These days a sense of unreality is pervasive. We’re overwhelmed by gigatons of information courtesy of cyberspace, and we live in an age in which politicians and media pundits insist that there are no absolute facts.
Image of Neptune by Lee Haslup.
It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet as Jupiter opposes Chiron this week, which Eric discusses in the latest Planet Waves TV, we have the opportunity to point a searchlight into all that fog.
How do you begin to do this? Firstly, as Eric suggests, it’s important to abandon the notion that facts are at best relative.
Without getting lost in a vortex, you can safely assume that if you dig deep enough, you’ll eventually find a solid truth at the root of every question. Doing this often takes a lot of diligence and organization, but it’s worth it.
Dispensing with credulity — or, as Eric puts it, checking against multiple sources — might be another useful technique this week. Social media facilitates the spread of memes, platitudes and dubious stories — the more shocking, the better. Yet if you scratch the surface, the substance can be lacking.
I myself (to my shame) have been occasionally caught up in a frenzy of collective emotion over some astonishing headline, only to find the actual story is wildly different, or has a date that in internet years might as well be in the Jurassic era. It’s all too easy not to notice errors, or to assume something is legit. So this week, buck the trend and take extra care. You never know what you might end up discovering.
