Neptune Conjunct the North Node in Pisces: Can Love Really Save Us?

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/]. Happy Friday, everybody. Today we are going to take a look at the north node of the moon moving into a conjunction with Neptune in Pisces. I figure, since it's Valentine's Day, we'll talk about love. We'll talk about love in a pretty broad way, where we are also talking about some of the mystical and spiritual dimensions of that word, as well as the general way in which Neptune in the north node can point us toward the things that we wish or hope or long for that will redeem us or somehow save us.

And I think this is an appropriate meditation for Valentine's Day, hopefully nothing too heavy, but hopefully something that can add a little insight to a day that, for some people, is lonely and painful, while for others it might be, you know, a fun date night or whatever the case may be. So hopefully, there's a little something for everyone in this today. Anyhow, before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe. If you are not yet subscribed to the channel, it's free to do so it really does help us grow our community and our work. So thank you for doing that.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, which is Nightlight astrology.com, when you are over there on the website, I have a webinar coming up, speaking of love on Venus Retrogrades. If you want to learn more about Venus retrograde, check out the Events page. Go to live talks. You'll see my webinar on February 20. You can register for it. You can come live on February 20, from seven to 9pm Eastern. For this talk, there's a Q and A at the end you can ask questions. We're going to talk about Venus Retrogrades. They're meaning all the different facial dynamics of Venus's cycle. How To Track Venus Retrogrades? All good stuff. And if you cannot make it live, of course, you get the recording afterwards. You can watch or listen to it on your own time.

All right, let's take a look at the North Node coming together. Of course, Mercury's just entered Pisces as well. But what I want to focus on is the traveling of the North Node through the conjunction with Neptune. If I track this out a little bit, watch how this evolves. We are looking at a process of the North Node crossing Neptune within only a couple of degrees of Neptune between now and the end of March, when Neptune then enters the sign of Aries. So and then Neptune will be going or north node will be going through a conjunction with Saturn. So an interesting sequence of events, and something that we will track as well the North Node and Saturn's conjunction, which coincides with Venus's retrograde into late Pisces. So it becomes extra interesting on that level.

But for now, today, I just want to focus on the vibe that you might be feeling between now and, say, the end of March, with the North Node and Neptune traveling very close together. The actual conjunction depends on which measurement you use for the nodes of the moon. I use the mean node measurement. Some people use true. Either way, the conjunction is taking place between now and late February. So like that, last week of February in particular is when the actual conjunction occurs. But you should be feeling it any old day now as the nodes of the moon have recently transitioned from Aries and Libra into Pisces and Virgo. That transition, by the way, would have taken place by mean node measurement, right around January 29 the very end of January.

So I've already done an exploration of the nodes of the Moon in Pisces and Virgo. If you missed that, if you go back a couple of weeks in the video list on my channel, you'll find a talk on the nodes shifting into these signs and what the general archetypal themes and meanings might be for the year and a half ahead, as the nodes are now in Pisces and Virgo, but today we're going to talk about Neptune and the north node. So I'm going to borrow a few thoughts from the evolutionary the world of evolutionary astrology. And I'll also kind of tap into some of the Hellenistic views of the North Node to start with, explain a little the general meanings of these two and then I want to talk broadly about what Neptune in the north node can bring up for us on a spiritual and philosophical level, something to work with, I think, especially on a day like Valentine's Day, where there's a lot of projections and fantasies. Some people call it a Hallmark holiday, and other people enjoy it, and some people it feels really lonely and painful a day like this. So hopefully this will give again, a little something for everyone.

So first of all, the North Node in Hellenistic astrology simply amplifies or augments whatever it touches. It is a little bit like Jupiter in that it grants a kind of expansiveness and largeness, and it makes things grow. It is generally the North Node associated with gain or growth in the realm of fortune, which means the world in which constantly there are constantly fluctuating events and circumstances, and the North Node causes things within that realm to grow or expand or get bigger, and it's generally associated with benefic qualities. However, if it's contacting, say, a malefic like Mars, it can kind of put Mars on steroids, and all of a sudden you've got a Hulk in the room or something. Lance Armstrong is a good example of someone who had the North Node and Mars together and took steroids to cheat and. Win in cycling. So there's, there's a way in which the north node can amplify the difficult dimensions or features of a planet that it's contacting.

In the case of Neptune, for example, when we put these two together from the Hellenistic standpoint, all Neptunian things, longing, hoping, wishing, fantasizing, dreaming, that kind of mystical, other worldly, imaginative, expansive, oceanic quality of Neptune gets bigger and it expands and is augmented because of its contact with the North Node. So you may just notice things getting particularly Neptunian. Now, on the other hand, from the evolutionary perspective, which I also find very useful and interesting. If you guys haven't watched the series I recently did, recently did with my colleague and friend Ari Moshe Wolf, we kind of compared and contrasted Hellenistic and evolutionary perspectives and found some interesting ways of bringing value from both into chart work. We did an example chart with Ram Das chart. So go back and see that series in the archives if you are interested in that.

But from the evolutionary perspective, the North Node is going to bring up things like the evolutionary direction of our soul that feels new and unexplored. That's my very simple way of putting it. Ari is much more eloquent than I am, of course, as a practitioner of EA but so there's something Neptune and the North Node are bringing into our lives right now as a matter of evolutionary purpose or direction. This is the direction our souls are being led in in some facet or of our lives, or some area of our lives. Visa V maybe the whole sign house of Pisces in your birth chart, from my whole sign perspective. So you could think about that as well. But regardless, Neptune tends to bring up the the aspiration, the hope, the wish, the longing for something like paradise or salvation or redemption or healing or mystical union with the Divine or bliss. These are Neptunian features that have been well documented by many archetypal astrologers, psychological astrologers, so we in Neptune can be problematic too, because all also when it comes to the longing and quest for redemption, healing, mystical union, all of these things there are, is also the potential for becoming ungrounded, for Becoming dissociative or escapist, or for chasing illusions, for fantasies overwhelming our rational capacities. So Neptune has also been associated with the potential for this kind of other worldly, you know, illusion or delusional quality. So all of those things have to be considered when we place it with the North Node, which can augment and expand all of those shadow qualities, while also expanding some of the more uplifting qualities that we've mentioned.

So on that level, I was thinking today, it might be interesting to explore this idea of love and like, what is behind like on a day like today, like a Valentine's Day. A lot of us tap into that part of us that longs or hopes or wishes for bliss, union, ecstasy, Paradise through another human being, which is one of the most common, basic, recurring, timeless human endeavors. I would say over 50% of the readings I've done, and I've done, you know, 1000s of them, right? So, so many readings about love, will I find my person? Will I find my soulmate? When will I meet someone special? Will I ever be with someone? These are easily the most recurrent questions I receive as an astrologer, easily, next to that, usually calling and career, you know, maybe next to that, something like money, health, etc, but it right at the top is love. So love is this, this universal thing that we long for. We talk about self love. We talk about a love that will heal, a love that will redeem finding a soulmate. And a lot of these fantasies and projections get amplified on a day like Valentine's Day, which is why some of us get sad, because we feel very far on this Hallmark holiday from the realization of that dream or that wish or that hope or that desire for for, you know. And some people don't take it that. Some people don't care at all about this holiday, and some people just have a date, if they're, you know, in a relationship, it's just a fun date day or whatever. But I thought, okay, let's talk a little bit about some of the things that we put onto love. And I think this is useful to talk about, because one of the main and primary ways that Neptune will show up in terms of the kinds of aspirations, hopes, fantasies, dreams and longings, the divine longing for union that it, that it often shows up as in transits to Natal charts, is in the fantasy of a love that will heal and make us whole. And don't get me wrong, relate. Relationships, whether they're deep friendships or, you know, a lifelong partner or something, can go a long way to making us feel whole and happy. So I don't think that relationships are futile or pointless or I think relationships can do a lot, but there's also some fantasies that we put on to relationships, and frankly, that with Neptune in the north node, we have to be careful of putting on anything. And let's so let's dive a little bit deeper into some of the projections and things that we put on to love that are setting we set ourselves up to be disappointed. And that's a big thing with Neptune, is that one of the fine lines between our hopes, our dreams and delusions and fantasies, has to do with the weight of expectation that we place on certain things. We live in this material world that's constantly fluctuating, that's mortal, where things die, where there's constant impermanence, fluctuation and change, where pain and darkness and chaos are a part of the the way in which things unfold. The interplay of light and dark is fundamental. The dualities and the fluctuating of energies along spectrums of opposites. These things are constant in the material world. This is why I love Taoism so much. It talks so frequently about how to handle and work with those tensions and fluid movements of opposites. We need to be very aware of that, because if we're not aware of those, there's an interplay of light and dark happening all the time, that there's fluctuation, change, impermanence. Then when we long for something to save us or heal us or help us or make us whole or bring us to the realization of something we dream for or desire. If we if we have these things in mind, it's a lot harder to become ungrounded and then deal with incredible disappointment, disillusionment and Neptune word that comes not because we dreamed in that so audacious but because we dreamed without an understanding of the relative, impermanent nature of the world we're in, where anything we dream for that comes into being can only approximate an ideal, because it will die and it will change, you know. So we have to somehow reconcile the hoping, wishing, aspiring part of ourselves to the fundamental nature of this world that we live in, and if we can hold those two things at once, then we can come into contact with things that are truly blissful, while not holding onto them so tightly that we set ourselves up for tragedy and disappointment and frustration over and over again, which is why many people end up feeling very deeply depressed, because it's as Though nothing I long forever comes to pass, or there's always a disappointment or always falls apart. Yes, and it will right, and if we can again, kind of reconcile ourselves to that, then we're dealing with Neptune in a much better way, because it will bring on the strongest of our longings and fantasies and desires. And we have to know how to work with those within the world that we're living in, where for each of us, death is an inevitability. There's no one gets out alive, right? We all leave so everything ends. Now all of that in mind, let's think about some of the things we put into love that we have to be very careful of one. And I see this whether and this could. You don't even have to think about this as love. I chose love because it is one of the most basic things that Neptune brings up. Is our desire to love and be loved, to commune with something divine and blissful and loving is fundamentally Neptunian. But it could be the desire to be good at something. It could be the desire to achieve or realize a dream of any kind. Here are the things that we put on to love in particular, though, one is the elimination of pain. So it's very common that we think, if I find love, maybe you don't even think. Maybe you're not so, you know, out of touch with reality, that you think that a love is going to be perfect. But many of us sort of subconsciously believe that if and when I find someone, or if and when my relationship, you know, evolves or changes and becomes what I need it to be, because oftentimes we're in relationships that we're kind of disappointed. We want it to be something else. We need it to become we need the other person to become someone else, whatever the case may be, we think that if I reach this ideal state in a relationship, then there will be no more pain, and because it's painful to live in a world where there's conflict and there's tension and there's discord and there's power struggles and there are like, there's things that don't fit or sync up with other beings, and we think, well, love is that thing that will come in and make it so that there's a smooth, easy, peaceful. Loving, happy, harmonious vibration, and it'll be relatively constant, and then I won't have to feel the pain of discordancy in relationships. And I know it sounds to like when you hear this. I'm sure anyone listening to this goes well, I'm not like that. I'm not I don't have my head in the clouds that I think that, you know, I'll have a relationship that'll never have conflict. Yeah, you me and everyone else acts like we talk a big talk. But the truth is that underlying a ton of conflicts in relationships and a ton of like in my client work, what do I see people coming in with? I see them coming in with this tremendous hope and other worldly aspiration that there is an ideal kind of love that will be that will really minimize pain, if not eliminated, and it's something you can hear, and how people talk about it, what kinds of expectations or hopes or ideas or images we have in our head about a relationship. The problem with this that so many wisdom traditions have told us over and over again, and it's a hard thing to learn, and I'm not at someone who has this learned at all, is that pain is a part of life. Pain is a part of love. Pain is a part of how we grow and learn. And pain is not the enemy. Pain is not something you can get rid of. Pain is part of the process of how love deepens. Pain is part of the process of how love is made real. And so it's a really hard thing to imagine that the love we most need will necessarily involve elements of pain and suffering, because to be alive and to experience how profound and beautiful and uplifting love is, there's an element of pain that comes with it in a world that's impermanent and mortal, that's part of it. We lose people. Some people come into our lives for a season for such deep reasons, but the relationship doesn't last forever, and we think, Well, that was a failed relationship. And once I get to the one that's lasting and didn't end in a divorce or a conflict or a breakup or a hard learning lesson, then, then I'll be in the real love.

Love is there. It may be true that you come to a relationship that's relatively healthier and Stabler than maybe previous ones, right? But that doesn't mean that every Mo, every relationship that we've had, that we learn from, that we grow through, wasn't a process of love. We have to think of the opportunity to exist and be real and experience everything we experience as the outpouring of divine love. That's hard to think about it that way, because we think, Well, you know, it's only when I get to some ideal state that that love is real. Well, that's the same thing on number two, which is that we think love will eliminate loneliness, but actually in many cases, love is meant to amplify the feeling of being alone apart an individual. In many ways, our deepest and most powerful, most valuable relationships will be those that highlight, amplify, draw out what makes us absolutely different from someone else. It's as though other people provide us with the only means we can have, in some cases, to discover parts of ourselves that are truly unique, because it's the contrast. It's the saying, I'm really not like you in this this in this way. Well, that could be the source of conflict and drama and maybe a breakup. But for many of us, we also grow to appreciate the way in which other human beings help us draw things out of ourselves that make us other, that make us unique, that make that set us apart. So apartness and togetherness have this dance that they do with each other, and it's really hard if we live loneliness is painful. Being alone is painful, being a part is painful, being different or other is often painful. And so one of the things that we put onto love is it'll eliminate loneliness. It'll eliminate the feeling of having to be a part or other, when actually, in many ways, the purpose of love is to draw us into a deeper sense of our uniqueness and apartness.

In bhakti, there is a way in which Krishna and Radha representing something like the divine yin and yang, right? They they go through phases of being together and fused and then pulled apart, and in many ways, in many texts that said that their love is stronger when they are a part that the ache, that the pangs of like love and loneliness and separation amplify the love and so one of the things that we unfairly do to ourselves is we think that there's the love part, the union Part. This is the same thing for people who have, you know, in spirituality, we think, well, oneness is the final goal, without considering that. You know, there, there could be a way in which our apartness, our separateness, is fundamental and somehow necessary for the experience of oneness. In. It to exist. So we think, well, I'll be I'll be really happy once I shed the illusion of my individual identity and just merge with God or something like that. But in many spiritual traditions, that's actually not the point. The point is to be an individual and to individuate as a spiritual being who can experience some fusion with the divine while remaining apart at the exact same time. So it's kind of a paradox. But the thing is, is that love is meant to amplify our apartness as much as it is to draw us together. And unless we hold that tension, Neptune especially, will be a planet, when involved with love that will constantly make us feel frustrated the elimination of complexity. Well, we don't like that life is complex, that it's not black and white, that it's not easy or simple, and that people and emotions and relationships are complicated, that this world is complicated, which is another reason why the fantasy of oneness is so appealing. Just forget all of the complexity. You know, it's just we're all just one. And let me tell you, there's the an equivalent, which is that sometimes when I'm really stressed out, there's a lot of things going on in my head, I just need to take some deep breaths and collapse all of the chaos into a simple thing, like the oneness of my breath. So there's a way in which we know that this is true, that oneness and fusion eliminate the problems and chaos of complexity, yeah, but chaos also in chaos, complexity, distinction, diversity, separation, being pulled apart, that also enhances the ability to Need desire and feel the bliss of the oneness the two go together in there's a saying in Indian philosophy called a chin to beta, beta tattva, which means inconceivable, simultaneous oneness and duality. It's like the two things are both real. Neptune will almost always tend to favor the fusion, and then the separation part becomes the source of discomfort or irritation or a sense of let down or disillusionment. But if we recognize complexity overwhelm diversity, these things are not the enemies of oneness and bliss. They are a part of the fabric of how that those states of satisfaction come to be. They're intimately woven together. They're not apart, even though it seems like they are. So one of the things that we put on to love or anything we long for or desire for, is that if I realize this dream or this hope or this aspiration, it will eliminate the feeling that things are complicated. You know, it's like the relationship status on Facebook. Remember that one? It's complicated, right? And everyone you know, you look at that and you go, Oh, I feel bad for that person. It's not good to be in a complicated state. Well, you know, sorry to break it to you. But like for all of us, when I spend so much time talking to human beings about their lives, over the years, I've realized that we, as much as we love to say, Oh, I don't like chaos. I don't like things being complicated. Oh, yes, you do, and I do too, and we all do because we create complexity in our lives, because it is part of how we weave into the most ecstatic states of union. We love the chaos, the chaos loves us, right? And the oneness and chaos dance together. It's not I'm not saying that you have to go out and be chaotic on purpose, or be destructive or fill your life with complications and stress. I'm just saying thinking that the divine ideal state will eliminate complexity is to not have understood the divinity of complexity, the elimination of death. Of course, another fantasy that we have, this will give me something that lasts forever, if, if we project that onto a career, a legacy, fame, love, money, if we project that onto anything, one of the things that we have forgotten, most basically, is that we're a spirit, soul that lives on after death, and we don't need anything to carry us into eternity, because we are already eternal. And so some of just a very basic thing that happens is we, we. We project our eternal nature because we've forgotten who we are. We project it onto things that we long for or hope for that will bring us back in touch with something that is so fundamental and basic that all we have to do is get back in touch with it, and then paradoxically, the the real, the reality that all things will die, a relationship will die, a person that I love will die, or I will die and leave them. That becomes part of what makes love so sweet, the bitterness and the sweetness go together. And we understand that when we don't project eternity outside of the eternal nature of who we are, onto things we hope or long for, we need to be very careful of that tendency. Again, not that we can't have a really fantastic romantic imagination, that we can't have a rich fantasy life. It's not that, it's. About recognizing that we don't need saving, right? We're already saved, right? We're and it's that. It's that simple, really. It's just kind of like, I don't need this thing to save me. I'm going to long for this without mistaking this for salvation, because I nothing is at stake, right? When we take that attitude, paradoxically, the most dramatic, rich, amazing, fantastical things can become realer to us because they're coming from an understanding of our own true nature. And number five is the elimination of boredom. I'm not kidding when I say that Neptune comes up frequently in charts, when people feel bored or dissatisfied or restless, there's just a feeling of like, I want something more. There's there has to be something more than this. And interestingly, like, I remember when I was a kid, I used to hate this. My mom, I would go, I'm bored. My mom would say, Well, you have a choice. You can either decide to be bored or be a boring person, or you can choose to be imaginative and creative and find something interesting to do. That's your choice. And I would just, it would drive me nuts, because I would be like, some things, some days are just boring. There's no, there's no option or choice that like makes sense. You know, I get so madder to be like, like she was denying the existence of boredom or something, but it's the funny thing is, I'm sure all of you at some point had that conversation with your parents, but there is a way in which we need to be able to accept boredom. By boredom, I don't mean that life is boring. I mean that life can be boring. And by that, I guess we just mean that there's a lot of mundane things we do. There's a lot of brushing of teeth, there's a lot of eating of food, preparing of food, there's a lot of sleeping, there's a lot of tooting and going to the bathroom. You know, it's just a lot of very basic things that are not that exciting. And yet, if we recognize that there is, there's some need that like, one of the things that i i as a kid, I used to be so fascinated by, was how peaceful and accepting and interesting and almost like in love with basic daily things. My grandmother was, man, I would just be like, how is she so possible, so interested in something as basic as, like dinner or, like some, some stupid basic thing that, to me, was not exciting. It was so every day. And as I get older, I'm starting to realize that one of the things that often had, not for everybody, but it often happens when people age, is that they find more joy in simple, basic, everyday things like the weather. Oh, my God. I know it sounds crazy, because it's like, Isn't it the most boring thing in the world when people talk about the weather? But there's also a way in which we talk about very basic, mundane things. The closer we get to realizing how rich and dense and like full of life. And like for my grandmother, there was so much in the imagination, in her imagination around very basic things, like the fly problem in the kitchen, you know, and or the what the weather's going to do this week. And she lived out in the country, it was kind of like, to me, like simple, and that was my very arrogant, childlike way of looking at her. So she's simple. She lives in the country, and I look at it now, and I go, No, she had there was so much there in such simple things. And boredom is often like there's an opportunity, like a gateway in boredom, to enter into the kind of heaven in the grain of sand mentality. So anyway, I'll leave it here. I won't keep going on and on. But the point, I guess, on this last one, is that life has to be ordinary. If there's any opportunity for us to find those wardrobes and step into Narnia, there has to be a normal, boring, everyday closet filled with stupid, stupid coats for us to walk through and find some magical world on the other side, there has to be a threshold between things for us to move across them for the sensational, most other worldly, imaginative, profound things we long for to be real, there has to be a very real way that we appreciate in which things aren't that way. You know, again, the philosophical tradition I have found that constantly talks about these dichotomies and getting to know and appreciate their interconnectedness has been the study of the Tao Te Ching and Taoism in general, because it's just rich with the talk about opposites, anyway, take or leave, whatever works for you from this talk today, I hope that it gives us some deeper insights for a day in which we often think about love and how shallow it is, or, you know, how beautiful it is, or a lot of interesting experiences that people have. On Valentine's Day. So I hope this gave you something good and positive to think about, and with that, I will leave you now, and we'll come back on Monday for more. Take it easy. Bye.