Author: john (Page 4 of 9)

Theocracy or Bust – The clash between Piscean and Aquarian Age values

I discuss the epic cultural clash between Piscean Age and Aquarian Age values and how it is manifesting in the current militant movements that aim to forcibly impose theocracy on societies, particularly the USA. I also demonstrate how such movements are fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic as well as untenable.

This episode was published on December 22, 2023 at 3:21pm EDT.



Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.  

You can support my work and this channel ⁠⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠⁠

You can also support this channel with ⁠a monthly membership⁠.

Follow me on Threads⁠ where I share articles I feel are important.  

Please ⁠⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠⁠.

Episode transcript:

Greetings all! Welcome to Aquarian Diary.

I’m your host, John Irving.

It is December 22nd, 2023. This was recorded on December 21st.

As I frequently do, I will be displaying some graphics on the screen. If the visuals matter to you, and you’re listening to this by podcast, you may prefer to watch this on YouTube.

Today is the solstice. [Correction: It is the Equinox, of course! I know this. I credit this to the current Mercury retrograde!]

The day and night will be of equal length. The light will gradually start getting longer, and the reverse in the southern hemisphere.

So this is great. Although we’re entering winter, having that extra light for longer periods of time really makes a difference. So happy solstice everyone!

It kind of feels like this is a big one for some reason. I think it’s probably because Pluto will soon re-enter Aquarius. See my last episode and others about that. I’m really looking forward to that.

But today, I want to touch on something that has been on my mind for about a week. I actually recorded a little bit about it in a longer segment, and then I decided, no, I’ll do a separate little segment on this. So I’m re-recording it here now.

And it’s something that really struck me, because it’s not something I’ve seen necessarily discussed. It’s implied frequently, but not considered directly, and I think it’s a really important question that people might just want to think about.

And it goes like this.

Especially in the United States, there are millions of Americans right now, Christian nationalists, etc., who have been in the news quite a bit, especially because of people like the new speaker, Mike Johnson, and the whole agenda of the Trump campaign.

And I’ve posted a few articles on this topic on my community tab, which I don’t know how many people actually see. Some people interact, but who knows. So I’ll include some of those links in the episode description as well.

But generally, there is a significant movement that openly wants the United States to become a theocracy. And not only that, they have aligned themselves with many of the groups, organizations, and figures on the political right, generally those who are more extreme. And that alone has startling implications, which a lot of people have been talking about.

The whole notion, which Trump himself put forward, about being a dictator.

And the recent references to a very potent political figure from the 1930s that originated in Germany, which led to the Second World War, whose name I don’t want to mention here because it will probably trigger the algorithms. Algorithms which are incapable of differentiating between the use of a term in a constructive context versus a harmful one. But that’s a whole separate beef of mine. Really, honestly, the algorithms and their application leave a lot to be desired.

Now this term, or the name of that individual I’m referencing in the 1930s, is being used in a lot of headlines even in places like the New York Times. So are the algorithms blocking posts from prominent, well-respected sources like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, CNN? Who knows? Probably.

But anyway, this whole concept of a theocracy and America becoming a theocracy, which is a distinct possibility if the former president gets re-elected.

I was contemplating that because, like I said, there’s been a lot of articles about it lately. Thoughtful articles and good articles.

And like I’ve said before, I think a lot of this relates to this transit of Pluto through Capricorn, Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn. I’ve done a couple episodes linking the astrology of the 1930s to the astrology of today and the 2010s. So it’s something I’ve talked a lot about myself.

But there’s a fundamental question or assumption made about this whole notion of the United States becoming a theocracy.

So like I said, the agenda is out there. Everybody knows that that’s what they want to do. That the evangelical community believes and wants America to be a distinctly Christian state and to embrace their particular worldview in many respects and regards.

I would go so far as to say that they would probably, ideally, want to get rid of anyone in the public service or any politicians who are not overtly aligned with them. In other words, they’re not overtly Christian.

Which, you know, which kind of brings us back to the dark ages and religious wars and ironically, what the Taliban wanted or ISIL. We’re talking about basically, this would be like the Christian Taliban.

They’re already book banning and trying to stamp out any kind of cultural related rhetoric that conflicts with their paradigm or worldview or beliefs or which threatens systemic white privilege.

And let’s be clear, these are beliefs. These are just a bunch of arbitrary beliefs based on a book that was published 2000 years ago and then edited and re-edited so that it reflected or advanced the power of the church versus other churches and other religions. And, you know, millions of people have died fighting religious wars for centuries.

And at the same time, you know, for those of us who are being objective, there is a phenomenal amount of hypocrisy involved in this as well because they will say that, you know, the state should agree with our values, but at the same time, reject the values of other groups or religions that they disagree with. So they want rules that benefit them and discriminate against others and to reject values that conflict with theirs.

In other words, it’s not democratic, right? This is a really big question or point because the whole premise of the United States is that it is the world’s leading democracy.

Not only that, but it has promulgated that narrative to the whole world for decades, if not generations.

During the Cold War, the United States was promoting the fact that we’re a democracy, we’re better than the communists, etc., etc., etc.

There was almost a world war over this, you know, think the Bay of Pigs. And trillions of dollars have been spent to defend that narrative in military spending, and foreign policy, and foreign aid, and investments, and so forth.

So this whole question of “are we a democracy or are we an illiberal state” like some form of autocracy, or dictatorship, or fascism.

And let’s face it, there’s lots of cases in the past where religious organizations have aligned themselves with fascist movements. Poland recently just flipped where they had a very Christo-fascist kind of state, and now they just recently elected Donald Tusk, who is much more liberal and democratically oriented. But I digress.

The question is, and I would like you to reflect on this, is the notion of America being a theocracy even possible?

Think about that.

Is it conceivable that America could become a theocracy?

My immediate response is “Hell no, it will never happen.” Here’s why.

If a group of radical militant Christian nationalists tried to take over the United States and impose their theocratic worldview and political order on the rest of America, it would probably lead to civil war.

If there’s even a fraction of people who feel the way that I do, there is absolutely no way, period, that people will allow religious values to be strictly and forcibly imposed upon them by the state for all of the reasons I’ve just articulated, which is that it is illiberal and non-democratic. And there would probably be clashes over this.

In other words, as far as I’m concerned, it is simply not possible.

Religiosity has been declining in the United States for many years, and the hypocrisy of religious groups and organizations who have aligned themselves with some of the worst possible people and criminals politically in American history – the former president literally tried to foment an insurrection – is a serial liar, to put it politely, faces in the vicinity of a hundred criminal charges, the only president in American history to be criminally indicted, plus all of the issues around reproductive rights, and people like Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, who was recently exposed for having tried to engage in a three-way sexual encounter which involved lesbian sex.

You know, it’s like we need a new word for hypocrisy because we’ve used it too much, and we need another term that’s more powerful because these kinds of situations, you know, someone who has been rabidly and militantly attacking the education system for anything that veers slightly from strict orthodoxy in these respects, I mean, it’s just jaw-dropping. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Really, I just wanted people to think about that because as I thought about this a number of days ago, I was just like, “Yeah, these people are completely delusional, clinically delusional, if they think that they can impose a theocratic system of government on the United States of America and actually get away with it.

I mean, don’t you think, I mean, isn’t that what you think? Like, it’s just completely bizarre and crazy?

While religiosity is declining precipitously and people are leaving these fundamentalist religious organizations in droves, and even the Pope now is pushing the Catholic Church, which moves extremely slowly, but he’s gradually pushing the Church in more and more progressive directions, we’re dealing with millions of people who are completely detached from reality.

But like I said, if they try, let’s say they get down the road to a certain degree, let’s say Trump gets re-elected, are Americans just going to sit there and take it? I can’t see that happening. There’s no way.

Like, I know in my country, if that was to happen, there would be an uprising. In Canada, you can’t even talk about this stuff if you’re a politician, because you will just get run out of office. So they have to take a much more low-key approach, you know, the social conservatives.

So I thought I’d just put that out there, because that is literally their agenda. There’s a huge swath of the evangelical community and Republican politicians who are aligned with this vision, and hardly anyone has asked about this fundamental premise of like, is what they want even literally possible or conceivable? So, I mean, it’s a really huge question.

The other thing is that this really underscores this transition from the age of Pisces into the age of Aquarius, because the age of Pisces was characterized by this kind of stuff.

There were the religious wars, the religious organizations, the subservience to dogma and doctrine, and patriarchal authority, might is right, that whole thing.

And the Aquarian age is very, very different.

So the fact that this is coming to a head, it’s happening in Poland and Hungary and Italy, and you know, this stuff is happening everywhere.

But the United States, of course, given its stature in many regards, is where we’re all focused. And it’s very overt now.

So the point I’m trying to make is that this is like the last dying gasps of the age of Pisces.

And there are people who are reactionary, who don’t want this shift to occur or are not comfortable with it, because it threatens their privileged status, their hegemony, their fragile egos, their need to feel superior to someone else, which is fundamentally anti-Christian and hypocritical.

Again, the combination of religion and power inevitably becomes toxic and abusive. The whole paradigm is based on lies. Lies that increasing numbers of people are no longer afraid of questioning, because we’re shifting into a whole new age.

And interestingly, of course, the beginning of the Piscean age was really the appearance of Christ. And I’m not criticizing Christ, it’s just that his message has been so bastardized over the years and altered to bolster the interests of large and powerful, centralized organizations that were often very cult-like.

And here we are, having this huge battle for the fate of the world’s major superpower and most influential country on the planet between these Piscean age ideals and the Aquarian age ideals.

Thankfully, I am aligned with the Aquarian side of the equation. That’s the future, regardless of what these other people think. And you are too, or you most likely wouldn’t be listening to me.

So I find that very fascinating.

And as I have long articulated, and even in my most recent episode, I view this shift of Pluto into Aquarius as one of the major trigger points for this shift from the Piscean age into the Aquarian age.

And there’s still people out there who say that, “Oh, the Aquarian age isn’t going to happen for 500 years.” And I’m like, “How can you be so dense?” Just look at the evidence, look around you.

We went from horse and buggy 100 years ago to now I can carry around a device and speak with anyone on the planet at any time of the day. And just technologically, the advancements in so many respects are just mind-blowing.

The rate of evolution that’s occurred in the past couple generations is completely unprecedented. We hardly changed for 2000 years. People were still growing food and living to be 40 years old and being serfs and all that stuff.

Just look at how much change has occurred and is occurring right now. It’s accelerating. The technological advancements are accelerating exponentially. Now we’re into AI.

This stuff was inconceivable, even in my youth. So come on, take off your blinders.

I made that argument here on my channel months ago. I did a whole episode on this. But I think if we just look at the objective evidence, it’s happening.

We’re in the midst of this transition. I’m not saying we’re through, but there’s zero question that we are moving very quickly into the age of Aquarius.

And this whole debate about theocracy versus democracy, which is really the root of a lot of this backlash that’s going on with right-wing extremism and everything, they believe that white Christians are somehow superior and should be in positions of leadership and authority over everybody else, which is just so ridiculous. It’s absurd.

I mean, you have a whole country like China with 1.4 billion people, which is the second biggest global economic force on the planet now. And India is not far behind.

I mean, how can you sit there and say that we are, by virtue of our skin color, superior? It’s just so dumb.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that.

I just wanted to put that out there because I think it’s provocative. And really, that’s what we should be questioning.

Are we going to have…

Maybe the Democrats should be running on… No, they’re probably too chicken shit to do that. They probably don’t have the balls to come out and go head to head against religious groups.

And I’m not crapping on… There’s a lot of good religious people out there, but there’s some, and many of them, who are literally a threat to democracy and sanity.

Because at the same time as all this other stuff is happening, we have a global environmental crisis that could literally bring down civilization. And these people, because they believe in all this dominionism nonsense, completely negate that. They’re delusional, as I’ve described. So, it would be catastrophic if they have their wish. And like I said, I don’t even think it’s conceivable or possible without something like civil war or mass civil unrest and conflict.

My whole point with all of this is just to point out how ridiculous, absurd, and futile the whole proposition is. Because like I said, it seems to me that nobody ever questions this fundamental assumption that underlies this whole movement.

What do you think?

Again, for more detail, check the episode description for other episodes or articles that are related or that I mentioned.

And if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well. I have a 20% off special on currently, a natal or transit reading makes a great gift, by the way. It’s something people won’t forget.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End transcript


Other related episodes or referenced herein:

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – Will brute force stop progress?

The Aquarian Age has Already Begun (Sept 16, 2021)

USA Pluto Return 2022 – Civil War or Transformation? Part 1

⁠Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness⁠

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning⁠

Uranus square Pluto and Far-Right Extremism: 1930’s and 2010’s

The Astrology of Mass Delusion: 2011-2026

Other episodes featuring Pluto.


Articles or podcasts referenced herein:

Please note: I am not linking some articles – even though published by credible sources – for reasons described in this episode. Please google them if desired.

This conservative ‘mandate’ is a terrifying preview of Christianized government

Republican voters know Trump isn’t joking with his “dictator” remarks — it’s why they love him

The Background Briefing episode I mentioned (audio date Dec 19, 2023)

How Republicans convinced themselves America was meant to be a “Christian nation”

‘I Am Your Retribution.’ Trump Knows What He Wants to Do With a Second Term.

Fascism and Catholicism

There’s plenty of hypocrisy with Moms for Liberty, other pious GOP frauds

In U.S., roughly three-in-ten adults now religiously unaffiliated

Pope Francis says priests can bless same-sex couples, under certain conditions


Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Pluto #Capricorn #Aquarius

Check my “Community Tab” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

Errata




Pluto at 29° Capricorn – Will brute force stop progress?

I discuss the current epic astrology transit of Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn, the critical “Anaretic” degree. What will be the outcome and effects of this socially and politically and how long will it last?

This episode was published on December 20, 2023 at 6:14pm EDT.


Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠⁠.

You can also support this channel with ⁠a monthly membership⁠.

Follow me on Threads⁠ where I share articles I feel are important.

Please ⁠⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠⁠.

Episode transcript:

Greetings all!

Welcome to Aquarian Diary.

I’m your host, John Irving.

It is December 20th, 2023.

This is just a quick update to draw people’s attention to something that is very important. It is something I have talked a lot about on my channel here for a very long time.

That is, that as of yesterday, December 19th, 2023, Pluto entered 29 degrees of Capricorn, which is the anaretic degree.

The very final degree of an astrological sign is considered to be particularly intense because the energies of that sign, the whole 30 degrees, which in the case of Pluto, which began its transit in 2008, is completing that multi-year journey.

So what tends to happen, even if you have a planet at 29 degrees in your natal chart, that planet, depending on the sign in the house, will have an exaggerated effect.

So Pluto now has moved into the anaretic degree, 29 degrees, where it will be until January 20th of 2024. So basically a month.

As someone who follows the news a lot, quite carefully, everything seems to be very exaggerated right now. It’s like the volume has been turned to 11, and especially with respect to the issues that relate to Capricorn, or the 10th house in many ways, as I have articulated in previous episodes.

So we’re seeing the worst aspects of all of those themes, whether it is unhinged billionaires, the rise and unprecedented fervency of autocratic right-wing politics and political movements, the structures and institutions of our societies being challenged, or having their failures become blatantly evident to us.

If you’re feeling really discouraged or disappointed right now, which I am in many ways, because I find a lot of the things that are happening right now are very disturbing, that is not unusual.

The whole point of this transit is to show us the failures and flaws that underpin a lot of our assumptions about these institutions and structures of society, particularly that deal with those in positions of leadership and power. Pluto represents power. So we are seeing basically how the system is corrupt.

We now have the former president of the United States, who, by the polls at least, is a leading contender to be the next president, again, even though he is shockingly inept, unqualified, and is under investigation for criminal behavior on multiple different levels and in multiple different jurisdictions.

Again, the point of all this is to show us how desperately those areas of human life and activity need to be reformed, and probably dramatically so, at least if we care about things like democracy.

In some ways, it’s kind of like just before a new moon, when the light is diminished to its darkest state, before you begin a new cycle. So bear that in mind if you’re disturbed by what’s happening. These are the darkest hours. But it won’t necessarily last, at least like this.

It’s not that we won’t have a lot of work to do, because what happens with Pluto is that it will destroy or undermine things that are no longer valid, or that are corrupt, and make us all aware of that as part of the process.

And then we have to actually go and do all the work to transform and rebirth those areas or themes, to renew them and ensure that they reflect the reality that we want legitimately.

In the case of all the resurgence of the right-wing stuff, we have to ask what conditions precipitated or allowed that to occur. How could this happen? Why did it happen? And how do we prevent that? Or what changes do we need to make?

In other words, where did all the anger and resentment come from and what do we need to do to address those kinds of conditions? Why do people feel alienated?

And I’ve argued that a lot of it is just plain economics. That if you look at the distribution of wealth over the past 50 years, our quality of life has actually been deteriorating.

The situation for young people right now is very bleak. It used to be that your children could have a better life than you, and that’s not true anymore. And it has to do with economic inequality.

And both the right and the left are responsible for allowing that to occur. There may be more blame on the right, who lowered taxes for billionaires, but, for example, it was Bill Clinton who opened up a lot of foreign trade, which offshored a lot of jobs. Globalization, etc., etc., etc.

So in your personal life, depending on what house Pluto is transiting, the lessons that you’ve been learning since 2008 with Pluto transiting that house may be coming to a head. It’s like there’s an exclamation point that is showing you any final flaws that are in need of reform, renewal, and regeneration.

And if there was work that needed to be done that wasn’t, Pluto can hit very hard. It can actually destroy things to basically clear the ground for a new beginning.

Pluto is going to retrograde back into Capricorn one more time next year. That’s from September 1st until November 19th of 2024. And then it is done, finished, transiting Capricorn, and it will be in Aquarius for the most part through 2044. That is 20 years. A whole new cycle.

And of course, I will put links in the episode description to other episodes where I go into this in more detail.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that things are off the charts, happening very fast, very intensely. The seeming war between reactionary movements and forces and progressive ones is reaching a climax. And temporarily at least it may seem like the progressive forces are on their back foot. But that’s only temporary.

The last time that Pluto went into Aquarius, which was actually the first time that it went into Aquarius, in any of our lifetimes at least, was from March 23rd of this year until June 11th. And I recall personally that when Pluto went into Aquarius I felt a huge shift, which I like because it’s an air sign, and that suits me much better, personally.

And then on June 11th when Pluto moved back into Capricorn retrograde, I felt kind of the reverse. Like, instantly I felt this heavy, weighty energy. Pluto in Capricorn, the ruler of Capricorn, is Saturn. Saturn is a heavy energy that doesn’t like to move or shift and is very rigid.

And for some people it can manifest as being very controlling and repressive. And Saturn is not known for being fun at all, actually. It usually means work and concentration and focus and duty and responsibility. And yes, those things are important, of course, but they’re not light, they’re not entertaining, they’re not expansive. It’s more of a contracting energy.

So this is really important. Again, through January 20th we’re going to be dealing with a lot of really intense energy. We’re probably going to continue to see things that occur that are shocking.

Again, the rhetoric of Trump recently, which is unparalleled given its scale and implications, that is so reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s in Germany, for many people it’s very shocking.

There’s roughly 40% of the population that is either authoritarian-leaning or capable of being triggered to be an authoritarian. In other words, these tendencies are latent.

I’ll put a link in the episode description to an episode of Background Briefing that actually just came out yesterday that discusses this a bit more, the psychology of it.

So there are some people who are hardcore authoritarian. And then there’s another segment whose authoritarian tendencies can be triggered under stress or duress. And we are clearly in very stressful times.

It appears as if we’re going backwards socially. And politically there’s a lot of stuff happening on the right-leaning side of the spectrum, which is quite surprising to a lot of people. But again, that’s being triggered, especially for the next month or so.

One thing I should point out, recall that I stated that Pluto will make its final retrograde into Capricorn from September 1st to November 19th of 2024. The 60th US federal election will be on November 5th of 2024. Anyone who pays attention to current affairs knows that this election is going to be extremely important for the whole world. That election is occurring when Pluto is at 29 degrees of Capricorn.

So it could be very dramatic. It could be a situation where there is kind of like a final face-off between reactionary and progressive forces. It’s going to be intense regardless, that whole period.

But again, it is the very final time that Pluto will be in Capricorn for over two centuries. It’s a really big deal.

I’ll just remind you of one other thing as well. As I’ve stated in my previous episodes, the last time that Pluto was in Aquarius, which is where we’re just about to go, we had the French and the American revolutions. Extremely, extremely important.

Aquarius is an air sign.

It is all about moving forward and dramatic changes, and it moves very quickly. It’s not stuck energy in the same way that an earth sign like Capricorn is.

Aquarius is very independent, rational, intellectual. It challenges the status quo, and it generally has very progressive and egalitarian, and that’s key, egalitarian values. The right is not egalitarian by definition, which is in stark contrast to the energies of Capricorn and its ruling planet Saturn.

That is why, as Pluto is at this critical degree, everything is so polarized and extreme because the energies are very, very different.

Mercury is retrograde until January 1st. That adds a bit to the confusion.

Jupiter, which can represent our philosophy and our higher values, and things like higher education and international or foreign related themes, as well as optimism, has been retrograde since September 4th and doesn’t go direct until December 30th.

So December 30th, Jupiter goes direct. January 1st, Mercury goes direct. January 20th, Pluto enters Aquarius.

There’s going to be a lot of shifting energy over the next month. It’s a really big deal, and this shift of Pluto from Capricorn into Aquarius is also a very, very big deal. So a lot is going to happen.

Things can appear very dark right now, but like I said, in many ways, it’s like the dark before the dawn. So hang in there.

I mean, I find a lot of things that are happening are just like jaw dropping constantly and horrifying. But in many ways, the rebirth cycle is just around the corner.

And remember, despite all of the batshit crazy stuff that’s happening right now, all of this authoritarian, controlling, dominating, punitive, vengeful, grievance-centered, belligerently oriented energy…

Aquarius is very egalitarian. It’s very progressive. It’s very socially conscious. It believes in social justice. It is not top-down or hierarchical. It is not tribalistic.

Because I know a lot of you are like me – that’s why you’re listening to me – despite how dark and nasty and negative, and let’s face it, what we’re really seeing is how our social and political systems have been corrupted by literal criminals. These are criminals who should be prosecuted, as far as I’m concerned. They are anti-social, sociopaths, if not psychopaths. They need to be rooted out from our systems of governance and control, whether it’s corporate, political, banking, finance, etc.

And all these dark money groups that are operating behind the scenes to reshape society for their own personal benefit, all that crap, that energy is in complete conflict with the energy of Aquarius. So just remember that.

I know that things look really, really bad right now, but we’re going to have that energy of Pluto in Aquarius for 20 years. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or that there isn’t going to be battles, but the tide is moving in the direction of a more progressive, egalitarian, and just society for all around the world.

It’s up to us to root out the criminal and corrupt elements in our systems of governance on a global scale. That is what we are going to be focused on for the next 20 years. And that may mean that there are literal battles that will take place to arrive at that outcome.

As far as I’m concerned, and I’ve said this before too, we shouldn’t even be doing business with corrupt regimes or foreign countries that are anti-democratic.

A lot of what’s happening, I think, geopolitically is blowback for us compromising our ethics and values and being hypocritical in pursuit of profit or strategic advantage. We could have placed pressures on them to change if they wanted to do business with us, but we did not. Not sufficiently anyway.

And there have been plenty of cases where Western countries literally installed dictatorships or subversively toppled democratically elected governments with horrific outcomes.

How much more hypocritical can one possibly be? We have been enabling dictators and autocrats for profit. You can imagine the magnitude of the karma. Gigantic.

So hang in there, and like I said, fasten your seatbelts. And don’t give up. Don’t lose hope, no matter what anyone tells you.

One small housekeeping note.

If you subscribed to my contact list on my website, you should have received an email which you have to open, and there’s a link in it that you click to verify your email address.

There are many people who have subscribed to my contact list who did not complete that step. It may have gone into your spam folder or whatever.

So if you think you’ve subscribed to my contact list, but you didn’t go through that confirmation process, you may want to try going to my website and adding yourself to my list again, and then be on the lookout for that email. Because if you don’t confirm your email, you will not receive any updates.

So all the best to you during the holiday season, by the way. If you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. Thanks very much.

Again, for more detail, check the episode description for other episodes or articles that are related or that I mentioned.

And if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

I have a 20% off special on currently. A natal or transit reading makes a great gift, by the way. It’s something people won’t forget.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End transcript

Other related episodes or referenced herein:

⁠Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness⁠

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning⁠

Uranus square Pluto and Far-Right Extremism: 1930’s and 2010’s

The Astrology of Mass Delusion: 2011-2026

Other episodes featuring Pluto.

Articles or podcasts referenced herein:

Indian government accused of attack on democracy as 141 MPs suspended

The Background Briefing episode I mentioned (audio date Dec 19, 2023)

10 Times America Helped Overthrow a Foreign Government

Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America

How The CIA Overthrew Iran’s Democracy In 4 Days

CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic as it revisits ‘Argo’ rescue

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Pluto #Capricorn #Aquarius

Check my “Community Tab” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

Errata

The Never-Ending Tragedy of Spineless Complicity

I discuss the gut-wrenching situation in Gaza and why we must hold our leaders to higher ethical standards.

This episode was recorded on December 11, 2023. It was published on December 12, 2023 at 11:15am EDT.




Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.  

You can support my work and this channel ⁠⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠⁠

You can also support this channel with ⁠a monthly membership⁠.

Follow me on Threads⁠ where I share articles I feel are important.  

Please ⁠⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠⁠


Episode transcript:

Greetings all!

Welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving.

It is December 12th, 2023.

This episode was recorded on December 11th and published on December 12th.

We’re having some very unusual weather here today, with wind speeds up to around 100 kilometers an hour, or 60 miles an hour, so if that’s audible in the background, I apologize for that.

I’m at the final stages of some difficult transits, which have kind of caused me to lay low, as I described in my previous episode, which turned out to be very aptly titled “Drawing Lines”. That episode was published on November 19th.

I want to share with you what I’ve been experiencing and feeling in recent weeks and months.

Before I get into that, a quick heads up about the fact that Mercury will be going retrograde on December 13th in early Capricorn, through January 1st in Sagittarius. Most of you, I’m sure, understand the implications of that, with all of the travel plans and purchasing that goes on around this time of year that can introduce some challenges. So be aware of that. I mentioned this in an episode quite some time ago.

One of the main things I want to talk about here today is what has been coming up for all of us, I think, since the powerful eclipses in October. This is going on around the world, and we can see a lot of tumult, politically and socially, pretty much everywhere.

One of the things that I pray for pretty much every day, or set intentions for, actually, is that the light reveal the darkness so that humanity can become aware of what is actually happening, so that we can address those things.

And I particularly focus on people in positions of significant power, authority, privilege, wealth, or influence. And I’ve been doing that for a long time. I actually have a short on that, which provides some text or verbiage that you can use in your own practice for that end.

And that has most certainly been happening.

What is occurring right now in the Middle East, in Gaza, to me is extremely shocking for a number of reasons. The scale and ferocity of it is something that I find profoundly disturbing.

But even more so is the fact that many of the people who, in some ways, not entirely, but in some ways, I looked up to, or referenced as good sources, are promoting the dominating narrative, which is enabling these atrocities to occur.

And there are many scholars who have defined what’s happening as just that, whether it’s war crimes, genocide, or ethnic cleansing. Those are extremely powerful terms, all of them. But in many respects, what’s happening meets those definitions.

And again, one of the most disturbing aspects of this is that this is being cheered on by many people who we look up to, and in some cases, even elected, who not only oppose a ceasefire, but are, in some cases, are providing the weaponry and the technology, or the political cover, which is enabling this to occur.

Meaning that they are actively complicit in this. To me, this is extremely disappointing from a moral and ethical perspective.

There is no justification for what is happening, and the fact that the majority of the victims are innocent men, women, and children, who will be forever traumatized by what is occurring.

And I think we can argue that for those of us who are watching what’s happening, it can be quite traumatizing as well. I can certainly say that’s true in my case.

To add insult to injury, much of the mainstream media is disproportionately favoring the dominant narrative. There are many examples where people who have been questioning what’s happening have been shut down, targeted, attacked, and in some cases, removed from their positions, or fired.

This has been very divisive on the left, as everyone knows, I’m sure, because anyone in good conscience finds what’s happening extremely disturbing. That is simply a fact.

When you think about this whole scenario, it undermines our faith in our institutions, our leaders, and those who are supposed to be representing our values.

And perhaps that trust has been permanently broken. How can you forgive somebody who has been condoning atrocities? It’s very difficult.

Sure, there are some people who are simply misled, but we know that even within the Biden administration, for example, there are people within the State Department and staffers and aides to Democratic politicians who have taken steps to voice their concerns and outrage about this situation.So there are good people with good intentions within these institutions who are expressing their outrage.

Yet, despite a brief ceasefire, the atrocities continue and they are being supported diplomatically and militarily in what they’re doing.

All of the people who listen to me, I’m sure, know that the threat of the right, politically, represents a clear and present danger. The former president of the United States and his acolytes have declared very clearly what their intentions are should they be re-elected, and we should all be terrified about that.

But at the same time, like I said, our trust in the alternative has been tremendously degraded. And this is extremely disturbing because it can leave one feeling a sense of hopelessness that we have to choose the lesser of evils when we don’t want to choose any evil at all.

And so what the light of truth is showing us, chills here, is that our system is corrupt no matter how you look at it. That it requires profound transformation from top to bottom.

Now that pretty much jives with everything I’ve been saying on my channel for a very long time, that we need radical transformation.

But this transit of Pluto through the final degrees of Capricorn as it’s finishing up its devastation since 2008 is making it very clear that it is not black and white. That we have work to do on all sides.

Even in my own country here in Canada, there are things going on politically where the governing Liberal Party, who is supposedly center-left, has been engaging in a wide variety of policies that, if you’re an objective observer, cause you to question whether they’re simply just incredibly inept or incompetent or simply serving the interests of the wealthiest in our society.

It’s dumbfounding to behold, actually. I mean, it’s so inept you have to think sometimes that maybe it’s deliberate.

The alternative to the Liberals, who are likely to win the next federal election when it occurs by quite a significant margin because of the incompetence of the governing Liberal Party, who at the same time seem to be completely oblivious, tone-deaf, and indifferent to the mood of the nation, like they’re completely disconnected in a different reality, and they go out of their way to not listen, so they’re intransigent, which makes them seem so arrogant, and the polling keeps showing them going down and down and down, and this has been happening for months.

It’s a death spiral. But they refuse to change course on critical issues. It’s completely baffling.

The alternative is even worse, but people are so pissed off and fed up with the status quo that they are probably going to vote out of resentment. They’re not voting for something, they’re voting against something.

And I express that simply because that trend is occurring around the world right now. That’s exactly what’s happening from Denmark* to the United States to everywhere.

[*Correction: I inadvertently referenced “Denmark'” here. I intended to mention “Netherlands” (ie the recent election of Geert Wilders).]

People are pissed off, and they should be because the system is basically garbage, and our leaders are not reflecting our values accurately, and that is becoming crystal clear to us.

But back to the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East.

The cowardice and lack of moral compass and moral or ethical spinelessness of some people can be gut-wrenching to behold. How can you respect people who are in positions of leadership who are cowardly?

As I have stated here previously, there is a greater onus on those of us in positions of power or privilege to protect the most vulnerable people. Period. Strong chills here. We have a fundamental duty to protect the most vulnerable people, and if we fail that test, we should not be in positions of power or influence. There should be no exceptions to this rule.

The fact that so many people on the so-called left are willing to allow elected representatives or the government to tell universities and students or academics what they can do and what they can think and what they can say should be utterly terrifying.

And I am appalled that people are casually allowing these kinds of things to happen in so-called democracies. This is the road to totalitarianism or fascism.

The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping. How is that better than what we criticize countries like China or Hungary or Russia for doing?

This plays right into the hands of far-right extremists and their agenda to undermine, control, and discredit all of our institutions, whether it’s journalism, the fourth estate, or higher education. And many people applaud or tacitly condone this. It is incredibly naive and dangerous.

Like I said at these final stages of Pluto, Transit, and Capricorn, which I’ve talked a lot about before, and again I’ll put links in the episode description, Pluto re-enters Aquarius for a longer period of time on January 20th of 2024, and it will be there for a very long time, save for about 11 weeks later in 2024. And that marks kind of the new beginning.

When people talk about Pluto transits, they often refer to things like death and rebirth, or the Phoenix rising from the flames of destruction. And this came to me in my spiritual practice a few days ago. We’re in that destruction phase.

But for those of us who are feeling really disheartened and lost or disillusioned right now, like we have nowhere to place our faith, and that includes me, we need to remember that we’re in the death cycle, but there will be a regeneration, a rebirth cycle that will follow.

The old needs to die before something new can be born. So bear that in mind that all of these things that seem to be crashing down around us, they need to be destroyed in order to create a better future.

So we’re becoming aware of all of the darkness because the light is shining on it. That’s the optimistic conclusion to this.

But I can say that I am disgusted by what I have been seeing occurring over the past few months. So much so that it stopped me. It stopped me in my tracks because I felt like there was nothing positive I could say because the news is really bad.

This situation which is occurring right now in the Middle East that has compromised the integrity of so many people who we had put our faith in, where innocent civilians are being starved to death and being bombed relentlessly.

On that note, I will include in the episode description a link to a speech that Chris Hedges published a day or so ago, which is extremely moving.

He is a phenomenally credible person, a very powerful thinker with a lot of real world experience as a journalist who has frequently reported from war zones, including at one time for the New York Times, which resulted in him receiving a Pulitzer Prize. And he articulates his perspective about this situation in Gaza.

And I encourage everyone to listen to it because our media is failing us on this point. And it’s not failing us because of the journalists, let’s be clear about that. It’s just that a lot of journalists who want to counter the dominant narrative are being shut down.

The LA Times even went so far as to ban a significant number of their journalists from even reporting on this issue because they signed a letter calling for a ceasefire. That’s just one example.

So it’s really important that you make sure that you’re not getting all of your news or information about this incredibly complex and significant situation from only the mainstream traditional media sources. You have to read other sources.

The Guardian does a pretty good job of this. You can check Al Jazeera for a more Middle Eastern perspective. There are a lot of people covering this on platforms like Substack and some smaller independent media sources.

Of course, you want to make sure that you’re not reading propaganda because that is a real problem. So it’s important to make sure that the sources you’re acquiring information from are credible and respected and uphold the highest journalistic standards.

So to close, there’s one other thing I want to point out, which came to me the night after I listened to Chris Hedges’ speech, which is a video. And you can just listen to it because it’s basically just him talking.

So in my spiritual practice, at first I was concerned about the safety of these people because they’re putting themselves at danger potentially.

And so I sort of asked for protection for these brave souls who are speaking out and doing so diligently. And then what I got was that there are bright lights out there.

These are people who are actually putting themselves at risk to promote the truth and to promote perspectives that differ from the dominant mainstream narrative. And that these people are extremely brave and extremely important, but that there’s not a lot of them.

There’s a lot of people who are simply too fearful to talk about this. They would like to, but you know, people have to survive. They have to pay their mortgages, care for their families and so forth. So there’s a lot of people who simply can’t afford to take risks like that. And that must be heartbreaking. But there’s a few people who are willing to do it.

And in my spiritual practice, what came to me was that these people are the really bright lights. They are the truth tellers. Getting strong chills saying this.

So we need to support them and we need to look to them because they are the true change agents. There’s not a lot of them.

And it doesn’t matter where it is. Maybe it’s somebody in Russia. Maybe it’s somebody in the United States or in Britain or the Middle East or China or South America or wherever who is speaking truth to power. These are the bright lights of this new age we’re entering into.

There’s a lot of people who simply are really poorly informed or misled and we try not to be one of those.

And there’s a lot of people who are afraid. There’s a lot of people who just don’t care. There’s a lot of people who just want to make money and profit from whatever they’re doing. And they’re not willing to put their ethics ahead of anything else.

But there are a small group of people who are willing to stand up for the truth. And we need to support them and recognize them.

But generally these bright lights are people who are very well informed, very well intentioned, extremely conscientious, and very, very brave. They are the beacons of light.

I look forward as usual to all of your feedback and I thank all of the people who’ve been supportive of me. People have been wondering where have I been? What have I been doing?

I have been actually following what I have published here on my channel in recent months, which is that I just knew and saw, if you look back at what I published, that we were going to be going through a really challenging phase.

I believe the energy should really start shifting January 20th.

Jupiter is also retrograde now too, until the end of the year. That’s a bit of a bummer, especially if you’re a Sag. Or Jupiter is your chart ruler or something like that, or otherwise important to you. So hang in there.

And you know what we need to take away from this is that we need to zero in on the truth and the light and put pressure on people to hold themselves to a higher standard of ethics and morality.

We definitely don’t want something like 45 to win the next election because that would be utterly catastrophic for democracy, but those people that we are aligned with have to hold themselves to a higher standard.

And like I said, I have found that there’s a lot of people who I used to look at in one way, and now I look at them differently. And I recognize that they’re not as aligned with my values as I thought they were.

And so I’m a bit more jaded. I’m a bit more realistic, and I’m a bit more critical than I used to be. And that’s probably a good thing.

This whole period, frankly, has felt like a gut punch to me.

If you happen to agree with the prevailing opinion about this topic, please listen to my prior episode before challenging me.

I am in no way condoning any kind of atrocity against anyone. On the contrary. And I have made that point very clearly previously, as I’ve said.

All of the innocent victims of this terrible tragedy deserve our compassion. It doesn’t matter what side they’re on. All efforts should be made to minimize any further unnecessary harm.

If I am critical of the policies of the United States, and many of us are, including most of my listeners, it doesn’t mean we are prejudiced against all Americans.

Being critical of the state of Israel and its policies does not mean that one is anti-Semitic. We should criticize any country around the world for its failures. It is a fundamental component of a democratic society to be able to openly criticize your government, or any government for that matter.

And this applies to organizations and institutions like religious groups as well.

Again, for more detail, check the episode description for other episodes or articles that are related or that I mentioned.

And if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well. I have a 20% off special on currently. A natal or transit reading makes a great gift, by the way. It’s something people won’t forget.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End transcript.

Other episodes referenced herein:

Drawing Lines

⁠Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness⁠⁠Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning⁠

Intentions 4: Accountability for Those That Cause Harm

Drama and Detachment During This Intensely Karmic Cycle

Prepare for Major Systemic Changes


Articles or podcasts referenced herein:

So Many Child Deaths in Gaza, and for What? – Nicholas Kristof

Killing Children, the Burdens of Conscience, and the Israel-Hamas War – Henry Giroux

Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds

Israel-Hamas war live updates: Gaza’s health system is ‘collapsing’ and battles intensify in the south

Why is the US still sending an endless supply of arms to Israel without conditions?

State Department employees send Blinken ‘dissent’ cables over Gaza policy

Democratic Aides in Congress Break With Their Bosses on Israel-Hamas War

More Than 500 U.S. Officials Sign Letter Protesting Biden’s Israel Policy

U.S. Military Equipment Traced to Possible War Crimes in Gaza, Report Finds

It could be a ‘bloodbath for the Liberals’ if polls hold up until next election, say political strategists and insiders

The Sick Hypocrisy of the Republican Investigation Into College Campuses

How University Presidents Fell Into Congresswoman Stefanik’s Trap

Israel-Gaza war sets Biden at odds with youth of America

Progressives rebel against Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza crisis

The Genocide in Gaza – Chris Hedges

LA Times blocks reporters who signed open letter criticizing Israel from covering Gaza

‘I’m concerned about my personal safety’: Hong Kong activist Agnes Chow speaks about life in exile

On Israel’s War Against Hamas, Sanders Faces a Backlash From the Left

“Just factually wrong”: Jewish Dem calls out GOP resolution declaring “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Gaza #MiddleEast #Spirituality

Check my “Community Tab” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

Errata

Drawing Lines

I discuss some significant current affairs and some prominent ethical dilemmas (namely the conflict in the Middle East) and some astrological influences that are at play.

Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.

This episode was recorded on November 18, 2023. It was published on November 19, 2023 at 5:51pm EDT.



You can support my work and this channel ⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠.

You can also support this channel with a monthly membership.

Follow me on Threads where I share articles I feel are important. 

Please ⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠.

Episode transcript:

Greetings all, welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving.

It is November 19th, 2023. The bulk of this was recorded on November 18th.

As I often do, I will be displaying some graphics or articles on the screen that will only be visible in the video version of this episode, in case that matters to you.

It’s been a while since I’ve recorded anything, and my absence may seem a little odd. I’ve certainly thought a lot about recording at various times.

But this period has been very weird and peculiar. It started with an eclipse in October that was right on one of my key points in my astrology chart. This is a life-altering event.

On top of that, my ruling planet Jupiter has been retrograde, and Saturn has been squaring my sun. Not only that, but it retrograded and then basically stationed direct right as it was squaring my sun, which really extended that aspect in terms of time. One of the things about a transit like this with Saturn is that your physical energy and vitality can be quite low, and that’s probably coming through in my presentation right now. Another reason to lay low.

I’ll probably do an episode on that Saturn aspect once it’s complete, because I have a lot of observations that may help other people who are grappling with that transit. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to what has been coming up, both internally and externally, during this time. And I have a lot to say about that, which, like I said, I’ll get to at a later date. I don’t like to talk about things too much when I’m in the midst of it, because, based on my experience, you need to be able to see it in hindsight to fully appreciate it, or articulate it.

Of course, there’s an awful lot going on in the world these days, much of which I would like to comment on.

I still have been doing an awful lot of reading, and I listen to podcasts from around the world, so I have a lot of opinions about things, quite strong ones actually. But I still have this sense, which I have articulated here before, that this is kind of a time to lay low and not stick your head above the trenches too much.

I think as is clear, we can see that there’s a lot of people who have been getting into a lot of trouble lately by expressing their opinions in ways which might have been avoided if they had taken a little bit of time to think about what they were saying.

Also, a lot of what is occurring is exactly what I was describing in the episode that I did titled Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn, a karmic reckoning. We are seeing things very clearly. Much of it is not pleasant, but that’s not unexpected.

It’s just that world events are forcing people into positions, and they can be very stark and dramatic. Whether we agree with them or not.

So it’s like the light is shining on everyone and everything, and it is causing people to question their beliefs and their assumptions and their allegiances. And to me, from that perspective, it’s a good thing because we’re seeing things as they are. It’s like we’re cutting through the fog.

Like I said, that may not be pleasant, and we may not like it, but at least we are seeing the truth about who people are, where they stand, what their intentions are, and so forth.

There’s a lot of criticism about people in various camps right now, especially about what’s happening in the Middle East. And young people in particular are taking a lot of heat for their perspectives.

I am in no way advocating disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, or such. If you’ve listened to me before, you know how much I disdain that.

However, I do think that it is good that people are strongly expressing their views, because that is what we need. Strong chills here. That is what we need for society and democracy to function properly. We need people to be engaged and vocal.

And so I think the fact that young people are taking stands, even if they’re not necessarily fully informed or accurately informed, is a good thing. Yay! I’ve been for years saying that the key to our future lies in getting young people engaged. I think that’s fantastic.

So I had a bit of time where it’s quiet here, relatively, and there’s not a lot of stuff I can do because we’re in the midst of a big rainstorm here today. And I was thinking, how do I get on and talk about what I want to talk about or say what I need to say, which is a lot of things that have been on my mind lately, without alienating a lot of people or becoming a target myself.

And as I was contemplating this, something that happened in my youth came to my mind, a memory. And as I reflected on this, I realized that that is perfect. So I don’t know where this came from. It’s not something I think about very often, but it was a striking experience in my younger years.

And it goes like this:

Back in 1980, I was still a teenager. My very first job.

I used to do all kinds of things to make money when I was a teenager, like everything from painting people’s houses to doing yard maintenance to whatever, you know, short term things. But this was my first legitimate job with a paycheck and so on.

And I was an usher at a movie theater, briefly, as it would turn out. Remember, this is 1980, so it’s well before the days of the internet.

And the movie at this time was The Elephant Man. Fantastic movie, if you’ve never seen it. It’s slow and it’s black and white, but it was groundbreaking at the time.

So the movie was playing and I was in the lobby sweeping up popcorn from the floor or whatever in my really ill-fitting, cheap suit that they gave me, which was really ugly. This is an absolutely true story. And a couple comes into the lobby. They’re very upset.

They explain that there’s been a car accident, that there’s someone in the theater that they need to get ahold of because they need to go to the hospital to approve an emergency surgery on someone who has been severely injured in this accident.

And I’m a teenager, remember, at this time. And my first reaction was like, holy shit.

So I go to the manager and I say, we need to stop the movie and make an announcement. There’s a serious life-threatening situation. And I explained to him what’s going on.

And he refuses to do this. He says, we can’t interrupt the movie. They’ll have to wait.

And I was dumbfounded.

I didn’t know what to do, but I thought about it very quickly. And I’m like, someone could die if we don’t do this. This is crazy. You’re putting one screening of this movie ahead of this life-threatening situation.

And I’m sure everybody in the audience will understand why we’re doing this if we do it. So I go back to the manager and I say, we have to do something about this. Then the people were very upset and understandably so.

So he still refuses to do it.

And I look at the people and I think to myself, oh my God, what do I do?

So right there on the spot, I made a decision.

I walked into the theater. It was dark. I go in front of the screen and the movie’s still playing.

And I say very loudly, there’s an emergency.

Would so-and-so please come to the lobby if you’re here?

Please everyone pay attention.

If so-and-so is here, please come to the lobby. It’s urgent.

And then I go back to the lobby.

I take off my jacket. I hang it up and I walk out of the theater and I never go back.

That was my first job.

I was put in this incredibly important ethical and moral dilemma where I had to make a really snap decision.

And I basically walked away from my first job because I had to do the right thing.

So the moral of this story is that sometimes we have to make sacrifices to do the right thing.

And when situations are very clear cut and we weigh the pros and the cons, in that scenario, yes, that whole audience was inconvenienced by my interruption and some of them might have even been upset.

And I lost my job by defying the manager, but I had to do the right thing.

And so in this situation that’s occurring in the world right now, there is no justification for harming or endangering the lives of innocent civilians. Every possible measure and step should be taken to avoid doing that. Period.

Yes, we have the right to protect ourselves, but we do not have the right to harm innocent bystanders.

If something really terrible happened in the United States and the police had to go after an individual or even a group of individuals to bring them to justice, and in the course of doing that, they killed many innocent people to get their hands on a few guilty ones, the moral outrage, which would be entirely justified, would be of epic proportions.

Even if somebody has done something heinous, you cannot harm tens, hundreds, thousands of innocent people in seeking justice, because that is not justice. You are creating more injustice by doing that. And there is karma associated with that. It’s a very fine line.

Sometimes in conflicts innocent people get harmed. That happens. But every possible measure to avoid that occurring has to be taken.

It is simply not ethical to intentionally harm innocent people or bystanders. It’s black and white. It’s really simple. I challenge anyone to question that fundamental premise.

For example, how can a child or an infant be guilty of heinous crimes?

So, people who are calling for a ceasefire or a humanitarian pause are justified. It doesn’t mean that the guilty cannot be found and prosecuted or rooted out. It’s a question of how you do it.

And there is no moral justification for engaging in activity that harms thousands of innocent men, women, and children, that is disproportionate to the crimes that instigated the conflict in the first place. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than the criminals.

That’s why we have very complex legal and judicial systems. We go to great lengths to protect the innocent and to ensure that the guilty are actually guilty before they are charged.

It’s not a perfect system, but just think about the legal system, for example, in the United States, how complex it is. How many hoops you have to go through.

And we really go out of our way to make sure that justice is applied fairly accurately and reasonably, the thought of, for example, executing somebody who is innocent is horrific, and everyone agrees that we want to avoid that.

Now, I know a bit about the history here, and I know that there are grievances on all sides, and I’m not going to get into the history of it because that is a Pandora’s box. That’s not my point.

My point is that morally and ethically we have to hold ourselves to the highest possible standards, period.

One of the things I’ve been witnessing is that there’s a tremendous amount of tribalism at play. And to me, tribalism is very low consciousness. It is old paradigm.

There really is only one tribe. There isn’t many. We have different cultures and religious groups and so forth. Fair enough. That’s what makes life on earth interesting.

But fundamentally, we are all human beings, and we all have the same rights and privileges. It doesn’t matter about our ethnicity, culture, religion, country of origin, and so forth. Those are completely secondary to that.

So we should never unequivocally support any group, organization, or cause if what they’re doing is wrong.

And that is the moral of my story about the theater, is that what the manager was asking me to do was unethical and immoral, and I had to make a sacrifice to put my foot down and make a decision on the spot, without a lot of time to think about it, to do the right thing.

It’s black and white when you simplify it to its basic moral dilemma, as far as I’m concerned.

I also want to add that from my perspective, there is a fair amount of bias in politics and in the media, where we’re often not really hearing a lot of balance.

It seems to me that more people are speaking out about the disproportionate response and the consequences of that, but often you will also hear that a lot of people who express those kinds of concerns pay significant prices for doing so.

It is entirely legitimate to criticize military action that appears to be inappropriate. That is completely legitimate.

And I often see a lot of cases where, for example, criticism is conflated with anti-semitism, and they’re not necessarily the same thing.

I’m not talking about supporting the group that initiated the attack on October 7th.

But people being censured or losing their jobs, or being persecuted or blocked from advocating for a humanitarian pause or a ceasefire, is completely unconscionable if you actually think about it.

These are peace protesters. Not all of them, but the majority of them.

This is not the same situation as Ukraine, where one country tried to illegally steal another country. This is a totally different situation.

I will put in the description several links that describe how aides and people who work on foreign policy are critical of the Biden administration for not promoting a ceasefire.

And the reason I’m sharing that is because it validates that there are reasonable people within the administration itself who are dissenting voices, who are speaking out about this.

These are well-informed, intelligent people who are questioning these policies and the unquestioning support for what is occurring now. That simply validates my point or my perspective. The people who are questioning this are not just fringe, far-left people. These are advisors to the current administration. These are trusted advisors.

So yes, we should be debating this and its merits, or lack thereof, and that is completely 100% legitimate, and we should always do that. Whenever there’s war or conflict, we need a very balanced approach and perspective.

And one of the things that really concerns me about this the most is that it seems to me that, like I said, there is a bias, and that people who are questioning what’s happening are being targeted and even attacked. Just because you don’t support the tactics that are currently being employed doesn’t mean you’re anti-semitic.

I really encourage people, especially Americans, to read the news from other countries. Canada, the UK, Europe, Germany, Australia, wherever.

I remember very vividly during the Gulf War, I was traveling in Europe, and I would watch CNN at night just to catch up on what was happening. And I was shocked, it was jaw-dropping, how different the European CNN broadcasts were compared to what was broadcast in the United States.

It may be different now, but back then, they had their own reporters and hosts who were based in Europe. It was really something to behold.

I was so struck by this that I couldn’t stop talking about it. It’s like two different universes from the same network.

So American news has a particular style and presentation that is very different from what you get, for example, in Europe. Places like The Guardian, which is one of the top news publications in the world by traffic, has a very different style and presentation than, say, The Washington Post or The New York Times.

So again, I just really encourage people to check out different perspectives to make sure that you’re not stuck in an information bubble.

I also want to take this opportunity to express one more point of concern. Clearly, there is an awful lot of darkness being expressed in the world right now. A lot of us, I think, feel like we are being yanked back into some old paradigm that is very ugly in many ways. And this can be quite disturbing.

I myself have not read many of the details about what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East since October 7th. I follow it at a high level, but I find it very difficult to focus on the trauma that is being experienced on the ground. It’s very dark.

And there are many other things going on politically and environmentally that are also very disconcerting.

I’m a realist when it comes to what’s happening in the world. And I have been very critical of things like conspiracy theories, the rise of authoritarianism and populism, the move by those on the right into increasingly extreme positions, Christian nationalism, etc.

Now, clearly, there are people who disagree with my perspective, and I don’t typically shy away from expressing my honest opinion about these kinds of things.

One of the tactics that is commonly employed by people who are offended by those kinds of statements or observations is to use ad hominem attacks.

They will say, for example, that you are being dark or excessively negative, even if you’re simply stating facts. And people who use ad hominems do so because they can’t refute your statements with facts or evidence or logic, so they attack the person or their character. It is not a tactic that I respect.

But as truth-tellers, we need to be aware that there are people who are going to be offended by what we state or observe or point out, and that these people will try and undermine us.

To me, it is quite self-evident when this is occurring, and I assume that most reasonable people are capable of identifying when that’s happening. But that may not always be the case, and we need to be vigilant to not allow such attacks to undermine us or cause us to shut up, because that is exactly what the intent is.

The intent is for us to go away, stop speaking our truth, to shut us down, so that the people we are offending can just carry on with whatever it is they’re doing, unchallenged.

Because of everything that’s happening in the world right now, a lot of us can feel like we’re under attack, like our beliefs, our perspectives, our worldviews are being questioned and we’re under attack, and we may even feel hopeless at times.

But I’m urging you to not do that, to maintain your strength, to know yourself, and not allow what’s happening to beat you down, because that is exactly what the dark side wants to happen.

There is a push and a pull going on right now between an old paradigm and a new paradigm, and the new paradigm I have described a lot on my channel, especially in my episodes about Pluto transiting Aquarius, and Pluto will re-enter Aquarius again on January 20th of next year. That’s only about two months from now.

So between now and then, Pluto is going to be hitting 29 degrees of Capricorn. I’ll put the dates on the screen. And this is one of the final battles between these two paradigms.

The energy should shift back more into where we would like it to be probably come January 20th of 2024, the last time Pluto shifted into Aquarius, I felt the shift almost immediately.

So hang in there, and don’t let all of the screams and the agonies of the death throes of this old paradigm cause you to question your core beliefs, values, or positions.

It really is kind of like a spiritual battle that’s going on. The truth will always win in the end, it just may take a bit of time.

I’m not suggesting that on January 20th everything is going to suddenly be resolved, but the tide will have turned, and the momentum will again start moving towards this more egalitarian future that is our destiny.

Pluto will dip back into Capricorn one more time next year, and that is between September 1st and November 19th of 2024. That should be especially interesting because it’s just going to retrograde into 29 degrees of Capricorn and then station direct at 29 degrees just for that 6 or 7 week period. That should be absolutely fascinating to witness.

A quick update on some near-term transits.

I posted on my community tab last night about Mars and the Sun being conjunct most of this week all the way through next weekend really. So watch your temper and think twice before you speak anything contentious or challenging, and watch out for that coming at you the other way, because people can be acting quite aggressively right now without thinking about what they’re saying, and then they may end up regretting it later. Also watch out for rash and impulsive behavior that you may also regret later. You can use this energy to get out and do some physical stuff, like whether it’s chores or exercise, it’s really good for that.

The Sun and Mars are currently in Scorpio. Scorpio is a very intense sign, so that adds to what I’ve been describing.

For example, what’s happening with Elon Musk right now is a classic example of that. Just look at how much his tweet cost him and X, formerly Twitter.

Neptune goes direct on December 6th in Pisces.

Jupiter goes direct on December 30th.

Saturn went direct on November 4th. That’s a good thing.

And the effect of the eclipses back in October are still playing out, as we can clearly see.

Jupiter is continuing its transit of Taurus until May 25th of 2024. I mention this because in terms of the incredible inflation that we’ve been experiencing, and the cost of living crisis that is being felt around the world, things like greedflation and price gouging, financially it’s been crazy lately. The stock market is still doing surprisingly well.

When Jupiter leaves Taurus after May 25th, I believe we should see things start to settle down in those regards. In terms of everything being insanely expensive, paying more for smaller items, reduced packaging size, increased prices, insidious junk fees, corporate profiteering, naked greed, the housing market going berserk, rent prices, all that stuff. Inflationary.

Jupiter is very expansive, and in the money sign of Taurus it tends to exaggerate everything. Taurus also governs things like property and real estate, of course. So like I said, after May 25th, I expect that we should see things start to simmer or calm down a bit in those regards. That will be welcome.

I apologize for my absence, but I’ve really just been following my guidance on that, and I think I’m doing the right thing. I’ve just been keeping busy doing a lot of stuff I’ve been putting off, and that’s been going well. Laying low. Until now.

After this Saturn-square-my-sun transit is over, I’ll probably be back and getting into some other interesting things that have been on my mind.

So I think I’ll just leave it there for now.

Again, for more detail, check the episode description for other episodes or articles that are related or that I mentioned.

And if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well. I have a 20% off Black Friday special on currently. A natal or transit reading makes a great gift, by the way. It’s something people won’t forget.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End transcript.



Other episodes referenced herein:

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning

Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness

Jupiter transit Taurus: 2023-2024

Drama and Detachment During This Intensely Karmic Cycle

Articles and resources referenced or displayed in this episode:

The Elephant Man (movie, 1980)

State Department employees send Blinken ‘dissent’ cables over Gaza policy

More Than 500 U.S. Officials Sign Letter Protesting Biden’s Israel Policy

Democratic Aides in Congress Break With Their Bosses on Israel-Hamas War

“Let It Go to Voicemail”: Democrats Reportedly Ignoring Calls for Cease-Fire

Voters Agree the U.S. Should Call for a Ceasefire and De-Escalation of Violence in Gaza to Prevent Civilian Deaths

Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024

#Astrology #War #Peace

Check my “Community Tab” where I comment and share links I find interesting

Errata

Uranus transit Gemini 2025-2033

I discuss the astrology of the transit of Uranus through the sign of Taurus and what we can expect when it transits Gemini from 2025 through 2033.

Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.

This episode was recorded between September 8-10, 2023. It was published on October 10, 2023 at 8:00pm EDT.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠.

You can also support this channel with a monthly membership.

Please see my “⁠Environment⁠” playlist for other episodes on this topic.

Follow me on Threads where I share articles I feel are important. 

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Episode transcript:

Greetings all, welcome to Aquarian Diary.

I’m your host, John Irving.

It is October 10th, 2023.

The bulk of this was recorded on October 8th.

Today, I will primarily talk about something that has been stuck at the forefront of my mind for about a week in terms of things I want to talk about here.

Before I get to that, though, most people in the world are likely aware of what happened in Israel on the weekend. A terrible tragedy.

At that time, Mars was conjuncting the south node in Libra, opposing the north node in Aries of course, and tightly squaring Pluto in Capricorn. A T-square involving Pluto, Mars, and the Nodes.

I also want to draw your attention to this Libra solar eclipse, this New Moon eclipse which is occurring on October 14th, a few days from now.

Eclipses can bring sudden, intense events to areas that they influence.

In mundane astrology, the seventh house, which is ruled by Libra and its ruling planet Venus, governs things like diplomacy and open enemies. These are enemies that you know exist, as opposed to the 12th house, which traditionally ruled hidden enemies, which are enemies you have but you don’t know you have them or you can’t identify them.

So here we see this dramatic, unexpected event that relates to a complete failure or breakdown of diplomacy, perhaps triggered by the violent and explosive energy of Mars squaring Pluto and involving the Nodes, which are very karmic points.

Like I said, it’s surprising, it’s dramatic, and this event is certainly one that will be noteworthy historically, where relations will never be the same going forward.

In fact, I find it quite surprising that nobody predicted this or saw it coming, given its incredibly significant implications geopolitically and historically.

I personally find this very horrible and unfortunate tragedy difficult to contemplate. It’s very disturbing.

In personal astrology, Libra and the 7th house, where the October 14th eclipse is occurring, govern our own close relationships, typically committed ones, as well as business partnerships, and in negative expression, our detractors or “enemies”. So bear that in mind.

We also have, at the same time, and I’ve done a whole episode on this, we have the North Node transiting Aries and the South Node transiting Libra. Which I believe plays into this as well. Aries, of course, is ruled by Mars. Mars is the god of war.

So it’s not surprising to see dramatic expressions of aggression because that is the lower expression of Mars, and a diminishment (South Node) of diplomacy.

In fact, there’s a lot of diplomatic breakdowns that have been occurring recently, even with China, for example, or India, or the BRIC nations.

Countries and leaders are striking out independently (Mars) and a lot of traditional geopolitical policies and alliances are being tested. Rash behavior is not unexpected.

As usual, I will be putting links in the episode description to other episodes where I go into some of these topics in more detail.

But, the North Node entered Aries on July 17th of 2023 and will be transiting Aries until January 11th of 2025.

In the episode prior to this one, I mentioned the two eclipses in October. The second is a lunar eclipse on October 28th at 5 degrees of Taurus. And I also talked about the major retrograde cycles.

And quickly I want to point out here again, just to refresh your memory, that Pluto goes direct on October 10th and then Saturn goes direct on November 4th. So those are coming up fairly quickly.

Neptune will be going direct on December 6th and Jupiter won’t be going direct until December 30th.

Those are major shifts that will be occurring by the end of the year.

When planets are retrograde, think of it like going back and double-checking your path or your progress. Retrogrades give us an opportunity to review or revisit, to make adjustments in our path or direction before we proceed forward again.

This can be very, very useful. It’s kind of like clearing up loose ends.

And so, it’s not surprising that a lot of the issues that we’ve been seeing playing out in the media, and there are many, it’s been incredibly intense from a news and current events perspective. There have been many, many things that are coming to the surface that really need to be addressed in many dimensions of society, politics, human experience, and so forth.

When these planets start moving forward again there will be more of an energy for problem-solving and implementing fixes. Right now there’s a lot of energy going into backtracking a bit, questioning and revisiting topics as I said, giving us a chance to make course corrections before the energy start moving ahead again.

Now we’re still going to have Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn which is a really big deal and I also did a whole episode on that as well. I don’t like to be redundant so I’m not going to repeat all of that. You can check the episode description if you want to consider that.

So finally, back to my original mission here.

I have done a couple episodes talking about a lot of the radical kind of experiences, politically and socially, that we have been witnessing in recent years, trying to put them into a historic context. I’ll link those in the description as well.

But I want to express one of those slightly differently because sometimes it helps to look at things from a slightly different perspective. And that is the transit of Uranus through Taurus.

Uranus has been transiting Taurus since 2018 and will complete its transit in 2026. And for various reasons I have pinpointed the time frame of 2026 for the end of a lot of the chaos we’ve been experiencing. I’m not going to repeat all that either here right now.

But the aspect of this transit that I want to focus on a little differently is just that most people associate Taurus – in mundane terms or big picture terms – with property, banking, finance, money, possessions, real estate, and the like.

But on another level, Taurus also represents what we value.

Money is an abstract representation of our value. Why is one thing worth a lot more than something else? That’s because people value it, obviously. Or something may be more valuable because it’s more rare, whether it’s a mineral, a piece of fine art, a property, a car, whatever it is.

Uranus can represent dramatic events and dramatic changes. Things that occur suddenly. Things that are out of step with the past. Things that are radical, extreme, or completely unexpected. It can be shocking, and sometimes it can be so shocking that it actually causes trauma. Because it literally breaks up patterns that we may have clung to.

So when we think about, for example, what’s happened with banking and finance and money and the stock market, real estate and housing, and things like inflation over recent years, it has been truly shocking. A lot of norms and patterns that people predicted and expected were completely upended, and in some cases, shattered.

And the same can be said for our values. We have seen an incredible rise of really extreme and radical values and expressions of those. A lot of it has been incredibly shocking. That is a fact.

If you read the news, you can find completely jaw-dropping, shocking things on almost a daily basis. That’s what I experience.

This can be quite stressful and anxiety-inducing, because you don’t know what to expect next. And a lot of these things are outside of what anyone predicted would occur. So they’re very surprising. This is very Uranian.

My point is that we can expect this all the way through 2026. We get a brief reprieve between July and November of 2025 – that’ll give us a taste of what the new normal is going to look like. But things will start to settle down in some ways then.

Then Uranus is going to transit Gemini from 2025 through 2033.

Now in mundane astrology, the third house, which is what Gemini rules, governs communication, short forms of transportation, a country’s neighbors, that would be countries that are adjacent to them, and local commerce.

So in some ways it includes the internet because the internet is a form of communication, and we also use it for commerce.

But it’s more like your local community as opposed to your country. It’s your town, your village, your neighborhood.

And it includes the media because the media is all about communication.

Now you can expand this tent as large as you want because there are many, many expressions of these kinds of activities.

But we can expect, for example, a lot of changes during that time from 2025 to 2033 about how communities function and there will be probably a lot of shake-up and transformation in news, publishing, communications, the media, any form of expression that conveys knowledge or information, even film or art.

Local commerce will probably go through a lot of radical changes, and there will probably be a lot of involvement with technology and the internet with all of this.

The news media is already in a state of crisis. There are many, many traditional publications which have really been struggling with how to survive in a digital age. And so there is a dearth of local reporting in many cases, which is really unfortunate for a lot of obvious reasons.

And I think we’re going to see a huge shift in transportation. So, electric vehicles, for example, electric cars and trucks, community-based transportation, public transportation, all of those kinds of things are going to be up for radical evolution and change.

Now, Uranus can manifest quite shockingly, as I’ve explained. So, a lot of these changes are not necessarily going to be received as being beneficial by everybody. A lot of the stuff that will occur will be upsetting.

I expect that many of these issues will pertain to environmental issues, like think about what’s happening for example with the Mississippi River and New Orleans right now, where suddenly they’re finding out that their water supply is being contaminated by saltwater intrusion because of drought and sea level rise.

So there may not be a lot of stability within the boundaries of traditional communities, whether it’s a town or village, the suburbs, whatever.

By now, we’re all aware of these really unprecedented, extreme weather events that have been really devastating to a lot of communities around the globe, whether it’s floods or wildfires or smoke or drought.

Even now, insurance companies are starting to pull out of a lot of these markets and even if it’s available, insurance is becoming insanely expensive. So this makes people vulnerable and puts them and their properties and their communities at risk. We know that the climate situation will worsen for years to come, even under the best case scenarios.

Uranus can fracture things. I’ve seen that in my own personal experience with significant Uranus transits to my personal planets. And like I’ve said before, it can be traumatic.

So, with Uranus in the sector of communities, I think that those kinds of things are probably going to reach a completely different level.

And because Uranus breaks things up, we may start to see people being displaced and dealing with all of the stress and anxiety about that. Where we find that these communities that have been a place of refuge for generations no longer feel secure or safe.

For some reason, the suburbs came to my mind a lot while I was thinking about this.

You know, I hate to say this because I’m a fan of the country, but we might start to realize that we are quite vulnerable in rural settings where we don’t have as much infrastructure or as many municipal services under these kinds of conditions.

I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but whatever it is, community and community life will be disrupted and changed and broken up in some ways. Living situations may be more transient or less permanent than what we’re familiar with.

Another possibility would be, say, homes get a lot smaller, so they change a lot in size, or maybe they are mobile.

And a lot of this may relate to commerce and the way that commerce is conducted on a local level. We know that there has been a huge consolidation of power and ownership in many, many sectors of the economy, whether it’s grocery store chains, agribusiness, meat processing, sales, whatever.

There will be a lot of stress and strain and changes and things are going to be breaking in a lot of those areas. And like I said, there will certainly be changes that were not expected.

It could also be, for example, that there are new forms of energy, maybe that are distributed, where people are producing their own energy at home, which leads them to be less dependent on utilities or the power grid, that would be very Uranian and technology-driven, which is a Uranian thing.

And like I said there could be tremendous breakthroughs with transportation. For example, batteries with really significant range capabilities could suddenly become available at a much cheaper price, which would completely upend the entire automotive industry. It’s already being dramatically altered, but this would take it to a whole new level and it would occur much more quickly.

Or maybe driverless or autonomous vehicles take off to the point where they become a major form of transportation for people. It could be that it’s much cheaper to use them than it is to buy or lease a vehicle because they will just show up whenever you need them. And you don’t have the monthly lease or bank loan expense and all the other costs associated with owning a vehicle, like maintenance. And a lot of people could adopt that because vehicles are a major expense for people.

That also would have really important implications for us as individuals, for our communities, and for the automotive and transportation industry, which in many cases are locally owned enterprises that could become redundant overnight. Truck drivers are a classic example.

And also for the government, because they generate a lot of tax revenue from vehicles, highways, driving infractions, vehicle licensing fees, and so on. And how do governments tax labor that’s done by machines or computers?

These are the kind of disruptions we should probably anticipate. The technology is there, it just needs to reach a level of maturity. Those kinds of changes would have profound implications.

I would expect to see, in the publishing and news industry, that a lot of things are going to make a shift into being truly digital during this time. And whatever happens with the news and media will likely be something that nobody really fully anticipated. There might have been a few people who saw it coming, but the vast majority of people won’t have seen this coming.

One possibility that might fit into these energies might be a lot of journalists operating independently, because Uranus doesn’t like boundaries. And that’s already kind of starting to happen with podcasting.

The current generation of AI [artificial intelligence] is advancing at an unbelievable pace, and it has the potential to displace countless jobs in fields like the media and publishing and journalism.

But beyond that, combining AI with robotics could render millions of jobs obsolete, which would devastate communities. We would either have completely unprecedented unemployment rates, akin to the Great Depression, or the government is going to have to step in and offer some form of universal basic income.

Internet connectivity itself, right to your home, could also be revolutionized, such that it becomes available to people even if they’re, for example, in far-flung places. We already have satellite connectivity, but that could dramatically expand and become more broadly available or ubiquitous. Like for example, imagine if satellite connectivity was built right into your laptop as a standard thing where you don’t need a wired connection or even Wi-Fi anymore.

There will also likely be a lot of really significant developments with things like computing and cell phone technology. We think our phones are pretty sophisticated right now and they most certainly are compared to what they were like a decade ago, but the proliferation of them and their capabilities will likely go through really profound evolution during this time.

This whole notion of us being digitally connected will be taken to completely different levels. It might even mean, for example, that things like electronic voting takes hold, where we can weigh in on things almost instantaneously.

Digital currencies is another thing. Many people may not realize this, but China is moving very, very quickly towards a purely digital technology for its currency. For day-to-day use, this is the third house.

In fact, even people on the street in China who, for example beg for money, need to have smartphones because people don’t have cash.

So, that’s really good in some ways because it reduces a lot of middlemen. Like when your employer pays you, the money is instantaneously in your account. When you purchase something, it instantaneously goes from you to someone else and there’s fewer middlemen.

Like credit card companies, for example, may not welcome this because they charge a lot of fees on transactions. But if you can make a payment instantaneously with no middlemen, what do you need them for? Think about that. It has huge implications.

The downsides are that the Chinese government can monitor every single transaction by everyone in the country at any point in time. That is really scary. If someone is critical of the Chinese government, they can be cut off from making financial transactions, which basically would bankrupt them. So this can be a very powerful tool of autocratic control and oppression. So there’s potential for abuse, but there’s also upsides to it.

Now that’s going to put pressure on the United States to also move forward with this technology because they don’t want to be left behind. China is not a direct threat yet in terms of America’s reserve currency, but the US cannot ignore the trends.

So I would not be surprised to see this become a major theme for, for example, the European Union and the United States and other major countries to start seriously implementing digital currencies, for better or for worse.

Because we use currencies in our commerce, day-to-day commerce. That’s the third house.

As someone who has been very involved in internet and internet technology for many years, I don’t even like raising the prospect of this, but I would not be surprised to see a lot of battles over control of the internet and the role of journalism and the media during this cycle.

There may very well be attempts by various governments to try and rein in internet activity, even if some of it is well-intentioned. It may have unforeseen and unexpected consequences and there could be a lot of battles over that. The government may think that it needs to put its foot down, but at what cost?

I am a huge advocate of free speech. There is a fine line between free speech and irresponsible or dangerous speech. Now clearly those that cross that line have to be held accountable, but that is a very slippery slope.

We’re already seeing that begin here in Canada, where the government is trying to implement legislation that many people find very concerning and troubling. And others are arguing that, well, we need to do something about it. But the question is, what do you do, and who are the gatekeepers? And who are the gatekeepers aligned with?

It’s a very complicated, tricky issue, and very few countries in the world even anticipated these kinds of problems, much less what forms of legislation would address them, without stepping on people’s freedoms.

The flip side of that might be that we have much greater privacy laws and digital protections.

It would also not be surprising to see large monopolies in the tech space being taken to task for unfair business practices, for example. Uranus can break things up.

Some of these discussions are already underway with, for example, Google in the United States, as well as Amazon, which are being accused of monopolistic and predatory practices.

Now one other thing that’s really important to note here is that Uranus in Taurus will be trining Pluto in Aquarius the whole time that it’s in Gemini. This is really important.

The trine is the most harmonious or easy flowing aspect in astrology. The energies, in fact, can flow so smoothly that we take them for granted.

But what that means is that this relationship between Pluto and Uranus, two of the big players, will be very harmonious and the energy will flow incredibly easily. It’s like the volume knob is turned all the way up and there’s very little resistance between the two.

Pluto representing change and transformation, death and rebirth, is going to be in this very powerful harmonious aspect to Uranus and Gemini for this whole six or seven year period. And so, these kinds of changes that I’m talking about are going to be flowing very powerfully and without a lot of obstruction.

It doesn’t mean that we as people are going to find that easy because change is just going to be happening so fast and so constantly that it’ll be hard to keep up with. And people, generally, some more than others, like things to be predictable. But in many ways they won’t be.

Of course, I did a huge episode on Pluto and Aquarius, which is really about this shift in consciousness to more of a global level, where we have a trend towards global egalitarianism and connectedness and awareness. The breakdown of the smaller tribes, more of a focus on us as a species and our place in the world. And Aquarius is very intelligent and rational, generally.

So think about how this effect is going to play out for us, like on a community level in our day-to-day lives. It has really big implications if you take all the things I’ve been talking about and meld them together.

So there will be a surge of change and evolution in a very forward-looking, rational, and globally conscious egalitarian perspective.

Now Pluto will be showing us the negative sides of Aquarius because it has to purge. It has to purge the darkness, the garbage. It will be bringing that to our attention wherever we’re not expressing the energies of Aquarius or the 11th house authentically.

So we’re definitely going to have challenges, but the overriding agenda will be to purge all of those false expressions of Aquarius so that we can manifest the accurate and positive expressions of it.

So we’re going to see how governments and organizations and groups and groupthink and nations and tribalism are expressed in its lowest expression or in ways that are antithetical to Aquarius, on a higher level, so that we can get past that. It’s really about what we want the future to look like.

Pluto transits are never easy, but they can be profoundly transformative and sometimes old ways of being and old ways of thinking need to die so that new ones can take their place. It’s very regenerative, but there can be that metaphorical death part of the cycle, and there often is.

The third house, or where Uranus will be transiting in Gemini, is a mutable house, meaning that it is more adaptive and flexible about changes, and is capable of seeing things from different perspectives. So, the overall trend won’t be necessarily as dramatic, perhaps, as it was in the fixed sign of Taurus.

And, of course, yes, in the third house, Uranus is in trine to the house that it rules.

On a personal level, if you have significant planets or points in Gemini, you’re going to be experiencing a lot of very noteworthy and sometimes sudden developments or changes.

While in Gemini, Uranus will be squaring Pisces and Virgo and opposing Sagittarius. Those are all very significant aspects as well.

So, whatever planets or points, like your Ascendant or Midheaven, are in aspects of square, opposition or conjunction to Uranus, things will happen and they can be quite intense and disruptive, and forever change the course of matters that pertain to those planets or points or houses.

As I’ve mentioned, Uranus will be trining Aquarius and Libra during this time and sextiling Aries and Leo. Those are the more easy-flowing energies or aspects.

You’ll have to check your chart for more details on how this transit will play out for you.

So that’s a bit of what you can expect when Uranus moves from the values area into the communication and community area. And again, this is local community, not global community.

So there’s a transformation happening on the global scale, which is Pluto, as well as how that percolates down to and expresses and manifests in our local communities.

However it plays out, you can expect it to be dramatic and unexpected and sometimes shocking.

But at least by then, we won’t be dealing with the radical extreme expressions of values that we’ve been seeing relentlessly for years now. To the point where even democracies are under direct threat. Where it seemed like the genie was let out of the bottle with respect to our psychology around values. A lot of people were saying the quiet part out loud, which is pretty shocking because they’re not supposed to do that, even if that’s how they feel on the inside.

That cycle will be finishing in the next few years.

So that’s what I wanted to say. This is a lot longer than I thought it would be, but I guess that’s just how long it takes to express these things.

Again, for more detail, check the episode description for other episodes that are related or that I mentioned.

And if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well. A natal or transit reading makes a great gift, by the way. It’s something people won’t forget.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.

End transcript.

Other episodes of mine referenced herein:

North Node transit Aries / South Node transit Libra: 2023-2025

Uranus square Pluto and Far-Right Extremism: 1930’s and 2010’s

The Astrology of Mass Delusion: 2011-2026

Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning

#Astrology #Uranus #Pluto #Aquarius #Gemini #Taurus #3rdHouse #11thHouse

Check my “⁠Community Tab⁠” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

⁠Errata⁠



Pluto Transit Capricorn – Lessons for Humanity

I discuss the current retrograde dates (many retrogrades are ending soon), the solar and lunar eclipse dates in October 2023 and the Mercury retrograde over the holiday season this year.

I then discuss the societal level lessons for humanity that Pluto – which is finishing its transit of Capricorn (for the most part) – has been teaching us.

Astrological dates mentioned herein are calculated using the Eastern Daylight time zone.

This episode was recorded on September 30, 2023 and it was published on October 1, 2023 at 9:20am EDT.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠.

You can also support this channel with a monthly membership.

Please see my “⁠Environment⁠” playlist for other episodes on this topic.

Follow me on Threads where I share articles I feel are important. 

To receive alerts about new episodes please ⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠ here.


Episode transcript:

Greetings all.

Welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving. It is October 1, 2023.

The first 10 minutes or so of this episode are dedicated to near-term astrology, for the most part. After that I get more into the meaning or purpose of the transit of Pluto through Capricorn, which we are at the final stages of as I record this.

If you’re listening to this at a much later date, you may want to skip ahead to about the 10 minute 30 second mark.

I haven’t posted anything since September 6th. This last period of time has been very weird. And for a long time I thought it was just me. But then I did a few transit readings, or updates for people, recently. And in speaking to them, they shared that their experiences have been very similar lately. I’ve been kind of laying low waiting for things to shift.

We’ve had an awful lot of planets retrograde, including Saturn, transiting Pisces, and of course Pluto, which has been retrograde since May 1st, and is now back in Capricorn until January 20th of next year.

As I have commented on before, this period with Pluto around 29 degrees of Capricorn is a very karmic cycle. I did a whole episode on that which I would encourage you to check out.

If we look at what’s been happening in the world lately, for me it shows up so clearly.

Saturn retrograding in Pisces is also a karmic signature. A lot of people are dealing with the consequences of actions that have been occurring in recent history.

There’s a daily barrage of news and developments that are often really striking, and that I think will be a major theme, especially right up through January 20th.

So that explains why some of us really don’t want to stick our heads above the trenches. The sense is that we just have to get through this period as best we can, and in many ways, the skies will start to clear come January.

If you’re interested in specific details, I’ll be putting some dates on the screen.

We have a solar new moon eclipse at 21 degrees of Libra on October 14th and a lunar full moon eclipse at 5 degrees of Taurus on October 28th.

Eclipse energies show up, say, 3 months prior to the event and play out up to 6 months after.

If you have significant planets or points at 21 degrees of Libra or 5 degrees of Taurus, give or take a few degrees or in strong aspect to those degrees, these may be especially important for you.

Now many of those major retrogrades are going to be ending over the next few months.

Pluto goes direct on October 10th in Capricorn. It will enter Aquarius on January 20th.

Saturn turns direct on November 4th.

Neptune goes direct on December 6th.

Jupiter goes direct on December 30th.

Uranus won’t go direct until January 27th of next year.

Mercury will go retrograde again on December 13th and turns direct on January 1st. That’s a bit unfortunate because Mercury will be retrograde throughout the holiday season in many parts of the world.

Not only that, but Mercury will square Neptune in Pisces and conjunct Mars in Sagittarius on December 27th while retrograde, if not almost station retrograde, in other words, it’s going to sit there.

Avoid getting into heated arguments or debates, especially with religiously oriented people. One strategy could just be avoidance, but you’ll probably take heat for that anyway.

Make sure you have receipts. Things could get very confused and heated at the same time.

It’s quite something, especially because of the time of year, with traveling and family and all that stuff.

I don’t really mean to get into exhaustive detail here, but that’s one thing that really jumped out at me. It looks messy.

It’s funny, Apple just released its new iPhone, the iPhone 15, during Mercury retrograde. And they’re having quite a few technical problems with the phone. When it was announced, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t good.” Bad timing.

So if you want to avoid issues with holiday gift giving, for example, you might want to do your shopping before, say, November 25th. A bit of a stretch for a lot of people I know, but especially when it comes to tech items and gifts and travel, Mercury retrograde can introduce some issues. This retrograde will be occurring in the early degrees of Capricorn and late degrees of Sagittarius.

Something else that’s come up lately has been in doing transit readings for people which is really helpful because I can help people become aware of how upcoming transits that they may not be aware of may affect them.

A lot of people are trying to make decisions and planning things now and it’s very helpful to know what kind of influences are going to be at play in the coming year or even further out.

And so when you do a transit reading for somebody it’s quite a bit different than a natal reading. The natal reading focuses more on your basic persona and wiring, you know, who you are, what you came here to do, what your basic strengths and weaknesses are. And a transit reading focuses more on what influences are at play in your world or life now or in the near future.

And it can be extremely helpful to have those insights. There have been occasions where people are considering making major changes or initiating new projects and things like that. And I can help offer a lot of insights into the timing of that. So that can be very valuable.

I’ve also been working with people who do spiritual practice and we’ve been combining their astrology with their spiritual practice because I have over many, many years of practice developed a lot of techniques that can help us clear certain types of blockages or focus in on how we can release things like karma and karmic relationships, karmic contracts, and overcome obstacles that are demonstrated in the natal chart.

I can basically tailor techniques that will work in collaboration with the astrology to help people really move forward, and there have been some examples that are highly effective, and that’s something I find very rewarding.

I often get guidance too for how to help people, what things to focus on. There was a really strong example of that just this week, actually. That requires some discipline and effort for people to take advantage of, but it can be extremely powerful. To bring to people’s awareness where some of their blockages or where shadow work needs to be done.

And that’s something I would like to focus on more, because it’s simply so beneficial and transformative.

The astrology is fantastic for giving us kind of a roadmap, and I’m getting really strong chills saying this, but the spiritual work itself is like the actual trip. The astrology gives us clues about where to go and then we need to do the work to get there. It’s absolutely fantastic. I can’t promote that highly enough.

And these techniques actually work. There’s someone I was working with this week who had almost instant results, the first stages of them at least, from just doing a practice once. It’s phenomenal.

And right now we’re in this very intense, karmic clearing cycle, so doing the shadow work is extremely potent and powerful right now. It has to happen so that we can move forward when the energies start shifting.

We’re sort of like in a new moon phase. Yes, the new moon is a great time to be setting intentions. But what you’re actually doing is planting seeds. It takes the seeds a while to germinate and to grow and develop into tangible results. It’s a process. We plant in the spring, but we don’t see the harvest until the summer usually.

So my sense is that we are going to be moving into a much more potent energy around going forward, really beginning early next year.

Again, see my videos on Pluto and Aquarius, because a lot of the stuff I have said in that episode, which I published over a year and a half ago, are being validated in reality.

And that leads me to the main point I really wanted to make today.

And that is this, that all of this craziness, all of the insanity, the breakdown of all of the social structures, political structures, economic systems, our relationship with nature, all of those things are really indicative of the systemic and endemic failures in our paradigm.

I have made this point countless times in past episodes, but it’s really evident right now, that even if we consider the really radical movements in the world that are frightening a lot of us, and justifiably so, and even if we consider the breakdown of the environment, which I have also talked a lot about here before, which is very scary actually right now, these are all telling us that our paradigm is flawed and that it needs systemic changes.

By systemic, I mean, from the ground up. We’re not talking about changes that are just like band-aid solutions. We need really deep and profound changes from the top to the bottom.

So all of the rage and resentment that we witness particularly on the political right, a lot of the irrational and destructive and nihilistic kind of behavior is symptomatic of how these people have been let down by our political and social and economic systems.

I’m not justifying their anger or rage, but I have stated this here before, that our economic system is severely flawed, and we’re not going to correct that until we fix the social and economic injustice that is inherent in our social and political systems. Period.

And when we look at it from that perspective, even people on the left are guilty for the current circumstances.

Those of us who are in positions of comfort, wealth, better education, better living situations, better childhood experiences, those of us who are more aware politically and socially, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable people in our society, strong chills here. I have said that before as well.

But those of us who are privileged, and that even includes on the global stage, those of us who are privileged, there is more of an onus on us to be responsible for not only ourselves, but for our brothers and sisters and for the planet and its biosphere.

And so because there’s more of an onus on us, we have to step up and defend the rights of all people, regardless of their education level, their social status, their economic status, or whatever.

And until we do that, we are going to continue to see the breakdown of social and political structures.

Yes, there are some people who try and capitalize on these kinds of social inequalities or economic inequalities, or who try and amplify division for their own gain. They are a crass opportunists. That’s to be expected, but we need fundamental changes.

Using the United States, for example, the manufacturing and industrial heartland was basically hollowed out by corporate interests wanted to offshore manufacturing to foreign jurisdictions where labor was dramatically less expensive and workers didn’t have protection or rights. And that was just opportunism.

But the consequences were you ended up with millions of people who were disenfranchised and who felt like they had been let down abandoned or thrown to the wolves by the political, elite, and in many ways they were.

So it’s not surprising that these people are upset. And this applies in countries around the world. This doesn’t just apply to the United States.

As I have said before, when I was a child, my father worked nine to five Monday to Friday, didn’t work evenings, didn’t work weekends, there were four children and a stay-at-home mother and we lived very well on one income. That isn’t even remotely conceivable anymore, unless you’re rich.

People need to feel that their children’s lives have a chance of being better than theirs, and that is not true for millions and millions of people. Young people today can’t even afford to start families. They’re putting it off. Not only that, they are very concerned about the future environmentally and what prospects the future holds for their potential children.

This is a complete failure on the part of older generations. We have let these people down, and we need to own that and take responsibility for it and do something really traumatic about it. This is the most important thing really socially.

We have been sitting here in awe watching all the craziness and all the insanity since the former guy got elected and going like how can people be so irrational. Well, it’s because they’re angry. They’ve been let down. They’ve been abandoned. That is why. It is really, really simple.

The vast wealth disparity, the plutocrats, the oligarchs, the billionaires, our economic system is fundamentally broken. And the consequence is going to be authoritarianism, if not fascism, if we don’t address this.

And that includes the cost of living, the cost of housing, people are getting increasingly stressed, an unprecedented amount of people are living on the streets, and relying on food banks, this is a travesty.

It’s not just the people in those circumstances now, it’s the people who are afraid that they They may be one paycheck away from being in those circumstances. Millions and millions of people. And if we want to avoid the worst case outcomes, we have to address that period.

I came across something back in early September. Actually, it was September 9th.

Typically I start my day by checking the news media for all the major stories, and there’s a whole slew of publications I read or scan every day. And this day, for some reason, I checked USA Today. It’s not a publication I check all that often. However, just by chance, I check USA Today.

And here’s an article which I’ll link in the description and show on the screen. This completely blew my mind. It’s one of the most shocking things I’ve read in a very long time. And I was also really surprised that I didn’t already know this.

It is this that 130 million Americans read below a sixth grade level. That represents more than half the US adult population, according to the Department of Education. I believe I had to read this three times to make sure I was reading it accurately because it was so shocking.

In fact, and I’m not making this up, I was basically ready to publish this episode and I thought I better check to make sure that that USA Today article is actually accurate. I did, and I found that the statistics were fact-checked by Snopes affirmatively. They verify the statistics.

Now I’m a Canadian and I couldn’t find a direct comparison, but I did find a statistic that 93% of Canadians have completed high school. So obviously, they have a much higher literacy rate than this percentage of Americans who only have a grade 6 reading level.

So I read this and I’m like, “Well, it’s no wonder so many Americans fall for disinformation, conspiracy theories are completely out of touch with reality in a lot of ways because As they lack the knowledge, the critical thinking skills, or ability to do research, etc. That explains something I’ve been trying to understand for years.

How can a country as powerful and rich as the United States have half its population with this level of education? It’s almost incomprehensible.

Half the population is functionally illiterate. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid. It just means they’re uneducated.

You can’t have a functioning democracy with millions of people who are basically illiterate.

The first thing that America should be doing is educating its populace. Not only would that help preserve, for example, democracy, it would benefit the country economically in ways that would be incalculable.

It is just baffling how this situation can even exist. But this illustrates my point about how we have not taken care of and let down people who are the basis of our society, of our economies. It affects our healthcare system. It affects everything.

This is a systemic failure of epic proportions. It’s completely baffling to me. But that makes my point.

Countless hours have gone into trying to understand why America has been experiencing what it’s been experiencing since and before the former guy was elected. And the answer is right there. It’s that simple.

My main point was simply that what we have been experiencing, all the tumult, all the craziness that trends towards extremism and autocracy and fascism can all be explained by how we have failed our people.

And it’s true with the environment as well. It’s the same situation, basically.

So we need to get real. And that means making changes and changing our priorities.

We are to be our brothers keeper. Those of us who are privileged, whether it’s intellectually, financially, economically, by virtue of where you grew up, your power, your influence, your authority, whatever it is.

We need to get real and stop being narcissistic. And I’m not saying that the people who are listening to this are like that. You probably aren’t. That’s probably why you’re listening to me because you’re not like that.

But this is the message we need to get to our leaders, those in positions of power and authority that we need to make radical reforms that benefit everyone in our society and everyone on the planet.

And we need to start with the most vulnerable people. That would be the people on the streets, the people who are homeless, the people with mental health issues, the people that need health care.

We triage. We start with the most vulnerable, the most at risk, and we work our way up.

That is my major insight from this period of time that has been so crazy. The world will continue to get more and more crazy until we fix this.

This fits in perfectly with the themes of Pluto transiting Capricorn, which I have talked about a lot. Pluto is showing us how the structures of our societies, our institutions, banking, finance, political systems are failing people. It’s so clear.

But to distill it down to its essence, it is what I have just been talking about. It’s about how we abuse the most vulnerable members of our society and the price now that we’re paying for that gross negligence. The relationship is very, very clear.

Our security, our stability, democracy itself is in peril because these systems are fundamentally flawed and corrupt and they need to be transformed… Pluto.

See my episode on Pluto transiting Aquarius or Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn.

Also, I will add that I personally feel that if people aren’t complaining about this, they are tacitly endorsing it.

This clarity that I have, these insights, are a result of all of the recent retrogrades we’ve been experiencing. So we see the benefit of this perspective from something that many people fear. Retrogrades in their natal chart, retrogrades by transit.

This is how we gain wisdom and insights. And I’m grateful for that.

I have a tremendous amount of clarity on things that had puzzled me for a very long time and I hope that’s That’s true in your case as well.

So that’s what I wanted to share.

I still have a 20% discount on readings going on for a while longer, I’m extending that a little bit. I had some technical problems with my website which wasn’t working for a few days so people couldn’t get through to me.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content and if you’re interested in a reading with me I’ll put a link to that as well.

Any sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members. Thank you very much.

Take care all the best and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End transcript.

Other episodes of mine referenced herein:

Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning

Prepare for Major Systemic Changes

Our Paradigm is Literally Untenable and Hardly Anyone will Admit it

Other articles and resources referenced (in order of appearance):

1 in 5 Americans have low-literacy skills: These charts explain reading levels in the US

Do More Than Half of Americans Read Below 6th-Grade Level?

Education in Canada

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Astrology #Pluto #Capricorn

Check my “⁠Community Tab⁠” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

⁠Errata⁠

Welcome to the Post-Growth Era

I discuss a recent peer-reviewed paper published in the September 2023 issue of The Lancet Planetary Health journal and its significant implications for humanity and the planet.

This episode was recorded on September 5, 2023 and it was published on September 6, 2023 at 5:15pm EDT.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠.

See my recent conversation with Irish Granny Tarot.

You can also support this channel with a monthly membership.

Please see my “⁠Environment⁠” playlist for other episodes on this topic.

Follow me on Threads where I share articles I feel are important. 

To receive alerts about new episodes please ⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠ here.


Episode transcript:

Greetings all, welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving. It is September 6th, 2023.

As I often do, I will be displaying some graphics on the screen. If you’re listening to this by podcast, you may want to watch it on YouTube if that matters to you.

As usual, I will be putting links in the episode description, which I encourage you to check out and read for yourself.

As I have said before, I do an awful lot of reading every day, especially about the environmental crisis. There are so many things happening now on a daily basis, it’s almost impossible to keep up with it.

And today, in fact yesterday, September 5th, I came across a report that referenced a paper that had just been published in the September 2023 edition of the Lancet Planetary Health Journal.

The reason I’m recording this right now is because this paper effectively validates a of the things I have been saying in my most recent episodes, and it has very striking implications for humanity, for the economy, and of course for the environment.

I haven’t really seen this paper talked about much yet elsewhere. I suspect we will because of the gravity of what it’s saying.

The gist of it goes like this.

For the past decade or so, a lot of the world’s major economies and their politicians have basically been making the argument, and I don’t use the word argument in a negative sense, I mean it as a statement of position.

But back to my point…

This paper does the math and has analyzed this notion that a lot of people in major developed economies have been promulgating, which is that we can basically decouple our economies from greenhouse gas emissions by shifting to green technology and things like that, and that we could continue to have economic growth while we reduced our emissions.

In other words, we could carry on with business as usual, simply by replacing highly polluting technology with green technology. And this analysis basically concludes that that is not happening as remotely fast as it needs to, not even close, despite pledges to do so.

Effectively, the pledges made in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which 195 nations are signatories of are all greenwashing and BS. That we are so far off our targets that we are heading towards catastrophe, and that the only way forward based on real-world evidence versus hypothetical or aspirational scenarios is radically changing our economies and lifestyles just as I have been stating in episodes that I have published on this topic.

The Lancet, as I am sure many of you know, is a very highly respected journal.

I could basically quote the whole article here, because it’s all quite jaw-dropping, and I thought about doing that, but basically I would end up reading the whole piece. Because it’s just too much information that’s really important. But here’s a few quotes.

Begin quotes:

At current rates, these countries, these are the major developed countries or economies, would on average take over 200 years to get their emissions close to zero and would emit more than 27 times their fair share of the global carbon budget for 1.5°C.

The scale of the gap between achieved and Paris compliant emissions reductions is dramatic. Among the 11 high-income countries examined, emissions reductions between 2013 and 2019 were on average just 1.6% per year. By contrast, reduction rates of 30% per year are needed by 2025 for countries to comply with their fair shares of the global carbon budget for 1.5°C.

Many major countries, including Belgium, Australia, Austria, Canada, and Germany, will need to reduce their emissions more than 30 times faster than they did between 2013 and 2019 under absolute decoupling.

In light of their findings, the authors say that attempts to pursue “green growth” in high-income countries will not deliver the emissions reductions required to meet the climate targets and fairness principles of the Paris Agreement and argue that a post-growth approach is needed.

They conclude that shifting away from economic growth as a core objective, and instead prioritizing ecological sustainability, well-being, and fairness as development objectives.

Scaling down carbon-intensive and unnecessary forms of production and consumption, for example, SUVs, air travel, industrial, meat and dairy, fast fashion, cruises, mansions, private jets, reducing inequalities in income and wealth, introducing laws to lengthen product lifespans and guarantee rights to repair, shifting away from private cars and improving public transit, bike lanes and walkability.

If we are to prevent even more catastrophic climate breakdown, high-income countries urgently need to pursue post-growth approaches that slash emissions while enhancing well-being and fairness.

End quotes.

Lower income countries will not need to make as radical changes as we do because their emissions per capita are much, much lower than ours.

Quotes:

Politicians and media have been celebrating recent decoupling achievements of high-income countries as ‘green growth,’ claiming this could reconcile economic growth with climate targets.

“There is nothing green about economic growth in high-income countries,” said the lead author Jefim Vogel.

“It is a recipe for climate breakdown and further climate injustice. Calling such highly inefficient emission reductions ‘green growth’ is misleading. It is essentially greenwashing. For growth to be legitimately ‘green’, it must be consistent with the climate targets and fairness principles of the Paris Climate Agreement, but high-income countries have not achieved anything close to this and are highly unlikely to achieve it in the future.”

End quotes.

If you recall, in my recent episodes I have been saying that there is no way that we can carry on with the lifestyles that we currently have, involving so much consumption, pollution, and high energy intensity lifestyles, like what we have been familiar with.

And what this paper demonstrates is that all of the strategies to try and do that in the 2010s were a complete and utter failure. We didn’t even come close to the targets that we need to in order for the world to maintain safe levels of greenhouse gas concentrations, which now are zero, because we blew the budget.

So effectively, it’s validating what I’ve been saying, that our lifestyle is completely unsustainable and not possible based on the laws of physics if we want to maintain a habitable planet.

And even more importantly perhaps, because that’s not entirely surprising, to me at least, is that the policies and the positions of our governments and those who have been promoting the idea that we could continue to increase economic activity while at the same time addressing this crisis are completely wrong and that that logic is completely flawed and untenable, if not deliberately misleading.

If you look at your screen now, I will be displaying a graph which shows where we are headed That’s the red line in a business as usual scenario based on emissions in 2022. The blue line that swoops down and goes really low down to the bottom is where we need to be. As you can see, there is a dramatic difference between the two. This graph comes from the report in the Lancet.

This is really, really important.

It’s one of the most important things I’ve read recently, because now we have the evidence in one paper from a very reputable source that validates that perpetual economic growth is not tenable if we want to maintain our civilization.

And the implications of that are huge.

A few weeks ago I did an episode titled “Our Paradigm is Literally Untenable” and here’s the evidence, a peer-reviewed paper in a highly respected journal.

I’m sharing this because I want people to realize two things. One is that what I’m saying is extremely important. And two is, it’s not just conjecture. We have science and evidence to back up those assertions that I’ve been making. So it gets very real.

This issue is going to persist for decades, if not millennia, and many, many generations. So it has an overriding quality to it.

One of the most remarkable things I read that happened today was that Greece got hit with extreme rainfall. They received 30 inches of rain in the span of a day, effectively.

Can you even imagine what that would be like? That is like having a river everywhere from the sky. And this followed a period of extreme heat and drought and wildfires and then they get slammed with 30 inches of rain.

That’s around 76 centimeters. They normally get half that much in an entire year. It’s almost incomprehensible.

If that were to happen on, say, New York City, it would be a catastrophe, or any highly populated area.

That’s just one event on one day. That was yesterday, September 5th.

So the point of all this is just that here’s hard evidence from a very reputable source that backs up what I’ve been saying for weeks or months and even years now, that our current lifestyles are untenable, literally, and that our institutions, our politicians, the corporate sector, the finance and economic sectors are completely full of BS.

It’s not possible to maintain this way of life anymore, literally. It’d be like trying to defy the laws of physics or gravity or something.

Now, just so you understand, when they talk about decoupling, what they mean is separating emissions from economic growth and lifestyle activities. In other words, we can reduce emissions while we can still have growth and expansion.

And what this study goes on to demonstrate is that in practice not only has that not happened, but we haven’t even come close to the objectives we set in the Paris Climate Accord, which was established in 2015 and to which 195 nations are signatories of currently.

So in effect all of these nations signed up to these pledges and the most developed nations have not come anywhere close to actually keeping them despite everyone claiming that they would. So there’s a huge difference between what countries said they would do versus what they’ve actually done.

And this is really important because if we don’t meet those targets we are going to exceed extremely dangerous thresholds that will threaten the viability of civilization, which is another topic I have discussed here a lot on my channel.

It’s also important to understand what de-growth means in this context. It means probably just what you think it means, but think about that. When, in modern history, has anyone said we need to reduce growth and been taken seriously?

In a recent episode I stated that no politician would be likely to say that, very few of them at least, but that’s exactly what this study is saying, that the only way out of this scenario is to scale back everything.

This is extremely profound. It’s a concept that probably hasn’t really been applied willfully for millennia. That’s how big of a deal it is.

It flies in the face of the vast majority of conventional thinking about the economy, how societies function and operate, what our expectations are as individuals. It’s diametrically opposed to the prevailing paradigm, and yet that’s exactly what we have to do. I’m not exaggerating when I say this is huge.

This idea has been put forward by some people, primarily environmentalists, but not at high levels of government or on any kind of significant policy level. I myself have advocated this for decades, but of course nobody would take that seriously. They would almost laugh at you if you suggested that as a path or course that we should pursue, And now we have irrefutable evidence that trying to maintain the status quo has been an abject failure, and, like I said, is leading us towards utterly catastrophic outcomes.

So as I said in my most recent episodes, we’re being forced into this. The question is, when do we accept that? And when we do, it’s going to radically transform everything about our world as we know it. I cannot overstate how important this is.

And as I’ve said before as well, there is a huge chunk of the population that either this is completely foreign to, or they are in complete and utter denial about it. They can’t even imagine it or conceive of it. But here it is. This is happening right now.

We have to make fundamental changes on a civilizational level, or we’re screwed. And that is exactly what I have been saying here on my channel, and that very few people are actually recognizing. Very few.

One other point that I think is very important is that it’s fairly safe to assume that the assumptions that underlie these targets are probably conservative. What I mean by that is that, especially based on recent empirical evidence, it appears as if warming is occurring more quickly than people expected or anticipated.

And I presume that they are basing their assumptions on data that was used to formulate the Paris Climate Accord in the years leading up to 2015. Well here in 2023, it’s quite evident that the crisis is accelerating in ways, like I said, that we hadn’t fully anticipated.

Therefore, the targets that they’re referencing are probably inadequate to begin with, meaning that the actual reductions that are required and the rate at which they need to be made are probably greater than what was expected back when the Paris Agreement was formulated.

I expect that in the near term we will be seeing data coming out that will show that we can safely emit fewer carbon emissions than we thought we could.

I recorded most of this yesterday, September 5th. And when I woke this morning, one of the first thoughts in my mind was that this is what Pluto transiting Aquarius represents.

One of the things that Aquarius, which naturally rules the 11th house, covers is hopes and dreams. Our collective paradigm is to achieve independence and prosperity, wealth, riches, comfort, security.

And Pluto, which is frequently referred to as bringing a process of death and rebirth, during its transit of Aquarius is going to completely upend all of our dreams about the future, and it will bring an end to those beliefs and expectations that are fundamentally corrupt or untenable. And it will do so on a collective scale, on a planetary scale.

So here we have this problem, and as individuals we can’t really solve this problem. No amount of recycling, for example, is going to address this problem. It has to be dealt with collectively on a planetary scale with all nations of the world participating.

So in terms of mass consciousness, we are beginning to become aware that all of our fantasies and dreams about what’s possible and what’s realistic and what is achievable are completely defunct.

That our way of being – and remember, Pluto’s orbit is about 248 years, so all of the dreams and ambitions that we have been focused on for the past couple centuries, and that takes us back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, which kicked off this whole crisis – are basically up in smoke, quite literally, if we think about all of the out of control wildfires.

And so humanity is going to go through this process of death, of old ideas, old paradigms, old ways of being, and that can be very upsetting and disconcerting. But we need to go through this process of death so that we can renew ourselves and create something that is much better. That’s the death and rebirth process of Pluto.

But even though I’ve done episodes on this before, I hadn’t fully thought about it in this way about our ecological footprint collectively, which currently far exceeds the boundaries or carrying capacity of the Earth’s biosphere, clearly.

And so yes, many ways of being and thinking and many of our expectations and ambitions and dreams about what the world was going to look like are going to die or collapse, like a house of cards.

And it’s really interesting because this paper I’ve been talking about in The Lancet makes the case very clearly that there’s no way of fixing this problem based on our past paradigm of endless growth. It’s literally untenable.

That’s what I hope people understand, that this isn’t just an abstract conceptual discussion about being more environmentally conscious or aware, it is about fundamental and foundational aspects of our reality that are completely defunct and corrupt, and that that is coming to a complete dead end.

Our governments, our institutions, the economy, the corporate sector, everything is about to hit a major, major wall that we cannot surpass if we try and do so with past thinking, or within a past paradigm that is effectively dead.

The vast majority of people probably do not realize this yet, but there will be a shocking awareness, because at some point we’re going to have to hit the brakes, and we’re going have to hit the brakes really hard. And this is going to be extremely upsetting for millions, if not billions of people.

We don’t have a choice. We can either keep going with business as usual and go right over the edge of the cliff, which would probably lead to the complete collapse of civilization, or we stop.

Who has the will or ability to do that? This is a huge question.

Either our leaders are phenomenally and inexcusably incompetent, or they are malevolent, they just don’t care. And we’ve been being lied to on an unprecedented level. Mass deceit and deception that puts our lives at stake, our future at stake, and the habitability of planet earth at stake.

At best it’s gross incompetence, at worst it is criminally negligent on a scale never before witnessed. And that’s what I would like people to start thinking about. We have been sold a bill of goods that enriches a few at the expense of everyone and everything that constitutes our biosphere.

This is one of the biggest events or periods of time in all of human history. Period.

If you think this through, what I’m saying is not hyperbole. It is very, very real.

And we are starting to see the consequences of that now on a dramatic level, but those consequences are going to continue to get worse and worse and worse from here on in, despite everything that has happened environmentally in 2023, it might be the best year we yet see going forward. It’s going to get worse from here on in.

This is a paradigm shift unfolding, and paradigm shifts are really dramatic, and once you go through the shift, your entire perspective and understanding about everything changes, And that is what we are at the early stages of experiencing on a collective level.

Some of us are way ahead of the curve, the vast majority of people haven’t even started to experience it yet, but that’s coming. And there’s going to be a lot of people who are in shock when they find out that everything they believed was a lie, that many of the things they took for granted are simply not true.

On Monday, September 4th, I had a great chat with Irish Granny Tarot. The discussion is on her channel. I’ll put a link to that in the episode description as well.

We had a nice long chat about a whole wide variety of issues. You may find that interesting. Check it out.

Finally, I still have my 20% sale on readings that are longer than one hour. There’ll be a link to that in the description too.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content, and if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members.

Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End of episode transcript.

Other episodes of mine referenced herein:

We Urgently Need New Definitions of Criminal Activity

Our Paradigm is Literally Untenable and Hardly Anyone will Admit it

Humanity is losing its War on Nature. Are we too Dumb to Stop it?

Prepare for Major Systemic Changes

The Climate Crisis requires profound societal changes immediately

The Era of Mass Migration Has Begun

Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness

Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning


Other articles and resources referenced (in order of appearance):

Experts warn ‘green growth’ in high income countries is not happening, call for ‘post-growth’ climate policies

Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries

Seven dead as severe storms trigger flooding in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria

Wildfires may have sparked ecosystem collapse during Earth’s worst mass extinction

We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse

The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable

Population ecologist warns that humanity is on the verge of massive population correction

Exxon Sees CO2 Emissions in 2050 More Than Twice Paris Goal

Revealed: Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s

Humans Face Major Population ‘Correction’ This Century, Scientist Warns

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Environment #ClimateChange #PostGrowth

Check my “⁠Community Tab⁠” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

⁠Errata⁠

Prepare for Major Systemic Changes

I discuss how we need to think about. and prepare for, major systemic-level changes that are beginning to manifest on Earth due to the escalating global environmental crisis. 

This episode was recorded on August 28, 2023 and it was published on August 30, 2023 at 1:46am EDT.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠⁠.

You can also support this channel with ⁠a monthly membership⁠.

Please see my “⁠⁠Environment⁠⁠” playlist for other episodes on this topic.

To receive alerts about new episodes please ⁠⁠add yourself to my contact list⁠⁠ here.



Episode transcript:

Greetings, all.

Welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving.

It is August 30, 2023. I am recording this on August 28.

Many people I know right now are really struggling with inflationary pressures.
From now through September 20th, I am offering a 20% discount on any astrology readings that are 60 minutes or longer. Readings have to be booked and paid for by September 20th, 2023. Please check my website at AquarianDiary.com for details.

I’ll be displaying some graphics and screenshots throughout this episode. If that matters to you, you may prefer to watch this on YouTube.

If you’ve been listening to my recent episodes, you will have noticed that I have been quite heavily focused on the global environmental crisis. As I have stated before, I do an awful lot of reading on this. I only share via social media a very small portion of what I read. It’s a subject I have followed very closely for many, many years.

Today I want to address that from a slightly different perspective, and that is, how should we be personally thinking about the implications of this situation in our own lives?

Because of my very lengthy exposure to this subject, I am able to parse through the information that’s coming out and infer from that significant implications.

Based on my many years of engaging with other people on the topic, for whatever reason, it seems to me there are not that many people who are able to actually connect all the dots realize what all those implications mean or imply.

Recent events have been indicating very strongly that the situation is accelerating and that it has very broad, profound, and significant implications for society and humanity.

This morning I was debating whether or not to record this, and then, around 12:15 p.m. Eastern time, there was a report by Bloomberg that Exxon, the fossil fuel company, was projecting that we would exceed the 2C limit due to rapidly industrializing and developing countries, that their growth would offset efficiencies gained elsewhere.

Now you may be thinking, who cares what Exxon thinks? They’re biased. However, their climate projections have been eerily accurate going back to 1977, and especially one they produced in 1985, which was much later found to be 99% accurate. That is an incredibly remarkable feat, technically and scientifically. They have scientists that work for them that are very skilled. These are separate divisions from management and public relations and that kind of thing.

So when I read that article, and it’s not very long, I said to myself, well, that’s basically what I wanted to say in this recording, so here I am.

What the vast majority of people don’t understand is that these systems, whether we’re talking about our economy or the environment are extremely complex, and every time there is a major event or change in one area, it can trigger a cascading effect that ripples through the whole system.

So whether it’s wildfires on an unprecedented scale or scope, or extreme weather events, whatever the case may be, it affects all aspects of society and the economy. And our economy, as I have argued before, is much more fragile than people think.

An easy way to think about this might be to think of a house of cards. If you pull out too many cards, the whole thing collapses. That’s how I view the current status quo.

So what I want to convey here today is that I think people need to start thinking about how they prepare for these cascading effects as they start to unfold, and I believe they already are.

To be clear, if we go above the 2C threshold, that is considered to be extremely dangerous because it will trigger positive feedbacks that will then run on their own outside of our control, whether or not we make any adjustments or changes, won’t matter, or it won’t matter as much. So that’s the demarcation line we are not supposed to cross, because the situation will spiral out of control.

Could be things like methane release from melting permafrost, or the desertification of the Amazon rainforest, or rapid melting of ice sheets such as Greenland or Antarctica, or record low sea ice extent.

Technically, right now, we’re only at about 1.2 C of average global warming, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you look at what’s happening in the world, as I’ve stated before, we have regions that are on the precipice of being too hot for humans to survive in already.

We have unprecedented wildfires, we have unprecedented droughts, and so forth. So going from 1.2 to 2 is a massive change.

As I have already stated, I do not see how it is possible for the status quo to persist, with respect to things like the economy.

All sectors are going to be hammered by this, whether it’s agriculture, tourism, the loss of coastal properties to sea level rise, and extreme weather events, utility grids that fail because they can’t meet the supply of energy needed for people to cool their homes, people unable to work outside, I could go on and on for hours.

So what I want to get across to you as my listeners is that you have an advantage because you’re aware of this.

The vast majority of people may be starting to get very concerned about all of these extreme weather events, but I can assure you they haven’t thought through all of the implications of these, like I said, cascading feedbacks.

Right now we have thousands of people, for example, who had to abandon areas in Canada’s Northwest Territories, or Hawaii, or Greece, and they’re not living in their homes, they’re living in hotel rooms, or wherever, and, you know, people just aren’t prepared for that.

The government support that has been offered to these people is not sufficient. If someone loses a home due to extreme weather or fire or whatever, and they don’t have insurance, they lose all of the equity in that house that may represent their life savings. They may be responsible for removing what’s left of the home from the property. They may have to rebuild, and they’re still on the hook for the mortgage. I mean, you know, think this through.

And then there’s agriculture and our food supply and our water supplies. There are water use restrictions right now in Texas and California, for example, and that is going to be a recurring issue going forward.

So you’ll hear some people say that we’re going to get through this somehow and that everything’s going to be okay, but the empirical evidence is diametrically opposed to that position. If you hear opposing opinions on this topic, both can’t be true simultaneously. They are mutually exclusive. I personally favor objectifiable facts and reality.

There’s no way that eight billion people are going to get through this situation unscathed. And, like I said, I fail to see how the economy can survive all of these unrelenting hits. It just, to me, seems impossible.

Now the irony of all this is that we should really be downsizing our lives, our consumption, our expenditure of energy to the greatest extent possible. The people in the developed world, by far, use vastly more energy than people in the the rest of the world.

And cumulatively, going back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, America, for example, has still generated more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country on the planet. Even though countries like China are catching up, they still have not produced as much pollution as America has over the past couple hundred years. And China’s population is three or four times bigger than America’s. So on a per capita basis, it’s not even remotely in the same ballpark. Also, many of the goods they produce are consumed by people in the developed world, so in a sense we are offshoring our emissions.

Personally, I have had periods of my life that were very simple in terms of my energy consumption and lifestyle. I did that out of choice because I wanted to keep my life really simple so I could do things like focus on my spirituality. And those were some of the best periods of my life. My footprint is really small compared to the average person, I can assure you, relative to this part of the world at least. But my life has been very rich, so that doesn’t intimidate me at all.

What I would advocate that people do is they do that to the greatest extent possible. If you’re still relying on income from a job, for example, or from other sources, I would minimize your expenses and your overhead as much as possible, because like I said, I don’t see how we’re not going to start to see systems around us collapse in the economy and in finances.

The irony of all this is that that’s exactly what we need to do to deal with this situation. The problem is that we’re not doing it by choice. Nature is going to force us to do that because we’re just not being responsible about our environmental impacts.

Just for an example, if everyone lived like an American, it would take four Earths to support them in a sustainable manner. I don’t mean to pick on America. It’s just a statistic that’s readily available.

So because we’re not doing this willingly, like I said, we’re not going to have a choice. We’re going to be forced into this situation. Humanity is going to have to dramatically downsize its environmental footprint, probably by force. Even Exxon is basically saying that in their forecast that was just reported on today.

If you think things are crazy right now with respect to the environment, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s going to get way, way worse. And it’ll be relentless.

So those of us who are informed and aware can make decisions now that will make it easier. For example, you know, people who live in like McMansions, you know, five, eight, ten thousand, fifteen thousand square foot homes, that’s like the worst possible scenario. So get rid of stuff you don’t need, simplify your life, reduce your overhead and expenses.

And also I would suggest that most of us be in a position where we can mobilize really quickly if we need to leave or move, that we don’t have a lot of stuff that we have to drag with us. Like things that you have in storage, for example, that kind of stuff has very little value under these kinds of circumstances.

Because there’s going to be different kinds of things happening in different places that are likely going to force many, many people to have to relocate, if not permanently, they will have to do that temporarily. This is already happening, it’s just at the beginning stages, and it’s mostly affected people in the developing world so far.

So I see what’s happening as a precursor to what will be happening later, but on a much larger scale as we go through this. If you don’t have a lot of stuff and a lot of financial pressures, we’re still going to have to go through a lot of difficult things. But you won’t be as stressed out as other people are.

Like someone who loses their home and all of their equity, for example, in a fire or something, or a flood or something like that. Or someone who lives in southern Florida, which is only three feet above sea level, and who doesn’t have insurance. These people are going to be in a state of shock, plus they’re going to be financially ruined.

So I’m suggesting that you position yourself to be as flexible and mobile as possible, to also have as low a carbon footprint as possible, and it will make it easier to get through these periods.

Also, if you can, you probably want to get out of areas that are prone to dangerous heat, for example. There are certain areas that are just going to get much hotter than they already are.

You know, the whole Mediterranean has been going through extreme heat and drought and wildfires like Greece. It’s been horrible. That whole region, including the Persian Gulf, is getting extremely hot and dry. So for example, all of the olive crops have failed and some of these orchards are centuries old. You know, so you have to think these kinds of things through.

But if you’re light on your feet, generally, it’ll be easier for you to get through this because this is going to be unfolding for decades and beyond.

For example, even if we stopped all emissions today, sea level rise is going to continue for a very long time because there’s so much energy built up in the oceans. These are vast.

The oceans absorb 90% of the excess heat that is generated as a result of human activity. It takes a long time for something on the scale of the oceans to warm up, and it also takes a long time for it to cool down.

So even if by some miracle humanity gets its act together, and it hasn’t for decades, and emissions are continuing to grow every Well, like I said, we’re going to see things worsen for a long time to come yet. And again, Exxon’s predictions have been extremely accurate.

You can’t really compare this situation to something like a recession or a depression, because those only last a few years, typically. But these circumstances will unfold for decades, if not indefinitely. And we don’t even have a plan for this unwinding. We are way off the mark.

So barring some kind of miracle, and I mean a global scale miracle, there’s no way out of this situation that I am aware of at this point in time, realistically, not even close.

A couple years ago, when a lot of people had to stay at home, and there was a lot less human activity in coastal waterways and things like that. A lot of people misunderstand that and they think that suddenly the Earth’s environment changed almost overnight. But that is not the same thing as dramatically curtailing our emissions on a global scale, which is what we need to do.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about that, probably due to social media. Yes, there were cases where humans weren’t stirring up waterways, and wildlife came back into certain areas because it was quiet.

Emissions have been going up every year. There was a slight dip during that time, a 1% change, that’s it, 1%, but it was not on the level that is required. I’ll put some links in the episode description that prove my point. And there’s also a graph on the screen right now that demonstrates this.

But back to what I was discussing, the irony is that that’s what we should have been doing decades ago, is dramatically downsizing our ecological footprint. But we didn’t. So humanity made a collective decision to carry on with business as usual, despite all of the risks and warnings.

On the right, it’s very clear that they don’t want to even acknowledge this problem, but the left is responsible as well because they basically didn’t do anything about it, not even remotely close to what needed to be done. So there’s blame to go around everywhere.

And that’s important to realize too, is that we haven’t done anything that is close to adequate given the implications. This represents a systemic failure of truly historic proportions. No amount of tinkering around the edges will solve this problem.

As I’ve said before, we have chosen a disorderly retreat. And that means that there’s going to be quite a bit of chaos and unrest.

There is no way that eight billion people are going to be living like we do right now. It’s technically not possible without absolutely catastrophic outcomes.

And the rest of the world is not going to sit there and let us continue doing what we’re doing and living the way we’re living while their societies are being destroyed. Why should they?

In fact, there was a recent paper that was published that was talking about the imminent collapse of civilization due to what I’m describing here, and this is a peer-reviewed paper.

I shared it on my community tab. I share a lot of things there, but not many people pay attention to that. Thank you to those that do. Since Threads opened up their web-based interface, I have started to post there more frequently. I don’t want to post too much on my YouTube community tab, it just doesn’t seem to be designed for that. So I will be posting more of what I read that I find really important on Threads under AquarianAgeDiary. I couldn’t get Aquarian Diary, so my Threads account is AquarianAgeDiary.

So that’s my advice. Be light on your feet. Reduce your overhead. Think about your economic situation. Is your source of income sustainable under these kinds of scenarios?

It sounds rather grim, but I think what I’m suggesting is just realistic. I can assure you most people are not even thinking like this yet. So, like I said, you have an advantage.

Pluto transiting Aquarius, and I’ve talked a lot about that here before, and I also did an episode about Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn, where it has been and will be transiting again soon, as being a very karmic cycle, and if you look at what’s happening recently, that’s very clear.

Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, in mundane astrology, represents the foundations of our civilization or country, and those in position of authority or power. As we can clearly see, these foundations have been rocked during the transit which commenced in 2008.

As Pluto finishes its transit of Capricorn, developments accelerate very quickly.

Pluto in Aquarius, on the other hand, is going to show us how our world is profoundly unequal and unjust. And that is going to be a twenty-year period where there is going to be a reckoning.

Justifiably so, there are going to be many countries that are going to look to those who are primarily responsible for this crisis, and they’re going to be seeking social justice.

Now the way Pluto tends to work is that you can’t really win if you try and fight it. So I expect that this whole theme that I’m discussing here now and that I’ve talked a lot about before is going to be a major, major issue.

What right does the developed world have to trash the planetary biosphere, reap all the benefits or so-called benefits of that, and then leave it up to the rest of the world to deal with the consequences. It is morally and ethically irresponsible.

Aquarius is all about social justice. Think about it.

Pluto will resume its transit of Aquarius on January 20th of 2024 for a much longer period of time. So while we’re all focused on politics and our crazy politicians, the rest of the world is going to be worrying about their survival. We need to come back to reality, and there’s going to be a tremendous amount of karma to deal with during this period.

When Pluto moves into Pisces in 2044, we’re going to be dealing with all of this on a much higher, much more spiritual level. But between now and then social justice will be the main theme. And there will be difficult lessons if we try and avoid taking accountability for our actions over the last 200 years. That’s a lot of karma.

And there will be a lot of people who will lie and try and shirk and evade responsibility. But that will be a losing game. You can’t run from Pluto. If you try and hide, you will get whacked really hard.

We know exactly what we need to do, or what we should have done already. We have refused to do what we needed to, no amount of magical thinking is going to get us out of this problem. It requires tangible action and change, period.

It’s as if in your life you have some kind of problem or issue you refuse to deal with or change or correct and you think you can pray your way out of being responsible, But that’s not how the universe works, right?

The universe doesn’t reward you for, say, for example, continuing with some addiction. The solution is to change. The universe isn’t going to enable you in your self-destructive behavior.

So people need to knock it off with the spiritual bypassing and magical or wishful thinking and get real. That’s what Pluto is going to do to humanity in the next 20 years.

The United States of America is unquestionably the current world superpower, and many assert that it is an empire.

It has not escaped my attention that this incredibly important and historic inflection point is occurring just after the Pluto return of the United States of America passed its zenith. I have done episodes on that topic as well.

Is this possibly just coincidental? In many respects, events that occurred in America were a significant contributing factor to these circumstances. And the country is wracked by incredible levels of polarization and political dysfunction.

If it’s a coincidence, it is a remarkable one that will be noted in history books.

I want to say one other thing too, and I have said this before as well. I tend to be prescient, but I tend to be quite a bit ahead of my time. What’s happening now I saw coming probably starting in the 1990s, so it’s possible that that is true here too, although things are accelerating dramatically right now, so the timeline of this could be shorter than that. Caveat emptor.

On another note, I recently did a reading for someone looking at their transits because they they had to make a major decision.

And it’s another one of those examples where it just proved the usefulness of being able to access this information because the person in question didn’t realize that they had certain transits coming up in the next year or so that might alter their situation quite a bit.

And it was very useful to be able to provide that person with those kinds of insights. So think about that if you’re in some kind of situation and you want to get a lay of the land in terms of the conditions of the future for yourself.

It felt really good to be able to help this person, and I think it materially altered their decision-making in a positive way.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content, and if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members.

Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End of episode transcript.


Other episodes of mine referenced herein:

⁠Our Paradigm is Literally Untenable and Hardly Anyone will Admit it⁠

⁠Humanity is losing its War on Nature. Are we too Dumb to Stop it?⁠

⁠The Era of Mass Migration Has Begun⁠

⁠Pluto in Aquarius – Dawn of Global Consciousness⁠

⁠Pluto at 29° Capricorn – A Karmic Reckoning⁠

⁠USA Pluto Return 2022 – Civil War or Transformation?⁠


Other articles and resources referenced (in order of appearance):

⁠Exxon Sees CO2 Emissions in 2050 More Than Twice Paris Goal⁠

⁠The tropics could get so hot that all leaves on rainforest trees die⁠

⁠Scripps CO2 Program – Mauna Loa Observatory⁠

⁠Hot-tub-like Persian Gulf fuels 158-degree heat index in Iran⁠

⁠Greece wildfire declared largest ever recorded in EU⁠

⁠’Crisis situation’: N.W.T. declares territorial state of emergency over wildfires (note title has changed)⁠

⁠America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow⁠

⁠Various charts⁠

⁠Various charts⁠

⁠How many Earths do we need?⁠

⁠Americans Are Bailing on Their Home Insurance⁠

⁠Olive oil prices soar as climate-related catastrophes shrink Mediterranean harvests⁠

⁠10,000 Years of Carbon Dioxide⁠

⁠Global Temperature Report for 2022⁠

⁠Chart: IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean⁠

⁠Climate change: Covid pandemic has little impact on rise in CO2⁠

⁠Emissions rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic⁠

⁠‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?⁠

⁠Dramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather⁠

⁠The Indian economy’s burning question⁠

⁠The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable⁠

⁠We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse⁠

⁠Humans Face Major Population ‘Correction’ This Century, Scientist Warns⁠

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Environment #ClimateChange #ExtremeWeather

Check my “⁠⁠Community Tab⁠⁠” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

⁠⁠Errata⁠

Humanity is losing its War on Nature. Are we too Dumb to Stop it?

I discuss how humanity is being forced to adopt an unprecedented defensive posture with respect to nature. 

How will this play out? Can our communities and the way we exist be sustained? Is nature at war with us?

Based on increasingly erratic and dangerous climatic events, which are now threatening entire communities on a regular basis, our current prospects are not encouraging.

This episode was recorded on August 20, 2023 and it was published on August 21, 2023 at 3:33pm EDT.

You can support my work and this channel ⁠by booking an astrology reading⁠.

Please also see this related episode (Aug 14, 2023): Our Paradigm is Literally Untenable and Hardly Anyone will Admit it



Episode transcript:

Greetings, all. Welcome to Aquarian Diary. I’m your host, John Irving.

It is August 21, 2023. I recorded this on August 20.

I’ll be displaying some graphics and screenshots throughout this episode. If that matters to you, you may prefer to watch this on YouTube.

Of course I have been following many of the alarming environmental crises that are occurring around the world. In my own country of Canada we have the Northwest Territories and the entire province of British Colombia under states of emergency due to unprecedented and out-of-control wildfires.

The city of Kelowna in B.C. and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories are under evacuation orders.

This year our environmental agency, Environment Canada, issued three times the normal amount of air quality alerts than it normally would in the course of a year, and the year is not even finished. And the amount of area that has been burned this year is off the charts as well.

Anyone who follows the news will have heard about this.

Throughout their lifespan, forests have extracted and captured a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which they store in their form. When they burn, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere all at once, and it can take many decades for those forests to regenerate.

Another thing that came to light is that in the aftermath of the fires in Hawaii there are very significant concerns about the toxic legacy of all of the materials that were burned, that they will leach into the waters and poison the land.

Of course human beings use a lot of toxic products in construction and in day-to-day life and many of those now pose a threat to the local ecosystems. This is something that makes perfect sense when you think about it, but it’s not something that people had really thought about before. What happens when residential or commercial areas are raised in fire?

It introduces another feedback that we have to think about and that hasn’t really been fully considered before, because in many ways this is also unprecedented.

But what I really want to focus on here today is something that was triggered by an article I read yesterday, August 19th, in a Canadian publication called The Globe and Mail. Unfortunately it’s paywalled, but the concepts it articulates are pretty straightforward (and of course I’ll put links as usual in the episode description).

What this article describes is how some Canadian cities are starting to plan for how they will need buildings and spaces that are equipped to provide people with clean and safe air during such conditions. In other words, there would be places where people can go in these kinds of events when there’s very poor air quality. Not everyone lives in a residence with good air filtration and those kinds of things.

But when I read this, I thought about how more and more people would need to be hunkering down in spaces or shelters that are safe under these kinds of extreme conditions, that are going to be becoming more normal and commonplace. And to me, this is a very telling development.

When I was younger, growing up, nature was a refuge. We were encouraged to go out into nature to rejuvenate, to restore our mental health and well-being. We thought about going to the country to get away from it all. But now it seems like that is being completely reversed.

To me personally, this is one of the most upsetting elements of current trends. It really bothers me that, for example, my son, who is in his 20s, will not be able to experience the same kinds of things I experienced when I was young. To be in pristine natural environments, it wasn’t all that hard to find places where there were no people or very few signs of human activity.

There were also a couple reports in the past few days about additional invasive species that have made their way into the area where I am currently that are threatening, for example, hemlock and spruce trees. Spruce are the dominant tree in many parts of Canada and the United States. They are critically important.

These are just further indicators of how our ecosystems are facing all of these threats simultaneously that just keep multiplying.

So this notion of having protected spaces for the public, like I said, I feel is very telling. I am concerned, and at the same time fairly highly convinced, that these trends portend our future, a dystopic science fiction-like future.

The script is effectively flipping where it appears that nature is turning against us and that we will be going from having kind of an offensive posture towards nature, where we perceived ourselves as the dominant force on the planet, to being in a defensive posture where we have to protect ourselves from all of these feedbacks that are the result of generations of unrelenting attempts by human beings to dominate nature, to force it to submit to our will.

Again, the script seems to be flipping, and I predict that we will be seeing this occur more and more going forward, because all of the data and much that we are observing empirically supports this trend continuing.

People have no idea how hard it is to evacuate a place like Yellowknife. It is extremely isolated and remote. So it’s not just a matter of getting in your car and driving for 30 minutes. It takes many hours to get to the nearest community.

For example, it is a fourteen or fifteen hour drive from Yellowknife, NWT to Edmonton, Alberta, and the population of Yellowknife is, or was, some twenty thousand people, all of whom had to evacuate, and many people had to be airlifted out of that area. It’s not trivial, and this has occurred many times recently in various places.

So these remote or distant areas that are surrounded by a lot of forests in particular are turning out to be dangerous and very costly. Again, this is not trivial at all.

We have to consider how it affects people’s lives, businesses, local hospitals, industry, infrastructure, airports, roads, everything. What will happen if that occurs on a regular basis? It’s already extremely expensive just to live in these remote areas.

Can we extrapolate from this that human beings are going to have to live in more centralized locations that can be protected from these spiraling out-of-control events? That’s what I was thinking when I was reading this article about these cities needing to create safe spaces that are climate-controlled.

And it’s not just the smoke, it’s the heat. The province that I’m in right now, hardly anyone had air conditioning when I was growing up here. It wasn’t even needed in vehicles, it was very uncommon. Now it’s pretty much essential because it gets much hotter than it used to. And this area is relatively cool compared to many other areas like Ontario in the summer, the vast majority of Canadians live.

And of course, the more air conditioning that’s running all the time, the more energy we’re consuming, and in many cases, the more emissions that are generated. So it’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

But my larger point really is this shift from nature sustaining us in so many ways. I mean, think about the lumber industry, think about farming, think about the fisheries.

Whereas now we’re moving into an era where nature is going to be dangerous, whether that means extreme weather events, forest fires, floods, droughts, wildfire smoke, hurricanes, sea level rise, ecosystems that are completely unpredictable compared to what they were like in the past, and I think this marks a critical shift in global history.

Of course this isn’t just occurring in Canada, it’s occurring all over the world. Look at the Mediterranean, look at the Persian Gulf, look at India, China, Europe, America, America. South America just had its incredibly hot winter temperatures off the charts where it should be cold.

Humanity needs to completely restructure civilization because it was built on almost a diametrically opposed premise where we controlled nature and now nature is becoming a threat to us in ways that it never was before.

Yes, there have been extreme events in the past, but not nearly on this level. Not constant, unrelenting, extreme events that are occurring around the world almost on a daily basis.

It affects everything from our air quality, and wildfire smoke is toxic, to our food and water supplies. All of these things are essential for our survival.

It may turn out that it is no longer possible for people to live in remote areas or enclaves outside of major urban centers simply because the conditions are going to become too extreme. I’m not saying that’s going to happen in the next few years, but that’s possible in the coming decades.

And that is the point I wanted to make here today, that this shift into what has been termed the Anthropocene, or a new scientifically designated epoch on the planet where the biosphere has been dramatically affected by human activity on a global scale for the first time in recorded history.

So are these early discussions about creating shelters for the public to cope with extreme events? Is that portending, like I said, the future? And I believe it very well could be.

When an entire province the size of British Columbia, and it is huge, some 365,000 square miles, or just under a million square kilometers. Huge! Or the Northwest Territories, which is also huge, about 30% bigger than British Columbia, or even California with Hurricane Hillary.

These are unprecedented, especially because they’re all occurring simultaneously.

Is this the beginning of an epoch where humanity and civilization will be in retreat in a defensive posture, where in effect we are at war with nature, or nature is at war with us? Is this truly the beginning of the Anthropocene, or as some are asserting, the Pyrocene, or the age of fire? If so, that is a major, major change from the status quo that has prevailed for centuries, if not millennia.

And there is a significant percentage of the population that do not even acknowledge that this is a human-caused phenomenon, despite vast and overwhelming amounts of highly credible and at this point virtually irrefutable evidence.

It appears as if it will require very dramatic events to break an almost incomprehensible level of human hubris or arrogance, if not stupidity, which they say you can’t fix.

So that’s what I want to put out there mostly to have on the record.

I know that a lot of what I talk about here is rather gloomy, and I debate that all the time. But this is actually happening in real time, and we’re witnessing it. So we can ignore it, but it isn’t going to go away just because we ignore it.

Given the profound gravity of this situation, it should be at the forefront of our minds and actions, and we should be calling out those who are attempting to thwart us from doing everything we possibly can to mitigate these circumstances, as well as their enablers and sycophants.

I’m going to add a little clarification on a couple technical points that frequently come to my mind to share.

In simplified terms, the Earth’s atmosphere is only 60 miles thick. That’s about 95 kilometers. If your car could drive vertically and you started a journey on the surface of Earth, It would take you one hour to get to the edge of the atmosphere. That’s it. That’s all we have on planet Earth is 60 miles of atmosphere.

So remember that when people say that human beings can’t alter the atmosphere. We have been producing vast amounts of pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for the past 200 years or so.

On a related matter, I often see people speculate that they feel like there must be more solar activity than normal. That’s not true.

On your screen is a graph from NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a very highly regarded American scientific body.

As you can see, there is nothing particularly abnormal about current solar activity.

We measure solar cycles based on the level of sunspot activity and we can measure those quite accurately.

Geomagnetic activity has significant implications for many arenas of human activity from power grids to aviation, so it’s important for us to measure that accurately, which we do.

During its 11-year solar cycle, the Sun’s solar radiation only varies by 0.15%.

Such small short-term changes in solar irradiance are not strong enough to have a long-term influence on the Earth’s climate. So no, it’s not the Sun.

I’ll include a link in the episode description to an FAQ from NASA that addresses this topic in more detail.

Obvious questions like these were long ago considered by scientists and analyzed and evaluated many years ago.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content, and if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members.

Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.


END of Transcript.

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Please see my “⁠Environment⁠” playlist for other episodes on this topic.

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Episode references:

⁠Cities pondering how to protect against wildfire smoke (paywalled, sorry)⁠

⁠’Crisis situation’: N.W.T. declares territorial state of emergency over wildfires (note title has changed)⁠

⁠’It was 100 years’ worth of firefighting in one night’: West Kelowna chief on wildfire⁠

⁠A state of emergency has been declared in B.C. due to wildfires. Here’s what that means⁠

⁠Hurricane Hilary triggers Southern California’s first tropical storm warning ever, with heavy rain and flash flooding forecast⁠

⁠The toxic aftermath of the Maui fires could last for years⁠

⁠Our Toxic Legacy⁠

⁠Nature Spirits in Distress⁠

⁠Destructive insect makes its way to Halifax area, attacking hemlock trees⁠

⁠Worms that secrete a dangerous paralyzing toxin spreading in Montreal⁠

⁠The climate crisis will make entire cities uninhabitable. It’s time to head underground.⁠

⁠The only way is down: subterranean survival warning⁠

⁠Wildfires’ mounting damage will cloud the economic view for months⁠

⁠Mid-winter temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius in South America leave climatologists in disbelief⁠

⁠Welcome to the ‘Pyrocene,’ an Epoch of Runaway Fire⁠

⁠Solar Cycle Progression – NOAA⁠

⁠FAQ: How Does the Solar Cycle Affect Earth’s Climate?⁠

Search for “Aquarian Diary” in your podcast app to find the podcast version of this channel.

#Environment #ClimateChange #ExtremeWeather

Check my “⁠Community Tab⁠” where I comment and share links I find interesting.

⁠Errata⁠

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