New Moon And Solar Eclipse In Aries – A 2nd Chance

Astro Butterfly Apr 20, 2023

On April 20th, 2023 we have a New Moon and Solar Eclipse at 29° Aries.

The Solar Eclipse is Hybrid, starting as an Annular Eclipse in the Indian Ocean and then changing to a Total Eclipse before reaching the land. Hybrid eclipses are even more rare than total and annular eclipses, taking place only once every 10 years.

The eclipse is the 2nd lunation in Aries. In March we had a New Moon at 0° Aries, at the beginning of the sign; this New Moon is at 29°, at the very end of the sign.

We are coming full circle.

The Solar Eclipse in Aries is a North Node eclipse, so it may stretch you outside your comfort zone. It may feel unnatural to just BE, to go with your gut, to get out there, to make a stand. But a North Node Eclipse is a nudge that the time has come. You’ll never feel 100% ready. So what? The future is for those who dare.

Occurring at a final, anaretic degree, the eclipse makes a strong statement. If the previous New Moon awakened us to the possibilities of living our life on our own terms, the Eclipse is a strong push forward. “Now I understand”. “I got this”.

We can only have two New Moons in the same sign when one New Moon is at 0° and the other at 29° of the sign. Two New Moons in the same sign are very rare, and they only occur about 3% of the time.

2 New Moons in the same sign are rare. Second chances are rare. The New Moon Eclipse in Aries is truly a unique moment in time when the sky aligns to give you all you need to birth something that’s important to you into existence.

Having a 2nd New Moon in the same sign is our second chance to bring something important into existence.

Ruled by Mars (now in Cancer) the Solar Eclipse in Aries asks a very important question: what is it that you want? Let your deepest desire drive your actions.

Just like the sprout naturally comes up out of the ground in spring, whatever comes from a place of truth and authenticity will eventually find a way to come into existence.

Pay attention to any messages that come your way. If something – however insignificant – happens when there’s a Solar Eclipse, it happens for a reason. Don’t forget that Eclipses are times of alignment. What is meant to be will be, what not, falls away.

At a North Node Eclipse, you want to LISTEN and you go with the tide, rather than against it.

Solar Eclipse In Aries Square Pluto

This Aries Eclipse is a dynamite Eclipse exactly square Pluto at 0° Aquarius. No more half-truths, no more living half-lives. The North Node Solar Eclipse in the last degree of Aries square Pluto is a call for total authenticity.

This Eclipse is a call to live fully and truthfully, without holding back or living halfheartedly.

A square is considered a dynamic, tense aspect. For two planets to be in a square, they have to be 90° away from each other. Buildings are square. Squares are a man-made thing. You can’t find them in nature.

Squares, and the number 4 represent an “intervention”. Squares are 4D. Unlike in the 3D (3D is an abbreviation for the 3 dimensions: breadth, height and width), in the 4D we also have the element of time. 4D means that something evolves over time.

When we have a square, something happens – in the environment – that changes the status quo. This change doesn’t happen from within ourselves.

An opposition for example, it’s a much more personal aspect. When we have an opposition, there are two aspects from within ourselves that ask for a reconciliation, or a superior understanding. When there’s an opposition, nothing factual may actually happen. When we have a square instead, something does happen.

The New Moon Eclipse in Aries is square Pluto (now at 0° Aquarius).

At the New Moon in Aries something from outside ourselves will require our attention. The Eclipse may come with an earth-shattering event OR with a more subtle invitation. When Pluto is involved, fate is knocking on our door.

Given the nature of the square (an event that feels unnatural and contrary to our purposes), our first temptation may be to shut the door.

But a different – better – approach is to pay attention and listen. There’s a reason why fate knocks at your door twice. It has something very important to deliver. Open the door.

He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’

Researchers like Carlos Moreno, the professor behind a popular urban planning concept, are struggling with conspiracy theories and death threats.

Carlos Moreno, wearing a dark suit, sits in a room among piles of books and papers.
Carlos Moreno has faced harassment in online forums and over email in recent weeks.Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Tiffany Hsu

By Tiffany Hsu

Published March 28, 2023 Updated March 29, 2023 (NYTimes.com)

For most of his 40-year career, Carlos Moreno, a scientist and business professor in Paris, worked in relative peace.

Many cities around the world embraced a concept he started to develop in 2010. Called the 15-minute city, the idea is that everyday destinations such as schools, stores and offices should be only a short walk or bike ride away from home. A group of nearly 100 mayors worldwide embraced it as a way to help recover from the pandemic.

The conspiracy theorists came late, but suddenly.

In recent weeks, a deluge of rumors and distortions have taken aim at Mr. Moreno’s proposal. Driven in part by climate change deniers and backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests and even in government hearings that 15-minute cities were a precursor to “climate change lockdowns” — urban “prison camps” in which residents’ movements would be surveilled and heavily restricted.

Many attacked Mr. Moreno, 63, directly. The professor, who teaches at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, faced harassment in online forums and over email. He was accused without evidence of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was likened to criminals and dictators.

For the first time in his career, he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

“I wasn’t a researcher anymore, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,” Mr. Moreno said. “I have become, in one week, Public Enemy No. 1.”

For high-profile figures, such as the infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, misinformation and the hostility it can cause have long been a part of the job description. But increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats. Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

One epidemiologist keeps a folder on her computer to store all the death threats she receives just “in case.” A professor of atmospheric science who studied global warming received a letter containing white powder (it looked like anthrax but turned out to be cornstarch). A professor of health law and science policy, in an article touching on his experiences with death threats, lawsuits and online trolling, wrote: “My skin is thick. I’m used to the hate.”

Mr. Moreno’s work has not been focused on the pandemic, though his 15-minute cities idea has become more popular since it began. Like many of his academic peers who have faced harassment and disinformation campaigns, he is at a loss for ways to protect himself.

“I’m not totally sure what is the best reaction — to respond, to not respond, to call a press conference, to write a press release,” he said. Academics, he said, “are relatively alone.”

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities. The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Mr. Moreno did not face harassment, however, until conspiracy theorists mistakenly conflated 15-minute cities with the low-traffic-neighborhood idea in Britain.

Efforts to adopt LTNs, which were approved for testing last year in centuries-old Oxford, have drawn concerns about whether the traffic reduction measures could cause congestion to spill into surrounding areas or make some properties less accessible. Some people, however, seized on other elements of the plan — including cameras meant to monitor license plates.

The result, according to misinformed conspiracy theorists: A nightmare scenario in which residents would be confined in open-air prisons fenced off into siloed zones. On Feb. 18, when an estimated 2,000 demonstrators converged at a protest in Oxford, some carried signs claiming that 15-minute cities would become “ghettos” created by the World Economic Forum as a form of “tyrannical control.”

In fact, LTNs are championed by the Oxfordshire county council; the separate Oxford City Council has cited the 15-minute city as an inspiration for its vision of the city in 2040. As both government bodies noted in an attempt to debunk the rumors, neither proposal involves physical barriers. One concept is concerned with limiting cars, while the other is focused on bringing daily necessities closer to residents.

Still, Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,” she said.

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,” Ms. King said. Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

The ramped-up rhetoric and the disintegration of safeguards has caused many people in the academic community to flee forums like Twitter for more niche sites like Mastodon, Ms. King said. Last year, the American Psychological Association published a feature suggesting that universities form safety offices to help professors filter menacing messages, scrub their personal information from the internet and gain access to counseling.

Mr. Moreno said he did not understand the intensity of the hate directed at him.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

Transhumanism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the critique of humanism and related term, see Posthumanism.

Not to be confused with Transhumance.

Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.[1][2]

Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics[3] of using such technologies. Some transhumanists believe that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.[2]

Another topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential risks, such as nuclear war or asteroid collision.[4][better source needed]

Julian Huxley was a biologist who popularised the term transhumanism in an influential 1957 essay.[5] The contemporary meaning of the term “transhumanism” was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught “new concepts of the human” at The New School when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews “transitional” to posthumanity as “transhuman“.[6] The assertion would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, and organizing in California a school of thought that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.[6][7][8]

Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion.[6]

In 2017, Penn State University Press, in cooperation with philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and sociologist James Hughes, established the Journal of Posthuman Studies[9] as the first academic journal explicitly dedicated to the posthuman, with the goal of clarifying the notions of posthumanism and transhumanism, as well as comparing and contrasting both.

History

Precursors of transhumanism

According to Nick Bostromtranscendentalist impulses have been expressed at least as far back as the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as in historical quests for the Fountain of Youth, the Elixir of Life, and other efforts to stave off aging and death.[2]

In his Divine ComedyDante coined the word trasumanar meaning “to transcend human nature, to pass beyond human nature” in the first canto of Paradiso.[10][11][12][13]

One of the early precursors to transhumanist ideas is Discourse on Method (1637) by René Descartes. In the Discourse, Descartes envisioned a new kind of medicine that could grant both physical immortality and stronger minds.[14]

In his first edition of Political Justice (1793), William Godwin included arguments favoring the possibility of “earthly immortality” (what would now be called physical immortality). Godwin explored the themes of life extension and immortality in his gothic novel St. Leon, which became popular (and notorious) at the time of its publication in 1799, but is now mostly forgotten. St. Leon may have provided inspiration for his daughter Mary Shelley‘s novel Frankenstein.[15]

There is debate about whether the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can be considered an influence on transhumanism, despite its exaltation of the “Übermensch” (overman or superman), due to its emphasis on self-actualization rather than technological transformation.[2][16][17][18] The transhumanist philosophies of Max More and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner have been influenced strongly by Nietzschean thinking.[16] By way of contrast, The Transhumanist Declaration[19] “…advocates the well-being of all sentience (whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human animals)”.

The late 19th to early 20th century movement known as Russian cosmism, by Russian philosopher N. F. Fyodorov, is noted for anticipating transhumanist ideas.[20]

Early transhumanist thinking

Julian Huxley, the biologist who popularised the term transhumanism in an influential 1957 essay[5]

Fundamental ideas of transhumanism were first advanced in 1923 by the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in his essay Daedalus: Science and the Future, which predicted that great benefits would come from the application of advanced sciences to human biology—and that every such advance would first appear to someone as blasphemy or perversion, “indecent and unnatural”.[21] In particular, he was interested in the development of the science of eugenicsectogenesis (creating and sustaining life in an artificial environment), and the application of genetics to improve human characteristics, such as health and intelligence.

His article inspired academic and popular interest. J. D. Bernal, a crystallographer at Cambridge, wrote The World, the Flesh and the Devil in 1929, in which he speculated on the prospects of space colonization and radical changes to human bodies and intelligence through bionic implants and cognitive enhancement.[22] These ideas have been common transhumanist themes ever since.[2]

The biologist Julian Huxley is generally regarded as the founder of transhumanism after using the term for the title of an influential 1957 article.[5] The term itself, however, derives from an earlier 1940 paper by the Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall.[23] Huxley describes transhumanism in these terms:

Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish and short’; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery… we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted… The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.[5]

Huxley’s definition differs, albeit not substantially, from the one commonly in use since the 1980s. The ideas raised by these thinkers were explored in the science fiction of the 1960s, notably in Arthur C. Clarke‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which an alien artifact grants transcendent power to its wielder.[24]

Japanese Metabolist architects produced a manifesto in 1960 which outlined goals to “encourage active metabolic development of our society”[25] through design and technology. In the Material and Man section of the manifesto, Noboru Kawazoe suggests that:

After several decades, with the rapid progress of communication technology, every one will have a “brain wave receiver” in his ear, which conveys directly and exactly what other people think about him and vice versa. What I think will be known by all the people. There is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole.[26]

Artificial intelligence and the technological singularity

The concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence, was first proposed by the British cryptologist I. J. Good in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.[27]

Computer scientist Marvin Minsky wrote on relationships between human and artificial intelligence beginning in the 1960s.[28] Over the succeeding decades, this field continued to generate influential thinkers such as Hans Moravec and Raymond Kurzweil, who oscillated between the technical arena and futuristic speculations in the transhumanist vein.[29][30] The coalescence of an identifiable transhumanist movement began in the last decades of the 20th century. In 1966, FM-2030 (formerly F. M. Esfandiary), a futurist who taught “new concepts of the human” at The New School, in New York City, began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and world views transitional to posthumanity as “transhuman“.[31] In 1972, Robert Ettinger, whose 1964 Prospect of Immortality founded the cryonics movement,[32] contributed to the conceptualization of “transhumanity” with his 1972 Man into Superman.[33] FM-2030 published the Upwingers Manifesto in 1973.[34]

Growth of transhumanism

The first self-described transhumanists met formally in the early 1980s at the University of California, Los Angeles, which became the main center of transhumanist thought. Here, FM-2030 lectured on his “Third Way” futurist ideology.[35] At the EZTV Media venue, frequented by transhumanists and other futurists, Natasha Vita-More presented Breaking Away, her 1980 experimental film with the theme of humans breaking away from their biological limitations and the Earth’s gravity as they head into space.[36][37] FM-2030 and Vita-More soon began holding gatherings for transhumanists in Los Angeles, which included students from FM-2030’s courses and audiences from Vita-More’s artistic productions. In 1982, Vita-More authored the Transhumanist Arts Statement[38] and, six years later, produced the cable TV show TransCentury Update on transhumanity, a program which reached over 100,000 viewers.

In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,[39] which discussed the prospects for nanotechnology and molecular assemblers, and founded the Foresight Institute. As the first non-profit organization to research, advocate for, and perform cryonics, the Southern California offices of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation became a center for futurists. In 1988, the first issue of Extropy Magazine was published by Max More and Tom Morrow. In 1990, More, a strategic philosopher, created his own particular transhumanist doctrine, which took the form of the Principles of Extropy, and laid the foundation of modern transhumanism by giving it a new definition:[40]

Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life. […] Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies […].

In 1992, More and Morrow founded the Extropy Institute, a catalyst for networking futurists and brainstorming new memeplexes by organizing a series of conferences and, more importantly, providing a mailing list, which exposed many to transhumanist views for the first time during the rise of cyberculture and the cyberdelic counterculture. In 1998, philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), an international non-governmental organization working toward the recognition of transhumanism as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry and public policy.[41] In 2002, the WTA modified and adopted The Transhumanist Declaration.[19][4] The Transhumanist FAQ, prepared by the WTA (later Humanity+), gave two formal definitions for transhumanism:[42]

  1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
  2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

In possible contrast with other transhumanist organizations, WTA officials considered that social forces could undermine their futurist visions and needed to be addressed.[6] A particular concern is the equal access to human enhancement technologies across classes and borders.[43] In 2006, a political struggle within the transhumanist movement between the libertarian right and the liberal left resulted in a more centre-leftward positioning of the WTA under its former executive director James Hughes.[43][44] In 2006, the board of directors of the Extropy Institute ceased operations of the organization, stating that its mission was “essentially completed”.[45] This left the World Transhumanist Association as the leading international transhumanist organization. In 2008, as part of a rebranding effort, the WTA changed its name to “Humanity+“.[46] In 2012, the transhumanist Longevity Party had been initiated as an international union of people who promote the development of scientific and technological means to significant life extension, that for now has more than 30 national organisations throughout the world.[47][48]

The Mormon Transhumanist Association was founded in 2006.[49] By 2012, it consisted of hundreds of members.[50]

The first transhumanist elected member of a parliament has been Giuseppe Vatinno, in Italy.[51]

Theory

It is a matter of debate whether transhumanism is a branch of posthumanism and how this philosophical movement should be conceptualised with regard to transhumanism.[52][53] The latter is often referred to as a variant or activist form of posthumanism by its conservative,[54] Christian[55] and progressive[56][57] critics.[58]

A common feature of transhumanism and philosophical posthumanism is the future vision of a new intelligent species, into which humanity will evolve and eventually will supplement or supersede it. Transhumanism stresses the evolutionary perspective, including sometimes the creation of a highly intelligent animal species by way of cognitive enhancement (i.e. biological uplift),[6] but clings to a “posthuman future” as the final goal of participant evolution.[59][60]

Nevertheless, the idea of creating intelligent artificial beings (proposed, for example, by roboticist Hans Moravec) has influenced transhumanism.[29] Moravec’s ideas and transhumanism have also been characterised as a “complacent” or “apocalyptic” variant of posthumanism and contrasted with “cultural posthumanism” in humanities and the arts.[61] While such a “cultural posthumanism” would offer resources for rethinking the relationships between humans and increasingly sophisticated machines, transhumanism and similar posthumanisms are, in this view, not abandoning obsolete concepts of the “autonomous liberal subject“, but are expanding its “prerogatives” into the realm of the posthuman.[62] Transhumanist self-characterisations as a continuation of humanism and Enlightenment thinking correspond with this view.

Some secular humanists conceive transhumanism as an offspring of the humanist freethought movement and argue that transhumanists differ from the humanist mainstream by having a specific focus on technological approaches to resolving human concerns (i.e. technocentrism) and on the issue of mortality.[63] However, other progressives have argued that posthumanism, whether it be its philosophical or activist forms, amounts to a shift away from concerns about social justice, from the reform of human institutions and from other Enlightenment preoccupations, toward narcissistic longings for a transcendence of the human body in quest of more exquisite ways of being.[64]

As an alternative, humanist philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones has proposed a renewed Renaissance humanism through DNA and genome repositories, with each individual genotype (DNA) being instantiated as successive phenotypes (bodies or lives via cloning, Church of Man, 1978). In his view, native molecular DNA “continuity” is required for retaining the “self” and no amount of computing power or memory aggregation can replace the essential “stink” of our true genetic identity, which he terms “genity”. Instead, DNA/genome stewardship by an institution analogous to the Jesuits’ 400 year vigil is a suggested model for enabling humanism to become our species’ common credo, a project he proposed in his speculative novel The Humanist – 1000 Summers (2011), wherein humanity dedicates these coming centuries to harmonizing our planet and peoples.

The philosophy of transhumanism is closely related to technoself studies, an interdisciplinary domain of scholarly research dealing with all aspects of human identity in a technological society and focusing on the changing nature of relationships between humans and technology.[65]

Aims

You awake one morning to find your brain has another lobe functioning. Invisible, this auxiliary lobe answers your questions with information beyond the realm of your own memory, suggests plausible courses of action, and asks questions that help bring out relevant facts. You quickly come to rely on the new lobe so much that you stop wondering how it works. You just use it. This is the dream of artificial intelligence.

— Byte, April 1985[66]

Ray Kurzweil believes that a countdown to when “human life will be irreversibly transformed” can be made through plotting major world events on a graph.

While many transhumanist theorists and advocates seek to apply reason, science and technology for the purposes of reducing poverty, disease, disability and malnutrition around the globe,[42] transhumanism is distinctive in its particular focus on the applications of technologies to the improvement of human bodies at the individual level. Many transhumanists actively assess the potential for future technologies and innovative social systems to improve the quality of all life, while seeking to make the material reality of the human condition fulfill the promise of legal and political equality by eliminating congenital mental and physical barriers.

Transhumanist philosophers argue that there not only exists a perfectionist ethical imperative for humans to strive for progress and improvement of the human condition, but that it is possible and desirable for humanity to enter a transhuman phase of existence in which humans enhance themselves beyond what is naturally human. In such a phase, natural evolution would be replaced with deliberate participatory or directed evolution.

Some theorists such as Ray Kurzweil think that the pace of technological innovation is accelerating and that the next 50 years may yield not only radical technological advances, but possibly a technological singularity, which may fundamentally change the nature of human beings.[67] Transhumanists who foresee this massive technological change generally maintain that it is desirable. However, some are also concerned with the possible dangers of extremely rapid technological change and propose options for ensuring that advanced technology is used responsibly. For example, Bostrom has written extensively on existential risks to humanity’s future welfare, including ones that could be created by emerging technologies.[68] In contrast, some proponents of transhumanism view it as essential to humanity’s survival. For instance, Stephen Hawking points out that the “external transmission” phase of human evolution, where knowledge production and knowledge management is more important than transmission of information via evolution, may be the point at which human civilization becomes unstable and self-destructs, one of Hawking’s explanations for the Fermi paradox. To counter this, Hawking emphasizes either self-design of the human genome or mechanical enhancement (e.g., brain-computer interface) to enhance human intelligence and reduce aggression, without which he implies human civilization may be too stupid collectively to survive an increasingly unstable system, resulting in societal collapse.[69]

While many people believe that all transhumanists are striving for immortality, it is not necessarily true. Hank Pellissier, managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (2011–2012), surveyed transhumanists. He found that, of the 818 respondents, 23.8% did not want immortality.[70] Some of the reasons argued were boredom, Earth’s overpopulation and the desire “to go to an afterlife”.[70]

Empathic fallibility and conversational consent

See also: Uplift (science fiction)

Certain transhumanist philosophers hold that since all assumptions about what others experience are fallible, and that therefore all attempts to help or protect beings that are not capable of correcting what others assume about them no matter how well-intentioned are in danger of actually hurting them, all sentient beings deserve to be sapient. These thinkers argue that the ability to discuss in a falsification-based way constitutes a threshold that is not arbitrary at which it becomes possible for an individual to speak for themselves in a way that is not dependent on exterior assumptions. They also argue that all beings capable of experiencing something deserve to be elevated to this threshold if they are not at it, typically stating that the underlying change that leads to the threshold is an increase in the preciseness of the brain‘s ability to discriminate. This includes increasing the neuron count and connectivity in animals as well as accelerating the development of connectivity to shorten or ideally skip non-sapient childhood incapable of independently deciding for oneself. Transhumanists of this description stress that the genetic engineering that they advocate is general insertion into both the somatic cells of living beings and in germ cells, and not purging of individuals without the modifications, deeming the latter not only unethical but also unnecessary due to the possibilities of efficient genetic engineering.[71][72][73][74]

Ethics

Transhumanists engage in interdisciplinary approaches to understand and evaluate possibilities for overcoming biological limitations by drawing on futurology and various fields of ethics.[citation needed] Unlike many philosophers, social critics and activists who place a moral value on preservation of natural systems, transhumanists see the very concept of the specifically natural as problematically nebulous at best and an obstacle to progress at worst.[75] In keeping with this, many prominent transhumanist advocates, such as Dan Agin, refer to transhumanism’s critics, on the political right and left jointly, as “bioconservatives” or “bioluddites“, the latter term alluding to the 19th century anti-industrialisation social movement that opposed the replacement of human manual labourers by machines.[76]

A belief of counter-transhumanism is that transhumanism can cause unfair human enhancement in many areas of life, but specifically on the social plane. This can be compared to steroid use, where athletes who use steroids in sports have an advantage over those who do not. The same scenario happens when people have certain neural implants that give them an advantage in the work place and in educational aspects.[77] Additionally, there are many, according to M.J. McNamee and S.D. Edwards, who fear that the improvements afforded by a specific, privileged section of society will lead to a division of the human species into two different and distinct species.[78] The idea of two human species, one being at a great physical and economic advantage in comparison with the other, is a troublesome one at best. One may be incapable of breeding with the other, and may by consequence of lower physical health and ability, be considered of a lower moral standing than the other.[78]

Nick Bostrom stated that transhumanism advocates for the wellbeing of all sentient beings, whether in non-human animals, extra-terrestrials or artificial forms of life.[79] This view is reiterated by David Pearce, who advocates for the use of biotechnology to eradicate suffering in all sentient beings.[80]

Currents

There is a variety of opinions within transhumanist thought. Many of the leading transhumanist thinkers hold views that are under constant revision and development.[81] Some distinctive currents of transhumanism are identified and listed here in alphabetical order:

Spirituality

Although many transhumanists are atheistsagnostics, and/or secular humanists, some have religious or spiritual views.[41] Despite the prevailing secular attitude, some transhumanists pursue hopes traditionally espoused by religions, such as immortality,[85] while several controversial new religious movements from the late 20th century have explicitly embraced transhumanist goals of transforming the human condition by applying technology to the alteration of the mind and body, such as Raëlism.[88] However, most thinkers associated with the transhumanist movement focus on the practical goals of using technology to help achieve longer and healthier lives, while speculating that future understanding of neurotheology and the application of neurotechnology will enable humans to gain greater control of altered states of consciousness, which were commonly interpreted as spiritual experiences, and thus achieve more profound self-knowledge.[89] Transhumanist Buddhists have sought to explore areas of agreement between various types of Buddhism and Buddhist-derived meditation and mind-expanding neurotechnologies.[90] However, they have been criticised for appropriating mindfulness as a tool for transcending humanness.[91]

Some transhumanists believe in the compatibility between the human mind and computer hardware, with the theoretical implication that human consciousness may someday be transferred to alternative media (a speculative technique commonly known as mind uploading).[92] One extreme formulation of this idea, which some transhumanists are interested in, is the proposal of the Omega Point by Christian cosmologist Frank Tipler. Drawing upon ideas in digitalism, Tipler has advanced the notion that the collapse of the Universe billions of years hence could create the conditions for the perpetuation of humanity in a simulated reality within a megacomputer and thus achieve a form of “posthuman godhood“. Before Tipler, the term Omega Point was used by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist and Jesuit theologian who saw an evolutionary telos in the development of an encompassing noosphere, a global consciousness.[93][94][95]

Viewed from the perspective of some Christian thinkers, the idea of mind uploading is asserted to represent a denigration of the human body, characteristic of gnostic manichaean belief.[96] Transhumanism and its presumed intellectual progenitors have also been described as neo-gnostic by non-Christian and secular commentators.[97][98]

The first dialogue between transhumanism and faith was a one-day conference held at the University of Toronto in 2004.[99] Religious critics alone faulted the philosophy of transhumanism as offering no eternal truths nor a relationship with the divine. They commented that a philosophy bereft of these beliefs leaves humanity adrift in a foggy sea of postmodern cynicism and anomie. Transhumanists responded that such criticisms reflect a failure to look at the actual content of the transhumanist philosophy, which, far from being cynical, is rooted in optimistic, idealistic attitudes that trace back to the Enlightenment.[100] Following this dialogue, William Sims Bainbridge, a sociologist of religion, conducted a pilot study, published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, suggesting that religious attitudes were negatively correlated with acceptance of transhumanist ideas and indicating that individuals with highly religious worldviews tended to perceive transhumanism as being a direct, competitive (though ultimately futile) affront to their spiritual beliefs.[101]

Since 2006, the Mormon Transhumanist Association sponsors conferences and lectures on the intersection of technology and religion.[102] The Christian Transhumanist Association[103] was established in 2014.

Since 2009, the American Academy of Religion holds a “Transhumanism and Religion” consultation during its annual meeting, where scholars in the field of religious studies seek to identify and critically evaluate any implicit religious beliefs that might underlie key transhumanist claims and assumptions; consider how transhumanism challenges religious traditions to develop their own ideas of the human future, in particular the prospect of human transformation, whether by technological or other means; and provide critical and constructive assessments of an envisioned future that place greater confidence in nanotechnology, robotics and information technology to achieve virtual immortality and create a superior posthuman species.[104]

The physicist and transhumanist thinker Giulio Prisco states that “cosmist religions based on science, might be our best protection from reckless pursuit of superintelligence and other risky technologies.”[105] Prisco also recognizes the importance of spiritual ideas, such as the ones of Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, to the origins of the transhumanism movement.

Continue reading Transhumanism

Why cities are so hot (and how we can fix it)

Even the Romans noticed that cities are engineered to be heat islands. But that means we can do something about it.

BY ALISSA GREENBERG FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2023 NOVA NEXT

A pedestrian uses an umbrella to protect herself from the sun during a heatwave in London on July 18, 2022. Image Credit: Bloomberg, Getty Images

You don’t have to live in Phoenix, Arizona, to notice that cities are getting hotter, but it helps. Consistently the hottest major metropolitan area in the country, Phoenix spent more than a third of 2022 in triple-digit temperatures. It has also seen a dramatic uptick in heat-related deaths in recent years, with the Maricopa County public health department reporting more than 300 heat-associated deaths in 2021, an increase of 450% from 2014.

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Weathering the FutureHow Extreme Heat Overwhelms the Human Body

“It’s a really unfortunate, tragic data point that we find ourselves sharing a lot,” David Hondula, director of the city’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, said in an interview for the NOVA documentary “Weathering the Future.” People are often surprised to learn that heat is the leading cause of weather-related death, he said. It “lurks as a background hazard and doesn’t always get the attention of hazards like thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods.”

Phoenix did not hire Hondula because the planet in general is getting hotter but because cities are the hottest of all. That’s due to what’s known as the “urban heat island” effect, which refers to the ways that the design and infrastructure of cities tend to make that environment hotter—up to 20 degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas.

We’ve known about the urban heat island effect for a long time; even the Romans noticed it. But it’s especially important now because of the health risks that come with heat, according Brian Stone, a professor of environmental planning at Georgia Institute of Technology. “Of all the stressors we associate with climate change, heat is the only one that has a physiological threshold that we know will lead to certain death,” he told NOVA. 

There’s a flip side, though. Since “we’ve basically engineered cities to be hot,” he said, “we can reverse engineer them to be cooler.”

What creates an urban heat island?

Researchers have pinpointed four main factors that drive the urban heat island effect. First is vegetation, or lack thereof. Trees are often the first thing to go when cities expand. (Take Atlanta, which has lost nearly 80,000 trees to development since 2014.) Cutting down trees creates a double-whammy effect, since they not only offer shade but also soak up heat from their environment. When we cut down urban trees, “we reduce the capacity of the natural system to cool itself through evaporation, much like we cool ourselves through perspiration,” Stone said.

Then, the materials we install in place of that lost greenery tend to aggravate the problem further. Mineral-based materials such as asphalt, concrete, shingles, and other roofing have a high “thermal capacity,” meaning they absorb a lot of heat during the day and then release it slowly back into the environment as they cool, even well into the night. That’s a problem in particular because the atmosphere doesn’t actually heat up very much from direct sunlight; instead, it warms more as heat is released from the ground.

WATCH: HOW EXTREME HEAT OVERWHELMS THE HUMAN BODY

Next, urban morphology, or the three-dimensional structure of a city, also contributes to increasing temperatures, since tall buildings are particularly good at trapping heat between them. And lastly, there’s waste heat, another double whammy. The process of consuming energy to do work, by anything from a car engine to a lightbulb to a computer, generates heat as a byproduct. Since cities are where most humans live together, they’re also where we consume the most energy: for transit, heating and cooling our homes, and the myriad electrified activities of daily life. And the waste heat that escapes into the environment from those activities measurably affects city temperatures.

Urban heat islands and human health

As all of those factors accumulate, the consequences for human health add up, too. Human bodies can handle very hot temperatures briefly but are sensitive to heat over the long term. “It’s the warm nighttime temperatures that cause the health problems,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, told NOVA. “And that’s where the urban heat island comes in, because that’s when it tends to peak”— with all those mineral surfaces re-releasing heat after dark.

Our bodies respond to heat by elevating our heart rate, allowing us to better circulate moisture. That moisture becomes sweat, which we use to cool ourselves down. Most people can handle an elevated heart rate for a few hours a day. But “if you have to elevate your heart rate for 24 hours because it’s 85 degrees at night in your home, then you are overly taxing your physiologic capacity to deal with heat,” Stone said. Then things start to get dangerous. 

Research shows that it’s generally the neighborhoods that can least afford it that get hit the hardest by urban heat. That’s in part because of discriminatory urban planning policies like redlining, which ensured that poorer neighborhoods had fewer trees and more industrial development. One recent study found a difference of 7 to 10 degrees between lower and higher income areas of the same cities. In another project, Shepherd and his colleagues compared redlining maps with satellite data tracking heat. The results showed “a clear heat island within the heat island for marginalized groups,” he said.

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What can we do about it?

With Phoenix’s heat-related death rate doubling in just five years, the city went into crisis mode in 2021. Nighttime temperatures in Phoenix average about 10 degrees hotter than they were half a century ago, hovering around 85 degrees during the hottest part of the year. And there are some days when “we’ve measured pavement, for example, at 160 Fahrenheit, 170 Fahrenheit,” Hondula said, with similar numbers on, for example, metal playground slides—a temperature that can cause direct burns. 

As he’s stepped into his role managing the city’s heat crisis, Hondula has remained hopeful. Phoenix’s trends aside, “we’ve seen decreasing heat-associated deaths over the past several decades, as our planet has been warming,” he said. He attributes that to increased understanding of the urban heat island effect, which is beginning to lead to meaningful change in many cities.

One place to start: more trees. Large cities such as Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York currently average around 25%-40% tree canopy cover but could support up to 60% cover, the U.S. Forest Service has found. Even arid Phoenix has committed over $7 million to planting drought-tolerant trees over the next few years. Similar non-profit organizations all over the world have committed to planting trees in the coming decades: 170,000 in Paris, 1 million in Atlanta, 1 million in São Paulo, 4 million in Houston. 

Two adults talk while walking toward the camera through two rows of small trees in a grassy park
Professor David Sailor (left) and Professor Na’Taki Osborne Jelks (right) walk through a “cool corridor,” where trees have been planted to provide relief from the heat in Phoenix, Arizona. Image courtesy of GBH

But it will take years, maybe decades, for those trees to mature and start making a difference. So Stone also sees great potential in changing the materials we use to build cities. For example, dark-colored slate roof shingles with high thermal capacity might make sense in London, or somewhere else cold and wet, but are much less logical in the southern United States. “We can engineer any color we’d like of roofing material, and so part of what we need is not just a technological change in the way we build, but a cultural shift to be more accepting of lighter, more reflective materials,” he said. Other more immediate solutions include initiatives like Phoenix’s cool pavement program, which encourages the use of alternative road materials, as well as the city’s work prioritizing shade structures at bus stops or in other places where trees might not be suitable.

The powerful thing about recognizing the heat island effect is recognizing it as a phenomenon within local control. That means it’s possible to make progress without waiting for national or international policy change, Stone said. Research shows “we can substantially cool down cities in a relatively quick period of time without major expenditures.” 

Hondula takes this optimism even further. Even in the context of global warming, he said, efforts to increase tree and other shade cover and promote use of materials with lower thermal capacity mean “we could wind up with a city of the future that’s cooler than the one we have today.”

The A.I. Dilemma – March 9, 2023

Center for Human • Apr 5, 2023 Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world. This presentation is from a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model A.I.s. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4. We encourage viewers to consider calling their political representatives to advocate for holding hearings on AI risk and creating adequate guardrails. For the podcast version, please visit: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/th…

James Tunney – Resisting Technocracy Through Spirituality

Evan McDermod • Mar 25, 2023 – James Tunney rejoins the podcast to discuss formulating a master plan for using spirituality as a means of combatting technocratic dystopia. James is an author and painter who left a successful career in law to focus on spiritual and artistic development. He is a leading voice critiquing the implications of transhumanism and collective abandonment of our spiritual consciousness. Full topic discussions include: -A summarization of where we are in the technocratic dystopian gameplan -The technocratic inversion of spirituality -The empire of scientism and quest to conquer death -Man’s devolution and domestication paving the way towards transhumanism -The key principles of spiritual evolution -Returning to spiritual traditions as a means of recognizing a common perennial philosophy Connect with James: https://www.jamestunney.com/

The Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Artist Franz Marc, the Wisdom of Animals, and the Triumph of Beauty Over Brutality

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses (public library).

In the bleak winter of 1916, in the thickest darkness of World War I, several enormous canvases dappled in pointillist patterns of color appeared across the French countryside, as if Kandinsky or Klee had descended upon the war-torn hills to bandage the brutality with beauty. But no. The painted tarps were military camouflage, designed to conceal artillery from aerial observation — the work of the young German painter, printmaker, and Expressionist pioneer Franz Marc (February 8, 1880–March 4, 1916), who had devoted himself to parting the veil of appearances with art in order to “look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.”

Deer in a Monastery Garden, 1912. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Conscripted into the German Imperial Army at the outbreak of the war, midway through his thirties and just after a period of extraordinary creative fecundity, Marc found this improbable outlet for his artistic vitality during his military service. Unlikely to have had any practical advantage over ordinary camouflage, his colossal canvases are almost certain to have served as a psychological lifeline for the young artist drafted into the machinery of death.

Within a month of painting them, Marc was dead — a shell explosion in the first days of the war’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it.

The Fate of the Animals, 1913.

Among the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals — an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.”

Destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1916, The Fate of the Animals was restored by Marc’s close friend Paul Klee, who painstakingly recreated the oil canvas from surviving photographs.

The Tiger, 1912. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The Foxes, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Animals, Marc felt, were in many ways superior to humans — more honest in their expression of their inner truths, in more direct contact with the inner truths of nature:

Animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me.

The Little Monkey, 1912. (Available as a print.)

The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available as a print.)

In 1910, just before he turned thirty, Marc became a founding member of The Blue Rider — a journal that became an epicenter of the German Expressionist community that included artists like Kandinsky, who had just formalized his thinking on the role of the spiritual in art, and Klee. At the end of that year, Marc began corresponding with the twenty-two-year-old writer and pianist Lisbeth Macke, who was married to one of the Blue Rider artists, about the relationship between color and emotion through the lens of music. Exactly a century after Goethe devised his psychology of color and emotion, Macke and Marc created a kind of synesthetic color wheel of tones, assigning sombre sounds to blue, joyful sounds to yellow, and a brutality of discord to red. Marc went on to ascribe not only emotional but spiritual attributes to the primary colors, writing to Macke:

Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two!

Further exploring the analogy between music and color, Marc envisioned the equivalent of music without tonality in painting — a sensibility where “a so-called dissonance is simply a consonance apart,” producing a harmonic effect in the overall composition, in color as in sound.

The Tower of Blue Horses, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Twenty years after Marc’s death on the battlefields of the First World War, when the forces of terror that had fomented it festered into the Second, the Nazis declared his art “degenerate.” Many of his paintings went missing after WWII, last seen in a 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art, alongside several of Klee’s paintings. Marc’s art is believed to have been seized by Nazi leaders for their personal theft-collections. An international search for his painting The Tower of Blue Horses has been underway for decades. In 2012, another of his missing paintings of horses was discovered in the Munich home of the son of one of Hitler’s art dealers, along with more than a thousand other artworks the Nazis denounced as “degenerate” in their deadly ideology but welcomed into their private living rooms as works of transcendent beauty and poetic power.

The Dreaming Horses, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The title poem of Mary Oliver’s Blue Horses embodies the original meaning of empathy, which became popular in the early twentieth century as a term for projecting oneself into a work of art. The poet projects herself into Marc’s painting The Large Blue Horses, running her hand gently one animal’s blue mane, letting another’s nose touch her gently, as she reflects on Marc’s tragic, tremendous life that managed to make such timeless portals into beauty and tenderness in the midst of unspeakable brutality:

I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Free Will Astrology: Week of April 20, 2023

APRIL 18, 2023 AT 7:00 AM BY ROB BREZSNY

Photo: Johannes Plenio

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In English, the phrase “growing pains” refers to stresses that emerge during times of rapid ripening or vigorous development. Although they might feel uncomfortable, they are often signs that the ongoing transformations are invigorating. Any project that doesn’t have at least some growing pains may lack ambition. If we hope to transcend our previous limits and become a more complete expression of our destiny, we must stretch ourselves in ways that inconvenience our old selves. I’m expecting growing pains to be one of your key motifs in the coming weeks, dear Aries. It’s important that you don’t try to repress the discomfort. On the other hand, it’s also crucial not to obsess over them. Keep a clear vision of what these sacrifices will make possible for you.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Satirical Taurus author Karl Kraus defined “sentimental irony” as “a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.” Please avoid that decadent emotion in the coming weeks, Taurus. You will also be wise to reject any other useless or counterproductive feelings that rise up within you or hurtle toward you from other people, like “clever cruelty” or “noble self-pity” or “sweet revenge.” In fact, I hope you will be rigorous about what moods you feed and what influences you allow into your sphere. You have a right and a duty to be highly discerning about shaping both your inner and outer environments. Renewal time is imminent.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In his poem “October Fullness,” Pablo Neruda says, “Our own wounds heal with weeping, / Our own wounds heal with singing.” I agree. I believe that weeping and singing are two effective ways to recover from emotional pain and distress. The more weeping and singing we do, the better. I especially recommend these therapeutic actions to you now, Gemini. You are in a phase when you can accomplish far more curative and restorative transformations than usual.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): After careful analysis of the astrological omens and a deep-diving meditation, I have concluded that the coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to indulge in an unprecedented binge of convivial revelry and pleasure. My advice is to engage in as much feasting and carousing as you can without completely ignoring your responsibilities. I know this may sound extreme, but I am inviting you to have more fun than you have ever had—even more fun than you imagine you deserve. (You do deserve it, though.) I hope you will break all your previous records for frequency and intensity of laughter.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In 1886, Vincent van Gogh bought a pair of worn-out shoes at a Paris flea market. When he got home, he realized they didn’t fit. Rather than discard them, he made them the centerpiece of one of his paintings. Eventually, they became famous. In 2009, a renowned gallery in Cologne, Germany, built an entire exhibit around the scruffy brown leather shoes. In the course of their celebrated career, six major philosophers and art historians have written about them as if they were potent symbols worthy of profound consideration. I propose that we regard their history as an inspirational metaphor for you in the coming weeks. What humble influence might be ready for evocative consideration and inspirational use?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Gliding away from the routine for rendezvous with fun riddles? I approve! Delivering your gorgeous self into the vicinity of a possibly righteous temptation? OK. But go slowly, please. Size up the situation with your gut intuition and long-range vision as well as your itchy fervor. In general, I am pleased with your willingness to slip outside your comfortable enclaves and play freely in the frontier zones. It makes me happy to see you experimenting with AHA and WHAT-IF and MAYBE BABY. I hope you summon the chutzpah to find and reveal veiled parts of your authentic self.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The German word Sehnsucht refers to when we have a profound, poignant yearning for something, but we quite don’t know what that something is. I suspect you may soon be in the grip of your personal Sehnsucht. But I also believe you are close to identifying an experience that will quench the seemingly impossible longing. You will either discover a novel source of deep gratification, or you will be able to transform an existing gratification to accommodate your Sehnsucht. Sounds like spectacular fun to me. Clear some space in your schedule to welcome it.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Most of us have at some time in the past been mean and cruel to people we loved. We acted unconsciously or unintentionally, perhaps, but the bottom line is that we caused pain. The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to atone for any such hurts you have dispensed. I encourage you to be creative as you offer healing and correction for any mistakes you’ve made with important allies. I’m not necessarily suggesting you try to resume your bond with ex-lovers and former friends. The goal is to purge your iffy karma and graduate from the past. Perform whatever magic you have at your disposal to transform suffering with love.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The blues singer-songwriter B. B. King wasn’t always known by that name. He was born Riley B. King. In his twenties, when he began working at a Memphis radio station, he acquired the nickname “Beales Street Blues Boy.” Later, that was shortened to “Blues Boy,” and eventually to “B. B.” In the spirit of B. B. King’s evolution and in accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to identify areas of your life with cumbersome or unnecessary complexities that might benefit from simplification.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Proboscis monkeys live in Borneo and nowhere else on earth. Their diet consists largely of fruits and leaves from trees that grow only on Borneo and nowhere else. I propose we make them your anti-role model in the coming months. In my astrological opinion, you need to diversify your sources of nourishment, both the literal and metaphorical varieties. You will also be wise to draw influences from a wide variety of humans and experiences. I further suggest that you expand your financial life so you have multiple sources of income and diversified investments.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): It’s challenging to track down the sources of quotes on the Internet. Today, for instance, I found these words attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato: “I enjoy the simple things in life, like recklessly spending my cash and being a disappointment to my family.” That can’t be right. I’m sure Plato didn’t actually say such things. Elsewhere, I came upon a review of George Orwell’s book “Animal Farm” that was supposedly penned by pop star Taylor Swift: “Not a very good instructional guide on farming. Would NOT recommend to first-time farmers.” Again, I’m sure that wasn’t written by Swift. I bring this up, Aquarius, because one of your crucial tasks these days is to be dogged and discerning as you track down the true origins of things. Not just Internet quotes, but everything else, as well—including rumors, theories and evidence. Go to the source, the roots, the foundations.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In accordance with astrological omens, I’m turning over this horoscope to Piscean teacher Esther Hicks. Here are affirmations she advises you to embody: “I’m going to be happy. I’m going to skip and dance. I will be glad. I will smile a lot. I will be easy. I will count my blessings. I will look for reasons to feel good. I will dig up positive things from the past. I will look for positive things where I am right now. I will look for positive things in the future. It is my natural state to be a happy person. It’s natural for me to love and laugh. I am a happy person!”

Homework: Make a guess about when you will fulfill your number one goal. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com

Tarot Card for April 20: The Priestess

The Priestess

The Priestess (or High Priestess, Papess, Pope Joan, Isis) is numbered two. This is the representation of the Goddess. She is the complementary partner of the Magician, possessing all his skill and ability, but with far more insight and psychism. She is more subtle yet somehow far more noticeable.

She is almost always shown with the Lunar Crescent, conveying her natural affinity with the forces of Nature and natural cycles. The Magician generates his own power, whereas the Priestess draws upon the forces of life itself.

She sits between two pillars with veils suspended between them – it is the Priestess who allows us to penetrate the innermost secrets of life. She is also the bridge between our conscious and Higher selves, by teaching us through our dreams and our subconscious. It is in our subconscious that we hold the keys to the Universe.

The Priestess

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more