Dear Friend and Reader:

This odd sense that everything is growing more chaotic and uncertain by the minute is described magnificently by Mars conjunct Eris in Aries. This is Mars nearly in position to go retrograde on Sept. 9. One of the central concepts Eris represents astrologically is the result of electrical technology on one’s state of being.

Twice-presidential candidate Ross Perot (1930-2019) made great use of his phrase, “The giant sucking sound,” which was his description of a free trade agreement he opposed. Today, the sucking sound is souls being vacuumed into the synthetic astral plane known as digital, AI and virtual and enhanced reality.

Whatever may be going on medically and politically on the planet right now, the moment is all in the direction of astral/digital. This is an actual plane of reality (a concept some esoteric students may be familiar with). The astral is the nonphysical state closest to physical, the one accessed in dreams, fantasies, drug experiences and related activities. Many people spend their lives there, and did long before the internet.

Yet the internet opened up a new, electrically powered dimension of existence and experience that drew in millions of otherwise well-incarnated people. This happened by gradually replacing nearly all physical points of reference and many physical objects with nonphysical equivalents.

How To Know You’re On the Astral

One of the ways you know you’re on the astral plane is things seem very strange.

Time can flow in many directions. It can squish and stretch. It used to seem time was moving faster and faster. Now it seems like there is a huge drain located approximately last Friday where everything circles into and vanishes into another realm.

Alterations to time and space are disorienting, if you are accustomed to navigating around your town by sight and direction. Imagine if suddenly all of those familiar landmarks and landscape features vanished. Imagine your home looked different every time you entered it. Imagine it could show up somewhere other than where you left it. This is the approximate feeling of the astral plane.

Another way you know is because things seem polarized. Everything is in opposition to everything else. States of mind differ radically from one another. There is no logic to how events progress. There is the sensation of a dream that is running out of control.

Internal Logic of Microdreams

Each little branch or bubble of the dream — your consciousness — has its own internal logic, which does not hold up under any other conditions. You might try to apply dependable logic from one area to another (mathematics, for example) and find out that it does not work, or that there is some other form of data that overpowers it.

Every day, there is some news about another advent that pushes ever more people onto the digital/astral. It’s not just that Harvard is about to become Netflix. It’s not just the Facebook device that (according to Mark Zuckerberg) can read your mind via a wrist strap. It’s more stuff like this, from The Independent in the UK. Get ready:

“Scientists have discovered a ground-breaking bio-synthetic material that they claim can be used to merge artificial intelligence with the human brain. The breakthrough, presented today at the American Chemical Society Fall 2020 virtual expo, is a major step towards integrating electronics with the body to create part human, part robotic ‘cyborg’ beings.”

Yes, there is now a product commercially available whereby you can convert yourself into a cyborg.

Mars Retrograde: The Quest to Remain Human

My take on the forthcoming Mars retrograde is that it comes down to the quest to remain human, and further, to discover and fully encounter your humanity.

That means discovering and exploring your physical being, desire, and your emotions. Such experiences can arrive with letting go of the layers of dross and interference that have blocked you from making contact with yourself. Or, they may be the layers that have in some way served to insulate you from yourself.

It will be possible to go either way. It’s certainly tempting to yield to the deluge, or maybe it seems you don’t have an option. However, in any event, awareness is what you need, which translates to self-awareness. Under digital conditions, this has become a very slippery concept.

Exercising your prerogatives in the physical world will help you anchor yourself here, though it will also do something else: give you the means of comparison so you have a better sense of who you are. Pay special attention to activities like bathing, walking, gardening, or cooking and other housework — and contrast them to the feeling tone when you are in a digital or astral realm.

Pick up a book and sit under natural light and read a little, to remind yourself how it feels. Then, when you find yourself somewhere else, you will be able to reckon where you are, and maybe find your way back.

With love,

PS — I have covered the Leo New Moon and the Virgo ingress of the Sun in the article below. More on Daily Astrology.