Neptune Discussion

[James Condor]

The nature of Neptune link I read again and need some clarification on what I see as incongruent descriptions of the planet in how the planet can be true metaphysically and blow things out of proportion at the same time. The term 'metaphysical' is mentioned only under Neptune which I find a true and accurate interpretation. Yet, misleading and contrary to the rest said description and in relation to all planets. Meta means 'after or beyond'. Physical is self explanatory. So metaphysical means beyond physical. Neptune is indeed Metaphysical, so I cannot disagree with this part. But the suggestion being implied, because of paradoxical and/or incomplete info, is that the entire philosophical branch spawned from Neptune or I.e, that only Neptune is metaphysical or, and maybe most important, that Neptune's metaphysical is false. Let me explain.
To blow things out of proportion is definitely Neptunian and I agree with this description. But what I see as contrary, is that the description is suggesting that something can be both blown out of proportion and metaphysical at the same time while also being true. The key here is the word 'true'. It requires allot of backwards logic to bend this description to fit a rational agreement. Metaphysics is very real. Yet Netune is 'unreal'. Metaphysics is not a flaky, inaccurate false belief system. Blowing things out of proportion suggests that Neptune is incapable of forming a true metaphysics. Being the planet of unreality, suggests that one knows what reality is in the first place.
So basically the description is saying metaphysics is false, saying the interpreter(s) knows what absolute reality is and that, Neptune can be all things beyond real yet Neptune itself is real. Neptune is real by being unreal. Science is now proving more and more that scientific physics and meta physics are congruent. This is why Neptune itself is like Pluto in difficult to describe.
I suggest either taking the metaphysical portion out of the Nature of Neptune or aligning the description more logically. It isn't an easy thing to do the latter.

[Jim Eshelman]

This is more a question of what the original writer (me) meant and why it was written that way, than a question about Neptune itself, I think; but we can cover both points at the same time. (Covering multiple points at the same time is how the confusion came to be.)

The word "metaphysical" in that paragraph was intended (when I wrote it in 1976) to mean "metaphysical interests." Neptunian people have metaphysical interests. (I say that first to address the seeming inconsistency of the paragraph.) As for the rest...

What I see as conrty is how can something be blown out of proportion and be metaphysical at the same time while being true.

An older use of "metaphysical" is "fanciful, imaginary." Part of my style as a writer - especially (but not exclusively) when writing concentrated, brief summaries such as the paragraph in question, is to pick words and phrases that can simultaneously have multiple meanings (even when those diverse meanings contradict each other), so that the reader is likely to be led in several places at once as if I'd written a much longer description, and it seems I did that here.

In the broadest sense, "metaphysical" means, "in a framework outside the physical." There are people who believe there is a framework outside the physical, for whom this has one set of meanings, and people who believe there is nothing outside the physical, for whom it has another. I was writing to both of them at the same time, and probably first meant "metaphysical" in the sense of "not pertaining to things that are physical."

I think you would agree that, whether one thinks there is or isn't anything "real" outside of the physical, lone can blow it out of proportion in one's mind and expression.

As a digression, I'd had conversations with a couple of trusted colleagues about which word to assign to each of the outermost planets, all of which clearly were "interested in weird stuff." What were the distinctions? Drawing such tine lines isn't always easy, and, of course, we tried to categorize the "weird stuff" drawing their interests according to our best understanding of how those words were used in practice, knowing there would be overlaps in real life. We settled on occult for Uranus, mystical and metaphysical for Neptune, and existential for Pluto.

The key here is the word 'true'. Metaphysics is very real. It is not a flaky, inaccurate false belief system.

That may be true of metaphysics (or of a specific area of metaphysics), but not necessarily true of people who are interested in metaphysics. A lot of people displaying the trait, "interested in metaphysics," are flakey and hold inaccurate, false beliefs.

I dispute that any particular thing that comes from a metaphysical perspective is inherently true, just as not everything that comes from a physical perspective is inherently true. It's like debating whether you are more likely to be right if you saw something inside your house, or through a window outside your house.

One of the exercises I used to use in classes is to ask people which planet represented reality, and a close relationship to reality. It is a trick question, of course (or, rather, a setup), because I use "reality" as a keyword for a couple of planets. But, after I'd get four or five or six opinions out of the ten planets, and we were starting to drift from excitement to confusion, I'd give the punch line: Every planet represents "reality" because every planet represents a tendency to relate to "reality" in a different way. Saturn is hard, physical, survival-based reality, Uranus is the naked and disclosed actual, Venus agrees with the Greeks that the True is inseparable from the Beautiful, Mercury is factual reality, Mars is competitive ("I win, so I'm right") reality, etc. We'd spend the next half hour working through all ten as an exercise in seeing how all the planets find their own expression of some idea we normally relate to one or two of them.

And this brings me to the point of what I think the real, root psychophysiological principle of Neptune is: Neptune represents the root function of selective perception. Our sensoria (each of us, at each moment) - through all of our sensory channels, psychological channels, and more - is bombarded constantly with an immeasurable (if not infinite) number of impressions, which in turn have an immeasurable (if not infinite) number of relationships, on which we attach a potentially infinite number of meanings. Neptune is the planet of sanity; i.e., it signifies that part of us living continuously in a state of overwhelm that decides to filter a subset from all of those impressions and put them together in a psychologically useful way and then assign meaning to them. If we put this together more or less the same way other people do, then we are labelled "sane." If we put this together more or less in a way that is different from how other people do it, we are labelled "insane." If we have enough Pluto in our charts, we don't care how we get labelled

For Neptune, I think there is no difference between physical, sensory input and psychological input. Neptune lives in a chaotic abyss of infinite points of impression, all neutral and equal in their own right, and has to (based on his or her own nature) pick from this those points to which he or she will anchor most strongly, and from which he or she will compose some sense of order to which meaning can be attached.

This one set of processes describes everything we attribute to Neptune. It is the opposite of Uranus, which is also dealing with the fact that reality is infinite beyond full assimilation of our nervous systems; but, while Neptune narrows what is flowing through the reality matrix, Uranus lives more of life with the orienting reflex active - that neurological circuit that comes into play when we encounter something new, and all the physical senses become more acute and the nervous system in general goes into an accelerated mode of orienting to new impressions and data. This reflex gradually quiets with successive exposures to the same impressions (familiarity), but Uranus is less inclined to have it quiet, e.g., the sense that "everything is always new."

Pluto resembles Uranus more than Neptune, but is a distinct idea. Pluto is our relationship to authenticity. Pluto, the true antithesis of Mercury, is never fully engaged while we are still thinking. This is part of why, in mundane astrology in particular, I've settled on the language that Pluto experiences "stun the senses and halt the mind."

Blowing things out of proportion suggests that Neptune is incapable of forming a true metaphysics.

You have a formal - I think, perhaps, academic - view of metaphysics. That's a narrow subset of how the word is used, and especially a narrow definition of how the word is most used by people interested in astrology, i.e., my target audience when I wrote that paragraph.

So basically the description is saying metaphysics is false.

One mistake you made in reading the paragraph (and one I, as writer, inadvertently let you make) is that you are indulging in what Fagan called "thingish thought." (We all indulge in this as a shorthand. The important thing is to understand that it's a shorthand, and not actually think "thingishly.") "Thingish thought" is the thinking mode of the vast majority of astrology who (to simplify) think "planets rule things," as in "Mercury rules automobiles" or "Venus rules vanity mirrors." You are thinking I meant, "the subject of metaphysics is ruled by Neptune." (Worse, you're reacting to it as "the academic study of metaphysics is ruled by Neptune.") As already mentioned, I meant by that one word "metaphysics" that strongly Neptunian people are interested in metaphysical topics and have a metaphysical way of thinking, perceiving, etc. Planets aren't described by nouns, but as verbs, and so often confusions over planets comes from this specific error.

I was not at all talking about a noun - the subject of metaphysics - but about verbs - the living, perceiving, acting, thinking metaphysically.


Good question, BTW.

[James Condor]

Thanks for the thorough explanation. You really only had to write the first 2 paragraphs for me to understand but its cool to have more info than not. My question was more of a 'where are you coming from'. I really didn't mean that I thought that you thought what I argued, I just wanted to make points. I had a feeling of what you might have meant, but I had to ask to know for sure.
Very good stuff written here Jim