The Sun Squaring Neptune — Please Take Me Out of Myself

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

Today we're going to take a look at the sun squaring Neptune. The sun is in Cancer, Neptune's in Aries. The two planets are moving through a square today. Tomorrow was building up yesterday. We're going to talk about the timeline, and I'm going to share with you some of the thoughts and insights from the great astrologer Liz Greene, kind of a modern master of astrology, whose book on Neptune has a very famous passage covering the sun and Neptune combinations in birth charts or transits that we're going to take a look at today.

I'm going to read you some parts of what she wrote about this and share my insights and reflections, kind of riffing off from some of what I think are the best insights ever written about this combination, so hopefully you'll find this interesting, educational, and helpful when it comes to living through the experience of this transit, which you're probably going to notice today. So that is our agenda for the day, but before we get into it, as always, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections. It takes two seconds to subscribe, it's free, it really helps us grow as a community, we appreciate it.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, that's nightlightastrology.com. When you are over there, excuse me. Couple of promotions. First of all, hey, tonight I'm giving a talk on Mars, so go to the events page, click on monthly webinars, and you will see that this evening at 5:30 central, 6:30 eastern time. I'm giving a talk on the many faces of Mars. Now, what this talk is about is what's called the archetype, or first principle of Mars in ancient philosophy and astrology. So, we're getting down to the ancient elemental roots of the planetary philosophy, trying to understand what Mars represents in reality as an archetype, most fundamentally, and then how does that archetype pair naturally with other planets through aspects or conjunctions and things like that.

So, if you like deep dives into the philosophical roots of things, like why does Mars mean what it means, where does it come from? Why is it a thing at all? Then I think you'll really like this talk. You can't make it live, of course. You get the recording later. You get it either way, if you attend live or not. We always give you the recording too, so you can re-listen to it if you want. So that's happening this evening. The other thing that I'm promoting is my book, The Oracle Speaks. I'll be announcing a book release party soon, just a time to get together, talk about the book, talk about creative writing, journaling, astrological writing, and memoir.

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Yeah, I'll mention more about the book release party next week again. So, finally, go to the courses page: first year course, first year, second year, horary - all start this month. There's still a little bit of time to register. Early bird sales over, but need-based tuition is still open. Our first year class starts June 28. There's an informational video on the end of all of our videos during enrollment season, so you can check it out if you want to learn more about it. Just a couple of days really left to register before we start this new class. I'm so excited to start. Hopefully, we'll see some of you there. So, on that note, let's put Necepso up and get into things here.

Nice episodes, our official software program. You can find the affiliate link to get this software 20% off perpetually, that never expires in the comment section or the description of the video. Here's the chat, so let's talk about what's going on here. Okay, so let's get my Epic pen out, and you can see here, Thursday, June 25, the sun is in a square with Neptune. Now, if we back this up by a day, you can see that yesterday we were within a degree, so you could easily have been noticing anything we're going to talk about today. Yesterday, and then tomorrow we see the two planets parting within a degree. We're going to give that a little bit longer, and let's say by Sunday, June 28, they're about getting close to three degrees apart.

So this is a short-lived transit in terms of how long it lasts. If we give it three degrees total, then we're talking about Monday, June 22 all the way through about Sunday, June 28; you'll really notice it today, though, because the two planets are exact. The other thing that is important to note is on this fine day, on this fine beautiful day, let's roll the clock forward just a little bit. There's a very powerful lunar aspect today that's coinciding with the Sun Neptune Square, and that's going to be the opposition between the Moon in Scorpio and Mars in Taurus, that actually takes place tomorrow morning, but it's coming off the Sun Neptune Square within half a degree, so very powerful moment astrologically made more powerful by the fact that the moon is also in her fall, moving towards full, so waxing gibbous moon in her fall in Mars, a sign opposing a debilitated Mars.

That's a rough transit, that's a transit that could create some positive changes, but usually there's tension, there's the potential for polarization. So, how well we hold the tension of the opposites around the moon and Mars at the same time that Sun and Neptune are coming together, that becomes a point of emphasis right now. Anyhow, so what I want to do for you now today is share with you a passage that I am going to riff off from. I haven't done this for a while, but it feels like the right time. This is the astrological Neptune and the quest for redemption by Liz Greene. It is one of the best books ever written in astrology, in modern astrology on archetypes, in my opinion.

And especially, this book is all dedicated to Neptune, but she has a section where she goes through the combinations of planets, what they say on an archetypal level when they combine with Neptune, and there is a section on the sun and Neptune that I would like to read to you today. That's going to be our mission for the day. It's about three pages, and as I go, I'm going to pause and speak, kind of riff off from what Liz Greene says, and share some of my own insights and experiences, both in counseling and teaching, and personal, even personal transit work. Alright, so this is what she says about Neptune Sun.

She starts off with a little poem that says, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." When Neptune and the sun are combined, the need for individual self-expression and the longing for the formlessness of pre-birth are forced into dialogue. Now she's using the sun here as a way of talking about ambition and the formation of selfhood in relation to ambition, direction, desire, the sun can be like the plot line in a movie, which is involved with our evolving sense of why we're here, what we're doing with our life. So she says that individual sense of a life having something that it's living for, that's what she's calling individual self-expression, the formlessness of pre-birth, that kind of oceanic oneness of the womb she's associating with Neptune.

The subject of the conversation, conscious or unconscious, is the purpose of one's life. The sun and Neptune are uneasy bedfellows, and it generally takes at least until the time of the first Saturn return for the individual to begin to fathom how to live with this disturbing cohabitation. That it is possible is suggested by the Greeks, who coupled the two gods in their joint shrine at Delphi, presenting the worshiper with an alternating rhythm of solar clarity and chthonic ecstasy, each with its own part of the year set aside for the appropriate rituals, because the sun symbolizes those values and goals which develop fully at midlife, forming the bedrock of the individual's sense of personal destiny.

The Sun Neptune individual needs to include the Neptunian world in their chosen path in life. Otherwise, nagging discontent, disillusionment, and apathy may undermine everything one tries to do. I'll say something about this: when these two planets get together, the sense that life has a purpose is met with something very Dionysian in Neptune. If I think of Dionysus as Neptune for a second, which is a common association made by many modern archetypal astrologers, the feeling is like I need to lose myself in ecstatic dance. It's like Neptune wants to take us to belly dancing class, you know. By the way, shout out to Prentice, who gave me this Texas shirt.

She was on our retreat, and we had a belly dancing class on the retreat as well. My wife was like, 'Are you wearing a Texas shirt?' I was like, 'Prentice gave it to me on the retreat,' she was like, 'Oh, Prentice, yeah.' So, thanks. Shout out to Prentice, who lives down there. Anyway, we had a great belly dancing class on the retreat, and we also had great salsa dancing, and the salsa dance instructor was explaining, as was the belly dance instructor, that dance is a way of re-emerging as we get disconnected, of reconnecting, really reconnection, religion, religio, to reconnect; the dance can reconnect us to that sense of oneness that we sometimes feel a little distant from.

But that chthonic ecstasy is very different than being like, I'm here, I have a purpose, I'm working toward something, I have a legacy to fulfill, you know, a family business or a trade or a craft or a subject I want to master, you know, whatever. So the two things can be a little uneasy, because one has to do with individual self-expression, legacy plotline. The other one is like, let's dissolve ourselves in ecstatic madness, let's go to cosmic belly dancing class in Texas. Anyway, and she says that if the two don't figure out how to work together, then sometimes there'll be this nagging sense of discontent that starts to undermine everything one tries to do as a life path or ambition.

The reason for this is that if our life path or ambition doesn't have something of the Dionysian, you know, ecstatic oceanic oneness associated with it, it can start to feel dry and sort of empty or hollow. It's like a lot of celebrities have said, when they achieve great things in acting, or their career, they attain a lot of fame, they say it's kind of hollow, everyone has the need for their life path and ambition to also have aspects or elements that touch something transcendental and ineffable, something that goes beyond all of the ambitions of this world, even while living a life that has ambitions.

All the aspects, she writes, hard and soft, require some expression of the pre-birth realm through an individually developed medium, preferably, but not necessarily, one which can be pursued as a vocation or profession. That's very solar. The sun wants to feel like this thing completely occupies my sense of why I'm here, of what I'm doing, so often that's career. It doesn't have to be, but often it is. She's right about that. Including the Neptunian world in your life path might sound simple. All one has to do, apparently, is think transcendent thoughts, but the sun is a dynamic force which seeks to express and articulate and actualize.

It must radiate out into life and make some impact, however small, on the outer world. If the person is to avoid the illusory comfort of an escapist spirituality, he or she must find a vehicle that offers an outlet for Neptune's sensual and emotional theatricality, as well as its longing for fusion with the divine. Most importantly, this vehicle must be individual; doctrines, however beautiful and worthwhile they might seem, are not individual unless they are processed through one's own experience and values. This is important because sometimes the sun and Neptune will appear through religious calling or a sense of spiritual commitment to something like astrology or meditation or yoga or some path.

For many of us in the West, that path is sort of diffused and often disconnected from its roots, right. We're modern spiritual shoppers trying to find something to pacify our material malaise. It's often that it's disconnected from culture or community, it feels like it's a very individual solo journey. I'm not sure how healthy all of that is, to be honest. I think we probably do need community, but either way, the point that Liz is making here so nicely, like I'm on a first name basis with her, oh Liz, but the point that she's making is that it has to be with Neptune and the sun, however spiritual it might be, and whatever tradition or lineage it might be part of spiritually, again, yoga, astrology, whatever it is, it still has to be very individual for the sun to be satisfied.

Neptune is the pull toward things like a group spiritual religious experience. The sun seeks to actualize that through individual expression, so that's a tricky combination, because they kind of pull in opposite directions, one toward individuation, the other toward dissolution of individuation or individuality. Sun Neptune can signify the musician, the actor, the composer, the playwright, the writer of poetry and fiction, the painter, the filmmaker, the photographer, the astrologer, the experimental scientist who relies upon inspiration as well as empirical research, or the therapist, the counselor, teacher, who works with the products of imagination in order to heal.

Neptune may also feel at home nurturing or redeeming an environment which echoes Eden. Neptune's empathy with human suffering and longing marks the sun Neptune individual's creative endeavors with a quality of universality, he or she can communicate in a language everyone understands. These forms of expression are solar as well as oceanic, they have body, although they are fluid, they necessitate conscious effort, dedication, individual choice, sensual contact, and imagery, and a subtle interrelationship with the rest of life. So what she's now doing nicely is articulating what it looks like when they come together in a healthy way.

When Sun and Neptune come together in a healthy way, there is a way of one's individual ambitions, creativity, sense of direction, and purpose usually aligning or feeding into the zeitgeist or collective concern or emotion, or they're able to tap into something that's universal that people can relate to. I think this is really important point; the unseen is not just transcendent light, it is also primal darkness. If one tries to befriend the little fish without the big one, the darkness may rise up through other channels: alcohol, drug addiction, compulsive eating disorders, sexual difficulties, or disabling and disintegrating mental or physical illness, or may be experienced through projection.

And by some blackly humorous quirk of fate, one's partner or child will embody all the Neptunian elements that one most strongly repudiates within oneself. Some Neptunian person, like Pentheus, may initially succeed in banning the god, but may end up marrying a manic depressive, a hysteric, an alcoholic, or giving birth to a little Dionysus, who becomes a drug addict when he grows up. This is really important point, which is that the extent to which we divorce our sense of individuality, solo heroic individual purpose, and becoming from something oceanic and overwhelming to the ego, the more that those two things stay apart, and the more that we try to keep that overwhelm of Neptune at a distance, the more that it will find back doors into our conscious awareness.

That does not mean that you are personally responsible for someone else's alcoholism, or something like she's saying, that's not what Liz Greene is saying, is not that you become responsible for it, only that archetypes have a way of permeating our lives, and the sun and Neptune is an archetypal constellation. If it's in your birth chart, or we're in a transit like this, it will have a way of making itself felt through other things, other people, other events in the environment, especially to the extent that we repudiate it and be like, no, Neptune's overwhelming, or if you find collective reality to be overwhelming, it'll find a way of touching you personally at some point.

If you find spiritual, mystical, and unexplainable states to be just bogus bs, if they annoy you, synchronicities will find a way of coming into your life in ways that are undeniable. So you can't keep Neptune out, because Neptune is sort of all pervasive, and it becomes more monstrous and overwhelming, and can feel like a tidal wave, or a flood that floods our rational mind, or that floods our awareness in ways that we describe as problematic, often to the extent that we are unconsciously averse to it, and not establishing a relationship with it. Establishing a relationship with it, we get afraid, it will overwhelm my sense of personhood.

For example, in the new theory of attachment that has been really popular for a while now, let's talk about a quick way of thinking about avoidant attachment style, right? It can find the union of intimacy to be threatening to one's sense of selfhood, so it keeps it at an arm's length. That's one reason of many that someone might be more avoidant in their attachment style, but what happens is, you know, they'll keep attracting relationships where there's just these gentle invitations to open up and allow the overwhelm to come in, so that you can discover that you don't lose yourself, you know. So this is how it works. We don't want to be afraid of Neptune. Now she's going to go in a different direction, because there's some shadows that work in a totally different way as well.

But let's keep going. The individual with Sun Neptune longs to be taken out of him or herself through an act of voluntary submission to something greater or higher. See, a lot of people come to me for readings, saying, What is my calling? What is my purpose? What I really hear in that is never it's I can't sit down and tell you what job you ought to do. I can tell you about archetypes in your chart, things that probably fit you better than others, but when I hear that, what I really hear people longing for is something to surrender to, something to submit to, and I don't mean that in a, like, a when you're overwhelmed by love for something, interest in something, and you quite clearly can't get it out of your mind, you feel you have to surrender to the love or passion that's come into your life.

For me, that was astrology. I think people are looking for that. When people ask me that question in readings, what is my passion? What is my purpose? What I really hear them saying is nothing has got me in its grip so much that I feel I have to surrender to it, and we need that. If you've ever, like, floated on your back in the ocean, something that I did the last day of our retreat in Mexico, I went down, thanked the ocean, went out into the surf, and just rolled with the waves. There are few things in life that present such a strong contrast between being an individual within forces that are overwhelmingly larger than your own power or control than being an individual laying on your back in the ocean.

So we need to feel that we're taken out of ourselves, or that we belong to something bigger with that, but that thing that's bigger doesn't threaten us, it holds us, and we're looking for that with Sun Neptune, and when people ask about their calling, that's usually what they're talking about, and the feeling that we are aching for something, but it's not there, can be very Sun Neptune, and that itself is the call to search, to probe, to pray, to open the heart, to ask for clues. The dissatisfaction does not mean that an answer is going to be instantly provided, but it's like a summons, you know, show up, and when that ache gets there, like I'm just don't feel like I've completely found something that I can lie on my back in and float in some bigger thing that I can surrender and find myself held by and express through.

Well, just because you're aching for that doesn't mean, right? It's a good sign that you know that that ache exists, and then it can be validated somehow. It's a good starting point. Most of us get a little too impatient, though, and this is where cheap replacements can come in, like addiction or ego inflation, delusions of grandeur, things that we feel well, I can give myself to it quickly. It solves the ache really quickly, rather than putting me in the difficult position of having to knock on the door, knock on the door, knock until an answer comes. One cannot fake it in either realm, and then hope to experience the sun's sense of personal authenticity.

But being naked is not the same as giving up the ego. It is the state of being most genuinely oneself, without defense or disguise. Those common dreams in which one discovers oneself naked in the middle of a crowd in a public place portray the painful experience of self-exposure, the loss of an acceptable persona or social role. This solar need for expression of unique self, even in the face of loneliness or collective disapproval, needs to be held in balance with Neptune's longing for dissolution. If the sun is swamped, then individuality can only make itself known through covert channels, symptoms which justify one's unconscious demand to be noticed, or a relationship pattern in which one's specialness is measured by the degree of victimization suffered at the hands of a selfish and domineering partner, child, parent, or friend.

If Neptune is suppressed, symptoms reflecting one's helplessness and dependency may appear, or may be repeatedly drawn to those who are themselves helpless and victimized, and one may experience an intolerable longing for something unknown and unseen, a longing for dissolution, which can only be satisfied by an act of what older astrology textbooks call self-undoing. All of her points are so good here, and the thing is, is that if, when you feel a sense of divine dissatisfaction, divine discontent, you know something more is there, you know some higher sense of meaning or purpose is there to be surrendered to, but you can't find it, you have to be really careful in those moments that the sense of discontent, the apathy, the disappointment, the frustration, the feeling of loneliness or disconnection doesn't drive you to make unhealthy decisions.

Self-undoing can occur very easily with Sun Neptune, but the alternative is delusions of grandeur, which means that we try to pump our own tires to deal with the ache that we feel, and then we pursue something that is rooted in some illusion or some very ungrounded fantasy, and that's a Sun Neptune problem, traditionally. Now she goes on, and she talks about the father, and I think this part's really interesting. Like all solar aspects, Sun Neptune can describe one's experience of the personal father. The individual may have experienced a vanishing father who was emotionally or physically absent, ailing, or weak, there's often profound unconscious idealization of the father.

He may have been Neptunian himself. His birth chart may reveal Sun Neptune, Moon Neptune, angular Neptune. Creative imagination and psychic receptivity may have been strong in the father's nature, and perhaps in the male line, going back over several generations, but often these attributes have remained undeveloped, or are masked by more materialistic concerns. The father's life may appear to have been wasted, its creative potentials dissipated in alcohol, womanizing, depression, illness, or repeated financial failure. On some level, the father, inaccessible yet fascinating, damaged yet promising the ecstasy of fusion, beloved yet a failure to his offspring, may appear as a Christ figure, a redeemer himself in need of redemption, hidden behind or driven away by a more prosaic wife.

There is a lot more that has been written about the Sun Neptune when it comes to the personal father, but I will say that creative fathers, spiritual fathers, as well as fathers who struggle with the tension of carrying something spiritual, imaginative, otherworldly, the ache that it can create to feel, to want to feel connected to that, and how a father actually individuates or integrates that Neptunian dimension of life will often come up when these transits occur. There will be some kind of referendum on your relationship between your father and your beliefs, or your worldview, or spirituality, or art, or sensuality. So, some really interesting things that can come up when Sun Neptune get together.

The personal father, melded with the archetypal father, is a symbol for every child's sense of confidence and creative power. This is why we expect so much from our fathers, who will inevitably get it wrong, because they are mortal. It is also why the sun in the horoscope seems to personify what has been inherited from the father as part of the raw material of one's own individual destiny. The mythic hero's quest is invariably the externalization of an attribute embodied by his parent god. Any planet aspecting the sun points to a particular facet of the father archetype, which is the individual's task to confront and express as creatively as possible.

The Neptunian father is a spirit who has not maybe embodied himself in life, and his child is left to find his or her own model for confident spiritual imaginative living. It is not surprising that many Sun Neptune individuals take a long time to do so. Many, she talks about many Sun Neptune people whose fathers she met were talented actors, musicians, writers, painters. My daughter has Sun Neptune contact in her chart, and I'm an astrologer, and play the guitar and a kind of creative person who has a lot of experience with psychedelics, but I could see how when you have a father image that's like that, archetypally, not literally, but archetypally, that trying to figure out what it means for you to find connection to some of the same spirit can become challenging.

My own father, a preacher and minister in the Christian church, had Sun Neptune contacts on his birth as well, so I can relate to this. My dad also went through some really intense mental health crises that led him out of the church, and sooner or later a Sun Neptune person will have to develop self-confidence in their own creative direction, and let's see what else. Yeah, I think we'll skip past some of this. Sometimes the vanishing father becomes the vanishing god. That's important. Where, if Dad is absent or really disappointing or weak or sick, any of those things, where the archetype of the father weakens, it can necessitate a search for the Grail.

That's a Grail Quest motif that she goes into here, which means recovering spirituality when a source, a sense of the source of life, creatively, imaginatively, spiritually, and psychologically. Where do we find that sense of where do we find a well to draw from that can go through some intense challenges and changes when the sun and Neptune are combined in aspect or in the birth chart, because the father goes through some kind of weakening; when dad gets sick, when, like my dad, Sun Neptune contact my father, when his kind of faith and mental health were transforming in a very difficult way. Mine went through an upheaval and transformation.

I already know that my daughter, having that contact in her chart, when I go through things with my faith or my profession or my creative direction in life, when there are big changes, I know because I am an astrologer who's worked with this, that I'm going to have to be really attentive to doing my best to be attentive to what her experience of that is like, because when kids are born with Sun Neptune, a lot of the times their father's spiritual and psychological crises and transformations, weaknesses and rebirths will be personally effective, right? It'll have a big impact. Enormous imaginative and creative potential is reflected in the Sun Neptune contacts, but if one is to express that potential, one must build a strong vessel to contain the sacred wine. Yeah, that's it.

These are oceanic powers, and the Sun Neptune seeks a way to integrate and express those things creatively. So that's a really big, deep, you know, talk on archetypal Sun Neptune. But where do you see it right now? Maybe it's showing up very briefly in one little arena of life, your job or your relationships or your marriage or your health or your family relationships, something like that. Pay attention to the whole sign houses of Cancer and Aries for some clues as to where these two planets might be commingling right now and helping you see something or get in touch with that Neptunian realm, and how is it playing off from your individual sense of creative purpose and direction in life? That's really the good questions to be reflecting on right now.

Always fun to hang out with all of you. I'm going to sign off, tell you more about the year one program next. We're starting really soon now, on the 28th. Hope to see you guys there. I also hope you're having a great day. Thanks again. Shout out to Prentice for the Texas shirt on the retreat. Really appreciate all you guys for giving me these little gifts. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.