THE GRAND ILLUSION

or

everywhere I look, Illusion,

and yet without Opinion.

by

Maggie Nalbandian & Gregory N. Nalbandian

Written: January, 1994

      It is a beautiful, lazy summer day.  The sky is clear pale blue with a few fluffy white clouds slowly changing shape.  A young girl slowly swings back and forth on her swing, leaning back mesmerized by the sky and clouds.  Her imagination leisurely working, she see the clouds forming fanciful pictures as she dreams fairy tales to accompany the pictures.  Gradually the sky comes more into focus and she feels a growing wonder at its vastness.  She feels more and more overwhelmed by it as she gazes upward, knowing it goes on to forever.  As she continues swinging, she begins feeling weightless, floating in the universe with all its splendor and quiet peacefulness.  A sense of anxiety begins to manifest as she compares her self to all that surrounds her.  She feels so small, so insignificant in comparison to all that she sees.  She feels herself to be a tiny speck of dust - meaningless in the larger context of this vast space, prompting the questions "Who, what am I?", "What can I possibly do compared to all of this?".  This is Neptune

A quiet man sits in chair next to his bed piecing together the fragments of images he recalls from this nightly sleep.  He has practiced one form of religion or another most of his life, trying to connect with the higher forces.  Meditation has taken him close enough to utterly confuse him.  He taught himself how to expand his awareness to such a state that one day he expanded his perceptions so far out that he could hear the roar of the universe.  But as his perception expand past the known, to a place where every place exists, he was dumbfounded to find that when all is perceived, it appears as completely nothing.  A Void.  This again is Neptune

      Above are many examples of Neptune's symbology - dreaming, meditation, illusion, delusion, timelessness and universal awareness.  It is that unconscious part of ourselves that is outside of earth's time and reality, a portal to the undivided Godself through the function we call the collective unconsciousness.  From the beginning of recorded history to modern time humans have searched for that connection with the universe.  We have looked to the stars and developed spiritual and religious philosophies to fill that void within ourselves that we fear is meaningless.  All that we do or seek to accomplish may have no meaning as we all die.  Does it die with us and do we simply cease to exist - was it all for nothing?  This is a very real fear we seek to prove groundless.  We develop religions that give us an afterlife or we seek to continue through our children.  We plan and work hard to leave a legacy saying we were here and we made a significant contribution to our world.

Neptune rules the unconscious mind and its connection to the collective unconscious.  Through this connection, we are able to push our minds out into that vastness we have discussed earlier.  The conscious mind or ego functions in our daily awakened state, while the unconscious takes command in our sleeping or meditative state.  However, it is always there beneath our ego or conscious mind prompting us in subtle ways - either positively or negatively.  Our dreams are the medium of communication between our two minds.  The problem of communication here is they use different languages.  Saturn's realm is the Earth and form, where reality is a linear time frame, while Neptune is formless, timeless and archetypal symbology.  We try to put Neptune into Earth reality based structure and it does not fit.  This can leaves us both confused and angered about the nature of our source.  We are only now beginning to study the true significance of dreams as witnessed by the work of Carl Jung and  many others.

      In all our astrological literature Neptune is given rulership over motion pictures, illusions of all sorts, daydreaming, trances, meditation, escapism in all forms including drugs, alcohol, and insanity.  How can we connect this with the universal archetype?  Remember that Neptune is formless and outside of our time/space reality thereby seemingly unreal.  It is the universe thereby often too overwhelming for us to face, as most who have tried to pier directly into the divine find out, it is safer to buffer the information with the comforts of our self built belief systems, than to go it alone..  The ego function, which is our buffering system, can have such a hard time with any information that doesn't jive with the ego's need for a predictable life, that we try to escape it.  When Neptune fills the psyche with symbols and information that could possibly cause you to question yourself and your world, the ego has to get off it's butt and reinvent reality.  So, we seek to escape before it confuses us or makes our reality meaningless.  Our conscious ego grasps at anything that will either give the illusion significance or try to hide from this fear through escapism (drugs, etc.).  Some of us will seek out that universal sereneness through trance or meditation.  Positively we allow Neptune to work through our compassion and selfless love of others.  We allow ourselves to connect and empathize or mirror others.

      Neptune is the higher octave of the planet Venus.  Venus symbolizes our personal value systems based on our judgments made through comparison or relating.  Neptune then would be our ultimate or universal value systems based on concepts beyond Earth based reality that relies on faith rather than judgment.  Venus also symbolizes creativity that is based on conscious feelings.  Neptune takes that creativity into the realm of the unconscious or collective unconscious.  Many musicians, for example, hear the music inside before they write or play it.  They don't really know where it comes from but they hear it or feel it.

      Let us return to the young girl on the swing.  She has now grown to her later years and is at a contemplative time of her life.  She has always been haunted by the early life experience and has spent her life seeking meaning.  She spent years searching through and experiencing all types of religions seeking something she could truly believe in.  Still haunted by feelings of meaninglessness, she began a period of productive work seeking to leave her mark in the scheme of history.  She also raised a family; again telling herself that she would leave behind her genes or legacy - her life had meaning.  One day she sat looking at the sky remembering the child she had been.  She again let herself feel as a part of the universe like a wave that had crashed on the beach only to return to the ocean and dissolve into it's depths.  There was that speck of dust feeling again but this time a sudden realization happened.  That one speck of dust became the very integrity of the entire universe.  She realized that, if that speck of dust were destroyed or somehow removed, the universe itself would collapse.  Like a giant jigsaw puzzle hanging in space, removing one piece would make it collapse.  Now this speck of dust took on a whole new meaning - there is continuity because the universe continues.  Whether that continuity is a heaven/hell or if there is a soul that continues through many lifetimes, there is more than ego fulfillment.  There is love, growth and meaning.  There is faith and faith is Neptune.