Mercury moves into Pisces on Monday, March 15th, joining the effortless harmonics of the Sun, Venus and Neptune.  Into the vibrant vibrato goes the trickster, to see what can be seen through the ultimate fish-eyed lenses.  

Having moved through Aquarius since the start of the year, there has been healthy turbulence in the streams of thought.  The turbulence has oxygenated the water, and created fresh negative ions.  The atmosphere is like that after a rainstorm, perceptually speaking.  How can you make the most out of these new lenses?  This new soft vision of synthesis?

For starters, soft vision is not to be confused with blurriness.  Soft vision is a receptive mental act.  At its ultimate, it is what John Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’, a kind of negation of the personality so as to be as open as possible to all different points of view.  Shakespeare was said to be an expert in negative capability as his characters diversified from each other with  such rich complexities, yet Shakespeare the man remains quite a mystery.  

To have negative capability is to be satisfied with ‘half-knowledge’ and not impatient to reach firm conclusions that would undermine the complexities of experience.

Keats said, “Let the mind be a thorough fare of thoughts” rather than a “select party of beliefs.”

Pisces vision is like a waterfall.  Not only a stream of consciousness, but the real world of all streams.  The real world of all accumulated thought, Chardin’s ‘noosphere’.  The reality that if libraries were to contain all the written works of history, and then the human race was nearly wiped out, a new generation could use this knowledge instead of starting from scratch.    

When Mercury is in Pisces, the real world of all streams is more apparent.  There is a desire to synthesize, and to open your senses as wide as they can go.  Through the lenses of the fish, peripheries are extended and centers are strengthened.  Outside of the hard outlines of a fact and reason, the mind gets a holiday, and can begin to think about nothing, which can lead to everything, as Einstein and other geniuses have proved.  

Mercury will be in Pisces until April 3rd when it will burst forth in willful Aries. 

Happy soft eyes, happy open mind, and as always, happy astro pondering!

Astro art by Johnnie Day Durand

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