Article · Neptune
What Neptune Is Really About
Spirituality, wholeness, and the work that makes knowledge your own
Pavel Medvedev · Published: · Updated:
When people say Neptune is about spirituality, they are essentially right. The question is what they mean by “spirituality”. Behind the word is the idea that there are parts and there is a whole. Neither is an abstraction. They are things we deal with in life. We belong to systems: a family, a lineage, a team, a country, an interest or a profession. Something we have given our time to, something we have studied. We may or may not have mastered it, but one way or another we are involved in that whole.
What wholeness means
The idea of parts and the whole bears directly on the idea of being whole. Everyone agrees that being whole is a good thing. Yet nowhere do we get an answer to what it means. What exactly do you mean when you say it would be good to be a whole person?
Neptune — and so the book about Neptune, this website, Neptune in the twelve signs, the use of archetypes in psychology — answers that very question.
Take this knowledge of Neptune itself: knowledge of parts and the whole. The book’s first task is to bring you into the world of this account, which I have deliberately made a coherent whole. Why? So it can have value in life. The echo between the Russian words for “whole” and “value” is no accident. Things that form a whole are valuable, as are people who are whole. Any field of knowledge should form a whole, giving a systematic account of certain concepts.
As you read, you will begin to recognize the things I have described in the world and in your own life. You will say: yes, I know this, it rings true. Now I understand Neptune in Pisces, Neptune in Virgo. Neptune in Cancer — I know that too. Neptune in Capricorn — that as well. The axes make sense, and so do the ways they break down. And their connections with familiar psychological problems. A reasonably coherent account of the world.
The second step
Why make such an account? So that, through some inner work with it, you can take a second step: make this coherent account valuable to you. It has to work. It has to bring something into your life that was not there before. Situations must change, and so must the way you feel in them. Your life must change. And you must experience wholeness for yourself: before, I wasn’t whole; now I am. And that is good. I like it. And now I can.
Valuable things open up possibilities. That is why we explore the world and come to know it, and why we build coherent fields of knowledge.
Why did I say “inner work”? Because Neptune really does reflect the realities of our lives, including the difficulties. For something to acquire value, you have to come to know it. Knowing is not just reading. It is not just remembering the words. It is not even being able to give an elegant account of them. Knowing means making that knowledge part of your life. Making it valuable in your life. Gaining something through it. Learning to gain something, to use it.
Neptune’s main difficulty
Neptune’s central difficulty lies in situations where there is a goal, something of value, and complete hopelessness about reaching it or making it real in your life.
And that is normal. I will never say: no, everything is fine, nothing is hopeless. I will say: yes, this exists. The question is what happens then.
You have come to know Neptune when the hopelessness of a situation does not make you give up the goal. And I mean hopelessness you feel, which brings despair, not just a situation you can rationally describe as hopeless. You do not give up the goal or its value. You remain just as inspired; what matters to you remains a source of strength. At the same time, you can live through the distinctly unpleasant feelings that come with the hopelessness of realizing it in the circumstances you find yourself in.
That is Neptune. Coming to know Neptune, finding that alignment, means teaching yourself not to give up the goal.
Usually it goes like this: hopeless — well, then it is impossible. Enough, enough, enough. We’re done with it. Goodbye. Forget it. Anything to stop feeling the pain of having no hope of reaching the goal, of realizing what we value. Of realizing our own wholeness.
Wholeness is precisely the ability to experience fully what you value and live by it, while also feeling, often recognizing, often encountering very hard circumstances in which realizing that value is hopeless. Learning to hold that balance, to bring those things into alignment, is what it means to come to know Neptune.
That is the work I mentioned at the beginning. Work that will make the knowledge offered in the book and on this website valuable — of value in your life. Something that has entered your life as a whole, become part of you, filled you with its strength. This is the strength of wholeness. Your wholeness.
And that is Neptune.