I LOVE this post from Phil today:

I see him everywhere. He’s in the supermarket tabloids…the soldier’s camouflage…the politician’s dissembling…the celebrity’s alcoholic binge…and in the movies.

Neptune is so much with us.

We seem at times to be living in a world adrift at sea, pulled by seahorses with no direction home. The Saturn-Neptune opposition, which makes its last exact stare-down in about three weeks, has brought this home. . . .

Shifts in collective consciousness do not always shake the world like massive earthquakes. Sometimes, the change is more like developing a picture in a darkroom or putting on a new pair of glasses. This is especially true when we are looking at any configuration involving Neptune, a planet that does not like to be pinned down.

The 180 degree opposition angle, as Bil Tierney has so wonderfully pointed out in his book, Dynamics of Aspect Analysis, often brings projection. We tend to favor one side of an opposition. We “own” it and it is easy for us to express that planet’s energy. The opposite planet, the one that makes us uncomfortable or that we don’t accept so easily, is projected onto others. We meet that other planet through others and events in the world. Things happen to us that are of the nature of the planet we don’t internalize. Tierney writes,

…the under-valued planet’s expression is projected onto another individual who then must play out that planet’s role….The more we tend to block or deny the activity of that undervalued planet within our own consciousness, the more we attract it (often through its negative expression) in somebody else who tends to apply it in a manner that literally opposes the other more valued planet we do personally relate to.

I think this can also be applied to a lot of what is happening in the world around us. Have we collectively embraced and “owned” Neptune…or Saturn? Which one is it? And which one have we collectively projected onto events and others?

Saturn is conjunct Neptune in my own chart, and straddles my Sun. I am all too familiar with the oppositional dynamic (though conjunct, the two are always battling it out in my psyche) between Saturn’s need for form and structure and Neptune’s siren call to the spiritual. The Saturn/Neptune opposition will set off the Venus/Jupiter opposition in my chart as well as my Leonine Pluto as it will for so many of us. I mention this only to illustrate the strong personal affect this transit is having within me as well as so many others.

I have been advising a more disciplined spiritual practice for my clients who are having problems during this time, but I confess I have been lagging behind in my own practice. For me this blog has become a substitute in some ways for my daily meditation and journaling, and in many ways it has not been a satisfying one. There really is no substitute for a commitment to step within the truth of our inner reality each day and draw nourishment from the infinite source of truth that lies within us.