ecosophia | Magic Monday

Midnight is almost here, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.2 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well... alright, then. So, what would you like to see come out of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction this time? As far as I can tell, the universe is not at all averse to taking requests, even from puny humans like us. We should each probably begin brainstorming a wishlist now, in order to get it sufficiently whittled down and focused for our prayers to stand a chance of making any difference by the time the conjunction arrives.

Changes in the ground rules of the collective unconscious, the birthplace of influential dreams and visions, would be quite the magical transformation (in the Fortunian sense.) Those changes will inevitably unfold in accordance with the greater wills of the universe, but lesser wills do somehow manage to exert a tiny pull on greater wills. With this type of conjunction promising such sweeping changes in consciousness, there’s an awful lot of will to get in accordance with, and not a lot of time to do it in!

Given the truly creepy number of vision-starved tiny wills currently focused on no real change to the status quo, perhaps our willing a little visionary counterbalance to their visionless inertia could make an oversized difference. Certainly offering our prayers up to any currently disregarded greater wills could have far-reaching outcomes. For those who feel up to it, a little concerted effort on shifting the fulcrum between the visionary and the visionless could quite possibly knock our prayers right out of the park.

A little imagination, a tiny dream, a wee bit of vision can become the decisive point around which the whole universe turns. All that is required is for us to align our tiny wills with the greater wills around us. And let us not forget to give thanks for the crucial passive inertia to which so many have now chained their vital will, thereby providing the essential opening needed for our own tiny dreams to be able to shake the cosmos. (As always: Results may vary. Author makes no guarantees or warrantees of any kind. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Etc.)

I have to admit, trying to imagine anything as sweepingly transformative as classical philosophy or democracy or widespread literacy is a daunting challenge. I tend to be more preoccupied with things like reupholstering a chair, or making guacamole before the avocados go bad. Somehow, I can’t see Saturn and Neptune conjuncting just to help me with my guacamole problems! Setting aside the dubious importance of perfectly ripened avocados, I guess it’s high time for me to up my game in the dreams and visions department. Anyone have any suggestions for visionary transformations of the underlying patterns of the collective unconscious that Saturn and Neptune might actually consider to be worth praying for?

— Christophe

I suspect what happens will be as utterly baffling to me as philosophy or democracy would have been to your average Bronze Age scribe. In fact, I'd prefer that -- human intelligence isn't all that impressive, and I'd much rather leave it to Saturn and Neptune to come up with something interesting themselves!

I don't remember if I actually went through with saying this the last time the topic came up about half a year ago, but, in case you hadn't already been aware of this way of connecting some of those dots: there's a certain development already halfway off the ground, which combines elements of capital-intensive material mechanicality with dreamlike readiness to produce illusions and grave systemic challenges in maintaining grounded meaningfulness, and which also might become a means by which dreamlike novelty, incoherence, and wishes could all flow through into material manifestation. And a number of observers close to this development are expecting it to be epochal, somewhere in the range of "comparable to the industrial revolution", "comparable to the oxygen catastrophe", and "comparable to the emergence of life".

I don't know, maybe you don't like hearing about that, but that observation seems like an important starting-point to include in speculation. I know you're expecting the whole phenomenon to blow itself up and choke itself off in a Plutonian way, but what if that still leaves a Minervan remnant?

For my part, if I knew that the development wasn't going to get any farther than Piscean dreamlikeness, so that it would not extend also to include Mercurial precise cunning, planning, and strategizing, or Solar coherently focused intention -- at least, that it wouldn't do so other than in net-benefic ways, anyway -- then that would be a big load off my mind. (It would also mean you had been right, at least as regarded what ended up happening in practice.)

Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?

Anything that takes that much hope-charged jargon to describe is unlikely to go anywhere except a self-policing echo-chamber. Likewise, anything claiming to be "already halfway off the ground" is likely to stay exactly where it has claimed to be, for precisely as long as the funding holds out.

— Christophe

I don't know why you call it "hope-charged jargon". I think if you count, word by word, the things you're somehow coming away with the impression that they're "jargon", you'll be surprised how many of those words are better fit by my hypothesis about how I was choosing which words to write, which is: "presenting, in a detailed but compact way, the specific elements of the relations between the phenomenon in question and the astrological entities it might be related to", those astrological entities being Saturn, Neptune/Pisces, Pluto (and Minerva), Mercury, and the Sun.

Also, the way you say that makes it seem as though you think I'm using astrological justifications to buttress my hope, and then in turn buttressing the astrological justifications with complicated jargon so I can get lost in the details and miss how the picture doesn't make sense. No. What?

This came into focus for me, in this form, far before I was really giving any attention to astrology. (Also it's mostly dread rather than hope.)

If you want complicated jargon, look at the arguments over the Church-Turing thesis. Ask yourself why the Universe goes so far out of its way to give skeptics so much ammunition, in the form of "decline effects" and "evasive psi" in parapsychology, which is the one place where you would normally have thought to expect science to discover that the Church-Turing thesis was false if the Universe wasn't playing unexpected games with humanity's states of knowledge. And then ask yourself how safe you should feel about your certainty that the Universe will abruptly stop imitating that same semblance of materialism being true, just at the point where people start leaning a lot harder on certain implications of the Church-Turing thesis.

Just spitballing, but you might benefit by reading Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". But maybe that's just something about Saturn and Neptune themselves, rather than about a millenium-scale change whose transition would have been facilitated by their contact.

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