April 2022: Merge and Surge

In the past few years the process of coming into coherence of what is true or real in any given circumstance has slipped from the automatic procedure we might have assumed is normally playing out and with this slippage the hold upon these circumstance contextualizing ontologies slides away exponentially far and at an ever quickening rate. Of course, there are many factors. Social media has only been around long enough to observe cultural surface effects rather than deep churnings at the tectonics of our generational strata. The loss of deep literacy and reduction to assumed phraseologies as character limits crunch our messages further, the scrap of paper in the bottle paraphrases the synopsis of our condition. I’ve wondered repeatedly since the leap across the Triplicity Shift was imminent if people think about what they think about, as in, ‘you think that but have you thought about the thinking that arrived you there?’. We once read volumes, reflected, dialogued with peers, revisited our ideas augmented by new findings and moiré of interfacing materials vectoring in our cognitions, which splashed about in our emotional bodies. The loss of this as it morphs into something else is obvious across the spectrum, but where we are headed ultimately is known by none.

So where are we headed? If anywhere. What is real in our world. If anything. The politicization of everything results in endless statements that are by no known criteria of meaning making or truth validating to be true or real or have actual meaning. They are abstract concepts relying on theoretical architecture. We’ve gotten exceedingly careless with this all pervasive device. Why? If the meme mill spinning off takes upon imagined political suppositions doesn’t provide meaningful truth, then in what way do we understand our reality?

Maybe let’s begin with what is reality? I’ll just throw out my current guess: Reality is the activity of a living and sentient dynamic symbiotic ecology of narratives and stories experienced through sensory experience and integrated through the multilayered dialogues of many participants. As far as this moment this is perhaps close to what I gather is going on. How have I arrived at this? I think in large part wondering over the existence of Creation. How did this, and how does this all come to be. I might suggest if you haven’t thought these two things through you might want to drop everything and devote some time to this exercise. The result, obviously, is not to arrive at a concrete definition, as you can see in my own guess, reality seems to be dynamic, in which case what it is is in a state of perpetual flux and state change, phase. But lacking this first framework might lead to unfounded thinking down stream which could be vulnerable to exponential slipping of the operations conducted to cohere truth and meaning from what you are experiencing, and a kind of susceptibility to having what you receive and then what you distribute while in dialogue being hijacked by threads of thinking, actions and emotions that are not your own, and are dis-genuine to what you actually value within the larger ecology including the web of humans and machines and various networks you interact with.

Maria Peñil Cobo

After doing some thinking about what is reality and how does Creation occur, maybe next answer for yourself: what are your metaphysics? I think at this point in history it is safe to make this commonplace aside values, ethics, philosophy, aesthetics and so on. We might reference here how something like the Tao is a kind of operative metaphysical system of organization rather than a collection of faith based beliefs. I’ve been struggling with the lack of tactility to the word “spirituality”, and its cultural function has essentially been train wrecked beyond repair. We probably need also to rest religion a bit longer and let it cool off from the overheat of wars and monolithic friction. But metaphysics I find is a good Air period operative framework to fill in for oneself so that their attention to reality and the actions which may precede or follow any attention cohere to the principles through which they approach energy, bodies, beings, stories, and so on and perhaps not pollute, disturb, damage or otherwise imbalance everything they engage with via unawareness and holistic neglect, but instead attempt at least with humility to contribute to the wealth and health of the emerging symbiotic ecology that surrounds us and find their part within its activity and exchanges more readily. The feedback loop from adding to the dis-ease of the whole via unawareness I suspect may be a leading factor in the state of desperation which forms around the thinking mind in its anxiety to fix the patterns and arrange or align with solutions from the political field.

But what is political? What is politic? The word makes a debut in Aristotles work of political philosophy Politiká, and refers to the affairs of the city, the power dynamics and distribution negotiations among citizens of the city or polis. But the polis comes on the scene not too much prior in relative terms that when Aristotle wrote about it in the 4th C BC. Prior to when conceptions of pantheons acted out human like dramas as the government tops in the heavens there was still human settlement and organization for hundreds of thousands of years. There was society and culture long before the affairs of the city— there were even what we would call cities before the age of the cities! The polis is a particular inclusion into a paradigm, a kind of mode we went into collectively coming through and out of the bronze age. With the onset of agriculture, irrigation, road building, labor, defense, law, written record, and eventually neoplatonism, hierarchy, monotheism, empire, we have been arriving at our present day in a kind of eventuality over rails of artifice. We don’t have to continue in such a fashion. Food was grown prior to agriculture. It’s not necessary to optimize to thrive. We might consider at this point how we can return to dynamic symbiosis and dialogue with the emerging ecology rather than continue to outwit probabilities as we are clearly not succeeding and most everyone would agree upon the the levels of disgrace and ugliness.

William Adolphe Bouguereau

A hacker recently stole a sum of assets in the millions from an NFT exchange. The community of users used the available information they could source from the ledger and discovered the thief's physical address and ordered miso soup to their house then called to ask how he was enjoying the soup and the thief returned all of the stolen funds. People in autonomous mass collaboration can assemble themselves in self regulating systems. When layers of policing and regulation are applied from external governing bodies systems don’t tend to navigate organically back to health or balance but instead the crimes are usually transferred to legalities and conducted in extortion by the state itself, the legalization of cartels which co-rule he space of the system. We might see authoritarianism or crippling bureaucracy as the symptoms of unwell society. For the immune response of the cultural body to operate there needs to be total sovereignty of the individual bodies which make up the whole, or else the population gets flattened into a collective and is managed by external agents which have sterilizing agendas not suitable to the incredibly dynamic and myriad scenarios of a diversified earth teaming with interspecies collaborations that cannot be brought into harmony through static plans and require participatory attention, dialogue, activity and allowances within the layers of the localized sphere or at least where the activity vectors.

Rivane Neuenschwander

I have struggled immensely carrying a thread along the past couple years as a forecasting astrologer, as I have encountered difficulty describing what I see in the charts, the cycles of history, and in the collection of circumstances and actors at play in our contemporary world without alarming the sensibilities of my readership and agitating the adversarial polarities which seemed to be driving the thinking around what has been playing out since the beginning of the sequence of episodes from 2020 till now. There is no true reality to right or left political categorization. Much of its mechanics gets inevitably scrapped anyway if we decide to abandon the polis paradigm and weave the pre-polis world to the post-polis world, a radical act of perpetual world regenerating co-creation under mass collaborative values, exercising autonomy and sovereignty in a belonging to the symbiosis of wider being. Although, what of value is left over from the polarity of left and right politic can be composted and merged into a more complete cultural discourse, where all things are considered. Currently, the space between the poles is a crossfire, a place of extreme alienation and exile. Although, this same space can become the host bed of a flourishing culture of alternatives and optionalities that author their own outcomes rather than escalate along the design. I wonder over how to encourage these enclaves and lace them together with beacon light, as if stars were hubs of peer to peer exchange that flashed with story and resonated episodically assuring their own biological oscillation, mirroring both ground and sky. Jupiter is in holistic Pisces, Saturn is in bleeding edge Aquarius, but what of us? Why are we so subject to an overarching narrative that has real control reaching into our lives and altering our existences? Why so monolithic? Why so external? Why so much compliance? Why exile and alienate? Where does the enclave exist as a narrative space outside the authority story?

There will be the first of the next pair of eclipses on the last day of the month, which may steal the show. But, leading up to this and coloring the kairotic fabric of the spring is Jupiter’s current conjoining with Neptune in Pisces. Much talked about are the events which occured last time this pair conjoined in the Fishes sign, namely the accidental discovery of Mauvine, the first chemical dye, from which the entire synthetic world spun forth, giving us eventually plastics and pharmaceuticals not to mention color of every kind on demand. The young man behind the discovery was working with coal tar extraction from the build up of the street lamps to find a malarial cure to aid the efforts of the East India Company. So what is up now? What accident in militarized medicine for a corporate cause might be leading to the mind bending proliferation of synthetic realities? We are witness to the emergence of the metaverse, nuclear fusion wishes to promise free energy, last years teleportation of a photon 27 miles means big things for quantum computing… but what is 2022’s Mauvine? When do we find out? Or do we?

Michael Anderson

4/1/22: new moon Aries conjunct Chiron

I found myself suddenly having to drive five hours away to extract my grandmother out of her house while she swatted and yowled so I could get her to a doctors appointment she refused to go to. Meanwhile, I was taking a class on healing via Resonant Attention. Multiple people I talked to since then had various injury stories to tell or accounts of healing from illness. This would have been the Lunar Zodiacal New Year, which sets a certain kind of tone for Spring 2022 to Spring 2023. Go back and listen to the last episode of Liminal Light if you want to hear more about the vibe of this particular lunation.

4/2/22: Mercury cazimi: Although occurring on the following day after the lunation this superior conjunction of Mercury and the Sun tracked very tight with the New Moon and there was likely some aha moments and wider yet specific realizations delivered with whatever healing diagnostics were laid out in the stirring lunar episode.

Guillarme Vincent

4/4/22: Mars conjunct Saturn: Saturn has been regulating something new in our lives and constricting things we never thought to constrict since March 2020, and wherever Aquarius falls in your chart you likely have had to deal with reformatting a layer that was once more natural and free. This has for some led to fresh construction in that area and for most an alienating trial which is getting quite old at this point. Throw in Mars and we grind against the absurd new limits under obligations to get things done despite them not being able to budge. Luckily, the peak is here on the fourth before Mars moves along and out of copresence with the Greater Malefic.

Loie Hallowell

4/5/22: Venus ingress Pisces: Then splish splash, Venus exits Aquarius herself and slips into something a bit more exalted. She went into Capricorn on November 5th, has been in Saturn’s signs since, turned retrograde on top of Pluto, marched with Mars across Saturn and has finally reached a place away from the malefics where she can freely express herself without limits. Cue cocktails, creativity, pleasure, romanticism, inspiration and fun. Depending on how much Venus circuitry you run on this can be quite profound, especially as Saturn’s insistence of alienation for the past two years has led to severe depression in many. Venus returning to full power brings a lubrication to reality that can more than facilitate the ongoings of personal experience. Find her applying to the fixed star Fomalhaut in the pre-dawn sky, where the mystical and mythopoetic intelligence flows copiously.

Rivane Neuenschwander

4/10/22: Mercury ingress Taurus: Venus being exalted is lucky for clever Mercury while traverses her sign of Taurus. Here Mercury can be slow and methodical, organizing plans and keeping thoughts on track to get stuff done. But with Venus in her exaltation upstream in Pisces the artisanal craft and sensual experience and rhythmic groove aspects of the Bulls sign are unlocked, motivating Mercury’s careful analysis of the terrain.

4/12/22: Jupiter conjunct Neptune: Of course, one of the defining configurations of our era, we’ll have to immerse into the romantic atmosphere of the current moment to cohere what transpires and oozes out into the distributed whole from this aspect. Synthetic, hypnotic, idealistic, fantastical, dreams of gold and undulating opportunities in an amorphous sci fi soup. Psychic phenomenon is on high, but we might be in too much of a daze to even understand the signs. Nothing solid to say here, just surf the wave and keep your antenae tuned to everything all at once including your activity while asleep and take the temperature of the world for insight into what you might imagine is wise. The very moment of the conjunction, which sets up and rides along for weeks and weeks, the Moon is ironically opposite Mars, and the Sun sextile Saturn, so the problems afoot are not necessarily melted out of awareness, but contextualized within the morphing and mutating world. Everything plays a part.

Thomas Donaldson

4/14/22: Mars ingress Pisces: Soon after Mars will also be applying to Fomalhaut in the morning sky. This cools Mars and mellows him out but also allows for him to surge fluidly with titanic power. Last time Mars was in Pisces was amidst the uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd, when everyone was angry and martial action and critical response had no defined boundaries, the presence on the streets was oceanic. That was when Jupiter was in detriment in Capricorn and the South Node was in Jupiter’s sign of Sagittarius. The astrological context now is different, but with Jupiter headed for Aries in May, where he was for Occupy, Arab Spring and the late 90s WTO protests in Seattle, I would expect mass protests to be on the radar very soon, with the world economic organizations seemingly always the source of unified anger. Aside from great unrest, Mars here is potent and poetic, so utilize his flow model tactics and intuitive manuevers to overcome obstacles with beauty and grace. Maybe especially source from this as he approaches the Watcher Of The South where mystical inspiration springs forth from the Urn of Aquarius into the Fish’s Mouth in a great Celestial River.

Kavya Bhat

4/16/22: Full Moon 26 Libra 2:54pm: Again, a Venusian ruled event will greatly benefit from her exaltation as well as copresence with sign ruler Jupiter, awash in hallucinatory Neptune. We can expect sociality and relating, charm and soiree to swing forth liberally here, but also note this lunation is square Pluto, once more art and fun occurring along with alarms of a problematic world where manipulation and shadowy chess moves go down on the highest orders of management. Mercury also here is applying to conjoin Uranus with Venus applying to sextile simultaneously. Some radical communications and exchanges are taking place and revolution is being discussed as glasses clink and bodies sway freely to the music. It’s spring time, we’re happy, there’s good feels, we want to mingle and we’re all aware the elites are fucking us over and attempting to crash the economy on purpose and ruin our lives for the management of the system. By the time the conjunctions of Mercury and Uranus, the sextile with Venus and the sun’s square to Pluto all complete we find the Moon passing over the South Node in Scorpio, so some foreshadowing to the May 15th eclipse might slip through the gates here, but in general there’s a gut churning vibe going around saying from the depths of our animal instincts, we’re sick of being poked and prodded and fucked with.

4/17/22: Mercury-Uranus sextile Venus: see above

4/19/22: Sun ingress Taurus: We turn our sights to the earth, to real things, to goods and commodities, to how well prepared we are, but again, Venus is still exalted, so there is a kind of pleasure in setting ourselves up, and feeling our hands in the dirt as we put some effort into our gardens. This is also the material basis beginning to shape up for the events of the eclipse 11 days later.

4/23/22: Mercury conjunct North Node: Here is the next plot point leading up to the events of the April 30th eclipse. Mercury inspects the North Node and looks at what is battering at the gates to burst forth into our reality. Whats coming in, what we are compelled by, whats obsessing us, what we can’t get enough of, whats emerging. This is the first planet to be on the other side of the nodal axis since December 15th, right before Venus turned retrograde. This is likely a significant step forward in the story we are all playing a part in, so watch for narrative developments. Also this is only a few degrees away from where Mercury will return to in his next retrograde, so there will be some time spent with whatever substance turns up on the chopping block.

4/25/22—4/27/22: Moon through Pisces conjoining Mars, Venus, Neptune, Jupiter: It’s worth noting a disorienting few days under the enchantment of a spell narcotically nostalgic, inebriating romanticism, laced moods, drugged sleep, hallucinatory daydreams, premonitions and psychic subjectivity. It’ll be going around the wave pool.

4/27/22: Venus conjunct Neptune: Here’s the peak of Venus’ trip, see the above and consider the mid 1800s for aesthetic content. Fin Di Siecle, Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, Decadence, etc etc.

4/29/22: Mercury ingress Gemini: Interesting that Mercury escapes into his frenetic, curious, clever, scattering and social rulership just before the eclipse. Minds will be spinning I’d assume. But remember he’s in shadow here so he’ll be coming back to reality in a few weeks time.

Loie Hallowell

4/30/22: 4:28pm: North Node Solar eclipse in Taurus with Venus conjunct Jupiter on highest degree of exaltation sextile Pluto: Here’s an eclipse I’ve been curious about for a couple years. I’ve commented previously it looks Woodstock-like. There seems to be a deluge of pleasure and sensation, emotion and substance and electricity overflowing here, burbling up in an oceanic surge and popping the top. I guess I’ll leave it simply at that and we can look at it after the event unfolds. Note that the next eclipse in the pair looks rough, gross, and possibly somewhat regretful, being South Node, in Scorpio and square to Saturn. It appears to be the hangover mid May after late Aprils big party. In a way all to be expected. I’m reminded of Altamont and the aftermath of the Summer Of Love, or the graffiti of Missing Foundation, the upside down martini glass spray painted all over NYC by squatters in the earlier days of gentrification amidst crack wars, the symbol representing the sentiment “the party’s over”. With Jupiter moving into take it to the streets Aries May 10th we can kind of glimpse the sequence. Highly charged idealistic and psychedelic fun surges up and with it comes an animal ethos which transforms into dumpster fires as the things we rely on are even more disrupted and our bodies are even more intruded on. Here comes the creatures snarling in the corners of the cages. A beach resort upon a tidal lagoon hung with fireflies dilates like entheogenic eyes en mass, and whoosh, order everyone another round of Molotov cocktail.