Thoughts On Where We Are, and Where We're Going

[Eric the Green]

(09-12-2018, 11:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-11-2018, 10:15 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-11-2018, 08:35 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Not a 4T!  A 2T!  Mumble...  

There is a slight uptick in the spiral of violence.  Suicides are pushing for a splash before exiting the scene.  This does not seem linked to any particular political movement, so I am not counting it as a large change in the spiral.  The media is exploiting and boosting the trend by reporting it to an extreme.  You have to kill more people to get lots of impact for your act.  As they once put it, anything to sell papers.  It is blood money.

I think this may be the end point: muddle through and let the next 2T settle the argument philosophically … or not.  Our grandchildren may decide to chop the country into separate nations, and let the teams relocate to areas they find more to their liking, though I see that as a 4T-type effort.

Come to think of it, the blue awakening was pretty much a new thing.  The key central emotional parts of the early American awakenings were highly religious.  The 2T as a social and political movement was pretty new with the 1950s and 1960s, with Martin Luther King and successor movements.  This may be what I'm seeing in the change in the pattern of history, a shift from the Industrial Age pattern to the new age.  Things move faster in the 2T.  The new values, once they go critical, are social, political and implemented faster.  There isn't a slow brewing of an unravelling.  Think the Civil Rights Act, the wave of environmentalism, the softer implementation of the Domino Theory.  The unravelling seems dominated by a counter awakening, an attempt by conservatives to turn back the clock.

If the nature of cultural change has already happened, if we have already seen a new age 2T, we are seeing a new style of transformation for the new age.  The new transformation might be something unlike the Industrial Age 2T or 4T with the Conciseness Revolution as a model for what we are likely to see.

But I will stick to what I have been saying about not being in a classic Industrial Age 4T.   There is a time in the late 3T to early 4T where the new values are shouted loudly enough for people to know them, but the government and people are not united enough to try to implement them, and the eventual Champion has not been elected yet.  The military catalysts (Lexington Green, Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor) have not occurred yet.  The war hasn't started yet.  Maybe a brave speech has redefined what we are fighting for, such as the Four Freedoms speech.  Maybe the big speeches have to wait until near the climax, such as the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's Second Inaugural or the Iron Curtain speech.  The Constitution, the post Civil War amendments, the formation of the United Nations, become attempts to nail the thing down, a 'permanence' of the new values for a while, a sign that the 1T has arrived.

But we have not seen yet a nation united in purpose, a successful attempt at making the new values universal.  What we have seen is the see saw, with the conservatives and progressives taking turns at having their innings.  We progressives certainly hope the see saw will flip at least one more time, perhaps thee more times.  It is not clear that Trump has totally discredited Reagan.  The middle of the country could blame Trump, not a failure of Reagan. 

We will see.  I have often called cultures stubborn.  It seems that the S&H fanatics are no exception, would prefer to stick with seeing the old pattern.

I think the old pattern does apply, yes.  I also use the planetary pattern to relate it to something ingrained in the very being and the cycles of our planet and solar system within which we live. The spiral dynamics paradigm as originally given by philosophers and psychologists also has a claim on our view of things, as well as other economic and cultural cycles that Mike has discussed.

We have moved from the industrial to the information age, and we also have seen the new age movement grow out of the consciousness revolution. The industrial age definitely shifted the saeculum, from a roughly 100-year duration to a roughly 82-year duration. This also coincided with the period in which Uranus was discovered, and the associated political and scientific changes of that time. The saeculum speeded up, and progress as we know it began.

The switch to the information age, which is also associated with discovery of Pluto and the other smaller bodies in the solar system, could logically, possibly, shift the saeculum. I just don't see Bob's points as indicating sufficient changes to define such a shift.

The double rhythm, as indicated by Neptune's cycle, seems enough of an explanation for why the 4T seems to come upon us more slowly this time. As I have said before, the change that needed to be made in the S&H theory seems not to be to redefine what is happening today. It is to revision what they saw as the anomaly. I have pointed this out many times, and other participants such as Chas and Odin have also revised it. Our 4T is a recurrance of the civil war 4T, which extended back at least to 1850, not just to 1860. That means that the controversies, the failed compromises, the failures to act, the bleeding kansas, the polarization of that time, and the upheavals from abroad that affected us, and the worldwide depression and mass migration preceding 1850, all are reflected in what is happening today as well.

And that means also that the next 1T will be a recurrance of the Gilded Age 1T. What that means, as I see it, is that the controversies of our 4T, with all their procrastination and failed compromises, will be extended into the 1T, so that it won't be as united and peaceful as the previous 1T of the 1950s. So, the double rhythm has meant a milder 4T in its early phase, and a more active 1T, than what we experienced in the 20th century's 4T and 1T. 

This is also indicated by Neptune transiting in muddled Pisces from 1848 through the 1850s, and today since 2011, and Neptune in activist/warlike Aries from 1861 to 1874, and from 2025 to 2039. And remember Neptune entered the sign Aries on the VERY DAY of Ft. Sumter's bombing. All this was covered in my video



4Ts do not indicate or represent a united country. That is the point that I made in my previous post, and Bob seems to not get. It is very clear, though. The country united only in the final defeat of the enemy at the climax and end of all previous 4Ts, when consensus develops as we move into the 1T. 

So there is no change indicated in our saeculum by the fact that we are still polarized and muddling along today. It is 1850s redux. Again, I have indicated this here many times, and predicted this in advance long ago. Things could not be MORE on schedule, considering the saeculum and all the cycles.

The 2T was not different from earlier ones either. The consciousness revolution featured a new spiritual awakening, the new age movement, as previous ones did (e.g. transcendentalism in the 1830s to the 50s, and theosophy/new thought in the 1890s), and a counter-awakening with a powerful fundamentalist revival of traditional Christian evangelism as well, just like previous great awakenings during 2Ts. And 2Ts, just as before, also featured social and political rebellions and new movements emerging, as Bob mentioned, and as happened in previous 2Ts with the populist social gospel and labor and progressive movements of the 1890s and 1900s, the anti-slavery movements of the 1820s and 30s, the great awakening ideals of the new city on a hill of the Enlightenment era of the 1740s period, and the great rebellion of the 1640s. I see no indication of changes to the saeculum in these respects.

So how would the information age shift the saeculum, then? The only thing I could see, possibly, is a slowing down of progress a little. The information age is also what we call post-modernism. This trend has shifted our cultural milieu. It is an outgrowth of the consciousness revolution, both in its social justice movements, which created a mindset to reduce the authority of social roles and increase our awareness of relativity, and the environmental and counter-cultural movements which redefined our whole notion of progress. 

These are also reflected in what spiral dynamics calls the Green Meme, and is roughly equivalent to the cosmic meanings of Pluto, the Kuiper Belt, and Chiron and the centaurs; Pluto having been discovered in 1930 at the time of the uncertainty principle, Heidegger's existentialism, Jungian psychology and gestalt psychology and Reichian bio-energetics, and the rest being discovered in the 1970s to the 1990s. Chiron was discovered in the same year 1977 as Apple Computer was founded and the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber was published. These new discoveries were amplified into entire regions of similar but smaller bodies discovered in the 1990s, just as integral philosophy was fully developed and the internet exploded in scale. More on all this at http://philosopherswheel.com/planetarydynamics.html

The saeculum seemed to speed up even faster than the 82-year cycle indicated by half of Neptune's orbit, in the previous 4T and 1T. JFK's assassination seemed to end the 1T a little prematurely. But the 3T lasted longer. So if there's any effect of the post-modern information age, it may just be to slow the saeculum down again from this acceleration. This may be due to longer lifespans, so that adaptives are in power longer and thus slowing down change and readiness to enter combat and conflict in full-on 4T style. 

But Uranus-Pluto cycles also seemed to speed the end of the 1T, and open the 2T early, in the mid-1960s; and this may happen again in circa 2046, so that the next 1T will also be only about 18 years long; and once again the following 2T through 4Ts will be longer too. So the speeding up and subsequent slowing down may also be coincidental with the cosmic schedule.

The next 1T will therefore not be quite the easy and peaceful breather that folks here hope for, and it will also end too soon! But in compensation, we have had, so far, an easier 4T, and the combat, in whatever form it takes, will be of shorter duration.