The Queen lost her head because she could not see that reality had changed. How good are you in seeing the reverse of your life is true ? That is the primary reality of the Age of Aquarius.

They say this is the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. My wife is an Aquarian. So is my dad. I’m surrounded by them. What glimmer of this new Age have I learned from these Aquarians around me?

They think the opposite of the conventional. They are not wrong. They just see things in ways that the mainstream doesn’t want to accept.

That makes the story of Marie Antoinette a cautionary tale. She lost her head, only after she finally found it. Most people are so caught up in their own thinking, floating through life on their assumptions, that when adversity brings out their true selves it can be fatal.

The last Queen of France is known for the mistaken quote ‘let them eat cake,’ as the peasants starved in the street from a famine. All her life, Marie floated through the fairyland that was the royal court. When the French Revolution happened, she suddenly got serious about life.

Unfortunately, she gave the wrong advice to her husband, the king: reject giving up power to the parliament and keep all the power to himself. That’s the way kings always acted. There was no reason to give up conventional thinking for these upstarts. ‘D’oh!’

She couldn’t see that the world had suddenly changed. She kept to her old way of thinking. The guillotine thought otherwise.

So the Age of Aquarius is supposed to be the opposite of how we have been operating up until now. What does that mean?

What I find amazing on my journey is how little people really understand themselves. We take so much for granted. We pride ourselves in being in control and having a reason for how we act and think. Civilization is the progress of knowledge through history. We have figured it all out.

When you point out how they think and act, it is so strange that they give you a blank stare. Nothing sinks in. And yet, at that moment, everything just changed for them, and they cannot recognize it.

It is like space travel. We have seen the glory of the whole planet for almost 50 years. But we still act as individuals and nation-states like we did on the eve of World War I. We are self-interested, convinced we can control our lives. And we go off to war in Iraq to steal their oil, just like kings did when they wanted their neighbors riches.

It goes the same with global warming. We think we can fix the environment like a car engine. But the biosphere is a little beyond our science or politics right now. We know we can stop it by simply stopping pollution. Easy. And yet no one wants to face the fact that it means completely re-arranging our society to do so. No one wants to think that big. We just want to believe we are in control.

When you point this out, people protest and bring up all kinds of solutions, like keep our tires properly inflated and changing our lightbulbs to be energy efficient. They don’t get it. They want to feel in control and have instant solutions. Science makes us feel like our knowledge gives us control. Stopping global warming as a business opportunity.

Marie Antoinette believed in business-as-usual as well. Having only ever lived in prosperity, in control of all that she saw, why would one consider any other course of action? It worked in the past. Why fix what is not broken? The peasants showed her how broken it actually was. She just couldn’t see it.

How many other facets of the way we think need a reversal? Can we even imagine it? The spirituality industry is still focused on making consumers successful. It is still human-centered, not realizing that our palace of civilization is built on the back of a much greater life force. We are the kings and queens of knowledge for our own comfort and ‘growth.’ Are we even aware we are like this? What is Nature, other than recreation and raw materials? We have dominion over it. We are in charge. God gave us dominance over all this dust, even if we don’t believe in ‘God.’ What’s the big deal?

It is funny, if it wasn’t so sad. We have so much knowledge and yet we are prisoners to our illusion of self-awareness. True self-awareness comes when we have to accept a truth we have been avoiding or managing. That’s wisdom, the lost language of the modern age.

But we are a pain relief culture, and the truth hurts. We are sure we can manage with the status-quo. We’ve done so well this far. No use losing our heads over it.