When We Remembered Our Selves
New Moon in Taurus, April 21st, 2012
Looking back, we see that 2011/2012 was when internet use peaked. That was when the amount of junk we all had to wade through to get what we wanted from “The Online Experience” overwhelmed whatever it was we were after.
Not that the experience had been that great from the start. You could always sense the potential. For about 20 years, we surfed through choppy water, trying to get the program we needed to work the way we wanted, trying to find content we wanted amidst the cookies, add-ons, plug-ins, surveys, new versions, and everything else that got in our way. Every once in awhile, it was great. Cigarettes are that way too.
Internet content and traffic during the peak has been analyzed and sorted exhaustively. Nothing actually changed. It’s just that collectively we all decided that the internet itself wasn’t really what we were after. Whatever we wanted, it wasn’t the experience of the net.
It was during late April or early May of 2012, actually, when the number of hours people were spending online really started to drop off. That was when there was this collective realization that, even if we couldn’t figure out how to delete our facebook accounts, we could stop going there – and that it felt better to not know what our so-called “friends” had done 10 seconds ago, anyway. If they were really friends, they could call, or come by. It turned out that people can be more than a series of tweets or posts.
Business analysts are still trying to explain it in terms of what was on the internet and what wasn’t, that kind of thing. They look at the sites that survived and theorize what it was that made them last. Overall it’s easy to see that they were the ones that were easy to use, had no adds, collected no personal data, and did what they said they would do without needing to be updated every 5 minutes.
One thing that definitely killed the net was that it never felt private. Everything we did online was watched and analyzed – either by those who would hold what we looked at against us, or by those who would use what we looked at to sell us something we didn’t need. In the end, it turned out WE just didn’t need the internet at all.
Actually, THEY were the ones who needed it – the thought controllers were the ones who had the most to lose, who fought the decline the hardest. There was this assumption they made – that can be traced back to the 1920s – that they could get us to conform socially through psychological manipulation of our economic behavior.
But we woke up.
It was shortly after the New Moon in Taurus, at 12:18 AM on April 21st, 2012, that it happened. Taurus is about knowing what you want, and what you don’t want. It’s about the feeling of life inside you. That quiet, inner sense of the goodness of the air, or the Sunlight, or the smell of the Earth. It can seem like a simple and innocent energy, but in fact Taurus is what tunes us in to what we desire – by making the desire so intense and overwhelming that we’re willing to actually do something crazy to get it.
There were a lot of factors that combined to make that particular time, the month of Taurus in 2012, the end of the technological nightmare and the beginning of the return to nature. Astrologers will always talk about the timing of that New Moon in relationship to Saturn and Pluto being retrograde in cardinal signs, the Pluto/Uranus square, that kind of thing.
But whatever it was, we are freer now. Our thoughts are our own again. And we spend more time feeling the air than we do reading about the weather.
Look toward the horizon and you can see what started it, symbolically. It was the Pleiadian symbol for the 2nddegree of Taurus, where that New Moon happened. The symbol is “Sheet lightning flickering in soft, shifting colors.”
I invite you to visualize that image. Conjure the moment – the smell of the air, the distant thunder. Your lover’s hand. The laughter of children playing in the evening. Time is slow again, thank God.
To get what you want, you have to see what you want.
Learn more about our times at Sense of Vision Astrology
Fascinating insights. And so true. As an artist and musician who resisted the internet for many years, I typically strive to focus on developing computer craft and creativity while limiting social media and virtual busyness as qualitatively as I can. And while visiting the woods or seashore has always held a special place in my heart, I did notice beginning this early April a powerful call to exploit unusual circumstances and hike the local Nature reserves for hours almost daily, rain or shine, and with great attention to the ever-evolving nuances of the spring season. Doing so led to composing some new songs and posting some much-appreciated photo essays that documented my hiking experience and woodland encounters for “real” friends around the world. Most nourishing, all culminating with my May 18 birthday. Seems much in tune with the stars as you describe it. So thanks for the article. Wonderful website. Viva Cascadia. Supporter in exile.