This excerpt is part of a presentation for the upcoming Blast Conference, September 16 to 21st, 2008, in Sedona, Arizona. It's posted here with permission from the author, Jessica Murray.
Never in my lifetime have I witnessed a historical moment when it seemed so important to understand the phenomenon of fear. In the collective, fear is behind myriad losses of social freedoms. It is the enemy of true democracy; it is the father of war. It is often argued thatfear serves an evolutionary purpose in Nature: as when a rat fears a snake, or when our bodies tense in the presence of a stranger -- because the unknown may have danger in it. The type of fear I propose we need to challenge is that which misused Saturn creates in the human mind.
Spiritual teachers have told us since time immemorial that fear is a function of the experience of separation, and that separation is an illusion. We are all part of the Whole, they say; and when sitting in meditation, perhaps we glimpse this in our hearts. I think the rat knows it, too, even though it is wired to spook in the presence of the snake; I believe that in its DNA, it knows that it, and the snake, are part of the same Whole. It is human fear that deserves our utmost caution. This is a product of reactive Saturn, and it makes us forget what we, just like the rat, know in a species-knowing way: that the separations we experience in society -- from the suspicion one high-school clique feels for another, to the xenophobia behind horrible global suffering –--all separation is an illusion.
That this is so is spelled out in the ordering of the planets in our solar system: Saturn, the planet of separation, is trumped by Neptune, which orbits beyond it, further out, symbolic of a higher Truth. This does not make Saturn any less real; it doesn’t mean separation has no legitimacy. All the planets represent realities. But the sequencing of their orbits in the solar system is a heavy hint. Neptune represents the spiritual über-Truth that encompasses all the other realities of which Saturn is only one. Neptune is the cosmic Source, and if there is one fundamental law of mystical thinking, it is this: That there is no such thing as being separated from Source. This is Neptune’s promise; and by remembering it, we can use Saturn without fear. This is only way to use it if we want to be a real grown-up. And the world has never needed us to grow up more than it does now.
