Jupiter in Pisces, the Bardo + the Cosmology of the Dreamer’s Path
Image: Beach collage swirling by Ashley Otero
The achieved one has no dreams.
His dream is not a dream,
It is a voyage to the high spheres.
The achieved one and even the secondary achieved ones do not sleep.
When he rests, he nurtures his inner energy,
So the fire in the stove never stops.
The medicine keeps being refined.
—Poem attributed to Chen Tuan (TB)
In Chinese, Wu is translated as a number of words. A few relevant to this series include: Five (wǔ), as in five spirits or elements, shaman (wū), and dance (wǔ), which is also symbolic in the context of the five elements/spirits.
In this series, I’ll write about the context of healing through Chinese medicine and what it means to be supporting the continuity of humanity and helping people maintain or return to their sense of being human. That’s quite a feat living in today’s sped up and fragmented world, though I hope to offer inspiration and maybe some clarity when you think about health, healing, medicine, humanity, and what you’re doing here.
Today marks the culmination of the total lunar eclipse in Sagittarius (at 7:14 AM). [Podcast version of this post is here.]
Jupiter, the ruler of this eclipse just entered Pisces on May 14, and though it isn’t making any aspects to the other planets, it is slowing down to station retrograde and is co-present with Neptune in Pisces sprinkling in a subtle hint of floating between worlds or between different life experiences as other more dynamic configurations (like the Mercury Venus conjunction in Gemini squaring Neptune while Mars trines Neptune and Saturn applies to square Uranus) are applying under this blood moon.
Navigating ideas about truth, freeing ourselves from different ideals, and figuring out a healthy ratio of containment to range of motion are some of the themes we could play with in this eclipse cycle as Sagittarius and Pisces (both Jupiter ruled) are highly entertained by Truth and can be quite idealist.
Aside from these themes, I can’t help but notice how many people are talking more about dreams, including myself. As an astrologer, it should come as no surprise since Jupiter is at home in Pisces and this is the archetype of the dreamer!
Pisces is also the sign of the fish, commonly interpreted as a symbol of the duality of human experience: internal and external, heaven and earth, light and darkness, awake and asleep. From a traditional Asian healing perspective Jupiter is connected to the spirit of the Hun which is housed in the Liver. The presence of the Hun is what allows us to wander into dream and to aspire as Jupiter symbolizes. I talked about this briefly in a recent post for Wu Woo Wednesday, but of course there’s much to plumb when it comes to the depths of dreaming.
An interesting association between Jupiter in Pisces and the path of dreaming is the notion of hooking or catching a dream. In other words, to recall your dreams, rather than only remembering a black out. Traditionally, the Chinese wisdom sciences recognize dreams about fish as portent of fortune or opportunities. Jupiter, the planet of fortune and expansion, is known as the greater benefic in astrology which is also true to the life on our planet, “Every year, Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, protects Earth from space debris thanks to its massive gravitational pull.” AG
Heaven is long lasting;
Earth endures.
Heaven is able to be long lasting,
And Earth endures,
Because they do not live for themselves. (TB)
Pisces is often known as a self-effacing sign, concerned with softening into an eternity which has no beginning and no ending. Which leads me to my next thought...
Have you noticed or thought about that dark space that’s between waking, sleeping, and dreaming?
It’s the same dark space that’s between our birth and our earliest memories. Essentially, these are thresholds. Tibetan Buddhist traditions call these gaps the Bardo and we experience this in a quasi lucid sense during the eclipse seasons every year when significant shifts occur in our lives and we’re suspended in periods of waiting. Waiting, witnessing, rearranging, unlearning, and being swept up in change. It’s a pause from which circulation appears. In this context we are circulation. We are, fundamentally, precessions of time with compound form. When the bardo appears, we find people, places, events, and spirits coming and going more dramatically from our lives and from the collective view.
This is why eclipse season is so often referred to as a portal. Culminating near the south node of the moon, this eclipse in Sagittarius dims or filters the light of awareness, activity, and conviction through a darkened lens. Jupiter in Pisces rulership over the eclipse beckons us to balance out any lopsidedness of self- righteous, overly opinionated philosophies (even beliefs), and dogmatic doctrines through the realm of dreams. Astrologers and anyone really familiar with the cosmology of eclipses knows well that the consciousness becomes more activated during the weeks surrounding eclipses. This is when/where important messages, ancestral images, and dreams of portent are likely to arise, and the symbolism is potent (if not wildly mixed).
Not only are these dark spaces a threshold, they’re a subtle periodic pattern that essentially highlights what we don’t know. No one remembers their own experience of being born... not in the cognitive sense... nor do we remember that unique feeling. Was it something we hoped for? Or was it a terrible mistake?
That’s the beginning of the dark space interval. And we return to it each night. There will most likely be another at the end— the best we can do is assume— because if you don’t know where you came from, you probably don’t know where you’re going for certain!
Religious folk might have an answer to that as a sort of salve to anxiety, but is that congruent with their experience or just hearsay?
The old cabalistic legend of the “Formation of the Child”, paraphrased above, specifies that
“God orders the angel in charge of the souls living in the Beyond to initiate this soul into all the mysteries of that other world, through Paradise and Hell. In such manner the soul experiences all the secrets of the Beyond. At the moment of birth, however, when the soul comes to earth, the angel extinguished the light of knowledge burning above it, and the soul, enclosed in its earthly envelope, enters this world, having forgotten its lofty wisdom, but always seeking to regain it.”
………
“We can also understand in this context the death and rebirth symbolism attached to any transformation process and the insistence on the need to “die” as a necessary complement to this fixity of existence in the ego alone.” (EW)
False views of what death is makes most of us afraid to die. In the modern culture of the speed obsessed, it also makes us afraid that we’ll die if we surrender to sleep. (I wonder what Neptune in Aries will show us about that. What ways, what lengths will people go to to develop ways of allowing people to sleep even less?) what kinds of delusions and perceived “spiritual warfare” might people be sucked into as they fight to maintain the fantasy of a self that abides with their definition of reality and their narrative of a past. It’s this commitment to this perceived past that leads many to live as indigenous wisdom sciences would say, like a ghost. The Taoist view would ask, “Who can point to where or when the past really is/was?!”
…We might say that the “archetype as such” is concentrated psychic energy, but that the symbol provides the mode of manifestation by which the archetype becomes discernible. In this sense Jung defined the symbol as the “essence and image of psychic energy.” Consequently one can never encounter the “archetype as such” directly, but only indirectly, when it is manifested in the archetypal image, in a symbol, or in a complex or symptom. (EW)
Was that was dark? I dunno. Maybe… it’s relative, right? The Cosmic Soup Bowl doesn’t just serve palatable treats of love and light. Bitter medicine is often just what the heart needs.
When we let go and stop resisting what we’ve tucked into the dark spaces that psychologists and analysts call the subconscious (a habit that costs a little bit of our Qi every time we do it), when we give ourselves permission to be as we are, those places stop being so dark. That said, there’s no half-way into it. Approaching a dream practice in a hobbyist way, without sincere intention, there can be no fruit.
From a somatic therapy perspective, this dark space of the subconscious is a sort of self-protective measure. We can even thank our protective parts for doing such heavy lifting and for looking out for us, as some therapy methods teach, like in Internal Family Systems. We don’t have to slap ourselves on the hand for trying to take care of ourselves the best way we know how. But if we want to know what it is to be a true human, we allow ourself to see past our own delusions, fantasies, and put ghosts to rest. Feed the ghost and it feeds on you. Liberate yourself and you can walk the path of true dreaming.
As a somatic experiencing practitioner in training, it would be negligent for me to leave out that opening up to what’s in the dark spaces is done safest through titration. That means slowly, gently familiarizing oneself with your personal trauma vortex, one tiny bite at a time. Trying to fast track healing and awareness in this way is like riding with several gallons of gasoline in the trunk of your car. The catharsis of jumping into the deep end and trying to keep swimming through old layers of psycho-somatic wounds is like free diving into the depths of unknown waters to see how far down we can go, without training of any kind (at best), or testing out violent waves of a stormy ocean thinking we can just mindfully “surf” the waves (at worst). What’s in the dark doesn’t have to stay there, hidden and evaded or mysterious. Coaxing it out simply takes unforced time.
Just like astrology, dream practices are about reflection and getting to know oneself, not just a ghostly narrative, but what you are, moment to moment and what you’re doing here and in those dark transition spaces.
When dark spaces get opened up, waking and sleeping become one continuity. You don’t need to distinguish what happened “in real life” and you don’t have to “have” a dream. You can see them. They are always playing out (even when you’re awake)— not just a projection of fantasy during a spaced out day dream or during sleep. Dreaming is both an internal and external process, and you’ll notice that softening the lines between waking and sleeping doesn’t make you disconnected from reality, but more aligned to it.
There’s no need to fish for secret teachings when you’ve established a consistent and fully applied dream practice. There aren’t really any secrets anyway. That’s a marketing hype. There’s only your experience. You only need to uncover what you actually are. Move into and with your own experience because that’s self revealing!
I can’t say from my own experience, so this is hearsay, but if I had died at least once in this carnation I could tell you! Many a Taoist and other spiritual practitioners have said that,
“There’s a memory process that is a preparation for the transition to death which is a series of dreams at the end of your life. Some traditions have retreats for that so you have the dreams necessary to complete everything, and so that you’re clear and there’s no back log.” LM
This isn’t about living a perfect pristine life. That’s fable if not indefinable. No mud, no lotus, right? This path is about your freedom. Ultimately, it’s about claiming your freedom to die rather than feeling forced to die before you’ve finished up. Who doesn’t want the freedom to go on their terms (more or less), without blacking out (the way some people with near death experiences explain they did). That’s what happens when there isn’t enough Qi to pass over. That’s when living relatives need to step in and hold rituals and send offerings to help one pass through the threshold... it’s why funerals are so important.
Just as our sense of hearing tends to stay activated in dream, so too does the first few days after death leave our auditory sense intact. Song and mantra sung over and near the body carry blessings and light to the departed person whose Po spirit may or may not need closure and aid in transitioning back to the earth, where it goes once disembodied.
The whole process of incarnation is an incredibly complex and unknowable one, though various religious and spiritual cultures have their ideas and speculations to understand some of it, but I want pretend to know exactly how it all plays out. I can only share what I’ve been taught. In cultivating a path for true dreaming, we open the possibility for the Heart Shen to become undifferentiated from Tao. That is, refining the Heart Shen (spirit) and returning it to emptiness. This is a most basic and bare description of what alchemy means to the tradition of Chinese cosmology, and this view is one of the branches of wisdom that Jupiter in Pisces has to offer to those seeking a path discover their original nature, to uncover the meaning of coming and going— “Where did I come from?/Where am I going?”, and to experience the cyclical nature of life and death without fear. Ultimately, there is nothing to fear. Everything eventually recalibrates to its original nature. Trust in the process and all is coming.
And returning to one’s root is called stillness.
This is known as returning to one’s destiny;To return to one’s destiny is known as constancy.
To know constancy is called “enlightenment.”
— Dao De Jing of Laozi
Translation and commentary by Philip Ivanhoe (TB)
Edit: As of January 24, 2022 this entry and following entries that were part of the series called “Wu Woo Wednesday” are being left with the title following the designated category of “WWW” posts. This has been done in response to and out of respect for the word Wu and its meaning as “shaman” in the Chinese language. This post script is here to create accountability rather than to erase a poor choice and to show respect for the culture, people, medicine, and ancestors of East Asia.
References:
Bisio, Tom; Daoist Sleeping Meditation: Chen Tuan’s Sleeping Gong (p 94, 109, 166)
Gat, Annabel & Otero, Ashley; Your Astrological Guide to Jupiter In Your Birth Chart
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjwyd5/what-does-jupiter-in-the-signs-mean-in-my-birth-chart ; 2019, 10/29
Ming, Liu, Sleep, Dream, and the Dao of the Night
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
Whitmont, Edward; The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology
This post and it’s corresponding podcast episode are meant solely for entertainment purposes. It is not meant to be taken as medical or psychotherapeutic advice.