Season of Surrender
“The only way Neptune can be truly understood in its essence is to surrender to it; for it is, by definition and function, beyond boundaries. It is only when we merge with it – i.e become boundary-less ourselves – that we can know it………..the most useful way of describing Neptune’s essential meaning is to say that it represents the urge to lose one’s self in another state of consciousness and the urge to escape from all limitation, from both the limitations of material existence and its boredom and the limitations of the personality and ego.” (Stephen Arroyo)
This season of Pisces which we are currently moving through is the time of year in which Neptune’s vibration is felt most acutely. This is particularly so for Pisces natives (Pisces Sun, Moon, Ascendant) but all of us to some extent will feel the frequency of the archetype of sensitivity, compassion and unity. The vibration of the Pisces/Neptune archetype evokes these feelings of sensitivity to pain, our own and/or others, as if to compel us to know we are not our individual selfhoods alone – we are each a cell in the one body of humanity and deeply connected to all sentient life on our blue planet. Each season has its reason, after all. Feeling this sensitivity can be excruciating. Out of nowhere the feelings thrust themselves into our heart and headspace, calling on us to reflect, to go within, to withdraw from the outside world, to meditate, to escape, through whatever means from the harshness, limitation and suffering we see and feel in the world. We sense, in Pisces season, the invisible threads that bind us to all life forms, even if we cannot put that sense into words; we may ponder the meaning of it all, a meaning that is surely more foggy and confusing than ever, at this time. Most watery of all the signs, we are easily brought to tears and feelings of drowning in oceans of sadness in Pisces season.
As Stephen Arroyo’s quote above signposts, Neptune (and the archetypal grouping as a whole) is beyond boundaries. Here is a natural conflict. We human creatures have our conscious awareness contained for the most part within the perimeters of our mind-bodies. Saturn, ruler of the material realm has dominion over our physicality. Saturn’s requisites in our psyche are the complete opposite of Neptune’s. Neptune wants to dissolve the boundaries that keep us in separateness and limitation; Saturn wants to enforce them. We might argue the mind is boundless, transcending time and space – and this is true. However our minds are profoundly conditioned by the human experiences we have encountered, making this domain far from boundless and free. Which is to say our minds predispose us to see the world in certain, conditioned ways. And our bodies are naturally enough constricted and confined within their flesh and bone boundaries. Saturn has a case, but it is Neptune who must win out now.
How to deal with all of this? Pisces/Neptune is the most ‘spiritual’ of all the signs/planets. The Neptunian vibration is one of divine discontent; of a longing for something higher – a longing for connection, for union with the Great One Consciousness – God/Goddess or whatever name you give it. Natives of this sign have an innate urge to escape the mundane world – hence the attraction to spiritual practices, to alcohol and drugs, or to any form of consciousness altering. All are forms of escapism at heart. Piscean natives are more inclined to seek escape than other signs because of the discomfort, the pain, of feeling too much. But now, in late February and most of March, everyone is vulnerable to this vibration…….
This week, 25 year old US airman Aaron Bushnell set fire to himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, dying for the cause of Free Palestine. This act of ultimate martyrdom is symbolic of Neptunian sacrifice, above and beyond any earthly reasoning. I can only try to imagine the level of pain that took this courageous soul to the brink, culminating in him ending his young life for the cause. The pain of his identification, his sensitivity to the pain of others – the Palestinians – must have been so overwhelming for him that he could think of no other course. It is utterly tragic. And utterly fitting of the archetype of the victim-martyr – foundational symbols of Neptune/Pisces. Endings, completion, death – are other symbols of the last sign of the zodiac. Aaron’s death, his sacrifice, his martyrdom is an echo of the sacrifice of the Palestinian people. Palestinians have been the sacrificial victims of a sick, twisted psychopathic and demonic entity – non-human in origin surely - since the beginning of the 20th Century. Dispossessed of their homes and land, exiled, murdered, tortured, imprisoned in a concentration camp, denied the most basic human needs and rights through decades of illegal occupation by the Zionist entity called the (illegitimate) ‘state of Israel’. The Palestinians are deeply spiritual - most of them followers of Islam but a percentage Christian – innocent victims of a political deception most vile and staged against a backdrop of contrived (and erroneous) religious ‘justification.’ They lost almost everything we need and value as human beings – in many cases life itself - and for all of them, they lost their freedom. Forced to live a semi-human existence by the brutal occupiers they didn’t surrender willingly. How could they possibly have done so? They are human beings. They resisted their torture and imprisonment. They resisted passively and in the limited ways available to them. Until October 7th, when their truly understandable desperation culminated in the breakout. But you must know the story (I hope not the propagandized versions)………..
And here we are, in this season of completion, endings, death, sacrifice and the sign of the ‘victim-saint-martyr’. Many of us are feeling on the brink as our empathy has reached overload and overwhelm, not knowing what to do, how to deal with the intensity of our feelings. Neptune’s vibration is pinging us so deeply it is almost unbearable. It was for Aaron. In echoing the indescribable pain of the Palestinian people being bombed, shot, burned, starved to death; of witnessing their children, husbands, wives, mothers, being dismembered, shot, amputated without anesthetic, starved to death, through four unrelenting months of medieval barbarism, the sacrifice of his life will echo through time in ways we cannot possibly know, landing in hearts and minds, altering the fabric of consciousness, altering the construct itself. It is an ending time, a time of weighing the Karmic scales, of justice, retribution, something indefinable – and we hope and pray an ending to the long tragedy of a stolen land and genocide, the sacrifice of the indigenous people of Palestine. We pray for Aaron and peace for him where he is now and we pray for them.
I asked above, how do we deal with it – with this time of piercing sensitivity and the feelings of sadness and desperation to escape the suffering of this earth plane. The task of the season of surrender is simply this: to surrender. I know, it is not simple in truth. We are conditioned through the hard experiences of emotional and physical pain we’ve known, to resist. We have unconsciously set up walls, boundaries around our hearts to ‘keep it out’! We don’t want to feel the pain of feeling our feelings too deeply so we try to shut them out. Distraction, escapism, denial, avoidance - we have the tools to keep pain at bay.
But at this time the Kosmos is trying to break through those walls. Neptune is the great dissolver. Now he wants us to melt our resistance and open our hearts. He wants us to surrender. We may prefer to escape, but that is the lower road of Neptune……the true medicine is found in taking higher road. We may feel our hearts are already too open, too permeable to the suffering we witness in the insane world, so much so that we think we need to resist more. We need to avoid more. And therefore we might be turning away from the screens and blocking our ears to the stream of suffering trying to claim our attention. But, again, the medicine is surrender. Not resistance. A most effective way of melting into surrender is through the inward breath. That is, we close our eyes to enable us to turn inward – so we can focus on our breath. Breathing deeply and calmly, slowly and consciously we feel the area around our hearts – perhaps into the solar plexus – the places where the knots of resistance are most keenly felt. Keeping this attention we exhale longer than we inhale. We feel a softening within. It feels lighter. We feel a melting. It feels better. The challenge is to stay with the softening and not allow the mind to pull us back into the thought world too soon. We need to digest our pain. The only way out is through. And so we continue this practice for as little or long as we can. We return to it throughout the day, whenever we notice thoughts and their attendant emotions creating contraction, whenever we feel the pain is too much. When we have had enough of tears.
Contraction is Saturn. We are in the class of Neptune for now – expansion. We expand our hearts as we soften resistance. And yes, we will return soon enough to our empathic rendering of the suffering we see in the world; to dealing with it as best we can. Denying it, avoiding it is not the answer. We are all cells in the body of humanity. We are all connected. Their pain is our pain. We are all one. What we are called on to do in the season of surrender is to surrender the avoidance, the denial, the blocks that keep us in separateness. We need to feel the pain. If we refuse to feel, we become numb. Robots, psychopaths, those engineering these events in our world are numb, completely devoid of empathy, of any semblance of compassion. Refusing to feel is a one-way ticket to a world we do not want to see. We are, at this point, in danger of being well on that road. We must turn back, while we still can. The unimaginable suffering of the sacrificial people of Palestine is a searing and unfathomable offering to take us back, back to our hearts and our human connection with our brothers and sisters – whatever colour, race, sex, species they may be.
This is the gift of this season, of Neptune and Pisces. The season of surrender.
Be calm, be connected, be compassionate, be clear.
And see you in March.
“The same number of years you spent meditating on emptiness, you should now spend meditating day and night on compassion, a compassion a hundred times stronger than that of a mother for a child burnt in a fire; an unbearably intense compassion that arises when thinking about the suffering of sentient beings…….. Once such compassion is born, you must practice until you to think, with fierce energy, ‘Until enlightenment, I shall do whatever is possible to benefit all beings, not omitting a single one, no matter what evil actions they commit and no matter what difficulties I must endure.” (Shabkar – Tibetan Master)