Mark Twain said “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus”.
Saturn, the planet of focus, moves into the imaginal realm of Pisces today on March 7th, 2023. Are you ready to get your vision checked?
The transit occurs at the height of a Full Moon, ensuring that no magic goes wasted on such a potent shift. Saturn had been focused for the past 3 years in Aquarius, the sign of networking, future, and individualism, seeing the growth of the web and the rise of new existential questions about how we are to live in a blooming digital age. Now the focus shifts into the imagination.
How sharp can you see with the eyes of your heart? How much reality can you discern in the clear sweeps of a fairy tale that has diligently been taking shape all of your life yet remains cocooned in the galaxy of your dreams?
Concentration is such a powerful gift, as are all of nature’s powers. Concentration is like tossing a stone into the waters of your mind and allowing the concentric circles to radiate outward. No matter how big these circles get, how far they travel into a larger sense of self and a bigger sense of nature, they share the same center. Your concentration is that center, surrounded by coherence in a large and poetic natural world.
There is sight to be brightened by the sea of dreams. Saturn will swim through these waters until May 2025, and again with the retrograde from August 2025 to February 2026.
After a 2 month journey dedicated to finding better stability, the red planet now embarks into the quizzical domain of Gemini. Nothing is straight forward when it comes to the Twins. They represent objective thought, yet they are tricksters. They are two, yet they lie. They are perception, as well as perceptions’ tricks.
Giggling all the way, the Twins welcome Mars on Wednesday, 3/3. Wednesday and 3 both belong to the trickster, with Gemini being the 3rd sign and Wednesday attributed to Mercury (Gemini’s ruling planet). The willful hero is about to go through the looking glass in search of the Twin’s treasures.
Gemini looks at the world objectively. In philosophy, objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity. For example, the tree that you climbed on in childhood is just a tree and not the loving supporting wooden arms that supported you in your triumph of independence.
And here is where the Twins start to giggle. They know that it isn’t truly possible to separate the tree in such a way from the onlooker whose experience has helped constitute for them that special tree.
Just like identical twins, Gemini was once one, not two.
The two used to be one!
Writer, philosopher Owen Barfield discovered that by studying words (Gemini delight!) one can see how consciousness is evolving. He says that all words have deeper meanings that fade over time, and that their deeper meanings reflect a time when life was very differently experienced.
As Barfield sees it, early humans existed in what he calls “original participation”, living “inside the world’s unity.” At some point, however we became free from the world’s unity. Free to think, and perceive things for ourselves, from our own centers of subjectivity.
We became free, but now we don’t see the full reality.
In original participation, thinking and perceiving were one. The games of the Twins had not yet begun.
Barfield sees subjectivity as not just something that comes out of nothing, but rather a form of consciousness that has contracted from reality’s peripheries into individual centers. The inner meanings of things is the inward truth of nature, and of ourselves.
By ignoring inner meanings, and being content with only the outer meanings, Barfield warns that we have produced a “world of outsides with no insides to them”.
Mars commits to moving forward into Gemini’s gifts. What is Gemini’s purpose? If we have split from the world’s unity in the name of freedom, what are we becoming free for?
Barfield sees this question answered by means of a new phase of consciousness. He refers to this phase as final participation, and sees it to be based around our creative use of the imagination, to actively restore for ourselves the world’s unity. With imagination’s ability to enlarge a meaning, by the power of its full expression, we can begin to taste that original sense of wholeness, while also maintaining our full subjective freedoms.
“Mere perception — perception without imagination — is the sword thrust between spirit and matter.”
Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays
No better time to embrace such a concept as now, is the midst of Pisces Season.
Rev up those engines of curiosity! Mars will be in Gemini until April 23rd, giving you plenty of time to tackle the twin’s illusions and transcend their tricks, enlivening what you see to a fuller reality deemed true by the inwardness of nature, and yourself!
Toroidal Zodiac 