The Reason We Need So Much Pisces Energy Right Now

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today we're going to talk about Pisces. We're going to take a deep dive into the evolutionary signatures of the sign of Pisces, what it means when we're going through a Pisces season, not just in terms of what happens, but why it happens.

This is something that astrologers have been talking about for a very long time, but has been illuminated, I think, by several schools of astrology. Recently, Jeffrey Wolf Green, Steven Forrest, the evolutionary schools of astrology, I think, have done a really nice job talking about, why does a soul need a certain kind of karmic experience? Why does a soul need to experience things, for example, that are coming through the filter of Pisces.

We've done this recently with our Eclipse in Virgo, with our Eclipse in Aquarius, with the Saturn Neptune conjunction in Pisces. And I sort of tried to plumb the depths of the evolutionary perspective on these signs and give us some deeper sense of the reason behind it. I'm doing a lot of that work lately. It feels like maybe it's Saturn Neptune in the air, but I've been enjoying it, and so I hope that you will too.

One of the reasons this comes to my mind right now, that this is so important, is I was sitting here going, like, God, if it didn't feel like we were just about done with Pisces, you know, like we've had Saturn in Pisces for two and a half years. Neptune there for God, 14 years, you know. And now we, as soon as it feels like these two major slow moving planets are exiting the sign, nope, you get a Mercury Retrograde in that sign. You get to stay there for a long time, debilitated north node still moving through that sign. And hey, Mars is going to enter that sign right now as the host of the Saturn Neptune dynamic, you know?

So something in me said, You know what? It might be a good time, because we still have, I guess, one almost like, what do they call it an encore? Like Pisces went, they the band went off stage, and we were all like, no, please come back. We need more Pisces experience. So let's pause and ask—I mean, this serves a couple of purposes.

One, it can help us with Mars. It can help us with the ongoing Mercury Retrograde, and its kind of final phases. It can help us with the final moments of the North Node there. It can also help us reflect on Saturn and Neptune having left and been there for a long time. So it feels like a good time to reflect on the deeper meaning of Pisces. Why do we have these kinds of experiences? What are they doing for the soul? And I'm going to draw on, as I have been, the work of Jeffrey Wolf Green, Steven Forrest.

You might be asking yourself the question like, why is Adam suddenly throw back to his evolutionary astrology roots? There's actually a reason for it. I'm, as you guys know, I'm just finishing a book that I wrote called The Oracle Speaks. And I was so fortunate, and when I reached out to some astrologers colleagues to ask if they might read the book and offer a blurb for it, Steven Forrest, who I reached out to, very generously offered to write a foreword for my book.

And so he wrote a beautiful, very honoring foreword for my new book. I was so—it was just so beautiful, and it meant so much to me, because although we're of different schools of astrology, he just the way he practices his craft as a storyteller, the depth and spiritual focus he brings to astrology have always been one of the, you know, one of, like an elder, something like that, like a role model, someone that I really look up to as an astrologer.

And so, of course, it has had me reflecting on my evolutionary roots and re-spending time with some of his books, with some of Jeffrey Wolf Green's work. Another friend of mine named Ari Moshe Wolfe has been reading my book as well, and we've been kind of conversing. So I've just been in a bit of an evolutionary headspace thinking about these things. Anyway. Just a little background, in case people are wondering, like, why are we—

The other thing I will say very honestly is that all of these evolutionary perspectives on the signs are, in a way, they're not out of line with the history of astrology and the meanings of the signs. In fact, I think they're a very faithful representation of them. I may not use the north and south node techniques or the Pluto and Pluto polarity point techniques of evolutionary astrology, but I don't think that they're missing when it comes to this school's ability to talk about the signs on a level of evolutionary significance that I still deeply resonate with, even though I'm a Hellenistic astrologer.

Anyway, all that being said, before we get into it today, remember to like and subscribe. That was a long intro, and you can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website NightlightAstrology.com.

A couple of brief promotions for the day. Just want to make you aware of some things that are happening here. So head to the events page and you're going to go to the immersive retreat. Thankfully, everything is intact for our Mexico retreat. After some drama that was taking place in Mexico, we kind of had our eye monitoring the situation, and have been in contact with the retreat center and their staff, and they've been just lovely and telling us what's been happening on the ground, but everything's safe and stable there as of the time of making this after some unrest. So we're going to continue with our retreat.

You know, it's interesting because not to overly romanticize it, but in the ancient world, a pilgrimage to go see an Oracle could be a very treacherous, long term journey. Something about the events that happened recently made me realize that just having a little something at stake in making a journey like this to study the art of divination and to essentially go on a retreat that's about connecting with an Oracle, it suddenly took on a lot deeper meaning for me. You know, obviously we'll keep our eye on things. If anything else changes, we'll keep that in mind too. But just so you know, the retreats open, we still have some spots available. It's taking place in June. So check that out.

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The other thing is, we have—where am I—live talks. So the last thing I need to promote is the talk coming up on March 12, on the first house. That's going to be a deep exploration of the topic of dharma, what that means and why the first house is anything but just like a superficial persona. So if you can't attend that talk live, then you get the recording.

Oh, and you know what I almost forgot? I'm sorry today is a long intro. The other thing to remember is that if you're in Minneapolis, we have an event happening this Friday night, a time to connect and heal and share and meditate in Minneapolis, here at the New City Center, Grapevine Collective, six to 8:30pm Friday night, come out and join us. It's free, just RSVP and let us know you're coming. Hope to see you guys there and have a nice meditation and sharing session. Yeah, I think we need a little time like this. If you're local here around the Twin Cities, it's been a lot this winter. So anyway, okay, that's it all right.

Now, let's turn our attention to the real time clock and sort out this Piscean marsh. It's like a soupy, soupy puddle. So the reason, again, that I'm bringing this to our attention is, in case you thought Pisces, life in the realm of Pisces was over, you are sorely mistaken. We have Mars just entering Pisces. North Node is in Pisces, Sun is in Pisces, Mercury Retrograde is taking place in Pisces. Venus is culminating in her exaltation in Pisces.

Now this is coming on the heels of a lunar eclipse in Virgo yesterday, and Pisces is also the polarity point. The ruler of the eclipse is the Mercury Retrograde in Pisces. So even though Saturn and Neptune got out, it feels like, oh, wow, that house has had a lot of attention for a long time. The band has come back on stage for one last jam session.

So again, the very basic purpose of today's talk is to explore some of the deeper evolutionary meanings of the sign of Pisces. What we mean by that, very simply, is, what does this sign tell us about not just what happens, but why it happens for the soul, for its evolutionary journey across many lifetimes. Now, you kind of have to believe in that kind of stuff to really kind of resonate with the evolutionary perspective.

That evolutionary perspective is not new. It's been around for 1000s of years, the belief that the soul is transmigrating in an evolutionary enlightenment kind of journey. Yeah, that's a part of astrology, always has been. I don't think there's anything in this talk, even though a lot of it is drawn from the work of Jeffrey Wolf Green, Steven Forrest and those schools, that deviates very much at all from the meaning of the sign of Pisces from the dawn of Hellenistic astrology.

Even that does not necessarily mean the techniques are the same, again, as I was saying earlier, the modern school of evolutionary astrology has specific uses of the nodes of the moon that aren't identical to Hellenistic use of Pluto and Pluto polarity point—not identical. But this content today is, I think, universal. I don't have any issues with these takes on the sign of Pisces, which I first learned as an evolutionary astrologer, and only confirmed and understood more deeply when I started studying ancient dignities and why Venus was exalted here, why Jupiter's feminine rulership was here and so on.

So anyway, let's get into it. What we're really talking about is, why do we need these kinds of experiences? What was Saturn and Neptune in Pisces really about? Think about the whole sign/house in your birth chart, if you need to connect this to a more practical sphere of your life. But as we now are faced with another, you know, at least another month plus of Pisces experience before the node changes sign, we have the North Node in Pisces all the way till August. So what is this about?

Well, from the evolutionary perspective, there are a number of things that I have on my list to talk about today. First of all, remember we talked about Virgo. We talked about Virgo sort of becoming an adult, like the initiation of moving from youth into adulthood and being like, I need to be a responsible member of a society. You have to be a responsible member of the S word, and you have to show up with skills and abilities. You measure your worth in some ways, in terms of how responsible a contributor you are to the world and so forth.

So we talked about Virgo at length. The opposite side of that, the very last sign of the zodiac, is very much about the dissolution of the identity that you forged in the world. We're talking about a sign at the end of a cycle, a never ending cycle, by the way. So don't think when we talk about Pisces, I don't want people to mistake what I'm saying for there being some kind of literal, linear progression through the signs, like Pisces is more enlightened than Aries because it's the last sign. It is a recurring, never ending, eternal cycle, like yin and yang in the circle, okay.

But from the standpoint of a kind of developmental story through the Zodiac that we tell as a metaphor, we're at the point of the dissolution of the whole cycle and the restarting of a new cycle. So that's a signature in Pisces that often relates to the surrender of identity, the surrender of worldly conditions that we've become identified with, the surrender of a sense of anything in this world being final. And instead, there's a deep awareness in the sign of Pisces that everything is impermanent, everything is in flux. And there is this higher purpose to life, which is God-realization, enlightenment, spiritual evolution, whatever you want to call it.

I was giving a talk on the eclipse and why eclipses exist. And I said, for ancient philosophers, everything was happening under this broad umbrella of the soul evolving. Everything, like you know me taking Hilda on a walk, is a local experience that's happening in time space, in a particular body in a particular lifetime, that has its own relative truth and subjective core and its reasons for existing in a matrix of related events that are here and local, but they're all kind of camped under this bigger umbrella of spiritual evolution.

Now that's a very clear idea in ancient philosophy. But if you think about that ultimate banner of spiritual evolution, in many ways, the sign of Pisces can represent that. In terms of the Zodiac, we're talking about a Jupiter ruled sign. Jupiter was the planet of purpose and meaning. What is the meaning of life? It's God-realization. From this standpoint, it's enlightenment. It's the process of the soul liberating itself from falsehoods or illusions.

So this sign has to do with the identification of my will with Thine. Right, not my will, but Thine. But there's a paradoxical way in which that can be very empowering. We learn to flow with the Tao in this sign because we align our will with something bigger. We align our ego with something bigger. So it's not killing the ego in this sign—some people think about death of the ego—but it's merging, surrendering, becoming more deeply identified, on the level of will and identity, with the transcendent.

And that is a kind of depersonalization. It's not annihilating who you are as an individual, but it's expanding who you are to something beyond separate self. And this is kind of a culminating space from the evolutionary perspective. Now, again, don't take that literally. It doesn't mean if you have a bunch of Pisces energy, that you're better than Sally, you know? So, anyway, okay.

So part two, what does it mean? What does it actually mean to surrender, dissolve, relinquish the ego? Some people have ideas about this that are really punitive, like the ego is bad. Well, the ego, the ego just means "I." That's what the word means. It means I. So it's a subjective center of identity. The idea, if it's very basic, and I'm sure most of you know this, so I'm probably just preaching to the choir, it's like, in this lifetime, my subjective center of consciousness in this body with this personality and this temperament, in the life circumstances I have, is not ultimate or final. It was something different in a previous lifetime. It will be something different in a future lifetime.

All we mean by ego decentering, or the ego as the ultimate organizing principle, is that the idea that that is the concrete, absolute center of reality is loosened. Its hold as a kind of illusion, an illusion of permanence and fixity, is being loosened. That doesn't mean the ego stops existing. It means it's decentralized. It means its power to be an ultimate, absolute organizing principle is seen through as an illusion.

I think a lot of people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. We've all probably—a reason we're into astrology is because we've had an experience that this ego in this body is temporary, sacred, beautiful, not like something that needs to be chucked out or killed, you know, but not ultimate. So this is a sign, though, that continues and perpetuates the decentralization. And it's deep. It's deep, deep, deep, right? If you think, Oh, I'm not—my ego is decentered. Is it? But is it, you know? So it's like for myself, that's why I sit on this couch every day. And if you join me for morning meditations, this couch is the part of my day that is dedicated to handing the ultimate organizing principle back over to God, to divinity, to the Goddess, to higher self, whatever we call it.

Meditation is one way. There's many, right, that we have of saying, No, my ego exists, but it's actually a servant to a higher organizing principle that's at work in my life. That's an ongoing act of ego death. But, you know, death is so extreme. It's like, why does this language sound like it's from a fucking Game of Thrones episode, you know? Like, look, I'm gonna kill the king. He's a false Lord. Well, I mean, you know, if you've got a really huge ego, then maybe. But, and we've all had moments where our ego is just like, Wow, you're a tyrant. But mostly this sign just has to do with that gradual—it's like water gradually washing away the edges of hard rocks.

The idea that we hold that is so common because it's scary. It's scary to be alive. We need something that gives us a center or a sense of stability. "I self" is one such idea, but it's actually a servant, in a temporary, mortal, ecological body and framework, of a higher self, a higher purpose, a higher organizing principle. And Pisces is the sign whose work it is to continually make us aware of that and try to gently nudge us in that direction. Actually, the Infinite is organizing, you know.

But what happens as this decentering is taking place in our life is that you may lose touch with former ambitions. There may be a certain kind of disillusionment around worldly definitions of success, a spiritual kind of longing for that higher intelligence that may actually need to disrupt some ordinary sphere of life where more mundane organizing principles have held power, and in an overwhelming sense, at times like this, a sense of "isn't really who I am" that grows in strength because the sign is trying to actively help us surrender to this higher power.

This is, by the way, why when we go looking for this higher power, it's very easy to misidentify the higher power. When we don't know where to find it, or we don't know what it is, the longing can take us in the direction of addiction or illusion or intoxication or idealism, romanticism, projections, fantasies. All of those things are just sort of like misdirections of the right impulse to seek something bigger as a container and organizing principle for the experience of being alive in a kind of vulnerable state, you know?

So this is why we have a sign that also teaches us compassion. Because if you can see that this is the case, as I just said, then you can see that people are doing their best to try to find this. Sometimes we think it'll save us—an ideology or a religion or a love relationship or alcohol or whatever. And when we put everything into something thinking, "This is the higher thing," it's often outside of ourselves. Often those things can become illusory, like intoxicants.

This is why a Jupiter ruled sign in Pisces, just like Sagittarius, can become very dogmatic. You wouldn't think of Piscean people as being dogmatic, but to whatever extent we've externalized this sense of higher organizing stability, sanity, authority, guidance, direction into a relationship or into the bottle or into whatever it is, it's often the extent to which we will eventually have to be stripped of that illusion later, and stripped of some sense of maybe dogma or fanaticism or addictive, compulsive attachment, right?

So it's—all the water signs in Indian astrology are associated with moksha, which means liberation, right, from karma. So this is a sign that's about, you know, pointing us toward source and away from illusions that pose. But the compassion is key, because the things that pose are usually coming from the right space. They're just misapplications of the desire for something higher to guide and direct our lives. That romantic longing, in other words, rightly directed, is a romantic longing for the soul, for God, for divinity, for the heart, which can easily extend into the world and easily extend into relationships and to the living of a life, but not if we put the cart before the horse.

So now, one of Jeffrey Wolf Green's central metaphors that he uses to describe the sign of Pisces and its evolutionary necessity is "the plunge into the infinite." So the soul occasionally has to remember that it is a part of something boundless and infinitely real and new, which is why I was mentioning eclipses, for example, and I was talking about how eclipses have to disrupt a part of us that has found something comfortable, that's like, Oh, this is an operative truth or set of conditions that makes me feel happy and secure and stable. But if it gets stagnant and prevents us from continuing to stay open to and move in the ever evolving infinite field of love and truth, then something will disrupt the status quo of that system. Ecologically, karmically, Pisces is very similar in terms of its disruptiveness.

This is, you know, in modern astrology, this is, I think, one of the interesting and not so bad reasons. I mean, obviously, as a traditional astrologer, I don't like conflating signs with houses, but you can understand why the 12th house would be conflated with Pisces. In this perspective, the evolutionary demand in this sign is one of faith that something has come in to take away your sense of control or certainty or understanding, and so it's a test of faith that in what feels like the muddledness or overwhelm or mist or fog—all things that we also end up associating with Neptune, right—that there is some feeling of your way through the darkness, the overwhelm.

There is always a moment in the evolutionary process of the soul where, birth canal, going through a birth canal means going through constrictive, contractive, dark places where you can't see where you're going and you don't understand, you don't have the big picture. And Pisces, bizarrely, is a sign that often implies this very contractive sense of confusion or loss of direction or overwhelm, and it can feel like you're trapped and without bearing and without direction.

And that's a really interesting thing, because typically the Jupiter ruled signs, because Jupiter and Saturn are natural opposites in the language of ancient astrology, the Jupiter ruled signs have a subtle, implicit battle with Saturn. Sagittarius, too, but for totally different reasons. That's because in the language of ancient astrology, if you study the dignities, you're going to see that anytime you're dealing with a Jupiter ruled place, or a Jupiter ruled thing, it has built into it the contractive opposite of Saturn.

So the point is that the contraction of Pisces that's present here in a Jupiter ruled sign that tends to be more about faith and buoyancy and direction—loss of faith is darkness, is confusion, is overwhelm, is a crisis of direction or guidance, right? But these are mystical openings. These are mystical passages that tend to be redemptive because they are, in the end, a Jupiter-Venus ruled sign, that tend to lead to things that save or uplift or redeem or guide us through the contracted period.

This is a sign that's on the precipice of the moment of birth. So that birth canal in Pisces is not quite like the deep, dark winter of Saturn in, you know, like Capricorn or something like that, or Scorpio going into the darkness. Those signs are more about the loss, the death, the mortality, the endings, the limits. This is a sign that is really about the process of moving up, out, and through contractive space into expansion.

Now for most of us, what we don't realize is that our ego is actually kind of a dark, restrictive place, because it's very limited in its capacity to see ultimate reality. Most of us end up decentering the ego and putting it into the role of a beautiful friend, a beautiful servant. Like, when I think of myself, when I think of Adam, I'm like, Well, what a chap, you know, like, I'm my own friend, but I know what my role is in this lifetime. I really do. Not that I perform it well. My ego doesn't try to take over. It does all the time. But my role, Adam, is to serve, to serve this bigger thing that's happening for all souls, but also for my soul.

That's why I sit, that's why I provide free meditation every day. That's why I do this. That's why I love this, because I know that this higher truth is where my real happiness resides, is where my real heart resides. You know, so when we go through decentering experiences of the ego, they can be really heavy, because at first it almost feels like we're being told there's something wrong with us, or there's something to feel shame about.

There's a feeling of—this is why the sign is often talked about. Liz Greene talks about it frequently as a sign that brings up the juxtaposition between sinners and saints, or salvation and damnation. When you're discovering that your ego is living with the illusion that it is the ultimate organizing, stable, sane center of your life, and when that starts being shown to you as untrue, and this bigger context appears, sometimes the very first thing the ego's very first reaction is to think, "There was something wrong with me. There's something bad about me." And that's where all of the heavy stuff about ego death comes in. It's not graduated from a paradigm of shame and guilt and damnation and sin and original sin and all these bad trips that aren't really true anyway.

So we have identity implosions, mystical openings, psychological confusions, periods of deep existential uncertainty—all actually very Saturnian. But this sign does tend to deliver us from them. That's the kind of process that the sign points to, very different than being led into contractive spaces out of expansive spaces. You know, it's like it's different when fall comes and the abundance is dropped, and it's more about emptying a cup. This sign is actually about filling your cup, but it kind of goes through a process of being empty too. That's what can be so confusing about the sign, it's so sort of angsty.

But anyway, the crises are not punishments. They're initiations into a larger field of consciousness, into a higher organizing principle that your ego can actually find its sanctification in, its reason for existing, its total special beautifulness. You know, well, there's a few evolutionary responses to this sign that Jeffrey Wolf Green talks about.

One he talks about as "surrendering to the ocean." And this is something that comes—obviously, I know he was someone who read a lot of Vedic philosophy. I think he might have even had a Vedic guru at one point. I don't know the whole story, but the surrender to the ocean would be the ego seeing itself as ultimately a temporary part of, and servant of, the One. That does not eliminate individuality. Does not have to eliminate, you know, individual beings or diversity. But it is a recognition that there is this one thing, this one heart, this one love, that we're all part of.

And the evolutionary response, ideally, is to sort of consciously become more identified, surrendering of the will, finding of the will, finding of the way in this oneness that can lead, actively in this sign, to greater emphasis on devotion, meditation, contemplation, living as a vessel for something larger, being more in touch with what inspires and guides on a divine or transcendent level.

The individual having societalized itself is now recognizing that it's good to be a contributing member of a community, but even bigger than that, is to be a contributing member of infinity, you know? And that larger sense has to be coupled with the local sense. And this is why conversations about bypassing are almost always very predictable and somewhat ignorant, to be honest, because the work of being a local contributing member of anything is really only as good as the level of surrender and service that you've found to your spirit soul.

In other words, active civic service without spiritual practice is more commonly talked about as the real bypassing. I mean, most traditions say that's actually harder, because most people find action in the world easier than spiritual practice. But you need both, is the point. And being of service without having a spiritual practice of surrender to this transmigratory, multiple lifetime process that your soul is going through, identifying with that as the larger reality, is actually typically more problematic for people than, you know, bypassing the material level of commitment or contribution because of being overly involved with spiritual practice.

So but the point is still that right action in the world, positive contributions from a space of dharma, which is very Virgo, needs an equal emphasis on that which is transcendent, because this world will pass away. All empires will pass away. The sun will burn out, the Earth will die. And all of it, from the standpoint of eternity, will have been a bubble rippling up to the top of a river and popping. And it will be as beautiful and simple as that. Not that it is evidence of meaninglessness. That is evidence of a beauty and a simplicity that is so vast and so tremendous that it should inspire within us the deepest level of surrender, trust, and faith.

And also, at the bottom of that is all of the motivation we need in the world to do something useful with this lifetime. Because why wouldn't we? If that's what life is, then we have all the impetus in the world to be active on part of beauty and peace. Because what else is there that's actually worth anything but love and beauty and peace and communion. But these are Pisces-Virgo dynamics. You can feel them as I'm talking about them. I hope.

Resistance to dissolution is the other tendency. So when the soul resists this higher orientation, escapism becomes the substitute. And that will often be escapism, fantasy, romanticism, rose colored glasses, illusions that inflate to compensate for the insecurity of losing the ego. Fantasy to replace a faith path. Escapism or intoxication as a substitute for the actual work and commitment to transcendence. One may cling to a kind of inflated, distorted sense of who they are. Savior complexes, victim narratives, addiction, avoidance, dissociation, denial. All of these things can come up in this sign as ways of having to avoid the deeper work of surrender.

And if anyone tells you it isn't a kind of work for most of us, it is. Grace is always at work in the sign of Pisces. Grace is always at work in the universe, which means, if we make two steps of effort, the universe gives grace by taking us 10 steps when we only made two on our own. But don't get it twisted. Let's not cheapen grace here. If you don't take even a half a step, the universe can't bring you the five. If you don't take the two steps, it can't bring you the 10. We have to make some effort, you know.

And effort is not an indication that there's something bad or wrong about you existing. Right. Effort has to do with the recognition that I am a participating member of divinity. I'm part of the cast of this light, which means I have to take up the burden of learning and growing and evolving. I have to put my money where my mouth is, walk my talk, not because I'm messed up, but because this truth is worth sacrificing for. That's it, right?

Both of these signs, Virgo and Pisces, have so much to do with willing sacrifice. The shadows, of course, could be martyrdom or self denial, or, you know, subservience or servitude, or slavery, or intoxication or addiction. Yes, you can get lost in all of that stuff. But a little effort is required, and then grace carries us. We show the smallest iota.

In fact, there's a poem that when I grew up as a kid I really loved. My dad used to read it to me. It's called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And in this text, the Mariner goes through this whole ordeal, and he's basically, he gets cursed by his shipmates, and then all these gnarly bad things happen. And he's sitting there at the end, and he's just like, completely screwed, and he's on the deck of the ship, and everyone on the ship was killed by an angel of death, and he's looking out at the dark night of the ocean, and like everyone's dead, it's really gnarly. And he sees these water snakes swimming in the moonlight and starlight. And these are like kind of dark underworld creatures, but the way the light catches them, he just thinks to himself, that's beautiful. He appreciates. He takes a moment to be appreciative, even though he's basically fucked. And then all of a sudden, because of that simple act of appreciating beauty in the midst of darkness, simple gratitude, simple faith, everything changes. All of the darkness transforms. And it's amazing, because the whole story of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in many ways about the little mattering a lot more than we think—the little things.

So in this sign there is this like, Oh, my God, it's too hard. And that's a real thing that we all deal with. It's like it's hard to cope, it's hard to exist, it's hard to evolve, it's hard to have faith. It's hard to keep going. But you know, this sign tends to reward pure, faithful efforts to surrender, to trust, to have hope and to move forward despite darkness, despite difficulty. It rewards you if, even if you have been a victim of terrible people or forces. It rewards when you forgive and try to move forward, even just a little.

That doesn't mean you have to like people who hurt you, but it says deep in your heart, you know that people who do stuff like that are suffering, and you could take a moment to acknowledge that even as you heal and hurt from hurt and trauma. It's little things like that in this sign that show us that we're placing our faith in something bigger. It's the little things that say I'm suffering, but I'm going to choose to have faith despite the fact that my circumstances feel very overwhelming to me, and I'm going to stay very humble and faithful.

This sign can feel so heavy because of the feeling that you're flooded by circumstances that are very overwhelming and sometimes feel very unfair. And yet, if you fall into addiction, avoidance, dissociation, denial, savior or victim narratives, etc, etc, etc, as ways of coping with or dealing with things, there's a downward spiral, and it gets pretty wild.

Now I say this as someone who also watched my father, who has a good amount of Piscean planets in his chart, go down a pretty dark downward spiral, because he just had a really hard time not turning his story into a "woe is me" kind of thing. I think it's really hard to talk about this, and he's good now, but it took him a long time. I just think it's really hard to talk about this, because victimhood is real. It's not an illusion. In fact, I can't stand those new age narratives that are like, Yeah, you know, your victimhood is a total illusion. Be empowered. It's not that simple. You know, healing is not that simple. But faith heals.

And faith is sort of like saying, look, it is real that bad things have happened. It is also equally real that I am having faith in some higher direction or purpose or meaning for my life, and that ultimately, I am safe, held, loved. Nothing is at stake in eternity. My life is being guided. Darkness exists for a reason I don't understand. I can trust that healing will come to me. I can trust that my life is purposeful. I don't have to run or escape or, you know, fall into a state of letting my complaints and my problems overwhelm me. But it's a battle in this sign to wrestle light from darkness. And ultimately, that is why this sign is kind of the ultimate "fall on your knees" sign.

It is hard to fall on our knees, because for a lot of us, falling on our knees suggests submitting myself to an authority that I'm not sure I can trust. And the authority, however, is our own Higher Self. It is our own soul. It is not just some external figure, an old man in the sky. Surrendering to that is surrendering to the strongest, most beautiful, heart-centered, compassionate, forgiving, graceful part of who we are, as much as it is a part of what is real overall. A tremendous act of faith in this sign is to find that during times where you just feel screwed.

Now there's also a weird way in which this sign points to archetypal identification. This is something Liz Greene wrote about in her book on Neptune. This is something Jeffrey Wolf Green talks about as well, but I think most famously, Liz Greene talked about this because it's a sign that's been associated with Neptune in the modern take. I think it's there even in the traditional take, for different reasons. I won't get into all of that.

But the basic idea here is that the sign points to the tendency to get overly identified with things in the collective, the movements, the zeitgeist. This has a tendency, in other words, the sign does, of getting lost in projections, fantasies and collective themes or trends that are sometimes very subtle and hard to see. And the over-identification with collective storylines tends to be in terms of what will heal or save us in some mundane sense, or what is the source of the problem in some mundane sense.

And this is problematic because, from the standpoint of the ultimate reality of Pisces, it's divinity, it's love, it's the heart, it's the soul that is real and that saves. And the problem for everyone and everything that potentially keeps us from that is ignorance and illusion. That we think that temporary things that are always fluctuating in their states, if we grab hold of one of them, will fulfill us. That's the basic source of illusion, desire, fear, aversion, you know, hatred, greed, jealousy. All these things that burn in us, the source of suffering talked about in Buddhism, right? These are all rooted in, hey, as I'm having experiences, you know, what if I have enough money, if I have enough popularity, if I have enough power, if I get the right relationships, you know, if I attain these things, if I get this kind of mastery, if I just stay away from this or that. All of these kinds of stories that we have about desires and aversions that guide our sense of what will provide us a safe, happy existence—those are the illusions. Those are the basic illusions.

And the basic truth that saves is you are a heart. You are a spirit, soul. Your beingness, your very consciousness is the seat of bliss, of truth, of love, etc. So Pisces wants us to see the clear problem of suffering and the clear solution, just like Buddhists describe, or Yogis describe. All these ancient traditions basically describe it in the same way, you know.

But what can happen is that, in the sign of Pisces, we can get glommed on to almost like misappropriations of the problem and the solution that exists in temporary settings. So let me give you a simple example, not untrue, but only partially true. Is the idea that the problem is technology, or the problem is dissociation because of technology, or the problem is environmental decay, like lack of care for the earth. These are all truths, right? But people tend to say, like, that's the—they get, if I can identify the source of the problem, right? And it tends to be very collective, like, the problem for people, for humanity, is greed. And these are problems. So it's not like untrue, but we tend to think of it as the whole truth.

And then we think of the salvation as like, well, the salvation is, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to join Greenpeace and become an environmental activist. Maybe that's a really great thing to do, and it's not based on something that's untrue. But the point that Liz Greene makes so well, Jeffrey Wolf Green makes as well, is that, do you see how, if people replace this with the basic problem of suffering and the basic solution of spiritual life, that they're missing the much larger reality, where the problem of environmental decay and the problem of maybe a misuse of technology, or the problem of reductive empiricism and objectifying the world—those are real problems, but sometimes we, rather than seeing them as a manifestation of these more basic, universal issues and solutions, we treat them as though they're everything.

This is so common. So this projection and fantasy that, Hey, here's a temporary problem that I see in the world, and here's what I can see as the answer to that problem, have a way of replacing the spiritual process. Now, if they include the spiritual process, and you're also doing something to, you know, combat kids melting their brains from using Instagram at too early of an age, like that's not bad at all. But it is a problem if that quest and mission doesn't take place within this larger container. And for whatever reason, people in this sign in particular tend to get really heroic about a lot of the things that are only partial truths.

Does that—I hope that makes sense, because it's a little tricky to talk about, because, on the one hand, it might sound like you're saying that, well, spiritual things are more important than Greenpeace or something. It's not. That's not at all what we're saying. So hopefully that was communicated clearly enough. It's a tricky thing to explain.

Anyway, going on, the dreams, fantasies and illusions of this sign are really important because it's the imaginative faculty that bridges us to spirituality. For example, when most of us get into astrology, it's because we have noticed signs, omens, the Oracle speaking throughout the fabric of our lives. And you've had the ability to do that because you're an imaginative person. Fantasy is not wrong. Imagination is not wrong. But it's supposed to be a faculty that is always connecting us to and helping us in the process of shifting from ego-centered to source-centered, where the ego is just a contributing cast member in infinity, right?

But if the imagination is being used as a bridge to the infinite, thumbs up in Pisces. Fantastic art that facilitates that. Love and romance that facilitates that. Of course, romance and love with another soul can facilitate spiritual awakening. Art can facilitate. Dance can facilitate spiritual awakening. So all of the imaginative—this is the exaltation of Venus, right? All the imaginative dimensions of Pisces can awaken this, pointing us toward the infinite.

But when disconnected from that, then we're thinking that it's romance that saves, it's art that saves. But unless it has that higher context alone, it becomes quite hollow, it becomes quite shallow. It becomes the source of illusion rather than revelation. So a lot of the sign has to do with also recognizing where there is a healthy fantasy, a healthy romantic impulse, a healthy imaginative faculty that just need to be redirected to something that is serving a higher, spiritual end. And that's the same exact thing with the Greenpeace, right? It's like Greenpeace good, environmental stewardship good. Earth having a problem with humans not treating it right, accurate assessment, right? But how can you also marry that to a transcendental perspective?

That same shift has to also come into—do you mistakenly think that a painting is going to save your soul? It could. It could save your soul, but only, I guess, if you're aware that you have one, you know what I mean? You get what I mean. It's like—so there's, it's funny, because this sign is like, so imaginative. But there's also a very mundane level at which imagination and fantasy and art and romance exist in this world, disconnected from source.

I will tell you, let me just give you a simple example. And again, I told this story recently, but my mom and dad were, you know, kind of getting inundated by hippie counterculture in the 60s when they were teenagers. And they talked about how, you know, they had a strong faith path, right? They were like hippie Christians, and they at times felt like it was art and drugs for the sake of art and drugs. So there was something very imaginative, very creative, that drew them to a lot of the hippie scene, but the lack of spiritual context at times made it feel like nothing more than hedonism.

Yeah, similarly, I was invited at one point to go to Burning Man. Now I have—I know a lot of people have gone to Burning Man over the years, friends, personal friends, you know, I've never gone. So I'm not in any place to judge. And it's not something as vast as Burning Man. It's not just one thing. But one of the things that I initially had a hard time with in terms of, like, do I want to go, is I was like, I don't know, you know, like a lot of this seems like there's a very deep spiritual core to a lot of the intentions behind why people go. And the art that's there, and what it speaks to, is clearly pointed towards something transcendent. But there was enough of the feeling that there might just be a glorification of fantasy, art, romance happening here, disconnected and sort of hedonistic, that I felt really suspicious.

Now, again, for those of you who've been to Burning Man and love it and know the transcendent value of things that happened there, I don't mean any offense by this. I'm just trying to give an illustration of like, where I've come up against that edge myself. I remember when I was in high school, I was a part of the arts and theater department in my school, and I was someone who was studying philosophy and really starting to open myself up to different spiritual, like broader spiritual experiences outside the Christian faith, and I had a hard time connecting with people in the art community who just wanted to smoke pot and do art and didn't care about anything bigger happening in reality.

So it's the same thing in this sign. And again, I don't mean for any of this to sound judgmental, right? Because again, I would say, some of my best friends have gone to Burning Man and had very spiritual experiences. So please don't get me wrong. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be judging anything. But it's that idea that the energies of Pisces, disconnected from source, can be about things that are romantic and artistic and fantasy based, but being very mundane and actually the source of illusion and distraction. They don't appear that way, because they're sort of beautiful and sensually gratifying on some level, but there's some need to overcome this in this sign. So anyway, take that as you will. Again, a lot of these things are just like, oh, I need to—I'm gonna have to take a walk after this. This is tricky to explain, and I don't want to be misunderstood as a hater. But anyway.

Pisces also correlates to faith. We've talked about that a bunch, but it's not so much about systems of faith. I mean, any system of faith could be Piscean, but it's more about the trust and the surrender and the faith that comes through any kind of participation in a religious structure or tradition. In other words, it's experiential. In Pisces, it's not—that's another thing that happens where Pisces, the Piscean path, is truly mystical, in the sense that, you know, every institutional religion typically has a kind of controversial mystical sect, and the mystical sect is almost always about emphasizing experience over doctrines and institution. They can coexist. They don't have to cancel each other out. But the point is that this sign really says, like, where is the experience?

So I want to give you an example, because this might help. So as Saturn was going through Pisces, along with Neptune in my 11th house, place of community, groups, friends, I went through a lot of different faith experiences with Neptune in that house, you know. But most recently with Saturn, at the outset of Saturn in Pisces, I had left the bhakti yoga community that I was a part of. I had taken a name. So some of you knew me from that former name. And in that 11th house, as Saturn went through, I started thinking about what is my responsibility, very Saturnian, to the larger purpose and arc of the larger field of astrology. And how can I show some sense of putting that higher purpose of the entire field ahead of my own interests, just as a creator or just as a teacher or just as a professional? It's a very Pisces 11th house kind of thing, right?

And so some of the things that came out of Saturn in the 11th that you now know and have seen, that have come from the work of contemplating these exact spaces in this higher sense, of surrendering to something higher in the 11th through Saturn—bringing on the affordable reading service that provides tiered pricing, that gives graduates from our programs an opportunity to practice, to earn some money, to develop their careers. We don't take any money from that, and it provides flexible price points for people. That, to me, is a kind of Piscean like, what's the higher calling? What's the higher purpose? Where is there some surrender of my own self interest for the sake of the larger field.

That's a work that we have to do that, you know, it was coming up for me like an ache: I gotta do, there's something more I need to do. Holding auditions for co-hosts that can help other creators that come through our school start getting experience making content on a social media platform, they can get some visibility, build their work. That was Saturn in the 11th house being like, what is my contribution to the larger whole of the field? At the very end of this process, it was starting to hold space in Minneapolis for free meetups for meditation on the equinoxes and solstices that turned into Silent Sundays, that turned into daily meditation free, right?

So when we're thinking about Pisces, we're thinking about, what is the process of surrendering to something bigger that's trying to come through, that we want to be in service to. And that, interestingly, for me, one of the things that guided the meditation for a while was hanging out with the Quakers. Love the Quakers. They just sit quietly together. And the experience of that is what came through the silent sitting group that we have, not the doctrine, not the dogma, not the actual institution of Quakerism, but the experience—sitting quietly, that's what conveyed.

That's Piscean as well, because I had to go through a process, a real hard process, where I had to differentiate between what was really experientially speaking to me about my involvement with Quakers and what I could provide to the community that was of the experiential essence of those experiences that did not come easily, right? That was a differentiating process between the container and the essence. And this is something that Pisces is having us work on. A Jupiter ruled sign that's talking about faith as lived experience that you surrender to, that you let shape and guide.

So that's been a bit, just to reflect a little bit about how Saturn worked through Pisces in my 11th.

Anyway, one of the reasons that it's so easy to feel like a victim in this sign is because you can feel like you're the victim of unseen, overwhelming forces. That's a very strong part of Pisces, the martyr, the victim. There can be an easy way when overwhelming things happen. You think to yourself, you can instantly say, Well, I'm going to be the hero, or I'm going to save someone from that thing that is catastrophic. There's something really compassionate and sweet and truly martyr-like about this sign. I mean, to stand up for someone, to sacrifice something of yourself on behalf of someone, especially when it feels like overwhelming or unseen forces are bringing catastrophe, is an incredibly noble spiritual thing to do. The bodhisattvas do this for us. Jesus does this for us. All—you get what I'm saying.

But also, there can be a way in which we try to egotistically gain glory or power or pride or self importance by becoming someone's savior. We're constantly looking for victims to elevate through our heroic effort, and the difference can be very subtle. Often it has to do with how much attention we try to draw to ourselves for the act of giving or caring. But also drawing boundaries and saying, This is all I have to give, that can really come from an authentic place, right?

All of this stuff is really hard. You know, what we really want in response to overwhelming situations is to call on something within ourselves to trust and surrender at such times. And also, you know, kind of like you get what you give, that if you want to receive mercy and support, you have to make some effort. And you also have to develop a practice of thinking, how am I in service to this larger, unseen force of divinity? And the more we do that, the more we find that there's this reciprocal dynamic of aid, support, help flowing in when we're overwhelmed, because we've also recognized how to give from a real healthy place when others are overwhelmed. And this is why it's difficult, because you have to ask the question, how do I give and be in service to something bigger than myself, from something I can actually give, you know, something that's real. It's not just, you know, a kind of vain heroism.

Anyway, so when Pisces has been integrated consciously, to round out our talk today: the ego has become a servant, not a tyrant. The individual acts in harmony with something that's transpersonal. Compassion naturally arises for ourselves and others. Service is not just about improvement or heroism, but participation and service to a larger process that we've gotten in touch with. Life is lived as experiential faith in and through containers, possibly, but also doesn't necessarily need them. And you know, the final realization is very Course in Miracles, it's like nothing real can be lost. So a lot of the sign is deeply uplifting in the way that it takes away burdens that we never really had to carry, that weren't really real on some level.

Anyway, I know that this has been a sprawling exploration of a very deep and mystical space of the zodiac. I just hope that it's been useful, that you can do something positive with this as we have a little bit more Piscean activity in front of us. Hope you're having a good day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.