The Sun Opposite Neptune and How We Mess it Up

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we're going to talk about the Sun opposite Neptune. In particular, I want to look as this transit is perfecting at the different ways in which we tend to fumble the ball. It was NFL opening weekend recently. So I have football on the brain, maybe. But how do we tend not to get this transit, right?

I mean, on one level, I want to say that there's no getting it right or wrong. It's just experiencing it and staying open to what we learned and all of that, but what do I see people doing myself clients, the stories that you guys share? What do I see people doing with Sun-Neptune transits that kind of mess us up? That we become self-destructive? Or, you know, somehow the shadow of the transit gets a hold of us? What are the mistakes that we make, and we can learn from them. So I want to talk about five of them today as a way of helping us work through this transit positively and again, with the kind of under the broader umbrella that there's no really getting it right or wrong, of course.

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Okay, anyway, so let's take a look today at the Sun opposite Neptune, and the main thing that I want to get into is how we tend to, I said, fumble the ball earlier; you can tell where my head's at. But, you know, how do we tend to sort of mess this one up because it does happen. Here is the Sun moving through the opposition to Neptune.

If I go one day forward, you're going to see that it's Tuesday, September 19, that you'll see this perfecting, and then if we give it another day, you'll see the perfection separates Wednesday by a degree couple of degrees out by Friday, September 22. So, the rest of this week is really the story of the Sun opposite Neptune.

Now, given that is the case, and we had a New Moon in Virgo that also opposes Neptune, which we talked a lot about last week, I want to talk about five reasons that we tend to mess up with the Sun-Neptune transit now, please when I say mess up, I mean, I don't know if we can mess it up. I don't know what that even means. I'm just it's just really it's just kind of a fun, clever way of creating a list. Just like be transparent about it.

Here are the ways in which I see us getting caught or grabbed by the unconscious dimension of a Sun-Neptune transit. What do we do where we have a choice, we have agency, and we get to interact with transits of our free will. What do we tend to do with our free will that causes us to suffer during Sun Neptune transits?

Number one, we are not patient enough, and this is really important because what Sun Neptune often implies you get the Sun, which is a universal symbol for purpose and life direction. If you think about the course of life, like the plotline of a novel or a movie, the Sun is very much that big arc that takes us on a heroic quest to individuate to become what we're meant to become like the acorn has within it the oak tree and there's some divine image inherent within the acorn that kind of gives the acorn a sense of where it's going. It's like its little blueprint inside of it.

Each of us, by the position of our Sun sign, the whole sign house of the Sun, aspects to the Sun, the ruler of the Sun, and its relation with the Sun. Really, lots of different things can be used to kind of qualify and develop a sun delineation in a birth chart. But generally speaking, the Sun has to do with our sense of vitality and purpose; what makes me feel alive, and where is spirit guiding me?

One of the cool things is that when the Sun comes in contact with Neptune, this planet that represents the transcendent and transcendental, the otherworldly, the romantic, the imaginative, the subtle, the timeless, the unitive, and also sometimes the delusions and intoxication and the tendency to get lost in fantasies and an almost like a drunkenness on or like an idealism that makes us drunk, you know, a romantic intoxication, there's that side of it too.

But when the Sun and Neptune come together in any kind of aspect, one of the things that happens is that we start to get this feeling like what I'm doing with my life isn't enough, or it's lacking something and the weird reason that this comes up is because Neptune in order to infuse within our sense of life purpose, a connection to the romantic, to the ideal, to the imaginative to you know, kind of that sort of otherworldliness of Neptune, it first will tend to amplify, especially in an opposition for the Sun, the way in which our life purpose feels as though it is lacking some higher sense of purpose or some imaginative pull.

It's like in other words, Sun-Neptune often makes us feel bored and or dry or without purpose, or it can make us start to yearn or long for something of higher meaning and value that we want to see infused within our sense of purpose. It's like the acorn looking at the image of the oak tree and not being particularly inspired by it, you know, and we need inspiration because it's part of what fuels our growth toward our potential or our purpose or whatever we want to call it.

Now, I'm going to talk more about the cult of purpose later because that can be an issue as well. But generally speaking, the problem is that when this Neptunian energy comes through and touches on the Sun, we lose patience; we say, I want to be something more. I'm tired of the way things are, and sometimes, that comes with a feeling of being lost.

I'm lost, I'm adrift, I feel bored or restless, or I feel like something's lacking, and most of us don't like that feeling and, so what do we do rather than being patient and understanding that divine discontent as a moment that is sort of pregnant with possibility and meaning, and that if we allow it to play out and just stay, will usually contribute to our lives and renew our sense of purpose, deepen or transcendentalize, or romanticize or bring our fantasy into a new revitalizing position in our hearts and minds, it will do that if we allow it time and space, if we can work with and through the restlessness and the discontent.

What often happens is that we're not patient enough, and so we rush to some simple solution that we think will fix it all. Well, let me just, I don't know, I'm just making stuff up. But let me just dye my hair and buy new clothes. I mean, sometimes that's really fun, but you get what I'm saying. Or let me, I'm just gonna go and take a workshop, and you've not even thought about whether or not you want to take it; you're just doing something, to do something. So now, maybe you do take a workshop, but maybe it's a workshop that has come as you've allowed this divine discontent to gestate and clarify what you actually want to do with the energy.

So I would say the number one way in which I've noticed myself sort of messing up and becoming, you know, self destructive with Neptune-Sun transits is that I'm not patient; I go, ooh, I'm wanting something, something exciting. But it's like you're pre-empting, where the transit will take you and align you naturally if you just let it unfold. We're not comfortable with the kind of yearning.

It's like if you're in love, and you just can't help but call someone too many times, you know, you just can't help but text that extra text when you know, you just wait a couple of minutes, and you'll hear back from the person, but you just can't help yourself. That's Sun-Neptune energy that might be Venus-Neptune, but that's the kind of even, as something is forming, that's going to be a wonderful uplifting and exciting contribution to your sense of purpose in life, you'll preempt it and try to push it somehow. So we're not patient. That's one of the main things.

Number two, we aren't open to compromise. So Neptune can bring to the Sun a sense of romantic idealism, spiritual, moral, political, artistic, and idealism. The perfect world it can be sort of utopian, and what, unfortunately, what happens when we have these beautiful fantasies is that for as beautiful as they are, and as much as they may actually inform and bring our lives in a positive direction, they can also make us incredibly hard headed and closed down to compromise. It's either this perfect ideal, or it's nothing at all.

So, one of the ways we tend to mess up a Sun Neptune transit is that we're not open to compromise. We can't just say, well, maybe it'll be a little bit of this and a little bit of that, maybe it'll be, you know, that there's some element of what I'm like, maybe there's some way in which I can incorporate a higher longing or romantic image or an imagined, an inspired goal or vision that we start developing. But the reason we won't get there is because we're not willing to say, well, it may not get to, you know, level 10. But it's pretty cool if I get up to level seven.

Or we're not comfortable with the kind of any kind of compromise that may be involved because we get very all or nothing in our thinking when we're in a peak state of romantic longing, and that's an issue with the Sun Neptune.

Number three is we won't open our hearts or imaginations. So sometimes the Sun-Neptune comes along, and it just amplifies our sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are with the status quo, and we'll feel all this yearning, but it'll come in the way we'll it's almost like it gets filtered through dissatisfaction. So if you're only feeling dissatisfied with the way things are and yearning for something more or, but not opening your heart or imagination to receive a new vision, you're just staying stuck on the dissatisfaction, this transit will just be a bummer.

I mean, that's, that's the truth of it, and how I've experienced, I've seen other people experience it when they're you; you can't just stay stuck in. This isn't good enough; I long for something more. You have to open your heart and your imagination to possibilities. If you won't do that, you'll just the transit will just come by and make you feel dissatisfied.

Number four is we can't stay grounded. This is really important because groundedness is such a key feature of the split between Virgo and Pisces in general; you've got Earth and water. One of the problems with Neptune transits is that it's very similar to we aren't open to compromise. The vision is so compelling. Even if it's clear and you've moved past the satisfaction, you've opened your heart, your imagination; you have a sense of where you want to go; oh my god, it's so exciting. But then, you cannot come up with a rational plan. So I've seen so many people during Neptune-Sun things come in and say I'm gonna write a book. Okay, well, you have to sit down every day and write.

You know, that's part of the discipline, the grounded, this having a planned strategy, having to develop some skills, they'll just be like, so we can stay high on a vision, but not do anything to actually bring the vision into embodied reality.

One of the things that drives me nuts is that there are a lot of people out there who love to talk about the imagination as though it is our savior, and in many ways, it is, you know, it's like, I think it was Blake who said something like Jesus, the imagination, like pairing, the sort of saving and graceful saving uplifting effect of the imagination to Christ. So that's a that's a powerful comparison.

But the point is that and I might be getting that quote slightly wrong. But that's the idea that I want to mention here, which is that so still one of the things about if you've been thinking about the Christ story, here's a myth or a story or if you take it literally, that's cool too. But it's God become human, become flesh, become material, materialized.

We sometimes think that the process of something imagined becoming something concrete is a bad thing. We think, Oh, we, you know, it's like, the urge to take a vision and make it physical, is somehow an affront to the imaginal. This is evidence in people who love to talk about art and vision and imagination but almost get angry or offended if you say, Okay, fine. But what are you doing with that? Are you just walking around like a romantic elitist? Who thinks that everything imaginable or artistic is fundamentally better than everything that's more earthy and mundane?

I mean, there is a dichotomy between, say, the mundane and the sort of ethereal otherworldliness, but they don't; they can work together in and through each other. So that compromise is also if we make the compromise, we're not offended by the fact that we sometimes have to be grounded as we work with the imagination.

It's very important because the imagination seeks expression in material; it's like, I want to become a pot, or I want to become a painting, and that requires canvas and color and ink and, you know, so we, we, if we can't stay grounded, we're not going to work well with this energy and but I don't mean stay grounded. I mean, I should say that there isn't a relationship between the Earth and the water, between the form and the kind of imaginal world that informs and joins itself to material.

Number five, we can't get too high on the heroic. Now, Sun-Neptune transits often come along and get us drunk on heroism, and this for most people; in my experience, if you take a Sun-Neptune transit, there are heroic dimensions in life, don't get me wrong, and the myth of the hero was a valuable one that we all work with. But you get kind of Sun-Neptune drunk on heroism, whether that's all I'm going to be a compassionate, saintly person, or I'm going to be the hero that saves me, you've just whatever. Neptune-Sun transits will often bring eventual disillusionment. So you get high on being heroic, but you'll have to eventually recede back into some degree of irrelevance.

The other thing that happens is like whenever a good idea in a book, I might be reading a really good book that has a really interesting idea about the mind or therapy or human behavior or some modality that could help us, and then they start saying, in fact, the potential of this idea is to save the world. I always get, like, glazed over and like the, you know, the channel that comes up on the old TVs with just the black and white static, and I'm just like sitting there going, you lost me; it saved the world.

Can we start with something simpler? I don't mean that saving the world isn't a good thing. I'm just not sure that the world needs saving, at least not from us. I don't know, maybe the world needs to save us, I don't know. But you see what I mean? Like, as soon as you get into let's save someone, let's save the world, this heroic quest of salvation which is very Sun-Neptune.

There can be this kind of aggrandizing egotistical energy that's cloaked in goodness and the impulse to save and stuff like that. So it's like, you have to beware of the ego casting itself as the hero, the savior, the saint, and it's not that we can't be heroic. It's that we have to recognize it as archetypal, and when we understand that heroic impulse as an archetypal impulse, then I think we can work with it without getting identified with it.

Which is what happens when we say, for example, you take a good idea, and you say this idea is so good it could save the world. If everyone, one of the things that I think helps the hero complex is to say, what is my sphere of concern? What is my sphere of influence? Let's say, for example, I'm concerned with the welfare of animals, Mars entered my sixth house in Libra, and suddenly, I found myself feeling the motivation to rescue an animal.

This is something Ashley had been wanting to do for a while, and I'd been a little bit more like, we already have a dog, you know, she's a rescue dog like we've done some good, and Ashley has been like, I want to rescue another one, like, and I was just like, oh, man, she's a Cancer rising, you know? Like, I don't know. Well, now you can see it, you can see on the floor behind me, that's Hilda. She's a mastiff rescue that we took in last week, and she's the sweetest as can be. There's Mars entering my sixth house in Libra. Right? Advocacy. So you can have like, Okay, I'm concerned about animals.

What I've learned in my life thus far, and what some of my teachers have taught me, and maybe this is, it's different for everyone. But there's my sphere of concern. I have concern for animals, my wife does, and I take up that concern; what's my sphere of influence? Well, I probably can't save or adopt 20 animals; I can't save the world from animal cruelty. But I can take a dog in, right? That's my sphere of influence; there's that that's something I can do.

So I think that Neptune-Sun transits come down to just making sure that our sphere of concern, what am I what am I passionate about? What do I wear? And how can I actually be a hero, a helper? How can I contribute to the changing or saving of the world? If you want to put it that way? Sorry, I'm annoyed by the whole, like, save the world culture. But that's just me. That's my own stuff, I guess? Well, you can look and say, What am I concerned about, and then where does the ability that I have to influence or do something overlap with what I'm concerned about, and if we can sort of not push ourselves to take on a concern that's too big. Considering how much time, energy, interest, or consistency we can actually devote to something.

For example, I would say that one of my biggest spheres of influence comes through my astrology work, and the question thus becomes how can I use astrology to help the human soul with suffering and, creating meaning in life, and finding joy and humor and happiness in the way that things happen?

So, my sphere of concern has very much to do with those things. So, my sphere of influence as an astrologer has grown so that I can make content that I hope makes a positive impact, and I can actually do that five days a week; I can make this content, and I can hope that it does some good with the things I'm concerned about. That's really cool. You know, that's, that's really cool.

So now, one of the things that I have to battle is also that people see, oh, he has a platform. Well, here's how you ought to use that platform based on other people's concerns or influences, and I have to make sure that I stay true to what I feel legitimately concerned about and how I can serve within my capacity, given my real concerns.

Now, with a Sun-Neptune, one of the things that can happen is we can get out of our own wheelhouse. We can start to say oh, well, there are these concerns, and they all seem really good, but they may not be your actual concerns. Sometimes, with the Sun-Neptune, it's also about recognizing that what you're concerned with in the way you want to serve or giving compassion to other souls or the planet or whatever has to come from what you're actually concerned with, and not what not like images of what is good or just or righteous or pure or valued or virtuous. It has to come from your own heart and your own heart's connection to that.

So one of the ways we can get sun Neptune wrong is also by getting high on the heroic images that are outside of our sphere of influence and outside of our actual concerns, things that we actually, on a heart level, feel connected to, and of course, it's possible to open our hearts to new things and new concerns all the time, and I guess we should try to stretch our hearts open and listen and hear what's going on in the world and open ourselves to being concerned about new things. That might be a Sun-Neptune dynamic as well. Can we open our heads, hearts, or imaginations a little bit wider like we said earlier.

But anyway, these are some of the issues that can come up if we get high on the heroic high, and the heroic often happens because we haven't considered whether or not we actually care about something or are we just picking up on something because other people are saying, well, this is good or righteous or pure or something like that.

There are a lot of good causes to care about, and I think we do our best work when we find actual heart resonance with something we really care about and then find how we can impact or create change, given that concern within our actual capacity. Doing that modeling that in the world, to me, is part of how we can, I believe how we can, see greater systemic changes.

I feel like somehow trying to go beyond our means. Our actual concerns, our actual sphere of influence, contributes to this kind of delusional egotistic savior complex that is not actually helping the culture.

Those are just my beliefs. So take them or leave them. I'm just explaining how I relate to this idea with the Sun-Neptune, and I hope it helps you in one way or another to influence your thinking today and give you good things to think about and consider as the Sun-Neptune is coming through. That is it for today. I hope that you enjoyed this, and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys again tomorrow. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.