Saturn in Sagittarius is square Neptune in Pisces through November 2015 (this will be exact at 7 degrees 11/21-30, then again, June 2016 -12 degrees with Saturn and Neptune retrograde, and again, Sept 10 degrees, Neptune retrograde)*.

As Saturn in Sag lines up for a square with Neptune in Pisces this month, there’s a conflict between our spiritual worldview, faith (Pisces) and our core beliefs about life (Sagittarius). As Neptunian glamour and illusion clashes with reality, we witness endless shenanigans (Donald Trump, for instance) and real suffering (the Syrian refugees crisis, etc.) co-existing side-by-side in the world. Life can all but seem surreal. Horrors happen in a corner of the world every day, in our own life, atrocities and suffering sometimes so harsh that we cannot imagine living another day…yet our stomach still grumbles for food, and the beauty of a rainstorm still moves us. Life is an absurdist art piece. How weird. How to make sense of it? Moreso, how can we make sense of the absurd, confounding and suffersome situations in our own life?

All the World’s a Stage

Shakespeare once said: All the world’s a stage. As Saturn conjuncts my natal Neptune, and Neptune squares it, I have chosen to use this wise phrase as literal fact. Life is all illusion; life is a movie. And from my studies about Life Between Lives regressions (LBL), we actually do sit in a screening room before we come into the world. We choose a body (costume), the key relationships we’re involved with (supporting cast), a place and time to incarnate (the set), all in order to grow our soul. We even get to watch snippets of our future incarnation, deciding, with help, on the best set of circumstances specific to the growth we want to undertake. In the screening room for the movie of our life, there’s only free will, nothing but choice. We choose everything. But before we’re dropped down into the role of our lifetime, we forget what we’re trying to learn. Our lessons are concealed from us so we can achieve maximum growth.

The Search for Understanding

The forgetting part is the thing I, and many people I’ve worked with over the years, don’t like. We want to know the purpose and meaning behind everything. “Why is this happening?” “Why can’t I get to the bottom of this?” “I know this must be a lesson, but…*&{edc87575597f4f3ad5e35fd7f36c45c2e827b7d30afc5bd9b12c8599e57b4ed7}$…insert expletive here”. These questions can lead The Seeker, inside, on a lovely pilgrimage to destinations unknown. It can also be a real soul-suck, a way of staying stuck. Don’t get me wrong, as a ninth house Sun person, I’m a born seeker; I love resting in the big picture, asking big questions, searching for meaning. But have you ever looked at the Sun so long that you start seeing black squiggly things, get dizzy, confused and lose all sense of reality and perception?

If the meaning and purpose of the obstacles we have in our life aren’t usually obvious, maybe they aren’t meant to be. Maybe we’re not meant to know the answers, or even to understand. If we did, we wouldn’t get the growth experiences we need. Imagine Helen Keller, a woman who was born blind and deaf mute, asking “God, What is the meaning of this?” all the time. Would that have gotten her where she needed to go? Instead she worked within her limitations. Instead of looking for the big Answer, she looked for the little answers, ways she could learn to live with her limits. She innovated. She persisted. She problem solved. She looked to the people around her, and her environment for help. I’ve faith that her soul arrived in the next world, triumphant. I also imagine she probably never understood the purpose of her lifetime as a blind and deaf person until she arrived there.

What Do You Believe?

If there’s one thing that connects us all it’s that each of us have limitations that we feel hold us back from greater possibilities. Sagittarius holds our faith, our ability to envision “a bigger picture”, to step back and draw patterns from our experience and make sense of it. Saturn in Sagittarius can present a blockage to these same things, as well as the importance of trying to reach some level of faith and philosophical wisdom about our world, our life and its conditions. Saturn in Sagittarius makes this idea of undertaking the quest for meaning, and having a philosophical worldview worth having, timely and important, but also potentially fraught with difficulty. For instance, questioning, and searching for meaning and purpose can be a huge distraction in and of itself- by taking us out of problem solving, and the present moment, where real change can occur. Remember: Helen. What if she continually focused on the “why” instead of the “how”?

Meanwhile, Neptune in Pisces churns out illusion, chaos, discontent and yearning, disconnection and reconnection… we forget our self, remember, and then forget again. Noting Neptune’s tendency to focus on the wrong things while totally missing the boat about what can and probably should be changed, the danger of this square might be: Believing in the wrong story, but the possibility of this square is waking up. And the formation of a durable container (Saturn) for a more inclusive consciousness of reality to emerge (Neptune).

Forming a More Reliable Version of Reality

How important is it for you to have a worldview? What do you believe about the world, and about yourself? Can you see that: The assumptions and core beliefs you keep replaying, frames your experience entirely? We all form assumptions. For instance, it’s hard to see evil committed by someone with power, over and over, without deciding “power corrupts”… but if we form that core belief it can limit our possibilities. And one person’s beliefs will be different from another’s.  Imagine your mother was afraid of spiders and, as a child, you observed her freak out when she saw them. Now every time you see spiders your heart races and you get anxious. Conscious or not, your core belief is “spiders are dangerous.” We all have such distortions. We live them every day.

Our world is filled with ravishing beauty, prosperity, love; devastation, abuse and poverty. Do you hold a worldview that can cut through illusion? Would having one give you more freedom and happiness? As I work on healing my own trauma, and helping others, “all the world’s a stage” helps me to hold space for the higher self to offer something truthful, real and helpful. It also takes the edge off all the sometimes horrible stuff we endure. Because while scary-difficult things happen in life, it’s rarely for the reason we think. Re-framing such things can be revelatory and life changing.

All astrological aspects offer a chance to become more conscious– especially the tough ones. The question of the hour is: Does your faith, and your core beliefs about life, undermine or serve? Remember, reality is a very convincing, and persistent, illusion. We reinforce our beliefs, and perpetuate their reality, simply by believing in what we think we see. As an experiment, the next time you read the newspaper and get emotional about it, start to buy into your problems, or drive home your point of view to another person, ask: What core belief about my self, or life, is running this show? Then prepare to be disillusioned. You may laugh, cry, or even see that “You’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust…What’s there to be afraid of?”

More possibilities for this square:

-Conflict between belief/faith versus fundamental human values

-Difficulty and the necessity of seeing where we’ve been in denial, victim, are holding distortions of our faith/worldview

-Righting wrong thinking, getting good at ferreting out disinformation (thanks, Molly Hall, for this bit)

-Searching out how our beliefs shape our perception, working with limiting core beliefs, choosing new ones

-Disillusionment followed by a more realistic understanding

-Developing a more mature and inclusive spiritual worldview

*dates provided by Molly Hall’s article Saturn square Neptune

art: Matrix and Enigma by Michael Cheval