Uranus-Eris: Of God, Country and Internet "When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy." -- The Log Lady speaking to Laura in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With MeDear Friend and Reader: Today is the big day. This morning Uranus aligned in a conjunction with Eris for the first time since 1928. Because Uranus goes retrograde and then direct, there will be three conjunctions in close proximity, just like with any Uranus event. The next two are Sept. 25, 2016 and March 17, 2017.
It can be difficult to discern the nature of outer-planet events, especially while they are happening. Yet sometimes it's possible to suss out. You might recall that a few weeks ago, I looked at how the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s was perceived at the time. Because outer planets have this strange, often invisible effect, one must look closely and go beyond the ordinary. That is what outer planets signify: what is outside the realm of normal waking consciousness; what is often invisible to the senses. Assuming one is not too distracted by ice cream, it's possible to get some clues, using major cultural events around the time of an astrological development. The week this happened, Hillary Clinton became the first woman in American history to be the presumptive presidential candidate for a major political party. This fits the pattern of Eris events, which seem to come with advances in women's rights (particularly Chiron-Eris conjunctions). A week earlier, Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, somewhat unprecedented in that someone outside the political establishment used a form of media manipulation (rather than political contacts or money) to get as far as he did. In last week's article I described how the presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders, were tapping into some underlying background energy to establish themselves. The political candidates are figures dancing around in front of a background environment that is invisible until you know what to look for.
"The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted." Experiencing the Internet used to be a trip onto the astral plane. You used to dive in and explore, and feel the strange weightlessness of your cyber being, and a strange sensation of being shorn of your identity. Today, however, we are subsumed by the Internet. It's part of the ubiquitous background environment. Wherever you go, you're in some online environment or another: Netflix in the nail salon; digital purchasing every time you swipe a credit or debit card; your travel patterns tracked by E-ZPass and GPS (and so on). Most people carry around a device that accesses the Internet many different ways, which they are doing all day long, in that form and many others. Meanwhile the conducting media of the digital sphere -- microwaves -- are soaking our nervous systems to increasing degrees every minute of the day and night, altering consciousness and sleep patterns. You cannot enter the Internet with your body, and now the Internet is everywhere. Instead of visiting the astral plane, life is now an out-of-body experience. And as Eric McLuhan writes, the body -- and identity -- are utterly transformed and distorted. For those curious, I describe this process in greater detail in the most recent Planet Waves FM and the corresponding Planet Waves TV.
So be it. Here is an illustration. It's well known among those who communicate with the other side that many dead people don't know they're dead. They live what you might call an unconscious astral life, one that can involve repetitive cycles such as getting up and getting dressed every day, day after day (and that's all that happens) -- somewhat like being in-body but not. [One such experience is documented here.] In a similar way, the living don't know they're actually alive, and it's getting more difficult to figure out. Now imagine that a nuclear bomb went off over society and all at once everyone was suddenly shorn of their body, and transformed into an astral being -- but with nobody knowing what happened. Life is a hazy trance wherein there is no past and no future and only a weird replica of the present. People seem to have human form, but they live in a constant state of dyslexia and vertigo. The prospect of physical experiences or indeed any unexpected development is 'scary'. The rules and logic of existence are as strange as in a dream. There might be some internal logic; but when you think about it, exceedingly little makes sense. That's rather like what happened as the Internet took over. In politics, this has gone from the idea that politicians are liars to the somewhat broader notion that there is no such thing as truth. And this, in turn, easily leads to how it doesn't matter anyway.
I left out two quotes by Donald Trump, saving the best for last. In a famous episode recently, Trump said he thought that Sen. John McCain, a Republican that even many Democrats used to respect, was not really a war hero. Whatever you want to call him, McCain was indeed taken prisoner of war, held in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, kept in solitary confinement and tortured over the course of five years. He refused release when his captors offered; they’d learned that his father was the commanding officer of the Vietnam theater of war, and saw a propaganda opportunity. Instead, he opted to stick with his fellow American prisoners who’d been captured before him, following the military code of conduct. "He's not a war hero," Trump said in an interview with the master dreamweaver himself, Frank Luntz. "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." First there is the circuitous 'logic' of the sentence. If you woke up from a dream and someone had said that to you, you would be wondering what the heck they meant. If you remember that all facets of your dream are elements of your own consciousness, you might wonder what was going on. The statement, "I like people that weren't captured" is about as pleasant as swallowing a mouthful of splinters, especially coming from someone who never served in the military much less in combat. But somehow it doesn't matter. Now, remember that Trump is the Republican nominee for president -- representing the very party that has vocally extolled the virtues of war and war heroes; the party of the last American five-star general, Dwight David Eisenhower.
By some miracle Trump not only gets away with this statement (as with many others that would have been unconscionable in the past); he vanquished his adversaries and won enough delegates to get the nomination. To me this says more about his supporters than it does about him. Values and attitudes have changed. Trump also got away with lying about giving $6 million to veterans groups; the funds did not move until media reports called him to task. This coincides perfectly with every other aspect of the treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. It's as if the United States took its own service men and women prisoner of war, denying them health care, jobs and homes. The ground that used to be an important element of American values, respect for veterans, has crumbled. This coincides with what seems to be an inability to get people excited about war, pro or con. It took the Sept. 11 incident -- the bombing of Manhattan, and being totally shocked -- to get people sufficiently excited about Bush War II that they acquiesced to it. This is not vaguely about Trump; this is about all of us. He is merely acting as a spokesman, someone with the guts or the ambition to say how he knows many people already feel. In this respect, he's a great contemporary artist, or an activist -- he's thrown his astral body into the machine. There is another possibility here, which is that people are seeing through how ridiculous the whole concept of a war hero is. I would still contend that if there's such a thing, McCain would surely qualify. Let's now consider the other great cornerstone of Republicanism, God. Particularly since the 1980s, fundamentalist churches were the hot and happening Republican clubhouses. Jesus and the Republican Party seemed to have a full merger. Abstinence brainwashing became a mandatory program in schools; military prayer breakfasts could be upset by "radical secularists."
Then Trump trumped that. This, by the way, is my favorite Donald quote of all, because of what it reveals: "I'm not sure I have ever asked God's forgiveness. I don't bring God into that picture," he said. "When I go to church and when I drink my little wine and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of forgiveness. I do that as often as I can because I feel cleansed." My little wine and my little cracker? Seriously? That would be funny, were it not so strange coming from the mouth of someone claiming to be a Republican, unless everyone is lost in their dream body in a dimension where up and down, left and right, have no meaning whatsoever. A bit earlier in the primary season, there was coverage of fundamentalist Christian leaders figuring out that many members of the flock are not really so Christian at all. They're in it for the picnics and the social status. Many of these evangelicals don't go to church or act especially godly. (This had to be news only to them, or maybe someone made it real by doing a video segment and it took on a more vivid form.) Here is the thing: many people feel this way. They go to church because they're supposed to, and then feel a little better because they did. But that is not faith. Even Mother Teresa famously said toward the end of her life, "What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." "I am told God lives in me -- and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul," she wrote at one point. "I want God with all the power of my soul -- and yet between us there is terrible separation." On another occasion she wrote: "I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing."
It's refreshing that we knew all those foot-tapping, affair-having, warmongering Republicans were full of shit anyway. It is disturbing in that we lose even the thin pretense of a moral code. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion what would they be if without it?" For all his wisdom, Franklin did not seem to consider that religion itself was one such source or at least propagator of evil. This all makes perfect sense in a world where everyone is floating around the astral plane without an orientation on body, on identity, and with languishing connection to others. In harmony with the astral level, we see sharp polarization, get a chilly feeling and suspend even the broadest ideas of reason. It makes perfect sense where everything is just more newsfeed going by. It's perfectly logical in a world where what we think of as information comes from places like Gawker and BuzzFeed. To me the identity chaos factor here is described by Uranus conjunct Eris. As I documented this week on my two programs, the first Uranus-Eris conjunction arrived with the first TV broadcast and the first commercially licensed radio station. These were the 'new media' of their day that pretty much ran identity, individuality and comprehensible national identity through the blender. What we are seeing now is the hyperdimensional version of that. Because this is in Aries, it describes something of the foreground or the figure; the state of the human ego.
One is Pluto in Capricorn. You might think of this as an influence that is rotting out the structures of tradition. When Chiron passed through Capricorn, Enron was revealed to be a termite-eaten facade of a business. Now that Pluto is halfway through Capricorn, every facet of American big business and banking is being revealed as a Ponzi scheme. Remember that when Pluto ingressed Capricorn, the next thing that happened was that the subprime mortgage crisis blossomed into the Great Recession. What banks lent money to how many people claiming to make how much per year, and were packaged as securities and sold as investments to major banks and corporations? All leading to a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. Pluto in Capricorn (2008-2022) is destroying some traditions, and it's resurrecting others. My prediction several years ago that under this influence everything old would be new again seems to be coming true. But we need to retrieve more than wood, glass, cast iron and revivals of every comic book character from the 1930s if we want to have any common ground. We need some return to actual, living tradition. Change is not about the slaying of all that was old, but rather the updating of our culture so that it can help guide and contain our experiences. Our current state of psychic vertigo is driven by change so fast nobody can keep up. Either you thrust it forward as a tech giant, or you're dragged along as a consumer/user. This really has become about change for its own sake, or rather to keep dangling a new shade of glitz in front of people to get them to take out their credit card. Change and upheaval at the current pace are for many people a little like the astral realm known as Nightmare Alley. There is a kind of equivalent factor going on two signs away. Neptune in Pisces (2011-2024) might feel like inspiration to some, but to others it's like a deluge of delusion. That alone would be enough to make everything seem like a spooky dream, a seance or the astral realm known as Summerland (not the TV program but rather a false paradise sometimes found in dreams).
We currently have Chiron in Pisces, which is offering an opportunity for some clarity. Chiron is the person in the room full of tripping people who says, "Wow, we're tripping. This is all so strange." Chiron in Pisces is the person who notices that someone in the teeming crowd of Grand Central Station has collapsed, and instead of stepping over him, stops and calls for assistance. Chiron in Pisces says, "This may be a dream, but you can still show empathy. It matters." Chiron is an option, and it's not one that many people choose. To most these days, it's the person or the thing that seems too real, the question that penetrates too deeply. It's the reminder within the dream that this is just a dream. It gives new meaning to the idea, "Nothing I see means anything." Except that as far as I can tell, we're longing for meaning, and know it exists. The question is where to find it, or even where to search. Some might say within, and they would be correct. Others might say, reach out to your brothers and sisters and acknowledge their existence; they too would be correct. Lovingly, 
Planet Waves (ISSN 1933-9135) is published each Tuesday and Thursday evening in Kingston, New York, by Planet Waves, Inc. Core community membership: $197/year. Editor and Publisher: Eric Francis Coppolino. Web Developer: Anatoly Ryzhenko. Designer: Lizanne Webb. Finance: Victoria Pomante. Astrology Editor: Amanda Painter. Astrology Fact Checker: Len Wallick. Copy Editor and Fact Checker: Jessica Keet. Client Services: Amy Elliott. Media Consultant: Andrew Marshall McLuhan. Research, Writing and Editing: In addition to those listed above, Planet Waves is produced by a team consisting of Fe Bongolan, Judith Gayle, Kelly Janes, Amanda Moreno and Carol van Strum.
This Week on Planet Waves FM Live from the Astral Plane! It's the Uranus-Eris Conjunction Dear Friend and Listener: This week's edition of Planet Waves FM [play episode here] opens up the Uranus-Eris conjunction as a commentary about our disembodied lives on the Internet. I explain how 20 years of nonstop proliferation of online life have turned the world into the astral plane, where we struggle to make sense of existence and of our bodies; where there's no longer any sense of reality.
Later in the program, I tell the story of John Oliver buying -- and then forgiving -- $15 million in hospital debt in one of the funniest and most revealing media stunts in history (again under the influence of Uranus-Eris). [See fabulous video here.] Finally, I talk about the life of, and read the chart of, Muhammad Ali, whom the New York Times aptly described as "a titan of boxing and of the 20th century." [Read obituary here.] The charts of Oliver and Ali are posted at this link. Music is from just about everyone: David Byrne and Brian Eno; Bjork; Dead Can Dance; and the Planet Waves in-house ensemble, Vision Quest (with our theme from Gemini, called Letter to Urbana. Speaking of, don't miss The Gemini Files -- your 2016-2017 reading, in audio and video formats. With love, You Are Having an Out-of-Body Experience Right Now This week's edition of Planet Waves TV dives into the mysteries of the Uranus-Eris conjunction, which aligns for the first time since 1928 on June 9. This cycle is about the impact of broadcasting on the human psyche, self-concept and world view. In effect, the Internet has induced a full-time immersion in the astral plane. As "online" becomes everywhere, we are all having nearly nonstop out-of-body experiences. This is not your usual Planet Waves TV. I am interested in your feedback. More on Planet Waves FM. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. What Will You Do With the Planet Waves Boutique? "His is a truly holistic approach and what he delivers is truly one of a kind -- something born of a moment that is as true in that moment as it is later on." -- Suzana Da CostaTrue, at first glance, the Planet Waves Boutique holds all of Eric's customer-favorite sign readings, broader-topic readings and class recordings. But what it really holds is potential:
TRANSFORM fear, confusion, inner and outer conflict, anger, guilt, feeling stuck, lack of self-worth and undirected energy into starting points for productive growth and healing. DEVELOP trust in your intuition, instincts and choices on a day-to-day basis. INITIATE creative projects you never thought you'd get to, new relationships and deeper engagement in your community. INSPIRE yourself to keep learning, to remain curious and to share your gifts with others. How will you use what you find there? Visit the Boutique now, and begin to find out.
"I thought to myself that I should check Gemini, because I'm Gemini rising, and my progressed Sun recently entered Gemini too. WOW. I'm completely blown away. Certain passages are literally transcripts of my thought process about my life so far this year."You don't have to be a professional astrologer like Dia to be blown away. You certainly don't have to know what "progressed Sun" means to feel like the 2016-17 Gemini Reading contains "transcripts of your life." All you need to know is you -- and that can mean realizing that you feel like you don't know. Do you question your fears, dreams and desires? Or your love life, work situation, money habits or healing process? Do you feel like you could really take off and soar if only you had the right person coaching you? These questions are Eric's specialty. "Once again, I can't get over how you tick all those boxes, and more. Once again, am bowled over by your extraordinary gifts, preparation and wisdom, dear Eric, and am filled with inspiration, courage and joy by your words."Eric has put together a brief complimentary preview video so you can get a sense of what he addresses -- but it's only a small taste of the insights and encouragement you'll receive in the two audio segments (30-40+ minutes each), plus the video tarot reading for your next 12 months of life-journey. Order your Gemini Sun / Gemini Rising Reading today -- or buy it for a friend.  The Astrology Experience You Always Wanted
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Eric's friendly and fun approach to teaching means this event is suitable for beginners and more advanced students alike. If you're a first-time student we'll even give you a discount -- please write to office@planetwaves.net to take advantage of that.
 Your Monthly Horoscopes -- and our Publishing Schedule Notes We published your extended monthly horoscope for June on Thursday, May 26. We published your extended monthly horoscope for May on Thursday, April 21. We published your Moonshine horoscope for the Taurus New Moon, by Len Wallick, on Thursday, May 5. Please note: we normally publish the extended monthly horoscope on the first Friday after the Sun has entered a new sign.  Note from the editors: In honor of today's Uranus-Eris conjunction, we are re-running Monday's horoscope, which is based on that chart. Monday Morning Horoscope for June 6, 2016 | By Eric Francis Coppolino
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