A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis

[ecosophia]

A few days ago I spent some time reading Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine, looking for material to help explain polarity magic -- yes, I've got a manuscript on that subject in process. In the process, though, I reread a section that might just explain the weirdness of the times in which we live.

Some background will be necessary. In Fortune's cosmology there are seven Cosmic planes. Our solar system, and every other star system in the universe known to astronomers, is on the seventh of these planes.  The six other planes are composed of varieties of matter our senses cannot detect -- yes, it's been pointed out that this corresponds rather closely to the "dark matter" today's cosmologists have to postulate in order to explain the results of their experiments. (Fortune got there first -- The Cosmic Doctrine was originally written, and circulated in mimeographed form, in the 1920s.)

The other six Cosmic planes have their own star systems.  These, like the systems in our plane, are seen as revolving around a common center, which Fortune calls the Central Stillness. The attraction of the Central Stillness holds the whole vast system in balance, in the same way that the gravitational attraction of the sun holds the solar system in balance. In Fortune's cosmology, of course, we are not just talking about astrophysics, but spirituality as well, so the balance in question is spiritual -- and it affects the intelligent inhabitants of any planet that happens to have them.

Here's where the complexity comes in. The Cosmic planes aren't actually separate in space -- they're all present right where you're sitting now -- but it helps schematically to think of the other planes as closer to the Central Stillness than our seventh plane is. When a star system of one of the other planes passes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, metaphorically speaking, it replaces the influence of the Central Stillness with its own attraction, and things get weird.

You can tell which Cosmic plane is the source of the disruption, in turn, by paying attention to which of the sub-planes here in the seventh Cosmic plane get shaken up. There's a straightforward correspondence between Cosmic planes and sub-planes:

First Cosmic plane --> Upper spiritual plane, governing relations with the Divine
Second Cosmic plane --> Lower spiritual plane, governing relations with meanings and ideals
Third Cosmic plane --> Upper mental plane, governing abstract thinking
Fourth Cosmic plane --> Lower mental plane, governing concrete thinking
Fifth Cosmic plane --> Upper astral plane, governing the emotions and the arts
Sixth Cosmic plane --> Lower astral plane, governing the passions
Seventh Cosmic plane --> Physical plane, the realm of physical and etheric matter

With this in mind it's not too hard to sketch out what might be happening.

First, sometime around 1900 a star system on the fifth Cosmic plane got close enough to our solar system to start having a disruptive influence. It was after this that the arts abandoned millennia of focus on beauty and started pursuing deliberate ugliness instead; it's also when a lot of human relationships started getting problematic in odd ways. People's aesthetic and emotional lives got very strange and stayed there.

Second, sometime around 2016 a star system on the second Cosmic plane did the same thing. It was after this that a great many people suddenly lost the ability to relate their actions and words to their supposed ideals -- when civil libertarians started rejecting the idea of free speech, people who'd spent years insisting that natural healing methods were better than corporate medicine turned on a dime and insisted that everyone had to get the latest and most inadequately tested product of Big Pharma, Green parties in Europe abandoned their longstanding pacifism and started baying for war with Russia, and so on.  People's grasp of meaning and value got very strange and stayed there.

My working guess is that the first process peaked sometime in the early 1960s and has been fading out since then -- it's not accidental, in other words, that modern art remains stuck in place only because of institutional inertia, and most of the really interesting new trends in art and music involve returning to classic technique and its forms. My guess is that the second process, which is much faster because it's on a higher plane, peaked sometime in 2021-2022, and has just started to fade out -- though I'm less certain of this.

This is a hypothesis from which predictions can be made.  If I'm right about the first part, the collapse of interest in what used to be modern art will accelerate in the years to come, and nearly all of what's been produced during the Age of Ugliness will be stuck in warehouses if it isn't simply consigned to dumpsters. Older forms of art and music will be revived by new artistic movements, and everyone will shake their heads and wonder what they were thinking back then.

If I'm right about the second part, we're going to hear a spreading silence when it comes to the extreme claims and actions of the last few years. As the influence of the second Cosmic plane system passes off, a good many people will be embarrassed and shamed by their actions; human nature being what it is, most of them will do their best to pretend that it never happened, and may respond with frantic rage when their behavior gets brought up.  If the consequences of those actions turn out to be as bad as some of them seem to be, that may make things very, very brittle for a while. But of course we'll just have to wait and see.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We are talking about a real silence here, not something like that recent wave of public demands to be forgiven the "viral deeds" of the recent past? Or is that part of it already starting?

[ecosophia]

I'd expect a real silence -- very tense, very brittle. I've seen some signs of that recently.

Speed at "altitude"

[(Anonymous)]

"the second process, which is much faster because it's on a higher plane"

I may have missed this by not participating in the CosDoc readalong, but is this a general rule? I.e. is the rhythm of activity faster the higher the plane on which it occurs?

Re: Speed at "altitude"

[ecosophia]

Not a general rule, but a rule in terms of orbits. In the metaphor, the 2nd plane is much closer to the Central Stillness than the 7th, so the "shadow" of a 2nd plane star system whips around the 7th plane much more quickly than the "shadow" of a system on the 5th plane.

[claire_58]

Interesting that the timeline for the disruption from the second plane (starting in 2016; peaking in 2021-2022; and (presumably) fading out around 2026-2027) matches the end of malefic influences from a cluster of solar eclipses in 2026. A bit of corroboration for your hypothesis perhaps?

[ecosophia]

Possibly so. I also notice that the series of Sun-Neptune aspects in ingress charts coming into play right now -- a very bad omen in mundane astrology -- will be waning by then, too.

[booklover1973]

An interesting hypothesis. How does Pluto fit into this picture, because you wrote, the the ugliness of modern art is one if his temporary influences?

[ecosophia]

Good question. Fortune doesn't discuss Pluto as such -- but if Pluto's basically a glorified comet, as he seems to be, there's an indirect reference, because comets are supposed to mark the passage of other systems. Beyond that -- well, I'm still assessing all this.

[(Anonymous)]

This makes sense! For the Second Cosmic Plane incident, the people who went the most crazy were not anchored by a spiritual, or even metaphysical, foundation. It would be easy to stir them up since there wasn't anything there to give them stability.

Jon
Tangerine Tangential Cactus

[ecosophia]

Yes, exactly.

[(Anonymous)]

I've had some thoughts along these lines, too, as I first read the part on the influence of other solar systems on ours a few months back, though more vague than this, because I probably was too lazy and didn't bother to map that model on certain planes and events.

You've stirred up a lot of thoughts with this which can be roughly grouped in two clusters - 1) the descriptive and predictive power of the model with regard to mundane events and 2) the explanatory power and validity of it as a (more or less) accurate description of reality.

1) Practically, it boils down to "there are cycles of influence which are - in contrast to the terrain "ordinary" astrology covers - external to our solar system. All cycles that exist - from the very small in our bodies and minds to the vast cosmological cycles - add up their influences on us. Sometimes we observe constructive interference between the different cycles which results in very large effects, sometimes the interference is destructive and the different influences more or less cancel each other out.

For me as an individual it is important to know that cycles do exist, to assess the influence they are having on me and to be aware of possible interference which might produce large effects so that I can navigate the tides. So in Fortunes terms I need to be aware of the cycles and to have the knowledge (=memory) of their influence, I need to be conscious of them.

2) "These are too remote for practical purposes" - I've struggled for some time to get rid of the habit of taking what Fortune writes too literally and now I'm finding it difficult to see more than "just" analogy in it, which might be equally wrong. I am currently at chapter 18 (mill. edition) and experienced some moments of frustration when I realized that nothing in what Fortune writes about the mechanics of how the different swarms descend and ascend the planes and meet (or not) each other really adds up, that the inherent logic that is presented as such is not so logic at all. But then as you have frequently pointed out that might be for good reason. On the other blog I recently equated "objective reality" with infinite regress. There's always something negative that comes with the term but that's not necessarily true. Do you know these zoom-tours into the mandelbrot set like this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif/220px-Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif ? No matter how deep you zoom into it, there will always be small "micro-mandelbrot-sets" that very much look like the big one. They are all full-featured with infinite details and contain countless micro-mandelbrots themselves. On which level of iteration do we live? How many levels are above us? How many below? Does it even matter? After all, a(n+1) = a(n)^2 + c is the governing principle for any of these. Likewise, does it matter if we are members of the 4th or the 400th swarm or if counting is even possible? There might be cosmic planes of existence and there might be solar systems that exert their influence on us while passing by, or it's just a well crafted analogy to raise the image of cyclical influences in our minds. There might be a link to dark matter or dark matter might be nothing more than another epicycle, who knows - and in my more cynical moments I wonder why even care?

There was a time when I watched videos of Sadhgurus Q&A sessios. In one instance he was asked a weakly disguised "what is the nature of my existence"-question and answered "the fact that you can ask this question without bursting into tears shows that you haven't yet grasped the implications of what it means" and refused to give an answer. The "pain of not-knowing" is not alien to me and there were times when just bursting into tears when asking such questions would have been a relieving experience compared to what I actually experienced.

So in a way I had "high hopes" in the CosDoc but what a fool I was to do so and what a fool I were if I didn't...

It's a wild ride, indeed...

Cheers,
Nachtgurke

[ecosophia]

Nachtgurke, granted. My approach is to treat the Cos. Doc. as a collection of useful metaphors that more or less represent realities our minds cannot grasp. Where the metaphors break down -- that's where you get a glimpse of the limits of human awareness. If the occult traditions are correct, though, no worries -- we're still in an early part of our individual spiritual evolutions, and eventually we'll get to the point that it all makes sense.

[(Anonymous)]

If this is what happened, then why would some people continue to function the same as before during the period when the star system on the second plane was whipping past? Why wouldn't it have affected everyone?

[ecosophia]

Because some people have developed enough clarity of consciousness, and/or enough of a contact with the divine, that they're not easily swayed by the distorting influence of such things. Have you noticed how often it's the people who have a strong religious or spiritual life, or a daily occult practice, who can shrug the pressures off?

Has Brandon Sanderson read Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine?

[(Anonymous)]

"The Cosmic planes aren't actually separate in space -- they're all present right where you're sitting now."

Shadesmar!

Re: Has Brandon Sanderson read Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine?

[ecosophia]

It's always possible -- and if he didn't read Fortune, he might well have read some other occult writer who made the same point.

[scottyc]

This hypothesis allows for some optimism (i.e. the storm will blow over one day) but my pessimistic side broods that even when the star systems on the higher planes clear the bad folks amongst us (manifest and unmanifest) will still be here amongst us.

Even so, hope this means life for regular folks gets better in different ways going forward.

[ecosophia]

Granted, the jerks ye have always with you. What will clear away, if my hypothesis is right, is the weird distortions of consciousness that have made so many people fall blindly in lockstep with them.

Blocking star systems

[(Anonymous)]

Back when we were discussing the Cos Doc on Ecosophia, I hypothesized a blocking star system on either the third or fourth cosmic plane as being part of the rejection of nature, history, and the human condition (#28, 7/13/19). It was a long comment so I will pull out the one paragraph that put everything together:

"So this idea of rejection of nature, history, and the human condition (a sin, in Fortune’s term) suggests that the plane on which mental processes exist could be affected by a mirror Cosmic plane with a blocking Great Entity on it. This suggests either the 3rd or the 4th Cosmic plane, with the latter being more likely since it’s metaphorically closer. The sensibility itself is emotional/intuitional in nature, but it gets worked on and expressed by the rickety rational mind, which is why I’m considering the blockage as being on one of the mental planes rather than on one of the astral planes which are closer still. But I could easily be persuaded otherwise since I’m still trying to understand how the planes manifest in our mental processes and emotions."

Your response was:

"That hadn’t occurred to me, but you know, you may very well be right. If there is such a blockage, caused by a Great Entity on another plane above ours, it would be on the third plane, the plane of the divine spirit. When a Great Entity comes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, as noted in Ch. 8, the atoms that belong to the plane of the intervening Great Entity are attracted toward that Great Entity, while the atoms of other planes tend to fly outward toward the Ring-Pass-Not. Look at the last 2000-odd years of religion and culture, and what you see is a mysticism that fixates on the spiritual essence of the individual (esoterically, the divine spirit) abandoning the world and flying up to some higher realm, while the life spirit (4th plane), the intellect (5th plane), the emotions and passions (6th plane) and the etheric and physical bodies (7th plane) have been constantly pulled toward wild disorganized extremes. We’ll know it’s passing off when the kind of mysticism that fixates on fleeing the world fades out in favor of one that sees being in the world as holy, and when the vehicles below the divine spirit become noticeably better behaved…"

I find it interesting to compare my hypothesis with your hypothesis in this post - which makes a lot of sense to me. The blockage I hypothesized has already lasted much longer than those you've hypothesized in this post, so that would argue against it, if the signs you are observing play out on about the time frame you suggest. I would like to see your hypothesis prove out and mine not, if it would mean we'd get a break from blocking star systems for awhile to allow us a chance to breathe and pick up the pieces that are everywhere to be seen from all the weirdness and damage that we are living through.

Re: Blocking star systems

[ecosophia]

I've been thinking about that at intervals since we originally had that conversation. The 2000-year period is too long for any other star system to block ours, I've come to think, and so what we've been seeing is simply the influence of the Piscean age: Pisces the fishes always pull in two different directions at the same time, which would explain what's happened. If I'm right, we'll see that fairly soon -- say, before the end of the decade.

[antoine_eva]

I was wondering if you have considered, that, maybe you just found a new planet.
If the theory about Pluto work, is it possible that somewhere in 2016 (or the argument can be made that some subtle version of it started in 2012) some new influence has arrived and the human race will subtle upon a new planet 30 years after.

[(Anonymous)]

I've wondered for a while about that, given a few people I know seem to have had synchronicities suggesting Planet Bacchus. What's occurred to me is that the most Bacchian way for it to be found, given our current social norms, would be for occultists and astrologers to realize there's a planet there, go look for it, and find it. In any case, we'll see if it shows up around 2042-2046. If not, then there's no new planet behind this madness.

[randomactsofkarmasc]

Do you think the other systems passing between us and the Central Stillness blocked or filtered what is emanated by the Central Stillness (is it still considered Astral Light, or does it have a different name since it is outside of our system?) or is it that it gets refracted? (My somewhat literal head is trying to figure out if the other systems caused sort of an eclipse (with a shadow passing over a swath of our Plane) or more like a season (like if the refracted rays had the same effect of Earth being tilted away from the Sun during the winter, if that makes sense).

Or I might be thinking too literally. (...train the mind, not inform it...)

[ecosophia]

Fortune describes it as being like gravity -- the substance of the plane corresponding to the other system is attracted by the passing system, while the substance of the other planes is cut off from the gravity of the Central Stillness and pulls outward due to centrifugal force, putting weird strains on the whole solar system as well as the individual beings that inhabit it. I'm not sure how that fits either of your two metaphors.

[jprussell]

This is fascinating, and I look forward to any further development on this line of reasoning you share.

I had a couple of quick questions, though:

1) Are these other-planar-star-systems the higher-planar "equivalents" of our 7th plane system? Such as, are the Lords of Form, Flame, and Mind hanging out in the systems you're talking about? Or is it wholly separate from the higher-planar experiences of our own system? Or am I way off the mark?

2) I'm a bit confused why, from your examples, it seems that the influence of these systems is seemingly mostly malefic. Is it because they disrupt the balanced influence of the central stillness? Are these systems on the involutionary path rather than evolutionary, and so actually "behind" our 7th plane system, and thus have a "regressive" influence rather than a transcendent one? Or something totally different?

Whatever the case, excellent food for thought, thank you again for sharing!
Jeff

[ecosophia]

1) The Lords of Flame, Form, and Mind are purely local -- they belong to this solar system. Other star systems might have similar swarms or might evolve along wholly different lines, depending on what the Logos of those systems happen to choose.

2) Fortune's analysis is that the influence of passing systems is always malefic. They cut off the influence of the Central Stillness, causing the attraction of outer space to become stronger than the attraction of the center, and they also attract the substance of their corresponding planes in weird directions. So when they pass, everything becomes more disorganized, more conflict-ridden, more disruptive, and more troubled. At the same time, this is how the Solar Logos evolves; its efforts to bring itself and its system back into balance, together with the experiences it harvests from the swarms, enable it to achieve self-knowledge.

[frittermywig]

Any idea that helps make the last three+ years intelligible is welcome by me, no matter how tentative or speculative. I'll look forward to reading the commentariat flesh this out.

[ecosophia]

Me too!

[(Anonymous)]

Something intriguing has occurred to me: if you're correct, then within the last century, we've been under the influence of not just one, but two disruptions from higher planes. Given that over the course of the entire life of the solar system, we're unlikely to see a single disruption of this sort on the physical plane, would this imply that such disruptions happen more often in the higher planes? If so, I wonder if that's a general rule, and so the First Cosmic Plane gets disrupted most often, the Second the second most often, and so on down the lines.

[ecosophia]

No, the first Cosmic plane gets no disruptions at all, because nothing can come between it and the Central Stillness. Think of it as a solar system. No other planet can come between Mercury and the Sun; only Mercury can come between the Sun and Venus, and so on out to Neptune, which can have all the other planets waltzing between it and the Sun. We're in Neptune's place.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if the passing 2nd Plane would leave a strong enough stress on the 7th Plane that it weakens the barrier between our universe and a previous universe. (Being cut off from the Central Stillness might also be a factor.) That could explain how malefic entities can contact us. And if you don't have a strong spiritual or occult practice, it would allow the entities to influence you.

This may also explain how those malefic entities first contacted humans in our remote past.

Jon
Tangerine Tangential Cactus

[ecosophia]

Hmm. I don't know; Fortune doesn't mention that. It may well be a possibility worth exploring, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Stimulating idea, JMG. With respect to the second influence, it is certainly worth exploring, as all the ordinary, worldly explanations seem to fall slightly short and even mundane astrology does not seem to be able to reveal the depths of the weirdness.

When postulating phenomena such as other solar-system-planes messing around with ours, I believe that it is important to make sure that the phenomena that we observe are, more or less, global in reach. Too often I have come across sweeping statements about global changes in human behaviour when in reality the explanation fits only a small portion of humanity (usually the West). I am not saying that your tentative explanation wears cultural or geographic blinders – for I believe that what you have described have been two fairly global phenomena – but I am saying that we always have to be watchful of slipping into the all-too-common assumption that because ‘we’ are experiencing something, ‘the whole world’ is, too. I have observed that barring a couple of brief ugly episodes, Indian society has been mostly sane for the past few years.

Ron M

[ecosophia]

That's a valid point. I wonder, though, to what extent the enduring influence of traditional religion in Indian society might have sheltered them from the worst of the craziness. I note that really weird behavior over the coronavirus in particular seems to be, if not global, then certainly fairly widely distributed.

Pisces and two comets

[emily07]

Not sure if this cuts any wood, since astrology and related subjects currently are not what I (can) do: above there is the idea (from commenters and JMG) that pisces go in two directions and that two comets entered the picture at the same time, so I wonder: maybe the outcome will be two directions at the same time? One for the ones that follow the fish facing one direction the other the other?!
This is kinda sad-invoking for me, since my SO is squarely (mostly by development) in the non-deity direction...

Re: Pisces and two comets

[ecosophia]

That's a question I don't think anyone can answer yet. Certainly I hope not, because you're not the only person in that situation.

thank you for this, fascinating read

[(Anonymous)]

It is my hope that the conclusion is true. I hope this realization accelerates over the next year. My son is going off to college next summer, and many of the schools he is interested in still require the jabs despite "the science" confirming they don't prevent catching or transmitting the hallowed cooties. Nobody should have to decide whether or not to get a risky jab in order to attend a great university, esp. when you're a teenage male. This is almost as obnoxious as the tuition they charge despite their multi-billion endowments. Life is grand.

Re: thank you for this, fascinating read

[ecosophia]

I note with some interest that 56% of Americans no longer believe a college education is worth the cost:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/sliding-confidence-majority-americans-question-value-college

Anti-human or Anti-life?

[earthworm_uk]

JMG said: "...when civil libertarians started rejecting the idea of free speech, people who'd spent years insisting that natural healing methods were better than corporate medicine turned on a dime and insisted that everyone had to get the latest and most inadequately tested product of Big Pharma, Green parties in Europe abandoned their longstanding pacifism and started baying for war with Russia, and so on. People's grasp of meaning and value got very strange and stayed there.

And: "The influence I've been watching is profoundly antihuman"

Contemplating what has been and is going on in the world in such diverse topics as the derangement syndrome from 2016, covid spectacle, what is going on in Ukraine, the claim that mathematics is racist [or something] and all the way through to the attempt to change language use in what looks like an effort to erase the concept of 'woman' with language gymnastics like 'cervix-haver', 'menstruator' and 'birthing parent', or that solar and wind turbines will power industry etc. I quite expect to hear that unicorn farts are to become a source of energy supply.

Sometimes it seems that whatever direction I look, there is some aspect of ebbing and flowing crazy that I've come to think of as 'anti-life' - from seeing someone deliberately swerve to hit a bird while driving, to the insistence that babies need to be injected with alchemical hooch from the darkside, to the idea that one can bomb people into democracy or have mostly peaceful riots... it just goes on and on!

Then on the other hand there is the flow towards a multi-polar world where the west have pushed China and Russia into an accord and the Chinese have just worked to try and get the Saudis and Iranians in dialogue. Methinks western hegemony/wealth pump is over and the world is heading somewhere new; but like turning off the hot water in my shower, there's about a five second timelag before the stream is proper cold.
For the west, the hot water is being turned off now, flows are reducing but we've yet to fully realise what it means and when the cold water comes, there will be some weeping and wailing I reckon.
Thinking of Indian, Chinese, Persian and Russian survival as cultures made me think, what exactly is the cultural foundation of the collective west at this point? Other than a Borg-like treatment of the world, is there anything to hold western society together like the great cultures of the past? Mainly I see a culture that not only seems to have completely lost the plot, tried bullying everyone else and is now into self harm and a spiral to oblivion.

JMG: "...peaked sometime in 2021-2022, and has just started to fade out -- though I'm less certain of this."

Thinking of it in terms of some of the behaviour seen over the last month (in regards to how western style societies seem to be behaving), I'm not sure that it peaked in 2021 - maybe towards the end of 2022(?). I recently came across a term I had not known before - Extinction burst - and that that possible peak (end 2022) could lead to extinction burst activities... and March 2023 has had some things that could perhaps be called extinction bursts.
The dissonance is so strong that a few psychotic breaks would not surprise me as those who think 'the world is what I say it is' are still doubling down hard. Frantic flailing and desperation to hold things together as bits start dropping off and bouncing to the gutter.

2020 thru 2022 were different in nature than previous years for my practices, but the first three months of 2023 have been weirder still - best way I can describe it is like feeling the turns of a spiritual rubic's cube. Signs, omens, cryptic thoughts... the works!

So if it peaked 2021 then, as you said, perhaps things could become clearer as we get to the end of the decade - given what we've seen over the last few years, the unwind could be extraordinary... 7 years to the end of the decade... I'm minded of what you said about the number of humans incarnate at this time - a lot of folks have rolled up for this show by the look of things.
We might get to see whether the west goes out incandescently or gradually turns into a much quieter backwater.
The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

[earthworm]

...and in 500 years time maps of western europe, no longer showing countries may just be identified with a land-based version of "Here be Monsters'

Re: Anti-human or Anti-life?

[ecosophia]

We're in a fairly standard predicament in a declining society -- the dominant class lost its beliefs in the core values of the society, passed through the stage where it believes only in its own right to control things, and started believing in its own buzzwords to the exclusion of all else. That condition is reliably terminal for the dominant class, and sometimes for the society it rules. Once the rubble stops bouncing, if any of the current Western societies still exist as organized entities, they'll move back toward the abandoned values -- that's how long-lived societies such as Egypt and China weathered their own eras of crisis. It's just a rough road until then.

[readoldthings]

Fascinating...

You know, I wonder if a solar system from the Sixth or Seventh cosmic planes passed between our sun and the Central Sun a few centuries ago and can be expected to remain there for some time. It would explain the often radically different descriptions of the physical world and its inhabitants that you see in writers from centuries prior to 1700 or so.

It might even be the case that this occurs along predictable cycles, ours and another Sixth or Seventh plane star being locked in orbit around a central point which causes each to block the other from the influence of the Central Sun, alternating back and forth over the course of a millennium or so. This would help account for the cyclical nature of disenchantment, and the way that archaic texts often describe what we would term "etheric" effects as though they were straightforward and everyday parts of the physical environment. (I think the way to test that hypothesis would be to see if ancient naturalists writing in disenchanted periods nevertheless describe dragons and the like with a straight face; if so, it's a one-off event, rather than part of a cycle.)

[ecosophia]

That's an interesting speculation. Fortune assigns the etheric and physical regions to a single plane, the seventh; the sixth plane in her system is the plane of the passions, the lower astral realm. A situation where our system interacts with other seventh plane systems on an etheric level could explain much, though.

The Deafening Silence!

[(Anonymous)]

One anecdote regarding ‘silence’: in October 2022, Canada’s ‘Top Doc’ Theresa Tam publicly urged all Canadians to get boosted at least once every six months. Well, six months have now completed – and no reminder from her. Hmmm. Since then, she has been ‘banging the drum’ on Twitter regarding the recent epidemic of opioid overdoses – jeez, I wonder why that would be happening? The last sign of her publicly mentioning 'cooties and vixens' on TV was the world’s most cringeworthy Christmas video (forum members - watch at your own peril!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuESX_Fiz8

Ron M

Re: The Deafening Silence!

[(Anonymous)]

That one is as bad as John Tory whispering to children on TV about 'the vax.'
Man do we ever have some 'top-notch uber-creepy bad art' here.

[(Anonymous)]

I think if you are going to argue very broadly that something went wrong in "the arts" after 1900, then it would help to give some examples. Magritte, for example, was born in 1898, WH Auden in 1907, Shostakovich in 1906. Do you include them in your strictures? Or for that matter the Beatles?

Modernism has mundane explanations as well. For example, there is the simple exhaustion of artistic forms: the only way forward from the Victorian novel was really in the direction of Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Something had to follow Impressionism, which in its own day was subject to the same kind of criticisms as you make here. And don't forget the massive cultural impact of the First World War (far greater in Europe than the US), which for many people made the pursuit of beauty a pointless and even blasphemous exercise.

So it's not all in the stars......

[(Anonymous)]

Cosmic cycles ebbing and flowing.... art movements beginning and ending.....strengthening......interrupted by savage war.........
Art as a footnote (?) or driver (?) of culture.
Shostakovich inspired by bravery/suffering/resistance in war. Connected with general populace. Mythic work. The exception to the rule or the rule?
Continuing in a Russian tradition. Did Communism (after an early fling with experimentation) clamp down on 'the modern?'
Is Social Realism a stifling of the human spirit or energizer?

Is it possible that disorder begets disorder.
Picasso's Blue Period was positively medieval compared to his garish 'baguette-fingered' portraits. Did he veer more into disorder following his reaction to events in Guernica, Spain and the bombing of civilians?
What about classical art that depicts slaughter and 'the sacking' of cities.
The Crucifixion? Was it presented in a way that was 'beyond ego? Beyond self-analysis?'
Easy to compare Islamic architecture or the Gothic with Brutalism and see a regression with us to this day in western capitalism.
Were the Beatles (in their genius or whoever was behind the scenes i.e. The Wrecking Crew /idea-ala /George Martin) a manifestation of pure artistry or were they manipulated like the Abstract Expressionists by a certain agency (cough). I wonder about weaponized culture and what it leads to.
The White Album for all its magic reflected heavy dark themes at play in the counter-culture.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan distracted (healed?) Americans from realizing what JFK's death signified.
The Abstract Expressionists were exploring myth with rather tactile emotionality it seems before they were 'approved' in set styles that kept 'the unknown' on the very surface (my bias).
I've heard that official approval of Abstract Expressionism was to 'head populism off at the pass.' Like LSD and sex diverted the anti-war movement.
Where have we ended up?
Endless wars and slaughter since WW2. Great art too of course. Gil Scott Heron -The Revolution Will Not be Televised - (but the system never made Gil a super star).
I wonder if the economics of the art world and what is rewarded controlled what eventually was seen. Do cosmic wheels/cycles create economic systems of reward and punishment.
Pop culture today seems a demonic wasteland at least by the music awards shows and super bowl half-time shows.
Just wondering about degeneracy and waste in the arts and if an explosion of experimentation in early modernism was rotted out
from the inside (for the most part) by the time it got here.
'If you lived here you'd be home by now.'

I'm trying to picture, imagine, breathe the idea of these cosmic cycles at play and influences, partial influences, delayed influences.
Magritte or Dorothea Carrington's surrealism (outlandish once) seems positively quaint at this point when I look at the horrors of Hollywood/ art world/ corporate capitalist woke warmonger media intersecting.
Consumerism created pop art (some of it seems pretty cool to me) created (the junk of) Warhol.

Where does discordance stop serving a social-critique function and become mental illness 'on parade?'
Not sure I've said anything valuable here.

[(Anonymous)]

I usually do a daily Sacred Geometry Oracle reading asking how the oracle recommends I approach the energies and events of the day. Today I got necessity, and I'm grateful for your hypothesis because it helps me avoid wasting more energy getting upset over the "small" stuff like losing our nation and watching everyone go crazy. Knowing there are larger patterns at work helps me stay grateful for the many opportunities that are still in front of me, and I'm very thankful that you shared it.

[ecosophia]

I'm glad to hear this.

[(Anonymous)]

One few more questions, if I may - how does the actual (material) universe that we experience fit in Fortunes cosmology? If the solar logos is the god of our solar system, then what is the god of a galaxy, or of the universe in the sense we use the word today? Is anything said anywhere about whether we witness a part of the whole cosmic 7th plane or if the universe we witness is just one of many disjunct universes?

Of course, the CosDoc is not an astronomy book, but the question remains where the line between pure metaphor and actual description is drawn. After all, there is a material universe and Fortune does talk about matter, too.

Cheers,
Nachtgurke

[ecosophia]

The material universe is the seventh Cosmic plane of Fortune's cosmology. The god of the universe, the actual Supreme Being, is utterly beyond our comprehension; it manifests to us as the Central Stillness. We can witness as much of the seventh Cosmic plane as our telescopes can reach. And the line between description and metaphor -- I'm not sure if it's a line at all, or a very broad zone of overlap!