Robotosis: The Machine-ifying Disease

There is a big sickness in the world today. It isn’t Zika; it isn’t E. Coli; it isn’t  AIDS. It’s something much worse and something far more pervasive. It’s so extant that we’ve forgotten you can not have it. I have it. You have it. Everyone you know has it. What is this illness?  I’ll call it Robotosis.

Robotosis is what happens when we act like a machine. This means that we no longer do anything. We no longer think, feel, or will — by ourselves. Instead, we react. When someone says something that offends us, we get triggered. When someone says something that we agree with, we get a warm tickling inside. If x happens, we always do y. Do we have any choice over this? None. We bum off of our impressions. We are slaves to them.

Robotosis is another word for the effects of the Fall. We have fallen into reactivity, thinking that we choose our destinies, when, in fact, we are composed of the feelings, sensations, and events that we react to. We don’t actually chose anything; our predetermined opinions and preferences choose for us. We don’t exist; we have forfeited our right to exist by giving that right to the impressions that please or offend us. What’s left is only a shell of being: the “natural man.” Likewise, sin comes from Robotosis. Another name for Robotosis is “the pathological rejection of love,” and that’s exactly what sin is. Love is the absence of Robotosis, and when we contract it (i.e. fall into sin), we reject the evidence of God’s love given in this very moment. To sin is to reject that moment. Everything shows God’s love for us, which means that all things are a testament to the fact that we are of infinite worth. A person may say “you’re awful,” but those words can lead to a deeper recognition of your worth if you follow them to the end that God leads them to. Even wars and genocides can lead to good things that could not come otherwise. But we all reject this.

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. - Mosiah 3:19

You may think “this can’t be right; I have to fix it,” or “I’m wrong, so I have to fix me.” Nothing is wrong but our perception that things are wrong. If you didn’t flee from God’s love in the moment, you wouldn’t fall into the more obvious sins like anger or unchastity, and if you stopped fleeing, those sins would end. They all involve the rejection of what God has given you in the grace of the moment. And when any of us sin in this primordial way, we hide from love. And this hiding, this sin, shows up as Robotosis’s automatic patterns. We can’t bear the light of being exactly what I am, of being authentic to the truth of the moment. So instead, we act on the caricature of the moment predetermined by our preferences.

 And they who remain shall also be quickened; nevertheless, they shall return again to their own place, to enjoy that which they are willing to receive, because they were not willing to enjoy that which they might have received. For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift? Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift. - D&C 88:32-33

But how do you cure it? The way out of Robotosis is hard and simple at the same time. It involves working against your natural tendencies. Your natural tendencies are a caricature of something deeper and more eternal, but to become what it really is on a higher level, you need to frustrate it. If you like to laze around, push yourself to be active. If you’re always active, try to push yourself to sit still. Do something that blocks the natural flow of being that characterizes Robotosis. Get in your own way.

 Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion! Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well! - 2 Nephi 28:24-25

This is also why organized religions are helpful. Organized religions can be (but often aren’t) a cure for Robotosis. The more that is asked of you in a religion, the less you can bum off your own unrefined tendencies. Religions are like a model of authentic being that frustrates the natural man whenever he wants to slide into inauthentic being. They are a “great check.” They keep us awake to the light of God.

 For the kingdom of the devil must shake, and they which belong to it must needs be stirred up unto repentance, or the devil will grasp them with his everlasting chains, and they be stirred up to anger, and perish; For behold, at that day shall he rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good. And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell. And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance. Yea, they are grasped with death, and hell; and death, and hell, and the devil, and all that have been seized therewith must stand before the throne of God, and be judged according to their works, from whence they must go into the place prepared for them, even a lake of fire and brimstone, which is endless torment. - 2 Nephi 28:19-23

For this reason, guilt is absolutely necessary in overcoming Robotosis. But it has to be the right kind of guilt. It has to be smart. When you sin, you can either think “woe is me, I’ve sinned” or “I hate the fact that I’m not allowed to do this.” But these are both wrong; they both come from Robotosis. In truth, guilt is a feeling that comes from sin as its own cure. If you trusted guilt as a manifestation of love, it would lead you out of sin. You have to realize that “I have sinned; I have rejected the love God wanted to give me. And despite this, there was nothing I could have done differently!” You don’t rebel, and you don’t beat yourself up for not being better. You realize your utter and complete insufficiency; you sit in that tension. But between that rock and that hard place, a light begins to dawn. You realize that something more than you is present within you. And that thing, born from guilt, begins to grow brighter and brighter.

No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile—Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy. That he may know that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death. - D&C 121:44-44

You are where you are. You aren’t where you aren’t. When you want to be where you’re not at the expense of where you are, you begin to suffer. When this becomes habitual and automatic, that suffering becomes Robotosis. To realize the sufficiency of where you are — which is the only place you’ll ever be — is to overcome it.

Let this realization burn within you. Everything is OK.

Autism and Spirit

If you don’t know already, I have high-functioning autism, aka Asperger Syndrome. You know the type: the aloof, uncoordinated, slightly arrogant person who doesn’t look people in the eye. It can be really hard. It isn’t easy to notice social cues. It’s even harder for me to be present in my body, even in the most basic sense. Because of my diagnosis, I’m uniquely able to write about what it’s like being in an autistic head: I’m trained philosophically and can write well, so I can help neurotypical parents understand what’s going on with the children they have on the Spectrum. So that’s what I’m going to start here.

Autistic people are spirits tethered to a body. For instance, I don’t feel like I’m what I see in the mirror. I am an observer; I am other. Autistic people never got used to having a body. We might even want to leave our bodies, but for obvious reasons, we all have to have one. Moreover, in autism, there’s a desire to be “bigger” than the body will actually let the spirit be. It’s like the entire universe were pushed inside a tiny bag of skin and told to “stay put!” We can’t bear to be so small; we want to be a universe ourselves. So we get “hot” just by virtue of that energetic density. That inner fire shows up as overstimulation and restlessness. The world is aflame; the fire of stars and galaxies is pushed into light bulbs and television sets.

So we  figure out ways to deal with this stellar fire: what the world calls “stims.” For instance, I pace. The pacing lets me feel as expansive as a universe in a limited time and space. It lets me weave together diverse moments and places into a something like a unity. Obsession is like this too. When I obsess about x mystical topic, I become that topic. I forget about my body and my finite life. There is just the seeking, the searching. But it isn’t always that easy. In truth, I’m a slave to that inner fire. Since I don’t distinguish myself from it, I feel compelled to follow it wherever it leads, and it leads far further than my body and my earthly personality can bear. I am a vessel that can’t handle the heat. It was never meant to be in an earthly personality such as mine. And so we tend to reject anything earthly at all. We’d rather be the fire than an incompetent vessel for it.

To put it in a few words, autism is what happens when the fire of higher worlds loses itself in this world but never adapts to it. Everyone comes from that fire and has it at their core, but most people forget it and focus on this world. This is normal and healthy. But we’re bad at adapting; we’re true to celestial worlds at the expense of this one. Our literalism and our mind-blindness come from how we assume everything shows its face and nothing hides its inner meaning. In fact, things are how they appear in higher worlds. We rant about our obsessions because we assume that, like there, thoughts are shared with those who are close to us. We never learned, or else refused to learn, that this world is founded on difference. I am different from you, this pot is different from this pan, etc. In the world of spiritual fire, everyone shares everything. There is no hiding and no separation. Of course, there is difference in the spiritual world, but only because the differences here act as a containing vessel for things in the spiritual world that would otherwise be identical. Without the physical, the spiritual would spill out all over the counter; the fire you cook dinner with would burn the house down.

The autistic person has a fire in her belly that resents vesseling. We refuse to descend, and as a result, we reject principles that mediate between the highest and the lowest worlds. It’s like we’ve removed the rungs from Jacob’s Ladder; we want to control the physical directly from the spiritual. And it doesn’t work. We try to operate our arm like crane lifts. We move our legs as if by dual joysticks on a video game controller. We walk around as if we were learning to drive a car with a manual transmission. And it’s really cumbersome.

But we aren’t “wrong.” Even if it were possible, autistic people shouldn’t be cured. For there is a gift for the world hidden in our weakness; with autism, the fire is breaking out. I’ve written before about how the fire of heaven, of the “no-thing-ness” that comes before all things, is getting hotter and brighter. Autistic people are a manifestation of this fire. Since the earth resists change, this causes dissonance, and we are that dissonance in the flesh. We’re a test case; the war of the worlds is being fought in our skins (among other places). Not a battle, but a dance or a “snuggle with a struggle.” Heaven and earth are learning to love each other.

And, finally, I tend to think that the more low-functioning the autistic person, the fiercer the battle that’s being played out. They are extreme in every sense of the world. A hotter fire; a more rigid earth. And they are utterly irreplaceable. Treasure them. They are warriors in invisible worlds.

Please don’t think of me as vain. I am not very autistic. I pass for neurotypical more and more. And I often feel bad that it’s not more severe. I have to walk between worlds, but I want to flee this world. But I can communicate. I can let each side know what it’s like on the other. I hope I’m doing an OK job.

Treasure the autistic people in your midst. They are needed just as everyone is needed. And they announce a reality far greater than themselves, far greater than you. They are the call of this world’s insufficiency; they announce a better one.

Big Cat

If you read my blog carefully, you’ll know that I’ve been doing “active imagination” for almost four years now. Active imagination is a technique invented by Carl Jung where a person “consciously daydreams” and somehow records it. It’s been so helpful to me, but until recently, I’ve kept it private.

I believe the characters I encounter in active imagination are very real. They’re not made up: they’re real propensities toward existence; I just supply the details that clothe those propensities. I guess you could call them forces; I give them things like memories and concrete associations that they act on. As such, I try to respect their wishes and treat them like any other intelligent being.

Today, I did an active imagination with a big cat from one of my dreams. It was actually a nightmare, where Big Cat (what I’ll call him) chased me and apparently wanted to keep me for his own. It was terrifying. I approached him in this active imagination and things went differently than expected. You’ll see. Anyway, I asked him if I could show this to others, and he agreed, on one condition: that the world knows he is not a monster and isn’t evil. That is what you must realize while reading this.

So here it is:

There is a big cat on the borders of the imagination. It stalks and prowls, only to pounce at the moment when weakness is there. It is not fearful; it is dense, powerful, overwhelmingly powerful. It wants to kill everything that lies in its path, not to destroy it but to wisen it up. It wants to burn away the fluff, kill the extra fat. It wants to trim me with its teeth. 

It chases me. Yes, it chases me! It’s just behind me! I run, run, RUN until it’s there… it’s THERE and I can’t stop, I can’t breathe, I can’t think and it’s there and it’s monstrous and powerful and scary. There it stands, breathing, pulsing, densely powerful, forcefully pushing me to the ground. It stares me in the eyes. And then it bites me on the head

But not hard. It’s a play bite. Suddenly, it curls me into the crook of its front leg and licks up my face and into my hair. Then it sets me down with its mighty paws and tells me to stand up straight. Yes, STRAIGHT! Be still, be powerful, be relaxed. Let the energy of the cat run through you. Yes! Be the one you were meant to be! Let the force of the panther and the jaguar and the ocelot fly through your veins and come out through your fingertips as if they were reservoirs of fire. I feel the fire in me and I lose my balance. I sway and can’t keep myself. Big Cat pushes me back up with a gentle, forceful nudge. Can I do it? 

Yes, you can! Be straight. It’s your own power you’re reclaiming. Don’t be fudgy. Let it out. Let it SWIM! 

I do it. I am still. Firm. Powerful. I am the rudder of the wind. I turn the tree roots and let them sink in the flesh of the earth. I bring it up and up and up to the sky and let it OUT! Let it all out to the place where it circles and clouds and rains again to the earth. This is my calling, I say. I say. This is not a forgetful thing, but a strong, powerful, fiery thing! Let it all out! It is beyond power! It is the power of the dance, of the forceful pounce and tumble. I have become the grace of fire, the density of the elastic.

The cat applauds and says: not yet… not yet. You aren’t ready for this power. You want to make it simple and clean, but it’s not. Tear the meat out, he says. Be fiery and strong and MEAN it. You can’t ride on me. Cultivate me. I will teach you. Then I say, what would you have me do? BURN it. Burn the whole pilgrimage and let it die to itself. That is the only way.

What do I burn?, I ask.

The sky, the mountains and the waters, he says. Burn it all. Let it out! Become the fire!!!!

That is good for now. You are ready to re-enter the world. Do it faithfully and step-by-step. You can do it.

Thank you, Big Cat. You're very kind, and you're very needed.

So, some reflections on what I'm sure was odd to you. First, notice that active imagination like this happens in the midst of writing. It was only revised for grammar and spelling; not much was altered from the stream-of-consciousness state. The writing is the imagining; the imagining is the writing. Second, observe that speech and description in it are fluid. That's because in the imagination, description and speech bleed into each other. And finally, notice that Big Cat didn't always respect my wishes. When I tried to "stand up straight," he thought I went too far.This happens often -- these figures of the imagination resist my conscious wishes and will tell me so point blank.

Moreover, this particular figure (Big Cat) is likely a figure associated with the energies of the body (specifically masculine embodiment), which I've resisted. That's why it was chasing me. It isn't just in my mind, though. It would appear in other people's minds, although it would likely take another form and clothe itself in the details in that person's memory. This is just another way of saying that the figure is a kind of "current" that only surfaces in different ways. It has an identity because it has a similar "feeling tone" in each one. It's big, bulging, forceful, powerful, and dense, whether he's a cat or a wrestler or the Hulk.

Anyway, overcome your hesitation and try something like this. They're very accommodating hosts, the figures in your imagination. You've got nothing to lose.

Hide and Seek

Imagine a game of hide-and-seek. You’re the one seeking; little children are hiding. As you count from one to a hundred, they dart around your house looking for curtains to wrap themselves in and furniture to crawl under. With swallowed giggles, they wait. But what if, after counting…forty-three...forty-four...forty-five…you pause and ask yourself "What was I waiting for?" You can’t remember. You press your head for an answer and the memory almost pops up — a glimmer in your mind of laughter and a set of curtains. But then you get frustrated and give up. And you give yourself a convincing reason why: "I must have drifted off." So you leave.

The children wait. And wait. And wait. Years later, they’re still waiting. But they don’t lose heart. They even think it’s fun. They hold their breaths whenever you walk by, giggling to each other across the hall whenever you pass into another room. Their innocence persists. Their laughter still shines.

And, bored, the children get really good at hiding. They play tag in that place between the sunlight and lamplight in your living room. They do somersaults underneath the kitchen stools. And they realized what we’ve forgotten: that every part of the house is bigger on the inside. One day they found a tiny door behind the living room couch leading to dusty, sunlit bedrooms. They found the hallways inside your walls, the ballrooms inside cabinets. The house is an endless system of circulating corridors, closets, and staircases. For them, there is no outside.

You can still hear them. Sometimes, as you're just about to fall asleep, you may hear the faint sound of children giggling. You can't tell where from. As your muscles relax in sleep, the walls relax too, and the children peek their heads out. They may even run out to meet you as if to say "aren't you coming?" At that moment, you might remember the game you forgot. But you won't in a few hours. For by then, you will have drawn your heart back inside your chest and the children will have gone back into dusty shadows amid the sunlight

There is childhood in everything. Every armchair has bright youth inside it, and each potted plant rings with wondrous laughter. But we can't see or hear the children we promised to find, to remember. We’ve made each thing solid; we can’t bear the open playfulness of light. And it’s your job to let it out. You do that by trust, innocence, and a gleeful hope. If you just loosened your shoulders, exhaled, followed the bread crumbs, smiled, leaped ahead, dancing the whole way, those children would come out. “You found me!” And giggling ourselves, we’d realize that they had found us too. 

What Everyone Forgets

Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve forgotten something? Not your keys, not your coat; this is stranger. You sense something like a thread coming loose in your belly, and with it, you spontaneously know that the whole world isn’t what you thought it was. It’s not even close. The colors seem drab, the scene like a cardboard cutout. But it’s not a bad feeling. Thinking it through, you will see the world’s new flatness as a sign: that what you knew isn’t the whole package of what is. You’ll think: there’s more here. And there is.

Everything you know is just a facade. All things hide something else within and behind them. What’s hidden there? An openness. An expanse. And it’s not dark but overpoweringly bright. It rushes between atoms and shines between the eyes of two people deep in conversation. Everything around you is just a nozzle for this bright open space. And you used to know this; you just forgot. A long time ago, you pushed that bright openness deep down inside and pretended it wasn’t there. The sun at noonday is just a shadow by comparison to the brightness in your chest.

For the whole world of things has fallen away from itself. So have you. All of it—stone to shrub, elephant to eggplant — used to rest in that inner light, but they don’t anymore. Each one fell down and out until it landed with a sharp “pft” in the rigid shape we know each one to be. We did this to them. By turning away from the light within everything, the light crashed into that pile of rubble we call the world.

Deep in your abdomen, you remember. As you move further into your own within, the nostalgia for that other place gets hotter and hotter until you burn with it. That fire flares up in those moments when you can’t tell longing and contentment apart anymore. The song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” does this for me. Someone once said that when Judy Garland sang it in concert, everyone forgot who she was, where they were, who they were. There was just a shared longing for something they could almost remember but not quite. “Birds fly over the rainbow. Why…oh why can’t I?”

The bright spaces between things and themselves, between you and yourself, are calling. The call is very soft, but at the same time, it’s a roar so constant that you’ve forgotten it’s there. But you can tune yourself to it. You can cock your head and close your eyes until you can just discern its sound. Align your sail with the wind. Follow the golden threads and pull on them until it all unravels into liquid light. This is life from death, light from darkness. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. A part of you does even now.

But you have to try to remember. I’ve tried, and yet it’s still like a dim dream. Any words I say about that call is like sprinkling confetti on an invisible man - you see the outline for a few seconds and then it’s gone. But I don’t think it’s a futile quest, trying to remember. It can come back; it will.

I’ll see you at sunrise.

Moana's Call: Remembering the World

SPOILER WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the new Disney movie Moana. If you haven't seen it, you really should, and you really shouldn't read this post until you do.

Last night, I watched the recently released Disney movie Moana - the story of a girl who gets called across the ocean to save the world. It's really important in lots of ways, I realized: not only does it have a strong female protagonist (Moana) with no love interest, but both she and the other main character (Maui) never overcome their trials using brute force. They always use cunning, acting more like an Odysseus than a Hercules.

But I immediately realized that Moana is one of the most important movies that has been released in the last few years. Not because of the movie's cinematic qualities or even because of how good of a movie it is. The movie is so crucial to us because it helps us all remember what we've forgotten. What is that? If I could say it in a few words, the movie wouldn't have been so necessary. So let me do it in more than a few.

The Soul of the World

The world has a soul. This Soul is the luster of all living things: the shimmer of fractured sunlight on a creek, the damp scent that hints of a thunderstorm, the virgin snow of the morning after a blizzard. Without the Soul of the World, the world gets shoved beneath our concepts. For the world is particular: never are there "trees" or "flowers" but always "that tree, the one with the bark like elephant's skin," or "that flower, the one with silky petals." Our concepts generalize, but the world is never general. As Alan Watts once pointed out, even though we try to make it fit a grid, the world "wiggles."

But we've forgotten it. The Soul of the World longs to be seen; its sheen and color are hidden in darkness unless they become appreciated, become noticed. To notice the world is to remember it. And by remembering the world in this way, the world remembers itself, through us. But we have shirked that responsibility. Because we push the world's wildness into our conceptual framework, we've forgotten that the world has a soul. And so has the world.

Remember Her

This is the first thing Moana helps us remember: that the world is in peril. In the movie, a blackness spreads across the ocean, poisoning the coconuts, driving away the fish, making dead what was once alive. It seems like the end of the world, just as the real-life world seems to be ending. But in truth, the world isn't dead or dying but only amnesiac. Like in Moana, the world has forgotten who she is. We've stolen the heart out of her chest, carrying it like booty to the only place we think something like a soul still exists: the prison of our own skulls. The aliveness of bark, dragonfly wings, and the scent of rain - what we should ensoul - has retreated into this bony globe. And deprived of soul - her very heart - the world becomes the soulless, indifferent thing we imagine her to be.

The world is scared and alone. She doesn't even think she exists. I have tears coming to my eyes as I write this because I feel her pain, as I have before. We have beaten her, abused her, raped her. We must stop. We must return to her the heart we have stolen. Not for our sake, but for hers - the bruised woman trapped in the closet of our egoism.

Moana is a glimmer of remembrance. With this film, many people, if only dimly, see the plight of the World Soul for the first time. We must feed this spark. And so I urge you: remember. See the sky's blueness. See the sadness in a dog's eyes. Hear the stillnesss of a December night. We must let the World know that we see her. Look her - the very Soul of the world - in the eyes and say:

I have crossed the horizon to find you. I know your name.They have stolen the heart from inside you.But this does not define you.This is not who you are.You know who you are.

How to Get Out of Saturn's Belly

The visionary activist astrologer Caroline Casey often says on her radio show “The Visionary Activist Show” that it’s our job to help “inauguarate a guiding story” for the world. Without a vision of not just what events are happening in the world, but of what they mean, we’re caught by hidden patterns that control us.

The end result is something like this:

Without a guiding story, we’re just robots controlled by the news. But with a guiding story, we’re able to be “first responders” instead of the “first reactors” everyone is these days. This is my attempt to inaugurate, or at least nominate, a guiding story. Take it as you will, just try not to robotically react.

The Wall, the Goat, and the Planets

Right now, the planet Pluto is passing through Capricorn, where it has been since 2008 and where it will be until 2024. Interpreted, that means that Pluto – the planet of intense change, evisceration, and upheaval – is doing its magic in Capricorn’s domain, which basically means that we’re in the middle of huge, cleansing transformations in what Capricorn governs. And what does Capricorn govern? Control, opposition, boundaries, and force. In other words, everything having to do with a defensive stance against opposing sides, the boundaries between groups of people, and our attitudes toward control are lit up on Pluto’s radar. They’re due for a violent makeover, and it won’t be pretty.

This is exactly what we see in the world. If there is one thing Capricorn doesn’t do, it’s compromising, which is also something no one today does. We’ve all been snookered into opposition: if group 1 does something group 2 doesn’t like, the group 2 inevitably starts a protest. Trump supporters hated Hilary; Hilary supporters hated Trump. The solution is never to build bridges; it’s always to build a wall.

Snookered by Saturn

But this is all a style of consciousness that we’ve seen before. It’s always here, but normally too invisible to see. And that style of consciousness belongs to what the ancients called a god (what I’d call a divine aspect): Kronos/Saturn, whose planet rules Capricorn. Remember: Saturn is the god of time, fixed limits, boundaries, edges. He keeps the rhythm of the cosmos, defining its limits by standing just outside it. He swallowed his children, keeping all the gods’ energies safe and contained in his belly. With him, we’re locked inside a fixed vessel, but without him, we suffer the even harder fate of being lost in a vast expanse without definition.

So as the archetype that’s constellated in the world today, we can view Saturn in two ways: 1) as an enemy to freedom and love who hates outsiders and who moves back the clock of progress, or 2) as someone who reins in the world from getting lost and dispersed our world of polyamory and thirty-something unique gender choices. Moreover, we can make this observation: the political right is explicitly Saturn (since it promotes order, limits and walls), but the political left is implicitly Saturn. In Jungian language, Saturn is the left’s Shadow: while they may not explicitly want to build walls, they are just as if not more oppositional and rigid than the right. So essentially, Saturn is at work in both sides. He’s ruling the world again, like it or not.

Cutting It (Everything) Out

So whats’s the cure? Not to fight the other side – that oppositionalism is what defines Saturn as Saturn. I’d suggest that, instead of rigidly opposing (what we see as) light and (what we see as) darkness, we accept “a twilight state.” Only then can we give back to the gods what Saturn has swallowed. Let each thing, mood, person, and viewpoint be what it wants to be. Allow coexistence, not just on the terms of your ideals, but let ideals themselves coexist. And that would mean allowing viewpoints different from yours, or even wildly opposed to it, to exist without your interference.

But above all, the cure is to trust in the light that isn’t the harsh fluorescent light of ego consciousness. The ego is the heavy-handed, rigid, literal miser that we all have in our heads. Let him die, not by killing him, but by letting him be no longer the only acceptable way to be. The light we should trust in is, again, a twilight: where the light of each god respects and does not fight against or try to swallow the light of every other god. You let consciousness be, neither claiming it as mine nor repressing it as unacceptable. And this twilight is not a dusk but a dawn. It would be where each style of consciousness is always on the way toward union, none ever dominating the others as the harsh noon of a “complete” union (which is just Saturn swallowing his kids again). And as Swedenborg said, this means a lot more than just relief from strife:

Moreover, by “morning” is signified in the supreme sense the Lord Himself, for the reason that the Lord is the Sun from which comes all the light in heaven, and He is always in the rising, thus in the morning. (Arcana Coelestia 5097)