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 subtle but all-encompassing, like the smell of salt water in the air. We feel it in the mass mood. We can feel it buzzing around in the collective vibration like an ocean of bees.

Dangerously suggestible

The shadow side of Neptune in Pisces is confusion and free-floating anxiety, the most debilitating type of fear. Why is it so peculiarly destabilizing? It is everywhere and nowhere at once. Without a clear sense of where the perceived danger is coming from, we displace our fear readily, projecting it upon imagined perils: terrorists on every street corner, deadly viruses coming at us from the guy sitting next to us on the bus.

art by metelhet

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

In this scenario the mass mind is dangerously suggestible. Once a herd mentality garners 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, and before that, “devil” and its infinite variations.

This is terrible for our well-being as individuals. It makes us lose our sense of moral and spiritual integrity. Trouble is, we seldom think of those dimensions of our being once the mob mind takes hold.

How do we avoid being pulled into the chaos swirling around in the group? We start by understanding what’s happening; then taking

responsibility for our own use of Neptune. Where is it transiting in your chart right now? Locate it, or have an astrologer do it for you. Consider whether the affairs of this house have made you susceptible to the group’s paranoia.

Mob Mind

In the USA a massive 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 square). Ever the world pioneers in the realm of grotesque cultural trends, Americans seem to be abandoning their ethical and common sense willy-nilly, casting their lot with the mob mind.

Pop culture has become the dictator of American thought. Distracted by the World Series, children’s soccer and the iPhone 6, the public pays less and less attention to current events, unless they’re about Renee Zellwegger’s face lift. If people think about “politics” at all, they think in terms of what the mass media has deemed newsworthy.

In this atmosphere do the war makers play the public like saps. I think most Americans would be astounded to hear how the rest of the world sees their country, not suspecting that it is associated, in the Middle East and Central Asia, with mass murder by drone. Never in recent memory has so much state-sanctioned, extrajudicial killing — unspecified, sketchily explained,

sometimes completely undocumented — been given a pass by the American public.⁽¹⁾

Ugly Bug

It’s apparent in the type of stories that get covered by the corporate media that they, too, are making hay out of the pulbic’s lack of focus. If Ebola hadn’t existed, Fox News would’ve invented it.

Neptunian fear is not the same as that of Saturn (lack) 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 that what appeals to today’s over-stimulated

viewers are random, easy-to-grasp, isolated panics like Ebola. The kind of disaster you might find in the plot of a superhero comic book.

Most of the reporting on Ebola doesn’t waste time on the kind of facts and figures that would provide context and real understanding. Such data would detract from the perverse appeal of this kind of fear. 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 from news stories this month was any mention of the other epidemics to which Ebola could be compared — the ones Westerners never hear about on the news – to confer perspective.

But perspective isn’t sexy. In fact it’s 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 desired or feared, we’re attracted to whatever supports the 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, all sense of proportion and scale dispensed with.

I don’t think we can afford, any longer, to indulge in this kind of nonsense. 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 informed ourselves, instead, with stories that could actually focus all this free-floating anxiety, and thus transform it? We know, from psychology, that when we address the underlying sources of our anxiety, it turns into something else. We know that emotions are energy, like everything else – no matter how chaotic and undefined, they are made of the same stuff: 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.

When we realize how the media plays out Neptune’s shadow side, we have begun to free ourselves from it. 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. Then we try on this idea for size. We take a look at which of our media behaviors make us feel  dis-empowered. The moment we dare to do this, to make a recognition like this, we shift gears on a soul level.

Then, by Natural Law, we start to attract empowering ideas instead. We start magnetizing people of heart and intelligence, those who personify Neptune, and Pisces, at their 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, does the opposite of what conventional reporting does. 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 hides behind a for-profit amorality, Klein takes a moral stand, a secular moral stand. This connects us to our hearts. The state of Neptunian helplessness that drained us before is replaced with empathy, a strengthening force. Not sympathy, which is personal, but empathy, which is transpersonal.

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. The best way to avoid being snookered is to steer your yearnings in the positive direction (I refer to Neptune do’s & don’t’s in several of this year’s Skywatches; for example, that of August, June,  and February.)

The post Out of Africa appeared first on MotherSky.

Read the full post here →