Jupiter Trines Saturn: Become “the Vessel Through Which Love Can Pour”

Known to the ancients as "the Great Benefic," Jupiter contains 71% of the planetary mass in our solar system.

Known to the ancients as “the Great Benefic,” Jupiter contains 71% of the planetary mass in our solar system.

Tonight Jupiter and Saturn, two of the great carriers of cosmic power, have joined forces.  The grace and abundance of Jupiter has flowed, with the superconductive force astrologers call a trine, straight into the structuring realism of Saturn.  For the second time since July, these two very different forms of power have shown us what lays beyond the compartmentalized “two-ness” that we’ve learned to call “reality.”  Over the last few days and hours, we’ve been invited not just to recognize the Oneness at the heart of this and every moment.  We’ve been invited to make a place for it at the center of our consciousness.

Together, Jupiter and Saturn account for 92% of our solar system's planetary mass.

Together, Jupiter and Saturn account for 92% of our solar system’s planetary mass.

Jupiter, Saturn, and Structures to Contain Consciousness in Transformation

Jupiter and Saturn bridge the worldly and the spiritual. When their vibrations are in synch, within us and around us, exuberance, confidence, and idealism exist in perfect balance with caution, pragmatism, and experience. We can accommodate both limitation and generosity, frustration and grace.

Together these two create energetic containers that can sustain long-term growth and expansion.  And isn’t that precisely what we need now:  structures that can contain a whole new consciousness as we continue through unprecedented personal and global transformation?

To  the ancient astrologers, Jupiter was known as the “Great Benefic.”  His energy is full of grace.  Saturn, who brings struggle, frustration, and loss, was the “Great Malefic.”  Yet Jupiter can be a flash in the pan, full of excess and good feelings, while Saturn’s sometimes punishing challenges bring deep-rooted achievements into being.

In the Deep Time when Western consciousness was forming, Jupiter (then known as Zeus) was the younger energy, the son who overthrew his father Saturn (then known as Kronos) and took over the world.  A whole civilization took root.

Of all the planets orbiting our Sun, Jupiter and Saturn  account for 92% of the mass. Jupiter is the larger of the two.  Comprising over 71% of the solar system’s planetary mass, he’s over three times greater than Saturn.  Energetically, he expands what he touches.

Saturn is the furthest planet from the Sun that can be seen from the earth without a telescope — the Guardian at the Gate to the Mysteries, as the ancients knew him.  Saturn creates structures and draws boundaries.  His limiting, constricting energy prevails over the three-dimensional reality that is our own “ring pass not” — until we have met its tests.

One of the reasons we gaze at the stars is to confirm our felt sense of the Oneness everywhere and always around us.

One of the reasons we gaze at the stars is to confirm our felt sense of the Oneness everywhere and always around us.

Beyond Polarity

A structure can be a process, a practice, a relationship — with ourselves, with Life, with another or a community of others. It can be anything that allow us to share and ground new ways of seeing, of thinking, of understanding, and of acting. Even a little knowledge of what lies ahead tells us that more than anything, we need a new way to see. We need to see what lies beyond the polarities.

Life Without a Centre is the phrase that author and teacher Jeff Foster used as the title one of his books about seeing beyond the dualities.  This non-dual way of perceiving reality, Foster says, shows us “the essential oneness of life [and the]  wholeness which exists here and now” when we can relax our grip on “good” and “bad” and “yes” and “no.”  Life, he says, “is the constant invitation to discover who you are in this moment.”   Beneath our incessant seeking for the job, the partner, the house, the dream is a deeper desire.  What we really want, he tells us, to discover what is always with us — “presence [in the] here and now.”  Beyond the ubiquitous two-ness, we’re always looking for the Oneness.

This might sound simple — especially if you haven’t tried to live by it.  What it contains, though, is fathomless depth and an openness as unbounded as the Universe  As we move deeper and deeper into the transformational vortex of our times, more and more luminous voices are emerging to voice this awareness of the Oneness and sound its depths within us and among us.  Jeff Foster, Vicky Woodyard, Matt Licata, Chameli Ardagh, Barbara Heile are just a few of them.  The awareness they illuminate is as fresh as this brand-new moment, and as ancient as the vedas. Nondual — the translation of the Sanskrit word “advaita” — is the awareness that underlies the great Advaita Vedanta tradition of India.

Saturn's first conjunction with Jupiter, on July 16, came just days after the conclusion of his long vision quest deep into the early degrees of Scorpio.

Saturn’s first conjunction with Jupiter, on July 16, came just days after the conclusion of his long vision quest deep into the early degrees of Scorpio.

After the Pounding, the Blessing

Today’s trine between Jupiter’s energy of blessing and Saturn’s of struggle is the second of three that occur between July 2013 and May 2014.   The first occurred five months ago, on July 16.   Saturn had just completed his five-month retrograde vision quest through the first, intense decan of Scorpio. Jupiter had just entered 

From February until early July, the ancient Guardian drilled deep into the fears that the first Uranus-Pluto squares were excavating.  Saturn began his five-month quest in the most intense Pisces sky we’ve experienced in centuries.  Through the fiery chaos ignited by a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Aries, through the turbulence of three eclipses and the third square of Uranus and Pluto, the Guardian went deeper and deeper.

Month after month, as the ground within us and around us was pounded and split, Saturn pushed against the boundaries we’ve created to keep out fear and keep in power and control.  The Guardian was looking for something within each of us, and within the shared boundaries that we all protect as well.  What Saturn was searching was the energy that we need to build structure that can contain more of the true and authentic power of the life force.

It was in the very degree that Saturn’s five-month search ended that, just 8 days later, Jupiter formed a perfect trine.  The Blessing Giver had only entered Cancer’s deeply creative and nurturing waters three weeks earlier.  This is the sign where Jupiter is exalted, his blessings flowing more freely than anywhere else in the zodiac.

As Jupiter joined the Sun and Mercury in Cancer, we found ourselves living as the great poet Theodore Roethke had suggested decades ago.   We began to  “think by feeling.”   In July, seven of the astrological “planets” (who include the Sun, the Moon, and Chiron) were in water signs.  Mercury was on a vision quest of his own, retrograding through Cancer’s primal waters for lost energetic treasure. The first of the summer’s two Merkabas, the six-pointed star of the Cosmic Feminine, was just 12 days away.

Black Moon Lilith is not a planet, but a point in the sky -- the point in the Moon's orbit that is furthest from the Earth.

Black Moon Lilith is not a planet, but a point in the sky — the point in the Moon’s orbit that is furthest from the Earth.

Jupiter, Saturn & Black Moon Lilith:  Meeting the Transformative Goddess

Something else happened just days before the first Jupiter-Saturn trine.  Jupiter made the first of two conjunctions with Black Moon Lilith, an encounter that only takes place every 33 years.   When it occurs, the expansive male energy that has ruled our consciousness from the beginning of the civilization we call the West,  merges with the feminine shadow.  Both are changed by their meeting — and so are we. 

Black Moon Lilith describes the place within us that received, in our earliest years, the vibrations of our deepst wounds and core fears.   For much of 2013 she has been been traveling with Jupiter through Cancer, the sign of the Cosmic Mother.  In mid-July and on December 1, they made two exact conjunctions.

Their journey has expanded, revealed, and begun to heal the reality of feminine experience that has been hidden from our awareness.  On December 1, Jupiter and the Black Moon made the second of their two exact conjunctions.  The trine that Jupiter and Saturn formed a few hours ago contains the blessings of both the benevolent god and the transformative goddess.

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The Oneness Within Us, The Oneness Among Us

We’re now at the center of the most powerful vortex of transformation that our planet has experienced in thousands of year.  Throughout the 33-month initiation by Uranus and Pluto’s seven squares, the Cosmos has been showing us something that is both vital and eternal.  Our civilization arose form the perception of  polarities — but behind the “two-ness” of you and me, us and them, good and bad, right and wrong, easy and hard, is something else.  Behind and beneath the ubiquitous two-ness is the ever-present Oneness.

Everywhere we look, this is the message being exchanged between the Cosmos within us and the Cosmos around us.  It’s carried by Neptune, the Cosmic Mystic who is traveling for the first time in 160 years through his own sign of Pisces.  The sacred wound and sacred gift that Chiron carries speaks the same truth.  Now, after spending seven months last year in Virgo, Mars, the Cosmic Warrior, has begun an eight-month sojourn   in Libra, the sign of the great love goddess.  Venus herself is going retrograde, vision questing deep into Saturn’s sign. And Jupiter, his grace flowing abundantly from the ancient sign of the Cosmic Mother, is trining Saturn.

Becoming The Translucent Vessel Through Which Love Pours

We’re just eight days now from the Winter Solstice, one of the great energetic hinges of our circle around the Sun.  This year, it will mark the beginning of Venus’ retrograde vision quest.  Until the end of January, she’ll be searching for what we’ve lost and forgotten that prevents us from loving the entirety of our brief moments on the Earth — the struggle most of all.  As you read these words, Jupiter and Saturn are creating the structure within you to contain what she will find.

Matt Licata, a Boulder, Colorado psychotherapist and messenger from the Nondual Matt Licata, puts it like this:

There are pieces of you / wandering out in the cold / Do you sense / them nearby?

Your old friend sadness / your long-lost partner shame / and your faithful lover loneliness.

Even your ancient companions / anxiety and unlovability / have arrived.

Love has assembled them all / for an extraordinary meeting.

Sweet friend, will you gather / these fellow travelers / and hold them close?

Will you provide safe passage / out of the cold / and into the warmth / of your one, wild heart?

For if you do, / you will become / a translucent vessel / through which love / will pour into this world.