The Moon is in Pisces today, applying to an opposition of Jupiter in the next few hours. I’m excited because very shortly I will be launching my kickstarter to raise funds for another full year of horoscope writing. The kickstarter will last 40 days and will occur during the birth of my first child! So it’s a very special time right now, and a time that I plan to use for reflection before endeavoring to write another 300+ daily horoscopes in 2016. Watch for that announcement soon, and please consider contributing if my daily horoscopes have been helpful to you during 2015. I promise to do my best work for you again in the year to come!
Meanwhile, let’s look once more at the Saturn/Neptune square that is rapidly approaching and will be exact next week!
Another important angle to consider between Saturn and Neptune has to do with the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. Whereas Saturn is traditionally related to the “objective,” Neptune is frequently associated with the “subjective.” To translate, Neptune is said to have more to do with imagination and psychological reflection…the poetic interface or middle ground that takes events “as they appear” and transforms them, through perception, imagination, and reflection, into something more, or something less, or something different, or something extraordinary. Neptune is the poet’s eye or the lucid dreamer walking through the waking world.
By contrast, Saturn is about objectivity. To translate again, Saturn is said to have more to do with “things as they are,” or “things in their just so-ness.” When we see a traffic jam and we start imagining the traffic jam like a fountain of angry fire ants, Saturn says, “you’re imagining.” Saturn doesn’t necessarily degrade that imagining, but it says, “You’re psychologically or imaginatively reflecting right now.” Saturn is the realist and the blackening light of the intellect reaching the limits of imagination. Silence and openness like winter.
Most of this makes sense to most of us who know a thing or two about astrology. But perhaps something we don’t know is the way in which either of these two planets, especially when in dialogue with each other, can subtly change faces or merge with each other.
For example, after many years of ritual psychedelic ceremonies, I began to notice an interesting irony at play. People who alter their consciousness somewhat regularly, through art, music, or perhaps more potently with actual substances, start to repeat some very inflexible mantras. “We create our own reality,” or “imagination IS reality” or “dreams ARE reality” or “psyche IS reality,” or even “everything is everything and THAT is reality.”
The irony is of course the fact that these ideas become inflexible ideologies. Which isn’t really a problem so long as we can step back and recognize that pure subjectivity is a kind of objectification of something. No matter how much we try to dance around it, slip past it, avoid or deny it, if we hold these “infinitely possible” viewpoints, or even if we embody or live them, we are still held in the grip of a God or a structure of consciousness…an “archetype” if you will, and even if the structure is rather flexible or invisible and porous (like an ocean), it is still given shape in the realm of the Gods, and the form giver is Saturn.
On the other hand, Saturn’s insistence upon objective reality becomes ironically subjective the more moody, temperamental, or controlling he becomes about it. We have to get beyond the idea that one and only one archetype signifies “the ocean.” Saturn’s relationship to the ocean might be better described as the tempestuous blackness of a storm, or the morose or somber qualities of a grey day over a winter sea. Saturn becomes more subjective, mad, depressed, or even raving, the more that he tries to convince himself that formal reality is the only reality. His inability to recognize himself as a subjective entity somehow IS his subjective presence as a personality among the Gods. And for this reason, Neptune is a most polarizing figure for Saturn and vice versa.
Taking all of this together, we might suggest a few things for us to consider right now within our personal reflections or daily devotions:
* How can I step back, stop projecting a story, and try to see the simplest facts of what’s happening…this is happening, I’m doing this, I’m doing that…and allow for that simplicity to bring me back into my body and out of the saturation of imagination or mental/emotional fluctuating or story telling?
* How can I step into a story, a vision, an idea, or the poetry of this moment in my life?
* How can I see stars and animals and planets and plants growing symbolically all around me?
* How can I learn to stop seeing myself AS a symbol or AS a projected fantasy or vision…how can I stop making my life all about metaphors?
* How can I invite metaphors and poetic fancy to play a larger role in how I perceive?
* Instead of trying to get it right, or trying to demonstrate that my way of doing something is objectively “correct,” how can I learn to see my approach like a costume, color, image, or imaginative lens?
* Instead of resisting the idea that there is a right or better way, instead of resisting all authority, structure, dogma, or guidance, how can I open myself to the idea that my subjective powers are not the be all end all
Playing with these questions right now, back and forth, will likely produce good results. These are the Gods discussing things in the sky right now, and thus they are here cloaking the atmosphere with their imaginative powers and filling us with their numinosity…and yet, they are merely symbols…not to be identified with. For were are humans, not gods.
Prayer: Help me to see the real imagination, and help me to stay firmly anchored in the imaginative facts… that I am who I am, and we are who we are, all things great and small
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