Pursuing my ideas and blogging the connections between media pieces and the planetary cycles brings me joy. The question becomes; Why don't I take the time to do it more often? It is almost like the idea of the pleasure and satisfaction to be derived is enough; I do not have to necessarily follow it through; or am so good at delaying gratification that it has become a way of life? Maybe I am influenced too much by the I Ching; the first part of my life is ruled by the hexagram "Standstill", the second, "Waiting". Or is it my over active Saturn?
It's not that my mind is hollow but that the effort to begin -just to begin becomes a significant hurdle to cross. Sometimes, however, like this morning, I see something that provokes me to write because it speaks of concrete evidence that our current economic events (in this case) are hurling us into the next Jupiter/Saturn conjunction, occurring on December 21st, 2020 at 0 degrees of Aquarius. Those of you born on or around January 21st, any year, will be a part of the next huge cultural shift.
These two planets pair up only every 20 years and when they do new cultural, political, social and economic paradigms begin. Jupiter rules beliefs, religious, social, economic, political or scientific; Saturn rules the laws of nature and society. Saturn makes our belief systems real as in laws to live by. These two planets are visible to the naked eye, the last ones in our Solar System that are, and have been used by the chroniclers of time since man started looking up at the sky to try to understand what the gods were telling us.
May 28 2000 was their last conjunction in earth sign Taurus, the month the the tech bubble burst and the stock market took its first huge nose dive. This event put all of us on notice that there was no more permanent security in the material. Events since have reinforced this notion- with the tragic housing bust- that a boom to bust scenario (or visa versa) can come mightily speedily.
The next conjunction is in an air sign Aquarius, the sign of Universal Brotherhood, with an Ideal relationship between all things, cooperation in the highest sense and groups united around a common bond -not an earth sign. The conjunctions occur in one element (fire, earth, air or water) for 200 years and then morph into another. These "Grand Conjunctions" have been occurring in earth signs for 200 years, since 1802. (Excepting 1980-81, "Reaganomics", when the conjunction was in Libra, an air sign, and previewed the next 200 years starting in 2020.) Grand Conjunctions in air signs, says Robert Blaschke, correspond to rapid social progress, significant intellectual development and new concepts entering human consciousness.
Which brings me to the piece I got excited about this morning. It is in the New Yorker issue of November 25th, on the Financial page written by James Surowiecki, entitled "Gross Domestic Freebie". Surowiecki writes about the extraordinary valuation of the Twitter IPO's- $24 Billion dollars, with revenue of $535 million, 230 million active users, 100 million using its services every day and one-half a billion tweets a day. Yet no one pays Twitter ANTHING. How can a company be valued at $24 billion dollars but its value is not anything which can be held or accounted for.
In fact much of the time we spend on the Internet with its digital goods and services is given to us free of charge,Surowiecki says, and not part of any traditional accounting as in the G.D.P. for instance. In the Industrial Age this Gross Domestic Product was easily measured in what we produced for sale. The Digital Age is markedly different in that there seems to be real monetary value (Twitter's IPO), but figuring out the invisible value of the Internet and including it as a measure of the economy is not easy. We seem to be valuing AIR. Hence my excitement in seeing evidence of what the next 200 years will be like-we will no longer be valuing material capital, but intellectual capital.
Evidence in the seismic shift in cultural, political, economic etc. affairs coming at the solstice 2020 is everywhere you look (16 states have now ratified gay marriages). The Congressional hearings held this week, are another example. The legislators wanted to hear from professionals the pros and cons about "bitcoin"-the digital global currency. I found it hard to believe that Congress was already looking into it. It must be further along in the mainstream than I thought. Can you imagine a global currency not connected to the banks?? How healthy would that be???
Stayed Tuned more coming...
