Neptune just slipped back into Pisces where it will remain until 2025.  Neptune’s role in the astrological pantheon is to cause us to question where the physical world ends and a more transcendent reality begins.  It therefore rules our spiritual experience, but it can also be confusing and induce delusion if our grasp of reality begins to slip.

Over the past few years Neptune was in Aquarius, which is ruled by Uranus (modern rulership), and Aquarius, the sign ruled by Uranus, was in Pisces which is Neptune’s sign.  Astrologer’s call this “mutual reception” and it was signaled by the blurring of boundaries (Neptune) between the “real” world and the world of technology and the internet: the wired world.

Neptune is also associated with any kind of mass consciousness in which the mind of the individual is subsumed by the mind of the collective such as we see in pop culture generally,  episodes of mass hysteria, etc.

So with Neptune in its own sign of Pisces, different forms of reality are already entering the consciousness of the masses.  Such as “augmented reality,” which will bring us experiences such as this one:

It’s reality, only better.  Maybe.  With augmented reality you can see the world through the lens of your electronic device, instead of through your own eyes and your own soul.  I’m not so sure that’s an improvement, but it’s certainly the wave of the future during Neptune in Pisces.

In googling around I found an article I myself wrote five years ago on this very subject.  In this article I quoted my friend Tim Boucher who predicted this very thing:

How many years this will take to happen, I can’t say. Maybe five years? But the world is going to look like this. You are going to walk around with an augmented reality device, as well as a variety of devices whose purpose is to record, sort and “index” audio, visual and other information about your experience of life. You will become the spiderbot for Google walking around and “crawling” the physical earth. You will be paid a modest amount for your data-collection efforts. We think of these technologies now as “tracking” and “surveillance” but those terms will fall away and be replaced by terms which more accurately reflect the breadth of cultural change these devices will entail. By way of analogy, you could think of your experience of life as going something like this. You walk around and perceive augmented or mixed reality through your headset.

This is an unexpectedly and eerily accurate prediction, down to the timing.  As I said then, and as I still believe today, “With information coming only through the media, we lose the ability to process information independently and live as autonomous beings; instead we will become cogs in a huge wheel that is controlled by the media machine. The better alternative, I believe, is the choice to live a real and authentic life.”