Input is not experience

Notes from the World Information War. Holy rage (Neptune in Aries) and the forthcoming, ongoing conjunction of Chiron and Eris in Aries.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Of News, Local and Global

Dear Friend and Reader:

In local news, we are approaching the Scorpio Full Moon, which takes place Monday, May 12. In global news, we are approaching the conjunction of Chiron and Eris in Aries. Something like this last happened in 1971-1972, and we as individuals and a society are still reeling from its effects.

Major events in Aries describe the total transformation of humanity. This is always induced by the media environment, which is the thing we take for granted. At every stage — the book, the telegraph, the radio, the television and others — there is some outer-planet astrology that rocks through Aries, and we come out different on the other side.

Focusing on Chiron-Eris, this occurred at the peak of the TV era. TV transformed people, but most do not understand how. The changes had already been initiated by radio (1920s through 1940s) and early television (1950s and 1960s).

But the 1970s came with something special: turning society, particularly youth culture, into tribes often pitted against one another. This is the now taken-for-granted thing called identity politics. This lasts to the current day, where everything is about “what you identify with.” This is different from what you are.* Most people are so outside of themselves, they don’t know the difference.

Movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s Fragment under Chiron-Eris

By the time of the ‘71-’72 Chiron-Eris event, the civil rights movement, which became the anti-Vietnam War movement, had fragmented into countless pieces, isolating people and groups from one another. There was some cooperation, but only so much. Generally, groups had to stay in their silo. Martin Luther King got in a lot of trouble for coming out against the Vietnam War one year to the day before he was shot.

To name a few fragments, there were the student movement, the environmental movement, the new age movement, the human potential movement, the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the intentional community movement, the black rights movement, Puerto Rican liberation, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and many others. There were counter-movements, such as the anti-abortion movement and Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-feminism campaign.

There are some who speculate that this fragmentation was induced by programs run by the FBI or the CIA (such as COINTELPRO). Maybe they tried, and they certainly did some damage — especially on the interpersonal level (leaders and their private relationships were targeted).

Without the preexisting tribal hypnosis of television, there would have been nothing special. It was television that was creating the tribal effect. Ideology just comes along for the ride, and certain thought forms will take root in certain media environments. Ideology is secondary. Of itself, it is inert. It needs oxygen to burn. Only certain ideologies can develop in certain environments; the rest end up in the bargain bin.

It was as if everyone wanted to be in their own special television show, directing and writing their own script. But it was more than that: many people hooked their whole identity to the tribe they were part of. And this drama continues to the present day.

Notably, neither Chiron nor Eris was discovered at the time of the ‘71-’72 event. This is the first time it will be happening consciously. So this one is special, happening as the digital age reaches a new and frenzied peak. This is a wakeup call, and a bold one. We have had many warnings about the nature of the unfolding digital disaster, by which I mean its effect on the human condition. And by that I mean our condition: how we feel, who we are becoming, how we treat ourselves and how we treat others.

_______

*Speaking of identity, I’m working in a diner right now with the TV going, and I just heard something funny. A “news”-caster said that black smoke coming from the Vatican indicated that the cardinals are still debating the identity of the next pope. No, they are debating which man will be the next pope, in his actual person.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

The Tinderbox of Consciousness

Consciousness is a tinderbox right now. People are fragile and feeling unstable. Many are irritable, short-tempered and looking for something or someone to blame for how they feel. Sometimes I feel like everyone is waiting for the next bad thing to happen — while not noticing that it already is.

The internet (which is our collective nervous system) is more flammable than a dry forest, and therefore so are people’s minds. And within this dry forest, a war is being waged. We see it every day and don’t recognize it for what it is. That’s because it seems normal; but the temperature has risen so slowly that nobody knew when to scream.

We get some little yelps, after the fact. We now find out that “social media” apps were designed to be addictive to kids — after they’ve already been hurt. “Hurt” translates to the programmed destructive, self-destructive and depressive behavior patterns of young adults today. Think: the massive incel situation (young men who are totally alienated from women and live their lives through the digital realm).

We are getting a big yelp in the breakdown of the air traffic control system. Both civilian and military aviation are on the same brink of disaster that society has been pushed out to. The systems are fragile, complicated and difficult to update. But the real deficit is on the human side: being an air traffic controller is probably the most stressful job on the planet.

New Environments Work Us Over Completely

New media environments no matter how seemingly basic (radio, for instance), work people and society over completely, and transform them into something that would have been unrecognizable a generation or less earlier. And nobody checks in advance whether there will be a problem. We just follow the marketing and plunge in.

There has been nothing with the power of digital technology, ever, coming on so fast and so totally a consuming so many minds on every continent from urban centers to the Australian bush, adopted by everyone from small children to the elderly, nearly at once.

Enveloping the planet in satellites and location tracking, cameras the size of pins, microphone wristwatches that record every utterance the wearer makes and generate AI analysis, games that have consumed the childhood and adolescence of a generation of boys whose emergent manhood was and is being bathed in electrons and pixels.

And then we impressionable humans become like these things. When we use algorithms, we become algorithmic. When we use robots, we become robotic. When we live in an environment where the only emotion is anger, we become angry.

As I have proposed many times, we are becoming like “artificial intelligence” a lot faster than it is becoming like us. We are the ones closing the gap. And Chiron-Eris is saying it’s time to wake up.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Total Involvement of Digital

All electric media is involving; it drags us in. Few can resist staring at a television when it’s on and in the room. But with a TV, all you can do is flip the channels.

Yet digital media peaks the meters by bringing three senses into the act — the majority of them — sight, sound and touch. The gadgets now read our breathing and other vital signs with ease, though the thing left out is taste and smell.

A funny thing happened during a major phase of the digital revolution — if you may recall: many people say they lost their sense of taste and smell. This was during a time when everything went from in person to digital — both Yale and the local kindergarten became Netflix. As if to prove we were all being vacuumed onto the digital plane, many people lost the senses that do not exist there.

Input is not experience. We are dragged in by looking, hearing and touching — though usually with our attention divided, which tends to cool down or freeze the mind. We think we’re having an experience, but we are not until we get into some creative state of mind. Not reactive, but responsive, seeking to make a contribution. Many people feel too foolish or unworthy to think they can do this. And that too is a product of digital conditions, which make people totally submissive.

Holy Rage and Neptune in Aries

We are also dealing with nascent Neptune in Aries. This is adding the drug of self-delusion to the punch, and one form that will take is holy rage. Neptune has that holy quality, and Aries is the sign of war. Watch out for this, in yourself and in others.

The essence of the feeling is described by the word sanctimonious: “making a show of sanctity, affecting an appearance of holiness.” Only add Aries and you add rage; and Chiron conjunct Eris is NOT comfortable. It demands self-reflection, or the discomfort and pain will be projected outward.

The digital environment (an extension of the electrical environment) affects men and women differently. Men tend to become feminized and submissive. In women, the opposite thing happens. It’s my observation that for women, the digital environment is like a hot seat with an electrode, jolting them out of their bodies and making them hate being female. (This has gone on since the days of the telegraph, which is where I first noticed the effect.)

All sexual dynamics become alien, that is, natural sexuality seems like this strange thing, as if we are visitors from another planet that does not have anything like it. The body becomes the symbol of attack against humanity.

This is pretty close to being spiritually dead. You can do something about this by making decisions and taking action — but the AI god is taking over our decisions (whether you use it or not, you are exposed). We are becoming it.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

The Quest for Phaedrus — The Individual and Not the Tribe

What I am describing is the dominant environment. During the last conjunction of Chiron and Eris, Robert M. Pirsig wrote the book I have sampled above, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was written during the peak of the early 1970s. The book entirely contradicts the tribal and externalized quality of the era in many ways.

Pirsig was a teacher of writing and rhetoric and was a very advanced philosopher, though living a fairly ordinary life working at a state college in Montana. There, he suffered from mental illness in the early 1960s (just ahead of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction).

He experienced a mental breakdown and was diagnosed as legally insane. He was sentenced by the court to 28 electroshock therapy treatments known as “annihilation ECS” — the intent was to completely erase his previous personality.

Such is the power of electricity.

The story takes place in the summer of 1968, when he takes a motorcycle journey from Minnesota to San Francisco with his son riding on the back of the bike. And during this journey, he strives to tell us the story of Phaedrus and what he thought. He has memory fragments; he has read all of the surviving notes and papers left by his previous self. He is on an outer journey across the western U.S. and an inner journey into parts of himself that have been forbidden to exist — supposedly annihilated — by court order.

He visits the places Phaedrus has gone, riding the motorcycle he once owned, looking down at the gloved hands that once belonged to someone else. He is committed to understanding what his prior self learned, what he taught and what motivated him. In doing so, he opens up a new branch of philosophy devoted to the study of quality.

We are all Phaedrus, gradually being deleted by the electrical digital environment. We are being annihilated — and we are cooperating with it. Pirsig is not settling for this. He wants to know who he is. He notices the prevailing tribal environment of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and sees how dead it is. But he stays on the backroads, and he reads Thoreau to his kid and answers all of his many questions.

Most of all, he understands and maintains his own motorcycle.

With love,

Your faithful astrologer,