Or: I might put it now: HOW RED-PILLING REMINDS ME OF ASTROLOGY.
The entire universe of discourse that surrounds the naming of a phenomenon we now call “red-pilling” reminds me of my “position” in the larger culture during most of my adult life. Then, as an astrologer, and now, having been redpilled a long time ago and now can name it, I tend to live inside a world-view utterly Other than that considered “normal.”
Two different worlds . . . reminds me of the old song, which refers to lovers, but could just as well refer to all of us who find ourselves on one side of what appears to be an impenetrable ideological and emotional divide. For while our minds may say NO! Never! Our hearts long for each other, and they always will.
So here we are now, the great red pill/blue pill divide growing stronger and stronger, and yet more and more people are red-pilling themselves, doing their own interior and investigative work and finding themselves either tunneling down under the wall or floating above and beyond it, or blasting their way through with 4th of July fireworks, throwing caution to the wind!
So many people letting go of mainstream news to pursue alt-news, following their own noses, willingly or unwillingly falling down one rabbit hole after another (politics and geopolitics, religion, food, energy, ET disclosure, military health, finances, child sex trafficking, satanism, you name it!) into a world so wild and strange that they had no idea it could exist, much less that it does exist — but does it?
Given the explosion of personal points of view, unique personal vantage points from which we view the world, and our sharing of ours with others, there is simply no way that any of us can get even a modicum of an “overview” of “what’s really going on.” What’s going on is, all of this! The millions of points of view, each reflecting and refracting “the world” in our own unique way!
But of course, given our penchant for polarity, we tend to want to stop this mighty profusion, and hold tight to our usual big divides. Please, let me to either stay in the way the mainstream news sources (themselves agents of what we are now calling the “deep state” — another new term, signifying another new universe of discourse that we are still getting used to!) think, or, to hell with it, I’m going to go whole hog on out into the wildest theories possible! Mainstream calls the latter “conspiracy theory,” of course. And yet let me point to a bit of history here:
“Oh well,” you might counter: “You are just a conspiracy theorist about the origin of conspiracy theories!”
And I suppose one could start an infinite regress of conspiracy theories this way. But win an argument? No.
Either you see it or you don’t. Which means, in practice, either you are red-pilled or you’re not. Not yet. It takes time. It takes time — and courage, and a willingness to open to the vastness of what we do NOT know — to even begin to let the simplistic mainstream understanding of the world go. The MSM may keep it alive, but it started for each of us way back when. When we were parented. When we were schooled. When we began to read books, comics, talk to each other, etc.
None of us comes to this place in our own lives without having gone through some kind of conditioning process of the mind which, at birth, was open, “trailing clouds of glory,” and then gradually, or suddenly closed. Much like the skull bones above the corpus callosum which divides the left from right brain gradually closed. No longer were we in touch with the larger universe. Now we were Here, on Earth, in a Body, getting used to the constraints of 3D Space and Time which eventually, when we are around two years old and Mars kicks in (Mars has about a two-year cycle), we begin to use the words “ME!” and “MINE” an “MY” and to see ourselves as SEPARATE from others — whose stuff we want!
Thus is the idea of separation born. And most likely, we have been suffering from this malaise, this lack of appreciation for the oneness of creation, ever since the birth of at least the English language. I.e. It’s not Thomas Hobbes’ fault! He just codified what had been there all along.
But that is not the subject of this AK Reader piece. What interests me here is how much the whole phenomenon of red-pilling (how our reawakened curiosity puts us in a place of solitude, where literally, even our closest family and friends who are still taking the blue pill do not understand us) is similar to anyone who bothers to learn the language of astrology, which also throws us into another world, much richer and more complex than the usual one.
Here’s a Guest Column published in the Casper (Wyoming) Star Tribune, June 3, 1988, during the brief years that I lived there.
ASTROLOGY DEEPENS OUR UNDERSTANDING OF TIME & SPACE
by Ann Kreilkamp
“So. What do you think about the news that Reagan believes in astrology?”
How often, during the past month, have I heard this question? And each time I hear it, I cringe.
I cringe because the question puts me, once again, in a position of having to say, in a few words, what cannot be understood without a total change in world view. It’s a bit like a tropical islander who hears about a phenomenon called “snow,” and asks a visiting Eskimo if he believes in it. On the one hand, of course! On the other hand, what a strange question! Snow is an obvious fact of Eskimo existence. His very survival depends upon his awareness of snow. He can barely imagine how yawning the gap must be between the tropical and the arctic mind’s knowledge of, memories of, associations with, attitudes towards — that little word “snow.”
The “scientific experts” who declare astrology worthless are like tropical islanders, isolated entirely from the world upon which they so arrogantly pass judgment. As Isaac Newton himself is said to have responded to one of his critics on this very subject: “Sir, I have studied it, you have not!”
And I cringe for another reason, best shown in a good joke on the subject currently making the rounds: “Did you hear that Reagan believes in astrology?” “Oh really! That makes me lose faith . . . in astrology.”
Reagan is not a person I would ask to decide the value of astrology. Indeed, this latest embarrassment of the Reagan presidency is probably, as Lance Morrow put it in a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the May 16th issue of Time Magazine, “the metaphysical equivalent of his jelly beans.”
And that’s the problem. I cringe because the astrology that the public is aware of through syndicated newspaper columns, and the astrology within which I am immersed, inhabit two entirely different universes.
I am an astrologer. I make my living as a consultant in astrology; I write and publish regularly on the subject; I read and study and think endlessly upon and within this most ancient and fascinating language. It is my life. It is, and has been for the past 14 years, my ruling passion. I do not expect it to stop anytime soon.
Prior to this, I was a student of philosophy, earning a doctorate in philosophy of science from Boston University in 1972. My quest for the inner meaning of astrology is philosophical: astrology is an investigation into the nature of, and the interconnected and ever-changing processes and structures of, the two most fundamental and deeply-rooted concepts of human understanding, those of time and space.
To fully enter the world of astrology is to transform the way the concepts of time and space operate within one’s psyche. To do this is to expand one’s world-view from the narrow window of Newtonian science to include aspects of life that we all experience but seldom consciously recognize.
The Newtonian world-view assumes that time is linear, that it measures points on a line, moment to moment, each moment the same, all of them stretching endlessly forward into the future. The western ideal of “progress” is a corollary to this unquestioned assumption about the nature of time. Our obsession with progress is associated with the ideals of industry and mechanization. We have made idols out of our tools, focusing on our relationship with them, rather than the natural world around us. What we do to the outside reflects within: we squash our very aliveness into the rules and roles of mechanical motion.
Linear time, as a basic epistemological condition for our perceiving everything else, subtly and irrevocably separates us from both our own natures and the natural world around us. And the results of this separation are coming in now, through massive and perhaps irreversible pollution of earth, air, and water. Unlike any other animal, we have carelessly fouled our own nest.
By contrast, astrological time is the time of the interweaving of many different cycles into one glorious fabric of creation, in which we are all participants. Astrology acknowledges a most basic fact of human experience — the ebb and flow of all that is. While we tend to associate astrology with heavenly phenomena like the phases of the moon, and cannot help but marvel at the synchronous timing of the moon’s pull on both oceanic tides and human female menstrual cycles, there are other, equally ubiquitous cycles in which we all participate, and which also present us with the wondrous orderliness of nature. Consider consciously the two most personal and obvious, and therefore least noticed cycles — the thudding of our beating hearts and the inhale/exhale cycle of our lungs; and we cannot help but adjust ourselves to the quotidian cycles of day and night, or the seasonal changes both within our aging bodies and within nature as she ever renews herself. All these cycles and many, many more — there is nothing alive that does not function in pulsing, interwoven cycles, and everything, even the rocks and the planets are alive — all these cycles are so obvious to us that we do not see them, and thus fail to recognize the profound truth of the cyclical nature of time.
Rather than removing us from either our own nature or the natural world around us, astrology honors the unceasing birthing, flowering and dying of all living forms. Instead of separating ourselves off from life in an attempt to become purely predictable, mechanical, “living” our lives according to some pre-set expectation of who we think we are or should be, we move with the flow of life, knowing all is change, and accepting the precise coordinates for any particular moment, its surprising but exacting character, what its nature entails.
As our conception of time is enlarged and deepened through the study of astrology, so is that of space. We open our eyes and hearts and souls, replacing our preoccupation with space as merely three dimensions, an empty container, the void — wherein we feel lonely, alienated and separate from others — to a feeling for its full, rich, and multi-dimensional character. We sense and feel bathed by, protected and nourished within, a space that is itself a living entity, carrying and making music with the resonance of all possible frequencies. What we think and speak and do matters; each action, no matter how trivial, reverberates throughout the whole, affecting all of us. In a very real sense, we are all parts of one another.
The great physicist Neils Bohr once said: “The opposite of a fact is another fact. But the opposite of one great truth is another great truth.” Astrology acknowledges the double truth of a fundamental paradox, known in academic philosophical circles as “the problem of the one and the many.”
Astrology teaches that each of us is one among many; standing at the exact center of an expanding universe, we are each an utterly unique and irreplaceable individual. Astrology honors the unlimited evolutionary capacity of each of us as an unfolding from within of the laws of our own natures.
Simultaneously, by placing each of us within the larger universe, and showing our original and continuously changing relations to it, astrology teaches that the many are also one: each of us exists as a mere point within an infinite, divine continuum. We expand to fill the space available. We express our love for the whole of creation.
