Why Things Go Wrong Under Mercury Retrograde

I don’t know if I’ve talked before about my theory as to why things go wrong during Mercury Retrograde (which occurs for 3 weeks, 3 times a year) but here it is: the world is not a separate ‘thing out there’. It is a product, to a large extent, of human consciousness. Think about it: our brain is hard-wired to make sense of the data coming in, and has created categories such as left and right, up and down, near and far, time and space, self and other, to make sense of it all. We all have the same hard-wiring, so we think this working model is more real than it is. This is not a philosophical head-game: if you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which has case studies of dysfunctions in the hard-wiring, you will be left aghast and mystified by the constructed nature of all aspects of our experience.

‘Primitive’ peoples understood this relationship between consciousness and the world when they ceremonially greeted the Sun every morning, for fear it would otherwise stop rising. The world as we know it keeps functioning because we continually create it through paying attention to it.

Mercury is the Mind, and when Mercury goes backwards, our attention collectively shifts inwards. For those 3 weeks we are not paying quite the full attention to the world out there that we usually do, so the world does not work quite so well, and my broadband slows down. It doesn’t matter that I as an individual may be paying full attention, because the collective as a whole is not, it’s a bit more reflective and inward than usual.

This theme reminds me of Greg Bear’s Sci-fi book Blood Music, in which a scientist develops a bacteria that can perform logic. He injects it into himself, it develops self-awareness, and it takes over the scientist and gradually the rest of the human population. Because the world is increasingly being perceived by a different type of consciousness, things gradually stop working properly. The bacteria eventually triumphs completely and the world itself shifts onto another plane. It’s a chilling story.