The Neptune Journey

[Michael Erlewine]

Neptune Keywords: “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”

Neptune traditionally represents compassion, acceptance, unity, and universal love. “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea,” is what this planet is about, anything to do with communion, and non-separateness. Neptune rules the imagination, dreams, mysticism and inspiration, including music, movies, film, and anything related to our ideas and images.

If the Uranian experience involves flashes of insight, then experience of Neptune dawns slowly and evenly. Neptune is more like the finale at a fireworks; it ever-increasingly lights up our entire inner sky. Through Uranus, we break through Saturn and began to discover our inner life. With Neptune comes the dawn, and it is like the Sun coming up. With Neptune we can at last get our arms around the whole idea, in this case the whole world. Our process of self discovery has gone beyond counting mere glimpses and insights, and into a cacophony of light. We finally get the whole idea, that beyond life as we knew it, we find that same life, alive and well, but now within us — our inner life. As Sir Edwin Arnold so aptly put it, “The Dewdrop Slips into the Shining Sea.” Neptune is the archetype of the “big picture,” the Grand Trine illumination of the planets.

With Neptune, we reach the point where we not only realize that we are now outside time or Saturn, but that we have (and we have always have had) an inner life, and that the same hard-edged life we grew up in and through is now something to be cherished and cared for.

Neptune embraces life, and with no exceptions. It is pure compassion, and everything is valued equally. In the Buddhist hierarchy, Neptune represents the Bodhisattva, the one who vows to care for and cherish all sentient beings until every last one reaches enlightenment.

The idea here is that what we discover in the planets beyond Saturn is not something out there beyond Saturn to “get,” but the true fact that there IS nothing else out there. This is what we can call the turning point, and as we turn, we discover the life we left and grew up in and through, to be the only game in town. As the philosopher Parmenides so eloquently put it: “Being alone is.” In other words, there are not two, but only one. Neptune is our finally discovering that one.

Uranus provides insights and flashes into this fact, and Neptune illuminates our inner sky with full daylight as to this truth, which leaves Pluto.