Nov 2013
Emotion-phobes Beware
Half of the sky is in water signs as the month begins. The mood is wet and deep.
How to Care
Jupiter in Cancer stations on the 6th; it is barely moving, which makes it emphatic.1 During the days around this station, in the sign of nurture, our thoughts may turn to questions of human need.
Atticus Finch and daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird
How do we help those who need care? How developed is our empathy? How much compassion did we learn from our natal family? If the answer to this is Not much, how have we redressed this lack?
Think about what you’re teaching (Jupiter) the children in your life. Are you teaching them how to care?
Probing and Yearning
The prevalence of Scorpio in the sky right now is making us impatient with superficial communication. With Mercury stationing direct in this sign and Saturn in its middle degrees, our curiosity about others is probing and psychological. It’s a good idea to be aware of this intensity, since we’re exuding it whether we want to or not.2
More demanding still are the soul-deep yearnings provoked by Neptune, treading water this month in the early degrees of Pisces. The planet of dreams is prompting us to sink and penetrate beneath the surface, supported and strengthened by the inner planets in water. 
Neptune Station
This is an opportunity to loosen the hold upon us of everyday thinking, and allow ourselves to float free upon a subtler field of consciousness.
Neptune turns direct on the 13th at 10:43 am PST. Those who do ritual may want to honor the god by lighting a violet candle, perhaps with an altar adorned with shells on a sea green cloth. Visualize being granted an audience with a priest of unfathomable power.
In this state, we coax our spiritual longings out of the shadows, and commune with them.
Dazed and Confused
The alternative to communing with these longings is being confused by them. As we negotiate as best we can our busy days, some of us may feel a tad more spaced-out than usual; vaguely ill-at-ease. Liberal use will be made this month of pharmaceuticals and 
alcohol.
It has become normative in modern urban societies to react to the divine discontent of Neptune by suppressing it. We are only human, and in these crisis-a-minute times it can be challenging to show up for life without artificial fortification from our mind-altering-
substance of choice.
But what might it mean to respond directly to Neptune’s call while alert, engaged and unmediated?
Feelings
Like all the distant planets, Neptune is extreme in its manifestations. Its energies can be breathtakingly sweet; they can also be devastating. The difference lies in knowing what, where, when and how it’s trying to teach us.
Under Neptune transits our minds may be flooded by bizarre, poignant, free-floating impressions that feel like feelings. But Neptune is not the feelings.
Certainly feelings can translate the sea god’s mysteries more closely than thoughts can, which is why we deploy emotional vocabulary when trying to interpret his messages. But just as words “reach out to” their referents “without really touching them”,3 with Neptune the emotions are only obliquely involved. They have only a glancing relationship to these roiling energies. Feelings are personal; Neptune is much more.
Neptune transits teach us about the nature of illusion. When we open ourselves to them full-throttle, we don’t just experience illusion, we learn about it. This is the difference that makes all the difference.
Escapism
Especially in the middle days of this month, we have the chance to break out of the hypnotic trance that has become the societal norm. Instead of succumbing to it we can actually escape from escapism.4
Ultimately the lesson here is to become more aware than ever before of the false and fragmented consciousness that is the modus vivendi of the modern world. Transits like these can give us a flash of revelation that allows us to see all boundaries as illusory — many of them necessary, but nonetheless illusory. In this state of mind we take in, with a detached appreciation, the buzzing nonsense as well as the breathtaking beauty all around us. We observe life as an integrated, pulsing, dreamlike whole.
We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.–Tich Nhat Hanh
Psychic Breakthroughs
We who live in secular societies are conditioned to dismiss Neptune’s subtle impulses. We are taught to discount even the most blatantly obvious psychic 
breakthroughs as “mere coincidences.” The weeks surrounding a Neptune station are a good time to slough off this counter-intuitive brainwashing.
These transits encourage us to still our minds and hear what’s prickling just below conscious awareness. What if those everyday instances of synchronicity that happen to us every once in a while — that we hurry to tell our friends about, as if to assuage our incredulity — were more than random anomalies? What if those delightful, astonishing coincidences represented the way existence actually works?
Mystery of Sleep
In the human psyche Neptune represents the image-making capacity of the mind, which for many of us arises only during sleep. At night, under cover of darkness, oceanic consciousness is given free rein. Ursula LeGuin described our minds billowing in the sleep state as jellyfish buoyed up by the sea.
When we wake up, that richness recedes back into the realm whence it emerged… almost always to be, alas, forgotten. Rationality takes over again.
The word imagination is a feint at Neptune, but the context of its usage usually says more about the modern worldview than it says about Neptune. For example, we tend to modify it with the discrediting adverb just: “It’s just your imagination.” Neptunian terms like imaginary and surreal are most often invoked to draw a contrast with what their subject is not: that is, normative, legitimate and real.
To honor Neptune this month is to mindfully enter into a realm that is other than real, but not less than real. In fact, it is a great deal more than real. This is the region of our minds where universal imagery resides. This is where we get the language of art and myth and spiritual understanding.
To dismiss Neptune’s reality is to dismiss the intuitions: the conversations we have with our Muse. Without them our mental pictures are as lifeless as a dried-out jellyfish on the shore.
Notes
1 Check your chart. Where does 20 and a half degrees of Cancer fall? This is the part of your life that’s teaching you about caring.
2 Those with planets at early or middle degrees of fixed signs, which will be squared or opposed to transiting Saturn right now, are especially advised to become aware of it.
3 From astrologer Frederick Woodruff’s blog on Wittgenstein.
4 To yearn for but misunderstand the Neptunian dream is to slip into the shadow of disillusion, an occupational hazard of seekers after transcendence. Rob Hand has called Neptune the planet of illusion as well as the way through illusion. The key to this apparent paradox lies in the prefix in disillusion. Dis- means “to take away.”