Neptune Directions: Right vs Real

Ephiphanie

A triptychon by Hieronymus Bosch (1475-1499)

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Just about the time we feel like we’re going to move on and get past whatever we’ve been dealing with, suddenly life takes a turn.

No, you’re not so sure, life says. So are you sure you want to…(choice of one or more: let go of, start to do, look at, talk about, ignore, go about being)…that?

There are two sets of metaphysical concepts involved here…the first being all about our relationship to reality. Do we see only that part of life we want to see? If so, why would we do that?

Whatever your coping mechanism (and we all have one or two)(or three or four)…the ‘why’ behind why you even need to cope is the sort of discomfort with how you feel about life which is plainly and uniquely Piscean.

It’s also 12th house. And yes, sort of Neptunian.

In this triad, Neptune is the verb – the ‘to 12th house’ where the 12th house (of any chart) is where the sign on the cusp describes the situations we set up in life in order to test our own vulnerabilities.

Why would we do that?

Answer: so as to grow. There is a wellspring of spirit of life seeking to exist which animates our existence in this time and moment. And that quotient both knows that we can survive most of what we fear and that we need fears. Fears are what allow us to feel ourselves feeling our feelings and reacting in real time…and in highly memorable ways.

We learn a lot through reflecting on own own emotions. Good or bad, we learn.

Considering how Neptune is going direct so soon after the Scorpio solar eclipse, whatever else is happening in your life it is likely that ‘structures’ are now beginning to crumble or become (at some level) less viable. Or maybe less ‘strict’ by definition.

In fact, Neptune going direct about a week after Jupiter goes retrograde is somewhat akin to whatever process in life is melting (Neptune) away some of the barriers which have stood in your way.

And yet…at the same time, that very same Neptune-Jupiter relationship also recalls some of the ‘unveiling’ qualities which suggest we may (Jupiter retrograde) learn something worth thinking about… often through others.

Probably most tempting-taunting-beckoning of all, however is the fact that Neptune is going direct on November 13th with Mercury having gone direct on the 10th.

This sort of begs a personal question: are you on the verge of creating something magical? Or maybe you’re someone poised to experience several very personal-feeling days where you find out you’ve lied…most of all to yourself…about something.

Oh, the good and bad of life. How often they coincide.

(Augh.)

(Yes, I just had to slip that in.)

Mercury-Neptune connections are famous for illusions, delusions, lies and deceptions. But all is not lost here: Mercury-Neptune…especially as presented here in Scorpio (Mercury) and Pisces (Neptune) is equally a representation of deep, emotionally resonant,

And this is no entirely uncommon common water sign trine we’re talking about, neither. No…this one i s where both participants are at 2 degrees of respective signs.

So…whatever else happened between…well, between November 8th and 15th (taking both stations into account)…it would be likely for these days to just feel personal. Everything may feel like it’s a critique. Or maybe you’re feeling the tug (good or bad) of everybody needing you. Or maybe you’re behind on things you had wanted to get done by now.

Some of us will experience these days as frustration, others as a revelation. Some of us will go through these days just happy to be reasonably invisible. Neptune-Mercury effects can herald the terribly good day, the inordinately magical day, the utterly helpless-feeling time.

It all depends on where 2 Pisces (Neptune’s position) and 2 Scorpio (Mercury’s degree of station) fall in your personal chart. And where both planets are in said natal chart.

Beyond that, there is the matter that Neptune is also in opposition to Pallas going into this station – with Pallas having entered Virgo just as the eclipse moved through.

It would seem to be a time which is whispering to us about all and everything we need to be smarter about with regards to the ‘who it is’ we’re being.

And how important it is to be that person not superficially, but genuinely – at your core, no matter how difficult that feels like it is.

One way or another, we’re going to get there. With and within the uncertainty and illusory delights of a Neptune station so closely associated with the kind of human ties emotional…evocative…thought provoking…which we experience with-and-through our ties to others now, at this turn of a Mercurial tide…

It could be one or many things. You may become overly aware that your life is driven by one or many things…and how some of them are assumptions.

Or realities never dealt with properly as realities. Wherever we have kidded ourselves, particularly where that concerns relationships and what parts of our own psyche we are willing to experience through our relationships with others…maybe not the actual situation, but the feelings which remind you of ‘something else’ now echo again through life.

It’s a freshly bitter rain. There are times when we need to be strung along the ragged edges of our soul so that we can experience growing up through coping with trials and disappointments, whether big or small.

As represented by Ceres at 3 Libra, plans (Ceres) now reach a moment of (Neptunian) uncertainty. There are lots of questions you could ask yourself about your uncertainty, yes. I suggest putting ‘what can I learn which will help me going forward through not just the responses I get, but who I get them from?’ on the list.

The other way to see this is in the Neptune-to-Ceres (8th derivation) sort of way. There, all Neptune’s ‘dissolving’ qualities would seem to be highlighted in a (Pisces)water-on-air(Libra) sort of way.

Water, meaning emotion...plus air, meaning communication?

One wonders what will come of that. I could hope for plans on how to deal with feelings or feelings about things, but how many people are actually that constructive that often?

I can hope, yes.

And yet, having learned so painfully and completely that even someone with strikingly good intentions can fall off the face of their personal Earth when they least expect it…I wonder.

Mercury in Scorpio expresses a certain kind of strength, a certain kind of emotional strength with others and with ourselves. Theoretically, we are now capable of great achievements moving forward providing and to the degree that we are willing to get our Neptunian ego – including ego-driven fears for/about Self – under control.

Or better yet, released. You know, so we can fly away on our own wings, wings unencumbered by our own sense of the improbable reduced to impossible by our unwillingness to try. 

Though a graveyard is just another piece of land, the feelings about them and the

indescribable senses we get when walking through one are very real... and very Neptunian.

(photo credit: an Easton Maudit church yard by R. Neil Marshman, November 2005)

The thing hardly anyone talks about when they talk about Neptune is its relationship to Saturn. I wasn’t surprised when NASA (bless their chip-driven heart) released news that Neptune has rings. And I don’t have to do a bunch of fancy math, though you know me, I’m devilish.

Maybe my favorite portrayal of the Devil ever to grace the silver screen, the above photo is Elizabeth Hurley as the satanic one in the Warner Bros/Regency film

'Bedazzled.' I'm pretty sure every woman has wanted to be her kind of

Devil at some point!

I like a fair slosh of math here and again, just to wallow in the glory of universal communication. (But I do know – generally – that that’s just me. I’m muy geeky. About my only question there is whether I’m a nerdy geek or a geeky nerd.)

Back to the metaphysical point, a point maybe best illustrated by a question I fielded years ago (and yes, I still remember it) about the ‘allowing yourself not to know’ quality which is so very and innately Neptunian.

Question: can’t we ever know anything Neptunian?

Answer: No. Once we can identify it, it’s no longer a Neptunian precept – it’s Saturnine. Neptune is ‘non-reality’ and Saturn represents reality and all you ‘know’ as real…right down to the realities of life created through how well or how badly aligned we are with others in relationship/s (….which would be why Saturn is exalted in Libra and the “LIbran” 7th).

This is the concept which defines this time as a time when nothing is really….defined. It’s all in flux. 
Everything is up for being…redefined.

And that’s just the thing – this is a time about the flexing and the fluctuating, the eternally knowing that you’re about to know how to make ‘it’ work…with only the barest sparkle of humor most painful at the thought that in you dedication you may also be seeding, building and carefully tending to that which will blossom into your very worst friend.

You just don’t know. None of us knows – that’s the Neptune issue. So long as we are focusing on our Self (or that which will benefit that Self) Neptune becomes the soggy mass of self-tying rope which has just planted itself around our feet.

So maybe you really want everything to not only just be right and run right and go right and feel right (and all that)…but that doesn’t look to be the undercurrent of most of what life is likely to handle us in this next little while.

Yes, for some of us this station will represent the sure and final finish to some process which has (probably) been dragging on and causing much angst. Maybe even just more burden to your schedule – whatever. I have one friend who got a languishing, lingering, really unhappy-making court matter settle as Mercury went into retrograde and the paperwork will now be settling out. The issue which brought about that lawsuit is finally over. As soon as the last envelope finds its file, the entire matter begins to melt away into memory.

That’s the sort of ‘before’ which dissolves now, leaving room for…

….well, that’s up to you. Once Neptune goes direct, our lives can become however much more we want them to be. They can grow and blossom and expand to include vistas only before suspected until now.

For that to happen, all we have to do is learn to tolerate more of life than we deal with now. We have to be willing to experience it and then (as if that’s not enough) also be willing to think it through and learn something, from which we release our boundaries on what can or “should” be.
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