DeepThought
We approach the New Moon in Pisces on February 28th – a New Moon that has five planets plus the North Node in Pisces!! Sun, Moon, Saturn, Mercury and Neptune. Is this a recipe for huge levels of compassion and spirituality or one of utter chaos? This Pisces imbalance precedes what we will see in March – action overload of the Aries ingress, a lunar eclipse, a solar eclipse and Neptune’s entry into Aries (Saturn follows in May). If you have a seat belt, I suggest you put it on and buckle up tightly.
Pisces has many positive sides to it – compassion, creativity, intuition, mysticism, connection to the divine – but it is also a sign of chaos and lack of boundaries; the sign is symbolised by two fish swimming in opposite directions. In Pisces we can escape to anywhere that our imagination allows, do anything that our imagination allows, take our thoughts anywhere and everywhere. With minds that have nothing fencing them in, alongside a Pluto ingress into the most futuristic of signs – Aquarius – and a new 200-year Jupiter/Saturn era of Air, we are on the brink of huge leaps in societal progress. Well, on the surface it would be regarded as progress, but for many it will be uncomfortable progress, as we straddle two eras – the industrial era, brought in by the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s, and the technological era which was ushered in with the Jupiter/Saturn move into the Air element and then retriggered just a few months ago by Pluto’s arrival at the same degree of the element change – 0 Aquarius.
The end of one era and the start of a new is never clear cut. It is more a blurred, drawn-out period with many changes, some of which will be felt by some as exciting and by others as highly uncomfortable; particularly as various opportunistic actors see their own chances for gaining money, wealth and power. As change comes in, we perhaps at first don’t notice that it is going to be as big as a civilisation change, but then suddenly it seems it is upon us and there is no going back. Astrologically we could look at many triggers – Jupiter/Saturn, markers of socio-economic trends, as I have already mentioned; Pluto/Uranus representing a complete ‘uptipping’ of societal norms. The 10 years between 2008 and 2018 saw an unprecedented seven squares between these two planets, reflecting the collapse of too big to fail institutions such as Lehman Brothers, and the destabilisation of the Middle East, triggering the Arab Spring in 2011 and subsequently many of our current issues. In 2012 we also experienced the end of the Mayan Long Count – it did not bring about the end of the world as many prophesied, but it was definitely significant in terms of acknowledging the end of one type of civilisation and the beginning of a new. Jupiter/Uranus can signify huge changes in disruptive technology – we had a conjunction between these two planets in April 2024. And going back to Jupiter/Saturn, the new era in Air was always going to be a tough experience, because it wasn’t just Jupiter and Saturn, it was Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto – so it was always destined to be a period of harsh, life-changing lessons.
It is our perception of such changes and difficult transitions that is important, and perceptions will vary so much from person to person, particularly when thought and debate – especially deep thought – seem discouraged. In this day and age one would think that, with such easy and quick access to information, it would be the opposite – that there would be more debate and a greater desire to research. But it is not. Plus we have hugely sophisticated mind-influencing techniques battering us constantly to encourage us to follow a desired narrative – techniques that are directed at us by our own governments no less. Project Mockingbird was actively run by the CIA in America during the early years of the Cold War, whilst our own government in the UK launched Mindspace in 2010[1]. NATO itself alerted the world, in a study entitled ‘Cognitive Warfare’, that the next battlefield of the 21st Century would be one for our minds. Humans would be ‘the contested domain’ and cognitive warfare would involve ‘the militarisation of brain sciences in a war on our individual processor – our brains. This study also explicitly said that ‘the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.[2] The Behavioural Insights Team in the UK, also known unofficially as the "Nudge Unit", began in 2010 at the same time as the Cabinet Office issued the Mindspace document – Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy. The Behavioural Insights Team is a UK-based global social purpose organisation that generates and applies behavioural insights to inform policy and improve public services, following nudge theory. At its roots it’s an organisation set up to influence behaviour change within the public.
None of this mind-influencing/brainwashing would have been possible, however, without first the invention of cinema and then, cinema’s little brother – the TV. A cinema beamed into every home!! The politicians’ and propagandists’ wet dream scenario. These inventions were symbolised astrologically by the Pluto/Neptune conjunction of 1891 and the Saturn/Uranus conjunction of 1897. Cinema arrived in 1895. Saturn/Uranus is symbolic of the clash between the old traditions (Saturn) and the new and the future (Uranus). Pluto/Neptune speaks more of transformation that pervades and creeps in, almost as though our bodies and minds are porous. Pluto and Neptune have a strange 500-year cycle with their dance involving a 100-year sextile dance active between 1940 and 2040, where this type of transformation via the medium of cinema and TV happens easily and opportunistically. And still we have around 15 years left of this particular dance.
The TV was first invented in the 1920’s, but it would be the 60’s before it became commonplace in every home, because of a Government concerted effort, via the buy now pay later scheme, to get this propagandist tool regarded as an essential household item. And this was the point where we had an aspect involving Saturn opposite a Pluto/Uranus conjunction (governance via a change agent). This point in time was indeed the age of counterculture, where everything changed. I know this era very well – I was young in the 60’s and they were indeed very exciting times, which I absolutely adored. My young teenage years were nothing like anyone had experienced before with new bands, new fashions, the era of Love supposedly, but certainly a time of extreme change. I fondly remember going up to London to buy the latest Biba dress for £2.50 (which now doesn’t even get me a coffee) to wear to a Beatles concert or to dance to a band that is still now a household name in a local village hall or club.
My interest for now though lies in how we arrive at our thoughts, how our thoughts are formed and how we arrive at our beliefs. Our thoughts begin as soon as we are born, created out of the Cross of Matter that we are born into. The Cross of Matter is formed from our unique birthcharts – from the date, exact time and location of our birth. The Cross of Matter forms from the two axes of the Ascendant/Descendant and the Midheaven/IC. From the Ascendant/Descendant axis we reach the basic conclusions to the questions of ‘Who am I’ and ‘Who am I versus Who are You?’. From the Midheaven/IC we reach the conclusion of how we want to consciously appear in the world (Midheaven) versus who we are at our deepest, most private roots (the IC).
The Ascendant acts like our front door – what we see around us when we open that door and look outside and around. This is something that we do on an unconscious level. Esoterically the Ascendant symbolises the point where the soul, having travelled through the realm of the planets, cloaking itself in their qualities, then enters the body (first house) and we take our first breath. Our thoughts create our perceptions and our actions and, therefore, our reality. The Descendant represents our recognition of ‘others’; our perception of ‘me versus you’. In our early years it is our parents and immediate family who represent ‘the other’ and they are crucial in how we form our first beliefs – both culturally and in terms of family.
I tend to look at the formation of beliefs in terms of a Saturn cycle (astrologers look at the first Saturn return at the age of around 28 in terms of when and how we arrive at maturity). So I look at how we reach this maturity in 7-year cycles. At the age of seven we are at school and are now gaining opinions and belief systems from outside the family – from teachers and from friends. At 14, the halfway point, we become much more independent and are spreading our wings. So our belief systems are changed from outside the education environment. By 21 we are perhaps at work or university and our opinions are influenced once again, until we finish our education and fully enter the world of work and find partners to build our own lives with once we are mature.
The Midheaven represents our conscious creation of self – how I consciously create my image which is linked to what I set out to do in my life, which is generally connected with my professional career. This comes into its own much more after the halfway age of 14, as we begin to develop a feeling for our individual purpose in life. Essentially, in practice, the sign of your Ascendant and Mercury (planet of communication), together with their ruling planets, will give a pretty good idea as to how curious you are and how you arrive at your mental conclusions. Similarly with the Midheaven and your Sun, we can see our purpose in life. But our brains have been dulled by a sense of overwhelm over the last few years, together with the constant bombardment of our senses by TV, social media and general brain influencing techniques. This kind of influencing has never been seen before so the effects on society are basically unknown. So we would look to Saturn once again for clues to our resilience.
But it is our Ascendant that also gives us our ‘automatic pilot mode’ because it works on such an unconscious level – that unconscious way that we come over to others and form our perceptions of the world at large. The Ascendant is susceptible to the repeated slogans of cognitive warfare that we hear so many times and just absorb into our unconscious mind. This will be particularly apparent for those who get their information from mainstream media, such as newspapers and TV and will appear very often in the form of three-word phrases that have been proven to have a psychological effect on our brains, such as ‘follow the science’, ‘trust the science’, etc., etc. These slogans embed themselves in our minds and produce learned responses. Those who follow the message of the phrases are rewarded with acceptance and ‘treats’ such as a progression up the career ladder. It’s just the same as giving a dog a treat for good behaviour, but instead language is being used as a means to limit people’s capacity to think. Language that once evolved in a complex fashion producing critical thinking and debate is now being impoverished and stripped of subtle meaning, partly through AI language and emojis that require little or no thought. However, as people adopt avatars and replace deep critical thinking with repetition and socially accepted speech forms, out of the dross perhaps we can also see rising up the green shoots of a new creative minority – a creativity that is a divine inspiration not controllable by those who wish to take society into the abyss.[3]
A New Moon with five planets in Pisces, as I said, could be recipe for chaos, but chaos theory is a ‘thing’ – it is a study of how systems that appear random or unpredictable can actually be governed by deterministic laws. Simply put, chaos theory is an attempt to see and understand the underlying order of complex systems that may appear to be without order at first glance. It was once commonly believed that the world is unpredictable because it is complicated. Chaos is the science of surprises, of the non-linear and the unpredictable. Within chaos theory we see such things as the butterfly effect which decrees that a butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico could cause a hurricane in China. It may take a very long time, but the connection is real. If the butterfly had not flapped its wings at just the right point in space and time the hurricane would not have happened. A more rigorous way to express this is that small changes in the initial conditions lead to drastic changes in the results. Perhaps what we don’t necessarily appreciate is that chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in surprising ways.
From chaos we transition to quantum – the smallest unit of a phenomenon. For example, a quantum of light is a photon, and a quantum of electricity is an electron. Quantum physics is the study of things that are very, very small. This branch of science investigates the behaviour of matter and the activities happening inside atoms in order to make sense of the smallest things in nature.
On February 19th of this year Microsoft unveiled Majorana 1 – the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new ‘topological core architecture’ that it expects will usher in the next generation of quantum computers capable of solving meaningful industrial scale problems in years rather than decades. Most of all Microsoft asserts that quantum computing could allow things to be designed exactly right the first time. The power of quantum computing combined with AI tools would allow someone to describe what kind of new material or molecule they want to create in plain language and get an answer that works straightaway – no guesswork and no years of trial and error. The quantum computer teaches AI the language of nature so the AI can just tell you the recipe for what you want to make. Well that’s what they claim anyway.
The exciting bit is that Microsoft has introduced the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits – the building blocks for quantum computers. In the same way that the invention of semiconductors made today’s smartphones, computers and electronics possible, topoconductors and the new type of chip they enable offer a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits, and are capable of tackling the most complex industrial and societal problems. ‘The Majorana 1 processor offers a path to fit a million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of the hand’. The topoconductor, however, can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state. Allow that to sink in. Assuming this is correct, we are talking about an entirely new state of matter!!!!
So will this be what the upcoming eclipse season and the Saturn/Neptune conjunction on the Aries point of global significance will be all about? Technologies that will change our lives. Sadly, already the majority appear to have given up thinking about problems – relying on Google to always provide an answer. But, despite all these new AI inventions, we must relearn how to use our brains, to research, to critically think and to engage in meaningful debate. Literally we must use it or lose it. Where will humans go, or will they become mere robots? Where will humans find their place – their place in the Cross of Matter? Where will humans find their purpose? We must use our ability to think before it’s too late. What will this mean for society? How will society find validation and purpose? These are all questions I contemplate. We must do deep thought. That small group within society that is hopefully rising up, with a creativity from divine inspiration not controllable by those who wish to take society into the abyss are desperately needed right now to guide the rest.
[1] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/MINDSPACE.pdf
[2] https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/08/nato-cognitive-warfare-brain/
[3] Serena Wylde, The Takeover of our Minds, The Light Paper, Issue 54.