“It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are.”
— Prof. Robert C. Solomon in Waking Life
Dear Friend and Reader:
Monday, Neptune enters Aries, where it will be until May 21, 2038 when it begins its transition into Taurus. But the Aries ingress is not your ordinary sign change. Anything entering Aries is commencing a whole new cycle, as is anything it represents along with it.
And in an odd way, this brings many people into the story. The first degree of Aries (the location of the Sun at the spring equinox) has a special name, called the sidereal vernal point (SVP or Aries Point). It’s the place where the sidereal zodiac and the tropical zodiac are reckoned. This is the degree gradually moving toward the Age of Aquarius.
The Aries Point is personal in that it has influence equivalent even to a powerful planet like Chiron or Pluto. But it’s in the same place in everyone’s chart, and that gives it a kind of mass effect, involving everyone.
The Saturn-Neptune Conjunction
It’s also the setup for another event, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the Aries Point. On Feb. 14, Saturn enters Aries, and four days later they form a conjunction right in the Aries Point. The odds of this happening are about as low as getting four aces and a queen in a poker game, then walking across the casino and winning a jackpot in a slot machine.
It has never happened in the history of astrology; according to David Palmer, you would have to go back around 6,500 years to find one. And it’s happening now — amidst much other truly unusual and rapidly developing planetary activity that does not let up until August.
I’ve been writing about these events for a couple of years, warming up the territory for you. The ongoing Inner Light – Inner Peace readings are based on them. In this series of essays, I’ll be covering events in real time, as they develop. I will include some technical detail and also historic context.
Saturn-Neptune and the Berlin Wall
Saturn represents a solidifying agent, a boundary, or a dependable structure: something we think of as real. Neptune represents a dissolving agent, an illusion, an invisible force in the environment, or something denied. Put them together and you have a tense combination — or massive movement.
The most recent Saturn-Neptune conjunction happened in Capricorn on Nov. 13, 1989, within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9. That historical event was precipitated by a mistimed press release.
This shows the power that Neptune (a kind of deception) has over Saturn (a massive wall that had divided the world for more than 40 years). Uranus was in the picture, and that helped speed things up.
The events in Capricorn of 1989 were the warmup for the series of Uranus-Neptune conjunctions of 1993 that opened the way to people accepting a digital world. We know that Pluto moved through Capricorn with tremendous destabilizing effects between 2008 and 2024. However, massive structural damage was done to society and our ideas about it with these earlier events.
False Spirituality
The Saturn-Neptune conjunction on the Aries Point represents a vast meltdown or re-conceptualization of what a human being is. Implied is some kind of recreation or reformulation, but often with Saturn-Neptune events this is a synthesis: the result is synthetic.
Real growth takes work, sustained effort and faith. We don’t live in a time when self-realization is a meaningful idea to most people. Rather, we are in a time when growth has been replaced by identity (and wealth). Wear this label, and identify those other folks as creeps, and suddenly you, too, are enlightened.
Nothing says automated spirituality like “artificial intelligence” or “virtual reality.” Or, get really, really rich and you are assumed to be self-actualized, even if you’re psychotic. Many other movements, such as Woke, Maga, Christian Nationalism, Zionism, techno cultism and others also bestow a sense of false instant enlightenment that is so convincing that it seems indelible.
The Near Miss of July 2025
Saturn and Neptune came within one degree on July 16, 2025, a near-miss conjunction. That was a strange season. In case you don’t remember, we were being told over and over again that this thing falsely being called artificial intelligence would be replacing humanity. Before that, it was a product launch; an app for your phone. After the presidential inauguration, the mask came off.
The reports that large language models lure people into suicide or tell children where to find dangerous chemicals in their home have been laughed off. I guess that’s one approach to the Grim Reaper.
That was when tech writer Taylor Lorenz began her investigation, published this week, revealing that the “existential threat,” that is, the potential extinction problem, was a design feature and not a bug. You can learn about this in her video Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead. And they are developing the technology to do it. There is a social movement to support it. (Content creators who are part of this movement use a special sign-off, which Lorenz documents in her video.)
This is hubris on a scale unimagined even by Shakespeare.
The MAID Problem
I would add that what is casually being called MAID, or medically assisted death, is part of this program. The press releases look fantastic. It seems humane. It will end suffering (and save the government money).
The way things are going, it will not be long before A.I. models are deciding who “deserves” to be approved for MAID, including those who suffer from psych problems and suicidal ideation.
As for MAID for mental illness, this has already begun in Canada, with the death of Adam Maier-Clayton back in 2017, a young man who chose euthanasia for a pronounced psychic disturbance.
Claire Brosseau is a comedian suffering from depression, and she, too wants to die by government suicide. There is a lobby coalition trying to make this available throughout the corporate territory of Canada. What happens there will happen in the United States and most of the world; that’s how this is being designed.
You might ask why I am so concerned — because this is MAID in combination with the digital effects we are living with. I would have been a lot less worried prior to the deception and mass murder campaign of 2020+.
I’m also concerned that the digital environment is churning out misery and despondency that will then be shuffled into the MAID system and be used to get rid of “useless eaters.”
Then there is the not-so-small matter of: what happens when someone is already gone and then determined not to have given consent, or to have been incapable of it? What happens when we find out (again) that hospitals got paid bonuses to kill their patients? MAID looks like one of those developments that starts as one thing and ends as another.
In total, the design scheme amounts to an open-air concentration camp that we are building not as prisoners under forced labor, with picks and shovels, but with our subscription fees, constant usage and devaluation of our work. Then there is the ongoing letting go of our humanity little by little, feeling by feeling. The result is the subtle stench of misery, longing and loneliness that is rising from society.
You may not think you’re any different from who you were in the past, but the effects of Neptune (and of Eris) are always invisible for a while. In my view, the result of the mass media era has been a creeping destabilization of self-awareness, of society, of culture and of intellect that are having slow-acting effects. There is the sense that you’re somehow not quite yourself, and the world is not what it was. You and everything are a little different but you don’t know why.
Maybe you think the Earth is flat, that you live in a simulation, or that you’re a tulpa (a replica of yourself). Maybe you’re angry all the time but you never were before. Or maybe you’re extremely confused, so confused that you don’t even notice until you try to do something ordinary and cannot. These are all effects of having been uploaded.
However, such gradual and often imperceptible movement reaches points of acceleration, and we are about to enter one of them.
Eris in Aries
Let’s end on a chipper, optimistic note. There is another conjunction that has been forming for a long time and that made first contact last year, concurrently with the Saturn-Neptune near miss. While they can be considered individually, I think it’s helpful to consider them as parts of the same process.
The other conjunction is that of Chiron and Eris, also in Aries. This even more explicitly describes the digital situation as it affects us as individuals.
I will try to be succinct and leave out back story I cover elsewhere, but this is worth knowing about.
Eris has spent about 100 years slowly moving across Aries. This is the electrical mass media age, including the licensing of commercial radio stations through the 1920s*. It extends through broadcast TV, cable TV, high definition TV, the invention and development of the computer, early A.I., ARPANET, DARPANET, BITNET, the commercial internet, the parallel gaming internet, ubiquitous porn, Tinder, Grindr and match.com taking over human beings meeting one another, the rise of virtual ‘reality’, the onslaught of social media, and now the mass infiltration of generative A.I. and large language models into everything from your car to your rice cooker.
Wow! That was quite a century!
Summing up the entire philosophy of Marshall McLuhan in one paragraph, the effect of print — which was to draw people out of tribal consciousness hanging over from hunter-gatherer days, and form individuals with a private conscience — was instantly unraveled by this sequence of events. Humans, in a sense, ceased to be individuals. We are now joined in the “global village” of the computer environment, which means that our central nervous systems overlap and are interconnected.
This, by the way, is why you probably feel so exhausted. Anything that happens anywhere — a war in Africa, a stabbing in London, a shooting in Arizona — all end up in your brain.
Add Chiron to the Equation: Point of No Return
Events associated with Chiron have the effect of helping people individuate. Chiron has a focusing, documenting quality. It raises awareness, of whatever needs awareness raised, and in Aries (the sign of I Am) that is the individual. That conjunction is March 19, just before the Aries equinox.
With Chiron, we come out of mass consciousness and find our way into individuality. This is part of the healing crisis of Chiron. It’s always about waking up to yourself. This is why so many people struggle with it.
Because Eris represents mass consciousness, Chiron conjunct Eris can represent a mass awakening. In fact many people are realizing that this has all gone too far.
One effect of Chiron will be seeing (and feeling) all this identity chaos for what it is. You may start to remember things you’ve forgotten and didn’t realize you’d left behind. You might remember personal qualities, desires, needs and aspirations. You might recall healing projects you’ve left behind; old wounds may show up, especially involving the problem of where the individual meets the mass tribe.
That is a sign that the astrology is working. It’s you waking up. You may look around and notice that it does not seem to be happening in others. Don’t try to wake them up or “Red Pill” them. Remember, it’s not about them, it’s about you.
Your awakening, your growth process, your decisions about who you are, are not the business of any other person or corporation. Yet I would add this. The most potent influence luring people back to sleep is not the digital environment.
It is the inconvenience of being an adult, with real responsibilities. This includes taking responsibility for society itself. It comes with the daunting prospect of being real to yourself. When you do that, you have to be real with others — and that is not only inconvenient. It often requires change, movement and activating long-delayed progress. And here we are today, approaching the point of no return.
On its own, Neptune entering Aries comes with a reminder, which to my ear is about honoring the mystery of existence, and respecting the ineffable mystery of who you are.
With love,
*Footnote
“I have read, printed, and taken notes on all twelve signs of Eric’s Inner Light readings. I’m a bit old school and truly appreciate having the printed pages in hand, where I can highlight his words of wisdom and insight. As a Scorpio, reading my sign felt like he was looking directly into my soul—capturing the essence of this past year, especially the personal woes of AI as an author, and even illuminating what may lie ahead.
I’m not someone who typically writes reviews or offers public praise, but I wholeheartedly believe that Eric’s work, expertise, teachings, honesty, and artistry deserve the time it takes to express my appreciation. I deeply value those rare individuals who speak to the soul and offer hope through a genuine sense of kinship.
As I move through yet another dark night of the soul, I had considered reaching out for a personal reading with Eric—and I still may—but after reading his 2026 Scorpio forecast, I’m no longer certain I need to. He has a remarkable gift for speaking to each sign in a personal and distinctive way, offering both a compass and a roadmap for today and for what lies ahead.
Many years ago, a client gifted me a complimentary subscription to Eric’s work. She has since passed, and I remain profoundly grateful for that connection. As someone who also works in the healing field—as a medium, healer, and artist—I deeply appreciate finding a mentor whose insight resonates so clearly and authentically.”
— Samara Anjelae