will continue asking me to learn, adapt, refine, and grow.

And that’s ultimately what this notion of applied astrology has become for me. It’s not so much about predicting the future, but more a means of cultivating a relationship with it. The symbols stir my imagination, the unfolding history provides the conditions, and the chapters of my life supply the experience. My task is to meet the moment as consciously as I can, remaining disciplined enough to build upon solid foundations while staying open enough to recognize genuinely new possibilities as they emerge.

My hope in sharing this journey isn’t to convince anyone to see the world exactly as I do. It’s to encourage the same spirit of inquiry in whatever symbolic language, contemplative practice, or creative discipline you happen to find meaningful. Pluto’s journey through Aquarius belongs to all of us. The cultural atmosphere is shared. The invitation becomes personal through the unique landscape of our own lives.