The symbol given for Pisces is the World Savior, as Aquarius is World Server. This last meditation of the zodiacal year from Aries to Pisces presents an opportunity to contemplate completion and fulfillment. What might that mean for the individual and for our time? What ideas and ideals, what methods and results are we left with at the end of a life span?
 
Using the religious perspective of the Christian tradition this meditation focuses on the story of the Prodigal son who ventures forth, loses his way and then returns to his Father’s house wiser for the experience. In the ageless wisdom tradition it is the journey of humanity itself who descends into matter on the involutionary arc and ascends out of matter on the evolutionary arc, completing a ‘round’ in time. We are said to be in the fifth of seven rounds of time. In this way we lift up matter, redeem it and act as living bridges between spirit and matter in constant flux but with purpose moving in a spiral dynamic of cyclic change to an endpoint of fulfillment and completion.  In Buddhism enlightenment is achieved by returning to the original or primordial state after development and removing obscurations. And they have an impressive literature on stages of the path and states of meditation charting out  methodologies for the path of return.  In Kabbalism, and in  the Sufi tradition, Rumi says it well,

            I died as a mineral and became a plant,
            I died as a plant and rose to animal
            I died as animal and was a man
            Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Deepok Chopra, interviewed on a comedy program, summed up the Vedantic perspective as, ‘There is only one; you are an illusion!’   His new book gives an important perspective on non-dualism from a non-materialistic point of view.
 
From the psychological perspective, Carl Jung observed: “A political, social, religious, and philosophical conflict of unprecedented proportions has split the consciousness of our age. When such tremendous opposites split asunder, we may expect with certainty that the need for a savior” will emerge. “In the psyche as in nature, a tension of opposites creates a potential which may express itself at any time in a manifestation of energy,” summing it up with the beautiful phrase, “between above and below flows the waterfall.” Ramakrishna, the famous Hindu saint in the bhakti tradition, said, “Men float sticks upon the water and think that they have divided it.”
 
At the completion and fulfillment of the Piscean time period of human development, the ‘waterfall’ of new life is poured forth as potential, setting the standard for the age to come. A God-man (or woman), a God-Hero in the Herculean sense emerges embodying the model and methods of the new human for the age to come. The Herculean task is always essentially the same: ending the fear of terror and war by slaying the cause, and cleaning up the mess made by the imbalanced and incomplete thinking and living of the previous age. The cry of suffering humanity evokes an archetype.  “Between opposites there arises spontaneously a symbol of unity and wholeness, no matter whether it reaches consciousness or not,” Jung writes (Vol. 10, p. 414). He defined an archetype or primordial image as a tendency to form variable “representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.  There are, for instance, many representations of the motif of the hostile brethren, but the motif itself remains the same.” (Man and His Symbols, p. 67).  Whether the hostility is within the same family, regional family or the families of East and West, the myth of the hostile brethren is basically the same, it is the motif of war in one way or another. The same can be said for conflicting needs and desires within each individual.
 
For us now, much talk has been given to catastrophic and non-catastrophic end times of the Bible, and the Vedantic or Buddhic end of one time or age and the beginning of another. In his article on UFOs, Jung cites examples as old as ancient Egyptian history, as evidence of symbols appearing to signify an end of an era, specifically unusual sightings in the sky, such as “comets and saucer-like objects.“ Although the number of human aircraft in the sky could be called an early Aquarian achievement, there are objects yet to be identified, and some were seen by many people recently. Jung gave several different interpretations of this phenomenon. “They are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, or the archetypes, or ‘gods’ as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche,” which, Jung concludes, “may be expected when the spring-point enters Aquarius” from Pisces.  Such phenomena can be viewed in two ways. “In the first case, an objectively real, physical process forms the basis for an accompanying myth; in the second case an archetype creates the corresponding vision,” and in a third, much rarer case, they may occur synchronistically.  (Civilization in Transition, p. 311-313).
 
Ken Wilber summed up the conflict of our time as the “steel ceiling”, or steel lid, made of science which is spiritually repressed, and religion which is spiritually fixated! The imprisoned spiritual intelligence has brought the cultural crucible to   boiling point. And violence religiously motivated is increasing all over the world. Neither the spiritually repressed nor the religiously fixated is willing to accord the other a legitimate worldview. These two major methods for determining objective and subjective truths are hostily divided, demeaning and discrediting of each other.
Those scientists who believe in scientism in religious ways are clinging to there own unsubstantiated beliefs. “Ever since Democritus, there have been incredibly intelligent men and women who think that frisky dirt alone is real” Ken Wilber writes. Behavioral sciences began by “pronouncing disagreements with them to be illnesses, requiring medical intervention” like Soviet psychiatry. “God was now a disease for which the fledgling science of psychiatry had the cure,” (Integral Spirituality, p.178, p.190).
 
Wilber names the levels of consciousness from beginning to fulfillment in six stages as archaic, magical, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral, and applies this to individuals, groups and cultures alike. This gives us a picture of who makes up the full spectrum of religious people at one stage or another. The most important difference between people at these different stages is when we view them from the perspective of inclusiveness. Those at the highest or integral level of consciousness have inclusiveness. They see the full spectrum of perspectives as healthy.
 
For example, Christ can be interpreted as magically self-protective, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or universal, depending upon the stage of developmental spirituality. And this ability to account for the widest degree of development, the most spacious view, from primitive to universal, is the gift of the religions, according to Wilber. They alone account for development from earliest magical and mythical stages, correlating with Piaget’s cognitive development from early childhood to abstract reasoning, and considerably beyond. All cultural groups and subgroups throughout history can be placed on this continuum from primitive societies to technologically advanced and so can every individual from infancy to adulthood. “We are all born at stage one”, as Wilber points out (IS, pp. 191-192).
 
Alice O. Howell, Jungian astrologer and theosophist, describes the evolution of consciousness in terms of astrological ages, in her new book The Heavens Declare. She sees the Piscean age as contributing “faith and reason,” and forecasts That the Aquarian age “will be the dialectic of the individual and the cosmos” (p. 231).  
 
Evidence of holistic or integral thinking in another field is earth science. More and more people all over the world seem to be responding to the call for earth stewardship with growing awareness of the whole life web in which we exist and the necessity to take responsibility for the effects on it that our life style has caused.  The promising new field of Earth Systems Science, utilizing satellite technology for truly good and useful purposes: to observe a life form, instead of spying on it with suspicion! In this science we begin without an ‘us or them’ prejudice, but seek understanding of natural processes in a wholistic sense and knowledge that the observer and observed are one. As Chief Seattle observed: ‘We do not own the earth; the earth owns us.’ Identification with the whole is the future, it is intuition and it is wisdom. There are many people from all fields, nations and races who know this to be true and know it from their innermost being. These are the new group of world servers and they represent the kingdom of God on earth. This is the rational perspective. The center of synthesis uses those with a sense of synthesis. NASA considers that elements of this new science, Earth Science Enterprise, will benefit all humankind just as the first weather and communications satellites did.  On the ground Earth Stewardship has had proponents for decades now, such as Prince Charles, a spokesman for clean air, clean food and water, whose enterprises of organic growing have had good commercial success, and Al Gore, who also has with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, on global warning. He describes the earth as taking one breath a year—a truth monthly meditators have worked with for years!
 
As our cameras and satellites allow us to see ourselves from a higher perspective, our ability to think abstractly—a part of manas—increases, allowing us to enter the world of the spiritual triad of perspectives and energies. To enter into buddhi or the intuitional state, more than abstract concepts are needed. Go farther and a presence is perceived. As Buddhist Chogyal Norbu writes,   ‘For results, awareness must be accompanied by presence’ (Dzogchen, p. 125).  Abstract awareness without a sense of the living presence and energy of the whole can yield dry results, less than humane. Our ability to unite abstract thought and intuitive understanding or compassion may be the reemerging archetype that unifies human thought and intelligence, resulting in the new human, after the fear that separates is gone.  
 
May the living presence in this meditation touch us all with universal love.