Uranus Enters the Mind-bending Paradox Funhouse of Gemini

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

Happy Monday, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about Uranus entering Gemini again, but we're going to look at it from a slightly different perspective. Today, we are going to talk about Uranus in relation to the principle of opposites.

The reason for doing this is because Uranus is entering Mercury, sign of Gemini, a sign that is known for the interplay of opposites, one of the two Hermes ruled signs, and really the sign of the two Virgo being the other one that has the most to do with this kind of curious interplay of opposites, and whether opposites are working together or working at odds, it's really going to be an adventure when it comes to the mind and how we understand things that are connected but apart.

That may sound a little abstract, but I hope I will make it more clear and easy to understand today, because it really is something that is going to be a huge feature of the next seven years of our lives. It's like a whole different kind of philosophical and spiritual paradigm that we're entering as Uranus will begin changing our minds and our perceptions of reality itself.

So I hope that this will be informative, and as always, before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections, if you like this channel and you appreciate the kind of even steady way that we present content. Try to reduce the sensationalism, then you know the algorithm does not honor our approach. It doesn't show our videos as much to other people, which makes it harder to grow.

So if you appreciate this, help us grow by liking and subscribing, dropping a comment. We deeply appreciate it. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website. That's Nightlight astrology.com. When you are over on the website, I want to just point out a couple of things. Every day at Nightlight, we have daily meditation going to events, click, community. Quiet.

Meditation is an awesome way, a daily awesome way, to sit quietly and reflect and heal and grow. We make this free seven days a week for you guys, so that this channel can be truly a place of spiritual community. We hope you'll take advantage of it. The other thing I want to mention today is just very simply, on the Courses page, go to first year course, our first year course, ancient astrology for the modern mystic, begins in late June.

It's coming up soon. The early bird sale is there now, as you can enroll using the early bird sale, and there's need based tuition as well. So if you need help, you really want to take the course, but you have to work within a tight budget, or you're hurting financially. Please do take advantage of that. At the end of today's content, there's an informational video where I will tell you all about the program, everything it includes, and why I think it can change your life.

Now that being said, I also want one last thing. I'm going to put Nechepso up onto the screen. The guys just came out recently, so check the live streams tab if you want to learn more about this brand new software program I'm using. It is awesome. I'm glad to be an affiliate. You get 20% off annual or monthly subscription to their service, which they are constantly updating, upgrading.

You can learn more about all of the visionary things these guys are doing with astrology software in the live stream talks. But if you want to check out the software and get a discount, use the affiliate link in the comment section or in the description of this video. All right, let's now talk about, let's talk about what's happening here.

So really, very simply, we have Uranus entering the sign of Gemini, which you can see right here. Don't worry about the house position. This is just, you know where it's floating freely, Monday, April 27 in Minnetonka. The main thing to note is that we now have Uranus in this sign to stay for seven years.

Now. We did some horoscopes on this last week. Today, we're going to do a bit more of a deep dive into the way that Uranus is likely to change our minds, change or develop our spiritual understanding and cultivate a different kind of paradigm. The reason that it is important to look at this is because, however, Uranus may be affecting us personally in terms of events that will unfold.

Uranus is a planet that is constantly elevating our understanding of reality itself. Let me try to explain in ancient Greek mythology, Oranos, the sky god, is basically associated with something like the archetypal realm, meaning in the Platonic sense that there is something like design, intelligent design, at work in everything. And we have evidence of this in things like very things that you can actually experience really tangibly, like music.

Music is very intelligent, tones, intervals, scales, and yet it's beautiful, it's aesthetic. So the universe is a display, aesthetically, a well arranged like the word cosmos comes share similar roots of the word cosmetic, like life is sensual and embodied and beautiful and scary, you know? And it has all of the things. But there's an intelligence behind how it's all arranged. It's within it, and we can study it. It is also simultaneous to its actual embodiment.

But if we want to understand who we are and why we're here, at some point, most of us start getting interested in things like astrology or spirituality or meditation or philosophy, we start asking questions about our existence, maybe only to sit down on a meditation mat and let go of the need to know, you know, but simultaneously, there is always, even if you sit quietly in meditation every day of your life, letting go of the need to know, slowly, you'll be permeated with the same kind of wisdom that you know, perhaps Buddhists have written down and passed down for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The point is that when we cultivate a deeper awareness of our being, of being itself, of life itself, and we are reflective upon it, reflecting upon it, reflecting upon ourselves, which is a way of saying having a relationship with it that is intimate and deep, it starts showing us things. The cosmos was thought of by ancient astrologers as alive, as sentient, as intelligible and intelligent and communicative, which means, as we experience, most of us learn something about the nature of ourselves and about the nature of reality.

Uranus is a god like all planets that are here to help aid us in the process of enlightenment. Insofar as enlightenment means coming to understand who we are, even if coming to understand the mystery means being more befuddled by it, there's still a process. Even Socrates was said to be wise, specifically because of the depth he went to in revealing what he didn't know.

Any way you think about it, we are here learning from experience, and as we learn and grow, experience reveals more of truth of reality. Maybe it can never be fully understood, but the process, the accelerated moments where our learning and our understanding grow rapidly and expand and change habits and traditions and structures of our mind, of perception, of cognition, of communication, Uranus is almost always at play in those developments.

Over the past seven years, Uranus was in the sign of Taurus. So over those seven years, wherever it was in your birth chart, Uranus was providing you with more of an understanding of Venusian Taurian, you know, Taurus being the sign of Venus and the moon, providing us deeper understandings of Venusian and lunar things in some area of your life. For example, rapidly understanding what it means to be embodied, what it means to be sensual, what it means to have to develop a relationship with things like material security, what that actually means and what it doesn't mean.

So when we think about Uranus, we think of a planet that is often called an Awakener. It awakens us to something that our current modes of understanding, perception, habit, tradition, where we place authority hasn't grasped, can't grasp. And sometimes Uranus is called revolutionary because the structures that hold our current understanding often oppose or resist this kind of breakthrough in insight, in wisdom.

But Uranus doesn't have a lot of patience for the resistance, the recalcitrant, you know, like, like no. So Uranus will sometimes deliver tower like moments. If you think of that card from the Tao, it will break up structures. Uranus is in many ways antithetical to Saturn, insofar as Saturn ever represents something like resistance to change. Uranus says change has to happen because you're at a threshold where your current understanding cannot hold any longer, and so your understanding has to broaden.

It's not broadening like Jupiter, which incorporates as it expands and is, I don't know, I'd say Jupiter is a little bit gentler and often a little bit more moral, not I'm not joking. We can say more about Jupiter later. Uranus is more mind blowing. Uranus is more paradigm shattering. Uranus is more wisdom, accelerating and quick and lightning like. It is epiphanic, and it tends to appear in sudden bursts and fits of mania that coincide with brand new ways of thinking about things.

When people get bit by the bug of astrology, it's like not just curiosity anymore, as I've been saying lately. It's a rapid acceleration of a new paradigm and worldview that's entering and just saying, okay, this is something really changing. And it feels like my perception of reality is moving. Because, you know, these archetypes and patterns of these planets, this language is starting to really click somehow, and you feel it. It's like a very rapid feeling of interest and enthusiasm. I always joke and say it's like you get bit by the bug.

Uranus is meant to evolve us out of stagnation and into spaces of originality. It's associated with inventors and breakthroughs in technology. Sometimes Uranus is a little transgressive insofar as it only cares about newness and breaking from standards and paradigms and innovation and originality at all costs. Some things, some traditions are worth holding, not the future can be worshiped in a way that is naturally polarizing with the past, as if the only things that are good are technological, future oriented, and anything in the past is regressive.

In other words, you know, if you want to uphold something a little bit more like, for example, there is clearly, I'm noticing this among parents raising kids right now, that there are some people who think, just give the kids the technology, they're going to have to work in this world and make their money in this world and survive in this world. So they better just get into the technology right away. And that may be very Uranian.

On the other hand, the parents who are saying, and we're probably more on this side generally, though not a big black and white thing for us, like, let's keep them away from screens as long as possible, you know, and let's gradually introduce technology as they get older. That's a very classic Uranian question about what is the cost of progress? When does progress become transgressive and violating of something sacred?

This is why Prometheus, one of the figures classically associated with the Uranian archetype in astrology, is a transgressive figure who steals the fire and gets punished for it, but is also considered the savior of humanity for delivering fire, you know. So it's rarely ever clear with Uranus. Transgression is not an easy, moral black and white thing, and that's why I say it's quite a bit different than Zeus Jupiter, where the expansion tends to happen along lines of justice, morality, piety. Uranus or Jupiter's quite frequently associated with the law and dogma and things like that. Uranus is much more rebellious and defiant in its originality, and so we do have to be aware of that.

But what I wanted to do today, given all of this that I've just set us up with, is talk about the kind of paradigmatic revolution that we are likely to see with Uranus over the next seven years in the sign of Gemini. I've got a list of five things to watch for, and they're all actually derived from Taoism.

Now, if you've ever read the Tao Te Ching, or if you've ever read the I Ching, these are texts that are either a classic Taoist text or a text that actually predates Taoism, but Taoism is thought to grow out of it. In case of the I Ching, that's what I understood recently from if you watch the interview I had with Ben Felen Wen, we talked about that. So these five things are part of the lessons and really deep insights of Taoism and the Tao Te Ching. I have quotes from for every point on my list.

The reason that I'm doing this is because Taoism, if you've ever seen that Yin Yang symbol, which I'm sure you all have, we've got black and white both held together in a circle, and we have a speck of white in the black and black in the white, as if to say that opposites stand apart, polarize, are fixed in oppositions, and they constantly blend fluidly, and those two dynamics are all held simultaneously in a circle. And that's a pretty if you think about it. It sort of says it all like what's missing there, you know? And that's why people love Taoism. It is so complete and yet completely enigmatic.

I want to talk about the likelihood that Uranus in Gemini delivers insights that are very similar to the insights of Taoism, potentially, as well as the places we could go that would be shadow like by comparison. The reason I want to do this is because Uranus in Gemini in the 1940s was associated with one of the most intense waves of existential philosophy and philosophizing that we experienced. It was really one of the heydays of existentialism.

And I think the reason for that is that when faced with Uranian and Gemini, Mercurial like wisdom, it's very tempting to read certain patterns that exist within opposites, dyads, dualities, etc., and go in the direction of something a little bit nihilistic or a little bit hopeless, and potentially, the feeling of disillusionment with things like meaning or coherence or belief or faith can be really strong and somewhat destructive, deconstructive of things.

Health deconstruction of things that are healthy deconstructions. I'm all for, and the Taoist tradition is great at doing that, but deconstruction for its own sake, as its own dogma, can become problematic, and that's part of what I'm hoping this talk will also make us aware of, because we are entering into seven years where the potential for things like nihilism, a kind of almost like an abandoning of faith or higher meaning or order, in the face of our awareness of opposites and dualities growing, is a real possibility.

When people contemplate dualities, when they become so much more apparent in our lives, people have a way of throwing up their hands and being like, yeah, it's just ones and zeros. I'm in a matrix. Nothing's real. You know, I think we can anticipate some of this and talk about it. So I hope you'll find this useful. We are talking, after all, about the one sign of the zodiac, Gemini, ruled by Hermes Mercury, the god of dualities, but also the patron deity of astrology itself, a language that is entirely constructed on dualities, the same exact dualities found in Taoism on a metaphysical and philosophical level.

This is why Taoism makes such a good accompanying study for astrologers. Much of the early history of astrology is probably influenced by Platonism, in turn, Pythagoreanism, in turn, Egyptian mysticism and Indian mysticism, all of which talk extensively about opposites and how they behave and why they exist. I find these traditions much more enriching than just the straight up, kind of a darker, deconstructive, doubt filled nihilistic, existential trend, which does tend to happen when Uranus enters Gemini.

So that's my own bias speaking. I'd rather be open about it, because these are the paradigms that guide my life, and astrology does as well. And astrology shares so much with Taoism. So here we go.

Number one, the instability of fixed meaning. I'm going to read you a quote for each one. Here's a quote from the Tao Te Ching. This comes from the first chapter, and you've probably heard it before. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

One of the things that Uranus in Gemini can do powerfully is to destabilize language. If you think of, I don't know if you ever had to read Derrida. It's someone I had to read when I was in graduate school in creative writing and master's degree in English and an MFA and an MA, and in those programs, had to read a lot of Derrida looking at postmodern conventions in literature and things like that. This is a topic, deconstructionism, decentralization. These are great Uranian and Gemini themes.

The moment that we fix a definition, we create in the shadow of that definition, there grows and lives a natural opposite. And Taoism reminds us that this act is already a departure from what is real. This is why, if we were to say there just is no meaning that can be named, as soon as you define that and fix that as a meaning, the shadow of it is the creation of a meaning that can be named. So it also goes in the opposite direction. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

What would this reveal to us if we take this a step or two deeper? It is like trying. The reason you can't pin down eternity, the reason you can't pin down the Tao, is that it's not a thing. It's a living, contingent, relational, ecological presence. And living things, you know, if you pin them down, what are you doing? You're putting them in a cage, and then you're saying that the real nature of what this thing is exists in a cage. But by definition, then it is being contained within something that limits what it is. Do you see what I mean?

So Uranus in Gemini has to do with rapid reversals in meaning and language that loses its authority, the realization that truth shifts depending on perspective. And so the teaching is the deeper teaching is about humility before the fluidity of names and definitions. As much as I celebrate the refinement and careful differentiation of identity categories, because I celebrate uniqueness, I do not like singularities that erase diversity.

You know, in general, the kind of monotheism of the Western mind wants to collapse difference into sameness. That also tends to be very Yang, as opposed to Yin. So I'm always very careful about that. At the same time, Uranus in Gemini can pull out the paradoxical opposite, which is that the more and more that diversity and differentiation is held up as the supreme standard, difference, diversity, uniqueness become myopic. They themselves can become rigid.

And so back and forth it goes. Uranus in Gemini can present us with ways of realizing, hey, all of these diverse categories that we use to define who we are, that we live our experience through, they're limiting us, and they're preventing us from relating more easily and fluidly with each other, because we're not seeing each other as beings anymore, something more simple and basic that we all share in. Instead, we're constantly relating to each other through so many different identity categories.

Okay, so that's one thing. On the other hand, you could instantly see that things that have happened in the name of progressing storylines around gender, around sexual fluidity, also tend to peak when Uranus is in Gemini. Go back to the 1940s. A lot of very rapid breakthroughs happened in the field of understanding human sexuality. Some of the Kinsey reports came out for the first time that revealed, for example, that there are far more gay people than people imagined.

People thought, oh, it's just this very rare, almost like a random deviation that's so rare, right? But this report said, actually, there's a very large population of gay men, for example, when the Kinsey report on men came out. So a lot of things can advance our understanding of diversity that are so important and so valuable. At the exact same time, the more fixed we get in anything, including diversity itself, the opposite can take hold and become something that lives in the shadow, right, the monotheism of diversity.

That's why people, at a certain point, can just throw their hands up and go, nothing's real. Nothing matters, because the incessant spin cycle of opposites is more immediately perceptible, and you just go, like, I'm getting tired. I'm getting tired. It's like, not surprisingly, did you know that Uranus, or Uranus, Mercury Hermes, was associated with wrestling, the sport of wrestling and the sport of court games? Like, think of racquetball or tennis or something, things that go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in sport and play. That was Mercury's territory, or things that are intertwined and wrestling with each other, Hermes territory.

So if you feel like you're in a constant spin cycle and wrestling match with opposites, isn't it easy to just throw your hands up and become nihilistic, or to tilt into existentialism, because you're starting to see through something. You are starting to see through the matrix. It's all zeros and ones. Now, on the other hand, the Taoist tradition and the early mystical sects that perpetuated the language of astrology, all built on opposites, would say that this perception can actually facilitate mystical awareness.

What is the mystical awareness? Humility. Humility intellectually. Good lesson, right? I know I could use that, because I get real certain about things. Two opposites generate each other. Here's another teaching from the Tao Te Ching: being and non being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. The essence of Yin Yang teachings is that opposites are not enemies, but co creators.

Now with Uranus sort of electrifying Gemini's duality, polarization isn't going to just divide, although polarization could become a lot more extreme in the way we see it and perceive it. This is why, by the way, Uranus in Gemini coincides with a lot of periods of warfare, but Uranus in Gemini's duality won't just reveal, it won't just divide. It will also reveal interdependence. Think of the Buddhist notion of contingency, of the co arising of all things.

You see, whenever I think to myself, what a good person I am, at the exact moment that I assume that psychic posture, it casts a shadow as natural as the sun when it falls on the Earth. It casts shadows, and as soon as that Yang like assertion, I am good, the shadow is cast long before me, and I don't see it most of the time. And it is the opposite. I am bad. And what will we have to do? We will have to get in touch with the I am bad part, to realize that it arises simultaneous to the I am good part.

I so deeply wish that as a collective, we could get more in touch with the reality of how opposites enable and create one another at times that are so divided. Not to illustrate that everything is identical and the same. There are important differences. Opposites will always remain in some ways polarized, but if we had just a hint more awareness of the fact that these oppositional tensions, these polarizations, these ideological conflicts co create each other, how could that shift things?

Everything the Tao teaches us says that situations where conflicts intensify may also expose how every side relies on the other for its very definition. Division in this way becomes a teacher of patience, compassion and unity, if we have the eyes to see it that way. And that requires that we don't get exhausted by the war of opposites and give up and throw in the towel and get nihilistic and very existential, because that is a real possibility during this time.

But instead, we say division is my teaching, my teacher of unity. And the real brave step is to say that unity, when it grows in pride and strength and luminosity, is the source of conflict. You want it some other way? We all would wish that it would be some other way. But it's like, you know, when I was a kid, you go to the fair and you get these little things, you put your fingers in them, and you try to pull them apart and they tighten.

We wish that opposites didn't exist. We wish that it could all just be good somehow. But that's not life. That's not what this reality is. All of these ancient teachings begin with impermanence, begin with oppositions, tensions of opposites, contingent co arisings, suffering as the basic inability to accept that these things coexist within us, by the way, within me, not just outside of myself, because I've got it all figured out, then there's my shadow of the hell if I do have anything figured out.

Number three, paradox can be a form of intelligence. Tao Te Ching, chapter 78 says straightforward words seem paradoxical. You see, Taoist wisdom often sounds very contradictory when you read it, because it reflects reality more accurately than linear logic. This is why Uranus in Gemini is very exciting when it comes to paradigmatic breakthroughs in how we think, how we educate, how we speak, how we understand cognition.

Again, in the 1940s, something we didn't really understand that we started understanding very rapidly during World War Two, and the aftermath of World War Two was trauma and how the nervous system responds to trauma. We had a very, in some ways, disembodied, rational, linear way of thinking about our bodies and pain and suffering. You know, you came back from the war, you didn't die. You should be fine, you know. No.

So I think of my grandfather, who came back an alcoholic from the Korean War that he was a part of, and in some ways the drinking was tied for him, I know, to the feeling that this can't be it. This can't, I mean, it's like, what's the point? The things he saw and experienced were so terrible and the justifications for their happening so thin and hollow. Existentialism sometimes doesn't come as a philosophy. It comes as a reach for a medication that says, just numb me. The shit's too much. You know, there's no way out.

It's a classic. Was that the play by Sartre, No Way Out? Get it? No way out of the matrix. The matrix is zeros and ones. However, for an illuminated soul, the matrix is also heaven. Heaven is in a mustard seed. Heaven is right here, spread before us, but we don't see it. This is a transit that can allow us to understand that contradiction is not a problem to fix. The zeros and ones don't need to be eliminated by some kind of total oneness philosophy. The oneness philosophy in the shadow grows the zero and one binary. That's it. It always will, you know.

And that's what I love about Taoism. You can't, there is no way out. The only way is through. What does through mean? Through is paradox. Paradox opens up the co presence, the simultaneity of opposites that seem contradictory and like they should cancel each other out. Somehow, no, two things can be true at the exact same time. It is paradoxical. And when we move through paradox, our intelligence becomes flexible, fluid and non linear.

I believe deeply, and this is I'm going to go real sci fi on you guys here. But I believe very deeply, after 10 years of working with Ayahuasca in deeply altered states of consciousness, that the universe has all different kinds of dimensions, all different kinds of living beings with all different kinds of intelligence, all different kinds of intelligences. And if we want to participate in a much bigger tapestry of being, we have to learn to think within and outside of opposites at the same time.

I have never found a language more capable of doing that in terms of the overlay of a paradoxical form of perception on our everyday experiences than astrology. It's also why a lot of people hate it, to be frank, because if you're using it kind of dully and bluntly and unintelligently, it can look like you're just using it to say whatever you want and justify anything you want. Understandably, that's irritating.

But when you learn to work with astrology really sensitively, contextually in a living ecosystem of reality, and you learn to use it as a living language in context, it's both objective and subjective at the same time, and you can feel it when a practitioner is tapping into that. That's why we call it oracular. And this is why Hermes, as much as Hermes fucks around with opposites, Hermes is also the god of divination.

The whole project of astrology comes out of a divinatory epistemology, which is that zeros and ones, on a certain level, are just sort of linear, rational, logical, but on another level, their interaction in consciousness, in life, in relationship, in beingness is the paradoxical portal of relationship. And this is why, if our consciousness changes, we will find that our consciousness has new forms of relationship coming in.

I believe very deeply this is what we're actually talking about when we talk about the entrance of different forms of life, plant life, natural life, earth life. But also, who knows, spirits, angels, aliens. I believe it is more likely, on some level, that as consciousness advances and becomes more intelligent, there's more parity, there's more play, there's more paradox at work in intelligence. It probably leads to less division and more peace, because we understand how to pair the two together better.

There's always division, and there's always unity co present. If you know that very well, then division is able to be handled more peacefully, and peace can be handled with all the nuances of division. Haven't you ever had a really friendly, caring conversation with someone you disagree with, and hasn't that conversation, at times, been the source of more intimacy and depth and curiosity and even pleasure than people you agree with? If you haven't had that experience, then I pray that you have it.

All right. Number four, because I have, and I don't have enough of it in my life. Honestly, most of the time when argumentation and division comes up, our heart starts pounding faster, right? Why? And I don't, I mean, there's good reasons why, because there's hostility and conflict around opposites and their polarization. But that's not the only way that opposites can relate.

Number four is the collapse of artificial dualities. From Tao Te Ching chapter two, when people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. This passage in particular exposes how many dualities are constructed by perception. And Uranus tends to liberate us by breaking down what has been artificially separated.

Rigid binaries exist for all of us along moral, social, intellectual lines, and Uranus in Gemini has the power to dissolve some of them or make some of those artificial binaries feel insufficient. You may see systems built on either/or that fragment under the pressure of complexity. Let me give you an example. So my daughter was saying something about how much she was like, oh, I hate that. I hate that song. It's like a song, I hate it.

And so I showed her on social media. I pulled up, there was a song, and I just seen this post, and it was from a musician performing something. And it was a post that was like, I love this musician so much. Of course, there was like 3000 comments. I was like, okay, here we go. I'll show my daughter. Took on the comments. Like, three, four down. I hate this song, you know, I hate this band.

Exaggeration, first of all, can be a disease. Exaggeration can be a huge, like exaggeration is like a hallmark of humor and of good comedy, you know, to take the little things in life and exaggerate them. Oh my gosh, so much fun, so much fun. But if we are a culture that is constantly trying to be funny, constantly trying to be sarcastic, constantly exaggerating everything, the problem is that in situations that are not really light and humorous, the same exaggerated tendency appears.

It's like sitcoms infected all of us with the need to be funny all the time and exaggerating all the time and sarcastic all the time, and God knows that we probably needed to loosen up a little bit from a more rigid moral way of being. There's Uranus again, saying, loosen up. Be sarcastic. Have fun. Can you be sharp and witty and humorous all the time and sarcastic? And life is more fun if you do that. Can I agree with that on a certain level?

But the shadow of that is we have this tendency to exaggerate simple things, and everything becomes hate and love and becomes a competition of wits. And so, not surprisingly, a lot of social media forums are just pretty toxic because the conversation is extreme, is exaggerated, is not always in the name of lighthearted humor, and is often very polarizing.

So I showed my daughter, I said, what do you think of this song? Oh, that's nice. So read these comments. I hate this. I hated this. I hate this song now, but I also hated it when it first came out. Okay, so I said to my daughter, why do you think people are expressing such strong language? And she was like, well, I think it probably, like, it's not a song that they like, and then it makes them mad to see someone else really, really liking it. It's like, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I was like, I think it's okay if you don't like this song, but I would think it's better if you say nothing at all, or if you say something like, oh, this isn't my favorite, or I don't really care for this song, because accuracy in our language matters. If you say that you absolutely hate everything that you just don't like, then you also set up a standard which makes it harder to just moderately like things. You know, like, there's some things you're going to like but not love, and you may suddenly find that the gray area or the middle ground, or the middle goodness or something, is harder to locate.

And I was trying to illustrate this Tao. My daughter's really smart. She totally got what I was saying. The reason I'm talking about this, let's read this quote again. When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, others become bad. The same thing happens to me as a content creator.

Let me tell you this, as soon as I see someone in the comments going, oh my god, your astrology saved my life. Oh my god, I love this channel. It's the best thing in the world. Blah, blah, blah. I can really see people are almost manic about how much they're connecting with the content or whatever role I or this content is serving in their life. First of all, I'm always really happy to hear that. It makes me feel good about my work and my job.

But also, in my 16, 17 years of doing this, I can almost predictably tell you that it is the same people who get that excited who will just as ambitiously swipe you off your platform, in their mind at least, you know, when you say something they don't like. The artificial dualities often have to do with exaggerated intensities about how we feel about something, how we like something, how we don't like something.

I'm not saying Uranus in Gemini is going to bring some kind of total neutrality, but neutrality is often the result of a process that is actually about intensifying and developing your palate, your palate intellectually, your palette experientially. Mercury Hermes is a god of spectrums, and if we want to have full appreciation for everything across the spectrum, we have to be careful of just putting things at the end of spectrums: good, bad, totally righteous, totally unrighteous. You know what I mean?

It doesn't mean that those extremes don't exist. It means that most people, most things, don't actually fall in those extremes in terms of how we receive and perceive experience. This passage in the Tao Te Ching is pointing that out. When you see certain things as glorious, other things will become totally ugly. When some things are really good, other things become bad.

Don't get me wrong. I love exaggeration, especially for the sake of good humor and calling out our own hypocrisy and our own entanglement. Humor and exaggeration are awesome. Sarcasm even can be a form of exaggerated almost like satire. I love all of that stuff, and we need it to call us out of an overly rigid, serious perspective. But also be careful of extremes. Rigid binaries, moral, social, intellectual, can begin to dissolve or feel insufficient.

Now, when this happens, it's also tempting to rush and say, yeah, nothing means anything. It's all bullshit. It's all just see. And that's a way of seeing the tendency toward exaggeration and then exaggerating about it. Nothing is meaningful at all. But if we are careful and patient and find our way back to a neutrality, the neutrality is actually like the channel that creates the fluidity, and then we can appreciate everything that exists in the fluidity. But we have to first locate the channel that contains it.

That's why meditation is so important, such a valuable and largely hermetic practice. Hermes and hermeticism itself was one of the core practices that promoted contemplative lifestyle.

Now number five, unity through division. Tao Te Ching, chapter 42: the ten thousand things carry Yin. Excuse me, the ten thousand things carry Yin and embrace Yang. They achieve harmony by combining these two forces. So multiplicity. The last lesson here is not separate from unity. It's how unity expresses itself.

How does oneness express itself through relational diversity? Gemini presents multiple perspectives. Uranus accelerates and tends to fracture them. Yet I think Taoism in particular, and the same could be said for hermeticism, reminds us that this proliferation of division and union, division and union is the dance of the one. And so sometimes what's going to happen while Uranus is in Gemini is we're going to get this increase in fragmentation, mentally, intellectually, socially, culturally, accompanied by almost mystical insights and hilarity and absurdity that underlie a unity that exists in the fracture.

I know right now that may sound like gibberish, but watch and see. Dualities will become a paradoxical source of unity. There will be tipping points culturally, politically, ideologically in the next seven years where something we've all, for example, politically, I bet you this happens in the next seven years. Something has had us divided. Certain divisions ideologically have existed. Don't have to look around far to see what those are right now. You can imagine them yourself.

But there will be things that, despite our dualities, will bring us together. And there will be this understanding, oh, there are reasons we have for being the same and being on the same page and being on the same team. This is why I don't throw up my hands in despair, even though we're going through difficult times. If you're a student of history, if you're a student of the Tao, then you know that eventually periods of division, what grows in them as they intensify in their fixed monotheistic reality, division is unity. Unity is growing within this stuff.

And I don't know what that unity is going to look like, but it will surprise us to find out at some point that there will be things that pull us together, not things that we control. People, because that's where the division tends to exist, but in things we don't control, very Uranian tower like moments that reorient us and bring us together again and say there are some things that we need to be together on. Yes, those divisions exist, you know.

So, all right, well, I hope that this mind bending paradox fun house of Gemini has been interesting for you today. I'm going to sign off now, but after I do, please take a look at the informational video about year one. You like this stuff. You want to change your life, change your mind, open your heart, heal. Give yourself a language that can be yours for the rest of your life. Come study with us. It's a great program. It's an awesome community. I hope to see some of you there. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.