It’s time for a reality check.
And by this, I do not mean that you need to “come back down to Earth” and look severely at what might well appear to be a chaotic, unpleasant and overwhelming world. I do not mean that you need to pop all of the beautiful bubbles in your imagination; I do not mean that you need to sideline your hopes and dreams; and I certainly do not mean that you need to make yourself impotent in your supposed smallness.
Because this, my friend, is not reality. This is fear.1
Fear cooks up fantastically convincing illusions, perhaps the most fundamental of which is the idea that you are somehow divorced from God, isolated in your individual awareness and separated from the vast infinity of Our loving Universe. This feeling of being alone is arguably the single greatest source of human suffering,2 and it can transform life into an unbearably heavy experience. I have personally felt alone as recently as this morning, when I felt so burdened with the relentless responsibilities of parenthood that I barely enjoyed bringing a giant tray of light blue frosted cupcakes to school.
So I am now here reminding myself that my life is not an unending battle, a tireless slog, or a thankless to-do list. This planet I call home is not a hopeless hellscape, a punishing prison or a steely school, and I am not marooned here to stew in my own karmic juices. I have not been given an impossible assignment; I am not trapped in an endless loop of repeating behavior; I am not a victim of circumstance. None of that is reality, and all of it is ridiculous.
The bigger me - the real me - knows this. Because the Universe is not sitting somewhere out there in the distance telling me what to do. It lives inside me, just as I live inside it. I am made of Universe, and the Universe is made of me. So if Our Universe is infinite, then so am I. And if Our Universe is forever expanding, then so am I. And if Our Universe is creating itself in every moment, then so am I.
Walking around with this awareness feels dangerously powerful. Centuries of religious and cultural conditioning have cautioned us heavily about playing God; we have been both taught to doubt our infinite presence as creator beings and asked to cede our agency to power-hungry individuals and institutions that purport to protect us. And while I understand the virtues of modesty, it now seems abundantly evident that fueling someone else’s ego with my fear is only going to get me more fear.
So if someone else is telling you not to play God, it’s probably because you’re getting in the way of them playing God. And - in the spirit of Aries - fuck that. You ARE God and you deserve to act like it.
If there’s one planet that understands how fear-based limitations on reality are an illusion, it is nebulous Neptune. In fact, Neptune invites us to question whether anything is real at all, to wonder why - given that atoms are 99.9999999% empty space - my fingers aren’t passing through the keyboard right now. Nothing is fixed in Neptune’s land, and the physical world you see when you’re awake is just a complex construction of sensory experiences you have created to know that you exist.
As Neptune traveled through liminal Pisces these past 14 years, we were shown that Our Universe has room for every person in it to live with their own version of the truth. Neptune in Pisces doesn’t believe in absolute facts; it knows that facts only lie in the eye of the beholder. So it’s no surprise that recent advances in quantum physics suggest there is no such thing as objective reality,3 or that - as even more traditional hard science reveals - perhaps we can no longer agree on what’s black or white because we simply don’t see color the same way.4
This has left us swimming in truth soup, and now - since Neptune crossed into Aries this past Sunday for the first time since 1875 - it’s time to dry off and get real. Because Aries isn’t interested in wandering or wondering, and Neptune in Aries doesn’t need for us to contemplate the machinations behind the Universe when we already are it. So the question is no longer whether you are playing God, the question is what kind of God you want to play.
Neptune in Aries is a glorious reminder that who you are shapes the world. Or at the very least, that who you are shapes your world. So when you find yourself suddenly snarled in what feels like a twist of fate, Neptune in Aries is here to remind you that it was you who twisted fate. And it’s also you who can untwist it. Own that power and it’s yours: It was always you, and it always will be.
Our favorite destiny-weaving planet will be hanging out with the ram through October 22, when it dips back into the tail end of Pisces until January 26 to close out some fishy business. So you can consider these next 6 months to be an extended preview of what awaits us in Neptune’s next 12-year chapter. For my part, I’ve noticed that Neptune in Aries is NOT shy about synchronicity. Just hours after last week’s personal revelation about angels went live, I opened a small package from a friend to discover this:
My new angel had arrived a few days earlier in an unassuming white envelope. It wasn’t a gift for any particular occasion, and there wasn’t a card or note about why my friend sent it. We hadn’t talked about angels, and I hadn’t yet shared my recent heavenly conversations with her. But somehow, across time and space, she knew exactly when to send this angel and I knew exactly when to receive it.
This kind of magic is so wonderfully Aries. It doesn’t need deep analysis, studied interrogation or really any kind of explanation. It simply speaks for itself, and that is enough. This is also the mantra behind my Obvious Wisdom publishing pop-up: self-help titles that speak for themselves. Check out our latest releases below.
Love,
Patrick
PS: If you found value in this post, I invite you to drop a coin in my magical Author’s Tip Jar. It’s an enchanted jar so any contribution you make will come back to you five-fold. Believe it and it’s real.✨
HUGE appreciation to my brilliant friend Cassie who changed my life forever last week when she talked about “getting out of fear and back into reality.”
The former U.S. Surgeon General wrote a touching and revealing report about the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/
https://psychology.tips/do-people-see-colors-differently/
Thanks for the reminder
Thank you!