The proposal is that everybody spend about one week on the following meditation, keeping a record of your results and sharing them here. Enjoy!
Fundamental Need of MERCURY: Information needs: curiosity, gaining and sharing information, understanding and demonstrating relationships between facts.
Ensure that you understand the words of the definition.
Identify this specified need in yourself. Recognize that you have it. Reflect on how it manifests in you at a simple, basic level, and then as secondary motivations and behaviors that arise from the simpler ones.
How strong is this need in you compared to other needs? Compared to its strength in other people? How has it expressed itself in you at various stages of your life (from earliest memories through later life stages)?
Have you been able to satisfy this need? Or has it gone largely unsatisfied?
What are the worst things in your personality and behavior that arise from this need (and from succeeding or failing at satisfying it)? What are the best things?
As far as possible, answer these questions about other people you know well.
For this week or longer, as you meet and interact with other people, observe the presence of this specific need in yourself and in the other(s) during the interaction. What can you observe in terms of both how you share the need with them and how differences in the need’s intensity, your psychological maturity, and other factors produce different expressions.
Please share the results of this exploration on this thread and feel free to engage in such discussion as arises.
Was this exercise valuable to you? If so, what made it valuable? If not, what would have made it more valuable?
In meditation of this need I saw in myself a very strong need to sometimes say exactly what I am thinking, to share my perspective and understanding, to explain my feelings and to try to bring to light and awareness what I think is going on. Sometimes my Mercurial need is one of deep still silence, of biting my tounge and not saying what I am thinking, often under the guise of keeping the peace.
This meditation made me acutely aware of the fact that I believe most people are not being honest or truthful, that many people have deep lies inside of themselves and they are begging to be called out and have thier "transgressions" exposed, often with a resounding how did you know, are you psychic?
This exercise brought to light in me my own struggle with understanding how I know things. There seems to be two ways, either through direct study, hard work, perseverance, trial and error acquiring mechanisms or via some deeper memory, instinct, ingrained, subconscious sensory received message from deep inside.
I feel that the first way is how most all people think of information and thoughts, of long hours spent studying and working and that is the way we discover truth.
I feel the world does not like, is fearful of, distrustful of, information and ideas that come from the gut, inspiration, empathy and connection.
I have lots of dreams rich in color, sound and sensations and many many times I dream of things that will come to pass that day, silly things like I once dreamed of a fruit roll up display in vividness and saw the same display later that day. It makes me wonder how?
I have a very strong need to feel seen and heard. We wouldnt be posting to a forum if that wasnt true of us. I also feel a deep need for quiet, for utter stillness and for everything to just stop so much business, busyiness and enjoy the beautiful moment as it is without all the chaotic commotion. I especially feel this strongly when I think of things like extinction of species, habitat destruction, wasteful use of resources, exploitation of any kind and environmental issues in general. Humans need to sit still...our planet functions on a feast and famine seasonal cycle yet I seems we have been feasting and feasting and feasting forever and now everything is all eaten up and gone.
My Mercury is strongly tied into a complex aspect arrangement with my Saturn and Mars but also in a not as strong aspect with Venus and Uranus, all 5 joining in together for a very challenging and troubling mind at times, yet at other times a mind so filled with love and gratitude and appreciation for the smallest of things. I try to stay positive and look on the bright side and make the best of what I have been given.
The worst thing about this need is that sometimes no amount of self control, self soothing works and I find myself feeling like I am fighting for the very right to breathe,to take up space, to think differently, to live. That's when I can get very very angry and will lash out violently with fists and my mouth. I can say the most utterly horrible things when provoked and feeling threatened. I suppose this need is what keeps me alive, keeps me going and fighting to live when I feel I am being inundated by a world that wants to eat me up. That of course would be the best thing about this need, it makes me human, it makes me say I'm hungry, I'm cold, I need a hug, I need to be quiet, I'm overwhelmed. It's just hard to do so before feelings of abandonment, betrayal, deceit build up and I either explode like a bomb no one knew was their let alone lit, or I get sick.
I have found when I dont express this need in healthy ways, dont stop and reflect, dont honor my own need for quiet peace and love, that's when I get sick and laid up in bed convalescent with my nerves flayed and spasming, my gut destroyed, my head pounding, and liquids pouring out from everywhere, eyes, ears, skin and my poor nose and throat.
I decided not to really write about this one because it would be boring unnecessary VOLUMES. Mercury - surely because I'm a Virgo - is the every scrap of thing you get from me, every breath in and out. Ultimately, I exist in the universe for no other reason than to receive, organize, and retransmit information. My earliest motto summarizing my nature was the Latin phrase Disco et Instruo, "I learn and I teach." Every other thing that comes out of me is in the context of, and in service to, that basic set of information needs that acquire information, distribute information, and along the way understand it and especially show the relationships between individual facts.
Your reflection on your own Mercurial needs is helpful for me to come to grips with what I discerned as a sort of learning disability I have, and one that I dont have. When I was a child I was the student who asked questions, who raised their hand when the teacher asked...who doesnt understand. I needed to know what they were talking about, be it language issues, or mathematical equations and formulas. I asked straight up why am I being taught algebra, how is this helpful to my life?
I was the student with the highest scores because I did the work asked of me. My father told me school was my job and I needed to know everything about the world.
I think that my Mercurial needs are often more tied up in my Angular Pluto in Virgo and its aspects and midpoints then with Mercury itself. In this area of my character needs I do feel as if I have some sort of learning disability in which I forget facts rapidly, cannot memorize well, and have trouble ordering things correctly. Learning takes time and patience and hard work and devotion and unless I feel that the subject touches my soul then there is little need for me to learn it. It's as if some part of me says.....there are allready enough experts who know everything about this, who are allready so much better then you, smarter then you, more skilled and better supported by culture that your efforts here are not needed, welcome, necessary or helpful. The only thing that I feel I know anything more about then anyone, the thing I am an expert in or have any real authority or responsibility investigating or exploring is my self, my person, my character, my spirit, my soul, my moment of birth. Everything else I am only offering my opinion of, and everyone has an opinion about everything.
That's why I post my thoughts and feelings and ideas here on your forum forum, I feel safe to raise my hand and say I have no ue what you are talking about but I need to understand myself and astrology helps...and you have always kindly answered my questions and ignored the snickering of others who think I'm stupid for not getting it right away.
