There is a Dark Side to the Aquarian Age

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Friends,
Today I tried unsuccessfully to send all of you a Hogue Prophecy Bulletin in “text-only” format. I tried to send text-only because it has come to my attention that many of you may not be receiving my bulletins thanks to spam filters provided by your server. Apparently many filters may view as spam the newsletters you choose to read. You may not even be aware that your servers block them and you are under the false assumption that I did not send them to you. Authors of other newsletters tell me that spam filters leave their articles alone if they send them without HTML format. Today’s Bulletin was an attempt to test that theory. Today, my Listbuilder program did not allow me to do this. I will have to try this experiment another time when they tyranny of the Microsoft tech-support busy signal has abated.

It would seem that the internet industry’s recent “fix” for the unprecedented spam problems of the summer of 2003 had created more problems. One could wax cynical and say all the spam, blaster viruses and so-big worms overloading the internet have given those who want to block the free flow of information a great excuse to create spam filters that use a cyber hatchet to sever a connection to emails and e-newsletters that look remotely like spam. Most of the large servers like AOL do not give their users the option to choose what is blocked, nor do they report what was blocked. Thus millions of people out there might not even know what they are missing.

A few servers like my own (Indra’s Net) allow the user to customize what email addresses can be permitted and black listed. However, my server’s filter makes it incumbent on the user to spend more time and energy going through a mounting list of hundreds of blocked mail addresses to see if there are any new and interesting messages being censored. In the end, the filtering service became a greater burden than spam. I spent more time trying to fish for new and interesting messages in the blocked list than it took manually deleting spam in my inbox. I had to disconnect the filters after a week.

I welcome being the recipient of generally unsolicited broadcast mailing. Most of these uninvited messages certainly are worthless but I can number many a good lead into an interesting subject coming from a kind stranger who assumed I should have a copy of their mass mailed newsletter.

I would like to wax paranoiac about newsletters and the free flow of information being purposefully blocked; however, I think the only conspiracy working here (so far) is the viral maliciousness that created spam and the anti viral missteps of what mystics like Gurdjieff or Osho would call the unconscious “human machine” working in us. The internet’s viral plagues and draconian patches are a good example of the screw-ups that will come from the following the darker aspects of the Aquarian Age.

I wrote the rest of today’s bulletin back in 1993. I think this cautionary warning about the darker potentials of the “new age” is more pertinent for readers living in this first decade of the Aquarian Age. To be forewarned of the darker potentials of the future is to be forearmed to prevent them.

The following passage is from the The Millennium Book of Prophecy.

BEGINNING OF QUOTE

There is very little written in the New Age genre about the darker potentials of the Aquarian Age. I experience this omission as a blend of Piscean and Aquarian denial: The Piscean escapes into dreams rather than face reality – in this case, the subconscious manipulation of our minds. The Aquarian is a blind idealist, optimistic about the future — at all costs. The adherents of New Age thinking glibly encourage this misplaced idealism in others: “Don’t give the negative any energy and it won’t happen.”

Their definition of “apocalypse” is as dark as their fear of sweet dreams evaporating in the presence of sobering, sometimes frightening realities.

Phenomena like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, terrorism and mind control are not going to die with the Piscean Age. These are the more ominous aspects of the dawning Aquarian epoch that humankind must dodge and parry for the next two thousand years. Dictatorial Piscean father figures will certainly die out in the coming centuries, but unless we remain aware of all the potentials shaping human behavior in the coming age, we may not recognize the return of Hitler and Stalin archetypes in less vulgar and more palatable forms.

Aquarius rules the urge to impersonalize. This might herald a more tolerant humankind that takes and perceives slights less personally. Used unconsciously, however, the same potential for impersonalization can see a people lose their souls to a dictatorship of the computer. Dictators of the Piscean Age control the human flock through manipulating the emotions of hope, demanding sacrifices, and worshiping divine superstitions. Future tyrants won’t use the threat of the sword or promises of bread and paradise to conscript believers; they will instead fashion psycho-weapons out of the Aquarian element of atmosphere and mood. And you may not even feel the repression.

In fact, you will feel as if you are happy, as if you are a citizen living in the harmonious New Age. You will be seduced into believing it. In fact, in the darker realm of the future, the more people will be programmed not to think for themselves at all. One can already see signs of a more shadowy Aquarian dispensation in the seemingly innocent words of a cable TV ad from a Tele-Communication, Inc. (TCI) broadcast in the early 1990s. It ends with the words: “…as we head into the future, maybe the secret lies not so much in knowing what tomorrow will bring, just in making sure we know someone who does.”

Big Brother knows.

Since 1984, puritanical Communism has been disintegrating along with the Cold War, and one can hope that the negative Utopia portrayed in George Orwell’s book is no longer a possibility. Big Brother, the Stalinist, is replaced by Max Headroom, the computer-manufactured TV host. He’s funny, he’s witty, he has no soul. He even admits it, and invites you to have no soul as well. Having no soul is cool. Orwell’s Ministry of Culture has long ago been replaced by a brighter and more entertaining propaganda organ called Madison Avenue, with its computer-morphed ads made in Hollywood.

Before the Stalinists went the way of the dinosaurs, they taught power freaks a valuable lesson in perpetuating a dismal new age: take free thinking away from the individual. Program people to think the way you want them to. And this is precisely what the darker side of Aquarius is skilled in.

In 1990 consumer activist Ralph Nader addressed the Utne Reader Early Warning Environmental Conference about a clear and present danger. He warned, “Corporations are more important in raising children than parents.”

“Let’s start with infant formula — a destructive and costly displacement of the best food infants could ever consume,” said Nader. “Let’s go to war toys. Let’s go to overmedication to tranquilize the super-active kiddies. Let’s move to seven- and eight-year-old-girls being taught cosmetics by the cosmetic industry so they can learn to be proper objects and subjects later in life. Let’s move to music. However much we may like it, it’s designed to blot out the mind walking down the street with the Walkman, never allowing a true reflection that might take the place of sonic assault….Who’s raising the kids? Kindercare is raising them. McDonald’s is feeding them, HBO and Disneyland are entertaining them. They are spending more time with corporate products and services and entertainment and addictions than they do with adults. Now that’s got to have an effect on them. It’s got to twist and distort their values and rupture their sense of history.”

The New Age is already making us robopaths of product.

Many prophets in the past ten thousand years foresaw something akin to a one-world government. A common projection of the New Age movement is living “happily ever after” the millennium. But those who covet power won’t just disappear by the wave of some plastic magic wand bought from a New Age bookstore. Nor will a weekend spent chanting in some high-powered energy spot on some auspicious date in the Mayan calendar sing away the Will to Power Blues for the next twenty centuries.

The future, like energy, is neutral. We make the best or worst out of its potentials, they don’t make us.

A flowering global society that celebrates the uniqueness of everyone is possible. In the end, wars and ecological disasters might bring the world together. Those who survive get on with rebuilding their lives in a new age. But no prophet is needed to predict that there will still be power-mongers afoot doing all they can to establish their dominance even within a new world order.

If World War III is averted and we weather the greenhouse effect, watch out for the worldwide corporate police-state-with-a-smile. George Orwell’s puritanical and brute quality of Utopia foreseen in 1984 is less and less possible in the age of science and communication by light wave. But paradise on Earth could still become a paradise lost.

Don’t worry, be happy. There is hope that a negative world Utopia will not become an international Stalinist Third World state-in-crumbling. The police state of tomorrow will be clean and corporate, and you will be happy. You can’t help it because your genes were altered at birth. And whatever bad moods or antisocial behavior that cannot be altered by gene splicing can be dulled by drugs or distracted by an entertainment fix. Tomorrow’s negative Utopia will be more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the neo-yuppie police state of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 .

The first steps toward Huxley’s social nightmare are already upon us. The speed and accessibility of information are not enlightening humankind as much as overburdening us with knowledge and entertainment stimuli. Ultimately we are running the danger of suffering what Ted Mooney, author of the novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets , calls “brain fade” – a kind of information pestilence.

Wait just a minute. Mute the volume!
Listen: Have you forgotten your childhood?
Has the wisdom of innocence and simplicity become an abstract?
Do the three or four dozen murders — real or fictional — you
see on a daily dose of television move you less than the car ads?
If the answer is yes to all the above you might be suffering from:
brain fade.

Ma-Ma-Max Headroom, the “future shock” personality-without-a-soul, becomes the conscience of the future brain-dead and sensorially overloaded society. This Cyberpunk TV show about a hopeless though vastly entertained future humanity rapidly faded in the ratings. The show cut too close to the truth of the future. The boob-tubers of the 1990s still harbor a Piscean penchant to dream in a Aldous Huxtable heaven. Neither Max Headroom’s synthetic wit nor Orwell’s gibberish-cum-morality called “doublethink” will be the means for our fall in Aquarian darkness. The fall will come from our current lolling brain virus of “telethink.”

“The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things,” Mooney explained. “This is why people’s eye, ears, brains, and nervous systems have grown weary. It’s a simple case of misuse.”

Extrapolating from the 1990s to the 2090s, you find the misuse of Aquarian energy creating the nightmare vision of Ray Bradbury’s negative Utopia: firemen will not fight fires, but set them. Books are outlawed and burned. The technologically advanced society gives neo-yuppies all the creature comforts they desire. The earshell radios and four-walled 3D televisions supply all the “human” contact people are programmed to desire. And being rebellious has become a fad. Rebellion, and even antisocial behavior, can be expressed at your neighborhood Fun Park. There you can break windows, shoot, and even run down people, just for kicks. In Bradbury’s future you can act just like your own Ninja turtle toys.

Your typical Aquarian Ager is a born rebel. If during his development that innate activism is repressed, astrology tells us that it might erupt in minor eccentric gestures such as the man in a conservative business suit who wears a loud bow tie. If the repression runs deeper, the straight-laced rebel resorts to absurd or gutless acts, such as those of drunken male collegians cruising Palm Springs, California, and stripping young women waiting at red lights in their convertibles.

Or, the Aquarian natural tendency for rebellion can be debauched by empty and often harmless gestures. Rather than risking a real rebellion against their parents’ hypocrisies, some kids put their hairdos in a blender and wear black as if they are mourning the loss of their future.

The future shift will be from Orwell’s mindless terror to Huxley’s and Bradbury’s terror of blissed-out mindlessness. Freedom of thought can be packaged and supplied with the ease of a home video store. Tomorrow’s rebel-gelding will walk into a hologram device and “become” Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death , Neil Postman reminds us that social visionaries like Huxley believed humankind was “in a race between education and disaster.” We must be ever alert to the pivotal role played by “the politics and epistemology of media.”

“For in the end,” Postman writes, ” [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

But if we continue to evolve into a race of spectators (i.e., Homo recumbere rädix , a.k.a. Couch Potatoes) preferring to watch actors make love rather than make love ourselves, there’s a new generation of power-mongers set to rule us by means of a darker Aquarian maxim. No Hitler or Stalin, but something witty and inhuman like Mr Headroom, the computer byte-spliced David Letterman of tomorrow, will shock-treat you with the Cyberpunk manifesto:

“Everyone is mentally, physically, and genetically programmed to serve the World State. It exists to control the mind and feelings of the individual and impart an artificial sense of achieving his or her full potential.”

If we remain alert enough to think and feel for ourselves, the future shape of things Aquarian will have us live by this axiom:
“Everyone is equally unique and the World State exists to nurture an individual’s uniqueness to its full potential.”

John Hogue
(27 September 2003)

Books by John Hogue