Saturn Square Uranus: Make it New

Transcript:

0:35
Welcome everybody hope you're all doing well out there. This is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. Today we're going to be taking a look at Saturn square Uranus and a few thoughts that I've been having, as I've reflected on this transit that I want to share today. One of the slogans that you'll that you'll hear people use when talking about Uranus is about newness about innovation about breaking away from old outworn habits or patterns or you know kind of revolution like that so that part of Saturn Uranus is pretty obvious. Everyone knows that Saturn Uranus and come about and old structures can kind of be demolished like the tower card in Tarot, a lightning bolt can come down and strike and existing structure and boom, there's a kind of creative chaos and then some striking new original form or idea that comes as a result of either destroying the new or destroying the old or the old getting somehow taken down by a force of nature, force of mind force of will. So everyone's familiar with that side of the Saturn Uranus dynamic and I'm going to reiterate it a little bit before I dive in deeper today but the thing that I want to talk about today is what is this? How does Saturn pull on Uranus in the direction of its own Saturnine significations? And how can we understand Saturn Uranus, not so much from the way that Uranus sort of strikes down the old but how can we understand it from the perspective of Saturn making a demand on Uranus? And that's the In my opinion, that's the less talked about less explored, less understood dynamic of the archetypal interaction. Planets are always interacting with one another in both ways, in aspects like squares, the one that we have in the sky right now between Saturn and Uranus, both planets are pulling on one another, we have to understand how the archetype combination works. Not just in one side, not just on one side, but on both sides. So that's what we're gonna try to do today.

3:20
So we've got this big stellium and Aquarius forming, a big new moon coming up on the 11th and I'm going to narrow it down to just Saturn and Uranus the big transit of the month which I feel like we need to talk about from a few different angles this month so that we really have a good deep understanding of it. So here on the one hand is Saturn in Aquarius, and here is Uranus and Taurus. These two planets are in a square with one another what is the nature of a square the nature of a square is the the nature of Mars. So they're in a Marsy relationship, which means action oriented, but also potentially kind of tense, combative, or a little bit hostile. So it's especially good when you have a square to understand how the demands of each planet are placed on the other. Uranus is going to have a way of asserting itself towards Saturn that Saturn has to sort of deal with and Saturn is going to assert itself toward Uranus and Uranus is going to have to respond. You can always tell within an aspectual dynamic in ancient astrology, which planet is going to tend to have the more dominant role to play. In this case, Saturn because Saturn is what was in what we call the superior position, the superior position can be found, if you imagine both planets in an aspect to be looking in toward the middle of the wheel. The planet that is on the position where in the on the on the side that casts its ray to its right. So here's Saturn, Saturn is casting its ray, it's square to Uranus, from its right hand side. If you imagine that you are Saturn and that you're looking in toward the middle of the wheel, and to your right shoulder off your right shoulder, if your Saturn, your ray is going out to connect with Uranus. Now if you're Uranus looking at the circle, your ray is going back to connect with Saturn from your left hand side. So that right handed and left handedness was associated with yin and yang or with dominance or assertiveness versus receptivity. And that was part of how astrologers looked at which planet was going to be more dominant within the archetype of exchange of two planets. And this goes for any aspect except for the opposition where there's more of a an equal but opposite kind of situation going on. So at any rate, Saturn has the upper hand here, and, you know, most of what I have seen, has put Uranus in the dominant position in terms of the interpretations and that's a little bit of a mistake. And that's what I want to do. That's why I want to talk about it today. So what does it mean when Saturn and Uranus are together, but Saturn is a little bit more dominant than Uranus?

6:33
Okay, so before we go into that, let's take a look at the timeline for this, you can see that Saturn is coming to make a square to Uranus on February 17. So we're talking about about two weeks from now. But this is building anytime the planet is within about three degrees of perfecting an aspect. That's typically when ancient astrologers said that the events or the the peak events of the transit, it's all process oriented, of course, but there are events that tend to manifest and somehow define or characterise the energy of the entire transit. And those tend to happen during these peak periods, which can happen within three degrees applying and perfecting, or three degrees of separating, or a little bit of both and you'll get this recurring to this same transit is going to recur in June, and then at the end of the year in December. So we have a few passes of these planets this year.

7:36
Okay, so now that you have a visual of it, here's what I want to talk about today. Let's talk about the way in which typically Uranus sort of gets the upper hand right, you're typically going to see the planet Uranus, in this dynamic being the one that sort of leads the way in, in popular sort of sentiment and interpretation. And it's basically like I said earlier, it's basically the tower card from Tarot. So what is the tower card? The tower card shows an old sort of monolithic, you know, structure and it has the crown on top of it the old established tradition or, or the old way of doing things. And it gets struck down by lightning, a force of nature comes strikes it down, everyone's freaking out diving out of the tower. So it's destructive. But it's also there's an invigorating dimension to this and that has to do with the fact that you're going to see quite commonly with this transit actually a sense of innovative original revolutionary like that. So, and and why like where does that where does that come from? It comes from the lightning bolt, right. So the in Uranus is associated with electricity and lightning and things like that, okay. Where there is that element of sudden destruction, where there is that element of sudden unexpected breakups of tradition or structure or habit, and it could be both destructive, but also revolutionary, that's Uranus. And Saturn fits really nicely into that picture to establish Uranus as dominance in the interpretation because Saturn is is often read as the old tower, the old structure. And that's unfortunate because that is only one of very many meanings that Saturn has. But it does fit. I'm not saying it doesn't, it definitely fits to think of the tower card as a kind of Uranus Saturn dynamic. We talked about earthquakes, and I've talked about, you know, sudden breakups of traditions or structures. And that's all the Uranus-heavy version of the transit. Okay, so what we're trying to do today is say, Well, what is the Saturn dominant view of this transit? How, what does it mean when Uranus is coloured by Saturn rather than Saturn being, you know, painted in the picture of Uranus? In other words, what happens when Saturn isn't just the tower getting struck by lightning? What else could it be? What else could it do? So that's what we're going to go into.

10:57
I want to consider an idea. This is an idea that you could think of it as encapsulating the Saturn Uranus dynamic from Saturn's standpoint. And I'm going to use a phrase, the limit is your freedom. The limit, or the limitation is your freedom. All right, so that's the idea, just just take that in very deeply, even after I go through kind of unpacking this, just sit with that and even in in almost like, mantra, mantra meditation fashion, I would highly recommend over the weeks ahead, taking that into a quiet inner place and just spending some time with that phrase. It's something that can really serve us right now. It's not a it's not something that I feel like we think about a lot because you usually our usual way of thinking about limitations is that we don't like them. Nobody likes restrictions. Nobody likes limitations. Nobody likes the cosmic red light, the cosmic no thumbs down the negation, the prohibition. Now most people I speak with, and work with everyday are talking about how can I overcome limitations. So it's very rare that we think of limitations as a good thing or even as a liberating thing. And I'm certainly not going to be sitting here advocating today for some kind of punitive, harsh strictness that will set you free, but I do want to talk about the virtue of this idea: limitation is the freedom, your limit is your freedom.

12:41
I'm going to give you an example of a Saturn Uranus dynamic that happened in my life. When I was a freshman in college, I had just gone through a Saturnine period. A Saturn period is defined by a lot of different things. But for me, it involved a lot of isolation, a lot of solitude, feeling like something of a black sheep, high school, basically my last years of high school, which I'm guessing for a lot of people are kind of like that, you know, it's like you're trying to fit in, you're trying to find your your niche. And a lot of people struggle and a lot of people, you know, school school can be really cool. I'm sure a lot of you know, so I was going through a Saturnine period, I get it, I get to college, and for whatever reason at college, I really started hitting my stride again. I certainly started to feel in sync with myself, with others socially, etc. And I was playing on the lacrosse team. I had never even played lacrosse, but because it was a club team and it was basically just for fun. I decided to walk on and learn how to play lacrosse. So I was playing lacrosse and decided one Sunday afternoon. Well backstory first. This was feeling really redeeming to me. It was like, I felt like this black sheep and I was pretty isolated and pretty lonely and angsty during high school. My last two years of high school I went through this programme to have in Minnesota called post secondary enrollment options. So you can leave high school and go to a nearby Community College and the Minnesota State curriculum transfer programme or something like that allows those credits to transfer over to the college that you go to after high school. So I was going to a community college full time my junior and senior year, basically stacking philosophy classes because I could it was you could really do whatever you wanted to. So I was just stacking philosophy classes and I was really alone, that just that kind of angsty emo 17 year old kid or whatever, pounding power cords in my basement.

15:15
But it was a lonely time and then I get to school, and through the socialisation of this lacrosse team, I felt like I was like redeeming something that I wished I would have had in high school. And it was really pretty stupid. But I was feeling so happy with all of this. So on a Sunday afternoon, I get together with a bunch of people on the lacrosse team and some guys in my dorm and stuff like that. And we were playing football on a practice field for the college football team that wasn't the official field that we would have got in trouble for that, I'm sure. But it was his back practice field. And we were playing on it. And as we were playing, I tried to tackle my roommate who had the football and was running with it. And he fell on top of me and my whole weight of my body twisted and went down into the ground, my elbow went into the ground and then he landed like a sledgehammer right on my shoulder and ended up I ended up getting a compound fracture my bone literally broken half my humerus. It wasn't humorous. So I'm laying there on the ground screaming my arm looked like a rainbow. I can't even describe how gross it looked. But it was like totally messed up. Right? This was a, this was a Saturn and Uranus combination in my birth chart. So anyway, long story short, I had to have a plate put in my arm, if you ever see me I have a huge long scar on my left arm. And I lost the use of my wrist. I could not I had a radial nerve that was stretched. And so I had a drop wrist like this, like a dropped wrist and I couldn't lift it, it was just it was unusable. Like I could, I couldn't even move my fingers really. So for about eight months, I couldn't play lacrosse, I couldn't really do anything. And I couldn't lift my wrist. And I had to wear this bizarre glove that an occupational therapist made for me. And it was a glove that kept my fingers straight. It was like a wristband and it had these long hooks that went out over my fingers, and there were these little like scoops like little bucket scoops that my fingers went in so that my hand would stay out and straight so that the nerve would as it tightened back up that it I would have full motion backs, you have to keep your arm hands straight like that. So for my entire freshman year immediately, I got a big broken arm poop in my swimming pool. That's what happened. It was gone. Let the all of that joy and all of that sense of belonging and it was gone through a freak accident that came on very, very suddenly and paralysed my hand for about eight months. All right, so that's the background of this Saturn Uranus story. Now as a result of that, what happened? Well, I'll never forget the day that I got out of the hospital. Radiohead who is my favourite band when I was that age, starting with The Bends and Okay Computer, which were two of my favourite albums, but they they came out with a new album called Kid A, and I, I went to get kid a with my weird Darth Vader looking hand. And I remember listening to it in my room. And it was so dark and so mysterious, but beautiful as well. And I remember sitting there going, this is not going to go how I thought it was going to go. And part of this actually was the beginning of how I ended up getting hooked on pain pills. Because I was prescribed pretty intense painkillers that I ended up getting addicted to even though even though I didn't use them after the prescription ran out, that the need or desire for them stayed in my mind and about a couple years later, I had another accident or injury and was prescribed them again and it just built like that. So I always attribute that always also to the beginning. I have this kind of weird taste for opiates that I ended up having to really purge from my life later and get clean. Anyway, so I'm sitting there and I'm going like, my life is not gonna be the same, I'm not going to have a normal year, I'm back to where I was in high school, which is alone in solitude. And I was really depressed. It was I remember it just being really, really depressed, and I slept a lot more, and blah, blah, blah. And then one day I was I was a philosophy major, and I had a professor who, to this day remains one of my favourite professors I've ever had. And his specialty was in Eastern philosophy. And he just sort of looked me in the eye when I went into his office one day, and he said, Are you doing okay? And I was like, it sort of pierced my heart a little bit, you know, it just opened my heart, and it got in there. Because he cared, and I just said, I don't know, it's really hard, something like that I just kind of basic. And he said, Well, there's no better time to study philosophy. And it was a simple thing that he said, but I knew he was right, he said, there's no better time to study philosophy. And so for the rest of that year, because my social life was in a sense, destroyed, it was not normal, it was it was painful and embarrassing for me to go out with a hook on my hand and all this crazy stuff. So my year became a year of very, very deep contemplative reading of philosophy. The rest of that year, I became a straight A student. And I was just neck deep in, in ancient philosophy. And that set the foundation really for the rest of my life. So, in a weird way, this limitation, this constraint that came on through this kind of freak, uranian type of accident, ended up being the ground for an almost monastic level of commitment to studying Greek philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and reading and writing. And I dealt with a little bit of insomnia and depression, it was a sort of melancholic time. But during that time, it was punctuated over and over again, by these lightning strikes of intellectual and spiritual revelation. So the habit, the confinement, the limitation, the paralysis, the broken bone, the dark humour of the broken humerus, really, throughout the year set in, and put me on a path of almost like monastic discipline with studying philosophy and so many breakthroughs of mind and spirit happened as a result of those constraints in that confinement. So that was my freshman year, and I always remember how I never could have found that degree of mental and spiritual and intellectual liberation and freedom, if it weren't for the confines, and sort of melancholic constraint of that broken bone, and the paralysis of my hand. So that's what we mean when we say, when Saturn pushes on Uranus, it can become the case where the limitation is the freedom, the limitation is the ground that then the uranian impulse for freedom becomes in service to. That uranian freedom becomes a servant to the confining or limiting the parameters that Saturn sets.

24:07
To give you another example, another part of my life that reflects this and I'm guessing that you guys in hearing this have stories like this too, so I would love to hear yours in the chat box and how you've had moments like this when has the limitation become your freedom? Becoming a dad, that has been one of the biggest ones for me. So I have a pretty strong Uranus in my chart. It's very angular in a very tight trine with the Sun in my chart and so forth, and I've always been inclined toward freedom and becoming a day was was a huge sense of limitation or constraint. The sleepless nights, the screaming, the diapers, the bodily fluids ever everywhere, the tantrums and meltdowns, and of course there's all the joys, there's so many things aspects of course of having a child that are totally delightful. The laughter, the games, the fun, the affection, the sweetness, the songs, you know, so all of that's there. I'm someone who tends to look for the absurd humour and the elements of darkness because I can't ignore them. I even though I'm a pretty optimistic person, I have to make peace with and find either a good sense of humour or a place for the elements of things that I don't like, I can't just sit there and be like, come on, man, just get more positive, just let that stuff go. It's like no, I it needs a place somehow on the shelves of my life. Like I'm a Venus-Taurus ruled person, like if it doesn't feel like it has some kind of Fung Shui a placement in my life, then I don't feel good about it. So I have to find room and space for all these difficult things, right? Anyway, that's just a pretext to say that I was really, really struggling to find where on the shelf of my life does all of the horrors of having a kid go like we're, this is my first one, Gigi. It was really, really hard. And I got into this habit, after my wife and daughter were asleep at night, I would stay up. And a lot of the times I would just cry. I would look like the thinker by Rodin. In my head, I'm just going like, Oh, my God, I've screwed my life over. What have I done? You know, like that? Or I would just be or Oh, just be like, I'm not mature enough for this? I have no patience. I wouldn't say that, on the level of the actions and the motions of being a parent that I that I have messed up. I think I've been decent, I would put myself in the average to above average category in terms of just showing up and doing parent stuff and having a good attitude about it. That doesn't mean that in your head, you're not going through all this turmoil, like oh my god, I'd rather be doing this or like, this is like driving me crazy. Or, you know, these frenzied thoughts that come in and make you feel like you're not doing it right, or you're not the real deal. Or you should love this and you don't, there's all this turmoil. And I would just sit up late at night. And it was like, every night for at least the first year and a half. And it felt like a prison. I'm not proud to say that, like, I'm sure that there are people out there who are like, Oh, you know, sorry for you that you're such a sulky Sue or whatever, like, No offence to any Susan's out there. But, you know, sorry, that you couldn't enjoy Well, I couldn't, like I couldn't I there were, you know, aspects of my day that I would enjoy. But I keep coming back to that place of feeling like, maybe I've ruined my life. And this was a really, really hard thing for me as a parent. It's definitely like been the most important, maybe growth-like, classroom of my life like the parent classroom, in my life has been like, that's been hard. moon in Capricorn. It's been hard for me. It's been hard for me to not end up feeling somewhat confined. I mean, previous to having kids. My life was like all of my 20s I basically lived alone in solitude in little houses and grad school out in the country and wrote and read and stuff like that, that like, isolated contemplative monastic mood that started when I was in school, when I broke my arm really just continued throughout all of my 20s. And so having a kid suddenly felt like this huge constraint being placed on me psychically. But here's what came out of that. Every night because I had to get become confronted more and more with the fact that there was nowhere to go, right? I'm not I'm not gonna bail on my kids, I love this enough. And I know it's important and good enough for me that I'll never bail. Right? I'll always be there. And I'll always show up and always try to do my best at this. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm going through this excruciating sense of pain and loss.

30:01
And people had told me that before my parents told me that lots of people tell me that being a parents like an ego death, it's really hard. But I wasn't anticipating that it would be so challenging. It was challenging for my wife too it still is for both of us. But thankfully, we have each other to talk about this, you know. So what started happening was, I finally hit a place where I said, I can't just stay up late at night, despairing anymore, I have to do something with this space. In the evening, when everyone's gone to bed. And my wife's not an evening person, she's a morning person, I tend to be more of a night person. So I have to do something, so what I ended up doing was, I ended up getting back into prayer and I ended up getting back into some of my spiritual practices, which initially when I had children had sort of fallen by the wayside because I was so exhausted, and I was so tired, and I was so just depressed, really, that I had sort of let them go. And it was through that limitation through that kind of dark, these dark nights of the soul, these dark parenting nights, that I finally said, Well, I might as well just throw my hands up in prayer, somewhere in in this space of confinement and limitation, there's got to be a hallelujah in here somewhere. And I don't know what it is in me, there's just a stupid persistence, about about finding some kind of gold, you know, within the confines of these kinds of spaces. But that's what I did, I just said, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to pray. And I'm going to take this opportunity to become the person that I wish I could be, which is someone who feels at the very least a little bit more comfortable with these limitations. You get a piece of clothing, like a, I don't know, like a pair of boots or something. And you first wear them and you're like, this is great, but it'll be really great in two years, when they're like worn in. And I just said to myself, you know what, like, I need to be able to wear parenting comfortably. The pain and difficulty of it, the isolation, the constraints, I want this to become like a well worn in boot that I just I feel comfortable in. I know that the pain and the difficulties of it aren't going to go away. I just need to break this in. And I was like, Well, the only thing that's really going to help me is is prayer, and meditation and my spiritual practice. And it was one night while I was doing that, one night in particular, that I remember where we had a little hot tub on the porch. It was very small. It was like two people could fit in it. And I was sitting in the hot tub. And I had just sort of started praying and meditating again. And I said, God, I can't do this by myself, I need a teacher, I need some guides, I need a mentor. And I'm not even sure that anything like that really exists. You know, I'm not sure if that out there. And if there is, could you just send me one, I had never prayed that prayer my entire life. Never that I can ever remember any way that I had said, I need a spiritual guide, specific to me like a good match. So I told my wife about the prayer. I said to my wife, like the next day or something I said, you know, there was this. There's this prayer that I prayed last night. And you know, she knew what I was going through, we talked about everything. And she handed me a book by a teacher that was teaching at our yoga studio, he taught the philosophy portion of our yoga teacher training programme, he had just written a book called "In Search of the Highest Truth." And I looked at it with my typical, like, I can be sort of cynical at first and I was like, Great. Another yoga teacher wrote a book, great, you know, like, that's not what I want. Not not at all what I want to read, because I'm sure that his insights are not interesting. And you know, like trite, and what do they What do they compare to the deep thinkers that I read, like Carl Jung, like super arrogant. And she was like, why don't you just give it a try? And I was like, I picked it up. And I said, I'll look at it. So I ended up opening up the book, and reading the first chapter. And I was like, I actually really liked it. So then I kept going, and I read the whole thing. And then my wife said, Well, you know, he teaches private yoga teacher training programmes, and I had been saying, like, maybe I'll take another yoga teacher training programme or something. I just knew that the answer for my feeling of being restricted was to go into it and find a discipline and commitment and practice sadhana, somehow. I needed that. I knew that that was the antidote, like treats like, don't go running from this, I'm not gonna run from my wife run from my kids run from being a dad just because it's it kind of sucks in his heart in parts, I got to go into it. So how can I go into it? And I thought, well, maybe I'll do this yoga teacher training programme. So I ended up calling him and talking to him, and ended up studying with him. And for about a year of my life, once a week, I would sit over at his apartment and for like, eight hours a day, I would sit on a little mat about three feet in front of him on his little mat. And we would be sitting and talking yoga philosophy for like, eight hours, I'm not kidding. Through that process, that the during that process, I got an invitation. And I was really upping my yoga game at this point, and really starting to feel like the boots were getting worn in, you know, this is really helping me, this, the suckiness doesn't go away completely. And I'm starting to appreciate it. It's starting to feel not just like suckiness, but suckiness with soul, you know what I mean? That's different, it feels different. So then I got an invitation to speak at an East meets West astrology conference in Calcutta. And I told my teacher about it. I said, Oh, Hari, like, I got invited to India, like, we're studying yoga, it was so cool. Like, shouldn't I go see something? And he said, Well, when are you going? And I told him the date. And he said, Well, actually, I'm going to be about four hours north of Calcutta at a pilgrimage site for Bhaktas, called Mayapur, and I'm going to be there at the same time that your, your conference is happening. Maybe you should come up early, and meet me and my poor and then afterward go to your conference. And I can like show you around. So I did. I went to this sacred pilgrimage site for Bhaktas. And if you're if you're, if you're into bhakti, you know Myapur. But at any rate, I went to Myapur, and my wife let me go, which was to this day. It's gonna make me cry if I think about it, but it was the it was a really, really deeply generous thing that she did, because she had to be alone with the, with our daughter to do it. And she let me go. And and while I was there, it felt like the doors of my heart got completely blasted open. And what was I doing while I was there, I was sitting in an ashram all day chanting. And not doing anything. So the same, the same limitation, the same sense of cloistered confinement was there. But it was as though inside of it was this ocean of sweetness, this ocean of nurturing milk. And on the last day, my teacher left, and I had a day or two there by myself, and he had been showing me around and now I was on my own, and I didn't know where to go. And so I said another prayer. I said, maybe there's a guru here, because I had not let go of how significant it had been that within days of saying that original prayer, Lord, please give me a teacher, that one had appeared in my life. And he wasn't an initiating guru. So I knew that if I wanted to go deeper with bhakti, eventually, I would need to find one. And I did want to go deeper with bhakti, especially after being there and having studied it for a year at that point, and practice for a year. So I just went wandering around Myapur, and I just was asking people if they knew of any classes that were happening, because there were classes happening all over the area with different monks and Saudis and gurus in the in the Bhakti lineage. So I ended up stumbling into a classroom. And my guru was teaching the class. And I didn't know at the time because I barely even remember what he said. But there was a kirtan at the end that he led. And the kirtan felt like it was like, lit some something on fire in my heart, and ended up going through the streets that night. There's a big elephant parade, going through the streets, taking the deities out to see everyone and there was kirtan in the streets. And it was like, it might as well have been like a, you know, like, Woodstock or something. I mean, there was probably a couple 1000 people and it was just you couldn't even move. And we were walking through the streets more like almost like being carried through the streets. And, and I was singing kirtan and like, it felt like my mind and my heart got completely blown open. Well, he had been the one who started the kirtan and then suggested that we go and join the elephant parade. So anyway, I was really really curious to know more about him when I got home and I searched on YouTube, I just searched the name of the place that I was at and the date, because I knew the date and I knew the name of the place, but I didn't know who the guru was that had been speaking. And sure enough, I found a video recording on YouTube of the class that I was in there I am on video sitting there in some Indian classroom. And I found out the Guru's name. And I thought, well, he did something that guy triggered something in me that was fan freaking tastic. So I want to hear what he has to say. So I started listening to his classes. And that was how I met my guru. And that all happened about one year from the date, all of that happened within about a year of the date of praying that prayer and asking for a teacher. My limitations, my constraint, my difficulty, because I took the risk of going into it, rather than trying to break free of it. In some kind of act of total rebelliousness and defiance, my defiance was to say, I'm not going to let the limit limit me, instead, the limit is going to be my freedom. I'm going to take that weird stance about this and go into it. And that's what I did. And that's how I became a monk myself. That's how I eventually found my groove. That's how I found my teacher. So that was also a Saturn Uranus dynamic in my birth chart. So I wanted to share those two stories with you.

41:27
I want to read you something that comes from James Hillman, who wrote about Saturn in a book called "Senex and Puer". This book is a really good one when it comes to understanding the archetypal difference between say Saturn and Jupiter. But there's a chapter in this book called negative senex. Now senex means like, old man, it's where we get the word senator from. But it can mean elder and sort of has a connotation of being wise or, or potentially sort of curmudgeonly, like an old person can be either the wise grandfather or the like, stifling, controlling old man or something like that. And this could be a woman too, it doesn't really matter. All right, so here's a few passages from Hillman that I want to elaborate upon.

42:21
"The limitations which Saturn at the outer rim of the spheres imposes upon the other gods, and which senex consciousness imposes upon the psyche may be seen as a modified form of negation. There remains a real value in the Saturnian ego informed by the senex spirit of limitation, Know thyself becomes know the limits, beyond which are powers that do not belong to any human. The ego can then no longer be a doer and maker, a creator or any of the romantic expectations that the hero asks of us. Ego becomes a conserver, a guardian figure, or a witness at the frontiers of a weak kingdom, who dozes at the edge of star filled madness and continual relation with what's out there. A consciousness of limitation both rules and is in exile. It drifts among the complexes, a watchman in the night of their fantasies, keeping time by the measure of images traversing the inner sky, an astrologer of constellations, the heroe's gone under, his rule is through depression and sacrifice. For limitation means serving Saturn, the God of sacrifice, Moses and Abraham patriarchs demanding the entirety 'costing not less than everything' so close to Moloch, the kingdom shrinks, decrease is on the ascendant, what is not sacrificed will anyway decay, but sacrifice, which is depression in another guy's and is limitation to, is not a one time gesture. Through prolongated depression, sacrifice becomes chronic. One keeps up the sacrifice and perpetuates limitation into a mode mimetic to the senex god."

44:34
Beautiful. And then the next portion, he talks about this,

44:39
"The redemptive power of senex contradiction is discovered by turning to the contradiction itself. The antithesis of its nature, release healing insight. The insight is a function of thought, contemplation, speculation, music, mathematics, and imagination become the Via Regia. Problems are taken to their extremity, where they no longer are living realities but have become fantastic, reflecting their source in imaginal reality. The world is taken back into its logos, the end into its beginning in nous. Issues are removed from the narrowed field of personally particularised depression and expanded into a melancholic contemplation of impersonal and imaginal universals. The acedia of silence and the turning inward by refusing to blame anyone but oneself and ones stars lead to the interior space, memoria. crucial to this inward move is realising that interiority must be black, and empty, otherwise the antidote cannot appear in the poison. Rigid self centred focusing without escape into future hopes, is precisely the melancholy method, a process of archetypal self correction, the very agitation and circling thoughts that accompany the narrowing solitude and interior imaginal monologues are the peripheral activities that go along with every kind of centering. The contradictory is of centre and circumference appear in the paradox of agitated depression, handwringing, pacing, insomnia, the intensely focused desert saint is assailed by chattering distractions, the old king wanting to be left alone to his books at the same time as out busily defending far flung borders. The structure obsessively works at its inner opposition."

46:53
So I thought you guys would like that. What do I take from that? Well, this is exactly what I love so much about Saturn, Uranus, on the Saturn side of things, the Uranus side of things is great too, where Uranus says, hey, let's just break down old structures. Let's innovate, let's rebel, let's be defiant, let's be original, let's cast out the old and there is a time and a season for that. But what about the Saturn side when Saturn pushes on Uranus? And when it does, so it says, your freedom is not in the heroic overcoming of limitation, the heroic constant innovation of the new compared to the old, the constant heroic projections of a future that's braver and better and more evolved and more sophisticated and more moral than it is right now. No, on the southern side of things, we say, I'm going into the limitation, I'm going into the depression into the absurdity into the darkness into the feelings of failure and moral struggle. I'm going into my wound. And in that space, I'm sitting down and I'm staying and I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to stay here. And I'm going to chew the chewed. I'm going to chew it up, I'm going to sit and I'm just going to chew on this. And when we do that, the force of habit that we develop in the stubborn persistence to sit within that space, the habit of that becomes prayer. At first, it's a habit. And that part sucks. Because it you have to take this risk of almost amplifying and increasing the level of constraint and difficulty that you feel that you want to be free from. And it seems counterintuitive to add more restraint and control or discipline or habit, it almost seems to amplify the feeling of being stuck. But then if you stick with it persistently... Prayer is habit until habit becomes prayer. And that's how it works. And prayer liberates. Because, by going into prayer, we become a guardian of all of our experiences. And that's how Saturn was understood. Saturn was the guardian of the planets that sat on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. What tremendous breakthroughs of imagination thought heart and soul exist and come up when we just say I'm going to sit here stubbornly and persistently to be with these things. And then all of a sudden, prayer explodes from habit.

49:37
What does habit mean? What are some of the etymological meanings? Habit means condition, demeanour, appearance or dress. So, yeah, there's a way in which to get into prayer or to get the benefits of any kind of spiritual practice, there's a weird way in the beginning where it feels like a feigned appearance, it feels mechanical. It feels really structured it feels like a false front that we're putting on somehow, it doesn't feel natural. But weirdly, habit also means to dwell, to reside in, to inhabit and to stay. So there's two dimensions habit is like there's a dimension of habit that is this external appearance. Not surprisingly, Saturn was a god that was called the God of feigned appearances, habits. Habits that are just rote and mechanical and dry. And then just, I shake your hand, how are you? I'm doing well today. How are you? Good, we've accomplished the social convention. Saturn has that dimension to it, we always tend to go to that dimension of it. But what we don't realise is that if you shake enough hands, sincerely, you'll eventually love shaking people's hands, it won't just be a convention. Right? If you tell people, I care about you, are you having a good day today, if you say it enough with sincerity, the habit will become sincere, you will actually care about how people are doing you'll care if people are having a good day or not. So Saturn, the ruler of feigned appearances, but also a planet that was associated with the, the substance of mystical awareness that comes through sitting in habit, with prayer, or with meditation, or with stillness, or with reading or solitude or anything. So I ended up becoming a monk because I believe so deeply that the habits and practices of spiritual life are profoundly liberating, if you can just stick with them long enough, that the habit, the appearance, the clothing, the costume, ends up becoming a place that you dwell in and reside, you reside in. And that's what happens with Saturn, Uranus. That's the breakthrough that can happen with Saturn, Uranus. If you take the constraint that comes up, and you just try to blast through it, because blindly we just believe that newness, innovation, originality is always better than anything that's constraining in any way, then you're never going to get the really profound sense of freedom that can come with Saturn, Uranus, where it's like, No, no, just stick with it a little while and watch what comes up. Until we learn the staying power, of habit, that to reside in good habits, they can't become the moving meditation of prayer, they can't become the organic space of prayer, we have to be willing to taste the poison of artifice, which is nothing more than a reflection of our own stuckness. And if we can move through that, with a little bit of courage, determination and faith, then all of a sudden, boom, it's like, lightning starts striking everywhere.

52:56
And what appears to the world like people look at me and they go, Oh, you live such a regimented life. It's like it doesn't feel that way to me. It did at first. But I find that when I sit down for 90 minutes, two hours a day to meditate every single day now for going on three, four years of being a monk, I find that these places are constantly like, there are sacred trees getting struck by lightning everywhere lighting on fire and becoming little burning bushes. It could be about something really simple, but I'll tell you nothing has made me feel like a better parent, a more present parent, and more peace with the flaws that I have as a parent. Those are Saturn Uranus dynamics in my own life that I thought you guys might find interesting.

53:44
There are two people that really to my mind, had Saturn Uranus dynamics in their chart that really define the Saturn Uranus dimension of life really well on the Saturn side. One was Christopher Reeve. So you probably know he was played Superman in like the 80s I think it was and he was an actor. And he had a terrible horseback riding incident accident where he I think his spinal cord almost severed completely like neck from body almost entirely but he ended up becoming completely paralysed. I think the correct term is quadriplegic, but he ended up becoming completely paralysed. And there's that see how paralysis comes in again. And yet, he himself said that in some ways, the best thing that ever happened to him was becoming paralysed, because through paralysis, he came to understand what freedom really is. He came to understand what humility really means. He came to understand what love really means, especially with his wife. He came to understand what charity and philanthropy really meant. And though and he was a lightning rod for apparently very exciting research. scientifically, there's a Saturn Uranus thing. How can we eventually help people who have this injury recover, I'm going to invest in stem cell research or whatever it was that he was investing in. So he found freedom in this incredible restraint. It's an extreme story. And I know that it's not like, you can't just go and be like, yeah, so I'm gonna be like that today with all of my limits, you know what I mean? But it's like, it's something to work for, like we can do that we really can do that. And we don't need total paralysis, to give us the opportunity to do so. If we take a moment to look at how we get paralysed, but everyday mundane blocks of our lives, if we just get honest with ourselves about that, and also honest about the fact that they're not going to go away, right, there's nothing we can go and do or get, or actions we can take to try and fix it in some superficial sense until we reconcile with those things deep within us. You know, we won't dwell we won't reside in them will have this kind of oppositional relationship with them. Not surprisingly, Saturn was the God of opposition's.

56:08
Another one was Ezra Pound. So, as your pound had this, he's a poet, modern poet, and he had this phrase that he used, or that he was famous for saying called make it new. So if you guys have ever studied poetry or literature, you've probably heard of it before. I want to tell you, there's a really interesting articles about the history of where this phrase came from. It wasn't actually original to Ezra Pound actually came from the sort of, if I'm not mistaken, it was a bit of a Confucian idea. It was an Eastern idea that he had been picking up. And a lot of people read it, make it new, as innovate avant garde originality defy conventions, right like that. That's not actually what Ezra Pound meant by this phrase that he used called make it new. What what he was really saying in this but he was a Saturn Uranus person, he was born with Saturn Uranus in a square in his chart. what he was saying, really, is that, that there, there isn't really anything new under the sun. But every day, there is an opportunity to see and experience the new in terms of recombinations recurrences of previously or even eternally existing ingredients. And so, he he was someone who had this kind of really terse, almost like haikus like very terse, minimalistic writing style. And he, his motto was to sort of look for the new in the old look for the new in in the recycled stuff of everyday life, there's always something new there in what appears to be just the everyday stuff in the everyday stuff that some to some people might look really old. And this runs contrary to the flagrant optimism of New Age thinking. That's just constantly about new horizons, new opportunities, new possibilities, future future future, we have to understand that the past and the future are both traps. When we understand their relationship, as it exists in the soul. In soulful life and soulful living, it's only then that we really can appreciate the new as it exists in the old and the old as it exists in the new. And that's what Ezra Pound is really getting at when he said make it new. And this is another thing that's great about Saturn Uranus is that it's an opportunity to take things that look like limitations that look old, that look mundane, that look limiting that look like some kind of cosmic red light and say, I'm going to make it new, how am I going to make it new, by being with it, through a contemplative mind through an open heart, I can see the same thing that I always see in, in, in the light of this moment. So if we in a weird way, the other thing that happens with spiritual practice, is that we learn the art of presence, and its presence alone that eliminates the need for constant revolutions and rebellions against the old into the new as well as the constant labouring of traditions that should never be done away with it should lead us and, you know, keep away the dangerous newness of the future. These voices have been battling from time eternal. There's never been a time where those two voices aren't on some level already existing in a tense, oppositional dialogue with one another. So how do we do something else? How do we make something that's truly new? Well, to do that, we have to, through force of habit, our lives become prayer. And the prayers are good. It ends up to some people appearing really regimented. It's like, No, it might appear that way. But I've discovered something new that lives within this appearance. You know, I've come to inhabit my life. So anyway, I hope that this has been interesting for you guys just kind of a philosophical journey down the Saturn Uranus road. I think there'll be some more because there's a couple of other angles we can take with this. But I wanted to emphasise this one because when I look right now, at the web, here's what I see in like, by and large, what I see is this formula for Saturn, Uranus, I see the tower card, I see a breakdown the old, sudden destruction of the old innovation of the new get rid of the old and do something progressive. And I just want to introduce the idea just because pushing in the opposite direction is always good with the archetypes to just push gently in the opposite direction and say, Well, you know, can we not can we not for a few minutes you know, taste the defeat of progressivism, you know, just be like sometimes that fails us. And sometimes we find the new by sitting with what's limiting or confining sometimes our limit the limitation is our freedom. So, at any rate, that's what I have for you guys today. Just for your consideration. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the chat box. I know a lot of you have been sharing beautiful thoughts and reflections as I've been going here. And I'd love to hear more of you in the chat box who are watching this after the live stream is done. I know some of you will be catching it later. So yeah, what are you what are your thoughts? How have you worked that Saturn Uranus tension in your life? Do you have Saturn and Uranus in your birth chart? I'd love to hear from you guys. Okay, have a great rest of your week. Probably be back again tomorrow or Friday. I'm almost done with all my Kickstarter work. So just about ready to get back to five days a week.