Being Present to Future Shock

Back in the summer of 1998, I was on my first stint living in Europe (principally in Germany) and a writer for Rob Brezsny’s “Televisionary Oracle” online magazine. The series eventually became known as “Planet Waves” and when TVO ended publication, I spun Planet Waves off as a new independent project. A little while ago, I was searching for the data for one of the alternative United States charts — one called Scorpionic America, but my old friend (the late) David Solté — and I found a mirror archive of the old TVO site. I thought I would share it with you — it seems to speak of today as much as any other day. I plan to give the Scorpionic America chart a look; I’ll tell you what I find. — efc

Today I’ve been practicing the great discipline of doing nothing. Of the two types of discipline necessary to get anything worthwhile accomplished, this one is by far the more difficult to master, or even to find out about. It must be some kind of national security secret or information reserved for 33rd degree Masons.

Then, huddled under an umbrella over coffee and books at an outdoor cafe in Freiburg im Bresgau, Germany, it starts to come over me: That cosmic feeling. First I notice my sense of visual perspective. The beautiful geometry of physical space suddenly becomes vivid, like I’m peering into a dimension that’s usually covered by some kind of veil. The umbrellas and the ground create a narrow band of space, and I notice that I feel perfectly safe and perfectly protected here. Then, something changes in the way my body feels and I feel like I’m moving in space–subtle, barely noticeable, very distinct.

My senses register the normal activity of the world around me, yet a greater silence has encompassed everything. I rest gently within it, just sitting in my chair, looking, listening.

It’s a few hours before the New Moon, quiet on the psychic planes, and I’ve already decided not to push myself today. The New Moon is a great time for being introspective. A peculiar normality washes over all the lunatics in the world, and they leave you alone. Now I notice that everything around me is in tune and in focus, more clear and vivid with the increase of a soft, invisible light. This light comes with a sense of perfection and harmony, and the light and the feeling are one thing. Soon there’ll be a $15 bulb you can buy in health food stores that emits this stuff.

But I’m not in a euphoric or a high-up state of mind; in fact, I feel pretty regular and low-to-the-ground. Right on the ground, in fact. Now I can feel the fact that I am on the planet, sitting on its surface, on the very outer skin of its surface, and that it’s a small planet, and that the planet is moving through space in a very obvious way. But everything is just fine here. We’re not about to collide with anything. Everything is developing perfectly. A deep sense of peace surrounds and fills me, and it’s getting larger, and I look around to see if anyone else notices. Nope. Life proceeds as normal. People are still sitting under the umbrellas talking. . . .

Maybe something I’ve just read has triggered the experience, or something I’ve just written, or maybe it was this really good cappuccino. But I get the message: One breath at a time. Don’t sweat anything. Just pay attention.

What I happened to be reading right before this delightful interlude is a book called Esoteric Astrology by Alice A. Bailey. It’s one of those thick, blue $20 soft-cover books with nothing but the title and a little mysterious glyph on the cover pretending to be channeled from the Ashtar Command or a Tibetan llama or somebody, the kind of book that makes you wonder whether you’ll ever be spiritual enough to grok it.

The first 124 times I tried to read it, this feeling was somewhat enhanced. But I’m stubborn, and occasionally this quality works for me. I should give expensive workshops on being thick-headed as a key to enlightenment.

When Esoteric Astrology first appeared in 1950, five years after we dropped The Bomb on Japan and at the dawn of the Beat Generation and pre-dawn of the ’60s, deep in the heart of the Dark Night of America, it must have felt to most astrologers like a cross between occult nonsense and certifiable religious psychosis. At that time, astrologers were a pretty nuts-and-bolts crowd, and it was clear from the precise, highly predictable ticking forward of the cosmos that destiny was a well-greased gizmo.

Anyone who has studied astrology has had some of this mechanical thinking bashed into him, and Esoteric Astrology’s job is to get you really confused, wash it all away, and propose a few weird alternatives. Its roundabout writing style is typical of the Theosophics and the Anthroposophics and the Othersophics. But as I read through it this time, I’m noticing clear ideas popping off the page, as though I finally focused just right on one of those “Magic Eye” books.

The concepts popping up like 3-D trains and kangaroos feel like they’ve influenced where modern astrology is desperately trying to go, and where modern religion (the New Age) is begging for mercy to go, and where psychology is wishing it could someday go if only being faithful and believing in the invisible were not still official forms of insanity; ideas that point to something that was obvious to me from the first time I pulled a Rune out of the bag and saw my own thought looking back at me.

Astrology, says Bailey, is not what’s important, but rather it’s what’s behind the astrology that really counts, whatever that something turns out to be: The One Mind, the Oversoul, the Greater Presence, the Cosmic Blender, Jesus, the Wizard–whatever it is. And we exist in relationship to that something else. We live with it. It lives with us.

Astrology or any other form of divination is an effect, and something causes this effect. “It” is not happening by itself, and this same energy is also the cause operating behind many other experiences that we would call “spiritual” or “healings” or “blessings.”

Normally, we don’t notice the cause, just the effect. It’s like when you’re at the movies, and you don’t notice the projector until it stops working–then you realize that something must have been creating the illusion of the movie. Only we really notice that something is weird when things go right in our delightful world of chaos, rather than when they go wrong. And when things go write, that is a clue.

Using astrology and other divination tools provides other little clues about what’s creating the effect of this world. Watch the planets moving for a few years or even a few months and you’ll soon start to get the idea that there must be something intelligent operating behind the scenes, and the more you personally experience the astrology, the more contact you’ll get with what’s making it all happen with such magnificent choreography.

Cause and effect are never separate. When you have one, you’ll have the other right nearby, and following astrology makes this very obvious. Once you get this idea down, then the trick is to watch the world for the actual connections between aspects of reality as they pop up in your face. The Celestine Prophesy and many other paths call them “synchronicities.” The Course in Miracles calls them “miracles” and notes that “the course” is not the book, but rather what we learn from contact with actual experiences that cause the miracles, purely from experience.

Miracles point to something that is actually here, and the reality of this something gradually becomes more and more obvious the more observations of its effects that we make. In other words, if you keep asking for miracles and you keep getting them, sooner or later you figure out that something is answering your prayers.

So on this principle, astrology is a miracle. It points to the reality that we are not separate from the Universe or God or whatever you want to call it.

I mean seriously, how wacky can you get, making up a grossly distorted little six-inch diagram of the universe and then using it to decide who to marry? Something else must be going on.

Riding right on this ray, Bailey says that the big problem with most astrology is that it gets totally hung up on the effect of “individual destiny” rather than on the cause of reality and the interconnection of everything to which it points. Real (or “esoteric”) astrology, she says, is concerned with the deeper cause of life and with the development of the soul. Heavy, but I bet this makes perfect sense to you, reading here in 1998, when much of what was once considered “occult truth” is now common sense, or at least good bathroom material.

She goes on. Space (which we often think of as empty space) is a living entity–an alive, eternal medium of existence and communication accessible to us all the time. We exist within this living field of space amid many other living creatures, including way too many mosquitos. The use of astrology (“reading space”) is just an excellent bridge toward the attaining a state of mind in which we’re not separate from anything or anyone.

Bailey throws in one last opening point that really grabbed me by the noodle. Writing back in 1950, she nonchalantly mentions the old (“ancient,” she calls it) news that there are an additional 70 or so planets orbiting our Sun, very important planets, she says, with powerful astrological effects, planets that were “hidden” at the time of her writing, but which are not so hidden today. I know, because I’m schlepping a fast-growing collection of information about them across Europe in a banana box.

But 70 more planets? Will that save our ass?

We live in edgy times. We are on the edge, and on-edge as a result. Many of us are seeking solutions to whatever it is that we’ve gotten ourselves into here and thank the Goddess because it’s about freaking time. Some people are figuring out that a positive attitude means the difference between life and death, and maintaining a positive attitude can be quite tricky, in part because so much is balancing on it. Bless the hearts, minds, and genitals of everyone spreading good vibes. Keep it up and please don’t go parachuting too often.

I don’t remember so many of my last thousand lifetimes, so I’m not in a good position to over-generalize, but I believe that we believe that we live in a critical moment. Shit, it’s just about the year 2000. It must be important. It better be. As much as we’d like to think that it doesn’t mean anything, inasmuch as we think we’re able to ignore the fact that we know it must mean something, in fact, we actually do live on the edge of who knows what. God, I’m writing like a Theosophic.

In this weird moment, I believe we know that the chances of being saved from our global chaos by “the future” are well-nigh zip, and are looking increasingly pathetic based on where certain well-established, not-so-subtle trends–like ecological ones–are headed. And we know almost for certain that history has just about nothing to offer us except one huge reminder of what not to do and what not to believe and how many people, animals, cultures, species, forests, civilizations, and great ideas it would be better not to kill, and how many antiquated nuclear weapons systems that spontaneously kick into combat mode like dying Atari games it would be better not to have left behind.

Maybe this is just enough advice. But besides these pearls, I think history offers us very little wisdom applicable to this moment; we still use lead pipes and joke about the Roman Empire dying a slow but certain death because of lead pipes. Go figure. Maybe it’s all the lead.

It’s a fact, we’re trapped in the present and there’s no way out. Sometimes the present is great and sometimes the present sucks, but we’re stuck here together. There are definitely some things that look like ways out–drugs and materialism come to mind–but we’re actually getting to the point where most people who are paying any attention at all realize that these are temporary fixes and therefore pointless. You can use them, and then it’s today again. Or you use them and realize it takes so much creativity to make them meaningful that they’ve negated their purpose of putting you to sleep by waking you up. You can smoke and smoke and smoke and wake up coughing 500 times in a row, and then one day you wake up and realize it’s today again and it’s your soul that’s coughing.

Gestalt therapy talks about “losing your mind and coming to your senses.” This is great advice, but I don’t recommend doing one without the other. Our minds are full of all kinds of ideas that are not true, but I think that the scariest thing about the mind is that it makes synthetic continuity from past to future, conveniently skipping over the present.

It’s an imaginary continuity, a more high-tech, brilliantly sophisticated, magnificently indoctrinated version of what happens when, except when you try it now and consciously notice, we blink but experience no break in the visual field.

We then pass this wonderful mental programming through the ages and end up with a perfect transfer of misery, hope, hopelessness, and disappointment right down the generations unto this very afternoon.

Astrology is a living model of our consciousness. Whether it’s scientifically “proven” or not, when you look straight at it, that’s what it actually is. Now that those 70 new planets have arrived–mostly in the past six years, by the way, which is an outrageous proposition–it’s clear that both the model and consciousness are changing very, very fast. That means us, fellow boys and girls.

For the moral of my story, I believe that the time has arrived when we must look and listen and sniff, a time when the only thing we can say absolutely positively 100 percent totally for sure is what I tell people to ask themselves in traffic court: “Where am I, and what am I doing here?”

And there is one other thing, which I like to write in bathrooms: “There is hope for humanity and you are it. Let X = X.”