Striving for perfection: in striving to achieve the pinnacle of synchronistic perfection we sometimes get a painful reminder from those who have hitherto supported our progress, the repercussions of which may well be exposed for all to see.
When a quorum of celestial bodies congregate, albeit briefly, in one particular degree number but in differing signs of the zodiac, then the essential nature of that degree number is more fully invoked and the repercussions reverberate across the structure of the whole system.
So when stubborn Mars comes trudging through the myriad thickets of 9 Virgo to oppose wounded teacher Chiron in 9 of old souls Pisces, and makes the connection of a can't-say-it's-good-or-bad-it-just-happens-anyway trine to an I-rule-the-world-and-don't-you-forget-it Pluto in 9 of status-is-all-about-perception-in-which-case-I'll-stick-with-the-status-QUO (thank you very much!) Capricorn...
... and Moon meanwhile flits fleetingly through 9 of outreach Libra in a last ditch attempt to mediate but merely exacerbates matters in vainly appealing to the non-existent humane qualities of an intransigent Pluto and an it’s-always-the-right-time-for-change Uranus in 9 of and-I-mean-NOW Aries..
..before the inevitable and latest long-heralded grinding clash of those other-worldly transformers Uranus and Pluto in their titanic struggle for which survival plan we go with, stick or twist..
... what happens next?
Or rather, what happens from hereon in?
Possibly the very thing we've been scrupulously avoiding for several months, which just flew out of the window with one careless click and all semblance of contained appropriateness is now stripped away. It’s gloves off and time to get down to the nitty-gritty of the reality of life on this magic roundabout of ours, planet Earth.
Meanwhile, unseen Mercury slips backwards through 9 of Scorpio, giving a passing nod to Mars on the way, to conjoin with his Lord and Master, the Sun god himself Ra, in the very same 9 of Scorpio, and a sensibly deep and meaningful conversation ensues that sets the psycho pomp on a mission to restructure the recent past and the affairs of that which has been before (people, circumstances & communications conveniently buried), because the past has not been put to rights in a peaceful and proper manner. This is the nature and purpose of Mercury retrograde in his inferior conjunction with the Sun, sort out that which has been, leaving a mess behind ONE is not the vegetarian option. And in Scorpio there really is no safe hiding place down there no matter how deep he has to go to root out and confront the secreted truth.
Of course he’s been here before on this circuit, when ahead of the Sun and going direct on 07 October, but by then he was already slowing down as he took the curve of the bend and knew he needed to be heading back home, there was something he noted that wasn’t quite right that had to be reported upon. To pick up the thread of where this emanated from he has to get all the way back to where he was on 01 October to clarify matters, to the beginnings of this tantalisingly indulgent but non-concluded Scorpio dilemma that the Sun had himself put under the spotlight of closer examination on Friday 25 October. Whatever it was, it is unlikely to get full acknowledgement, never mind anything akin to a resolution, until 20 November, by which time it may all be too late to redress the apparent error of judgement that occurred. The message being, if you’re going to engage in someone or something so self-indulgently then you might as well immerse yourself thoroughly, better to be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Essentially, if nothing was stolen, if no-one’s freedoms of choice were misused or abused and nothing got wounded except one’s pride or those familiarly superficial delusions of self-esteem, then what have all the continuing resentments been for, simply because we didn’t get what we wanted? But if we had the choice at the time then we chose what we chose, might as well live with it or let it pass, there’s nothing more to be gained by letting it fester, move on.
The bigger picture is nonetheless the more gripping reality, rather than that parochial squabble. As those impersonal outer bodies, Uranus and Pluto, play out this crossroads in their cycles, serious questions are being asked about how we live our lives, both individually and collectively, now and into the foreseeable future, these alternative possibilities of realities being inextricably intertwined, regardless of our attempts to separate the one from the other. Saturn has done his best to focus our attentions and intentions on how it is the real world, but his job is done here and he’s moving on to other more pressing matters further ahead, this one is very firmly with us to resolve in whichever way we choose for ourselves. Because, we talk the talk but there are surely times when we do have to walk the walk, otherwise it’s all just a waking dream and/or nightmare. In a supposedly civilised society it surely does not behove us to live our lives like some latter-day Dickensian characters (and that’s an entirely euphemistic way of expressing some of the cultural monsters birthed within) with regard to the people we profess to care for or have cared about in our more recent intense interactions, no matter what our background or life experiences have enabled us to seemingly get away with in our past, or even past lives, even those past lives in this incarnation. There is always the 'heart way' of doing what our spirit shows us to be the path of inner truth and peace, if we can but summon the courage of our convictions to truly and truthfully look it in the face and then see it through.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall....”
We might persuade ourselves into believing that we are the elevated and untouchable observers and self-qualified commentators of those over-talked ostensible universal changes of our life and times, hoping to quietly hop on the bandwagon when it’s already conveniently rolling our way, but that merely belies essential personal truths. How is the whole to evolve effectively if individually we decline to acknowledge or play our designated roles in the processes? What did we conveniently bury from the prying eyes and ears of others in a complex web of deceit designed to deflect the path of truth from our own doorstep? Sending people and things off to the light is simply a clever but cowardly way of abdicating our responsibilities, and, whilst appearing to float off with the angels is a neat trick if you can pull it off, that’s only the thinly veiled public performance of an opposite private dark underworld existence, ultimately it’s a shallow fool’s game of smoke and mirrors because whilst it might seem to temporarily delight others it doesn’t deceive the one person who really counts in all of this, oneself.
So what of this degree number 9, other than the John Lennon portended revolution? Number 9 is the journey, that transitional state between the occult of 8 and the divine of 10, it is the journey of exploration and belief in the arrival, that arrival where one might ultimately be at home with oneself, one’s destination but not one’s destiny, where one enters that state of being at one with oneself. 9 is that journey, the one where we take the leap of faith in ascending to our unique and individual peak of existence, where we can breathe the pure air of being, the pinnacle of transcending out of the dark and into the light, our own light. Some say that God is to be found in 9, whoever or whatever our particular “god” is in this lifetime, but this is not the dwelling place of God, nor is this the place of our highest good, this is the place where we seek to commune with those gods that might guide us to that other place beyond this 9, this hostelry along the road that renews and recharges us for the continuing journey, that long and winding road up the rocky mountain path of living.
But 9 is also the number of joy, our own unique joyousness. It is neither to be judged good nor bad, it is joyful to us. 3 is the number of ease, the number of life itself, 9 is our individual ease, our unique number of life, our own life, in all its shining glory. So come on in number 9, your time is up. How was your joyfulness in life so dissipated, where back there did you let it go on the journey? What did you bury in anger and shame in that underground cavern, that dark foreboding place within, that fortress of the deep, other than your own true self, that was so irreconcilable with your heart story?
Truth is, time was actually up some while back but you deferred and deflected and procrastinated and pretended and eventually persuaded yourself that you had got yourself through the worst and that it would all magically disappear if you hid yourself away heads down working hard for long enough only then to re-emerge as some dawn-fresh shiny new chrysalis into a brave new self-created world order. But that didn’t substantially deal with anything other than your own guilt and fears, internalised and creatively realigned as the suffering energetically inflicted on others, and then neatly put away with all the other skeletons in your bulging cupboard, the contents of which are now about to spill out on to the sidewalk of public scrutiny. Time now to clear through the accumulated debris, lest those quizzical gazes linger on you and it for too long to be readily forgotten in the future, and in any event there’s only so much we can all carry in life before we succumb to the inevitable crisis of consciousness and subsequent breakdown of internal structures. So let’s do ourselves the kindness of honesty and face our fear of the facts, rather than our expedient illusion of them, and then deal with them with the same courage and fearlessness on which we nail our colours to the mast and hoist it up for all to marvel at. Trick or treat, the pause button will no longer hover on what should have already been accomplished if we are to truly practise what we so eloquently preach to others on the topic of what the true path is to align oneself towards one’s supposed highest good, it simply doesn’t compute if continually emanating from what is in reality our poorly camouflaged lower selves.
Time now to re-engage with the purity of belief in degree number 9, refreshed and reinvigorated we recommence the journey to ascend to our highest potentials with the joyfulness in one’s heart that is the pre-requisite for a happy hopeful smiling traveller.
“elevating oneself amongst one’s peers by posturing a position of spirituality may give rise to a painful reminder from the deep of one’s fallibility.”
Andrew Morton, 3rd November 2013