Category: Philosophy

I began writing these notes on Saturday May 24, with Saturn just about to enter Aries in roughly 12 hours. This seems like a good time to reflect on the meanings of the Saturn/Neptune conjunction on the Aries point which is the focus of the main astrological factors of the next few years.

I am also writing this since it hits my chart personally – I have Mercury at 29 Pisces 20, less than a degree from the Aries point. Especially with my being a writer, the Saturn/Neptune configuration affects me strongly on every level, from personal to global externally and from mundane to spiritual personally.

It is also worth noting that I have Saturn and Neptune loosely conjunct in my natal chart. I view this period we are entering now as a kind of culmination of major themes that have been with me my whole life. My natal Saturn and Neptune are both in Libra so my issues have to do with balance, reconciling and combining opposite factors.

I want to meditate on using the Saturn/Neptune conjunction as they transition into Aries as the frame for a spiritual discipline during this period. I suspect that we are coming up on a period of turbulent, fundamental, and possibly violent changes. This will take a great deal of grace, flexibility and self-awareness to navigate the brutally difficult mental, spiritual and emotional stresses that will be part of this. That is my main focus – the individual’s response to the changes we will be seeing.

This is a rough period for me, and I am reflecting this way to help process the turbulent internal stresses I feel. I assume I am not the only person affected this way.

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First, some astrology basics on the two planets.

Saturn is moving into Aries, a sign where it is in its fall. This can mean loss of control, disgrace, prison, loss of respect, being disgraced and ignored. With Saturn having to do with control, rigidity, structure, and also responsibility, all of these are shaken when in fall. At is best, Saturn in fall is gracefully admitting and dealing with defeat, downfall, decline. At its worst it is refusing to admit decline and loss of control, and resorting to blaming. The key here, which is the key to Saturn in general, is honesty and taking responsibility.

Neptune is moving from cold, wet Pisces where it is very strong and comfortable, to hot dry Aries where it is much less effective. Neptune can be dreams, religions, also fantasy, imagination, falsehood and illusions. Moving into a sign where it is weaker can be dis-illusioning, dreams falling apart, religious or spiritual crisis. Physically Neptune is also related to toxic liquids – the Greek word in the New Testament for sorcery is pharmakeia, the root from which we get the word pharmacy – deception, control or manipulation using poisonous drugs. That is very Neptunian.

The higher side of Neptune is a real spiritual connection, but that is very tricky to do right. It is far too easy to cling to illusion.

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Here are some ways to think about the meanings of the Saturn/Neptune conjunction. All of these come from combinations of the planet meanings I outlined above. If any of these touch a nerve for you – if you react with anger or fear or defensiveness, or just ouch – that is a sign that particular meaning will be touching you in the coming months. Remember that blaming and refusing to take responsibility is one of the weaknesses of Saturn in fall.

– illusions being shattered and coming back down to earth; dealing with the consequences of that.

– places we lie to ourselves in order to have the illusion of control. Places where we lie to others, putting on a false front.

– places we have been lied to; coming to realize and admitting that; taking steps to avoid being manipulated by lies. Saturn/Neptune in Aries can be a bitter, disillusioning wake-up call.

– dealing with the ill effects of being poisoned – Neptune can mean poisons, especially poison liquids, especially those being given in a deceitful or hidden way; fall and death found to be caused by poison. This can mean toxic drugs or foods, or toxins in the environment. Saturn/Neptune could easily play out as the downfall and death of a world leader where poisoning and deception is involved.

– Saturn in fall can be refusing to take responsibility; lying and blaming.

– control based on lies and delusions falling apart; attempting to cling to power by refusing to admit that and doubling down on the lies.

– a time of drastic fracturing political change; beliefs and ideologies falling apart. Old structures and old securities dissolving and collapsing.

– old powers losing control and falling as people realize their power is based on illusion and deceit.

– refusing to take responsibility for lying; doubling down on lies; being caught and called out out for lying. Being caught lying and trying to blame others.

– refusing to change; clinging to structures that are falling apart and refusing to admit that is happening.

– a spiritual crisis; loss of credibility or faith in old established religious structures and institutions; a crisis of authority for religious institutions.

If you do not resonate or have a reaction to any of these suggested meanings, check to make sure you still have a pulse.

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I think the core meaning of what we are dealing with is, spiritual crisis.

The changes we are watching our society go through are a kind of spiritual collapse, a collapse caused by spiritual emptiness or deadness, where the living core is hollowed out so the person is walking dead, living in superficial illusions that have no life to them – that fits the symbolism perfectly.

Some people are talking of this time as a grand new beginning, a kind of planetary reset. To make the transition the dead shell of outworn structures is falling apart, and to survive there is a need to connect up to the living spiritual center.

Remember that this is a long term process.. very long term.. very, very long term, as in centuries – and this turbulent start to the new period will mostly be about the old collapsing. This is not the much hyped Dawning of the Age of Aquarius (cue string section and chorus).

The worst way to respond is to continue clinging to a dead world, one with no living core. The second worst way is to assume we are right on the verge of a new Golden Age, once we get rid of all those evil people getting in the way and get just a few bugs out of our grand New System. This is not the next big step of Progress; it is more like the mythology of Progress finally collapsing.

In order to survive this sort of earth-shaking change you need to get at the highest aspect of Neptune, the fidelity to the living spiritual core, and to do the fall part of Saturn with as much awareness and grace as possible.

That which is dying needs to die; that which is phony needs to be seen through; and the worst thing to do is to cling to lies and double down on them – that is a recipe for mental and emotional collapse, fracturing. Expect a lot of mood swings, depression alternating to blind rage with possible violence – an example would be the outbreaks of vandalism on Tesla vehicles. I would not be surprised if we see more of the sort of “Mostly Peaceful Protests” that marked the Summer of Covid and George Floyd.

Back in Spring of 2022 I did an essay on my other blog that I titled, Spiritual Emptiness  – where I quote extensively from the great Russian spiritual writer St. Theophan the Recluse. I think that describes the sort of spiritual crisis of an empty world that is coming to a head these next few years.

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Another major theme that surfaces repeatedly is letting go of delusions, and dealing with the consequences of delusion and deception

Closely related to that is the theme of taking responsibility for consequences, and that is likely going to be among the most difficult to do since Saturn in fall is weak on responsibility and strong on blame and excuses.

It really doesn’t matter who is “to blame”, as finding a scapegoat does not make problems go away. I suspect that much of the likely violence of the next few years will be people trying to find someone to blame and punish.

If I have been lied to I am the one who has to deal with that

I am responsible for the consequences of any actions I take, whether or not I did them in good faith, whether or not I was lied to or fooled. I have no-one to blame. (Saturn in fall could very easily work out as refusing to take responsibility for failure; trying to duck consequences.)

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A lot of this focuses back on each individual person’s response. I originally titled this essay, Saturn/Neptune as a Spiritual Discipline, and I think that is a good way to approach this.

For each of us as individuals this circles back to a matter or personal awareness and responsibility:

– admitting where you lie to yourself .

– admitting where you have an illusory self-image, or present a magnified or false self-image to the world – for reputation, for admiration, for money, for friendship.

– admitting your own errors and limitations. This is a good time for what Catholics call the Examination of Conscience – letting go of excusing or rationalizing your own errors and weaknesses.

– not putting on a fake face.

– admitting the possibility of failure, or of covering over failure by either not admitting it or glossing it over or excusing it.

This last point has a large scale political dimension to it. Part of America’s dilemma and weakness is the inability to ever admit we can do anything wrong – or that we are losing another in a string of messy catastrophic wars – or that we are no longer the great shining Light to the World we like to see ourselves as. The US is in decline in a lot of ways, and until we own up to that and take steps to deal with it we will continue to be blind-sided by one catastrophe after another.

In with its good points – and I think there are a lot of them – the MAGA movement has a large element of nostalgia for a mythical golden age. America is not Great anymore, and we cannot go back to the conditions of lifestyle, affluence and industrial domination of the 1950’s.

It will be a real test of strength and integrity for Americans, individually and as a nation, to be able to admit we are in decline, that we no longer rule the world, and that we are in the midst of a collapsing empire and have to deal with the messy consequences. Unless I miss my guess, after the next few years that condition will be very difficult to deny.

It takes a lot of strength and integrity to gracefully admit defeat – we will see if our world leaders are strong enough to do that.

For my friends and colleagues in England and Europe – examine your own condition.

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I talked about this being a crisis of faith, a spiritual crisis. I think this coming period is going to be very turbulent and important specifically for the Roman Catholic church. My previous essay was an analysis of the Inauguration Mass of Pope Leo XIV . Based on some critical configurations in that chart I expect that the church is entering a period of loss of credibility and authority.

This impacts me personally since I became Catholic just a few years ago. With the Catholic faith, I am having to come to terms with admitting that the old institution is deeply corrupt, and I can’t count on the Church for security and stability. I have also learned that some parish churches can be unhealthy.

Saturn can mean a dogmatic, rule-driven approach to religion, and that is a very shaky ground for stability. The strength and support that comes from religion has to go deeper than a set of dogma or a political institution, and I am having to sort that out. For me personally this period is a severe crisis of faith, and I can’t predict how it will turn out. I expect I am not alone in dealing with that.

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Hovering in the background, and overshadowing this entire situation is the ubiquitous, all-encompassing Mainstream Media (MSM) – the techno-media world most of us are immersed in. That has been a pet theme of mine for years.

Five years ago I did a video on the Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn as ushering in a period where the big battle will be for control of our minds using media.

My series on the Sorcerer State goes into these same issues, and this Saturn/Neptune conjunction period is where they all come to a head. I think of this upcoming period as like the moment in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy throws a pail of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

I’m melting…

Media awareness is absolutely critical to navigate the changes of the next few years.

– admitting where you’ve been lied to.

– awakening to media manipulation; becoming aware of it; taking steps to become more media savvy. This is especially important as the MSM continues to lose credibility and becomes more vague, shrill and incoherent – having to get a distance from that to avoid a psychological meltdown.

– admitting the effect media has on us; getting past that odd delusion that most people have (including me most of the time) that I am the one person who is immune to being duped by the media because I’m too smart for that.

Note that I am writing this essay on an old backup computer that does not have Internet turned on – I have figured out that when I am on my main laptop I stop periodically – roughly every 17 seconds or so – to recheck my email and the news and blog sites… I’m addicted and I know it, and I have learned that working on this offline machine is much quieter, more peaceful and less stressful. Being off the Net helps clear a kind of foggy tense blur in my mind.

For me an Internet Fast will part of my discipline this summer. I suspect that I am not the only person who might find that helpful.

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Hopefully I have suggested a few ways to think about this Saturn/Neptune conjunction period, and suggested some ways to navigate it and come through intact.

I wasn’t planning on writing anything about the new Pope Leo XIV until I saw the chart of his inauguration Mass.

As far as I am aware it is usual to time the start of the Pope’s tenure from the Habemus Papam moment, when white smoke comes up from the Vatican. We have that timed to the minute, and I will briefly talk about it later.

The situation with the new Pope Leo XIV is complicated by the fact that we do not have a timed birth chart – we have a date and no birth time.

On a whim I took a look at the timed chart for Pope Leo’s inaugural Mass, and there is one feature that jumped out at me, and that triggered this post.

Continue reading “Pope Leo XIV Inaugural Mass”

Astrology is the art of applying a heavenly pattern to earthly patterns. It is meaningless until you map the symbolic language of astrology onto data of the world.

Your astrology is only as good as the news sources you rely on.

We are in a time of extreme polarization politically, and for several years now I am seeing an increasing trend of more and more astrology online being permeated by a political agenda straight out of the mainstream media. Sometimes this seems to reflect the astrologer’s own political bias, and sometimes it seems to be a matter of echoing media talking points without awareness. Continue reading “Fake News, Fake Astrology”

This is the final essay in a series on looking at our world as a Sorcerer State, where people are manipulated and controlled primarily by media persuasion rather than brute force. I am arguing that this persuasion scheme violates some of the most basic and important rules of persuasion and of mental magic, and hence is doomed to recoil back on itself and fail by self-destructing.

Here I want to concentrate on what I call the Law of Altruism and Selflessness.

This gets close to the core of a problem in our society, and it is a problem with how we view reality.

The underlying rules are:

– Ultimately we are all one and are connected in consciousness – what benefits one, benefits all; what harms one harms all.

– Thus the only safe way to use mind influence is to use it selflessly, for the good of all. To violate that rule is dangerous to oneself and to others – it causes harm and eventually backfires.

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The particular form that mental and persuasive magic takes in our culture is heavily influenced by a movement known as New Thought. It has a lot of different forms, and is probably best known as the different forms of positive thinking. It is far more pervasive in our culture than most people realize.

I was raised as a member of a New Thought church called Unity, which is part of that movement, so I have studied quite a bit about it as it is part of my own spiritual roots. There are some very crucial truths that are emphasized in the earliest forms of the movement that have been lost sight of, and that we need to bring back.

If you go back and study the work and writings of the pioneers of New Thought, there is a very strong and pervasive streak of altruism and selflessness in them. It operates from the premise that we are all One in Mind, and that our thoughts affect the reality we experience. Thus it only makes sense that, to work with that Oneness, that our motives should be selfless and working for the good of all. To work for selfish motives, or pitting people against each other, is self-contradictory and backfires since it denies the oneness that the whole system is based on.

In some later developments of New Thought that sense of altruism and selfishness was lost, and there are distinctly selfish variants of New Thought that became very popular in the US, especially among educated and moneyed classes – you might have heard of Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich, or the work of Earl Nightingale. A few decades down the road you have the influence of Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking.

At its best this self-centered variety of New Thought can help to give people self-confidence – but at its worst it can be used to further selfish greed and a sense of entitlement.

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In another variant of New Thought, there is a different kind of assumption that external reality is in some ways a blank slate that can be shaped to whatever we want. I talked about that in the essay on truthfulness and persuasion. This is the “You create your own reality” variant of New Thought.

There is another strange contradictory variant, where there are those in media and government who believe they Create their Own Reality that they can then impose on others by persuasion. It doesn’t take much consideration to realize that is internally contradictory.

What we see in our modern culture is a kind of highly developed and sophisticated mental selfishness, with no regard for the larger system that we are all part of – both the community of other people, the larger ecosystem of earth, and the yet larger mental and spiritual ecosystem we are all part of.

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When you start messing with the sort of mass mental persuasion or sorcery that our culture deals in you are working at a level of reality where you need to take into account that our minds are connected and can influence each other.

The laws of any sort of mental influence need to include that effect – we can no longer afford to act as if we are separate.

The setting up of the kinds of opposite polarities we see in politics divides people against each other, and violates that rule of our connectedness. Selfishness is self-defeating since we are part of each other.

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There is another consequence of this law that is commonly violated today – using negative magic, or directing negative spells at a person, is ultimately self-defeating since it violates the law of our connectedness – and negative influence always and everywhere backfires on the person practicing it.

Look at how much of the corporate media is devoted to attacks on one group or another, and how much influence now is attack influence based on stirring up feelings of rage, hatred and contempt towards ones enemies. It seems to be particularly bad in our current period – I am writing these worlds in November in the period just around the US election – and the viciousness and dishonesty of the media attacks – I won’t call it breath taking but choking.

It destroys the people practicing it, and it tears down the bonds that keep our society together – not to mention how this sort of reckless exploitive disregard also tears down our connections to the larger ecology.

It sets family against family, brother against sister and children against parents, political parties against each other, states against each other – all the way up to the highest level of countries lined up and destroying each other.

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So what do we do? What is the way forward?

We need to acknowledge our interconnectedness, that we are all one in mind and spirit – that we are responsible for our thoughts and words, how they affect our world and each other.

We need to recognize the importance of compassion and altruistic motives in how we live in the world, and that any sort of divisive selfishness destroys the people who practice it.

We need to recognize that when we attack others we are attacking something within ourselves and it divides and destroys us, externally and internally. When we when we attack others or attack evil forces outside of ourselves we are ultimately attacking ourselves.

Making the darkness outside you the enemy is dangerous; the real darkness is within and needs to be accepted and dealt with.

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So, we need altruism; tolerance; getting past demonizing others and learning to work with others; and waking up from the us/them blame game.

In a period where we are badly divided, and so much of what we have been told about the world is ending up being manipulative lies to further divide us, there is a deep need for dialog and cooperation with those we disagree with. We can no longer afford name-calling and demonizing. If we continue on the path of polarizing division we are on we will destroy ourselves.

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To wrap up I want to briefly recap the persuasion rules that I have been talking about. I think when you look at them together you see that they are all of a piece.

The Law of Equilibrium and Balance – push too far in one direction and you will get an inevitable recoil and backlash.

The Law of Truth and Honesty – words have the power of the truth behind them; use words that are deliberately false and misleading and you hollow out your words and rob them of power. Persuasion in relationship is based on a foundation of trust and honesty. Violate that trust and your persuasion loses all power and conviction, and recoils back on yourself.

The Law of Altruism and Selflessness – we really are far more interconnected than we realize, and our thoughts and minds influence each other. Whatever is good for one must be good for the whole or it is short-sighted and falls apart. To cultivate hostility and division where groups are pitted against each other is ultimately self-defeating and collapses in on itself.

I think we are at a point where the not-particularly-masterful masterminds of the Sorcerer State are in the process of melting down and self-destructing. The next few years could get messy as we become aware of problem areas that have been covered over with a veneer of persuasion fiction. To get through, we will need balance; we will need truth and honesty; we will need altruism and gracious mutual good-will.

I think we are headed in the right direction now, and the more of us work with these principles in mind, the better we will do.

We have some serious work to do.

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Image of sun over water by jrm – photo from Pixabay.

Image from the Wizard of Oz of the Wicked Witch melting by William Wallace Denslow, illustrator, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

This post is part of series on how the media world we live in today is a Sorcerer State, based on manipulating and controlling people primarily by persuasion rather than force. I maintain that this persuasion model violates some of the most basic laws of effective communication and change work.

In this post I am looking at the Law of Truth, Honesty and Trust.

There are two dimensions to this Law, and they are inter-related.

– First, there is the nature of words and thinking, their relation to creation and to reality as we affect it and experience it.

– Second is how our use of words affects the nature of inter-personal relationships.

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The corporate media today is based on a model of the world which is all persuasion and no truth – or rather, it is operating on the premise that reality can be whatever we wish it to appear to be – that reality is like a TV or computer screen, and we can do whatever we want with the contents.

It has effectively lost all notion of underlying truthfulness, or of there being some sort of actual truth that can be checked against. This can be easily seen in how very often the media broadcasts stories to have a particular persuasive effect, which are found to be complete fiction – not even a biased presentation of fact, but based on no facts at all.

There is a flaw in the underlying philosophy at work here. Awareness of this problem goes back to the writings of Plato/Socrates. The dialog named First Alcibiades has for its subject the difference between philosophy and rhetoric, language used to convey truth or to persuade. The point is made that focusing on persuasion with no regard for truth or for any kind of underlying moral values is questionable at best and very dangerous at worst. We see the fallout from persuasion without truth in the state of the corporate media today, which seems to be in the process of imploding in on itself from a collapse of trust in the truthfulness of the media message.

You hear much in our culture about persuasion, and influencing, and making a good impression, putting on a good face, on marketing and on image. The whole focus is on how you want to appear, with no emphasis on underlying reality. It is all mask with nothing behind the mask.

Plato makes the point in First Alcibiades that is is dangerous to concentrate on persuasion skills until you have a solid sense of underlying values. The young man in the dialog very much wanted to be a political leader and was focused on persuading people he could lead, but he had given no thought to what his values were, or what was true of false, or what direction would be best to go. This is wanting to be a leader with no direction, just to be able to say you are a leader. People like that end up being very easily corrupted by promises of power and wealth – just say what we tell you and you can have the world at your feet. When the power of being a leader is itself the goal with no larger context that quickly devolves to lowest-common-denominator selfishness.

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Another dimension of this issue is about the power of words, and how words are used in creation. Numerous religious and philosophical traditions speak of the Logos, or God creating by his Word, You can make the case that in Taoist philosophy the concept of Tao or the Way is analogous to that of the Word – Chinese translations of the Gospel of John say, In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God, and so on.

It is very important to realize that this creative power is not arbitrary. The universe operates within laws, so it is not a matter of, it is true because God said so, but, God must create what is true. Philosophically this is known as the difference between realism and nominalism – realism says there is an underlying reality to creation by word, and nominalism says that creation can be arbitrary. The modern approach to persuasion/marketing/reality is nominalist – it is true because I say so.

The point I am making here is that the universe operates in realist terms. it is not arbitrary, and has underlying laws and structure. When we create, we must abide by those laws, and the power of our words directly reflects how they correspond with those laws.

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For the individual – thoughts have power, and how you think goes far to determine the world you experience. Since thoughts have power you are bound by them and by their consequences – the kinds of things you think, the thoughts and images you hold in your mind, shape you. This shows how the mind has a great deal of power but it is not arbitrary; there are laws.

it makes sense then that working on thinking as clearly and truthfully as possible is good for your mental health, and leads to your thoughts being clear and powerful. It also makes sense that to use deliberate falsehood and deception robs your words of power.

Think about ignoring truth and concentrating just on persuasion and appearance – we see a great deal of that in the media and political sphere these days, people whose speeches and actions are all tailored towards marketing and appearance with no regard to underlying truth. If you do that for any length of time you lose the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between reality and desired appearance – lay down a line of jive and you will inevitably buy your own jive. Get in the habit of lying to persuade and you get caught up in believing the lies.

Our thoughts, our words, are part of our inner connection to God and to the depths of our own souls. It is related to our intuition and conscience, a guiding voice of the divine within us. Live in a world of deliberate falsehood and you blur over and eventually lose that inner . It rots the soul out from within, so that eventually you have people who are all image and no substance, a shell with nothing behind it. It rots out any sense of internal coherence and personhood. When you have lost that inner rational and spiritual coherence then all that is left is the lowest level of physical and animal sensations, desires and instincts – which in turn makes you a sucker for other’s manipulation.

There is also a self-defeating loop here – concentrate on persuasion and marketing with no regard for truth and that robs your words and actions of all their real power. This turns into a vicious escalating spiral – as you lose control the tendency is to double down on the persuasion and marketing, with no regard for truth – and with zero respect for the people you are trying to control.

That’s the nub – manipulation with no regard for truth shows a profound contempt and lack of respect – for others – and, for yourself. Once people figure that out you are in trouble.

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This is where the inter-personal dimension comes in.

In the study of persuasion and salesmanship one of the core principles for long term success is building relationships, building a reputation for truth and reliability. It is not just a matter of lip-service to say that the best sales people are those who sincerely do operate with the best interest of their clients in mind, who would never take advantage of a customer to close a quick sale and make a quick buck. That may work in the short term, but long-term it is self-defeating.

Any persuasion relationship has to be built on a basis of truth and trustfulness. Once that trust in broken – once a person has figured out that they are being lied to or manipulated – then you have lost all credibility and your ability to persuade drops to zero.

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So what do we as individuals do about this problem? How do we navigate?

Value truth and honesty over reputation and appearance – in my experience this is much, much more difficult than you realize – until your thinking and exploration takes you into areas that are off-limits to the mainstream consensus. I’ve discovered over the past several years that I have mental guard-rails set up in my mind – when I would start to explore in questionable areas I would get a mental warning sign and a flash of tension, like a red warning light saying, don’t go here – don’t even think this – it could get you in trouble. In the past I have nicknamed these mental land-mines, placed there to make sure that certain topics were off limits. It wasn’t until I pushed past those warning signals and did my own thinking, that I realized how thoroughly my thinking had been constricted. This in turn created serious problems communicating with people who still had those mental land-mines in place – touching on some topics felt like setting off an explosion.

I’ve been writing online for well over a decade now, and I can’t count the number of times I have started to write something and then thought, wait – this could hurt your reputation – you can’t say anything that will turn people off. It is a kind of hard-wired self-censorship that is hard to become aware of. I also noticed that in situations like that there was often a kind of inner imperative there, pushing me to write exactly in those areas – sometimes I would be writing in response to an inner prompting while simultaneously thinking, oh, man, don’t make me write about this; you’ll get me in trouble.

The best way I know of to become aware of this is to pay attention to your own thought processes, and your emotional reactions to news – and what kinds of thoughts run through your mind before you decide to speak – or to stay silent.

When you start to question parts of the news, pay attention to your motives, your feelings – are you thinking, I can’t go there, it will get me in trouble; What will my (fill in the blank) think?

Thinking for yourself sounds easy until you try it.

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Another very important milestone is to be willing to admit where you have been fooled and taken advantage of. Be willing to admit you have made mistakes, have been told lies and have bought them. Again, this can be much harder than it sounds until you are faced with it, and get that ugly sinking feeling where you would do anything rather than admit that. This is particularly difficult where you have said things in public that you figure out were false.

Get some good recipes for eating crow; you will need them.

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In my experience there is also a scary point where you realize that a lot of the authorities you have trusted through your life are corrupt, so that you cannot rely on anyone else, any institution or expert, to do your thinking for you. There is a funny sort of free-fall moment where you realize you are responsible for your own decisions, and your own thinking. Past a certain point there is no-one left to blame and no-place to shift the responsibility. Whether you were misled or not, you are responsible for the consequences of the decisions you made.

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To move past the persuasion model we need to be willing to dialog, be willing to let people disagree without your having the need to judge them or cut them off. Again, this can be a lot harder than it sounds, especially in your personal hot-button areas.

We are so trained into an adversarial model of relating to others, the binary right/wrong model, that getting past that can take work and feel really uncomfortable – I know it does for me.

It is very important to allow other people to think for themselves. to allow that there can be areas where they are right and you are wrong, or that it is more likely a mixed bag where neither side is all right or wrong. Or, sometimes you may have areas where you are convinced you are right, and you need to allow people the freedom to disagree, without rancor or judgment. That is hard.

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Learn to think. Get a good dictionary, and get in the habit of defining important words. Learn to recognize when language is being used on you to obfuscate and manipulate rather than inform. That is not a quick process; it takes work and awareness, and it is very different from the sort of thinking we are trained to do in school, which is largely a matter of rote memorization and parroting back the expected response if you want to get ahead. That is a hard habit to break.

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Choose your news sources carefully. if you agree with me here about the corporate media, now that they have lost authority and credibility, it means you can no longer rely on credentials in choosing your news. The people I now follow online have proved their veracity and trustworthiness to me over time, so I now rely on them, which does not mean I agree with all they say. Over the years I have followed and then discarded multiple news sources, and I now have a small handful of people I read regularly who are my main sources of news.

If you learn from experience that a news source has lied to you to manipulate you – that is a big red flag. Drop it; do not assume that because you are aware of their manipulation in that one area, that you are not being hoodwinked in others. It is so very easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are too smart to be fooled like that. Whatever media you ingest affects your mind, and much of that effect is outside your conscious awareness.

Manipulative media is toxic and brainwashing; avoid it, it is dangerous – And no, you are not above being fooled because you are too intelligent. Some of the most thoroughly brainwashed people I know are the most credentialed and degreed.

If you place a lot of value on credentials, be careful; given the disillusionment going on with authority and trustworthiness, those credentials no longer mean what they used to. By now, my favorite and most trustworthy news sources ares un-credentialed outsider types who have no academic cred. I have to judge sources by their inherent worth rather than their credentials or labeling.

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This next point may be the hardest part – being honest with yourself.

Sometimes there is a price to be paid for stepping outside of popular opinions and being honest. Ask yourself if you are willing to pay it – and don’t bother equivocating, because if you lie here you are only lying to yourself – and if you lie to yourself you will never know what trust means – because if you are lying you will have to assume that everyone else is lying also, and that will destroy any real friendship.

If you get in the habit of lying to yourself you are proving you can’t trust yourself – and if you can’t trust yourself, how can you expect anyone else to trust you?

How in the world can you possibly find the sorts of friends you would like to have if you aren’t honest with others? If you are putting up a false front, then how can anyone figure out who you really are?

—

We are reaping the consequences of living in a society that places manipulation and persuasion above respect for truth and for others. That world is falling apart around us, and going forward we need to rediscover the importance of the ironclad, unbreakable laws of honesty, truthfulness and trust.

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Image by M. Richter from Pixabay.

In the first post in this series, The Sorcerer State, I talked about understanding our current predicament as that of a Sorcerer State, where those mindlessly casting the persuasion spells are breaking some very basic rules of effective magic.

In this post I want to talk about one group of those basic rules – of Equilibrium, Balance and Reaction. You can sum them up in this way:

– All systems will always tend towards maintaining a state of equilibrium. This is not stillness but a dynamic, oscillating and cyclical movement, an orderly movement around a center.

– Any disturbance of equilibrium will create a reaction in the opposite direction. The more extreme the original deviance from equilibrium the more extreme the reaction.

– The best way to keep a state of balance is to avoid extremes because they create extreme polarization and tension.

It will be pretty clear that I am writing this from the perspective of a resident of the US, so my comments are colored by that.

—

I did a post earlier this year on this topic: Cycles and the Shape of Decline.

That post is about the topic of cycles and equilibrium, of growth and decline, where I talked about our country wanting to pursue a policy of straight line unlimited growth – and, if that growth was not actually happening, to manipulate the news and the numbers to make it appear it was happening, That’s a very good example of pushing a system out balance to an extreme that calls for an extreme reaction back.

The image above is referring to the state of our economy, where the blue wave shows the actual condition our economy is in and the red jagged line shows the official narrative – and if I am right we are in for a serious correction. That wave shape applies to other sorts of cycles also – the wave is the graph of a pendulum moving through time.

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There is another dimension to this media manipulation, which is to push people to wildly polarized extremes. I talked about the tendency to paint things in black/white good/evil dichotomies. That groups people in one extreme camp or the other and pits them against each other.

I will be exploring both these points in this essay.

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I want to use a useful analogy here that I saw in John Michael Greer’s book, Dark Age America, in a chapter discussing ecology and the environment. Take a bathtub mostly full of water, and move your hand in it. If you move your hand gradually you will get a series of gentle waves in reaction, and if you remove your hand it gradually returns to rest. The more strongly and rapidly you move your hand, the bigger the waves become, until past a certain point the regular wave pattern breaks down and you get chaotic movement, likely with water splashing all over the floor.

That is the point I think we are approaching now. The persuasion in the media, which is wildly out of balance and out of touch, is like wildly slapping the water over and over in a single direction, rather like trying to pile all the water up in half the tub and pretend the other half doesn’t exist.

At this point the very best thing to do is take your hand out of the tub and Back Off.

—

Another dimension of this rule of balanced movement is what I think of as Riding the Wave. Any sort of action is most effective when it is going in harmony with a larger current – riding the wave – and attempting to go against the wave both runs into extreme resistance and also pushes an out of balance system even further out of balance, inviting a yet stronger and more extreme backlash reaction when it does come.

From where I am sitting the politics of 2020 in the US (and apparently in England, much of Europe and even Australia) was a move of desperation, of people who knew they were losing control and tried taking extreme measures to keep it, crossing a line more and more from persuasion into coercion. That control can be powerful, but it is also very brittle – which invites and makes inevitable an extreme reaction, an extreme swing back the other way. That swing back is being desperately resisted, and the longer that happens the worse the inevitable backlash will be.

That persuasion included extreme measures to shut down all alternate points of view, and to harass, vilify, slander and attack those disagreeing with the mandated points. This extreme coercion and censorship was taken to the point of un-personing people who resisted the coercion. (I experienced some of that first hand a few years back, when I had Twitter and Facebook cancel mobs after me to destroy my reputation because I had made some statements that were taken to be politically incorrect. It is all kinds of no fun to be on the receiving end of that.)

In a nutshell I think that is what happened with the covid mania in 2020 and its political ramifications – it was a violent swing in one direction in attempt to maintain control, and it worked for awhile, but only by using some pretty brutally extreme coercive techniques. This was like trying to take a pendulum that was already far over on one side and about to swing back, and using extreme force to push it even further in that same direction.

Here is a quote from Blavatsky that describes this process of equilibrium and reaction with the eastern term karma.

It is man who plants and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigor. If it happens to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say it is the bough which broke our arm or that our own folly has brought us to grief?

– H P Blavatsky, Key to Theosophy pp 211-212

The net result is that we have a system that is wildly out of balance and desperately trying to act like everything is going just fine, thank you very much. I expected we will be seeing more than a few dislocated arms in the coming days.

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If I look at the last few years of my life, – since 2016 in a larger frame, and definitely since 2020 and the covid mania – I experienced what seemed to me like our culture taking a very violent swing hard left, and painting me as an enemy of society and extremist in the process. I in turn personally responded by taking a rightward swing in my own opinions for awhile – that was my semi-conscious reaction to reach some sort of balance. This past year, as I calm down and become more aware, I am trying to settle back to a more balanced and equilibrated place, recognizing the best of my experience on the right side of the spectrum while backing away from some of their distinctive imbalances.

—

I want to talk some more about this tactic of painting things in stark extremes, setting up polarized opposites against each other. This involves labeling actions, and people, in terms of extreme binaries, like:

– White/Black

– Good/Evil

– Us/Them

That last one, Us/Them, is the worst, since it sets people at each other’s throats and creates violent divisions and fractures in social groups – families, clubs, work groups, churches and so on. Friendships were destroyed, groups and families were torn apart, both on political lines, and on attitudes and actions towards the mandated covid directives of vaccination, masking, distancing and so on. This divided groups on sharp binary lines that fractured any sense of tolerance or cooperation. I know I personally lost my main social communities over those issues.

This Us/Them division is related to the general attitude in our society of lack of context, where something can be good for me or for Us and I can ignore all the rest of Them out there because they don’t count – or, I can ignore the greater world and leave it out of account. It’s the isolation of exploitive selfishness, and it is an attitude that runs very deep in our culture.

—

In trying to manipulate these extreme divisions, part of the way MSM – Mainstream Media, aka Legacy Media since it is in the process of being obsoleted and superseded – MSM appears to be trying to deal with these extreme divisions by getting us involved in yet another holy war abroad as a way of uniting popular sentiment. This has been done before, several times even in my own lifetime. The problem is that this does not seem to be working very well anymore; too many people recall the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Ukraine situation now seems to be falling apart and backfiring. I suspect there may be another try in the Middle East, but there is already a wide split in American culture on conflicts there – and that split is there whether or not MSM acknowledges the split or tries to shut down open discussion. These divisions do not miraculously disappear by declaring a false state of Unity that very quietly (or maybe not so quietly) erases half of the country.

Past a point, finding an external enemy as a way of papering over domestic problems and divisions quits working, and I suspect we are well past that point already.

—

There is another metaphor for our unbalanced state that I used in an earlier post, one that is particularly apt for the direction our economy is going, and related to that, the government’s actions in funding wars around the world. In some ways our country is like a way over-inflated balloon that is springing leaks, and the strategy to deal with that is to keep frantically pumping more and more air into it to compensate… you can visualize where that will end up.

—

Given that we are dealing with a grossly unbalanced and unstable state of affairs, what can we do about it? How can we personally respond to keep from exacerbating the situation and getting caught up in the violent wild swings over the next few years?

Take the bathtub analogy again – when the waves get too disorderly and water starts splashing all over the place, this is a really good time to back away from the tub and wait a bit until the water calms down.

This is a very good time to avoid conflict.

Individually, it is a good time to keep from giving in to violent mood swings, or to get caught up in rage, blaming and yelling. It is good to moderate one’s own emotional responses by getting some distance and perspective from them. This takes some time, some perspective, and some emotional maturity to be able to get a distance from your own emotions to moderate them. It also means taking responsibility for your own emotional reactions rather than blaming them on an outside force.

I find it very helpful to remember that the violent mood swings, pitting people against each other, are part and parcel of the manipulation techniques used to keep people under control by having them rip each other down. By staying calm and refusing to play the rage and blame game I am helping to break the spell.

This is also a very good time to cultivate compassion and understanding – to remember that there are usually more than two sides to an argument; that no one side has a monopoly on Rightness – and to remember that the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea, and to seek another option closer to the middle.

In other words, the best thing to do now is to cultivate a sense of balance and equilibrium in yourself.

For myself, I find it absolutely essential to have a regular prayer and worship life to keep balance – one that includes humility and self-examination – and to take advantage of my faith without falling into the trap of seeing myself on the one Right side while every one else is on the Wrong side. This also means to stay away from the trap of getting caught up in a need to convert others to My Side which has The capital T Truth. Tolerance, understanding and compassion are all virtues that badly need cultivation right now. Remember that the word virtue means power or force, and cultivating these virtues of self-control, discipline, balance, compassion and forgiveness are all very empowering. The closer you are to calm equilibrium the harder you are to knock off balance – anyone who has studied anything about martial arts knows that as soon as your opponent loses their cool and gets angry that the match is over, given skill and patience.

So, the best way to help our society ride the changes coming is to first establish a center of equilibrium in yourself. I am convinced that prayer from a place of calm and balance is far more powerful and effective, and frankly I think we can be greatly helped by many people devoting themselves to such prayer.

When you are not in a place of calm and balance, prayer is one of the best things I know to help move you there.

I also suspect that there will be periods where things can get unstable enough that taking direct public action will be dangerous – there is a potential for actual violence at a local level. Sometimes the best advice really is to stop thrashing the water and back away from the tub until the water calms down.

Don’t just Do Something, Sit There!

There is something to be said for regularly getting to a place of silence, stillness and balance before taking any action. Also, a lot can be done with prayer from a place of silence.

If you are in motion and off-balance, it really helps to slow down and stop moving to regain balance before moving again.

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Part of why I am writing this series right now, at this point in time – I talked about how much of the MSM sorcery is exacerbating things in an extreme direction. I am convinced we are in the midst of a growing swing back from the excesses of 2020 and earlier – aka a backlash – and with this post, if I read things correctly, I am riding that wave and taking advantage of its momentum.

I write this next note for those who have felt frustrated, isolated and unhappy with the direction things have swung in the past few years:

Take heart; you are not alone. Keep your signals out, online and locally – you have friends.

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Here I want to sum up where the whole series on the Sorcerer State is going. To make it through the rough years of transition ahead, both personally and as a group, I convinced we are wanting to move in these directions:

– away from extreme polarization and towards equilibrium and a balancing point in middle.

– away from adversary attitudes and blaming, and towards forgiveness and cooperation.

– away from exploitive, adversary persuasion/marketing and towards dialog and truth.

– away from selfishness and self-isolation towards community, context, ecology, working in harmony with the larger whole – moving with the currents of the greater world.

—

In the next essay in this series I want to talk about another set of laws related to effective magic and living an effective life – the laws of Truthfulness, of Honesty and of Trust.

Stay tuned.

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Image of pendulum from Wikimedia Commons.

In the post I want to look at the inception chart for the city of Baghdad, founded in 762 as the capital city of the Abbasid dynasty, which dominated Arab and Islamic civilization for a period of 500 years until it was conquered by Mongols in 1258.

It is generally recognized that this inception chart of the city of Baghdad is an astrological election, likely the single most famous elected chart in the history of astrology. It is the deliberately chosen foundation for a religious dynasty.

[A note on the chart diagram – the symbol near the Midheaven that says ‘AP Spirit A’ is the Lot of Spirit – AP stands for Arabic Part – and the symbol to the right of the Midheaven with a small Sun and Moon symbol is the Sun/Moon midpoint.]

Looking at this chart in the light of my current work with the two major Lots of Fortune and Spirit makes sense of it at a whole different level – in fact, without the Lots it is highly problematic. The Lots are the key to the entire chart. Continue reading “Baghdad and the Lots”

The Sorcerer State

This is a sequel to my previous post, Saturn and Neptune: The Fight for Our Minds

In this post I want to talk about the mind-control state me we live in; to become aware of it and recognize it; to recognize some of the main techniques, how it snares and controls people.

I also want to talk about the big mistakes it is making, and why it is destined to boomerang and collapse.

And finally, I want to touch on ways to break out of the control. In my experience that can be a long and painful process, so I will be sharing some of what I went through.

So what do I mean by Sorcerer State? Continue reading “The Sorcerer State”

In this post I want to talk about using the four solar Cardinal Ingress charts in conjunction with personal natal charts.

It is common to look at New Moon charts, both stand-alone and in conjunction with a natal chart, to get an idea of what the upcoming month will be like. It is also sometimes used for a sort of simple astrological magic by using the time of the New Moon to “set your intentions” for the month ahead. If you know much at all about magic this is not a good practice; the time of the New Moon itself is traditionally considered particularly weak and malefic and will warp any intentional magic done then. If you are attracted to this practice, consider planning prior to the New Moon itself, and if you want to do a change-working meditation, wait until the Moon is past the dark phase and is starting to wax again.

New Moons are worth looking at, as they can give you information on what the tone of the upcoming month will be like. I think they are best used in conjunction with a natal, as the most important aspect of the New Moon chart is how it intersects and activates the natal. Like with Solar Returns, I find I get most meaningful results if I draw up the New Moon for my birthplace, although some people prefer to use your current location.

On the larger mundane level it is common to look at the cardinal ingresses for predictions relative to a nation. It is most common to use only the Ingress into Aries as the start of the year. Uranian astrologers use the Capricorn ingress for this purpose, and there is something to be said for that since that Ingress corresponds most closely to the New Moon phase, whereas the Spring Aries Ingress is more like the emergence into the world that starts with the Moon at the waxing quarter. I personally find that all four ingresses are important.

What I am arguing for in this post is using the solar Cardinal Ingress charts to map to individual natal charts as a way of seeing a larger context of activity for the period – and not just for heads of state to do mundane analysis, but for ordinary people. Continue reading “Aligning with the Cardinal Ingresses”

This is the third of a series of posts in which I am talking about the upcoming series of Cardinal Ingress charts from now through the middle of 2026.

First  is the Graphic Ephemeris post – A Graphic View of the Coming Changes.

And the second is the Ingress series post, The Shape of Ingresses to Come.

As I pointed out, we have the rare occurrence of all five of the outermost planets, from Jupiter on out to Pluto, all changing signs in a brief period of time.

I want to tie this post in with the theme of a video on Vimeo that I did a few years ago, The Grand Conjunction 2020 and Beyond,  about the Jupiter/Saturn Grand Conjunction, in which those two planets started a new series of conjunctions in Air signs.

The theme of that video is that we are in a period where the main focus of control and warfare is the media, and we are in a period of increasingly obvious media pressure for control of our minds and behavior. That connects with the main theme of this Ingress series.

I want to start with the most prominent, and likely most important, sign change going on here. Continue reading “Saturn and Neptune: The Fight for Our Minds”