There will be a total solar eclipse on 22 July 2009, mostly visible from India, China and the western Pacific Ocean. This will be the longest total solar eclipse this century and is the next in the Saros 136 series, following the eclipses of 1937, 1955, 1973 and 1991. Here is a short documentary about it.
Sunday 12 July 2009
Sunday 7 June 2009
Neptune's Return in 2009 - Part IV
Part IV of this series has been a long time coming - because it took longer to produce!
Saturday 14 February 2009
The Neptune Return in 2009 – Part III
Aquarius is a sign that, among other things, is representative of the commons, that is those things that we all share and which we feel should be beyond property rights. This is because Aquarius is symbolic of the group purpose, and is concerned with what can foster fellowship and collective motives. Around the time of its discovery in 1846, Marx was developing his ideas of the collective responsibility, and right, to allocate the shares of labour and capital according to collective need. With Neptune conjunct Saturn at this time, we can see how, in the decades following, the idealistic vision of socialism attempted to share out the burdens of labour, the pains of wealth creation and the struggles of penury, as though such necessary difficulty was really a part of the commons.
Of course there was a major problem with the actual attempts to manifest this vision, as can be readily observed in the history of Stalinist Russia, the severe repression in Maoist China and the ultimate failure of communism and a centrally planned economy to meet people’s needs. Why did it fail? Whole books have been written in answer to such a question, but here I would like to suggest one theme, related to Neptune’s placement in Aquarius. Inherent in visions of the socialist utopia is an assumption of equality amongst individual members of society; everyone contributes labour, and everyone reaps a reward. As Marx said ‘from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.’ And in some very basic ways it is true that individuals are equal. Everyone counts as one in a census; everyone gets one vote in a democratic election (except children), and everyone has a right to life (except people sentenced to capital punishment). But in other fundamental ways, they are quite unequal. Some people are successful athletes, some people are talented playwrights, some people are disabled from birth and some people are untrustworthy scoundrels. In communist societies it was common for talented university academics, with clearly superior skills in a particular research field, to be forced to work in mines or as cleaners, whereas well-paid positions in the governing bureaucracy were given to individuals with little native talent or educational achievement. This, of course, while attempting to achieve as homogenous a society as possible in terms of the balance of labour and reward, simply resulted in mass depression, resentment, misallocation of resources and gross inefficiency as the spark of individual creativity was snuffed out on the altar of ideological conformity. Neptune’s solvent, while in Aquarius, is the ultimate liberation of being freed from social expectation based on accident of birth, gender, nationality, clan or calling. It is the bliss of total freedom to direct one’s life according to one’s own values irrespective of what prevails in one’s social surroundings. But it is also the anaesthetic that dulls and deadens the burning fire of identity, of uniqueness and character, and renders individual people into random statistics, demographic units and atomized units of humanity suspended in a mist of anomie.
Observe our current society in the developed world: thanks to information technology we have tools at our disposal as individuals that can afford us enormous power to access the audience of the collective, that have brought the locus of information exchange and power transaction from distant authority to individual IP address. The implications of this for global evolution are profound and productive of vastly complex networks and social structures which can create enormous positive change to our common property – whether this be the noosphere or the atmosphere. And yet, we see epidemic rates of depression and prescription of psychotropic drugs, escapist leisure pursuits engaged in on a massive scale, such as internet role-playing games and virtual worlds, internet pornography and even the huge social networking phenomenon where individuals outcompete each other for how deeply integrated into the hive-mind they can become. What is going on here? I think we are suffering from the intense stress being placed on the individual to interact with the entire world on a daily basis, a stress which is really unprecedented. It is like our individual puny brains are being forced to plug into the vast database that is the planetary consciousness, but it is so extraordinarily powerful that it makes each of us nauseous with the neurological overload. As Neptune’s first cycle comes to a close, I think we are witnessing the evolution of a new commons, a shared world consciousness, a worldwide web of networked brains, similar to the mass of neuronal interconnections in each individual brain. And as Neptune conjoins Jupiter this time around, what is shared is a higher consciousness, a deeper, grander understanding of our moral imperatives, our path to future health and prosperity.
More than any time in recorded history, humanity is in a position where we have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth that unites us all and which is inescapable: our oceans and our atmosphere (those fluid Neptunian realms of chaotic maelstroms with their capacity for seemingly infinite dissolution) are our commons. Nobody can lay claim to them or any subtantial part of them, because any effort to delineate boundaries within them proves as futile as building a sandcastle and expecting it to last. As we intoxicate our oceans and atmosphere with carbon dioxide and watch the temperatures rise and the sea inundate our coasts, are we aware of how we are suffocating and anesthetising ourselves into oblivion with the noxious vapours of unchecked growth? As climate change advances at seemingly ever-accelerating pace, increasing numbers of people are realising that the only realistic way of getting any control over this runaway process is by declaring the commonality of ownership and responsibility for the atmosphere and oceans, and then implementing fair agreements on how much of these commons each person, and by extension, each nation-state can use. This will mean that people in some areas of the world will be able to use more than they have (and hence may continue to industrialise), whereas others will have to reduce their use (and hence contract their economic activity). There is no other means of approaching the problem of common property that is fairer than this.
Will this be a new form of socialism, where the nature of the common resource has changed from labour and capital (Saturnian in essence) to planet-wide regulators of our weather and preservers of life (Jupiterian in essence), which is what the atmosphere and oceans are? Or, should we abandon the term socialism and simply categorise such an ideological stance as yet another Aquarian instantiation of the redemptive longings of Neptune, one which, as we witness the final closure of the first complete cycle of this hypnotic phantasm, strangely yet fittingly echoes the collective concerns at the time of its discovery? Neptune is the force that calls us to dissolve into a greater and more powerful consciousness by purifying the essence of our intentions. But it is also the force that seduces us into mindless automatons of collective emotion. It is both our curse and our blessing to be perenially faced with the choice between these two modes of using this powerful force. With this Aquarian anniversary, perhaps we should distill from the reality of our collective circumstances a vision of a more evolved planetary consciousness, one which more clearly connects individuals to their collective responsibility, and which honours the planetary matrix for the single system that it is, decentralised and interconnected. We should not despair of making a difference in a world of such vastly diluted individual influence, for the behaviour of chaotic systems is such as to surprise us with the potential locked within even the smallest of changes. If we wish to preserve our commons, our environment that supports us, then we must start by changing our view of ourselves, no longer atomized and powerless in the face of the enormous waves of social change bearing down upon us; rather, informed, clear-sighted and united in love of truth, evolving within our networks and groups and forming the vanguard of a new movement as much committed to the ecological and holistic as to the egalitarian and just.
© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency
Of course there was a major problem with the actual attempts to manifest this vision, as can be readily observed in the history of Stalinist Russia, the severe repression in Maoist China and the ultimate failure of communism and a centrally planned economy to meet people’s needs. Why did it fail? Whole books have been written in answer to such a question, but here I would like to suggest one theme, related to Neptune’s placement in Aquarius. Inherent in visions of the socialist utopia is an assumption of equality amongst individual members of society; everyone contributes labour, and everyone reaps a reward. As Marx said ‘from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.’ And in some very basic ways it is true that individuals are equal. Everyone counts as one in a census; everyone gets one vote in a democratic election (except children), and everyone has a right to life (except people sentenced to capital punishment). But in other fundamental ways, they are quite unequal. Some people are successful athletes, some people are talented playwrights, some people are disabled from birth and some people are untrustworthy scoundrels. In communist societies it was common for talented university academics, with clearly superior skills in a particular research field, to be forced to work in mines or as cleaners, whereas well-paid positions in the governing bureaucracy were given to individuals with little native talent or educational achievement. This, of course, while attempting to achieve as homogenous a society as possible in terms of the balance of labour and reward, simply resulted in mass depression, resentment, misallocation of resources and gross inefficiency as the spark of individual creativity was snuffed out on the altar of ideological conformity. Neptune’s solvent, while in Aquarius, is the ultimate liberation of being freed from social expectation based on accident of birth, gender, nationality, clan or calling. It is the bliss of total freedom to direct one’s life according to one’s own values irrespective of what prevails in one’s social surroundings. But it is also the anaesthetic that dulls and deadens the burning fire of identity, of uniqueness and character, and renders individual people into random statistics, demographic units and atomized units of humanity suspended in a mist of anomie.
Observe our current society in the developed world: thanks to information technology we have tools at our disposal as individuals that can afford us enormous power to access the audience of the collective, that have brought the locus of information exchange and power transaction from distant authority to individual IP address. The implications of this for global evolution are profound and productive of vastly complex networks and social structures which can create enormous positive change to our common property – whether this be the noosphere or the atmosphere. And yet, we see epidemic rates of depression and prescription of psychotropic drugs, escapist leisure pursuits engaged in on a massive scale, such as internet role-playing games and virtual worlds, internet pornography and even the huge social networking phenomenon where individuals outcompete each other for how deeply integrated into the hive-mind they can become. What is going on here? I think we are suffering from the intense stress being placed on the individual to interact with the entire world on a daily basis, a stress which is really unprecedented. It is like our individual puny brains are being forced to plug into the vast database that is the planetary consciousness, but it is so extraordinarily powerful that it makes each of us nauseous with the neurological overload. As Neptune’s first cycle comes to a close, I think we are witnessing the evolution of a new commons, a shared world consciousness, a worldwide web of networked brains, similar to the mass of neuronal interconnections in each individual brain. And as Neptune conjoins Jupiter this time around, what is shared is a higher consciousness, a deeper, grander understanding of our moral imperatives, our path to future health and prosperity.
More than any time in recorded history, humanity is in a position where we have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth that unites us all and which is inescapable: our oceans and our atmosphere (those fluid Neptunian realms of chaotic maelstroms with their capacity for seemingly infinite dissolution) are our commons. Nobody can lay claim to them or any subtantial part of them, because any effort to delineate boundaries within them proves as futile as building a sandcastle and expecting it to last. As we intoxicate our oceans and atmosphere with carbon dioxide and watch the temperatures rise and the sea inundate our coasts, are we aware of how we are suffocating and anesthetising ourselves into oblivion with the noxious vapours of unchecked growth? As climate change advances at seemingly ever-accelerating pace, increasing numbers of people are realising that the only realistic way of getting any control over this runaway process is by declaring the commonality of ownership and responsibility for the atmosphere and oceans, and then implementing fair agreements on how much of these commons each person, and by extension, each nation-state can use. This will mean that people in some areas of the world will be able to use more than they have (and hence may continue to industrialise), whereas others will have to reduce their use (and hence contract their economic activity). There is no other means of approaching the problem of common property that is fairer than this.
Will this be a new form of socialism, where the nature of the common resource has changed from labour and capital (Saturnian in essence) to planet-wide regulators of our weather and preservers of life (Jupiterian in essence), which is what the atmosphere and oceans are? Or, should we abandon the term socialism and simply categorise such an ideological stance as yet another Aquarian instantiation of the redemptive longings of Neptune, one which, as we witness the final closure of the first complete cycle of this hypnotic phantasm, strangely yet fittingly echoes the collective concerns at the time of its discovery? Neptune is the force that calls us to dissolve into a greater and more powerful consciousness by purifying the essence of our intentions. But it is also the force that seduces us into mindless automatons of collective emotion. It is both our curse and our blessing to be perenially faced with the choice between these two modes of using this powerful force. With this Aquarian anniversary, perhaps we should distill from the reality of our collective circumstances a vision of a more evolved planetary consciousness, one which more clearly connects individuals to their collective responsibility, and which honours the planetary matrix for the single system that it is, decentralised and interconnected. We should not despair of making a difference in a world of such vastly diluted individual influence, for the behaviour of chaotic systems is such as to surprise us with the potential locked within even the smallest of changes. If we wish to preserve our commons, our environment that supports us, then we must start by changing our view of ourselves, no longer atomized and powerless in the face of the enormous waves of social change bearing down upon us; rather, informed, clear-sighted and united in love of truth, evolving within our networks and groups and forming the vanguard of a new movement as much committed to the ecological and holistic as to the egalitarian and just.
© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency
Sunday 18 January 2009
The Neptune Return in 2009 - Part II
In the last segment of this series I discussed the role of Neptune in pointing us towards our capacity for self-deception and alluded to how an awareness of this tendency to be taken in by things that are too good to be true is the first step to spiritual growth. In this article I’d like to take a different approach to understanding the meaning of Neptune, one that examines the concept of loss and disappearance.
Looking back to the discovery of Neptune in September 1846, its conjunction with Saturn in many ways reflected the particular flavour of meaning that Neptune adopted amongst astrologers for the following decades. For it was the loss or disappearance of pain in the course of anaesthesia, and the loss or disappearance of suffering and the hard reality of social class in the course of socialism that defined the semantic boundaries of Neptune until relatively recently. And with these losses identity was dissolved, inasmuch as identity was built upon sensate bodily awareness or one’s achievements in the world of social exchange.
The conjunction with Saturn seemed to demand a physical manifestation of the ethereal (ether!), a real-world daguerrotype of the communion of souls hidden behind the veil of arbitrary physical and circumstantial difference. There was an insistent motive to make it real, bring it down to earth, cast it in stone and define it as it really is, ‘it’ being the true essence of spirit.
Conjoining Jupiter at the time of its return to its discovery degree, we can contemplate a similar loss and disappearance of trust in life, of all that is expected to be benevolent, just, morally righteous and humane. An erosion of confidence in the traditional figureheads of religious and ethical standards may be occurring, and we may feel that we have lost confidence in the arbiters of what is good and true. Most acutely we have seen the disappearance of enormous amounts of wealth as a system of artificial and purely speculative financial skulduggery has reached the limits of credibility and dissolved into thin air. Always with Neptune, we are challenged to turn inwards and question our own beliefs about the world and about what is truly essential in life. Many people are still unable to believe the reality of what has happened, what is happening, in the world today, the sheer scale of the duplicity and deception on the part of certain economists and financiers and their political henchmen. How could they get away with it? How are they still getting away with it? Confidence tricks are of course nothing new, but perhaps the scale of economic destruction currently unfolding is such as to demonstrate quite forcefully how damaging such criminal activities can be.
But in being confronted with such opportunistic greed and its destructive impacts worldwide I think we are situated at just one stage of a larger process of losing our moral bearings, entering a fog of confusion as to basic questions of justice and even doubting the common myth of human progress. Of ‘recovery’. We have been through bad patches before, recessions, downturns etc., we just need to set the rules straight again and things will eventually pull through and we can resume our ascent towards the stellar future of human expansion and growth, or so we have been told to think. And yet – we take a hard-nosed, perhaps uncomfortably objective and classically Aquarian look at ourselves and we see that we have multiplied like a bacterium in a Petri-dish, like a cancerous tumour that has consumed its host in the course of growth so voracious that nothing is safe from its exploitative machinations. Neptune’s conjunction with Jupiter (and Chiron) is, I think, symbolic of our need to dissolve our illusions of endless growth, to renounce the weed-like proliferation that the bottom-line of profit maximization demands. Ironically, Marx was probably right when he forecast the destruction of capitalism taken to its purest extremity, on the basis of its inherent instability, when he began to publish his socialist ideas exactly one Neptune cycle ago.
Neptune is representative of chaos: the chaos of systems that are deterministic but ultimately unpredictable, despite how alluring they may seem as candidates for predictive accuracy. Capitalism as a means of resource distribution and commercial justice is a chaotic system; even a cursory examination of stock-market charts and the hundreds of attempts to predict their fluctuations will attest to this. Weather is a chaotic system, which we can predict to a minimal extent, even with the most powerful computers on the planet, but here’s the rub: we take precautions against the weather and adapt to its vicissitudes with no ideological grumblings. But to regulate capitalist forces to as much as is possible prevent their damaging chaotic impositions on our lives seems to have been as taboo as capitalism itself was in communist dictatorships. Jupiter conjoining Neptune is symbolic of how we must more deeply understand the nature of chaos, and allow ourselves to jettison the notion of unending progress and profit in order to develop a more realistic (but inevitably more depressing and weighty) perspective on our collective predicament. This will mean sacrificing and losing our ‘growth fetish’ and re-fashioning economic theory to make it more sustainable and less profit-driven. Yes, there will be a huge vanishing of wealth, but in the final analysis such wealth is ephemeral and irrelevant to the health and maintenance of the matrix which nurtures us, our ecological context.
The inclusion of Chiron in this conjunction reflects the sense of having to cross a bridge in this process of changing perspectives. There is a necessity for a fundamental change of attitude, more than anything an acceptance of our mistakes, our human-ness, our rank stupidity and capacity to believe ridiculous notions which appeal to our narcissism and divest us of responsibility to life, to the greater life around us. More simply we are at a time when we must accept that we were wrong, that we got it wrong, again. We can try to get it right, but this will be impossible unless we develop the humility to admit to our mistakes. I also think Jupiter, when involved in any aspect pattern, especially a conjunction, tends to magnify things, to make them spectacular and larger-than-life. That the three bodies conjoin for a lengthy period in the second quarter of 2009 and Jupiter and Neptune conjoin 3 times, the last time for another lengthy period in the second half of 2010, suggests that this may really be a time for a new beginning in terms of our definition of progress and justice. And the conjunctions occurring in late Aquarius suggests that this new beginning will again, as occurred at the time Neptune was discovered, centrally involve the relationships between men and women and the society of which they form a part. My intuition is that this will be the most important positive and natural, free-flowing energy of the coming two years, the one that we can most easily build on and nurture to a new vision of the world. Coincident with the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square, which is almost within orb as I write, together with the cardinal climax of 2010, it will be this background change in ideology with respect to social justice and collective values that will frame the battles and struggles of the coming decade.
© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency
Looking back to the discovery of Neptune in September 1846, its conjunction with Saturn in many ways reflected the particular flavour of meaning that Neptune adopted amongst astrologers for the following decades. For it was the loss or disappearance of pain in the course of anaesthesia, and the loss or disappearance of suffering and the hard reality of social class in the course of socialism that defined the semantic boundaries of Neptune until relatively recently. And with these losses identity was dissolved, inasmuch as identity was built upon sensate bodily awareness or one’s achievements in the world of social exchange.
The conjunction with Saturn seemed to demand a physical manifestation of the ethereal (ether!), a real-world daguerrotype of the communion of souls hidden behind the veil of arbitrary physical and circumstantial difference. There was an insistent motive to make it real, bring it down to earth, cast it in stone and define it as it really is, ‘it’ being the true essence of spirit.
Conjoining Jupiter at the time of its return to its discovery degree, we can contemplate a similar loss and disappearance of trust in life, of all that is expected to be benevolent, just, morally righteous and humane. An erosion of confidence in the traditional figureheads of religious and ethical standards may be occurring, and we may feel that we have lost confidence in the arbiters of what is good and true. Most acutely we have seen the disappearance of enormous amounts of wealth as a system of artificial and purely speculative financial skulduggery has reached the limits of credibility and dissolved into thin air. Always with Neptune, we are challenged to turn inwards and question our own beliefs about the world and about what is truly essential in life. Many people are still unable to believe the reality of what has happened, what is happening, in the world today, the sheer scale of the duplicity and deception on the part of certain economists and financiers and their political henchmen. How could they get away with it? How are they still getting away with it? Confidence tricks are of course nothing new, but perhaps the scale of economic destruction currently unfolding is such as to demonstrate quite forcefully how damaging such criminal activities can be.
But in being confronted with such opportunistic greed and its destructive impacts worldwide I think we are situated at just one stage of a larger process of losing our moral bearings, entering a fog of confusion as to basic questions of justice and even doubting the common myth of human progress. Of ‘recovery’. We have been through bad patches before, recessions, downturns etc., we just need to set the rules straight again and things will eventually pull through and we can resume our ascent towards the stellar future of human expansion and growth, or so we have been told to think. And yet – we take a hard-nosed, perhaps uncomfortably objective and classically Aquarian look at ourselves and we see that we have multiplied like a bacterium in a Petri-dish, like a cancerous tumour that has consumed its host in the course of growth so voracious that nothing is safe from its exploitative machinations. Neptune’s conjunction with Jupiter (and Chiron) is, I think, symbolic of our need to dissolve our illusions of endless growth, to renounce the weed-like proliferation that the bottom-line of profit maximization demands. Ironically, Marx was probably right when he forecast the destruction of capitalism taken to its purest extremity, on the basis of its inherent instability, when he began to publish his socialist ideas exactly one Neptune cycle ago.
Neptune is representative of chaos: the chaos of systems that are deterministic but ultimately unpredictable, despite how alluring they may seem as candidates for predictive accuracy. Capitalism as a means of resource distribution and commercial justice is a chaotic system; even a cursory examination of stock-market charts and the hundreds of attempts to predict their fluctuations will attest to this. Weather is a chaotic system, which we can predict to a minimal extent, even with the most powerful computers on the planet, but here’s the rub: we take precautions against the weather and adapt to its vicissitudes with no ideological grumblings. But to regulate capitalist forces to as much as is possible prevent their damaging chaotic impositions on our lives seems to have been as taboo as capitalism itself was in communist dictatorships. Jupiter conjoining Neptune is symbolic of how we must more deeply understand the nature of chaos, and allow ourselves to jettison the notion of unending progress and profit in order to develop a more realistic (but inevitably more depressing and weighty) perspective on our collective predicament. This will mean sacrificing and losing our ‘growth fetish’ and re-fashioning economic theory to make it more sustainable and less profit-driven. Yes, there will be a huge vanishing of wealth, but in the final analysis such wealth is ephemeral and irrelevant to the health and maintenance of the matrix which nurtures us, our ecological context.
The inclusion of Chiron in this conjunction reflects the sense of having to cross a bridge in this process of changing perspectives. There is a necessity for a fundamental change of attitude, more than anything an acceptance of our mistakes, our human-ness, our rank stupidity and capacity to believe ridiculous notions which appeal to our narcissism and divest us of responsibility to life, to the greater life around us. More simply we are at a time when we must accept that we were wrong, that we got it wrong, again. We can try to get it right, but this will be impossible unless we develop the humility to admit to our mistakes. I also think Jupiter, when involved in any aspect pattern, especially a conjunction, tends to magnify things, to make them spectacular and larger-than-life. That the three bodies conjoin for a lengthy period in the second quarter of 2009 and Jupiter and Neptune conjoin 3 times, the last time for another lengthy period in the second half of 2010, suggests that this may really be a time for a new beginning in terms of our definition of progress and justice. And the conjunctions occurring in late Aquarius suggests that this new beginning will again, as occurred at the time Neptune was discovered, centrally involve the relationships between men and women and the society of which they form a part. My intuition is that this will be the most important positive and natural, free-flowing energy of the coming two years, the one that we can most easily build on and nurture to a new vision of the world. Coincident with the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square, which is almost within orb as I write, together with the cardinal climax of 2010, it will be this background change in ideology with respect to social justice and collective values that will frame the battles and struggles of the coming decade.
© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
