As June begins, Mercury has just entered Cancer, a poignantly personal sign that makes us prone to, well, taking things personally. Cancer is Cardinal Water, the element of emotional sensitivity.

Venus follows on the second, marinating our social lives in this same subjectivity. Then Neptune – planet of mists and oceans — stations on the 7^th. Next, the Sun enters Cancer with a splash, at the solstice: June 20^th at 10:05 pm PDT. Finally, on June 25th, Jupiter makes its long-awaited ingress into Cancer for the first time in twelve years.

In an earlier Skywatch we talked about how big the symbolism of water was going to be in 2013. We are now diving into the deepest reservoir of the year.

People with a lot of water in their charts are famously receptive to psychic nuance. In fact, if you have multiple natal planets in Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, you probably worry sometimes about being “too sensitive.” Highly intuitive people are often counseled to rein in their empathy.

Forget this nonsense. Sensitivity is not a character flaw.

Feeling Too Much

It seems to be a therapeutic fashion these days, especially in relationship counseling, to enforce sturdy boundaries between Self and Other. It’s good advice, up to a point. But self-awareness doesn’t come about by steeling ourselves with self-protection whenever we go out the door.

If you are a watery person and want to be true to your chart, your first allegiance is to honor your sensitivity. For you, being told not to cry, or to otherwise block genuine feelings, is a blasphemy. You are at your strongest when centered in your capacity to feel whatever emotions the moment has in it.

Being open to these subtle vibrations is a gift. Granted, it’s a gift that requires a certain kind of self-awareness. Our goal should be to feel everything, the whole gamut of human feeling — all the while applying realistic guidelines to keep ourselves grounded. It’s a delicate balance. Watery individuals who walk this fine line can show the rest of us how to keep our hearts open while diving into life.

Is there someone you know who uses water well? Keep an eye on her/ him. This month every one of us feels a bit like watery people feel all the time.

I Feel, Therefore I Am

It is perhaps surprising that something as utterly universal as emotion rarely gets considered in a phenomenological way: simply as energy, no more or less. Energy that has power and impact.

The modern scientific attitude towards feelings is blinkered and dismissive. We are educated to view emotions as suspect; they are believed to distort logic and pull us away from “reality”.

In the post-Enlightenment West, it is thinking (air) and material reality (earth) that get all the respect. Descartes’ advocacy of the intellect, outrageously revolutionary at the time, ended up demoting the realms of spirit (fire) and emotion (water). Ever since, feeling has been the black sheep of the elemental family. But we needn’t assume that this is the way emotions will be viewed as humanity evolves.

Feelings are regaining the respect of serious thinkers. Conventional psychology has finally recognized the peculiar genius of water, legitimizing it with the phrase “emotional intelligence.” Another modern science, sociology, considers empathy a measure of societal health. Even in politics, the most creative activism is predicated upon our refusal to ignore the suffering of others.

Channeled Wisdom

As for spiritual search, wisdom paths old and new consider the ability to feel what others feel as a sign that we are tuning into ultimate truth: it is our feelings that tell us everything in the universe is connected. It is our feelings that tell us that a hurt to one being is a hurt to all beings.

In Seth Speaks, a nonphysical teacher describes the way feelings are perceived in his dimension, a realm more psychically sophisticated than our own. “We are able to travel through emotions,” he says, “and translate them into other facets of creativity… We do not feel the need to conceal emotions, for we know it is basically impossible and undesirable. Within your system, they can appear troublesome because you have not yet learned how to use them.”

Saturn in Scorpio

We’re now eight months into Saturn’s tenure in Scorpio  (October 5, 2012 – December 23, 2014), the darkest of the water signs. By dark, I mean hidden: occult. Each of us, in her own way, has been working hard (Saturn)  underground, where our inscrutable impulses reside.

On the collective level, Scorpio energy — in hideously misdirected form — has recently shown up in the epidemic of sexual assaults in the church and the army. When repressed and disrespected en masse, the sex drive backfires horribly.

So does our incomprehension and denial (Saturn) of death (Scorpio), which give rise to the perversion of horror as entertainment. The appeal of zombie movies, like their undead protagonists, never seems to die. Also enjoying a resurgence is the vampire theme, which melds the two Dark Mysteries for which the sign Scorpio is most famous: sex and death.

Now is a good time to ask ourselves why this kind of fare compels us the way it does. What is there about incompletely understood Scorpio that strikes us as somehow glamorous? Part of the intrigue lies in the power of the forbidden (see my recent blog, Taboo). In an earlier age, notions of “evil” – symbolized by Scorpio’s planetary ruler, Pluto — held the same ambivalent allure for our ancestors. Examples abound in works of literature (for example, Milton’s Comus) where the devil character is far more interesting than the hero.

Spooky and Weird

The fact that there are dimensions of experience that defy our comprehension is both fascinating and frightening to the modern mind. In Western society, where the paranormal is boycotted by scientific thinkers, there are few avenues of serious inquiry with which to explore this Scorpionic terrain. So it ends up reduced and degraded, like a Ouija board at a cocktail party.

Whether or not a person claims to disbelieve in extrasensory perception, when a synchronicity occurs in their daily life – “coincidences”¹ that they can’t explain with the logic of mechanistic materialism – they may giggle nervously, and invoke some synonym of the word “strange”. As in, “I was just thinking of you, and then you called! That’s so strange/ weird² /spooky/ eerie.”

Scorpio governs the exploration of realities that the five physical senses alone cannot perceive and the linear mind alone cannot fathom. This is the source of the odd attraction/repulsion we feel in the face of the occult and other Mysteries. For those who recognize the existence of no dimension other than the physical, these Mysteries titillate but cannot enlighten.

Notes

1 In fact the word needs no quotation marks in order to satisfy believers in synchronicity, since it just means two or more things that happen at the same time. The common assumption is that these co-happenings have no significance; they are random (i.e. a “mere coincidence”).  But the word’s straight-up denotation presumes nothing about any lack of meaningfulness.

2 The word derives from Old English wyrd: Infused with the power of fate (cf “the Wyrd Sisters,” the witches in Macbeth).