Mercury is retrograde and moving through slow conjunction with Neptune as it prepares to station and turn direct this week. Mercury will now be sitting within a degree or so of Neptune into the first week of April.
What to watch for:
* Smoke and mirrors.
* Sleight of hand.
* Tricksters and hucksters.
* Spin.
* Confusing appearances, images, or information.
* Misleading or manipulating others, or being misled.
* Trying to hide or conceal a piece of news, information, gossip, or facts.
* Denial of the facts, selective listening.
* Otherworldly communication, omens and symbols in dreams.
* Fantasy, mysticism, imagination and heightened states of awareness or lucidity.
* The Mueller Report.
* Socerery, illusions, deceptions, dreams, and nightmares.
* Gaining an intuitive grasp on something complicated or technical.
* Seeing the forest from the trees.
* Calling out to something higher, getting a response.
* Asking for guidance from a higher source, humbly, as an approach to intellectual, philosophical and “rational” learning.
* A breakdown of logic and reasoning that leads to faith, belief, hope, or emotional outpourings.
* When a contradiction speaks a deeper truth.
* Following what’s not being said, one discovers what is being said.
* Wrongly interpreting events, or experiences, but then acting entitled to one’s wrong opinion…because, “I’m entitled to an opinion.”
* Irrational or ungrounded thinking.
* Clairvoyance and thinking informed by a higher mind.
* In the absence of universal truth, or the relationship with higher truth, we sometimes imagine there isn’t one, and thus truth becomes purely a matter of personal opinion. Plato once said that this is basically one of the major challenges of the material world…people mistake personal opinions, which change by the minute, with the absolute truth. As a result, society changes according to the opinions that become popular from one day, year, decade, century to the next. When ideas are paired with consumer culture, our ideas become accessories to go with our fashion, film, and food. Cultures or cults of ideas get formed one after another, appearing and disappearing as rapidly as tweets and Instagram fads appear and disappear. Now more than ever, when every single person has a public platform from which to voice their personal opinion, and this is seen as an “evolved” development, truth can change by the minute. The news isn’t fake, it’s just a collection of opinions. Even astrologers suffer from this, as more and more people take up astrology and offer their often uninformed, unstudied, “opinions” about life, spirit, the planets, and the cosmos, often without anything at all resembling a reflective, spiritual or even philosophical or academic approach to their lives or the subject matter. Self-help culture reinforces the idea that to be happy you just need to have happy opinions about everything, mostly yourself, and “spiritual evolution” culture means that we spin everything happening in the “collective,” (which collective?) toward a narrative about awakening, growth, healing, etc.
* The mantra of the cult of opinion is found in the total aversion to the very idea of truth, of absolute truth, of higher truth. No. No. Truth is personal! Truth is relative. Truth is subjective. The very notion of higher, universal truth, is an affront to many people. It is considered violent. Instantly compared to fallen religious leaders, warmongers, zealots, abusers, and fanatics.
* So we have a spectrum. We have those who believe there is no such thing as Universal truth, that truth is relative, and those who believe this believe it absolutely (without noting the contradiction), and we have those who believe in a higher truth only for the sake of wielding it as a weapon against those who do not agree. Both sides of this polarity live in the realm of opinions. And so our world is ablaze with a war of opinions.
* At this point, our inner voice of reason is bound to say, “Well, then what is the absolute truth? If there is such a thing, then how do I learn about it or come to know it?”
* For Mercury/Neptune the answer can be simple, “The honest, humble, sincere, desire to know the truth, when it grows inside of us over time, leads us toward a relationship with truth. It is the relationship with truth, the living vibration of truth in the heart, that eventually takes us beyond the conception of truth as mere information, reasoned conclusions, belief systems, religions, political positions, moral principles, etc., and into truth as an aspect of a living being. This living being is both who we are at heart, and also the infinite source from which we come.”
* When asked to talk about how he first fell in love with his wife, one of my favorite literary philosophers, Jacques Derrida, refused to speak about it on camera to a group of documentary filmmakers. After a long pause in the video interview, he finally said, “It is an impossible confidence.”
* Truth is like this. It is an impossible confidence, but not…impossible.
* We fear that truth will objectify life, or get us wrong, paint us in black and white, and so naturally we fear the thought of absolute truth. But in our fear, we expose ourselves. The truth, behind our aversion to truth, is that we want to be understood within the context of an impossible confidence. We want to be loved for who we are, and we feel that we are MORE than one thing or another, one category or another, one life event or experience or another, one…opinion…or another. The truth…is that we want to be loved, and we want to love.
* But to see love in everything, it takes honesty. To feel that we are loved, it takes truth and sincerity.
* We are living in an age where the truth is threatened, it’s true, but what this really means is that we live in an age where we are more interested in defending, or upholding, or winning on behalf of our favorite opinions than we are interested in loving and being loved.
* In divine love even our strongest personal opinions are easily defeated. They become helplessly, hopelessly, incapable of answering the one question that matters the most, which is, “How do I make YOU happy? Oh, soul of my soul, oh heart of my heart!”
* When we love love more than we crave the power of personal truth, then the ultimate truth flows through us, and makes us happy to “know” even just a fragment of a fragment of a fragement of the reality of love.
* So, in the days ahead, as Mercury stations near to the smoke, mirrors, and vastness of Neptune, may we recall this prayer in the midst of the war of opinions…
Prayer: The final word, the final report, and the hidden truth that matters most is always the truth of your love.
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