Uranus-Neptune, Magic and Consciousness

A conjunction of 2 outer planets is a very powerful thing, it sets all sorts of new and transformative forces in action for many years afterwards. And we can use quite a wide orb when assessing its influence. The most recent such conjunction was Uranus and Neptune, which was exact in 1993, but operative for pretty much the rest of the nineties. And then, remarkably, since 2003 we have had a mutual reception of Uranus and Neptune, which acts like a conjunction, and so has prolonged the influence of the original 1993 conjunction.

A mutual reception occurs between 2 planets when each is in a sign that the other rules. So Uranus is in Pisces, a sign ruled by Neptune; and Neptune is in Aquarius, a sign ruled by Uranus.

I think that one expression of this continuation of the conjunction has been the continual development of the internet: we haven’t just seen an initial burst of creativity, followed by a period of adjustment. The creativity has gone on and on and shows no sign of letting up. We can expect this exceptional vitality to continue for at least another 2 years, when Uranus starts to enter Aries.

We can compare this to the previous outer planet conjunction, that of Uranus and Pluto in the sixties. This caused a huge social upheaval, with all sorts of progressive ideas coming in and old values being discarded and authorities being challenged. Its effects are still with us, but that initial burst of creativity did not last into the seventies, which were much more characterised by disillusion. If Uranus and Pluto had moved into mutual reception, the sixties would most likely have continued well into the seventies.

Uranus governs electronics and insights and progressive social ideas, and Neptune governs the imagination and the dissolving of boundaries. So we can see globalisation coming out of this, and its particular expression via the internet, where boundaries between people are dissolved (Neptune) electronically (Uranus) and new types of communities (like the astroblogosphere!) can spring up (Uranus).

It is sometimes said that people had much stronger psychic abilities when they lived tribally or as hunter gatherers. And the reason was that these abilities were needed. You needed to know where the game was, you needed to know where other people were and if they were safe etc. We are less psychic now, not because we represent some sort of degeneration from a pure original humanity (which is sometimes how it gets put: the idealisation of tribal people), but because we haven’t needed to be psychic. It’s like a muscle that hasn’t been used.

I have often thought that the internet is a good place for psychic occurrences, because it is such a fluid, immediate medium. And you NEED to be psychic if you are going to make friends and communicate coherently with all these people that you will never talk to or meet in the flesh. I keep getting this when I do email readings for people from all over the world. They keep accusing me of being psychic in my interpretations! Now this is not something I am conscious of. But it may well be happening, because to do a useful reading, you have to tune in to someone. To do this purely over the internet, you need to be ‘psychic’ – a modern word that kind of mystifies and sets apart and even rubbishes what is a perfectly natural human ability.

It is easy to think of computers as dehumanising, and they can be. But looked at in this kind of way, they can be humanising, boundaries that have developed over the last few thousand years are melting, as people re-discover their ‘psychic’ abilities when communicating over the internet. But we’re probably hardly conscious of it. This is a big collective shift in consciousness going on, particularly perhaps among young people. You NEED, for example, to have a sixth sense that tells you that your nice new friend is actually an old pervert who’s grooming you. Or not to open that attachment. Or that so and so has just emailed you.

On Monday I put up a post on Eris on this blog. Later on I also posted it at the Visual Astrology blog, and as I did so I changed the first sentence. I came back to this blog to make the same change, to find it had already happened, apart from one word! So magic happens on the internet, my intention alone was enough to bring about an event. What do you make of that?

Speaking of intentions bringing about events, here is an article from bbc news:

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year. "It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv. "It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity. Ms Le said: "Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we've created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically."

Of course this isn’t quite the same as what I have been talking about. But it is still also about the dissolution of normal boundaries (Neptune) via an electronic medium (Uranus), and the bringing about of events by intention alone. And this is only the start. There have been plenty of lab experiments already where you wire a person or monkey’s brain up to a computer and they get something to happen by brain activity alone. But it is now just starting to go mainstream. It will be a common experience. And it will really get us all thinking about the nature of consciousness. In a sense it is nothing new, for we do it all the time when we move our body: we think it, and it happens.

Science is getting closer and closer to the seat of personality. For some, this will prove that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of matter, an illusory by-product of chemical and electrical activity that can be manipulated just like anything else. For others of us, perhaps, it will show that consciousness and matter are inseparable, it will re-enchant the physical world we live in, which has for so long been separated from, even inimical to, the world of ‘spirit’. And even then, I suspect there will continue to be something elusive and essential that cannot be explained scientifically. We may be able, for example, to provide an objective, physical description of what goes into creating the subjective experience of ‘I’. But you can never describe the experience itself. The closer science gets to this physical description, the more the inherent limits to its type of knowledge will become clear. We have nothing to fear. We are being slowly led into a fascinating contemplation on the nature of consciousness.