Disrupting Dis-Ease
As Above, so below
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”
Paradigms are systems of “ease” — frameworks that create a certain level of autonomy so that we can focus our attention on the novel, growth, what is coming into being.
A lot of your hear me going on and on about ease A LOT, but that’s the ease that comes on the other side of updating our Reality Operating System™️. When paradigms trap us in the past, in reactive, autopilot versions of self that prevent us from living fully in the present and with responsiveness, that’s when the shift begins. All frameworks, at some point in their life cycle, become dis-eased and dysfunctional — and they will, when the fear of ceasing to exist outweighs the fear of change, collapse. This applies both to the individual as well as on a civilization level.
ON THE NECESSITY OF COLLAPSE
In the second half of 2019, I was founding a capital platform to matchmake investors looking for mission driven, ESG (before it became greenwashing) centered ventures. The due diligence involved gave me an excuse to go on a whole hog deep dive into my pet topics that I’d been studying and tracking since the late 90s and early 00s and feel will be the defining pillars of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century:
the future of work and politics given the developments in automation and AI;
climate change technology, policy, and human migration;
currency reformation (particularly vis-a-vis just exchange) and societal restructure “beyond money”; and
the rise of neofeudalism
During our due diligence, in September 2019, I wound up explicitly stating to my co-founders that the only things that would make a significant dent in our stated objectives to help bring about an holistic economic system based on just exchange and respect for the planet would be a global pandemic, a hard reset of the global financial and economic system, and maybe the help of a couple of insurance and reinsurance breaking climate catastrophes. When lockdown happened six months later, one of them asked me if I’d manifested it or merely known it was coming down the pipeline.
Girl. If I could manifest a global pandemic but not a steady source of abundant income, that would seriously be the worst joke on me by the Universe. Lol.
Anyhow, why do I bring this up?
One of the biggest concepts that jumped out at me as I was writing my (still incomplete) white paper on this matter (funny how the pandemic scuppered that capital platform as well) was the concept of humanity as a macro-organism. (If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ve seen me refer to this often.) It is both an uncomfortable idea but also a liberating framework.
Human beings (including myself) often do not enact fundamental system change until the system — whether that’s a job, relationship, one’s own body — breaks down beyond plausible use. It’s a design flaw when you have a brain that is wired to keep you alive by being a prediction machine based on previous patterns of behavior. Because of this, as succinctly stated in a recent slideshow post by Dr. Tara Swart on IG (which you can check out here), you are essentially living out your personal version of groundhog day. Neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman’s work on time perception and neural signaling has shown that essentially consciousness essentially exists to call out what does not conform to the brain’s internal modeling of reality. (Best illustrated when you’re climbing a set of stairs. Gait analysis suggests that the human brain “maps” a staircase after the first two steps. Once that rhythm is set, your foot clearance is often as little as .5 inches. A variance of just 3/8 of an inch between any two steps is enough to cause a person to trip. When a riser is off by .5 to 1 inch, the brain’s motor program fails to adjust in time and results in an uncontrolled fall, leading often to traumatic head or neck injuries.)
The concepts of unconsciously repeating past behavior patterns and looking out into the world with an inherent confirmation bias to preserve the structure of an internal narrative are present (without the scientific justification) in various spiritual lineages that believe in the reincarnation of souls. Whether you believe in reincarnation, karma, etc, an unavoidable idea we need to consider, based on the evidence at hand, is we’re all wandering around essentially in a time warp autopilot that’s a result of genetics, epigenetics, nurture, and environment.
The default mindset is scarcity because it prompts you to take the actions necessary to stay alive. One neuroscience based hypothesis for the origin and purpose of emotion is that prompts the individual to do what it takes to maintain homeostasis. You start to feel an emotion long before your consciousness even knows its coming on and it prompts you, given your innate algorithm for threat —> emotion —> pre-cognitive decision —> action, to make yourself safe again regardless of whether that sense of “safety” results in a dysfunctional situation. Your mind doesn’t care if you stay in a dysfunctional scenario because it’s fulfilled its mission to keep you alive.
What interrupts an autonomous system and forces change and the need for new pathways? Collapse.Breakdown. A complete cessation of the ability to selectively pull from the environment the same inputs and put forth the same outputs that the internal model needs to continue functioning like it’s business as usual.
How many of us have had to undergo this in our own lives in order to disrupt systems of dis-ease? How many of us have the adaptability, resilience, and discipline to accept a novel, often alien understanding of our selves and the world around us to undergo the process of remapping our minds and re-shaping our lives? How many of us get trapped trying to “get back” to an old version of ourselves that was safe despite being overtly dysfunctional?
Apply the cumulative effect of this across the approximately 8.3 billion cells of the human macro organism. We don’t need a zombie apocalypse. We are the zombies and we are the the author of this story.
The question is: Are we finally at a point of collapse that will prompt Consciousness to flag that we need to do something differently? Is humanity finally at a survival inflection point? Has our macro organism finally grasped that something isn’t fitting the internal model? Do we as a collective macro organism and as its individual cells have the wherewithal to adapt and undergo the painstaking work to build a new reality paradigm?
CIVILIZATION AS A REALITYOPERATING SYSTEM™️
Humanity’s primary homeostasis framework is the concept of an economy, which, if you strip it down to its core, is simply a system of energy exchange between the cells and organs of the human macro organism and signals whether or not it’s alive. That economy — like the theory that the stomach and digestive system are the first mind that gave rise to the brain as a second mind — gives rise to civilization as reality operating system that ensures homeostasis.
In joining a long list of sociologists, philosophers, and economists, let’s take this even further for the sake of discussion. (I promise — it’ll come back to the astrology you came for.) We could identify nine fundamental elements of this reality operating system mapped on a macro organism:
1. Urban Centers / Cellular Tissue & Organ Matrices
Civilizations require a large, permanent population of individuals living in a concentrated area to aggregate skill and experience sets, increase resource efficiencies and security.
Cells cluster into organs to perform high-level functions and increase the efficiency of resource capture, sharing and exchange.
2. Organized Government and Law / Central Nervous System
As populations grow, informal tribal leadership is replaced by centralized authority. This includes a bureaucracy to manage resources, a system of laws to maintain order, and the power to collect taxes or tribute.
The brain and spinal cord. It provides the "Centralized Authority" that maintains the proven algorithms of survival, maintaining systemic order and response.
3. Complex Religion / The Immune System
Most early civilizations developed shared belief systems that explained the natural world and provided a moral framework.
The "Self/Non-Self" identification system. It provides the shared molecular signature that maintains system cohesion and defends against internal rot or external pathogens.
4. Social Systems and Hierarchies / The MUSCO-Skeletal System
Civilizations inevitably move away from egalitarianism toward stratification based on perceived valuation of skill set relative to collective function resulting in a distribution of wealth and power that creates distinct classes like nobles, merchants, artisans, and laborers.
A skeletal system is a complex organism’s load-bearing structure, providing a definitive framework to prevent collapse under complexity and facilitate coordinated movement.
5. Job Specialization / Cellular Differentiation
In a civilization, not everyone needs to produce food. This allows individuals to become experts in specific crafts which accelerates technological growth.
Generalist "stem cells" become specialized experts (neurons, muscle fibers, etc.) to allow a complex organism to transcend basic survival.
6. Systems of Writing and Record-Keeping / Genomic Data
The need to track taxes, trade agreements, and historical events led to the development of writing. Whether through cuneiform, hieroglyphs, or quipu, recording information is a hallmark of complex societies.
DNA, RNA, and epigenetic mutations account for an organism’s long-term data storage connecting and reproducing past, present, and future.
7. Advanced Infrastructure and Public Works / The Circulatory & Vascular System
This includes large-scale projects that benefit the community, such as irrigation systems for farming, defensive walls, roads, and bridges.
Veins and arteries conduct the high-pressure movement of resources to keep cells fed while the lymphatic system removes waste.
8. Monumental Architecture and Art / Phenotype & Signaling
Civilizations express their identity and power through permanent structures like temples, palaces, and tombs. These works often require the mobilization of massive amounts of labor and resources only available because of surplus.
For an organism, the outward expression of genetic fitness is "plumage" or phenotype, signaling the health, strength, and vitality of the system to others.
9. Currency and Accounting / Endocrine System & ATP
A civilization is defined by its ability to abstract value. By translating physical labor and natural resources into symbolic tokens (whether through physical currency, credit, or debt ledgers) societies can store and exchange "energy" across time and distance. This leap into symbolic thinking is what allows for the scaling of human cooperation beyond the limits of direct barter and personal trust.
Complexity demands efficient resource allocation even in organisms. Hormones are the "contracts" that tell distant cells to release energy while ATP is the universal energy currency that makes specialized work possible.
HOLOGRAPHIC THEORY
“ἐν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ μικρὸς κόσμος ἐστίν
In (hu)man, there is a small world”
Holographic theory suggests that every fragment of a system (or every cell in an organism) contains the information or "code" required to reconstruct the entire entity.
This is mirrored in various spiritual traditions in which the individual is an expression of the order of the universe and vice versa. With that said, let’s then get back to the astrological application of this long convoluted way to empower us with agency during a worldwide systemic collapse.
As Above, So Below
Let’s now map our 9 elements of Civilization to the 9 classical planets.
1. Urban Centers / The Moon
The moon is the “mind” that defines what criteria define safety around which the being coalesces.
2. Government & Law / Sun
The sun represents the divine light that each of us carries into this existence to shine and the divine authority that guides us in fulfilling our dharma (the work that is only ours to do in this lifetime).
3. Complex Religion / Jupiter
Jupiter is the planet of belief and connection to universal order encompassing the moral and philosophical frameworks around which we structure our connection to that which is larger than our personal existence as well as a direct connection to source.
4. Social Hierarchy / Saturn
Saturn, the lord of Karma — both as action that we think originates from one’s self / ego and the consequences that reverberate through time of said action — also governs the external frameworks of class, duty, and societal structure as well as humanity as a whole itself.
5. Job Specialization / Rahu
The "hunger" for expertise. Rahu represents the obsession with mastering a specific niche or manifesting an experience or thing when in fact it represents the journey through maya to a true understanding of identity.
6. Writing & Records / Ketu
Ketu is the "tail" of time as an eternal record of lineage, past events, completed actions that both must be accepted as the sum of one’s identity and released in order to transcend conditioning and rise to choice and responsiveness.
7. Infrastructure / Mars
The physical muscle required to translate internal affect into external effect.
8. Monumental Art / Venus
Venus is the planet that provides the surplus for life to evolve from scarcity and survival into civilization and the highest expression of this is the ability to engage in relationship and have the space to bridge mundane and heavenly via the arts.
9. Currency & Accounting / Mercury
Books are open!
Mercury is the patron of the merchant and the counter. It rules the Symbolic Token and the mental capacity to agree that a mark on a tablet or a coin has a value beyond its physical form.
Translated like this, the chart becomes not only the framework of which your life is an expression but the building blocks of your sovereignty regardless of what’s happening in the external world.
the butterfly effect
“but·ter·fly ef·fect
/ˈbədərˌflī əˈfekt,ēˈfekt/
noun
(in chaos theory) the phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.”
This is how these thoughts start.
Last week I was talking to a retainer client about her anxieties around how to prepare for what the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $11T AUM, has publicly identified in an interview with the BBC as one of two possible outcomes for the global economy vis-à-vis the war in Iran the dreaded two word phrase “global recession”. The circles I travel in are reverberating like a jack hammer with anxiety of how to brace for the fallout from events they cannot personally effect.
As a futurist, gaming out the possibilities and the ways through scenarios like the one we have confronting us as a civilization right now is the whole assignment. But for the purposes of this already epically long blog post, that will have to wait for another day.
What I want to end on is what is actionable for you and us as a community that gather in this space. Regardless of how global events are resolved, none of us can, as conscious, spiritual beings having a human experience, unsee that the paradigm is dis-eased and dysfunctional. It cannot be returned to and, like Humpty Dumpty, it cannot be put back together again.
We need new systems of:
how to value energy exchange (currency and economic systems);
resourcing and production;
community structure and governance;
family organization, care and education; and
redefine what are our core values as a macro organism and answer what it means to be a human being in the 21st century.
Oh, you know, just a little Sims world building. J/k.
But, what can each of us do? START WITH OURSELVES.
Each one of us must take on the challenge to break free of our conditioned understanding of security and how we go about ensuring our access to it in ways that keep us trapped in old identities and hence trapped in living in reaction to the past. As uncomfortable and difficult as it is, we need to dare our minds to make new pathways, try novel approaches, rewire to a more functional paradigm of ease. We have to do the hard work in our own lives, with the resources available (or not) to us in the now, within the context of our relationships and communities, to be the person of the present creating a future that is a legacy those coming after us will be honored (not burdened) to inherit.
The Great Flood
Astrologically, what we are seeing on the world stage and its ripple effect in our lives can be explained by the continued passage of the South Node / Ketu through tropical Virgo (especially as set off during the Virgo Eclipse this past month). As I’ve said previously, the South Node will force you to “release” from your compulsion so that you can choose to consciously engage with a matter, energy, area of life, relationship related to the house or planet it’s affect in yours (or for that matter a company’s or country’s) chart.
In tropical Virgo, the release that is being called for is the release from systems of ease that we use to organize our transactions and trade, methods of realizing ideas / means of resourcing and production, managing actual disease, and human resources. Our autonomous systems in our personal lives and in the world around these Virgoan themes have become dis-eased and are stuck in a past paradigm that existentially threatens to survival of the human macro organism.
Then, once Neptune and Saturn entered Aries, they also entered Virgo by their shadow antiscion presence. Antiscion is the seamy, reactive underbelly of a placement on the ecliptic — the unconscious, knee jerk reaction that must be made conscious to get to a response use of the house and planet.
There is a reason many civilizations across the world have myths about Great Floods.
Neptune is the clean up crew to the release the South Node has been causing for the past fourteen months. Neptune is the Great Flood, power washing away all that keeps you from seeing the truth and striving for the ideal. Neptune’s shadow presence asks:
How can you dissolve the inauthentic expressions of self, masculinity, and create correct boundaries, express courage and a coherent sense of self into the world if the systems in which you operate, organize interaction with the external world and bring things into reality are corrupt, inefficient, take no account of the cost of harm done, and are premised on extraction and performative value?
How can you show up as the version of you that is an expression of the divine in a system that cannot assign value in a way that contributes to enlivenment and communal care but is a measure of oppression and the number of those vanquished?
Thankfully, Jupiter is the final dispositor of the sky (well, okay, not as I right this — he’s sat there with his dispositor — the moon in Cancer), especially as Mercury trines it for the next couple of weeks and completes its retrograde cycle, offers a path through: By centering care, emotional balance, and a belief that our highest potential is reached via the creation of interdependent spaces and systems of safety, nurture, and that we live in an unprecedented time when there is actually enough for all and that scarcity and resource guarding is a relic of a past we no longer have to live.
Honestly, we have enough imagination and wherewithal to become the people who live these lives and in that world order.
KEY TAKEAWAY
The butterfly effect is such that every action and choice you make compounds as it ripples through each life you touch whether seen or unseen.END OF MARCH + APRIL Books Are Open
My books are open if you’d like to suss out how you can hack your chart and current transits to work with the Great Reset from a place of coherence and responsiveness.
