The vainglorious Full Moons of winter, soaring in the summer constellations of Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn, have passed. Spring is here, the season of begetting: of coupling, certainly, but ever and always for the rejuvenation of the hive.

If you think that the mantra, ‘Everything is connected to everything else,’ paves your road through a universe of things; if your boogeymen are racism, capitalism, climate change or, God forbid, immigration, apostasy, homosexuality , delinquency or addiction, and you can’t accept that you are their strongest henchman; and if knowing everything you don’t need to know more, and the relativity of astrology is no more than a penny dropping into your slot:  then at least you may recognize the Cartesian, cogito ergo sum, as one of the smallest steps ever taken by mankind. The connection mantra is as small.

If you have never experienced the growth inside your body of another transforming your flesh and blood, and the bifurcation of your soul into two; if you have never experienced yourself as a process of nature, and your organism as so dissolved in exchange and becoming that any separate identity is inconceivable; if you have never stood under the stars in awful dread of the tiny span of humanity’s integration of stardust yet been overwhelmed by gratitude and worship: this one’s for you.

The Drone honours the periphery, where importance is conditional, value contingent, and identity redundant.

“So have I got it right? I can help end suffering by overcoming my neediness? If I ferret around among the causes of my irresponsibility and guilt I can find my root pain to heal with compassion for my inner child? Then I will be able to love even psychopathological extremists, give unlimited asylum, cause no offence, and live harmoniously in a utopia of universal human rights without reacting with despising and blame to those egoistically clinging to opinions and identities which produce pain and suffering? …Okay, I can do that.”

Thus, he departed from the Sun, and now, once more, the Moon is Full in the Atacama Desert.

“The addict seems to have rejected the values of the ordinary person, which the Buddhist has also rejected, such as the permanent nature of reality and the idea that pleasure should be cosy, quiet and decent. The Buddhist aspires to entirely destroy desire and aversion as the root causes of all suffering, and sees both in turn as products of our deluded apprehension of the world as solid and real. The addict has also experienced the emptiness, but has failed to realise that the cause of suffering is aversion and desire – in which they continue to indulge. Thus, the addict appears to sit mid-way between the ordinary person and the Buddhist, and is moving in some ways ‘along the way towards’ Buddhism – chiefly in apprehending the emptiness and in realising that desire and hatred have some problems and price-tags attached. I would therefore conclude that the addict’s is a form of spiritual path – a development away from the ordinary life position – and that involves experiences, which can be more fully understood from a deeper study of Buddhism. These relate to cause and effect, the nature of mind, desire and aversion and finally impermanence and emptiness.” Peter Morrell.

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo”: ‘If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.’
Aeneid, Book VII, Line 312, Virgil.

The last addiction is love. Not an addiction, you cry? Hard-wired by natural selection into the human essence? The spark of divinity linking humanity to its creator? Perhaps you are inclined to attach yourself to drones. Every prophet, every saint, every healer that ever existed was a drone. What is the spirit but an addiction to emptiness? What is the word of God but addiction to language, the echo of apes barking? What is the Noble Path but addiction to mind, a midday siesta under a shady tree?

And what is a drone? A peripheral member of a community whose single purpose is one day to make an utterance which of all the utterances of all the drones of a generation may prove to be the utterance which perpetuates the hive, long after everyone in the generation of a previous utterance is dead. And the hive is not dedicated to love, just the feeding of the young, the Great Mother, and the drones. What remains when all desire is defeated may well be revered by those suffering in the yoke of life, but really, what remains is only death. This is not transcendent revelation.

In fact, all drone utterances and all cultural memes preserve a drop of desire in their ethic, all the more precious for being the very last one. Can you love without desire? Of course not. This elementary truth is masked by confusion around the nature of desire. It is not asked if you can love your children without the urge to fornicate with them, but if you can love them without distinction from others and without hope for their future. If you can do this, congratulations for attaining enlightenment, and now take your place among the drones. Perhaps your utterance will be the one which will perpetuate the hive, be its will, as it were: “Your children are no more deserving of your love than anyone else, including the most degraded sexual predator on pre-pubescent children; and the future is not your concern.” Perhaps this utterance will be the one.

The lot of the Great Mother is to lead into nowhere, of the Worker to persevere, and of the Drone to weigh emptiness and purpose. Everything is connected.