The Sun Squares Neptune: Why Perfectionism is a Good Thing

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we're going to take a look at this week's Sun Neptune square; the Sun is in Jupiter sign of Sagittarius, while Neptune is of course, in Pisces, the feminine temple of Jupiter. So we're going to look at the square between these two planets today. And we're going to talk about one theme or pattern that is often related to the Sun square Neptune or any Sun Neptune combination, which is that of perfectionism. And normally, I think most of the time I talk to people say in my client practice, and we talk about how to avoid the trap or curse of perfectionism, you know, like, so today, we're actually going to flip that on its head, we will talk about perfectionism and what it might actually bring to our life. And this is a good thing to do with archetypes.

Let's say a combination of planets is often associated with vanity. Okay, well, vanity is something you probably want to avoid. But how can that same quality or pattern be turned or flipped in order to be something that is virtuous or helpful, and that is a good thing to do with any of the patterns or themes that emerge around planetary combinations? Because it's, it's always about the interplay of light and dark and astrology, the whole language of ancient astrology was built on relationships between opposites, opposing qualities, opposing themes, and opposing planets. So while for most of us, you hear the word perfectionism, and you go, Oh, that's not good. Like, don't be a perfectionist, right? But there is some value to this theme or quality of the Sun square, Neptune. That is perfectionism, and we're going to talk about what that might be today. Anyway, that's a little sneak preview.

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Alright, let's take a look at the transit of the week, one of the transits of the week anyway, which is the square between the Sun and Neptune. I'm going to put the real-time clock up on the screen. So here you can see the transit coming through. This is Wednesday, December 14. Wednesday, December 14, and the transit is from the Sun in Sagittarius to Neptune in Pisces. So we can see this transit kind of heating up as the week goes on. Here is Tuesday as we're today, December 13. And the Sun is just coming into the square within a degree; this means that you should have been feeling this transit all the way, maybe from Sunday all the way up until about Wednesday, for reading all the way until about Saturday.

So typically, about a three-degree range that is before and after the exact square that will designate the time or sphere within which the symbolism of the planetary combination will make itself manifest. Now, that doesn't mean that every planetary transit is going to manifest in your life. These are signs and omens. And often enough, you will notice them in very peculiar places. You might notice them in terms of something that you're suddenly attracted to on Netflix that you want to watch one night, and the art or the moral of the story, or the characters or the setting can somehow be represented by a planetary transit can be something really mundane like that.

Or it can be something really important happening in a relationship or with your health or at work or in some sphere of your life where it's like very obvious and personal. It can also be something happening in the periphery, in a partner's life, or a friend's life, or something like that.

So the reason that we pay attention, of course, to the transits is so that we can live a life walking day by day with the planets. What that does is it makes the transcendental realm that which is eternal. And remember, we are souls living in bodies. And what that does for us is it awakens and engages the soul, which is also a transcendent being, a transcendental being, an eternal being, a being without beginning or end. And it connects that transcendent, transcendent part of ourselves to the world in which we are living, so that above and below are bridged. So that's the whole point of doing this, and to turn the archetypes, the planetary combinations that are coming through in the sky in different ways, so that you can learn to identify them and learn to be more conscious of their presence in your life, which is a fantastic thing to do because that grant, to my experience, it gives us more freedom.

There's more freedom, at least psychologically, psychically, and spiritually, when you're living a life that is more aware of all of these divine forces and archetypes that are playing out around you. Now, this is also the reason that I'm saying this; for starters, is that the Sun and Neptune are broadly speaking associated with making life about some kind of transcendent or transcendental purpose, or mission, or ideal. Now that could range throughout the history of planet Earth from building the most, you know, beautiful thing like, you know, designing of a skyscraper for someone that was a beautiful transcendental goal. You know, for other people, it might literally be salvation in another hour in the afterlife. For other people, it might be the perfect body. For other people, it may be cultivating the perfect relationship.

But we tend to live our lives with ideals, and ideal images, which are like perfect, timeless, eternal images. And we aim our lives toward them. And this is very solar in nature. But it starts to take on an imaginal-like sparkle when the Sun comes into contact with Neptune. Those ideal images start to be infused with the feeling that this image will save me, this image will redeem me, this image grants my life not just a sense of purpose, which is kind of mundane in every, in an everyday sense. We all live with images that propel us to act in certain ways. We have a sense of purpose that moves the plotline along. And it's, you know, it's like relatively mundane stuff, work, bills, relationships, jobs, the things that give us pleasure, right, like everyday stuff. But when the Sun hits Neptune, now it is; What is the big purpose of my life? Why am I here, you know, starts getting even sometimes more religious in nature when the Sun hits Neptune, or it can be about is my life worth, or does my life mean anything? Here are all of these different mundane purposes, but is there any higher reason or higher purpose for being here? Is there a higher self which I'm trying to actualize? Somehow within my day-to-day life, this is what the Sun Neptune is like.

To reiterate this idea, I want to read you a short passage from, as you guys know, one of my favorite books on Neptune that I often quote, the Astrological Neptune by Liz Greene. So a brief passage, just like a little paragraph. So she's talking about Sun Neptune contacts, and she says the Sun Neptune individual longs to experience being taken out of himself or herself through an act of voluntary submission to something greater or higher.

So she goes in both the act of love and the act of creative expression; we must truly be naked. If we wish to offer a genuine reflection of our innermost selves. 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 defenses and disguises. 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 the self for the expression of a 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 with 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 one 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.

So what I like about that passage, in relation to what we're talking about today, is that what Liz Greene is telling us is that we each have some, you know, I don't love the word ego, but we have a personal sense of identity. And as life goes on, many of us, especially those of us, who are attracted to astrology, live with the sense that I am here to do certain things, have certain experiences, meet certain people, learn certain lessons, and live for some higher sense of purpose, or at the very least, that I am here to experience some form of personal and quote unquote, spiritual evolution.

Now, I think that that is deeply like Sun Neptune kind of archetype. All of those themes are resoundingly Sun Neptune. So the problem is that for most of us, when we, when we take, so the Sun Neptune, let's say, generates an image or a series of images in our lives that are ideal in some way, they give us a sense of why I'm here or what I'm living for. That's, it's both about me, but it's bigger than me somehow; it makes us feel as though we're living within a divine arrangement or plan. Sometimes people use the word calling or something like that.

So now, our ability to live with that sense of calling. That's a tricky thing. It's a really tricky thing. Because, in a sense, that Sun Neptune urge to transcend and fulfill a unique sense of purpose. Right? That, in truth, is perfectionism. Now, the so people immediately when they hear that will be like, you know, it's an uncomfortable word. It's a word that there's a lot of baggage around perfectionism. But I think that it's, it's something that we have to explore because the Sun Neptune, for example, will often produce within people a sense that life is meaningless and without purpose, or it will produce in equal extreme measure the sense that you know, I am, Jesus Christ and my life is of the utmost importance that every single difficult thing that's happened to me is making me into the world's most special healer or something like that, you know, so the sense of inflating my sense of purpose, to grant me some transcendent reason for being here.

And that we can craft that state that almost like delusions of grandeur, right? And we craft that in almost like direct response to the feeling that we live with over a long period of time, or acutely at times, that life is meaningless. And then I don't have a reason for being here. So then the flip side comes out, and we have some reason for being here that is almost delusional. It's like delusionally grandiose. And the two extremes are both associated with the Sun and Neptune.

In fact, when people go through Neptune Sun transits, you will see them struggle profoundly with alternating between everything is sort of meaningless. And I don't want to be here. I want to I almost like dissolve my sense of individuality because it's so frustrating to not feel like I'm unique or that I stand out, or I have any transcendent purpose. And this is, in a sense, a person having to deal with the fact that you are not that special, you know that any of us are not that special, there's a weird way in which, you know, each one of us is just like a grain of sand on the, you know, the beach of infinity. It's like, who cares, you know, you know, and the Sun, like Sun Neptune transits, can make you feel like acutely aware of the fact that you know, it's, it can be sort of nihilistic, or it can just be just intensely deflating, or I think I'm special, well, I'm nothing special at all. I'm a few. I'm like; I'm a fart in the wind, you know. And, like, nobody wants to feel that way. But the other extreme will often come in during Sun Neptune transits which is I have the world's most important special purpose for being here. And often, all of the pain that is most common and most basic, and just, like a part of the universe, will be twisted, and, like warped into a narrative that is about, you know, like a grandiose narrative, every painful thing I've ever been through is making me into the perfect something. Right? And or, you know, all of these, I'm doing the work, you know, I'm just I'm really working on myself, and I'm moving toward some perfect state. And people may not phrase it like that. They may not. I mean, very few people would probably openly be like, Yes, I'm trying to perfect myself, right? Because everyone's way cooler than that, right? But that's kind of what's underneath it all. Is like, I'm working on myself. I'm a work in progress, the self-sort of like New Age self-help culture, you know, perpetuates this and underneath it, underneath the drive to become perfect in some way, even if you never get there, but you're moving toward like life is trying to move you towards salvation, or some kind of ultimate relevance. And in every single mundane thing you've ever experienced is actually just part of moving toward this perfect thing.

The equal opposite extreme also, Sun Neptune is nothing means anything. There is no; it's just a mirage, a mandala of mirages of, you know, of all different kinds of activities and ambitions that we do. But we're just like a spinning wheel of, you know, buckets on a spinning wheel picking up water and dumping them out, you know, and you think it means anything it doesn't.

Okay, so both are like extreme Sun Neptune underlying Sun Neptune philosophies that inform and guide like whole narrative trajectories of people's lives when they're going through these transits or if you're born with them nataly. Now, in extreme version, neither of those are really healthy, right? I mean, in extreme, but I want to talk today about Okay, so when is perfectionism a problem? And I think it's easy enough to spot that, right? But then, when and how do we actually need perfectionism? And what does that actually look like? And how can we be aware of it so that it's in our lives, but we're not duping ourselves into believing that it's not like, I think nine out of 10 people, including myself, if someone was like, Are you a perfectionist? I'd be like, No, I'm not a perfectionist. I'm, you know, I'm I. Or either that or I went, or I might say, you know, it's like, no one wants to admit that they're a perfectionist, you know? No, no, I'm not trying to be perfect. I'm just trying to be me, man, you know, like that. At least, that's what I would say.

But the other extreme might be that maybe you say, Yeah, I'm a perfectionist. Oh, God, I struggle with it. You know, like, it's, it's equally sort of hip to be like, oh, yeah, I struggle with perfectionism all the time. You know, and I think there's, it's, it's like, somewhere between, you know, like, so anyway, the question is, what is healthy perfectionism?

What does it look like to have perfectionism in our lives? I really only ever hear people use the word perfectionism in a negative way. And it is a Sun Neptune. Dynamic can be very negative, but it also is a very necessary part of our lives. And I suspect it's actually it's active in most of our lives, whether we know it or not, and so better to know it and recognize it and work with it archetypally and, therefore, relate to it more consciously. Alright, anyway, that's where we're heading. So when is perfectionism a problem with Sun Neptune?

So I think there are three ways, three easy to spot. Ways in which perfectionism as a problem, and I don't think I'm going to be preaching to the choir here; you all know these things, right? But number one is when we take things literally. So let's say, for example, that I have an ideal image. And by ideal, I mean perfect, perfect in a transcendental archetypal sense. I want to be a virtuous, good husband, good Father, good astrologer, blah, blah, blah, right? So there's nothing really wrong with any of those ideal images that I have in my mind. Right? And that I try to that effect that I tried to somehow method act, those ideal images, right? I don't even think there's a problem with that. I think most of us are method-acting according to certain archetypal themes, characters, and ideals that we have, in our mind, some of us consciously and some of us unconsciously.

I don't think the problem is in trying to conform our lives to ideals because I think that's the joy of life. Life is like a stage upon which we're acting. And we become possessed by different archetypes, and they are profoundly interesting to live in, in, conform ourselves to and try on as costumes. That's what experience is all about, isn't it? So I think the problem is, and this is something that Carl Jung said, and certainly, the tradition of archetypal psychology and astrology has also said for a long time problem is when we take them literally. So if, in other words, you know, in method acting, I know you're not supposed to think that you're method acting, you're supposed to absorb and be in the character so fully that you know, you lose all reflective awareness of the fact that you're an actor. But that's not quite the best way to relate to this Sun Neptune archetype of idealism or perfectionism.

So if I'm trying to conform my life to the ideal image of Father, it is very important to have this meta-level at which I realize that I am method acting out a role that I am attracted to, that is beautiful to me, that I lose myself in. But I also take moments to come back and become reflexively aware of it. When I do that, what I'm coming to what I essentially what I'm saying is that I realize that an ideal is not literally obtainable. It is something that somehow guides and propels experience, which is valuable and interesting as a way of living and getting to know myself, and relating to the world. And I don't try to literally become a perfect thing. But I have a relationship with ideal images. Right. So that's so the problem is when we take things literally.

Number two, when perfectionism is a problem, is when we're unforgiving. The more that you take an ideal literally, the more unforgiving you are when you fail to become it, and it is impossible to become an archetype because you're a soul. Right? So you're a living being. Archetypes have a kind of ontology; they have a kind of beingness. But you are your own person; you are your own being. And so when we are acting in relation to these ideal images that we have, in our heads, one of the symptoms that we're taking them too literally is we become very unforgiving of our failures or shortcomings in living up to those images or embodying them.

We are also less forgiving of others in their capacity to play those roles as well. If there's anything that has made my marriage work thus far, for example, I would say that it is the ability to have my wife and I to give each other room to fail, you know, fail at being a mom, fail at being a dad fail at being the spouse that we each know and love and want each other to be, you know, what I mean? The roles that we play, and to allow those to allow ourselves to fail in those roles, to know that we're sort of acting in roles and to give each other humorous, forgiving space, do you know what I mean? And it's the same thing when I'm trying to be the best astrologer that I can be great.

There's another there's ideal image in my head, and it's, you know, it's like a are like a tapestry of images that somehow, you know, point me, you know, toward that it's like a North Star, and it points me toward what it means to be a good astrologer, integrity spiritually, blah, blah, blah. Well, if I'm not, if I'm missing the mark, somehow, you know, if I don't see that as an opportunity for forgiveness, compassion, humor, you know, it's learning, you know, then I know that I'm starting to develop think some kind of archetypal or God Complex meaning I'm, I'm starting to think that the goal is to literally become or to be identified with that archetype. And that is not a good thing. That is typically when perfectionism becomes a problem because it breeds intolerance. And this could be said for not just ideals but ideologies, right belief systems, or as well as literal images that we're trying to become more personally.

Okay. It also has a lot to do with how we see each other and how we see communities and society at large. So we may have in mind, what the potential of humanity is, and it's good to hold out potentials like that ideal images of where we can go; the more literally we take those images, the more unforgiving we become, which ironically, then ends up breeding within us intolerance, often hatred, lack of compassion, you know, and so forth. Am I saying anything you guys don't know? Probably not.

When perfectionism is a problem, part three, when we lose sight of the present moment, so, you know, obviously, and trying to conform our lives to an ideal, we're often thinking about the future, or there's something that at least in our time-bound sense of things feels like, it pulls us through time in a linear manner, you know, towards something that we're trying to become. And in doing that, the more literally we do that, the less figuratively, metaphorically, and symbolically archetypally that we do that with grace, forgiveness, compassion, and humor, the more we tend to lose sight of the present moment, and all the richness that is already here.

Okay, so for these reasons, isn't generally true that we all sort of would say to one another, don't, you know, don't be such a perfectionist, you say it to yourself, you say to other people, like I don't, you know, don't be a perfectionist, that's not doesn't sound like a very good thing you can make you take things to literally be very unforgiving, lose sight of the present. Okay. And there are other reasons too.

But now, on the other hand, there are five reasons that I think we actually need perfectionism. And let me try to break those down. Let's look at the etymology of the word perfection for starters. Coming from the word, perfect. One of the meanings means leaving from the early 13th-century French completeness, leaving nothing to be desired, leaving nothing to be desired. Now, perfect, flawless, ideal, complete, full, lacking in no way, but also to accomplish or completely, and to finish. Okay, so it may or may not be possible for eternal beings to finish anything. Do you know what I mean? It's like, if you're eternal, then this is why perfectionism has to be understood itself as an archetype, that the Sun Neptune is in, you know, whatever Sun Neptune transits come up, and people suddenly go through these long experiences dealing with perfectionism, and learning to work with it and distinguish between what it means to be idealistic, have a perfect image that you go after in a positive, healthy way versus an unhealthy way. It's because perfectionism itself is a kind of archetype. So the important thing to keep in mind is that an eternal being never really reaches perfection. Because in eternal, it's, it's sort of more like saying, you know, how could you reach completion when you are a being that has existed fully and completely before and after time itself before and after? Anything and everything?

That's hard for us to wrap our minds around, but as eternal beings, this means that it's not that we, if you kind of recognize that, then immediately go yes, so perfectionism is a problem, like so get rid of perfectionism. But no, it's not. It's not good to get rid of it. It's good to recognize it as an archetype. But once you recognize it as an archetype, it can do some really wonderful things for you in your life, as long as you understand it for what it is, well, it's not literally going to bring me to that consummate state or form that degree of excellence which leaves nothing to be desired.

No, because desire is part of the very evidence that you're a being, right, like desire is the very heartbeat of life. It moves us into relating with the rest of the eternal Cosmos, like the other beings and events and experiences all propelled by desire; it's as though the secret fuel pushing everything along is the desire for different ideal images. But as soon as we understand that you can't ever grasp or taste one, to the point that it just goes up, okay? Everything is completely and fully done forever, with nothing left to do. Now desire gets shut off, that would mean that being itself gets shut off. That would mean that life itself and love itself, and divinity itself gets shut off because desire is just part of the engine or motor that is pushing experience eternally along.

So you'll find, for example, that in many religious traditions that focus on perfectionism as a literal state to be obtained, that, of course, how does that obtain, it's obtained by annihilating desire, getting completely rid of desire. So if you want to finish existence, get rid of existence if you know, the final problem, the final problem is existence, and you want to transcend existence itself being itself well, of course, then, you know, the main thing to do is to try to get rid of desire. That's like the ultimate form of perfectionism. I would personally say it's just my humble opinion that that kind of religious perfectionism is taking things too literally. But anyway, regardless of that, we can all debate that all day long.

There are five reasons that I think we need perfectionism in this life right now, regardless of what the eternal Reality of Things may or may not be. One, perfectionism keeps us humble. If you if in my mind, I have a healthy relationship to the ideal image of the Father. Right? If I'm like, you know, I have a sense of what the perfect Father looks like, you know, and it's, it's imaginary. It's in my mind. I can't; there's no living example of a perfect father, right? But there is an archetypal image of a good dad, you know? If I keep that in mind, not in a way that is punishing, merciless, literal, and impossible, right? But if I keep it as an archetype, on the think of it, like an, an object on your altar, a statue of something that resembles the archetype of a beautiful parent, you know, if you're a parent, having a relationship to that ideal image, keeps you humble, because it's constantly making you realize when the ego wants to inflate itself, if that's a problem for you, maybe it isn't, I know it is for me when the ego wants to be like, Oh, well, I'm so awesome. I'm so special; I'm so important. It's like, well, if you keep in mind the ideal image, and for some people, that's like the Buddha, or the Christ, or a bodhisattva, or Kuan Yin, or whatever it is, the Divine Mother, you see what I mean?

You keep that archetypal image in mind. You offer it respect, love, and reverence, and you're not trying to literally become it, not that kind of perfectionism. But you're keeping a perfect image of something that, you know, you can always move a little closer toward, in fact, what is most merciful about the universe is that any of these images because they are perfect, and because we're living beings that are not actually trying to become literally perfect. That means that we can move infinitely deeper and closer to an archetype.

That's amazing. You know, it's if you let go have the idea that you have to literally get to this perfect image, then perfectionism is a path that takes you deeper and closer toward a living relationship with an archetype that will keep you humble. It's a beautiful path to walk. It's not one about saying you're less than because you're not perfect. It's one that invites you deeper and deeper and deeper into an archetype where there's always room to become something new, something different, a little wiser, a little deeper, a little bit more loving, and so forth. So keeping ideal images around us in right relationship is something that keeps us humble. Two, it connects the imminent with the transcendent. So you know, in our lives, it's very easy to lose track of the eternal scope of things. It's very easy for me, for example, to lose track of the fact that being a dad is something that millions and millions and millions of people have done, or being a parent or however you want to put it, or being a lover or being an astrologer. And if you keep those ideal images, for example, I just got a statue you'll see in my room pretty soon. I got a statue given to me from a dear friend of Hermes mercury, and that is the ideal astrologer Hermes, the mythical founder of astrology.

Keeping Hermes around doesn't make me feel like I need to become literally the perfect astrologer, but archetypally that image of perfection Hermes. It helps me connect something eternal and archetypal with what I'm doing here today. And that deepens what I'm doing. It makes it more, and that's why we're doing astrology because that's what it does to our whole lives. That is a form of perfectionism archetypally understood, not literal perfectionism but archetypal perfectionism and archetypal idealism. So I hope this distinction makes sense.

And also, what I like to do, I really love to do is, you know, when everyone's like, that's not perfectionism. The only way you can talk about perfectionism is about unrealistic expectations of yourself that you shouldn't be placing on yourself. I'm like, well, it to me that, that makes me feel like the word perfectionism is being bound. And it's in bondage somehow. And I'm naturally a very curious person; I naturally want to untangle that knot and be like, well, let me twist it in five different ways and see if it's anything other than bad self-expectations that aren't realistic, right? So that's why I like to do things like this. Like, this is like how I play. This is my version of, like, a playground. I've been like that since I was a little kid. I think it's very Mars in Gemini anyway.

But Okay, number three is it brings, so it connects the imminent with the transcendent; it can also brings order out of chaos. Now I think chaos is part of life. I'm not saying the chaos needs to be under the thumb of order, right? I'm not; that's not my personality. However, I would say that there's a dance between chaos and order, always. And chaos will always have a way of, you know, deconstructing things. But also, we need things that can, when there is the chaos that can bring order back. As long as you know that there's a dance between order and chaos, then, you know, I don't think it's bad to say that we need things in our life that bring order out of chaos, as long as you're aware that chaos is also a natural, inevitable and sort of beautiful part of reality. But we do need things that bring order out of chaos. And one thing that perfectionism can do is it can motivate, it can help people who are feeling lost, overwhelmed, weak, and without a sense of purpose.

Like how many times during Neptune Sun transits have I seen people to go? I just feel like I'm a wash, I'm adrift, I'm lost in the fog. I don't know what I'm doing. And then they need a vision. Oh, now I have a vision; I have a sense of purpose, right? So that emergent sense of a transcendent image, that's something that calls you right. It may never be literally obtainable. But one of the purposes and roles that it serves is to pull us out of times or periods of uncertainty, chaos, etc., which, although are like the womb, so they're those periods of chaos are vital. They're their life-giving; they're actually deeply supportive. But we do need things too, you know, we want to make sure that, that the womb also we succeed, life successfully comes out, you know, and doesn't get kind of like stuck in the birth canal. So living with idealism and perfectionism is something that can bring order or a sense of meaning and direction out of times of uncertainty. And these are Sun Neptune dynamics.

Number four, perfectionism is important because ideal images grant soulfulness to both success and failure. I just watched a movie recently with my wife called A Star is Born. It was Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. I don't know if you guys have seen this or not. And what I found so interesting was the way in it because I was I'm always sitting and reflecting while I'm watching movies about the archetype, and I watch this over the weekend as Sun Neptune was coming through. This is like the perfect Sun Neptune movie in so many ways. I won't give too much of it away, but it does involve an alcoholic rockstar. And this alcoholic rock star in the story dealt with a father who was like a drinking buddy and not a very good person. So much of his music in the film comes from the reason that it's so soulful it comes right out of the failure of the Father to live up to an ideal image and the hurt and the pain of something falling short. Grant this soulfulness, and nothing else, could have produced such music, and you feel that, and yet it's really tragic because it's also killing him. It's so painful that it makes such beautiful music. But the same painfulness creating the beautiful music is copresent in his alcoholism.

This is such a Sun-Neptune dynamic. I don't think it always needs to be that tragic. But my point is that the sun Neptune, when we have ideal images in our life, again, when things fail, when you fall short, you know, there's, you can't sing the blues and the blues can't be so soulful and beautiful and sort of perfect in their own right, without failure, without things falling short somehow, you know, without pain without suffering without missing the mark. So ideal images grant soulfulness to the experience of failure. And when we succeed and get close to an ideal, they also grant joy.

So ideal images bless us with soulfulness in sex, both in success and failure. Most of the time, it's really hard to experience success and failure as equally soulful without some kind of appreciation for ideal images, regardless of if they're ever literally achieved or not. You have to be able to just appreciate ideals in and of themselves, regardless of whether you achieve them or not. And it's the people who do that, that are somehow reflexively able to take joy in getting sort of close to an ideal in the moments where you come close and also create some kind of soulful depth when you fall short. So there's a lot of souls that comes about when we fall short and ideal images are, you know, they're implicated, you know what I mean?

Finally, the last and most important thing that's very similar is that we can only emerge as our own ideal; each one of us, in a sense, is our own perfect ideal as a soul, as a living being, that is part of the tapestry of being, but we can only it seems that we can only come to deeply know, the ideal that is us, in and through relationships to other ideal images, whether that means the ideal image that is another soul that acts as a mirror for us in a beautiful relationship, a friendship, a love, love relationship or something else.

Or in terms of, you know, these archetypes that we take on Father from, you know, Father, husband, astrologer, for me, those are some of the core archetypal images, the more than I take those on, and in my succeeding to get close to them. And in my failings and shortcomings, this interesting thing emerges, there's suddenly a deeper awareness of myself as my own emergent ideal. But that doesn't happen without relationship and relationship in and through and to other divine perfect images and beings.

And so we need perfectionism. We need to want to become something that we are not in order to discover that we are full and enough just as we are. And that doesn't need to ever end. Because that's a process of discovery, and in like that, we can be surprised over and over again, we can lose ourselves only to find ourselves in and through this kind of seeking and reaching for something or someone over and over, only to come back home and find out that Oh, wow. I'm full and beautiful and perfect as I am. I think that sometimes we get frustrated with or are very impatient about the fact that that kind of dynamism should exist because, but actually, if we take joy in and just allow for it to exist, that it turns out that, you know, perfectionism is a process by means of which we come to know ourselves all the time.

And so what if we get a little lost along the way? So what if it's a little painful? The more we do this, I think, the more you also start to understand, oh, there's nothing at stake because I'm an eternal being. So why don't I just enjoy the ride? You know? And as you go along, you also start to realize, okay, I don't have to do these things that I'm trying to be and become; I can do them while also being enough. I can do that simultaneously. It's not that I need to pit one against the other. Well, I don't try to be anything because I'm enough. Most of the time that seems to devolve into something not so humble, you know? But you can, you can, I think you can pursue trying to become all of these different things that you find beautiful, that you find compelling, that you want to be. And you can do so well also gradually and deepeningly, you know, realizing I'm enough. You can do both. Are we so unimaginative that we can't, you know, we can't live in a universe where we're doing both of those things?

I look at my life, and I'm like, Well, that's exactly what my life is. It's a combination of those two things all the time, striving to become things only to realize that I'm enough, only to realize that there's so much more I could become, only to realize I'm enough. These are Sun Neptune dynamics. So I hope that this was a useful talk for everyone to learn more about the archetypal combination not that you have to believe and agree with everything I say either, but at least it stimulates thought within you that you would take this and maybe put it in your astrological crock pot this week and you know, make something tasty for yourself. So okay, that's it for today.

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