Life is looking an awful lot like this lately, is it not? I think we can pretty accurately sum up the square between Saturn in Sagittarius and Neptune in Pisces as being one big surreal “Chrono Trigger” moment; complete with alternate timelines and weird portals being stumbled upon in unlikely places. Time is anything but linear under this astrological influence; it loops, bends, and distorts. At any point, we – somewhat like Ebenezer Scrooge – may be visited by Ghosts of Times Past, Present, and/or Future…and not necessarily in that order.
We’ve just gotten our first taste of this square, but have about a year more of it to go…short term, this energy begins to ebb soon yet it will become continually pervasive once again from May through October 2016.
I have already touched upon the “delusion-busting” potential of the approaching square between Saturn in Sagittarius and Neptune in Pisces in a previous post, but now it’s the “illusion-busting” part I want to focus on today as this certainly is a key and pervasive theme we’ll see playing out over the next year while the energy of this square is active. Soooooo on that note, remember how I said in my October newsletter that we would start seeing the effects of the approaching Saturn/Neptune square by the end of October even though this formation wouldn’t be exact until late November? Well almost right on cue, it appears we have been given Exhibit A: The recent news surrounding young social media maven Essena O’neill.
Essena is a 19 year old Australian girl who was, until very recently, a rising star of Instagram, Youtube, etc.. Just a few days ago she made headlines for abruptly decrying how “Social media is not real life” through exposing the illusory nature of her carefully crafted Instagram pics et al and then subsequently quitting social media. If you really want to get a clearer feel for this astro-energy, do an internet search of her name and read some of the news stories concerning this hoopla.
If you hadn’t heard of her up until now, don’t worry because neither had I. I am by no means a pop-culture junkie, but I do find it useful to attune myself to it on occasion purely for the purposes of more clearly illustrating the workings of key astrological energies. And when this story floated up to my consciousness, all I saw was the Saturn/Neptune square in action. The tearful video explaining the pressure that she felt to project herself a certain way, the selfie she took and re-captioned “THERE IS NOTHING REAL ABOUT THIS”….one key thing this square does is distort our perception of reality, and it appears Miss O’neill is tired of it all and wants to “keep it real” so to speak. The effects of this square are a lot like a record scratch; a sudden and full stop where the music suddenly cuts out. Or a buzzkill – pick your metaphor. The point is this square represents a time where we can and should expect the Great and Powerful Oz to be exposed as simply being “the man behind the curtain” – he isn’t really a wizard and certainly shouldn’t be anyone’s guru/messiah (more to come on that line of thought later)…it is only an illusion. Or perhaps more accurately: a projection based upon what we WANT to believe. But if and when it doesn’t serve our Highest Good to believe in a False Prophet, rest assured the energies of this square will help to provide us with a little reality check.
Now there is a flip to Essena’s story in that many are calling it a publicity stunt. The point is not whether it is or it isn’t; the point is there absolutely IS a kernel of Truth in her message regardless under the Saturn/Neptune Square.
Have you ever had the surreal experience of seeing somebody that you “used to know” from afar? Time and distance causing their familiarity to erode and making them virtually unrecognizable to you, almost as if they had been a complete stranger? And I don’t mean the physical appearance changing so much; rather that the path of your soul’s development and theirs seems to have diverged so widely for so long there is a profound disconnect where barely even a dim spark of recognition can be made. It’s as if you are worlds…or perhaps oceans…apart.
It is a strange thing indeed, like stepping into some sort of temporal vortex.
On that note, speaking of time warps – I am considering the phrase “Use Your Illusion” (referencing of course the Guns N’ Roses albums of the same name) an appropriate and totally relevant theme for the approaching Saturn/Neptune Square. Astro-geeks will appreciate knowing the first album was recorded as Neptune and Saturn were conjunct in Capricorn. Fast-forward 26 years and here we are with these two planets squaring one another from Pisces and Sagittarius, respectively – echoes of the past haunting the present…
Though Sagittarius is currently getting a brief reprieve from Saturn’s energy until September 17th due its temporary backtrack into Scorpio, I find the effects of this energy still lingering on my mind nonetheless. There is a particular a visual image conjured forth when I contemplate Saturn in Sagittarius – it is that of a bush pilot skillfully navigating through dicey terrain; soaring toward an as-yet unknown landing zone in some remote, aboriginal destination. Sadge has long been associated with air travel, and with Saturn as our captain it seems we are indeed learning to fly in a metaphorical sense.
Being this planet squares Neptune in Pisces a total of three times between now and late 2016, we should expect this could turn out to be a water landing, so hopefully you will come prepared for this possibility and thus equip your aircraft with pontoon floats. In a figurative sense, the ground beneath our feet is not solid at all during these squares; rather it is liquid. Consequently, conditions such as this can make it difficult to gain traction; however this is not the point. As is always …Read More…
And the journalism debacle continues, folks…..! We’ve already spoken in a previous post about the effects of Saturn in Sagittarius on reporters as a whole and how Saturn is basically putting them on the stand and requiring that they tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But just a few short weeks after Saturn halted movement and turned retrograde in a square to Neptune, guess what has popped up on the radar? Disgraced journalist Judith Miller recently had a book published – The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. For those not familiar with her work, Ms. Miller became a household name for her coverage of the Iraq War and came under fire very publicly for her role in reporting on supposed “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq that were never actually there. Uh, whoopsie!
It seems she might have been seeking redemption and to clear her good name – supposedly this book was going to “set the record straight”. But that didn’t quiiiiiite happen!
Critics have been….um, shall we say, vocal…in voicing their disgust with the book. Apparently it was received by readers as being heavy with excuses for her conduct/poor judgement as a reporter during the Iraq War. And when you’re a journalist who has already screwed up pretty bad to the point that your credibility has been shredded and your level of respectability within your chosen profession has virtually become nil, needless to say the very last thing you would want to do during Saturn in Sadge is put out a book that gives people the impression of anything less than a complete “mea culpa”.
You don’t shift blame, you don’t offer up half-assed excuses for your conduct, you don’t go on the defense….you suck it up, say you were wrong, apologize, and then most importantly, you ask for the ability to EARN FORGIVENESS back! This is an important concept with Saturn making 3 exact squares to Neptune between now and late 2016 – when you do wrong and/or make a mistake, if you want people to trust you again it means you are actually going to have to earn (Saturn) that forgiveness (Neptune) and work at it. You don’t just get to wave a magic wand and think all will be forgiven, heavens no! You have to acknowledge that it will take time, and that you will have to make consistent and repeated efforts before people will find you trustworthy again.
But if you err on the Neptune side of the equation and make nebulous statements about how the whole thing was nobody’s fault, really, or how it was supposedly all just a big misunderstanding ….well, nobody’s really going to want to hear that! Saturn says,“Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to JAIL!” OK…maybe not *literally* jail in all cases, but rest assured if you are a reporter the penalties for *not* “getting with the program” are inclined to be very stiff during the next 2 1/2 years. People are going to be hard on you, mostly because you deserve it if you’re caught lying or if you blab on in a book about your biggest career failure (which, by the way, was BECAUSE of a credibility issue) without actually accepting real and direct accountability for that transgression. As a Capricorn Sun (governed by Saturn), Miller really SHOULD know better!
But yes, people are rightfully going to be tough on those who fall on the wrong side of this energy. On that note, I must mention the reviews – this New York Times piece on Miller’s book by Terry McDermott is virtually saturated with the energy of Saturn/Neptune square – especially the last two lines of it. Then there’s one of the more interesting (and politically controversial) Amazon.com reviews, which with one line pretty much sums up the current state of journalism during these Saturn-in-Sadge-with-Neptune-in-Pisces times “…the media is no longer capable of finding the facts, much less reporting them honestly”.
As I’ve said, Brian Williams may have been the first reporter casualty to be felled by his own hand during Saturn in Sagittarius, but he definitely won’t be the last. We now have Judith Miller apparently digging herself a deeper hole with the release of this book and sacrificing herself upon the Saturn-Neptune altar.
I’ve found myself placing an unusually high value on “restorative time” these days, whether this is time spent unwinding in yoga class or simply catching some good zzz’s at night, so I recently decided that I was in the market for a new mattress, naturally. I was searching for something supportive and yet soft enough to make me want to leap into the bed with glee at the end of a long day, but before making this investment I decided to do some investigating – there’s so many bedding options out there these days that looking into the pros and cons of all the different varieties on the market only seemed sensible. Inner spring, pillow top, pocketed coil, latex, memory foam, gel foam, air cushioned……the array of sleep possibilities are simply dizzying!
Now this got me thinking, because Neptune is the Lord of Dreamtime, so of course mattresses fall under his domain. And no matter where we turn, it seems everyone is trying to sell us on this ideal of “a perfect night’s sleep”. But I have to wonder if such an elusive, mythical creature even exists or if it’s simply a vague yet enticing concept cooked up by marketing gurus, designed to drive us in sleepless droves down to the mattress stores. And what does “perfect” entail, exactly? Because what’s perfect to you, me, or the guy next door are likely to be very different things indeed!
During the course of all this information filtering, I came upon an eye-opening statistic: Did you know that in a consumer report survey conducted regarding mattress manufactures, most brand makers only had customer satisfaction ratings around the 50% mark? That’s just crazy to me – especially when you consider the average person’s willingness to shell out good coin to get that “perfect night’s sleep”. In my research, I came across models that were 5, 7, 10, 20+ THOUSAND dollars – now when a mattress costs more than a new CAR (which has complex engineering that goes into all those moving mechanical components), something fishy (yes, that’s a Neptune reference) is most certainly going on!
Neptune is a planet of fantasy – it tries to sell us a dream. And that’s what happens when we go a-mattress-shoppin’ – everyone is trying to convince us the dream is real and that it too can be ours for the low, low price of just fill-in-the-blank. A friend worked in this industry years ago and once told me the markup on these products was something like 1000% (yup, you read that right) – I don’t think he was …Read More…
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