Neptune is the also-ran outer planet. It hasn’t been getting the press that Uranus and Pluto have been getting. But it is stationing in mid-November in the sign of its rulership, Pisces, where it is maximally strong (2011-2025). These weeks of its station provide a window into its power.

Neptunian power is all-encompassing but subtle, like the smell of salt water in the air. We feel it buzzing in the collective vibration like an ocean of bees.

Dangerously suggestible

The shadow side of this placement includes free-floating anxiety, the most debilitating type of fear. It seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once. With no clear sense of where the perceived danger is coming from, we readily displace our fear, projecting it upon imagined perils. Terrorists on every street corner, deadly viruses coming at us from the guy next to us on the bus.

Right now, from a background position, Neptune is interacting with the other two outer planets. At their worst, the three augment eachother’s shadow. Neptune washes the atmosphere with a generalized anxiety that jacks up agitation (Uranus) into hysteria,  making us perfect subjects for manipulation and control (Pluto).

In this scenario the mass mind is dangerously suggestible. Once the herd mentality gains momentum, people get spooked by whomever the authorities identify as an enemy. In our era, the word/concept terrorist (a.k.a. militant/ extremist/ insurgent) has captured the imagination of the herd, as “Communist” did for an earlier generation.

Buying into this kind of group-think is terrible for our well-being as individuals. Not only do we lose our moral and spiritual integrity —  we hardly remember they exist.

How do we avoid being pulled into the chaos swirling around us? We start by understanding what’s happening. Then we work on taking responsibility for our own use of Neptune. Where is it transiting in your chart right now? Locate it, or have an astrologer explain its position. Consider whether the affairs of this particular house have made you susceptible to psychic toxicity.

Mob Mind

In the USA a vacuum of leadership, a wholesale loss of faith in the political system and a widening wealth and power gap have set the stage for an era of devolutionary misrule (Uranus-Pluto grand cross in the US chart). With no collective center of gravity, the American public, ever the world pioneers in the realm of cultural grotesqueries, seems to be pitching its ethical and common sense out the window as it speeds down the trending superhighway.

Instead of seeing ourselves as individuals first and foremost, we self-express by merging with the mob mind, taking pride in our ever-larger numbers of FaceBook affiliations (can we really, with a straight face, call them “friends”?).

Pop culture has become the dictator of American thought. Distracted by the World Series, pet videos and the iPhone 6, citizens pay less and less attention to current events, unless it’s Renee Zellwegger’s face lift. If people think about “politics” at all, it is confined to what the corporate media tells them is newsworthy.

In this atmosphere the war makers play the public like saps.

I think most people in this country would be astounded to hear how the rest of the world sees the USA. They seem to have no clue the extent to which Uncle Sam is associated, in the Middle East and Central Asia, with the terror of fatal drone strikes. They seem unaware that the Pentagon has made children in Pakistan and Yemen afraid of the sky.

Never in recent memory has so much taxpayer-funded extrajudicial killing — unspecified, sketchily explained, sometimes completely undocumented — been given a pass by the American public.⁽¹⁾

Ugly Bug

The media arm of the military-industrial complex, too, is making hay out of our unfocused anxiety. If Ebola hadn’t existed, Fox News would’ve invented it.

Neptunian fear is not the same as that of Saturn (scarcity) or Mars (fight/ flight). With Neptune there’s an element of theatricality, of perverse titillation. Today’s mass media is the perfect organ to exploit it. Its programmers know what appeals to their over-stimulated viewers: random, easy-to-grasp, isolated panics like Ebola. The kind of disaster you might find in the plot of a superhero comic book.

This month’s reporting on Ebola spent precious little time providing meaningful context. To do so would have promoted real understanding, which would detract from the subject’s perverse appeal. The fact that more Americans are killed every single day by stray bullets, and far more because of poverty, than by Ebola is not considered relevant in this kind of coverage. Equally absent was any mention of the other epidemics to which Ebola could be compared, to confer perspective — the ones Westerners never hear about on the news.

This is because perspective isn’t sexy. In fact, it’s dark Neptune’s worst enemy. Perspective bursts the bubble, as when we point out to a friend the glaring inconsistencies in the story her handsome new hook-up told her at the bar last night. That’s not what she wants to hear.

When seduced by a fantasy, whether it’s a desire or a fear, we’re attracted to whatever supports that fantasy.⁽²⁾ Neptunian patterns (hypnosis, entrancement), like Pavlov’s dog, thrive on repeated cues. Ebola was the perfect story for the media’s signature echo-chamber treatment, ratcheting up public hysteria with each hyperbolic retelling. Under the Scorpio eclipse last week, enthralled readers were able to read, over and over again, about the Ebola-like symptoms of one singular New Yorker, devoid of all sense of proportion or scale.

I don’t think we can afford to indulge in this kind of nonsense any longer. In a world this unbalanced, we have to be more careful than ever to maintain balance within ourselves.

Conscious Neptune

What would happen if we accessed real information, instead? We would focus the anxiety, and transform it.

We know, from psychology, that when we address the underlying sources of our anxiety, it turns into something else. This is because feelings, when we look underneath our stories about them, are just energy. And energy changes form in the presence of consciousness.

Properly channeled, Neptune in Pisces confers the revelation that everything is connected. It inspires us to perceive the whole-pattern truth in front of us. It makes us understand the gestalt of whatever we’re looking at. During these weeks of the station, take the time to think about the difference between this side of Neptune and its shadow side.

We should know by now that the telecommunications industry is a business, and that empowering viewers with understanding is not the business it’s in. This includes our servitude to social media. The corporate sponsor of our viewing content no more wants to empower us than a ventriloquist wants to empower his dummy.

As soon as we understand the toxic mesmerism going on here, we start to recognize it when it’s happening. We will find ourselves feeling instinctively repulsed by, rather than attracted to, shadow Neptune. We may start to feel uncomfortable and restless after a few minutes of the television being on, and feel the urge to walk out of the room.

Are we ready for liberation? It starts with getting in touch with the way we’re feeling in our various media behaviors. Do we feel invigorated by what we’re hearing? or do we feel dis-empowered? The moment we dare to consider this, something shifts.

The Law of Correspondences dictates that we draw to ourselves energies in the outside world that match our own level of awareness. So once we make a choice to refuse to engage with dark Neptune, by we will start attracting events, ideas and people of heart and intelligence. We will call to ourselves Neptune in Pisces at its highest.

This Changes Everything

Consider the kind of intelligence at work in the immersive reporting of Naomi Klein. Her new book, This Changes Everything, which connects the dots about climate change, has the opposite effect of the news on TV. Instead of disbursing the reader’s attention, she focuses it.

Instead of thinning out our grasp of the subject, leaving us feeling helpless and at sea, she deepens our relationship to the information, making us feel a part of it. We feel ourselves to be a component of the world in which all this is happening. An essential component.

Whereas Big Media, like all for-profit entities, hides behind a posture of amorality, thinkers like Klein take a moral stand: a secular moral stand. Reading their heart-connected ideas, we become connected to our own hearts. The vague feeling of powerlessness that was draining us is replaced with empathy. Empathy is a strengthening emotion.

Informed concern takes the place of fear.

Notes

1 As to how history will remember the Obama years, it won’t be for healthcare or obstructionist Republicans. Obama’s stint as Leader of the World’s Greatest Democracy will be remembered globally for the killing of “suspected militants” (and anyone in their immediate vicinity), without requiring even the barest evidence of guilt. Since 2004, more than three thousand people in Pakistan alone have been killed by Pentagon strikes, less than 2% of which are high-profile targets (click here for a stunning visual record); the rest are mostly women and children. There’s been an eight-fold increase of civilian deaths under Obama. Comic John Oliver is a heroic voice in the wilderness for his masterful airing of this material.

2 Check your natal chart for the first few degrees of Pisces (house placement, aspects). This is where you are most seduction-prone right now. I refer to Neptune do’s & don’t’s in the Skywatches from August, June,  and February.