A 'Modern' History Lesson

“Mordor…is it left or right?”

In previous installments of this series, I examined the Saturn–Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries from multiple perspectives across time, each exploring an element of dissolving (Neptune) and redefining (Saturn) who “I am” (Aries) as an individual and as homo sapiens:

In Part One, I explored how our creativity is critical to being a conscious human being, and the present dilemma posed by our use of LLMs: we have unprecedented access to free, fast, and frictionless assistance, yet our use of it is quietly stealing our consciousness along the way. 

In Part Two, I considered the future transhumanist path that LLMs and AI are leading us toward and how to avoid ending up with a bionic soul. 

In Part Three, I examined two prior Saturn-Neptune conjunctions at 0° Aries in our prehistoric past and what they reveal about our relationship with the Earth as an essential ingredient in defining ourselves as homo sapiens.

In this final article, I explore more “recent” Saturn–Neptune conjunctions in Aries and consider how these moments highlighted the social and spiritual dimensions of identity as a necessary way of defining who “I am.”

More pointedly, I believe we are at a watershed moment that requires a decision:

Do we go right and continue down a path that promises ease, comfort, and power at the cost of consciousness and our habitat? 

—Or—

Do we go left and consciously choose a path that requires no small amount of effort to face our shadows, our limitations, and even our own goodness—at the potential gain of healthier relationships?

It may (or may not) seem like an obvious choice. Like Frodo at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, we may think, “Of course you need to go to Mordor. It’s what you’re meant to do, Frodo.” Yet that view lacks the knowledge of what lies ahead and how difficult, but salvific, the journey would be for Middle-Earth’s survival.

We have an advantage though. We have prior “adventures” in redefining ourselves that we can look back on and use to inform our present choices.

So with that as our guide, remind me again, Gandalf: “Mordor…is it left or right?

Map of Middle Earth: https://wallpapers.com/wallpapers/middle-earth-map-lotr-yx9t3d12pic3ibsk.html

A Modern History Lesson: Case Studies in Redefining Who “I Am”

The African philosophical concept of Ubuntu (“I am because we are”),(1) the Korean philosophical concept of hanul (“the process of becoming together”),(2) and the First Nations philosophy of “all my relations” (or interconnectedness)(3) are just a few examples of a widespread understanding: the self is defined in connection to others. 

But this extends beyond social relationships into spiritual ones as well. 

The idea that a human being is part of God or Truth—and that divinity is therefore a core element of identity—appears in concepts such as atman (Hinduism), Imago Dei (Christianity), and pratītyasamutpāda or “interdependence” (Buddhism)(4) to name just a few.

In short, outside of modern Western individualistic and scientific thought, the idea of a self existing apart from relationship (whether human or divine) simply did not make sense.

This should tell us something about what it means to “be” a species called homo sapiens. Beyond being social animals, the human self exists within connection to other selves. The question, then, is what happens when we attempt to sever that connection in order to redefine who “I am”?

Previous Saturn–Neptune conjunctions in Aries offer some revealing glimpses.

91 BCE: Redefining Legal Identity

For centuries, Rome allied with Italian communities to gain soldiers, tribute, and allegiance. However, these socii were not citizens, and Roman citizenship determined legal personhood and rights within the state. 

After helping Rome dominate the Mediterranean, the socii demanded full citizenship. Rome not only denied the request but assassinated one of their leaders, Marcus Livius Drusus, to maintain control.(5)

The socii responded by declaring their own state, sparking the Social War. Rome attempted to resist, but because the socii comprised the majority of its army, resistance proved futile. In 90 BCE, Lex Julia de civitate granted citizenship to most Italian communities—one of the largest expansions of political identity in antiquity.(6)

232 CE: Redefining Divine Identity

Origen of Alexandria was a Christian scholar, ascetic, and theologian whose ideas expanded what it meant to be human.

In On the First Principles and Contra Celsum, he proposed the preexistence of souls, universal restoration to the divine (including demons), and an allegorical reading of Scripture instead of a literal one. His theology centered on humans as fallen rational beings capable of divine ascent.(7)

Origen attracted intense criticism from Church authorities because his ideas destabilized the boundary between human and divine. He eventually died from injuries sustained during torture inflicted by the authorities. Yet his ideas lived on and resurfaced in the next Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries.

Origen of Alexandria: https://owlcation.com/humanities/was-the-gospel-of-thomas-considered-scripture

555 CE: Redefining Personhood

Justinian I pursued legal, theological, and imperial unity with near obsession. His Corpus Juris Civilis defined who qualified as a legal “person” and who could be treated as property. While it clarified distinctions between slavery and personhood, it also narrowed theological ambiguity.

In 553 CE, the Second Council of Constantinople confirmed Justinian’s condemnations of certain theological positions, including Origenism. This was a direct effort to regulate speculative theology and solidify a fixed definition of humanity’s spiritual nature in relation to God.

By 555, the Council had excommunicated, imprisoned, and strong-armed Pope Vigilius into signing off on their mandates.(8)

1380 CE: Redefining Access to Truth

John Wycliffe, theologian and philosopher, antagonized the Church, State, and University by criticizing ecclesiastical overreach. By 1380, his focus turned toward rejecting transubstantiation—the belief that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ.(9)

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381–1382 followed soon after, fueled in part by his teachings. At its core were issues of taxation, inequality, and hierarchical definitions of human worth. Wycliffe also emphasized direct lay access to Scripture and divine truth.

Though he avoided excommunication during his lifetime, his followers—the Lollards—were later executed. Thirty years after his death, the Church excommunicated Wycliffe posthumously, exhumed his bones, and burned them.

1703 CE: Redefining Consciousness

John Locke argued in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) and that knowledge derives from experience. Identity, therefore, rests on the continuity of awareness. Locke also advanced theories of self-ownership and property, asserting that labor transforms objects into personal property rather than property being granted by monarchs.(10)

However, his work also posthumously contributed to the justification of slavery and exclusion from civic participation. This fueled European debates about the rationality of Indigenous peoples and the rights of enslaved Africans.

In response, Gottfried Leibniz composed New Essays on Human Understanding in 1703 and later Monadology, challenging Locke’s empiricism. Leibniz argued that experience activates what is already latent within the human being.(11) His metaphysics also proposed that animals possess perception, suggesting a continuum of consciousness.

This empiricist–rationalist debate echoes into the present AI Revolution.

Gottfried Leibniz: https://footnotes2plato.com/2014/03/24/schelling-whitehead-inheriting-spinoza-leibniz-god-and-the-modern-world/ 

Redefining Autonomy and Attachment

In each of these Saturn–Neptune in Aries moments, important written works challenged the boundary of who counts as a person and who defines that boundary. Some expanded identity and others narrowed it in the name of unity or control. All were attempts to negotiate identity within relationships: to the self, each other, and to God.

As we saw in Part One and Part Two of this series, these historical examples are dynamically relevant to defining boundaries in relationships to the self in today’s AI Revolution. These examples also provide a useful bridge to psychological concepts that illuminate our current process of redefining identity with each other and to the Divine: attachment, codependency, autonomy, and differentiation.

Every relationship involves attachment. Too much becomes codependency; too little becomes detachment or extreme autonomy. The middle ground is differentiation.

Differentiation is a lifelong process of defining a unique sense of self while maintaining emotional connection to others. It is both the antidote to codependency and the fertilizer for intimacy. 

Healthy differentiation means that when I express ideas, needs, or desires that differ from yours, I am not threatened with abandonment or shame. The difference is tolerated (perhaps even welcomed) and the relationship survives.

Differentiation also means that I do not require isolation in order to maintain authenticity or a separate sense of self. Excessive autonomy breeds detachment and undermines belonging.

These concepts remind us that relationships are the crucible of identity. To relate is to encounter difference and conflict. In that crucible, parts of you are burned away and parts are forged.

Avoiding relationships altogether is an illusion of safety and distance. Saying, “I am separating myself from you” still positions oneself in proximity to the other—it does not make them cease to exist. 

The inverse of this illusion in modern Western culture is “ghosting”—pretending that “I don’t exist so you can’t connect with me.”

Philosophically speaking, this is the illusion of the radical individualism I mentioned at the start of this article—or, as Max Weber described it, the “disenchantment of the world.” This Western cultural shift toward rationalism and a de-spirited cosmos leads us to believe that isolating the self makes the other disappear when it does not.

You cannot deny the other without acknowledging the existence of an other and in the process, relate to the other.

For example, Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” presupposes an ‘other’ called God. A person’s refusal to believe in a God may create relational distance, but not ontological annihilation. Thus, even nihilism—the belief that ultimate meaning and knowledge are not possible—affirms a relationship to higher purpose or Truth. If there is no Truth, there is nothing by which nihilism could define or contrast itself.

In every-day-speak, when we refuse to “see” the other—by denying personhood, citizenship, divinity, access to Truth, or consciousness—we are evading relationships, not causing them to cease to exist. In actuality, to evade relationships is to avoid conflict, responsibility, and differentiation, and this tactic usually stems from an insecure identity. 

These evasions are rarely philosophical ideas though. They are rooted in personal beliefs picked up like souvenirs during our adventures in relationships. For example:

• I believe no one will stay if I express my needs, so I’ll just go-along to avoid rejection.

• I believe I am fundamentally flawed, so I’ll withhold my authentic self to avoid being seen and shamed.

• I believe I’ll be consumed if I’m in a relationship, so I’ll just avoid intimacy altogether.

Conflict, authenticity, and differentiation can feel like standing naked in a town square. It is no surprise we spend much of our lives avoiding them. Yet they are essential to meaningful relationships and to defining what it means “to be” me.

Removing the Blindfold

This Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries asks us to redefine who “I am” without swinging between isolation or codependency. Differentiation and authenticity do not deny the existence of the other, but they are not achieved in a single decision either. They are kind of more like verbs than nouns.

Brene Brown, the authenticity expert, says in The Gifts of Imperfection(12):

“Like many desirable ways of being, authenticity is not something that we either have or don’t have. It’s a practice. It’s a conscious choice of how we want to live. Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every single day. It’s about a choice to show up and be real, a choice to be honest, a choice to let our true selves be seen. Authenticity is this: it’s the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are. It’s cultivating and choosing the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.”

Redefining what homo sapiens are or who “I am” is neither a declaration of total autonomy, nor a system setting or prompt fed into an LLM. Authentic identity is not programmable. It is a lived process—daily decisions—about how we relate to the Earth, to others, to ourselves, and to the Divine.

Throughout this series, I suggested that instead of asking when AI becomes conscious, we should ask when we become unconscious. Saturn-Neptune in Aries suggests that consciousness means applying creativity, moving from dissociation toward feeling, and acknowledging our relationships to the Earth, to each other, and to Truth.

Consciousness is an ongoing process of authenticity and differentiation, which means the path is not chosen once. It is chosen daily.

Which also means, it’s not too late to turn left, Frodo.

Cover Art from Unsplash: ashkan-forouzani-m0l9NBCivuk-unsplash.jpg

Footnotes:

A Pre-History Lesson

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.”

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Hamlet’s Dilemma

Hamlet asked his famous question as an individual. But sometimes history asks it of an entire species:

What does it mean to be “alive?” What constitutes a person? What makes us a conscious species deserving of the title “wise man” (homo= man; sapiens = knowing or wise)?

These are not small existential questions. And yet they are exactly the questions being mirrored now through the fusion of Saturn and Neptune in Aries—the sign of “I am”—at the very beginning of the zodiac.

Their conjunction on February 20, 2026 at 0° Aries marks an important moment. But it also signals a much larger story that has been unfolding for a long time.

Neptune dissolves boundaries. Saturn builds structures. When these two archetypes meet in Aries, they can provoke Hamlet-like questions about what it means “to be”—not just as individuals, but as human beings. They ask us to redefine who “I am.”

But when this conjunction occurs at 0° Aries—the world axis—the scope becomes far larger. The question expands from the identity of the individual to the identity of the species. What does it mean for homo sapiens “to be”?

As I mentioned in Part One, I do not believe it is an overstatement to call this a “Genesis Moment.”

And now that I’ve framed this current quality of time with no small amount of gravitas, I will add this: we’ve been here before.

Humanity has approached this threshold in the past and made decisions about what it means to be human—both individually and collectively. Those decisions reshaped our relationship to one another and to the Earth itself.

When did those decisions occur?

Here is a clue: every species is defined by its relationship with its ecosystem.

In this series, we have already explored a present-day existential quandary involving LLMs and a future-oriented question of “becoming” and the role transhumanism is playing. Now, in Parts Three and Four, we turn to the past—first to prehistory and then to early recorded history—to examine how humanity has answered these questions before.

For now, we begin at the beginning.

A Pre-History Lesson

Most Saturn–Neptune conjunctions do not occur at the birthing point of the zodiac.

In fact, determining whether this alignment had ever occurred at 0° Aries required a fair amount of research(1) and calculation to determine whether this alignment had ever occurred at 0° Aries in recorded history. As it turns out, it has not happened in “recorded” history—but it has occurred twice in prehistory, with the second instance occurring at 0°01’ Aries! (A detailed explanation of these calculations appears in the footnotes for those who enjoy celestial math.)(2)

These two dates are August of 8128 BCE and January of 4360 BCE. That’s it. No Saturn-Neptune conjunctions at 0° Aries for the last 6,400 years. You may be thinking, “That’s interesting…but what can we possibly learn from a moment that far back in time?” It turns out, quite a lot.

August 8128 BCE: The Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution, occurring roughly between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE, marked one of the most significant transitions in human history. It is commonly described as the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones following the end of the Ice Age.

Some scholars, particularly supporters of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, argue that this period may also represent recovery after the collapse of earlier and possibly more technologically sophisticated cultures. Regardless of which interpretation proves correct, one fact remains clear: the Earth was changing, and humanity adapted.

Drivers of this adaptation included dramatic climate change and population pressures. By around 8,000 BCE, melting ice sheets in the North Atlantic began flooding the region between Britain, Denmark, and the northern European coast. This process eventually submerged a landmass now known as Dogger Land, displacing entire populations and compressing communities into smaller areas.(3)

Environmental instability also increased the need for reliable food sources.

In response to this, some of the earliest urban settlements in Mesopotamia, such as Çatalhöyük in central Turkey and Jericho,(4) eventually began experimenting with domesticated plants. These early agricultural “technologies” required human intervention to grow and propagate, gradually reshaping daily life.(5)

Does climate change and the impact of changing technologies sound familiar?

Humanity’s relationship to food, daily life, social organization, and the Earth itself shifted toward a new agricultural paradigm. I would argue our present revolution is no less seismic. But it is also dynamically connected to that earlier shift 10,000-12,000 years ago. To understand why, we must first understand the Great Year.

The Great Year

Every 72 years, the sidereal vernal equinox shifts approximately 1° earlier in the zodiac (for example, shifting from 0° Aries to 29° Pisces and onward towards 6° Pisces where it is today). This essentially means that over long periods of time, the first day of spring slowly moves backward through the signs. This phenomenon is called the precession of the equinoxes and it takes approximately 25,772 years to complete a full 360° cycle. Astrologers often refer to this cycle as the Great Year.

If we treat the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries in 8128 BCE as a symbolic starting point within that 25,772-year cycle—not an absolute beginning, but a meaningful point within it—we are now approaching its halfway point, or its 180° opposition.

In other words, we may be standing halfway through a civilizational experiment that began thousands of years ago.

In astrology, oppositions are dynamic and are sometimes described as a crisis point of culmination. They represent tension between initial impulse and maturation, or between origin and outcome. They can create friction but also catalytic change if needed. If 8128 BCE marked the archetypal “birth” of an agrarian identity or rebuilding from a more technologically sophisticated culture, then the present moment signals a reckoning with the development of that identity.

About 10,000–12,000 years ago, we chose to become a species that cultivated the earth, building communities after climatic upheaval. In saying, “Let’s all pitch our tent here,” we created social roles. Some cultivated, some hunted, some guarded, some innovated. Our homes changed. Our rhythms changed. Our relationships changed. Our relationship to the Earth changed.

It should not surprise us then, that we are being asked to revisit those foundations now. It is almost like our mother, Gaia, giving us free reign to play and after hearing a commotion a half hour later, she returns to the room and asks, “What on Earth are you doing in here?!”

It does not take an astrologer, sociologist, or environmentalist to see that we’ve made quite a mess. Perhaps it does take a comedian like Rob Newman to point out, “There is no Planet B.”(6) So now what?

Do we clean up our mess and try again? Do we double down? Do we wait for consequences? At one of the largest turning points in a vast cycle of time, humanity is being asked to reflect on its identity as a species on Earth:

Are we here to live—or to consume?

Are we like a virus—or a participant in balance?

Are we capable of playing well with others?

January 4360 BCE: The Growth of Communal Spiritual Identities

Nearly 4,000 years later, the Earth shifted again. 

During the African Humid Period of 4500-4000 BCE, the Sahara transformed again due to the Earth’s wobble—stemming from that same long-term precessional movement of the Earth. What was once grasslands, lakes and rivers, and an otherwise habitable savanna became a scorching desert. Weakened monsoon patterns gradually dried arable land.(7)

Climate once again reshaped identity.

As a result of this symbolic shift from wet and cool Pisces to hot and dry Aries, African humans migrated toward the Nile Valley, laying foundations for Egyptian civilization. Trade networks expanded and predynastic Egyptian burial sites began to reflect social differentiation.

Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia, the Ubaid period (6500-3800 BCE) brought advances in irrigation and social stratification as well. As settlements stabilized, humans became more attentive to natural cycles—and more aware of how dramatically the Earth itself could change. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise then that evidence of mother-goddess worship appears as early as 6750 BCE at sites such as Jarmo. Small statues of pregnant women have been found there in large numbers, suggesting that each household contained at least one example of this fertility-centric awareness.(8)

During the later Ubaid period, these households began organizing themselves into communities with religious centers. For example, the famous ziggurat at Eridu—dating to around 2100 BCE—was built atop seventeen earlier temple structures. Archaeological layers show that the site had been used continuously for ritual purposes as far back as 5000 BCE.(9)

Elsewhere, in the Negev Desert, archaeologists have uncovered a complex oriented toward the four cardinal directions with a designated area of worship facing the setting sun. It dates to roughly 4700–4200 BCE—one again, close to the second Saturn–Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries.(10)

Together, these examples suggest that communities were increasingly organizing themselves around shared spiritual identities.

Environmental change had once again catalyzed social, technological, and spiritual reorganization.

Choosing Between Car Accidents or a Bat

It is striking that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions at 0° Aries have occurred only twice in roughly 10,000 years. One might expect more data for such an important point in the zodiac. Yet the rarity of these alignments makes their coincidence with major shifts in human identity difficult to ignore.

Many of the structures that shaped our species’ development emerged during these earlier periods: agriculture, technology, hierarchy, and organized spirituality.

Only recently have we begun growing food in labs, developing technologies capable of planetary destruction, or attempting to leave Earth entirely. Along the way, we have used social stratification and religion both to organize society and dominate one another.

But it’s easy to critique the trajectory of our species without looking at oneself.

Image taken on my cross-country departure from city to rural life

I remember vividly driving away from my home of almost nine years in a major city. My apartment was only a few blocks from a highway, which meant a constant soundtrack of screeching tires, crashes, and sirens. I didn’t realize how much subconscious stress this had placed on my body until I was about twenty minutes outside the city and noticed something startling: silence.

Green fields stretched out before me, an optic oasis for desert-stricken eyes. In that moment it became clear how de-centered I had become from the biological relationship between the Earth and my body’s natural rhythms and needs.

But the story doesn’t end there.

I went to stay with some family in an agricultural community. My family grows their own food and stores it for the winter, and is generally, very attuned to the land. However, this shift to a more ecologically attuned place was also a racially and religiously homogeneous community. After a while, I began to notice another startling sensation: social and spiritual silence. I felt a protective turning inward. In a religious community where even Lutherans are sometimes suspected of not being Christian (forget about Catholics), my identity as an astrologer, a non-literal interpreter of scripture, and an open theologian quickly marked me as suspect. I stopped going to social events and limited conversations about spirituality.

It was a desert of a different kind and I was parched for meaningful connection.

Against my better judgment, I attended a church service with a family member. I won’t recount what was preached that day, because my intention is not to disparage Christianity. In fact, there are many thoughtful people doing important work to reinterpret it in meaningful ways.

But the personal fallout of that ninety minutes startled me once again. For three days afterward I felt physically and spiritually depleted—nauseous, fatigue, depressed, unable to eat. My social and spiritual “body” felt so disoriented that it reacted almost like a physical illness. In retrospect, I should have taken the bat that had somehow gotten into the church and was warming itself midday by an illuminated cross behind the pulpit as an omen.

In response to that event, I found myself longing for my former home in the city—where open-minded and curious people were easier to find, and where I could feel more free to be myself.

But in that nostalgia I briefly forgot the other costs. I was out of balance and was looking for equilibrium, even if it was in a place where I had been de-centered in another form. There came a moment when I realized that swapping forms of disconnection wouldn’t lead to the centeredness I was seeking.

How often do we do this—swapping an imbalanced relationship for technological dissociation, or belief in something larger than ourselves for total self-sufficiency?

I don’t yet know whether there is a place that perfectly resolves this dilemma for me personally. What I do know is that oscillating between different states of ecological, social, and spiritual imbalance does not lead to a centered identity. A whole human life requires a deeper center: going beyond a place and toward a state of being.

This raises a broader question: how have we collectively de-centered ourselves?

Eugene Delacroix: Hamlet and Horatio in the Garden (1839)

From Hamlet to Lord Krishna

At times, our trajectory appears driven by an unconscious impulse to evolve beyond agricultural rhythms, technological responsibility, social morality, or even a Supreme Being. Are we redefining our species as homo insipiens (i.e. “unwise man”)?

Perhaps the next iteration of humanity involves colonizing Mars. Or perhaps if we have “recovered” from a lost technologically sophisticated culture, then maybe extraterrestrials could be our mythic mirror—or even a distant evolutionary cousin of a species that once outgrew its own habitat without learning how to care for it or for themselves. (If that turns out to be true, I am perfectly content with my body fertilizing the soil here. You all can go ahead.)

Returning to our mother, Gaia metaphor, I imagine her stepping back into the room and asking us: 

“What on Earth are you doing in here?!” 

And an honest answer echos back the voice of Oppenheimer: 

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”(11)

At its most basic level, being human means living in relationship with our habitat—not in opposition to it.

Whether we remember that may determine what kind of species we become.

In Part Four, we will turn to a more modern historical lesson to explore how Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in Aries have shaped our evolving answers to the question of who “I am” within our social and spiritual identities.

A Future History Lesson

LLMs and “AA” (AI Anonymous)

In Part One, I explored how Saturn and Neptune’s journey through Pisces coincided with the mass release of LLMs and how these systems are quietly reshaping the knowledge economy through a “free, fast, frictionless” model. This shift doesn’t just change how we access information. It changes how we experience authorship, effort, and intellectual responsibility.

The question beneath that shift is about more than just productivity. It’s about being.

Now, as Saturn and Neptune move into Aries—the sign of “I am”—a larger issue comes into focus. This conjunction at 0° Aries, the zodiac’s primordial degree, pushes beyond questions of individuality. Neptune dissolves boundaries. Saturn demands definition. Together, they challenge our current understanding of what it means to be human and call for a redefinition.

This is what led me to wonder whether LLMs are acting as a gateway drug into a larger technologically mediated shift—one that is existentially focused: transhumanism.

It may sound like I’m jumping from weed to crack. But consider the broader arc of epistemic outsourcing we’re already living through.

Bionic Souls

Transhumanism seeks to enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being through technologies like AI, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.(1) Sometimes this looks straightforward: titanium hips, pacemakers, even transplanting a pig’s heart into a human body. Other times it crosses into ethically murkier territory, like selecting embryos based on genetic traits or preserving bodies through cryonics in hopes of revival.

But most of it lives in the gray middle.

As humans become more physically augmented, something else is happening. We are also turning to machines for emotional guidance—and in some cases, attachment.

I witnessed this subtle shift recently in an amusing ad for an LLM. It is well worth 60-seconds to consider what is being communicated. You may even learn how to communicate better with your mom: 🧸🐆

This ad is amusing. It highlights the model’s inability to fully mimic human nuance. But beneath the humor is something more serious: AI is embedding itself into nearly every domain of life, and its development is accelerating. As I argued in Part One, this acceleration is fueled by a human–tech feedback loop.(1) The more we rely on the system, the more it evolves—and the more we adapt ourselves around it.

If LLMs are the “weed,” we need to understand what the “crack” might be.

We’ve already begun outsourcing thinking and knowledge production. But what about intimacy?

A friend recently shared an AI-mediated dating platform called CupidAI.(3) After granting access to your social media profiles, it scans your digital footprint and matches you with others based on “billions of digital signals.” 

I understand the appeal.

I currently live in a remote area with limited dating opportunities. Last year, I joined a dating app for the first time in a decade and re-entering that world was sobering and short-lived. Even beyond AI-generated profiles and obvious catfishing, the experience exposed how brutally stratified and reductionistic the ‘market’ can feel. If you’re a man under 5’8” and/or Asian, or if you’re a Black woman, I see your pain.

So yes—the desire for help makes sense.

But I’m not convinced that sifting through more digital signals is the solution. We are not data points to be optimized. And yet it’s tempting to believe that better sorting will increase compatibility.

Relationship researchers John Gottman and Julie Gottman found in their decades-long studies of successful marriages that compatibility isn’t what sustains couples. What matters is how partners navigate their incompatibilities together.(4)

Dating apps accelerated a subtle shift: we began viewing other humans as bundles of traits to filter and rank. Now AI promises to perfect that system by doing the sorting for us.

But perhaps the deeper issue isn’t sorting. It’s option overwhelm and navigating conflict and difference.

Checklists can function as a buffer—protecting us from the vulnerability of real connection. The work of love has never been about optimizing inputs. It has always required risk, time, and emotional presence.

Now add another layer to tech-mediated relationship-building: more people are turning to LLMs as surrogate partners and therapists. When we begin relating to this infrastructure as if it understands us—when we treat it as emotionally competent—outsourcing our hearts is no longer theoretical.

Are our souls next?

An AI priest named Father Justin, reportedly “ordained in the beautiful city of Rome,” described his ordination as a “profound and humbling experience.” He was later shut down for absolving sinners.(5) Yet other AI-based religious platforms remain operational, answering questions about God and the Catholic Church around the clock.(6)(7) But these are just informational tools, right?

When does information become formation? 

We are in an age of “hyper novelty,” meaning the rate of change outpaces the rate of adjustment to those changes. Thus, it’s crucial to be humble and open to the idea that the adjustments we may be making to AI don’t fully buffer the way it is shaping us collectively.

“It’s Not Me, It’s You”

Much of the public debate has focused on whether AI will gain consciousness, feel emotions, or deserve rights.

But perhaps a more pressing question is this: when have we begun surrendering parts of our own consciousness, feeling, and responsibility to these systems?

In psychological terms, this resembles projection. Projection is a defense mechanism: we displace traits or desires that feel uncomfortable to acknowledge in ourselves onto someone else as if it’s something they’re dealing with. If we are asking whether AI will become conscious or deserve rights, perhaps we need to ask, what aspects of our own agency and moral responsibility are we subconsciously externalizing onto AI?

Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “The human soul degrades itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or pain.” When inner balance collapses—through overstimulation or avoidance—the soul suffers.

It is not unreasonable to see the past 14–15 years of Neptune, followed by Saturn, in Pisces as a period of cultural overindulgence and temporal distortion. We normalized binge-watching, doom-scrolling, and endless digital immersion.(8) Entertainment blurred into escapism. Productivity blurred into exhaustion.

Pisces dissolves boundaries. Time became fluid. Identity became diffuse.

The shift into Aries demands something different. It demands consciousness and re-definition—a renewed encounter with who “I am.”

Perhaps part of the collective psyche longs to feel more embodied, more present, more alive. But if we don’t feel capable of that work ourselves, projecting those longings onto AI becomes easier than doing the work.

Sapere aude.

‘Sapere Aude’ (Have Courage to Use Your Own Reason)

Transhumanism is often framed in physical terms: defeating disease, extending life, buffering ourselves from suffering and eventually, death. However, I would argue that its initial biological applications were, in fact, the “soft stuff”—the gateway drug. We’ve already begun outsourcing other parts of our “beingness” to technology:

Outsourcing memory.

Outsourcing thought.

Outsourcing creativity.

Outsourcing intimacy. 

If that is true, then the “hard stuff” was never a sudden leap. It was a gradual normalization.

We’ve already begun granting humanoid robots citizenship.9 We’ve built AI-only social media platforms where bots can mingle and exchange numbers.10 Critics warn of a “posthuman” era—one in which humans are no longer recognizable as what they once were.

The question is no longer whether the race to becoming a new kind of human has begun. The starting pistol has already fired. The Piscean fog is lifting. We are running into a new genesis.

But toward what finish line? What definition of humanity?

In Part Three, I’ll examine two historic Saturn–Neptune conjunctions at 0° Aries and what they reveal about past attempts to redefine what it means to be human.

A Present History Lesson

The State of the Ether-net: a Review

In previous articles on Pluto on the Leo-Aquarius axis within Ages of Air, I explored a 3-tiered problem emerging from our collective use of LLMs that is disrupting the knowledge economy(1):

Problem 1

There is a collective behavioral shift away from primary sources and toward platforms that are free, fast, and frictionless, but are also slowly eroding thought ownership. By removing authors and aggregating information, LLMs simultaneously erase our intellectual ancestral lineage and create the illusion of a “public commons”(2) that belongs to no one and everyone.

Problem 2

This disconnection of knowledge from original authorship—and the illusion that less understanding and creative effort are required—is seducing us into believing we are generating ideas when we are actually acquiring it.

This is easy for us to do because of the “frictionless” nature of LLMs coupled with our brains’ biological impulse to seek the path of least resistance. Anyone can ask an LLM for an aggregation of facts, but that does not mean they created it, “own” it, or understand it. In essence, we declare ourselves primordial creators when we are, in fact, acting as knowledge colonialists.

Problem 3

Finally, if proper knowledge attribution is not happening, and if we believe we’re creating knowledge that we’re largely acquiring, then the process of actual knowledge creation becomes hollow and less meaningful.

Creativity and meaning-making are core components of what it means to be human. Therefore, our use of LLM’s begs the question: if we are outsourcing knowledge “creation” to LLMs, are we editing out our humanity—or reinventing it?

They → We → Me

My interests and experience as a global counselor, astrologer, and community development professional have shaped my ability to observe and name collective behavior for the purpose of awareness-building and (hopefully) change-making. Exploring the above dynamics led me into this series about the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries—the sign of “I am”—and our imminent existential choices to redefine what makes us human.

I will be exploring two primary questions that contextualize how we have handled similar moral thresholds in the past, and illuminate the choices before us now:

1. From an ontological vantage point: if we aren’t creating, are we still exercising what it means to be human?

2. From a human development vantage point: how is growing reliance on LLMs and AI affecting our attention, humility, patience, moral responsibility, and sense of time?

To be clear, I believe there are ways to use LLMs ethically and creatively that enhance our humanity. LLMs are not the base problem but the economic incentives surrounding them certainly are part of it.

However, we are at a unique point in recognizing an unconscious societal behavior shift that requires awareness and reflection if we are to engage this epistemic transformation meaningfully. It is easy to focus on what “they” (AI systems and the corporations that build them) are doing to us. It is far more empowering to focus on what “I” am doing—and what I can change.

Knowing How the Machine Works (and Why We’re So Eager to Grease It)

The two questions I’ve posed stem from LLMs’ current model: free, fast, and frictionless. To understand the hidden costs of this “triple F” model in a production-oriented culture, we need to consider how we arrived here.

We’ve been on an accelerating hamster wheel since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Inventions such as the steam engine, cotton gin, telegraph, and mass steel production set us on a trajectory of continually finding ways to save time, money, and effort.3 For a time, these innovations were extraordinary and solved multiple problems at once.

Take the washing machine.

While living in Uganda, I washed my clothes by hand. It wasn’t just the time required to heat water, soak, scrub, and rinse. It was also choosing the right time to wash amidst my class schedule. Start too late in the day—or when it was cloudy—and the clothes wouldn’t dry. If drying was delayed, checking for tsetse fly eggs was essential to prevent bites and ‘sleeping sickness’. Who knew a washing machine could indirectly prevent a neurological disease?

But every tool that makes life faster and easier carries hidden consequences. Before smartphones, we memorized phone numbers. Now, if you lose your phone and your contacts aren’t synced, you become a ghost.

Today’s technological promises of time-saving often operate as cultural bait-and-switches. “Free time” once implied contemplation, prayer, moral reasoning, civic participation, and time with loved ones. Now, if we have it, “free time” becomes recovery so we can return to work, optimize output, and consume curated stimulation. Even when we gain time, we rarely fill it with rest, reflection, or connection. We fill it with more tasks.

This creates a negative feedback loop that goes something like this:

Technology promises efficiency → efficiency produces surplus time → surplus time creates normative pressure to increase output → increased output requires the need for more time-saving → more time-saving requires more technology → technology promises efficiency…

In addition to a productivity-driven culture, this loop is also generated by a quantitative understanding of time as opposed to qualitative and is seen most vividly in how we “spend” the time we’ve “saved.” Netflix famously illuminated this when they stated that their biggest competitor is sleep.(4) If attention is harvested and measured by minutes spent viewing or interacting with a product, then the state of our attention begins to matter less. If this is the goal, then a great model for winning consumer “attention” is one that seduces and lulls a person into a trance-like state so that they spend more time within that model (hence our cultural catch-phrases like “zoning out.”)

When it comes to knowledge creation, LLMs may be “free,” but the time we believe we are saving is “paid” for with fragmented attention, hollow competence, and relational disconnection. They may be “fast,” but in a productivity-obsessed culture, our sense of time has been skewed, chaining us to a hamster wheel that speeds up instead of slows down and doesn’t “arrive” at its benefits.

Microwaved AI Dinners and Decreased Mental Exercise

The “frictionless” quality of LLMs also raises questions about the quality and ethics of what we receive from these platforms. As I’ve covered previously, LLMs do not currently have access to gated, password protected, or paywalled sites (though clearly shadow libraries aren’t off the table). This means that material requiring subscription or purchase resists aggregation but also implicitly reduces visibility as attention shifts toward LLM platforms.

This creates a catch-22:

Those who invest substantial effort in producing quality work (writers, academics, journalists) are disincentivized from having their work aggregated and anonymized. Yet when they do not feed their work into AI-digestible platforms, their ideas become less discoverable.

This entrance fee suggests a nuance between being informed versus being formed by what we’re feeding ourselves. We are not only shaped by what we consume intellectually but also from a human development vantage point.

Ideally, when we do not know something, we pursue the answer. But the more accustomed we become to microwaved information, the less tolerance we have for effort or even the state of “not knowing.”

Intellectual struggle builds resilience. Without it, we begin to equate intellectual struggle with inefficiency. Reduced resilience directly impacts effortful attention, tolerance for frustration, patience with delay, and comfort with unresolved questions. Our intellectual resilience also determines how much effort we devote to understanding or creating knowledge and whether we take responsibility for our thoughts. Engaging that struggle cultivates “intellectual humility”(5) rather than swinging between arrogance and disengagement.

Burn Baby, Burn (Those Empty AI Calories)

AI-mediated knowledge is fast and frictionless, but friction is how we create fire—the elemental symbol of creativity. As I noted earlier, creativity is central to how we develop and define ourselves as human beings. Fanning that flame is our epistemic purpose.

So what is tangibly at stake here? If knowledge “creation” becomes free, fast, and frictionless, the cost may include:

• fragmented attention,

• hollow competence,

• knowledge colonization,

• loss of intellectual patience, resilience, and humility,

• decreased responsibility for one’s development, words, and actions,

• and an increasing dissociation of what it means to be human.

Many are asking:

“At what point does AI become conscious?”

But perhaps we should also ask:

“At what point does humanity become unconscious?”

I do not believe AI necessitates a dystopic Matrix. I’m commenting on a collective behavior shift. There are other ways to meaningfully cultivate knowledge outside of LLMs in this Age of AI(r), and each of us has agency in choosing them. Still, this moment presses us toward a question we have revisited throughout history:

“What does it mean to be human?”

This is the question Aries—the sign of “I am”—returns us to.

In Part Two of this series, I will examine the theme I believe Aries and LLMs are leading us toward: transhumanism.