The Future Isn't What It Used to Be
Read to the end for Pink Floyd and Clare Torry's sonic antidote to compliment your odyssey into Nowhersville.
WE’VE HAD CIVILISED CULTURES on the planet for thousands and thousands of years—with our ability to self-reflect, gather information, theorize, analyze, etc., and yet we still write about the future as if it’s something that can be predicted.
Doubly so if we’re astrologers. We can’t stop poking at and dicking around with the notion.
And so data is gathered, parsed, and cross-referenced to past events as if that cross-referencing will reveal something literal about how something will play out in the future—but it never does.
And yet we keep doing this. Why?
As I told an interviewer from Substack recently: Life or reality or whatever you want to call our consensus experience of the world is wiggly.
Reality balks when it’s corralled or cornered by predictions and will usually toss up the opposite of what’s expected. Heraclitus works well here: "The only constant is change.”
But even when we think we’re secure by abiding with uncertainty, life will quickly turn the tables on us. Or not.
And so, “The future” is just another term for unpredictability. And this makes people insane. Especially in a science-obsessed culture like ours that equates knowledge and information with the ability to classify, algorithmize and predict.
An astrologer might say: “But there are predictable cycles.”
And this is kinda true. But still, there’s always an x-factor.
Think how dreary life would be without the x-factor. This is why a place like Las Vegas is so wildly popular; it’s a location that’s a-buzz, 24-7, with the x-factor.
Astrology, as an art, is a wondrous mixture of the mystical with the linear. I think this is why some astrologers attempt to make astrology into a science—the mystical can be too off-putting for hardcore rationalists. But science is too limited to contain astrology. It’s like trying to fit the ocean into a Dixie cup.
Usually, at least initially, when we consider the mystical, we do so from a passive posture. And for this reason, a lot of people don’t gravitate to a contemplative life or one that relies heavily on the imagination to act as a homing device.
When you begin to sense, in your bones, the ineffable presence that permeates all of life, or True Nature, as some traditions call it, you’re humbled to the point of silence.
Those same spiritual traditions call this obliteration process “ego death,” and, as I’ve experienced that experience, it’s a fitting term. To soften it, I’ll echo Carl Jung: “There is no coming into consciousness without pain.”
More about obliteration: