Saturn Conjoining Neptune — the Mystical Experience of Speaking in Tongues

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

Today we are going to take a look at Saturn's upcoming conjunction with Neptune and the sign of Aries. We're going to talk about the mystical experience of speaking in tongues, which I know people might have heard of from within the Christian sort of Pentecostal tradition.

We're going to talk about it as a kind of spiritual mystical experience that has been talked about by many different cultures and traditions all around the planet in a variety of different contexts, and why it makes sense to talk about this with respect to this conjunction between Saturn and Neptune.

I think you'll find this really exciting and an interesting take that also pairs nicely with the impact of this transit on the rest of the year, considering Uranus's upcoming entrance into the sign of Gemini, where innovative speech, words, and ideas alongside the Saturn-Neptune conjunction make a whole lot of sense.

So this will be a really fun episode, a really interesting way of looking at the upcoming conjunction. But before we get into it, as always, remember to like and subscribe. If you give us that little thumbs up and hit the subscribe button, if you watch regularly but aren't yet subscribed, that helps us grow and make it year by year as a company. We really appreciate it.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, that's nightlightastrology.com.

I messed up. I was telling you guys that the deadline for the retreat was the first. I think I said the 15th, and then I said the first. I got all goofed. The actual deadline for registration, I had to speak with my personal assistant about this, and we clarified it's March 14. So Saturday, March 14, is your last day to register for the Oracle Within training and retreat in Mexico in June. I hope to see some of you there. Everything you need to know is right there on the website, but if you have any questions, just feel free to send us an email at info@nightlightastrology.com.

I'm giving a talk tomorrow night on psychedelics and astrology and why they so often intertwine. If you like today's talk, you'll love tomorrow's because they have a lot in common. Today we're going to get kind of mystical and psychedelic in terms of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and I think you'll find that tomorrow night's talk will dovetail with that nicely. If you can't make it live, you get the recording like always.

Go to the events page, click on Silent Sundays. It's basically silent every day. Right now, we are meeting for daily meditation. If you want to join me in the morning to sit quietly and start your day with a little meditation and reflection, it is 9:30 Eastern, Monday through Saturday. We meet for about 30 minutes total: 20 minutes of quietly sitting. I usually say one thing or two or give an announcement at the beginning, and then we're off for 20 minutes. We do so in a group and community. That's a great way to start your day.

If you like the taste of the soup here at Nightlight, then I think you will enjoy this because this is where it's made. It's made in meditation. It comes from daily spiritual practice. It always has on my channel. You can come sit with us on Sundays. We have Silent Sundays where we meet at 11:30 Eastern, 10:30 Central. We do meditation, and then we also open up for discussion, processing, reflection, sharing, storytelling. It's really, really nice. So come check that out. It's a great little group, free. You'll find it on the events page under Silent Sundays.

Alright, so those are the announcements for the day. Let's shift our attention to the real-time clock and take a look at what's happening in the sky this week. Of course, we're just coming off from this big eclipse, and right off from the eclipse, by Friday, Saturn and Neptune will be conjoining in Aries. Now, the conjunction of those two planets in the sign of Aries is a very big deal. It is as epic a configuration as the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that we had in 2020.

I'm not saying that the world events will necessarily be the same, but typically, outer planetary configurations are history makers. Just as our personal lives are always evolving and unfolding with different events and seasons, and there's a big transit for us personally, these become major transitional spaces of learning, growth, and events that become like biographical markers of your life. These are the major biographical markers for collectives, meaning history, the broader sweep of history for collectives, nations, and peoples.

When those events are happening, there's often a deeper sense that the personal experiences you're going through have more crossover in the Venn diagram between your personal sphere of activity and the larger world and scope of history. That's a really special thing to be thinking about right now. These years bring a lot deeper meditation between collective and personal realities. They're not ever separate, but sometimes their intersection points can be very intense, and they tend to be around these kinds of transits.

After this conjunction, we're going to see Saturn get to about three degrees of separation from Neptune, not for a little while. Their three-degree conjunction, coming along with the Sun crossing into Aries, is not done till the end of March. Technically, by even April, Saturn and Neptune are out of the engagement range with one another. But then we have things like Mercury and Mars coming back through, translating the light and activating them. If you track this out a little bit, get Mercury all the way through, Mars all the way through, get those out of the engagement ranges, you're talking about the end of April.

So from late February to the end of April, we're in the wake of this powerful collective transit. By the end of April, just as that's separating, Uranus enters Gemini, where it's engaging with a trine to Pluto, and it's like there's a second chapter of our year in collective terms. The second chapter is really the ongoing trines that constellate around July and November between Uranus and Pluto. What's so interesting is that Uranus is now sextile Neptune and sextile Saturn by whole sign. Part of what the meaning of Saturn and Neptune in Aries is has to do with the ongoing developments of Uranus and Pluto this year.

Today is kind of looking at some themes that are likely going to unfold not just in this moment on this day, but from this point going forward as themes that will likely grow in significance throughout the rest of the year. I'll explain why. So that's our setup. The conjunction is this Friday. We're still going to do horoscopes tomorrow. We're going to focus on the evolutionary meaning of Aries, just like we did for Aquarius yesterday. So if you like that talk, there'll be a similar kind of deep field of Aries, and the polarity point of Libra will be included. That'll make for a really well-rounded set of considerations for this week.

What I want to talk about today is one of the very common things associated with Saturn-Neptune: mystical experiences becoming somehow more available to us than they might usually be. This is pretty easy to understand. We understand Neptune to be about otherworldly, mystical, subtle, relatively intangible, visionary things. It's romantic, it's imaginative. When it conjoins with Saturn, just like Saturn and Neptune were conjoined when Neptune was discovered, by the way, it's as though these mystical, otherworldly realities that are co-present—it's never like they exist in some other world; literally, they're right here with us—we just don't always have access to them.

This is why, for example, I chose to talk about psychedelics and astrology on the eve of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. That was deliberate. Most of the time, the reason psychedelics facilitate spiritual practices becoming more tangible and regular, or languages like astrology becoming an everyday way of seeing and relating to the world, is specifically because in a psychedelic experience, which often substitutes in our modern day for initiatory experiences in general, you're being opened to all of these Neptunian realities that are always here.

Just like the dream space is there every single night, but when you wake, the veil gets thicker. Saturn-Neptune experiences are about the veil getting thinner. Not surprisingly, when people have mystical experiences, astrology is often something that comes with it because it's a way of keeping that veil transparent. If you've ever seen the painting of that guy reaching through the world into the starry sphere, that's what we're doing.

One of the things that happens is mystical states of consciousness become more available. There's a specific mystical state of consciousness, or a mystical experience, that is common all around the planet. I'm going to speak about it from a particular linguistic standpoint today, and that is the experience of speaking in tongues. The reason I chose to talk about this is specifically because it kept coming up in my morning meditations.

All of you who sit with me, when you see me sitting on that couch, look at my new mushroom on the couch. My daughters gave me that. I love it. I've had some mushroom teachers. So okay, let's have the mushrooms anyway. That seems appropriate for what we're talking about this week. I'm preparing this talk, and my daughters went to a toy store, and one of them used some of her own allowance to buy me a mushroom stuffy. I was so... they're so sweet.

Sitting in morning meditation on this couch, as I do every morning, this word kept coming to my head. At first, I couldn't remember where I had heard it before. The word is called glossolalia. I knew I had heard it somewhere. I was like, why does this word keep coming up? At first, I just kind of ignored it because sometimes things come up and it's just a lot of stuff floating through my head. But I was like, okay, what is this word?

I looked it up because I couldn't remember. The etymology is Greek. Glossa means tongue or language, and the second part, lalia, comes from to speak, chatter, or utter. So it's a form of speaking. Glossolalia is used, for example, to describe the tongues of fire descending at the Pentecostal experience in the book of Acts from early Christianity. The apostles were speaking in other tongues, in languages that were not their own, that they had no way of knowing how to speak. Also, they were speaking in tongues of spirit languages.

In my late teens, early 20s, I was in a kind of Christian environment. I went to a Christian school and was looking for Christian community to replace and restore some of what was falling apart in my family. It was a little bit of an overcompensating situation. I went to a few Pentecostal worship services. Man, those guys go for it. No offense to my Pentecostal brothers and sisters out there. You guys are rolling in the Spirit. It was pretty nuts for me. I was like, this is crazy. Aside from smoking marijuana, I hadn't had many mystical experiences, so it felt pretty wild.

I'm not saying anything about the legitimacy of these things or not. I'm not trying to judge. I'm just telling you what it was like for me. The point is that within the history of Christianity, there's a whole thing called speaking in tongues. There's also something else described in the New Testament during the Pentecost: some would hear their own languages being spoken, called xenoglossia. That came up when I was doing this search, and it was connected as well.

Some people, when hearing this, will hear things spoken in their language despite it being from a different language, almost like they're getting a translation. Some people think they're drunk when it's happening, or others observing think they're drunk. Real or not, I don't know. This is one of the shadows we'll talk about: the potential for delusion around mystical states can be a real thing with Saturn-Neptune.

There's a literal way in which people think you're drunk, you're intoxicated. That's what it can look like to ordinary people not having an understanding, as opposed to people experiencing it who often feel possessed by a different kind of language flowing through them—spirit languages, languages they don't naturally speak. It'd be like if you or I just started speaking Spanish without knowing any Spanish.

One of the important dynamics about glossolalia is that it disrupts not just language but a perception of meaning because it bypasses rational interpretation. It demands a different mode of listening. It's often emphasized in the history of the church that not only is speaking this potentially a kind of gift of the Spirit, but also that to hear and interpret is a gift of the Spirit.

I want to use all these things metaphorically. I'm not interested in the literalness so much in this Christian context as the value of these mystical states and what they are archetypally. Many people around the planet, many traditions, speak to similar kinds of things occurring. Glossolalia could be seen as a kind of otherworldly language that comes through as a transmission. That's a simple way of putting it.

Ecstatic speech, if you think about it from that perspective, is speech that arises from an altered state—very Saturn-Neptune. Throughout history, it's described as rhythmic, musical, breath-driven. I'm extrapolating from the Greek word to what other people have said about spirit states of language coming through as a transmission. Speech that arises from altered states has a long history within mantic and oracular traditions of diviners speaking from this state.

In the Greek world, speaking in this state might be considered a demonic transmission, which later Christians would demonize. That's where we get some of the use of the word demon. But demonic intelligence and transmission, or the speech of the daimon in the language of astrology, would be considered a kind of glossolalia. Some early texts describe a person saying a prayer and listening for a voice that starts coming through them when they speak the interpretation of a birth chart.

It's bodily, not just mental or intellectual. It's something that can completely possess the body, often associated with trembling, tears, heat, intensity. It's as though the body becomes a medium or a transmitter of something. Follow the basic archetype: this is all very Saturn-Neptune. Saturn is the form, the vocal cords, the breath, the body, the sweat, the physical vehicle that's shaking to hold something that comes beyond the physical plane. Neptune is that spiritual overflow, that altered state.

Glossolalia is spirit pressing through matter. Remember those Play-Doh machines where you'd take the Play-Doh and squeeze it through, and it comes out like spaghetti? Glossolalia is like that—spirit coming through body like a little Play-Doh compressor. What happens when the body becomes a threshold or a medium for something?

This is very similar to talking about martyrs historically. We talked about martyrs recently. Martyrs always bring awareness of a larger context. They become emblematic of the fact that these things we talk about—peace is not an idea; it's a living thing. A monk burning on fire saying, "This is peace," is embodied. It can exist even in the heart of pure fire. It's not an idea you pit against action.

One of the things so fascinating about Saturn-Neptune conjunction is the way mystical things become realities, not just conceptual or intellectual things. We need avatars, martyrs, people who stand in truth and physically demonstrate that something is real, not just conceptual. We were using the concept of the martyr with Saturn-Neptune recently as a basic holder, a capacity to hold truth in an embodied way. That's a very basic definition of martyr that strips it of the heroism around martyrdom.

It is interesting because even in the New Testament, debates start happening about the phenomenon of glossolalia. Paul is saying that prophecy is better unless you have someone to interpret the tongues coming through. They're wrestling with the chaos, overwhelm, and nebulous, boundaryless state of glossolalia as opposed to something structured, interpretable, coherent, logical—like a prophet making a historical proclamation or giving guidance.

One could say Paul needed to chill out a little bit. Either way, you can see these early faith communities wrestling with something very Saturn-Neptune. Here's this thing that pours through—Holy Spirit, Christ consciousness, flames of fire, glossolalia, speaking in tongues—and Paul's like, wait, we need structure. You can feel the Saturn-Neptune dynamic.

Saturn-Neptune moments bring this ecstatic overflow, and Saturn asks, "Great, it's overflow, but is it doing anything constructive? Is it being directed? Is there containment to ensure it's not unmitigated chaos or something people get drunk on and identified with egotistically?" "I'm a medium, I'm a channel, I'm a psychic. Anything that comes into my head must be from God." You can see how they could go down a path of spiritual ego.

Being in touch may not be the issue, but becoming identified and thinking, "That's me and I'm special." This is why Saturn-Neptune interaction suggests containment isn't just repression or suppression. Containment is also focused, humble relating to forces that can easily intoxicate.

Glossolalia, taking it out of the historical context of the early Christian church, you can broaden it. Jazz improv, when something is just flowing through, is a tongue of fire, but it's held in a structure—musical scales, a band taking turns, wrapping it up so a song comes to a conclusion. Jam bands are very similar. Freestyle rap, slam poetry, poets who write in trance states, stream of consciousness writing that eventually makes its way into a form palatable enough to follow and read.

Stand-up comedians find improvisational moments where you're watching them discover something really funny. Mystics writing automatic text—Urantia, what are those books? Someone gave it to me one time. I was like, this is next-level nuts. If you love those books, God bless you. A Course in Miracles, Conversations with God—these kinds of things where there's automatic writing. Speech is being discovered as it's spoken.

As a creative writer, I'd say at least three-quarters of my creative writing doesn't come from a premeditated sense of where I'm going. It just flows through. Same for music. And parenting? I don't know. Speech is being discovered as it's spoken. It has a container.

Things like this happen collectively too when Saturn and Neptune come through, where things are being articulated. It could be culturally, in art—not just words or languages. Let me give an example. As Saturn and Neptune are within a degree of one another, we had a Super Bowl halftime show. If you're not a sports fan and didn't follow this, no big deal.

We watched it as a family. My daughter says, "Who's going to be the one doing the music?" because that's all they care about, and the food. She goes, "Who's gonna play?" I said, "Bad Bunny." She goes, "Bad Bunny?" I said, "Yeah, that's his band name." She goes, "Oh, why is he a bad bunny?" That was so sweet.

Someone ended up sharing with me on social media that he had been forced to wear a bunny costume as a kid. There were layers to that question. We watched this, and to me, more than a political event, that was a glossolalia event. I know a lot of people like to interpret everything in terms of political dialogue and divisiveness, but I was experiencing it as an act of glossolalia or xenoglossia—when you hear your language being spoken in a language that is not your own. That's trippy.

I've had psychedelic experiences just like this. Many people whose native cultural experience is from South Central America, Mexico, where Spanish is the language—here's a medium that's very American, in the language of America, English. Yet many people got to hear that event in terms of their culture and language. The resistance to that is very Saturn, trying to reject Neptune pouring through and speaking in tongues of fire.

I saw a variety of people on social media saying, "This should be in English so I can understand it." My little girls were dancing. They didn't care. They take Spanish at school; they could identify some words. I could too, not all of it. But we were dancing, having fun, because music is music.

From an archetypal perspective, this is just my opinion. If it doesn't land with you, that's cool. But what it was from my perspective was xenoglossia, glossolalia. It was penetrating a normal language set with a different language. You got to celebrate a culture and a people. It was a different language penetrating through an established language. That's one of the weird things about glossolalia.

Let me give an example of how glossolalia can happen in a psychedelic experience. Colors can speak to you like words. You can sometimes taste smells, or taste colors, or hear things you're looking at—synesthesia. If you've ever had profound psychedelic experiences, you know exactly what I'm talking about. One medium can become a transmitter of a sound rather than just a color.

I was perceiving this event in terms of glossolalia and xenoglossia. Some normal language site—the Super Bowl halftime show, where Aerosmith performs—it's a standard cultural medium with set expectations. Tongues of fire were coming through, speaking through the walls. That was so totally badass.

For ten years of my life, while working in the ayahuasca tradition, I was being healed in ceremonies where songs were sung all night in Quechua, Portuguese, and Spanish. I had no idea what was being sung. It did not matter because it spoke to me. Once my state was altered, that language spoke to me in my memories, my encoded experiences. I didn't need to know what it meant because I could feel what it meant. The altered state allowed me to feel that language without literal, rational understanding.

This is glossolalia. This is why we need these kinds of experiences and why they tend to constellate around Saturn-Neptune. Let other wisdom, other soul traditions seep through the boundaries and barriers of our psyches because that wisdom will enhance our own understanding and keep us less walled off from each other. That's why Berlin walls fall. They fall around Saturn-Neptune conjunctions.

That wall may not have been as perceptible, but culturally, that was a wall that tongues of fire were pouring through and blazing onto the other side. Isn't that magical? If my interpretation doesn't resonate with your take, it's okay. We don't need to assault each other if we have different perceptions of reality. Ultimate reality is above my pay grade. I'm just speaking from what I've passionately observed as an astrologer and someone who likes archetypes.

Glossolalia is not just about religion, spiritual gifts, or mysticism. It's the way otherness seeps through boundaries and barriers of any kind. When we let go of having to be in control, we don't lose ourselves, but become containers and vessels for the expression of otherness. That's mystical. We talk about union all the time. We think union is about collapsing all distinctions, so we get frustrated with talk about oneness, like we have to protect ourselves from it because it wants to collapse diversity. That's not what oneness means.

Oneness means allowing ourselves to be containers for plurality, for the coexistence of many things simultaneously, from many different perspectives, many different tongues singing in chorus in the same psychic room. We're a choir of infinite diversity. That's what oneness means. Can we make room for it?

Modern psychology often frames glossolalia as dissociation. Clinical psychology tries to put what we're talking about into boxes of dysfunction. We have to be careful with that. At the same time, you don't want to romanticize that there isn't potential for dysfunction. It really depends on the strength of the container psychically.

Many people who are traumatized can understand Saturn-Neptune might be about the erosion of a container that can hold overwhelm. You get wounded, go through trauma. Often, you're much more psychically sensitive. But let's not romanticize that. You might be more sensitive, but it may take many years to develop the capacity to withstand and hold the sensitivity that came through having boundaries violated.

Not every time these otherworldly things open up is positive. Psychedelic experiences can be traumatizing. They can open too wide or too fast. Trauma can create heightened sensitivity but also leave you feeling fragmented, like you don't have a container that can hold it.

We have a year ahead where the ability to speak to overwhelming states—mentally, emotionally, in our nervous systems—and have conversations about trauma, mental health, and different gradations of sensitivity is crucial. Too often, it's either romanticized—"Ooh, everyone in touch with these things is spiritually gifted"—which can be true. But oftentimes, we get in touch with these things because of trauma and dissociation.

The Saturn part is about having a healthy container that can work with and allow these things to pass through. Sometimes those containers need rebuilding. We don't have a lot of spiritual initiation designed to have safe containers for letting this stuff flood in. For many, the first initiation might be divorce or addiction. The ways we're getting in touch with this psychic reality are coming from spiritual emergencies or mental health emergencies, and recovery has to happen alongside awareness of a larger spiritual state.

This is a symptom of a sick world—that we don't have enough healthy spiritual containers and initiation rites. I've believed that for a long time. All of this gets heightened around Saturn-Neptune. In many traditions around the planet, especially among indigenous peoples, getting in touch with this is something everybody needs to do. If you're not in touch with it and don't develop a relationship with this overwhelming, non-rational, mystical, imaginative spirit dimension, you'll have a hard time relating to it. It'll turn into a polarization between the limits, the boundaries, and the otherworldliness.

There's a reason glossolalia tends to come up. When I say glossolalia, I'm talking about the need for something that feels like an inspired channel breaking through the normal limits and barriers of our consciousness or the status quo. When it feels like we're in a cultural historical moment of glossolalia, something bigger is trying to pour through the walls and articulate something that transcends the usual boundaries.

Why might this be happening right now? We live in a culture of algorithmic predictability. Responses are pre-coded. Ideological positions are templated. Identity and language around them are ritualized. As soon as an event happens on the news that many people see, don't you know in your heart of hearts that if you had to sit down and give five different types of responses you'll see in your feed from people you love, you already know the script?

Some people will say, "Let's join together and pray." Some will say, "Your suggestion of prayer is bypassing." Some will say, "We need to get rid of the guns." Some will argue about their guns. Not that these positions aren't real, but there comes a truth when Saturn transits Neptune in birth charts: anything that feels like there's a limited scope, where everything is already known, the responses are pre-coded, the ideological positions are templated. There's a ritual around how everything will work.

When anything happens, you go, "Okay, here's the thing that happens." You can predict the outrage, rebuttals, apologies, accusations, counter-apologies. This creates semantic exhaustion. That's a phrase I wrote in my journal this week. Semantic exhaustion occurs when there's no fire in the tongues—words but no flame, nothing coming through that feels new. You can feel the difference because when it comes through, even if the words are familiar, it doesn't feel that way.

In this way, Saturn is over-definition, over-categorization, hyper-structuring of social experiences. Language is defensive, structured, performative, strategic. You start going, "It's all bullshit." That tends to be heightened when Saturn and Neptune get together because what's trying to come through is spirit—the living, breathing spirit.

We're at moments where, like I thought the Super Bowl halftime show was brilliant because for a significant amount of people, it felt not in the pre-coded way language works. For another group, it felt like a wall was coming down. I thought that was absolutely beautiful. The production, the stagecraft—so cool.

When language is fully predictable, there's no risk, no discovery, no ignition switch. Glossolalia has to happen. The spirit has to start speaking collectively, personally, in ways that surprise the speaker. As a creative writer and daily content creator, I can tell when I'm not in a good space with my creativity: when nothing I'm saying surprises me.

You listeners, you've been with me for a long time. I hope you give me grace because it's hard to produce content year-round. You can feel days where it's like, "Hmm, Adam probably seems a little dead inside." I thank all of you who don't send me messages acting like you have insight into why I'm off my game when I'm producing content 365. It's annoying when people are like, "You seem off today. I had a dream and need to tell you all the insights as to why you're off." Save me. See? I'm surprising myself.

Expressions that carry risk—this is why we need stand-up comedians. We're tipping into a sick period if we start alienating our comedians. Not that everything is funny, and some comedians can be hateful. I'm talking about comedy as a performance art that has a way of surprising the speaker and the audience. What makes the audience laugh is the way the speaker is following something. They have an act, but they're also following something that surprises even them. The audience seeing the comedian get surprised by their line of thought tickles everybody.

Glossolalia is like this. Expressions have to carry risk. That's why we need comedy, because it's edgy. It has a risk that keeps us close to the living spirit. The living spirit is fun and has a ball-breaking quality. Don't take yourself so seriously. If you take yourself too seriously, you're too Saturnian, and nothing surprising can happen.

That also happens when words are spoken from a fully calculated place. If we live in a reality with no room for people to be a little unhinged and self-expressing, and immediately it's, "I caught you not being perfect in the pre-scripted language of virtue"—we're boring. That's Saturn, and the tongues of fire need to come through.

People have been talking a lot about spiritual bypassing. To me, this is just my perception—I'll take a risk saying this—people are talking about spiritual bypassing in ways that are entirely predictable, entirely boring. In one context or another, I'm like, "Oh, here's one of the pre-scripted things everyone's going to say." It's so predictable.

When there's too much Saturn in our spirituality, spiritual cliches multiply and repeat. Something becomes progressively lost in the original speaking. We should always be on guard against cliches because they're cancer for our language. Our language is our creative, participatory, God-given right as human beings. It's endowed within us to be creative through the Word, through speech—not because we're in control, not because we wield it as a weapon, but because we become channels of peace, love, and creativity.

Everything can sound right but feel hollow. The feeling of "I can't identify with that" becomes tricky. I mentioned this in the Aquarius video yesterday: on paper, yes, I agree, but the way you're saying it or what I feel behind it is a big no. Don't mean to be a dick. We can all be guilty of this. Several times a day, I find myself falling into a lack of presence that collapses my language and closes my heart. It's so ordinary, so basic to collapse into a place that's safe, controlled, and calculated.

It would be exhausting to be in the flow of spirit 24/7, but that is also described as the end result of an enlightenment process in any tradition I've studied—the flow, the Tao, the Buddha, the Christ. Cultural fatigue comes up when there's a longing for articulation of how we experience reality and each other that is new and fresh. This is a year like that. Isn't that exciting?

Rather than feeling disillusioned, you can think that every time you feel disillusioned, sick and tired of the same divisive stuff, what's real is the ache for tongues of fire to seep through the wall—the hunger for new speech, for freshly articulated content. Life can also produce dangerous substitutes: charismatic demagogues, conspiracy mythologies, ecstatic but destabilizing movements, mass movements fueled by erratic fanaticism, collective delusions. These are Saturn-Neptune dangers as well.

The question becomes, how do you tell the difference between tongues of fire and damaging wildfire? This is where I want to pivot to Terence McKenna. I realized it was Terence McKenna who used this glossolalia language originally. That was the first time I ever heard the word. Maybe I heard it in the Christian sphere about speaking in tongues, but that word in particular, McKenna.

Here are a few things he said. In summary, he said a language is not just descriptive. He had an anti-nominalist view of language, meaning words are not just dead things that point to other things conventionally or functionally. Words are living spirits. Words are like animals. Words are beings. They're generative, creative. The Logos, the Word, is an evolutionary attractor.

He came up with this through psychedelic experiences because he saw that psychedelic experiences accelerated linguistic innovation. I know that's true because in graduate school for creative writing, the number one accelerator for my exploration of creativity, the arts, and language was psychedelic experiences. I found myself reaching for more nuanced, different kinds of language, conventions, and structures of storytelling because I was being exposed to non-ordinary states of consciousness.

I'm not trying to glorify psychedelics as the only option. It was a huge part of my life path, so I reference it a lot. He often described experiences of hyper-dimensional language that is there in symbol, myth, metaphor, music, color, art, rational language, and philosophy. But it comes in the hyper-dimensional, generative, evolutionary, living presence of language only for people who see words arriving as living. Language is living. That could be any kind of language, any form.

In some DMT reports, people describe machine elves communicating in self-transforming language. The language becomes visual, geometric, musical. I don't know about machine elves; I've never taken straight DMT, only through ayahuasca. The point is, Aboriginal dreamtime is very similar. If you've never gotten into that, it's a beautiful tradition. Language and song can create reality.

If you've had altered states showing you that language, thoughts, words, emotions—every kind of language you can imagine—is living and alive, not just descriptive or functional, but creative and alive, this is glossolalia. In Saturn-Neptune moments, something prompts us to wake up. Are you dead? Is your language dead if there are no languages flowing through you like fire?

McKenna talked about people vocalizing spontaneously in high-dose psychedelic experiences. Let me tell you a story. In an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, probably my third or fourth year going to the Amazon regularly, I had an experience where I got flipped onto my back on the floor. My body started flopping around, gyrating crazily. It was nuts. This was a full cup of very powerful jungle medicine mixed with multiple other plant teachers.

I was flopping like a fish on the floor. A stream of vocal utterances came out of me. I had complete cognition of what it meant. It was moving so fast, the words were so nonsensical, and they came out so wildly that many people around me got worried. One of the facilitators came over, knelt down next to me, made sure I was okay. Then it went away.

What I experienced in that state I can't recapture. There was this fluid way I understood everything coming through. It was a language. It felt like something downloading, showing me progress along a line. It felt like understanding a long string of code. I couldn't tell you afterward what it meant, only that it was coming into me.

I'm not saying that makes me special. It was an archetypal experience of what we'd call a download. Many people have these in dreams and altered states—feeling as though something else is coming through. It might be symbolic of learning a new language. That download happened very close to when I started studying astrology. I've always thought, what if that was a visionary symbolic reference to the fact that I was going to start learning a new language? It's going to take a lifetime, but the process of learning it, the structure, is somehow installing the base software. I don't know.

McKenna talks about this. Isn't it wild that we have very little rational discourse about this phenomenon, even though almost all great cultural art movements, music moments, creative fields that shape history come from these spaces? Not to mention many other inspired spaces that shape history. It's fascinating.

McKenna believed culture was stalling in its evolution thanks to fear, materialism, empirical reductive secular materialism. He believed novelty drives evolution, and the psychedelic experience brings the importance of novelty to the forefront of languages—not just spoken verbal language like English, but languages like technology or art. Psychedelic experience injects novelty into language.

Think of people inspired—not saying everyone who has a psychedelic experience injects novelty without becoming problematic. Steve Jobs had psychedelic experiences. That doesn't mean everything about Steve Jobs is great or problem-free. But for McKenna, he was liberal in believing that creative ingenuity from novelty, from this kind of spirit infusion, glossolalia, has to be at the forefront of human experience. If we're not creating, not in touch with this spirit, he broadly trusted where that spirit led things—not that it would be perfect, but that it would lead evolution.

It's a pioneering Aries mindset: creativity channeled like fire, breaking through barriers and boundaries, will always lead the way forward rather than control or material benefit. He framed psychedelics as a teacher, an alien intelligence, and a linguistic disruptor. That's specifically how the daimon was seen in ancient astrology. The daimon speaks; the human mouth becomes a conduit. Astrology is a language that, if we're in touch with, provides spiritual novelty, a creative co-creative capacity. This is why we want to be in touch with astrology, the logos of the stars.

Last but not least, to add Saturn back in so we don't fly off the rails. Without Saturn, think of all the traditions that place being in touch with this presence, this spiritual living spirit—Buddhism, yoga, contemplative religious traditions, indigenous traditions valuing ritual, magical traditions, even creative traditions. They require craft, consistency, discipline, and care for the container. Without Saturn, language can fragment. Insights can evaporate. Language can destabilize identity.

Saturn wants to give us integration, discernment, craft, consistency, maturity, the ability to hold these things and bring them into structure and form in a world that can't live in the erratic flame all the time. We're not built to be there 24/7. We want to bring that in and shape it. We have to be careful that in getting in touch with these fiery flames, we are stewards of them.

Sitting peacefully every day in meditation is an incredible way to get in touch with that living spirit. It's where most of my talks come from when my practice isn't dragging. People who like these talks like the spiritual frequency and novelty that comes through. That's why we end up liking the creators we do—there's something of the spark they're connected to that resonates within us.

All of this is just to say that as magical, creative, and otherworldly as this need to speak new things into existence can be, we need safe, responsible containers. We need some sobriety, some maturity. When working with things like this and not taking care of your health, your body, being excessive with chemicals or drugs, not being a steward of a healthy temple, it can lead to degradation of that spirit as it comes through. It can pervert, twist, or warp it in ways problematic for you and karmically.

That doesn't mean we have to be perfect. It can be a process of discovery. Discernment is an ongoing process of discovery. Without some discernment, it doesn't come through. Craft and grounding are very important.

This talk went off the rails. What I love about astrology is that when I'm really feeling the archetypes of the talk, the talk itself has a way of resembling the texture of exactly what we're talking about. It's a joy and privilege to be in that stream. That's why I love doing this, and why I sit every morning with my little mushroom on my purple little couch.

If you want to sit, come join us every morning at 9:30 Eastern. Come sit and step into that stream yourself. With care and consistency, you can step into that stream, and it can work through the structures of your life in profound ways, making you feel less dead inside.

That's something there for you if it's useful. Hope you're having a good day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.