This is a piece about shame and pride, discipline and inadequacy, vitality and the lack of it, and the role of the critic in the psyche. It is about the necessity of sacrificing the ego, albeit temporarily, in exchange for meaningful growth.
This is also a piece about our culture’s problematic relationship with the Sun-Saturn pair, and how our mandatory participation in a kind of cultural neurosis makes it hard for us to honour Saturn well.
I want, in a small but meaningful way, to put the struggle of Sun-Saturn in a social, cultural, political and economic context.
I want to explore how society weaponises our desire to grow up, and uses it to trap us in perpetual adolescence; how our vitality and energy is extracted, hoarded, and ultimately wasted; how we are constantly reminded of our inadequacy and the scarcity of life’s necessities; how we are bullied, manipulated and repeatedly scammed into leaping to the defence of the ego, and how this presents an obstacle for genuine development.
Then, I want to provide some ideas about how to cut out the noise, and get back to the real work.
Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow
First of all, what is so worthy about Sun-Saturn that I would bother to defend or advocate for it? After all, few people with an astrological practice relish the prospect of a Sun-Saturn transit.
These transits do tend to coincide with periods of inhibited vitality, feelings of unworthiness and self-doubt, harsh criticism from within or without, or serious challenges to our sense of identity. Sun-Saturn can initiate a growing awareness of one’s mental or physical fallibility, or more broadly, with impermanence and mortality. These can be times when the spotlight is upon us, and our strengths and weaknesses seem to be on show for all to see.
However, all these uncomfortable symptoms of a Sun-Saturn transit have their place in the grand scheme of things. It may be rarer than we care to admit that human beings are motivated to act by anything other than discomfort of some kind. Scarcity, or at least the threat of it, is what inspires most work. Inadequacy, or at least the perception of it, is what most reliably catalyses action. We must become aware (Sun) of what is lacking (Saturn) in order to progress. Recognition is the first step towards rectifying a problem.
It would be too simple to say that “adversity breeds character” or that “hard times make strong men”. These types of arguments contain a grain of truth, but are in dire need of refinement. It is important to state that not all adversity helps a person to grow. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger if you are able to heal and transmute your suffering into strength. Such things are not guaranteed.
Saturn does guarantee two things though:
First: there will be suffering.
Second: suffering is redemptive.
The first hardly needs explaining. The second, though, requires clarification.
I first heard that phrase—suffering is redemptive—in the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr (born with an exact semi-sextile between Sun and Saturn), but it actually appears earlier, in a published article from 1960. Writing on the many hardships that he faced, King reflects:
“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.”1
Now, suffering is not the only ingredient in our creative vitality, and we should not glamorise or worship it. But when it arrives, the best thing we can do is bear it with grace and dignity, even if only “to save ourselves from bitterness”.
But more than a simple coping mechanism, it is a choice; to wilfully reject a posture of disempowered resentment. Not in order to gain some moral high ground, but for the sake of our own sanity and integrity; simply to continue functioning, one must avoid being ruled by bitterness.
It is, ultimately, simple: Suffering is redemptive, because it has to be.
Because, when anguish inundates us, when we lose that which we care about and which we belong to, the possibility of redemption is all that is left—the merest shred of hope.
Hope that what comes next will be enough to render all our previous suffering worthy. Hope that we can remember how to be in love with life again, and look back on hard times with a gratitude for the lessons they brought to us.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
—Kahlil Gibran (Sun trine Saturn)
When we feel at our most abandoned and unwelcome, when we are confronted with death and illness, or when we come up against implacable authority, and are squashed under the weight of civilisation’s impersonal and indifferent machinery—that is when we find out just how developed is our capacity for dignity, for there is none to be found in a life without suffering.
Bitterness and resentment are symptoms of resistance; when we don’t allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions, they become poisonous to us. Though it is not guaranteed, the occurrence of betrayal, oppression, persecution, wounding or exile can be the pivot point upon which we turn.
To welcome sorrow as we would welcome joy—differently attired, perhaps, but nonetheless with arms outstretched as though greeting an old friend—this is the option that is ever open to us in hard times.
“We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.”
―Jeff Buckley (Sun Trine Saturn)
The Cursed Pattern
We are almost never ready to hear it, but most of the challenging psychological material we carry is dead wood awaiting the fire. This is not easy to accept. The ego will fight for its prime position in the centre of the psyche using its primary weapons—attachment and aversion, fear and doubt, shame and pride.
I remember, during a silent meditation retreat, the astonishing vehemence with which my own ego rejected the notion that my back pain (which was extreme) could be understood as a mostly mental phenomenon, or that my situation could be improved through meditation alone. My anger, my intellect, my psychological knowledge, my understanding of physiology, my infantile compulsion towards rebellion, as well as endless unrelated distractions were all called into action by the ego—all in order to hold on to my pain.
I was deeply skeptical about the idea that I could ever be free of my chronic pain, because it felt like an integral part of my identity. It was dead wood at the end of a living branch and I was just used to holding up the weight of it. But I was scared, on some level, that the part of me that resided there, at the end of the branch, was a necessary part.
My pain was a badge of honour for my fragile ego:
I am he who lives with chronic pain; the spinal martyr; the bearer of excuses; he who is cursed; the stoic endurer, unfairly sentenced to a life without ease.
We use the stories we tell about ourselves to make difficult experiences make sense, and to give them meaning. If such a narrative has taken up a very central role in the psyche, the idea of deconstructing it will be met with extreme internal resistance. The ego will use whatever materials are to hand to reinforce the idea that change is impossible.
Eventually though, my resistance was broken, and I was able to proceed with the practice, learning to be simply curious about my pain. I still believe that most pain has a physiological origin, but I learned, step by painstaking step, how to stop piling up layer upon layer of resistance, fear, frustration, anger and self-doubt on top of that pain. With all that stripped away, it was easy to feel neutral about the physical sensations that remained.
The pain was real, but the suffering was a choice.
When you are suffering, you don’t want to hear that.
When trying to break patterns of thought and behaviour that have existed within us for decades, the sheer force of the resistance that surfaces can be terrifying. In these extreme moments, it is understandable when those who have the option to turn back choose to do so. In actual fact, it is rarely an option. Generally, the most we can do is put off our lessons until a later date.
Ultimately, Saturn is the archetype of patience and stamina, and it will happily lay siege to the walls of the solar ego’s castle for as long as it takes. It can even seem as though Saturn prefers to win such battles slowly and by attrition; Saturn knows that human beings learn difficult lessons slowly, and it doesn’t rush the process.
When we feel besieged by Saturn, we may well wonder, how am I going to rebuild these structures, if they crumble? But in fact, once the ego’s boundaries have been dissolved or dismantled, the work is complete.
The wall that was designed to keep the problems out had itself become the problem. All that was required was an opening. The resistance to change was the entirety of the pathology.
The Culture Problem
The Sun-Saturn way is already a difficult path and unfortunately, taking the decision accept the Sun-Saturn challenge of ego death by a thousand cuts is made still more difficult by the cultural, social and economic situations that we find ourselves in. The problem is that western culture has a deeply neurotic relationship with the Sun-Saturn pair. So please excuse me for a moment while I rage against the machine.
The vast majority of human creative potential in western culture is wasted; squandered in pointless work, apparently for the predominant purpose of reanimating the corpse of a recently deceased economic paradigm.
Sociological structures of innumerable variety have everywhere been built up, whose primary function appears to be to funnel the creative potential of consciousness (Sun) into an endless grey labyrinth of pointless pacifying activities referred to as “work” (Saturn).
Late-stage capitalism is a stubbornly efficient machine that converts human creative potential into slightly higher numbers in the ledgers of shareholders. Endless, bounteous wealth is created, but the workers must be kept at least a little hungry, else who would bother to keep the wheels turning? Whatever capitalism may have been in the past, it is now truthfully a system whose primary purpose is to harvest abundance and use it to manufacture scarcity.
Because our socioeconomic paradigm requires most of us to experience scarcity, at least (but not only) psychologically, we are constantly bombarded with marketing and propaganda which is designed to make us feel lacking and incomplete. In the media age, our lives are saturated with this degrading message from an early age.
Simultaneously, we are expected to broadcast curated versions of ourselves into the digital arena; to participate in an endless pseudo competitive game of persona arrangement where the aim is to gain social credit and public peer-endorsement in the form of “likes” and the rest.
you can be anything you want to be just not what you are right now you can be anything but that that is no good
It is hard to value structure and authority when basically every bureaucracy is soulless, every political organisation corrupt, every corporation ultimately owned by a megalomaniac, and most authority figures underserving of their power.
It is hard to care about one’s responsibility to uphold and observe rules of a society which is so unflinchingly uncaring, so incessantly dehumanising, so dismissive and destructive, exploitative and cruel.
It is also hard to hear the inner critic as an ally when they speak with a judgemental and dismissive tone of internalised capitalist propaganda which, remember, is demeaning and degrading of our humanity by design.
Perhaps, if we were less embattled and beleaguered by all this constant gaslighting and bullying, we would be more able to rise above the compulsion to avoid shame and embarrassment at all costs.
Perhaps, if we were not constantly confined and constrained by dead and dying socio-economic and political structures, we would not have such strained relationships to discipline and structure.
Perhaps, if less of our human vitality were spent carrying out pointless, insipid tasks for the benefit of shareholders, we would have a little more leftover for growing into a more expansive and magnanimous sense of selfhood.
Perhaps.
Sorting the Wheat
When we come to the work of Sun-Saturn, the first task that lies before us is one of discernment. We have to learn to tell the difference between our own desire for growth and the internalised voice of capitalism’s demeaning rhetoric.
When the inner critic starts talking, it can be difficult to know whether they really have our best interests at heart. The critic is a complex who usually arises as a defence mechanism for the young ego. We learn to criticise ourselves internally rather than face the possibility of shame or failure in the outer world. If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t try to do things that will bring negative consequences. This is perfectly effective initially, but as a strategy, it develops into big problems.
First, the critic endures beyond childhood.
As children, we are engaged in a somewhat reckless game of trial and error, and it makes sense that one capacity we need to develop is caution. We need to learn that many of our natural impulses, if not augmented by wisdom, experience and various learned skills, will lead to negative consequences. It is a steep learning curve for a human child to weigh the pros and cons of possible future outcomes, so we simplify the equation and just learn to hedge our bets and pick our battles. But this simplistic approach is simply not up to the task of dealing with the complexities of adult life.
As adults, we actually need to discern when to take risks and when to be cautious on a case by case basis. But the inner critic’s modus operandi is to play the percentages, by creating a base level of fear and self-doubt that functions by ruling out any risks which are instinctively deemed too dangerous. Because the core of this complex tends to form before we have well developed capacities for self-reflection and rationality, it functions in an irrational and somewhat oblivious manner. In short, the situations we need a critic for become too nuanced and difficult for the critic to handle. We outgrow the need for a complex of that nature.
The critic needs to either be updated and augmented somehow, or replaced altogether with a new complex that can fulfil the same objectives in a more mature manner. This certainly can be done, but it does not happen automatically.
Second, we internalise the problematic expressions of Saturn that proliferate throughout western culture, and the critic appropriates much of that material.
So, when the voice in your head says “don’t do that / you don’t know what you’re doing / nobody will believe in you / you are unworthy” and so on, it speaks with the psychological reinforcement of thousands of hours worth of propaganda and marketing which has been designed specifically to make you feel unable to overcome your feelings of inadequacy without either (1) the validation of external structures of authority or (2) the purchase of some material solution.
Win acclaim, or own the world—a message tailor made for the ego.
You aren’t enough, but if you play this game, you could be. Only, the game is rigged and the house always wins.
There is no father figure at the top of the hierarchy who cares enough about you to reward you for your actions, only a bunch of financial elites wondering how much more vitality they can squeeze you for.
There is no amount of stuff that you can own that will satisfy the craving of your soul for genuine growth and movement towards wholeness. It is obvious, really.
But the critic just pitches it so well.
The Remainder
I would like to change the world. I would like to live in a world without advertising. I would like to dismantle our dead systems of governance, finance, economics, law and law enforcement, healthcare and education and replace them with living ones. I would like to reimagine humanity’s relationship to the wider ecology and revolutionise our use of technology and infrastructure. I do want to live in a world where people are not oppressed, especially when that oppression is utterly arbitrary and benefits effectively nobody.
All these things and more, I want. And I will pursue them, in whatever small ways I can. But still then, we are left with the question.
Even if you can painstakingly factor out the cultural noise, process your own childhood material and develop a more mature and nuanced relationship to the critic, what then are you left with?
What is the remainder, and what do you do with it?
The answer is easy to say and difficult to do:
Whatever is left after all the subtraction is yours to do with what you please. Once you remove all the cultural garbage and help your critic to grow up a little, you no longer need to pretend that the two of you are separate entities.
Instead of hearing a voice inside your head says “you should be more responsible”, you can simply be the voice that says “I want to be more responsible.”
Instead of defending yourself against a malevolent voice that is trying to belittle you into submission, you can simply use your own voice to state your own intentions.
You don’t need some mental construct of a toxic daddy to tell you that “you need more structure”, you can just be the person who actively intends to live in a more structured way.
Easy to say. Difficult to do. But possible.
I will leave you with a poem about lemons.
if you don't eat your greens you won't grow tall said everybody's father with such confidence at the table, some evening an unparalleled source of reason and wisdom but it turns out you either grow tall or you don't but for some reason they want you to believe if you didn't grow tall it was your own fault we lie to children and tell them things are simple you get out what you put in (except most times) See, son the world basically good if you behave and do what's right you'll get what you deserve true enough I suppose, but if I am really just a temporary blip a momentary mystery of complexity and order nevertheless, still sliding down some Newtonian gradient towards maximum universal entropy what then, do I "deserve?" Don't worry about that. Count the pennies, lad the pounds will look after themselves and remember when life gives you lemons- Wait where are these lemons I keep hearing about these bounteous tropical fruits filled with delicious juice and life-nurturing vitamins, so easy to come by and to make into lemonade I would take lemons in fact, have you— not now son can't you see I'm on the phone? No, look, I'm sorry. We'll get you a melon when you're older OK? right now I erm just need to send these emails...
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/suffering-and-faith
Thanks for this great, nuanced piece Jon. This felt like a sincere attempt to grapple with the moral ambivalence of this archetypal power—appropriate to the precarious and confounding times we live in—that nonetheless conveyed a sense of genuine reverence for Saturn that can only come from a lifetime of experience.
I applaud your attempt to strip away the dysfunctional cultural baggage that has accumulated around this archetype by bringing the hard-won gifts of critical self-reflection and healthy skepticism to interrogate these cultural platitudes and expose their inadequacies. In doing so, you pave the way for a more enriching and sacred relationship with Saturn to take hold.