It was only recently that cigarettes were good for your health, the Vietnam War was a grand idea, and all gay people were evil. Ok, now we know better, but who admitted they were wrong? Who admitted there may have been a little issue with the way they were thinking? Who didn’t know they didn’t know? Who sprays Roundup on their lawn?
Notes from the Dreamtime
The Land Calls the People. The People Coexist with the Land.
By Eric Francis Coppolino
During the Northern Solstice of 2021 (when the Sun enters the sign Cancer, overnight Sunday to Monday), Mercury is stationing direct. This kind of confluence happens often, where turning point events cluster up. The current Mercury retrograde also included two eclipses and the central event of Saturn square Uranus.
There were other little flourishes. For the entire duration of the retrograde, Mercury and Neptune have been in a square aspect (90-degrees), which has been soggy, and calling for constant vigilance. For the next few weeks, well into July, we will be sorting out truth from lies. With each passing wave of that process, a few more people wake up.
It is difficult for most people to admit they have been fooled or in any way taken. It is easy for people in authority to abuse the trust that is invested in them.
There is a reason the Mesoamerican shaman don Juan Matus, written about by Carlos Castaneda, called clarity one of the enemies of humanity. He meant false clarity: thinking you know when you do not, or not knowing when you do not know.
One remedy for this problem is to spend a lot of time actively assuming you’re wrong, and actively attempting to disprove yourself. Another way to say that is recognizing and challenging your assumptions. This is one of the major spiritual tasks of our day: the essence of true ethics in our time.
It was only recently that cigarettes were good for your health, the Vietnam War was a grand idea, and all gay people were evil. Ok, now we know better, but who admitted they were wrong? Who admitted there may have been a little issue with the way they were thinking? Who didn’t know they didn’t know? Who sprays Roundup on their lawn?
When the Sun enters Cancer overnight Sunday to Monday, it will make an opposition to Ixion in the first degree of Capricorn. This is cautionary. It is a notice to track people’s motives and intentions, particularly if they hold actual structural or institutional power.
The Sun in water sign Cancer will make a trine to Jupiter in Pisces. This is the Big Easy. Yes, life is going “back to normal,” but beneath the veneer there are important elements to what is actually a new condition of society from which we cannot turn back.
In astrology, Altjira is is the portal into the dreamtime — which is an actual place, not merely thoughts bubbling up from the chaotic ‘unconscious’ that we experience.
Mercury Stations Direct Conjunct Altjira
Altjira is a term given by early anthropologists to the worldview of Australian indigenous people. It is not necessarily an individual ‘god’ (as we expect planets to be named for, and as it is sometimes depicted in comic books) but rather a way of existence. There is a lot in this discussion that I must skip over today.
In astronomy, Altjira is an object just outside the orbit of Neptune. It is a classical Kuiper belt object discovered in 2001 with an orbit of 294 years.
For most traditional cultures, the ancestors are the personification of deep, inherited traditions. Notably, modern technological society lacks these connections. We have many false idols to fill their place, and we are at a loss for it.
In astrology, Altjira is the portal into the dreamtime — which is an actual place, not merely thoughts bubbling up from the chaotic ‘unconscious’ that we experience.
For Australian indigenous culture, and for the rest of us if we tap into it, the dreamtime is the basis of our connection to the land. This happens through the ancestors (who made the world), and their connection to the ancestors is at the very core of their spiritual practice. The land, the ancestors, the dreamtime and the Milky Way exist outside of linear time. This is the main distinction between that and the reality we know.
For most traditional cultures, the ancestors are the personification of deep, inherited traditions. Notably, modern technological society lacks these connections. We have many false idols to fill their place, and we are at a loss for it.
Yet even in our society, they could be seen as more recent ideas about union of the land and one’s identity. There is always something about the people who were here before, even though we think of the dead as “dead and gone.” They are not. We all inhabit the bardo at the same time.
In Australia, it is understood that ancestors shaped the land and still live in it: in the caves, and jagged rocks, in Uluru (Ayers Rock, a giant rock formation and Unesco World Heritage Site), in rivers and mountains, and even desert spaces. The land is alive with everyone who has lived there. (We shun this and think of it as haunted. That is a misunderstanding.) Those not in-body can still speak to living people through dreaming and we can learn from them. These connections impart a sense of the timeless and the sacred.
When I arrive on the land — almost any time I do, and I can go there any time I want — I am given stories, histories, images, and what feel like remote viewing flashbacks (generally, to the time of the glacial retreat about 18,000 years ago). I have been shown what the land looked, felt and sounded like in the era just after the glaciers left the bare land. When I researched this, the description was startlingly like what I had seen.
Our Relationship to the Land is Our Relationship to Life
It is difficult to describe a relationship to the land to those who do not have one. Perhaps it’s easiest to say you arrive somewhere that you feel at home in an unusual way, though you don’t know why. When people talk about why they love Sedona, or the Hawaiian islands, that is often about a relationship to the land. Yet of course it goes deeper, into the connection with the ancestors.
Over the years, I have shown many photographs of what I call the Grandmother Land, a valley in the vicinity of High Falls of Ulster County, New York. My relationship to this land is a story of personal discovery and growth, that is, many happy accidents that guided me to my understanding of myself and the world over the past 29 years (I first arrived in the summer of 1992).
My relationship is partly to the people who “own” this land, though we all consider ourselves stewards. Yet my real relationship is to the ancestors, the Native American Grandmothers, who are personified for me in the form of a meta-grandmother whose name I’ll keep to myself for the moment.
When I arrive on the land — almost any time I do, and I can go there any time I want — I am given stories, histories, images, and what feel like remote viewing flashbacks (generally, to the time of the glacial retreat about 18,000 years ago). I have been shown what the land looked, felt and sounded like in the era just after the glaciers left the bare land. When I researched this, the description was startlingly like what I had seen.
The land is its own thing and it’s the story of what humans have done with it. My connection to the history goes up through contemporary times, during which I have documented various legal control dramas over ownership, and the history of the settlers and colonists working this specific region of the county.
People who work with land often feel direct and personal connections, whether they have a home garden, they are farmers, or they end up as a fish and game officer.
There are many forms of this relationship. You might feel it innately at first, though it builds over time, through an intuitive realm that could be called the dreamtime: it is not part of the rational, provable world, though it is part of your direct experience.
Part of how you make this real is you offer what you can. You offer yourself in service to the Earth, to the community, to other people — what you invest in becomes real to you.
The internet is a kind of synthetic dreamtime that takes us out of body but does not do two critical things: connect us to the land, or to the ancestors. Without these connections, humanity is lost. It may have been lost for a long time, though we are seeing an escalation of the efforts to get us out of body and fully invested, meaning directly integrated with, the digital sphere.
We Are Being Called to Awaken Now
In contemporary times, we are not drawn to the land so much as we are taken out of body into a synthetic bardo called the digital sphere. We are being pulled by compelling forces out of the natural body of the Earth and into an electronic body that has been installed around it. This “feels spiritual” because it is an out-of-body event. It’s about as spiritual as hard liquor.
While one could argue that the developments of human ingenuity are natural, one could also argue that there are critical differences.
Part of being alive means maintaining our connection to our bodies and the land we live and work on. It does not matter if this is Los Angeles, New York City or the Sierra Nevadas.
It is the thing we all have in common, and we are being conned out of this and of all things that one could rightly call organic. The pull of the digital sphere is alluring, glamorous, convenient and thoroughly enforced. It is the drive to not be a natural person.
The internet is a kind of synthetic dreamtime that takes us out of body but does not do two critical things: connect us to the land, or to the ancestors. Without these connections, humanity is lost. It may have been lost for a long time, though we are seeing an escalation of the efforts to get us out of body and fully invested, meaning directly integrated with, the digital sphere.
The end results of this effort would be like the deepest, darkest dystopian scenarios. We all know this, and those possibilities are so distasteful many refuse to acknowledge them. Also, the steps along the way seem like normal developments, not worth bothering with. That is a great way to be conned out of your most basic protection. I suggest being cautious of any scenario in which technology “has the answer.”
I would add one last thought. To make any helpful decision now, the chances are you will feel like you’re going against the flow of society and the seeming consensus of your friends. That is always how it is: you have to assert yourself and live the life that you choose. You cannot live any other, though you can be lulled into believing you can be someone other than yourself, or that your priorities, desires and needs are irrelevant.
Listen to your calling: you are being summoned, beckoned, and awakened. With that awakening comes the sense of vulnerability, and with that, there is protection.
Remember: your feeling of vulnerability is not a warning about danger. It’s about being open to life, to existence, to the Earth and to your sisters and brothers.
Faithfully,
