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Tower of Babel, Part 3

23 Oct 2016, 05:19 pm

Fritz Roeber (1851-1924) ~ Walpurgis Night 1910The buck stops here

In this series we’ve looked at some of the assumptions underlying the media onslaught about the election. We’ve considered how they box us into a worldview not our own.

Is it possible to think outside of the box when media is literally everywhere?

If we are to safeguard our independence of mind and spirit, we need to look at the way media messaging has infiltrated our lives.

Consider the way it has blurred the lines between commercial and public space. In the San Francisco subway station, huge flat advertisements carpet the floor. We found this strange and surreal at first, but we no longer do.

No longer surreal

We’re used to it, and can negotiate our world in spite of it. But I think we have to identify fakery for what it is, in order to not information-overloadbe diminished by it. What happens when it’s so ubiquitous, we can’t identify it any more?

When we’re in the superstore, we tune out the ambient ads that play over the PA system in an endless loop. It’s so much a part of the shopping experience that it rarely breaks through into consciousness. But on some level of our beings, we register the intrusion, and we shut down a little bit more.

Busy commuters walk over the software ads on the subway floor, no longer noticing them. But we unconsciously absorb their message: that we’re not workers or travelers or human beings, but mere consumers.

In the category of fakery for manipulative purposes, we must include the buying and selling of politicians. Elections in a plutocracy are an example of large-scale fraud for large-scale commercial purposes.

As with advertising, we brush off the grotesque smarminess of political speeches, understanding their falseness as an integral part of the lingua franca. We even have a phrase for its cynical codes: dog-whistle-speak.

What happens to a society when egregious insincerity becomes unremarkable?

52728506Beyond politics

The filmmaker Adam Curtis is our most eloquent chronicler of this phenomenon: the normalization of the hollow and the fake (his latest film is HyperNormalisation). He argues that phoniness is so pervasive in modern culture that we don’t notice it. It’s like that country song, “How can I miss you if you don’t go away?”

There is insidious power in ubiquity. We’re used to thinking of power as “politicians telling us what to do,” Curtis says, but this age-old construct needs an update. How powerful are federal regulations, for example, compared to the power inherent in algorithms that monitor every move we make online?  13151603_718149604993833_6277410836412685201_n

We won’t see Curtis interviewed on MSNBC any time soon. He’s too radical, and not in the narrow political 220px-chris_hedges_blursense.  His perspective is an example of a way to talk about the election that does not leave us in numb passivity.

Visionaries like Curtis and journalist Chris Hedges urge us to exert ourselves. They inspire us to resist the pressures from consensus thinking that deaden our sensibilities.

I doubt that either of these guys would describe himself as spiritual. But ultimately that is the level they are speaking on. By inspiring us to free ourselves of the dominant narrative, they are leading us back to the center of our own chart.

Back to the chart

Astrology teaches that all roads lead back to the natal chart. No matter how much blame can justifiably be14225400_1073527902760474_66184203052548906_n placed on externals — despicable politicians, ignorant and oppressed fellow citizens, and a system that is corrupt to the bone — the buck stops with us.

Any contemplation of how to respond to a toxic environment comes back to the fact that there are reasons – mysterious but specific karmic reasons — why we incarnated into this particular epoch and place. And the way we find out what those reasons are is by looking at ourselves.

This is not to say that self-examination cancels out caring about the outer world. From the perspective of astrology – as above, so below; as within, so without — both the personal and the collective realms are valid lines of inquiry. Both can lead us, or fail to lead us, to wisdom. (1)

Power and control

Consider the ever-fascinating themes of fatal ambition, power and control. Symbolized by the planet Pluto, they are features of the human condition in general, and of the specific age we were born into. And they take on a very individual form, too. Each 13438814_1777969632439895_286329444173991538_nnatal chart suggests our own unique relationship with the domination/ submission dynamic.

The cycles of Uranus (revolution), Neptune (mass trends) and Pluto (breakdown) help us understand big cultural events as well as our attitudes towards those events.

And the resources we bring to them. It shows why we’re interested (Mercury) in certain features of our group, what skills we could contribute (Mars), what our relationship is to its dominant paradigm (Saturn), and what values (Venus, Jupiter) we develop within it.

The chart hints at what our point of entry could be to an event like this election. That is, our optimal point of entry: what it could be, if we weren’t taking our cue from the contrivances of consensus reality.

This point of entry is, by definition, as unique as a fingerprint.

The candidates079

As an observer of US politics, my own view is that the issues afoot are much larger than who wins the White House next month. As Roseanne Barr puts it, “It doesn’t matter which one of them wins, it’s the … duopolistic fundraising arm of the prison-military-industrial complex. The media speaks to the demographic that it wants to fleece. Hello? Capitalism.”

As an astrologer, I see a spectacles like this election as a set of cosmic lessons. For us, the question is: What teachings are represented by the various characters engaged in this morality play, set in the waning years of the American Empire?

bob-dylanSome analysts are taking a page from Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man Theory” of history (a phrase that now, significantly, needs to be amended for gender). This approach sees human evolution as being shaped by certain individuals whose unique attributes prepare them – even compel them – to a place of power that changes the world.

The transpersonal take on this idea is that the leader chosen for such a role has effectively ceased to be an individual in the normal sense of the word. They’ve become an extension of the collective they represent.

This view has something in common with the way 161013130358-03-thailand-king-bhumibol-adulyadej-1013-large-169monarchs were seen in the age of rule by divine right. Mystically appointed, kings and czars were believed to be embodiments of the collective soul. The extreme reverence shown by ordinary Thais for their recently deceased king comes to mind.

The great astrologer Dane Rudhyar believed that some people, having reached a requisite level of individuation, live out their own dharma and that of the collective simultaneously. Their path is no longer personal; it becomes transpersonal. They surrender their own egos to the world moment.

They are what we call heroes.

donald_trump71-620x372Mirrors

I think most of us would agree that, more often, public figures surrender to the mass mind without having first become individuated. They become objects of emotive collective projection: a mirror for mass fantasies, as movie stars are. They are personifications of some key lesson the group needs to learn.

We can see this in the two candidates vying for the White House right now. They are singular embodiments of American society in the mid-20-teens. For good or ill, they’re here to show us ourselves.

I think everybody gets this. Many observers have called Trump a caricature of the image003sociopathic male entitlement of this culture in this era. Just as many have pegged Clinton as a caricature of the gimlet-eyed focus and willingness to play the corrupt game that any first-woman-president would have to cultivate.

We’ve created these two in order to help us understand what’s going on, while the USA lumbers towards its Pluto Return (exact in 2022) as the Age of Aquarius finds its footing.

From our center

The ultimate meaning of this group drama can be found only through our own point of entry. To discover this, those on a path of individuation will find themselves going back to their chart: the script for our lifetime play.

By this I don’t mean you have to literally look at your astrological chart (although of course I think it helps). I mean that if we’re going to learn anything from all this, we need to observe it from our psycho-spiritual center. And if we’re going to share in the discussion, we have to take back the conversation.

Patrick Gonzales -- artwork

Patrick Gonzales — artworkconversation.

Notes

1 I discuss the false divide between work-on-the-self and work-in-the-world (psycho-spiritual vs. secular) in “The World Moment,” an essay in the anthology Transpersonal Astrology.

Images:
Fritz Roeber, Walpurgis Night (1910)
Dylan photo: Daniel Kramer
Woman with Moon: Patrick Gonzales

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