The Neptune Return in 2009 - Part II

In the last segment of this series I discussed the role of Neptune in pointing us towards our capacity for self-deception and alluded to how an awareness of this tendency to be taken in by things that are too good to be true is the first step to spiritual growth. In this article I’d like to take a different approach to understanding the meaning of Neptune, one that examines the concept of loss and disappearance.

Looking back to the discovery of Neptune in September 1846, its conjunction with Saturn in many ways reflected the particular flavour of meaning that Neptune adopted amongst astrologers for the following decades. For it was the loss or disappearance of pain in the course of anaesthesia, and the loss or disappearance of suffering and the hard reality of social class in the course of socialism that defined the semantic boundaries of Neptune until relatively recently. And with these losses identity was dissolved, inasmuch as identity was built upon sensate bodily awareness or one’s achievements in the world of social exchange.

The conjunction with Saturn seemed to demand a physical manifestation of the ethereal (ether!), a real-world daguerrotype of the communion of souls hidden behind the veil of arbitrary physical and circumstantial difference. There was an insistent motive to make it real, bring it down to earth, cast it in stone and define it as it really is, ‘it’ being the true essence of spirit.

Conjoining Jupiter at the time of its return to its discovery degree, we can contemplate a similar loss and disappearance of trust in life, of all that is expected to be benevolent, just, morally righteous and humane. An erosion of confidence in the traditional figureheads of religious and ethical standards may be occurring, and we may feel that we have lost confidence in the arbiters of what is good and true. Most acutely we have seen the disappearance of enormous amounts of wealth as a system of artificial and purely speculative financial skulduggery has reached the limits of credibility and dissolved into thin air. Always with Neptune, we are challenged to turn inwards and question our own beliefs about the world and about what is truly essential in life. Many people are still unable to believe the reality of what has happened, what is happening, in the world today, the sheer scale of the duplicity and deception on the part of certain economists and financiers and their political henchmen. How could they get away with it? How are they still getting away with it? Confidence tricks are of course nothing new, but perhaps the scale of economic destruction currently unfolding is such as to demonstrate quite forcefully how damaging such criminal activities can be.

But in being confronted with such opportunistic greed and its destructive impacts worldwide I think we are situated at just one stage of a larger process of losing our moral bearings, entering a fog of confusion as to basic questions of justice and even doubting the common myth of human progress. Of ‘recovery’. We have been through bad patches before, recessions, downturns etc., we just need to set the rules straight again and things will eventually pull through and we can resume our ascent towards the stellar future of human expansion and growth, or so we have been told to think. And yet – we take a hard-nosed, perhaps uncomfortably objective and classically Aquarian look at ourselves and we see that we have multiplied like a bacterium in a Petri-dish, like a cancerous tumour that has consumed its host in the course of growth so voracious that nothing is safe from its exploitative machinations. Neptune’s conjunction with Jupiter (and Chiron) is, I think, symbolic of our need to dissolve our illusions of endless growth, to renounce the weed-like proliferation that the bottom-line of profit maximization demands. Ironically, Marx was probably right when he forecast the destruction of capitalism taken to its purest extremity, on the basis of its inherent instability, when he began to publish his socialist ideas exactly one Neptune cycle ago.

Neptune is representative of chaos: the chaos of systems that are deterministic but ultimately unpredictable, despite how alluring they may seem as candidates for predictive accuracy. Capitalism as a means of resource distribution and commercial justice is a chaotic system; even a cursory examination of stock-market charts and the hundreds of attempts to predict their fluctuations will attest to this. Weather is a chaotic system, which we can predict to a minimal extent, even with the most powerful computers on the planet, but here’s the rub: we take precautions against the weather and adapt to its vicissitudes with no ideological grumblings. But to regulate capitalist forces to as much as is possible prevent their damaging chaotic impositions on our lives seems to have been as taboo as capitalism itself was in communist dictatorships. Jupiter conjoining Neptune is symbolic of how we must more deeply understand the nature of chaos, and allow ourselves to jettison the notion of unending progress and profit in order to develop a more realistic (but inevitably more depressing and weighty) perspective on our collective predicament. This will mean sacrificing and losing our ‘growth fetish’ and re-fashioning economic theory to make it more sustainable and less profit-driven. Yes, there will be a huge vanishing of wealth, but in the final analysis such wealth is ephemeral and irrelevant to the health and maintenance of the matrix which nurtures us, our ecological context.

The inclusion of Chiron in this conjunction reflects the sense of having to cross a bridge in this process of changing perspectives. There is a necessity for a fundamental change of attitude, more than anything an acceptance of our mistakes, our human-ness, our rank stupidity and capacity to believe ridiculous notions which appeal to our narcissism and divest us of responsibility to life, to the greater life around us. More simply we are at a time when we must accept that we were wrong, that we got it wrong, again. We can try to get it right, but this will be impossible unless we develop the humility to admit to our mistakes. I also think Jupiter, when involved in any aspect pattern, especially a conjunction, tends to magnify things, to make them spectacular and larger-than-life. That the three bodies conjoin for a lengthy period in the second quarter of 2009 and Jupiter and Neptune conjoin 3 times, the last time for another lengthy period in the second half of 2010, suggests that this may really be a time for a new beginning in terms of our definition of progress and justice. And the conjunctions occurring in late Aquarius suggests that this new beginning will again, as occurred at the time Neptune was discovered, centrally involve the relationships between men and women and the society of which they form a part. My intuition is that this will be the most important positive and natural, free-flowing energy of the coming two years, the one that we can most easily build on and nurture to a new vision of the world. Coincident with the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square, which is almost within orb as I write, together with the cardinal climax of 2010, it will be this background change in ideology with respect to social justice and collective values that will frame the battles and struggles of the coming decade.

© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency