Neptune-Pluto and the Dreamtime

A few weeks ago I was told in a dream that we are continually imagining the world into being. Sounds about right to me. It’s Neptune.

On an everyday level, it’s like when you clearly intend something and it happens. It doesn’t always happen, but it still does happen more than you’d think, and you can feel the connection with your intention when it does. I think it works when the intention comes through us, is deeply felt, rather than being thought up. It gets called the Law of Attraction these days. But I prefer to think in terms of dreaming or imagining. Or even praying.

And it’s the same on a metaphysical level. Life (Pluto) is continually intending the universe (Neptune). That’s why science has got stuck in its progress at the quantum and galactic levels – the ‘irrationality’ of the former, and the unknowability, 96% dark energy – of the latter. It has come up against the limits of treating something like it’s separate and ‘out there’ when it’s not: the universe we see is profoundly connected to the human mind, on a level at which we find it hard to be aware.

So the basic power in the Universe is Pluto. He is the power behind both life and matter. He is that basic power in us that takes over when we just need to survive. He is what makes us keep wanting to live – and if in some ways when you’re honest with yourself, and there’s a feeling of I’m not sure I want to be around, then there is a Pluto challenge, that is where you can find your soul (Neptune). You don’t fight the feeling, you go into it and see what it’s saying.

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And this basic Pluto power intends, dreams the Universe and it happens, perfectly and immediately. Neptune is both the intention and what is dreamed into being, and they are the same thing. This is really how Evolution happens. It clearly does happen, look at all those DNA connections and physical similarities. But forget about natural selection and mutations and competition that takes billions of years. It’s not that. Life forms dream themselves into being, continually, and new forms can arise very quickly because this dreaming process is very powerful. But it is life itself doing the dreaming, so there is a wholeness and beauty to it, what science might call a balanced ecosystem. 

The closest scientific mechanism to this dreaming is the discredited Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, where you need eg a longer neck, and you could say it is dreamed into being collectively for the next generation.

Perhaps our job as humans is to make that dreaming conscious, which is why we are hit and miss at it, and why we even forget about it. It’s a remembering of how the whole show works, and in doing so we make it conscious. In one form or another, it seems to be present in all indigenous traditions.

But it is not something willed, or that we can control very much. When I hear people like Melinda Gates saying their children can be whatever they want to be, I think no it’s not like that, there’s all sorts of hidden pressure in there to become something, it’s not the freedom she is presenting it as: ‘The American Dream.’

It is more like the universe dreams us, and our job is to become conscious of that and live it. It is a deep thing, it connects us with what is most fundamental and powerful in life. Another way of saying it is that the astrological chart shows the way archetypal forces, the gods, are each and together making claims on us; the chart is a map of that dreaming.

And I think we can spend most of our life as a preparation for that sort of deep dreaming connection – if indeed life has that in store for us. It’s not our decision. In ‘The Shaman’s Body’ Arnold Mindell (founder of Process Work) says: “Parapsychological and alternative medical powers appear regularly as part of the development of the shaman but are… considered secondary to the overall development of the fluid, or flexible seer, whose goal is to live on a spiritual path.”

Exactly (though I don’t go much with the word ‘spiritual’). This is what is not understood very well in our culture. You so often see it, people who have a bit of a feeling for homeopathy or shiatsu or astrology or being a medium or a shamanic healer or a psychotherapist and they go off and do a few years training and get a certificate and they are off out there practising it and for so many of them it becomes their identity (Mindell again: ”None of the shamans I have met identifies himself as such the whole day long. The word shaman.. refers to one who works only part-time as a spiritual guide and healer”.)

And it becomes their identity because they have not had the decades, yes decades, of learning not to have an identity in that ordinary way. Where life keeps taking it away from you until you get the point. I’m always banging on about this when people are having major transits and can’t carry on as normal and feel bad or inadequate, and I say this is a major part of the transformation, you are having to live outside of the conventional tags that give you an identity, and conventional people may indeed think less of you for that, and it’s not easy, but learning to live with that really deepens you and gives you insight.

Professionalism is the curse of the modern-day healer. If you’re a professional you’re supposed to know the answers and have the trainings and certificates and straight teeth and brush your hair and have a well-designed web page and all the rest of it, and if you’re an accountant then that’s fine and necessary. But the best healer may appear a shambling mess who turns up late and who is happy to say I don’t know. Or maybe they appear quite ‘professional’, but that is a disguise if they are good. Professionalism is about having a respectable identity, it’s not about being a ‘fluid seer.’ I’d go so far as to say that such people, who may be in the majority, don’t do much real good, in fact may do more harm than good. Most psychotherapists I have met don’t have much natural insight into people, though they have plenty of words and professional empathy, and their training is no substitute for that insight. (The archetypal psychologist James Hillman was of the opinion that psychotherapy has done more harm than good.) But it doesn’t have to be like that. (This is the point at which I lose several subscribers!)

But back to where I started: my dream where I was told that we are continually imagining the world into being. A scientific ‘proof’ would be to consider the brain, and how much we take for granted in a deep structural sense – space and time, up and down, me, the world ‘out there’, left and right, up and down – all are a creation of our brains. Even the brain itself is such a creation. The brain is continually manufacturing, or dreaming our reality.

And I think this is a basis for a whole philosophy, a whole way of looking at the world. And it has a fluidity built into it. And the astrological chart is a way of contemplating the universe’s dream of you at the moment you were born.

On a collective level, there is also a dream. And it tends to possess the collective, like a dream will possess the unconscious individual. Again, you can probably see it in a national chart. In the UK, with our conflicting dreams of equality and hierarchy/royalty, you see it in Sun in Capricorn conj IC, square to Uranus Rising in Libra: the Angularity makes the dream that much more powerful.

A collective dream can change, and that is where individuals come in, with a powerful dream working through them that engages their collective. Like Margaret Thatcher, with her Saturn Rising in Scorpio (purging 'dead wood' in an uncaring way) conjoining the UK 2nd House (economy) Neptune (she attracted worship and hatred in equal measure).

But though that connection was powerful, and she could fight to the death, I think that collective dreams, and changing them, have their limitations. For we are not dealing with dreaming that is particularly conscious by individuals who have, through long preparation, stepped out of an ordinary way of defining themselves, into something much more fluid, the kind of fluidity and creativity (Uranus) that belongs to Neptune and the Dreamtime and where, in a sense, all things are possible.