How Humanity Went Blind To The Stars

Our ancestors understood the universe much better than us. They simply saw it more. Modern technology has completely whited out the night sky. Satellites and background interference are making observatories on Earth useless. We might have the exact gas composition of the universe written down somewhere, but we can’t see shit. And we think ourselves masters of the universe. We have the power of gods, and the understanding of muttals. Muttal refers to muttai, or egg. Which also refers to zero.

Humanity, in its scientific insanity, has closed its eyes to infinity. The infinity that is plainly written across the skies, if you don’t blast lights everywhere and blind yourself. And so we are, literally, flying blind. Flying around a sun, relying just on our instruments. It’s crazy. A few hundred years of science are what has caused climate collapse, along with the ‘enlightened’* destruction of much older, much wiser philosophical systems. This is the hubris that I often talk about, and there’s no greater sign of it that going out at night and looking up.

What the fuck have we done? The gods have obviously abandoned us. They’re fucking gone.

As much as we have written down, measured, and invented based on knowledge of the universe, look how much we have lost. Abul Hasan Ibn Ishaq could point a telescope at the sky in the 800s and see something. Today, my kids can’t see shit, except the moon. We have space telescopes which enable us to see further than ever before, but only space scientists have access to them. And they’re mostly depressed post-docs. Science has monopolized the night sky, monopolized the idea of the night sky, and the common people are left staring up at smog. Thus we have more knowledge than ever before, and even less wisdom. We have numbers spinning on a hard disk somewhere that describe the universe in great precision, but on a personal level we have closed our eyes, and our hearts. This is of course disastrous to the planet. We’re literally flying blind, navigating purely on instruments.

Today we laugh at astrology, but its heart is in the right place. Astrology is about an intimate connection between you and the universe. Is it true? I don’t know, is the number 7 true? It’s all just symbols. What matters is what you do with this information, how it changes you, and feeling a connection the stars is a good thing. A true thing. This is the proper orientation of the human heart. You can get it from astronomy or astrology. For almost all of human history they have been the same thing.

My Achchi in the village used to subscribe to astrological magazines and do her own charts. She was intimately familiar with the universe, though her dates were a bit off. The charts we follow in the South still follow the Babylonian system, and the Earth has wobbled significantly since then. So her star charts didn’t match the actual stars, they were a few millennia off. That to me was the most beautiful. That we were remember the night sky from 3,000 years ago, in the hearts and minds of achchis in every village. What a beautiful thing. What wisdom, what respectfulness. What understanding, in symbols that science brushes off and calls ignorant. But my Achchi didn’t blot out the night sky. That’s on ‘progress’, not the past.

Religion, superstition, ritual, sacrifice—these are all ancient ways of connecting with the universe. Worshiping the sun is in no way ignorant. The sun is awesome. Imagining that you’re connected to all the planets and space dust and explosions in the universe is not foolish. It’s true. Most of the old old religions were nature religions destroyed by the gods whom science (the worship of man) is trying to destroy now. But the old gods were the true gods. The gods of fire, the gods of trees, the gods of the planets.