A Conversation with “the Merlin Astrologer” Rick Levine

 

If you’ve been feeling confused by conflicting information about what’s happening in the world right now… 

You’ll love today’s interview with “the Merlin Astrologer” Rick Levine.

With so many planets going retrograde there’s a sense of confusion hanging in the air… 

But with Venus squaring Neptune, we have an incredible opportunity to dream a new world into existence.

 

Amanda: We have a lot of retrograde action happening right now… what’s it all mean?

 

Rick: We have three planets that are turning retrograde within a week. Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter, with Venus squaring Neptune.

Neptune is putting a big cosmic WTF up in the world on everything. Even though we thought we’d been living in a world of not knowing what’s going on, we’re sure we don’t know what’s going on now.

 

Amanda: Tell us more about Venus and Neptune square!

 

Rick: Well, Venus and Neptune have a great deal of affinity to one another.

Venus is personal love. It’s about what I like, what I’m attracted to, my sense of aesthetics. It’s the repulsion or the attractive magnetism that I feel. 

As a morning star, Venus relates to Taurus, which is Earth, touch, and sensual. It’s that which we can touch, taste, feel, see. 

There’s nothing metaphysical about Venus in the Taurus side of the equation, it’s more physical. However, Venus has an evening star relating to Libra. Then it becomes an Air sign. And Air is metaphysical.You can’t see Air, you see through Air. 

Venus has this component of being both physical and imaginative. 

Venus incarnate is anything that is physically beautiful, whether it is a flower in your hair, a photograph, a fine meal, poetry, music, all these things impinge upon our senses.

But as soon as you take the other side of Venus, you’d look at Libra and it’s about being diplomatic. Libra is the peacemaker. Libra is John Lennon singing Imagine there’s no heaven. Imagine there’s no hell, this is Libra. 

Neptune is capital L. O. V. E. It’s an Aquarian, depersonalized, Piscean, spiritualized love. It’s love extended to the infinite reaches of the universe where there is no person, no involvement in it. It’s bigger than my love for you. 

Venus and Neptune are always dancing and in fact they always, on some level, confuse us as to what we’re dealing with. 

The word con in Greek is like a conjunction, and fusion is when two things melt together.

My ego and your ego survive because the Sun has light at the center and Saturn creates a boundary. Mars defends that boundary. 

Neptune comes along and says, I am in love, there is no boundary between you and me. 

And the ego goes, that’s confusing! 

If I can’t separate myself from you, how do I have a point of view? How do I have a perspective? How do I figure out what I’m going to do? I can’t. And so Neptune’s job is to confuse us by melting the apparent boundaries. 

So that’s where we are. 

We are in the midst of this energy and it’s not going away. And that makes it more confusing. Normally we can take confusion for a day or two or three because things gain clarity again. 

But this confusion about the confusion is so confusing that we end up being confused because even though we know what’s right, even though we can normally listen to opposing views and understand, all of a sudden it doesn’t, or some aspect of it doesn’t. 

It’s a very tricky time aside from all the other things that are going on.

 

Amanda: What are we confused about? 

 

Rick: I’m not saying that we’re just confused and we don’t know what to do. We’re also in an amazing place where we can take the fantasies, the dreams, the hopes, and imagine it into being. That’s also an aspect of what’s at play here.

We feel the stress and it motivates us to be creative, and squares our creativity. We all have places in our life where there’s something outside reality, and this square is tickling, stimulating, irritating, and stressing those. 

We can either go into denial and push them away, we can label them fantasy, or we can allow them. And that may not be an easy thing to do, but that is where magic can occur.

 

Amanda: I love that you brought that up because I’ve been feeling that so strong. It’s so important right now for us to explore what’s possible, to be in that field, because it does feel potent. 

Even if we don’t know what to do with it yet, we’re going to get the visions, even if they seem unrealistic.

 

Rick: Yes, you have to think about it, because if you think about it, that creates the pathways in the brain. The brain can’t distinguish whether it happened, or whether it thought it happened. 

In order to make something real, we eventually have to externalize it. 

But part of this is using the technology of what we know about the brain, and how it works, and to give ourselves permission to stretch into realms of… what if.

We need to breathe with this process. Almost like it was waves washing on the shore. 

Right now we’re in this large set of waves that have to do with Venus, Neptune, fantasy, dreams, illusions, all that. The energies here are incredibly powerful and they’re very exciting. 

But anytime you’re in a place of strong current, if you’re not a good swimmer, it’s a very dangerous place to be. Well, don’t fight it. You need to have a certain level of surrender. Surrender doesn’t mean give up, it just means allow. 

 

Amanda: Very true. Well, and isn’t that what astrology is doing? It’s helping us understand what the nature of the tide is, how long it’s going to last, when to stop and breathe and just be, and when to actually move?

And I think so much of the invitation right now is for each one of us to trust that we are resourced. If we can just listen to that deep still small voice and trust it, we will be guided to the right action… If we’re not frenetically taking in everybody else’s opinion about what to do and how to do it.

It sounds like we’re in an exploration of the dream, possibilities, the future, and our role in it. And we’re actually transforming through the allowance of what’s possible. What could this become, who could we become, what could this look like on the other side? 

What we’re doing as we study astrology is using the stars to navigate our way. 

That means what’s happening astrologically from the transit perspective, but also the wisdom of our chart, and what’s coded into the chart, and what the chart says about our path.

So our desires right now are actually coded in us.

 

Rick: I think that Venus, and desire, is a magnetism that draws us to want to re-experience the home planet. And I don’t mean that physically as a planet. 

I mean the idea of being connected with the stars. There are certain indigenous people who remained way more connected with the stars than we can possibly imagine.

In the past, we’ve been way more connected than we are and we don’t even know how disconnected we are. Carl Jung wrote a book called Modern Man In Search of a Soul. 

We’re longing for something that we’ve lost, and we feel abandoned, but it’s we who have abandoned our connection with nature, with the natural order. 

We can live in a world where species are going extinct and saying, no, that’s out there. It doesn’t have anything to do with me, but we are beginning to be confronted with quantum physics.

There is no “out there.”  It’s about connecting with nature in here, which then automatically connects us with nature out there.

 

Amanda: Seems like anything is possible when Venus is square Neptune… Is there anything else you want to say about that?

 

Rick: You know, it’s my friend Caroline Casey who has said for years, that imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow. 

You know, dreams, imagination, fantasy, illusion… These things only become troublesome if we mistake them and put them in place of what our senses tell us is going on around us. 

They are also the things that inspire us. The dreams create the breakthroughs and in poetry, music, art, science it’s the dreamers that lay those tracks. 

It’s almost like Neptune creates gossamer scaffolding for Saturn to come in and create structures on.

 

Amanda: So dream everybody, allow yourself to play in that realm of imagination. I love the question… 

“What is that desire in you that wants to come forth, and what is the contribution that you’re here to make?” 

Check out your chart and see if there’s clues there if you’re not sure, but at the same time allow the process. This is not a process that we need to force. Let it play in the field and see what’s possible. And notice whenever “that’s not possible” comes up in your mind. 

Just let all that go for now. We don’t need to worry about any of that stuff right now. Just allow it to come through as much as possible. 

 

If you’d like to listen to the full-length podcast interview with Rick Levine you can play it here.

If you’d prefer to watch it on YouTube, you can do that here.

To keep current with the astrological weather as we move through these wild waves of energy, subscribe for updates here.

If you’d like to join Rick Levine’s online workshop, The Astrology of Relationships, you can learn more and join here.