The Saturn-Neptune square, which has been looming for months, reaches exactitude on November 26.(1) We will be steeping in it for more than a year. It’s the most significant transit since the series of grand crosses anchored by the Uranus-Pluto square, past its peak (2010-15) but in effect through 2023.
Transits of the outer planets, like these, hang around for as long as they do because they have important work to do.
In the world at large, the straight lines and solid masses (Saturn) of Earth are melting (Neptune). We see this in the new porousness of national boundaries, as millions of refugees pour from country to country. We see it in the once-immutable arctic ice caps now melting into open sea.
In my webinar next month we’ll be talking about the 
impact of these world-altering transits on the world as a whole, with the goal of understanding what humanity is supposed to learn.
And in the monthly Skywatches, we’ll be looking at the impact on us personally, as individuals. Here our goal is to milk the transits for self-knowledge.
Leaps of awareness
The Saturn-Neptune cycle reaches down deep into the psyche, unsettling our inner stasis. Where are these two planets transiting your chart right now? Ask an astrologer if you don’t know. If their current positions are oblique and unaspected, you may be aware of the square only as a vague background destabilization. But if it is setting off your natal placements, it will be rocking your boat. Dreams, fantasies and fears may be trying to get your attention. Confusion and doubt may be dogging an issue that you suspect isn’t the real problem.
These symptoms are not the point of the transit, of course. Its point is to get us to make leaps of awareness we wouldn’t otherwise make.
Messed-up
Nonetheless, our first reaction to a transit like this is usually to assume we’re personally messed-up. We’re anxious and unsettled: something must be wrong with us.
This is the kind of transit that makes clients say to their astrologers, “I thought I was crazy/ill/ bad/ possessed….” (We humans are endlessly creative when it comes to making a pathology out of a simple lack of understanding.)
Look at it this way: Saturn is the planet of blockage, Neptune is the unconscious mind. How could we not feel off-kilter? For many people, the square will somaticize as a physical ailments. For others, it may be diagnosed as neurosis.
This is where astrology is indispensable. When we look at the situation through the lens of planetary symbolism, 
we aren’t trying to tackle the malaise and wrestle it to the ground (unlike, say, Western medicine, which sees ailments as mean-spirited enemies, to fight and conquer). We’re not making claims to eradicate or cure the condition, which presumes there’s something wrong.
What we’re trying to do is understand it. We do so by breaking the situation down into its symbolic parts. When we do this with the Saturn-Neptune square, we uncover its source: the soul.
We start to see why earlier generations called experiences like these crises of faith.
Pinning down the infinite
Consider that the planet of limits, Saturn, is pitted against the planet of the infinite, Neptune. We’re being pressured by the former to make our earthly life more workable, at the same time that we’re being teased by the latter with the suspicion that everything in this world is just a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
That’s what’s happening to each of us, in a way that’s tailored to our unique life situation (represented by the houses of our chart that each planet is transiting. See this essay.) How can we get clear and purposeful about our lives, as Saturn insists, while Neptune is mocking our efforts with a sense of pointlessness?
Clearly we’ll get no satisfaction from this transit unless we shift gears, and align ourselves with the cosmic intention behind it.
Transit as koan
The square is daring us with a untenable contradiction, like a Buddhist koan. The Universe knows very well that 
our efforts to get all practical and orderly (Saturn) in the face of apparent meaninglessness (Neptune) is a no-win situation. Our day-to-day minds are being goaded to break out of a box we didn’t even know we were in.
In some area of our lives (check your chart) we’re being presented with a quandary that leaves us no choice but to question our existential assumptions, and reach some kind of still point beneath them. We get there by replacing the apparent contradiction with the realization of paradox.
Although Eastern philosophy has a good handle on paradox, it is a tricky concept for the Western mind. But it doesn’t have to be; paradox is nothing if not natural. Nature is full of paradoxes. Contradiction, by contrast, is a creation of the dualistic human mind, distorting life into a set of zero-sum games.
The fact that both Saturn and Neptune both exist is a case in point: That they are both demonstrably valid is a paradox.
Saturn governs the laws of cause-and-effect, whereas Neptune governs rule-defying processes such as synchronicity. We know that “real life” and “inexplicable mystery” don’t cancel each other out. For example, most modern people accept that both Newtonian physics and chaos theory are valid.
Right now, with increasing strength over the weeks to come, you are seeing that both of these principles are emphatically real. You are being asked to accept both, simultaneously, through the life circumstances indicated by the houses where Saturn and Neptune are currently positioned in your chart.
New perspective
Philosophically, we’re entering into mysterious terrain. Faced with the stress of conflicting options – among them, 
apathy and despair, either of which is deadly for our spiritual health(2) – we have little choice but to find a new perspective. Whatever it is, it will have to involve a certain amount of spiritual surrender.
The dominant paradigms of the society we live in are no help here whatsoever. Our cultural conditioning will have to be identified as such, and disregarded when it gets in the way.(3)
We won’t miss the truisms of our childhood. We will manage just fine without empty social values. Those that are no longer valid are melting away.
In their place, the transit will send us just the right spiritual guides — animal spirits, benevolent ancestors, flesh-and-blood teachers — at just the right time. But we still have to be on the ball, to recognize them when they appear. Nobody can do that for us.
The Saturn-Neptune square is one of those soul quests that, ultimately, we undertake alone.
Notes
1 A transit’s exactitude is when the angle between them, in this case 90 degrees, has a zero-degree orb. The next exactitude will be September 2016, but Saturn and Neptune will remain square (within a 6-degree orb) during the months in between.
2 The modern media encourages these two toxic reactions. See my recent blog.
3 The Saturn-Neptune square may require a stint in DIY rehab: some time set aside for conscious de-programming from the assumptions of modern society. The mechanistic materialist world is, by its very nature, Saturnine in the most limited sense: grounded in separation consciousness, psychologically fear-based, economically predatory, intellectually over-literal. In the capitalist West, our yearning for the numinous (Neptune) is harnessed for profit; elsewhere, spiritual institutions are either outlawed entirely (e.g. China) or designed to keep certain cartels in power (e.g. the feudal Gulf States), undermining rather than facilitating individual soul search.
