The Current Uranus-Neptune Sextile
When your world is lit up with squares and oppositions, sleeping through sextiles happens almost automatically. With hard aspects, your foot is in the fire. You’re highly motivated to act, in other words. Softer aspects aren’t nearly as pressing. You can think of them more as opportunities than as demands.
Still, missed opportunities are actually huge events. It’s just that they are often disguised as nothing at all. Imagine walking right past a hundred dollar bill lying on the sidewalk while looking the other way. Imagine feeling too tired to go to the party where your future soulmate is waiting for you.
Nothing happened? Ask your guardian angels . . .
Currently, humanity is experiencing a major sextile. It’s an opportunity to which we all need to be alert. Over the next couple of years, Uranus and Neptune will be exactly sixty degrees apart a total of five times. As you can see from the table below, the first sextile already happened in late August. The last one is due in June 2027. The upcoming sextile on November 20 is the outlier with the planets having retrograded back into Taurus and Pisces. All the rest are covered in the sparkles of Gemini and Aries.
I am calling this a “major” sextile since these two planets move slowly. That means that your consciousness will be immersed in these energies for a long time. Slow transits are far more life-shaping than a “here today, gone tomorrow” sextile of, say, Venus and Mercury. The slow ones have enough time to develop genuine depth and complexity of meaning.
As always with a sextile, we are looking at an opportunity. But what exactly is the nature of this one? To answer that question, we must first surmount a significant obstacle.
THE DILEMMA
All aspects regardless of their exact natures are about two energies trying to work together. The trouble is that Uranus and Neptune disagree about almost everything. Their energetic signatures are utterly distinct. Even with a “harmonious” sextile linking them, getting them to cooperate presents a monumental challenge. In Jungian terms, we are looking at the reconciliation of opposites.
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Uranus celebrates the ego, while Neptune seeks to let it go.
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Uranus rebels, while Neptune surrenders.
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Uranus doubts, while Neptune has faith.
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Uranus emphasizes separate individuality, while Neptune seeks oneness.
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Uranus swims upstream, while Neptune goes with the flow.
How can we get these two antagonistic forces to dance together? They are pulling in opposite directions. Still, Uranus promises breakthroughs while Neptune promises sacred spiritual experiences. Put them together and we can see that the universe is offering all of us an opportunity for a sudden spiritual breakthrough. The promise is 100% real – it’s just difficult to reach. Some of us will get it right and some of us won’t. That’s always the way things work astrologically.
Before we’re done here, I promise we’ll look at the darker side of this sextile. But let’s start by accentuating the positive. What treasure is the universe promising us all here and how can we dig it up?
THE INVISIBLE PORTAL
Four out five of these exact sextiles involve Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Aries. Let’s start there. The signal virtue in Gemini is an open mind – the willingness to entertain possibilities that we have never before considered. With Uranus in that sign, that wide-open energy is driving our individuation – our capacity to get past cultural conditioning and actually become who we really are. Back to Gemini – success there depends utterly on keeping our eyes – and our minds – open.
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In Gemini, Uranus is asking us to escape the tyranny of “common sense” and trust the reality of our own perceptions and our own direct experiences even if they seem very strange.
Meanwhile, Neptune is in Aries – a sign that always puts raw courage in the spotlight. The demon we call fear guards the gate to the garden – and makes sure that no wimps get through. Add mystical Neptune to the mixture and what we see emerging is the archetype of the spiritual warrior. There, the battle is always ultimately with our own fear.
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In Aries, Neptune is inviting us to stop playing it safe. From this lofty perspective, life itself is a spiritual emergency. We have no time to waste. Our only hope lies in boldness.
What happens when we combine these particular Uranian and Neptunian energies? That would be the right question to ask with any Uranus-Neptune aspect, no matter which one it was. With the sextile, we can add another specific dimension to our interpretation: how can they support, stimulate, and enhance each other? That’s what sextiles do. Put it all together and what you see emerging is an invisible portal – a doorway into a higher state of consciousness. There will be nothing gentle or subtle about passing through it – Gemini and Aries preclude that. Get it right and it will feel like hitting psychic Warp Drive in a field of hurtling asteroids.
There are countless ways to nail this alchemy and make it work for you. To make it as vividly real as I possibly can, I want to offer you three clear, literal examples. Just remember that astrological symbolism is not literalism! In the words and images that follow, the real point is the feeling they generate in you. Each image will embody the highest possibilities of this major sextile – just remember to think of them as illustrations, just three possibilities out of several billion.
A VISION QUEST
Sue is scared. She’s hiked three miles up a canyon in the desert. She has a blanket and some water. The sun is setting. Soon it will be pitch dark. She’s fasting, which means she’s hungry. She’s also assailed by thoughts of rattlesnakes, toxic insects, and cougars. Undertaking a vision quest sounded like a good idea at the time, but now she’s wondering if she was crazy to agree to put herself through this scary ordeal. Why is she doing it? And what’s waiting for her out there in the falling darkness?
Hours later, the sun rises on a different woman. In the desert night, Sue’s fear turned to courage. In the wee hours, she definitely sensed “a presence” out there in the dark. Was it a hungry cougar? Or was it the ghost of a Native American shaman deciding whether she was worthy of survival? Sue had always been “spiritual,” but now she knows that her spirituality is her true nature and that nothing else matters. Psychologically, she faced her death and she did not panic. Her life takes off in a new direction. She now understands that she has no time to waste.
A FOREIGN SHORE
Jack is torn. His favorite meditation teacher is offering a class in Nepal, but Jack is terrified of flying. Should he go? Would it be worth the anxiety? He bravely signs up for the class and books his flights. On the way there, the plane hits serious turbulence. A man not wearing his seatbelt is badly injured. Jack feels like he’s facing death and, to his surprise, he finds that he faces it with equanimity. Something wise and ancient opens up in him.
When Jack arrived in Nepal, the transmission he received from his meditation teacher went straight to his heart. He saw the auric light around the teacher and never doubted its reality for a moment. All the words that he heard are familiar, but it was as if he was hearing them for the first time. Two years later, Jack teaches his first meditation class.
A WAR STORY
War, famine, and genocide – Jane has been reading those headlines for her whole life, but this time they strike a chord of courageous compassion in her. She decides to do something about it. Innocent people are starving. Kids are dying. She takes on a warrior’s responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves, volunteering with a service organization delivering food and medicine to the beleaguered, victimized population.
At home, Jane meditates on a cushion in her bedroom. Here, in the War Zone, all she has time to do is to tune in to the higher powers in brief flashes – but those powers are more vividly present to her now than they’ve ever been before. For weeks, she lives close to the possibility of sudden death or crippling injury. Reflecting on that reality, she smiles – she now understands that living close to the possibility of sudden death is actually everyone’s constant reality. It took a few weeks in Gaza for her to make that life-changing breakthrough in wisdom.
JUST THREE STORIES . . .
Those are just a trio of invented tales. Each one of them embodies certain dimensions of the higher possibilities of the Uranus-Neptune sextile. There could be – there will be – millions and millions more such tales unfolding in real time over the next couple of years. Always, we will see someone doing something that requires both courage and a willingness to think and act “outside the box” and to trust their own perceptions. In all of these stories, there’s a pattern of sudden breakthrough – which often means being shocked into a higher state of awareness.
We could generate another cycle of stories in which that shock is not something for which the person volunteers.
There will be plenty of those tales as well. Accidents, sudden illnesses, unexpected losses – no one welcomes such events, but they too can trigger these kinds of fierce spiritual breakthroughs. Remember – whenever Aries energy is in the mix, you’ll find the word “fierce” getting a lot more use.
WHAT ABOUT THE DARK SIDE?
So far, we’ve been exploring the higher possibilities inherent in the Uranus-Neptune sextile – what it is supposed to mean in evolutionary terms. But every front has a back. It’s also quite possible to make a weak, self-destructive response to these forces. What might such spiritual failure look like?
The planet Uranus has several dark dimensions, as do the rest of the planets. It can simply be contrary – you say turn left, so I turn right. It can be dissociated, which is to say coldly alienated from human feeling. Meanwhile, Gemini is, among other things, about language. Putting two and two together, we can see Uranus in Gemini manifesting as endless argument, overthinking, and rationalization. Staying stuck is the bottom line – and surrounding our stuckness with a wall of words that spring from our defense mechanisms rather than from our hearts. All that reflects the soul cage created by Uranus in Gemini.
Neptune and escapism often go hand in hand as a soul is overwhelmed by its own sensitivity. It represents the part of us that can just give up and hide under the bed. Remember that Aries is about courage – a word that has no meaning outside the context of things that frighten us. How scary is something? That depends on how sensitive we are to it. Now push sensitivity up to the max and you can see where this is going. Few of us relish facing frightening circumstances. How might we choose to escape from them instead? One obvious notion is simply to run away. With Neptune in Aries, the fundamental weak response is simply cowardice. We chicken out. We fail to stand up for ourselves or fail to claim what we legitimately need for our spiritual journey. We can also fail to protect the people and principles we love.
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I am visualizing alienated (dark Uranus) people angrily (Aries) doomscrolling through social media sites (dark Neptunian escapism; dark Gemini) which they have carefully curated to reflect nothing but their preexisting beliefs and prejudices (dark Gemini again.)
That’s the tuned-out, escapist outward behavior of this sextile. We will see plenty of it. Meanwhile, inwardly, Neptune in Aries manifests as free-floating anxiety, while Uranus in Gemini adds nothing but shaky nerves. It’s uncomfortable, pointless, and a waste of a fine evolutionary opportunity. And I suspect it will prove popular.
Let me recommend a few courageous, creative spiritual breakthroughs instead! That’s what this Uranus-Neptune sextile is actually all about. That’s the magical portal through which you are invited to jump.