In fairy tales, the gifts magical creatures bestow are always exactly suited to the hero’s tasks. Since life is a fairy tale, the same applies to the tools we are given by circumstances. Each is perfect for our path, and for the age we were born into.

Ours being the age of the Fantastic Information Machine.

Ideally we would use our computers and phones with the same mindfulness with which we’d use magic beans or an enchanted lamp. We’d hold them with gratitude and awe, as we would a christening gift from a fairy godmother. We’d be fully alert to the information that comes through them, and meet it with all of our intelligence.

The Fantastic Information Machine

Imagine responding to the news every day with a perspective this respectful and holistic.

(By “responding” I don’t mean doing something, necessarily.⁽¹⁾ To this astrologer, responding — as opposed to merely reacting — means fully living out our charts and our transits: accessing our Venus and Moon [aesthetics and emotions] as well as our Mercury [mental connections] and Jupiter [moral precepts] and Saturn [understanding of limits] and all the rest of them. Not playing favorites, and not leaving any of them out.)

From a psycho-spiritual point of view, two things happen when we respond to outer-world events with our whole being. First, we mature and empower ourselves as individuals. Second, we take responsibility for the collective, and fuel its positive change.

But for a civilization in devolution mode, heart-centered intelligence on the part of ordinary people is dangerous to the powers-that-be. The gents at Bohemian Grove, for example, depend upon the public’s good old-fashioned ignorance. They don’t want the media courting serious discussion.

They count on the fact that we, the masses, will either consign ourselves to apathy or throw up our hands in despair — which amount to the same thing on the spiritual-moral spectrum, and serve the kingmakers equally well.

But as journalist Caille Millner has written, no one gets to live outside of history. The lessons of our epoch will find us, one way or another. And they will never stop inviting us to respond.

Cecil the Lion

As it happens, someone in the news recently did generate a mass response, one that beautifully connected many hearts and minds. It was Cecil, a beloved lion killed in order to gratify the basest of masculine impulses. His death unleashed one of those wonderful Neptunian empathy waves, like the international response to 9/11/01, or the viral Bring Back Our Girls campaign in 2014.

Encouraged by the transits of late July, thousands of Cecil’s mourners put together their Mercury (becoming informed), Venus (heart engagement) and Jupiter (moral outrage). The power of this response was evident right away, in the social and legal reforms that ensued. Animal rights consciousness shifted from the margins to the forefront of the public conversation.

In stirring up the muck around trophy-hunting, this event raised other questions, as milestone events tend to do. Many of us found ourselves wondering: Why did the murder of Cecil elicit so different a response from, for example, the murder of the Palestinian toddler in that house bombing, the same week?

Probably because being a lion gave the victim in Zimbabwe a unifying, archetypal clout. In Cecil, the world beheld a raw, uncomplicated symbol, a totem speaking directly to our collective unconscious. The cosmic teaching he represented was undistracted by social difference or geopolitics.

It is a lesson in itself, perhaps, that there was so much more compassion available in the USA and Europe for this noble animal than for, say, the two thousand human refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea this year.

It’s a sordid contradiction, but it does not shock us. We are all too familiar with the nationalistic and racial judgments with which we humans defend ourselves against identifying with the desperate of our own species.

Perhaps there is also a great displacement going on. We feel overwhelmed by the reality of global human suffering, so we suppress our response to it; and then, when a safer and simpler horror comes along, like Cecil’s death, all our pent-up grief and horror comes pouring out.

Atrocities

Musing about this inconsistency of human empathy is an appropriate exercise, as Saturn (critique) and Neptune (compassion) begin to square each other in the sky.

If we responded through the center of our charts, what would Americans make of the murder of twenty innocent men, women and children at an Afghan wedding, killed by a Pentagon drone that missed its mark? If we were using all of our Goddess-given natures – our ability to think, feel and evaluate — would we stand for atrocities like these?

One thing is certain: if the collective heart were wide open when we heard such news, the military-industrial-complex would not last long.

Nor would it survive if our full intelligence were brought to bear. Common sense would then lead millions of Americans to realize what all those blundering missiles are really doing: They are inspiring the citizens of Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia to fear and hate the USA. They are causing young men to swear allegiance to any group offering the hope of vengeance.

Suppose that, instead of clicking away the news of these drone deaths to find something more pleasant, we kept open the channels of thinking and feeling a moment longer. Would we not start to realize that, if the skies over Buffalo or Berkeley or Boise were raining drone death from a foreign power half the world away, that we, too, would feel the same hatred?

Manipulated

A well-functioning Mercury is curious. It doesn’t just consume information; it stops and thinks. But in countries where the media is censored or closely tied to the ruling elite, maintaining our intelligence at its sharpest is no easy feat.

Our inborn ability to think deeply is undermined by the commercial manipulation of our collective ADHD. As the speed of cyber life cranks up higher and higher, our Venus, Moon and Neptune (our innate empathy) hardly get a chance to breathe.

We are aware — even as we succumb to their ads — of how advertisers take advantage of the least noble of our human impulses, in order to sell us perfume, vodka, gutter journalism and websites like Ashley Madison. We’re inured to this exploitation; we expect it.

We’re not shocked when we see it in the political realm, too; rising to new heights of crazy during what Edward Luce calls the “permanent election campaign” in the USA. ⁽²⁾ Among the most obvious examples of this manipulation are the political ads that appeal to lowest-common-denominator mass feelings like race-baiting and anti-immigrant fear.

But there are other manipulations at work, less obvious, more ambitious, and still too disturbing for many Americans to recognize.

The prize for most egregious should go to the men around G. W. Bush who, a year before 9/11, decided in The New American Century that “what America needed was a new Pearl Harbor.” Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, outlines the way Plutonian cabals exploit collective crises to push through policies while the populace is too emotionally and physically distracted to resist.

Adam Curtis, the British filmmaker (“The Century of the Self”), is another who maintains that the public’s confusion and reactivity are intentionally orchestrated. Curtis suggests that the news is deliberately kept impossible to make sense of, so that we will lose interest.

He describes the foreign policy that Washington and London have been patching together, week by week, “to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.” To explain why our tax dollars are funding the bombing in Syria, we are told that President Assad is the evil enemy. Then we are told that his enemies are even more evil than he is, so we must bomb them, which maintains Assad in power.

[W]e live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can’t counter it with any coherent narrative of their own.

We are cajoled into dialing our native intelligence down several notches. We put our common sense on mute. The more we try to follow the dominant narrative, the less we understand. So, says Curtis, many people give up. Which is what the policymakers want us to do.

This makes some of us want to do just the opposite.

The news

Giving up is not a possibility if we see this era as part of our birthright. Instead, we want to understand more deeply.

To do so requires that we make a distinction, first of all, between “the news” and what’s really going on in the world.

Take the mainstream coverage of the Iran treaty. As with every other global issue, in this case the US news has devoted an absurd amount of its coverage not to Iran, but to the supposed differences between the Democratic and Republican positions on Iran.

Rather than being briefed with a few minutes of geopolitical perspective, viewers are treated to rambling pronouncements from the Senate floor, from out-of-their-depth politicians stumbling through predictable opinions so insincere as to be painful to watch. Then the news anchor wraps up by framing the report in terms of the one issue everyone is presumed to care most about: who’s ahead in the ongoing donkeys-vs.-elephants point-scoring contest. ⁽³⁾

It surprises no one that the vast majority of politicians now criticizing the Iran deal were ardent supporters of G.W. Bush and his disastrous wars. Although the implications of this are left unexplored, connecting the dots would make the coverage of the Iran treaty actually newsworthy. A consideration of the 2003 invasion of Baghdad would make it intelligible.

Logically, any discussion of US-Iran policy would be introduced by at least a passing mention of Washington’s illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: shameful episodes that were generated from hubris, advertised as victories (“Mission Accomplished”) and drawn out for years of stalemate, only to end in defeat.

This kind of backdrop would seem to be the bare minimum required to help American viewers understand their country’s relationship to the Middle East. But such context is left out altogether, widening the already enormous gulf in geopolitical literacy that exists between the U.S. populace and that of the rest of the educated world.

Self-informing

So here’s where we deploy our tools. We press into service the other resources that have been given to us, for this fairy tale that is our life. We press into service the Fantastic Information Machine.⁽⁴⁾

I’m not talking about glomming onto some random blogger’s crazed midnight ramblings (yours truly, by contrast, is writing this in broad daylight). I’m talking about using online the same criteria we’d apply to a hardcover book we’re considering investing good money in, or basing our academic thesis on. In other words, we’re making our assessments with a full deck: with all the planets in our chart.

We’re asking ourselves, Am I learning something here (Jupiter)? Can I relate to this writing (Venus)? Is the thinking coherent and consistent (Mercury)? We’re applying our common sense (earth) as well as our intellect (air), thirst for knowledge (fire) and intuition (water).

We find that there are commentators whose integrity we trust, and whose knowledge we respect. These are the ones we  turn to, to find out what’s going on.

Unplug

Once we have seen through the smokescreen of the official narrative, we can unplug from it and start really informing ourselves.

There may be some bumps along the path.  After all, our training has not encouraged us to question the dominant paradigm, and detaching from it may feel awkward at first.

In this strange cultural moment we live in, where the most sought-after criteria for evaluating anything is What Other People Think, we may be dismayed by how many people out there have opinions we find grotesque. We may be disheartened when we remember how many of our countrymen watch Fox News. Here we need to remember that quality outstrips quantity, in matters of consciousness as in all-you-can-eat buffets. On an energy level, a handful of souls aware of the truth outweigh multitudes cajoled by lies.

At other times our confidence may wobble in the other direction: we may feel that CNN’s spin on an important world event must surely be the right one, since it and all the other big networks are saying the same thing, and they’re the ones with the official White House press card.

Here we need to remember that our interests, as individuals seeking consciousness, are not the same as the “American interests” referred to by the anchormen. Our interests are far more similar to those of consciousness-seekers everywhere on Earth, than they are to the small group of Americans to which the disingenuous phrase “American interests” really refers: the ones trying to hold onto dominance and control.

Referring to the global crises ahead, journalist Chris Hedges spoke recently about the necessity of understanding this distinction. “The wealthy are not going to take care of us. They will retreat into their gated compounds where they will have access to food and water and all sorts of things we won’t.”

New channels

Once we unplug from the ignorance machine that is the mainstream news, we attract new sources of information, by Natural Law. Free from the brain drain, our Mercurial antennae pick up new channels. We use the magic tools we’ve been given, which are exactly suited to the adventures and perils we will encounter.

We commit to disengaging from toxic collective reactions like apathy and despair, that keep the decaying system patched together. Instead we pump our energy into building a vital, healthy relationship between our soul and this era.

Because it is not somebody else’s world. It is ours.

 

Notes

1 Maybe an actual behavior would be provoked — that’s Mars – but not necessarily. It would depend on our natal chart and transits.

2 His new book is Time to Start Thinking.

3 Have you wondered why so many GOP candidates have entered the field? Wouldn’t you think that all the effort and cost of running for president would make the prospect unattractive, at least for the ones who know they have no chance of winning? Caille Millner proposes that the reason is speaking fees. She reminds us that each one of the clowns in this sordid circus stands to make millions in talks/book deals/ consulting work once the election is over. Once upgraded from mere congressman to ex-presidential candidate, they can fetch an average of $2,000 a minute for an evening’s worth of toxic gas at the podium. They’re red-blooded American entrepreneurs, gaming the system.

4 People used to use the phrase “I read it online” ironically, to mean “I guess it’s ridiculous to assume that what we read online is true:” what’s on the internet wasn’t considered real information. I don’t know if this assumption still prevails, given that the internet is now the normal, default place to read everything. It is certainly still true that blogs have unleashed the dark side of democracy; online there are no safeguards against ubiquitous, unchecked stupidity.

 Drawings by Arthur Rackham

Sculptures: Grief, by Martin Hudáčeka; The Thinker, by Rodin