The View from the Physical Plane

For a second time, Trump rode the digital wave into the presidency.

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Along Rt. 299 heading into New Paltz from the mountain. Photo by Eric.

Thank you to everyone who participated in Tuesday’s live election coverage. That was fantastic and I’ll be doing more of it. — efc

Dear Friend and Reader:

What happened this week — a decisive victory for Donald Trump, who could not prevail in any age but digital — was a comment on the astrology of 2025-2026, and the electronic world in which we live. They are closely related. 

The New York Times headline Wednesday read, “Trump’s America: Victory Changes Nation’s Sense of Itself.” But they got that backwards. It should have read, “Nation’s Changing Sense of Self Leads to Trump Victory.” 

The reversal of cause and effect is revealing of our relationship to the problem. Shawn McCreesh, reporting from West Palm Beach for the Times, summed up Trump’s performance. “Mr. Trump was a ferociously effective campaigner. To watch him up close on this third run for president was to see him blend comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism like never before.”

In the digital age, that’s what feels good. That’s what feels trustworthy because it feels real. Anything not infused with anger seems to lack authenticity.

Photo by Eric Francis.

The Digital Emotional Plague

Digital technology radically alters and destabilizes the “sense of self” of both individuals and societies, making it anywhere from difficult to impossible to feel and experience who we are. The effect of digital technology is to take people out of contact with themselves, and leave us stranded there.

It has created a kind of emotional plague where many don’t understand how unfulfilled they are, and how desperate for sincerity and trust and physical experience of life, and of one another. 

Digital creates a sense of parched thirst without understanding there is such a thing as water. Then we get tyranny. This keeps happening. It is exactly what happened in the 1930s. The charismatic leader swoops in and pretends to rescue people from their own desperation.

Digital seems to offer so much, but it's ultimately depleting, adding a little fee and a little plastic to everything. You get something to eat, but the box was shaken, and the food is lukewarm, and contaminated. People remember throwing the package in the trash more than they remember eating the meal. Washing someone else’s dishes would be more fulfilling.

Trump has known how to harvest that sense of desperation since he first entered electoral politics in 2015. That’s how he ran the nation by Tweet (during the Uranus-Eris conjunction). Digital is a hungry ghost environment, with the phantoms seeking to attach themselves to any free-floating rage that might come along. 

Photo by Eric Francis.

Imagine the Big Bomb: Of Threats and Services

People have a hard time understanding the actual effect of the digital environment. So let me offer a metaphor for what has happened to us. Imagine life is proceeding as normal, and everyone is doing their thing. Then unexpectedly, a new kind of atomic bomb is detonated and kills everyone on the planet instantly, simultaneously.

Nobody remembers the incident itself. And instead of “going to heaven” or bardo or oblivion or whatever they were expecting, people are instantaneously transported to an astral replica of the life they recently lived, not knowing they no longer have a body.

That is the digital plane; it’s basically where consciousness has gone.

Everyone and everything is more or less familiar, but different in subtle ways. What is most different (though difficult to notice) is how people respond to one another: only as potential threats, or as potential services. Interrelating has been reduced to, “What can you do to me?” or “What can you do for me?” 

Missing is, “How can I help?” “How can I express my care for you?” “What do you want?” Digital emphasizes, “What can I get from this?” — to an extreme. Some people remember how to offer themselves to life, how to share and how to help, and they are much happier for it. 

Today when a man is interested in a woman, this registers for many as offensive, or as a mortal threat, and not an ordinary compliment. That is disembodied. We are paying for this dearly. All of this is a result of living under digital conditions.

Seen on Rt. 9W heading up to Saugerties. Photo by Eric Francis.

Here in Harris Country 

Here in upstate New York, where I live in a “liberal” enclave north of the city, the rage manifests as smugness. Not long ago, I rented a little art studio for $800 a month, and today, my neighborhood is filled with $500 a night hotel rooms (with no place to park). And the numerous visitors act accordingly. 

Tourists from New York City walk around like they are carrying the Black Card but with the look of slight disgust that the shopping is not quite up to Paris standards. Where there used to be retail are mostly law offices, real estate brokerages and empty storefronts.

I expect them to peer at me through bird glasses, and say, “Ohh! There’s one!” (Many have dogs, who still act like dogs. That much is reassuring.)

And this was Harris country. Tuesday, I was driving on a road called 9W and there was a little picket sign crudely spray painted with the single word “Trump,”  banged into the ground. So it was not so easy to see (from here) that Trump was going to storm the nation. His campaign was invisible here. There was no need to bother; Harris won by a 2:1 margin.

I might have predicted the national outcome accurately had I asked, “Who will prevail in an environment of disembodied rage?” 

Trump’s election tells us more about our own condition than his. Everyone knows who Trump is. That is the thing. He shows us who he is all the time. He’s very angry; people are very angry. Harris seemed blithe and chipper, but also dazed, and not too bright. There was nothing to latch onto. She carried herself not as a woman but rather “assigned female at birth.”

This was the reality of life under Trump. I served these people (and others) with a cease and desist notice for not honoring the medical exemption. Photo by Eric Francis.

How Quickly We Forget Four Years Ago

The need to latch on reveals just how far the insanity of total digital involvement has gone. We forget quickly that just four years ago, during the last Trump administration, the country was still in a state of lockdown (a term borrowed from prison culture — everyone is locked in their cell). 

At this time in 2020, I attended a wholly illegal potluck dinner for about 100 people in a remote place called Ghent, New York, where I listened to Tom Cowan and Andy Kaufman explain their then sketchy, nascent understanding of the missing virus problem for the first time. 

After nearly a year of daily terrorism, it was amazing to be in a room full of unmasked people eating food from common serving bowls, hugging one another and just hanging out. Little kids and a couple of dogs were roaming around.

We forget quickly what it was like to have all the restaurants and taverns locked down, the schools locked down, the universities like ghost towns, the shopping malls even more vacant than usual, the theaters all dark, with Walmart and Sam’s Club looking like a scene from a Stephen King novel.

(Imagine you dreamed this and were telling the story to a therapist. “It was so strange, nearly everything was closed because it was so dangerous. But then thousands of people were herded into big stores, and that was safe.” A good therapist would ask, “How do you feel describing this?”)

Then came the injections, allegedly to inoculate against last year’s big deal. 

Proposition 1 passed here in New York, falsely claimed to be an “Equal Rights Amendment” allowing male-to-female transsexuals to play girls’ sports, and making abortion a constitutional right. Photo by Eric.

The View from the Planets

There is some very potent weather blowing in. You won’t see it reported on the Weather Channel or most astrology channels.

To find comparable precedents, I have searched the patterns back to 1 B.C. The most useful comparisons are in the late 1840s and approximately 1916 into the 1920s. The early 1970s also show up in our search.

The focus is Aries, the first sign, a fire sign, and associated with one’s “sense of self.” That was the thing referenced in The New York Times headline Wednesday, but the Times used the non-personal word, “Itself.” This is accurate when most people should list their pronouns as “it,” since there is neither sex nor gender in the digital realm.

This is a large part of the agony. Every powerful institution that has ever influenced our society has turned sex and sexuality into a crime — from every church to the FBI to the Post Office. But nothing has done so with the brutal efficiency of digital.

We are all neutralized, and any sense of balance is removed. And that’s a good way to describe what is developing. I am tracking five different major events, any one of which would be enough to shock the world.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Emphasis on the ‘Masculine Signs’

Planets in Taurus (Uranus and Sedna) are entering or have just entered Gemini. Planets currently in Pisces are entering Aries (Saturn and Neptune). And Pluto, currently in Capricorn, is entering Aquarius, to stay till 2044.

This is a massive shift of emphasis from the feminine signs to the masculine. These seemingly sex-based properties need one another to exist; there must be some balance, or neither is accessible. 

You may have noticed that I’m using the term The AWA as short for “The Awakening.” The little hint here is that “awa” is slang from the Geisha world in Japan for the womb-like quality that describes a biological and emotional woman. (In ordinary speech, it’s what is frothy and flexible, like meringue.)

That will be the very thing lacking in the planetary patterns far into the future. We are now shifting into hot, airy and brittle. Hence, nobody cares much when 120 cops with clubs arrest 120 students sitting around a tree.

One problem is we are getting very little womb energy from women. The prevailing religion, feminism, promotes masculine qualities. As far as I can tell, most of the awa in the world today is coming from gay men; it’s better than nothing, but not much. 

Humanity and all of its actual human experiences must be gestated. It cannot be grown in a lab or invented by “artificial intelligence.” 

While masculine property may fertilize, it’s a feminine property that gestates. We need both, and neither exists in the digital realm. What is dispatched by computer and delivered in a plastic bucket in a plastic bag eaten with plastic utensils is not food.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Chiron-Eris, Then and Now

One thing we are living through is the Chiron-Eris conjunction. This tends to show up with massive wars: the Civil War (1863-1864, in Pisces), World War I (1917-1918, in Pisces), and the massacre in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1971, in Aries).

Each of these also arrived with massive leaps in electrical and electronic technology that shocked and destabilized society.

In 1971, at the first Chiron-Eris conjunction in Aries, people were more curious about themselves than they seem today. This is the thing I find most troubling, but it also reveals significant potential. There was more experimenting, whether socially, creatively, intellectually and sexually. 

There was more actually wanting to discover one’s inner truth — though this has been replaced by seeming outer knowledge.

A moment of life one Chiron-Eris cycle ago.

There were actual therapists doing group and individual process. Millions of people bought books by Alan Watts, a former Zen priest and philosopher, who bridged the Beat Generation of the 1950s with the New Age of the 1960s and 1970s. There was such a thing as together. There was such a thing as sexy. Now all we get is “rapey.”

There was plenty of tribal behavior, but that included taking care of the people in your tribe. It included food and experiments in communal living. Why take care of the people around you? That supposedly means less for you. But wait — the reason we have families and tribes and villages is to create some strength in numbers, and the power (and efficiey) of using collective resources.

These are the skills we will need the most as physical reality continues to crumble, or turn into bricks of increasingly worthless money. But it’s easy to forget, and it’s necessary to remember.

Exactly one Chiron-Eris cycle ago, Joni Mitchell wrote:

Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning.

But you can’t get there on rage. You won’t get there based on your rights. And you can’t get there alone, or terrified of your brothers and sisters, or constantly accusing them. That’s all a big ruse, anyway and none of that conduct was your original idea.

You did not come all this way to get to Earth and live your life in a fury — subtle or otherwise.

With love,

Most of today’s photos were taken this morning in and around Saugerties, NY.

Only humans have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains, and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere -- a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It's a quick comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I've seen it. I've been there in my vision, and it makes me shudder to think about it.

-- The Lakota Shaman Lame Deer
Lame Deer Seeker of Visions