Dear Friend and Reader:
I guess, looking at the charts above, it would have been easy to predict all-out war for our moment. The planets, though spread across Pisces and Aries with a little in Aquarius and Taurus, are especially concentrated: by the Equinox there will be about 19 planets and points in just 60 degrees of the sky.
When you put the planets that close together, you get dozens of separate conjunctions, most of them seemingly minor, but this alignment also contains two extremely rare, culture-bearing and era-defining conjunctions: the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the Chiron-Eris conjunction — both in military-oriented sign Aries.
A conjunction is two planets in the same degree, and you can almost always feel them, or see them play out. Currently we are building toward 19 planets and points in one alignment.
How exactly would that play out? Well, we’re witnessing it.
It’s easy to see these conjunctions as planets quietly drifting past one another in the depths of the solar system. Really, they describe events being sparked off in Aries, named for the Roman god of war. And that is exactly what we are getting, in a way akin to daily events reported in 1943 at the peak of World War II.
To sum up: escalation of war in Ukraine (with Russia recently hitting Kiev with a supersonic missile), the continuing effort to grind Gaza to dust, along with Trump seizing Venezuela for American oil companies and the threat to take Greenland. The U.S. was recently bombing Iran, and now this Aries-ruled country is a disaster.
The question is, what is driving all of this aggression?
Then, The Domestic War
The domestic war is escalating in the United States, with ICE agents active in many American cities. Renee Good was the 9th person killed by ICE since early 2025, and many others have died in ICE custody during the past 12 months. Now, while Minneapolis is still grieving, there was a second shooting of an unarmed civilian in Minneapolis overnight Wednesday to Thursday.
The FBI has searched a Washington Post reporter’s home, six senators and representatives are under investigation, and reporting harassment and attack, for making a video where they restated the Military Code of Conduct that everyone learns in Basic Training. (This is based on the Nuremberg Principles, the idea that a soldier must refuse illegal orders).
The chairman of the Federal Reserve is being threatened with criminal investigation for allegedly lying to Congress. So too have former federal officials and the New York State Attorney General.
I’m sure there are some who think this is Trump “straightening things out” and “someone finally doing what needs to be done.” Others think that the time of the Apocalypse has arrived, and they will soon be able to use up all the supplies they saved as part of their “prepping” activities. Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam!
It’s not that hard for anyone who can still think to connect the dots. But you might not like the picture you see when you do, and it’s easy to go back to scrolling TikTok or worrying about the many problems that people are facing today. None of this matters much if you don’t have food.
Neither the country nor the world are being governed. They are under nonstop attack. The economy is not being managed. It is under constant threat of destabilization and collapse. In case nobody has said so lately, the role of the American government is not to attack civilians in American cities.
Insurrection in Minneapolis?
As of Thursday morning, Trump was threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. This would allow him to deploy a full military response against protesters.
And what is this?
“Enacted in 1792, the Insurrection Act grants the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military domestically and use it against Americans under certain conditions,” according to the Brennan Center. “While there are rare circumstances in which such authority might be necessary, the law, which has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”
Then there is the Posse Comitatus of 1878, words I don’t hear enough. That’s the federal law prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Anyone who has taken Civics 101 knows this is what’s being done when Trump orders troops to a city. An undocumented immigrant is not a foreign enemy.
What exactly do people think is going to happen when a federal agent shoots and kills an unarmed person, execution style? Is the message here that everyone has to knuckle under? Whose concept of “freedom” and “greatness” is this?
Well, you would have to be extremely confused and have lived through a lot of abuse, to think this is some kind of reasonable response to protest. And if a federal agent shoots someone in the head twice at point blank range, you can expect a response; that’s why protest is protected speech under the 1st Amendment.
But we still don’t understand why this is happening. If all-out war breaks out, and if a civil war in the U.S. erupts, we still don’t understand why it’s happening. Oil running out does not have a connection to Mexicans making salads, or working as nannies or carpenters.
Why All the Aggression and Violence?
The past falls off quickly right now, and we don’t remember important things that happened fairly recently. This includes the total solar eclipse conjunct Chiron from April 8, 2024, which cast a diagonal shadow dividing the United States in two.
That was followed by the wave of protests and campus crackdowns later that month and into May. [See my article from May 3, 2024: And the Whole Wide World is Watchin’ — less than two years ago.]
Those were protests over the ongoing massacre in Gaza, which were met with full-strength state power everywhere. The war had already come home. Again. It keeps doing that, but now matters are extremely fragile.
What I am here to say is that what we are witnessing is a digital effect. It’s an effect of the digital environment. I don’t mean the content; I mean the impact of the technology directly on consciousness.
Matters have been exponentially more insane since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and have only escalated since the massive A.I. push that began in January 2025.
These things seem to be applications and devices; they seem to be tools. That is not true. They represent a total environment, which invades the mental environment totally. We shrug off LLM apps luring people into suicide, and writing their suicide notes for them.
People have been so perforated and weakened by exposure to these technologies, and to other people controlled by them, that there is very little concept of a private self left to work with. That is what would do the resisting, and the joining with others. This has many repercussions, one of which is a response of violence and aggression — or thinking these things are just fine; or that they feel good.
The Message of Chiron
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity is depleted, as it is today, people become more violent and more aggressive. They expect these things to be present in their environment, and they go after one another in ways that seem small and petty.
The result is both social and psychic destabilization, a sense of everything being upended.
Meanwhile, under these conditions, there is no longer a concept of the civic body, which depends on the inner awareness of many people, and their sense of personal responsibility to the community. This is why “congress is ineffectual.” People who are shocked out of themselves cannot get together and take action.
But it is very easy for an autocrat to do so. And it’s why people think that an autocrat is either a great idea, or something we cannot do anything about.
The planet with the most cohesive message in this whole bender is Chiron. The work of Chiron is to experience yourself as an individual, and to persist in the work of self-actualization. Chiron is about awareness, which means true perception. This is extremely unpopular.
It is intimidating to most people to even consider this, because individuating means getting kicked out of a tribe. And to do the work of Chiron means to do the work of healing, which further means admitting the ways you’re in pain — including from living in a society that obsesses over death in its 24/7 “news cycle.”
The digital environment has a way of bypassing both thought and feeling. It makes it seem like a great time to numb out and pretend it’s all gonna go away. But this is the suppression of chaos, and it’s based on not doing one’s personal work.
Right now some of the most important personal work we can be doing is seeking an understanding of the world situation and why people are behaving the way that they are. I don’t mean obsessing over each new development in the so-called news. I mean something more like asking what all these things have in common, and why you feel the way that you do — when you feel.
With love,
