Dear Friend and Reader:
Anyone who is paying attention has noticed that society lives through one “wakeup call” after another; so much so that the idea has become meaningless. That’s potentially because in the sense that I’m using it, the idea of being asleep feels a lot like being awake, until you’re awake, and if you’re not, you won’t know the difference.
When someone is asleep, such as at night, they’re not necessarily thinking “Oh, I’m asleep.” Then you might wake up and you realize you were not awake a moment ago. But where were you? Where are you now?
Maybe you awaken and then open your eyes as a conscious choice; maybe you’re just suddenly looking at something, still halfway in a dream. I would propose that the whole matter of sleeping, waking and various kinds of dreaming is something we would benefit from understanding better.
Chiron Conjunct Eris
The rare (55-year) generational event Chiron conjunct Eris, exact on Thursday, is a wakeup call. It’s happening now, amidst many other wakeup calls. It’s been building for a couple of years, gaining intensity, along with a good few other things doing so. That’s astrology for you: presenting in symbolic language what also exists in the world of experiences and relationships.
In my view, Chiron is the thing calling for awakening and Eris is the thing being awakened from. For most astrologers, Chiron has some vague inflection of healing. And Eris has some vague inflection of chaos, or discord (her name in Roman times was Discordia). OK, healing from chaos.
That still does not tell us much, but it does contain the seed of an idea. It’s still not exactly actionable information. However, given the available data, it’s easy to spot something useful or helpful if you know what to look for. This should not require the services of a shaman. However, seeing the invisible usually calls for the help of a world-walker, or someone adept at co-existing on multiple planes of awareness and moving between them with some aptitude.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s count Chiron as the state of awareness and Eris as the prevailing psychic state created in society by its technology. This is a confrontation between awareness and chaos.
What is Not Being Reckoned With
When you study history, the first thing you might notice is that nobody pays much attention to the history of technology and how it pertains to consciousness. (The obsession over content is not what I’m talking about.) The technology of our society strongly influences our state of mind, individual and collective, our sense of self, and our relationships.
The technological environment is always progressing and evolving rapidly, but humans are famous for not looking back and therefore not seeing what was done to them or the world; what happened to people; how we have changed. It’s as if nobody is interested.
History is always blamed on something else. Historians usually concern themselves with wars, treaties, elections, coronations, assassinations, scandals and economic conditions. They are adept at making up stories about how these things happen and what they mean. And historians verge on totally committed to never, ever understanding the psychic effects of the technology environment.
One probable reason for this is that environments are invisible and tend to exist below liminal perception. So ascribing them as a “cause” of something means claiming something invisible is making something happen. Another is that we think of technology in terms of the next great thing, which is sold in advertising as progress and convenience. That presents yet another invisible environment, so pervasive that people rarely notice its existence.
Every Person, Every Relationship
The thing we’re not reckoning with is what has happened to society and to us as individuals as the digital tide has steadily risen over the past 50 years. It’s all just…sort of back there somewhere. That means we are all just…sort of sleeping through it all.
Digital technology has evolved so far and so fast during that half-century that it spans from something that could generate your phone bill or school program to something else that lures people into suicide or convinces them they’re a mythical superhero traveling through space and time on other worlds. Underneath it all are electrical impulses and zeros and ones, which are not actually opposite states. They are slightly different states.
Along the way, exposure to this environment has shifted the self-concept of every person, the nature of every relationship, and the structure of society. There are effects; we don’t notice them.
There is a built-in delusion factor that conceals most of the problem. Marshall McLuhan compared exposure to computers as akin to being high on LSD — a dissociative state. Overexposure to digital technology creates a seemingly awake form of being asleep, much like dropping acid induces a kind of waking dream.
It’s easy to go from being really asleep to being asleep in front of your phone with barely a moment of transition. Unlike with astral experiences such as dreams, the astral-digital usually has time stamps and allows you to backtrack. That gives it a sense of reality, whether true or false.
Basic Concepts of Chiron and Eris
All of the early writers about Chiron (discovered in 1977) describe, as attributes of what was then the new planet, the willingness to stand out, and the intense individuality of people with a strong Chiron placement.
There are also the concepts of “holistic” and “integrative,” where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This has other terms, like biophilia or synergy.
There is also the expression of focused and distinct self-awareness, which is often cultivated by or emerges through healing crisis. Chiron represents an approach to crisis which facilitates both growth and ability.
If you read people’s charts to any real depth, you can see that those who have Chiron in strong aspect-patterns to the the angles, the Sun, the Moon and the inner planets (through Saturn) have a more focused state of inner awareness, of self-awareness, and the ability to see themselves in the context of their existence. (If you are missing these aspects, it’s possible to compensate but you have to do the work of challenging your assumptions.)
How people respond to Chiron transits (realtime events) describes how they go through their most important personal transitions. Study your own lifetime Chiron transits and you’re likely to discover this for yourself.
So What is Chaos?
Getting right to the point: personality fragmentation and extreme distortion of body perception as a result of exposure to new media, especially digital.
Eris, for its part, is first presented to astrologers as being named for the goddess of chaos. Co-discoverer Chad Trujillo told me he thought that it was an appropriate name for the times we are living through. So what is chaos? For that you have to study charts.
When you look, Eris shows up strongly in the charts of technology pioneers, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs (both of whom have Moon conjunct Eris) to the inventor of “artificial intelligence,” John McCarthy. Alan Turing has an unusually powerful Eris (square Pluto), similar to that of media and technology analyst Marshall McLuhan.
Eris shows up at major moments of transition that are driven by digital technology itself, like Trump taking over the country using his Twitter account in 2016 (during Uranus conjunct Eris).
You can see an Eris pattern in the specific history of most technological developments and their evolution. And this history also describes the fragmentation of psyche and society as technologies advance. This has been especially true of computer technology.
Social media is a good example of the dehumanizing effects of digital technology. As everyone knows, we were different people in radically pronounced ways before and after. And there have been hundreds of effects like this, contributing to the same problem.
And now this is all clashing with the profound need for self-awareness in a time when the air is getting so thin many people are blacking out.
What I’m Really Worried About
While the individual state of mind of any person is interesting, I’m concerned about the cumulative effects on millions of people adding up to something that does us in, creating a situation where the living envy the dead.
So let’s talk about Eris as a cultural force for a second. In the myth, which is a classic case of “one thing leads to another,” the final result is a horrific 10-year war. If Eris is the goddess of chaos, then war is the manifestation. Her myth is the basis for understanding the Trojan War.
There was vanity; there was a challenge (the apple of discord, inscribed “to the fairest,” there was a pageant (participated in even by the goddess of wisdom, Athena), the prize was a woman named Helen, and then a big war ensued. This was the original bonfire of the vanities.
The chaos I’m talking about in our time is what has happened to the collective human psyche under the influence of digital technology, which in a word is fragmentation. Again — think social media and friendships turned into transactional bullshit by Tinder or Instagram.
Of Context, Continuity, and Causes and Effects
Fragmentation includes loss of context, lack of continuity, not understanding related causes and effects, and the loss of what I will reluctantly call “sense of self.” These could, in a different context, be offered as the symptoms of mental illness, and when you aggregate them, you can end up with a mentally ill society that cannot see itself in the mirror that it’s looking into all the time.
A foundational aspect of this involves sex and sexuality. Sexual polarities are disrupted by all forms of electrical technology, which moves people on a current that is faster than the body (the speed of light rather than 5 mph). This is compounded by by people broadcasting themselves out of body every day, sometimes all day. Whatever you may think of “sexual politics,” there is a biological disruption beneath it, which is leading to “gender dysphoria” and amputation.
One might think, “Isn’t it so futuristic that we’re becoming nonbinary?” Yes, exactly, this is a digital effect, and in the biological sense, it’s as powerful as a dead battery with no polarity and no charge. If you’re looking for why relationships, sex, sexual orientation and reproduction are in the state they’re in, here we have a great starting point for understanding. It is not leading to “equality” but rather to a major psychic and biological disruption.
If you don’t have any sense of who you are, it’s difficult to know anything and it’s even more difficult to have a sense of direction or purpose. This works for societies as well as for individuals. Most Americans do not realize that it’s possible to know yourself much better than you do, and that there exist societies that have a much deeper sense of purpose. You don’t hear much about them because they tend not to be violent.
What I am getting at in my roundabout way is that exposure to digital technology has depleted us as individuals and as a society of our sense of existence. And this is a dangerous place to be. If you don’t feel like you exist, you cannot have faith and you will lack most practical sensibilities. Suicide does not require a note. It can come in the form of getting drunk and driving into a tree at 100mph, which (without a note) would be called an accident.
It Would Not Be an Accident
The world is out of control right now. People driven by their delusional digital state of mind and its enhanced emphasis on power and greed are leading other highly compromised people into very bad situations.
This is coupled with the introduction of a technology nobody really understands, to which matters of life and death are being delegated. Both are equally troubling. I have watched hundreds of videos of experts explaining the problems with generative large language models (falsely called A.I.) and nobody mentions the state of mind that this type of technology induces.
If things go very wrong on the planet, it will not be an accident. And the crucial connection of technology to state of mind to the outcome is likely to be missed.
I realize the world seems to grind on as it always has — until it does not. Since the end of the Second World War (really including the war era itself, from late 1941 to mid-1945), we in the United States are accustomed to relative stability and having food to eat.
It always seems that no matter how much the U.S. bombs anyone, there’s still a barbecue on Saturday afternoon and a church chicken dinner on Sunday afternoon.
Yet an honest assessment reveals the world at many tipping points: outrageous levels of private and public debt that will never be paid back; multiple military conflicts that are really between superpowers but being waged as proxy wars; many people alienated and suffering emotionally; and a prevailing state of insanity that seems to be rising in pressure and prevalence. We have yet to account honestly for where this is coming from or the full depth of the problem.
It is not a joke that a technology designed to falsely emulate thought and creativity has taken over the economy as well as consciousness and, it would seem, the flow of history.
What We Can Easily Miss, But Don’t Have To
The Chiron-Eris conjunction is bursting with the potential for self-actualization, awareness, maturity and other forms of growth. And the news every day — which does not seem to be escapable — is of how many political leaders, civilians and soldiers have died in a war that nobody understands and that cannot be controlled.
In the public sphere and many private lives, Chiron-Eris is being experienced as direct chaos: buildings falling down, bombs sailing by, the total up-ending of energy markets on which the economy is based, including A.I. data centers. Ultimately the silver lining of this war is that if the flow of oil is cut back drastically, that will reduce the amount of available energy to power the thing that is driving the insanity on the deepest level.
Yet on the most personal level, we can, if we want, awaken to the times in which we’re alive, who we are now in this context, and to the creative potential of our existence.
Eris, in her myth described as vengeful, subversive and bloodthirsty, is a powerful force for violence and disintegration. We can revoke consent for that, personally and collectively. But the effects of Eris largely operate invisibly, and its actions are self-concealing. Chiron is up-front, and demands discipline, focus, personal integrity and, more than anything, experience. The current paradox of awakening is coming into awareness of many things you might wish did not exist, in a world you might wish was different.
But here we are, in this particular moment — not your average wakeup call. Just remember, there is no cause without an effect; no effect without a cause; and cause and effect are never separate.
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ —
Most of today’s photos, created Wednesday evening, March 18 just before the New Moon, are of an abandoned barn on my property. The structure seems to date back 100 years but it’s impossible to tell; there have also been several stages of construction as the farm went through various phases as dairy, beef and horses. You can tell it was originally a large dairy farm because of the huge silos. The whole place is a spectacular study in the transience of physical forms, so much so that it’s not a good idea to go in — the air is thick with asbestos dust (which an electrician pointed out when we were checking the interior wiring for safety). But it’s so interesting and rich in there with many layers of history that it’ll be worth suiting up in Tyvek and wearing HEPA and looking around when the light is right. For today, we have exterior views and also some of the surrounding land and features. To get a different look, I used a lens I usually avoid, my Zeiss 50mm f 2.8 manual focus.
“Artists hate the suburbs and love decay.” — Marshall McLuhan
About lichen, from Wikipedia: A lichen is a hybrid colony of algae or cyanobacteria living symbiotically among filaments of multiple fungus species, along with bacteria embedded in the cortex or “skin”, in a mutualistic relationship. Lichens are the lifeform that first brought the term symbiosis into biological context.