Is anyplace safe?

Ongoing conditioning to be afraid, everywhere, all the time is not compatible with peace, calm, or any form of sanity. This is a crosspost from Planet Waves.

This is a cross-post from Planet Waves Astrology. If you are an in-house Core, Astrology or Galaxy subscriber, you can find this article at My Account. — efc

No blood, no gore: Bourbon St. on a typical day. Photo by Zack Smith.

Dear Friend and Reader:

That we in the United States began the year with a national tragedy does not surprise anyone. We are past any form of shock from such mass-kill events. The surprises now come in the press release. Early New Year’s morning, we are told that a guy with a rented pickup truck drove into crowds along Bourbon St., killing 15, then shooting it out with the cops. His chickens, goats and sheep are all said to have survived him.

Who exactly was behind this? A dead man named Shamsud-Din Jabbar is accused, and in his truck, he allegedly had the flag of ISIS. Remember that, from back during the Obama administration? Yes, the Islamic Caliphate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh.

That was the thing we were told replaced al-Queda in 2013, and that named itself a trans-national “country” in 2014. Was Shamsud-Din Jabbar really part of ISIS? Does ISIS even exist anymore? Or did he have some of its memorabilia handy?

There’s a photo of me posing with the Doobie Brothers floating around, backstage before a concert. For all the world it looks like I’m in the band. I am not. No more does having a flag make someone part of a movement or a nation. But once again we are back to the myth of alleged Arab terrorists using weapons of opportunity; in this case, the most American thing ever: a pickup truck.

Here in Kingston, a miniature city, portable barricades block the top and bottom of every street at a fair-type event; this was September 2023. Photo by Eric Francis.

High Anxiety

In my Dec. 19 article High Anxiety, I described the ongoing experience of Mars opposite Pluto, exact in the New Orleans massacre chart, as “psychic disturbance [that] is intensified and prolonged by Mars being retrograde: turned inward on itself.” It represents “energy, intention, ambition, desire, and action, all turned inward. This is stoking up a lot of both aggression and paranoia.”

Mars in Leo represents the individual; Pluto in Aquarius represents the group. This pattern is an early indicator of Pluto in Aquarius and its pitting of the individual against the collective. Notice how much damage “one disturbed person” can do. Notice that we have no skills or resources to stop such an incident in advance. Humans could easily attune themselves to create a psychic field where such a thing would be impossible.

The ground (of society and individuals) is prepared for this to come from any and every direction. In a short while, the center of astrology shifts to Aries, and retrograde Mars is serving as a probe telling us a little about what to expect. Once it begins, around the March equinox, the Aries energy is sustained for about two years, peaking a second time in the spring of 2026.

No matter who is behind these kinds of attacks, or who is behind not preventing them, the message here is that you must never feel safe anywhere, at any time. That is the point of terrorism. It’s about intense fear as a way of life. Yet most people cannot live in a state of abject paranoia, so the only option is to stuff it under awareness — where it will wreak havoc.

Events of the world cannot be separated from the media devices which convey them to us everywhere, all the time. Not long ago, an event like the NoLa truck attack would have garnered a small page-one article in The New York Times and maybe some TV coverage. Today it is broadcast wall-to-wall, around the clock, for many days on end. How do you respond? You really have no option but to cut off. Staying “connected” is all too painful.

Photo by Eric Francis

That is Digital Disembodiment

The experience of cutting off: that is disembodiment. And we are being provoked to numb out all the time. Part of the numbness is dissociating from any sensation or experience of safety. The feeling is one of being stalked all the time.