This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
Today I posted two links, the first one posted by forecasting intelligence in the post before the parsifal post (the twilight of the gods)
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinbatcho/p/the-death-throes-of-globalism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1dcn5
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-purge-of-the-deep-state-and-the-440
About the second link, I will only add a brief comment, the writer should know (or maybe he forgot) the anacyclocis of Polybius, from what I can deduce, the USA is in the monarch phase or in the tyranny phase, basically the monarch or the tyrant has just been elected.
The example that I think is perhaps the best is to look at the last crisis of this magnitude that can be remembered, and that is with the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, basically they elected him 4 times and he is the closest to monarch/tyrant that the United States could have in those days.
Today? Remember that a monarch or tyrant must have some support from the population, how bad can it be? In Nazi Germany (Nazism is a German phenomenon, I doubt very much that it is exportable to other places) the man with the mustache had wide acceptance in the German people when the war began.
The only way for the current president to achieve broad control over the United States is for a good part of the country to accept him, and that will depend on the results he manages to deliver in the coming months or years.
The most worrying thing today is that in the West in general it seems that there are no more competent politicians, basically Trump is not a Franklin D. Roosevelt, an Andrew Jackson or an Abraham Lincoln; he is a character from some show… from MTV? A character from SharkTank? You only have to read Rocketboy (musk) on his social network X, I just hope that MTV style politics tone down a bit in the following months.
And I don’t want to insult anyone, but the degradation of our societies, I’m from Latin America, is very worrying (yes, the “MTV-style democracy” model was exported very well and Latin Americans are very good consumers), just by opening TikTok or any social network and it’s already worrying, they are literally the societies of the spectacle, the United States (as far as my knowledge can see) is a handful of cultures in a state of rigor mortis, it has an educational system at the level of Latin America (third world).
If the MAGA project has some success (in these times of desperation for many, sometimes I feel that they do not need to be a great success, not even a medium success), how many people will become supporters of the MAGA boys, sometimes I think that Trump sees himself as a Franklin D. Roosevelt 2.0
I think you mentioned about indigenous people story from the pacific northwest about a character who goes around and makes a lot of wrong things right. Could you name that story? Relates to Orange Julius. Thanks.
Dear John Michael, I was at a conference a couple of weekends ago where one speaker mentioned re-enchanting.
She said that a key aspect of re-enchanting your world is gratitude.
I know that you wrote some time back about re-enchantment. Would you be able to link please, to your favorite post on that? Thanks.
According to the model of catabolic collapse, federal workers are being converted from capital to waste as they are being laid off. The next step is for them to become resources. My question is a ternary one. What do you hope will be done with the resources? What do you expect, if different from what you hope, will be done with resources? What do you fear, if different from what you expect, will the resources be used for? Thank you.
Hi,
What is your opinion on the apparent Trump II plan to restructure US debt outlined in the podcast below and the related article here – https://www.beyondwasteland.net/p/the-death-throes-of-globalism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1dcn5&triedRedirect=true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyJxSBLoxOI
I have also discussed the wider macro outlook on my blog here. FI – https://forecastingintelligence.org/2025/02/16/a-new-world-disorder/
It’s amazing that this blog has been the best predictor of the future over the last fifteen years or so. We are in the middle of an elite transition featuring the overthrow of the professional managerial class by wealthy entrepreneurs, our government has become too large to maintain, and the United States is retracting from the world, just as you have been saying they would for years now based on standard civilizational cycles.
Furthermore, Europe is on track to rearming and reverting to the violent place it always has been, the environmental movement continues to be full of sound and fury signifying and accomplishing nothing, and the predicted woke backlash has seemingly arrived and it seems like we may swing too far in the other direction based on how enthusiastically people are using slurs on social media.
Simply spot on.
I’m having such a hard time making sense of anything going on anymore. Trump seems to be dismantling the American Empire and alienating US allies. I have no problem with this, but I’m baffled to see a US president helming such a project. Europe is not realizing it has been in its own century of humiliation and is willing to go down with the American ship. Meanwhile, Trump wants reparations from Ukraine in the form of stripping its mineral resources. Zelinsky seems happy to go along with this even though he’s about to get screwed with his pants on. Again, I have no complaint with the war ending. I just don’t understand why the Ukrainian president is thrilled to be handing over his resources to the guy who’s taking away his toys and is about to hand over his land to the Russians. Nothing makes sense. What is your take on all of this?
I am working on aligning my will with my destiny and at a point in my life where faith will and destiny seem to be swirling in a big chaotic soup. (Pisces sun btw).
Traditionally, I’ve been good at meditating, but having trouble getting back into it after a hiatus, and of course, now trying to discursive method, instead of the power-of-now-empty your thoughts method. I’ve been easing into the personal use of astrology, and magic, and this ability to focus the will seems to be of paramount importance, especially since I am a moderately disciplined person, but prone to Impulse control slips. Any practical tips on meditating, especially as it applies to music? I can tell you my own natal chart is well supported by Venus.
Hi JMG,
I’d like to ask about your personal process for developing a story or plot for your novels. Recently, I’ve read about Stephen King’s method, which is to try and “discover” the story during the process of writing it, after beginning with some premise. King believes that the spontaneity of true creation is not compatible with trying to outline an entire story from the get-go. Rather, he advises imagining some characters, putting them in a particular situation (the premise from which the original narrative begins), and then “discovering” the story as you go along in the process of writing it–sort of like having a conversation with the characters and let them tell you the story.
Honestly, I’ve never really tried that approach, have you? I’ve always feel the need to know the whole sweep of events in a reasonable amount of detail before beginning the process of narrating them. However, I’ve also struggled with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the outcome of my usual “plot outline first” method. My writings have often felt dull and uninspired when going this route. Maybe I’ve missed the treasures of the subconscious mind, which can come out in a more spontaneous approach? My hesitation in beginning with the King method is a fear that I will ultimately end up with something incoherent, as I am not sure if I trust the subconscious to craft a coherent story outside of my conscious direction. I mean, my subconscious comes up with “stories” when I’m dreaming at night, but I wouldn’t call them coherent, or something that one would want to read in novel form.
Thanks!
>federal workers are being converted from capital to waste as they are being laid off. The next step is for them to become resources
Pardon me while I laugh. Elon expressed a similar thought – that only if we could drop kick them out the door, they’ll magically become more productive in the private sector. No, they can’t. No, they won’t. For the most part.
And if they could when Trump offered them voluntary severance, those were the ones that can and did. While getting out while the getting is good. You should never offer your underlings that. You’ll lose all your good people that way. Everyone left isn’t saying they’re on board (like Trump thinks), they’re saying this is as good as I can get and everything else is worse.
But it will be interesting to figure out what a feckless and gormless govviecrat does when she is eventually dropkicked out the door. Do they put on catgirl costumes and post TikToks all day long? Do they stream woke games on Twitch? Who knows?
I just finished the Oliver Huckel’s rendition of Parsifal last night, which is a recasting of the opera into blank verse (but surprisingly readable blank verse — I’ve always found blank verse miserable to read so I was surprised when I actually quite enjoyed reading this).
One thing that caught my attention is that the situation of the kingdom at the start of Act III: completely at peace, and completely miserable. As Gurnemanz says to Kundry,
For days of saddest peace have come to us,
And deeds of valiant arms no more are done.
A dark despair is over Monsalvat;
No messengers are sent to distant parts
To stir the hearts of fighting warriors;
Like every creature of the leafy woods,
Each man doth serve himself in daily needs.
In other words, the problem in Parsifal is the opposite of the problem in the traditional Grail legends: instead of a wasting and fruitless land, everything’s just… kind of OK. Life has been rendered meaningless through lack of strife. This is certainly a concern I and many other modern people resonate with: the old Piscean/Axial promises of a perpetual blessedness without its opposite has come to seem hollow, like a terrible way to spend an eternity.
I’m reminded of a novel from 1995: Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity, in which evil has been quite literally banished from the world by sealing the gates through which it entered, and an oppressive peace and blandness is threatening to literally destroy it. The story is otherwise quite different from Parsifal, but both involve a heroic Black Knight.
In Parsifal, that black knight is Parsifal himself, come carrying the Spear — which as you laid out in last week’s post is mythologically the weapon of winter to strike down the hero of summer. Parsifal uses the Spear to save Amfortas — but also to depose him and take his throne. Then with Grail and Spear both in his possession he seemingly transcends the summer/winter dichotomy.
(Though the death of Kundry is a harrowing feature of the tale since at least in Huckel’s version she is said to represent human nature. That her redemption requires her death is not a nice thought!)
So that seems to be the spiritual meaning of the third act, at least. I see why Huckel in his introduction felt the need to address the criticism that the moral of the opera is Buddhistic rather than Christian. I’m looking forward to seeing your take on how the opera ties into the Ring Cycle and gives its political themes a new resolution.
Greetings to the Grandmaster of DOOM!
At the Council of Wizards, Sir Malcom & you touched on Tolkien’s negative influence on the wider culture a la the eucatastrophe & related myths, which have rendered Faustian Man impotent:
He doesn’t have the will to survive & (as Sir Malcom noted) lies catatonic in bed, unable to chew his food…
Yet he is asked to ‘fight to the finish no matter what!’ because as the ‘good guy’, he will eventually overcome all obstacles & defeat The Giant Borg of Evil Subhumans & Untermensh, since he stands apart.
What mythologies, stories & meta-narratives do you foresee displacing this Tolkien meta-narrative?
Granted, several centuries from now, of the few hundred million people left on the planet, the few million descendants of Westerners today will be mixed race, far more brown & black-skinned than today… but at least some of them will argue continuity with the West of today. For these people specifically, what do you foresee?
Will they adopt more fatalistic/’ destiny-centric views of the world? Or will they still try to do this thing where ‘History is something man goes out there & MAKES!’
Thank You Again, & looking forward to reconvening the Council for Part-2 sometime soon!
~Ahnaf
>Trump seems to be dismantling the American Empire and alienating US allies
That empire will get dismantled with or without him. In some ways, they’re in a desperate race to throw as much ballast overboard before the balloon hits the ground. They don’t really want to publicize this, might spook the herd into doing things. But it’s a choice between hit the ground and have everything in the basket splatter all over the place (the Harris option) or start throwing things over the side and have them splatter while possibly saving the basket (the Trump option). I’m in favor of doing something over nothing. Might not matter but I’d rather see them at least try.
They don’t have time to do this the nice way, and at this point all the choices they have are bad. Glad it’s not my job.
On a different topic, does anyone know of any downsides to Transcendental Meditation, besides the official organization being cultish? I’ve seen it said that the app One Big Mind is the same technique without the baggage of the TM organization, and I’ve done a few of their introductory lessons, but I wanted to know if there are any known issues with the method itself before I get too deep or recommend it to others.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday with Tom Luongo ( Libertarian, gold guy) who predicted that Trumps administration would bring in the largest geopolitical shift since Genghis Khan. He also predicted that Trump, Putin and Xi would meet in Russia on May 9 ( Victory day in Russia) and essentially carve up the world in to spheres of influence like a modern Yalta.
I am not sure if I would go that far, but I think the huge big picture changes Trump’s team is bringing in will come close to those that happened at the end of WWII.
Accelerationist thought is making the rounds again. Here I offer instead, “A Slow and Steady Guide to Decelerationism”:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/a-slow-and-steady-guide-to-decelerationism
Davie,
Gratitude is great, but there’s some history to why someone might be giving it so central a place in discussion of anything spiritual: it’s a key technique of The Secret, especially in the follow-up books, The Power and The Magic. (Like The Secret itself, she got the idea from the New Thought tradition, especially Wallace Wattles.)
So if someone is saying gratitude is the key to [big spiritual topic], I’d be very suspicious that that person gets their ideas about spirituality from Rhonda Byrne.
Rather, I’d say the key to re-enchant is to simply approach the world as a place of actual magic and wonder: in particular that properties we usually think of as purely mental are present in all things: desire, intention, aversion, etc. If you look back at the ancient and medieval conception of the world (C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image is helpful for getting a sense of that conception), instead of matter behaving the way it does because it blindly follows “laws,” what if it behaves the way it does because it wants to? That is, perhaps something analogous to hunger or desire drives the behavior of even rocks and mountains.
As Thomist philosopher Edward Feser has put it: materialism swept all immaterial aspects of reality under the rug of “the mind” — as just subjective appearances — and now is frustrated that it can’t sweep the rug under itself and make the mind go away. The re-enchantment of the world is just putting those aspects back in their proper places in our understanding of things.
A few days agp, it occurred to me that the global decline of fertility is probably caused by a shortage of souls suitable to be incarnated into human bodies.
You and other occultists say that the time between incarnations has grown shorter, and that is probably leading to rises in mental illnesses and gender dysphoria. I suspect such a state of affairs is not sustainable anymore than getting insufficient sleep over a prolonged period is. At some point, souls need to be out of incarnation for a longer period to heal themselves. Souls that had not been incarnated in humans before the population boom might be even more suspectable to this exhaustion.
In the physical pkane, this shortage would probably manifest as drops in fertility and/or rises in miscarriages (the latter might be when an individuality cannot maintain its connection to the body of the fetus).
Does this seem plausiable to you?
I’ve got a few offers/requests for the community today:
1. I’m offering a Modern Order of Essenes course (online, and for free). We’ve started a bit more than a week ago, but joining later is no problem at all.
The course is suitable both for complete newbies and for people who have done MOE work before. If you’re interested, here is the link to the first post: https://thehiddenthings.com/moe-course-intro-and-unit-1
2. A heads up for MOE practitioners: I’m going to offer a Healer attunement on Sunday, March 30th. More details soon (to be announced on my site and on Magic Monday). I just wanted to put this out there so you can prepare.
3. I’m also going to perform a formal blessing again next Wednesday, as always, and would appreciate signups as they help me to practice. Thanks! https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
4. And finally, in case anybody is interested, I’ve started posting an essay series about “self improvement” (inner work) from an Hermetic angle, using the Hermetic view of the planets, and would love to get some feedback on it. The first post is here: https://thehiddenthings.com/viewing-yourself-through-a-different-lens
JMG, thanks a lot for hosting an Open Post again.. I’m very much looking forward to this months topics! 🙂
Milkyway
Zarcayce, it bears repeating that Western industrial civilization is in headlong decline, and the US is not exempt from that; political dysfunction, and the transformation of politicians from statesmen to charismatic warlords, are both part of that. It amuses me, though, that Roosevelt’s critics in 1933 denounced him in very nearly the same terms that Trump’s critics use now; Roosevelt’s posthumous reputation, that is, differs very sharply from how he was perceived at the time. (His radio “fireside chats,” to cite only one example, got roughly the same reaction as Trump’s tweets.)
Bradley, it’s the story of the Changer or Transformer. See if you can find a copy of Mythology of Southern Puget Sound by Arthur Ballard; the story of Moon, included there in several variants, is a good example of the type.
Davie, that’s a complex issue, because I see our current state as one of enchantment — a malign enchantment, that leads people to miss the genuine magic and wonder that’s actually all around us all the time. You might consider this post of mine:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-mask-of-disenchantment/
And also these:
https://www.ecosophia.net/science-as-enchantment/
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-thaumatophobia-part-one-a-door-into-springtime/
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-thaumatophobia-2-the-night-forest/
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-thaumatophobia-3-the-end-of-the-age-of-reason/
Neon, I don’t find hope or fear relevant to this situation. In terms of my expectations, there’s no single or simple answer. Some of them will become resources only to the sellers of drugs and alcohol, and then only until the money runs out. Some will become resources only to the extent that they purchase the means of suicide. Some of them will become resources to promoters of fringe political movements and cults. Some, the more ruthless ones, will transition into a slightly more direct form of organized crime. Some, the more resilient ones, will join the labor force and find something they can do to support themselves. Some, the ones who figured out what was going to happen in advance, will leave the country before they lose the gains they’ve squirreled away in the Cayman Islands, and will be resources for landlords and restauranteurs in Uruguay or wherever. The situation now unfolding is like the collapse of the Communist Party in the formerly Soviet former Union, and the same sort of sudden unraveling of a giant bureaucracy will leave similar confusion in its wake.
Forecasting, the article strikes me as overblown — like so much else these days, it tries to impose an overall plan on what is actually flailing improvisation — but your summary is considerably better, no surprises there. You’re quite correct that Europe is no longer relevant to US geopolitics: as we leave our era of empire, a nonaligned international stance like India’s, the same sort of thing we did in the 19th century, is far and away the wisest approach for the US. I didn’t watch the video, of course, but debt restructuring becomes a good deal easier when a nation no longer has a budget deficit, and ending US imperial entanglements and the massive fraud that inflates the budget these days will accomplish that. Once that’s in place, expect at least a technical default on US foreign debt, comparable to the one that cleared the books for Russia in 1998. And Europe? Stick a fork in it, it’s done. I expect the Islamic Republic of Britain to be proclaimed by 2050 or so.
Dennis, thank you. As the rubble stops bouncing, I’ll be talking about the next round of changes ahead. Stay tuned!
Michael, it’s quite simple. The US empire is ending one way or another, and fortunately the faction of our elite now in power has decided to be proactive about that and leave the empire business deliberately, as Britain did after the Second World War — this is one of the few ways to get out of empire without facing total collapse. Leaving our overseas allies/client states in the lurch is part of that. As for Zelensky, he’s clearly getting ready to bail out of Ukraine before everything falls apart around him; his payoff for signing over the mineral resources is probably a promise that he’s not going to get taken out by a US-paid assassin. It’s a rough world out there!
Cort, don’t rush it, and don’t stress out about it. Everything’s at sixes and sevens in many people’s lives just now, so it’s not just you! Do what you can and don’t beat yourself up when you can’t.
Balowulf, I’m far from a fan of King, but his process is the same as mine; all my fiction, and much of my nonfiction, is written the way he describes. I normally start with a situation and a vague idea of where it’s going, but the story evolves as I write, and quite often I’m astonished with where it ends up. As for incoherence, that’s what editing is for! Write your first draft without worrying about coherence, then set it aside for a few weeks and work on other things. That way you can go back to the first draft with a clear mind, see what needs to be added or reworked to make it coherent.
Slithy, hmm! I’ll have to have a look at that.
Ahnaf, that’s not ours to decide! Our narratives are all unraveling in what Vico called the barbarism of reflection, and that unraveling will continue until the decline bottoms out centuries from now and the age of memory gives way to a new age of faith. At that time, whatever faiths seize the hearts and imaginations of the scattered communities of the deindustrial world, and whatever stories inspire them, will become the basis of new narratives that we can’t even imagine.
Slithy, TM is simply basic mantra meditation. You can find many guides to it in many sources. It’s a fairly safe system, all thigns considered, as long as you don’t use it to run away from thinking.
Clay, that’s a fair analogy. The Second World War ushered in the age of American empire, and the current crisis is ushering in its end.
Justin, thanks for this! I wouldn’t mind Zelaznian accelerationism, except that our Deicrats are so boring and Mahasamatman is nowhere to be found.
Part of why I enjoy JMG’s writings so much is his really big picture perspective on what’s happening which very much helps me stay in agency rather than fear as all of these big changes are happening. Along those lines I recently came across Joshua Stylman’s substack and a piece entitled The Pattern Beneath. https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-pattern-beneath
From the piece:
“But it goes deeper. In what reads like a Michael Crichton plot come to life, the recent USAID revelations show a staggering reach of narrative control. Take Internews Network, a USAID-financed NGO that has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive network, ‘working with’ 4,291 media outlets. In just one year, they produced 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and ‘trained’ over 9,000 journalists. This isn’t just funding – it’s a systematic infrastructure of consciousness manipulation.”
Yikes! Consciousness manipulation. And it feels true to me. And then I consider JMG’s definition of magic: Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will.
Further on, Stylman encourages the reader to learn to track an event’s place in the bigger pattern of consciousness manipulation. Stylman goes into even more detail in his pattern recognition frame:
https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-pattern-recognition-era-a-manifesto
Has anyone here read his work? Thoughts?
I’m afraid I don’t know much about the Zelaznian version… I need to retry Zelazny. I read the first one or two of the Chronicles of Amber and didn’t get further. I never read his book about the Buddha either. I’m not sure why it didn’t click at the time, as I love a good “multiple worlds” story.
An earlier comment mentioned CATABOLIC COLLAPSE, and this is another. A couple weeks ago I listened again to Michael Dowd’s recording of Wealth of Nature (I am Dowd’s widow). Nobody in the new USA federal administration, of course, understands the absolute limits and importance of “primary wealth/economy” (ecology), but darned if they aren’t acting in a way that I, amazingly, ended up voting for and will soon be offering a proposal in a DOGE-like way. This will be in the realm of “endangered species”, which I am exceedingly controversial in: A citizen group I founded 20 years ago, Torreya Guardians, has been using an “exception” in the 1973 Endangered Species Act that applies just to plants to, against the official policy, begin the “assisted migration” far northward of a glacial relict ancient species of conifer that had been unable to float back north up the Chattahoochee River that had likely carried its large seed south when glaciers covered my homestate of Michigan. One of our volunteers (we are a loose network, not an NGO) achieved seed production in Cleveland OH in 2018 — and that really pissed off the officials. Long story short, in 2023 the federal regulation pertaining to “experimental populations” of endangered species was changed to remove the geographical constraint of “historical range”. So we will begin promoting sites of existing citizen-led “experiments” to be regarded as official. And unlike the official institutions, we cost the taxpayers nothing!
As to how CATABOLIC COLLAPSE applies to this: Just take a look at the new section called “Challenges and Controversies” that I spent 18 months researching and adding to the wikipedia page “Endangered Species Act of 1973.” You will be knocked off your chair about how complex and crazy implementation has become: trying to “solve” one problem results in more problems, and nobody can afford adequate funding anymore as a result. And with things getting so polarized, there have been no real substantive amendments to the act since 1988, and you know what that means: There is no way to value what can be learned from the mistakes because there is no way to make any adaptations.
Bottom line: If this piques your interest, see my proposal here: https://www.torreyaguardians.org/comments.html#doge There you will see a link to a video titled “DOGE for Endangered Plants: Cut costs, get results, follow our lead.” I know you cannot tolerate including videos in your research style, but just skim the time-coded table of topics in the caption. And then look at the 2 webpages I reworked into supporting experimental population designations for 2 citizen plantings, because right near the top I give lists of the significance of each: Shoal Sanctuary FL is here: https://www.torreyaguardians.org/liming.html Caroline Dormon Preserve in Louisiana is here: https://www.torreyaguardians.org/louisiana.html I know I can’t use catabolic collapse in my appeal to the new director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Trump administration, but I think more resistance will come from ardent conservationists who just want to keep on keepin’ on with complexity and trying to force conservation through the courts — which has actually produced adverse results over the years in terms of breeding immense opposition to the whole concept of endangered species. Hence Trump’s announcement that he plans to regularly convene the cabinet-level “God Squad” to just get past all the pile-up of documents and decisions that developers and various federal agencies in charge of a vast range of permits have to wade through if an endangered species might experience “jeopardy”. Any thoughts you have will be welcome. Oh, and know that I am only recommending this unleashing of citizen effort for plants; I have no idea of how complexity could be reduced for listed animal species.
@Zarcayce #1,
You wrote “Nazism is a German phenomenon, I doubt very much that it is exportable to other places”. Why do you think that’s the case?
Milkyway
Hi John,
Thanks for the compliment! The only reason I feel like I have a decent grasp on what is happening is mainly because of your writings. Otherwise I would be pretty lost out there! Thank you again!
I’ve looked carefully at the internal Muslim demographics, and if this is an internal thing, e.g. a rising internal Muslim population that grows over the decades to come this century, I don’t see a Sharia UK until two generations from now (e.g. the 2070s/2080s).
Sure, by around 2050, you will see a lot of Muslim youth becoming young adults in places like Birmingham, London and so on (and of course in other western European cities) but we the majority of the population, certainly over 30, would be non-Islamic. For an Islamic Britain to emerge in 25 years time or so, we would need a seriously large mass invasion from the Global South into western Europe.
Either way, I’ve done my research and Barbados looks like the best place to for me to start planning my exit strategy in the years to come.
I found myself contemplating the legacy of Barack Obama yesterday. He campaigned on the promise to bring change and hope to the American people, and the administration that followed, well, you can debate the exact effectiveness of the specific policies passed, but overall I think most would agree it left many Americans wanting, and more than a little disappointed, especially relative to the promises made, and particularly among the working class. This, to my understanding, helped to enable the election of Donald Trump, who is now changing America to a degree we haven’t seen in over a lifetime. Some of this is stuff Obama had promised himself during his first campaign (government downsizing, etc)
So, in a way, Obama did just as he promised. He brought change (and hope!) to America, but it took the form of a backlash to his administration. Definitely not what he or anyone supporting him expected during that first campaign.
This outcome gives me a distinctly magical feeling.
Is this perhaps a magical effect of that energy many of his supporters felt during his first campaign? Or was the Changer influencing things even back then? Curious to know if I might be on to something here or if there are other factors I haven’t taken into account. What do you think?
I am working my way through a curiculum meant to cover how to do the math required for my electrical engineering schooling by hand, and as I am working through it I am starting to get very worried about the future of the mathematical arts. To put it simply, I’m getting very concerned that a huge amount of practical mathematics of the sore that can make people’s lives better is going to be lost in the next round of dark ages. There is an enormous amount which can be done using relatively simple mathematics of the sort that can be done using a pen and paper that has immense value: working out whether a bridge will stay up, determining how thick a dam needs to be to stay up, determing how large an area a dam will flood, determining if a given electrical system will overload; and I could go on.
While the mathematics involved in all of these is simple enough to do with pen and paper, a huge amount of how to solve these problems by pen and paper is not obvious unless it is taught, and I think there is a huge bottleneck ahead that will unfold from that. Simply put, the way that mathematics is taught has been completely changed by the existence of affordable calculators, in such a way that when calculators vanish, a very large number of people will not know how to do complicated mathematics because they will not know what the steps are to do things by hand. Further, it is already getting hard to find the resources needed to learn some of these: it took me quite a while to track down good resources on how people did trigonometry before calculators, and this is only one field I need to learn.
The second issue I see is that using calculators seems to stunt growth in mathematical skills. I asked about this a little bit on Magic Monday, but it also creates a massive practical problem: I had to start from the basics that most people fifty years ago took for granted: addition, subtraction, multiplication. I had a very weak sense of numbers, and the process has been challenging to put it mildly. I have made immense progress, but I am no where close to being able to do my course work without calculators, even given much longer for the calculations. There are just too many steps I would not know where to begin.
Putting these together, I think that cheap calculators have made solving complicated math problems easier, but at the cost of destroying the mathematical skills and intuition needed to function without them. Since it seems likely to me that every effort is going to be made to ensure that engineers and technicians who need to solve mathematical problems will continue to have calculators until the last one burns out, I think is a very high chance it will be generations before we have to grapple with the problems of how we can do practical mathematics without calculators, by which time I fear that the collective memory will no longer include the knowledge needed in order to revive the skills required to do mathematics by hand.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/02/11/exclusive-sen-mike-lee-constitution-empowers-congress-to-tap-american-pirates-to-fight-cartels/
The era of the warring warlords has arrived…on the *US* side of the United States-Mexican border!
Congressman wants to issue “letters of marque” to “pirates” in order to fight drug cartels?!
@The Other Owen, @Neon Vincent
I know exactly what’s going to happen to those people because it happened to a member of my extended family. He was a middle manager in a telecom company that went under in the Tech Crash of 2000. He searched for another management job for, I think, two years without success. He ended up reinventing himself as a handyman at a considerably reduced income. These laid-off Federal workers, if they don’t retire early and can’t get themselves declared disabled, are going to be falling into the blue collar class where they will be competing with Trump’s base.
Mr. Greer,
A couple of questions: 1.) What to make of recent revelations of your.. uhh, ‘esteemed’ state senator Seldon Whitehouse’s purported influence/graft with regard to his wife’s ‘exploits.
2.) Any thoughts on Dan Crenshaw’s vapid death threat towards Tucker Carlson.
BTW, JMG, I had a thought about the side note I posted on my D&D comment on last week’s post. I think a proper inversion of the D&D sun-treasure myth would be a campaign of dungeon-dwelling monsters emerging to steal gold and other treasure from the surface-dwellers, then return to the depth and store it in their hoard.
As the PMs (Player Monsters, of course!) amass ever greater hoards and go up in level, they then have to move their lairs deeper into the underworld to avoid being easy prey for the surface-dwellers who want the treasure back. But this will entail fighting with other dungeon-dwellers for room, initiating the monster version of domain play.
There have been various attempts to invert the normal D&D campaign by having players play as the monsters, but most have fallen somewhat flat either by focusing entirely on defending against intruding heroes, by having the players play the “good” monsters fighting some even worse “bad” monsters, or just being played for comedy (the game Kobolds Ate My Baby! is an example of this last option). By explicitly structuring it around the summer/winter myth, perhaps the inversion could be taken a bit, err, deeper.
Yesterday the local county Historical Society Museum abruptly shut down due to a lack of money. I had not viewed it since I was a teenager and it was located in an old building on the county fairgrounds and staffed on weekends by volunteers.
In the last 8 years or so it had moved to a dedicated building on the local community college campus and renamed itself from the Washington County Historical Society to the ” 5 oaks museum” to distance itself from the ” colonial past” . It of course grew to having a half million dollar budget with several paid staffers to curate its exhibitions of Latinx artists, Native Hawaiian stories ?? and its main exhibit on the indigenous people who once lived here.
I am guessing this cut off the support from old time county groups like lodges, chambers etc. But no worries I am sure they were able to cash in to the endless flow of money coming down from USAID ( just guessing) to fund their operation.
But that worked until it didn’t and 2 days ago they announced the major grant ( not specified) that they were counting on did not come through ( my guess relating to Doges work) and they had no financial buffer. The collection will revert to the ownership of county government.
I am guessing this sort of thing is happening all over the country as the Astro Turf Equity movement is having its funding dry up.
I am talking with some county old timers I know to see if we can find a place to set up the useful historical artifacts to be exhibited by volunteers. After all ,we will need all the wisdom we can get from the pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail to get here as we slide down the slope of catabolic collapse.
Hello JMG!
I‘ve been a silent lurker for a year or two now and, as a (East-) German particularly enjoy your Wagner series.
The Open Post comes at an opportune time and I‘d like to use it to ask for your take where you think a European that is looking for greener pastures should look for such.
The way that most people in my home country dealt with Covid and the lockdowns shocked me at the time and opened my eyes, I‘m afraid, to the fact that whatever made the World Wars possible, is still alive and well in the German unconscious.
The 20% or of the Germans that resisted the immense pressure of being marginalized and ostracized deserve respect, but unfortunately it was not enough to sway the majority, of which many gleefully snitched on their neighbors and proudly displayed their badges of Vorauseilender Gehorsam (preemptive obedience), while the majority just ducked and went along with more and more absurd demands as long as they were promised stability.
I understand now what made Europeans seek a new beginning in America in previous centuries and I am mulling similar moves.
However every time I have visited the US, it quickly becomes apparent that in my essence I am a European.
The Tamanous culture that you have described does strike me as alien. I often felt a sense fragmentation of the social fabric in the US. The sense of not interfering in other people‘s personal affairs and ways of life speaks to me, but I also see in people in the US a fear of deeper relationships – as though being too social could turn one into a dreaded socialist.
The grid cities and the car-based lifestyle only amplifies this.
At the same time, while my socialist upbringing has endowed me with strong sense of camaraderie, when I head further east, I feel a repressive sense of group-think and „the nail that sticks out gets hammered down first“.
Is this the dark side of the Sobornost culture?
It seems that towards the Russian world, anything beyond survival and cold, hard rationality is seen as foolishly sentimental asking for disappointment at best.
With your outlook on the next decades, how would you say the uprooted Europeans would best go about finding new fertile soil?
JMG wrote…
And Europe? Stick a fork in it, it’s done. I expect the Islamic Republic of Britain to be proclaimed by 2050 or so.
Wondering if you could please expand on this comment a bit (though I’m aware expanding on this comment might take a book or two or three!)
Wondering if you briefly explain what you mean by Europe being done.
And were you being serious about the Islamic Republic of Britain?
And if so, what other countries in W Europe do you see becoming Islamic?
Thank you,
Edward
@MichaelinTaiwan #7. Sometimes what is good for the empire is not necessarily good for the citizens of the empire. Rome bringing in a lot of slaves didn’t help Roman free laborers very much, and they had to subsidize the lives of the poor. At some point, the Romans realized that they couldn’t hold on to Britain since it was just too damn expensive and the natives were a lot of trouble. Since the new administration seems to be focusing on appeasing the working middle class voters, they are careful to notice trends such low military recruitment, the resentment of immigration, or the dislike of foreign meddling. While I don’t think that the new administration is thinking in terms of gradually drawing down the empire, the results are the same, and a fair number of the policies are proving to be popular. Time will tell if the shakeup allows for a “soft landing” much like the British empire endured.
John,
Do you think that the states that entheogens/psychedelics produce are purely physical/natural or is there a spiritual component to them? Can these substances be helpful if used properly, or should they be shunned altogether?
@Slithy
I’ve been practicing TM for eight years. No obvious ill effects that I have been able to detect and a great many positive impacts on a daily life that has to deal with the usual stresses. But…I found the regular attempts to upsell expensive additions rather off putting. The resources needed to become a teacher of the technique in terms of time and money seemed excessive to me and have probably slowed down the wider spread of what seems like a useful adjunct to daily life. Other routes to have now started to appear in the UK in the form of trusts and charities.
It is probably worth noting that a regular meditation practice is not for everyone and some mental problems can be made worse. I would have thought that being able to distinguish between people who might benefit vs those that might be harmed would be a key task for a teacher.
Regarding the long decent, I am curious what people here think of the current insurance situation in California. I was talking with family out there about how their insurance options have changed and rates for individuals doubling with many being forced to go to CA plan of last resort. Very quickly people will be priced out of the insurance market. There is very little way that prices can be passed on to most people with already strained budgets. With healthcare that results in many people uninsured aka ‘self-insured’ (an well they may be better off that way). But with property insurance in most cases people are legally or contractually required to have it. If the business can no longer afford their commercial location even if they have a long term lease then it cascades down and may be what causes the property bubble to pop. Either way though the higher insurance rates are just one sign of the real maintenance costs that our economy may not (will not) be able to support going forward. It seems like there should be a way to address real insurance risk and maybe a functioning political system would be able to figure it out but I ran out of hopium on that a while ago. This seems to be to be a structural economic issue so not really something individuals will be able to address directly.
I am aware that many mistakes have been made that resulted in this current mess so hopefully we don’t get too far off topic on the cause here. I am really curious what people think the path forward might look like. Thanks!
Bill in Va
@balowulf: Robert Heinlein had a similar idea that he called “writing into the dark” you just followed the lead of your characters, etc. According to Heinlein’s Rules though, you don’t revise, but send it off, and only edit to editors decree. I haven’t found that has worked with me, because my first draft is usually just a kind of rough sketch, and that each draft is iterative and the seeds of ideas accumulate until its finished. I get images and flashes and ideas , leads that I work in as I go, for fiction and non-fiction.
@JMG: I got a copy of “Lords of Light” coming to me. Having read a bit just now on Zelaznian accelerationism I can see what you mean. Many other SF heads have recommended it to me, so its about time I read it… there might be a follow up article to what I just wrote in there maybe.
@Slithy Toves #14 I did TM seriously for about 5 years decades ago. I even lived in the campus center – a converted fraternity house- with a number of room mates. So I got a look at the inside of the organization. Some points. In a book I read then, published back in the sixties and probably no longer available, Maharishi Mahesh explicitly states the various mantras are actually invocations of deities that will assist you on your path to enlightenment. The book was stashed in a file cabinet in the center office that I found one night after hours poking around. I am sure this bit of information has been thoroughly repressed and the present gneration of TM leaders aren’t aware of it. The puja you participate in during the granting of your mantra is explicitly hindu and religious in nature, the words are nor translated for you. You make an offering as part of it. So deception as TM being a purely secular technigue is present. I became a Christian during this period and this information was contradicted by my faith so I ceased TM with no loss.
One of my roomates was a young man who had a mental breakdown with permanent effects during an extended meditation retreat. I heard through the grapevine of cases of this happening to others.
Taking up any form of serious meditaion is an intervention and change in your life and interventions and change may had unforeseen effects. A good book discusing the in and outs and ups and downs of meditation, including TM is this one https://www.catherinewikholm.com/the-buddha-pill
It’s time for another renewable energy report for January.
For Wind, well, there wasn’t much. The minimum was again zero on Jan 28th. The maximum was on the 10th at 65.4% of nameplate. The average for the month was 11.25%.
For solar the longer days and a streak of clear weather helped a lot. The worst day was 2.8% of nameplate on New Year’s day. The best day was the 29th at 33.6% of nameplate, and the average was 17.3% for the month. Note those are 24 hour averages, so during the day there was power to be had. The 29th had 85% capacity factor during the day although there is an irregularity in the data, as in 150 MW of output from 138 MW of installed capacity. But they could have expanded a PV farm and the BPA neglected to update the capacity data so I’ll count it because I can’t prove it wrong.
For the dunkelflaute count the longest was just over 20 hours. Average power demand over this time was 7907 MW which works out to 158,812 MW-hrs of battery capaacity needed or 40,721 Tesla Max power batteries weighing as much as 17.1 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers. Not as bad as it could be, but January was warmer than usual. The cold snap came in February. That caused a surge to about 11,000 MW of demand.
Averaged over Samhain to Imbolc (the real winter here) the average capacity factor for windpower was 17.7%, for solar it was 32.9% during the day and 12.1% over a 24 hour period, and 932 hours of dunkelflaute which is 42% of the the three months. The average power demand over those three months was 7453 MW, Maximum was 10,543 MW, minimum as 5,244 MW.
The nuclear plant ran at 1135 MW on average with a 67 MW standard deviation.
In other energy news, the local utility is running a new powerline from Wanapum dam to Quincy specifically to power data centers. I forgot where I saw it, but the EIA (I think) forecasts that the world will be adding one Japan of new generating power for each of the next four years, mostly not for data centers, but just to electrify the third world economies.
And this, “Domestic gas production is rising at the same time U.S. power generators continue to add more natural gas-fired capacity. Colorado-based analytics firm Yes Energy said recently that more than 200 gas-fired units were in various stages of development across the U.S., with potential to add about 86 GW of electricity output by 2032. EIA has said it expects at least 7.7 GW of new gas-fired capacity to come online this year and next, after about 8.6 GW of capacity was added last year, and 5.6 GW of new generation was brought online in 2022.”
https://www.powermag.com/hundreds-of-new-gas-fired-power-units-planned-as-u-s-gas-output-soars/
To those who prayed on Jennifer’s behalf through her recent childbirth, many thanks. It all went well, and Jennifer is now resting at home with her new healthy baby girl.
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At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture, update)
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who has been in the hospital since 1/20 with almost complete liver failure and 20% kidney function, have found the strength to survive and thrive when he recently came off of his respirator, and may he be blessed with robust healing that allows him to regenerate his failing organs to the fullest extent that the universe allows; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
The S.S. United States is, as I write this, off the coast of Florida being towed to its final resting place. There are photos of the old liner under tow, and there’s something haunting about it. She’s rusted, faded, and completely hollowed out, but still floating proud and dominating the seas around her. Very much like the actual United States.
I can’t help but think that the ultimate fate of this ship is somehow an omen. The fact that she’s going to be sunk to create an artificial reef (the world’s biggest) rather than scrapped…. it seems like, not a good omen, but not the worst omen. If the fate of the nation is echoed somehow in the fate of the ship, scrapping in a foreign port sounds much worse than settling gently to the bottom in ones own national waters. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into this– but this is both the flagship and namesake of the USA, and there has been a huge outpouring of attention to the old girl outside of the “people who nerd out on old ships” part of the internet I was expecting to be the only ones to care.
Does anyone else feel that there’s something symbolic, perhaps archetypal in this ship? Is it reasonable to look at her demise as an augary for the USA? (I for one will be watching her scuttling closely– if she settles on an even keel, as planned, I will take it as a good sign for the nation’s decline. If she capsizes… oof.)
Worth a read (sorry, no can do the linky thing) Maple Maidan by Postcards from Barsoom. Up until the Covid police state time and being a Unclean 2nd class wakeup call I was a fairly proud Canadian. But after reading this possible roadmap to Balkanization and some difficult reflection I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a viable solution. This country is hopelessly brainwashed. No strong Caesars. No Doge to clean out Ottawa and boot out about 4 million folk who should never been allowed in. No chance for our young to have the chances I had- and did. Heck, barely high school level but raised 4 on a single income.
So yeah, I know you guys are a dysfunctional decaying empire that might, just might become a normal functioning nation again. But if the western provinces broke away either by the above mentioned post or a stand-alone nation( doubtful- too brainwashed) there is a chance my grandchildren could have some hope for a decent life.
I wanted to again touch on the subject of the coming population decline. I’m looking at “decline” industries or businesses that people may fall into as the “standard” economy begins to sputter. Nursing and old age health care would of course prove lucrative. I myself am going to consider a side gig cutting firewood (partly to lose weight without GLP-1 medicine!). Firewood never really goes bad and a lot of folks have or will want wood heat as a backup. Also, I understand that the world trade is used goods is huge, especially goods consumed in the first world, then refurbished and resold in the third world. Less people = less need for stuff. Overproduced, surplus or used items may have great value in the future. As a musician, vintage musical instruments are thought of with reverence and the skills to repair them are in high demand. Would be interesting to see the world start to live off of the “resources” that the previous generations have produced.
On another note. A friend who I haven’t seen in 20 years (physically) except for on social media reached out to me and said they had a dream about meeting me. I had also had a dream about meeting this person recently. Coincidence? Just a natural outcome of chatting with someone online? Or something more meaningful? Any thoughts are appreciated.
@Ecosophia
I have some more info on China. Recently a Chinese hacker group broke into some city government servers and stole over 1 billion records. A large number of records included the name, date of birth, work history, credit scores, phone numbers, etc. The usual stuff. They then posted to the dark web the stolen records were for sale. To show they weren’t lying they posted 750K of the records openly and people all over China checked and found the info was legit.
But that’s just the context for what I’m about to relay next. The big surprise was assorted birth and death records usually available only to to top-tier CCP officials. This (hacked) classified info shows China has only 790 million people. The equally big surprise is that the CCP has been lying to the world and to its own people of just how many people died during the Covid lockdowns. Also the CCP is aware of accelerating deaths among the every demographic group but especially among the over 75s.
So it appears Lei’s Real Talk group of investigators with ChatGPT was right. The CCP elites (and now the rest of the country) knows China doesn’t have 1.4 billion like they tell the UN and the rest of the world. And every year their numbers are shrinking.
When word got out one Chinese university prof – I forget which university but it’s one of the top-tier universities there – said if birth rates don’t increase drastically china will have less than 300 million people by the end of the century.
I also note that Martin Armstrong’s Socrates has identified a cycle among the noise that the global population is going to drop by 50% due to limits to growth starting to hit over the next 20 years. Of course 2 billion of that will be the passing of the global Baby Boomer Era Gen simply from normal old age.
The big surprise to me is that the Socrates program has picked out a signal that the Limits to Growth will slice off – what I presume – is another 2 billion beyond that.
So in 20-25 years time due to limits being hit the planet will go from 8 billion people back to 4.
I’m also inclined to believe it because Sadhguru recently held a special session for his 7%-ers wherein he gave a lecture. The lecture was all about how the planet is going to completely change over the next 25 years and he wants his 7%-ers to be a “mother to the world” and stand up for all life on this planet regardless of whatever tribe or identity they may have. “Big changes are coming”, he said, “to the global economy over the next 25 years” and he wants his 7% to be a mother to the world. I suspect he would not be doing this if the need were not real. His speech left me wondering if he’s seen the last dregs of subtle plane support for the Biz-as-Usual-Global Economy has finally collapsed.
The other bit is I discovered yet another Indian Vedic astrologer and he said a few interesting things. One of which he repeated Abhigya Anand’s assertion that from 2029 to early 2030s the stars over Beijing are highly malefic and roar for war. This astrologer said there is a huge danger WW3 will be acknowledged to have officially begun when the Chinese kick start it. And he did stress it will be the Chinese that kick start it if WW3 happens from the mundane charts he drew up of major countries. No other countries at that time have as dreadful a mundane chart as China. I suppose if WW3 happens that could easily take out a sizeable chunk of that other missing 2 billion the Socrates program has identified as disappearing.
The whole astrological map over Beijing for that decade (2030s – early 2040s) shows China is highly likely to go-for-broke in trying to be the next dominating global hegemon. It will throw it’s weight around at everybody – especially its near-abroad but also even at the U.S. and EU.
One other thing that the Vedic astrologer said of China’s mundane star chart. China is going to be the premier STEM country in the coming decades while the U.S. and EU go into stagnation or outright decline regarding new discoveries and inventions. This is what the stars are saying.
The third big take away this vedic astrologer said was coming down the pike is the Second Religiosity. Also, religious wars breaking out around the planet are a real possibility. India in particular will see religious sectarianism rise over the next 10 years but he said the religion vs. religion vs. religion fights are coming down the pike for the whole planet.
The fourth take-away that Vedic Astrologer said is that the stars are reporting mental illness will up-spiral dramatically over the next 20 years among the global populace. Which makes sense to me. If 8 billion people start experiencing what hitting the Limits to Growth actually translates to in their daily lives that will be multiple stressors experienced daily. FYI, Sadhguru says if 3 billion people begin taking on some kind of spiritual practice then the rest of the global populace will reap the benefits without them ever taking even one thing up. He compared it once to a mango tree. One person can not eat the entire bounty of a mango tree. It takes many, many people to eat the whole bounty of just one mango tree. Take care of your own well-being and the benefits will spill over to everyone around you.
I believe it because Sadhguru seems to be in almost desperation-mode in that he’s been rolling out assorted programs and outreach – including a miracle of mind app ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DIRRfoMYJA ) to mitigate it as much as possible. He has a goal of reaching 3 billion people to teach simple tools for mental and emotional well-being. Of course the good thing is is that he’s not the only one doing this. There are plenty of other spiritual teachers in other traditions – JMG included – trying to do the same or similar things.
The fifth take-away of that Vedic Indian astrologer’s mundane charts is that schooling is going to change of the next 20 years. In a lot of countries he said it’s going to collapse. Schooling – even primary schooling – is going to change significantly in some way. Longer term mundane charts he did show multiple unschooled (from a Biz-as-Usual perspective) generations will arise over the 21st century even in the Overdeveloped Countries.
So hang on to your hats. If even a tidbit of what this Vedic Mundane Astrologer is reporting come true we are all living in very interesting times.
p.s. This Vedic astrologer says as of this March – I want to say 28th or so, forgot the date he gave – the planet is entering a 1200 year astronomical transition and is rising to Dwapara Yuga! The trek to Dharma that stands on 2 legs* instead of just 1 (Kali Yuga) begins! 😀
*Kali Yuga – humanity’s Dharma (the Way of the Tao) stands on one leg
Dwapara Yuga – humanity’s Dharma stands on two legs
Treta Yuga – humanity’s Dharma stands on three legs
Satya Yuga – humanity’s Dharma stands on four legs
Then the cycle repeats as it heads back down to bottom out at another Kali Yuga.
I see that the SS United States is being towed out into the Atlantic today to be scuttled. That’s some pretty dire symbolism, but is it better or worse than being broken up for scrap?
Hello, JMG and chat. I have a question and comment on your discourse on the latest with the federal workforce. First, I think many are mistaking a good deal of hyped media (on both sides) for what is actually happening — which, as someone in fed government 26 years, can tell you is somewhat real, but hugely exaggerated in the media. I know only one person who has been let go so far.
But, second, I want to ask your opinion on whether you think much of the invective online and in this chat towards said workers is productive. I can assure you the most senior people you dislike and whose name you hear in the news, will do just fine- it will be average working stiffs at some agencies – just middle class people with jobs and rent to pay ( and a third of us are veterans) who will pay the price. Getting other working and middle class folks to direct their anger at these low level federally people is exactly what our political and economic elite (of all parties) want , so we don’t direct our anger where it really belongs: at them.
Take the one individual I know who was let go: a GS-13 worker, with a wife and 2 kids, at IRS who did programs to help elderly and low income people file taxes. You may not like the IRS, but he was hardly some evil oppressor on behalf of the government. And, having known home for 20 years, I can assure you he won’t end up on drugs, or part of organized crime, or in Uruguay. Really, why say such awful things about people you don’t even know? In other words, shouldn’t we punch up, not down or sideways?
I’m in the process of replacing my stolen tarot deck (classic Rider-Waite-Smith) and went down a rabbit hole with all the decks available. I will definitely get a Universal deck to have the classic symbolism, and I already own a Wirth deck for my Levi meditations. But I’m also looking at others, including Druidcraft, and learning to actually read the cards instead of just meditate on them via John Gilbert’s book. I’ll put this question both to you, JMG, and the commentariat:
What are your favorite tarot/oracle decks for meditation or divination, or just because they look seriously cool?
Maybe this isn’t a hot topic at the moment, but – here’s some comment on how and why Pluto could be reinstated as a planet, i.e. reversing the IAU decision of 2006.
Faintly analogous to how an egregore is supposedly created by the action of human wills, we might say that planetary status can be conferred by the human imagination.
Pluto has done its bit to co-operate, insofar as the 2015 flyby showed it to be topographically a world with a definite character of its own, far more interesting than just a cratered ball, and deserving of more than “dwarf planet” status.
In case any of your subscribers are IAU members I furthermore suggest that the boundary between planet and dwarf-planet be fixed at a diameter of 1,000 miles – thus both honouring Pluto and biffing the metric system at the same time.
So as many of you know, I put a TikTok out there as a kind of sane occultism outreach. It is here at http://tiktok.com/@whitewitchoftheprairie Recently, a video popped up on my feed with an influencer telling people to run into the void when they physically died. According to this woman, who claims to be descended from Scottish royalty, the light, life review, and beckoning relatives and friends seen after death and in Near Death Experiences is a trap. Evil Archons want to mine our souls for energy. Her solution is to run away from the light, embrace the void, and circumvent the Archons by refusing to reincarnate. For those who don’t know, an Archon is an ancient cosmic space lizard god. I wasn’t content to just let it slide as she had a ton of sad, gullible people commenting that they would follow her advice when the time came.
I wrote this essay, which is also on my regular blog, and posted the audio version on TikTok as a rebuttal. https://substack.com/home/post/p-157858984
Here it is on my Dreamwidth blog:
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/141685.html
And here it is on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@whitewitchoftheprairie/video/7475600028946402606
I would appreciate everyone’s thoughts. I may be wrong about all of it, of course. The whole essay felt like I was dictating it from a source well above me and my puny little brain.
The mainstream media has finally been forced to admit it.
“Over more than 100 US intelligence officers have been fired by Tulsi Gabbard over explicit chat messages. The chat platform was meant for classified discussions but was misused for explicit conversations.”
“More than 100 intelligence officers from 15 different agencies were immediately dismissed, with their security clearances revoked.”
The CIA/NSA are supposed to collect blackmail material on others, not supply blackmail material to others. They somehow missed that during orientation. Or it was sheer arrogance. “I’m trans, therefore protected, therefore unfireable.” Oops.
Well, it seems like there are limits to the “New Transparency”:
Trump Admin Stonewalls Epstein Doc Revelations — Why the Limited Hangout?
https://armageddonprose.substack.com/p/trump-admin-stonewalls-epstein-doc
“Trump essentially promised to release the Epstein files back on the campaign trail, saying he would have “no problem” with it and that the list would “probably” see the light of day. …
“It’s been over a month since Trump’s been in office, and so far we’ve gotten nothing on that front.
The House Oversight Committee, two weeks ago, created a farcical “task force” headed by a previously largely unknown Congress member, Paulina Luna, tasked with “reviewing the Epstein client list.”
Why this “task force” would be necessary when the president could just direct the files’ release and be done with it is beyond the comprehension of anyone assuming good faith. …
The conclusion that the administration is covering the tracks for certain off-limits special interests is increasingly hard to avoid drawing.“
A noteworthy Canadian thinker, George Grant, who foresaw Trumpism in the 1960s:
https://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/george-grants-vision/
Hmmm …
More Than 20 Staffers Quit Musk’s DOGE, Rebuke Trump Admin Government Cuts
https://www.newsweek.com/more-20-doge-staffers-quit-over-musk-trump-government-slashing-plan-2035979
“More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), citing their refusal to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
Significantly:
“The resigning staffers had been part of what was originally the United States Digital Service, an office created during President Barack Obama’s administration in response to the failed launch of Healthcare.gov, the online portal for Americans enrolling in health insurance under his landmark health care law. ..
Many had previously held senior positions at major tech firms like Google and Amazon and had joined the government out of a commitment to public service.
So, is this simply a consolidation of power by Musk, or is it a sign of Coalition discord?
Inquiring minds are eager to know …
Kimberly,
I read your post yesterday. It’s really astounding to me that someone would get the idea that “the void” was better than “the light,” but maybe it shouldn’t be: it seems to be the curse of the Piscean/Axial Age religions that, in setting up something as Pure Good and its opposite as Pure Evil, they inspire a fringe to come to the completely opposite conclusion. (The usual logic seems to be: the world is imperfect => the gods are imperfect => the gods must be Evil => the demons must be Good.)
Only occasionally do you get glimpses of ways past this dichotomy (e.g. in Mahayana Buddhism you have the teaching that “Nirvana is Samsara”), and even then they’re phrased in terms of the dichotomy — it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone to just throw the dichotomy out and accept third, fourth, fifth, etc. options.
>Trump seems to be dismantling the American Empire and alienating US allies
As one can imagine, I am focused on what-the-Sam-hill-is-going-on-with-Canada-and-the-annexation-talk – there are quite a number of issues at play and an array of plausible futures.
Besides what others have noted, I wanted to put this out there: I don’t think one can fully appreciate what’s occurring without understanding that, as Team Trump takes on The Blob, that Blob is viewing/using countries like Canada as a fallback area in which to regroup and continue fighting. This has ramifications like: it helps explain why some of these countries (mine) are not instantly falling in line.
JMG, Andy, and BeardTree, re: TM
Thanks for your feedback. The deceptiveness and commercialism of the TM organization doesn’t surprise me: I’ve seen the warning that they’re a cult and to be avoided multiple times, though they don’t seem anywhere near as abusive as, say, the Church of Scientology.
Thanks especially for the book recommendation, BeardTree. I’ll check it out. I am well aware of the dangers of mindfulness meditation, including dissociation and psychotic breaks; it is, after all, a technique meant for hardcore ascetics trying to turn themselves into zombies. I just wasn’t sure if there was a similar risk for TM.
I have been considering the octave as the template for the description of planar existence. The Greater Entity who manifests as the 7 planes of existence which is our solar system, our Universe, has generally made himself known to us. Kether in the Tree of life has been described as the Malkuth of the next higher octave, and so deleting Kether and adding Daath we get:
#1 Chokmah and Binah
#2 Daath
#3 Chesed and Geburah
#4 Tiphereth
#5 Netzach and Hod
#6 Yesod
#7 Malkuth
An octave is a manifestation. Of course, if you were born in a more agrarian age, the octave would have been described as is done by the days of creation in Genesis each day being a plane. But the metaphors we use, must be couched in words that we know from experience. The idea is pandemic. A week is 7 days, and one week follows the next, so that one might think of the Cosmos as less than the dust if one could think large enough. But the idea of an infinite set of octaves from the greatest to the least is not impossible. As we view the Greater Entity as our God, so God may view the even Greater Entity manifesting as this Galaxy as His God, and even now, this Cosmos may be interacting with His Brothers and Sisters as they live in awe of their God. I have heard mention of the grail. When we view the three veils above Kether, the AIN, AIN SOPH, and AIN SOPH AUR, these are merely the 3 planes above Kether, constricted, so that a narrow channel allows manifestation into Kether. This would be like constricting Tiphareth, Netzach/Hod, and Yesod so that manifestation could occur in Malkuth. The resulting shape of the descending forces from God to Mother Earth, and the ascending forces from Mother Earth to God when constricted as such form the holy grail.
@50 Robert Gibson
I disagree.
1. People will lose interest in Pluto during the Long Descent, unless a popular pasttime in the coming decades is flipping through coffee table astronomy books .
2. Since Pluto is too faint to be seen by the naked eye or even small telescopes, our socities will probably forget about Pluto entirely in the coming dark ages. (In contrast, Uranus & Neptune are bright enough to be visible with binoculars.)
3. Many non-planets have interesting surface terrain: Europa, Io, Titan, Enceladus, & Miranda come to mind.
4. I don’t know a lot about astrology, being new to it, but Pluto is or was a malefic influence so we are probably better off if Pluto’s influence fades out.
JMG, I second @Dennis opinion. I’ve been reading your blog since 2012; what drew my attention back then was peak oil. I have no idea how I end up finding your blog; I was researching something for an energy and resources summer class, that’s all I recall. Anyways, I really didn’t expected you’d end up being right on the spot about so many things, big things, like the ones Dennis mentioned. I will stay tuned for your post on the next round of changes. Hopefully the Twilight’s scenario won’t play out!
Patrick, my take all along has been that for whatever reason, there’s been a rush of souls seeking incarnation in this era, and that’s why there’s been such a huge surge in human population. Now the rush is winding down fast, and so the number of bodies is falling accordingly. I think a lot of us are going to welcome plenty of time on the inner planes to process our experiences in this very busy, fast-changing era of Earth’s history!
Angelica, thanks for this; I’ll take a look at it. I’m beginning to wonder if this sort of manipulation has been behind the remarkably static nature of popular culture for the last thirty years, and especially — since it’s a core interest of mine — the way that science fiction and fantasy have stagnated during that period, and publishers have just kept on churning out the same dreary clichés even though sales have dropped steadily. More generally, yes, this is magic — evil magic, to be precise. It’s a spell that has to be broken.
Justin, sorry! I thought you might have read Lord of Light, which all this refers to.
Connie, thanks for this, and I’m delighted to hear about this project! I hope you and DOGE between you can clear away some of the regulatory deadwood so that adaptation to changing climates can be a little less difficult.
Forecasting, no, what I foresee is a combination of internal demographics and mass migration. 2050 may be a little soon, but not by much.
Untitled-1, funny. I suspect you’re quite correct, which makes it even funnier.
Anonymoose, it’s a crucial point. It’s quite common for knowledge to be lost in the fall of a civilization because it’s been outsourced to too small a number of people; ours may be the first time that it’s been outsourced to machines! Coming up with a constituency for doing math by hand is, I think, a crucial issue just now.
Tidlösa, yes, I saw that, and was appalled, for exactly the reason you’ve suggested. That route brings the age of warbands much, much closer!
Polecat, one of the things few people who don’t live in RI realize about this state is that it’s stunningly corrupt. Whitehouse’s activities are business as usual here. As for Crenshaw, that really did show just how weak he is.
Slithy, that game already exists — or did, back in the day. It was called Monsters! Monsters! and used the Tunnels & Trolls rule system; in it, parties of monsters ventured nervously up into the realm of the dread Humans to steal items of value and gain experience. Like everything T&T did, it had a comedic dimension, but you could also play it dead seriously. Like everything T&T did, it was also enormous fun.
Clay, it might be a matter of USAID, but it also may have been a classic managerial-class ripoff scheme: move into a vulnerable organization, use it to get as much money as possible, strip it of assets, and let it die. The same thing happened to Occupy Wall Street, as you’ll recall; it’s a standard gimmick these days. I hope you can salvage something from what’s left!
Sascha, as your English is better than that of most Americans, you can go almost anywhere on the planet; judge exactly where to go depending on your job prospects and personal needs. You might consider someplace in the global South, since the two obvious options are uncongenial to you.
Edward, given current demographics and trends in mass migration, everything east of Poland will become Muslim-majority during the second half of the current century, and once that happens you can expect a change of government and the imposition of Islamic law and customs.
Enjoyer, if you practice occultism they need to be shunned, as they don’t play well with occult practices. Otherwise? Up to you. My take is that they do give glimpses of other realities, but in a disordered and confused way.
Bill, California’s on the cutting edge of decline at this point. I expect to see formal property ownership give way, in many cases, to a kind of half-legal squatting, in which the residents have only such control over their property as they and their communities can maintain by direct action.
Siliconguy, many thanks for this!
Quin, many thanks for this as always. I’m delighted to hear that Jennifer and her child are both doing fine.
Tyler, yep. I see it as an echo of the changes now under way in the US: the existing order is sinking, to turn into a seedbed from which something very different will emerge.
Longsword, duly noted. One way or another, Canada’s facing a very rough road.
Watchflinger, repair trades are going to be very lucrative as we proceed, since it will be much more affordable to repair and recondition old technologies than to maintain the production lines to produce new items. As for your friend and the paired dreams, I’d consider that an important synchronicity, and follow up on the contact.
Panda, a 50% reduction over the decades ahead doesn’t seem improbable to me. As for China, I’d also consider the possibility of civil war — that’s a very common event in Chinese history, and there are plenty of pressures that could go that way. Other than that, the Vedic astrologer doesn’t seem out of line at all. Schooling in particular is already imploding in much of the industrial world, as its failures become increasingly obvious; finding other ways to maintain basic literacy and numeracy would be helpful.
Phutatorius, as I noted to Tyler above, it seems promising to me: the old ship may sink but it’ll become a seed bed for new life.
Anna, I’m not punching at all. I’m quite sure a lot of Party functionaries in the Soviet Union’s last years were also decent people. The fact remained that a contracting society could no longer support the system that paid their salaries. The same thing is true now: the US is effectively bankrupt, and that means a lot of federal employees are going to have to find other things to do. Your friend may not be one of the federal employees who drink themselves to death, or become criminals, or pocketed a few million and will be heading to Uruguay, but I trust you’re aware that such people do exist in the federal bureaucracy. And, by the way, blaming elite groups for issues that have causes much more widely distributed strikes me as convenient but unhelpful…
Most of the decks I like are out of print! Jean Beauchard’s Tarot Maconnique, for example, is a fave, and so is the Knapp-Hall tarot.
Robert, but that would leave out poor Ceres, who is also an interesting world with its own cryovolcanoes; Ahuna Mons would make a good setting for an Old Solar System adventure!
Kimberly, thanks for doing this. “Flee into the void!” is epic bad advice…
Siliconguy, yes, I heard about that. What a bucket of sleaze…
Michael, well, we’ll see. Given that releasing that list is probably going to decimate the entire US celebrity class and upper political class, giving Kash Patel time to get the FBI ready to handle the arrests is probably wise…
David, thanks for this.
Michael, since they were holdovers from the old administration, this isn’t surprising.
Ben, that works tolerably well. Keep meditating!
Bruno, thank you! So far it looks as though Twilight’s Last Gleaming is moving further into fictional territory — but we’ll see.