Mercury in Libra Square Pluto in Capricorn: Part One

Transcript:

0:02
Everyone this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology and today we are going to take a little deeper look at Mercury square to Pluto, which is coming through this week we're going to meditate on the topic of honesty today. One of the things you'll often hear about Mercury square to Pluto is that it it brings up truths that we're trying to hide from ourselves or others, or things that we need to hear or things that we might be avoiding. And it often comes up in speech and communication. But this is definitely one of those transits that will bring up the topic of truth and things being revealed to us or things that we were trying to hide from ourselves or others kind of coming up to the surface. So that's what we're going to talk about today. In the meantime, I want to remind all of you that my new class ancient astrology for the modern mystic begins in November. Registration is open now and it's nice to see people signing up every day. So you can check this out on my website nightlight astrology.com, go to the first year course page and click on it. You can learn all about the programme there 30 courses on the year we spend a lot of time talking about the philosophical and spiritual foundations of astrology, while also studying the sort of ancient karmic science of astrology. Learning how to read birth charts from the traditional perspective is 30 classes online that are all in webinar format plus 12 guest lectures plus breakout study sessions between our units. We have a staff full of tutors. In Depth forum discussions that are happening year round optional homework, quizzes reading bonus videos, you can email me with questions throughout the course. The webinars are live on Saturdays starting November 13. But you can also follow them on your own time remotely if you can't attend live because they're all recorded and put into your class folder. So if you have any questions, feel free to email night latest info at nightlight astrology calm. Otherwise, check out the earlybird payment he used that and sign up you can save $500 off also the there's a monthly payment plan and there's also need based tuition for people who need it. So if you're in some kind of tough financial situation and you need some help, make sure you check that out, we try to make sure that no one has ever priced out of the programme. So on that note, thank you for letting me take some time to promote that programme. Really looking forward to having some new students in class, I actually wrote down three reasons that someone might want to study astrology today. Astrology is a language. I'll just share this quickly before we go into talking about Mercury and Pluto.

2:39
Astrology is a language. When you learn that language, it gives you three things in my opinion, especially when you spend an immersive time with other people in a community with a teacher that you resonate with. It helps you to develop your own planetary navigation system. Having that in your life, whether it's on the daily level, or the monthly or yearly level of your life, knowing what kinds of transits are happening, knowing what challenges and what gifts and strengths are there in your birth chart. It is unbelievably helpful. We have weather men everyday who tell us it's going to rain 1000s of years ago, we had weatherman that would tell us in our lives, what kind of weather fronts were coming and, you know, having the skill to be able to know that and and speak that language is just so valuable. The second thing is for some people, it's going to give you the ability to also play that role for other people. If you have the desire or the natural inclination to read charts for other people, you're going to give them that assistance to help them know what kind of season of life they're moving through and how to meet that season. Super, super helpful. Also to get a sense of what's in their birth chart. A lot of people my programmes go on to read charts for their people. And then finally a sense of the gods in everything. You're moving through your daily life, there's a lot to get overwhelmed by and astrology helps us understand that whether it's something really small, or it's really big stuff happening in our life, the planets who are the gods are there and they're present. Even if things are rough or difficult. Having that awareness brings us a sense that reality is trustworthy, and it's easy to lose our faith and to get really lost and off track, especially when things get you know, a little crazy. So being able to see in a sense, the sacred and everything is my favourite gift that astrology gives me every day and that's why it's such a it's a joy to teach and to work with new students every year. So that's my pitch. I hope that you'll come and study.

4:30
Alright, so let's refresh on this transit for today. You'll see that Mercury is squaring Pluto. So between today Tuesday, September 21 and tomorrow, Wednesday, September 22. Mercury will go through the square to Pluto but it will then stay in that square to Pluto and move back through it by retrograde all the way through the beginning of October. long standing square between the two Pluto is about to station and turn direct after Being retrograde for a long time as well. next couple of days. And tomorrow in particular, we'll be talking about Venus also going through an opposition to Uranus. So one of the manifestations of this transit is that people tend to get honest about things, people tend to suddenly go like, it's time to tell the truth, and then there's this big explosion of truth telling, and sometimes that truth telling is very healing, very cathartic, really helpful to say, here's what I really think or feel, here's what I here's what's been held inside somehow. And now it's time to let it out. Generally speaking, what could be wrong with that, right. But there are some problems with it. And there's some good things for us to meditate on.

5:40
So let's just start with this premise. And this comes from the bhakti yoga tradition that I study, but I think it's fairly widespread. And in many spiritual traditions, I think we say the same things about honesty, and why honesty is so important and why honesty really shouldn't be something that happens just when mercury squares Pluto, or Venus opposes Uranus, and suddenly like, let's have a truth telling party and come to Jesus and have this big catharsis. In other words, a lot of what we're going to see in the next week, sure, it'll involve the kind of nuclear meltdown of honesty and relationships and big changes and revelations of what we've been thinking or doing behind the scenes. And suddenly, you know, it's like now, now we're telling the truth. Okay. And that can be healing, cathartic, but we can also address how did it get to this point? What are the things in our lives that keep us from being in a better daily practice of honesty? Right, so that's what we're going to talk about today. Because this transit can teach us a lot about the importance of honesty, and what honesty is and also what honesty isn't. So, let's start off by talking about some of the symptoms or signs that you can notice around you when honesty is not present. So I made a list of them. And a lot of these are informed by some of my favourite bhakti yoga teachings, but one of them is sarcasm, and cynicism. So habitual distrust and sarcasm, maybe a humorous way of sort of slightly, you know, sort of slicing and dicing things down to some kind of bottom line. I wanted to share with you the etymology of sarcasm, just so that you know.

7:39
Sarcasm, from late Greek sarcasmos: most a sneer, just taunt mockery, to speak bitterly, and literally to strip off the flesh. So there's a cut, there's something about honesty that's cutting, that cuts back and reduce this things. That tends to be sharp, that tends to be mocking. And I'm the first person to admit that like, you know, I love sarcastic humour, like well placed well timed, I'm not here to police language or tell you that sarcasm has no place in the human experience, right. But I read this paper in graduate school, when I was in graduate school for I did an MA and an MFA in creative writing. And I remember I read this article by this guy who is talking about what's happened to the English language, with the advent of of major sitcoms and how they've changed culture and how they've changed language. And he was talking about Seinfeld and friends. And I don't know what else was there cheers, I think was one of them. And maybe the Golden Girls, I don't remember there's a whole bunch. And it was a study that was done that showed that the average vocabulary of peep English speaking people in the West was rapidly decreasing, that the number of words that a person knows and knows how to use was decreasing. So this article was meant to talk about some of the reasons why that could be and there was another study that was done to show the amount of sarcastic speech in the most popular TV shows, though, most of which in the the 90s. At this point, were like sitcoms, if I remember correctly. And anyway, one of the things that this paper showed was that the sitcoms were almost the language of a sitcom was like 70% or more sarcasm. So that means that like, if you think about it, so his thesis in this paper was that one of the things greatly contributing to the decline of vocabulary was the cultural phenomenon of sarcasm, increased sarcastic speech, which is also very close to cynicism, a tendency to habitually distrust things and people, because the distrust is leads to this kind of nuclear cutting jeering, stripping away of the flesh, sarcastic speech.

10:14
Sarcasm and cynicism are signs of people who are disenchanted and who don't really believe that other people are generally speaking, honest or truthful. And so that maybe that's one reason we've come to an age of self interest and honesty is a rare commodity, right? So at any rate, but one of the one of the things that he said, and I'll never forget this was that the increase of sarcasm and the decrease of the human vocabulary. One of the byproducts of which is that that having more vocabulary, having a greater or expanded vocabulary is directly correlated to happiness. This was like his thesis. And that one of the things that cynicism and sarcasm exposes is an underlying dissatisfaction or unhappiness with things. And that it's almost like letting off steam to be sarcastic and cynical is like letting off steam with an underlying sense of dissatisfaction, disgust, unhappiness, unrest, uneasiness, anxiety, distrust, and that these are just like the fumes, the exhaust of that underlying feeling that people are dealing with in the sort of disenchanted modern age. And that his idea was that the cure for that is to keep it to keep an expanded vocabulary, because the one thing that an expanded vocabulary does, is that it allows you to appreciate more, that more language means a higher appreciating capacity. And a higher appreciating capacity is not to say that we're using language to paint unicorns in the sky and make everything positive with with language. It's to say that the truth of reality and the truth of experience, that, that when we articulate words, we use words and language to articulate our experiences of things, that experience itself, and the way we communicate about experience is nuanced. And that there's a discovery process that's going on in the way we talk about the things that happen, whether it's changing a tire on your car, to what you experienced at the grocery store, to that every day is actually not mundane. We don't have to walk around as cynical and sarcastic because everything is actually brimming with wonder. But if we lose language, and we lose the ability of language to appreciate and to unpack. Language, we use it as to have a discovery process of truth. Well, I unpack the truth in my experience going to target or I unpack that, because I have more words and language and I'm not just bottom lining it with little boxes like Twitter and lol's and names and keeps keeps collapsing and collapsing and collapsing.

13:17
There's a problem with that because truth is variegated truth is many truth is relational. And truth is a discovery process always. And an expanded vocabulary is a sign of an appreciating capacity and appreciating capacity is a sign of health. But what is an appreciating capacity in direct correlation with? Honesty and truth, being honest and experiencing truth. But the problem is that if we think of truth is this like super nuclear singular linear thing, then that's a little scary. Because then you start putting things into good Tommy, the moral truth teller, bad Tommy the liar, you know, that there's a truth in the situation and there's a falseness, and that's it. And you either get to the truth, or you're in a lie. Right? And, and actually, culturally speaking, most people around the world, their vocabulary, their language, has never really looked at truth in that way. Truth is a truth is relational, truth is dialectical truth is a discovery process and truth has a direct correlation of the the ability of language to explore in reality through an interpersonal you know, in an interpersonal way.

14:37
So, if we think that truth is some kind of linear, singular, non negotiable thing, it's not relational. It's not a discovery process is not variegated. It's not multi dimensional. It's not multi-vaillant. It's just the singular thing and you're telling the truth or you're not. It's either trustworthy or it's false. These like really hard dichotomies about truth and falseness. Well, of course they put us on edge. Of course they make us distrustful of ourselves. Of course, they make us harsh critics, of course, they tend to put us in blaming, complaining, shaming, gossiping, self pitying cynicism, sarcasm, of course, they bottom line us, if that's our view of truth, and that truth bottom lines us. But the way to think about honesty from the perspective of bhakti yoga, and I sense from the perspective of the ancient sages who created this language of astrology, which remember, they believe that reality itself was a kind of language and was interpersonal, that the learning of astrology is the learning of a language that helps us to interface with reality as something that is always giving us honest feedback and honest glimpses into the eternal nature of truth. And truth is beautiful, and just and mysterious and personal. And so honesty is something that is a lived part of everyday life. And so first to just say that, how important it is because in such moments were like, Oh, yeah, the truth is about to come out baby, Mercury square to Pluto, Venus is going to oppose Uranus, the truth is going to come out. It's like hopefully truthfulness as a process as a lived experience comes out, not just the truth, there's too much the before truth these days, you know.

16:31
So that's not to say that there there is no truth or the truth is entirely relative. Its truth is not is not as relative as it is relational. And so, honesty, when you know that honesty is present, it has some combinations of qualities that are like symptomatic of someone who's in the practice of being honest, in the practice of having an honest, appreciating relationship with experience and with reality, they like to be honest, they like insightful, honest experiences, they like to see truth come out. But in many ways, honesty is both emotional, emotionally intelligent and rationally intelligent at the same time. It's not one or the other. It's sincere. It's unguarded, unattached, but also vulnerable. And then also, honesty is firm. You know, you come if you ever been around someone who is really deeply honest?

17:28
When I was in graduate school, I was going through a really rough patch. And I found a spike a guidance, countless spiritual guidance counsellor, a therapist to speak with, she was a nun in the Catholic tradition, but like a super mystical nun. And I would sit with her on her couch, in she had a house like overlook this lake, and I would sit with her on the couch, she'd sit in this chair, and I'd be looking at the lake and we talking to her. And I remember, time after time, just observing how deeply patient she was, and how wise, but how curious she was too. She was a combination of patient, and intelligent, and vulnerable and curious all at once. And she was maybe one of the most honest people I can remember meeting. So honesty and curiosity were present in her at least as I observed it, patience and like knowledge and wisdom, but also, mystery and discovery were there in her personality. And I just remember, she told me one time that I needed to be more honest with myself. And I said, you know, this is the truth, and I'm really hiding. She's, that's not what I mean by honest. She said, honesty isn't like holding your feet to the fire. She said, honesty starts with being patient enough to sit with yourself and listen every day. And I'll just never forget her telling me that that No, no, you don't need to hold your feet to the fire. When I say being honest with yourself, I don't mean, you know, extracting the truth like someone from the Inquisition holding a hot iron up to your eye. You know what I mean? She said, being honest, starts with being patient enough to sit with yourself every single day and to listen. And I asked, should I pray or and she was like, well, prayer means listening. And listening means listening to the soul, and what it has to say and what it's thinking what it's feeling. And your mind has to get quiet to listen to what the soul is saying, because it doesn't just come out out of nowhere. And also to listen to a God and the hardest thing. And you can't do that if you don't sit down and listen.

19:55
And so the ability to be honest and to be truthful is not about some bold, you know, nuclear bomb that needs to go off, like, I'm going to stand in my truth. I'm going to be sovereign, and I'm going to be a truth teller like that. Her way of explaining it to me was like, Nah, there's too much. There's way too much sort of punitive energy in that approach. Start every day by just listening. Prayer means sitting and being quiet, and listening and communing with the soul and communing with God in the soul. And just listening. And if you ask me now what I love about being an astrologer so much, every day is sort of mercury, Pluto in the sense that people walk in and drop truth bombs, you know, they're like, let me I just got to tell you, I've got to tell the truth I've got, and I hear people tell me all kinds of things, you know, everyday about what's really going on that nobody knows. And what I've witnessed over time, is that most of the time when we get to a space where the truth comes out, in a way that's nuclear, and sort of destructive and sudden and has that feeling of like, a bomb that just dropped, you know, and we love that and culture. Did you hear the bomb today in the news, this viral story, blah, blah, blah, we love bombs, you know? But what I've reflected on over the years, you know, as a Mercury Pluto dynamic, or a Venus Uranus dynamic, would it get to this space of needing to have these nuclear truth, meltdowns, if we were in a practice of having an honest and curious approach to experience and to reality? And by honest, I mean, you know, being interested in the process of discovering truth. Discovering truth, not just one truth, but discovering truth itself, which is like a living river that's just pouring through all of our experiences, if we take time to listen and stay curious, if we use language to walk in circles around our experiences, and worship our experiences, because they're the sanctuary of God. If we don't do that, then our vocabulary diminishes. We become distrustful, and we start thinking the truth is one thing and falseness is another thing and then these transits come and we just blow up.

22:14
So, I'm thinking today of my nun, spiritual guidance counsellor, who said, No, no, honesty. I don't mean you need to be more honest with yourself as in hold your feet to the fire. I mean, taking every time to be patient enough with yourself and with reality to listen. And when from the listening comes in this this variegated, it's like a tapestry. It's like a mandala of truth doesn't mean truth is relative. It doesn't mean truth is to you. And truth is to me and there's no truth and no, it means that truth has a way of it's, it's a it's a living ecology that we're trying to bring into our lives. And when we live that way, it's really our lives are filled with wonder, you know, if you break it down the soul is this immortal and eternal, being into the soul, whatever is true is whatever is real. And whatever is real is what is beautiful. And whatever is beautiful is inherently just, whatever is inherently just is probably deeply mysterious. Whatever is deeply mysterious is almost always getting right into the essence of what is most personal. The soul is a great secret. Whatever is secretive and personal is what is soulful. And what is soulful is what is divine.

23:35
So living, you know, creating an environment of honesty in our lives is a process. And if we live with that process, we cultivate that through some kind of practice. listening practice the art of listening to ourselves, and listening to others and listening to the world. If we cultivate that, then we don't need these astrological moments to be like, these come to Jesus truth bombs. I mean, sometimes that's just the way that you know, what are you going to do? I sometimes like to say, how can you possibly judge the way a mountain crumbles into the sea, like sometimes that's just what's going to happen. But also, sometimes we know we don't have to get to the point where it's that the truth is like a nuclear meltdown. So that's what I wanted to share today. I hope that that's useful for all of you.

24:25
I've been meditating on this, because I need it not because I I'm so elevated, this is what this is the truth that I feel that I need this week. So I hope you guys find it useful as well. And hope you guys have a great day today. And I look forward to breaking down Venus opposite Uranus tomorrow. Don't be you know, lots more nuclear truth telling in that transit as well. So, Alright, I hope you guys are having a great day and we'll talk again soon. Bye.