Figure, Background and Focus

You have probably seen your share of what might broadly be called optical illusions. One of the most famous and straightforward examples (linked here) shows either a vase or two faces, depending on who you are and how you look at the picture.

Most of you can alternate how you look at the picture to either see a vase against a black background or two silhouetted faces separated by a white background. It’s not so easy to see both at once.

If there is anything to what’s indicated by the astrology at this time, the perceptual challenge of seeing both the vase and faces at once is reflected in (and by) your life. Perhaps that is no accident. It could be that your lifetime is a very important time in human history precisely because such challenges to perception exist.

You might very well find yourself cycling rapidly, alternating between what to focus on at any given time and what to relegate to the background. When you consider how modern innovations such as text messaging constantly pull your attention away from one part of your life into another, it can be dizzying to even contemplate. In addition, with so many things vying for your attention and energy, you may often find yourself wondering whether it is necessary (or even advisable) to keep up with everything all at once. Yet, there also seems to be an imperative to perceive everything as a connected whole so that each part can be better understood.

How to respond to such apparently authentic but also daunting perceptions? Astrology appears to be providing you with some clues.

For astrologers, the outer planets, which take many years to go around the Sun (and through the zodiac cycle of signs), have often symbolized the background. That background contains subject matter represented by generations, nations, cultural institutions and other long-term phenomena. The so-called “personal planets” — the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and (maybe) Mars — on the other hand, have usually been relegated to correlate with cycles that repeat many times in the course of a typical human life. Actual experience, however, does not seem so simple anymore.

Ever since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 (and perhaps going back even further to when Pluto and Neptune began a seemingly perpetual separation of about sixty degrees in the middle of the 20th Century), distinctions between long-term and short-term have less meaning. As Eric has often noted, “everything at once” has become more the rule than the exception. The same sort of coalescence has also taken place between the public and private parts of many (if not most) lives.

Now, with Neptune in Pisces for the last five years or so, the phenomenon of “everything at once” accompanied by a blurring of the lines between personal and political issues is reaching a crescendo. The idea is to see that as both a good and a necessary thing. As the personal planets move in rapid succession between major aspects to Pluto, Neptune and Uranus (which is in Aries), the celestial message seems to be that you must find your own way to make life manageable rather than rely on ways of the past.

Part of finding your way is determining a middle ground between foreground and background. It is no longer either advisable or possible to hide away from the world, if indeed it ever was. By the same token, it is more than any human being can manage to keep up with everything at the same time, all the time.

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Rather, it is up to you to select what to focus on, but not to compartmentalize your life. Separation is no longer a realistic approach. Instead, it is consistent with the world’s realities to discern what areas and types of involvement will keep you conversant with the whole while not overwhelming you.

In other words, you can’t do it all and shouldn’t elect to do nothing at all. There is another way that you can contribute to developing, thereby furthering the evolution of our kind. It is a middle way, in which each individual releases attachment to being separate, while also embracing the potential to emerge from the background — as called for to make a difference when too many others retreat into anonymity and non-involvement.

Your middle way does not require a rapid oscillation between one state and another. Quite the contrary. It is determining where you are at, and finding the rest of the world there with you. It will not be easy. It is possible, and efforts of the astrologically conversant (such as Eric and others you read here at Planet Waves) can guide your contribution to make it so.

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