This is a piece about the mystery of consciousness, and the way our far-fetched dreams about empiricism and rationality encourage us to collapse that mystery into dubiously simple categories like normal and abnormal, natural and supernatural, scientific and superstitious, real and unreal.
I want to talk about how the myth of normal is created and reaffirmed, and the detrimental effects that has for everybody. I will contend that the mind is a much more fluid and flexible phenomena than we generally give it credit for, and that there is much we stand to gain individually and collectively by deeply acknowledging that.
This will be a meandering process. I make no apologies. Such is the way with these archetypes.
River Consciousness
if you ask somebody who lives by a river, “how is the river today?” they will tell you if it is low or high rising or falling intense or calm; they will tell you if they saw a fish, a heron or a songbird.
they will tell you about the sound; an overwhelming roar, a sonorous rumble or the merest trickle. they will tell you how the trees are hanging over, the way the light is coming through the leaves, and how their reflections shimmer through the ripples on the surface of the water
They will never say that the river is normal
because there is no normal for a river.
A river is a shapeshifter, and even though it is predictably constrained by gravity, weather patterns and the shape of the river bed, it is nonetheless (for all intents and purposes) infinitely, turbulently dynamic.
If you are determined enough, you can build concrete defences around a river. You can divert it, dam it up, and so on. You can choke the ecosystem, drive away the herons, fish and songbirds, and make a nice tame canal for yourself that only overflows in designated areas.
You can manufacture a facsimile of a river that is stable enough to be ‘useful’. You can move stuff around on canals in lumbering, diesel powered boats that don’t need to be manoeuvrable. You can make your home on the still, murky water and never worry about floods, tides or waves.
Don’t get me wrong, canals can be nice. You still get the odd duckling paddling about in there. But even the keenest canal enthusiast would be hard pushed to claim that whatever quaint beauty they may have is really comparable to the intoxicating potency and wonder of a truly wild river.
Now before I get get lost in my own metaphor (a perennial concern for those writing about Mercury-Neptune), consider this:
Consciousness is like a river.
It is a morphing, rising, falling, constantly shifting, fundamentally dynamic, unpredictable phenomenon; it is a complex web of interacting processes; it is like a vortex whose centrifugal energy pulls other living processes towards itself and invites them into a mutually beneficial co-creative exchange.
the river is the fish, the heron and the songbird it is the rocks and moss the roots and dangling branches the trees; the lichen and the damselflies
The way you measure the health of a river is by finding out what is living in it.
Like a river, the vitality of consciousness is contingent upon its flexibility and its dynamism. If the river is to provide wetland habitats in the lowlands, it has to flood in winter. If it is to provide upriver breeding pools for salmon, it must be low in summer.
Your mind is like this. You too, rise and fall with the seasons. You too, sometimes swell, rise and burst out of the banks that contain you. At times, you too shall dwindle to a mere memory of yourself, and the stones of your riverbed shall be laid bare. You too can only be what you truly are, when you are dynamically participating in the vital processes of various others.
the you of this moment is rushing away down the valley to the ocean never to return while the next one is arriving now and now and now again there is no normal for a river only movement there is no normal for a mind
The Myth of Normal
In my estimation, most people act as though they believe there is such thing as a neutral state of mind; a calm equilibrium in which one is not feeling too much of anything; a vague state of normal from which any strong emotional, psychological, or physiological change represents a departure—the beginning of a journey which is really only a temporary diversion; a quick trip around the psychosomatic block before coming back home to good old normal consciousness.
This may seem like a fairly natural and innocuous belief, but it is actually pernicious, and before I open the Mercury-Neptune floodgates and say what I think we have to gain from this pair, I think it is important to grasp why and how this myth of normal came to be.
There are many facets to the origin of this myth, the simplest and probably most important to understand is that belief in a neutral default resting state of mind is a natural one to hold in the context of industrial capitalism.
In a gradual process that goes back at least as far as the beginning of the industrial revolution, our concept of what a human being is has been fundamentally eroded. With factories and automation comes data, quantification, optimisation, and a million ingenious ways to make it seem as though a human is merely an exploitable resource that can be adequately represented by a number in a ledger.
Before industry, communities were perhaps more able to bend with the natural ups and downs, expansions, retractions and compressions of the individuals that made them up. If everyone in the community is invited to a wedding or a funeral, for example, then whatever work needs doing has to stop, while we all go be human together for a day.
But once humans are reduced to labor hours and placed in the same category as coal, water, tax and rent (expenses to be minimised) it was only a matter of time before we would be expected to behave in a similarly predictable, quantifiable, optimisable fashion.
To the factory boss, your physiological, spiritual, emotional and other states are mere inconveniences which do not have a column on the spreadsheet. You are either present or you aren’t, so you do whatever is necessary in order to wrangle yourself into a state of compliance so that you can show up to the factory line and do your work.
Et voilà, the myth of normal is born—aka the state of consciousness which allows for human beings to perform tasks that have nothing intrinsically to do with themselves in a more-or-less incurious and subservient manner.
The funny thing about this state of mind is that it isn’t even one of the more productive or useful states for consciousness to be in.
But when you live in the machine world, the machine becomes your metaphor for yourself; without so much as a thought, we began to aspire to be more like the machines: predictable, singularly focused, ordered, unfeeling; “fitter, healthier, more productive—a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics.”
I could continue with this examination of the myth of normal’s origin: I could talk about the issues that arise from commonly held materialist metaphysical positions and the consequences of seeing consciousness as an accidental byproduct of material interactions; or about the influence of a philosophy of science that declares all that which it does not know how to measure unreal. I could provide a critique of overly medicalised approaches to psychiatry; we could see how the concept of normality itself has mutated through the generations in a social, political and cultural sense…
But I will spare us—you get the point:
One way or another, we’ve ended up believing that consciousness is a normalisable phenomena; that it has a basic state from which any long term change must be considered a pathology or at least an aberration. The myth of normal is the myth of the bell-curve—it takes the rich complexity of many individual subjective realities, and collapses them down into averages. But however appealing a simple graph may be, you are not merely a datapoint plotted on an x/y axis, and consciousness is not a line of best fit.
Life Outside of the Bell Curve
In my capacity as an astrologer, many of the people that I speak to report experiencing some kind of extra sensory phenomena. These experiences come in many shapes and sizes: precognitive dreams, psychic abilities of some kind; visionary interactions or visitations with non-physical beings, aliens, gods and goddesses, spirit guides, ghosts, angels (and so on), astral projection or other out of body experiences.
On several occasions, clients have shared stories with me about spontaneous unitive childhood experiences of merging with the divine, bearing witness to the interconnectedness of all beings, being spoken to with compassion and love by mysterious and (apparently) superior beings.
I myself have experienced many things during meditation, breathwork and psychedelic sessions which defy the myth of normal to explain or describe. I believe that almost every person has, and I believe that a sizeable percentage of the general population have such experiences regularly. Some people go looking for them through intentional practice, and others simply live with them, day in, day out, as a person lives with a pet cat or a sore knee.
The strange thing is that most people don’t speak about them.
In some cases, this is because they have been forced to reject their own memories of said experiences by misguided authority figures. If spontaneous childhood experiences that transgress the boundaries of normality are met with extreme outer resistance, we quickly learn to stop looking for them, and reject them when they occur spontaneously.
In others, it is a more banal kind of forgetfulness that we learn to acquiesce to through repeated exposure to oppressive social structures. As children, we learn what is real and what isn’t mostly by asking adults. But how well equipped is the average parent to guide an impressionable young mind through this type of terrain?
At best, we get a simple version of events: school is real, mummy and daddy are real, you are real, money is real, rules are real; Harry Potter is not real, dragons are not real, there is no such thing as monsters. (God and Santa occupy a third category which is left intentionally vague until you are old enough for skepticism to properly take root.)
These lessons appear to help us to map contours of our conscious experience, but actually they are more about teaching (or persuading) us to buy into tacit mutual agreements about which facets of consciousness are important, and which aren’t.
But, influenced as they are by the industrial mindset and the simplistic materialism of the masses, (and the rest) these social norms leave that which is most crucial out of the equation altogether. We, in turn, learn to disregard and avoid experiences that might otherwise be some of the most meaningful and pivotal experiences of our lives.
This is simply too high a price for whatever dubious benefits we stand collectively to gain by acquiescing to live in the realm of the lowest common denominator, the world of the bell curve, the world of normal.
Only somebody with a deeply ingrained tendency to behave in an extractive and instrumentalist manner would ever trade the wild beauty and innate freedom of the full range of their conscious expression for something so tedious and empty as practicality or productivity.
This is why we have to be enculturated with those behavioural patterns from an early age. A truly free mind would simply refuse to participate.
before you know better they show you the boxes teach you the rules of normal consciousness life is lived in these boxes here are the forms the acceptable ones that you can take learn to conform to this and now to this; they tell you the shapes you can take but you are quicksilver a liquid and the emptiness of every form in every shape waits for you to pour yourself in becoming everything
In Defence of Reverie
The combined influence of Mercury and Neptune brings about many things.
With this pair, thoughts are like songbirds. Some flutter softly into the inner world and may easily go unnoticed. Others catch the eye, and stir a curiosity for just a moment. Still others perch among branches and pierce the air with song, capturing our attention.
When you look outside and see a robin, starling, or a thrush; when you let yourself become absorbed by it, if you pay attention carefully, you will notice that your mind is living out there in the garden; that the grass, mud, flowers, weeds, bugs and birds are all a part of you, and you of them.
And if you stop long enough at the window, you might notice that just as the birds are like your thoughts, so your thoughts are like the birds—fragile, fleeting, and belonging to no one; temporary, interesting, and seemingly rather autonomous; singing their own songs for their own mysterious reasons.
The way modernity unfortunately deprives many people of such experiences in the outer world is obvious. Most people live in cramped environments populated primarily by brick and concrete structures, and are more likely to see an amazon delivery driver than a lark when they look out of the window.
In a sense, the concretisation of the inner world is an equally tragic occurrence, but at least in this case, there are things we can do to soften and dissolve the internal boundaries which living in the factory has required us to build up. Obviously, I recommend maintaining meditative, contemplative and reflective practices (especially dreamwork), and I advocate for the safe and appropriate use of psychedelic medicines.
But one of the greatest problems we currently face is the cornucopia of consciousness hijacking technologies which prevent the conscious mind from being allowed to drift and dream of its own accord in an aimless, undirected manner.
In Man and his Symbols, Jung writes that “daydreams arise just because they connect a man with his complexes” and “threaten the concentration and continuity of his consciousness.” Despite this ‘threat’, it seems that Jung was very much in favour of daydreaming:
“The second obstacle is exactly the opposite, and is due to an over-consolidation of ego-consciousness. Although a disciplined consciousness is necessary for the performance of civilized activities (we know what happens if a railway signalman lapses into daydreaming), it has the serious disadvantage that it is apt to block the reception of impulses and messages coming from the center. This is why so many dreams of civilized people are concerned with restoring this receptivity by attempting to correct the attitude of consciousness toward the unconscious center of Self.”
Many books will tell you that Mercury-Neptune natal aspects and transits can make it difficult to think, or that you may find that your capacity for rationality is somewhat impaired or obscured by their mutual influence—that Neptune weakens Mercury; that too much spirit, essentially, weakens the mind.
To me it feels more true to say that Mercury-Neptune is an invitation to bring the interplay between mind and spirit back into a more curious, reverent, harmonious and grateful balance. After all, it is only the socially constructed agreements about what constitutes normal that require us to continuously occupy this state of rational, ordered, singularly-focused consciousness. The kind of hazy discombobulation that comes with Mercury-Neptune is not rewarded by society, but that does not mean it is not valuable. Maybe the grasping, controlling, goal-oriented, categorising tendencies of the mind, so prized and centred most of the time, actually could do with a little impairment now and then.
These aspects and transits can infuse your mental arena with a somewhat more contemplative feeling. If you tend to navigate life by focusing on that which you can rationalise, this might feel like a hindrance to your normal functioning. But this is a problem with living in a society that subscribes to the myth of normal, not a disadvantage of Mercury-Neptune. Once you are willing and able to (at least temporarily) surrender some of the mind’s more calculating tendencies, other mental capacities may become available to you.
Mercury is by no means limited to rationality and order. It is also an expressive, communicative, poetic, speculative, curious, mind-opening, trickster archetype that understands things in the flexible terms of narrative and symbolism just as easily as equations and contracts.
There is no place for the trickster in the factory and no time for reverie. There is no value placed on poetry, no place for speculation and nothing to be curious about.
This is certainly a problem, but the solution is not to curtail and diminish your mind in order to fit with the factory’s blueprints. It is better to go outside and free yourself from the flimsy and demeaning view of humanity and of consciousness that the factory demands that you adopt.
No, Neptune is not a hindrance to the mind—it is medicine for it.
The Universe is All in your Head
When Mercury and Neptune come together, you may be made aware (to whatever extent you are able to accept it) that the boundaries between your mind and the rest of the universe, though not completely arbitrary, are constructed with the haphazard pragmatism of a socially anxious pre-teen on their first day at a new school. This generally is difficult to confront, at first.
These boundaries are made up of buried memories, social pressures, ingrained behaviours, cultural biases, and patterns of physiological reactivity imprinted on the nervous system during life and even before/during birth. They serve their purpose, and tell us where we end and where the world begins, but they also have the effect of hardening us; these boundaries constantly affirm our separateness from the rest of the universe.
But you aren’t separate.
You never were.
There, I said it
If you simply remember to look for the signs that you are not separate from the world, you will realise that they are all around you.
It could be that if you write down your dreams, they will increase in vividness and begin to deliver symbolism to you while you sleep that open a line of communication between you and the psyche. The same feeling could be established to an even greater extent in psychedelic sessions.
It may be that you have regularly occurring spontaneous experiences of spiritual emergence or extra-sensory phenomena, and that all you need is a little validation of the reality and importance of those experiences; an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and curiosity rather than one of untold stories and secrets.
It could be that you start to notice the synchronicities between events in your life and just start to enjoy the feeling of the universe’s propensity for playfulness and trickery.
Or it could even be the littler things: the sound of a river, the sight of a heron, a songbird through a window; a daydream; a simple moment of undirected, free-floating consciousness.
Remember, your mind is used to dismissing the outliers and extremes in order to emphasise the average, and keep us pragmatic and ‘functional’.
But impossible things happen every day.
You just have to know how to look.