Late 20th Century philosopher Terence McKenna once described science as a system which concerns itself only with those events so gross that you can repeat them by restoring the initial conditions of the scenario. A ball at the top of a hill will always roll to the bottom.
If we reflect on our own lives, however, it's apparent that something deeper and more vital is alive and at work in the unfolding process of Being. Every affair and divorce, every natural disaster and cross-continent relocation, every death of a loved one and new birth, all these things and more have a dimension to them that exists beyond what can be captured in the current equations of the quantum fields that physicists are working so hard to understand, to grok just enough to put in a bottle. Quantum flux as a genie in the lamp of computers.
You may be aware of Luminiferous Aether as a defunct theory of physics which proposed a medium through which waves (e.g. electromagnetism) propagate. In the same way waves of water travel as pressure systems through the ocean, it was thought that getting light from the Sun to the surface of the earth without a medium of exchange would be as ridiculous as a surfer trying to find gnarly swells in Death Valley. No ocean, no waves, my guy.
PBS Space Time, a YouTube channel I can highly recommend, has a video outlining the incredible experiment done to test for the aether, this medium of exchange that physicists were sure had to exist. Unfortunately, the experiment, a culmination of years of theoretical work that was supposed to be a given, a flex by the scientists of the time to demonstrate how subtle their methodology had become to test something so innate, found nothing.
Aether doesn't exist.
Light is waves without an ocean. And yet...
In June of 2023 a study was released, an international collaboration of astrophysicists using pulsars to detect extremely low frequency gravitational waves (shoutout Dr. Becky for breaking down the paper in this video), a background hum in spacetime. Space is flexed, distorted by gravity. The mass of entire galaxies can be used to lens more distant objects. And as Einstein discovered, spacetime is a unified system, messing with one affects the other, that is, the gravitational wave vibrations vibrate time as much as space. Light travels across the void, eight light-minutes from Sol to Gaia. That path shifting and stuttering, like a stone rolling across the bottom of a flowing river, polished and shaped.
The tools of science let us understand those most gross of physical systems, but the means of wayfinding through the more opaque waters of life, the way you relate to those people and scenarios you live through personal encounters with, are accessible to you. If you talk to emergency medical professionals, they will confirm the emergency room is more active during the full moon. If you talk to parents, the "Terrible Twos" are a real experience. It takes about 2 years for Mars to make a transit around the full chart before returning to transit the natal placement of native. So at 2, the child is experiencing their first Mars return, they're learning how to say no, to be independent. I'm sure there are biological and psychological processes that are unfolding, I don't use astrology proscriptively, Mars isn't making anyone do anything, but it's a pointer, an omen that can be used to test the atmosphere. "Red sky at night, sailors delight" is an aphorism that is useful in some limited geographical regions. The signs of astrology are more broadly applicable.
When it feels like everything is up in the air or falling apart, I find great comfort in looking at the astro weather. It's not that I'm surrendering all control of my life, but I can make more informed choices if I know what atmosphere I'm moving through. Maybe someone replaced the water in the pool with eggnog, and the new viscosity requires a different approach, or the viscosity is decreased and I need a big fin to get the same movement. Maybe the water is boiling and I need to stay out of the pool for a few days while it chills. Talking to people, sometimes you click and vibe right away, and sometimes your intuition tells you to break contact and remove yourself from someone's presence. I'm a big believer in always trusting your intuition, there is a deep knowing, a body wisdom that you've gained after millions of years of evolution, and I would recommend listening to it. When you make eye contact and fall in love, what is the medium of exchange enabling that transfer of soul?
In my model, that's the purpose of Luminiferous Aether. It's a field across which our souls meet, the landscape traversed by our higher selves to convey what is needed. It's just like the physicists imagined, only instead of being a field that we had a mechanical tool to measure, it's more metaphysical, a field of consciousness that can only be accessed with human awareness. To do a tarot reading is to capture a snapshot of the energy at a specific time and lens it through human cognition into archetypal forms, into a story structure that we can understand and explore. We can see ourselves moving as characters through this symbolic plot, map the real counterparts of the symbols to see the tale we're living.
A map is necessarily a simplification of a landscape. You'll get the broad outlines, a river crossing here, a mountain pass there, a church with a clocktower in the center of town, but when walking the trail for yourself, you keep your eyes open for loose stones and roots. There are things too small to be worth including on a map that may yet be big enough to trip you up if you aren't paying attention. Watch where you walk. You are an explorer in your own life, keeping a book of field notes to help you navigate that reality, much like the early European naturalists exploring the rivers of South America. Without GPS or satellite tracking, they take their canoe up a river, jot down that they followed the river 20 miles inland and passed 5 other rivers with an outflow of approximately X gallons per hour that you didn't have time to explore. Beyond the branching river structure that will require further expeditions to more fully explicate, you also have rough sketches of local flora and fauna. You're an amateur naturalist but you're pretty sure there are some never before seen species out in those woods. This voyage was dedicated to the primary river, though, so the work of collecting samples and building out a fuller model of the ecology is an exercise for a later time. You can't do everything at once, but careful early work will give you a framework you can build off of. Mindfully engaging with life, bringing awareness to the patterns you engage with life through, exteriorizing them through journaling or ritual, can give you a much more direct method of changing them. A voice of self-criticism in your head? Give it a name and call them out when they speak up out of turn. "You should be working harder" Oh, is that so, Shyster Steve? Maybe that's an outdated pattern and we're opening for rest at the moment. After days of ADHD executive dysfunction, I took some caffeine this morning and it's always such a pleasant surprise when I'm reminded how achievable life is when I'm medicated. That McKenna line came to mind earlier, I came in and did several other small tasks, then wrote this article. It feels good to have the focus and capability to get words onto the page.
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