One Screen, Two Movies (But Worse)

There's a prominent issue that I've been following the research on for the past year. I won't tell you what the issue is because I would prefer not to be deplatformed, but let's just say that it's an issue that has affected everyone's lives in a profound way. I noticed that what I was seeing in the research wasn't matching what was being presented in the media, and that people's responses to the issue tended to split along party lines. It occurred to me that if the media was able to create one picture of an issue that didn't correspond to the available research, that they could easily make two. I said so in an internet forum, and one of the responses pointed me to a blog post by Scott Adams: 

Good Example of Our Two-Movie Reality

I agree with what's in his post, but it seems to me to not go quite far enough. It is true that each of us looks at new information based on our prior knowledge and beliefs, but there's more going on. The media outlets are not only taking advantage of that tendency, but they are also selectively presenting information. Team Red will be shown things by their preferred media outlets that paints Team Blue in the worst light possible, and Team Blue is shown things that makes Team Red look bad. Team Red will not be shown things that make a Team Red elected official or candidate look bad, unless it's to distract from something even worse the person has done, and the same goes for Team Blue. 

It's true that outrage is good for ratings and web traffic, but there's something deeper going on. The mutual hatred between sides makes it less likely for people to get together with people from the other side and compare notes. This is important because neither side is right about everything. If one side was right about everything, that would make the other side wrong about everything, and both sides have some people who do their own research. One of them would find out and tell the others. By the way, this kind of arrangement is trivially easy if one group of people controls both sides' media outlets. 

So what do we do? My recommendation is to do what they don't want you to do: find someone from the other team who is willing to talk, and compare notes. Don't try to convert the other person; just compare notes in a search for the whole truth. 

1984, Version 2.0 (Cloud Edition)

I watched the 1984 movie two weeks ago and I'm reading the book now. It seems to me that the book and movie could use some modernization based on advances in technology and organizational techniques:

• TV screens that can look back at you and hear what you are saying was a logical next step given the technology at the time, but now we can do better. We can reduce the TV screen to the size of a short paperback book and have everyone carry one around in their pockets or purses.
• Big Brother doesn't need to be done by government. Outsourcing and privatization are things now and the book would be made more relevant to current times by incorporating elements of each. The cell phone companies would be an obvious choice for this function. 
• The Ministry of Truth also doesn't need to be a government function. Mainstream media today already presents a consistent message. We could bring the book up to date by having them manage what is official truth. And there's no need to bother with memory holes; burning old documents is wasteful and increases our carbon footprint; everything important is online anyway. If the old version of the official truth is more than a couple of weeks old, just leave the old articles up; only a handful of people will even bother looking and even if they tell others, no one will care. If it hasn't been two weeks yet, just change the article in place. No one will notice.
• The Thought Police was a good idea at the time, but we now know that trying to completely eradicate wrongthink is an unnecessary waste of resources. We could improve the book by having wrongthink allowed, but reducing its ability to affect others. Let people think what they want, even let them post it on social media, but take it down if it goes against the official truth as outlined above and gets too many views.
• And while we're on the subject of social media, the Two Minutes Hate seems unambitious. If we add social media to the book, we can have hate 24/7/365. 
• In the book, razor blades were hard to come by but gin was plentiful. Again, good but outdated. We can bring the book up to date by having barbershops be closed but marijuana dispensaries open. 

I believe that if we make the above changes to the book, it would be both more relevant and timely.

NOTE: Explicit permission is hereby given to everyone reading this post to copy, re-publish, or otherwise share the contents therein. The grant given applies only to this post. No attribution required.

Skeptics and Other Hazards

If you make it known that you study or practice astrology, you will from time to time encounter people who don't believe in it. You will also encounter people who believe in it, but also believe it's the work of the Devil. Ironically, the second group is usually easier to deal with, as you can generally point to a quote in whatever holy book they happen to be using that will support astrology. That won't work with the first group as they have no holy book, and in fact, no central authority. However, they are every bit as dogmatic as the second group.

The first group refers to themselves as skeptics. You might expect that to mean that they are skeptical about things until shown evidence. If that were true, they would reserve judgement until studies were done. The history of astrology skeptics is quite different. They do studies based on their assumptions about what astrology is, then publish those as proof that astrology doesn't work.

Furthermore, members of this group have no problem with saying that astrology is not valid, even if they know nothing about astrology. So they are not really skeptics, they are deniers. And because they do not know what they are denying, you have no hope with them.

The skeptics typically define astrology as the belief that the position of the sun and the planets relative to the earth at the time a person was born determines his and personality. The good news is that this is not true. The bad news is that what astrology really is will be even less palatable to the skeptics.

Astrology is simply the study of cycles as marked by the cycles of planets from the perspective of us here on earth. Astrology relies of the concept of an interconnected universe. In such a universe, the cycles of planets mirror other cycles which control everything. Under this concept, the Planets don't control anything but are simply indicators. And the natal chart doesn't determine a person's life; the life a person decided to have determines when and where they will be born.

In any case, argue with them at your own risk.

The other reason to be wary of those groups is that astrology is still illegal under laws against fortune-telling in some locations, and members of these two groups will be most likely to file a complaint.

tl;dr: Don't argue with fundamentalists, whether materialist or religious.

Astrology's Image Problem

Imagine a foreign exchange student from France or Italy comes to America for a visit. For some reason the host family takes him to either Denny's or McDonald's for every meal. He'd be entirely justified in concluding that American food is bland and possibly not even really food. However, that conclusion would be incorrect.

The average person's exposure to astrology is similar to the exchange student's experience with American food. Instead of being fed with nourishing concepts like the planets, the houses, aspects, reception and the like, they are fed bland Sun sign stereotypes. What's worse, few of them ever find out that there's more to astrology than that. Since everyone knows people who don't conform to the Sun sign stereotypes, many of them draw the conclusion that astrology is bullshit. It's not, but they have no way of knowing that.

Good astrologers know that there's more to people than their Sun signs. Unfortunately, good astrology doesn't sell books and newspapers, at least not in the quantity desired by those who are footing the bill. What's worse, someone who wants to study astrology in detail is faced with laundry lists of "this planet in this sign means X" and the like. Astrology, let's face it, is complex, and modern culture likes to oversimplify.

So what's the answer? I'm not sure, but I do know what would help: A fundamental change in the way we teach astrology, specifically a return to basic principles, and more specifically presenting traditional astrology to beginners first. Why traditional astrology? Because it's a system built on basic concepts. Once the beginners have sound knowledge of the basic concepts, they'll be able to derive everything else herself, and they'll have a solid base on which to add modern innovations.

This doesn't solve the problem of newspaper horoscopes and Sun sign books, and we still have materialist "skeptics" to deal with. I'm not worried about either. There's an old saying that nothing can beat an idea whose time has come. My feeling is that the materialist paradigm has already started to collapse, along with the current economic paradigm and a bunch of others. Our time is almost at hand.

An Infinity of Infinities

As a starting point, I'll present for you a grossly oversimplified model of the universe. First there was the Infinite. The Infinite was everywhere and everything. Even the word "was" is inaccurate as the Infinite was outside of time as we know it. Whatever the Infinite thought was real; after all, nothing else existed. Since the thoughts of the Infinite were still within the Infinite, they had the same properties and could create their own thoughts. So at this point we have an infinity of infinities. But things didn't stop there.

At this point, the Infinite and all of the thoughts for infinite generations were together within the Infinite. One of the thoughts had a thought of being separate from the rest. Since the thoughts of the Infinite were real and could create thoughts that were also real, that resulted in the experience of being separate from the rest. I'll leave out a few steps for the sake of brevity. Suffice it to say that, according to A Course in Miracles, that's why and how we are here in this place of pain, limit and lack.

This is the starting point, but what if the thought of being separate wasn't a mistake? Here's my theory: we're here to experience the underlying unity and limitlessness described above. Naturally, this won't happen overnight, but each of us has as many lifetimes as needed. But since we'll be doing this as people, each of us will have this experience from a different perspective. The effect will be that we will have multiplied infinity by itself, which in my opinion was the original plan.

Why You Should Learn Traditional Astrology

If you would like to learn astrology, I think that traditional astrology is the best place for you to start. This is because traditional astrology is a system built from basic concepts. It is therefore easier to learn because the ideas build upon each other.

The typical modern astrology book has lists of planet/sign and planet/house combinations. Few of these books give any indication of how the author derived the meanings of those combinations. Traditional astrology, on the other hand, gives you the tools to derive the meanings yourself.

Some of you may know that the Zodiac signs are based on the seasons, but how many of you knew that the sign rulerships are also based on the seasons? The two brightest objects in the sky, the Sun and the Moon, are given rulership of Leo and Cancer respectively, the parts of summer with the most daylight. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is assigned the two surrounding signs, Gemini and Virgo. Venus, the next closest planet, is assigned the next two signs, Taurus and Libra, and so on, until Saturn, the furthest of the visible planets from the Sun, gets the two signs of winter, Capricorn and Aquarius, with the least daylight.

Traditional astrology does not use the outer planets: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Because of this you may think that something is missing. How can traditional astrology function without the dynamic force of Uranus, the dissolving mist of Neptune, or the death-like transformation of Pluto? Traditional astrology has its own drama, orchestrated by the fixed stars and antiscia.

The fixed stars are just stars; they are called fixed to distinguish them from planets, which were also called wandering stars. These stars have been given names that don't really mean anything by modern astronomers, but their old names are quite colorful. Regulus, for example, was formerly known as the Heart of the Lion. Antares was formerly called the Heart of the Scorpion. There's even a medusa's head (Algol)! Some of these stars can have a  dramatic impact on a chart when prominently placed. For example, Regulus being close to the Midheaven in a chart can indicate fame and fortune for the native, but the fame may be of the fifteen-minutes variety and the fortune similarly short-lived.

Now let's talk about antiscia. An antiscion (antiscia plural) is a shadow point of a planet. If an antiscion of a planet falls within a degree of another planet, it can indicate a secret connection between the two. For example, if the antiscion of the First House ruler (which represents the person) is close to the Seventh House ruler (which represents the person's partners), that could indicate a tendency to have secret affairs.

But what if someone doesn't know what time they were born? You can still answer questions for them by using horary astrology. Horary astrology answers questions based on a chart of the time and place of the question. What kinds of questions can it answer? Well, England's
most famous astrologer, William Lilly, had a famous question about his stolen fish. He ordered a shipment of fish from a local warehouse and found out later that it had been stolen. Based only on an astrology chart, he was able to work out a description and location of the
thief, and caught the thief with some of the stolen goods.

Traditional astrology can tell us about more than individuals and their stuff. Mundane astrology tells us about cities, states and countries, using the same princples as natal and horary, but there are more charts to work with. Conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn
happen roughly every 20 years, and set the tone for the following 20 years. You can also cast a chart for the moment the Sun enters Aries each year, and charts for full moons, new moons and eclipses. Lilly used techniques like these to predict the Great Fire of London years before it happened.

If you'd like to learn more about traditional astrology, I'm working on a book about the subject. The book will be on leanpub.com, and I'll post a link later.

Traditional Astrology Course

I'm still working on my book on traditional astrology, but I'm taking a break to teach a four-week course on traditional astrology for beginners. The course will take place next month at a local New Age store in Michigan. I'll post after the course is done to let you know how it went.