ecosophia | A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis

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.

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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'

Edited (add image) 2023-04-01 15:07 (UTC)

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.

I think 2070 will look more like 1920 than like 1970.

That seems very, very likely to me.

A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis

Anti-human or Anti-life?

Re: Anti-human or Anti-life?

Re: Anti-human or Anti-life?

Re: Anti-human or Anti-life?